He made excellent appointments for administering the Tennessee Valley Authority (Dr. Arthur Morgan) and the Securities Com mission (Mr. Joseph P. Kennedy) ; his choice of Mr. Harry Hop kins as principal agent in charge of relief was also sound, though he was not able to prevent costly bickering between Mr. Hopkins and Secretary Harold I. Ickes. His administration at first moved too rapidly for the civil service merit system, but the attacks on its alleged subserviency to spoilsmen were grossly exaggerated.
While busy with administration Mr. Roosevelt continued to de mand new measures of social and economic reconstruction. One of the most important was the Gold Reserve Act of January under which he devalued the dollar to 59.06 cents in terms of its former gold parity. This step met such general approval that the next Congressional and Presidential campaigns evoked no criticism of it. A measure close to Mr. Roosevelt's heart, the Utilities Act, designed to end abuses in the organization of huge holding companies, became law August 26, 1935. It was essen tially an attack upon one of the most complicated and mis chievous forms of quasi-monopoly in the post-war period. Still more important was the Social Security Act, passed in August 1935 under pressure from Mr. Roosevelt and after he had ap pointed a Committee on Economic Security to report plans.
Setting up two great Federal-State systems for unemployment compensation and contributory old-age insurance, it obviously required amendment in the light of future experience, but held great social possibilities. Meanwhile Mr. Roosevelt on June 19, 1935 urged legislation to effect a wider distribution of wealth, call ing for two sets of measures : one, (inheritance taxes, high income surtaxes, abolition of tax-exempt securities) to halt the accumula tion and transmission of great fortunes; the other, (graduated corporation income taxes, holding-company taxes, and taxes on unwieldy corporate surpluses) to limit the concentration of power in big business. A highly controversial tax law shortly embodied
some of these proposals.
Mr. Roosevelt's views on national policy were never left in doubt. He was an earnest advocate of national planning; but by this he meant not the regimentation of society, but only a con stant use of foresight in dealing with national problems. He was hostile to great accumulations of wealth; suspicious of efforts by large-scale business to manipulate the government; eager to give better treatment to the farmer as against urban industry, and to labour as against capital; a believer in constant experimenta tion in government; certain that a more co-operative, less individ ualistic society must come into existence. In a time when con flict of opinion was violent, his way of zigzagging between "right" and "left" perhaps gave him a maximum of public support. His method of pushing reform, as the Securities and Exchange Act, Utilities Act, and other laws showed, was to ask for maximum remedies, then accepting modifications as experience showed them necessary. As the national crisis moderated, however, his tendency was clearly toward a conservative norm.
The Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia renom inated Mr. Roosevelt by acclamation on June 27, 1936, and he accepted in a speech to an enormous outdoor crowd in that city.
In the campaign that followed he spoke in nearly all the states east of the Rockies and north of the Ohio. The balloting on November 3, 1936 resulted in what was probably the most sweep ing victory in all American elections, a popular plurality of 11,069,785 votes, and an electoral vote of 523 to 8 for his op ponent, Mr. Alfred M. Landon, governor of Kansas. (A. N.)