Previously on "The Roosevelts"...
Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with a mysterious disease.
His legs felt funn and he felt feverish,
and he never walked without help again.
But his secret wouldn't keep him from the White House.
I pledge myself
to a new deal for the American people!
And now part 5 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History."
By the time FDR takes office,
there are at least 15 million unemployed,
probably more,
at least a quarter of the nation,
maybe a third.
And action now.
To get a sense of this, imagine that you're
one of 100,000 people in a football stadium
and that as you file out you're handed
a piece of paper saying, "you're fired."
Imagine the next week 100,000 more
come into that stadium, and as they leave,
each of them is told, "you no longer have a job, "
and imagine that happening for 52 weeks of the year
for 3 straight years.
You will then have approximated
the total of unemployed when Franklin Roosevelt
takes office.
By 1933, it was hard to put down a chilling thought...
"maybe the depression is never going to end."
There's a sense of fear that pervades the country.
John Maynard Keynes, the British economist,
was asked if there'd ever been anything before
like the great depression?
He said, "yes. It was called the dark ages, and it lasted 400 years."
We humbly ask the blessing of God.
May he protect each and every one of us.
May he guide me in the days to come.
Saturday, March 4, 1933, was inauguration day.
Among the friends and family members invited
to watch Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural parade
from the reviewing stand was the new president's
42-year-old sixth cousin Daisy Suckley.
She was quiet, good-humored, unmarried,
and already deeply devoted to Franklin Roosevelt.
His invitation had been so exciting,
she told a relative, that when the weekend was over
she thought she'd have to enter a convent.
My seat was on the president's stand,
section "B, " top row, from where I saw
the White House grounds, the parade,
and the president's head throughout the afternoon.
He had a high chair to sit on,
which gave the effect of his standing.
The first part of the parade was dignified,
the last part a sort of circus...
Tom mix cavorting in white on a black horse,
movie actresses on a float,
bands in fantastic feather costumes, et cetera.
Democracy!
The inauguration symbolized
almost a century and a half of American continuity,
but on that day in 1933, Americans were in the third year of a great depression
so crippling that it seemed to some
that unless the new president acted
with unprecedented boldness,
American democracy itself might be at an end,
and there were many who feared
the magnetic but essentially untried man
in the reviewing stand could not possibly be equal to the task.
Still 11 years earlier, Daisy had witnessed first-hand
Roosevelt's gallant struggle against the ravages of polio.
"Franklin is a man... mentally, physically,
and spiritually, " she confided to her diary.
"What more can I say?"
The rest of the country could only hope
that she was right.
S01E05 The Rising Road
There've been 3 presidents
who were larger than the office they inherited.
One was Washington, who fairly invented the office;
there was Lincoln, who preserved the country
at the center of which sits that office,
and then there was Roosevelt,
who fundamentally changed the relationship
of the citizen to the central government.
The presidency is like a soft leather glove,
and it takes the shape of the hand that's put into it,
and when a very big hand is put into it
and stretches the glove, stretches the office,
the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was.
So we are all living today with an office
enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt.
A president could be judged great,
Theodore Roosevelt once explained,
only if he had faced and overcome a great crisis.
Franklin Roosevelt would find himself confronted
by the two greatest crises since the civil war.
He had been taught since boyhood
to believe himself capable of succeeding at anything
to which he put his mind and hand,
and in part because of that belief,
he proved to have the power to make a majority
of his fellow citizens believe it, too.
The best of the new deal programs was Franklin Roosevelt's smile.
He was armored with Christian faith
that the universe is well-organized
and with the American faith that history is a rising road
and things are going to be all right.
Had that enormous head and that wonderful grin,
and it was the tonic the country needed.
The country was depressed.
We use the word depression in lots of ways,
and what they needed was a man who was
incapable of depression.
I have never known a man
who gave one a greater sense of security.
I never heard him say there was a problem
that he thought it was impossible
for human beings to solve.
I never knew him to face life or any problem
that came up with fear.
Franklin Roosevelt was essentially a lonely man.
No one was allowed to know all
that was going on within what one aide called
his "thickly forested interior."
That becomes a habit in your life,
to not reveal yourself to others,
as if there's a scar that
you're afraid that someone else will see.
You always have to be the one that's up.
You always have to be the one that's doing well,
and it means that you're not in touch,
in a certain sense, with some of those emotions
within yourself.
It makes it harder for you,
but it also makes you more mysterious,
more magical, perhaps, to the outside world.
Ideology did not interest him.
Once asked for his philosophy,
he said he was a Christian and a Democrat
and that was all.
He was steeped in tradition
and conservative by instinct,
but he was also utterly unafraid of experimentation.
"It is common sense to take a method
and try it, " he said.
"If it fails, admit it frankly and try another,
but above all, try something."
"I want to be a preaching president, "
FDR said, "like my cousin Theodore, "
and he believed, just as Theodore Roosevelt had believed,
that the presidency was "preeminently a place of moral leadership."
Building on the work of the first Roosevelt,
the second Roosevelt gave us the idea,
the shimmering, glittering idea of the heroic presidency
and with it the hope that complex problems
would yield to charisma.
This sets the country up for perpetual disappointment.
He set lofty goals for himself
and his country and pursued them
with a cheerful deviousness that sometimes appalled
his allies and often disappointed his wife.
He might have been happier
with a wife who was completely uncritical.
That I was never able to be,
and he had to find it in other people.
Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur,
even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome.
I was one of those who served his purposes.
The Roosevelts would become
perhaps the most admired and the most reviled couple
ever to occupy the White House.
Franklin would be denounced as a dictator,
a socialist, a traitor to his class.
Eleanor was dismissed as naive, meddling, dangerously radical.
They needed each other, too.
One was strong where the other was weak.
FDR was not as idealistic as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt was not as good a politician
as Franklin Roosevelt.
Together they represented
both the better angels of our nature
and a sense of how to get it done,
how to let those angels actually have some authority and run things.
5,000 banks have failed.
9 million savings accounts have been wiped out,
and Roosevelt declares
a national bank holiday.
And this is a happy term,
not at all like Hoover's "Moratorium, "
and for several days,
the country operates without cash.
Pickpockets are no longer able to ply their trade.
The floating crap game disappears.
The new movie "King Kong" plays at the radio city music hall
to empty houses,
and the expectation is that when the banks are reopened
in the following week
there's gonna be a massive withdrawal.
On Sunday evening, March 12,
8 days after his inauguration,
the new president spoke to the american people.
The president wants to come into your home
and sit at your fireside for a little fireside chat.
Some 60 million Americans
gathered around their radios.
My friends, I want to talk
for a few minutes with the people
of the United States about banking,
to talk with the comparatively few
who understand the mechanics of banking
but more particularly with the overwhelming majority
of you who use banks for the making of deposits
and the drawing of checks.
I want to tell you...
Roosevelt did for speaking
what bing Crosby did for singing.
They called it crooning.
Before that for all of human history,
leaders had talked to their people...
Like this.
They had had to orate because the microphone
hadn't been invented.
And Roosevelt was the first one
to understand that you could have this new relationship
with the audience that was an intimate relationship.
Let me make it clear to you
that the banks will take care of all needs,
and it is my belief that hoarding
during the past week has become
an exceedingly unfashionable pastime.
He spoke to them like a father,
like a favorite Uncle,
speaking to them on a Sunday night.
Many of them had already gone to bed,
but they were huddled under their covers.
It was a cold night.
They turned out the lights to save on electricity,
and his voice came over the radio,
and it reassured them that things were gonna be ok.
In less than 15 minutes, he explained
how the banking system was supposed to work.
He explained how it had failed.
Some of our bankers had shown themselves
either incompetent or dishonest
in their handling of the people's funds.
They had used the money entrusted to them
in speculations and unwise loans.
He explained what his administration and Congress had done.
This bank holiday is affording us
the opportunity to supply the currency
necessary to meet the situation.
Remember that no sound bank is a dollar worse off
than it was when it closed its doors last week.
And then he spoke to them as an equal,
and he said that "all that we've done "in Washington will mean nothing
without the support of the American people."
After all, there is an element
in the readjustment of our financial system
more important than currency, more important than gold,
and that is the confidence of the people themselves.
Confidence and courage are the essentials
of success in carrying out our plan.
Let us unite in banishing fear.
It is your problem, my friends...
your problem, no less than it is mine.
Together we cannot fail.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the president of the United States
has spoken to you from the White House in Washington, D.C.
And in 14 1/2 minutes, he utterly changed
the mindset of Americans.
When he says in that first fireside chat
"hoarding has become a terribly unfashionable pastime.
"Please take your money out from under your mattresses
"and redeposit it in the banks
when they reopen, " people actually did it.
The same people who had been lining up,
pushing each other out of the way to get
their money out of the banks,
they now after listening to the new president
on the radio, they lined up
to redeposit the money.
Now that's leadership.
Dear sir, while listening
to your broadcast Sunday night,
our little home seemed a church,
our radio the pulpit,
and you the preacher.
Thank you for the courage and faith you have given us.
My dear Mr. President,
no sooner had your voice died on the air
when mother, a hard-shelled Republican,
jumped from her chair saying, "isn't he a fine man?"
And father with tears in his eyes said,
"I feel one hundred percent better already."
This, I am certain, is the effect your talk
must have had on all who heard you tonight.
"Capitalism, " one of Roosevelt's advisers remembered, "was saved in 8 days."
The banks are open.
The headlines tell a new story,
new confidence, new spirit.
Billions in untapped wealth begin to flow.
New money backed by real assets pours
from Uncle Sam's treasury to revitalize
the country's commerce.
The leader leads, and the nation heeds.
Roosevelt had had his entire cabinet
sworn in at once, something that had
never been done before.
It included Harold Ickes,
an old progressive party follower
of the president's cousin Theodore,
as interior secretary,
and Southern Democrats like Senator Cordell Hull
from Tennessee, who became Secretary of State.
Henry Wallace, the Republican editor
of a farm journal from Iowa,
was named Secretary of Agriculture,
and Frances Perkins took the oath of office
as Secretary of Labor,
the first woman ever to serve in any cabinet.
Over the coming years, the ranks of government
would for the first time come to include
more talented women, as well as Catholics, Jews,
and African-Americans.
The Roosevelt administration is run
by a man who never knew any of those people
when he was young,
but he was so secure and so unthreatened,
and if you are, then you can employ the talents
of anyone you like.
FDR understood that no program
and no presidency could work unless the president
continued to communicate effectively
with the voters.
To do that, he welcomed the press into his office
twice a week...
997 times before he was through.
Except for Theodore Roosevelt,
most presidents before him had treated reporters
as little better than spies.
FDR called them by their first names,
claimed to be a newspaperman himself
because he'd once edited the "Harvard Crimson, "
and provided a constant flow of copy that kept
him always at the center of events.
Ha ha ha! Is it on straight?
We are planning within a few days
to ask the Congress
for legislation to enable the government
to undertake public works, thus stimulating directly
and indirectly the employment
of many others in well-considered projects.
Never in american history
had so much transformative legislation been passed
by Congress in so little time.
Republicans as well as Democrats voted for it.
During the first hundred days
of Franklin Roosevelt's administration,
15 major bills granted the federal government
the power to decide which banks should reopen
and which should be allowed to fail,
to guarantee depositors' bank deposits
and to definitively separate commercial
and investment banking activities
in the Glass-Steagall Act,
to demand greater transparency
in the selling of stocks and dictate
the gold value of the dollar,
to make loans to homeowners to save them from foreclosure,
and keep farm income high by paying farmers not to produce,
to provide public jobs for those who needed work,
and to provide public power and flood control
to the vast Tennessee River Basin
that sprawled across 6 states, the TVA.
The AAA, the PWA, the FDIC...
among the alphabet soup of programs Roosevelt's
new deal created to stimulate the economy
and combat unemployment was one especially dear
to the president's heart.
He had pushed it through Congress
in less than a week after being inaugurated,
the civilian conservation corps.
The CCC eventually put some 3 million jobless men
to work preserving the American landscape,
controlling erosion,
developing national parks,
planting hundreds of millions of trees.
They earned $30 a month
and sent 25 of it home to help their families.
Inspiring his forest army by a personal visit,
President Roosevelt makes his first tour
of the civilian conservation corps camps
in the Shenandoah Valley.
After inspecting skyland, the commander-in-chief
takes a seat at the head of the table to eat
with the boys,
and he enjoys every bite
of the plain, wholesome food furnished at the camp.
I wish that I could take a couple of months off
from the White House and come down here
and live with them because I know I'd get
full of health the way they have.
The only difference is that they put on
an average of about 12 pounds a piece
since they got here,
and I'm trying to take off 12 pounds.
FDR's most ambitious and daring program
was the national recovery administration,
which set prices and wages in 541 industries.
Roosevelt was asking businesses to keep wages up
and simultaneously keep prices down.
Two million employers signed up.
The NRA was so popular that when a parade it sponsored
marched down 5th Avenue, more than a quarter of a million
New Yorkers came out to cheer.
My father took me there.
I was 10 years old,
and to this day, it is the greatest parade
in the history of New York City.
Garment workers, tailors, barbers, marched
like medieval guilds down 5th Avenue.
It went on all through the afternoon,
all through the evening, past midnight.
People went to movies, they came out,
and paraders were still going by.
They were saying, "we do our part, "
that the American people were going to be
in league with the American government
in seeing that the country could lift itself
out of the great depression.
"There is a unity in this country, "
FDR said, "which I have not seen since we went
to war in 1917."
What he did in the first hundred days
was demonstrate that the federal government
was capable of acting swiftly.
We tend to forget,
partly because we want to forget,
that at about that time the word dictator, dictatorial,
dictatorship did not have an unambiguously bad ring,
not just in America but in Europe, as well,
where people were simply terrified
by the sense that things had spun out of control,
and respected people talked to Franklin Roosevelt
about the need for dictatorial powers,
and the president shrank from those, rightly so,
but he did infuse his rhetoric with strong appeals
to collective, almost military action...
"we're all in this war together."
It rang tellingly reassuring
to a lot of Americans at that point.
The United States was not alone in its suffering.
Everywhere, countries had been devastated
by the worldwide depression.
In parts of Europe, democracy itself had collapsed,
and some people had turned to other,
more extreme solutions.
Some Americans, too, were disillusioned
by their government's response to the crisis
and took to the streets in protest.
Shortly after he became president,
FDR had a visitor who said to him,
"Mr. President, you're either gonna be our greatest president,
or you're gonna be our worst president, "
and Roosevelt said, "No, if, if I fail,
I'll be our last president."
I think we can wonder whether our descendants...
because I think they'll still be here...
what they will think about us,
and let us hope that at least they will give us
the benefit of the doubt,
that they will believe that we have honestly striven
in our day and generation to preserve
for our descendants a decent land to live in
and a decent form of government to operate under.
Some of the new legislation
would be overthrown by the courts.
Other laws would turn out to have been counterproductive,
but in just a little over 3 months,
the federal government that had been a mostly passive observer
of the people's problems
had become an active force in trying to solve them.
It's more than a new deal.
It's a new world.
People feel free again.
They can breathe naturally.
It's like quitting a morgue for the open woods.
Harold Ickes.
The pitch is up.
At the end of the first hundred days in 1933,
he goes back to campobello for the first time
since he was stricken with polio...
And he goes out in the woods,
and he's sitting on a tree stump,
and a couple of people he knows are taking a walk in the woods,
and when they come upon him,
he's got his head in his hands,
and then when he looks up he has a grimace on his face,
a look of suffering.
Then he notices that they're there,
and it was like a shutter clicking in a camera,
Roosevelt, then he notices that they're there,
"picking flowers, Billy?"
And the mask was back on.
This evening, Virginia hunt told me
that Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt
evidently don't get on together.
She is always off somewhere, though always
on hand for dinners and receptions.
It is very sad as they are both such splendid people
and must miss a happy married life.
Daisy Suckley.
When Eleanor Roosevelt
first came to the White House after her husband's election,
the long-time chief Usher greeted her
as "Miss Eleanor," just as he had
during her uncle's presidency,
and she hurled herself into her duties as first lady
with all the energy for which Theodore Roosevelt was famous.
She began holding weekly press conferences of her own.
She allowed only female reporters to attend
because only men could attend her husband's.
Politics was officially off limits,
but no previous president's wife
had ever done anything remotely like it.
She would go on to write a syndicated newspaper column
called "My Day"
and have a network radio program of her own.
When a reporter warned her to be careful
what she said for fear of embarrassing her husband,
Eleanor explained that when she said things
that caused criticism she would often do so deliberately
to "arouse controversy"
and to "get the topics talked about
and so get people to thinking about them."
The White House, Washington.
Hick dearest, it was good to talk to you.
The one thing which reconciles me to this job
is the fact that I begin to think there may be ways
in which I can be useful.
I am getting some ideas
which I want to talk over with you.
A world of love to you and good night
and God bless you, "light of my life."
E.R.
Lorena Hickok... "Hick" to Eleanor Roosevelt...
had been one of America's top newspaperwomen in 1932,
when she was assigned by the associated press
to cover the Democratic candidate's wife
and found herself so in love with her subject
that she quit her job because she could
no longer be objective.
The result was one of the most intense friendships
of Eleanor Roosevelt's life.
When apart, the two women wrote one another daily.
Hick darling,
remember always, no one is just what you are to me.
I'd rather be writing this minute than anything else,
and yet I love many other people
and some often can do things for me probably better
than you could, but I've never enjoyed being
with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.
The important thing about Lorena Hickok
is that when Eleanor first became first lady,
Lorena's the one who gave her the confidence to become
something other than a ceremonial first lady,
and more importantly, she loved Eleanor.
It was the first person, perhaps, that loved
Eleanor completely for her own self
more than she loved anybody else.
I mean, Franklin loved her but loved the world.
Lorena fell in love with Eleanor,
and it gave her, I think, the self-assurance that
she needed for this whole new role as first lady.
In July of 1933, they quietly
took off together in Eleanor's blue buick convertible
for a month-long vacation on the back roads of new England
and the gaspe peninsula in Canada.
The Secret Service wanted to send an escort.
The first lady refused to have one
but did agree to carry a revolver
in her glove compartment,
though she carried no ammunition
with which to load it.
In most of the little towns they visited,
she went unrecognized.
That kind of anonymity would not last long.
Eleanor Roosevelt's frequent travels
would soon help make her the best-known woman
in the world.
Lawndale, California.
Most honorable president, I am writing you this morning
in all faith that if I can get word to you
of our horrible plight you will not
pass it by unnoticed.
I am a mother of 7 children
and utterly heartbroken in that they are hungry.
Have only 65 cents in money.
The father is in L.A. trying to find something to do.
Provisions all gone.
Our pride isn't all gone,
and if we have a chance,
we can care for ourselves and be happy.
President Herbert Hoover's mail
had been handled by a single clerk.
The Roosevelts needed 50.
During the week following FDR's inauguration,
450,000 Americans wrote the White House.
During the 145 months that followed,
FDR and his wife received an average
of between 5,000 and 8,000 letters every single day.
"Never before have we had leaders
"in the White House to whom we felt
we could go to with our problems, " one woman wrote,
"for never before have our leaders seemed
conscious of the masses."
They wrote because they felt they knew him,
but there was a lot they did not know.
It still amazes me to realize that even though
the public knew that he had had polio,
they had no idea, really most people,
that he could not walk on his own power.
If you look at the photographs of him
through the years,
there are thousands of pictures of him standing.
He is always in some way leaning on something.
He's balanced.
Sometimes his hand is behind his back,
leaning on the cane,
or he's holding a car door,
but the extraordinary thing is that there are lots
of accounts of people who said they visited him
in the oval office and that he rose to greet them.
He never once rose to greet anyone.
He could not rise without locking his braces,
but he was so outgoing and so magnetic that
people thought they saw him doing things he did not do,
just the power of his own personality.
His press secretary Steve Early turned away
all reporters' questions
about the president's disability.
"It's not a story, " he'd say.
When guests filed into the formal dining room
at the White House, they found the president
already seated at the head of the table.
No one was to see him being wheeled down the hall.
The secret service became expert at installing
and removing special ramps to allow
the president to enter a building without anyone
seeing him being carried.
And when the White House imposed rules
on how he could be filmed and photographed,
few complained, at least at first.
No images of FDR in his wheelchair
or getting in or out of cars were permitted.
No visual record was to be made
of the arduous effort it took him to move
just a few feet.
Photographers who defied the rules,
including ordinary tourists,
had their film confiscated by the secret service.
The thing that's different from our time
is that the press cooperated,
and people bought it in the thirties and forties.
They bought it.
They thought it was intrusive on the whole.
I don't think anyone as afflicted as he was
could ever be elected to national office today.
I think it would be impossible, which is sad.
What I want you to do is to go out
around the country and look this thing over.
Go talk with preachers and teachers,
businessmen, workers, farmers.
Go talk with the unemployed,
those who are on relief and those who aren't,
and when you talk with them,
don't ever forget that but for the grace of God,
you, I, or any of our friends might be in their shoes.
Harry Hopkins.
When Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok ended
their vacation in the summer of 1933,
Hickok moved into her own room at the White House
and then went to work traveling the country
as chief investigator for Harry Hopkins,
the head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Able and impatient, fueled by cigarettes and black coffee,
Hopkins combined the hard-eyed sensibilities
of a seasoned political operative
with the conscience of a committed social worker.
Told a new federal program was likely to succeed
in the long run, he answered
that wasn't good enough.
"People don't eat in the long run, " he said.
Hopkins would remain one of Roosevelt's
most effective and devoted advisors
throughout his presidency,
eager always to know from Lorena Hickok
what was really happening outside Washington.
It was the worst place I'd ever seen.
In a gutter along the main street,
there was stagnant, filthy water,
which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing,
and everything else imaginable.
On either side of the street were
ramshackle houses, black with coal dust,
which most americans would not have considered fit for pigs,
and in those houses every night children
went to sleep hungry on piles of bug-infested rags,
spread out on the floor.
Lorena Hickok.
Eleanor read every one of the reports
Lorena Hickok wrote for Harry Hopkins
and made sure they were among the papers she left
on FDR's bedside table each evening
so that he could read them, too.
In late August, Hickok telephoned Eleanor
at the White House.
If she wanted to see for herself how bad things were,
she should come to Scotts run, West Virginia.
The first lady of the United States came,
driving alone in her Buick.
The American Friends Service Committee
had been working in the region to help
unemployed coal miners and their families.
Some men had been without work for 8 years.
There was already a plan by West Virginia University
to shift some families to a big plot
of gently rolling land nearby owned by a family
named Arthur.
This is the worst place in depression America.
Eleanor Roosevelt goes down there with Lorena Hickok,
and they say these folks are gonna be out
of these caves and culverts within a year
and a new community called Arthurdale
is going to arise.
Eleanor returned to Washington,
committed to take over the project
and make "Arthurdale" a model community.
FDR shared Eleanor's enthusiasm.
Both believed that the lives of the rural poor
should be improved so that they would not be
tempted to shift into the already overcrowded
industrial cities.
165 families were eventually chosen.
Each was to be given a furnished home,
a plot of land, farm equipment, and livestock
with 30 years to pay the government back
for its investment.
The project was troubled from the beginning.
The first 50 prefabricated houses did not fit
their foundations.
The finished homes cost 4 times what had been budgeted.
When interior secretary Ickes complained to FDR,
he just shrugged.
"My missus, " he said, "hasn't any sense about money at all."
When she tried to attract small-scale industries,
congressional opponents torpedoed her plans.
A vacuum cleaner plant failed.
So did a shirt maker and a tractor manufacturer.
Eleanor refused to give up.
She was as dedicated to Arthurdale
as her husband was to warm Springs.
When federal funds proved insufficient,
she contributed nearly all her earned income
and canvassed wealthy friends to underwrite
projects, including a progressive high school
that allowed miners' children to get
advanced schooling their parents could not have imagined.
She adopts a whole community,
and she goes every year to the graduation at Arthurdale,
to the elementary school graduation,
the high school graduation,
and she square dances, and she plays
with the folks at Arthurdale, the whole community.
She had this brilliant notion that it's better
for everybody when it gets better
for everybody.
It was always individual by individual.
To its critics, Arthurdale came to
symbolize everything wrong with the new deal.
They charged that it was wasteful, overambitious, socialistic,
but for those who lived there,
Eleanor Roosevelt was a godsend, and Arthurdale was a triumph.
"We woke up in hell, "
one of the first homesteaders remembered,
"and went to bed the next night in heaven."
Portsmouth, Virginia.
Mr. President and wife, we is just in a place
where we don't know what to do.
Some of we colored peoples is so ragged
we is ashamed to get out among the peoples,
and it's getting cold, no wood,
and if we don't get something to do,
we will freeze to death during the winter.
Some of these peoples here where we rents houses from,
if a person can't pay house rent,
some of them will take the window out
and take the doors off.
So please do what you can for we peoples, please.
Most americans suffered during the depression
but African-Americans suffered most.
3 out of 4 still lived in the Jim Crow south.
More than half of them were without work,
and federal relief almost always went first
to needy whites.
Some 400,000 desperate people migrated north
during the 1930s only to discover
that, in many big cities, there was no work to be had.
Theodore Roosevelt had once sought to deal
with african-american citizens
through a single representative...
Booker T. Washington.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt understood that
the world had changed, and his administration
would prove more sympathetic to african-american aspirations
than any of its predecessors.
Eleanor Roosevelt obtained for her friend,
the educator Mary McLeod Bethune,
several posts within the administration.
When Bethune came to the White House for dinner
for the first time, a gardener stopped her.
"Hey there, auntie," he said.
"Where y'all think you're going?"
She looked him up and down, then asked,
"Which one of my sister's children are you?"
No one ever tried to stop her again.
Following the advice of Bethune and others,
FDR appointed an informal network of second-level officials,
who came to be called his "black cabinet, "
and Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins
struggled to ensure that new deal relief programs
did not discriminate.
By 1935, 1/3 of all black americans
would be receiving federal help of some kind,
and african-americans all over the country were
shifting their allegiance
from the party of Abraham Lincoln
to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
But local prejudice persisted in federal programs.
Most CCC camps were segregated.
The coal miners of Arthurdale voted
to keep out black homesteaders.
Black reporters were barred
from the president's press conferences,
and the shame of lynching persisted.
In 1933, 26 americans died at the hands of mobs,
3 times as many as had been lynched the year before.
New York senator Robert Wagner
and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado introduced a bill
to make lynching a federal crime.
Southern politicians denounced it
as an assault on state's rights
and kept it locked up in committee.
FDR had denounced lynching as
"a vile form of collective murder"
and was willing to sign the bill if it was passed,
but he felt he could not back the bill in public.
Walter White of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People asked
to see the president.
His Appointments Secretary said the boss
was far too busy.
Then Eleanor invited white to tea
on the south portico with the president.
There was really nothing he could do, FDR said.
The speaker of the house believed
the bill unconstitutional.
If it reached the senate floor,
it would be filibustered to death.
Eleanor persisted.
So did the president's mother.
FDR was immovable.
Seniority had given
Southern Democratic senators and congressmen
more than their share of chairmanships.
"I did not choose the tools with which
I must work, " he finally told white.
If he came out for the anti-lynching bill,
he would be unable to pass legislation
the whole country needed,
including african-americans.
We were very disappointed.
The interesting thing was that particularly african-american people
had such a strong feeling
about Franklin Roosevelt and all the things that
he was doing that they saw clearly that his own party
was defeating him at every step.
The good thing was that Mrs. Roosevelt encouraged
young people to act.
She was always there to say, "stay within the law
"and keep yourselves in hand,
but always stand for what you believe."
And I think it was that that gave us a kind of strength.
The president liked to remind critics
who thought him too cautious that
"you have to wait, even for the best things,
until the right time comes."
Although bills to end lynching would be revived
again and again during his administration,
that time would never come,
but Eleanor Roosevelt would continue to argue
for all of them.
Any president gets lied to
by all the yes-men around him.
They all need to go around that chain of command
and find out what's really going on on the ground.
She was a tremendous asset to him in telling him
what was working, not working in the new deal.
She would fill the inbox next to his bed,
and he would then say to his cabinet,
"my missus tells me, WPA's not working
too well in Texas."
The Roosevelt marriage was a partnership
in which each played a very important part,
each admired the other, each wanted very much
the approval of the other.
That was true throughout their lives together,
even when they were mad at each other.
They lived very separate lives.
Even when they were in the White House,
they were very separate lives,
and she took a sort of cold view of his fame
and the kind of popularity he had.
She knew who he was, and he wasn't
quite who they thought he was.
And he sought her approval,
but he had all sorts of practical political decisions
that he felt he had to make,
some of which she disapproved of,
and it bothered him when she didn't like it.
It is a happy privilege to talk to you
once again about Georgia Warm Springs Foundation
and its fight against infantile paralysis.
It is a privilege because I can tell you
of the accomplishments of those who are fighting
this battle.
Whenever he could manage it,
the president escaped to Warm Springs, Georgia.
A few days there, always restored his energy
and lifted the spirits of all the polio patients
struggling to regain their feet.
To have the president of the United States be
a sufferer from the same thing you had struggled with
was enormous benefit to them.
He was the example.
They just loved to be in his presence.
They loved to see him lead games and play
water polo and preside at Thanksgiving dinner,
which he did with enormous ceremony every year
no matter what he was doing.
He was always there for Thanksgiving.
And the first thing we do is to, uh,
distribute the spinach, which you're all so fond of.
And then at last, we get busy,
and we commit murder.
During his early days at Warm Springs,
he had lifted his own spirits
by fitting out a farmer's old Model T
with hand controls and setting out alone
along the back roads of meriwether county.
He'd get out in his car,
and he'd ride all over the community,
and if he saw you outside the road there,
he would toot his horn, say,
"may I speak to you just a minute?"
And he'd say, uh, "how you and your family getting along?"
Once he found out that you was all right there,
if you if you needed some supplies, anything,
or didn't have enough to eat,
"I'll have my farm supervisor, Otis
bring you something."
And when he got that settled down,
he found out you gonna be all right,
uh, "you have any ideas, any suggestions
"that'll to help us in the situation
"we in today?
I'll be glad to listen to them."
It's that simple.
By the spring of 1935, the panic
that had gripped America on inauguration day was over,
and Roosevelt had launched 3 sweeping new programs...
the national youth administration
to provide training for young people
without work;
the rural electrification administration
that would light up the american countryside;
and the works progress administration,
that would change the face
of much of the american landscape.
It built or rebuilt 2,500 hospitals,
6,000 public schools, 10,000 airport landing fields,
and enough miles of roadway
to pave the continent from coast to coast
more than 200 times.
Jobless artists and writers,
composers and musicians benefited from the WPA, as well...
Saul Bellow and Thomas Hart Benton,
Ralph Ellison and Orson Welles,
Berenice Abbott and Alan Lomax
and hundreds of others.
It turned out nearly a thousand publications,
including guides to all 48 states,
staged plays and performed symphonies in small towns
that had never seen a live performance,
revived the art of mural painting
on the walls of schools and post offices,
commissioned photographers to chronicle the human cost
of the depression,
and transcribed the memories of american slaves
and collected the folk songs all kinds of americans sang.
A few timid people
will try to give you new and strange names
for what we are doing.
Sometimes they will call it "fascism"
and sometimes "communism, "
and sometimes "socialism, "
but in so doing, they are trying to make
very complex something that is really very simple
and very practical.
Roosevelt asserted,
and the country in this dire straits
of the depression willingly accepted,
that the role of the central government from now on
would be to secure the material well-being
of the American people.
Hitherto from the founding to that point,
the general american orthodoxy had been
that our federal government existed to defend
the shores, deliver the mails,
protect rights, and get out of the way.
Roosevelt had bigger ideas.
But despite everything he had done,
the United States was still in its fifth year
of depression.
While 2.5 million americans
had returned to work,
another 10 million remained jobless.
A drought afflicted most of the 48 states.
In the dust bowl, the topsoil
of the southern plains was being blown away,
and hundreds of thousands of americans were on the move
toward California in search of work.
People everywhere were growing impatient.
On the right,
the American Liberty League,
organized by some of America's most powerful industrialists,
charged that the new deal was only making things worse,
that Roosevelt had
become a dictator,
defying the constitution,
encouraging "class warfare."
Their best-known spokesman was FDR's old ally Al Smith,
the former Democratic governor of New York.
The new dealers, he said,
were hell-bent on socialism.
"There can only be one capital, " Smith said,
"Washington or Moscow.
"There can be only one flag,
"the stars and stripes
or the flag of the godless Soviets."
Some of Roosevelt's enemies
called him "that man in the White House, "
because they could not bear even to say his name.
When someone unwisely mentioned FDR
in the presence of J.P. Morgan,
whose own father had earlier done battle with TR,
Morgan is said to have exploded,
"goddamn all Roosevelts."
The people among whom he was brought up,
an awful lot of them learned to hate him.
He seemed to be betraying everything that
they had believed.
And it just enraged people.
On the left, socialists and a handful
of communists took to the streets,
denouncing Roosevelt as a captive of capitalism,
incapable of bringing about real change.
Other men were peddling other schemes.
Dr. Francis Townsend, an elderly California physician,
promised to grant a monthly pension
to every worker over 60
who was willing to retire and spend the money
within 30 days.
Father Charles coughlin, the Detroit radio priest,
preached in favor of inflated currency
and against Wall Street
and international bankers,
but the biggest threat to FDR's reelection chances in 1936
came from the south.
There was widespread speculation that
Senator Huey P. Long,
the flamboyant, populist, ex-governor of Louisiana,
planned to lead a third party coalition against him.
We've tried the Republican Party,
we've tried the Democratic Party,
then we've gone back and tried the Republican Party,
and now we're back trying the Democratic party,
and, unfortunately, whenever we get into power
with either one of these parties,
we find that the one crying need of our people,
the redistribution of wealth
so that none will be too poor
and none will be too rich,
is always neglected
by the party that is in power.
Long called his program
"share our wealth, "
and hundreds of thousands of voters
signed up all across the country.
Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley
feared long would start out with at least
12% of the vote, enough to deny FDR
several important states.
Then, on Monday, May 27, 1935,
things got even worse.
The United States Supreme Court handed down
a unanimous decision in a case brought
by a kosher chicken producer from Brooklyn,
which invalidated the national recovery administration
on the grounds that the NRA had
unconstitutionally delegated
legislative power.
The NRA was already understood to be a failure.
It had only raised prices and lowered wages,
exactly the opposite of what it was
supposed to do,
but the narrow grounds on which the NRA decision
was made seemed to suggest that other
new deal programs might also be swept away.
From the first moments of our republic on,
we argued how much the federal government
is restrained by the doctrine
of limited, delegated, and enumerated powers.
Roosevelt, with that cheerful indifference
to detail said, "listen, the preamble stipulates
"certain things... a more perfect union,
"provide for the general welfare.
Implicitly, " he said, "the constitution gives
"the federal government any power requisite
for fulfilling the goals listed in the preamble."
End of constitutional reflection
as far as he was concerned.
The president put a handful of advisors
to work studying how the powers the court
had taken away could be restored
before it was too late.
In June, just as congressmen were
preparing to leave town for the summer,
Roosevelt seized back the initiative,
calling upon them to enact 5 major pieces of legislation
by autumn.
In part to steal a little of what FDR called
"Huey's thunder, " he proposed
new taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
He also wanted the federal reserve system
strengthened and a new law to break up
monopolistic holding companies,
and in the interest of achieving for ordinary americans
something of the sense of security
that had been his since boyhood,
rew himself something of the sense behind two bills
initially championed
by the Democratic senator from New York Robert F. Wagner.
They would turn out to be two of the most momentous pieces
of legislation in american history.
The first, called the Wagner Act,
created the national labor relations board
and for the first time provided a federal guarantee
of labor's right to organize and bargain collectively,
but it was the second, the Social Security Act,
that would be the most far-reaching.
It would provide old-age insurance paid for
by taxes on employees and their employers,
share with the states responsibility
for insuring the unemployed,
and provide federal aid to the states to help care
for dependent mothers and children,
the handicapped and the blind.
Social security represents a redefinition
of the american social contract
of what we owe each other as a people.
In old age and should they be widowed,
they deserved some help from the government,
and for that reason, he considered it to be
the centerpiece of the new deal.
He put it in through a regressive payroll tax
so that it couldn't be taken away,
so as he said, "no damn politician can ever
take this away."
Like all great pieces of social legislation,
you've got to start somewhere,
and the bill just barely cleared committee.
So he knew that if he did too much
for the liberals, he was gonna blow the bill.
If he did too much for the conservatives,
then he'd lose his liberal support.
And it was his political genius to know
just how much the system could take,
and people sometimes say now is, "why can't we
"have a leader like FDR who just gets it done
the way he wants it done?"
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It was all compromise, playing people off each other,
pushing the system a little here or there,
putting the foot on the gas,
then on the brake, back and forth.
There's an artistry to politics,
and social security wouldn't exist
if he hadn't been a brilliant political artist.
This law represents also a cornerstone
in a structure which is being built
but is by no means complete,
a structure intended to lessen the force
of possible future depressions.
To act as a protection to future...
1935 saw a sweltering, bruising,
summer-long struggle
on Capitol Hill,
and compromises did reduce the impact
of some of the legislation,
but newspapermen called it the "Second Hundred Days"
and the beginning of a second new deal.
Roosevelt's prospects for reelection
were all but assured.
And in September, FDR's most serious
third-party rival huey long was cut down
by an assassin's bullet.
September 23, 1935.
Dear Daisy,
do you know that you alone have known
that I was a bit "cast down" these past weeks?
I couldn't let anyone else know it,
but somehow, I seem to tell you all those things,
and what I don't happen to tell you,
you seem to know, anyway!
That when we open the building to the public...
In public, Franklin Roosevelt
always projected cheerful optimism.
Even in private, he rarely let anyone know
how he really felt,
but beginning in the late summer of 1935,
he began making an exception
for his admiring distant cousin Daisy Suckley.
One afternoon that month in Hyde Park,
he took her for a drive in his hand-controlled car
to a favorite picnic spot,
the crest of a forested Ridge on the Roosevelt property
he and Daisy named "our hill."
There, they began what they both called
their "voyage, " confessing to one another
the loneliness each felt,
speaking of a special bond of friendship,
agreeing to share confidences by letter
and long-distance telephone.
He even spoke to her of the pain of his braces,
something he never mentioned to his wife.
Daisy Suckley was a great secret.
He got from her the kind of total admiration
that he needed.
He told her when he was feeling sort of down.
He didn't tell anybody else.
Really an extraordinary relationship,
which was kept secret even from his closest aides.
She was the drab little cousin who took care of his dog fala...
that was how she was known in the world,
but she was in fact, I think, central to him.
Franklin addressed her as "M.M."
For "My Margaret, " and carried her letters
with him wherever he went.
She sometimes signed her letters "Y.M."... "Your Margaret."
They planned together a stone cottage to be built
on their hilltop where, after he had finished
the traditional two terms, she began to hope
she might live with him as his nurse and companion.
Dear F.
Do you mind if I do a little thinking aloud?
The subject is friendships and the way
they start and grow...
an introduction, a shake of the hand,
a few casual words to begin...
and the friendship usually finds very definite limits
not so far from the surface.
On rare occasions, however, it seems to
start in the deepest depths,
a never-ending voyage howeof discoverys to
with never a feeling of fear
because of the safe and solid ship
one knows is underfoot.
Daisy often remained at his side
throughout his presidency,
so quiet and unassuming and discreet
that the president's own secretaries,
puzzled by her presence,
dismissed her as "the little mud wren."
Roosevelt was surrounded by people all the time,
and he gave little pieces of himself
to different people,
but nobody ever got all of him.
A fatherly kiss seals...
No president's family since the time
of Theodore Roosevelt had ever received such
incessant coverage as FDR's,
though the picture it presented was always incomplete.
The public read Eleanor's column "My Day" that
appeared 6 times a week in newspapers all across the country,
but she made little mention
of the domestic difficulties of her 5 children,
among whom there would eventually be 19 marriages.
James served for a time as his father's assistant
despite charges that he was using his position
to further his own business interests.
Stress-related ulcers eventually forced him out
of the White House.
Anna, who had married early to get away
from the tensions within her family,
left her husband for a newspaperman.
Elliott, named for Eleanor's troubled father,
was troubled, as well.
He refused to attend college,
rarely stayed in one place for long,
used his famous name to get ahead
in a series of speculative businesses.
Franklin, Jr., who inherited his father's looks and charm,
earned a reputation at Harvard as a playboy.
And John, who had only been 5 when his father
developed polio and virtually vanished
from his life,
did what he could to avoid the spotlight,
working quietly as a clerk
at filene's basement in Boston.
"One of the worst things in the world is being
the child of a president, " FDR once said.
"It's a terrible life they lead."
Every house I visited,
mill worker or unemployed,
had a picture of the president.
These ranged from newspaper clippings
in destitute homes
to large colored prints, framed in gilt cardboard,
and the feelings of these people for the president
is one of the most remarkable phenomena
I have ever met.
He is at once god and their intimate friend.
He knows them all by name,
knows their little town and mill,
their little lives and problems.
And though everything else fails, he is there
and will not let them down.
Martha Gellhorn.
There's a poll taken by a New York radio station
of "who is the greatest man?"
And Roosevelt comes out first,
and God comes a distant second.
One mill worker in the south says,
"Roosevelt is the only president we've ever had who understands
that my boss is a son of a bitch."
On the evening of June 27, 1936,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled to Philadelphia
to accept his party's nomination
for a second term as president of the United States.
Once again, the nation was listening.
As the crowd just, just indescribable.
What should have been the greatest night of his life.
He went to be renominated in front
of 100,000 people at Franklin field in Philadelphia.
The night shall be filled with music,
and the sound of the crowd will explode
like 10,000 hand grenades that smash against the sky.
They drove into the stadium.
People went crazy.
The bands played.
Well, he got out of his car
out of sight of the cameras
and started toward the back entrance to the stage.
His son Jimmy was was carrying his speech
and holding his father's arm,
and his bodyguard was on the other side.
He was moving along and somehow got jostled.
The lock on his brace opened,
and he really started to go to the ground,
and Jimmy dropped the speech.
The bodyguard grabbed him
before he actually hit the ground,
but the whole... you know, the whole crowd
back there saw him.
And he said "Clean me up, goddamn it."
And they... but they got him cleaned.
He managed to get onto the stage
and put his speech back together.
He said it was the most frightful 5 minutes of his life.
He then gave one of the great speeches
of his administration.
"I was still mad when I began
the speech, " Roosevelt said later.
"It wasn't until I reached the line
"about economic royalists that I knew I had them,
and then I gave it to them."
These economic royalists
complain that we seek to overthrow
the institutions of America.
What they really complain of is that we seek
to take away their power.
Governments can err.
Presidents do make mistakes,
but the immortal Dante tells us that
divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded
and the sins of the warm-hearted
in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a government
that lives in a spirit of charity
than the consistent omissions of a government frozen
in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events.
To some generations much is given.
Of other generations much is expected.
This generation of americans
has a rendezvous with destiny.
Roosevelt's Republican opponent was
alf Landon, the able but unassuming governor of Kansas,
who had once enlisted
in Theodore Roosevelt's bull moose crusade in 1912.
When Landon promised to retain useful elements
of the new deal, FDR mocked the Republicans
for trying to steal Democratic thunder.
"We believe in social security.
"We believe work for the unemployed.
"We believe in saving homes.
"Cross our hearts and hope to die.
"We believe in all these things,
"but we do not like the way
"the present administration is doing them.
"Just turn them over to us.
"We will do all of them, we will do more of them,
"we will do them better, and most important of all,
the doing of them will not cost anybody anything."
Frustrated, the Republicans changed tactics,
accusing FDR of being a socialist in disguise.
The Oyster Bay Roosevelts joined the attack.
Theodore Roosevelt's oldest son Ted
addressed the president himself
in a Pennsylvania speech.
"You have been faithless, " he said.
"You have urged Congress to pass laws
"you knew were unconstitutional.
"You have broken your sacred oath
taken on the Bible."
Alice Roosevelt longworth,
Theodore Roosevelt's oldest child,
went still further.
Her father had conquered his illness...
childhood asthma... and therefore had championed
the "strenuous life, " she said,
but because Franklin remained in a wheelchair,
he had become a "mollycoddle, "
peddling a "mollycoddle philosophy."
No one who really knew both men
could make that contrast.
No man who has brought himself back
from what might have been an entire life of invalidism
to physical, mental, and spiritual strength can
ever be accused of preaching or exemplifying
a mollycoddle philosophy.
Nothing any critic said seemed to matter.
"The forces of organized money are unanimous
in their hatred for me, "
he told a cheering New York crowd,
"and I welcome their hatred."
Wherever FDR went, he asked the crowds
if they were better off than they had been
when he took office.
They were.
National income had now more than doubled,
unemployment had nearly been cut in half.
Voices called out, "Thank you, Mr. President!"
And, "you saved my home!"
Some people bowed their heads in prayer
as his train rattled past.
In Denver, someone had scrawled in chalk
on a boxcar, "Roosevelt is my friend."
Hick dearest,
I have never seen on any trip
such crowds or enthusiasm.
If they really have all this faith,
I hope he can do a good job for them.
I realize more and more that FDR is a great man,
and he is nice to me, but as a person,
I'm a stranger,
and I don't want to be anything else!
P.S. How I hate being a show,
but I'm doing it so nicely!
On election day, the Roosevelts voted
at the Hyde Park town hall.
Name, please?
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
At Springwood on election night,
as the returns began coming in,
FDR blew a big smoke ring and murmured, "wow."
He would win 60.8% of the popular vote,
the largest percentage anyone had ever won,
and this time carried 46 of the 48 states.
And he carries all but two of the states,
Maine and Vermont.
It was long said, "as Maine goes,
so goes the nation."
Now it was said, "as Maine goes,
so goes Vermont."
The election map of America has
been transformed.
FDR had forged a new Democratic Party,
a Roosevelt coalition that brought together
Western farmers and big-city industrial workers,
immigrants and african-americans
and the solid south.
Almost anything seemed possible.
We love Franklin!
At his second inaugural,
held for the first time on January 20,
Roosevelt promised to finish the job he'd started.
I see 1/3 of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad,
ill-nourished.
But it is not in despair that I paint
that picture for you.
I paint it for you in hope
because the nation, seeing and understanding
the injustice of it, proposes to paint it out.
The test of our progress is not whether we add
more to the abundance of those who have much.
It is whether we provide enough for those
who have too little.
The great works program
has removed a vast army from relief roles.
It revived lagging industry, restored morale,
and renewed courage.
Roosevelt believed that his reelection
as president in 1936 had essentially confirmed
popular approval of the new deal
and what he was trying to accomplish.
The executive branch had spoken,
the legislative branch had spoken,
the only branch of the government
that wasn't getting the message was the supreme court.
The Supreme Court had continued
on its conservative course.
It had already overturned a number of new deal statutes,
the NRA and AAA.
It seemed only a matter of time before it moved
against the national labor relations
and social security acts,
and all future reforms seemed to be in jeopardy, as well.
Buoyed by his big victory, Roosevelt determined to act.
He had been reelected without the help
of his old friend and closest advisor Louis Howe,
who had recently died.
Howe's political duties had been taken over by others,
but no one had replaced him as the man
who could tell FDR when he was about to be
a "damned fool."
Roosevelt genuinely believed
that in compelling the supreme court
to pay attention to modern conditions
he was doing the work of democracy.
These justices had been in office
in some cases for decades,
and they weren't listening to what
the american people wanted and needed.
The plan the president sent
to Capitol Hill without any warning to the leadership
stunned enemies and friends alike.
He asked for the power to name a new justice
for every sitting member of the court who did not resign
6 months after reaching the age of 70.
Roosevelt claimed the retirement
of elderly judges would improve the court's "efficiency."
Almost no one believed that was his real purpose.
He wasn't honest about it,
and when the Democrats on the hill recognized
that they really weren't being dealt with straight
by the White House, then that legislation
ran into trouble.
Daisy Suckley asked the president
to explain the plan during a weekend visit
to Hyde Park.
He did his high-minded best.
When he was finished, she asked "don't you mean
that you are packing the court?"
FDR roared. "I suppose you're right, Daisy, " he s
"I suppose you're right!"
President's Roosevelt's
supreme court bombshell has started
a telegraphic barrage aimed at Congress
the like of which hasn't been seen in years.
The polls of that day show that the country was
evenly divided on the supreme court plan,
and it seemed highly likely,
so large were the Democratic majorities
in both houses of Congress,
that Roosevelt would have gotten that plan through
if the supreme court had gone ahead
and struck down minimum wage legislation,
struck down the national labor relations act,
and struck down the social security law.
But then the court itself began
suddenly to shift, upholding a series
of laws most observers had expected it to overturn.
In the end, Roosevelt's bill was allowed to die.
Over the coming years, the president would be
given the opportunity to replace 8 members of the court.
He may have lost the battle, Roosevelt said,
but he had won the war.
Still, his court-packing plan had made him
a host of enemies within his own party
and strengthened a growing
conservative congressional coalition
that would make substantive new legislation
far more difficult to pass.
In August of 1937, there was still more trouble.
The economy had been steadily improving
since 1933, so steadily that american output had
finally outpaced 1929 levels.
FDR and some of his advisers began to worry
about inflation.
In response, the president slashed funds
for relief and public works in the interest,
he said, of balancing the budget.
There is a serious argument to be made that
Roosevelt stopped too soon,
that far from being bold, he wasn't bold enough
because the recession within the depression
that came along in 1937 came
because they prematurely declared victory.
The result was a sudden, precipitous
economic decline that continued
for 9 frightening months.
Republicans called it the "Roosevelt recession."
Industrial production fell again
by more than 1/3.
So did wages.
Widespread strikes by workers demanding
union recognition slowed factories still further.
4 million additional americans found
themselves out of work.
FDR's own advisers were divided as to what
he should do.
Some urged him to continue to hold the line
on spending.
Other, more left-leaning new dealers,
including his wife, wanted him to return
to the stimulus programs that had seemed
to be working earlier.
In the end, FDR sided with the liberals,
persuading Congress to pump billions of dollars more
into public works and public housing.
The decline halted.
"We are on our way again, " Roosevelt said,
and he won passage of the fair labor standards act,
which for the first time set federal minimum wages
and maximum hours.
I am very glad...
Meanwhile, the midterm elections
were approaching.
Furious at conservative members of his own party
who had joined forces with Republicans
on Capitol Hill to defeat his court plan and stall
new deal legislation, the president barnstormed
the country, urging voters
to oust conservative incumbents
and elect liberal challengers.
Voters still admired Roosevelt but resented
his intrusion into local races.
All but one of his targets survived his assault.
As a political blunder, it was enormous.
After the election of 1938 and the revival
of conservative Democrats and Republicans,
there was not a liberal legislating majority
in the Congress of the United States until 1965.
Newspapermen began writing that FDR
was finished as an effective leader,
a lame duck whose last two years as president were likely
to be without real achievement.
"President Roosevelt could not run for a third term, "
one wrote, "even if he so desired."
September 11, 1938.
Dear Daisy, the situation in Europe
is full of world dynamite,
and I don't dare be off the scene
because it needs hourly watching.
Did you hear Hitler on the radio today?
His shrieks, his histrionics
and the effect on the huge audience.
They did not applaud.
They made noises like animals.
Adolf Hitler had come to power
in Germany at almost precisely the same moment
Franklin Roosevelt first became president.
Americans had looked on with horror as he crushed
his domestic opposition,
persecuted German Jews...
Supported a fascist uprising in Spain...
Reclaimed the Rhineland from France in 1936,
and annexed Austria two years later.
Americans also deplored the Italian fascist
Benito Mussolini's brutal attack on Ethiopia...
And sympathized with China in her struggle
against invasion by imperial Japan.
But most americans saw events overseas
as none of their business.
More than one hundred and 116,000 american lives
had been lost in the great war,
and few americans thought it had been worth it.
In the intervening years, their representatives
on Capitol Hill had worked to ensure that
the United States would not again become entangled
in events overseas.
They shrank the army, kept America out
of international organizations,
limited immigration, and enacted 3 neutrality acts
barring arms sales to either side
in any future war.
Roosevelt was an internationalist
in an isolationist age,
and so when he watched Europe and Asia heading
toward war in the late 1930s,
he realized that the United States
was going to have to get involved in those conflicts
sooner or later
but that if he led America into war,
if another war became known as "Roosevelt's war"
the way the first world war was "Wilson's war, "
then he risked undoing all the good
american participation might have done,
and so he engaged in a very careful, very slow,
but sometimes very duplicitous campaign
of public education.
Franklin Roosevelt believed,
as Theodore Roosevelt had also believed,
that the United States had an important role
to play overseas,
but he had been consumed with the economic crisis
during his first years as president,
needed the support in Congress of progressive Republicans,
who were also implacable isolationists
and for the most part had been willing to go along
with public sentiment.
"What worries me, " he had told a friend
as the violence increased worldwide,
"is that public opinion over here is patting itself
"on the back every morning, thanking god
for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."
At first, his efforts at informing
the american public of the dangers it faced
did not go well.
The present reign of terror
and international lawlessness...
When the president compared
fascist aggression to a spreading disease
that needed to be quarantined,
pacifists charged Roosevelt was starting America
down the slope to war.
Isolationist congressmen threatened to impeach him.
The leaders of his own party remained silent.
The president took no action.
"It is a terrible thing, " he told an aide,
"to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead
and find no one there."
By September of 1938, Hitler was demanding to
annex the german-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia
known as the Sudetenland.
At Munich, at the end of that month,
the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
agreed not to oppose him
in exchange for a promise of what Chamberlain
called "peace in our time."
The newspapers these days
are becoming more and more painful.
I was reading my morning papers on the train
not so long ago and looked up
with a feeling of desperation.
Up and down the car, people were reading,
yet no one seemed upset.
To me, the whole situation seems intolerable.
We face today a world filled with suspicion and hatred.
On the evening of November 9, 1938,
all over Germany, Hitler's paramilitary thugs
looted Jewishj homes, smashed jewish shops,
it was remembered as Kristallnacht,
the night of broken glass.
Scores of Jews died.
Thousands were imprisoned.
The rest were required to pay what the Nazis called
an "atonement fine" for the damage done
to their own property
and then had the rest of their assets confiscated.
FDR told a press conference he could "scarcely believe
such things could occur in a 20th century civilization."
He ordered the visas of 15,000 german
and austrian resident aliens extended so that
they would not be forced to return to Nazi rule,
and he recalled his ambassador from Berlin,
something neither Britain nor France dared do.
A gallup poll taken early in 1939
would show that 85% of American protestants
and 84% of Catholics
opposed offering sanctuary to uropean refugees.
So did more than 1/4 of American Jews.
What has happened to us in this country?
If we study our own history,
we find that we have always been ready
to receive the unfortunate from other countries,
and though this may seem a generous gesture
on our part, we have profited
a thousand-fold by what they have brought us.
There comes a time in the affairs of men
when they must prepare to defend
not their homes alone
but the tenets of faith and humanity
on which their churches,
their governments,
and their very foundations are set.
The defense of religion, of democracy,
and of good faith among nations
is all the same fight.
To save one, we must now make up our minds
to save all.
In march of 1939, Hitler sent
his armies into what remained of Czechoslovakia.
Poland looked to be next, and Britain pledged to go
to war if Germany invaded her.
Roosevelt begged Congress to allow arms sales
to Britain and France.
The house watered down his proposal,
and it never even reached the floor.
That spring, FDR sent a list of 31 sovereign nations
to Hitler, asking the dictator to pledge
that he had no plans to attack any of them.
Hitler launched a two-hour tirade of contempt
directed at Roosevelt.
It was clear that the Fuehrer of Germany
believed he had nothing to fear
from the president of the United States.
In June of 1939, FDR invited King George VI
and his wife Elizabeth to visit
the United States to foster american sympathy
for England as she faced the growing threat
from Nazi Germany.
The president and Mrs. Roosevelt asked them
to spend a day in Hyde Park.
I arrived at St. James Church
at 10:00, and the doors did not open until 11:00.
The king and queen walked out together,
smiling from side to side
followed by the Roosevelt ladies and FDR,
"stumping along, " as he put it,
as fast as he could.
Then I went along to top cottage for the picnic.
One dish of hot dogs was served on the porch.
It is said that the king asked
for a second one!
After lunch, there was an interesting Indian program
organized by Mrs. Roosevelt
by a man and woman in lovely full-dress Indian clothes...
a little long, perhaps.
There was something
incredibly moving about this scene...
river in the evening light,
the voices of many people singing this old song...
The train slowly pulling out with the young couple
waving good-bye.
One thought of the clouds that hung over them
and the worries they were going to face
and turned away from the scene with a heavy heart.
If you were to come to this country
and you were at Laguardia Airport,
you would be at an airport
that Roosevelt and the new deal had built,
and that if you went over the Triborough Bridge
and then through the Lincoln Tunnel
and continued west across the country
on the Blue Ridge Parkway, on the Skyline Drive,
took Chicago's subway,
went all the way across to the great dams
of Bonneville and Grand Cooley,
all of this was done under Roosevelt
and the new deal,
and that's our legacy in America today.
I think what FDR was able to do somehow
was to make the government, which is all of us...
I mean, we think of the government
as something out there,
but he saw it as the collective responsibility
of the people to people in need.
He changed the relationship between government,
business, and labor forever,
but those words are just so abstract.
What he did in those programs was to bring
the force of the collective power of the country
to bear on helping people
to get through their daily lives.
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
there had been no unemployment compensation
or social security,
no regulation of the stock market,
no federal guarantee of bank deposits
or labor's right to bargain,
no national minimum wage or maximum hours,
no federal commitment to high employment,
and no price supports for farmers
or federal funds for electric power
with which to light their homes.
But for all the new deal's achievements,
the american economy was still struggling in 1939.
Many of those who most needed help
were still not getting it,
and Congress was no longer willing
to follow Roosevelt's lead.
The president's attention was already beginning
to turn away from reform toward readyin
a reluctant country for the new crisis
that now threatened to engulf the world,
and FDR had begun seriously to consider
doing something no man,
not even Theodore Roosevelt had dared to do,
run for a third consecutive term
as president of the United States.
How can we study history?
How can we live through the things
that we have lived through and complacently go on
allowing the same causes over and over again
to put us through these same horrible experiences.
Anyone who thinks
must think of the next war as suicide.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
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