by Adam Cohen
Early in the presidential campaign, in an April 7, 1932, radio address, Roosevelt promised to champion “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” It was one of the most talked-about, and most revolutionary, speeches of the campaign. Hoover and his Republican predecessors had governed in the interests of those at the top of the economic pyramid, insisting that their wealth would eventually trickle down to the rest of the country. Roosevelt was promising direct help to Americans who lacked money or social status. When the Democratic National Convention nominated him, Roosevelt broke with tradition and traveled to Chicago Stadium to address the delegates in person. In his acceptance speech on July 2, he made a historic promise. “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” he said. The New Deal was not a platform. Voters had no way of knowing exactly what Roosevelt would do about the agricultural crisis or unemployment, but his pledge of a New Deal was a commitment to bring about change, rather than wait for conditions to improve. “It was a happy phrase,” Frances Perkins would later say. “It made people feel better, and in that terrible period of depression they needed to feel better.”45
Each candidate warned that victory by his opponent would spell disaster. Hoover’s supporters argued that Roosevelt was a dilettante, unsuited to leading the nation even in the best of times. He was the sort of politician who told people what they wanted to hear, they charged—a “chameleon on plaid.” Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist of his day, dismissed Roosevelt, in a much-quoted putdown, as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Hoover was the most caustic of all in his criticism. The “inchoate new deal” Roosevelt was proposing would, he said, “crack the timbers of the Constitution” and “destroy the very foundation of our government.” Hoover spoke of a Roosevelt victory in apocalyptic terms. “The grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms,” he warned.46
Roosevelt, for his part, attacked Hoover for indifference to the plight of the Depression’s victims, and for lacking an identifiable plan for turning the economy around. The Hoover administration, he insisted, “has been unable to do more than put temporary patches on a leaking roof without any attempt to put a new roof on our economic structure.” In one of his last major speeches of the campaign, to a Baltimore audience, Roosevelt used an especially vivid image. He was waging war, he declared, “against the ‘Four Horsemen’ of the present Republican leadership: The Horsemen of Destruction, Delay, Deceit, Despair.”47
Hoover began the campaign convinced he would prevail. Roosevelt was simply too insubstantial, he believed, to be elected. Even as it became increasingly clear that his opponent was headed for an overwhelming victory, Hoover would not be dissuaded. “He is living on an island that is getting smaller each day,” a friend observed. Other than the candidate himself, few people were surprised when Hoover lost in a landslide, carrying only six states, or when Congress turned solidly Democratic. William “Big Bill” Thompson, the onetime Republican mayor of Chicago, noted dryly that “the history of American politics shows that the people don’t vote for continued depression.” When the election returns came in, Hoover was bitterly disappointed. To more objective observers, however, Roosevelt’s victory was expected—and a sign of where the nation was headed. William Allen White, the influential Kansas newspaper editor, declared that the outcome reflected “a new attitude in American life...a firm desire on the part of the American people to use government as an agency for human welfare.”48
After the election, relations between Hoover and Roosevelt were chilly. The Twentieth Amendment, which pushed presidential inaugurations forward from March to January, had been ratified but it had not yet taken effect. As a result, the transition from Hoover to Roosevelt was the last in which there would be four long months between election and inauguration. That was unfortunate since, as one journalist noted, “almost to a man . . . the country would have been delighted to see [Roosevelt] step into the Presidency at once.” Hoover wanted to work with Roosevelt during the interregnum, as the press called the period, but it proved impossible. Hoover was only interested in doing things on his own terms. Roosevelt was reluctant to do anything that would associate him too closely with his repudiated predecessor. Although they met several times, and there was urgent business to be done, the two men were unable to agree on a course of action.49
Now it was eleven a.m. on inauguration day, and Hoover stood waiting at the White House’s north door. A convertible pulled up and Roosevelt was inside looking, as a radio announcer observed, “magnificently confident.” Hoover, by contrast, appeared, in Rexford Tugwell’s words, “tired almost to death.” The two men took off their silk hats and exchanged a perfunctory handshake before setting off for the Capitol. They drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, the grand boulevard linking the executive and legislative branches. Hundreds of thousands of onlookers lined the route, standing ten deep, or sitting on bleachers, soapboxes, or, as one news account put it, “anything that would bear their weight, and some things that wouldn’t and didn’t.” The crowd roared when the convertible approached. Their excitement was about more than the chance to gawk at a pair of presidents. New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock detected “a note of jubilation that the day had come when [a] new philosophy was to replace the rejected theories of the old.”50
Roosevelt smiled and waved at the crowd along the one-and-a-quarter-mile route. Hoover sat next to him “grim as death, looking stonily forward,” James Roosevelt observed from the jump seat. Hoover did his best to ignore both the crowds and Roosevelt. When they passed a building under construction, Roosevelt exclaimed, “My, Mr. President, aren’t those the nicest steel girders you ever saw!” Hoover did not respond, and Roosevelt stopped making an effort. When the car reached the Capitol the two men said good-bye and went their separate ways. Hoover retreated to the building’s ornate President’s Room and spent his final minutes in office signing bills and receiving well-wishers. Roosevelt settled into the Military Affairs Committee Room on the same hallway. At noon, he walked to the Senate chamber, leaning on James’s arm, and looked on as his vice president, John Nance Garner, took the oath of office. Afterward, Roosevelt returned to the committee room and waited to be sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States.51
Roosevelt was to take the oath of office on a platform that had been erected on the Capitol’s East Portico, the setting of inaugurations going back to Andrew Jackson. The Inaugural Committee, which had carefully attended to the staging, could do nothing about the cold, windy day or the dark clouds hovering overhead. Close observers would notice another somber touch. The Capitol’s flags were flying at half-mast in tribute to Montana senator Thomas Walsh, who was to have been Roosevelt’s attorney general. The seventy-three-year-old Walsh, a liberal crusader who had investigated the Teapot Dome scandal, had died of a heart attack on a train headed to the inauguration, days after his marriage to Señora Mina Perez Chaumont de Truffin, a wealthy Cuban widow two decades his junior. His death was a major loss for the new administration, particularly for its progressive wing. Walsh’s was not the only death haunting the inauguration. Weeks earlier, in Miami, Giuseppe Zangara, a crazed Italian immigrant, had fired on a car carrying Roosevelt. Zangara had missed his mark after a fast-thinking woman jostled his arm, but his shots had seriously wounded Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was now on the verge of succumbing to his injuries. This would be the most mournful inauguration since 1865, when Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in the final throes of the Civil War, promising to strive “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”52
At precisely one p.m., a bugle sounded. Roosevelt, again leaning on his son, made his way through the Capitol’s ten-ton bronze doors. As the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” he moved haltingly up a ramp leading to the inaugural platform. As he came into view, the crowd applauded and stomped thei
r feet. At 1:06 p.m., Roosevelt faced Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and placed his hand on a Dutch Bible that his forebears had brought with them to the United States, the same one he had used both times he was sworn in as governor. It was open to a favorite passage of Roosevelt’s, 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” After taking the oath of office, Roosevelt launched into his inaugural address, which was broadcast over 178 radio stations, the first inaugural to be so widely aired.53
The American people were united behind Roosevelt. “In the present plight of the nation partisanship is forgotten,” The New York Herald Tribune declared on inauguration day. “All feel that they are in the same boat and that the captain must be upheld.” The nation expected Roosevelt to claim the powers of a dictator, or close to it. Senator William Borah, the legendary progressive Republican from Idaho, had announced that he was willing to put aside “partisanship and politics” and “agree to give our incoming President dictatorial powers within the Constitution for a certain period.” Senator David Reed, a mainstream Republican from Pennsylvania, had declared, “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” Even Walter Lippmann, usually a voice of studied moderation, was insisting that the use of “ ‘dictatorial powers,’ if that is the name for it—is essential.” There were dissenters. The liberal Nation magazine asked on its cover, “Do We Need a Dictator?” and answered inside: “Emphatically not!” The New Republic decided that what the nation was looking for was not a dictator but a “Messiah.” Time magazine put the nation’s hunger for a bold leader in homier terms. Its inauguration week cover bore a portrait of Sara Roosevelt over a quote: “Franklin had a great habit of ordering his playmates around.” Inside, Time completed the anecdote. “Once I said to him: ‘My son, don’t give the orders all of the time. Let the other boys give them sometimes.’ ‘Mummie,’ he said, lifting a soil-streaked face, ‘if I didn’t give the orders nothing would happen!’ ”54
Roosevelt had been thinking for months about what he wanted to say. He had been working on his address since the previous fall with Raymond Moley, the Columbia University professor who was his chief speechwriter and closest aide. The two men had begun the outlining in September, on a trip to San Francisco. Roosevelt’s western campaign swing was going so well that victory seemed assured. One night, he turned off the phone in his suite at the Palace Hotel, took the braces off his legs, and told Moley he wanted to begin drafting an inaugural address. They ended up talking until two in the morning. Roosevelt expected to be speaking in a time of crisis, to a despairing nation. He wanted to address the American people in a tone of utter seriousness, without any of the false optimism that they had been subjected to, but he also wanted to offer hope. Roosevelt was not prepared to declare a dictatorship, but he told Moley that he wanted to emphasize that he was determined to take the sort of action a leader would in wartime. It was important, he said, that Congress not be allowed to slow down his plans.55
Roosevelt and Moley had discussed the address again in early February, on a train ride from Warm Springs to Jacksonville, Florida. The depth of the Depression, and the grim conditions Americans were living under in early 1933, were having an effect on the writing. “The inaugural speech is going to the left,” Moley noted in his diary in mid-February. At the end of the month, Moley arrived at Hyde Park with a final draft. He and Roosevelt retreated to the library for a night of whiskey and writing. Moley’s draft was written out in longhand, but Roosevelt insisted on copying it over in his own handwriting because, he said, Louis Howe would “have a fit” if he thought Roosevelt had not written it. It would later strike Moley that Roosevelt had been trying to create physical evidence to support the claim that he had written the address himself. One major Roosevelt biography dutifully described the speech’s creation just that way, recounting how the president-elect had written it himself at Hyde Park, while his ancestors’ portraits looked down on him. In reality, the two men tinkered with Moley’s draft, sentence by sentence, into the early morning. The speech was, in the end, a true collaboration.56
The address’s best-known line was not in the version they completed that night. A story emerged that Roosevelt inserted the phrase “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” after coming across the words in Henry David Thoreau’s journals. It was actually Louis Howe who slipped it in, while he was tinkering with the speech. The source was almost certainly not Thoreau, or at least not directly. Howe read only “detective stories and newspapers,” Moley said, and “may never have heard of Thoreau.” Moley’s best guess was that Howe had seen the historic line in a newspaper advertisement. There were, in fact, many places Howe could have stumbled on the general idea, which was not an original one. Two years earlier, the chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce had been quoted in The New York Times warning, “In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself.”57
When Roosevelt spoke on that blustery March day, he looked out on an audience as despairing as he had anticipated. Hoover had stood in the same spot four years earlier and addressed himself to a nation “filled with millions of happy homes; blessed with comfort and opportunity.” His message had been one of boundless optimism. “In no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure,” he had declared. The crowd of 100,000 that was now stretched out before Roosevelt—standing on the Capitol grounds, peering down from rooftops, hanging from trees—was worried it would never see good times again. “There was the most terror-stricken look on the faces of the people,” Perkins recalled. Henrietta Nesbitt, who was about to start work as the Roosevelts’ housekeeper, was struck by how care-worn the young people around her seemed. “We older folks expect to have qualms,” she said, “but there is something terribly wrong when young people are afraid.” The audience was, one reporter observed, “as silent as a group of mourners around a grave.”58
Roosevelt launched into the address with his chin thrust out “as if at some invisible, insidious foe,” as one press account put it. “This is a day of national consecration,” he began, a characteristic bit of religious imagery that he had scribbled in at the last minute on his reading copy. Roosevelt pledged to speak to the American people “with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.” He then declared that it was his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the inspired addition that would become among the most famous lines ever uttered by a president.59
The speech was not all soaring rhetoric. Roosevelt laid out the nation’s problems straightforwardly. The government was short of income; industrial production had collapsed; “farmers find no markets for their produce”; and “the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.” He set out what his priorities would be. “Our greatest primary task,” he insisted, “is to put people to work.” Agricultural prices had to be raised, he said, so farmers could make a living. More had to be done to provide relief to the Depression’s victims. Picking up on a theme from the campaign, he talked about the need to reduce federal spending. And he called for stricter supervision of banking, credit, and investments—“an end to speculation with other people’s money.” Striking the balance he had decided on in San Francisco, of being serious without leaving his audience despondent, Roosevelt shifted back and forth between gravity and reassurance. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” he said at one point. At another, he reflected that the nation’s difficulties “concern, thank God, only material things.”60
The address’s great theme was “action, and action now.” Roosevelt underscored the sense of urgency through military imagery. He announced that he was assuming “unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people” and set out “the lines of attack.” The rhetorical high point was Roosevelt’s full-throated assault on the banking industry. “Practices of the unscrupulous mone
y changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men,” he declared. Then, in another religious reference, Roosevelt invoked Jesus’ temple cleansing from Matthew 21:12. “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” he said. “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.” The crowd responded excitedly, though one observer noted that they were reluctant to applaud for long, fearing it would halt the momentum with which Roosevelt took on the nation’s problems.61
Before the seventeen-minute speech was over, Roosevelt addressed on the talk of dictatorship directly. He would soon ask Congress, he said, to take on the nation’s problems. He hoped to be able to tackle the crisis within the president’s historic authority, but if he could not, he insisted, he was prepared to seek a “temporary departure.” He would ask Congress to give him “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.” It was the most radical part of the whole speech, with its understated suggestion of autocracy, and it received an enthusiastic response from the crowd.62