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

4. A Regular Guy

4 A Regular Guy The collapse of the American economy, the Great Depression, and the Roosevelt administration’s response to it in the form of the New Deal represents one of the most appealing, fascinating, and intensively interrogated episodes in the history of the United States. The sources of con›ict in New Deal historiography have shifted many times in the three-quarters of a century since Franklin Roosevelt was ‹rst elected to the presidency, but there has never been a time when the New Deal was not in some way controversial. In the 1950s, for example, Edgar Robinson charged that the New Deal was a failed experiment in state socialism, while others argued that the New Deal was a precious af‹rmation of democratic values at a time when dictatorships threatened to engulf the world. Historians broadly appreciative of the New Deal have nevertheless been critical: Rexford Tugwell, himself a New Dealer, bemoaned the fact that early enthusiasm for economic planning was not pursued; James MacGregor Burns argued that Roosevelt blundered in putting political expediency before the noble objective of fashioning a truly liberal Democratic Party.1 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and William E. Leuchtenburg, both of whom were liberal activists as well as historians, produced canonical works that—for their narrative grace and synthetic authority, respectively—are unlikely to be bettered. After them came historians in search of alternative interpretations. New Left scholars argued that the New Deal was a species of corporate liberalism; labor historians debated whether the New Deal sti›ed rank-and-‹le mil79 itancy; Paul Conkin, Barry Karl, and others observed the persistence of localism in the face of federal action.2 More recently, there have been lively exchanges about the New Deal and the judiciary and debates about the welfare state and its relation to race, gender, and sexuality. In various ways, scholars have probed the nature and potential of the liberal state and the constraints acting on it. Political scientists, pursuing an agenda mapped out by Theda Skocpol and other neoinstitutionalists in the 1980s, have made substantial contributions to this rich historiography, which is still developing.3 As the principal mediator between the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party, Jim Farley operated at the heart of New Deal politics . Farley’s career offers historians a window through which to view this complex—and very often fraught—relationship. As campaign manager , postmaster general, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee throughout the New Deal years, Farley’s essential task was to bridge tensions between Roosevelt and the New Deal administration, on the one hand, and Democratic Party organizations, on the other. Fault lines in this relationship were an inevitable feature of Farley’s work, both nationally and in his home state, where he continued to be active as party chairman until 1944. At ‹rst, these fault lines demanded careful handling. Nothing if not a skillful politician, Farley navigated the ‹rst term with considerable aplomb. By the middle of Roosevelt’s second term, however, he was under huge pressure. Con›ict between elements of the traditional party apparatus and the New Deal was beginning to dominate him. Eventually, it would overwhelm him entirely. In asking why the reformist thrust of Roosevelt’s ‹rst term was slowed to a virtual standstill by the middle of his second, historians have placed particular emphasis on the late New Deal, focusing on Roosevelt’s political miscalculations over the plan to reform the Supreme Court in 1937 and the attempted purge of congressional conservatives in 1938. They have also considered the impact of the 1937–38 recession, the coalescence of a powerful conservative opposition in Congress, and the ascendancy of a form of liberalism that avoided direct assaults on the infrastructure of American capitalism.4 Jim Farley’s story poses a challenge to this set of interpretations by showing how very early the con›icts between the Democratic Party and 80 Mr. Democrat the New Deal manifested themselves. It was not until the second term that these con›icts became chronic—so chronic that they forced Farley out of the New Deal altogether. But they were there from the beginning, and managing them was Farley’s principal task in the New Deal’s heady early years. The day after the 1932 election, Farley was invited over to Louis Howe’s of‹ce at 331 Madison Avenue for an afternoon meeting...