Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke Page A

powers beyond the restraints of the Constitution “if the normal balance of Executive and Legislative authority” did not prove “wholly adequate”; then “I shall ask the Congress for broad Executive power … as great as the power that would be given me if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe.” As he spoke those alarming words, he was already exercising extraordinary executive power: he had closed all the nation’s banks, and
he
would decide which ones were to survive and which would go under. And the Congress, as fearful as the rest of the country of widespread civil disorder, gladly gave him the dictatorial powers he wanted, and America took its first fling at National Socialism. It was not at the time recognized as such. With a cheering smile, an open checkbook, and a logo (a blue eagle symbolizing the NRA—the National Recovery Administration), Roosevelt appropriated the lawmaking power, suspended the antitrust laws and set up what amounted to government by trade association. Employers were required to bind themselves to a code that fixed prices and wages and labor practices for about seven hundred industries, from the steel makers to the humblest commercial theatre. (I saved for many years the NRA code as it applied to all burlesque companies, solemnly setting the maximum wage for first banana, second banana, star stripper and so on.)
    The honeymoon of America’s benevolent dictator lasted for just over two years, when, after disputing an oil case and the sale-of-a-chicken case, the nine old men of the Supreme Court found the whole NRA codemaking authority “flagrantly unconstitutional.”
    Having given big business more than its due in running the country, he now turned to elevate the status and define new rights for the labor unions and the farmers, and embarked on the consummate political act of his career, assembling a vast, shambling but dependable, coalition of the unlikeliest allies. This ever-smiling, confident patrician—the very patent of good breeding and a gentlemanly conscience—never had a second’s hesitation in making up to anyone he needed: rough labor leaders here, wily southern conservative senators there, the dictator of Louisiana, the men who ran corrupt city governments (in Chicago, Memphis, Jersey City). They were powerful and they could deliver the Democratic vote.
    Many times in press conferences, and on the last two presidential campaigns, I came to marvel at the ease, the beautifully played cool, of his behavior to us, the press, the morning after a congressional defeat, a jolt from the Supreme Court. The secret spring of this ease and seeming indifference to the mounting criticism of the press and the hatred of him by the Republicans was his deep, undisturbable sense of what the mass of the people wanted. Not, as in Winston Churchill’s liberal period, when he was appalled at poverty and wanted to return the poor to the decent estate to which God had ordered them. Roosevelt truly felt from the first to the last days in the White House that, after the degrading plunge into the Depression, everybody wanted not a return to the status quo ante but a better life altogether. He was so sure of the lightness of this instinct that he could toss off a defeat like a common cold. He had a new idea every day. As a testy columnist put it: “He started giving people federal money … to dig a ditch across Florida and build a dam to harness the tides of Fundy. The ditch and dam seemed not so good once they were under way; so, all right, skip them, and how about a new kind of Supreme Court?” This same columnist, an artful juggler with the English language, one Westbrook Pegler, paid Roosevelt the ultimate compliment, all the truer for coming from a man who for all of FDR’s later years harbored an almost pathological hatred of him: “Never in our time have people been so conscious of the meanness which a complacent upper