The Brain Trust has devised a number of schemes for getting money away from the fellows who accumulated it during the Golden Age of Coolidge, and some of those schemes are working. Any man who hoarded gold has now been relieved of it, any man who piled up a bank deposit sees it reduced by 40% in value.
H.L. Mencken on the Brain Trust (Liberty Magazine, 1934) Read More »
A year and a half into FDR’s first term, journalist William E. Berchtold caught wind of a growing realization in Washington that most of the ’emergency’ legislation will become permanent. This didn’t bother him nearly as much as the fact that such imperishability also meant that the host of beta males who were positioned to maintain this behemoth would also be remaining (History has taught us that it was not FDR’s alphabet agencies that became a mainstay, but those of LBJ).
The Brain Trusters (New Outlook Magazine, 1934) Read More »
I have gathered my tools and my charts… I shall roll up my sleeves – make America over!
This was the motto to which the young folk began their work, nearly a thousand of them, which may be grouped for study purposes under the generic title, ‘Junior Brain Trusters’. They were, for the most part, young men from the colleges and universities of the larger eastern cities…. Many of them came as protégés of the Senior Brain Trusters themselves, brought from the classrooms by [Guy] Tugwell, [Raymond Charles] Moley, [Felix] Frankfurter – Professor Frankfurter being especially successful in drafting students and recent graduates from the Harvard Law School.
The Junior Brain Trusters (New Outlook, 1934) Read More »
The Black Brain Trust consists of about 25 Negro leaders who have assumed command of America’s 13,000,000 Negroes in their fight for equality. They hold informal meetings to plan their strategy, whether it is to defeat a discriminatory bill in Congress or to overcome a prejudice against a private [in the army]. Few white men know it, but they have already opened a second front in America – a front to the liberation of the dark races.
‘The Black Brain Trust” (The American Magazine, 1943) Read More »
Theodore Roosevelt had loomed large in Washington for a long time – so when it was learned that his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat!), was chosen to work in Woodrow Wilson’s Department of the Navy he was an instant curiosity.
Click here to read a 1913 article about another young man on the move: Winston Churchill.
The Up-and-Coming FDR (The Saturday Evening Post, 1913) Read More »
Attached is an article by James A. Farley (1888 – 1976), who in 1933 was appointed by F.D.R. to serve as both the Postmaster General as well as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. During the Thirties, Farley was also FDR’s go-to-guy in all matters involving politics on Capitol Hill, and he wrote the attached article two years after Roosevelt’s death in order to explain how the Court-packing scheme was received in Congress and how his relationship with FDR soon soured.
Boss, I asked him, why didn’t you advise the senators in advance that you were sending them the Court bill?
Jim, I just couldn’t, he answered earnestly. I didn’t want to have it get to the press prematurely…
FDR, Congress and the Plan to Pack the Supreme Court (Collier’s Magazine, 1947) Read More »
This is a peculiar article about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull (1871 – 1955); the man who penned the piece was so obsessed with Hull’s hillbilly upbringing that he didn’t get around to writing about the man himself until page six.
FDR’s Man in Foggy Bottom (Collier’s Magazine, 1940) Read More »
When a 22-year-old expectant father wrote to President Roosevelt complaining that he’d been unemployed for four months, FDR wasted little time in contacting one of his alphabet agencies and seeing to it that the gent was offered a defense job.
FDR’s Sense of Sympathy (PM Tabloid, 1942) Read More »
Listed herein are the sixty-two alphabet agencies as they existed in 1934. More were on their way and, as this article makes quite clear, a good number of them were created by the Hoover administration. If you’re looking for an article indicating that Hoover and Roosevelt had similar approaches to governance, this might be a good place to start.
FDR’s Alphabet Agencies (Pathfinder Magazine, 1934) Read More »
It would be difficult to select the typical New Deal bureau. In not a few there is considerable friction between different degrees and elements of thought as to how far the New Deal should really go… The program is so vast, the limits of its intent so completely shrouded in the vague phraseology of the new idealism, that there appears to be plenty of work for all. [For example] unwanted surplusses were found in the electrical power and appliance field. It was perceived that here was a case of ‘under-consumption’ on the part of American homeowners. How to solve the problem? With another bureau, of course. And so we have the EHFA – the Electric Home and Farm Authority.
The Alphabet Bureaucrats (New Outlook Magazine, 1934) Read More »
