Mr. Halleck’s New Deal: Congressman Charles Halleck and the Limits to Reform ROBERT L. FULLER harles Halleck joked after his election in 1935 that, as the sole CRepublican representative from Indiana, he held his caucus in a phone booth. However, over time Congressman Halleck rose through party ranks in the House from “waterboy” to majority leader when Republicans regained control of Congress in 1946.1 Because the GOP also won a majority of seats in the Senate, and many Southern Democrats proved cooperative in advancing Republican policies, Republicans stood a very good chance of implementing their program for America. Congressman Halleck, who had railed against the New Deal since he first took a seat in the House, stood in position to do something about it in 1947. Yet, once in office, the Republicans and Southern Democrats, supposedly so dead set against the New Deal, made very few proposals and offered hardly any legislation to alter New Deal reforms in any significant way. Aside from changing labor laws, they made no effort to overturn the legislative achievements of the 1930s that lasted longer than the Depression. Majority Leader Halleck, __________________________ Robert L. Fuller holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. He is currently work- ing on a monograph about the banking crisis of the Great Depression. 1Charles A. Halleck to “Jim,” March 20, 1936, box 17, Charles A. Halleck Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (henceforth CAH). INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 103 (March 2007) ᭧ 2007, Trustees of Indiana University. MR. HALLECK’S NEW DEAL 67 Charles Halleck Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington his Republican colleagues, and their allies among the Democrats only tinkered with a few of the reforms that remained in place after the Supreme Court ruled them constitutionally sound, because by and large Halleck and other Republicans supported most New Deal reforms. When they lambasted “the New Deal,” which they did loudly and often, they really targeted the frequently chaotic administration set into place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to oversee the reforms and relief. Roosevelt’s “first New Deal,” a series of laws intended to save America’s banks and restore confidence in its financial institutions, sped through both houses in the early days of 1933. The laws proved general- ly popular and of varying effectiveness. Emergency acts intended to pro- vide short-term employment for the jobless ultimately provided millions of jobs for the unemployed and boosted morale within the nation, but failed to “prime the pump” and restore prosperity as intended. Those laws that regulated the banking system and supervised the stock exchanges (passed in 1934) were welcomed by the public and met with mixed reactions among business interests. Republican reaction to the 68 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY proposed bills paralleled public response: they voted overwhelmingly for relief and banking reforms, but had varying responses to the laws to supervise the securities markets.2 Laws that intervened in the market system—including the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which sought to curb business competition in favor of cooperation to keep up prices and wages; the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which hoped to curb farm output and raise prices; and the law authorizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which proposed to bestow a wide range of benefits upon the people of the Tennessee River Valley—met neither uniform hostility nor solid support. Regional reactions to such legislation proved stronger than partisan response.3 Historians typically ignore the mixed Republican support given New Deal-era legislation—as well as its subsequent bipartisan support— in favor of an account of a Republican-led assault upon the New Deal after 1945. Historian Jonathan Bell’s 2004 work, The Liberal State on Trial, describes the post-war eclipse of a New Deal-friendly social-demo- cratic agenda by the rise of an anti-communist dogma directed as much against the New Deal as against the Soviet Union and American commu- nists.4 This supposed post-war backlash against New Deal reformism is frequently painted as a war by business interests against labor unions, which had made such strides during the war with the helping hand of Uncle Sam. The expanding power of unions was, according to this ver- sion, opposed and reversed by conservatives like Halleck, who used popular disgust with communism as a tool to beat back “red” unions.5 Eric Goldman’s 1960 characterization of the work of the Eightieth Congress as “the wrathful counter-revolution” still typifies the views of historians today.6 While these views accurately echo Democratic and __________________________ 2Collier’s, “Your Congressman’s Vote on the New Deal,” 1934, box 51, John J. O’Connor Papers, Lilly Library. The undated special issue provides the roll-call votes on 22 major pieces of New Deal legislation. 3Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison, Wis., 1995), 209-10, points out that the regional appeal for the AAA was stronger than party allegiance. 4Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York, 2004). 5See, for example, Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991) 539-75; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 244-45. 6Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945-1960 (New York, 1960), 56. MR. HALLECK’S NEW DEAL 69 Progressive campaign rhetoric of its day, the more personal version of 1940s politics derived from Halleck’s papers reveals a dramatically dif- ferent picture. Halleck and his allies’ pre-war railings against “the New Deal” had in fact targeted more specifically the host of unorthodox and often polit- ically inept administrators imported by Roosevelt to Washington, D.C., to implement the new federal programs put into place by the president and Congress. By the time Republicans retook control of Congress in 1947, most of Roosevelt’s appointees had long ago moved on to other tasks, frequently as much to FDR’s and Truman’s great relief as to that of their political opponents. With Harold Ickes, Tommy Corcoran, Rexford Tugwell, and other convenient targets of the Republicans out of public employ, the Republicans’ battle against New Deal excesses had for its focus only “the reds” who supposedly still populated the ranks of the federal bureaucracy.7 To be sure, Congressman Halleck objected not only to irritating officials and costly bureaucracy, but also to New Deal programs that vio- lated his conception of economic orthodoxy. Yet despite his reservations, he went along with and ultimately accepted most of them. He opposed programs intended to inflate prices and deflate the value of the currency, and he criticized (though did little about) programs that interfered with the free-market system. He challenged federal efforts, such as TVA’s elec- tricity program, that dictated prices or put the government into direct competition with private business. He also consistently protested the size and cost of the bureaucracy necessary to implement federal pro- grams. Halleck and other Republicans had fixed ideas about fiscal poli- cies and appropriate functions for the federal government, but those ideas had been tempered by the blows of the Depression, and by 1947 they accommodated a large and expensive federal government. These legislators did not love expensive government, but they accepted it. The Republicans of 1947 oversaw federal programs that touched the daily lives of citizens because, by and large, they had agreed to such programs as they were first implemented. The political career of Charles Halleck serves to demonstrate Republican accommodation to federal involve- __________________________ 7See Katie Louchheim, ed., The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). Louchheim, herself a young New Dealer, collected the reminiscences of other young New Dealers—mostly lawyers—many of whom years afterward laugh at their youthful igno- rance and ineptness. 70 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY ment in many spheres that had provoked staunch opposition from con- gressmen of both parties before the Great Depression. When he assumed the powerful position of majority leader in 1947, Halleck already firmly supported government programs set into place by President Roosevelt’s New Deal. In his brief 1935 campaign, Halleck, an ambitious prosecutor from Rensselaer, Indiana, endorsed emergency relief, old-age pensions, a sta- ble currency, and a balanced budget—all positions consistent with mid- western Republicanism of the day and compatible with the proclaimed ends of Roosevelt’s New Deal administration.8 Unfortunately, America could not have relief and pensions as well as a stable currency and a bal- anced budget. Congressional Republicans and the president made the same compromise: a balanced budget had to be sacrificed temporarily to achieve more urgent ends. Despite running large budget deficits, the administration and congressional Democrats still extolled the conven- tion of the balanced budget, and for years promised one in the near future. Halleck’s orthodox economic thinking, which he had absorbed as an economics student at Indiana University, guided him to oppose most taxes and all spending bills intended to put money into circulation rather than to procure some specified public good. The “fast talking” freshman congressman’s relatively narrow view of the “public good” excluded, for example, $350,000 in federal expenditures for the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935 or funding for the Blue Ridge Parkway.9 This position was entirely consistent with the “Economy Act” of 1933, which had cut federal workers’ pay and veter- ans’ benefits in the name of “cutting wasteful spending.” Though a vet- eran of the First World War himself, Halleck, joined by six Indiana Democrats, voted against the Patman Veterans’ Bonus Bill, intended to put money into the pockets of World War veterans and to inflate the money supply by two billion dollars.