Business: Reassurance

It did not crackle with the thrill of new adventure but no fireside speech save his first pursued so definite an aim as the President’s microphone effort last week.

The purpose—the only purpose which his most attentive listeners would allow him to have—was, in their own words, to “reassure business.” Even to recognize this purpose was, for the President, an embarrassment because the necessity for reassurance could itself be taken as confession of the failure of his own New Deal. Many of those who demanded to be reassured were saying that nothing he said could reassure them—nothing short of his abdication. Others had, with some reason, pointed to his Green Bay speech and to other jocular remarks as indicating that the President was so ignorant of “what it is all about” that he did not even believe anybody really needed any reassurance.

And so, to the microphone. Within 30 seconds the President had grasped the nettle by saying that he was going to talk about “industry and labor,” his first point being that he was “bringing order out of the old chaos with a greater certainty of the employment of labor at a reasonable wage and of more business at a fair profit.”

“Profit” was one word the world waited for. He used it early, with matter-of-fact simplicity and without malice. Next sentence: “These governmental and industrial developments hold promise of new achievements for the nation.” Business-at-a-profit thus became, at the outset of his speech, not a naughty subject for the Presidential slipper but a respectable object of national hope and solicitude.

The President spoke for 28 minutes. Without repealing any of the New Deal but occasionally accepting a defensive attitude, he was at pains to establish his assumption that the New Deal had not repealed profitable enterprise. Phrases to this end:

“The restoration of normal business enterprise.”

“. . . Billions of dollars of invested capital have today a greater security of present and future earning power…..” “. . . Gains of trade and industry, as a whole, have been substantial…. There are assurances that hearten all forward-looking men and women. . . .”

“. . . A permanent improvement of business. . . .”

And most pointed of all: “We count, in the future as in the past, on the driving power of individual initiative and the incentive of fair private profit, strengthened with the acceptance of those obligations to the public interest which rest upon us all.”

The President quoted four people—all chosen for the conservative sanctity which surrounds their names. To square himself with the ancient virtues, he endorsed Benjamin Franklin’s apothegm that “the way to wealth is through work.” To justify the “interference of government in business” he quoted Abraham Lincoln and the G. O. P.’s most famed Elder Statesman Elihu Root. To justify the New Deal’s constitutionality he quoted “the great Chief Justice White.”

And to justify himself before the Ideal of Liberty he concluded his speech with these words: “I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.”

Just before this conclusion, the President also quoted none other than Old England herself. This gave him his chance for one savage slap at Old Dealers—a chance he still is not able to resist. Said he:

“Those, fortunately few in number, who are frightened by boldness and cowed by the necessity for making decisions, complain that all we have done is unnecessary and subject to great risks. Now that these people are coming out of their storm cellars, they forget that there ever was a storm. They point to England. They would have you believe that England has made progress out of her depression by a do-nothing policy, by letting nature take her course. . . .

“Did England let nature take her course? No. … Has England gone back to the gold standard today? No. Did England hesitate to call in $10,000,000,000 of her War bonds bearing 5% interest, to issue new bonds therefore bearing only 3½% interest, thereby saving the British Treasury $150,000,000 a year in interest alone? No. And let it be recorded that the British bankers helped. Is it not a fact that ever since the year 1909, Great Britain in many ways has advanced further along lines of social security than the United States? Is it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain than in the United States? It is perhaps not strange that the conservative British Press has told us with pardonable irony that much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with English reforms that go back ten years or more.”

Britain, and especially its Tory Government, beamed. But what of the U. S. businessman? Had the speech been a success? Had it reassured?

Some businessmen liked the speech. It was a lot better than nothing. The President had at last made it clear that he did not regard a profit-seeking businessman as a public enemy or moral leper.

Other businessmen shrugged their shoulders. They pointed to the omissions. Most important omission: the balancing of the budget and the “sound money” which the President has often promised but which can be based on a balanced budget and on nothing else.

The New York Sun’s Washington correspondent philosophically concluded that the speech contained “all the ‘reassurance’ that the New Dealers can honestly promise . . . for some time to come.”

The Wall Street Journal promptly, generously conceded that — even with its ominous silences—the speech was something to go on. It advised its readers to “now be up and on their way.”

One thing was clear. The President had not attempted to “laugh off” the business issue. To that extent, the effort of businessmen to smoke him out had succeeded. For two months that effort had been intense.

As far back as last May at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual congress, businessmen were demanding from the President a clear definition of future policies so that they might lay their plans accordingly. But the President did not speak.

By the time he returned from his Hawaiian cruise, businessmen had the jitters. Far from being soothed by his Green Bay speech, business demanded bigger & better assurances, and trade continued its dreary downward course. One by one members of the President’s intimate official family stepped to the microphone and in terms much more specific than any the President used even last week, assured business that it had nothing to fear.

Still unsatisfied, businessmen began to gather in groups to make their demands ring louder. Representatives of the durable goods industries met in mysterious session at Hot Springs, Va. At the Lido Country Club in Long Beach, N. Y., more than 100 tycoons last week locked themselves in for a three-day conclave. A convention of trade association officials met in Washington. The National Association of Manufacturers appointed a “Committee on Future Relations of Government to Industry.” And while they all issued stinging manifestoes against some element of the New Deal, they were unanimous on one thing: the longest step the President could take was to make a forthright pronouncement of policy. Still the President did not speak, or spoke only in gibes to newshawks.

The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce wrote the President directly for a “precise statement” on labor policies. The venerable Commercial & Financial Chronicle editorialized: “Of course everyone even moderately acquainted with the business situation knows, whether the President believes it or not, that there is the utmost need for reassurance from Washington at this time.”

The austere New York Times, having called the roll of U. S. Presidents who unequivocally spoke their minds in periods of stress, rebuked the 32nd President thus:

“The point of historic interest is that no President of strong convictions has hesitated even in the face of a stormy and angry Congress, to let people and legislators know where he himself stood.”

More than 1,000 firms and individuals reported to the New England Council that a lack of confidence was causing them to “negative, defer or curtail normal operations and commitments.” At a Boston conference on distribution, Lessing Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Co. uprose to praise a bitter attack on New Deal policies or lack of them, urging that the opinions be forwarded directly to the President because they reflected “not only the sense of the meeting but of the national business world as well.”

But business went further than mere squeals. After Editor Raymond Moley of Today let it be known that he simply did not believe that business held the opinions reported, a number of big businessmen arranged to have small dinner conferences with the President’s good friend. And over the filet mignons Mr. Moley was given unvarnished versions of business troubles under the New Deal.

Finally, last fortnight, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce sent the President a memorandum, explaining that “today, the directors are conscious of a general state of apprehension among the businessmen of the country.” They outlined the reasons why businessmen were apprehensive, requested the President to answer six questions:

“1. When and how is it proposed to balance the Federal budget?

“2. Is it the intention of the Administration to reduce further the value of the dollar? . . .

“3. Will the Administration at the earliest opportune moment collaborate with the other nations in an effort to agree upon a plan for the international stabilization of exchange?

“4. Will the efforts of the Administration be directed toward recovery by the encouragement of business initiative? . . .

“5. What is the Administration’s purpose toward agriculture?

“6. Is it the policy of the Administration to continue the construction and development of public works not now needed?”

The President ignored the questionnaire. When asked why, he said that if he thus established a precedent, he would have to answer questions from hundreds of other organizations seeking similar information. What was more, said the President, the questions were worded very much like the old one about “have you stopped beating your wife?”

Nevertheless, the issue had been joined. It was no longer a matter of Business v. Government but of Business v. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Last week, it could not be denied that the President had made a serious effort to allay this issue. And whether the issue was actually a ghost or a hatchet, many a businessman would go far to bury it.