American History 7

This is an excerpt from the following source:
Smoot, W. Scott. Force and Law: Ten Leaders in Times of Crisis. Kennesaw, GA: unpublished, 2001.

FDR: Keeping Faith During the Great Depression

After the "war to end all wars" that Woodrow Wilson promised would "make the world safe for Democracy," Americans tried to keep themselves uninfected by the social, economic, and political fevers of the Old World. They learned the hard way that even two oceans cannot quarantine a modern nation. When the United States suddenly found itself involved in another world-wide crisis, its citizens felt the same yearning for a strong leader, the same yearning that brought fascists to power in Europe. Americans elected four times a president who showed how a republic can respond to a crisis without overstepping the boundaries of a constitution: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Born in 1882 in the fashionable Hyde Park neighborhood of New York, Franklin followed the well-worn path of other Roosevelt men to Harvard and high society. Like his admired cousin President Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin went into politics. Although "Teddy" had been a Republican, Franklin rejected that party for its "hands off" policies towards economics, its faith that businessmen knew what was best for the nation's business, and its belief that government had no place at all in minding the nation's business, except to keep labor unions from disrupting it. Theodore Roosevelt himself led a fight against that attitude within the Republican Party by running for a third term in his own "Bull Moose" rebel Republican party. So Franklin entered politics as a Democrat, serving as senator from New York, and he was then appointed Assistant Secretary of Navy under President Woodrow Wilson during the Great War.

Roosevelt had lived a comfortable life until the 1920s, when he had to overcome two crises in his personal life. He had married his distant cousin Eleanor and they'd had six children when Eleanor discovered his love affair with her best friend. For the sake of their children, Eleanor agreed not to ask for divorce, in return for freedom to do as she wished, so long as she didn't jeopardize his career. In fact, she developed a career all her own, using her position as "first lady" to get a newspaper column and to draw attention to poverty, racism, and to international injustice for the rest of her long life. But she refused him affection ever after. For his part, he accepted the arrangement as just what he deserved.

The second personal crisis occurred soon after, in 1921, when Roosevelt contracted polio. One day he was swimming with friends at the beach; the next, he was paralyzed with the disease. He later remarked on the change this made in his attitude towards life: "If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toes, after that anything else would seem easy! (Boller 266)." Despite the fact that he had to be carried to campaign platforms, that he had to cling to any podium for fear of falling, he went on to become governor of New York by the end of that decade.

That decade, "the Roaring Twenties," was a high-flying time before it crash-landed in 1929. After saving our allies in 1918, America was self-confident, but also self-centered. Fads and fashions made headlines, and one fad became a constitutional amendment: prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Women led the fight for prohibition, exercising their newly-grantedright to vote. After ratifying the amendment, Americans became law-breakers in large numbers, keeping the gangsters such as Al Capone in business buying their "bootlegged" liquor. Besides breaking the law, celebrities were also breaking traditions regarding feminine modesty in dress and behavior. The music of the age was "hot" jazz, pioneered by black musicians, which broke out of the more rigid and polite forms of popular music of the Victorian Age. Near the end of the decade, a fresh-faced young American named Charles Lindbergh flew solo from the new world to the old in just thirty-three hours, and became a symbol of the high-flying self-confident times.

The stock market in the Twenties was a money-making game that anyone could play. A person with a little cash could buy stock in one company, then use that stock as collateral to buy more stocks on credit. Banks invested their customers' savings in this booming "bull" market as stocks climbed in value. During this time, Republicans dominated US politics, promising high times without end. But, soon after President Herbert Hoover boasted that America was on the verge of a "final triumph over poverty," the stock market crashed, on October 24, 1929, henceforth known as "Black Tuesday."

The crash was not the cause, only the loudest alarm bell, of the Great Depression that infected all industrial nations in the world. Depressions had followed periods of business expansion in industrial nations for over a hundred years, so Hoover expressed confidence that the market would take care of itself as it always had before. But the market had foolishly built "a mountain of credit on a molehill of money (Cooke 326)." Cash had gone to buy stock; but stocks were worthless, for stocks have value only so long as investors believe that business will keep growing. The boom in consumer buying that followed the Great War and the mass- production of the car had slowed, and countries' protective tarriffs slowed international trade even more; the "atrocious" Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act of 1930 in the US certainly spread the disease in business world-wide (Johnson 246). As confidence failed, people and businesses, too, sold their stocks, and stock values plummeted. Banks had used cash to buy stocks, and now had lost it all. Citizens in a panic rushed to withdraw their savings from banks, only to find the vaults empty. Banks failed; their customers had no deposit insurance; savings were lost forever. Companies naturally reacted by laying off workers. Laid-off workers with no income and no savings, couldn't buy food or goods, and more businesses failed. Even the so-called "breadbasket" of the US became a horrible "dust bowl" where dust storms miles wide and thousands of feet high blew across the land, choking families and livestock, turning day into darkness. In cities, communities of shacks for the homeless were dubbed "Hoovervilles" in contempt of the President. Hoover publicly continued to say that things were sure to get better, while, behind the scenes, he attempted all kinds of fixes -- the same that Roosevelt would later adopt with more publicity -- and only succeeded in making the Depression deeper and making himself look ridiculous (Johnson 241). America and the rest of the world spiraled into the deepest depression ever, and the Republicans were at a loss as how to deal with it.

Fascists knew how to deal with it. Hitler came to power in 1933 promising that he would make Germany work again. The Treaty of Versailles after the Great War had laid all blame on Germany, and Germany had been forced to send money out to its former enemies. Versailles had also forced Germany to have a democratic government, and elected officials made the mistake of printing up cash to make up the loss, and this caused hyper-inflation, when prices rose by the hour and money was worthless. Time took care of that, but now there was this world-wide Depression, and 5.5 million Germans were out of work. The democratic government had split into some fifty different political parties, all arguing for their own ways to deal with the problems. Hitler was elected promising to cut through all the silliness and wasted time of democracy. As soon as he was elected, he consolidated his power by killing or jailing opponents and taking over the media to silence all alternative voices. His Nazi party created a Labor Corps to build a highway system and to manufacture Volkswagens, cars for all the "volk" or "common folk." Of course, Hitler had another plan, too, which Europeans overlooked in their admiration for his leadership. He had written in his book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") that war was "earth's highest force for evolution" of the super race; and he'd written that the Nazi Party's aim was "to secure to the German nation the soil and space to which it is entitled on this earth," by which he meant all the land taken from it by the treaty of Versailles, and much more besides that (Remak, 107). In keeping with these openly-declared intentions, Hitler provided employment for millions in manufacturing weapons and building an army. By 1938, only .07 million (400 thousand) workers were still unemployed in Germany.

The same year that Hitler came to power, Americans heard Franklin Roosevelt take the Oath of Office to "preserve and protect" the Constitution of the United States, and they half-hoped, half-feared that he would take the fascist approach to solving the problem. On the day of his inauguration, Roosevelt, who had no authority to close businesses but who did have the authority to declare national holidays, declared a bank "holiday" to prevent runs on banks until his government had decided what to do with weak banks. Already he was reaching beyond the traditional authority of a President by interfering in business. He went further: he asked Congress for emergency powers, as it the nation had been invaded. In the first 100 days of his administration, he rushed bills through Congress known together as the "New Deal" package. The federal government funded the Workers' Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In one historians' metaphor, he "signed a check in the government's name for several billion invisible dollar," paying workers to build roads, bridges, schools and government buildings; to construct a dams and power stations to bring the twentieth century to the intensely poor people in the mountains of Tennessee; and, for unemployed workers in the Humanities, the government sponsored researchers, writers, theatre troupes, artists, and musicians, all in projects that were to educate the population.

For two years, he got what he wanted. Then in 1935, Roosevelt's entire "new deal" program came up against the barrier of the Supreme Court. The interference of his National Relief Administration in the business of New York state was, the Court ruled, unconstitutional. The President had used power for which he didn't have legal authority. A fascist ruler would simply override or dismiss (or shoot) the Court; the future of the US had reached a critical point, greater than the Depression itself: would the President ignore the judgement of the Court, and, if he did, would the citizenry approve?

Roosevelt responded to this setback the way he had responded to his own personal crises, looking for a way around the obstacle. One biographer observes that the "strength of Roosevelt's leadership was his willingness to venture down blind alleys," to make a way for himself when he couldn't find a way (Morgan, 398)." Facing five justices out of nine who opposed his whole New Deal program, Roosevelt looked for a loophole in the Constitution, and conceived the plan of simply increasing the number of justices. If Congress would approve, he could add to the Court any number of Democrats who would support him; the Constitution set no limit; it would become his court.

What he didn't count on was public reaction. Writer Sinclair Lewis spoke for a majority when he said packing that court would be like chopping off a head to cure a headache (Morgan 471). So Roosevelt failed to "stack" the Court, but found, tho his surprise, that the Court was coming around to his views anyway. It upheld a government-set minimum wage and a government-run pension plan called "social security."

The Depression was a turning point for America. From then on, government took an active role in economics and in the welfare of the needy. In this way, Roosevelt staved off a more radical change, for Marxism and fascism were both popular and openly-discussed possibilities in America. But Roosevelt believed that a democracy was flexible enough to mix systems within a constitution. When the Supreme Court denied him his way, he might have ignored its authority. But Roosevelt looked instead to the Constitution for his loophole. Unlike Hitler, he continued to operate within the Constitution.

Roosevelt's policies comforted and sustained America and did little else. He was the first President to use mass communication effectively, lowering his voice into friendly "fireside chats" by which he regularly addressed Americans live on radio. He made work for some, and he set in place the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and regulations that would prevent another such depression, but his policies made little real headway against the depression itself, and probably prolonged it (Johnson, 241). After five years of "New Deal," only 3 million had found work; ten million workers were still unemployed. But America felt better, and voted Roosevelt back into office an unprecedented third time in 1940 to continue his work, and to keep America out of the war that was brewing between fascists and everyone else in Europe. Ironically, only that war would be able to revive America's economy.

Link to a web site highly critical of FDR. The spelling and grammar and tone at this web site are unscholarly. It makes no factual claims that are not already familiar to the reader of this essay, but the interpretation is consistently contemptuous of FDR.

Sources Cited

Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Anecdotes. Harrisonburg, PA: R.R.Donnely and Sons Co., 1986.

Contains amusing and illuminating anecdotes about the Presidents through Reagan.

Cooke, Alistair. America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1977.

A profusely illustrated short and conversational history of the United States by the British journalist who reported on the USA from 1932 to the 1980s.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

English historian Johnson delights in poking holes in widely-accepted ideas about history, such as the idea that America was "isolationist" in the 20s, that Calvin Coolidge's inactivity makes him a failure (Johnson sees it as heroic and an effective defense against crises that would have happened under someone else), or the idea that Hoover did nothing to fight the Depression (Johnson argues that Hoover's "hyperactivity" hurt the nation and the world, and that FDR only continued Hoover's bad policies).

Morgan, Ted. FDR New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Morgan is a naturalized American citizen from France whose European background makes him an interesting observer of US history and culture. This is a large single-volume biography with photographs.

Remak, Joachim, ed. The Nazi Years: A Documentary History. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc. 1986.

Remak has collected documents including ads, speeches, private letters and legal documents to show different aspects of life under Nazi rule.
Glossary