Out of the Red with Roosevelt

The New Republic trumpeted its connections to the New Deal. One of its advertisements cited testimony from a visitor to the Oval Office who claimed to have witnessed copies of the magazine stacked on Roosevelt’s desk. This was a bit of disingenuous marketing. Until the late thirties, The New Republic raked FDR on a regular basis, even when it should have been nodding its head in agreement with his policies.

All this hostility to Roosevelt was fairly predictable. Intellectuals are paid to be skeptical and liberalism cherishes skepticism more than any ideology. But fulminations against Roosevelt were especially inevitable when the magazine assigned radicals like John Dos Passos to cover politics. When Sherwood Anderson once asked him about the difference between Socialists and Communists, he quipped, “The Communists mean it.” Like many of the magazine’s most cherished writers, he simply couldn’t fathom that the Great Depression had elicited so little revolutionary enthusiasm.

Dos Passos’s revolutionary instincts, however, faded not long after this piece. His brush with the Stalinists in Spain, where they had executed his friend José Robles, had convinced him of Communism’s rottenness. But as soon as his politics began shifting rightward, the magazine disowned him. Literary editor Malcolm Cowley, once his enthusiastic patron, trashed his novels.

—Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

They came out of the Stadium with a stale taste in their mouths. Down West Madison Street, walking between lanes of cops and a scattering of bums, the crowds from the galleries found the proud suave voice of the National Broadcasting Company still filling their jaded ears from every loudspeaker, enumerating the technical agencies that had worked together to obtain the superb hook-up through which they broadcast the proceedings of the Democratic Convention of 1932. Well, they did their part: the two big white disks above the speakers’ platform (the ears of the radio audience) delicately caught every intonation of the oratory, the dragged-out “gre-eats” when the “great Senator from the great state of ...” was introduced, the deep “stalwart” always being prefixed to “Democrat” when a candidate was being nominated, the indignant rumble in the voice when the present administration was “branded” as having induced “an orgy of crime and a saturnalia of corruption”; the page with the portable microphone in his buttonhole had invariably been on hand when a delegate was recognized from the floor; the managers for the N.B.C. had been there all the time, stage-managing, moving quietly and deftly around the platform, with the expression and gestures of old-fashioned photographers; coaxing the speakers into poses from which they could be heard; telegrams had been read giving the minute-to-minute position of the nominee’s plane speeding west, the radio voice of Wally Butterworth had whooped things up describing the adverse flying conditions, the plane’s arrival at the airport, the cheering throngs, the jolly ride from Buffalo, the Governor’s nice smile; but when Franklin D. Roosevelt (in person) walked to the front of the rostrum on his son’s arm while the organ played the “Star Spangled Banner” and an irrepressible young lady from Texas waved a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers over his head, to greet with a plain sensible and unassuming speech the crowd that had yelled itself hoarse for an hour for Al Smith three days before, that had gone delirious over the Wet plank and applauded every phrase in the party platform, and sat with eager patience through the week-long vaudeville show—nothing happened. Courteous applause, but no feeling. The crowd in the huge hall sat blank, blinking in the glare of the lights. Neither delegates nor the public seemed to be able to keep their minds on what the candidate, whom they had nominated after such long sessions and such frantic trading and bickering downtown in their hotel rooms, had to say. As he talked the faces in the galleries and boxes melted away, leaving red blocks of seats, even the delegates on the floor slunk out in twos and threes.

Starting on Monday with the “Star Spangled Banner” and an inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson’s read by a stout gentleman with a white gardenia in his buttonhole; through the Senator from Kentucky’s keynote speech, during which he so dextrously caught his glasses every time they fell from his nose when he jerked his head to one side and up to emphasize a point; through Wednesday’s all-star variety show that offered Clarence Darrow, Will Rogers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and Father Coughlin “the radio priest” (who, by the way, advised the convention to put Jesus Christ in the White House), all on one bill; through the joyful reading of the platform with its promise of beer now and a quietus by and by on prohibition snoopers and bootleggers; through the all-night cabaret on Thursday, with its smoke and sweaty shirts and fatigue and watered Coca Cola and putty sandwiches and the cockeyed idiocy of the demonstrations: Governor Byrd’s band in plumes and rabbit’s fur (which he kindly loaned to Ritchie and to Alfalfa Bill when their turn came) and the pigeons and the young women who kept climbing up on the platform and bathing in the klieg lights like people under a warm shower, and the sleepy little Oklahoma girls in their kilties; and the grim balloting while the sky outside the windows went blue and then pink until at last the sun rose and sent long frightening bright horizontal shafts through the cigar smoke and the spotlights and the huddled groups of worn-out politicians; through the nominating speeches, and the seconding speeches and the reseconding speeches, and the old-time tunes, “The Old Gray Mare,” “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” ... through all the convention week and flickering of flashlight bulbs and the roar of voices there had been built up a myth, as incongruous to this age as the myth of the keen-eyed pilot at the helm of the ship of state that the Republicans tried to revitalize three weeks ago; the myth of the young American working his way by honesty and brawn, from Log Cabin to President. This stalwart Democrat was to rise in his might, wrench the government out of the hands of the old bogey Republicans, Wall Street, Privilege, Graft and Corruption, return it to the people and thus in some mystic way give a job to the jobless, relieve the farmers of their mortgages, save the money the little fellow had deposited in the tottering banks, restore business to the small storekeeper and producer and thereby bring the would-be Democratic office holders massed on the floor back to the fleshpots of power. A powerful myth and an old myth. But when, largely through the backstage efforts of Mr. McAdoo, the myth took flesh in the crippled body and unassuming speech of the actual Governor of New York, the illusion crashed. Too late.

You come out of the Stadium and walk down the street. It’s West Madison Street, the home address of migratory workers and hoboes and jobless men all over the Middle West. Gradually the din of speeches fades out of your ears, you forget the taste of the cigar you were smoking, the cracks and gossip of the press gallery. Nobody on the street knows about the convention that’s deciding who shall run their government, or cares. The convention is the sirens of police motorcycles, a new set of scare headlines, a new sensation over the radio. There are six-day bicycle races and battles of the century and eucharistic congresses and big-league games and political conventions; and a man has got a job, or else he hasn’t got a job, he’s got jack in his pocket, or else he’s broke, he’s got a business, or else he’s a bum. Way off some place headline events happen. Even if they’re right on West Madison Street, they’re way off. Roosevelt or Hoover? It’ll be the same cops.

You walk on down, across the great train yards and the river to the Loop, out onto Michigan Avenue where Chicago is raising every year a more imposing front of skyscrapers, into the clean wind off the lake. Shiny store-fronts, doormen, smartly dressed girls, taxis, buses taking shoppers, clerks, business men home to the South Side and North Side. In Grant Park more jobless men lying under the bushes, beyond them sails in the harbor, a white steamboat putting out into the lake. Overhead pursuit planes fly in formation advertising the military show at Soldiers’ Field. To get their ominous buzz out of your ears, you go down a flight of steps, into the darkness feebly lit by ranks of dusty red electric lights of the roadway under Michigan Avenue. The fine smart marble and plate-glass front of the city peels off as you walk down the steps. Down here the air, drenched with the exhaust from the grinding motors of trucks, is full of dust and grit and the roar of the heavy traffic that hauls the city’s freight. When your eyes get used to the darkness, you discover that, like the world upstairs of store-fronts and hotel lobbies and battles of the century and political conventions, this world too has its leisure class. They lie in rows along the ledges above the roadway, huddled in grimed newspapers, gray sag-faced men in worn-out clothes, discards, men who have nothing left but their stiff hungry grimy bodies, men who have lost the power to want. Try to tell one of them that the gre-eat Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the gre-eat state of New York, has been nominated by the gre-eat Democratic party as its candidate for President, and you’ll get what the galleries at the convention gave Mr. McAdoo when they discovered that he had the votes of Texas and California in his pocket and was about to shovel them into the Roosevelt band wagon, a prolonged and enthusiastic Booo. Hoover or Roosevelt, it’ll be the same cops.