MacArthur, overwrought, apologized, offered his resignation as chief of staff, rushed outside, and vomited on the White House steps.34
Openly opposing Wall Street and the military made for smart politics in 1930s America, and Roosevelt was nothing if not an astute politician. The 1934 midterm elections showed how far to the left the country had moved. In fact, much of the electorate was to the left of the New Deal. In a remarkable break with normal voting patterns, the party in power drubbed the opposition. The Democrats won twenty-six of thirty-five Senate races, giving them a 69–25 advantage over Republicans in the upper chamber, with one seat being held by a Progressive and one by a Farmer-Laborite. Their lead in the House jumped to 322–103, with seven Progressives and three Farmer-Laborites. The New York Times called it “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics[, giving] the President a clear mandate… and… literally destroy[ing] the right wing of the Republican party.”35
Viewing the election as a wake-up call for Republicans, Idaho Republican Senator William Borah told reporters that “unless the Republican party is delivered from its reactionary leadership and reorganized in accordance with its one-time liberal principles it will die like the Whig party of sheer political cowardice.” He criticized his party’s leadership for opposing the New Deal “without offering a program of their own in place of it.” Borah complained that when Republicans around the country ask their leaders for an alternative to the New Deal, “they are offered the Constitution. But people can’t eat the Constitution.”36
Radical ideas were in the air. Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, almost won election as governor of California with a campaign called “End Poverty in California” that proposed handing uncultivated farms to farmers and idle factories to workers for productive use. California physician Francis Townsend’s call for giving people over age sixty $200 a month to stimulate the economy won numerous adherents. And Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” program, with its “soak-the-rich” tax plan, offered another vision for redistribution of wealth and a more just and egalitarian society.
The Soviet Union, which would later become such an albatross around the necks of American leftists when the almost unfathomable depths of Stalinist cruelty became known, actually strengthened the appeal of left-wing reform in the early 1930s. Soviet communism seemed to be producing a dynamic egalitarian society that offered a viable alternative to the moribund capitalist economic order. Soviet leaders sparked the interest of American intellectuals in 1928 by announcing their first Five-Year Plan, which promised a rational, centralized economy that would create abundance by unleashing science and technology. Socialists and progressives had long favored intelligent planning over a seemingly anarchic system in which individual capitalists made decisions based on maximizing profits. The concept of planning had inspired works as disparate as Edward Bellamy’s 1888 socialist masterpiece Looking Backward and Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift or Mastery, the bible of the Progressive movement. Many intellectuals agreed with editor of The Nation Oswald Garrison Villard, who, in late 1929, described the Soviet Union as “the greatest human experiment ever undertaken.”37
The results seemed to justify that description. While the United States and the rest of the capitalist world plunged deeper into depression, the Soviet economy appeared to be booming. In early 1931, the Christian Science Monitor reported that not only was the Soviet Union the only country to have escaped the Depression, its industrial production had jumped an astronomical 25 percent the previous year. In late 1931, The Nation’s Moscow correspondent described the Soviet frontier as “a charmed circle which the world economic crisis cannot cross…. While banks crash… abroad, the Soviet Union continues in an orgy of construction and national development.”38 The Nation could be dismissed as a liberal publication, but similar reports in Barron’s, Business Week, and the New York Times were harder to disregard. As the U.S. unemployment rate approached 25 percent, a Times report that the Soviet Union intended to hire foreign workers caused desperate jobless Americans to stampede Soviet offices in the United States. Despite official Soviet disclaimers, Business Week reported that the Soviets planned to import 6,000 Americans and that 100,000 had applied. Soviet society seemed to be undergoing an incredible transformation from agrarian backwardness to industrial modernization before people’s eyes.39
Many American intellectuals had also begun to see the Soviet Union as a place of intellectual, artistic, and scientific vibrancy compared with the United States’ stultifying bourgeois culture. In 1931, economist Stuart Chase wrote, “For Russians the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging.” The next year, he asked, “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”40 New Republic literary editor Edmund Wilson noted that when visiting the Soviet Union, he felt as if he were “at the moral top of the universe where the light never really goes out.” Socialized medicine for all, remarkable scientific breakthroughs, dazzling economic growth—Soviet progress, many Americans believed, was vastly eclipsing that of its economically struggling capitalist competitors.41
Indications of Soviet success added enormously to the appeal of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) at a time when so many Americans were looking for alternatives. An invigorated Communist Party would contribute significantly to the growth of 1930s radicalism, but it was only one piece in a much larger puzzle. Many groups, some having nothing to do with the CP, became radicalized during this decade. Radicalization proceeded at different paces for different groups. The first to respond were the unemployed. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated for jobs and relief all over the country on March 6, 1930. Intellectuals followed suit, rejecting the shallow materialism of American life in the 1920s and the anti-intellectualism that had driven so many writers and artists to Europe for cultural salvation. Edmund Wilson captured this perfectly when he wrote in 1932:
to the writers and artists of my generation who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism… these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden and unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.42
The upsurge among workers started in 1933, as the economy showed early signs of recovery, and continued throughout the decade. The year 1934 saw major strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as a national textile strike as workers turned to Musteites, Trotskyists, and Communists for leadership. Unemployed Councils and Unemployed Leagues brought in jobless workers to support the strikes rather than take jobs as strikebreakers. With broad support from all sectors of the working class, these strikes often spread to other industries, even shutting down entire cities, as happened in San Francisco. The Los Angeles Times reported, “The situation in San Francisco is not correctly described by the phrase ‘general strike.’ What is actually in progress there is an insurrection, a Communist-inspired and led revolt against organized government.”43 The Portland Oregonian called for presidential intervention: “San Francisco, paralyzed, is in the throes of violent insurrection. Portland faces the practical certainty of a general strike within a few days that will similarly paralyze this city.” The San Francisco Chronicle complained, “The radicals have wanted no settlement. What they want is revolution.”44