Mr. Democrat: Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics

5. The Death of the Broker?

5 The Death of the Broker? In his hugely in›uential Age of Roosevelt trilogy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. claimed that Jim Farley was “the last and one of the greatest of the classical school.” By this, he meant that Farley represented a species of politician rooted in the pre–New Deal era, that he used the techniques and operated under the codes of political conduct associated with traditional party bosses, and that he was essentially a broker politician who was happiest when working with patronage-based, service-oriented party organizations rather than with issue-driven coalitions. Such politicians were immune to ideology, preferring to trade jobs for votes than to engage with ideas or with the demands of the voting blocs and interest groups—organized labor, African Americans, and women—that bound themselves into the New Deal, changing American politics decisively and, in Schlesinger’s view, very much for the better. For Schlesinger, the New Deal sounded the death knell for politicians of the old school, making obsolete those, such as Farley, who were unable to respond with open arms and a receptive mind to the rising tide of American liberalism . In a typically vivid portrait, Schlesinger painted Farley as a necessary victim of the New Deal’s transformative power, an unwitting dupe, “majestically oblivious to the new political conceptions rising about him.”1 In a schematic sense, Schlesinger’s sketch of Farley is extremely valuable . It points to an important and enduring shift in the political environment , a shift that is largely attributable to the New Deal and that did serve to undermine both Farley’s career and the mode of politics it 99 embodied. The character of national politics did change in the 1930s, as an older kind of party politics—the kind that Farley had grown up with, ‹rst in upstate New York and then under the aegis of Al Smith, in New York City—ceded ground to the New Deal’s nationalizing tendencies, its embrace of large-scale organizations, and its relative openness to the use of national interest groups (rather than local machines) as the building blocks of party strength. A weakness of Schlesinger’s perspective, however, is that it so determinedly denies Farley any agency whatsoever in bringing about the changes that were transforming politics in the age of Roosevelt. Schlesinger was adamant that Farley was utterly baf›ed by the new politics . This new politics, about which Schlesinger wrote with great eloquence and enthusiasm, required a new army of helpers to articulate its message, and its ranks would consist not of party regulars in their organizations but of men and women who were, in fact, very much like Schlesinger himself—progressive intellectuals committed to the New Deal cause. That Farley might have played a key role in aiding the transition from the old politics to the new was, to Schlesinger, unthinkable. But that is what he did. He was less a hapless victim of change than its Trojan horse. He helped to bring the Democratic Party into a new era by negotiating a safe course, for a time at least, between the con›icting imperatives of two competing political forms—one rooted ‹rmly in the pre–New Deal era, the other associated with the New Deal order that came to dominate the middle third of the twentieth century. The impact of the changing politics of the New Deal was keenly felt within the Democratic Party’s national organization. As party chairman, Farley oversaw the expansion of the Democratic National Committee’s special divisions for women, African Americans (the Colored Division), and labor. He therefore presided over the consolidation of the in›uence of interest groups and individuals whose ‹rst commitment was not to the Democratic Party but to using the party as a vehicle to further their various programmatic concerns, a process that weakened the positions both of party regulars in the state organizations and of their practical political representatives in the administration. This, then, was one nail 100 Mr. Democrat that Farley hammered into his own cof‹n. A second was his cooperation —or at least acquiescence—in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s overtures to non-Democratic progressives in the states, notably during the campaigns for the 1934 midterm elections. These overtures discom‹ted Farley considerably, and he complained about them. But despite the bitter complaints of party regulars who felt they had been slighted by these overtures, he nonetheless did...