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— CHAPTER 1 —
CORDELL HULL AND
THE FREE TRADE TRADITION
Tennessee Congressman to
Secretary of State
ROOSEVELT’S CHOICE OF Hull for his senior cabinet position came as a surprise, for many Democrats seemed more likely candidates for that office. Yet better-known members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment such as Owen D. Young, Norman H. Davis, and Newton Baker fell by the wayside, often as a result of opposition from the Brains Trusters who had attached themselves to Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. Roosevelt first mentioned Hull as a possible secretary of state in a meeting with his advisers just before Christmas. The Brains Trusters distrusted Hull and hoped to block his appointment; yet the Tennessean had one very important friend in the president’s inner circle: Louis Howe. There were sound political reasons to appoint Hull, a well-respected member of the party’s rural southern wing, to a highly visible position in the administration. Roosevelt became increasingly taken by the idea of Hull as secretary of state, and he finally offered the position to the Tennessee senator on 19 January 1933. After pondering the offer for several weeks, Hull accepted.1
In choosing Hull, Roosevelt followed precedent by appointing a noted and powerful Democratic party politician to the post. Indeed, Hull had been the senior of the two figures during most of his twenty-year political relationship with the president-elect. Hull’s presence in the senior cabinet position offered several advantages to the new administration. As a longtime member of the House Ways and Means Committee, he understood major issues of economics, trade, and finance, as well as the ways of Capitol Hill. The Tennessean represented both southern Democrats and the party’s “Wilsonian” idealists, important sectors of Roosevelt’s electoral and political coalition, at the cabinet table. For many traditional Democrats, Hull assured professionalism and stability in an administration that had, and would, raise doubts as to its political tendencies and basic competence. Throughout the first Roosevelt administration and beyond, Hull was to prove FDR’s indispensable man. He was aware of this status and would exploit it at times when his relationship with the president became shaky.
In many ways this Tennessee politician would prove a transitional figure between the old democracy and the New Deal and between the pre–World War I era and the contemporary world. Cordell Hull was born on 2 October 1871 in rural Overton County, in east-central Tennessee about two miles from the Kentucky border, at a time and in a place where a man’s word was his bond and where authority and democracy were important concepts. Educated in the law, the ambitious young Democrat won his first general election, to Tennessee’s lower house, just before his twenty-first birthday. In 1903 Hull won appointment to the state bench, earning the moniker “Judge,” by which all but his very most intimate friends would address him throughout his career. By 1906 he had won a congressional seat and, once in Washington, a reputation for hard work. By his own admission, he was not a “fluent speaker,” although hard work and his skills at lobbying and convincing colleagues won adherents to his political positions; often, he would later reminisce, he won votes by supplying less dedicated colleagues with ideas and material on issues of interest to him. Convinced that the wealthy were shirking their share of the burden of financing the federal government, Hull introduced a comprehensive income tax bill only twelve days after taking his seat in December 1907. On 18 March of the following year he made his maiden speech in Congress, a substantive effort rather than the usual freshman formality. Setting forth themes that would serve him throughout his career, Hull attacked the high Republican tariff, reiterated his call for a national income tax, and attacked what he considered Theodore Roosevelt’s laxness in prosecuting antitrust violations. In 1911, at the age of thirty-nine, he won appointment to the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.2
Hull’s early years in Congress revealed both a political persistence and a knowledge of Capitol Hill politics that would serve him extremely well throughout his political career. Arriving in Washington with high expectations, the young Tennessean found himself shunted aside to a minor House committee. Getting little support from the Tennessee delegation for his efforts to improve his committee assignment, Hull decided to take matters into his own hands in a very unusual way. He determined, as he told a friend decades later, “to study and master the two biggest, dullest, most continuing problems of government”: taxation and public expenditures. After six years of immersion in statistical tables, Hull knew more about the issue than any man in Congress, thus placing himself in a perfect position when his party’s political fortunes changed.3
Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912 ensured that the Democrats had the White House to complement their majorities in both houses of Congress. It proved a propitious time for the young Tennessean. On 22 April 1913, little more than a month after Wilson’s inauguration, House Democrats introduced the Underwood Tariff, which, when passed by the House on 30 September and the Senate on 2 October, reduced ad valorem rates to the lowest level since the Civil War, terminating decades of the Republicans’ high-tariff policy. The Democratic leadership then designated Hull to address the $100 million revenue shortfall resulting from tariff reform by writing the income tax legislation, which passed on 31 October. Hull’s role in legislating the income tax established definitively his reputation as a major national politician and seemed at that time a worthy culmination of his political career. “I myself felt,” he remembered, “that if I should live two lifetimes I would probably not be able to render public service equal to my part in the long fight for enactment of our income-tax system.” He had set the basis for his lasting reputation as a man of “great prestige as an economic expert in Congress” and as the father of the modern income tax. Although he was not an academic economist, Harvard University thought enough of his expertise to request later in the decade that he write on tax reform for its Quarterly Journal of Economics.4
Hull had also made his mark in the national Democratic party. He became a Democratic National Committee (DNC) delegate from Tennessee and won promotion to the national party’s executive committee. By 1916 Hull was a dedicated Wilsonian. He worked actively in the president’s reelection campaign, moving to New York City for several months to contribute to the DNC’s national organization efforts. Four years later, President Wilson listed Hull among the three Democrats most qualified for the vice-presidency. Hull did not pursue the honor, but he was part of a small steering group that convinced Wilson during the party’s convention to abandon any idea of a third term. Democratic nominee James M. Cox, needing New York’s electoral votes to have a chance of election and seeking to win the delegates necessary to secure the nomination, chose the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a relatively unknown assistant secretary of the navy, as his vice-presidential candidate.5
The results of the 1920 election were devastating for both national and Tennessee Democrats, and Hull suffered the only electoral defeat of his career. Yet even here he found opportunities to reestablish himself on the national stage. In November 1921, a badly split DNC chose Hull as a compromise choice for its chairman. Hull’s tenure at the head of the committee, though relatively short, was notably successful. The new chairman traveled widely in hopes of invigorating local organizations, urging Democrats to put their personal ambitions aside so as to choose the most effective candidates for state and local office. He also vigorously attacked the $300,000 debt remaining from the 1920 election, retiring it and leaving a $30,000 surplus when he left the party chair following the 1924 convention. Most visibly, Hull helped direct a strong comeback—“an almost miraculous swing in our favor”—in the midterm election of 1922.6
Hull profited from his term as DNC chairman in two other respects. The first was the national visibility the position gave him. With the Republicans in the White House and in command of both houses of Congress, Hull as DNC chairman was the most important Democrat in the country. He spoke for his party on the major issues of the day and set the public tone for the election of 1922 and the party’s preconvention activities in 1924. His often acid tongue made him an effective partisan. Among his most important achievements, one reflecting his own political pragmatism, was his shift of the party’s political emphasis away from the losing issue of League of Nations membership toward the bread-and-butter issues that would eventually return the party to power. First among these, he was convinced, was the tariff.7
Hull also demonstrated an ability to win the confidence of the party’s current and future leadership. He worked closely with William Jennings Bryan and Bernard Baruch in retiring the party’s debt. He made two other allies of even greater long-term importance. One was Roosevelt, who had retired to New York City following the election of 1920 but who continued to be active in local and national politics despite being stricken with polio during the summer of 1921. Hull initiated a long-term political alliance with Roosevelt, marked by occasional correspondence, during that period. Roosevelt also had a personal interest in Hull’s efforts to retire the Democratic party’s debt. FDR had been one of ten cosigners of a 1920 note guaranteeing an $85,000 loan to the party, part of the debt that Hull retired. Early in 1926 Hull and Roosevelt began a series of regular meetings in Washington during Roosevelt’s return journeys from Warm Springs, Georgia, that were to continue until the latter’s election as president. Hull made a second crucial alliance during his party chairmanship when he recruited Arthur Krock, then a young Louisville Times reporter, to serve on an advisory committee for the national party. Krock began a long relationship with Hull that would give the congressman and secretary of state an important source of support when Krock became the New York Times’s chief Washington correspondent.8
Hull returned to Congress following the Democrats’ 1922 political recovery and was mentioned as a compromise presidential nominee during the 1924 convention’s long deadlock.9 Hull renewed his association with Roosevelt, although he wondered whether FDR, as a New Yorker and a supporter of Al Smith, could work objectively for the party’s future.10 A movement for Hull as favorite son for the Democratic presidential nomination arose among his southern colleagues in early 1928, followed by a boomlet for the Tennessean as Al Smith’s vice-presidential nominee. Among his most enthusiastic supporters for the vice-presidential nomination was Franklin Roosevelt. Hull finished second to Smith in the convention’s voting for the presidential nomination, but any chances of his becoming vice-president faltered over disagreements with northern Democrats over prohibition—they wanted national repeal while Hull supported a state’s right to repeal or not—and the tariff. The latter was to be a troublesome issue for Hull, as some Davis forces broke with the Democracy’s position by supporting higher tariff levies. Following the convention Hull resigned his seat on the Democratic National Committee, ending fourteen years of service on that body.11
Hull campaigned for his own reelection, limiting his role in the national campaign. Although Hoover won Tennessee, voters returned Hull to the House of Representatives. Most important for the Democratic party’s national future, Franklin D. Roosevelt, drafted against his will by Smith to stand for governor of New York, won a narrow 23,600-vote victory.12 Hull decided in mid-1929 that he would retire from national politics and return to Tennessee. A sudden vacancy in one of Tennessee’s Senate seats changed his mind, however, and he moved to the upper house following a landslide electoral victory.13
For the next two years Hull focused on his new duties as senator, serving on the upper chamber’s finance committee, and became one of FDR’s principal southern allies in the New Yorker’s quest for the presidency. The Roosevelt-Hull alliance blossomed both on tactics and on issues of principle. Both had good reason to unite in resistance to efforts by forces loyal to Smith and party chairman John J. Raskob to dominate the Democratic National Committee. Raskob’s pro-tariff views were anathema to Hull, who suspected that the Smith Democrats wanted to steal the soul of his party. Roosevelt, for his part, feared an effort to lock up the party machinery behind another run by Smith at the presidency. The struggle came to a head in March 1931, when Raskob, “proxies” of absent committee members in hand, sought to force through planks in favor of the national repeal of prohibition and higher tariffs. The Hull-Roosevelt victory in the committee created the basis for a natural alliance as the 1932 campaign approached.14
Hull formally and publicly committed to FDR in February of that year. He subsequently served as Roosevelt’s most important backer in the Senate, as his principal supporter among southern Democrats, and as a major force in the writing and passage of the party’s platform. Hull believed, with good reason, that he had played an important role in his party’s return to the White House. FDR himself assured him so, and Roosevelt’s campaign manager James A. Farley was unstinting in his praise. Farley insisted that he knew of “no man in America who, in the days when we needed a friend, rendered more efficient and loyal service in the preconvention days.” Hull was the man “whose advice we always sought and whose judgment we accepted.” Content that the White House had been rescued from the Republicans following twelve years of political exile, Hull prepared to return his attention to the Senate and to the legislative duties to which he had dedicated his life.15
Hull’s critics claimed with some justification that he was a one-issue politician. The Tennessean had had an intense interest in tariff measures since 1888, when, as a teenager with a budding interest in politics, he followed the progress of the Mills tariff bill through Congress. Hull’s political mentor, Tennessee congressman Burton McMillan, had advocated a low tariff during the last years of the nineteenth century from his seat on the House Ways and Means Committee. Following his arrival in Washington as a neophyte congressman, Hull honed his expertise through frequent Sunday afternoon discussions with his friend, neighbor, and congressional counterpart, E. J. Hill, a Connecticut Republican who also resided at Washington’s Cochran Hotel. The tariff, Hull believed, pitted the interests of the industrial Northeast against those of the agricultural South and West. As a rural southern Democrat, Hull fit naturally into an antitariff stance, for efficient American farmers dominated the domestic market, producing more than Americans could consume, and thus had nothing to gain from closing the United States to foreign competition. Indeed, during periods of high tariffs farmers paid more for protected nonagricultural products while losing opportunities to export their surpluses. Low tariffs, in contrast, would lower prices farmers paid for manufactured goods, make export of American agricultural products easier, and lead to higher prices for the goods farmers produced. Hull’s approach to tariffs also reflected his strong progressive instincts. Tariffs, he believed, shifted the burden of financing government from the rich to the poor; concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists influential enough to win favorable treatment for their products; and worked not as an effective source of revenue—for that purpose, lower, reasonable tariffs were legitimate, he admitted—but as a trade barrier that, by reducing trade, actually lowered revenue. Although U.S. producers had a right to a fair profit, they should not pursue this profit by stifling fair competition....
