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Bill Daley, FDR, and the Influence of Presidential Advisors by David Woolner New Deal 2.0 01/12/2012 http://www.newdeal20.org/2012/01/12/bill-daley-fdr-and-the-influence-of-presidential-advisors-69134/ An examination of the position of chief of staff reveals how crucial the role was to FDR's tenure as president. The recent news that President Obama's chief of staff has decided to step down after just a year in office has drawn attention to the role that senior advisors play in the White House and the impact they may have - or not - on directing policy and achieving a president's agenda. The role of senior advisor has a long history, dating back to President Woodrow Wilson's use of Colonel Edmund House as an "unofficial" advisor. House was offered an official cabinet position, but turned it down so that he would be at liberty to advise the president on a host of matters. Unlike many of his predecessors, House actually lived in the White House and, thanks to his close relationship with President Wilson, became something akin to what we might think of as a modern-day chief of staff or National Security Advisor, as he played a major role in shaping U.S. wartime diplomacy. Due to the complexity of the issues confronting the United States in trying to shape the eventual peace that would come after World War I, Wilson also asked House to lead a special team of experts called "The Inquiry" that was to help formulate U.S. policy at the peace negotiations. The use of The Inquiry, which included many experts drawn from academia, may have served as a model for a far more influential group of expert advisors that came a generation later under what FDR called the "Brains Trust." The fact that FDR may have modeled this group of advisors on Wilson's use of Colonel House and The Inquiry should come as no surprise. After all, FDR served as Under Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration and was a great admirer of the latter. The immediate inspiration for this group of advisors, however, came not from FDR, but from his legal counsel and speech writer, Samuel Rosenman, who suggested the idea in the course of FDR's 1932 run for the White House. With the country in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history, which seemed to defy common understanding, the idea of putting together a group of experts to advise the president during the campaign seemed to make a great deal of sense. Moreover, as Roosevelt had already made use of expert advice during his term as Governor of New York, he readily embraced the idea. The term Brains Trust - which was first coined in 1932 by James Kieran of the New York Times -- would come to represent the entire coterie of advisors that surrounded FDR during the New Deal. But the original Brains Trust was actually made up of just three individuals drawn from the ranks of Columbia University: Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf A. Berle. All three of these men would play an important part in shaping the New Deal, but it was Moley who had perhaps the greatest initial impact. Moley was a professor of law and government who had supported FDR's 1928 gubernatorial campaign and was active in the field of criminal justice. He also had a knack for organization and for gathering support for his progressive ideas which, along with his innate ability as a speech writer, led Rosenman to suggest him as the person to both recruit and head up the inchoate group of advisors. Moley was only too happy to do so, and it wasn't long before both Tugwell and Berle agreed to join him. In April 1932, Moley undertook his first major assignment for the would-be president, helping draft one of FDR's first major national addresses of the campaign: his famous "forgotten man" speech that focused on rural and urban poverty. In the speech, Roosevelt publicly proclaimed his firm belief in the responsibility of the federal government to come to the aid of ordinary citizens. In doing so, FDR rejected the trickle down approach taken by the Hoover administration in response to the economic crisis and instead called for economic mobilization that focused on the lower - as opposed to upper - echelons of American society. As Roosevelt put it: These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest on upon the forgotten, the unorganized, but the essential units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Moley played a significant role in both drafting the speech and in giving it its populist appeal. It was Moley, for example, who suggested the phrase "forgotten man" (which stemmed from an essay written in the 19th century by the sociologist William Graham Sumner). The line stuck a chord with the public and came to symbolize FDR's support for the millions of poor and powerless Americans that had been victimized by the Depression. Moley also supported the theme of economic mobilization, another concept that would reappear in Roosevelt's rhetoric as the years progressed - most famously in his First Inaugural. Perhaps most importantly, Moley may also be responsible not only for the use of the phrase "New Deal" to describe FDR's social and economic agenda, but also - at least in part - for some of its most famous components. It is in a May 1932 memorandum written by Moley, for example, that we first see the phrase New Deal. Moreover, the same document also calls for FDR and the Democratic Party to reject the more orthodox and conservative elements of both major parties and embrace instead a much more progressive agenda. He advocated such ideas as a massive federal program of public works to relieve unemployment, the regulation of the utility industry, greater transparency in the financial sector, and the separation of commercial and investment banking - all issues that would be covered under the reforms of the New Deal. Ironically, in spite of Moley's strong influence over FDR's policies in the early months of the New Deal, his tenure as a presidential advisor, like that of Bill Daley, would be relatively short lived. It was shorter, in fact, than Daley's or his two fellow members of the original Brains Trust. Under pressure in part from FDR's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was diametrically opposed to the protectionist aspects of Moley's economic agenda, as well as from FDR's long-time political advisor Louis Howe, who began to see Moley as something of a rival, Moley was forced to resign from public service in September 1933. Still, there is no question that during the first critical months of the New Deal Raymond Moley wielded a great deal of power and influence in Washington. The fact that he was able to do so, and to rise to the upper echelons of the government so quickly, serves as a reminder of just how important presidential advisors can be. This is surely something the press and public should keep in mind as we move further into this election year. ___________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. 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