Raymond Moley was an American professor of political science, presidential adviser, and journalist.
Background
Raymond Charles Moley was born on September 27, 1886, in Berea, Ohio. He was the son of Felix James Moley, an immigrant storekeeper from Ireland, and Agnes Fairchild. The family moved to the nearby village of Olmsted Falls, Ohio, in 1893.
Education
Moley graduated from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea in 1906 and for the next three years worked as a teacher and superintendent of schools in Olmsted Falls. The onset of tuberculosis in 1909 led to nearly three years of convalescence in Colorado and New Mexico. He returned to Ohio in 1912 to teach history at Cleveland's West High School, where he remained until 1914. Meanwhile, he continued his studies at Oberlin College, where he received his master's degree in 1913. In 1914, Moley enrolled as a graduate student in political science at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation on state government reform in the Progressive Era was supervised by the famed historian Charles A. Beard. He received his Ph. D. in 1918, and in that same year became an assistant professor of politics at Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Career
Reflecting his persistent attraction to a more active public role, however, in 1919 Moley accepted appointment as director of the Cleveland Foundation. The nation's first community trust, the foundation promoted civic reform, research on urban issues, business-government cooperation, and local philanthropy. Moley left this position in 1923 to become an associate professor of public law at Columbia University. Moley made a reputation as an expert on criminal justice, publishing two widely acclaimed works: Politics and Criminal Prosecution (1929) and Our Criminal Courts (1930). His increasing prominence in this field brought him to the attention of Louis M. Howe, then a member of the National Crime Commission and a close associate of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Through this connection, Moley played a small role in Roosevelt's 1928 New York gubernatorial campaign and later advised GovernorRoosevelt on criminal justice matters. In 1930, Moley served on a committee that drafted a model state parole system for Roosevelt, and in 1931 Roosevelt appointed him as his chief representative on the New York State Commission on Administration of Justice. In early 1932, Samuel I. Rosenman, counsel to Governor Roosevelt, now a presidential candidate, asked Moley to join the informal group of academic advisers to Roosevelt that became known as the Brain Trust. Moley quickly emerged as the leader of the group, whose most conspicuous other members included his Columbia University colleagues Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Moley had been raised in the Populist political tradition of William Jennings Bryan, with its hostility to Wall Street and suspicion of the special interest. But he was also a great admirer of the "single-tax" theorist Henry George and of Cleveland reform mayor Tom L. Johnson. From George's writings, Moley learned the importance of transcending Bryan's simple Manichaeanism that pitted the virtuous people against the evil interests, and of thinking systemically about economic and social issues. Johnson provided him with a practical example of the complexities of applying reform theories to recalcitrant reality. Moley's own experience at the Cleveland Foundation no doubt also convinced him that cooperation between business and government was both viable and conducive to the public good. Yet in many ways, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, Moley remained faithful to the small-town, Midwestern values that Bryan had championed. This ideological heritage shaped Moley's contributions to the Brain Trust.
Though the group never developed a formal philosophy or a comprehensive manifesto, its members broadly agreed that the causes of the Great Depression lay in the chaotic, disarticulated, wasteful practices of the American economy. Rejecting the laissez-faire theory of conservative classical economists, as well as the confiscatory doctrines of socialism and the antitrust nostrums of the populists, the Brain Trusters sought remedies for the catastrophe of the Depression in government-directed economic planning on a national scale, with government acting in close consultation and cooperation with private business. Specifically, the Brain Trusters advocated greatly expanded spending on public works; national policies governing wages, prices, and production levels; relief for the long-suffering agricultural sector; and better regulation of banking and securities markets. In broad outline, these ideas informed the major programs of the early New Deal, including the Public Works Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and the banking and securities legislation of 1933 and 1934.
In the four intervening months between Roosevelt's election in November 1932 and his inauguration in March 1933, Moley emerged as a key policy adviser to Roosevelt. Moley accompanied President-elect Roosevelt to two tense White House meetings with Herbert Hoover, who tried to persuade Roosevelt to continue the defeated president's efforts to fight the Depression through international agreements lowering tariffs, stabilizing exchange rates, and preserving the gold standard. Buttressed by the intensely nationalistic Moley, who argued that the causes of the Depression were domestic and that recovery required disentanglement from the international economic system, Roosevelt turned these suggestions aside. Moley became assistant secretary of state in the new Roosevelt administration, with the understanding that his portfolio would extend well beyond diplomatic matters.
Moley received what became his last major assignment from Roosevelt just after the adjournment of the Hundred Days session of Congress in June 1933, when he was dispatched as the president's personal representative to the World Economic and Monetary Conference in London, with instructions to negotiate a vague agreement on currency stabilization. This was a delicate mission for Moley, who had to contend in London with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the official head of the American delegation. Hull resented both Moley's presence and Moley's nationalistic views, which were sharply at odds with the secretary's own internationalism. In the end, Moley succeeded in severely antagonizing Hull, but failed to rescue the conference. On July 3, 1933, Roosevelt sent his notorious "bombshell message" to London, effectively foreclosing the possibility of further American international economic cooperation.
Press accounts of the episode dwelt upon Roosevelt's apparent repudiation and public humiliation of Moley. Hull seized the occasion to insist that Moley be removed from the State Department. Ironically, the nationalistic, even isolationist, sentiments of the "bombshell message" faithfully reflected the views that Moley himself had long urged upon Roosevelt. Moley resigned his government position in 1933 to return to teaching at Columbia and to assume the editorship of Today, a periodical intended to be "concerned with public affairs, independent in its political affiliations, liberal in outlook"; it was absorbed by Newsweek in 1937.
As a private citizen, he held a series of "Moley dinners" in 1934, designed to build business confidence in the New Deal and to defang the nascent and ferociously anti-Roosevelt Liberty League. He continued as an occasional speechwriter for the president, collaborating on Roosevelt's 1936 acceptance speech. But though he retained his respect and affection for Roosevelt's person, Moley grew increasingly disenchanted with what he regarded as the New Deal's growing hostility toward business. Moley openly broke with the New Deal in 1939 when he published After Seven Years, a scrupulously accurate, vividly written, and highly critical account of Roosevelt's policies. In 1940, he supported Wendell Willkie for president, and gradually drifted still further rightward. He backed Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, and actively encouraged the career of Richard M. Nixon, who awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1970.
Raymond Charles Moley died on February 18, 1975, in Phoenix, Arizona.
Moley was a middle-aged man of medium height, a bit portly, whose hair was thinning. Affable and engaging, he was also toughminded and coolly analytical. Though his posture of repudiating romantic idealism and facing the world without illusions distanced him from many of his academic colleagues, he always retained something of the professorial manner, including a fondness for smoking a pipe.
Quotes from others about the person
Democratic Congressman Sam Rayburn of Texas pointedly declared to Moley, "I hope we don't have any goddamned Rasputin in this administration. "
Connections
Moley married Eva Dall of Olmsted Falls on August 14, 1916, with whom he had twin sons. After divorcing his first wife, he married Frances S. Hebard on January 15, 1949, with whom he had one daughter.