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

8. The Breaking Point

8 The Breaking Point Of all the provocations Farley endured in the course of the New Deal’s second term, the purge campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to prevent conservative congressmen from being nominated to stand in the 1938 midterm elections, was the most galling. The purge dramatized and widened the rift between the Democratic Party’s ideological wings and alienated a substantial proportion of the party’s rank and ‹le in affected state organizations. It propelled Farley, once one of Roosevelt’s most loyal lieutenants, toward open con›ict with the president.1 The purge campaign represented the very antithesis of Farley’s approach to politics. It broke all of his beloved “rules of the game.” As an ideologically inspired attempt to eradicate Democrats who had obstructed the New Deal’s programmatic goals, the purge was based on assumptions that were entirely alien to Farley’s view that the best means to solving the Democratic Party’s problems and to saving the New Deal’s legislative program was the application of common sense and a little straight talk between honest men. Further, the purge represented a threat to Farley’s role as the key broker between the administration, congressmen , and local and state party organizations, because it was predicated on the idea that, ultimately, the administration’s programmatic goals could not be reconciled with the political goals of some of the most powerful ‹gures within the Democratic Party’s traditional apparatus. In his autobiographical writings, Farley argued that the purge campaign was an extension of the president’s personal hatred for those members of his own party who had opposed him during the ‹ght over 165 his plan for reform of the Supreme Court. Farley claimed that whereas he himself had adhered to “the rules of the game,” Roosevelt had broken them. At the end of January 1938, Farley issued a statement explaining that the nomination of candidates was a local affair and that it was not the business of the national party chairman or, especially, of administration of‹cials to interfere in the selection process. As individuals, the members of the National Committee may have their favorites, but as a body the organization’s hands are off and will continue to be off.2 Farley felt, however, that his “hands-off” policy was compromised from the start, because the president ordered the omission of the statement’s last two sentences, which declared that whatever the outcome of individual battles, the Democratic National Committee would support the victorious candidate in every state and congressional district. Though he piously presented this amendment to his prepared text as an unwarranted and ill-advised intervention that jeopardized any future prospect of party harmony (“An albatross, not of my own shooting, was hung from my neck. From that time on I knew no political peace”), Farley had in fact broken his own rules in the past and would do so again.3 Farley had intervened in local and state elections on Roosevelt’s behalf on numerous occasions, notably by opposing Tammany Hall candidates in New York in 1933 and then helping to establish the American Labor Party in the same state three years later. On these occasions, Farley might be excused on the grounds that he was intervening in a state where he was both party chairman and a voter, but the same could not be said of his actions in 1934 when, albeit reluctantly, he aided non-Democrat progressives by providing advice and information during the midterm elections . Even in May 1938, factional squabbles in Pennsylvania provoked Farley to release a statement urging Democrats to back Tom Kennedy for governor and George Earle for the Senate. He acknowledged that this was a violation of his own rule of noninterference, but he explained that the intervention was justi‹ed by the extraordinary circumstances.4 Even if there was an element of posturing—even hypocrisy—about Farley’s position on the purge campaign, he was nevertheless correct in 166 Mr. Democrat interpreting as unprecedented the scale and ferocity of Roosevelt’s 1938 attack on congressional conservatives and on the conventions on federal interference in local matters. The purge campaign sent a clear signal to Democrats that those who had consistently resisted the passage of New Deal legislation, especially in southern and border states, were not part of Roosevelt’s plans for the Democratic Party’s future as a motor of liberal...