Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (59 page)

R
OOSEVELT COULD
hardly have devised a more dramatic backdrop for his inauguration. The country was in crisis, and the man elected to lead it through its moment of peril narrowly escaped assassination. Hoover added an element of petty bitterness to the drama. Defying tradition, the departing president refused to invite the Roosevelts to dinner the night before the inauguration, substituting an awkward tea. And when Roosevelt tried to end the awkwardness and afford the president a graceful exit from the room, Hoover simply aggravated the discomfort. “Mr. President, as you know, it is rather difficult for me to move in a hurry,” Roosevelt said. “It takes me a little while to get up, and I know how busy you must be. So please don’t wait for me.” Hoover stood up and fixed Roosevelt with a glare. “Mr. Roosevelt, after you have been president for a while, you will learn that the President of the United States waits for no one.” He stalked off, leaving his wife to handle the good-byes.

Hoover’s mood hadn’t improved the next morning. Roosevelt began the long day with a private service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House (and just east of where Henry Adams’s house, demolished for a hotel a few years earlier, had been). Endicott Peabody, seventy-five years old but still headmaster of the Groton School, conducted the service, which was attended by members of the Roosevelt family and close associates. Roosevelt valued the service for its own sake; he also thought it set a good tone for the first day of his new administration.

At eleven o’clock the car that would carry him to the inaugural ceremonies swung by the Mayflower Hotel, where he and Eleanor had spent the night. Roosevelt took his place in the back seat, and the driver proceeded to the White House to pick up Hoover. The outgoing president took a final look at the mansion but scarcely glanced at Roosevelt as he climbed in. The open car drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, with crowds cheering on either side. Roosevelt initially adopted the respectful posture that the cheers were for the (still) president and declined to acknowledge them. But within blocks the fiction became unsustainable, and he began smiling and waving his silk top hat at the crowd. The anger radiating from Hoover only intensified.

At the Capitol, Roosevelt let Hoover get out of the car, then took the arm of his son James and entered the Senate side of the building. He observed the swearing-in of the new senators and of John Nance Garner as vice president, and he witnessed the historic adjournment of the last lame duck session of Congress. (The seemingly endless interregnum had prompted approval of the Twentieth Amendment, which shifted presidential inaugurations to January 20 and canceled the post-election meetings of Congress.)

At one o’clock the president-elect and the rest of the inaugural party moved outdoors, to the east steps of the Capitol. A throng of one hundred thousand waited impatiently. Roosevelt’s demeanor was uncharacteristically serious. Arthur Krock was surprised by Roosevelt’s somber mood, but he thought it in keeping with the general feeling in Washington. “Though the city was gay with flags and lively with the music of bands and cheers for the marchers in the inaugural parade which followed the oath taking,” the
New York Times
reporter wrote, “the atmosphere which surrounded the change of government in the United States was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.”

Roosevelt had been preparing his inaugural address for a week. By his own later account he wrote the initial draft in four hours at Hyde Park on the night of February 27. His longhand sentences were then typed and polished, and reviewed and repolished during the next several days. Roosevelt amended the text by hand up to the last minute and improvised even from the final draft. After taking his oath of office—unusually repeating the words read from the Constitution, by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, rather than saying simply “I do”—the new president turned to the great crowd and, with unsmiling face, declared, “This is a day of national consecration, and I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels.”

Hoover was standing next to Roosevelt, and his dour expression became a grimace as he anticipated yet another attack on his administration. But Roosevelt proceeded with words of encouragement and hope. “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper…. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Before long this line about having to fear only fear would be hailed as a landmark of presidential rhetoric. At the time it didn’t seem so, not least since it was patently false. Americans had plenty to fear, starting with massive unemployment, widespread hunger, and a collapsing financial system. Yet coming from one who had just survived an assassination attempt, following a decadelong battle with polio, it struck a reassuring tone.

More noticed at the moment was a phrase that corroborated Hoover’s grimace and furnished the headlines for the next day’s news accounts of the inauguration. Roosevelt assailed the “unscrupulous money changers” of Wall Street as those responsible for America’s plight. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply,” he said. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence.” Waxing biblical, Roosevelt declared, at once accusingly and promisingly: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

Other matters demanded attention. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work,” Roosevelt said. This task would be accomplished in part “by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war.” It would be aided by a reconfiguration of the American economy. “We must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.” As means to such a vague end, Roosevelt advanced suggestions that could be variously interpreted. He called for “definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products,” for “insistence that the federal, state, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced,” and for “an adequate but sound currency.” On the foreign front he was somewhat clearer: “Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are, in point of time and necessity, secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.”

Though Roosevelt’s words left listeners uncertain as to what his administration would do, they made plain that the administration would do
something.
“We must act, and act quickly,” Roosevelt said. No longer would the federal government wait for the business cycle to turn and the economy to correct itself. Roosevelt announced that he would call a special session of Congress. He expected the legislature to rise to the challenge confronting it. But if Congress failed in its duty, he would take additional steps. “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require…. I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

No new president, not even Lincoln amid the secession crisis of 1861, had spoken so boldly of the power he required and would insist upon. The American people were demanding much, and they deserved all that government could accomplish for them. “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.”

22.

S
ARA
R
OOSEVELT SAT WITH HER SON ON THE PLATFORM AT THE INAUGURATION,
beside Eleanor and the children. She observed the ceremony with the pride any mother would feel on such an occasion, mixed with some stubborn residual conviction that Franklin would have been better off retiring to Hyde Park after contracting polio. If her thoughts extended beyond her son and his accomplishments, she might have reflected on the remarkable changes America had experienced during her lifetime. She wouldn’t have put it quite so, but the country had undergone a capitalist revolution, a thoroughgoing economic and social transformation in which an agrarian society had given way to one based on manufacturing; in which land as the predominant form of property had been eclipsed by bank accounts and corporate shares; in which small producers had been absorbed, marginalized, or extinguished by giant enterprises; in which the farmsteads and villages of a rural people had been overtaken by the cities of an urban nation; in which muscle-powered transport had fallen far behind the locomotion of steam and internal combustion; in which handwritten letters as the principal means of communication over distance had been supplanted by telegraph, telephone, and radio; in which a population descended primarily from Northwestern Europeans and West Africans had been augmented by the arrival of millions from Southern and Eastern Europe; in which the Protestants who founded America now jostled with Catholics and Jews; in which material life grew richer but more precarious and less equal.

The capitalist revolution had triggered, after the turn of the twentieth century, a democratic counterrevolution, as the institutions of government adjusted to the modern terms of economic existence. Progressives led by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had tamed the most egregious of the trusts, curbed the power of the private bankers, established standards of quality for food and drugs, opened the political process to greater popular participation, and generally reasserted the principle that even the greatest capitalist entities were ultimately responsible to the American people, acting through their democratic institutions.

After the World War the balance had shifted again, back in the direction of capitalism. The business of America, Calvin Coolidge had said, was business, and business largely had its way. The boom of the 1920s appeared proof of the efficacy of modern capitalism, which, Herbert Hoover promised, would carry the country to a new level of enduring prosperity.

The stock market crash had punctured the pretense of the New Era, and the depression had gone far toward discrediting capitalism. What remained to be seen—and for Franklin Roosevelt perhaps to help determine—was whether capitalism’s stumble would produce a democratic resurgence. In his campaign Roosevelt made much of the forgotten man, of the plight of the ordinary people of America, of the interdependence of all classes and occupational groups. Capitalist individualism—the philosophy of every man for himself—no longer persuaded. Whether democratic collectivism—the belief that we’re all in this together—could do better was the question of the hour.

It could hardly do worse. The late winter of 1933 was the darkest moment in American life since the Civil War, which for all the destruction it wreaked at least was comprehensible to ordinary men and women. The most discouraging aspect of the Great Depression was that it defied common logic. People went hungry while farmers dumped milk in ditches and left crops standing in the fields. The thriftiest savers, cautious souls who had shunned the stock market as reckless speculation, saw their carefully tended nest eggs vanish overnight as banks collapsed. Factories sat idle while millions wanted nothing more than to go back to work.

The magnitude of the disaster could only be estimated, not least because the Hoover administration hadn’t been eager to quantify the bad news. But the evidence available to a subsequent generation of historical statisticians indicated that by 1933 the total production of American farms and factories had fallen by a third, in real terms, since 1929. (The nominal decline was greater but included a sharp fall in prices as well.) One-quarter of American workers were unemployed in 1933: twelve million men and women, by the most plausible estimates. Many more were underemployed—working part-time or at jobs beneath their skills and training. Five thousand banks had failed or were failing, typically leaving their depositors without recourse. The stock market had lost three-quarters of its value since October 1929, wiping out millions more. Half a million home mortgages had been foreclosed, rendering the owners at once bankrupt and homeless. As property values plummeted, property tax receipts shriveled, forcing cities and states to lay off workers or pay them in IOUs.

Hunger scoured the land. Generations accustomed to pulling their own weight often refused to seek organized relief until they were starving; in other locales the relief simply fell short of what was required. Individuals and families hit the road looking for work and shelter; the Hoovervilles that sprang up in every city and many towns were merely the most visible manifestation of the tide of homelessness that swept the country. Young men and women postponed marriage; the nation’s birth rate fell by a third.

Old people were particularly vulnerable. Guaranteed pensions were a rarity in the 1930s; workers expected to save for their retirements or work until they died. But bank failures stole their savings, and unemployment their livelihoods. In the human nature of things they were less mobile than the young, often because they were sicker. Some moved in with their children; millions simply suffered alone.