Lives of the New Dealers

REVIEW ESSAY
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment
by Brad Snyder
W. W. Norton, 2022, 992 pages

Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants,
and the World They Made
by Derek Leebaert
St. Martin’s, 2023, 496 pages

There is no grander age of unelected heroes in American government and society at large than the early twentieth century. And in all the epic decades of the early twentieth century, there is no time more focused, more electric, more clear in its implications for the possibility of public action, than the gloomy crisis years of the 1930s and ’40s—years dominated on the American home front by that motley gallery of talented, sympathetic misfits from everywhere and nowhere called the “New Dealers.”

At the center of their circles, yet hovering opaquely above them all, was the “spider-king” himself, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Assuming office in 1933, the chatty Hudson Valley squire, whose wheelchair went unseen by his radio audiences, borrowed promiscuously from traditions and practices long opposed to each other on the American spectrum. His administration meshed and melded them to­gether into nonsensical arrangements that baffled his advisers, rewarded his friends, and ultimately preserved the public’s sense of social and economic security, of democratic dignity, and even of good-faith small-town pragmatism by a government with a human heart. That sense was the singular thing that carried the American people through the Depres­sion and World War II—a thing which Roosevelt’s predecessor and onetime friend Herbert Hoover, who was by most measures a superior man and administrator, simply lacked as president.

It didn’t matter in the short run if the New Deal measures saved the economy or not. What mattered was that the federal government, on FDR’s watch and under the conditions of a complex economy and modern society, executed that most crucial task of democratic government: in the words of Clinton Rossiter, it maintained “the confidence of the people [which] is the prin­ciple support of government,” by “an honorable, dignified, efficient administration of public affairs” and “by the sounds and appearances of such an administration,”¹ in the dark and gloomy days when that trust was constantly and justifiably on the verge of total breakdown.

Franklin Roosevelt can never be accused of being a consistent and principled expositor of any particular framework of government as president. He was fickle and elusive and seductive, as anyone who ever trusted him soon learned to their regret. He knew how to use his subordinates and admirers for his own purposes, and was ruthless when it suited him. Not as bombastic as his cousin Theodore, but equally flamboyant and more mischievous, his overreaches carried far deeper consequences for his underlings. And those underlings of his who sought to ride his coattails for their own ends learned fast to stick as close as possible to his whims and caprices while carving out what ground they could, or else found themselves turned out of town.

The New Deal is a hard study if one is looking for consistency, partly because of FDR’s personalism in politics, and his continuing improvisation amid new political and social conditions. He was always curious about ongoing developments, and followed social science and history quite avidly; but for abstract thought, Justice Holmes’s apocryphal charge that FDR had “a second class intellect but a first class temperament” rings at least functionally true—a modern prince, intel­lectualism mattered to him more as a tool of trust than a pursuit for its own sake.

The most successful of his many captains and counselors, however closely they might’ve held their pet policies and ideological convictions, operated knowing that FDR fundamentally did not care, and would use their ideologies and policies however he saw fit, just as he used them as people. Those who could make that arrangement work to greatest ad­vantage were never singular powers behind the throne, but all punched high above their weight, for FDR was a chief unthreatened by the celebrity of his loyal champions.

The New Deal, in general, very well encapsulates one of the chief dynamics of policy change in American pluralism. Everything happens slowly for quite some time, then suddenly changes all at once. The predecessors of New Deal policy were out in the American mind and the American field for decades, sometimes written into policy and other times merely dreamt in the minds of activists and leaders. The networks and coalitions and conflicts that played out among Progressives and Populists, Wilsonians and Preparedness men, labor bosses and conservationists and all the rest had already existed awhile, and their fruits were there for the picking by the time a strong president with an eye to shift fundamental systems entered the Oval Office. All grand dispensations in American politics emerge as a mix of social movements and quiet conspiracies; all are shepherded in by teams of great leaders, and are more or less associated with the great individuals who make them up.

Of the New Dealers there were many sorts, and these could be organized by ideological factions, by governmental functions, by per­sonal styles, by concentric circles getting closer to or further away from the Oval Office, or any number of other ways. They were so disparate and diverse, that there is no single comprehensive study of all of them—only dedicated studies of particular factions or general trends.

The single best of these remains Jordan Schwartz’s The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt,² a collection of individual biog­raphies of New Dealers who worked in public finance and credit law. Brad Snyder looks closely at them in Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, particularly the idealistic Harvard men brought to Washington by Frankfurter and Tommy Corcoran. There were the Brain Trusters, Columbia professors FDR called to Hyde Park in 1932 for the transition. There were cartelists in the First New Deal, committed to saving capitalism by enforcing voluntary coordination. There were the social workers and activists from a variety of fields brought in to administer the Cabinet—Derek Leebaert argues, in Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, that these were the most central of Roosevelt’s aides. There was the president’s White House family, his personal secretaries and aides, who often lived in the residence with him.³ Then there were the old-line Democratic Party hacks like Jim Farley, the tight-money patricians in the Treasury and budget teams, the War and Navy Department mobilizers who’d be integral to the founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps and who later on would help the Cabinet redirect domestic production toward wartime preparedness in those hazy, anxious months before December 7, 1941.

Leebaert and Snyder’s books are decent additions to the literature, providing the indispensable resource of dedicated narratives on insuf­ficiently remembered American leaders who inhabited the political gal­axy of an overly remembered one. But neither achieves its stated aim. Snyder aims to cast Frankfurter as the father of the modern liberal establishment and, by extension, of modern liberalism itself. Leebaert tries to position Hopkins, Ickes, Perkins, and Wallace as the true powers in the Roosevelt administration, simultaneously beneath and above the flashier intellectuals of the First and Second New Deals. But the father of modern liberalism was Franklin Roosevelt, and the power of the later “lieutenants” reflected FDR’s whims no more or less than the early power of the Brain Trusters from Columbia or Tommy Corcoran’s Gal­lery of Lawyers.

Leebaert and Snyder both write in the confines and styles of early twenty-first-century personal biography, an art perfected by Ron Cher­now and David McCullough, among others. This style is incomparable for depicting life as lived by the subject, exploring his character, and portraying his friendships, hatreds, fears, and loves. It is also very good for looking into the social history and the experience of any time and any event. But it has always been insufficient on the parts of life that matter most to public intellectuals and activists for great causes—the grand historical meanings of moments, the deep ideological divisions of any given issue, the interior rationality and self-conception of thinkers and movements and institutions. Given what was at stake in the lives and work of Hopkins, Frankfurter, Wallace, Ickes, and Perkins, these should be examined more fully in truly definitive biographies.

Of the New Dealers, some were all-purpose presidential advisers and aides, many-hatted handymen whose power emerged from closeness to FDR and dexterity of talent. Some were powerful domestic administrators, whose power flowed from their positions at major agencies and departments, whose domains could expand as far as their talents and ambitions could sustain. Some were powerful staff recruiters, social butterflies, and one-man personnel shops with a knack for inspiring individuals to great idealism and a penchant to place them to great effect in governments, parties, universities, and institutions where their coordi­native power could be most effective. Many New Dealers filled more than one of these roles for FDR, and as was his wont, he played them off each other.

The fact that each individual here, and several others not here profiled, can be argued to have been FDR’s key lieutenant at one point or another illustrates the subtlety of FDR’s leadership. He did not truly have lieutenants; he had servants, and he used them unscrupulously for high ends and low. Each was his hammer, his tool, and he could cast them aside as easily as he could tell a half-truth through a grin at a campaign whistlestop. But he knew how they were useful, and used them for their greatest public services.

It is important to note that most of these men were serious thinkers, and many did intellectual work in government. But their power did not flow from their intellects; it flowed from other skills. Most did not come from the world of politics. There were activists and social workers, academics and newspapermen, lawyers and clerks. They came from outside government, and the New Deal brought them in, and they effected changes in government which would likely have been impos­sible by the logic of government alone. Here are vignettes of five of the most prominent.

Louis Howe: Loyal Sidekick

There are two individuals most often said to be FDR’s “chief of staff” and closest professional confidante: Harry Hopkins and Louis Howe. Hopkins met FDR only after Roosevelt was a national figure, and worked his way into the chambers of power from the outside. But Howe discovered FDR in his earliest, most long-shot days, when Howe was a local newspaperman and Roosevelt was a young and struggling state legislator, and made it his life’s business to promote Roosevelt upward. He did so loyally and competently while Roosevelt served in the New York State Senate; he followed Roosevelt to Washington as an aide upon the latter’s star-crossed appointment as assistant secretary of the navy; and he pressed and stumped and organized through Roosevelt’s first shot at national office in the 1920 campaign. Howe served as an all-in-one correspondence and scheduling secretary,⁴ a consummate promoter and publicist, the first of FDR’s special envoys empowered and trusted to speak and negotiate for him personally, and general aide-de-camp. Roosevelt’s son Elliott recalled, “[Father] must have loved striding down Connecticut Avenue every weekday morning with Louis hurrying along at his side, the two of them looking uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho [Panza] setting out to battle with giants. . . .”⁵

But Howe’s most crucial service to FDR came when Roosevelt was hit with polio in 1921. In those dreary first weeks and months, Howe joined Eleanor Roosevelt and the Roosevelt family in nursing FDR amid the darkest days of his life, and more importantly, in convincing a newly crippled and depressed Roosevelt that his career was not, against all odds, over; and that there was a higher meaning to things which would become evident in time. This happened, perhaps providentially, as Franklin and Eleanor’s marriage was broken and cooled upon Eleanor’s discovery of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer. After Roosevelt’s great heights, he was ground down to the bottom, and Howe stood by both him and Eleanor, becoming in some senses as close to each of them as they were to each other. And when FDR returned from that darkest abyss a sobered man and a greater Roosevelt, it was thanks to Howe’s aid most of all.

But Howe lived the life of a man who, for all his energy and dedication and talent, only ever mattered to history because of his master; his fortunes rose with Roosevelt’s, and it was Roosevelt alone who called the shots, Roosevelt alone whom history remembered. Howe had the great honor of being a servant of a world figure, and of living his whole professional life for the advancement and betterment of his boss. He lived as such in all circumstances, including when he stayed at Roosevelt’s side, massaging his legs and cleaning his bedpans, in the darkest days of polio. He reaped the rewards of such loyalty, remaining FDR’s single most trusted man through his brief governorship and into the 1932 campaign season, sparring with Brain Trusters and Cabinet officers, and in the chaotic and revolutionary days of the early first term, as his chief secretary and functional chief of staff.

Henry Adams had remarked a few decades before, “A friend in power is a friend lost.”⁶ And like John Rawlins after years of service to U. S. Grant, Louis Howe faded away and curdled into sickness and death at the apex of Roosevelt’s power, and as his health failed, Roose­velt’s uses for him declined. Their affection never entirely dissipated, but Howe’s death in 1936 seems not to have outwardly affected FDR. The president just kept going, and soon was courting other aides. Howe had been indispensable to Roosevelt, but indispensable solely to him. Not all Roosevelt lieutenants would make that mistake, and the ones who best kept their own freedom did so by making themselves indispensable to a cause, an institution, or a field, rather than simply to Roosevelt the man.

Harold Ickes: Lord Chancellor

There are those who know how to stay in their lanes, and those who do not. Derek Leebaert’s quadruple biography profiles Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, great admin­is­trators and solid, sober people.

Perkins, the first-ever female Cabinet secretary and a longtime social worker and labor reform activist, maintained a level of dignity and gravity aloof from many of her male colleagues. Unlike them, she was never deeply impressed with FDR, and thus impervious to his flattery. As long-suffering as Eleanor and estranged from her husband and chil­dren, Perkins was a quiet, responsible, sad-eyed, and compassionate steward in a government full of celebrities. She became a crucial bulwark in the administration, both for her standing and for her counsel. She was routinely surprised at how often powerful men felt automatically comfortable confiding in her, it seems, merely because she was a woman. She used this to great advantage as an intelligence source to FDR.

Wallace, a cerebral, brilliant, and taciturn editor and agronomist from Iowa, impressed Roosevelt with his intellect and his creative understandings of the problems of modern agriculture. His department served as an experimenting ground for policy much as his fields had in his long years as editor of Wallace’s Farmer. By 1940, FDR tapped him for the vice-presidency, before unceremoniously dumping him from the ticket in 1944, and moving him over to Commerce; but in his years in the Cabinet, Wallace was a sort of prairie prophet always alone in his thoughts, never fully understood, with a mystical purpose hard to pene­trate, and vast power over the shape of the New Deal’s agricultural approaches and more.

Secretaries Perkins and Wallace were competent administrators and not, generally, empire builders. They did not go out of their way to expand their turfs; they did their jobs and managed their portfolios without reputations for intrigue.⁷

By contrast, their colleague, Harold Ickes, did not know how to stay in his lane. Of all the New Deal’s bureaucratic empire builders, and perhaps of all the bureaucratic empire builders in American history, Ickes was the most greedily turf-hungry. He was a visionary, personally combative, and yet broken and brooding and volatile.⁸ In his tenure as secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1946, Ickes both stood astride an enormous administrative domain, as literal manager of vast tracts of American conservation lands and territories, and used his power to advance and complete the old ambitions of the Progressive Movement, a movement which had never appreciated him in his lost decades of youth, and yet a movement of which he can rightly be said to be the last and greatest of its champions. He was a one-man caucus of the old Teddy Roosevelt–Hiram Johnson school.

He did not start out as much of anything. In youth and early adulthood, his ambitions took him tantalizingly close to great opportunities before he fell back to earth in overreach and disgrace. Born poor and eventually making his way into journalism and law in Chicago, Ickes strove to be a political kingmaker in midwestern Republican politics, along the lines of William Allen White. He worked in such causes as the YMCA and naacp; he took on public interest law cases; he vigorously supported Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose campaign, yet was never really rewarded for it. Ickes made things worse by routinely destroying his marriages with affairs (the two worst such were with his own stepdaughter, and then in the New Deal years with Republican newspaperwoman and heiress Cissy Patterson). He was a nervous, inveterate womanizer, racked by paranoia and alcoholism, and perennially depressed. In 1918, reflecting after one of many salacious and imprudent affairs, he declared, “I did not care if I lived or died.” In 1929, after working on several failed campaigns, he was referring to himself as a “has-been.” And then after the 1932 election, almost out of the blue, President Roosevelt named this unstable bureaucrat-activist to be secretary of the interior, and Ickes came to Washington a passionate, vigorous, deeply troubled dreamer, with a reputation to redeem and a long-lost cause to fight for.

As secretary of the interior, Ickes’s formal purview famously included a bowl’s worth of alphabet soup agencies managing federal lands: the Bureau of Reclamation, soon to begin many massive hydro­electric projects on southern and western rivers; the predecessors to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with its vast system of wildlife preserves established by the first Roosevelt, and to the Bureau of Land Management, agencies with vast tracts of mineral-rich land in the West; and famously the National Park System and still-young National Park Service, shortly to become the famous backdrop of the most visible and romantic of the New Deal’s great crusades, the Civilian Conservation Corps’ mobilization of young men for conservation labor. It also included the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, effectively making Ickes the viceroy for Hawaii, Alaska, an increasing number of Pacific and Caribbean Island territories eventually including the Philippines, and all American Indian reservations. The number of territories he administered steadily crept up even as various Interior offices were transferred to Labor, Commerce, and elsewhere, per Ickes’s careful empire building. His managerial reach even included the District of Columbia, a source of constant tension with Congress.

Had Ickes succeeded in his broader ambitions, at some point he would’ve poached the U.S. Forest Service from Henry Wallace’s Agriculture Department, and the U.S. Department of the Interior would have become a U.S. Department of Conservation. Ickes would’ve subjected an even larger proportion of the American landmass to a certain old Progressive idea of wise cultivation and development sur­rounding a wild core of the romantic wilderness, both styles in service to the ideals of pioneer virtue and always-ready citizenship that drove so much of the Progressives’ activism and social vision. But Roosevelt only dangled the merger before Ickes’s eyes, never fully committing to it; Leebaert surmises that Roosevelt had both politically strategic and personally devious reasons for playing Ickes and Wallace and Hopkins against each other in bureaucratic games like this, and it certainly was in character.

Regardless, as something of President Roosevelt’s national gardener, Ickes held and used his Interior Department power to fundamentally reshape the American landscape. Civilian Conservation Corps crews did their most famous work on National Park lands, in everything from reforestation and soil restoration projects to the construction of tourist infrastructure for public recreation. Ickes also ran the Public Works Administration, tasked with large construction projects and a major financer of long-term infrastructure. Even activists and builders and bureaucrats who never worked in an Interior office—the Forest Service’s rugged Bob Marshall, the Bureau of Public Roads’s brilliant Thomas MacDonald, the dynamo Tennessee Valley Authority administrator David Lilienthal—found backing in Ickes’s sprawling empire. As the Second World War approached and the management of national resources became a more pressing issue, Ickes’s management became all the more crucial to national projects. Every New Dealer had a habit of doing a little bit of everything, but Ickes mastered this habit and solidified his interests institutionally more than any of his colleagues, and under a general social vision which endures to this day.

Ickes’s power in the New Deal rested on his ability to manage the vast domain he constructed, and in Franklin Roosevelt’s trust in him as a steward of a certain old conscience harkening back to Bull Moose days. He could always be relied upon as both a hardline New Deal partisan, just as many Progressive Republicans who’d flocked to the Roosevelt banner now were, and as an indefatigable conscience-prophet for certain liberal ideals against the conveniences of liberal politics. Singularly for an Interior secretary, he was one of the loudest voices in the administration clamoring for military preparedness against the Nazi ascension in the mid-1930s, and famously opened the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for black singer Marian Anderson’s performance that had been canceled by the Daughters of the American Revolution at their then still-seg­regated Constitution Hall. He was never above pettiness, however, whether against his fellow New Dealers, conservative Democrats, or Republicans. And while Roosevelt trusted him, he also used him, and he was routinely exiled from the Oval Office and ignored at Cabinet meetings whenever his style sufficiently got in the way of Roosevelt’s own intentions.

All this being said, by the time Ickes stepped down from Interior in 1946, having outlasted even Roosevelt himself, he had probably been more influential in actual policy administration than any other Cabinet official in building the world of the New Deal, and his dogged clinging to the old Progressive faith kept alive and institutionalized ambitions once stymied in the lives of the earlier Progressives. Leebaert calls him a “chancellor of an ever-watchful monarch,” while T. H. Watkins calls him a “righteous pilgrim.”⁹ To be both is to have played a fascinating role in both power and conscience; and were it not for his penchant for ruining his personal life in obscene affairs and chaotic drinking sprees, Ickes may well have qualified for the greatest American minister.

Felix Frankfurter: Privy Counselor

It is possible to exert vast amounts of influence without actually holding anything resembling institutional power, and this was the basic style of Felix Frankfurter for most of his career before 1939. He came from nowhere, as a Jewish immigrant from Austria, and rapidly entered the highest levels of the American elite, graduating from City College of New York and Harvard Law School, and soon attaching himself to a new U.S. district attorney named Henry Stimson. In his first stint in Washington, D.C., still in the Taft administration, he began hosting salons at a little DuPont townhouse which still stands, dubbed the “House of Truth,” through which “almost everybody who was interest­ing in Washington sooner or later passed. . . .”¹⁰

He founded the New Republic magazine in 1914 with, among others, his future great rival Walter Lippmann; and he had added to his list of friends the great associate justices Louis D. Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He then went back to Harvard Law, where he began training young lawyers and admonishing them to pursue careers in public service—the beginnings of his eventual role as personnel recruiter for the entire federal government. In his next stint in Washington during the First World War, he deepened all these ties, and made the acquaintance of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, and began corre­sponding in depth with his former student Dean Acheson, two friendships which would last for life and have crucial consequences for the world. Aside from his first job with Stimson and the advisory roles he’d hold in the Wilson Administration, he never held public office in Washington before his final role as Supreme Court justice; yet by the early 1930s he was striding confidently into the White House to help FDR name cabinet officials, and the press looked upon him as a force behind the throne.¹¹

Frankfurter enjoyed an enviable balance of intellectual freedom, political influence, social status, and personal stability, routinely briefing Cabinet secretaries and senators on prospects for their programs, lectur­ing on the law and questions of American political theory, training and inspiring young people toward a life of public service, and advising the president on matters of high policy, with his checks coming from Harvard Law School and a happy and stable marriage at home. If anything, the one problem with his life was that there was not enough adventure in the old Rooseveltian sense; it was so well polished. But he maintained his intellectual integrity, and routinely walked away from presidential offers, while still exerting a real influence over policy both in his counsel and in his networks. He walked the line between political responsibility and intellectual honesty, at the highest levels, probably as well as any other American has ever walked it. He was an inveterate socialite, a charismatic talker who flourished best in small groups and private conversations; these made him a legend in the seminar classroom, and a much-in-demand commodity in the Washington social scene, while his wife Marion Denman Frankfurter was every bit as capable a socialite as he. By the time President Roosevelt finally appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939, he had committed the majority of his services to America; his life beyond, while dignified and significant, is shockingly uninteresting compared to his youth and rise.

Frankfurter exerted influence on the Roosevelt administration as much through personal aloofness as through eager helpfulness; he is one of the few key figures of the New Deal who largely escaped the schemes and wiles of Franklin Roosevelt, without his own profile diminishing. He was Roosevelt’s same age, a contemporary and a peer rather than an underling. For most of the New Deal years, he lived in Boston, coming through D.C. more secretively than he needed to for his frequent, and often uncatalogued, audiences with the president, and he continued his practice of recommending former students to positions in government, to the degree that his rival, National Recovery Administration Director Hugh Johnson, accused him of being the “the most influential single individual in the United States” and at the head of some vast Jewish conspiracy.

Like his great patron and partner, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Frank­furter saw his own role as more or less that of a conscience-keeper and moral shaper of advocacy and jurisprudence (which he mixed less scrupulously than most of his colleagues at the time) and most importantly of the vast armies of young lawyers he exhorted to careers in public service and the ideals of a certain vision of liberal democracy. His two most important ideals were a civil libertarianism in an age that produced the conditions George Orwell most feared and illustrated and, according to Snyder, a faith in the democratic process and popular deliberation, which plutocracy and judicial overreach alike could only stifle. His long-term project, building up the corps of public-spirited lawyers and public servants, was intended to create a sort of countervailing power-elite which would oppose and eventually replace the mon­eyed elites whose gospel was wealth and whose capricious power threatened democracy.

Actual influence and prolonged contact with power posed challenges and problems for Frankfurter’s role as a conscience-shaper, however. In his ministries to the president and upon his ascent to the Supreme Court, his fidelity to his own stated convictions of personal liberty and democratic deliberation, and his ideals of public service itself, inevitably were tested. Some of his brightest students, most notoriously Alger Hiss, followed their idealistic visions of public service all the way to the corridors of treason, and spent the New Deal years as spies for the Soviet Union, having convinced themselves of the harmony between New Deal liberalism, American interests, and Soviet Communism. And in the longer run, and even already visible during the New Deal years, the very public agencies which Frankfurter’s students built and ran and defended, and agencies like them, became as pernicious to the democratic process and unaccountable to the American people as the same pluto­cratic capitalists and legal activists Frankfurter had railed against earlier in life. It might be the case that these were both deviations from the ideal Frankfurter preached, but the historical fact remains that they happened, more or less justified by his principles.

Most telling, in terms of Frankfurter’s relationship to power, is his record on civil liberties. As one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the staunchest defenders of free speech in his day and ever since, his contributions to liberty cannot be questioned. He was a major force, especially, in the failed defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-immigrant anarchists whose trial is widely regarded to be a sham and whose 1927 execution remains a major scandal in the history of American jurisprudence. He similarly defended accused Communists during the Red Scare of the 1950s, with similar track records of failure under overwhelming odds. And his contributions to the civil rights movement and defenses of black southern protestors, far more successful, were in the same vein.

But for all he stood for, his circles of empathy had their limits. Snyder notes in detail Frankfurter’s reluctance to endorse civilian trial for the Nazi saboteurs in 1942,¹² and while it is likely they would’ve been executed under any circumstances, Frankfurter—by then on the Court—did not respond to requests to maintain the rights afforded all accused in wartime. And far more darkly, he similarly remained un­moved throughout the greatest American violation of the rights of American citizens in the twentieth century—the internment of Japanese migrants and their Japanese American children under Executive Order 9066. A liberalism that only applies in peacetime and for ostensibly left-wing victims is not a worthwhile liberalism at all, and Frankfurter of all people was in position to know this.

So Frankfurter, for all he did in life to walk that tense and narrow line between intellectual honesty and public responsibility, working to exert power to drive social change while striving not to perjure himself and his honor, wound up at least partly giving in to the inexorable logic of power over truth several times. He never really submitted to Franklin Roosevelt the way others did, but in his attempts to remain simultaneously aloof and influential, he contorted his witness enough for it to be a continuing stain on his record as a prophet. This was not enough to end his career with Roosevelt; unlike others profiled here, he’d be a real political force in America for decades after 1945. It does mean that he only partially succeeded in the conscience-shaping role he’d committed himself to in his early days with Holmes, Brandeis, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The fact remains that Frankfurter was one of the crucial forces shaping the New Deal and its liberal order. Alger Hiss of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Benjamin Cohen of the president’s legisla­tive team, Dean Acheson of the Treasury and then State Department, and David Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority were among his students. People he hadn’t taught but still recognized as tal­ents, like Jerome Frank and William O. Douglas, would enter his circles as well. “He collected people,” as a confidante wrote, and he had a singular talent for honing the desires of those he collected to lifetimes in defense of the ideological projects he held most dear. He was a living case study in network-movement politics, the century’s best example of someone who figured out how to turn high principles into cultivated habits and thence into social change, and that rare New Dealer who knew how to use FDR without being excessively used by FDR. Some of his students outpaced him; one of them, Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, probably did more at an applied level to “make” the New Deal than he did. It is regrettable that this student, in due time, found himself betrayed by the president and abandoned by his teacher Frankfurter. But even among idealistic New Dealers, that was par for the course.

Tommy Corcoran: All-American Fixer

If Felix Frankfurter was a conscience, Tommy Corcoran was a fixer.¹³ If Frankfurter knew how to find and cultivate talent, Corcoran knew how to deploy it. If Frankfurter knew how to translate the high and ethereal ideals of Louis Brandeis into broad political programs and heuristics, Corcoran knew how to translate Frankfurter’s teachings into practical marching orders for the armies of bachelor-lawyers he drew to 1930s Washington and placed in mid-level counsel and advisory positions in all the New Deal’s alphabet-soup agencies. Frankfurter’s prodigies tend­ed to become Cabinet officials and sometimes Supreme Court justices; Corcoran’s usually did not rise so high, but in a city staffed and run by young people as much as D.C. was then, and remains now, Corcoran’s placements were enough of a force that they became, as Schwartz describes them, “Roosevelt’s party and Corcoran their chairman.”¹⁴ They were committed to Frankfurter’s ideals of nonpartisan public service and loyal to the person of Franklin Roosevelt, not the hacks and grifters they perceived in the political machines run by John Nance Garner, Jim Farley, and other old-timers of the Democratic Party. They held their salons and debates in an old Georgetown mansion dubbed by the press the “Little Red House,” a generational echo of Frankfurter’s House of Truth across Rock Creek from a few decades prior. The social crew was visible enough in D.C. to earn the epithet “The Corcoran Gallery of Lawyers,” as much a fixture of D.C.’s social architecture as the Corcoran Gallery of Art was to its physical architecture.

Corcoran had not been one of Frankfurter’s favorites at Harvard Law, but he did well and entered a successful law career in New York, before heading to Washington in the depths of the Depression to work in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, still in the Hoover admin­istration. The presidential transition and rise of Jesse Jones as the Roosevelt administration’s powerful RFC Chairman elevated him to higher levels, and in the First Hundred Days, he and his awkward, ethereal, virtuoso fellow RFC lawyer Benjamin Cohen—acknowledged by most of his contemporaries, friend and foe, as the most brilliant legal mind of his generation—began a policy partnership that would result in their quiet coauthorship of the most important and controversial securi­ties legislation of the age.

At some point in 1934, Corcoran was invited to a party at SEC Chairman Joseph P. Kennedy’s Georgetown home, and brought along the accordion he’d taught himself to play for social clout in D.C. Missy LeHand, a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s White House “official family” and key presidential aide, evidently was charmed, and invited Corcoran to perform for the president at a subsequent date. Corcoran accepted the invitation, and Roosevelt—perhaps seeing in this physically vigorous outdoorsman with a sparkling intellect and a forceful gift of friendship a little bit of the “incorrigible romantic” of his own pre-polio self, or perhaps of his cousin Theodore—bestowed upon Corcoran one of his famous affectionate nicknames, “Tommy the Cork.”¹⁵ From that point on, Corcoran’s star began to rise, and this most hustling of the New Dealers took on one side-gig after another, expanding his little Washington empire, eventually growing as close to the president as anyone but Harry “The Hop” Hopkins in the late 1930s.

Various of the Democratic operatives Corcoran despised and out­maneuvered got a sense of what he was up to; anonymous congressional Democrats were quoted as having been concerned about his “extra­curricular activities in running the government.” Aside from his formal duties in the RFC and his legislative drafting work, he personally recruited and placed the lawyers in his gallery—a few hundred in total over time—and provided for their cohesion and camaraderie as a unit in salons and debates at the Little Red House and elsewhere. Roosevelt used him as a speechwriter on occasion, and as the second term went on, he also employed Corcoran’s talents as a fixer against his own enemies in the Democratic Party. Corcoran wound up as one of Roosevelt’s key enforcers, both in terms of manhandling insurgent congressmen ahead of critical votes and, by the time Roosevelt attempted a Third New Deal, realigning the parties and stacking the Supreme Court, serving as one of Roosevelt’s chief assassins in the failed purge of Democratic anti–New Dealers. The man did something close to everything, but he did it as an aide and not as a power unto himself.

And that fundamental dependence probably did more than anything to simultaneously drive him from the administration and destroy his long friendship with Frankfurter. As the second term drew on and mobilization for war picked up, it seems FDR found Corcoran’s reputa­tion as an enforcer to be more trouble than it was worth, something that might’ve been an asset in the court-packing fight but which would erode the administration’s ability to guide the country quietly onto a war footing. Frankfurter, on the bench by this point, apparently had grown disillusioned with his former pupil, seeing him now as more of a hack and a blowhard. And so Corcoran, who’d been so crucial a factotum to Roosevelt and so indispensable to his programs, was quietly pocket-fired as the dogs of war barked louder; his considerable talents would not be employed in the war on fascism to come.

Corcoran left the administration without leaving Washington, and spent the remaining decades of his life as a powerful figure in the defense industry’s lobbying world.¹⁶ But this affluence and influence would seem to be a pale consolation for a vivacious and ambitious figure whose heart, in youth, was touched by fire, in his relations with Frankfurter and Holmes and Brandeis and the swashbuckling days of New Deal fixing, when all the world seemed new. He had trusted Roosevelt, and done great things, but never quite managed to become independent as well as indispensable. FDR’s war diplomacy would go to other lieuten­ants.

Harry Hopkins: Right-Hand Man

By the 1940s, Harry Hopkins had ceased to work on domestic aspects of the war effort and was instead shuttling between Washington, London, and Moscow as FDR’s personal envoy to Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. He undertook other travels as well and helped arrange the wartime conferences between the allied leaders, all while being one of the main forces behind the Lend-Lease program for the relief and supply of the United Kingdom and USSR against the Nazi campaigns. This globetrotting secret diplomacy, so contingent on personal touch and an implicit confidence with Roosevelt which no other New Dealer ever reached, was fitting for Hopkins, a restless, mischievous, enterprising American Odysseus. His last services to Roosevelt were as a sort of “shadow secretary of state” and many considered him to be Roosevelt’s alter-ego.¹⁷

But he’d spent the New Deal years stateside. Harry Hopkins, like Frances Perkins and more or less like Harold Ickes, had been an activist and a social worker before he ever set foot in government. Born in Iowa and cut from similar cultural cloth as his Commerce predecessor Herbert Hoover and successor Henry Wallace, he was something of a stereotypical midwesterner—friendly, frank, straightforward, wide-eyed, simple in his manners to the point of bumpkinism, never brusque or curt. He could be boastful and loud, and drank, smoked, gambled, and womanized so indulgently it almost seemed compulsive; he also had an apparent itch to spend money for social clout, which paid off in the networks of the glamorously wealthy patrons he cultivated but left him and his family in crushing debt. His marriages failed, too, and to cap it all off he suffered all his years in government from a crushing cancer and routine sickness, enflamed and probably caused by his lifestyle. Two of the adjectives most associated with him are “frail” and “disheveled,” and he bore a strange spiritual resemblance to Roosevelt’s earlier chief lieutenant, Louis Howe. There was a dustiness about him, and a deep anguish buried in all the high-flying escapism.

None of this simplicity nor any of this vice precluded him from supreme competence as an administrator. He was educated at Grinnell College (where, in student government, he held the only elected office he’d ever hold) and was trained in social work at Christadora House. At some point after Roosevelt’s election as governor, Frances Perkins pulled him into the administration in Albany, where he ran state-level relief programs in the depths of the Depression. New York’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) would be reborn into new life when Roosevelt assumed the presidency, and Hopkins was recruited into the Roosevelt administration in 1933 to run the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and then the Civil Works Administration, two of the administration’s first public-relief projects. (Roosevelt instinctively told reporters this was not the “dole,” but there is no other word for it; and FDR’s short-term work-relief projects were all basically calibrated to preserve public trust and carry over working families through unem­ployment long enough for the macroeconomic stabilization programs of the National Recovery Administration, and then the Second New Deal’s other measures, to restore employment and wages to pre-crash levels.) Hopkins famously spent $5 million in his first two hours on the job, wiring FERA relief aid to various state governments.

Hopkins would spend the New Deal running similar mass-mobilized dole delivery in more and more creative ways. When the Civil Works Administration expired, he was placed in charge of the Works Progress Administration, which he had helped design, and which remains one of the half-dozen most culturally memorable initiatives of the New Deal era. From the Works Progress Administration he would occasionally collaborate and occasionally war with Ickes and Wallace, and toward the late 1930s he’d routinely assist FDR on speechwriting and, alongside Corcoran, purges of dissident party members. With the 1940 election approaching, FDR coyly managed to convince Hopkins he was under consideration for the presidential nomination, and as part of the elaborate preparations for this stunt, appointed Hopkins secretary of commerce. Herbert Hoover, of course, had ascended to the presidency from Commerce. But Roosevelt remained on the ticket, with Wallace as his vice-president, and Hopkins continued on as an aide, becoming ever-closer with Roosevelt.

In September 1940, Hopkins resigned from his post at Commerce and became an untitled personal aide to Roosevelt; he stepped down from a Cabinet office to become a minister without portfolio, a role more akin to secretarial work than anything. But this placed him in Roosevelt’s White House official family, and he lived in the White House for a time as his personal partnership with Roosevelt grew deeper and as the Second World War marched toward America. It became outwardly clear how deeply FDR trusted Hopkins, and he famously explained to Wendell Wilkie:

I can understand that you wonder why I need that half-man around me. But—someday you may well be sitting here where I am now, as President of the United States. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins, who asks for nothing except to serve you.¹⁸

And from inside the White House came the two posts that would assure him the title of the president’s right-hand man, at the very least, in the grand strategy of the war effort, if perhaps not in the New Deal itself. First, Roosevelt cooked up the famous Lend-Lease scheme as a way to provide aid to the British, and then to the Soviets, without technically violating international law or American neutrality. Hopkins had spent the prior eight years as an informal “secretary of welfare” disbursing funds and moving people and equipment around the Ameri­can homeland; he now did more or less the same on the international stage, in a feat of diplomatic-administrative improvisation only matched by Herbert Hoover’s wartime food relief twenty years prior. Similarly, Roosevelt bypassed standard diplomatic channels by appointing Hopkins his special assistant, his informal envoy to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, and entrusting him fully to negotiate on his behalf. Roosevelt does not appear to ever have trusted any other subordinate at quite so deep a level.

Leebaert’s book downplays Hopkins’s role as FDR’s chief lieutenant, but David Roll’s The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler offers a different perspective. It is the case that Hopkins, on the home front, was no more powerful or trusted than Ickes, Wallace, or Perkins, and may well have been somewhat less important than they were in the context of the New Deal. But Hopkins managed to maintain his New Deal status and become FDR’s most important aide in foreign affairs as both an envoy and an administrator, maintaining both roles through the end of the Roosevelt administration. When FDR died amid the final throes of German and Japanese resistance, Hopkins remarked to his aide Robert Sherwood, “We have had it too easy all this time, because we knew he was there. Now we’ve got to find a way to do things by ourselves. . . .” Hopkins, that little sickly man whose smoking and drinking binges killed him not long after FDR himself died, had been envoy between three of the most powerful men in the world.

Legacies

And so the Roosevelt administration came to an end, and the German and Japanese regimes would soon surrender, and the various agencies of the New Deal would expire and fade to history, offices where onetime lawyers and social workers had strode across the stage of American life to help a second Roosevelt complete a revolution and hold a world together. Another age of global conflict loomed, and the cabinet minis­ters and chamber-counselors and intellectuals and networkers who’d served FDR would look back, realizing they’d built the institutions that made the war mobilization possible, and that made American global power inevitable. They’d helped FDR create a world.

And most would be forgotten in time, for their appointed roles—no matter how well they played them, no matter what great services they wrought—were all made possible by Roosevelt himself, who would tower over his own age as Lincoln towered over another. Some generals and other veterans would be remembered. But the ministers and counse­lors and public servants who could capture the public imagination and become legendary in their own right would no longer be fixtures of D.C.’s domestic policymaking; they would be national security advisors and secretaries of state and secretaries of defense, most of all. The age of the New Dealers ended.

The success of the New Deal reformist model as the peak of American court politics inspired both emulation and reaction in the later decades of the twentieth century. Presidents for four decades onward would push for comprehensive policy packages establishing new agencies and rules, and these programs would increasingly take the form of expertise-driven management agencies rather than the stakeholder-management departments leading up to the Roosevelt era. When the neoliberal turn deepened after the late 1970s, the same comprehensive approach informed much of the thinking of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, but for newly in vogue public ends like fiscal responsibility and privatization. The sheer success of the Roosevelt administration inaugurated an epoch of personalist policy presidencies, ranging across the spectrum and all becoming increasingly ideologically niche and cloistered.

But the quality of unelected public servants appointed to advise and administer these visions would decline. Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as a draftsman and a brain on domestic policy across three presidencies, and seems to have generally impressed his interlocutors as having been from an earlier age—and that precisely demonstrates the problem. The Sargent Shrivers and John DiIulios and Jim Pinkertons and Ben Rhodeses and Steve Bannons of the world may have advised presidents toward great things, but for various reasons (perhaps the increasing demands upon the presidency itself) never seem to have made the same headway their forebears did. One reason may be that, for all the real shocks and transformations in the century since, there has been no truly prerevolutionary moment on the home front quite like that of the 1930s, when all social, political, and economic orders seemed on the verge of collapse, and looming crisis disciplined the public mind. Even the explosions of the 1960s and ’70s were subdued, taking the form of internal revolt and social protest, and wherever our 2010s–20s era is on the spectrum of severity, it doesn’t invoke quite the same regime-ending specter which the Americans of the 1930s seemed to fear.

More plausibly, the very success of the New Deal state—even admitting various rollbacks like the decline of official tripartism and the later gutting of much of that state’s social programs in subsequent decades—facilitated a newly empowered and entrenched institutional class of technocrats and kludgeocrats exactly as prone to swaggering decadence as the plutocrats Ickes and Corcoran railed against in their own times. The construction of countervailing power in government against the depredations of finance and the insufficiencies of industry might partly balance but could not finally manage the contradictions of a modernizing society. The premium the New Deal state put on experts in the public sector, too, probably contributed to the later crises of over-credentialization which we now struggle to allay in our own time.

Another, perhaps paradoxical, consideration is the degree to which the insider politics of the New Dealers was fundamentally made possible by the vast social movements and political activism of Americans far outside the corridors of power. Theda Skocpol’s work has traced the decline of locally based grassroots civil society and the rise of professionally run civil society, and the half century before the New Deal, even with all the crises of the Gilded Age, saw far more “democracy” in a civic-participation sense than the latter half of the twentieth century ever did. What was once done by voters and citizens is now done by experts and professionals, and some effect on the broader content of national policy probably emerges from this trend.

Does collective action among the American people in our much-ballyhooed voluntary associations make strategic collective action in our national policy more politically palatable? Must structural reform always be preceded by genuine, broad-based movements for social change? Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was more in tune with the emotive and participatory social movements of its time—the farmer and labor movements most especially, and a variety of progressive groups as well—than any of its successors, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan’s relationship to the early conservative movement. No president in the 1960s and ’70s, for example, ever really rode the waves of left-wing or right-wing protestors and organizers of the age. Roose­velt, conversely, did; and when the New Dealers served him, they functionally served those movements as well.

Among the most important lessons of the lives of each of the New Dealers is the helpful advice Donald Rumsfeld gave all his successors as White House chief of staff: “Don’t begin to think you’re the president. You’re not.”¹⁹ And every New Dealer in the “celebrity-crazed 1930s,” if they began to forget this, was reminded of it sooner or later. For all the hopes that Alexander Hamilton and William Seward might’ve once had for the functional development of an American prime ministership, independent of an unpredictable or ceremonial presidency,²⁰ the fact of the matter is that American constitutionalism does not naturally bend toward this arrangement; and the most powerful ministers have been those backed, essentially, by a strong president, not alternate sovereignties but reflections and servants of the true sovereignty.

And so the key figure in the New Deal is not Louis Howe, Harold Ickes, Felix Frankfurter, Tommy Corcoran, or Harry Hopkins, nor any of their many talented colleagues and rivals and aides. The key figure in the New Deal is Franklin Roosevelt. The New Deal might have been made up in embryo before him; its preliminary programs and enduring spirits did, in fact, take shape at lower levels of government and in civil society in the decades before 1933, as the lives of the New Dealers show. But the New Deal as a national movement, a national campaign, a whole‑of-society effort led from the highest levels of government all the way down, rested ultimately on presidential leadership, not ministerial ambition or intellectual subtlety. It was politics first.

And those who followed FDR and served in his government, for all their talents and ambitions, were always fundamentally the servants of a president, and by extension the servants of the American people. They had to bend their ambitions and convictions beneath this reality, if they wanted to exercise real power. Those who wish to serve and follow must never forget the enduring sovereignty of American democracy, even amid the transformations and breakdowns of times as chaotic as the early decades of the last century, and of our own.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 134–55.

Notes