20 Joslin, Hoover off the Record, 3; David Burner, Herbert Hoover: The Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1978), 314.
21 Liebovich, Bylines in Despair, 135; Joslin, Hoover off the Record, 315.
22 Hoff, Herbert Hoover, 140. The estimate of apple vendors appears in William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 109; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 3:195.
23 Hoover, interview by Raymond Clapper, February 27, 1931, in Olive Ewing Clapper, Washington Tapestry (New York: Whittlesey House, div. of McGraw-Hill, 1946), 4; “The Presidency: Opener,” Time, October 10, 1932, 223; Day, Autobiography of Will Rogers, 275.
24 Hoover, interview by Raymond Clapper, February 27, 1931, in O. E. Clapper, Washington Tapestry, 4; Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 25.
25 On “bulldog gravy,” see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 169; [Archibald MacLeish], “ ‘No One Has Starved,’ ” Fortune, September 1932, 28.
26 Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 120; “Candidature,” Time, January 25, 1932, 9.
27 Peel and Donnelly, 1932 Campaign, 51; Burner, Herbert Hoover, 316.
28 Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 3, 6; Herbert Hoover, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1, 1932 to March 4, 1933, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1977), 569; Herbert Hoover, Campaign Speeches of 1932 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933), 227.
29 Burner, Herbert Hoover, 315–17; Hoff, Herbert Hoover, 167.
30 “Election Results: President Reject,” Time, November 14, 1932, 26.
31 John Gray, review of Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, 46.
32 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 166.
33 Gladstone Williams, “Smiles of Franklin D. Roosevelt Will End Decade of Dourness,” Atlanta Constitution, November 25, 1932, 6.
34 Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 91. On Roosevelt’s childhood, see Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
35 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 11.
36 Ward, Before the Trumpet, 253; Ward, First-Class Temperament, 509.
37 Ward, Before the Trumpet, 315; Ward, First-Class Temperament, 86. FDR fulfilled TR’s example even to the point of having six children, though one of FDR’s sons died in infancy.
38 On Roosevelt’s bout with polio, see especially Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985); Ward, First-Class Temperament, 576–648 and passim; and Garry Wills, “The Power of Impotence,” New York Review of Books, November 23, 1989, 3–4.
39 Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, 17; Ward, First-Class Temperament, 623, 647.
40 Sara Roosevelt to Frederic Delano, as quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 2, The Ordeal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 100.
41 James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R.: A Son’s Story of a Lonely Man (New York: Hearst, 1959), 143.
42 On FDR’s skillful and ultimately unconscious diversions from his handicap, see Rexford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 22.
43 “Republicans: Dutch Take Holland,” Time, June 27, 1932, 11; James O’Donnell Bennett, “Boos Give Way to Victory Song as Tide Turns,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1932, 4; “Learns ‘Happy Days,’ ” New York Times, July 10, 1932, 12; “Roosevelt’s Theme Song,” Washington Post, July 10, 1932, M6; Peel and Donnelly, 1932 Campaign, 147.
44 Clinton L. Mosher, as quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 3, The Triumph (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 358; Peel and Donnelly, 1932 Campaign, 170.
45 Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 35, 40.
46 Tully, F.D.R., My Boss, 68; Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, Drawn & Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons (Montgomery, AL: Elliott & Clark, 1996), 94.
47 Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, esp. 93–97, 65; Ward, First-Class Temperament, 651, 780–84.
48 Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt with a Special Introduction and Explanatory Notes by President Roosevelt, vol. 2, The Year of Crisis, 1933 (New York: Random House: 1938), 11, 12, 15. Although FDR had drafted much of the inaugural address with the aid of Raymond Moley, the famous phrase “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was contributed by his longtime aide Louis Howe. Davis W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 120. On the enthusiastic response to FDR’s possible use of broad executive power, see Alter, Defining Moment, 219.
49 “500,000 in Streets Cheer Roosevelt,” New York Times, March 5, 1933, 1; Gish quoted in Sally Stein, “The President’s Two Bodies: Staging and Restagings of FDR and the New Deal Body Politic,” American Art 18, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 37.
50 For analysis of Roosevelt’s Hundred Days, see William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 41–62; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 131–59; Anthony J. Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); and Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Hundred Days War: Histories of the New Deal,” Nation, April 27, 2009, 25–28.
51 Hiram Johnson to Katherine Edson, April 20, 1933, as quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 62 n. 54; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7.
52 Leo C. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Harcourt, 1937), 39–53, esp. 49–50; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, 11–13; “Roosevelt at Ease in Chat with Press,” New York Times, March 9, 1933, 3; see also Alter, Defining Moment, 253–58.
53 The U.S. Census Bureau reported the proportion of families with radios rose from roughly 46 percent in 1930 to 81 percent in 1940. See table Dg117–130, “Radio and television—stations, sets produced, and households with sets: 1921–2000,” in Susan B. Carter et al. eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial ed. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4:4-1027. Obviously, many people also listened to the radio outside their own homes.
54 Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. 53–114.
55 Ira R. T. Smith with Joe Alex Morris, “Dear Mr. President . . .”: The Story of Fifty Years in the White House Mail Room (New York: J. Messner, 1949), 12, 216.
56 Helen S. Brown to FDR; Laurence L. Prince to FDR; Frank J. Reveley to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 4, 1933, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR Library).
57 Dow D. Burch to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 4, 1933, FDR Library; Cleveland correspondent, quoted in Houck, FDR and Fear Itself, 10.
58 Mrs. John H. Quigley to FDR; Mae Barnie to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 4, 1933, FDR Library.
59 William F. Purdy to FDR; Charlotte Reeve Conover to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 4, 1933, FDR Library.
60 F. W. Clements to FDR (emphasis in original); James A. Peers to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 4, 1933, FDR Library.
61 The description of FDR’s conception of a chat around the fireside comes from his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, as quoted in Lenthall, Radio’s America, 88–89. The Washington bureau chief for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Harry Butcher, popularized the phrase “fireside chat.” See Betty Houchin Winfield, FDR and the News Media (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 104.
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62 Lawrence Levine and Cornelia Levine observe that FDR usually spoke at not more than 100 to 120 words per minute, a pace 30 percent less than was commonly used on the radio and a decided contrast with the rapid-fire styles of the columnist Walter Winchell and Louisiana senator Huey Long. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, eds., The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 16.
63 Radio address, March 12, 1933, in Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, FDR’s Fireside Chats (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 12–17.
64 F. W. Meyers to FDR; Florence M. Betts to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 13, 1933, FDR Library.
65 Charles L. Kimmel to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 13, 1933, FDR Library.
66 Frank J. Cregg to FDR; Ruth Liebermann to FDR, as quoted in Levine and Levine, People and the President, 37, 22.
67 Walker S. Duel, “Landslide Victory Held Tribute to Roosevelt’s Courage, Character,” Atlanta Constitution, November 7, 1936, 2; Levine and Levine, People and the President, 17.
68 Virginia Miller to FDR; Etta A. Buckley to FDR; Mrs. A. J. Bell to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 13, 1933, FDR Library.
69 Paul H. Russell to FDR; Chester E. Bruns to FDR, in Levine and Levine, People and the President, 48, 42; Will Rogers, “Roosevelt Illiterate—Rogers,” Miami News, January 26, 1936, 11; “Common Words Keynote of Roosevelt’s Talks,” New York Times, May 16, 1937, 174.
70 Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 72.
71 Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in Levine and Levine, People and the President, 18; FDR to C. Leffingwell, March 16, 1942, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 4:1298.
72 Melvyn Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” New Republic, April 15, 1946, 543.
73 Of course, FDR’s opponents did not applaud such appearances. One of Peter Arno’s most famous cartoons depicted a patrician-looking group in evening dress inviting friends on an outing. It was captioned, “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux [a Manhattan newsreel theater] to hiss Roosevelt.” The New Yorker, September 19, 1936, 16.
74 Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” 543. The journalist Marquis Childs observed that FDR was a “man who could be photographed . . . always with just the perfect camera angle.” Ward, First-Class Temperament, 552.
75 James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, 1956), 447; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, 13.
76 Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1938), 7: 615.
77 Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 316; Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” 542.
78 “Smile like Roosevelt,” New York Times, August 21, 1933, 11; “Roosevelt Canvas Approved by Wife,” New York Times, March 2, 1934, 25; “A Laughing Cavalier,” Vanity Fair, October 1933, 15. On portraits of FDR, see Stein, “President’s Two Bodies,” 32–57; and David Meschutt, “Portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” American Art Journal 18, no. 4 (1986): 3–50.
79 I. Hoover, Forty-Two Years in the White House, 233; Fulton Oursler, Behold This Dreamer! An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 419; Ward, First-Class Temperament, 711.
80 Joseph W. Martin and Robert J. Donovan, My First Fifty Years in Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 73.
81 Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 36.
82 H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe, ed. Malcolm Moos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 262; Mencken, “Three Years of Dr. Roosevelt,” American Mercury, March 1936, 257; Charles A. Fecher, ed., The Diary of H. L. Mencken (New York: Knopf, 1989), 76; George Wolfskill and John Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 28.
83 Rauch, Roosevelt Reader, 166.
84 “No Hasty Inflation,” New York Times, May 9, 1933, 16; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, 312; Lenthall, Radio’s America, 126, 141.
85 Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 477; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 238. Ross here speaks of Hitler and Stalin, but the phrase is equally applicable to Il Duce.
CHAPTER TWO: SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE FACE!
1 The story of Shirley’s weekly bleachings appeared in Lloyd Pantages, “I Cover Hollywood,” Los Angeles Examiner, October 16, 1935, Clippings File—Shirley Temple, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA (hereafter MHL); see also Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 69. A brunette Shirley appears in New Deal Rhythm (1933).
2 Diana Serra Cary, Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997), 149.
3 Black, Child Star, 12–14.
4 Black, Child Star, 14.
5 Anne Edwards says that Shirley Temple’s earnings from her films before Stand Up and Cheer! were $1,135. Edwards, Shirley Temple: American Princess (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 49. Shirley Temple Black says her earnings on the Educational Films shorts and her early bit parts amounted to $702.50. Black, Child Star, 31.
6 Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, Growing Up on the Set: Interviews with 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 21, 334.
7 Black, Child Star, 15–16.
8 Black, Child Star, 14.
9 Black, Child Star, 20–21.
10 Black, Child Star, 21–23, 25–27, 19.
11 Edwards, Shirley Temple, 70.
12 Gertrude Temple, “Bringing Up Shirley,” American Magazine, February 1935, 92; [Max Trell], “My Life and Times: The Autobiography of Shirley Temple, Part I,” Pictorial Review, August 1935, 40. A Time magazine cover story echoed this assertion: “Her work entails no effort. She plays at acting as other small girls play at dolls.” “Peewee’s Progress,” Time, April 27, 1936, 42.
13 For example, the mother of the silent film star “Baby Peggy” Montgomery told reporters, “She [Peggy] works—if you would call it work—four hours a day, never at night and never on Sundays. She considers her work play and nothing is ever done or said to let her feel otherwise.” The former child star found this comment bitterly amusing. Cary, Hollywood’s Children, 92.
14 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 95.
15 Susan Rae Applebaum, “The Little Princess Onstage in 1903: Its Historical Significance,” Theatre History Studies 18 (1998): 71–72. In New York City, applications to the mayor’s office for licenses for juvenile actors, which had been fewer than two hundred in 1896, spiked to over four thousand in 1903. Benjamin McArthur, “ ‘Forbid Them Not’: Child Actor Labor Laws and Political Activism in the Theatre,” Theatre Survey 36, no. 2 (1995): 63–80.
16 A particularly formidable critic was Elbridge Gerry, longtime head of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. See McArthur, “ ‘Forbid Them Not,’ ” 66–67.
17 National Alliance for the Protection of Stage Children, Stage Children of America (New York: Times Building, [1911]), 5, 16, 8, 22.
18 I. A. Taylor, “The Show-Child: A Protest,” Living Age 9 (1896): 113, 116; see also F. Zeta Youmans, “Childhood, Inc.,” Survey 52 (1924): 464.
19 Educational Films continued until 1939.
20 The song may also have had roots in Yiddish theater. See Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 44.
21 Rob Kapilow, interview by Susan Stamberg, “A Depression-Era Anthem for Our Times,” National Public Radio, broadcast November 15, 2008.
22 Gary Giddins, Bi
ng Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 305.
23 Film dialogue throughout this book is my own transcriptions.
24 Black, Child Star, 232–33; David Emblidge, ed., My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 27. Black notes that originally the bill made no exceptions with respect to age for children in films. She mistakenly says Roosevelt signed the bill on the day of her visit, June 24, 1938. So ludicrous did the idea of Shirley Temple as a child laborer seem in the mid-1930s that it was the subject of a humorous imaginary interview between the child star and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, in which Shirley says, “I don’t work. I dance and sing and make faces.” Corey Ford with illustration by Miguel Covarrubias, “Impossible Interview: Frances Perkins vs. Shirley Temple,” Vanity Fair, September 1935, 33.
25 In this context, FDR has been frequently quoted by Shirley Temple Black and others as paying tribute to her cheering smile, saying, “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.” Lester David and Irene David, The Shirley Temple Story (New York: Putnam, 1983),16; Black, Child Star, 59; George F. Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 199. I have been unable to verify the quotation, however, and suspect that it is apocryphal.
26 The character of Cromwell was loosely modeled on Florenz Ziegfeld. In the script’s earliest conception, Will Rogers was to play the secretary of laughter. Rian James, “Fox Follies, Rough First Draft,” 3, n.d. [c. July 1, 1933], Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, Cinema Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter USC). On restrictions of Roosevelt’s likeness in films, see Ronald Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 76–77. Later, FDR broke this policy for Yankee Doodle Dandy (Warner Bros., 1942), in which Roosevelt’s voice is used and an actor impersonates him. Melvyn Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” New Republic, April 15, 1946, 543.
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 25