William Allen White – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Powerful images helped FDR advance his agenda

Dorothea Lange’s 1936 *Migrant Mother* was taken while she was employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration program.

By Jim O’Neal

President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that it was not enough for only him to understand the Great Depression’s grip on the nation. The American people would have to see for themselves the faces of their fellow citizens, their backs against the wall, drained by the struggle to hold families and farms together.

The Depression was in its fourth year. In the neighborhoods and hamlets of a stricken nation, millions of men and women languished in sullen gloom and looked to Washington with guarded hope. Still they struggled to comprehend the nature of the calamity that had engulfed them. At the new Federal Emergency Relief Administration, headed up by Harry Hopkins, rivers of data flowed that measured the Depression’s impact in cold, hard numbers. Shareholders had seen the value of their assets decline by 75 percent since 1929, a colossal financial meltdown affecting the idle rich, struggling neighborhood banks, retirement nest eggs and even university endowments. Five thousand banks failed between the crash and the New Deal’s rescue operations in March 1933, wiping out $7 billion of depositors’ money.

Mortgage loan defaults accelerated – 150,000 homes lost in 1930; 200,000 in 1931; 250,000 in 1932. This stripped millions of people of both shelter and life savings in a single stroke, menacing the balance sheets of thousands of surviving banks. Shrinking real estate prices and tax revenues forced 1,300 municipalities to default, cutting services, payrolls and paychecks. Chicago reduced teacher pay and by 1932-33 cut their pay to zero.

Gross national product fell in 1933 to half of 1929, while capital spending on plant and equipment plummeted to $3 billion from $24 billion. Car production dropped 60 percent and steel was even worse. Mute bands of jobless men drifted through the streets of every American city on the prowl for jobs that didn’t exist.

Hardest hit was the countryside. Income for America’s farmers collapsed from $6 billion to $2 billion in three years. Unemployment and reduced wages were the most obvious and fell hardest on the most vulnerable: the young, the elderly, the least educated, the unskilled, and especially on rural Americans, with large numbers of immigrant workers.

But Hopkins knew that he needed more than sterile economic data to gain the necessary political power to make the structural government changes required. They needed to touch the human face of the catastrophe, taste the metallic smack of the fear and feel the hunger of the unemployed. He convinced Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press in July 1933 to travel the entire nation … talking to a broad swath of Americans and capturing their stories in their own words and in photographs. With FDR’s encouragement, a flood of documentary photographs would be converted into political power on a massive scale. In addition to Hickok, they contracted some of the nation’s finest photographers. Names like Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans and others would help create the consciousness necessary to mobilize the government’s resources. Their photographs helped create the absolute sense of urgency needed so desperately.

The small, nimble government agency that would support and encourage their photographic mission was the Resettlement Administration – later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – under the leadership of Rexford Tugwell, an original member of FDR’s brain trust, and still Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. Importantly, neither the Resettlement Administration nor the FSA had any Congressional oversight. These photographers had the freedom to tell the truth as they saw it. Their photographs are now housed in the Library of Congress and bear witness to what people were enduring, refuting what newspapers had been calling “moochers” or “an invading hoard of the idle.”

Looking at these portraits now, we can see the compassion of the photographers and the dignity of real Americans on the edge. They refuted the charges of those who thought the pictures were political propaganda. In discussions of the work of Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor, the photographer/curator Thomas Heyman summed it up: “They clung to the hope that what they were doing might be part of the solution.”

The strategy worked and FDR was given a mandate to introduce all aspects of the New Deal, the most expansive role of the federal government into America’s daily life. After the 1936 elections, newspaper editor William Allen White said, “He has all but been crowned by the people.” Still, it would take yet another war to get everybody back to work.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

As court controversy rages, let’s not forget what we do best

A photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt signed and inscribed to Eleanor Roosevelt sold for $10,000 at an October 2016 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The Supreme Court was created by the Constitution, but the document wisely calls for Congress to decide the number of justices. This was vastly superior to a formula based on the number of states or population, which would have resulted in a large, unwieldy committee. The 1789 Judiciary Act established the initial number at six, with a chief justice and five associates all selected by President Washington.

In 1807, the number was increased to seven (to avoid tie votes) and in 1837 to nine, and then to 10 in 1863. The Judiciary Act of 1866 temporarily reduced the court to seven in response to post-Civil War politics and the Andrew Johnson presidency. Finally, the 1869 Act settled on nine, where it has remained to this day. The major concern has consistently been over the activities of the court and the fear it would inevitably try to create policy rather than evaluate it (ensuring that Congressional legislation was lawful and conformed to the intent of the Constitution).

The recent confirmation hearings are the latest example of both political parties vying for advantage by using the court to shape future policies, reflecting political partisanship at its worst. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court can’t enforce its decisions since Congress has the power of the purse and the president the power of force, the court has devolved into a de facto legislative function through its deliberations. In a sharply divided nation, on most issues, policy has become the victim, largely since Congress is unable to find consensus. The appellate process is simply a poor substitute for this legislative weakness.

We have been here before and it helps to remember the journey. Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited on our ancestors: a terrible economic depression and a world war. The economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than the result of the excesses of the 1920s. In the 100 years before the 1929 stock-market crash, our dynamic industrial revolution had produced a series of boom-bust cycles, inflicting great misery on capital and on many people. Even the fabled Roaring ’20s had excluded great segments of the population, especially blacks, farmers and newly arrived immigrants. Who or what to blame?

“[President] Hoover will be known as the greatest innocent bystander in history, a brave man fighting valiantly, futile, to the end,” populist newspaperman William Allen White wrote in 1932.

The same generation that suffered through the Great Depression was then faced with war in Europe and Asia, the rationing of common items, entrance to the nuclear age and, eventually, the responsibilities for rebuilding the world. Our basic way of life was threatened by a global tyranny with thousands of nukes wired to red buttons on two desks 4,862 miles apart.

FDR was swept into office in 1932 during the depth of the Great Depression and his supporters believed he possessed just what the country needed: inherent optimism, confidence, decisiveness, and the desire to get things done. We had 13 million unemployed, 9,100 banks closed, and a government at a standstill. “This nation asks for action and action now!”

In his first 100 days, Roosevelt swamped Congress with a score of carefully crafted legislative actions designed to bring about economic reforms. Congress responded eagerly. But the Supreme Court, now dubbed the “Nine Old Men,” said no to most New Deal legislation by votes of 6-3 or 5-4. They made mincemeat of the proposals. But the economy did improve and resulted in an even bigger landslide re-election. FDR won 60.3 percent of the popular vote and an astonishing 98.5 percent of the electoral votes, losing only Vermont and Maine.

In his 1937 inaugural address, FDR emphasized that “one-third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished.” He called for more federal support. However, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau worried about business confidence and argued for a balanced budget, and in early 1937, Roosevelt, almost inexplicably, ordered federal spending reduced. Predictably, the U.S. economy went into decline. Industrial production had fallen 14 percent and in October alone, another half million people were thrown out of work. It was clearly now “Roosevelt’s Recession.”

Fearing that the Supreme Court would continue to nullify the New Deal, Roosevelt in his ninth Fireside Chat unveiled a new plan for the judiciary. He proposed that the president should have the power to appoint additional justices – up to a maximum of six, one for every member of the Supreme Court over age 70 who did not retire in six months. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (known as the “court-packing plan”) hopelessly split the Democratic majority in the Senate, caused a storm of protest from bench to bar, and created an uproar among both Constitutional conservatives and liberals. The bill was doomed from the start and even the Senate Judiciary reported it to the floor negatively, 10-14. The Senate vote was even worse … 70-20 to bury it.

We know how that story ended, as Americans were united to fight a Great War and then do what we do best: work hard, innovate and preserve the precious freedoms our forebears guaranteed us.

Unite vs. Fight seems like a good idea to me.

JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Taft Waited Patiently to Fulfill a Dream Beyond the Presidency

An oil portrait of William Howard Taft as chief justice, by Emily Burling Waite (1887-1980), realized $3,883 at a May 2010 auction. The painting originated from the collection of the American Red Cross.

By Jim O’Neal

The election of 1920 brought to the presidency a man universally regarded as less than mediocre: Warren Gamaliel Harding of Marion, Ohio.

He was clearly not up to the job and his scandal-ridden administration was perhaps the worst. It was widely known that he soon became disenchanted. “My God,” he told renowned editor William Allen White, “this is a hell of a job! … My friends, my damn friends, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!” And in a moment of retrospection, he admitted to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”

His associates, dubbed the “Ohio Gang,” and his senate colleagues had chosen Harding, a “presidential-looking man,” possibly because they sensed opportunity. Yet Harding’s public embrace of a “return to normalcy” had widespread popular support and it had been a long eight years since Republicans controlled the White House. But still, the evidence of financial scandals penetrating his administration could hardly be ignored. Although some of the worst, such as the Teapot Dome Scandal (which involved his departments of Interior, Justice and the Navy), did not break until after his demise, he was far from unpopular.

One man who was delighted with Harding’s election was ex-President William Howard Taft, who was obsessed with joining the Supreme Court and had been patiently waiting for another Republican president. However, he made it abundantly clear that it had to be as chief justice and not a mere associate. The sitting chief justice – Edward Douglass White – had been elevated by Taft in 1910, and had purposely delayed his retirement pending a Republican in the WH. He even conveniently died on May 19, 1921, just three months after Harding’s inauguration.

The public was expecting an instant appointment. But President Harding procrastinated and the 63-year-old Taft, filled with anxiety and anticipation, used intermediaries to lobby the president vigorously. Finally, Harding concurred and in June 1921, Taft was confirmed 61-4 as chief justice on the same day he was nominated … without even a committee meeting. In a first, the chief justice was succeeded by the president who had nominated him.

New Chief Justice Taft exulted: “I love judges. I love courts. They are my ideas on earth of what we shall meet afterwards in heaven under a just God.” The greatest aspiration of his life had been fulfilled at last!

Few worked as hard on the court, and his dedication and affection for the court are unparalleled. During his time, he wrote 20 percent of the opinions and provided administrative and technical leadership second to none. His orchestration of consensus, of amassing the court into a majority, was often spectacular. He proved to be a superb judicial leader, even in the face of a seriously divided, backlogged, contentious court – skills rarely displayed for many years.

William Howard Taft served in his beloved center chair until acute circulatory ailments resulted in a series of crippling strokes. The result was a grief-stricken resignation on Feb. 3, 1930. He died one month later and became the first president and the first Supreme Court justice to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The fat gentleman finally got to sing – and then it was over.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].