The Men and the Moment
I
THE midsummer pall, the all-enfolding Southern heat that is Washington’s, lay over the city until the middle of September; and then suddenly the weather changed, it became fresh and cool, glorious days led smoothly into autumn, and the rich rolling lands of neighboring Virginia went yellow and red and russet in the October sun.
As the weather changed, something else changed also. The stifling, trembling closeness of the people seemed to clear; the crowds dispersed a. bit, the sweating short-breathed excitement of the summer was quieted to some degree, and a calmer, a steadier pace of work came over the Capital.
The change, then, was an atmospheric one; and to catch the alteration of moods, temperatures, winds, and pressures — both meteorological and official — one had to be there to witness it. One could not report it factually to one’s newspaper: ‘A rising barometer, together with prevailing westerly winds, resulted in major changes in the projected steel code.’ No, one could not assume that the heavens had anything to do with it. But, as one changed the wilted shantung shirt for the energetic clothes of fall, one could not avoid getting private impressions.
A newcomer to Washington, I felt something strange, something almost unearthly, in the scene during those sweltering July and August weeks when the N.R.A. programme was so passionately launched. In the summer months of all other years, I was told, the city had been placid and deserted. But now, not just that it was full and active — it was rather seething with hurrying, arguing, coatless humanity. The spacious halls of the Commerce Building, which had been drafted into service as the N.R.A. headquarters, were a hive of electricians installing telephones; movers rushing in desks and chairs by the hundred; carpenters building and tearing down partitions; porters carting bundles of freshly printed forms, broadsides, pledge cards, catalogues; delegations milling in General Johnson’s outer offices to plead for a five minutes’ audience; committees meeting in unfinished rooms and sitting on packing boxes; second-string labor leaders stalking majestically down the corridors, and first-string captains of industry sitting along the wall to await their turn.
In the Agriculture Building, where the gigantic movement for subsidizing farmers and raising prices was just grinding into action, the scene was practically the same. Mailing clerks, handling the mountains of blanks and farm literature that had to go out at top speed, were working in three shifts; from a strategic corner I could watch experts rush by with charts fluttering under their arms, legal advisers with their inevitable portfolios, messengers with bulging rush packets, and groups of newly employed young intellectuals (whom I had last seen disputing in Greenwich Village, probably on Humanism), now disputing, so that I could overhear them, on ‘marginal productivity . . . consumer latitude . . . probability graphs.’ No one noticed me; all hurried on.
Late at night I drove by the building again, hoping to catch some refreshing breezes from across the Mall; but the sweltering air never thinned, and long rows of office windows were garishly lit along the broad façade.
I said it seemed a bit unearthly. It seemed as though these people were slaving together in some singular pit, some cauldron, separated from the outer world by the thick blanket of heat that had rolled down around them. With the passing of my first flush of enthusiasm and admiration, the scene took on the character of a phantasmagoria, an unreal thing. I was not thinking of it as economics, but as drama; and it aroused in me the dim sentiment that something about it was alien, doubtful, even in some curious manner suspicious.
II
And then, suddenly and quietly, the tropic pallor drew away. One could dare to breathe deeply again. One had a sensation of a clearing atmosphere: objects, persons, became again sharply defined. There was new perspective.
It was the time when the important industrial codes, after long series of hearings, were being forced into shape and signed. Secretary Perkins had made her great speech in which she called out, ‘It’s about time we treated ourselves to a little civilization.’ The president of the United Mine Workers, a bull of a man, had stood up before the hushed hearing room to introduce himself: ‘My name is Lewis, John L.’ Labor had regarded the millennium as at hand — until the business interests suddenly revived, after their surrender in the spring. Now, in September, the actual forces were beginning to reveal themselves: the mirage was dispelled; the basic, open battles began — battles that were to lead, slowly but directly, right up to the massed attack on the entire recovery programme.
Perhaps it was the background, the setting of these events, that was most stirring. There was a memorable afternoon when all the coal operators were called into the N.R.A. hearing hall, to be handed out, like schoolboys, a list of directions from cool, clear-voiced Donald Richberg, the administration counsel. They sat there in long rows, these men from all over the country — some of them prosperous, comfortable, heavy faces chatting with showy amiability, but more of them the hard, powerfully wrought, cold faces of men who you knew had risen from the ranks, and who were now bitterly determined to hold their peak. Farther back in the room, still and massed, sat a delegation from the miners’ union. They gazed up with distant curiosity at the luxurious murals and the wrought-iron decorations; the muscles of their arms, as they crossed them, stood out under the cheap clothing, and their hands still seemed to have the grime of the mine shafts on them. All sat there without a word, the fierce contending fronts of bosses and workers; and, as Richberg finished and folded up his paper, quietly together they walked out.
The pace was slower; the issues clearer; and the statements sharper. What had been the scuffling, milling, hurrying host of the summer now resolved itself into personalities, into individual attitudes and divided views. The personal clashes began. Perhaps it was all the result of frayed nerves and overwork. Perhaps it was the clearer sight of separate objectives, as the panorama came into full relief.
It became the fashion to have luncheon at the Occidental Restaurant, opposite the Commerce Building, to which General Johnson came every day, occupying the same corner table in the way a German burgomaster establishes his Stammtisch. The influential and the wealthy, who had perhaps been turned away from his office an hour before, sought after tables that would be nearest to him. Great industrialists, noted for their haughty unapproachability, tried to edge closer to the exalted empty corner table identified by the flowers upon it. Finally, lumbering, heavy-featured, tired-eyed, enormous, the General would stalk in. Following in his footsteps would come his little secretary — the brilliant and almost dictatorial ‘Robbie’ of the Recovery Administration. She might stop off at some table to greet a friend and lament that nobody in Johnson’s inner office had gotten to bed before six-thirty that morning. It was not a cause for amazement.
At the table, Edward F. McGrady, the obscurely energetic labor chief, or Kenneth Simpson, the appropriately burly administrator for heavy industries, or grave Mr. Richberg himself, would join them. The industrialists across the way would look jealously at the empty chairs left over. But ’Robbie’ kept a sharp, protecting eye open, and the lofty gentlemen stayed where they were.
Once an explosion occurred. A messenger brought in a letter. Johnson seemed ill-disposed to read it; it was a message from the recalcitrant coal operators. Finally he opened it, suddenly went purple in the face, and with a roar of oaths threw the script to the floor. All of us, who had been watching the General out of the corner of our eyes all along, stopped short; in the hush that followed we could not make up our minds whether the thunder had resembled Jove’s or that of a drill sergeant.
It became an era of explosions. They were good to see. To go to the code hearings in the big decorated hall was to sit awaiting some outburst ol choleric resentment followed by a stream of eloquent radical demand. There was an entire morning during the momentous hearings on the newspaper code when the publishers’ counsel, Elisha Hanson, poured forth endlessly legalistic arguments upholding the ’imperiled freedom of the press,’ only to be confronted, for an entire afternoon, by Charles P. Howard, head of the typographical union, who hammered out a furious record of minimum-wage evasions and cases of publishers’ bad faith.
There was an exciting afternoon during the hearings on the revised silk and rayon code when the meek and placid eyes of elderly Mr. Whiteside, administrator in charge of the meeting, popped wide open to find a delegation of 150 Communist strikers marching boldly into the hall, led by fieryheaded Ann Burlak, their spokesman. One could see the look of dismay spread over the faces of the mill owners. Mr. Whiteside had to allow a whole series of these strikers to present their case; some were finished and eloquent, some were almost illiterate, but all threatened something worse than a strike. Repeatedly the administrator warned them against intimidations of this sort right under the ægis of the government; but when finally he had to allow the flaming Burlak girl to talk, that was too much for him, and he gave up trying to keep the meeting in hand. While she insinuated revolution, he simply smoked cigarettes in quick succession and looked far away. That, many observers felt, was the best way out of it.
III
In the early days of autumn I noticed a peculiar enrichment of my vocabulary. Where once my political language had been very limited, I was now using descriptive phrases like ‘chiseler’ and ‘tom-tom beater’ with perfect ease. I shall always regard it as a pity that H. L. Mencken did not attend, with all the rest of us, General Johnson’s press conferences, and hold in his hand a scholar’s rather than a reporter’s notebook; for he would have picked up a whole appendix for The American Language. That visionary Johnsonian phrase to the effect that ‘the air’s going to be full of dead cats pretty soon’ was of early vintage — July, I think. But the glorious verb ‘to crack down’ (that is, on Henry Ford) was born in the September period, closely followed by that sparkling reference to the textile industry leaders, ‘ We started out with those babies in March.’
Now imagine emerging from one of these conferences, with their snap, their crowding, their recklessness, and then having to go right over to the neighboring Treasury Department on business. So it happened to me one day. At the start I did not think of any unusual sense of contrast that might come over me; but, as soon as I had passed through the portals of the old pseudo-Greek building of Hamilton’s successors, I knew that I had entered another world. Over there, in the corridors of the brand-new Commerce Building, all was modern, stripped for action, rushing with business efficiency. Here, the first thing one noticed was the tall, feudal, gracefully Southern, and silent corridors. Sombre old portraits hung where, across the street, direction charts had stared; ancestral white swinging doors closed on padded inner doors, while across the street all doorways had been open and crowded with life. Here in the Treasury Building were no carpenters, runners, messengers; there were only a few kindly old Negro door openers, yawning at their little tables in the hall. It was as if, by crossing the street, I had passed from our century into the century before.
During this time much grave discussion of dollar policy was going on; and I had some business with a gentleman of the Federal Reserve Board. Climbing the dark old stairs of the building, I half expected that at least around the Federal Reserve offices there would be bustle and disturbance. But, as I reached there, the opposite was true. Everything was spacious and calm. It seemed that no tumble of the dollar, however fantastic, could disturb the hush of the deep green inner-office carpets, or cause the luxurious plants in the windows to go without a day’s watering, or ruffle one lock of a softvoiced secretary’s hair. And even if the dollar disappeared from view, it could surely not upset the Board members out of their cultured and obscure financial dialogue, and make them reach for an exclamation point!
I had a chance to peer into the sacred Board meeting room. It stretched out there, long and narrow, with the blotters and ash trays for the members modestly gathered toward one end of it. Along the walls were charts and more charts, the mural paintings of finance. Not a sound could be heard; everything was at peace. I suddenly felt a curious upwelling within me: all is for the best, I mused, with this best of all possible dollars.
IV
The worst conspirators against our good health or sanity were names — names, adding, multiplying, substituting, disappearing, and then more names. The only kind of man who could remember them was the man who could recite offhand a canto of The Faerie Queene.
It would have been nothing at all if the new names were merely those normally substituting for the outgoing ones of the old administration. But the trouble began with the dozens of new organizations that were set up in the spring. The original trouble maker, of course, was the Brain Trust, because some authorities said it included only three people, while others said it included two dozen. But then the names came thick and fast. There were experts like Mordecai Ezekiel, James P. Warburg, Alexander Sachs, Frederic Howe. There were men suddenly thrown up from obscurity, as far as the nation was concerned, into exalted position, like George N. Peek or young Morgenthau. There were, as sources of more mystery, Who’s Who chasing, and confusion, the Professors Berle, Tugwell, Wolman, Warren, Rogers, Sprague, Myers, and Morgan. There were a dozen deputy administrators whose names had to be remembered. There were labor leaders who had been promoted into the N.R.A.; there were lawyers like Richberg and Frank; there were consumers’ committees, industrial committees, labor committees, planning committees, subcommittees, and supercommiltees, with memberships that changed and interlocked.
Almost every week came the announcement of another government ‘administration’ or ‘corporation,’ each with a bigger capitalization than the one before, and each for a more elaborate purpose. Soon I had to keep neat lists in a notebook, but not even that did any good; the names, groups, organizations, multiplied so fast that I was utterly swamped. The names of half of the august bodies slipped my mind; and I still believe that in the turmoil Washington has completely forgotten about several of them, and that they will turn up perhaps a year from now, to the great surprise of even Mr. Roosevelt.
V
While the department buildings in the centre of town were staging a scene of construction, isolated Capitol Hill was staging a scene of destruction. Since it was the Congressional off season, most of the offices were deserted in that always rather deserted-looking corner of town. But the tall, marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building was the exception: with its rank of noisy telegraph instruments outside the door, and its constant flow of people, it gave life to the whole hill of cold white. It was the scene of the Senate Banking Committee hearings.
There is probably no meeting room anywhere that is so gorgeously luxurious in its construction, and so utterly hopeless in its acoustics. And so, as a consequence, most of the remarks delivered to a waiting world by Messrs. Morgan, Kahn, Dillon, and Wiggin were missed by even the closest listeners. The only man whom we could hear with consistent clarity was Counsel Ferdinand Pecora. Was that because he had an especially resounding voice? Or because his position in the hall was acoustically better? Or because the radio mechanic had given him a better microphone to talk into than the others?
That I cannot say. I only know that the effect of the Pecora voice was that of a crowbar closely thrust into the speculative structure of the country. It boomed as it rose in an embarrassing question, it barked as it rattled out a ten-million-dollar profit figure; and ‘at every word a reputation died.‘
Perhaps of all the spectacles enacted in Washington in this period — and there were so many spectacles that we shall not be able to digest them for many a year — this was the most impressive. If the N.R.A. hearings were explosions, this was nothing less than the Inquisition. The only reason that the banking hearings were not followed with consistent attention by the public is that their subject matter grew too complex and technical. The average reporter could make no sense out of all the discussion of stock transfers, holding companies, trading pools; a John T. Flynn was needed to illuminate these sundry operations, and make them read like a detective yarn.
Perhaps it was another of those things that had to be seen rather than read about. One had to watch closely the faces around that crucial table: Chairman Fletcher, a placid and peaceful old gentleman, and beside him, in rude contrast, the dark, steely-haired, heavy-lipped, and brutal-chinned Pecora, with his worshiping assistants lined behind him. Among the Committee members, one would spot Senator Couzens, always on guard, and disrupting Pecora’s studied train of questions with neat side queries for himself; or Senator Gore, with his blind and delicate ascetic face. Senator Glass was conspicuous by his absence.
And on the opposite side, week after week, sat Albert H. Wiggin — heavy, secretive, amiable. In the first days he was especially amiable. He seemed to have learned that the way to slip by the Pecora grueling was to answer questions promptly, lightly, easily, dismissing the matter with a smile and thus avoiding further complications. Perhaps he expected that it would all be over quickly, as it was with Morgan and Kahn, or that it might end with a handshake, as with Dillon. Put Pecora had other things in mind. And as I sat there day after day I could see the mood of the table change. Wiggin grew heavy under the ordeal; the amiability wilted into a wry smile; he balked, caught himself in errors of figures; and Pecora dropped the cordial manner.
The chairs for the public, which had been practically vacant since the day when J. P. Morgan held the midget on his lap, filled up again. Newspaper men who had ignored the whole proceedings began to trickle in. And slowly, through hours of wrangling and impatience, the story was laid bare of the president of the world’s greatest bank, who had speculated in his own bank stock, who had entered pools to pump up an artificial market for it (a market that he called ‘God-given,’ getting from Mr. Couzens the rejoinder, ‘Are you so sure as to the source?’), and who finally had sold his own stock short.
I shall not forget the moment when he admitted the actual fact of having made short sales. Not even Pecora, I think, expected that. When the words were out, I could see the committeemen stare. For a moment there was a complete hush. The only noise was the endless clacking of the telegraph instruments outside in the hall.
VI
It was after dark that the general let-down came over the people in the city of crisis. That was brought home to me forcibly, for I had just come from New York, where the great streets in the fifties, so unexciting in daytime, break forth into their crowded and subterranean glamour only well after the sun has set. But here, with the passing of day, the human beings also passed from the scene. Only a few lingered on, downtown, under isolated lights blazing in the N.R.A. windows. Along the main streets there was no restaurant life, no assemblage at a gay speak-easy; there was only an occasional road theatre, and only one night club that had survived — patronized chiefly by diplomatic attachés, those handsome gentlemen of gilded leisure. But beyond that there came, with the darkness, peace.
Or there came boredom. Washington’s immemorial dinners continued, with their exactitude and their early hours. But the government men who came to them, as far as I could see, were either so engrossed in their work that they wished only to talk shop, or so weary of staging Recovery that they subsided into something resembling a coma. Night after night we talked about wheat futures, the Roosevelt programme in reference to market speculation, the commodity dollar, the compensated dollar, the rubber dollar, and — just to get away from it all — the cheese dollar. And when the ladies retired to the salon for coffee after dinner, what did they discuss? Once I overheard a particularly charming one holding forth on the price of hogs.
It was in these hours — usually so free and companionable, in the rest of the world — that one sensed the seepage of strength, the frayed nervousness, the inner exhaustion of the people. During the day, with its excitement and courage and activity, everything went on in full style. With the night came the time for reflection over the disputes, the attacks, the abandonments, the changes, the unfinished programmes, the improbable figures, the impossible hopes; and a great sombreness seemed to come over the faces of men, and a great weariness.
VII
Thinking such thoughts, one windy cheerless morning-after, I walked across the White House grounds for the President’s midweek press conference. The leaves were already scattering fast under the old portico that spread over the glass doors behind which, in their starched immaculateness, Negro footmen peered out.
The entrance to the Executive Offices, a little beyond, was less formal; the correspondents were gathering around, passing under the cold blue eyes of the chief of the guard as they entered the large bare vestibule. Inside they stood smoking and waiting as usual for the summons. The wellknown and popular men moved from group to group: there was dignified Mark Sullivan, his hair as white as his tall collar, a man who had had free access to the White House from the days of Theodore Roosevelt to March 4, 1933; there was Charles Ross of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the quiet, brilliant writer with the face of an aristocratic Will Rogers — startling combination; Drew Pearson, the gossiping and sparkling co-author of the MerryGo-Round books; T. C. Alford, the agrarian expert of the Kansas City Star. There were other men whose particular drawl betrayed the home town of the far-off papers for which they worked. There were press association writers, hard-boiled and severe; several lounging columnists; a group of business-journal correspondents in violent technical argument; and, as the one really resplendent figure in the noisy crowd, Sir Willmott Lewis, of the London Times, in spats.
At the clap of an usher’s hand, the leisurely mass was suddenly transformed into something resembling a football rush. The white-haired veterans vied with young ‘leg-men’ to be the first to reach the office of the President.
They streamed into the large oval room, whose three windows, flanked by flags, opened on the private garden of the White House. Around the room hung prints and water colors, in two dense rows, most of them pictures of ships. On the mantel stood models, models of more ships. It might be the office of the owner of some old-fashioned shipping company.
They streamed in until the room was full; they crowded in a crescent around a desk in the middle of the room, standing with their hands in their pockets, without ceremony. And where was the President? He was nowhere to be seen. Would he come in by the left door? Or by the right? But oh! — suddenly, as I rose to my toes, I could look right down upon him; he had been sitting at his desk all the time, almost buried by his press.
My thoughts had been troubled; the President was smiling. Ruddy, his head bobbing and never still, with careless hair of steely hue, he looked like a man who had just come in from the athletic out-of-doors. Only the habitual dark rings under his pale blue eyes suggested the man of sedentary work. But he was smiling — not with that full and officious grin he affects before the news reels, but with a lighter, easier good humor.
The system was that anyone out of the crowd could fire a question, which the President would either answer or wave aside. It was a complete revolution from the style of Coolidge and Hoover, who insisted that newspaper men’s questions should be written out and submitted in advance; their refusal to answer a question was thus practically unnoticed, while with Roosevelt it would be frank and public. It was interesting to watch the variety of questions: some were highly technical ones about monetary policy or diplomatic procedure, asked perhaps to impress the crowd or to stump the President; some were broad and intelligent questions on policy; some merely banal.
The matter under discussion — the announcement of another corporation to handle some particular variety of financing — was not of great interest to me, and my mind began to wander. I looked out of the windows into the cold morning beyond, with the leaves flying and the clouds chasing low across a leaden sky. A lone guard paced along a walk, the cold wind nipping under his coat. The sun was gone; it might rain any minute. I thought of many sombre moods.
But in here it was warm and pleasant, full of flags and pictures, and a handsome chandelier overhead; and the President’s quick look and engaging smile — yes, that was the source of it, that was the peculiar radiant energy which spread through the room. I was not being sentimental about it; it was a fact; I could recognize in a few minutes the truth of the remarks about Roosevelt’s genius to captivate, disarm, encourage, befriend, enthrall.
One might, if one wished, doubt it as a thing that could bring only hypnotic, and momentary, and therefore ephemeral results. One might regard it as a show of false or unwarranted optimism. But I came to no definite conclusions: I merely watched the bobbing of the head.
There were no more technical questions, and a young reporter for a prominent Chicago paper (whose publisher had been warning the country that the freedom of the press was about to be curtailed) spoke up; he asked the President’s reaction to that matter. It was a question of embarrassing — almost of staggering — breadth. But without batting an eyelid Mr. Roosevelt looked at the young man, and instantaneously we gathered that Colonel McCormick was seeing things under the bed. There was no formality in the convulsion that followed.
Now the clouds rolled up and the drizzle began, and we all filed out into the long frigid vestibule. We had to return now through the wet to the rest of Washington. As I passed the last door and buttoned my coat against the cold, I wished for a moment that I might escape this harsh outer world, the heaviness, the rain, and slip back covertly into the pleasant oval room. I might catch him in an off moment, just before he went about creating another corporation. We could sit there and talk about the ship models.