The New Deal Falls Sick

Franklin Roosevelt, founder, father and symbol, reassured his followers last week that the New Deal--as a political philosophy--was ready to resume on the domestic front at war's end. But even as he spoke, the New Deal--as a political party--was in more trouble than at any time since its birth in 1933.

No man can say, even in the retrospect of history, exactly when one political movement dies and another is born. But anyone who looked last week could see that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was sick, with ailments that could not lightly be thrown off.

> Congress was in open revolt: not only Republicans, not only conservative Democrats, but also many of the men on whom Franklin Roosevelt once counted to write his political philosophy into the law of the land. Congress last week wrote restrictions into the President's bill for wartime tariff and immigration powers, started talk of economy drives and payroll investigations, got ready to wheel up the heavy artillery against some of his administrators.

> Among his closest henchmen, Franklin Roosevelt was forced to concede another casualty: there were reports that unpopular Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. would be replaced, as tax spokesman, by Economic Czar James F. Byrnes.

> Washington was just beginning to feel the full impact of the Nov. 3 election results. Democratic leaders privately admitted that great blocks of labor, farm and independent votes--once the keystone of the peculiar New Deal Alliance--had gone Republican. Said one wise old New Deal Congressman last week: "Unless we can reverse this political tide, the Democratic Party faces defeat in 1944. I don't know whether we can dam it up or not; we are in a bad way."

Vitality: Low. The decline of Henry Morgenthau typified one aspect of the New Deal dilemma: it lacked the vitality of leadership needed to throw off its ills. To practical politicians in the Democratic Party, most New Deal bigwigs had become anathema. Such good New Dealers as Henry Morgenthau, Price Boss Leon Henderson and Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, who were in the bitter struggles of organizing the nation for war, had left much of their popularity and most of their political blood on the battlefield--and had won no administrative medals.

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, for all his uniquely good record as a wartime administrator, was still the kind of man voters would love to swat at the polls. So was Presidential alter ego Harry Hopkins. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, universally believed to be the man Franklin Roosevelt had chosen as his successor, had failed to grow up as a politico: for all his good intentions and ready-made opportunities, he was still the same thoughtful, bashful, stumbling man who used to throw boomerangs at himself in East Potomac Park. To professional politicians, Democratic and Republican, he would always have a kick-me note attached to his coattails.

The President, engrossed in the war, had lost some of his own magic touch: he failed to make Senator James M. Mead Governor of New York, his endorsement of liberal George Norris failed in Nebraska. And, outside of the President, there was hardly a New Dealer with the political oomph that controls party conventions and wins elections.

Masters of Politics. One man who could help the New Deal survive was smooth, shrewd Jimmy Byrnes, the best politician it has outside the President. As economic czar, Jimmy Byrnes's job was to iron out the bickerings in the war administration, to clean out the obvious trouble spots, to smooth the path for the difficult and unpopular steps that any war administration must take.

But Jimmy Byrnes, who combines his liberalism with hardheaded native conservatism and has friends on both sides of the political railroad tracks, had an unpublicized job that was even bigger. On the home front he was rapidly becoming assistant president, with a clear hand to smooth ruffled party tempers, to compromise and persuade in Congress, to figure out where the Administration had got off track with public opinion. If the New Deal party could be cured of its sickness through adroit poulticing, Jimmy Byrnes was the ideal physician.

Yet Jimmy Byrnes was the eternal right-hand man: where was the future leader whom he could serve as good right hand? On all the New Deal horizon there seemed to be just one man who had the qualifications: Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Canny, angry Bill Douglas proved his executive ability and his crusading fervor as head of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Even from the austerity of the Supreme Court he casts such a personal spell that politicians of both parties struggle to be seen with him when he goes back to the West Coast for vacations. Of all New Dealers, Justice Douglas looks to many of his colleagues like the white hope for political savvy and good, sound, vote-winning sense. If Jimmy Byrnes can patch up the New Deal, Bill Douglas may be the man to bring off the final cure.

Yet last week Bill Douglas had not yet been called in for consultation. On the bench he was politically immobilized; thus far he had rejected all overtures to move into a war job that would put him back in the political arena. The Douglas cure looked like a long-term proposition, the Byrnes treatment was merely first aid, and time and political tide wait for no party.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.