The Split in the Democratic Party

I

IF the New Deal has done no other thing, — and it has done many other things, — it has driven a wedge into the organization of the Democratic Party. How deep that wedge has gone may be debatable. Whether it will force a party split of fateful — or, let us say, of suicidal — dimensions is more debatable still.

But failure to realize that there are now two irreconcilable elements — irreconcilable by any known rule of reason — within the Democratic Party at the moment would be fatuous. The elements exist. They are bitterly arrayed against each other. Each proclaims in passionate phrase its right to the Democratic label. Each claims title to the Jeffersonian heritage. Each parades its fidelity to the Democratic philosophy of government.

It would be equally fatuous, however, to assert or to assume that this elemental conflict is the result of a single issue — of judiciary reform, for example; or to imagine that the conflict dates no further back than the first session of the Seventy-fifth Congress, a session which ended in August. It was, in fact, quickened and broadened by the clashes of that period. But the schism is much older than that.

The truth is that the Democratic Party as it had existed since the Woodrow Wilson era became a prey to deadly factionalism in the 1932 convention at Chicago — the convention that first nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Presidency. Then and there it was that a powerful group of party leaders, profoundly distrusting both the personality and the performances of Mr. Roosevelt, made a desperate stand against him — and lost!

With these men, let it be added, it was a case of defeat, but not surrender. The members of that group have never for one minute relaxed in their opposition to Mr. Roosevelt. They were silenced during the crisis that followed his inauguration in 1933. They were ignored in the four years that ensued. They were shunted aside and virtually disfranchised in the Philadelphia Convention. And many of them took the long leap by bolting to the Republican nominee in the 1936 campaign.

It may be answered that the intransigence of these bolters in 1936 proved one thing: it proved them to be generals without an army — leaders without a following. So it did, in the light of net results. The President carried forty-six out of the forty-eight states in spite of them and in spite of all else that was thrown against him. It was an unbelievable victory — one might add, an historic victory. For every Democrat that the Smith-Davis-Raskob-Shouse group led out of the party, a score must have been recruited from the opposition.

Neither these conservatives, however, nor the greater group elsewhere in the party, — those who lacked the courage to quit the reservation, — have been won over. The Democratic anti-New Dealers of the upper-bracket class may not have increased greatly in numbers since the last election, but they have increased in boldness. They are now outspoken in their opposition to the Roosevelt policies, as shown in the Supreme Court fight, and outright in their determination to regain control of the party.

To regain such control is a large order. The present breach must become both deeper and wider before that can be achieved. It must reach to the great body of the voters themselves. It is not enough that twenty or more Democratic United States Senators, plus a sizable company of House members, should organize a battalion of death against the Administration. It is not enough that a Court-reform bill should be obstructed and buried in a Senate Committee. It is not enough that a minority combination should put a wages-and-hours bill on ice. It is not enough that sections of the South should be alienated by an antilynching bill.

There is nothing decisive about these things. Even so, they have their significance. They are particularly significant in the case of a President whose ‘mandate’ at the last election was more sweeping than any given a party leader in the life of this generation. By such rules as exist in politics, Mr. Roosevelt should now be in undisputed command of his party. He should be able to suppress recalcitrancy. The extent of his popular backing should immunize him against insurgency.

Quite the contrary: insurgency against the New Deal has become both overt and rampant since the 1937 inauguration. It has presented a broad front, a surprising resourcefulness. For the first time in more than four years the President has suffered direct defeat upon a major measure — upon the Court bill. He suffered this, moreover, at the hands of his own party associates. For the first time a general programme for a Congressional session has been shattered.

Of the six primary proposals composing that programme, exactly one — housing — cleared the legislative hurdles; and that was almost hopelessly emasculated. Of the five others, Court reorganization was abandoned; surpluscrop control was put over until the ensuing session; executive reorganization went by the board, the wages-and-hours bill was denied a vote in the House, and regional conservation was ignored.

This is a startling record of opposition success, negative though it be in its effect. But its intrinsic importance should not be overappraised in its bearing upon the future. It would be worse than shortsighted to assume that the President has been frustrated or disarmed; that his hands are up; that there is no fight left in him, and that triumphant ‘Toryism’ hereafter will have its way.

The inner-party battle will be renewed. It will be renewed with vigor, not to say ferocity. Full notice that it will was given by the President in his speech on Constitution Day. It wilt be renewed by a man whose relentlessness — yes, and ruthlessness — by now should be well understood by the American people, although I am not sure that it is. That relentlessness was shown clearly enough in his drive to impose Federal control upon both the issuance and the marketing of securities. It was shown in his deadly feud with the utilities holding companies. It has been shown in his assaults, one after another, upon the Supreme Court.

I venture the view that it will be shown again and again before the present Administration passes into history. He has been challenged, and challenged effectively, by the conservatives within his party. He will accept that challenge. In fact, he has accepted it already. He has taken his position further and more firmly to the Left, and from that position he will direct his forces.

He still believes himself to be the leader, the spokesman, the champion, maybe the political guardian even, of the great mass of the American people. Perhaps he is. Such evidence as we have at the moment convinces me that he has lost little of his hold upon the millions who have followed him in three campaigns.

Certainly the New York City primary indicated that he had lost little if any substantial support. The same can be said of the two-to-one Democratic victory in the recent Massachusetts byelection to fill the Connery vacancy in the House. An intensive survey of nine Southern states by Louis J. O’Donnell, staff writer of the Baltimore Sun, made after the adjournment of Congress, showed all of them to be as pro-Roosevelt as ever. The even broader survey of both the South and the West by Walter Karig of the Newark News pointed in the same direction.

This brings me back to my earlier proposition that control of the Democratic Party cannot be wrested from Mr. Roosevelt and his New Deal associates unless the party breach is both widened and deepened. It must extend far beyond a cabalistic Senate group leaning heavily for reënforcement upon the Republican minority. It must extend beyond a House bloc and beyond a press that has been consistently hostile from the day of Mr. Roosevelt’s first nomination.

It must spread far. It must spread wide. It must encompass millions of everyday people whose confidence Mr. Roosevelt has played for and long ago won — and, it appears, still holds.

Also a greater, a more appealing issue must be raised against him than his effort to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court, or to undermine the Constitution, or to hamstring business, or even his appointment of Hugo L. Black to the Supreme Court with his Ku Klux Klan background. That appointment was by far the costliest blunder the President had yet made.

Another disastrous depression might create such an issue as I have envisaged — it has happened before; or a false step in the matter of war or peace; or a decision by Mr. Roosevelt to seek a third term, provided the spectre of a dictatorship could be made sufficiently terrifying.

II

Of these possibilities, that of a third term is by all odds the most positive. The movement to nominate Mr. Roosevelt again is fairly under way. It cannot be lightly dismissed — first, because of its extent; next, because of the vast Administration machine that will promote it; and finally, because of the man himself about whom the agitation centres.

On the first count, no less than ten Democratic governors have publicly declared in favor of the third term — and that more than three years before another presidential election. Some of them may be dishonest about it, but surely not all of them. A few undoubtedly have ambitions of their own to serve and may be playing adroitly (or maladroitly) for the President’s favor. But, whatever their motives, they are lending themselves to the Big Idea.

As soon as it may be safe or expedient, we shall find the New Deal machine — an organization that reaches into every state, into every Congressional district, into every county, and perhaps into every voting precinct — giving mighty support to the ‘cause.’ Nor is this support to be discounted. For American politics has known no more compact and effective machine than this. The fact that it is based in the main upon public bounty and undiluted self-interest makes no difference.

I pass now to the man himself. I must, say candidly that I do not believe that in his heart the President wishes another term. I am willing to believe that the prospect is repellent to him for several reasons. Most of these reasons are personal. Most of them are implicit in the wear and tear upon the body, upon the mind and the soul, of whoever may occupy the Presidency in time of stress. I think he would be immensely happy to find himself relieved of it all.

Against this are two important facts. They may prove in the end to be controlling facts. The first, and the less important from a public standpoint, is a manifest determination on the part of Franklin D. Roosevelt to become the Roosevelt of history. To doubt that determination is to be ignorant of the man and his background.

Through the whole of his public life, the President has been jeered at or sneered at by the Republican branch of his family, the branch that has glorified the career and the personality of Theodore Roosevelt. Not only have these kinsmen opposed him politically, which is their undeniable privilege, but Cousin Franklin has even been stigmatized as the ‘maverick’ of the clan, an imputation that could not fail to rankle.

It is true enough that the achievements of the present President have given abundant answer to the detractions of his unfriendly family relations. He has gained and wielded great power — by two victories at the polls unmatched by anything in the record of any other Roosevelt. He has re-created one historic political party, and has all but smothered another. He has gone far toward reordering the economy of a nation. He has done all that and more.

But who knows how strong the temptation will be, when the time comes, to end forever the argument in the Roosevelt family as to its preëminent member, by making himself the first twelve-year President in our history?

Of infinitely greater consequence, however, as bearing upon the third-term prospect, is the fate of the New Deal programme. It is easy to conceive of a set of conditions, involving that programme, under which Mr. Roosevelt would run again; under which he would feel that he was literally forced to run. Let us assume that the conservative forces in the President’s own party, by combining with conservative Republicans, develop sufficient strength and generate sufficient courage not only to obstruct but even to defeat the President’s more cherished policies. That is not a violent assumption. These forces have done so once, and it is altogether possible that they will repeat the performance in other sessions of Congress.

In other words, let us imagine a conservative coalition that in effect paralyzes the Roosevelt leadership through the next two years. In such a case it is not only a possibility, but to my mind a strong probability, that the President will say something like this to his opposition: —

‘Very well, gentlemen, you have won in the Congress. You have nullified my policies. Your victory is a gage of battle, which I accept.

‘I have no personal desire to be President for twelve years. I should far prefer to retire to my pleasant place at Hyde Park and leave to another the responsibilities and the anxieties of the Presidency.

‘But my programme is more important than my leisure. I believe as firmly now as ever that my policies are vital to the welfare of the country. You have questioned them and, by uniting with the traditional enemies of our party, you have stalled me.

‘I will neither abandon these policies nor desert the millions who gave me their vote of confidence in 1936. The only course that is open to me is to go to the country again. We will let the people themselves, in their exercise of their sovereign right, determine whether you or I represent the majority.’

And, if he should take that course, I now do what is perilous for any political writer: I make a solemn prediction. I predict that if Mr. Roosevelt runs a third time, under the conditions which I have suggested, he will be renominated and reëlected.

My belief is that the third-term issue per se would count against the President only in the nominating convention. It would be used there and in the primaries earlier with all possible effect. It would take from him not only the delegates avowedly conservative, but many others who would be antagonistic for other reasons and would be desperately in need of an excuse for voting against him.

But with the party organization in his hands, with the far more effective New Deal machine at his command, plus the less partisan interests sincerely convinced that he should continue to carry on — with all this, it seems to me impossible that a majority of the 1940 delegates could be held against him.

And it is to be remembered that the old two-thirds rule — the deadlock producer of other days — has been abrogated. The next nomination in a Democratic convention will be made by a simple majority, unless the old rule is reinstated. And reinstatement can be prevented by a majority of one vote!

Once the nomination hurdle is passed, the third-term issue will become largely academic from the point of view of the great body of the voters. Only if it can be used to drive home the dictatorship idea, used to alarm the country to the depths of its consciousness, used as a horrifying warning of a Fascist black shirt or a Communistic red one in the White House — only if it can be thus capitalized will it make any considerable difference in the general campaign.

In the light of history, much of it in our own time, it is difficult to believe that the mass of the people care very deeply about the third term in itself. There is nothing in our experience as a nation to prove that they do care; and there is much to indicate how little the average man concerns himself about the matter.

General Grant was the only President openly to seek a twelve-year tenure in office. He was stopped in the Republican convention of 1880, ostensibly on the third-term issue. Actually the delegates rejected his candidacy because it was gravely doubted whether he could be elected in the light of the scandals of his administration. It is fair to assume that if he had been nominated, notwithstanding, he would have run as well against Tilden as did Hayes. He could scarcely have done worse.

The next effort to nominate a thirdterm candidate was made in 1908. Every known means was applied by his worshipful friends to induce Theodore Roosevelt to run again. He flatly refused. Had he acquiesced, he would have been nominated. And, if nominated, the probabilities are that he would have defeated Bryan as decisively as did Taft.

Four years later Colonel Roosevelt changed his mind. He fought furiously for the Republican nomination in 1912. Failing to achieve it, he ran as the candidate of the hastily created Progressive Party. But if he had been given the Republican nomination that year it is better than an even bet that he would have won against Woodrow Wilson, third term or no third term.

Overwhelming pressure was laid upon Calvin Coolidge in 1928 to lead his party again in battle. He resisted that pressure. But who is there to say, looking back upon it, that he would not have been nominated at Kansas City if he had been willing? And who is there who will seriously contend that if he had been the party candidate that year he would not have beaten A1 Smith as badly as did Herbert Hoover? It is idle to argue the contrary.

The foregoing, I think, disposes of the question: Can any man win the Presidency against the third-term tradition — that is, against the unwritten law that no President shall serve longer than eight years?

One will search in vain for a word in the Constitution bearing upon this question. Reporters of the original Constitutional Convention, notably the Federalist, indicate very clearly that the Convention in no sense opposed a third or a fourth presidential term. Any limitation upon presidential tenure was purposely omitted from the organic law. Most of the delegates strongly favored a powerful central government. A few of them were frank monarchists.

It was General Washington himself who set the two-term precedent, and made it a rule for his successors. But he did not base his refusal to stand for a third term on any ground of imperative public policy. As has been observed by an editor of the Nation, ‘the relevant passage in his “Farewell Address” is not so much a warning against a third term as an apology for not continuing in office.’ As a matter of historical fact, he retired to private life because he wanted to rehabilitate his estate.

It actually fell to Thomas Jefferson, the Democrat, to speak with positiveness upon the question. He made it plain to the American people that he withdrew at the end of his eight years in office as a matter of principle. He told his countrymen that he firmly believed that rotation in office was necessary to overcome a tendency or a temptation toward bureaucracy and despotism.

Just the same, it is a fact of interest that even Jefferson conceived an exception to the rule by which he governed his own conduct. ‘There is but one circumstance,’ he said in 1805, ‘which would engage my acquiescence in another election — to wit, such a division about a successor as might bring in a monarchist.’

There is no threat of monarchism in American life now, as in earlier days, and none can be foreseen. But there are a great many people who have shuddered as they contemplated the possibility of a Fascist régime supplanting democracy in this country.

It would be preposterous to say or to imply that Mr. Roosevelt, as a thirdterm candidate, would lose no votes on that account. He would lose some, perhaps many. But I am convinced that if he should seek and win another nomination his loss on a mere abstract issue would be negligible compared to the more than 40,000,000 people eligible to vote — unless, let me add quickly, this issue could be dramatically translated in terms of the very type of dictatorship which Thomas Jefferson had in mind.

In any case, I believe we should find behind Mr. Roosevelt in a third-term campaign the same restless, uneasy forces that overwhelmed Alf M. Landon in 1936. We should find the same Progressives, the same liberals, the radicals, the laborites, most of the Socialists, and more of the Communists, whooping it up for the President again.

And what an appeal could be made to these forces with Senator Robert M. La Follette on the ticket as the vicepresidential candidate!

We should probably find most of the farmers going along once more, as they went along in 1932 and in 1936. Add to this multitude the millions who have lived off the government, directly or indirectly, and it is easy to understand how nearly impossible it would be to prevent Mr. Roosevelt’s third election.

III

All of this, of course, means that I see no prospect of an organized labor party in the field in 1940. Certainly there will be none as long as there is a chance that the President will be a candidate to succeed himself. There have been warnings, to be sure, that John L. Lewis would be a candidate for the Presidency in the next campaign. Such storm signals have been flying in many quarters.

That threat, many of my Democratic friends have argued, is more ominous from a party standpoint than is the uprising of the conservatives. The conservatives, it is insisted, can be taken care of. They have no considerable popular following anyway. And in any event, so the reasoning goes, not many more of them will ‘fly to evils they know not of’ than went over to Landon in 1936. But with a labor ticket in the field, the outcome, from a Democratic standpoint, might be disastrous.

The ‘nightmares’ thus conjured up are morally certain to vanish if there is a third-term candidate. Mr. Lewis may not like Mr. Roosevelt. There are a good many reasons to believe that he does not. He dislikes the President chiefly because he has found, to his chagrin, that he cannot dominate the man he helped to elect in 1936. And there is reassurance for all of us in the fact that there is no such domination of the President of the United States.

Only one thing can possibly reconcile those of us who believe in practical democracy, who believe in government by the party system, and who know that system is unworkable without a powerful opposition — only one thing can reconcile us to the colossal majority given the President in 1936. That is the fact that his vote was so vast that no minority which gave him support can hold a whip over him. He is literally a free agent.

As far as anyone can foresee, Mr. Lewis will be forced to go along, whatever his personal attitude toward the President may be. There will be no other place for him to land. He could not support a conservative Republican candidate; and he dare not support a Socialist or a Communist. As has been suggested, he might be a candidate himself; but I believe him too intelligent for that.

The most such a candidacy could accomplish would be the defeat of Mr. Roosevelt and the delivery of the government into the hands of the conservative enemies of labor. His followers would know that; and it is conceivable that they would not only desert Mr. Lewis at the polls, but might even smash his leadership of labor itself.

Much that has been put down here is based on a third-term candidacy. And there may be no such candidacy. Mr. Roosevelt may ‘choose’ to stand aside. For it is to be borne in mind that the only remotely reasonable pretext he may have for running again would be a series of defeats at the hands of the conservatives in Congress.

That may come, but there is no certainty of it. The Senate coalition may crack up. The House opposition bloc has never been able to do more than amend or delay an Administration measure. The programme, broadly speaking, may be pushed to consummation in the next two or three years.

Whether that happens depends chiefly upon the Senate. That there exists an inclination on the part of a slender majority of that body (if there be a majority) to defy the New Deal I have no doubt. But I am not so sure about the courage. It takes more of that quality for a party man to make war upon his party’s President — one enjoying undeniable political popularity — than it did to flout Mr. Hoover during the period when the latter declined in popular favor.

That Mr. Roosevelt will marshal his forces in this and the next Congress in an effort to vote down the conservatives, to render them powerless, may be taken for granted. He may fail, but he will not quit. There is nothing more certain, in my judgment, than that he will not quit.

If the conservatives, in any case, wish to leave the party, that is their privilege, Mr. Roosevelt will say to them. But he will not invite them to leave. He is far too shrewd and calculating for that. And I am convinced that he will practise no ‘reprisals ’ against the party men who oppose him.

He had an opportunity on his recent transcontinental tour to pillory the men who stand in his way, to impeach their party loyalty, to denounce many of them before their own people, to scourge and, maybe, crucify them. He did nothing of the sort. He will leave them to the mercies of the voters of their own states. That is the Roosevelt way.

Let us assume that Mr. Roosevelt will remove himself as a candidate in 1940. He will, nevertheless, claim the right to dictate his successor as party leader. Not to believe that is to have slight acquaintance with the man — no acquaintance at all, in fact.

Such dictation will be resented and resisted by every anti-New Deal individual and element in the party. Not only will the conservatives turn more savagely upon him, but every candidate upon whom his benediction fails to fall will be in league against him — all of which would make for a highly flavored, old-time Democratic convention ‘riot.’

It is an anomalous circumstance — almost a phenomenon — that there is nobody in the whole New Deal régime who can now be regarded as the President’s heir apparent. The figure of such a person is nowhere on the political horizon. No one near Mr. Roosevelt, or removed from him, has appeared who might naturally step into his shoes and carry his programme forward.

For the truth is that we have in the present Administration a vast system of government set up and ruled almost wholly by the mind and the policies of a single individual — an individual without an understudy who could take over either in an emergency or in the natural course of events.

A Roosevelt legatee may emerge from the background, of course, during the next two or three years — that is to say, if one is needed. But the more I scrutinize the situation as it exists in Washington and as it exists outside, the more I become convinced that, if Mr. Roosevelt lives, no legatee will be needed until after 1940.