The Pittsburgh Press (August 1, 1941)
ROOSEVELT-WHEELER FEUD COOLS AFTER STIMSON’S APOLOGY
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But President still did not retract statement declaring that Senator had gone too far; bad blood runs deep between two men
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By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington, Aug. 1 –
Another chapter in the feud between President Roosevelt and Senator Wheeler (D-MT), into which others have been drawn lately, has come to a temporary halt with an apology from Secretary of War Stimson for the “near treason” charge hurled at the isolationist leader.
The President himself has uttered no apology for his statement that the Senator had gone too far. This was in comment on the Stimson charge that Senator Wheeler had circularized soldiers at Army camps which, it developed upon investigation, was not in accord with the facts.
Nor is an apology expected from Mr. Roosevelt.
Bad blood runs deep between the two men who once stood together in the earlier days of the New Deal, fighting for the Roosevelt program of social and economic reform. That was not a new fight for the Montana Senator, only he had been on the losing side for a long time, battling against the entrenched conservatism of three Republican regimes.
Probes Justice Department
Mr. Wheeler had to pay the price of fighting the entrenched oligarchy of those days. For his temerity in inquiring into corruption in the Justice Department under Harry M. Daugherty, in the Harding administration, he was indicted on a charge for which he was exonerated by a Senate committee and acquitted by a jury in Montana.
But that did not stop the then-young Senator, who had been schooled on such rough tactics by the opposition when he was a district attorney.
Mr. Daugherty’s lieutenants had been able to squelch an investigation by a House committee, but Senators Wheeler and Brookhart (R-IA) carried their own inquiry to its unsavory and unbelievable conclusion, revealing to the country how its government was being prostituted.
‘I object! I object!’
This investigation ran concurrently with the famous investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal, conducted by Senator Wheeler’s older colleague, the late Senator Tom Walsh (D-MT).
Senator Wheeler joined Senator Walsh, Senator Norris of Nebraska, and the late Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr., in the fight for social and reform measures, a fight which laid the basis for the later success of the New Deal program.
It was a new and naive freshman Wheeler, unschooled in parliamentary procedure, who started one of those early fights by jumping up from his place and shouting:
I object! I object!
Senate deadlocked*
What he was objecting to was approval of committee slates, usually a routine procedure, which gave the late Senator Cummins (R-IA) the chairmanship of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee while he was also President pro tempore of the Senate.
This was a rather flimsy excuse, but back of it was a real movement, the attempt to elevate Senator La Follette, next ranking member, to the chairmanship, in order to open the way for reforms in the railroad structure so the farmer could get cheaper rates for shipping his produce.
The struggle precipitated by the young Montana Senator lasted for days. The Senate was deadlocked in balloting, with Democrats supporting Senator Smith (D-SC); the Republicans, Senator Cummins; and a handful of irregulars, including Senators Wheeler and Norris, backing Senator La Follette. The last group held the balance of power. Senator Smith was finally chosen when Democrats promised certain concessions to the La Follette group.
Hits Supreme Court bill
Senator Wheeler was Senator La Follette’s running mate in the independent campaign for the Presidency in 1924 which gathered 5 million votes. Mr. Roosevelt supported and spoke for John W. Davis, the Democratic candidate, who later turned up in Washington to fight the New Deal.
In the early part of the New Deal, Senator Wheeler directed for President Roosevelt perhaps the hardest and bitterest legislative battle the President has had to fight – with one exception – that over the Public Utility Holding Company Act.
The exception was the one which bred the hostility between the two men. That was the Supreme Court Reform Bill which Senator Wheeler, along with others, could not accept. But the Senator did not stop, as did others, with mere opposition. He led the fight, and thus incurred the enmity of the President. The enmity engendered there was deepened when the Senator took issue with the Roosevelt foreign policy.