Raymond Moley, best known as a leading member of the “brain trust” that guided Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House and as FDR’s first assistant secretary of state, became the first full-time director of the Cleveland Foundation on September 1, 1919. Born in the Cuyahoga County town of Berea, Ohio, in 1886, Moley graduated from his hometown college (now Baldwin Wallace University) in 1906 and taught at a country school in nearby Olmsted Falls before being elected “boy mayor” of that rural village in 1908.
He next decided to pursue a master’s degree (Oberlin College, 1913) and managed to earn a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1918 while teaching that subject at Western Reserve College in Cleveland and organizing citizenship classes for Cleveland’s foreign-born as the mayor’s Americanization chief during World War I. These varied experiences recommended Moley to the board of the Cleveland Foundation, which hired him in May 1919 to complete work on the foundation’s second major municipal survey, a recreation study. When Leonard Ayres (who had conducted the first major survey, on education) declined the offer of the foundation’s directorship, the board turned to Moley, awarding him a contract for a one-year term at a salary of $5,000.
During his four-year tenure as director, Moley shepherded two additional research efforts. The first turned out to be a minor inquiry into the causes of political disaffection among newly arrived immigrants, whose interests Moley continued to champion as the volunteer chair of the Citizens Bureau, a nonprofit organization that offered legal aid to the foreign-born. The dissection of the city’s dysfunctional and unfair criminal justice system, officially requested by the Cleveland Bar Association at Moley’s behest, was perhaps the most important of the eight surveys commissioned by foundation.
In 1922, Moley accepted an offer from Columbia University to become an associate professor of government at its sister Barnard College the following year. His work on behalf of Democrat Al Smith’s failed presidential campaigns in 1924 and 1928 introduced the political science professor to Smith’s successor as New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their formal association began when Governor Roosevelt drafted Moley to design a model state parole plan.
Moley became one of FDR’s most trusted advisers and speechwriters during the governor’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1932. Fred Goff’s former protégé persuaded FDR and the Democrats to embrace a progressive economic and social agenda calling for such reforms as a massive federal public works program to assuage joblessness, Wall Street accountability and transparency, and the separation of commercial and investment banking. The term Moley coined to describe this agenda—the “New Deal”—would forever be associated with Roosevelt’s acuminous first term in the White House.
Moley’s service as assistant secretary of state was brief but consequential. Because his office was located in the West Wing, he acted as gatekeeper of Roosevelt’s time while continuing to draft presidential speeches and fireside chats. A difference of opinion with the secretary of state about foreign trade—Moley favored a certain degree of protectionism—prompted the assistant secretary’s resignation in September 1933. He soon found new bully pulpits as a syndicated political journalist and the editor of the weekly journal Today (which later merged with Newsweek).
When he left the Cleveland Foundation, Moley said that he regretted the move because he considered Cleveland “in many ways the most progressive city in America.” Later in life, he sized up his hometown legacy differently. He now believed that the most important contribution “by far” of the criminal justice survey was “what it did for the Cleveland Foundation.” The high-impact survey, he had come to recognize, “literally underlined the importance of the foundation as one of Cleveland’s great institutions.”