Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 40. THE DELEGATE TO LONDON
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 268-274
• View Citation
• Additional Information

CHAPTER XL

THE DELEGATE TO LONDON

Roosevelt unexpectedly opened the way to his needed change of scene. Summoning him to the White House for a 9 A.M. meeting, but without telling him the purpose, Roosevelt had Couzens ushered into his private apartment. The President was still in bed, having breakfast and reading the newspapers, which informality (inconceivable with Coolidge or Hoover) so impressed Couzens that instead of setting down in his notebook the reason for the visit, he wrote: “Saw Roosevelt in his pajamas.” Roosevelt promptly sprung on him the offer of an appointment as a delegate to the World Economic and Monetary Conference scheduled to open in London in June.

Roosevelt had been scouting around for a suitable Republican on an otherwise Democratic delegation, and Senator McNary mentioned Couzens’ name to him. With certain other Republican progressives, McNary had begun hinting to Roosevelt that Couzens would be a good man in his cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury, if only because of his stand against Mellonism. The London assignment looked to McNary like a step in that direction. Besides, McNary was worried over Couzens’ health and believed the trip would be good for him. Though wary of Couzens’ independence, Roosevelt quickly fell in with the suggestion. He saw that Couzens fit exactly what he had in mind—a Republican who was sympathetic, openly so, toward the New Deal.¹

With Mrs. Couzens, John Carson, and Jay Hayden, whom the Detroit News assigned to cover his activities, he sailed for England on June 6, 1933.

2

This was his fifth transatlantic crossing. His first, back in 1891, when he accompanied his father on a visit to London, was made just after he had begun his life in Detroit, still a Canadian. Oddly, in view of the purpose of this latest crossing—to help solve the deepest world monetary questions—his main impression of his first visit to London was the trouble he had experienced in keeping his American money straight in terms of pounds and shillings.²

The second and third trips abroad, in 1907 and 1909, had been in connection with the Ford Motor Company. Memories, some sharp, even poignant, naturally would be evoked from thinking of those days—of his early association with Ford, of Malcomson (dead ten years by 1933), of the Selden case, of the negotiations with Durant for selling the Ford company which, if they had gone through, would have left him one-fourth owner of General Motors (bigger than Ford now), of the five-dollar-a-day plan . . . of, indeed, the many phases of the whole Ford story.

Not all such memories were wholly pleasant. The break with Malcomson had not been pleasant. Nor the break with Ford. Then, too, there was the great sadness of his life, the death of that promising boy, Homer. Nobody else could ever know how deeply that tragedy had affected him, of what pleasure in life it had robbed him. Never had he ceased to reflect on the shining hopes of achievement he had held for Homer.³

True, his other son, Frank, had not done so bad. Indeed not! In 1933, Frank was the Mayor of Detroit. That had happened because Roosevelt, two weeks before he asked Couzens to go to London, appointed Mayor Frank Murphy as High Commissioner of the Philippines. As president of the Detroit Common Council, Frank Couzens succeeded to Murphy’s job as Mayor. “I’ve lived pretty well, don’t you think, to have raised a mayor?” Couzens said to reporters who interviewed him just before he left for London.⁴

Thoughts of Frank in his own former office in the grimy old Detroit City Hall were bound to bring to mind his own mayoralty, as well as his earlier term as police commissioner. How serene the world had appeared to most persons in that era! Possibly some remembered that on returning from his fourth visit abroad, in 1923, he had pointed to danger signals in Europe and suggested a receivership for Germany. These ideas were laughed at or denounced, and especially was this true of his assertion that the United States ought to play a more positive role in international affairs so as to help avoid another world war which he felt was brewing already in Germany. Now, ten years later, this conference, to which he was a delegate, had been called precisely because such warnings had been ignored. The economy of the whole world had gone to pot, just as the economy of the United States had gone to pot, and another world war would, in fact, be the result in six more years. In Germany Hitler was already in power.

Coolidge had been President when Couzens returned from that fourth trip. Just ten years ago—and it seemed centuries.

Poor Coolidge! Only the previous January 1933 he had died, heartbroken, it was said, because even to him it was plain that “Coolidge prosperity” had been built on sand. Coolidge had seemed so wise in saying, “The business of America is business,” or when, on the international debt problem, he had commented, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Yet he lived long enough to realize that such “Yankee talk” was not so statesmanlike as he had supposed. The Coolidge world—Andy Mellon’s too—had crashed utterly. Even the banks in Northampton, Massachusetts had closed.⁵

That the London conference, for which he was making this new trip to Europe as he was turning sixty-one, would help the world to recover economically was a hope that Couzens shared with many others. He had seldom talked in the Senate about foreign affairs, yet he had a greater awareness than most of his colleagues—certainly more than most of his fellow Middle Westerners, especially the other progressives—of the perilous position of the world and the impact of foreign conditions upon the United States, as witness his warning in 1923 to Coolidge about “Hiram Johnson’s isolationism.” He knew that the major powers, the United States included (with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1932 especially), were engaged in a form of economic warfare. He hoped that the London conference might change this pattern and bring “economic disarmament” as a step for preventing the resort to military force. “On every side there are possibilities . . . more ominous than any since 1914,” said James W. Angell, American member of the Preparatory Commission of the conference, in March 1933. And Couzens agreed as he sailed for England.⁶

3

Unhappily, the London conference proved unworthy of the hope it had inspired. It had been ill timed. It ought to have been held many months earlier, when first planned under Hoover, or not at all. For economic stabilization, as a condition precedent to the breaking down of barriers to international trade, was the principal goal, yet stabilization at that juncture was precisely what the Roosevelt New Deal was against. For stabilization then meant settling for the deflationary level of the depression. “Reflation,” not stabilization, in the United States, was the Roosevelt goal, and he had flatly said in his inaugural that this must come ahead of international arrangements.

On arriving in London, Couzens found himself in an atmosphere of gloom because no one expected the meeting to succeed. “Everything within the delegation was all so riotously unhappy,” recalled Herbert Feis, economic adviser to the United States State Department.⁷ Nor were matters helped by the British. It had been specifically agreed, or so it was thought, that the question of war debts would not be brought up. Yet Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in his opening address, seconded by Neville Chamberlain, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought up precisely this question.⁸ Then, just after Couzens arrived, the conference faced a kind of sit-down strike. No monetary stabilization, no action on anything else that the agenda provided, such as toning down tariffs, exclusive trade agreements, dumping, and the other impediments to free trade in the world—such was the tacit position of France. It was no wonder that Couzens later said he was under “a terrific strain” there “trying to be diplomatic.”⁹ Frustration engulfed everyone.

4

He was appointed to the monetary and financial commission. It was there that the struggle over stabilization centered. As always, he took his responsibility seriously and worked hard at it. Mrs. Couzens wrote to Madeleine, “Daddy’s hours are from 9:30 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening, sometimes later. . . . He is quite tired.”¹⁰ But he was not long in discovering that the conference was involved in an irreconcilable conflict: nationalism versus internationalism.

On June 19 he expressed himself candidly to the conference on this impasse. “The nations have not suffered enough to be willing to meet in complete humility. . . . Most nations are still rather cocky about their nationalism and feel confident that they can paddle their own canoes, whether anything comes out of the conference or not.”¹¹

Of all the utterances at the gathering, this most bluntly exposed the impasse. The Times of London placed over it a headline that showed that in one statement he had been capable of making in

London the same impression for which he was most noted in Washington: “PLAIN SPEAKING.”

5

Not even the American delegation was in agreement within itself on a program. There were some in the delegation who wanted to agree to currency stabilization after all, in spite of Roosevelt. A resolution to that effect was drawn up, but word came from Roosevelt that he was against it. “The whole conference very nearly broke up in disorder,” recalled young James P. Warburg, one of the advisers to the American delegation.¹² Couzens sided with Roosevelt. “We must work together,” he said in a statement showing that he was shelving his mild internationalist views, at least temporarily, to embrace fully Roosevelt’s program of “First things first.”¹³

But unity remained the one thing the delegation could not achieve. “On one day at the conference,” recalled Raymond Moley, then a confidant of Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of State, “Senator Couzens spoke against tariff reductions and, on the next, Representative McReynolds asserted that lower tariffs were necessary to recovery. To complete the impression created by this episode, McReynolds denounced the Republican party as though he were making a speech on the floor of the House.”¹⁴ This was typical.

When it was suggested at a meeting of the American delegation that no one speak for publication without the approval of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the delegation chairman, Couzens refused to be bound by such a rule. He “intended to voice his opinions to the press on all matters at any time,” he said.¹⁵

His insistence on his independence did not endear him to Hull, who later asked Moley to convey to Roosevelt a pointed message. The President should “not give Progressive Republicans too prominent a place in the administration, since they didn’t seem capable of working with anybody.”¹⁶ Roosevelt of course knew that Couzens in London was more in line with “the administration” than was Hull, for Hull did not believe that economic recovery in the United States could come from domestic action alone.¹⁷ After a row with Hull, one of several, Couzens threatened to resign.¹⁸ Mrs. Couzens expressed his feelings when she wrote to Madeleine: “If the policy of this conference does not change and get a little more pep and sense into it, I am sure Daddy will pack up and get out of it all. This crowd is going around in circles.”¹⁹

Only Hull’s pleas that Couzens’ resignation would prove a serious embarrassment and that he should at least stand by until the expected arrival from Washington of Moley, caused Couzens to stay on. But after this, he devoted himself mainly to championing aggressively the Roosevelt program for increasing employment in the United States through public works and to urging all other nations to do likewise. “I am enthusiastic about what President Roosevelt is accomplishing, if press reports are correct,” he wrote to Tom Payne concerning news about the NRA, which went into effect on June 16. In the same vein, during a formal speech before the monetary and financial commission, he argued that the nationalistic Roosevelt program be made international, that all the nations do as the New Deal was doing—an idea that Roosevelt, cruising on a destroyer off the Atlantic coast, almost at the same moment was expressing to Moley.²⁰ Thus did Couzens try personally, albeit naively, to bridge the unbridgeable gap that then existed between nationalism and internationalism.

6

When Moley arrived in London on the next day, he immediately took the spotlight as one who had recently been with Roosevelt. Would Moley be able to break the deadlock on the question of monetary stabilization? He tried his hand. At the American embassy, during a secret meeting which Couzens attended, he drafted the text of a suggested resolution which was forwarded to Roosevelt. It committed no nation to anything except a desire to return to the gold standard when it was deemed proper to do so. Couzens sensed that Roosevelt would not approve even this innocuous resolution.

Thoroughly disgusted by then—the more so since Hull had raised objections because he had been in on the embassy meeting, whereas Hull had known nothing of it—Couzens informed Moley that he wished to resign forthwith.²¹ But again yielding to an appeal not to bring into the open the pitiful division within the delegation, he agreed to remain at least until Roosevelt responded to the resolution forwarded by Moley.²² “If this conference does not come to some understanding soon, poor Daddy will blow up,” Mrs. Couzens wrote to Madeleine.²³

When Roosevelt responded on July 3, his message said that the conference should not “allow itself to be diverted by the proposal of a purely artificial and temporary experiment affecting the monetary exchange of a few nations only. . . .”²⁴ Whatever was Roosevelt’s intent, the effect of his pronouncement was to bring the conference to an end for all practical purposes.²⁵ Again there was talk of resignation, this time not by Couzens, but by Hull.²⁶ Indeed, it was Couzens, in the unusual role of pacifier, who stood out among those who tried to save the conference from wreckage. He made a speech attempting to explain America’s position and urged: “The conference must go on with the work for which it was summoned.”²⁷ But almost no one shared his view that anything still could be accomplished, and his heart was really not in the effort.

7

After this, the conference became just an occasion for social gatherings. These were interesting, of course. At one of them Mrs. Couzens met “the lady that the Prince of Wales is so devoted to, and had a charming visit with her.” But soon even the parties grew boring to everyone. London’s weather turned uncommonly hot. “Poor Daddy will be a wreck—it is so hot,” Mrs. Couzens informed Madeleine on July 7. “Besides, everyone of our delegates is very unhappy over the turn affairs have taken and are undecided what to do.”²⁸

But Couzens knew what he intended to do. He made reservations to sail for home without waiting for the official adjournment. He did not, however, get away before being involved in one more irritating incident. Roosevelt had asked Moley to send him a confidential estimate of the American delegation. In complying, Moley deprecated in frank terms all the delegates except Senator Pittman. He had marked the message “Secret from Moley, to the President Alone and Exclusively.” But an embassy employee showed a copy to Ambassador Robert Bingham, who showed it to Hull, who saw to it that Couzens, among the others mentioned, read the Moley comments. Especially wrathful because just previously Moley had “particularly praised him to his face,” Couzens gave Moley a tongue lashing. No wonder John Franklin Carter summed up the whole conference as a “diplomatic bedroom farce.”²⁹

Thus at the end as at the start, this interlude, “a Donnybrook Fair,” as Moley accurately called it, proved a poor sedative.³⁰ Especially was this so in view of still another eruption, one occurring in Detroit, that disturbed Couzens as much as the frustrations in London, indeed even more.