The Exuberance of the New Deaf: The Morgen Thau Diaries

BY GERALD W. JOHNSON

“Only the toughest survived.”

This is the judgment of John Morton Blum on an aspect of the New Deal that has received singularly little attention from historians, although its importance is obvious. Apparently there is a psychological block in the conventional mind that prevents it from accepting the locution “hard-boiled egghead” as anything but a contradiction in terms. An egghead is by definition a theorist, by common acceptance an idealist, and by observation usually a humanitarian. Most of us are unable to associate speculative philosophy, idealism, and humanitarianism with the steely character, in spite of massive evidence that the association is logical. This block is doubtless one reason why such relatively late arrivals on the scene as Schlesinger and Freidel have done more in their writings to make the New Deal intelligible than has been accomplished by all of those who participated prominently in it.

Blum is a commentator of the same order. He was not there; hence, he bears no personal responsibility for anything that happened and is under no compulsion to explain or justify. But he has had access to a tremendous mass of authentic records, so his factual knowledge is comprehensive and precise. Furthermore, he is an analyst of extraordinary lucidity, although of limited range; his book on Woodrow Wilson’s injection of morality into international politics was a triumph of analysis, even in the eyes of a Didymus who regards it as an example of the use of extensive and accurate knowledge to support the wrong conclusions.

Therefore, his assertion that the New Deal was an ordeal that only the toughest survived cannot be dismissed as the chatter of an uninformed phrasemaker. It is an observation based on study of voluminous records, in this case the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., one of the survivors and unquestionably tough. The Morgenthau diaries comprise some six hundred manuscript volumes of the most heterogeneous materials — letters, documents, notes, memorandums, as well as a more or less formal journal. Morgenthau has already published much of this material. Blum has rearranged it into a connected and comprehensible narrative (From the Morgenthau Dianes: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938, Houghton Mifflin, $7.50), written in his own words but based almost exclusively on the Morgenthau records.

This makes it, of course, an ex parte proceeding. Morgenthau invariably gets the best of it, but why not? It is his book, and who ever heard of a man writing a book to discredit himself? There is no reason to believe that either Morgenthau or Blum has falsified any statement of fact, and the reader is under no compulsion to accept their inferences.

For the rest, the book is a brilliant study of the inner workings of government in stressful times. Blum’s gift for lucid exposition is invaluable here because Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury and his work was in the realm of finance, which is dark and mysterious indeed to those of us who have trouble enough making the stubs in our checkbooks agree with the bank’s monthly statement. Remember, then, that in the years from 1933 to 1938 the realm of finance was itself in a state of such utter confusion that the ablest financiers were bewildered, and you will begin to understand how remarkable is Blum’s feat of making Morgenthau’s fiscal operations a story that is not only understandable but entertaining and sometimes exciting.

The financial aspect is, however, a side issue. In his official capacity the Secretary of the Treasury is a technician, and Henry Morgenthau had no great ambition to be remembered merely as a financial expert. His technical competence is sufficiently attested by the survival of the United States Treasury; what worried him then, and apparently worries him still, was the test of his competence as a human being — specifically, as a citizen of the United States with a considerable measure of responsibility for the formulation of public policy. The reflection of his soul searching is the element that lifts this book from the category of research scholarship and places it among fascinating psychological studies.

BY THE year 1940, when everything else gave place to preparations for war, the ten portfolios in Roosevelt’s Cabinet had been held by nineteen individuals. The survivors from 1933 were Hull,

Ickes, Farley, Wallace, and Perkins, and if there is a soft character in that group, all psychological appraisal may as well be abandoned. “Only the toughest survived.” Morgenthau’s appointment dates from 1934, because overwork quickly killed the original Secretary of the Treasury, Woodin, but survival from 1934 is sufficient evidence to add Morgenthau to the tough five.

Exactly half of the six were never New Dealers. Hull and Farley were Democrats first, last, and all the time. Morgenthau was frankly a Rooseveltian first and an opportunist second, but his opportunism had an honorable basis. He went along kicking and screaming, but he went along, because he figured, rightly, that this was the biggest thing in which he had ever had, or ever would have, an opportunity to participate, and if he aspired to have his life count for anything important in history, here was his chance. This may certainly be defined as opportunism, but hardly in the pejorative sense.

This raises, without answering, the perennially fascinating question, what was Roosevelt? Was he ever a New Dealer? In the pages of Mr. Blum’s book nothing is more impressive than the evidence that Ickes, Wallace, and Perkins went along kicking and screaming, too. When a number of salient personalities are included in any administrative group, battle is the inevitable result, because strong men will not willingly suffer domination, but the Donnybrook Fair over which Roosevelt presided during his first two terms surpassed even that of Lincoln’s Administration.

Nevertheless, twenty years later it is plain that the Administration proceeded along a consistent and definite line, uproariously but steadily. That is proved by the fact that not one of its important innovations in American political theory has since been abandoned. If half the Administration opposed the policy as being too radical and the other half opposed it as being too conservative, what was the real position of the administrative leader of the dissident group?

The easy and inadequate answer is opportunism. It does not satisfy Morgenthau any more than it satisfies anyone else who takes the facts into account. But Morgenthau is in the unhappy position of a man convinced against his will. Roosevelt never formulated a coherent philosophic basis for his economic policy; probably he could not, for much of his knowledge in that field was intuitive, not ratiocinative, and intuition is a name for the inexplicable. It seems clear now that he had apprehended, although he had not fully comprehended, the Keynesian theory that in the modern world distribution takes priority over production as an economic problem. If it comes to that, who has grasped all its implications twenty years later?

The remarkable fact is that Morgenthau, for all his conviction that the President’s fiscal policy was disastrous, remained unshaken in his belief that Roosevelt was the one leader who had a chance to bring the country through its troubles still recognizably the republic of the pre-war years. This is the central conflict that gives the book its tension; by comparison with it, all the squabbles with Ickes and Wallace and Hopkins and Jesse Jones and the rest were minor incidents.

Indeed, Morgenthau’s judgment of his colleagues, as reflected in the pages of his book, is more temperate than might have been expected. In part, of course, this is due to editorial prudence; Mr. Blum has been careful not to perpetuate hasty judgments made in a heated moment. In part — but in relatively small part — it is due to the advantage of hindsight. But largely it seems to be based on a genuine appreciation by Morgenthau of the good qualities of men whom he heartily disliked. His relations with Harry Hopkins, in particular, although punctuated with explosions, were on the whole surprisingly amicable.

Roosevelt took a great deal of plain speaking from Morgenthau. It must be remembered that this is Morgenthau telling it, and no man’s account of how he called down the boss should be accepted verbatim, but after due allowance has been made for that quirk of human nature, there remain convincing records that Morgenthau said to his chief things that would not have been tolerated in the absence of heavy countervailing weights.

These counterbalances are not far to seek. In the first place, when it came to keeping the complicated administrative machinery of the Treasury operating efficiently, Morgenthau knew his stuff. In the second place, his religious affiliation was an asset to Roosevelt once Hitler began his obscene attack on Judaism; the retention of a Jew in one of the great offices of state was an admirable gesture of defiance of the tyrant. But the real basis of Roosevelt’s tolerance unquestionably was the years of association with Morgenthau when they were both young men in Dutchess County, New York, and Washington seemed far away. Roosevelt knew his man, both his strong and his weak points, and with this knowledge he was aware that Morgenthau’s strongest point was loyalty. Knowing that his friend was incapable of genuine insubordination, he countered sharp words with equally sharp words, but nothing more.

That this situation was exceptional is conclusively proved by the fact that in less than seven years nineteen persons held the ten great offices that, after the presidency, are the shining goals of every politician’s ambition. A man does not quit the Cabinet except for compelling reasons, and the fact that so many were so compelled in one term and a half demonstrates beyond debate the interior violence of the New Deal.

Yet Morgenthau at the very time he was being torn apart by this violence was aware that the New Deal was a curiously joyous adventure. Indeed, one of his great trials was the exuberance of the New Dealers, especially the younger ones. They were rending Adam Smith limb from limb and strewing the disjecta membra far and wide, and they were actually enjoying it. Worse than that, there were moments when Morgenthau himself was swept along by the tide of enthusiasm and his heart leaped up in defiance of his better judgment. It was disconcerting, but it was a fact, and such moments dissolved his fatigue and anxiety and renewed his capacity for endurance.

It was a negative demonstration of Schopenhauer’s assertion that of the two positive evils in the world, pain and boredom, boredom is by far the worse. Nobody was bored by the New Deal. One might fear it, one might hate it, one might see in it the summation of political madness, but nobody found it dull. Even those quondam New Dealers who recanted and joined the opposition Moley, for example — found in their ineffectual opposition a frantic urge that banished tedium from their lives.

Something of that interest carries over into the narratives of all those who held prominent positions in that turbulent era. None of them spent his years in office merely drawing his breath and his salary. None was a drudge engrossed in drab routine. Each has a tale to tell, and if some of the tales are horrid, nevertheless they are of a quality “which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner.”

This is true even of the man who held the office that the uninformed regard as that of a sublimated bookkeeper, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. What Henry Morgenthau, Jr., did from 1933 to 1938 affected the lives of millions of people at the time and will continue to affect them for a period of unknown duration. Whether for good or for ill, it counted. Twenty years later a majority of Americans are persuaded that on the whole it counted for good, but there is in the human heart such an abhorrence of vacuity that most men would prefer to take the risk of counting for ill rather than creep through life in utter insignificance.

It was Morgenthau’s misfortune never to be able to believe, as his happier associates believed, that he was assisting in a vast readjustment of the economy to conform to radically modified facts of life. He would suffer even now from frustration, since, after twenty years, that readjustment is incomplete and still opposed by powerful forces; but if he had really believed in what was being done, he could have consoled himself with Woodrow Wilson’s philosophy that it is better to fail in a cause that is bound eventually to succeed than to succeed in a cause that is bound eventually to fail.

Morgenthau served for six years after the outbreak of war in Europe rang down the curtain on the amazing political drama known as the New Deal. It is evident from Mr. Blum’s book, which ends in 1938, that Morgenthau found his war service more satisfactory, and probably regards it as more important, than his operations among the New Dealers.

That is a matter of opinion. The war, after all, was only another war, a repetition on an unprecedented scale of the tragedy that had been played countless times before, while the New Deal was a governmental operation without parallel. At the same time, Morgenthau in war had the happiness of serving a cause in which he did believe with his whole heart. This makes it nonsensical to regard him as in any way a tragic figure. The fact remains, however, that for those first six years he served Roosevelt diligently, intelligently, and loyally. One closes the account with a mild regret that the man did not have a better time doing it.