Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 42. THE NEW DEAL REPUBLICAN
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 291-297
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CHAPTER XLII

THE NEW DEAL REPUBLICAN

By then, in 1934, Roosevelt’s honeymoon was over. As the banks stayed open and business indices rose, as everyone began to feel better about the state of the nation, the earlier fear disappeared. Then many stand-patters turned on the new President and there occurred, with Couzens playing a part, increasingly bitter debate over the policies of the new administration.

In August 1934, on the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, Couzens was interviewed by the North American Newspaper Alliance. He took the occasion to rebuke those who, without offering an alternative, criticized the New Deal, saying: “This is not the time for mere words. The country is in the fifth year of depression, and action, rather than words, is needed.”¹

In the following November, he told the Detroit Optimist Club:

The thing to do is for everyone to show a continued faith in President Roosevelt’s policies. . . . There is no light in the future of America unless we get away from the idea of “rugged individualism” which means, I believe, that a few can become wealthy at the expense of the many. . . .²

No one was more disgusted than he with the propaganda line of New Deal opponents which pictured certain Roosevelt advisers, notably Professor Rexford G. Tugwell, then of Columbia University, later of the University of Chicago, as “communists” bent on undermining the nation.³ He told Madeleine: “Most of these yarns about communism, dictatorship, etc. are smoke screens, or evidence of fear that someone’s money may be lost.”⁴ When one of his constituents in Detroit wrote him to urge that he try to get rid of Tugwell before America was “sovietized,” Couzens answered:

“I am unwilling to sit by and see millions of our people in distress because they are unable to secure work, and if that is what Professor Tugwell is driving at, then I am for it.”⁵

2

By no means, however, was he always on Roosevelt’s side.

He was still Couzens, still the individualist who stubbornly hoed his own row; still the natural critic. Hence, he often let loose blasts at the Roosevelt administration as trenchant and resounding as any set off by the “Stop Roosevelt” bloc then active. A case in point occurred when Secretary Woodin, because of illness, resigned from the Treasury, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was named his successor. Couzens did not object to Morgenthau; rather, he approved.⁶ But he did object to Morgenthau’s plan to retain in the Treasury department as a principal assistant Earl Baillie, member of J. & W. Seligman & Company. In Couzens’ view, this was “another Acheson type of appointment.” Baillie’s banking firm was one of those involved in the foreign-loan scandals unearthed by the Senate Finance Committee. Indeed, it was the very firm that had floated the discredited Peruvian loan of unpleasant memory. Couzens let it be known that unless Baillie went, he would conduct a fight against the confirmation of Morgenthau. He “laid down the law,” and Baillie resigned.⁷

3

Certain New Deal projects went wholly against Couzens’ grain. The public housing program was one. As did the remaining stalwart Republicans and conservative Democrats, including a new and inconspicuous senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, he voted against the bill establishing the United States Housing Authority.⁸ His general opposition to public housing was that it represented a subsidy to employers. “I never quite understood the theory of some people,” he wrote, “that the taxpayers should supply houses for certain low income wage workers to enable private employers to get these workers at low wages.”⁹ His attitude seemed an about-face from his own stand as Mayor of Detroit, when he proposed a municipal bond issue to build homes because of the wartime housing shortage. But he viewed his proposal as different from the New Deal program of raising the standards of homes that existed.

As in the days when he suggested the five-dollar-a-day plan at the Ford Company, he held to the view that it was up to the industry to pay wages high enough so that workers could arrange for their own housing. Or, he maintained, let employers pay the whole bill in higher corporation taxes, rather than assess the cost to the general taxpayer.¹⁰

One phase of New Deal housing, the subsistence homestead projects, had his sympathy for these represented fruition of an idea that he and Ford had toyed with back in the days of the five-dollar plan. The concept was that factory workers would also be small farmers. Couzens was glad to see the New Deal experiment in that direction. But here he felt that the approach was wrong, in that the first such projects were located in areas that lacked factories, notably the so-called Red House project in West Virginia.

With Roosevelt, and also with Harry Hopkins, relief administrator, Couzens carried on an extended argument over this. It was foolish, he told them, “to go out in a field and build some houses under the assumption that eventually some industry would come in. . . . He felt that it was far more sensible to build the houses somewhere adjacent to where industries already were established.” The New Dealers, he said, were “cockeyed” in their approach.¹¹

Curiously enough, as a result of this discussion, he found himself sponsoring a housing project, even though he was opposed to the general idea.

“How much did the Red House project cost?” he asked Hopkins.

Hopkins guessed that the cost was $550,000.

“All right,” said Couzens. “I’ll put up $550,000 for a project to show that I am right. But if the Red House project cost more, and I think it did, you put up the balance.”¹²

The Red House project cost $850,000. So the arrangement was made for Couzens to donate $550,000 to the State of Michigan, to which the federal government added $300,000, and there was born the non-profit “Oakland Housing, Inc.,” for building West Acres, a community of 150 six-room homes located on a 1,000-acre tract nine miles west of Pontiac, in close proximity to the automobile industry.¹³ There, low-income families who were subject to the seasonal unemployment then characteristic of the automobile industry, were permitted to acquire on easy terms homes on sufficient land to enable them to fill in their income through raising garden products.

But he was sorry that he had made this housing gift almost as soon as he had made it. His doubts about it were clearly revealed in the announcement that was made to the public.

This project is not economically sound if there is any fundamental soundness in our capitalistic system. It is merely a bridge. . . . Our fundamental job is to readjust national income, wages, and working conditions so as to provide more of these men with a living income. . . .¹⁴

4

This ambivalence, well-founded, regarding West Acres really reflected his basic attitude toward the way the New Deal was being administered. Roosevelt himself admitted that he often considered himself “a quarterback” who followed one line and then another, depending on how the game was going.¹⁵ Couzens noted this, was disturbed, and complained. He frankly told Roosevelt that good laws were being ruined by “abominable administration.” In one such talk with Roosevelt he said, “Do you know what’s wrong with your administration? You haven’t anyone in it who ever earned a dollar. That’s what’s wrong!”¹⁶

To Dr. Freund he wrote: “While I have a very definite conviction that where the President wants to go is right, I am not always sure that he is on the right road and neither can anyone else be.”¹⁷

In the following spring he complained to a friend in London: “Things are in a terrible turmoil, and I haven’t the slightest idea where the New Deal is going. . . .”¹⁸

Yet it was always apparent that his criticisms of the New Deal were those of a friend who wanted a new program to succeed. Often the fault he found with the New Deal was that it was not liberal enough.

5

In April 1934 he drew upon himself much of the abuse generally reserved for Roosevelt, when he initiated an amendment to an appropriation bill for increasing surtaxes on large incomes by a flat 10 per cent as the most equitable way to pay the cost of unemployment relief.

It was his old fight on Mellonism over again.

In San Simeon, California, Publisher Hearst was enraged by Couzens’ tax plan. The Hearst papers soon campaigned against it in 120-point type. Hearst was especially bitter, it appeared, because Hiram Johnson had endorsed Couzens’ amendment, thus, for once in this period, taking a non-Hearstian stand.

“Hearst called his editors in a violent wrath in the dead of night and ordered them to crucify Johnson and Couzens with him. . . . Hearst screamed: ‘That man Couzens has all the money he wants and now he’s trying to feather his political nest by appearing to help the people. We’ll have to throw Couzens out. His money has turned Johnson’s head!’” So one Hearst editor recalled.¹⁹

B. C. Forbes, in earlier years author of several articles friendly toward Couzens, sent nationwide a bitter attack on Couzens. “The foremost ‘Soak the Rich’ advocate in America is a rich man, a very rich man, a multi-millionaire,” wrote Forbes. “This extremely wealthy soaker of the rich has placed himself largely beyond the reach of the kind of soaking he vehemently urges for others, for his fortune is in tax-exempt bonds.” Not patriotism but demagoguery motivated Couzens, Forbes said.²⁰

In the Senate, although not in the House, Couzens obtained passage of his proposal.²¹ Then he delivered an attack on Hearst, referring to him scornfully as a “yellow journalist.”²² Hearst stood for “soaking the poor,” he said. He sarcastically noted that Hearst had finally changed his slogan against his plan from “Soaking the Rich” to “Soaking the Thrifty” because “somebody must have tipped him off to the absurdity of the ‘soak the rich’ slogan, as there isn’t anybody else to soak.” He reminded the Senate that Hearst was the foremost supporter of a general sales tax. “I compliment the American Congress,” he said, “for never having fallen for the stupid and unscrupulous general sales tax, in spite of the years and years of propaganda for it by Mr. Hearst.”²³

His main purpose in answering the Hearst attacks, he said, was to comment on a more important and dangerous propaganda line then prominent in Hearst editorials. This was that England, then under a Tory government, had staged a greater recovery from the depression than had the United States, by balancing her budget and planning to lower taxes. If England had indeed balanced her budget, went on Couzens, she had done so by postponing payment of her debt to the United States.

“We could balance our budget and reduce our income taxes if we repudiated all of the money we borrowed from our citizens to loan to Great Britain and other countries.”²⁴

6

Not long after that he again rubbed persons of wealth the wrong way when, as in the Mellon days, he plumped for publicity on income tax payments, holding that “secrecy . . . breeds favoritism, corruption, dishonesty, graft and maladministration.” As he wrote to an editor of the Detroit News: “If the income tax returns had been matters of public record, Congress long ago would have discovered the means of evasion adopted by the Morgans, Mitchells, and others to avoid all taxation for the years 1930 and on . . .”²⁵ He conceded that one argument against the publicity proposal was valid: gossip would be encouraged. But, he declared, “there are many things in a democratic society which have to be done to maintain our country.”²⁶

In this battle, one that stirred up a great heat, much abuse was directed at Couzens. Bingay devoted a column to the old charge that Couzens wanted to embarrass other rich men, whereas “Jim has $60,000,000 in tax exempt bonds.”²⁷ A few weeks later, the Chicago Tribune published a long magazine-section article under the headings:

‘SWAT THE RICH’ IS COUZENS’ CRY $30,000,000 SENATOR HAS TAX-FREE FORTUNE²⁸

However, the real complaint against Couzens by staunch Republican organs was more fundamental than mere outrage over his views on taxation. He was now looked upon, with Norris, young La Follette, and Hiram Johnson, as a real threat to the continued existence of the Republican party. His evident friendliness toward the New Deal was interpreted as playing into the hands of a Rooseveltian scheme to bring about a new political alignment in the United States, by which the old parties would give way to a Liberal and a Conservative party. The inclusion in Roosevelt’s cabinet of two Republicans, Henry A. Wallace and Harold L. Ickes, was seen as one step in this direction. Another would be the winning permanently of the allegiance of the old Republican insurgents.

So Couzens was now anathematized in the conservative Republican papers as a “New Deal Republican” or, worse, a “Roosevelt New Dealer,” who had turned traitor to his own party and class. “Party wheelhorses are taking the position that anything that could be done to discredit Couzens would be to the Republican advantage,” Jay Hayden wrote.²⁹

7

But Couzens did not at all resent the New Deal label. More than ever, he was convinced that not just recovery, but a new deal in fact, was needed in America. It would be stupid, he felt, to go back to the old order, and thus merely assure a repetition of the Great Depression. Until a better new deal was produced, he would support Roosevelt’s, regardless of partisan considerations.

Temperamentally, this decision meant disciplining his trait of independence. It would have been easier on his emotions to let this trait now take him along the path followed, for example, by Senator Borah. For by 1935 Borah, once denounced as a dangerous radical, had become, strangely, a hero of the conservative Republicans. He had decided that the whole New Deal was “unconstitutional,” its tax program, in particular, a “spread the poverty” scheme that would lead to “dictatorship.”³⁰ In effect, Borah had committed insurgency against himself. With him on his circuitous route, Borah took along an oldtime admirer, Vandenberg. For a time Vandenberg had surprised Couzens, and, perhaps, even himself, by standing for certain New Deal proposals and even going further than Roosevelt wished, as in sponsorship of federal insurance of bank deposits. Now, like Borah, Vandenberg was declaiming against the New Deal as a threat to American institutions. His slogan was: “Roosevelt must be stopped.”³¹

To Couzens, Borah’s position was illogical—opposition to the New Deal for mere opposition’s sake, something of which he himself had been often accused. If Borah were motivated by a desire to preserve the old party labels—perhaps to get the Presidency in 1936—Couzens was even less sympathetic. During the crisis, he was for postponing all partisan activity. Thus in December 1934 he turned down an invitation to participate in a conference of Republican leaders, even when the meeting was ostensibly to be held for the purpose of reorganizing the Republican party along liberal lines.³²

A few months later, he still held to this position even to the extent of creating a new breach between himself and the Republican leadership in Michigan. Howard C. Lawrence, state chairman, had asked him to send a message to the regular Republican state convention, scheduled to be held in Lansing in March 1935. A mere greeting would have served. Couzens declined even this. He bluntly informed the state chairman that he did not believe a political convention should be held at that time, in view of the critical problems which the nation faced. It was “inopportune” to discuss “partisan politics” in such a crisis, he said.³³ Of course, the party leaders were offended, retaliating at the convention by passing a resolution praising Senator Vandenberg but pointedly ignoring Couzens. It was 1924 all over again.³⁴ It was also a forecast that if Couzens were forced to choose between Republicanism and Roosevelt, Roosevelt probably would win.