The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  But nothing could stem the President’s momentum. On March 12, at the end of his first week, he established direct contact with the people in the first of his “fireside chats.” The President’s reading copy of his talk disappeared just before the talk, but he calmly took a newspaperman’s mimeographed copy, mashed out a cigarette stub, turned to the microphone, and began simply, “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.…” For twenty minutes or so his warm, reassuring voice welled into millions of homes, explaining the banking situation in simple terms without giving the impression of talking down to his listeners. The speech was a brilliant success.

  The President stayed on the offensive. The next day, when a divided Senate was to consider the economy bill, he shot a terse seventy-two-word message to Congress on a new subject: beer. He recommended immediate modification of the Volstead Act to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer and light wines; he asked also for substantial taxes on these beverages. The shattered ranks of Democratic congressmen quickly solidified behind this popular move, which had been promised in their national platform. Roosevelt skillfully timed his message for maximum effect. The Senate passed the economy bill on the fifteenth, the beer bill the next day.

  A dozen days after the inauguration a move of adulation for Roosevelt was sweeping the country. Over ten thousand telegrams swamped the White House in a single week. Newspaper editorials were paeans of praise. The new President seemed human; he seemed brave; above all, he was acting. A flush of hope swept the nation. Gold was flowing back to financial institutions; banks were reopening without crowds of depositors clamoring for their money; employment and production seemed to be turning upward.

  “I will do anything you ask,” a congressman from Iowa wrote the President. “You are my leader.”

  But the President did not deceive himself. The efforts so far, he realized, had been essentially defensive. Even with the first three measures through, he told reporters, “we still shall have done nothing on the constructive side, unless you consider the beer bill partially constructive.” Originally he had planned for Congress to adjourn after enacting the first set of bills, then to reassemble when permanent legislation was ready. But why not strike again and again while the mood of the country was so friendly? The leaders were willing to hold Congress in session; a host of presidential advisers were at work in a dozen agencies, in hotel rooms, anywhere they could find a desk, drawing up bills. The result was more of the fast and staccato action that would go down in history as the “Hundred Days.”

  March 16—The President asked for an agriculture bill to raise farmers’ purchasing power, relieve the pressure of farm mortgages, and increase the value of farm loans made by banks. Hastily framed by Secretary Wallace and his aides, the measure was based partly on recommendations of a conference of farm leaders. It was the most dramatic and far-reaching farm bill ever proposed in peacetime, the President said later. The House passed the bill by a 315-98 vote on March 22 after five and a half hours of debate, the Senate by an equally lopsided vote five weeks later. In mid-May the President signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act into law.

  AND SO, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!, May 17, 1933

  Ding Darling, © 1933, New York Herald Tribune, Inc.

  March 21—The President asked for quick authorization of a civilian conservation corps for the purposes of both reforestation and humanitarianism. This bill interested Roosevelt himself as much as any single measure of the Hundred Days. It was designed to put a quarter of a million young men to work by early summer, building dams, draining marshlands, fighting forest fires, planting trees. Congress pushed the measure through in ten days by voice vote.

  March 21—The President asked for federal grants to the states for direct unemployment relief. His move represented a break with the previous administration’s policy; flatly opposed to giving money to the states for relief, Hoover in the end had grudgingly backed loans to states and cities. Proclaiming that the nation would see to it that no one starved, Roosevelt was prepared to launch the biggest relief program in history. Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act by heavy majorities and authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make available five hundred millions through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

  March 29—The President asked for federal supervision of traffic in investment securities in interstate commerce. To the old doctrine of caveat emptor, he said, must be added the further doctrine, “let the seller beware.” The essential goal was full publicity for new securities to be sold in interstate commerce. In an effort to restore public confidence, heavy penalties would be levied for failure to lodge full and accurate information about securities with the government. The bill passed early in May. Another measure, the Banking bill of 1933, was intended to impose on banks a complete separation from their security affiliates. Early in May the two Houses passed the measure to help drive the money-changers out of the temple.

  April 10—The President asked for legislation to create a Tennessee Valley Authority, charged with the duty of planning for the “proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and adjoining territory.…” Roosevelt’s vision was broad: he saw the project as transcending mere power development and entering the wide fields of flood control, soil erosion, afforestation, retirement of marginal lands, industrial distribution and diversification—in short, “national planning for a complete river watershed.…” The measure had a dramatic background: for over a decade George W. Norris of Nebraska and other members of Congress had desperately fought efforts to sell the government-built Muscle Shoals dam and power plant to private interests. They had barely staved off such a sale. Now Roosevelt was urging that Muscle Shoals be but a small part of a vast program that would tie together and invigorate a huge, underdeveloped region. Involving extensive public ownership and control, the measure was almost pure socialism, but Congress passed it by decisive majorities. The President signed the bill May 18, with Senator Norris exultantly looking on.

  April 13—The President asked for legislation to save small home mortgages from foreclosure. With foreclosures rising to a thousand a day, he wanted safeguards thrown around home ownership as a guarantee of social and economic stability. Machinery would be provided through which mortgage debts on small homes could be readjusted at lower interest rates and with provision for postponing interest and principal payments in cases of extreme need. Roosevelt had his legislation within a month.

  May 4—The President proposed emergency railroad legislation under which a co-ordinator of transportation would be authorized to promote or compel action by carriers to avoid duplications of service, prevent waste, and encourage financial reorganizations. He recommended repeal of the recapture provisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission Act and the regulation of railroad holding companies by the ICC. Both Houses passed bills within a month of Roosevelt’s request.

  May 17—The President proposed machinery for “a great cooperative movement throughout all industry in order to obtain wide reemployment, to shorten the working week, to pay a decent wage for the shorter week and to prevent unfair competition and disastrous overproduction.” He asked also for full power to start a large program of direct employment, and estimated that $3,300,000,000 could be invested in public construction to put the “largest possible” number of people to work. The National Industrial Recovery bill got a severe lambasting in the Senate, especially from the left, but it passed substantially intact, and the President signed it June 16.

  “A LEADERSHIP OF FRANKNESS AND VIGOR”

  The display of action was dazzling and heartwarming. But what did it all amount to? Where was the country headed? At a press conference late in March a reporter admitted to some confusion. The President’s first actions, he noted, had been deflationary, but his later bills, like the farm bill, seemed to mean more government spending. Roosevelt’s answer was cautious. Local machinery would be used and
the budget for ordinary governmental running expenses would be balanced. But “you cannot let people starve,” the President finished.

  Roosevelt was following no master program—no “economic panaceas or fancy plans,” as he later called them derisively. He not only admitted to, he boasted of, playing by ear. He was a football quarterback, he liked to tell reporters, calling a new play when he saw how the last one turned out. The situation had “moved so fast,” he wrote Colonel House in mid-May, “that what is a problem one day is solved or superseded the next. As you will realize, snap judgments have had to be made.”

  But what lay back of the snap judgments? If Roosevelt’s actions were frankly experimental, what shaped the experiments? The main influences working on Roosevelt were embodied in his party, his advisers, and in Congress.

  Americans like to scoff at party platforms and campaign promises, but Roosevelt’s action during the Hundred Days can be understood only against the party and election background. He had promised economy in government, and the economy bill was a determined effort to honor that promise. The party had promised beer, and his short message on beer quoted the party plank almost word for word. The farm bill had been generally forecast in the Democratic platform and in Roosevelt’s acceptance and Topeka speeches. Virtually every other major action had been outlined in more or less detailed form in platform or addresses or both. Never before had a President converted so many promises into so much legislation so quickly.

  One result, of course, was that the program of the Hundred Days reflected the inconsistencies of platform and election pledges. But nothing better illustrates Roosevelt’s capacity to throw himself into a role than the fact that he really believed in the rightness of his major actions, however inconsistent with one another. Economy was an example. Amid tremendous projects for governmental spending Roosevelt prepared plans for parsimonies in government—for example, cutting a war veteran totally disabled in civil life from $40 to $20 a month. And when Daniels wrote him in concern because state legislatures were drastically reducing school appropriations, Roosevelt in reply complained that teachers’ salaries were too high. In the White House, meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt was instituting nineteen-cent luncheons, which the President duly ate.

  Partly by design, partly by chance, Roosevelt had gathered around him a group of advisers as diverse in philosophy as the New Deal itself. One of the most influential of these during 1933 was the President’s budget director, Lewis W. Douglas. His plain, open face and lean frame gave Douglas the look of a cowboy rather than what he really was, scion of a copper-rich Arizona family, and an able politician who had served in the national House of Representatives. So well did he help the President economize that Roosevelt was calling him “in many ways the greatest ‘find’ of the administration” within a month of the inauguration. Keeping a tight hold on the purse strings, Douglas quickly won a reputation as a do-or-die budget-balancer.

  He had numerous allies. Centered in the Treasury Department was a group of men pressing for government economy and orthodox fiscal policies. Woodin was ill much of the spring and summer of 1933, and Dean Acheson, a dapper young lawyer and old Grotonian, often took his place at the White House. Fussy, scholarly looking Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an old friend of the President’s, advised him on farm credit and other agricultural matters; although fundamentally humanitarian in outlook, Morgenthau was cautious and conservative in his approach to many economic problems. Roosevelt installed his old friend Jesse Jones, Texas banker and Democrat, as head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Other enclaves of orthodox thinking were the Commerce Department and the Federal Reserve Board.

  But fresh minds and new ideas also had full scope at the White House. Roosevelt installed Raymond Moley in the State Department as Assistant Secretary with the understanding that he would continue to work closely with the President. Harry Hopkins, appointed Federal Relief Administrator, had a voice in many relief and recovery decisions. Tugwell, now Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, did not confine his advice to farm matters. Berle helped draft several key bills of the Hundred Days. But these were only four of a host of zealous, indefatigable lawyers, economists, teachers, social workers, some of them amazingly young, who were flocking into key staff positions in the old departments and in the new emergency agencies that were springing up all around town.

  Some of these idea men were more influential than they might have guessed, for Roosevelt did not let the weight of his office squeeze out fresh notions and projects. Interesting new ideas were often relayed to him by Wallace, Ickes, or Miss Perkins, and he pounced on them avidly. Sometimes he would winnow them from abstracts of the long reports that his secretaries piled on his desk. Much advice and information came by mail; the names of his correspondents already were beginning to look like a small “Who’s Who of America.”

  Of incalculable influence was Eleanor Roosevelt. Varied and imposing though her new duties were, the First Lady was not content with presiding over the White House. She was so much a center of interest and activity that by the end of 1933 she had received over three hundred thousand pieces of mail. In that year she began the trips that would take her to an incredible number of places throughout the country, and eventually to many parts of the world. A New Yorker cartoon showing a miner at the bottom of a deep shaft looking up and exclaiming to his mate “Why, it’s Mrs. Roosevelt!” nicely captured the popular reaction of surprise and delight at the First Lady’s gadding about.

  Roosevelt was still teaching his wife how to observe conditions and report back to him. “Watch the people’s faces,” he told her. “Look at the condition of their clothes on the wash line. You can tell a lot from that. Notice their cars.” As soon as possible after her return the President would question her closely. When she got back from a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula, for example, he wanted to know everything about the lives of the fishermen—what they had to eat, how they lived, what the farms were like, how the houses were built, what kind of education was provided.

  So eager was the President for intelligence, no matter how great the ensuing clutter and confusion, that he deliberately organized his office to cast as wide a net as possible. Not content with the varied advice available in the cabinet, he established in July 1933 an Executive Council that included all the cabinet members along with a dozen or so heads of recovery agencies. Still not content, he established later in the year the National Emergency Council with many of the same members. These agencies were clumsy affairs: they were too big to act effectively; petty difficulties were raised along with big problems; they often wasted the time of the busy men who attended. Moreover, they undercut the cabinet, which dwindled in importance, until eventually Ickes was quietly taking cat naps at cabinet meetings and hoping that the President did not see him.

  But one great function the cabinet and the two councils did serve: week after week they gave Roosevelt a vivid picture of the vast array of problems, big and small, that were arising in the first headlong, exuberant, haphazard months of the New Deal. And more, they exposed the heads of thirty of forty agencies firsthand to Roosevelt’s contagious drive and enthusiasm. Sitting confidently in the midst of his admiring lieutenants, telling stories, making jokes, knocking heads together, urging action, demanding quick reports and recommendations, Roosevelt almost singlehanded gave pace and direction to the New Deal battalions.

  “After spending an hour with the President,” an ordinarily rather sober agency chief exclaimed to a friend, “I could eat nails for lunch!”

  Supposedly sharing co-ordinate power with the President, even during crises, were 96 senators and 435 representatives on Capitol Hill. What would be their relation to the new president? The question was partially answered in the House of Representatives as soon as Congress convened. As a result of a three-way trade among the Tammany, Tennessee, and Texas congressional delegations, Representative Henry T. Rainey of Illinois was elected Speaker, the first Northern Democrat so chosen in over half a century. Under the deal the fl
oor leadership went to Joseph W. Byrns of Tennessee, and a Texan succeeded to the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee. Two other leading party positions went to Northerners. In the Senate three friends of Roosevelt were dominant: Vice-President Garner, who was attending cabinet meetings, President Pro Tem Key Pittman of Nevada, and Floor Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, a party stalwart.

  Within the two Houses, however, powerful forces were working toward both the left and the right. Southerners, generally conservative in outlook, except for their hostility toward Wall Street, were chairmen or ranking members of most of the committees as a result of storing up seniority during the long years of Democratic defeats in the North. Along with the time-honored blocs—public works, reclamation, farmers, labor, and the like—were factional groups propelled by depression-sharpened discontent: silverites, inflationists, veterans. A wholly unpredictable factor lay in the scores of freshman representatives, some of them stridently offering panaceas, others silent and bewildered by the capital kaleidoscope. The Senate had responded more slowly to political trends, but it too embraced a multitude of ideological splits, bipartisan blocs, and party factions.

  Left without direction the Democratic ranks in Congress would break up into guerrilla armies. Senate Democrats set up a steering committee and a policy committee, dominated by old hands friendly to the President. The new leadership of the House established a hierarchy of committees designed ostensibly to canvas members’ opinions but actually aimed more at siphoning off protest and holding rebels in line. But no congressional strong man was put at the top. Who would direct the steering committee, the whips, the caucus? What program would be followed? The question was not long left in doubt. Casually identifying the Democratic party’s program with the administration, Rainey said, “We will put over Mr. Roosevelt’s program.”