I’m afraid 1932 won’t get much of a review because frankly, it exhausted me. It’s the story of two men who were rising to national leadership on their respective sides of the pond in the same year – two men who would rule for twelve years, two men who would be antagonists and who would die within a month of one another. That’s the future, though: 1932’s story stays largely in 1932, and zooms in on the fine grain of political machinations. Pietrusza alternates between Roosevelt and Hitler chapters, and the Hitler chapters are largely more exciting given that Hitler and his cohorts are flamboyantly villainous and the Democratic backroom action is …soporific, frankly. It made me realize that Candidate Roosevelt was a very different creature than President Roosevelt; FDR was something of a political chameleon, and justified it with the conviction that to do good, one must first get in power. If that means using the Happy Warrior Al Smith as a stepping stone to greatness – relying on Smith’s support to reach the NY governor’s chair and then running off to DC – so be it. In Hitler’s case the backstabbing is more literal, as the Nazis’ rise to power is constantly mixed up with violence in the streets, largely against their codependent antagonists the KPD (Communists). There’s so much detail here, though, that even reading about von Hindenburg’s struggles to create a stable government and finally giving Hitler a shot at the chancellorship, had gotten dull by the time I was there. Given that the last Pietrusza book I read (1960) also lost me after a while with the precinct-by-precinct maneuvering, it’s safe to say that he and I probably aren’t great author-reader combinations, at last not for that microgenre of political history. There’s a lot of interest in his books, but it’s buried in paper for me.
Coming up: I am 2/3rds through a larger treatment of Carter and 1/3 through Amity Shlae’s Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I think I can finish one of them before month’s end.
Quotations
The experience took away half of the man, though many said it made him whole.
“There are times,” thought Howe, “when I think that Franklin might never have been President if he had not been stricken. You see, he had a thousand interests. You couldn’t pin him down. He rode, he swam, he played golf, tennis, he sailed, he collected stamps, he politicked, he did everything under the sun a man could think of doing. Then, suddenly, there he was, flat on his back with nothing to do but think. He began to read, he talked, he gathered people around him—his thoughts expanded. He began to see the other fellow’s point of view. He thought of others who were ill and afflicted and in want. He dwelt on many things that had not bothered him much before. Lying there, he grew bigger, day by day.”Göring, brilliant in his own way and shameless in his evil, provided the best, frankest, and most frightening, explanation (and to an interrogator at Nürnberg, no less) of what brought the lot of them together: If you really want to do something new, the good won’t help you with it. They are self-satisfied, lazy, they have their God and their own pig-headedness—you can’t do it with them. “Let me have men about me that are fat.” An anointed king can say that but not a leader who has made himself. Let me have men about me that are errant knaves. The wicked who have something on their conscience are obliging, quick to hear threats because they know how it’s done, and for booty you can offer them things because they will take them. Because they have no hesitations. You can hang them if they get out of step. Let me have men about me that
are utter villains—provided that I have the power of absolute power over life and death. The sole and single leader, whom no one can interfere with. What do you know of the possibilities and evil! Why do you write books and make philosophy when you only know about virtue and how to acquire it, whereas the world is fundamentally moved by something quite different?And what, in fact, did Franklin actually know about anything? What lay beyond his dazzling smile, the well-formed words, the often-forced banter? Fiorello La Guardia praised Roosevelt as “aldermanic” in remembering political details, and Tugwell conceded that he possessed “amazingly detailed” knowledge of utility valuations. But that was about it. “One of the characteristics most puzzling to those who met him first as late as 1932,” Tugwell would later confess, “was the completeness of his assurance, especially since it seemed to proceed from a less than sufficient competence. There were many matters about which his lack of knowledge was total. There were issues about which the groundwork had not been laid. Even his general attitude of liberal progressivism, sufficient until now for expedients, was suddenly irrelevant and obsolete.”
“Mr. Roosevelt, once a dry and a liberal and a reformer, has listed with every political wind that has blown within the last twenty years. He has stood in every camp; he has fought on every firing line. He is the soldier of fortune of American politics.” Did such “soldiering” result from a lack of interest? From mere cowardice? Or, instead, from sheer calculation? The first duty of a patriot, an old maxim held, was to get elected. William Jennings Bryan had been forthright. So had TR in 1912, and The Happy Warrior in 1928. What good had it provided them? Or the country? Or anyone, for that matter?
SPD delegate Kurt Schumacher (severely crippled in the war) sarcastically congratulated [Goebbels] for having succeeded for the first time in recorded history “in effecting the total mobilization of human stupidity.”
Hitler jeered at his opponents, “I know your slogan. You say, we will stay [in office] at any cost. And I tell you: We will overthrow you in any case!”
[Hitler] challenged not merely Grzesinski but also Hindenburg: “Dear old man, . . . With our deep regret, therefore, you must step aside, for they want to fight us and we want to fight them.”Hitler remained unswayed. “In any case,” he challenged his foreign press chief, “what part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.”
“People,” the frustrated Hanfstaengl answered, tossing caution to the wind, “say the same thing about you.”Coolidge also hated Hoover’s tendency to react to news with grand, intrusive plans. Could not Hoover see where some of his rescues had led? At one point later on, the minimalist president Calvin Coolidge concluded quite simply that “that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.” He had a nickname for Hoover: “Wonder Boy.”
The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker inquired of one of Hitler’s followers, “What will you do when you get power?”
“He might have launched a long discussion of the party program,” Knickerbocker recalled, “but his only reply was: ‘Keep it.’”Hitler needed to prove he was no longer a whip-wielding, putsch planning monster. The road to power was paved with new-found restraint— not the caked, dried blood of opponents. Moderation being absolutely necessary—he did the exact opposite.
Asked if he like Mussolini and his black shirts might march on Berlin, he snapped, “I don’t have to march on Berlin as they say I propose to do. I am already there. The question is who will march out of Berlin.”
“Mr. Hoover’s speech at Des Moines,” sniped Sen. George Norris from next-door Nebraska, could be “boiled down and summed up in one sentence: ‘It might be worse,’ and taking into consideration the remote possibility of his re-election, I am inclined to agree with him.”
Counted together, the Brown-Red total had now reached an alarming 50 percent. The majority of Germans had, in one form or another, voted not simply for dictatorship but for totalitarianism. (Brown being Nazis, Red being the Communists.)
“I saw them,” she recorded of these vigorous, brownshirted men, “in my mind’s eye, marching on and on, over frontiers, north, east, west and south. . . . I saw, in my mind’s eye, the machine guns that would soon be in their hands, the planes that would fly over their heads, the tanks that would rumble and roll with their tread.”
“Post-war Europe was finished,” she sorrowed, “and pre-war Europe had begun. . . .”
