THE TIMES WERE INDEED OUT OF JOINT AS THE NEW DEAL MOVED along. Nature took a hand in the festival of disaster. The plains, long parched by drought, were swept by cruel dust storms that made life impossible. Cattle died in the fields and the despairing farmers piled their wretched belongings on their old jalopies and began that dramatic migration of the Okies to the west coast in search of food and life. Floods inundated the great river valleys, bringing death and starvation in their wake.

AT WHAT POINT DID THE COMMUNISTS FIND THE CRACK IN THE wall of the New Deal and climb in?

IT WAS 1936 AND THE VERDICT ON MR. ROOSEVELT WAS NOW UP to the people. As the year rolled along, an uninformed observer might well suppose that the Roosevelt New Deal was in a state of considerable disarray. One after another of Mr. Roosevelt’s great adventures in social architecture had been outlawed by the Supreme Court or had fallen apart of their own weakness or both. The NRA had vanished and everyone was glad to be rid of it. The AAA had been held unconstitutional and was subject to bitter criticisms.

BOOK TWO

FOR THE SECOND TIME, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT FACED THE CHIEF Justice on the front portico of the Capitol to be sworn in as President. For a man who took almost childish delight in breaking precedents, he must have derived a good deal of satisfaction from the fact that he was the first President, under the new law, to be sworn in on January 20 instead of March 4. Aside from that, it was the standard type of inauguration, including the rain.

IF EVIDENCE WERE LACKING THAT ROOSEVELT’S MASSIVE VICTORY at the polls had done something to him, he lost no time in supplying the proof. On February 4, 1937, just two weeks after his inauguration, the President sent word to Joe Robinson, his Senate leader, and Speaker Bankhead of the House to be present at a cabinet meeting that day and to bring with them Hatton Sumners and Senator Henry Ashurst, chairmen respectively of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

A MONTH AFTER ROOSEVELT’S SECOND INAUGURATION MANY BUSIness men were fearful we might see a runaway boom. The war clouds had darkened over Europe. European money was in flight to America. Great Britain had just launched a $7,500,000,000 armament program and industry here was expecting to get a good slice of this war business. Our Neutrality Law did not prohibit armament sales abroad in peace-time. And Marriner Eccles and other administration officials were troubling their minds lest the rising armament industry unsettle our economy.

THE SITUATION AS THE 1938 ELECTIONS LOOMED AHEAD WAS NOT the same as when the second administration began. Neither Congress nor the country were any longer at Roosevelt’s feet. His party was profoundly divided and the hatreds within it were deep and poignant. He could not afford to lose any part of the subservient elements in the Congress. He had made up his mind to drive out of the House and Senate those members who had humiliated him in the Court fight and who had been grumbling at his extravagances.

I. THE PLANNERS

WHILE THE SHADOWS OF THE DEPRESSION WERE LENGTHENING over America, the war clouds grew darker over Europe. The First World War was the inevitable result of 50 years of European history. It began with the invasion of Serbia by Austria, as the Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia. But the invasion of Serbia was no more the cause of World War I than the invasion of Poland was the cause of World War II.