Howe’s duties were at once broad and vague. Age had reduced his energy; nothing in his experience had prepared him for the Depression. In the end, Howe was in the White House because he had been a devoted loyalist for more than two decades. Roosevelt still valued his political instincts, and his presence must have provided a reassuring sense of continuity. Above all, the appointment was an act of friendship. Early and McIntyre were known and reliable actors who had flitted in and out of Roosevelt’s life since his days in the Navy Department. From the beginning, Early’s primary responsibility would be press relations; McIntyre would function as appointments secretary.
It went without saying that Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would make the move to Washington. Just thirty-four years old when Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Missy controlled the flow of paper to the president’s desk, drafted letters for his signature, answered many routine queries herself, and did not hesitate to contribute political or policy opinions. More than ever, her relationship with Roosevelt was uniquely personal. Having power of attorney, she managed his finances, right down to controlling his checkbook. She was a regular at late-afternoon cocktail parties, frequently dined with the first family, and might be called on to serve as hostess in Eleanor’s absence. Tully worked with her smoothly and tirelessly as assistant and understudy.
What to do with the Brains Trusters, for whom no appropriate White House positions were available? Roosevelt placed them officially as assistant secretaries in cabinet departments but actually utilized them as personal policy aides. Moley accepted designation as assistant secretary of state, Tugwell as assistant secretary of agriculture. Berle opted to remain in New York.
Two valued personalities seemed more or less left out. Morgenthau received assignment only as caretaker head of Hoover’s Federal Farm Board. Harry Hopkins was left behind in New York. Both likely expected that bigger things awaited them.
Hoover persisted in attempting to get Roosevelt to sign on to his economic program. The president-elect continued to balk. The financial system continued to collapse. Across the country, people rushed to withdraw their bank deposits. Available funds exhausted, banks, large and small, shut their doors. Those unable to reopen took with them the savings of ordinary people and effectively closed down thousands of business enterprises. Financial speculators, expecting a dollar devaluation, sold the American currency short and hoarded gold. With the British pound already off the gold standard, the consequences of American abandonment were uncertain, but the prospect of an international commerce conducted in currencies with no precious-metal backing seemed potentially dire.
On February 18, Hoover handwrote a long letter, delivered by courier to Roosevelt in New York the same day. It requested a public pledge that Roosevelt would defend the dollar by preserving its gold valuation and balancing the budget, even at the cost of higher taxes. Compliance would, as Hoover privately commented, close off most of Roosevelt’s policy experimentation. Annoyed and still determined to preserve his freedom of action, the president-elect dallied in answering. A second urgent letter from the president finally got a response just days before the inauguration. Roosevelt demurred, leaving an angry Hoover convinced that his successor, by pursuing a policy of monetary uncertainty, wanted to create as bad a situation as possible.25
In Washington on March 3, the eve of the presidential transition, Roosevelt, accompanied by Eleanor, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s wife, visited the White House for a customary ceremonial tea with the Hoovers. When they arrived, the outgoing president was waiting with his Treasury secretary, Ogden Mills. The president-elect immediately called for Raymond Moley to join him. After a tense hour-and-a-half wait, a policy discussion began. Hoover wanted to issue a proclamation declaring a bank holiday throughout the country under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act but was unsure of his authority. Would his successor join in?
Roosevelt replied that he believed Hoover had the legal power and should go ahead and issue the order on his own. If not, he probably would do so the day after his inauguration. As the meeting came to its awkward end, the president-elect remarked that, given the emergency decisions Hoover faced, there was no need for him to follow what Roosevelt understood to be the custom of the outgoing president returning the visit the following morning. As he recounted it, an enraged Hoover responded, “Mr. Roosevelt, when you are in Washington as long as I have been, you will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody.”26
Amid the economic ruins of the country, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was eighteen hours from his date with destiny.
Roosevelt had left Washington twelve years earlier, a defeated but promising vice presidential candidate who considered his losing effort a first step toward an eventual campaign for the presidency. Everything he had undertaken, with the possible exception of the Warm Springs rehabilitation center, related to that long-term project. Even Warm Springs had broadened his political horizons by allowing him to develop ties to the southern wing of his party and by putting him in close contact with ordinary people who faced great difficulties beyond their control.
He had demonstrated invincible determination, developed a compelling personal presence, and learned to project his powerful personality over the radio. Yet many of his fellow partisans wrote him off as a light-minded opportunist. The appearance was a mask, worn by a man who valued his lineage and breeding, had confidence in his talents, and was skilled in the politics of democracy. Whether talking face to face with Georgia farmers, splashing in the pool at Warm Springs with his fellow polios, or delivering conversational radio talks to unseen mass audiences, he excelled at combining authority with a common touch.
No politician was better at identifying himself with broad common denominators in the American experience. Roosevelt told a reporter who asked about his political philosophy, “I am a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.” All who knew him closely agreed that his religious convictions were both sincere and simple, little influenced by doctrinal controversies. Responding to a query about his ancestors from the editor of the Detroit Jewish Chronicle, he wrote, “In the dim distant past they may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.”27
Speaking to students at the Milton Academy in 1926, he declared he had learned from Endicott Peabody that human history was a cycle of ups and downs with a constant trend line of progressive change. The assertion reflected the optimism of the Victorian world in which he had grown up and been educated.28
His Democratic allegiance was likewise both a legacy from his father and a practical implement in the service of a larger vision. A political leader had to begin by belonging, Roosevelt told Rexford Tugwell shortly before the 1932 election. Rex’s friends, the independent progressives, were a decent bunch, but they were individualists and political hobbyists, lacking organizational cohesion, possessing no comprehensive program, and bereft of the organizational skills to guide a legislative program through Congress. A president at the head of a party, equipped with a strong popular mandate, could deal with fellow partisans and get most of what he wanted. Roosevelt’s “new deal for the American people” would be a Democratic program.29
Such comments laid out an insight Roosevelt had possessed about himself at least since he had turned down opportunities to run for the US Senate. He was an executive, not a legislative type. He wanted to run things, not debate them, to give directives rather than engage in protracted discussion. He knew that administration required powers of motivation and persuasion. He understood the power of his personal charm and magnetism when linked to the majesty of high office and popular acclaim. And he realized full well that subordinates were there to be used, with few personal considerations, for larger ends. Like his father, who had once fired a butler who applied for a position with another gentleman, he was capable of cutting off aides who left without his consent.
Franklin Roose
velt clearly had two presidential role models: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Like both, he saw himself as a “progressive,” struggling for fairness and social justice against entrenched privilege. This self-image validated an appetite for power and responsibility. Like both of his larger-than-life predecessors, he believed that a president could make himself into the dominant, driving force in American politics. TR had once privately remarked that William Howard Taft was “a far abler man than I but he don’t know how to play the popular hero and shoot a bear.” FDR understood that a successful president had to be a self-dramatizer. Wilson had vividly displayed the power of oratory and seen himself as akin to a British prime minister, actively leading his party in Congress and pushing through a legislative program. The new president would draw heavily on both examples.30
Charming, inspirational, and calculating, Roosevelt was on the verge of remaking the American presidency. On the morning of March 4, 1933, the nation awaited him with an anxiety unmatched since Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural.
Part II
The New Deal
Chapter 13
Nothing to Fear
Creating a New Deal, March–July 1933
This is a day of national consecration. . . . [T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself. . . . [W]e must move as a trained and loyal army. . . . I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army. . . . The people of the United States . . . 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.1
Utilizing a far-reaching program of relief and reform and drawing on a unique talent for speaking to millions of his countrymen, Franklin Roosevelt was about to bring the national government, the New Deal, and above all himself into every part of the American nation.
Americans listening at radios on Saturday, March 4, 1933, heard a now-familiar voice, radiating strength and patrician authority, promising strong leadership in desperate times. A majority wanted just that. “You felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do,” Eleanor remarked later. Skeptics feared dictatorial ambition. But most of the new president’s countrymen, although living in desperate circumstances, had given no sign of being ready for another Benito Mussolini. They wanted assertive democratic direction, not authoritarian dictation. Roosevelt understood the difference.2
His inaugural address was far more than a declaration of personal strength. It expressed a classic progressive ideology in its attack on “the unscrupulous money changers” who had “fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” in its claim that “our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men,” and in its call for “an end to speculation with other people’s money.” It laid out a policy direction: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” A majority of the listeners probably nodded appreciatively at these sentiments. Above all, they wanted action. Over the next three months, in the first hundred days of the New Deal, Roosevelt pushed through Congress a legislative program that would change America forever.
Inaugural festivities consumed the rest of that Saturday. Sunday would not be a day of rest. As Roosevelt recalled it, he arose early, ate breakfast, and had himself wheeled to the Oval Office. Alone and seated at the presidential desk, he surveyed bare surfaces, opened empty drawers, and looked around in vain for a call button with which to summon aides. After a moment, he let out a shout that brought Marvin McIntyre and Missy LeHand scurrying into the room. The story remains a serviceable parable of the helplessness that afflicted the nation and of the new president’s determination to get beyond it.3
Action came fast and hard. Roosevelt called an afternoon cabinet meeting at which he informed the department heads gathered around him that Treasury functionaries, most of them Hoover holdovers, were at work drafting legislation for federal inspection of every bank in the country and preparing a proclamation mandating a national bank holiday. The proclamation was issued shortly after midnight on Monday morning. A second proclamation summoned Congress to Washington for a special session to begin on Thursday, March 9.
Franklin and Eleanor found time for a birthday visit to retired justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on March 8, the great jurist’s ninety-second birthday. Holmes doubtless remembered the president as one of the bright young men for whom he had hosted luncheons during the Wilson administration. The conversation was as pleasant as the champagne procured for the occasion (Prohibition notwithstanding) by Holmes’s former law clerks. After Roosevelt left, the old justice delivered an evaluation that would ring through the ages: “A second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament!”4
Roosevelt seems never to have been told of Holmes’s comment—some writers doubt that the justice ever uttered those words; others believe he was referring to TR—but the new president understood that the economic crisis demanded temperament above all else. During his first week in office, he managed a display of strength, decision, and concern that brought a strong majority of the nation behind him.5
Before calling on Justice Holmes, Roosevelt had presided over his first press conference. The newsmen were generally delighted that the president was executing a radical departure from the previous practice of chief executives, who had spoken off the record and frequently required advance submission of written questions. Roosevelt’s rules were astonishingly liberal by comparison: direct attribution allowed, direct quotation with permission, everything on the record unless otherwise specifically stipulated. The exchange was informal to the point of parody: Eleanor came in during the middle of the proceedings to deliver a whispered message; Elliott staged another interruption a bit later to bid his father good-bye before leaving town. The president welcomed photographers and posed for pictures.
On the surface, the questions and answers seemed remarkably frank. In fact, Roosevelt pleased his audience and conveyed a sense of things without saying much more than that banking legislation was on the way. As a New York Times header put it the next day, “Enjoys Jokes, Allows Cameras.” At the end of the conference, the press applauded. No president, the Times declared, had been as open with reporters since Theodore Roosevelt. Many of the White House reporters leaned in a liberal Democratic direction; the personal bond that Roosevelt established provided reinforcement. From time to time, the relationship might fray a little, but even those who knew that a charmer was playing them generally enjoyed the experience.6
Roosevelt’s first working week was a hectic but carefully orchestrated whirl of activism. Motivated in part by the public relations imperative of providing a contrast to Herbert Hoover’s apparent paralysis, it also demonstrated a new attitude toward the potential of government to manage the economy. Congress was not in a mood to block executive initiatives. The president met with legislative leaders, requested their advice, sometimes took cues from them, and mollified them when necessary. He also ostentatiously conferred with progressive Republicans. Over the next hundred days, Capitol Hill accepted a stunning agenda of legislation largely drawn up by the White House. Secretary of the Treasury William Woodin and Raymond Moley emerged as the president’s chief financial advisers.7
On Thursday, March 9, Congress was back in session. The banks had been closed since March 3. Businesses and ordinary people were trying to make do with little or no ready cash, frequently exchanging non–legal tender promises to pay. An emergency banking bill was ready for consideration. Roosevelt had been up past 1 a.m. that morning, selling it to the legislative leadership. It provided for federal inspection of every bank in the United States, certification of those that were sound, and liquidation of those that were not. He had persuaded the congressional nabobs of both parties that there was no time for committee consideration or lengthy debate.
House Banking and Currency Committee chair Henry Steagall walked down the aisles of his chamber holding the only copy of the bill, complete w
ith penciled corrections. “Here’s the bill! Let’s pass it!” he announced. House Republican leader Bertrand Snell seconded him. The chamber shouted a voice-vote approval. The Senate then began immediate consideration. A few mavericks talked back, but Carter Glass of Virginia, drawing on his renown as a legislative founder of the Federal Reserve System and former secretary of the Treasury, took the bill through the upper house with dispatch. That evening, Roosevelt signed it into law before a phalanx of press photographers and newsreel cameramen, then met with congressional leaders until past midnight.8
Over the next week, the Treasury Department, working closely with the district Federal Reserve banks, would undertake quick examinations of nationally chartered banks across the country, closing down many but allowing most to resume business, frequently with loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The administration extended similar support to state-chartered banks that appeared fundamentally sound. The calls were sometimes close. Woodin decided to reopen the Bank of America, the largest bank on the West Coast, against the contrary advice of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. It surely helped that Bank of America’s head, A. P. Giannini, could muster the support of California’s two senators, William Gibbs McAdoo and Hiram Johnson, as well as the goodwill of William Randolph Hearst. The gamble paid off. Bank of America thrived, and Giannini became a vocal Roosevelt supporter.9
Even a quick-and-dirty evaluation of institutions across the country would take more than a few days. The nation needed to be informed and reassured. The White House requested and received a radio slot for a brief talk to the nation on Sunday evening, March 12, during prime time, 10:00 p.m. Eastern, 7:00 p.m. Pacific. Using skills he had honed as governor of New York, the president imagined himself talking to ordinary people seated in their living rooms around the radio. He visualized them at work the next day, on a farm, behind a counter, laying brick on a construction project, all insecure about their bank deposits and their employment.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 24