Hoover strode across the room and loomed above him menacingly. In his most cutting voice he said, “Mr. Roosevelt, when you have been in Washington as long as I have, you will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody!” He turned his back to leave the room.
Jimmy Roosevelt glanced at his father; he had never seen him so angry. Before FDR could speak, Eleanor Roosevelt jumped up and said quickly, “It’s been very pleasant, but we must go now.”
In fact a complete break between the two men was impossible. Illinois and New York were on the brink; their governors, Horner and Herbert Lehman, had given up all hope of attending the inauguration. Back at the Mayflower, Roosevelt kept in touch with Hoover by telephone until 1 A.M., when he suggested that they both get some sleep. They did, and as they slept their advisers huddled at the Treasury Building and decided everything for them. Before them lay the latest bleak Federal Reserve report. During the last two days 500 million dollars had been drained from the nation’s banking system. They were convinced that the New York bankers did not understand the enormity of the disaster and must be protected. Mills and Woodin agreed that Lehman must be persuaded to close the New York banks and that Horner must also declare a moratorium for Illinois. Horner proclaimed his holiday at 2 A.M.; Lehman’s decision came at 4:20 A.M. Hoover was told at 6 A.M. “We are at the end of our string,” he said. “There is nothing more we can do.”
The financial heart of the country had stopped beating. Banking in every state was wholly or partly suspended. Flags flew in Wall Street honoring the inauguration, but the Stock Exchange was officially closed, and so, for the first time in eighty-five years, was the Chicago Board of Trade. On Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Norman Vincent Peale was writing a sermon for delivery the following morning demanding that bankers and corporation heads get down on their knees before God and confess their sins. In Kansas, Governor Landon was calling industrialists “racketeers.” Arthur Krock compared the atmosphere in Washington to “that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.” The sky was the color of slate. Over a hundred thousand people blackened the forty acres of park and pavement in front of the Capitol’s east facade, awaiting the inaugural. General MacArthur was in command of the inauguration parade, and he anticipated trouble. (It says something about the departing administration that Walter F. Brown, the outgoing Postmaster General, had requisitioned a new limousine for the occasion because he could not sit erect in the old one while wearing his tall silk hat.) Army machine guns had been mounted at strategic points. In many ways the occasion had the marks of an impromptu affair. John Nance Garner wore a borrowed muffler against the chill wind. Woodin, unable to reach his seat, perched on a railing with a cameraman.
The Capitol clocks struck twelve noon. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had at last become the thirty-second President of the United States.
Hatless and coatless, he threw back his great shoulders and repeated the oath after Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. The new President’s hand lay on the three-hundred-year-old Roosevelt family Bible, open at the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
He turned to the podium. Ignoring applause, he drew from his pocket a longhand manuscript which he had written in his Hyde Park study the Sunday before. No phrase was borrowed; it was pure Roosevelt:
“Let me first 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.”
The radio networks carried his ringing voice out across the suffering land, over the sweatshops and flophouses, the Hoovervilles and hobo jungles, the rocky soil tilled by tenant farmers, the ragged men shivering in the iron cold outside factory gates.
“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 me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
Herbert Hoover slumped and stared at his feet, but in the three-decker tenements with radios the hungry children looked up; in county courthouses the embattled farmers looked up; housewives patching threadbare clothes looked up; there was a kind of magic in the air; and in Santa Monica Will Rogers pecked out on his typewriter: “If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started somehow.’”
“The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.”
In Walt Whitman’s phrase, the new President had made a “tremendous entrance”; Roosevelt’s face was “so grim,” wrote Arthur Krock, “as to seem unfamiliar to those who have long known him.” Henry L. Stimson confided to his diary, “I was thoroughly scared.” The new First Lady thought the inaugural “very, very solemn and a little terrifying” because “when Franklin got to that part of his speech when it might become necessary for him to assume powers ordinarily granted to a President in wartime, he received his biggest demonstration.” Edmund Wilson, in Washington to cover the ceremonies for the New Republic, scorned “the old unctuousness, the old pulpit vagueness.” At the same time he wrote, “The thing that emerges most clearly is the warning of a dictatorship.” The intellectuals still didn’t understand FDR; some of them never would. Indeed, the man was mysterious even to those closest to him. It is a remarkable fact that he had not told his own wife of his decision to run for the Presidency; she had learned it from Louis Howe. Perhaps she came closest to the mood of thoughtful people in those first hours of his first administration when she said, “One has the feeling of going it blindly, because we’re in a tremendous stream, and none of us know where we’re going to land.” Yet the people, on the whole, did not share her uncertainty. To them the speech had been a triumph; that weekend 450,000 wrote Roosevelt to tell him so.
Eleanor went to the inaugural ball while her husband stayed in the Executive Mansion to work with Howe. Sunday morning after breakfast the President had himself wheeled down newly installed ramps and into the empty oval office. Alone, he contemplated the room. The desk was empty. Hoover had taken everything movable except the flag and the great seal. There was no pad, no pencil, no telephone, not even a buzzer to summon help. Slowly it came to him that he could do nothing by himself here. He gave a great shout, and his secretary and an aide came running. The incident was notable because it was the last time he would feel utterly helpless as President. By that evening he was ready to act. His cigarette holder atilt, he invoked the World War’s half-forgotten Trading with the Enemy Act to declare a four-day holiday for all banks. The 73rd Congress was being called into special session Thursday, when emergency legislation would be ready. Meantime the country would have to manage without moneychangers.
It was a challenge to American ingenuity, and it was met by improvised combinations of scrip, credit, barter, stamps, streetcar tokens, Canadian dollars, and Mexican pesos. The Dow Chemical Company was coining magnesium into “Dow-metal Money,” with an arbitrary value of twenty cents. A Wisconsin wrestler signed a contract to perform for a can of tomatoes and a peck of potatoes; an Ashtabula, Ohio, newspaper offered free ads in exchange for produce. A New York state senator arrived in Albany with twelve dozen eggs and a side of pork to see him through the week. The most spectacular transactions were conducted by the New York Daily News, which was sponsoring the semifinals of the Golden Gloves tournament in Madison Square Garden. The seat price was fifty cents, but any article worth that amount was accepted as admissio
n provided the five-cent amusement tax was paid. An appraiser was engaged who during the evening inspected frankfurters, mattresses, hats, shoes, overcoats, fish, noodles, nightgowns, steaks, spark plugs, box cameras, jigsaw puzzles, sweaters, canned goods, sacks of potatoes, golf knickers, mechanics’ tools, foot balm, copies of the New Testament, and what girls of that day called step-ins.
Nearly everyone assumed the holiday would end with the formal adoption of scrip—local currencies, managed by states, cities, and individual firms. Atlanta, Richmond, Mattituck, and Knoxville, of all places, were already on the stuff; before the week of March 6 was out Nashville would have a million dollars of it in circulation and Philadelphia eight million. In Nutley, New Jersey, a paper company which had been working three days a week went on three shifts, turning out six tons of scrip for Wisconsin and Tennessee. To Secretary of the Treasury Woodin, however, the thought of state and municipal currencies and company certificates floating around the country was appalling, and at breakfast on Tuesday, March 7, he told Ray Moley that he had decided scrip wasn’t needed. “We can issue currency against the sound assets of the banks,” he said. “It won’t frighten people. It won’t look like stage money. It’ll be money that looks like money.” There was nothing to lose. After all, he said publicly, “We’re on the bottom. We’re not going any lower.”
Working around the clock in his Carlton Hotel suite with Senator Carter Glass, Woodin met Thursday’s legislative deadline. As congressmen filed into the special session the finished bill was handed to the clerk—“My name’s Bill, and I’m finished, too,” Woodin muttered—and was read aloud. Few representatives heard it above the hubbub. They had no copies of their own; there had been no time to print them. Even the copy given to the clerk bore last-minute changes scribbled in pencil. In thirty-eight minutes they whooped it through while Mrs. Roosevelt sat knitting in the gallery like a benign Madame Defarge, counting votes. Then they crowded into the Senate chamber to hear Glass explain just what it was they had done.
The little Virginian backed it, though he acknowledged there were parts which shocked him. It was, in fact, a shocking measure, ratifying all acts “heretofore or hereinafter taken” by the President and the Secretary of the Treasury. It provided prison terms for hoarders, appointed “conservators” (receivers) for weak banks, and authorized the issue of two billion dollars in new currency based on bank assets. At 8:36 P.M. a rumpled Roosevelt signed it in the White House, surrounded by unpacked books and pictures from Hyde Park. That evening the Bureau of Engraving and Printing recruited 375 new workers. The official printing presses of the United States were going into action.
All that night and the next the lights of the Bureau twinkled across the tidal basin. There was no time to engrave new dies, so plates bearing the imprint “Series of 1929” were used. There wasn’t even an opportunity to acquire facsimile signatures from each of the twelve Federal Reserve banks; signatures were taken from government files and sent by messenger to the American Type Foundry in Jersey City, where logotypes were cut. Early Saturday morning planes began taking off from Washington bearing bales of cash. The first were received in the New York Federal Reserve bank shortly before noon. Transfer to member banks began immediately.
The real trick was prying open the rigid fists of hoarders, who in one week had taken 15 percent of the nation’s currency out of circulation. Even a bewitched Congress couldn’t make the penal clauses apply to hoarding that had already taken place. Instead, the government turned to the spur of publicity. On Wednesday, March 8, the Federal Reserve Board announced that its banks would prepare lists of persons who had withdrawn gold since February 1 and who failed to bring it back by the following Monday. Newspapers had scarcely appeared with this announcement before bank switchboards were jammed. Callers were told only that if they had gold and wanted to return it, the banks would open for them and newspapermen would be kept out of the lobbies. In the next few hours thousands of mattresses were torn open, cans dug up, hidden boxes brought forth. Banks everywhere reported long queues, reminiscent of the preceding week’s panic but comprised this time of men and women carrying Gladstones and briefcases. Encouraged, the board extended its order on Friday, asking for reports covering withdrawals of the past two years. The widened hunt brought bigger game; by Saturday night the Federal Reserve banks had recovered 300 million dollars in gold and gold certificates—enough to support 750 million dollars in additional circulation. And even before the planes flew out from Hoover Airport with new bank notes, Woodin had permitted individual savings banks to release ten dollars to each depositor. Business began to stir. Within a week 13,500—75 percent—of the country’s banks were back in business, and gongs were heard again in stock exchanges. In New York, where stocks jumped 15 percent, the Dow Jones ticker clicked off the message “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
They weren’t really. But the panic had ended without currency chaos or nationalization of the banks. Undoubtedly the medicine had been strong; the inflationary movement, once started, would prove irresistible in the long run. Yet Roosevelt had had very few options. A friend told him that if he succeeded he would go down in history as the greatest American President and that if he failed he would be known as the worst. FDR replied, “If I fail I shall be the last one.” But he had no intention of failing. His Hundred Days had begun.
***
In the eye of the Hundred Days hurricane—from March 9, when the Emergency Banking Act was cheered into law, to the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) on June 16—the new Chief Executive was continually revealing fresh reservoirs of imagination and energy. Before Congress adjourned in exhaustion he would have delivered ten major speeches, given birth to a new foreign policy, presided over press conferences and cabinet meetings twice a week, taken the country off the gold standard, sent fifteen messages to the Capitol, and shepherded through its chambers thirteen major pieces of legislation, including insurance for all bank deposits, refinancing of home mortgages, Wall Street reforms, authorization for nearly four billion dollars in federal relief, legalization of beer, and laws creating the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). “Occasionally,” he remarked at one point, “I think I am a bit shell-shocked.”
It was all improvised. “Take a method and try it,” he told his New Dealers. “If it fails, try another. But above all, try something.” He interpreted his landslide victory as a mandate for change, almost any change, as long as it was quick. At first he had planned to put through Woodin’s save-the-banks law, send Congress home, and work with the powers of the Presidency. Such a step would have been supported by the national consensus. The hour demanded “dictatorial authority,” the conservative Boston Evening Transcript editorialized. “This is unprecedented in its implications, but such is the desperate temper of the people that it is welcome.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler said congressmen would “jump through a hoop” for the new President, and their constituents, said Charles Michelson, were ready to believe FDR could “see in the dark.” Later, John Gunther was to suggest that the President could easily have become a dictator: “We are apt to forget nowadays the immense, unprecedented, overwhelming authority conferred on FDR by an enthusiastically willing Congress during the first hundred days of his first administration. The Reichstag did not give Hitler much more.”
Roosevelt preferred to work within the Constitution. He said he wanted to become a “preaching President,” like his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and the tremendous volume of White House mail suggested to him that his legislative revolution—for it amounted to that—might well be accompanied by a campaign to educate the people about the New Deal goals. He had no U.S. Information Agency, no Voice of America. He didn’t need one; with him as teacher, the country became one vast classroom.
The first lesson came on his fifth day in power, when he assembled the White House correspondents around his desk. It was the first of what would become an unequa
led number of press conferences (998), and it was an instant success. Will Rogers commented that Roosevelt could take a complicated subject like banking and explain it so that everyone could understand it, even the bankers; subsequently Charles A. Beard, no Roosevelt admirer, wrote that FDR discussed “more fundamental problems of American life and society than all the other Presidents combined.” At the end the correspondents burst into applause. In one stroke the President had shifted the news capital of the country from New York to Washington. The United Press tripled its Washington staff; 25 percent of all Associated Press news was coming from the capital. Metropolitan newspapers sent men to cover the White House, and smaller papers began running syndicated Washington columnists, who were joined, in time, by the President’s own wife.
On Sunday, March 12, Roosevelt preached his second lesson directly to the people. Microphones of the National, Columbia, and Mutual broadcasting systems were installed on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion in front of the fireplace in the Diplomatic Reception Room. The President said he wanted to catch the spirit of a man in his own home talking informally to his neighbors in their living rooms. In that case, said Harry C. Butcher, manager of the CBS Washington office, the talk might be called a “fireside chat,” and so it was christened. His cigarette burning down in its long ivory holder, FDR spoke to the nation about the bank moratorium: “My friends, I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be. First of all, let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe-deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit—bonds, mortgages. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels turning around….”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 12