by Jill Lepore
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was untroubled by any such awkwardness. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and wireless round eyeglasses. His daintiness, a certain fussiness of person, earned him the nickname “Feather Duster Roosevelt.” But if he had a patrician style, he spoke on the radio with an easy intimacy and a ready charm, coming across as knowledgeable, patient, kind-hearted, and firm of purpose. He spoke, he liked to say, with the “quiet of common sense and friendliness.”18 Hoover, a man of humble origins, dedicated to public service, would come to be seen as having turned his back on the suffering of the poorest of Americans. Roosevelt, raised as an aristocrat, would be remembered as their champion.
Born in Hyde Park in 1882, Roosevelt as a young man had much admired his distant cousin, lion-hunting Theodore Roosevelt, and even emulated him. “Delighted!” he would say, and “Bully!” He was elected to the state senate in 1910, at the age of twenty-eight, as a Democrat. Three years later, Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. By 1920, he’d risen to the rank of presidential running mate. But the next year, his political career appeared to be over when, at the age of thirty-nine, he contracted polio and lost the use of both of his legs. Confined to a wheelchair in private, he disguised his condition from the public by using leg braces and a cane, walking only with great pain. It was his paralysis, his wife, Eleanor, said, that taught Roosevelt “what suffering meant.”19
His acquaintance with anguish changed his voice: it made it warmer. Hoover understood the importance of radio; Roosevelt knew how to use it. In 1928, delivering a nominating address at the Democratic National Convention, the first convention broadcast on the air, Roosevelt felt—and sounded as though—he was addressing not the audience in Madison Square Garden but Americans across the country. He’d then honed his skills as a radio broadcaster as governor of New York, delivering regular “reports to the people” from WOKO in Albany. The state’s newspapers were predominantly Republican; to bypass them, Roosevelt delivered a monthly radio address, reaching voters directly.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt bypassed the press and spoke to the people directly by radio. In 1932, he stumped for the Democratic nomination on behalf of a new brand of liberalism that borrowed as much from Bryan’s populism as from Wilson’s Progressivism. “The history of the last half century is . . . in large measure a history of a group of financial Titans,” Roosevelt said in a rally in San Francisco. But “the day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over.”20
When Roosevelt, at the governor’s mansion in Albany, heard on the radio that he’d been nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he called the hall and said that he was on his way. While delegates—along with an expectant radio audience—waited, Roosevelt flew to Chicago, his plane refueling in Cleveland. No presidential nominee had ever shown up to accept the nomination in person, but the times were strange, Roosevelt said, and they called for change: “Let it from now on be the task of our party to break foolish traditions.” In his rousing acceptance speech, broadcast live, he promised Americans a “new deal.”
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” he told the roaring crowd in Chicago Stadium, straw hats waving. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”21
Republicans often said, as they’d said about William Jennings Bryan, that while listening to Roosevelt, they found themselves agreeing with him, even when they didn’t. “All that man has to do is speak on the radio, and the sound of his voice, his sincerity, and the manner of his delivery, just melts me,” one said. Hoover compared Roosevelt to Bryan not only in style but in substance, describing the New Deal as nothing more than “Bryanism under new words and methods.” That wasn’t really true, as a matter of politics and constituencies, but there were undeniable similarities. The New Deal “is as old as Christian ethics, for basically its ethics are the same,” Roosevelt liked to say. “It recognizes that man is indeed his brother’s keeper, insists that the laborer is worthy of his hire, demands that justice shall rule the mighty as well as the weak.”22
Still, much was new in Roosevelt’s presidency, beginning with his campaign. The stump speeches he delivered on stages all over the country were the first presidential campaign speeches recorded on film and screened in movie theaters as newsreels. After accepting the nomination, he began delivering nationwide radio addresses from the governor’s mansion, each speech more disarming than the last.
“I hope during this campaign to use the radio frequently, to speak to you about important things that concern us all,” he told his audience. “I want you to hear me tonight as I sit here in my own home, away from the excitement of the campaign, and with only a few of the family, and a few personal friends present.” Most Americans had only ever heard national political candidates shouting, trying to project their voices across a banquet hall or a football field. Hearing Roosevelt speak quietly and calmly, as if he were sitting across the kitchen table, having a reasonable argument with you, earned him Americans’ dedicated affection. “It was a God-given gift,” his wife said. He “could talk to people so that they felt he was talking to them individually.”23
In November, Roosevelt trounced Hoover, beating him 472 to 59 in the Electoral College and winning forty-two out of forty-eight states. The simplest explanation was that the public blamed Hoover for the Depression. But there was more to the rout. FDR’s election also ushered in a new party system, as the Democratic and Republican Parties rearranged themselves around what came to be called the New Deal coalition, which brought together blue-collar workers, southern farmers, racial minorities, liberal intellectuals, and even industrialists and, still more strangely, women. With roots in nineteenth-century populism and early twentieth-century Progressivism, FDR’s ascension marked the rise of modern liberalism.
But FDR’s election and the New Deal coalition also marked a turning point in another way, in the character and ambition of his wife, the indomitable Eleanor Roosevelt. Born in New York in 1884, she’d been orphaned as a child. She married FDR, her fifth cousin, in 1905; they had six children. Nine years into their marriage, Franklin began an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, and when Eleanor found out, he refused to agree to a divorce, fearing it would end his career in politics. Eleanor turned her energies outward. During the war, she worked on international relief, and, after Franklin was struck with polio in 1921, she began speaking in public, heeding a call that brought so many women to the stage for the first time: she was sent to appear in her husband’s stead.
Eleanor Roosevelt became a major figure in American politics in her own right just at a time when women were entering political parties. It was out of frustration with the major parties’ evasions on equal rights that Alice Paul had founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916.24 Fearful that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc, the Democratic and Republican Parties had then begun recruiting women. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) formed a Women’s Division in 1917, and the next year, the Republicans did the same, the party chairman pledging “to check any tendency toward the formation of a separate women’s party.” After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the League of Women Voters, steered women away from the National Woman’s Party and urged them to join one of the two major parties, advising, “The only way to get things in this country is to find them on the inside of the political party.” Few women answered that call more vigorously than Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a leader of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party while her husband campaigned and served as governor of the state. By 1928, she was one of the two most powerful women in American politics, head of the Women’s Division of the DNC.25
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sp; Eleanor Roosevelt created an entirely new role for the First Lady, not least by spending time touring the country. In May 1935, she visited a coal mine in Bellaire, Ohio. Eleanor Roosevelt, lean and rangy, wore floral dresses and tucked flowers in the brim of floppy hats perched on top of her wavy hair, but she had a spine as stiff as the steel girder of a skyscraper. She hadn’t wanted her husband to run for president, mainly because she had so little interest in becoming First Lady, a role that, with rare exception, had meant serving as a hostess at state dinners while demurring to the men when the talk turned to affairs of state. She made that role her own, deciding to use her position to advance causes she cared about: women’s rights and civil rights. She went on a national tour, wrote a regular newspaper column, and in December 1932 began delivering a series of thirteen nationwide radio broadcasts. While not a naturally gifted speaker, she earned an extraordinarily loyal following and became a radio celebrity. From the White House, she eventually delivered some three hundred broadcasts, about as many as FDR. Perhaps most significantly, she reached rural women, who had few ties to the national culture except by radio. “As I have talked to you,” she told her audience, “I have tried to realize that way up in the high mountain farms of Tennessee, on lonely ranches in the Texas plains, in thousands and thousands of homes, there are women listening to what I say.”26
Eleanor Roosevelt not only brought women into politics and reinvented the role of the First Lady, she also tilted the Democratic Party toward the interests of women, a dramatic reversal. The GOP had courted the support of women since its founding in 1854; the Democratic Party had turned women away and dismissed their concerns. With Eleanor Roosevelt, that began to change. During years when women were choosing a party for the first time, more of them became Democrats than Republicans. Between 1934 and 1938, while the numbers of Republican women grew by 400 percent, the numbers of Democratic women grew by 700 percent.27
In January 1933, she announced that she intended to write a book. “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has been one of the most active women in the country since her husband was elected President, is going to write a 40,000-word book between now and the March inauguration,” the Boston Globe reported, incredulous. “Every word will be written by Mrs. Roosevelt herself.”28
It’s Up to the Women came out that spring. Only women could lead the nation out of the Depression, she argued—by frugality, hard work, common sense, and civic participation. The “really new deal for the people,” Eleanor Roosevelt always said, had to do with the awakening of women.29
II.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT rode to the Capitol in the backseat of a convertible, seated next to Hoover, a blanket spread across their laps; after that cold day, March 4, 1933, the two men never met again. “This great nation will endure, as it has endured,” FDR said in his inaugural address, attempting to reassure a troubled nation as he braced himself against the podium, bearing the weight of his body in great pain. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”30
At the time, many Americans believed that the economic crisis was so dire as to require the new president to assume the powers of a dictator in order to avoid congressional obstructionism. “The situation is critical, Franklin,” Walter Lippmann wrote to Roosevelt. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”31 Gabriel Over the White House, a Hollywood film coproduced by William Randolph Hearst and released to coincide with the March 1933 inauguration, depicted a fictional but decidedly Rooseveltian president who, threatened with impeachment, bursts into a joint session of Congress.
“You have wasted precious days, and weeks and years in futile discussion,” he tells the assembled representatives. “We need action, immediate and effective action!” He declares a national emergency, adjourns Congress, and takes control of the government.
“Mr. President, this is dictatorship!” cries one senator.
“Words do not frighten me!” answers the president.32
“Do We Need a Dictator?” The Nation asked, the month the film was released, and answered, “Emphatically not!”33
Meanwhile, the world watched Germany. For a long time, American reporters had underestimated Hitler. Crackerjack world-famous journalist Dorothy Thompson interviewed Hitler in 1930 and dismissed him. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure,” she wrote. “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.” By 1933, what that little man intended was growing clearer, and Thompson would go on to do more to raise American awareness of the persecution of American Jews than almost any other writer. Nazism she would describe as “a repudiation of the whole past of Western man,” a “complete break with Reason, with Humanism, and with the Christian ethics that are the basis of liberalism and democracy.” Thrown out of Germany for her criticism of the Nazi government, she had her expulsion order framed and hung it on her wall.34
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. In parliamentary elections held on March 5—the last vote the German people would be allowed for a dozen years—the Nazi Party narrowly failed to win a majority. Six days later, Hitler told his cabinet of his intention to establish a Ministry of Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, appointed as its head on March 13, reported in his diary four days later that “broadcasting is now totally in the hands of the state.” Having seized control of the airwaves, Hitler seized control of what remained of the government. On March 23, he addressed the German legislature, the Reichstag, its doors barred. Speaking beneath a giant flag of a swastika, Hitler asked the Reichstag to pass the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, essentially abolishing its own authority and granting to Hitler the right to make law. The government then outlawed all parties but the Nazi Party. By October, Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations. Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone “likely to become a public charge.”35
To many people around the world, Roosevelt was the hope of democratic government, and his New Deal the last best hope for a liberal order. “You have made yourself the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system,” John Maynard Keynes wrote to the president. “If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office.”36
Keynes’s expectations were nothing compared to those of ordinary Americans. In FDR’s first seven days in office, he received more than 450,000 letters and telegrams from the public. By no means was all the mail favorable, but FDR loved it all the same; it taught him what people were thinking. He made a point of reading a selection daily.37
People had been writing to presidents since George Washington was inaugurated, but, by volume, no other presidency had come anywhere close.38 (Hoover received eight hundred letters a day; FDR eight thousand.) The rise of “fan mail”—the expression wasn’t used before the 1920s—was a product of radio; radio stations and networks encouraged listeners to write to them and used their responses to refine their programming. In the 1930s, the National Broadcasting Corporation received ten million letters a year (not counting mail sent to its affiliates, sponsors, and stations). Like radio stations, the White House began reading, sorting, and counting its mail. Eleanor Roosevelt received three hundred thousand letters in 1933 alone. The mail came pouring down on Congress next. By 1935, the Senate received forty thousand letters a day. By the end of the 1930s, voters were writing letters to Supreme Court justices.39
If FDR listened carefully to ordinary Americans by reading voter mail, he also assembled an altogether unordinary team of advisers. Elected during a national emergency, Roosevelt assembled a “bra
in trust” that included Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor, the first female member of a presidential cabinet. How he both relied on his brain trust and put his own touch on their advice is suggested in how he handled radio scripts. “We are trying to construct a more inclusive society,” Perkins wrote for him, in a draft of a speech he intended to give over the radio. When he delivered that speech, he said, instead: “We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”40
He began by shutting down the nation’s banks. The rate of bank and business failures reached the highest point in history. Millions of Americans had lost every penny. The New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had suspended trading, and the governors of thirty-two states had already shut their banks to prevent total collapse. In states where banks remained open, depositors could withdraw no more than 5 percent of their savings. Roosevelt shut the banks to prevent still further collapse. On March 5, the day after he was inaugurated, he asked Congress to declare a four-day bank holiday. Under the terms of the Emergency Banking Act, banks would be opened once they’d been found to be sound. On March 12, FDR spoke on the radio in what radio executives took to calling a “fireside chat”—the first of more than three hundred. Explaining his banking plan, he offered reassurance. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be,” he said. He offered a lesson: “When you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault.” He asked for Americans’ confidence. “I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.”41