Roosevelt's Life & Times

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Leftists, too, discovered that Roosevelt would listen to them, but not always follow them: he played by ear. Beneath these doubts, millions of plain people were all for him. They liked his jauntiness, admired his ability to make tough decisions by what often seemed to be sheer intuition — and then sleep peacefully. They idolized him as the leader who would always look after their interests.

Their devotion, along with the organizing genius of city bosses and union leaders, and the one-party tradition of the South, formed a coalition that kept Roosevelt in power longer than any man in U.S. history. In 1934, the year of Dillinger, the Dionnes, Primo Camera and It Happened One Night, the party in power actually gained seats in Congress, the first time in an off-year election since 1902. In 1936, only Maine and Vermont voted Republican.

"Forces of Selfishness." All this was heady stuff for a President; and the angle of Franklin Roosevelt's cigaret-holder, always a barometer of his mood, tilted higher & higher. The title of an F.D.R. book bespoke the optimism of the planners: On Our Way. Franklin Roosevelt saw his 1936 election asa mandate: the "forces of selfishness . . . the princes of privilege" would discover that they had "met their master."

In one of his most ill-advised maneuvers, he took on the Supreme Court. Though he failed to pack it, he forced it to go easier on New Deal measures. In a way, he won, but many were disturbed by his cynical, indirect attack on "a subject of delicacy . . . the question of aged or infirm judges."

Many were troubled, too, by the lawless 1937 sitdown strikes, and the Government's tacit acquiescence in them. They were alarmed as well by the 1937-38 business setback (euphemistically known as a "recession") which made people ask: is there no other remedy but constant pump-priming and debt-piling? Loyal Democrats took fright at Harry Hopkins' "purge" that failed. The New Deal could be thankful that the 1938 election was for Congressmen only, and not a Presidential year.

The Paperhanger. That was the low point, but Franklin Roosevelt had new highs ahead. He had come to office just 33 days after Adolf Hitler, the Austrian paperhanger, had taken over Germany. At first, Franklin Roosevelt's inclinations were at least partly isolationist: he scuttled the 1933 London Economic Conference because he believed that the U.S. could best make its comeback alone.

But he and Cordell Hull also negotiated reciprocal trade treaties, and set out to convince Latin America of U.S. Good Neighborliness. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia the year that America danced to the nonsense of The Music Goes Round & Around. But as Hitler's menace grew. Franklin Roosevelt saw the menace.

His "quarantine the aggressor" speech in 1937 heightened his immense prestige abroad. Many Americans who also saw the Hitler menace wanted the President to act more boldly, but Franklin Roosevelt well knew that the politician's is the "art of the possible," and in his time no abler politician lived.