The New Deal raises old ghosts

MARK SULLIVAN

"President Roosevelt" — "The New Deal"—"Bank Closures"—"Scandals in Finance."

These are the subjects bruited by every tongue today, in all corners of the nation, as if the present excitement were something unprecedented and heretofore unknown.

But the truth is that we have been just as excited before, even about Roosevelts.

I assure you I know.

During some thirty years as a journalist I wrote of those past agitations in the inflammatory terms that seemed called for by their importance at the time they raged.

On at least ten occasions within memory of the living have starry-eyed reformers seen the dawn of a new world; a corresponding number of times have dismayed conservatives seen the end of America as they knew it. And now again is the contrapuntal chorus repeated.

In the newspapers of today, I read that an ecstatic New Dealer, an official of P.W.A., Mr. David Cushman Coyle, tells a convention at Washington that the New Deal will make a race of Americans "larger, brighter, gayer and better-looking." That seems an exceptionally high temperature. But I turn back to 1894, and find a Missouri Congressman, David A. DeArmond, similarly exalted: "The [Income Tax] Bill," DeArmond said, January 30, 1894, "will mark the dawn of a brighter day . . . with more of that sweetest music, the laughter of children well-fed, wellclothed, well-housed; more of sunshine, more of the songs of birds."

Likewise, when, today, I hear the alarm of Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, and others, about Socialism being just around the corner, I again turn back to the time the first Income Tax measure was enacted. It was, said Senator Sherman of Ohio, "Socialism, communism, devilism." "The march of Socialistic revolution has gone far," said the New York Sun, conservative newspaper of the 1890's. Joseph H. Choate, arguing against it in the Supreme Court, said it was "the communistic march"; Choate hoped the Court would declare the law unconstitutional. But seventeen years later, a new form of Income Tax was enacted, was sustained by the Supreme Court, and has been in effect since 1913 without bringing the Socialism that its foes feared. And the other day I dined at the home of a grandson of Senator Sherman; some of the guests were as sure now that the New Deal means Socialism as Senator Sherman was sure that the Income Tax meant Socialism in 1894.

After such controversies as the present have subsided, after the smoke and spume have blown away, it is the common fate of both sides to note that their predictions fail to come true. When the now familiar Federal Reserve System was being debated in Congress in 1913, the late Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island thought it would be "revolutionary, socialistic and unconstitutional." Friends of the measure, however, were sure it would be a panacea for all our banking and currency troubles, would forever end the violent alternations of boom and depression. In the words of the very able Carter Glass of Virginia, now Senator but then an author of the bill in the House of Representatives, the Federal Reserve System would enable banks "always to be . . . without fear of a panic."

This faith in the Federal Reserve System lasted and grew for nearly twenty years. As late as 1928 I was writing a history which included an allusion to the panic of 1907. The condition which caused that 1907 panic, I wrote, "was later cured; since the adoption of the Federal Reserve System, a currency panic can hardly occur again."

And that was written in 1928!

The acrimony we have so far had against the New Deal is much less strident than that which, in 1900, and thereabouts, raged over an issue now so nearly forgotten that only the older generation will recognize the terms in which it was debated. Those who advocated it called it "Expansion"; those who opposed it had a more invidious word for it, "Imperialism." We had gone to war with Spain with the humanitarian purpose of liberating Cuba. The outcome had left us, surprised and a little dubious, in possession of miscellaneous islands, orphaned dependencies—the location and even the very names of which were unfamiliar to ninety-nine Americans in a hundred: Puerto Rico, Guam, Luzon, Sulu, Samar, and others of the Philippines. The question was not merely whether we should keep these but whether, thus unintentionally embarked, we should go on in a course glamorously suggested by a poem of Kipling's then currently stimulating to the imagination, "Take up the white man's burden." The conditions of the time made the course alluring. The participation of American soldiers with those of Britain, Germany, and France in putting down a rebellion in China—the "Boxer" outbreak which the Chinese government was too weak to cope with—gave substance to the notion that China was about to be dismembered and that America would possess some of the pieces. Millions of Americans in 1900 foresaw, with exultation or with dismay, America as an empire, with colonies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Many of our most thoughtful leaders urged the policy upon us. It was "manifest destiny." How long ago and far away that sounds now!

The prophecy seemed confirmed by the election of 1900, McKinley defeating the anti-imperialist candidate, William Jennings Bryan. A year later the Supreme Court found a way to make the policy conform to the Constitution, in a decision which led "Mr. Dooley" to say that "no matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' Supreme Court ginerally follows th' illiction returns."

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We seemed "set" for expansion. Actually, we never acquired another alien acre (except the strip of land in Panama for the canal, and the Virgin Islands bought during the Great Wrar for military protection of the canal). By 1908 we had forgotten Imperialism —the election of that year was fought on a longer-lived issue, the Trusts. And by 1934, our minds, preoccupied with another, domestic adventure called the New Deal, we were retiring from the overseas one; we cut the tie to Cuba a few months ago and we are in process of letting the Philippines go.

Over and over that sort of mass emotion recurs. The American temperament is a little prone to it and our proneness is increased by the radio, which facilitates incitement of such emotions. But the American temperament has also a way, with time, of settling back to a shrewd commonsense which ultimately smiles at its own former fervor. Again and again, a controversy, important or trivial but in either case vivid, blazes through the headlines. The country goes on a kind of debauch of impassioned argument. During the Great War the outcome of that struggle was for a few months subordinate in popular interest to a dispute over the relative merits of concentrating on the building of wooden ships or steel ones. A great engineer, Colonel George W. Goethals, spoke sneeringly of building ships quickly out of trees in which the eagles still had their aeries. Chairman of the Shipping Board, William Denman, believed in an immense wooden fleet as an auxiliary. In the end we built both. But long before the first wooden ship had been launched, the controversy and the public excitement over it had led President Wilson to accept the resignations of both Goethals and Denman, and our serious business of fighting the war had been retarded by our indulgence in a popular emotion. The fleets of scrapped wooden hulks which, for several years after the war, rotted in the lower Potomac, in the Hudson and elsewhere, reminded us rather of the minor controversy over personalities and technique than of the major controversy of war.

There have been many, literally scores, of such controversies, serious or trivial. Not only political and economic but religious, moral, and disputes having to do with personalities: Was John D. Rockefeller's fortune "tainted money" and could churches and colleges conscientiously accept his benefactions? . . . What did "recall of judicial decisions" mean? And was it sufficiently terrible to justify denying Theodore Roosevelt, the utterer of it, a nomination for the Presidency, which was the effect the provocative phrase had? . . .

The investigation of life-insurance companies, which launched Mr. Charles E. Hughes upon a public career and sent the fastidious Mr. James Hazen Hyde (much more sinned against than sinning) to be a voluntary exile in Paris. That investigation was quite similar to this year's examination of Wall Street and the banks, and the statutory house-cleaning of insurance

in 1906 was closely analogous to the present regulation of the Stock Exchange. . . Did Peary really discover the North Pole, and was the prior claim of Dr. Cook faked? About that there was a Congressional investigation, and loud head-line cannonading. . . . For months, in 1901, brother disputed with brother about whether Admiral Sampson or Admiral Schley should have most credit for the capture of Spanish Admiral Cervera. . . . And, was the serving of cocktails by a Vice-President named Charles W. Fairbanks a sufficient dissonance between profession and practice to be an impediment to his ambition to get a Presidential nomination? We must remember, too, the minor philippics and belligerencies of Theodore Roosevelt: his attack upon the "naturefakers" and their counter-attack; his lunch in the White House with a Negro educator, Booker Washington, and the blazing resentment of the South.

And the slogans and phrases thrilled some of us, irritated others: "Watchful waiting"—that was Woodrow Wilson's description of his policy about Mexico when a succession of revolutions in that country made it difficult for us to protect our interests and at the same time keep our hands off. . . . "Too proud to fight"—the unfortunate phrase used by Wilson in a speech made soon after the sinking of the Lusitania; as Wilson meant the words they did not refer to his policy about the Lusitania, but excitable and partisan public emotion, seeing only the words in the headlines and not reading the speech, assumed them to mean an avowal of poltroonery. . . . "The full dinner pail"—campaign slogan of McKinley and the Republicans in 1896; meant much the same as "the more abundant life" means now; at least, both the phrases had the same intent, to cause voters to dream an agreeable dream. . . . "The New Economic Era" —another phrase for it was "new price plateau"; it meant, at the time of its vogue about 1928, permanent prosperity, perpetual economic sunshine, "Tain't goin' to rain no mo'." . . . "To make the world safe for democracy" —that was Wilson's statement of one of his war aims—and now look at the darned thing! . . . "The war to end all wars"—another Wilsonian phrasing of his war aims—again one remarks, and now look at the darned thing! (Wilson, like the impetuous New Dealers of to-day, overlooked the most important lesson of history, namely that progress moves no faster than a glacier.)

Most of these controversies and incitements to emotion ebbed rather rapidly. One, however, has been perennial. For fully seventy years antagonism to trusts, "Big Business", has steadily simmered, erupting violently at the time of enactment of the Sherman anti-trust law in 1890; again when President Theodore Roosevelt ordered prosecution of the Northern Securities combination in 1903, once more when President Taft in 1911 began a prosecution of the Steel Corporation which moved through the courts for ten years; yet once more when Federal Judge Landis imposed a $29,000,000 fine on the Standard Oil Company, and the Supreme Court ordered its dissolution; yet again when President

Wilson brought about strengthening of the anti-trust law in 1916. And now once more. ⅜

The trust issue—with what billiardists call "reverse English"—is at the very heart of N.R.A. N.R.A. legalizes agreements in restraint of trade—every code is precisely such an agreement. The result is one of those paradoxes that make for the disquiet of the times, one of those abrupt reversals of popular mood, or of the will of government, like prohibition and its repeal, which turn vice into virtue and—I apologize— vice versa. Two years ago, if the members of an industry made an agreement, about prices for example, any member who stood out—public emotion rather deified him as "an independent"— went into court and had the parties to the agreement indicted. Today, under N.R.A., the situation is reversed— those who have combined go to the courts and have the recalcitrant one indicted.

Probably nothing in President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" has generated more emotion than Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal". Nothing in the present controversy has justified what Theodore Roosevelt said his 1912 fight was—no one has yet said or felt that "we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!" Not yet have the New Dealers marched through our cities singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "the Battle-Hymn of the Republic." And not yet has any one hurled at Franklin Roosevelt such epithets as a university head, Syracuse's Chancellor Day, with many others equally irate, flung at Theodore Roosevelt: "shrewd but reckless demagogue", "adroit and cunning", "the ravings of a disordered mind."

The present President Roosevelt has, so far as I can recall, tossed at his opponents only three grenades of verbal dynamite, all of them comparatively mild. "Tory", "plausible self-seekers", "theoretical die-hards."

O feeble day! Theodore Roosevelt, in one message used so many inflammatory phrases that a newspaper gave them a malicious conspicuousness by printing them in double-column. I here reproduce less than a fifth of these gems.

"Criminals of great wealth"

"Wealthy Malefactors"

"Powerful wrongdoers" "Representatives of predatory wealth" "Corrupt men of wealth"

"Very wealthy criminals"

"Bitter and unscrupulous craft"

"Evil eminence of infamy"

"Domineer in swollen pride"

And remember that those were all in one message to Congress—and a message by a Roosevelt.

A final word: I wanted to be careful in this article not to mislead about my personal view; it is plain that some of the New Deal measures point more directly toward Socialism than did the Income Tax; some indeed are of such a nature that automatically makes the next step inevitable. In brief, I think some innovations we are experimenting with would, if not interrupted, carry us toward state socialism of one type or another. But what my experience with America teaches me is that the interruption will come.