A Renegade History of the United States Page 31

  The men who made the New Deal were driven by dreams of a machinelike society, in which all members, from the leaders of government to the lowliest workers, would be parts designed, built, and employed entirely for their function within the whole apparatus. But to their dismay, these men found that most Americans rejected such dreams, except during times of crisis. The First World War was the first such crisis, and they embraced that opportunity to discipline America. But then came the peace and prosperity of the 1920s, a long time of waiting for another national emergency that could make their fantasies of social order come true.

  SOCIAL MACHINERY

  In the 1920s, the offices in the buildings along the eastern edge of the Columbia University campus looked from the hills of Morningside Heights out over Harlem. Rexford Tugwell, a professor in the economics department, occupied one of those offices. From behind his desk in Hamilton Hall, Tugwell could not hear the music but he could see the nightclubs, dance halls, and speakeasies that defined the Jazz Age. And so he waited.

  Tugwell had been shut off from the pleasures of the body as a child, when asthma and persistent illnesses kept him confined to bed in his rural and isolated hometown in far-western New York State. He grew into an extraordinarily handsome man, with the dark looks and wavy hair of a silent-screen star. But his illnesses continued, and by the time he reached maturity, he had retreated into a world of books. He was a fan of utopian science fiction, such as H. G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet, in which mankind, fearing destruction from an onrushing comet, remakes world society into a cooperative commune. Tugwell spent much of his youth conjuring perfect worlds inhabited by perfect people. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1910s, he fell under the spell of the young economics professor Scott Nearing, who had recently published a book calling for the creation of just such a world. “The kind of social philosophy I was developing under the tutelage of Nearing, reinforced by other instruction,” Tugwell later recalled in his autobiography, “is perhaps best defined in a little book called The Super Race: An American Problem, which Nearing published in 1912.” Nearing argued that the United States should develop, through selective breeding, a race of supermen who would create the world’s first utopia. These ideas, which were bastardized versions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, were then in vogue among German intellectuals who would become the intellectual founders of Nazism.

  Tugwell’s other mentor in college was the prominent progressive economist Simon Patten, who had been trained in German universities. “He taught me the importance of looking for uniformities, laws, explanations of the inner forces moving behind the façade of events,” Tugwell remembered. “One of these was the conclusion that our pluralistic system—laissez-faire in industry, checks and balances in government, and so on—must be shaped into a unity if its inherent conflicts, beginning to be so serious, were not to destroy us.” From where did Patten get this benignsounding idea? “He thought that the Germans had the key to that unity in philosophy, in economics, and perhaps in politics. He saw the conflict, now so ominously coming up over the horizon, as one between the living wholeness of the German conception and the dying divisiveness of English pluralism.” Even more ominous was the belief that Patten shared with his German colleagues—who would supply the intellectual basis for Nazism—that industrial capitalism and technological advances had softened and emasculated the people. “Every improvement which simplifies or lessens manual labor,” explained Patten, “increases the amount of the deficiencies which the laboring classes may possess without their being thereby overcome in the struggle for subsistence that the survival of the ignorant brings upon society.” Patten’s solution to this problem was swift, simple, and breathtakingly ruthless. “Social progress is a higher law than equality, and a nation must choose it at any cost,” and the only way to progress is the “eradication of the vicious and inefficient.” But the prescriptions of Nearing and Patten were just academic wishes. Tugwell wished to make them real.

  The world war was a godsend. When America entered the European conflict in 1917, Tugwell, like many progressives, saw it as a chance to create “an industrial engineer’s Utopia.” The government agencies that seized control of major industries and directed the national economy from Washington, the campaigns against vice to maintain the country’s discipline and racial vigor, and the creation of five million regimented, physically fit men through the draft, filled Tugwell with hope. “We were on the verge of having an international industrial machine,” he later remembered. But peace dashed his dreams. “Only the Armistice prevented a great experiment in control of production, control of price, and control of consumption.” Through the 1920s, Tugwell looked wistfully out the window of his Columbia office and wrote a series of articles calling for a return to a wartime society, when “social control” and the “scientific management of human life” would be the order of the day.

  The stock market crash of 1929 provided his next opportunity. In the early years of the Great Depression, Tugwell wrote a book that he thought America, now in its most desperate hour, could finally take seriously. The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts argued for making all of society into a great factory. The book called for removing “the dead hand of competitive enterprise” and replacing it with central planning. “When industry is government and government is industry, the dual conflict deep in our modern institutions will have abated,” he said. Naturally, he admired the Italian government for doing just this. Mussolini, he said, had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary. And at any rate, [Italy] is being rebuilt physically in a systematic way.”

  On a frigid winter day in 1932, while walking down the street near his office, huddled in his tweed jacket and overcoat, Tugwell encountered a colleague from the political science department named Raymond Moley. Moley asked if he would like to meet Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York and a candidate for the presidency, to discuss joining Roosevelt’s team of advisors. Tugwell, thrilled, accepted the offer, and within a few weeks he was a member of the famous “Brains Trust,” a small group of academics who built the New Deal. Tugwell would conceive and craft several major initiatives of the New Deal, including the NIRA, the public works programs, and many of Roosevelt’s agricultural projects. But soon after he started his new job in Washington, Tugwell began to envy his hero in Rome. “Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as F. D. R. has,” Tugwell later said. “But he has the press controlled so they cannot scream lies at him daily. And he has a compact and disciplined nation, although it lacks resources. On the surface, at least, he seems to have made enormous progress.” Democracy was the problem, and fascism was “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”

  While Tugwell came to his love for regimentation through the life of the rationalistic mind, General Hugh Johnson came to his through another major source of New Deal culture: the military. With a round Irish face reddened by alcoholism, Johnson looked and drank like W. C. Fields, but he did not share the comedian’s individualism and irreverence toward authority. As a teenager in the Wild West town of Alva, Oklahoma, Johnson voluntarily participated in twice-weekly drills with the local militia company. He was so enamored with thoughts of war that when he was fifteen he attempted to enlist with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to fight in the war against Spain. Foiled from becoming a child soldier by his father, Johnson nonetheless enrolled at West Point when he was just seventeen. Later, as an officer in the army, he relished directing drills, roll calls, parades, reviews, and marches, and was known to scream at soldiers for the smallest violations of protocol. While serving in the army, Johnson began a side career as a writer of short stories for magazines in which boys in the military learn discipline, loyalty, and self-sacrifice, and make themselves into men.

  Like Tugwell and many future New Dealers, Johnson saw the Great War not as the worthless horror that most Americans considered it
to be but as a long-awaited opportunity to militarize all of society. Because only 73,000 men volunteered for service in response to President Wilson’s call to create an army of millions, the federal government was forced to institute the first draft since the Civil War. Several military leaders recognized that few people were better suited to the job of creating a vast army of conscripts than Johnson, and he was brought to Washington to implement the new Selective Service System. The registration of 10 million men for compulsory military service, which resulted in 4 million actually being shipped to training camps, 117,000 killed in action, and more than 200,000 wounded, “was one of the most spectacular developments of the war,” Johnson recalled. He also devised a plan to make useful the undrafted men, “who stood in saloons and pool rooms watching their contemporaries marching away to war.” All deferred men who were either unemployed or engaged in “nonessential work” were warned that they would be inducted into the military if they did not find work that was essential for the war effort. Johnson boasted that the “work or fight” order forced 137,255 “bartenders, private chauffeurs, men hairdressers, and the like that are pansies” to take jobs that the government considered essential.

  During the 1920s, Johnson retreated into the private sector, waiting for the world to turn in favor of the martial life. In 1932, at the bottom of the Depression, Johnson saw his chance. He wrote a plan of action and circulated it privately among friends in the Democratic Party. With the heading, “By MUSCLEINNY, Dictator pro tem,” Johnson’s “Proclamation” called for him to “assum[e] the dictatorship of the Republic.” The time was right to do away with democracy. “In this crisis, and especially in this political year, divided powers were wholly inadequate,” he wrote. “The sole cure was singleness of control and immediate action.” He demanded that the president, vice president, “and all members of Congress” be removed from the country and that elections be suspended. One month after writing his proclamation, Johnson was invited into the inner circle of the Roosevelt campaign. He later recalled that “from the principle of taking active charge of events through several of the principal acts that were found to be necessary more than eight months later, Muscleinny pretty accurately diagnosed the situation and at least dimly anticipated much of the Recovery Program.”

  When it came time to draft the National Industrial Recovery Act, Johnson successfully argued for the president alone—rather than Congress—to have supervisory power over the code authorities. When the act was passed, Roosevelt—perhaps out of gratitude—made Johnson the first administrator of the NRA. By then, Johnson had discovered the writings of the Italian fascists. He distributed books written by Mussolini’s education minister to other members of the Roosevelt cabinet, and in a speech called the Italian dictator the “shining example of the twentieth century.”

  Johnson brought in Donald Richberg, a progressive labor lawyer who helped craft the NIRA, to be the general counsel of the NRA. Richberg recalled that the drafting of the law grew out of a desire to end parliamentary democracy and establish autocratic rule in America. “America did not want to reform its bad habits,” he said, and someone had to do it for the people. “America is not going to choose to do anything which a large number of Americans do not wish to do—so long as democratic government can endure and politicians can evade a perilous issue,” Richberg wrote. What he called “the inefficiencies and corruptions of popular government” were replaced by a single leader. “We called for a Man of Action, and we got one … The American people might well go down upon their knees and thank God that … there came into power the man who alone could save them—the Man of Action.” As the legal historian James Q. Whitman puts it, “The two leaders of the NIRA were marked antiparliamentarians; the true creatures of the crisis atmosphere of 1932–33.”

  Two other creatures of that crisis, Roosevelt and Hitler, shared a devotion to the soil and a belief that their nations could be redeemed by merging with it. First, they both established control over agriculture. In the United States, through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, and in Germany, through the Estate for Agriculture, the national government decided how much farmers would produce and how much they would charge for it. Roosevelt and Hitler both saw the family farm as the root of national virtue. For the president, the country was the only place “to establish a real home in the traditional American sense.” For the führer, peasants were “the foundation and life source” of Germany and “the source of national fertility.” As governor of New York, Roosevelt established a program to pay for city families to move to farms so that “they may secure through the good earth the permanent jobs they have lost in overcrowded cities and towns.” As president, he launched a program designed by Tug-well called Subsistence Homesteads, which provided families with “a modern but inexpensive house and outbuildings, located on a plot of land upon which a family may produce a considerable portion of the food required for home consumption.” Likewise, the Nazis subsidized the construction of homes in rural areas in order to encourage self-sufficiency and to alleviate overcrowding in the cities. In Italy, one of Mussolini’s most ambitious projects was the draining of a three-hundred-square-mile marshland near Rome and the establishment of independent family farms on the reclaimed land. As the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written, “Fascism, National Socialism, and the New Deal all made the garden-settlement into a cornerstone of their plans for a new form of civilization, feeding popular enthusiasm with appealing words, images, and projects.”

  Roosevelt’s favorite New Deal initiative was the Civilian Conservation Corps, also created in 1933, which placed young men in military-style camps and put them to work in the nation’s hinterland. The Nazis, too, improved much of the German countryside through the labor of youth housed in work camps. “There was, furthermore, little difference in appearance or intent,” according to John Garraty, “between the Nazi work camps and those set up in America under the Civilian Conservation Corps.” Roosevelt praised the CCC for getting young men “off the city street corners.” Hitler said the Nazi work camps saved German youth from “rotting helplessly in the streets.” Both the New Dealers and Nazis designed the programs to shape young men into citizen-soldiers. The U.S. Army was put in control of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who enlisted in the CCC. “Corps-men” were required to stand at attention, to address their superiors as “Sir,” and to attend morning and evening flag-raising ceremonies. One corps-man remarked in a letter home, “The engineers and technicians teach us to be soil soldiers, a name they call us here, because we are the army who are training to repel the enemies of the land.”

  Toward the end of the 1930s, as America moved closer to war, this militarization of youth became the undisguised purpose of the CCC. In 1940 Congress mandated noncombat military training for all CCC enrollees. The director of the program, James J. McEntee, explained that the military emphasis was necessary for “converting unemployed young men without work experience into strong, vigorous young men who could drive trucks, tractors, which are the first cousins to tanks, build roads, bridges, telephone lines … which would aid in the advancement of industrial defense and in the strengthening of the military forces.”

  The New Dealers, Mussolini, and Hitler were united in the belief that the conditions of the working class had to be greatly improved. The Fascist and Nazi regimes outlawed trade unions, but they worked hard to make factories safer, cleaner, and more pleasant workplaces, and also provided subsidized housing, low-cost vacations, and sports programs to millions of workers. In the U.S., more money was spent on public works projects than on any other part of the New Deal. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in 1935, was the largest such program. It made up half the federal budget and employed an average of 2.1 million workers per year between 1935 and 1941. WPA workers built highways, roads, sidewalks, libraries, schools, stadiums, parks, airports, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and swimming pools. Of the three regimes, the Third Reich was the most effective in
delivering a new life to the workers. The Nazis instituted a full employment program that within three years of Hitler’s rise to power had virtually eliminated unemployment in Germany. A massive public works project, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD), rivaled the WPA in size and scope. Functioning as a militarylike unit, the RAD built the Autobahn, countless surface roads, and bridges. It reclaimed marshland for cultivation, constructed dykes, improved drainage systems, and completed vast tree removal operations. During the war, the RAD built bunkers, underground facilities, and entrenchments all over Europe.

  In both the U.S. and Germany, government-sponsored employment programs were in large part directed toward military purposes. The Nazis put hundreds of thousands of Germans to work building weapons, planes, and tanks. In the U.S., workers employed by the Public Works Administration built two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, several smaller warships, more than one hundred fighter planes and bombers, close to fifty military airports, and the air force headquarters. The German and American public works programs served another important function too: they regimented large portions of the American and German workforces and inculcated national cultures of discipline, order, sacrifice, and loyalty to the state. It is striking to see how similar were the ways in which the New Dealers and Nazis promoted their programs. In the thousands of posters produced by both governments, loyalty to the state frames the messages, work is extolled as a means to dignity, masculinity and manual labor are glorified, and homoerotic overtones abound.