Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 32. THE END OF AN ERA
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 208-210
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CHAPTER XXXII

THE END OF AN ERA

Ahead was the 1932 election. Basically, this election among other things was a referendum on the Hoover policies on the depression in general, on unemployment relief in particular. Including many Republicans, the people plainly were angry with Hoover, rightly or wrongly. Even so stanch a regular Republican as Frank O. Lowden, the former Governor of Illinois who had come close to getting the Republican nomination for President in 1920, instead of Harding, deserted Hoover, though mainly on the farm issue. When he appeared in Detroit, Hoover was booed—something that rarely has happened to any President in office—and Secret Service men in Detroit feared for his life.¹ To Thomas L. Stokes, this experience was Hoover’s “Calvary.”²

The Democratic candidate was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, who in 1920 had been defeated for Vice President in the Harding landslide.

Couzens liked Roosevelt’s speeches. Indeed, when Roosevelt made his famous “Forgotten Man” speech, and was attacked for it as a “demagogue” by former Governor Alfred E. Smith, it was Couzens who defended Roosevelt in the Senate. “I’m awfully tired of hearing men accused of demagoguery because they speak out for the little fellow,” he said.³ It did not escape him that Roosevelt’s speeches were built largely around ideas which he had long championed in Detroit, as well as in Washington. Moreover, he sensed intuitively that he and Roosevelt held a similar view as to the causes of the depression. This was that the depression was in reality a moral, rather than economic, breakdown, that ethical conduct by the business leaders would have prevented the crash.

Neither Roosevelt nor Couzens was much of an economist. But both thought they knew what was “wrong” and “right” in the distribution of the good things of the world and they were for wider distribution.⁴ Both would be assailed as socialists, or some other breed of anti-capitalist. But this was nonsense for political effect. If anything, both Couzens and Roosevelt were pure capitalists, concerned with preserving the individual-enterprise system. In the thesis of Louis M. Hacker,⁵ Couzens was the “industrial” capitalist, who viewed the “finance” capitalist, moving toward monopoly, as an enemy bent upon destroying the very system by which he had built his own fortune. Roosevelt, in the last analysis, was on his side, he believed.

2

So, for this campaign, a Republican who could not go along with Hoover, Couzens kept silent. When Roosevelt won, he was pleased.

He was not even sorry that Michigan, rock-ribbed Republican since the days of “Zach” Chandler, had gone completely Democratic, electing for governor William A. Comstock, the Democratic chairman who had called him “really a Democrat.”

Among the Old Guard Republicans, Jim Watson went down, as did David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, one of those who had infuriated Couzens by praising dictatorships. So did George Moses, “the master parliamentarian” and coiner of the phrase, “Sons of the Wild Jackass.” Like Watson, Moses had felt more than once the lash of Couzens’ temper, notably after he had accused him of “personal animus” when Couzens had introduced the resolution for Mellon’s resignation in 1928.⁶

It amused Couzens to recall that Moses had apologized for this remark after Couzens told him that unless he did, he would hear a speech on the Senate floor about certain aspects of his political career that Moses would prefer, he said, not to have mentioned.⁷

In 1926, Smoot of Utah had insisted that Couzens be removed from the Senate Finance Committee. Smoot had taken this drastic step because Couzens so frequently objected to his high tariff proposals.⁸ A famous feud had gone on between them ever since. “I’d like to drive a golf ball through your head!” Couzens once had snapped at him.⁹ Now Smoot was also gone.

“The election pleased me from a national point of view,” Couzens wrote to Madeleine. “The most joy I had, of course, was the defeat of Moses, Smoot and Watson—a mean streak in me, no doubt.”¹⁰

But his “joy,” if that were the correct word, was to be short-lived. For the 1932 election marked more than the end of the Hoover administration. It also marked the end of a whole era of American political and economic policy, and such turning points are usually accompanied by considerable agony for the leading actors in the drama. This, as he soon was to discover, would be true for Couzens, as well as for numerous other Americans.