In all there were 578,231 executive branch employees, of whom 467,161 were in the classified civil service. “A considerable proportion of them,” in the opinion of a Roosevelt adviser, “had been appointed during the preceding twelve years of Republican rule.… What we called the Civil Service was, in the main, merely a mass of Republican political appointees frozen into office by act of Congress.”2
It was a familiar arrangement, and other administrations had found it workable. But the election year just past had seen the Great Depression spread inexorably. The agricultural heartland was devastated by years of drought and mismanagement of the land. Banks were failing at a rate of a hundred a month. More than a quarter-million families had been evicted from their homes. The government Roosevelt inherited had neither the structure nor the personnel to deal with the most serious economic crisis in the nation’s history.
The new president would change that forever, not simply by enlarging the government but by fundamentally redefining its goals and the way it achieved them. He would, in effect, be the first person to be the presiding officer of the modern presidency. But he certainly had no coherent plan. Despite having been governor of the most populous state, he was not much interested in the traditional forms of administration. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick in 1932. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”3 He was to stay in office long enough to give special weight to his view. His administrative predilections were to be flexible, to work informally, often outside the normal chain of command, to give competing assignments, to keep shifting the composition of his inner circle, to marshal support through adroit appeals to the public, and to maintain himself at the center of the action. A generation of political scientists would make of this style a virtue by which to measure subsequent presidents.
In staffing the administration Roosevelt generally relied on five (often overlapping) sources of talent:
The friends and colleagues of his young years, contemporaries in Washington such as Daniel Roper, William Phillips, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt when Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson, and more important, a small band of supporters (Louis McHenry Howe, Stephen Early, Marvin McIntyre) who had recognized his political potential, in some cases as early as during his pre-World War I tenure in the New York state legislature.
Those who had been in his state administration (Frances Perkins, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Harry Hopkins, Samuel Rosenman).
The 1932 campaigners, particularly those who supported him before the Democratic convention in Chicago: professional politicians (James Farley); financial backers (Joseph Kennedy); and the Brain Trust, mostly Columbia University professors (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle) who had provided position papers and otherwise sought to educate the candidate on policy.
The old boy networks, people who knew people who knew Roosevelt, the most fertile being united through a connection with Professor Felix Frankfurter and the Harvard Law School.
The rank and file of the Democratic party, the foot troops of politics whose just rewards would be the more lowly jobs in Washington and around the country.
Roosevelt’s staffing choices were a haphazard blend of chance, friendship, obligation, and pressure, as were those of the presidents who followed him. He was luckier than most, and his network of acquaintances was larger than most. It was not until much later that presidents began to make tentative efforts to systematically assess the qualities needed in appointive office, and even now staffing remains an underdeveloped responsibility of public administration.
When selecting the cabinet, Roosevelt seemed guided, according to Raymond Moley, by “neither a well-defined purpose nor an underlying principle.”4 He picked Frances Perkins as secretary of labor in part because he wanted to appoint the first woman to a cabinet position, although she was only tolerated by the unions. Harold Ickes at the Interior Department was a Bull Mooser and not personally known to the president-elect. The choice of Claude Swanson for secretary of the navy may have been made for no better reason than to create a place in the Senate for Governor Harry Byrd of Virginia, and anyway, as an old navy man Roosevelt would have wanted to make key decisions himself. Henry Wallace, the new secretary of agriculture, while a distinguished agricultural economist, was, like Ickes, a nominal Republican. Daniel Roper added no weight of any sort, but Commerce was no longer to be treated as a first-line department. Homer Cummings at the Justice Department was a last-minute substitution, again like Ickes, reflecting the fact that four senators had declined to enter the cabinet. The practice of appointing the national committee chairman of the president’s party to the position of postmaster general was continued: Farley was also put in charge of routine patronage, and by July 1934 he had located jobs for about 100,000 deserving Democrats, mostly in the new emergency agencies.
The only appointee of national stature was the secretary of state, Senator Cordell Hull of Tennessee, “the one man in public life,” according to Samuel Rosenman, “who could give the President substantial concern by threatening … to resign.”5 Other men of distinction, such as Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, would join the cabinet on the eve of World War II, when Roosevelt wished to give a bipartisan cast to national defense. And still others, of course, would acquire distinction in office. But Rosenman’s comment hinted at an underlying principle: Roosevelt sought cabinet subordinates who would neither overshadow him nor prove politically threatening. His administration was designed to be distinctly Rooseveltian.
A second underlying principle, although it is hazardous to attribute too much theorizing to Roosevelt, who operated largely on instinct, was to balance opposites. William Woodin, the first secretary of the treasury, was a conservative financier, as was Lewis Douglas, the budget director; others such as Hopkins, the federal emergency relief administrator and later secretary of commerce, were clearly spenders. “A little rivalry is stimulating, you know,” the president was to explain to Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too.”6 In practice, the balancing of opposites sharpened internal policy debates, but the price paid was that frictions often carried over into program implementation.
Appointments to the subcabinet—undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, general counsels—were of superior quality. Dean Acheson, Jerome Frank, Charles Wyzanski, James Landis, and many others were generally in their late thirties and early forties, which was younger than the cabinet members, and they were more ideological. They also were technicians and academicians who, in the opinion of Vice President John Nance Garner, had never worked a precinct. As the supreme mixmaster of his administration, Roosevelt made the secondary selections himself. His cabinet members acquiesced with forbearance or veiled distaste. Observing the blend of disparate ingredients from within the Agriculture Department, Russell Lord reported “national figures using the same washroom, shoulder to shoulder, and pretending not to see each other.”7
The presidential staff, those on the White House payroll, were noted primarily for their dedication to Roosevelt. “Those who were closest to him for the longest time,” thought Rexford Tugwell, “were kept there because they did not probe or try to understand but rather because they gave an unquestioning service.”8 McIntyre, Early, military aide Edwin (Pa) Watson, and Roosevelt’s personal secretaries, Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, provided the president with a comfortable, good-humored core around which the New Deal revolved. That the core did not become a cocoon was due mostly to Roosevelt’s insatiable appetite for information and his immediate staff’s recognition of its own role and limitations. Primus inter pares of this original group was Louis Howe, who, like the other members of the