Penguin History of the United States of America (98 page)

Oh yes, I know the faults and the other side,
The lyncher’s rope, the bought justice, the wasted land,
The scale on the leaf, the borers in the corn,
The finks with their clubs, the grey sky of relief,
All the long shame of our hearts and the long disunion.
I am merely remarking – as a country, we try.
As a country, I think we try.

Stephen Vincent Benét, 1940

We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us. This is new to us. It will be hard for us.

Dean Acheson, 1946

It’s a big holiday ev’rywhere

For the Jones family has a brand-new heir

He’s the joy heaven-sent, and they proudly present

Mr Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones!

When he grows up he never will stray

With a name like the one that he’s got today.

As he walks down the street folks will say, Pleased to meet

Mr Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones!

Popular song, 1939

Washington, DC, 4 March 1933. A cold, windy day. A cripple took the Presidential oath and then addressed America.

This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

His stern voice rang out, both to those present at the Capitol and to tens of millions listening anxiously to their radios:

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.

It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

It was one of the turning-points of American history. In a few minutes Roosevelt did what had so wearyingly eluded Hoover for four years: he gave back to his countrymen their hope and their energy. By the end of the week half a million grateful letters had poured into the White House – first waters of a flood that was never to dry up. Rhetoric was and is the curse of American politics; but here for once were words that meant something – words that became deeds.

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less… We do not distrust the future of democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

To most Americans the disaster of the Depression had come as an earthquake, without warning destroying their old lives so totally that they lost all their self-confidence. Their lives and their country were suddenly, it seemed, equally and entirely beyond their helping: they were lost in a dark wood. Now came a guide whom they trusted. Ultimately that trust was what saved them, for it was a renewed trust in themselves. The first achievement of the New Deal (as, following the phrase in Roosevelt’s acceptance speech, his administration was to be universally known) was this restoration of faith; and the first question that needs to be answered is, how could Roosevelt manage it?

He had been born (in 1882) to privilege, to the richer branch of an old Dutch gentry family of New York state. His mother, Sara Delano, came from a similar clan, of Huguenot origin. He was a pampered only child; as a young man he led the life of an easygoing aristocrat both at Harvard, where he picked up no more than a smattering of erudition, and later as a not very diligent lawyer in New York city. His first remarkable act was to marry Eleanor Roosevelt, his distant cousin, Theodore’s niece, who was as extraordinary a woman, it turned out, as he was a man. He soon turned to politics but, perhaps surprisingly, stuck to the Democratic party, to which his own branch of the family had always belonged. His charm, energy, shrewdness and tall good looks carried him easily up the ladder, from state Senator (1910), to Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, to Vice-Presidential candidate in 1920. Then disaster struck: in 1921 he contracted poliomyelitis and lost the use of his legs. Although he recovered sufficiently to be able to stand for short periods in iron leg braces, it was always to be agony for him. His real quality began to show. Doughtily supported by his wife, he refused to surrender to his illness, somehow keeping his political career going. By standing in for him on every possible occasion, Mrs Roosevelt became a political figure in her own right. Gradually he re-established himself as an effective member of the New
York Democracy. He made the nominating speech for Al Smith at the convention of 1924, and Smith picked him to be his successor as gubernatorial candidate in 1928. He won his election by a narrow margin just as Smith went heavily down to defeat in the Presidential race, failing to carry his own state. No doubt this encouraged Roosevelt to strike out as his own man; at any rate he soon established himself as an independent force. He responded effectively enough to the Crash and the Depression to win re-election in 1930 by a huge margin. He took vigorous action to assist the towns and cities of the state in furnishing relief to the unemployed, and his Temporary Relief Administration (TERA) may be mentioned as the first of all his alphabetical agencies. He became the favourite for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1932; the sequel has already been told.

The man who spoke to the American people in 1933, then, having overcome fearful blows in his own life (not only polio: he had fallen deeply in love with his wife’s secretary in 1918, and given her up for various good reasons; but he was to be lonely ever after), was well qualified to tell them that they were not and could not be defeated. But what inspired them was more than grit. It was more than his gallantry and charm, of which he made no use on 4 March. At bottom, Franklin Roosevelt was a man of power and vision. He was a master politician, who took command with absolute authority: he knew, like the elder Pitt, that he could save the country and that no one else could. His strength and ability went along with a profound, creative desire to shape America for a better future: his administration was to pursue reform as well as recovery. On Inauguration Day his hearers sensed above all his inner certainty and his deep sympathy with their plight.

Those closer to FDR (as they referred to him) discovered that he was better able to respond to people in numbers, at a distance, than to the needs of intimates. Like many a man who is totally committed to his career – in Roosevelt’s case it might for once be truer to say wedded to his destiny – he was highly egoistic. At close quarters he could be evasive, cold, occasionally brutal, if others grew too demanding. If they kept their place he could be boundlessly patient and generous;
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but who can always know his place? Many paid in the end a very high price for the privilege of working for FDR. Yet so intoxicating was his leadership that few seem to have regretted it. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, they felt it was enough to have served his great purposes. (She herself did so by endless travelling, public appearances, letter-writing, journalism, all in order to keep the people in touch with their President, and the President in touch with the people.) Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s closest adviser for more than twenty years, remarked, as he lay
dying, ‘I have been as close to Franklin Roosevelt as a valet, and he is still a hero to me.’ America got the benefit of this devotion.

The new President’s first actions were governed by the need to build on the inspiration of the inaugural speech. He called the new Congress into special session at once. The most urgent problem was the rescue of the banks. A radical measure might have been difficult to get through Congress with any speed; worse, it would have done nothing to restore confidence – on the contrary, it would have deeply alarmed the propertied classes. So Roosevelt simply took over the conservative proposals of the Hoover administration. His own men collaborated with their predecessors, and in five days a banking bill was ready: it was rushed through Congress in under eight hours. Meantime the President had held the fort by proclaiming a national banking holiday. This way of announcing that the banks were not going to re-open just yet tickled the American sense of humour: spirits began to rise, in spite of the inconvenience. They rose still further eight days after the inauguration, when on a Sunday evening the President gave the first of his famous Fireside Chats on the radio. In these broadcasts Roosevelt, who had a strong actor’s instinct, projected himself with astonishing success into the homes of America, aiming always to sound like a friend of the family talking at the fireside. But the performances were always best when the lines were good. On this first occasion he was able to announce that the banks in the twelve Federal Reserve cities would re-open the next day, and thanks to his Emergency Banking Act would be safe. The people listened to that warm voice and believed: the next day bank deposits exceeded withdrawals.

A characteristic piece of New Deal legislation, the Banking Act was a conservative measure that yet reformed the ramshackle US banking system: many weak banks were not allowed to re-open, while solvent ones were backed explicitly by the federal government, which took on greatly increased powers to govern the whole system. The act can therefore count as the first of the New Deal reform measures. The same cannot be said of Roosevelt’s second initiative, on 10 March, when he sent a message to Congress demanding a wholesale slashing of civil service salaries and veterans’ benefits. No Congress would normally look at a proposal so damaging to so many well-organized voters; but in the crisis atmosphere this deflationary conservative measure was hurried through like the banking bill, though by no means so unanimously: ninety Democrats opposed it. Again, Roosevelt’s purpose was to rally the ranks: by showing his willingness to save money he hoped to encourage the rich to spend it. One industrialist at least responded by urging his employees to go out and buy something – anything: ‘President Roosevelt has done his part: now you do something.’ For a few precious weeks Roosevelt had the confidence of the business community, even winning the endorsement of the House of Morgan. It was enough: by June the threat of total economic collapse had disappeared.

He had not been elected President to save the bankers, all the same; and
at this very time the so-called Pecora Committee (named after its special attorney) was conducting a ruthless investigation, on behalf of Congress, into the seamy side of American high finance. The current J. P. Morgan might toploftily say he approved of Roosevelt: he cowered before Pecora. Besides, Roosevelt meant to be an effective reformer as well as a redeemer. Before long he recommended to Congress a securities bill for regulating Wall Street: it became law on 27 May. It provided that full information must be made available to the public whenever new securities were issued, and that directors who issued misleading prospectuses were liable to prosecution as criminals. That was bad enough from the point of view of the Wall Street speculators and manipulators; worse came a year later with the Act setting up the Securities and Exchange Commission, a body which had the duty and power to oversee the stock exchanges of the nation and punish wrongdoers. It was headed by Joseph P. Kennedy, a notable millionaire speculator, and proved highly effective. Before long it was an axiom on Wall Street that the administration was anti-business, though it was really only against dishonest and incompetent business.

Meantime, in 1933, the torrent of legislation rolled on, Congress being overwhelmingly eager to pass whatever laws the President and his team of brilliant young advisers (many of them were professors, which led to the term ‘the Brain Trust’) saw fit to recommend. On 31 March the Civilian Conservation Corps was established. This expressed, better perhaps than anything else he ever did, Roosevelt’s compassion for the unfortunate. It took a quarter of a million unemployed young men and set them, under quasi-military discipline, to carrying out a gigantic programme of reafforestation, dam-building, marsh-draining, thus hitting three targets simultaneously: the land was reclaimed, so were the boys (they were given schooling as well as work), and their small wages went to the help of their families. The veteran problem, which had proved so fatal to Hoover, was also solved in this way. A second expedition of unemployed veterans descended on Washington; they were warmly received, notably by Mrs Roosevelt, who kept them supplied with cups of coffee, and soon enlisted in the C C C.

To continue the work of cheering everybody up, the President remarked that it was a good time for a beer, and in advance of the Twenty-First Amendment, which abolished prohibition by repealing the Eighteenth, he had the Volstead Act changed to permit the manufacture of beer and light wine again.
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Nor did Roosevelt lose sight of other claims. A sweeping Agricultural Adjustment Act, which gave the federal government wide new powers to help the farmers, was ready for his signature by 12 May; and before that, on 19 April, he had taken the United States off the gold standard. His Director of the Budget thought that it was the end of Western civilization; but
Roosevelt hoped that this inflationary measure would not only counteract his earlier cuts, but do something to counter the terrible deflationary effects of the Depression which were still all too evident. The New Deal also came to the rescue of mortgaged farmers and city-dwellers by taking steps to prevent foreclosures, then dreadfully common: the federal government, in essence, underwrote both the lenders and the borrowers. And on the same day as the Agricultural Adjustment Act the Federal Emergency Relief Act was signed, which swept away Hooverism and recognized the national government’s duty to come directly to the rescue of the unemployed with a federal dole: 500 million dollars was made available for distribution through state and municipal agencies.