The Working Class Republican Page 3

  it is not the function of the Government to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to their neighbors, or to relieve private institutions of their responsibilities to the public, or the local government to the States, or the responsibilities of the State governments to the Federal Government. . . .

  It does not follow, because our difficulties are stupendous, because there are some souls timorous enough to doubt the validity and effectiveness of our own ideals and our system, that we must turn to a State-controlled or State-directed social or economic system to cure our troubles. That is not liberalism; that is tyranny.23

  Hoover insisted that the federal government could only coordinate and assist the acts of others; it could not act on its own. Its primary responsibility was to ensure that it ran a balanced budget, which included raising new revenues and reducing other expenditures. “It is in reducing taxes from the backs of men that we liberate their powers,”24 Hoover argued. Roosevelt’s proposed spending increases on temporary public works programs, he said, would cost “upwards of $9,000,000,000 a year” and so endanger American liberty itself. He said that current government spending, which caused Americans to “work for the support of all forms of Government sixty-one days out of the year,” already threatened “national impoverishment and destruction of [our] liberties.”25 Roosevelt’s proposals would increase that amount by an additional forty days; Hoover argued that “our Nation cannot do this without destruction to our whole conception of the American system.”26

  Roosevelt responded to Hoover’s attacks the same day, contending that “my New Deal does not aim to change [the fundamental principles of America]. It does aim to bring [them] into effect.”27 He had first explained how his proposed expansion of federal government power fulfilled American principles at a speech delivered in front of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. FDR argued in that speech that the American Revolution was part of a worldwide effort by the many to control the power of the few that had sprung up in the late Middle Ages.28 He argued that this same struggle between a few who sought to control government for its benefit and the mass of average people continued after the American Revolution in the struggle between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton, in this telling, favored the rule of “a small group of able and public spirited citizens” while Jefferson favored rule by the whole of the people.

  Roosevelt’s Jefferson was not, however, a mere advocate of smaller government. “Government to him was a means to an end,” he said, and he quoted Jefferson to the effect that in early America most people could through their own effort “extract from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to feed abundantly, clothe above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.” Since the industrial revolution had evolved without a commensurate evolution of government power, he argued, that situation no longer prevailed. “We are steering a course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”

  FDR placed the well-being of the average person ahead of the economic liberty of the most successful individuals in his political hierarchy. “Every man has a right to make a comfortable living”; “every man has a right to be assured, to the fullest extent possible, in the safety of his savings.” If restricting “the operations of the speculator, the manipulator, even the financier” was needed to bring these rights to fruition, “I believe we must accept the restriction as needful, not to hamper individualism but to protect it.” “Faith in America,” that “apparent Utopia which Jefferson imagined for us in 1776, and which Jefferson, [Theodore] Roosevelt, and Wilson sought to bring to realization . . . demands we recognize the new terms of the old social contract.”

  Roosevelt decisively won his contest with Hoover. He received 57 percent of the vote, smashing the incumbent by nearly 18 points. FDR crushed Hoover in the Electoral College 472–59. Working-class Catholics and other immigrants whose votes had sustained the GOP for decades swung behind Roosevelt. Four years later, after New Deal projects had begun to be implemented, even more of these voters joined the Democratic ranks. They delivered another smashing electoral victory for FDR, giving him a 61–36 percent win over the Republican Alf Landon. Landon won only two states, Vermont and Maine, as Roosevelt won the Electoral College by a record 523–8 margin. These voters would not abandon FDR’s party again for decades.

  Roosevelt used his victories to remake American government. The first national unemployment insurance system was passed. Federal insurance of bank deposits (via the FDIC) followed, as did a host of new regulations and programs. The government employed people in public works; it subsidized home ownership through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA); and it built publicly owned units for people too poor to purchase their homes. The Social Security Act established the first retirement pension program in America as well as the forerunner of the main welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Banks and Wall Street were federally regulated by the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities Act, and the Securities Exchange Act. Finally, employers were forced to bargain with labor unions that had organized their workers, as a result of the Wagner Act. Federal spending and borrowing rose, and the top tax rate on the wealthy rose from 25 percent in 1930 to over 81 percent by 1939.

  Throughout this period Roosevelt stressed that the New Deal was consistent with American individualism. His fifth fireside chat, for example, told Americans that the New Deal was merely “a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals. . . . All that we do is fulfill the historic traditions of the American people.”29 The 1936 Democratic National Convention was held in Philadelphia, “a fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers” according to the re-nominated president. He repeated this theme again in his second inaugural address and in fireside chat 12. He even compared the New Deal to “the frontier husking bee” in a 1938 speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance. He went on in that speech to say, “Our recent legislation is not a departure from but a return to the healthy practices of mutual self-help of the early settlers of the Northwest.”

  Indeed, we owe one of our nation’s most beloved buildings, the Jefferson Memorial, to Roosevelt’s interpretation of American history. Construction on that edifice to liberty was authorized in 1934, and FDR himself presided over its opening on Jefferson’s two hundredth birthday.30

  Republicans railed that America was being destroyed, but Americans disagreed. They rewarded Roosevelt with an unprecedented third term in 1940, giving him a 55–45 victory over the Republican Wendell Willkie. Again, formerly Republican working-class voters gave FDR the decisive margin; Roosevelt won narrow victories throughout the Midwest and Northeast on the strength of votes in industrial counties and cities.

  The intervention of World War II halted further domestic policy changes, but FDR signaled his intention to press on. His 1944 State of the Union address declared that every American should have rights to things like “earn[ing] enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation . . . a decent home . . . adequate medical care . . . and a good education.”31 He called these and other government guarantees a “Second Bill of Rights”—the speech became known as the “Economic Bill of Rights” speech. The federal government also created the War Production Board to govern the American economy through the war and established wage and price controls through another agency.32

  Both FDR’s actions and his aspirations were unprecedented, but Americans rewarded him with a record fourth term in 1944. Yet again Roosevelt won narrow victories in industrial states with votes from working-class urban and industrial county voters.

  It may seem strange to most readers, but Ronald Reagan supported these changes. The future president acknowledged that by “the end of World War II, I was a New Dealer to the core.” He said that in late 1945:

  I thought that government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression. I didn’t trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own all our big public u
tilities; if there wasn’t enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.33

  Countless interviews with his friends and coworkers show that the war had not changed Reagan’s belief: he was as passionately pro–New Deal and liberal before the war as he was in 1945.

  Neither Reagan nor his friends and acquaintances go into much detail in these interviews about why he was so devoted to Roosevelt’s New Deal. But upon close examination, we can see how FDR’s support for the average American against the powerful and his invocation of traditional American values would have attracted the young Reagan.

  Consistent with FDR’s devotion to the average American, Reagan’s strongest political principle was always that that person should be free to pursue a life of his or her own choosing. In his autobiography he wrote:

  Throughout my life, I guess there’s been one thing that’s troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else.34

  This view pervaded his politics throughout his life, and those who knew him then noted how strongly he believed this. His high school science teacher, Bernard Frazer, remembered his young charge as someone who “bled for humanity.”35 Reagan noted that he changed his mind about being forced to join a union, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), as a condition of being able to work in movies after he learned how extras and less famous actors were “exploited” by the studios.36 He viewed the Democratic Party then as the “party of the people.”37 He desperately wanted to help “the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the homeless,”38 and described himself as “passionately devoted to the working man.”39 As a child from a working poor background with personal experience of the Depression’s ravages, he enthusiastically approved of FDR’s calls to action.40

  Roosevelt also extolled the average person’s dreams rather than those of the economically successful or the inventive. His philosophy was most succinctly stated when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1940:

  Democracy can thrive only when it enlists the devotion of those whom Lincoln called the common people. Democracy can hold that devotion only when it adequately respects their dignity by so ordering society as to assure to the masses of men and women reasonable security and hope for themselves and their children.

  Roosevelt’s “national policy” was based “upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men”;41 the goal of his four terms was “to advance the lot of the average American citizen who had been so forgotten after the last war.”42

  Reagan’s love of the average American knew no boundaries. Jack Reagan made a point of raising his children to see the good in every person regardless of his or her color or creed, a lesson Ronald Reagan took to heart. He stood up for his black teammates on the Eureka College football team when they encountered segregation;43 he resigned from a prestigious Hollywood country club in 1937 when he learned they did not admit Jews;44 he praised the combat sacrifices of Japanese American soldiers in World War II at a time when anti-Japanese prejudice was so rampant that over 100,000 American citizens of Japanese descent had been sent to internment camps by his political idol.45 The young Reagan as much as the mature Reagan was always on the side of the common man from every background.

  Reagan’s devotion was not condescending. He always believed that almost everyone, regardless of circumstance or ability, could and should run his or her own life.46 Reagan summarized this belief nicely in his autobiography:

  Individuals determine their own destiny; that is, it’s largely their own ambition and hard work that determine their fate in life. . . .

  Every individual is unique, but we all want freedom and liberty, peace, love, and security, a good home, and a chance to worship God in our own way; we all want the chance to get ahead and make our children’s lives better than our own. We all want the chance to work at a job of our own choosing and to be fairly rewarded for it and the opportunity to control our own destiny. . . .

  Not everyone aspires to be a bank president or a nuclear scientist, but everyone wants to do something with one’s life that will give him or her pride and a sense of accomplishment.47

  FDR would have agreed. While Reagan would ultimately view government as the chief obstacle among those barriers, FDR identified monopoly and the control of government by the “moneyed few” to be the primary barriers to a self-chosen life. Once big businessmen were required to bargain fairly with their employees and could no longer pay them “starvation wages”; once public investment in roads, schools, parks, and access to health care were sufficient; then the average person could enjoy “true individual freedom.”48 That emphasis on self-government meant that Roosevelt believed in both a collective responsibility to prevent “undeserved poverty” and that the average person’s work was an essential component of human happiness. Calling the New Deal “a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness which is an enemy of the human spirit,”49 Roosevelt proclaimed that “in a land of vast resources no one should be permitted to starve.”50 This was not intended to be a permanent handout for all. Instead, FDR’s aim was to procure work for everyone who wanted a job and could hold one. “We prefer useful work to pauperism of the dole,”51 he proclaimed, and said it should not be the “destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief roles.”52 One may “by sloth or by crime decline to exercise” his right to “make a comfortable living,”53 “but it may not be denied him.”

  Reagan would echo these sentiments throughout his career even as he ultimately placed more faith in purely private enterprise to provide the opportunities and the comfort everyone craved. Even the phrase he used to explain who could legitimately call upon the government for permanent assistance—those who “through no fault of their own” could not support themselves—owes an unacknowledged debt to Roosevelt. FDR used the exact phrase when referring to people who deserved government help in a 1937 fireside chat.54

  Thus Reagan could write in a 1947 newspaper article that “[America’s] highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual for therein lies the highest dignity of man.”55 That sentence could easily fit into any of Reagan’s most famous speeches, but he wrote it while he was a self-described New Deal Democrat.

  Reagan’s love of America also found its parallel in Roosevelt’s thought. Later in life he would say that America was a unique nation in mankind’s history, a place that “above all places, gives us the freedom to reach out and make our dreams come true.”56 He would call America a “shining city on a hill” and “the last best hope of man on earth.” FDR was less poetic than Reagan, but no less emphatic, when he said in his third inaugural that “the democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history.” He went on:

  In America [this aspiration’s] impact has been irresistible. America has been the New World in all tongues, and to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all who came believed they could create upon this continent a new life—a life that should be new in freedom.

  Reagan displayed this special patriotic love of America during his New Deal days too. In January 1940, he prevailed upon his fiancée, Jane Wyman, and the woman who got him his first break in show business, Jo Hodges, to go to Mount Vernon with him. His fascination with everything he saw there left a lasting impression on the women, so much so that Wyman arranged to have a replica of a writing desk of George Washington’s that Reagan deeply admired made for his study.57 By 1941 Reagan was studying the Constitution in his spare time between movies.58

  Roosevelt also made other promises that an older Reagan would cite to explain his youthful enthusiasm. He rightly notes in his autobiography that “Roosevelt ran for president on a platform dedicated to reducing waste and fat in government.”59 Reagan also said that one of FDR’s sons, FDR Jr., “often told me that his father said many times his welfa
re and relief programs during the Depression were meant only as emergency, stopgap measures, not the seeds of what others tried to turn into a permanent welfare state.”60 Reagan comforted himself by saying, “If he [FDR] had not been distracted by the war, I think he would have resisted the relentless expansion of the federal government that followed him.”61

  Reagan also argued that Democrats after Roosevelt had abandoned the true philosophy of the party’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Reagan’s Jefferson was a man who advocated a small government that left as much power as possible in the people.62 By demanding “the right to regulate and plan the social and economic life of the country and move into areas best left to private enterprise,” the Democrats had left behind their founder’s—and, purportedly, Reagan’s—philosophy, thereby forfeiting Reagan’s allegiance.63

  Roosevelt’s unexpected death in April 1945 forced the Democrats to decide how to carry out his legacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal always had two main competing strains of thought. One was that America’s promise could be restored by measures that gave average people a fairer shake in life through government regulation of the free market and guarantees of protection against undeserved poverty. The other was that America’s promise was fundamentally compromised by the modern economy and that only top-down governmental planning could ensure individuals’ freedom. The battle over which of these ideas would define the Democratic Party was fought in the election of 1948 between the incumbent, President Harry S. Truman, and the former vice president Henry Wallace.

  Wallace and many other disgruntled New Dealers were upset that the War Production Board, which they viewed as a potential vehicle to introduce national peacetime economic planning, had been abolished by Truman in late 1945. Desiring a rapid transformation of American society, they formed a new political party, the Progressive Party, to carry on their battle.