The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (4 page)

The 1932 election turned Hoover’s 1928 victory upside down. In 1928 Hoover had won the most colossal electoral majority in over a century. In 1932 his repudiation was devastating. In a Democratic landslide, Roosevelt carried all but six of the forty-eight states, for 472 electoral votes to Hoover’s 59, and won 59 percent of the popular vote. In reporting the returns,
Time
magazine called Hoover “President Reject.”
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The complex causes and cures of the Great Depression remain a vexed issue. The Depression was certainly not simply a crisis of confidence, as at times Hoover seemed to believe, but one of fundamental national policy and economic structures. Yet from the outset, numerous figures, including Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, and entertainers, agreed that the Depression was also an emotional crisis and that it needed to be addressed on emotional terms. Market economies are social institutions, after all, not simply constellations of natural forces. They depend on moral and social values, including confidence, trust, and expectations of stability.
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All of these had taken a severe beating in the years since the stock market crash of October 1929. To reinvigorate these values was thus not a distraction or an escape. Because such values could be powerful forces in enlivening a paralyzed economy, to summon them forth was a potent political act.

For all the innovations of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extraordinary first hundred days in office, in which he sought to provide economic relief and recovery as quickly as possible, arguably the most immediate, essential, and enduring achievement was the fundamentally different emotional attitude he successfully projected: a contagious sense of optimism and purpose. As Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor and longtime supporter, wrote in her memoirs, “When Franklin Roosevelt and his administration began their work in Washington in March 1933, the New Deal was not a plan with form and content. It was a happy phrase he had coined during the campaign, and its value was psychological. It made people feel better, and in that terrible period of depression they needed to feel better.”
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Hoover and Roosevelt reflected not just two different understandings of the role of the federal government in the economy but also two fundamentally different conceptions of leadership, one bureaucratic, the other more charismatic. The contrast also revealed two markedly different appetites for aggressive innovation. It indicated two very different approaches to the popular media of the day. Hoover, in so many ways an embodiment of technocratic skills, approached the camera merely as a recording device and the radio as a transmitter. Roosevelt, cultivating his considerable charm and skills as an actor, brilliantly seized these same media and bent them to his own purposes. In so doing, Roosevelt helped to forge, as Hoover had devastatingly failed to do, a broad emotional alliance between the politics of the New Deal and broader national efforts, both populist and corporate, endeavoring to get people back on their feet, with renewed confidence, smiling once again, ready to work, to invest, and to spend.

Only a few weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory, when the president-elect arrived at Warm Springs, Georgia, a reporter for the
Atlanta Constitution
observed, “After nearly a decade of grim visages and dour countenances the White House at Washington is about to adopt as its symbol a smile.”
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Indeed, Hoover’s worried frown and Roosevelt’s radiant smile epitomized their contrasting styles of presidential leadership. All that was warm, exuberant, ebullient, jaunty, optimistic, and hearty in FDR seemed cold, stiff, dour, pessimistic, and reserved in Hoover. Roosevelt’s smile, and the voice, gestures, words, and spirit that accompanied it, were essential to his success, and a vital part of his political legacy. In fact, with Roosevelt the requisite emotional expression of American presidents permanently changed. Roosevelt grinned more effectively than any president before him, and he made a broad smile an essential element for every president since.

The basis of that smile was a natural gift, but its perfection was cultivated. Born in 1882 in Hyde Park, New York, to doting parents from families of immense wealth and privilege, Roosevelt enjoyed a childhood as different from Hoover’s as imaginable. His father was a rich businessman with railroad and mining interests, who, in declining health, had abundant leisure to pursue his passion for horses and travel. His mother was not a dour Quaker minister but a patrician Delano Episcopalian. As an only child, he learned to charm adults and to hide or distract attention from physical and emotional discomfort. The villagers of Hyde Park, New York, treated Franklin and his family as local lords, doffing their caps when he and his father rode by, and addressing them as “Mister James” and “Master Franklin.”
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Yet young Franklin was not a political natural. As a fledgling New York state senator, the man who became one of the greatest politicians in American history was notably lacking in charisma. Frances Perkins remembered “a vivid impression” of FDR when, as head of the New York Consumers League, she saw him in 1911 on the floor of the New York State Senate: “tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.”
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Gradually, Roosevelt learned to shed his hauteur and to charm strangers and colleagues alike with a magnetic grin and ebullient personality. The transformation did not occur all at once. But by the time of the 1920 Democratic national convention in San Francisco, in which he received the nomination for vice president, he had learned, in Perkins’s words, “how to feign the genial enthusiasm required to build the bridges he needed to advance his career.”
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He envisioned that career with startling precision. In 1901, when Franklin was still a slender, narrow-shouldered, six-foot-one Harvard undergraduate, the elevation of his distant cousin (and future wife’s uncle) Theodore to the presidency made him a role model, right down to his pince-nez spectacles. Franklin determined to follow TR’s steps up the political ladder from the New York state legislature to assistant secretary of the navy to New York governor right on to the White House.
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During the next two decades FDR steadily climbed the rungs according to plan, restively serving as assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, then in 1920 achieving national attention as the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket (though suffering predictable defeat).

The sudden, apparently insuperable obstacle to achieving his goal, of course, was his contraction of poliomyelitis in August 1921. It was undoubtedly the great trial of his life, physically, emotionally, and professionally. While vacationing on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, with his family, he first experienced chills and fatigue, then weakness in one knee. Within two days he could no longer stand, and by the third, he was virtually paralyzed from the chest down, and the weakness extended to his shoulders, arms, and hands. His skin ached acutely. His vigorous body had suddenly become an inert throbbing mass. He lay in bed in excruciating torment, unable to sit up or turn himself from side to side, even to defecate or urinate without aid. His wife, Eleanor, who had not slept with him at least since her discovery in 1918 of his affair with her social secretary Lucy Mercer, now joined in an intense new intimacy. She shifted his body in bed, rubbed his back, buttocks, and useless legs, and inserted his enemas and catheter.
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For the next seven years, and, to a lesser degree, for the rest of his life, Roosevelt dedicated himself to his recovery. It was a long, arduous, painful effort. To keep his legs from bending grotesquely toward his hips as the paralyzed muscles tightened, attendants encased each leg in plaster and hammered wedges behind the knees in a torturous regimen lasting many days. Fitted with steel braces that weighed fourteen pounds and using crutches, he slowly mastered a rocking method of “walking,” by which he swung one leg before him, regained a precarious balance, and then swung the other. He never complained. Indeed, he often exceeded his regimen and so did more harm than good. His greatest goal was to walk again unaided. It was a goal he never achieved but also one he never completely surrendered. Years later, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked, “You know that he has never said he could not walk.”
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Recovery was a constant emotional and psychological struggle as well as a physical one. As Roosevelt toughened and thickened his upper body, acquiring the massive chest, back, arms, shoulders, and neck of a wrestler to assist in moving his heavy steel braces and shriveled, useless legs, so too did he develop new layers to his personality and manner. His reluctance to complain, easy smile, charm, talent for banter, and keen ambition—all were formidably brought to bear on his situation. He became supremely adroit at the social arts and psychological acts necessary to his recovery. These might be listed as a series of
d
’s: determination, discipline, denial, distraction, deception. Although he occasionally experienced waves of depression, he determinedly forced them down. In all of these, Roosevelt’s smile was essential.

He used that smile from the outset. His doting mother, Sara, described in a letter her first meeting with her adored son after the illness:

I got here yesterday at 1:30 and at once . . . came up to a brave, smiling, and beautiful son, who said: ‘Well, I’m glad you are back Mummy and I got up this party for you!’ He had shaved himself and seems very bright and
keen
. Below his waist he cannot move at all. His legs (that I have always been proud of) have to be moved often as they ache when long in one position. He and Eleanor decided at once to be cheerful and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness, so I have fallen in and follow their glorious example. . . . They went into his room and I hear them all laughing, Eleanor in the lead.
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Similarly, his oldest son, James, then thirteen, later remembered how his father greeted his children from his sickbed, even as the paralysis still gripped his upper body: “He grinned at us, and he did his best to call out, or gasp out, some cheery response to our tremulous, just-this-side-of-tears greetings.”
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In ensuing years, Roosevelt would perfect this hearty manner. Losing physical mobility and unable to command attention by his height as he once did, he learned to hold listeners by his powerful performance of geniality, confidence, and vitality. Waving his six-inch-long quill-stemmed cigarette holder to emphasize his points, pouring out stories, reminiscences, jokes, and gossip, he bathed listeners in a torrent of talk. Through his energetic voice, broad, expansive gestures, mobile face, ready laugh, and exuberant spirits, he gave an impression of great animation while sitting still. Keenly sensitive to potential embarrassment at his condition, he learned how to charm others and to sense their own foibles. Above all, he came to appreciate how powerful his example of triumph over adversity was, and, even to a degree among intimates, he learned to feign greater recovery than he had actually achieved.
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During his long convalescence Roosevelt continued to consolidate and extend his political power. When given the opportunity by the outgoing New York governor, Al Smith, to run for his post in 1928, after a brief hesitation, he seized it. As the Democratic presidential candidate that year, Smith was crushed in the Hoover landslide, but Roosevelt narrowly beat out his Republican opponent. FDR quickly put his own reform stamp on his administration and won easy reelection in 1930. Then, at the 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he deftly wrested the presidential nomination away from Smith and other rivals on the fourth ballot.

Also at the convention FDR’s supporters snatched a theme song that was still warm from the grip of a Republican governor and proudly bestowed it on their candidate. “Happy Days Are Here Again” originated as the booming Technicolor finale number in MGM’s largely black-and-white backstage musical
Chasing Rainbows
(1930), and it immediately became an anthem of cheer against the gloom of the Great Depression. Composed by Milton Ager in 4/4 time, the tune is eminently danceable as a two-step and even, in one 1930 rendition by Jack Hylton and His Orchestra, as a polka. Bidding farewell to gray skies and gloomy times, Jack Yellen’s lyrics compel a smile as they greet the dawning of happy days.

California’s Governor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph had made the piece his theme song, and the band played it in tribute to him at the 1932 Republican convention, in which he loyally supported Hoover. Nonetheless, after Roosevelt partisans triumphantly sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” as they clinched his nomination at the Democratic convention, the song became indelibly associated with FDR, and the phrase was a key one in Roosevelt’s campaign. As much as his promise of a “new deal,” it captured FDR’s exuberant optimism.
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In the general campaign, barnstorming the country by train, speaking energetically and smiling broadly from the rear of his railroad car at each stop, Roosevelt attacked Hoover from every angle. “Roosevelt smiles and smiles and smiles and it doesn’t get tiresome,” wrote a reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle
. “He can smile more than any man in American politics without being insipid.” Yet not even all of FDR’s admirers fully agreed with this assessment. In the words of two early analysts of the campaign, “Governor Roosevelt . . . almost overdid his charm; he smiled so broadly and he wagged his head so sincerely and spoke so appealingly and intimately that his more urbane admirers suffered acute distress. But the crowds liked him for all these posturings.”
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