The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  Restoration and recovery would come only when Americans banded together, Roosevelt said, “as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” He vowed to go immediately to Congress with a course of action for a national program to put Americans back to work, to prevent foreclosures and regulate banks, to enact a “good neighbor” foreign policy that respected the rights of others, and to ensure a “sound currency.” Above all, Roosevelt called for “action and action now.”

  We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. 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.

  Then, to underscore his sincerity, he pledged to take unprecedented steps if Congress or any other force sabotaged his efforts.

  I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. 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 to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

  He ended the speech at one thirty-four P.M., and as he gave a broad smile and final wave, the sun broke through the clouds.

  Conservative and liberal newspapers alike praised the speech for its courage and confidence. Even Roosevelt thought it divinely inspired and would eventually consider it “sacred ground,” according to his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. Italy’s Il Giornale d’Italia praised it as a Mussolini-like edict. “President Roosevelt’s words are clear and need no comment to make even the deaf hear that not only Europe but the whole world feels the need of executive authority capable of acting with full powers of cutting short the purposeless chatter of legislative assemblies. This method of government may well be defined as Fascist.” The New York Herald Tribune seized on his proclamation that he intended to ask Congress for “broad executive power,” publishing the banner headline: FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY. The New York Daily News—America’s largest-circulation newspaper—took the unprecedented step of announcing a yearlong moratorium from criticizing the new president. “A lot of us have been asking for a dictator,” the News editorialized. “Now we have one. His name is not Mussolini or Stalin or Hitler. It is Roosevelt … Dictatorship in crises was ancient Rome’s best idea … The impression we get from various quarters is that practically everyone feels better already. Confidence seems to be coming back with a rush, along with courage.”

  The “fear itself” phrase did not elicit applause when Roosevelt spoke it, though it would go down in history as one of the greatest presidential quotes of all time. Several would take credit for it, but in fact it had been Eleanor who had given Roosevelt a book of Henry David Thoreau’s writings with the line “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” He had the book with him at the Mayflower Hotel that morning while finalizing his speech.

  People around the world, listening on shortwave radio, welcomed the speech almost as much as Americans did. Congratulatory telegrams poured into the White House from England, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand.

  Among the tens of millions who listened on America’s 180 radio stations was Anton Cermak—now on his deathbed in a Miami hospital room. In the two and a half weeks since he had told Roosevelt “I’m glad it was me instead of you,” Cermak had declined steadily. First he had developed colitis, then he had contracted pneumonia, and finally gangrene had settled in his punctured lung. As it turned out, surgeons should have removed the bullet embedded in his spine.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bank Holiday

  In keeping with his inaugural vow to “act, and act quickly,” Roosevelt went to work even before the inaugural ball had commenced. While nearly two thousand guests mingled at a White House reception hosted by Eleanor, Roosevelt sent his cabinet nominations to the Senate and obtained unprecedentedly rapid confirmation. Then he gathered them all in the Oval Office and had a Supreme Court justice swear them in as a group. After a brief pep talk, in which he urged them to work together to solve the nation’s many crises, Roosevelt directed Secretary of the Treasury William Woodin to draft an emergency banking bill that could be submitted to Congress when it convened the following Thursday. As fireworks filled the sky near the Washington Monument and the formal ball began, Roosevelt closeted himself with Louis McHenry Howe in the Lincoln Study until he retired for the night.

  The next morning, Sunday, March 5, he awoke for the first time in the White House. After breakfast in bed, he rode in his new presidential limousine to St. Thomas’s Parish, an Episcopal church off Connecticut Avenue. Returning to the White House, he summoned his cabinet. “The President outlined more coherently than I had heard it outlined before, just what this banking crisis was and what the legal problems involved were,” recalled Secretary of Labor Perkins, the first female cabinet secretary ever appointed. Woodin reported on myriad conversations he had had with the bankers who had arrived in the capital from around the country to meet with the new president. The bankers themselves were panicking and clueless about how to rescue the industry, he told the president. Many banks had been invested heavily in the stock market and had “leant recklessly to speculative investors,” according to one account, finding “themselves without sufficient capital and in many cases without reserves.”

  Before taking office, Roosevelt had already settled on his primary course of action. He had written two presidential proclamations, which he now showed to his cabinet. One called for a special session of Congress to begin Thursday, March 9. The other declared a bank holiday until Congress convened, which would close every bank in America. Then, relying on a little-known provision of a World War I act designed to prevent gold shipments to foreign foes, he stopped the export and private hoarding of all gold and gold bullion in the United States. The order also prohibited any foreign exchange transactions. His new attorney general, Homer Cummings, quickly provided him with the constitutional authority to invoke the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, and Roosevelt’s bold proclamations were issued within hours.

  Next he spoke with congressional leaders, including Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry B. Steagal of the respective banking committees, and informed them of his call for a special session to address three emergencies: the banking crisis, unemployment, and the federal budget.

  That evening, his press secretary invited four newspaper correspondents to meet with Roosevelt in the Red Room. Roosevelt was in top form—Washington Daily News reporter Raymond Clapper portrayed him as a genuinely sanguine and an optimistic new leader. “Behind the plain desk … looking across under the shaded desk lamp,” Clapper wrote, “sat the President, in a blue serge business suit. Sturdy-shouldered, smiling, calm, talking pleasantly, with an occasional humorous sally, he was a picture of ease and confidence. As he talked, he deliberately inserted a fresh cigarette in an ivory holder. It was as if he was considering whether to sign a bill for a bridge in some far away rural county.” All he asked of the journalists, whom he stroked by giving them the big news scoop about his proclamations, was that they refer to the bank closures as a “holiday”—in stark contrast to Hoover’s depressing term, “moratorium.”

  At eleven thirty P.M. eastern standard time, Roosevelt gave the first radio address of his thirty-four-hour-old presidency. Directed to the American Legion, the short speech was carried live across the nation by all radio networks and may have been a calculated attempt by Roosevelt to rally the million-member veterans’ organization in the event of civil unrest. “With so many banks involved, the U.S. Army—including National Guard and Reserve units—might not be large enough to respond,” Jonathan Alter wrote in The Defining Moment. “This raised the question of whether the new president should establish a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law.” Alter, in researching his book on Roosevelt’s first
one hundred days in office, located a never-before-published draft of this speech, which included this “eye-popping sentence”:

  As new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.

  While it is not known who in Roosevelt’s inner circle wrote the phrase and inserted it into his text—and can only be guessed why Roosevelt chose not to utter it—the nature of it was, as Alter described it, “dictator talk—an explicit power grab.” Instead, Roosevelt delivered a five-minute speech about the merits of peace but calling upon “all men and women who love their country” to provide the same “sacrifice and devotion” that would be expected of them in wartime.

  Then, at one A.M. on Monday, March 6, he signed the proclamation. With the flourish of a pen, and the assumption of wartime powers, he had seized control by the government of all the banks in the land and all the gold in the Federal Reserve. “For the first time since the Civil War, the dollar had been cut adrift from the gold standard,” according to a history of America’s finance capitalism. Finally, he retired for the night. When he awakened in the morning, his first full working day as president, he asked Irwin McDuffie to take him down the newly installed wheelchair ramp to the Oval Office. There, left alone, he was startled by the emptiness. “Hoover had taken everything movable except the flag and the great seal,” said one account. “There was no pad, no pencil, no telephone, not even a buzzer to summon help.” The walls were bare, the desktop cleared. He saw it as symbolic of the plight of the nation—that its heart center had come to an absolute standstill. It also brought him a moment of sheer terror, in which he was reminded of his utter helplessness and forced to shout for help. When his secretary rushed in, his equilibrium returned. It would be the only moment in the Roosevelt presidency in which the office was not pulsating with activity.

  To the surprise of many in the administration, government, and industry, the overall reaction to the bank holiday was joyous, ushering in “almost a springtime mood” that raised Americans’ spirits and elicited nationwide cooperation. It was as if the closures signified that the economy had hit rock bottom and had nowhere to go but up. Merchants readily extended credit to their customers, and dozens of municipalities issued more local scrip to keep things running. Americans suddenly found comfort in the fact that they were all in the same boat, and a camaraderie was born. Nearly half a million jubilant telegrams and letters poured in to the White House during the first few days after the inauguration. The fear had miraculously evolved into hope, and if in fact Roosevelt did not know precisely what the outcome would be, at least someone had finally done something. “If he had burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say ‘Well, at least we got a fire started anyhow,’ ” Will Rogers wrote of the national mood in his Monday morning syndicated column. “We have had years of ‘don’t rock the boat.’ Go ahead and sink it, Franklin, if you want to. We might just as well be swimming as floundering around the way we are.”

  Roosevelt saw the role of president as equivalent to that of school principal. The chief executive of the nation, like the strong predecessors in his party—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson—should essentially be a preacher and lecturer. His job, as he articulated it, was to use the office for “persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.”

  Closing the nation’s banks was a far-reaching experiment with unknown consequences, prompting one of Roosevelt’s friends to tell him that if he succeeded, he would go down in history as the greatest American president; and if he failed, he would be known as the worst. “If I fail I shall be the last one,” he responded, fully comprehending the precipice on which America tottered.

  While a sense of excitement and euphoria filled the White House during those first few days of Roosevelt’s presidency, Eleanor was apprehensive. She thought her husband’s inaugural address “very, very solemn and a little terrifying,” she said during her exclusive first-ever interview of a First Lady, which she gave to her closest friend, Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok. The audience was “so tremendous and you felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do.” She had been particularly alarmed by the crowd’s exuberant response to Roosevelt’s vow to assume wartime powers. What went unsaid between the two women, as Hickok later recalled, was the precariousness of democracy and its vulnerability to the ascendance of a demagogue such as Huey Long or some other charismatic firebrand. “One had the feeling of going it blindly because we’re in a tremendous stream and none of us know where we’re going to land,” Eleanor said, her thoughts turning inevitably toward Adolf Hitler, who had risen to power just a month earlier and vowed to replace the German republic with a dictatorship. Eleanor “feared the kind of desperation that had upended Germany,” her biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote, “and she feared the random acts of violence and assassination aimed at her husband.”

  Indeed, hourly bulletins over the inaugural weekend brought reports from Miami of Mayor Cermak’s sudden and rapid deterioration. On Inauguration Day, his physicians gave him twenty-four to forty-eight hours to live and issued a statement:

  Mayor Cermak, last evening, developed pain in the right shoulder, together with tenderness over the right lower chest and liver. This together with his general septic appearance, caused us to suspect the presence of either a subphrenic abscess or pleural empyrema.

  For this reason the space between the liver and the diaphragm was aspirated with negative results. The pleural cavity yielded old bloody serous fluid.

  The lung itself, on aspiration, yielded a very foul, fetid air, but no pus, giving evidence that a gangrenous process was occurring in the lung.

  Chapter Twenty

  I Want to Keel All Presidents

  On the night of February 15, 1933, having been disarmed and transferred to the Dade County Jail, Zangara said repeatedly that he was sorry he had not killed Roosevelt and that he hoped he would have another opportunity to do so. Thirty-two years old, single, ill-disposed, unhealthy, and with a burning hatred of the privileged class, Zangara immediately, and unwaveringly, confessed to attempting to kill the president-elect and proclaimed his desire to kill all the torture agents of capitalists. All the while he rubbed his stomach in a circular clockwise direction.

  At the jail that night, Zangara was stripped, searched, photographed, and interrogated. Reporters seized on the opportunity to ridicule his pubescent physique and mimic his foreign accent.

  “Why do you want to kill?” reporters asked him.

  “As a man I like Meester Roosevelt. As a president I want to keel him. I want to keel all presidents.”

  The jail was on the top six floors of the South’s tallest building, a twenty-four-story granite tower that housed Dade County government. Around ten P.M., Zangara, battered and bleeding from the blows of the spectators and policemen who had set upon him, was whisked from the basement to the top level were he was stripped.

  “When we arrived at the jail,” Zangara said, policemen “threw me on the stone pavement like a dog. After a while they took all of my clothes away and left me nude.” He was cooperative and cheerful except when the subject turned to the capitalist oppression of the working class, which set him off on a tirade. Most of his interrogation was conducted by Sheriff Dan Hardie, who claimed to speak Italian. The Miami Herald described Hardie as “something of a linguist,” though in fact he knew only a couple of words in Spanish, which he inserted into his questions. The prisoner recounted his horrific Italian childhood, his immigration to America, and his steady work from the time of his arrival in 1923 until 1929, when the construction industry in New Jersey dried up. He had taken a bus to Miami in August 1932 and stayed at various hotels and cottages on the beach before settling in a third-floor apartment in the boardinghouse near Bayfront Park. He was paying two dollars a week in rent for the run-down attic space a
t 126 Northeast Fifth Street. He idled about on the wharves, gambled on the horse races, and played shuffleboard in Lummus Park.

  On Thursday, February 16, 1933, Zangara was charged with four counts of attempted murder for the botched assassination of Roosevelt and the wounding of three other victims who suffered minor injuries. He was not initially charged in connection with the wounding of Cermak or Mabel Gill, as the severity of their condition was not yet apparent. Rumors of a planned vigilante attack on Zangara by a lynching party prompted county officials to tighten security in the sixth-floor courtroom of Judge E. C. Collins. Observers were searched for weapons, and armed guards were stationed at all entrances to the courthouse. Zangara, wearing a checked shirt and dress trousers, was swept in by a mass of brawny policemen who engulfed the tiny prisoner. Seated in a massive leather chair that enveloped him, Zangara announced that he did not want legal representation. Still, Collins appointed three defense attorneys in order to guarantee that the Dade County justice system could not be accused later of railroading the defendant.

  The defense team made a request for the appointment of a lunacy commission to determine Zangara’s mental stability. The county physician, Dr. E. C. Thomas, had conducted a physical examination of Zangara on the night of his arrest. He had diagnosed the stomach pain as gastritis triggered by nervousness and fear, and had pronounced him not only “normal in every respect” but also “sane.” Thomas’s declaration would be the first in a long line of professional opinions that the assassin was sane. The judge appointed two local psychiatrists, who rushed to the jail to examine him near midnight. They issued their eighty-three-word finding the following morning, saying that Zangara had a “perverse character” and a “psychopathic personality,” but they did not call him insane. Zangara’s chief counsel also declared him to be “a sane man,” as did Judge Collins. In any case, Zangara and his lawyers had no intention of using an insanity defense, apparently leaving that decision to the defendant himself.