by Sally Denton
The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) protected home owners at a moment when more than a quarter million families had lost their homes and the foreclosure rate was a thousand per day. The government agency refinanced mortgages, provided money for taxes and repairs, lowered interest rates, and negotiated flexible repayment plans. It was designed to prevent the collapse of the national real estate market and would assume one sixth of all home mortgages in the country.
Among the measures that brought special pride to Roosevelt was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which addressed rural poverty. Based on the belief that all Americans were entitled to affordable utilities, the TVA was designed to bring cheap electrical power to one of the country’s most impoverished regions. In a feat of engineering—and a slap in the face to price-gouging utility executives—the TVA would build dams and power plants to benefit seven Southern states.
By executive order, Roosevelt created the Farm Credit Administration, merging nine federal agencies into one to provide emergency refinancing of farm mortgages for the desperate agricultural community. At his behest, Congress established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He placed Harry Hopkins, a New York social worker, as the head of this organization, which would deal with millions of indigent Americans. Entire families were living on less than fifty cents per day, and municipalities, states, and private charities were tapped out. The new legislation gave five hundred million dollars in unemployment-relief aid to states.
The triumphal achievement was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a massive economic stimulus package implemented by the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that established the Public Works Administration with a $3.3 billion budget for nationwide construction projects—roads, hospitals, power plants, schools, flood control projects, bridges, sewage plants, tunnels, courthouses, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and submarines, and fifty U.S. Army airports. The act strengthened organized labor, guaranteeing the right to bargain collectively and setting minimum wage and maximum hours standards to eliminate child labor and women’s sweatshops, ushering in a new era of corporate accountability for safe and humane working conditions. The NIRA bill also provided employment for two million people. When he signed the bill into law in June 1933, Roosevelt grandly proclaimed it “a supreme effort to stabilize for all time the many factors which make for the prosperity of the Nation, and the preservation of American standards.” He believed that history would prove it to be “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”
Other New Deal laws that emerged from the Roosevelt barrage included the Truth in Securities Act, which regulated stocks and bonds and put “the burden of telling the whole truth on the seller,” as Roosevelt saw it; the Railroad Coordination Act, which reorganized the railroad industry and was, in stark contrast to the other legislation, a paean to the powerful industry at the expense of the workers; and the abolition of the gold clause in public and private contracts. “Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus,” British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”
Most of the New Deal was aggressively defensive, a hodgepodge of reforms to keep America from falling apart. But a significant part of the legislation was also driven by Roosevelt’s dream to build a “balanced civilization,” to confirm that government had an obligation to its citizenry, and to eliminate the possibility of a future depression. He had a Jeffersonian agrarian nostalgia—harking back to his tranquil childhood—in which he envisioned a world where Americans thrived in peaceful landscapes rather than industrialized cities. As governor of New York he had sought to shift “the population balance between city and countryside,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Coming of the New Deal, “taking industry from crowded urban centers to airy villages, and giving scrawny kids from the slums opportunity for sun and growth in the country.” He saw himself as steward of the land and, in Jeffersonian terms, as guardian over a government that provided the greatest good for the greatest number. Simply put, he wanted to shape a better life for all Americans while conserving the land for future generations.
Much of the legislation was also directly paradoxical. Some programs were deflationary while others were inflationary, for instance. Roosevelt was aware of the “contradictory character of some of his policies,” according to his son Elliott. “The administration was wedded to no economic philosophy. It was pragmatic in outlook. What it sought was to put people back to work, to raise prices, and to lighten the debt load.” The overall effect was one of emergency, and more carefully considered bills would supersede much of the legislation down the road, once the economy stabilized.
The Hundred Days was a breathtaking period in which American society and government was restructured. Steeped in regulation and federal expenditures, the new bills changed the balance of power and gave Roosevelt unprecedented and virtually unbridled authority. Declaring a state of national emergency and assuming full responsibility for the government, the patrician reformer forever altered the role of the U.S. president and signed the largest peacetime appropriations bills in the country’s history. We were “confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution—a peaceful and rapid departure from past concepts,” wrote Tugwell, “and a violent and disorderly overthrow of the whole capitalist structure.” The seamlessness with which the executive and legislative branches collaborated—under dire circumstances and a perilous time constraint—was unmatched. Roosevelt thanked the exhausted representatives profusely, and in the wee hours of June 16, 1933, the most productive Congress in American history adjourned.
No one would ever know “how close were we to collapse and revolution,” U.S. Army General Hugh S. Johnson later said. “We could have got a dictator a lot easier than Germany got Hitler.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Hankering for Superman
The motion picture industry and commercial newsreel firms jumped on the Roosevelt bandwagon, exploiting his on-screen charisma—and calling him “the Barrymore of the capital”—to produce propaganda films and short documentaries about America’s savior. Even before his inauguration, the industry had begun preparing the country for a radical takeover of government. Spawned by the fear of violent mobs of unemployed men blanketing the nation, this dictator craze, fueled by Hollywood and right-wing media moguls, set off an idealistic yearning for a benevolent despot—what Walter Lippmann called a “hankering for Superman” and another described as “a rage for order.”
Hollywood was at the ready with a string of politically charged features about economic injustice, governmental fraud, revolutionary fervor, class hatred, mob hysteria, and the tyrannical white-knight heroes who came to the rescue. Frank Capra’s American Madness depicted a frenzied mass of depositors rushing a bank in what the New York World Telegram described as “one of the most excitingly realistic mob scenes ever pictured on the screen.” In Wild Boys of the Road a roving quartet of teenage misfits thrown into destitution and rootlessness by economic conditions wander the country looking for redemption. As their road trip unfolds, hundreds of juvenile hoboes join them, sending the unmistakable message that America has abandoned its children. Rousted about by police and railroad “bulls,” the hungry, unemployed teens are a heartbreaking lot.
In Cecil B. DeMille’s This Day and Age, an ominous collection of teen vigilantes, disgusted by the depravity of adult politics and culture, form a bloodthirsty gang. Most discomfiting were the rousing cheers of moviegoers during a scene when the mob’s target is bound by rope and lowered into a pit of rats. “The public has been milked and are growing tired of it,” DeMille proclaimed in justification of his gratuitously violent film. “It is not [financial] speculation alone. There is something rotten at the core of our system.”
The most incendiary of the films was the overnight sensation The Three Little Pigs, with its memorably eerie son
g, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.” Screened throughout the spring and summer of 1933 to standing-room-only crowds, the eight-minute Walt Disney cartoon came to symbolize the threat of the Great Depression and the unshakable hope for deliverance. “The whimsical tale follows the adventures of a trio of pigs who experiment with three progressively sturdier options in home building materials (straw, wood, and bricks),” wrote Thomas Doherty in his academic treatise Pre-Code Hollywood, “and their respective resistance to the lung power of a lupine predator.” The unmistakable moral of the fable was that the huffing and puffing predatory wolf could be kept at bay with “sound reconstruction policies and honest statecraft.” No film in American history had so emblemized the political environment of fortitude in the face of terror. Its theme song became “an alternate national anthem,” according to one historian, “sung, hummed, and whistled on trains and buses, in taxis and hotels.” The audience in a Texas movie theater nearly rioted when management forgot to show the cartoon.
At the same time, breadlines, hunger marchers, mobs of unemployed veterans, strikers, and hobo camps dominated the newsreels and wirephotos, inciting the very fear President Roosevelt had warned against in his inaugural address. After his inauguration—the first to be recorded with sound—the newsreels played a crucial role in championing both the president and the New Deal. In Fox Movietone’s The Inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which played in theaters across the land and often received top marquee billing, the narrator momentously proclaims that the “hour of destiny has struck.” Several melodramatic newsreels came in the following weeks, including Hearst Metrotone’s Roosevelt: The Man of the Hour and Universal’s The Fighting President (with its tagline “Show Us the Way and We Will Follow”), complete with robust nationalistic marching music. Hollywood, recognizing Roosevelt and the New Deal as the box-office saviors, embraced its role as chief booster. Studio executives formed a committee to bolster the White House by creating propaganda films and enlisting the support of the nation’s movie theaters. “Stand by your president,” trailers intoned at the beginning of film projections. “President Roosevelt is doing a great job. He is restoring order out of banking chaos … Our lot may be tough, but his is tougher, so let us all help him as best we can.”
The only film to capture the first hundred days during which America wobbled on the verge of anarchy was Gabriel Over the White House. Media mogul William Randolph Hearst bought the rights to the script and financed the controversial film, which was an unabashed glorification of totalitarian dictatorship. Written by a British novelist, it was adapted as a screenplay with a Rooseveltian figure and released in theaters shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration. The film’s over-the-top propagandistic elements were alternately decried as Fascist, Socialist, liberal, or reactionary, capturing the radically fluid nature of the moment. “Just as American communists looked dewy-eyed toward Joseph Stalin and the future that worked in the Soviet Union,” wrote one scholar, “homegrown authoritarians yearned for potent stewardship and doted on images of ordered men marching together in sharp uniforms.” Hearst was just such a man, one who firmly believed that America needed a dictator and took seriously his self-appointed mandate to shape public opinion. Having first backed Roosevelt’s Democratic opponent the previous summer, he moved swiftly to curry favor with the new president and help him chart a despotic course.
Hearst enlisted Roosevelt’s creative input, sending him a copy of the script, complete with Hearst’s own annotated edits, before the movie went into production. The plot begins benignly enough, with a hack politician ascending to the presidency. Played by Walter Huston—father of John Huston and grandfather of Anjelica Huston—the fictional president Jud Hammond is a handsome lightweight who is the genial front man for behind-the-scenes party powerbrokers. He makes no pretense of wielding real power, as scenes show him playing on the floor with his young nephew, oblivious to the background radio blaring reports of poverty and unemployment. Elected to office on promises he has no intention of honoring, Hammond smiles blankly when an aide reminds him, “Oh, don’t worry, by the time they realize you’re not keeping them, your term will be over.” A feckless playboy, Hammond directs his passion toward his secretary—a thinly veiled reference to Roosevelt’s extramarital affair with his wife’s secretary, Lucy Mercer—and driving fast cars, an analogy to Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for sailing and yachting.
The story takes a dramatic turn when the boyishly irresponsible Hammond drives speedily away from a pack of motorcycle-riding journalists. His car careens out of control after a tire blowout at a hundred miles per hour, landing him in a coma with a terminal prognosis. Given up for dead back in his sumptuous White House bedroom, he receives a visit from Gabriel—the archangel of revelations—at the moment of his passing. Like Roosevelt overcoming polio, Hammond arises from his deathbed a changed man. His previously vacant eyes are now brimming with intensity, symbolizing his metamorphosis from empty suit to divinely inspired autocrat. In a dizzying series of executive actions, he seizes control of the government; calls Congress into a special session and orders it to take “immediate and effective action”; declares martial law; prohibits the military from attacking the fictional version of the Bonus Army; muscles in on the liquor racket of an Al Capone–like hoodlum by nationalizing the sale and distribution of alcohol; oversees the execution by firing squad of the Capone gang after a court-martial conviction; creates an “Army of Construction” to put the unemployed to work; rallies the public with a series of radio addresses; threatens to destroy any European nation that reneges on its war debt; fires his cabinet of old, white Wall Street patsies; allocates billions of dollars in New Deal–style social and public works programs; and disarms the world, bringing about global peace.
Understandably, he falls away exhausted. In a final scene, Hammond can barely summon the energy to raise the quill pen Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Taking pen to paper to sign the historic legislation that has been enacted under his direction, he is struck by a fatal heart attack as the famous quill scratches across the page. He is eulogized as “one of the greatest presidents who ever lived.”
“The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace,” reads the Library of Congress description of the presidential character in the film. “The bad news: he’s Mussolini … Depending on your perspective, it’s a strident defense of democracy and the wisdom of the common man, a good argument for benevolent dictatorship, a prescient anticipation of the New Deal, [or] a call for theocratic governance.”
Hearst had intended the movie to prepare both Roosevelt and the nation for the necessity for decisive executive action. The original screenplay included a scene in which the president was shot at, but after the Miami assassination attempt, it was deemed to be too close to reality and was deleted. “I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in ‘Gabriel Over the White House,’ ” President Roosevelt wrote to Hearst in April after he had viewed the film in a private screening. “I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help.”
Left-leaning magazines dismissed it as an instructional effort to convert Americans to the benefits of Fascism. Nascent Hollywood censors declared, “Its reality is a dangerous item at this time,” and MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was infuriated upon viewing the film that his studio had produced. “Put that picture back in the can, take it back to the studio, and lock it up,” he reportedly told an associate, though it was already in distribution.
While Hearst saw the film as a fantastic primer, Roosevelt ultimately came to regard it as fantasy entertainment, and the American public—riveted by Roosevelt’s movie-star looks and larger-than-life exploits—felt no need for a dramatized version. Despite its backing by the tycoon, the film was a box-office flop throughout the country. The deifying of Roosevelt through newsreels continued in Hollywood, but Hearst soon broke with
the president, disappointed that his “protégé” had a mind of his own and had failed to follow the script to its letter.
Chapter Twenty-eight
That Jew Cripple in the White House
In a few short months, those who had been begging Roosevelt to become a dictator had turned against him. At first it was the predictable resistance: “It is socialism,” sniffed Republican congressman Robert Luce of Massachusetts about the New Deal legislation. “Whether it is communism or not I do not know.” But by summer the criticism was reaching a crescendo. Nine million workers were employed in NRA programs, and wage codes had been signed by a million employers. Businessmen—nervous that Roosevelt’s legitimizing of collective bargaining would strengthen the labor movement—denounced the omnibus NIRA as creeping socialism or business fascism. Northern sweatshop owners and Southern planters feared they would lose their cheap labor to the “dole,” as the recovery and public works projects were dubbed, and started calling Roosevelt a Communist. Herbert Hoover publicly denounced the NIRA as totalitarian.
The massive government-industry collaboration lauded as a godsend in May seemed radically anti-capitalist as panic receded and business leaders contemplated the scope of Roosevelt’s program. “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American life,” Walter Lippmann said. Erstwhile Roosevelt supporter Hearst charged that NRA stood for “Nonsensical, Ridiculous, Asinine interference.” He aggressively opposed “Stalin Delano Roosevelt’s Raw Deal” and compared the president to “the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Lenins and all of those who seek to establish a dictatorial form of government.”
