Chamber of Commerce admits robust admiration; ruthless politically, but man is kind
By Eric Johnston, North American Newspaper Alliance
This story, reprinted in part from the April American Mercury Magazine, is an interesting appraisal of President Roosevelt by Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Are you for the New Deal or against it?
Although the question makes no sense, few sensible Americans will refrain from answering it. Most of them, in fact, will proffer a categorical answer with the emphasis of fervor normally reserved for a discussion of the virtue of one’s mother. Approval and denunciation are usually of the blanket type – despite the fact that few New Deal leaders can themselves adequately define the phrase; and despite the fact that the more excited anti-New Dealers who attempt a definition peter out in cusswords.
Quarrels always explode around symbols, and the most potent of these was Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. Not since Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, I suppose, has any President been so execrated and so glorified by his own generation. At the risk of upsetting the metabolism of my more unbending anti-FDR friends, I want to confess a robust, non-partisan admiration.
There are, it seems to me, three Roosevelts, one impinging on the other.
Roosevelt the man
There is Roosevelt the man, as fine a specimen as our country has produced. Born into wealth and family, he is a democrat to his fingertips, with a genuine sympathy for the underdog. No ne who has known him intimately doubts the sincerity of his social conscience. Friend and foe alike must be thrilled by the courage and the spiritual vigor that conquered physical handicaps which would have laid lesser men low.
Although there is more than a touch of the snob in his heritage and makeup, he meets all men as equals, whatever their race, creed or station. There is nothing remotely stuffed-shirt about him. He talks easily and racily – on occasion excessively, I must add – in man-to-man spirit. He laughs easily and contagiously, and with equal exuberance whether his friends or his enemies are the butt of the joke.
Let me put this first Roosevelt, the man, into the most elementary terms I can find. If he were not President, but your next-door neighbor, an associate in your business, or a casual Pullman acquaintance, you couldn’t help liking him. You would decide that you want him as a friend, because he is an interesting, amusing, and authentic personality.
Roosevelt the politician
Secondly, there is Roosevelt the politician. Unless you have a special taste for such things, you would be decidedly less enthusiastic about this one. It is, as a matter of fact, the cunning, conniving politician, rather than the man who has been so successful in transforming enthusiasts into detractors: Hugh Johnson, Raymond Moley, Joseph Medill Patterson, Stanley High, James Farley – the list could be extended into at least a prominent score.
Roosevelt understands and enjoys the game of politics as other men enjoy their favorite sport, and he has no more conscience about toppling an opponent than a halfback in the throes of a hotly contested game. He has the shrewdness and a lot of the ruthlessness of the political adept, he thinks in deals, bargains, blocs or votes and pressure groups as naturally as you and I, if we are both businessmen, think in terms of markets, costs, overheads, profits and losses. There are few men in public life, I venture to say, more skilled in dangling the carrot of promises before the eyes of plodding political donkeys. And he is not a man to hand around too long with a lost cause.
Roosevelt the President
Finally, there is Roosevelt the President. In that capacity, I am convinced, he has as keen a sense of the sacredness of his position and the magnitude of his responsibility as any of his predecessors. Those who doubt this are, I fear, unmindful of the psychological effect the Presidency has on a man. I do not believe that any man invested with the dignity of the greatest office in the world could fail to respond to its challenge, or be less than a total patriot. The very title of President of the United States works its magic over the most self-centered and mediocre men – and Franklin Roosevelt is neither of these.
He has an acute sense of his own place in history, and of his obligations to coming generations. In talking to him, I have sometimes had the feeling that he was stepping back a few decades and looking at himself in the perspective of time. Men who knew Woodrow Wilson intimately have told me this trait was especially strong in the Princeton president as White House incumbent. Perhaps it is one of the “occupational diseases” associated with the office; but it has its wholesome side, in that it makes a man President first – Democrat, Republican, New Dealer or whatnot second.
Three characters conflict
Small wonder that these three Roosevelts, confined in one vigorous personality, jostle and contradict one another. The politician intrudes on the President, the President reproves the politician, the man brushes them both aside. They dispute one another and strike compromises, to the confusion of admirers and critics alike.
The President soars to peaks of patriotism; the politician condescends to vituperation and small vengeances that grieve his friends; the man shows streaks of generosity, horseplay, pettiness, vanity, like all sons of Adam. Had Roosevelt been more the statesman-President and less the politician, his administration might have been less embittered his reforms on a more constructive and more enduring level.
If I were to summarize the evils of the New Deal, as I would list the following:
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Its unfortunate resort to the language, techniques and philosophy of class conflict, at a time when the urgent need has been cooperation.
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Its attempts, all too successful on occasion, to legislate by administrative decrees, substituting government by officials for government by law.
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Its clear tendency to excessive centralization, whereby it has intruded upon the prerogatives of the states and, more important, the prerogatives of the people.
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Its deleterious emphasis upon negative and defeatist ideas and procedures, such as “made” work, plowing-under, spread work, measures against saving and investment. The very habit of productivity, the faith in abundance has been hurt by such insistence on curbing, restricting, beating down the creative urge of man.
Despite excesses in their practice, I approve the principle of many phases of New Deal policy.
Relief for all Americans in distress, because of unemployment or other reasons, seems to me a matter beyond doubt.
The same holds true for relief to farmers hard hit by economic dislocations. Distress in agricultural regions is less evident than in urban centers, but it is nonetheless real.
The protection of labor’s right to collective bargaining, a field in which the New Deal has advanced onto new ground, remains as a permanent gain.
The Security Exchange Commission, in the same way, can be made a stout support for the capitalist system.
These and a good man many other New Deal measures can be absorbed and brought into alignment with a freely functioning private enterprise world.
The designation New Deal has been ostentatiously abandoned by the President, indicating a trend “to the Right,” to use an expression that is not altogether accurate. But the facts compassed by the New Deal, good and bad, are with us. The time has come to sift reality from legend, to examine the crucial Roosevelt Era without passion or bitterness, so that we may retain the constructive elements and repudiate the destructive tendencies.
