by Adam Cohen
When Perkins and Wallace got into the taxi in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, they were unsure of what route to take. The Inaugural Committee, which had not made reservations for Perkins, had also failed to tell her how to get to the inauguration. Perkins and Wallace told the driver to head to the Capitol, but when they got close, the taxi got caught in a traffic jam. A policeman told them they would have to travel the rest of the way on foot. They got out and, with the inauguration about to start, tried to make their way through the sea of humanity. “Henry, Ilo, Susanna, and I just ran,” Perkins later recalled. “We elbowed our way.”63
It suddenly seemed possible that the incoming labor and agriculture secretaries might not make it to the inauguration at all. Perkins and Wallace separated from Ilo and Susanna, whose tickets were for the distinguished visitors’ section, and made a dash for the inaugural platform, which was far in the distance. “I hope you’ve got rubbers on,” Wallace said. They climbed under ropes and cut across lawns that had been put off-limits. Perkins and Wallace arrived after the proceedings had already begun. They got there too late to claim their seats in a section set aside for the Cabinet. Instead, they settled unobtrusively into a section off to the side. They missed Roosevelt’s swearing in and only heard his inaugural address when it was “about half through,” Wallace recalled later. After she settled in, Perkins saw the speech’s author, bending over, hands on his knees, sighing. Moley turned to Perkins, whom he knew from New York. “Well, he’s taken the ship of state and he’s turned it right around,” he said. “We’re going in the opposite direction.”64
The crowd applauded one last time, and the ceremony ended at 1:34. Hoover had been a grim presence at the event. “I have seen people once or twice, standing at the brink of an open grave with that same look of despair,” Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson wrote in The Washington Herald. Hoover did not enjoy Roosevelt’s speech—“dark little knots of disagreement came and went” on his forehead, another news account observed. When it was over, he left for Union Station, where he caught a train for New York. He and Roosevelt would never see each other again. Hoover would soon embark on his next career of criticizing, and trying to derail, the New Deal. Other than Hoover, though, it would have been hard to find anyone in the vast crowd outside the Capitol that day who had not been moved and inspired. From the podium, Frances Perkins could see tears streaming “down the faces of strong men in the audience as they listened to it.” The crowd’s reaction was so emotional that Eleanor Roosevelt was worried. “You felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do,” she said. The inauguration had been, she concluded, “very, very solemn and a little terrifying.”65
In tenements crowded with immigrants, parlors of elegant town houses, and isolated farmhouses, Americans had huddled around their radios to hear the address. Joseph Williams, who was listening in Detroit, was overcome by “a feeling almost impossible to describe.” Roosevelt had inspired in him, he said, “a feeling of renewed hope, a feeling that this old world is again going to be a pretty good place after all, a feeling that soon this life will be worth living.” The press gave the speech rave reviews. The Chicago Tribune, a Republican paper, praised its “dominant note of courageous confidence.” The New York Times hailed it as “a Jacksonian speech, a fighting speech.” Even Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for president in 1932, conceded that it had been “quite a fine talk as Democratic talks go.” The Daily News in New York declared: “This newspaper now pledges itself to support the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a period of at least one year from today; longer, if circumstances warrant.” Nearly half a million listeners were moved to send letters to Roosevelt over the next few days, and their praise was effusive. “I am quite sure it was not a mere bit of chance that brought you to the office you now hold,” Mrs. William Showalter of Westmont, New Jersey, wrote. “I truly believe you have been sent directly by God to our nation, for such a time as this.”66
Roosevelt walked down a ramp and into his car, and he and his family drove off, escorted by a team of cavalrymen. He entered the White House for the first time as president and sat down for a modest family buffet. The formal luncheon for five hundred that had been planned had been canceled out of respect for Senator Walsh. Roosevelt then went out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where a six-mile-long inaugural parade was under way. He took his place in the official reviewing stand, a replica of Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee homestead, the Hermitage, alongside his wife and mother, Cabinet members, armed forces leaders, and other dignitaries. The eighteen thousand marchers who filed by included governors of more than half the states, members of the Electoral College, and veterans, some from the Civil War. There were prancing horses pulling artillery caissons, a Sioux Indian bugle-and-drum corps, and Prohibition opponents from Boston shouting “We Want Beer!” More than one hundred military planes, and two dirigibles, flew overhead. Bands played “The Franklin Delano Roosevelt March,” written by the incoming treasury secretary, William Woodin. Four black men pushed lawn mowers down the avenue, a retort to Hoover’s warning that if Roosevelt became president grass would grow in the streets. Roosevelt, who had always enjoyed parades, declared this one “wonderful,” and stayed for most of the three and a half hours it took to pass. By doing so, and exhibiting such high spirits, he was again reassuring the nation that everything would be all right.67
Eleanor left the reviewing stand to host a reception for 2,500 out-of-town visitors. The East Room, the White House’s magnificent “great hall,” in which James Madison held Cabinet meetings and Lincoln’s body lay in state, was decorated with fine glass, silver, and red roses. The crowd of friends, family, and government officials filled the room and spilled out into the State Dining Room. Among them were thirteen people with polio who had traveled up from Warm Springs for the inauguration. At eight p.m., there would be a buffet supper for seventy-five members of Roosevelt’s extended family, the largest gathering ever of Roosevelts and Delanos. After dinner, there would be a ball at the nearby Washington Auditorium. Eight thousand people had bought five-dollar tickets, and many more would be turned away.68
Roosevelt left the inaugural parade at dusk and made his way up to the Oval Room on the second floor. He had quietly arranged for the Senate to confirm his Cabinet that afternoon, and now he was about to do something that had never been done before: swearing in a full Cabinet at once. The incoming Cabinet members had been summoned to appear with any family members they wanted to bring, but they had not been told why. Perkins brought Susanna and her old friend Molly Dewson. When she arrived, Roosevelt was seated at a large desk—looking, as Ickes later recalled, “courageous, competent, and confident.” Perkins’s fellow Cabinet members were arranging themselves in a circle around Justice Benjamin Cardozo, an old friend of Roosevelt’s from his days on New York’s highest court, who had just been appointed to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s seat on the Supreme Court.69
The Cabinet had gotten a lukewarm reception when Roosevelt announced it. Arthur Krock of the Times declared that “its composite trait seems to me to be diligence; brilliance it lacks completely.” The new Cabinet was criticized for lacking “big men,” notably the candidates Roosevelt had defeated for the nomination, like the 1928 Democratic standard-bearer, Al Smith. One Republican congressman wisecracked that Roosevelt had kept his promise to look out for the “forgotten men,” since his Cabinet contained “nine of them and one woman.” Some of the people clamoring for “big men” lacked confidence in Roosevelt and wanted to be reassured that he had capable people around him. When the Eastern money interests talked about wanting big men, though, which they did loudly, they meant that they wanted conservative Cabinet members who would keep Roosevelt from doing anything rash, like nationalizing the banks or promoting inflation. “At its core,” one journalist observed at the time, “the cry was the last effort of the financial powers which had been defeated at Chicago and on Election Day to retain control of the government.”70
&n
bsp; Roosevelt’s Cabinet members may not have been well known, but they had been carefully chosen. There were Washington elder statesmen like Cordell Hull, the venerable Tennessee senator who was to become secretary of state, and people more in touch with what was happening in the states, like George Dern, a two-term Utah governor and a key Roosevelt supporter in the West, who would be secretary of war. The new agriculture secretary, Wallace, was revered in the Farm Belt, and the treasury secretary, William Woodin, was a businessman who was trusted by Wall Street. Roosevelt’s instinct for political coalition building was on display. Three of the Cabinet members were progressive Republicans, a key constituency that had swung to the Democratic ticket in the last election, and that Roosevelt was eager to include in his administration. Overall, Roosevelt declared his Cabinet “slightly to the left of center,” a characterization he also applied to himself. It was also the most diverse Cabinet in history. Roosevelt had appointed Southerners and Westerners. He had named two Catholics, including Senator Walsh, and the press noted that he had considered Jesse Isador Straus, the president of R. H. Macy & Co., and his old friend Henry Morgenthau, both of whom were Jewish. The appointment of Perkins was the most historic of all.71
Roosevelt announced to the Cabinet that Justice Cardozo would be swearing them in. “I hope you don’t mind being sworn in on my old Dutch Bible,” Roosevelt said. “You won’t be able to read a word of it, but it’s the Holy Scriptures, all right, isn’t it?” He called off the names of the new Cabinet members in order of protocol, starting with Hull, whose department had the highest ranking. As each stepped forward, the silver-haired Justice Cardozo administered the oath of office, and Roosevelt extended a congratulatory handshake and a signed commission. Last to be called was Perkins, whose department, which turned twenty that day, was the most recently created.72
Roosevelt joked that he had sworn in the Cabinet right away so they could “receive an extra day’s pay.” The real reason was that he wanted them to begin work immediately, in a spirit of unity. Even without “big men,” the Cabinet included men, and one woman, with a great deal of knowledge, experience, and commitment. The best of them had, as Walter Lippmann noted, something that would make them an important force during the next one hundred days: “convictions, which they have held to when it was neither profitable nor popular.” Time magazine declared that the group “presaged good teamwork with a President who obviously would be its master,” but the relationship would not be that simple. The Cabinet members gathered in the Oval Room, and many New Dealers not in the room, had very definite ideas about where they wanted to take the country, and on some of the most important issues of the day, they would be the ones taking the lead.73
CHAPTER TWO
“Moley! Moley! Moley! Lord God Almighty!”
With the start of the Roosevelt administration, Washington was suddenly seized with a new vitality and sense of purpose. Hoover administration officials, beaten down and dejected, had begun clearing out. In their place came waves of lawyers, economists, and aspiring bureaucrats, many of them recent graduates of the nation’s best schools. They were eager to join the federal government, which was seen as the best hope for defeating the Depression. “We came to Washington because that’s where the action was,” recalled Thomas Eliot, who left a Buffalo law firm to be a lawyer in the Labor Department. There was another consideration. Many of them simply needed a job. These would-be New Dealers showed up with letters of introduction from governors, professors, and anyone they knew back home who had contacts in Washington. They passed around résumés short on work experience and interviewed feverishly. “A plague of young lawyers settled on Washington,” George Peek, a businessman who would soon play a large role in Roosevelt’s agriculture program, wrote grumpily in his memoirs. “They all claimed to be friends of somebody or other...They floated airily into offices, took desks, asked for papers and found no end of things to be busy about.”1
The new arrivals settled into once-dowdy neighborhoods like Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, and infused sleepy Washington with a level of energy it had never seen before. “They have transformed it,” Collier’s reported, “from a placid, leisurely Southern town, with frozen faces and customs, into a gay, breezy, sophisticated and metropolitan center.” The New Dealers gathered for parties at which the fate of the nation was debated late into the night. “The most important things that happened in Washington in those days were over cocktails,” a prominent New Deal lawyer recalled. Perkins’s friend Molly Dewson, a leading Democratic Party activist, remembered that the capital was suddenly “as lively as an ants’ nest that has been split open.”2
This invigorating new spirit had also taken hold in the White House. The head of the Secret Service detail, Colonel Edmund W. Starling, noticed the difference as soon as he returned from dropping former president Hoover off at Union Station. The White House “had been transformed during my absence into a gay place, full of people who oozed confidence,” he said. “The President was the most happy and confident of them all.” Will Rogers was gratified that unlike Hoover, Roosevelt looked like he was enjoying himself. “A smile in the White House again,” Rogers said, “seemed like a meal to us.” Eleanor Roosevelt noted that the national crisis was having a “most exhilarating effect” on her husband. “Decisions were being made, new ideas were being tried, people were going to work and businessmen who ordinarily would have scorned government assistance were begging the government to find solutions for their problems,” she wrote in her memoirs. The new sense of possibility worked its way through every level of the federal government. Milton Katz, a young lawyer who had joined the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, remembered it as a “virtually physical” difference. “The air suddenly changed, the wind blew through the corridors,” recalled Katz, who would go on to become a distinguished Harvard Law School professor. “You suddenly felt, ‘By God, the air is fresh, it’s moving, life is resuming.’ ”3
Roosevelt’s first priority had to be the banking system. The banks’ troubles had begun, like the Depression itself, in the frothy economy of the 1920s. Americans had come to believe, along with President Coolidge, that the business of America was business. Over the course of the decade, the number of stockbrokers increased from fewer than thirty thousand to more than seventy thousand, and the public followed the market with a passion it had once reserved for baseball. Americans bought stocks at a frenzied pace, much of it on margin, putting up only a fraction of the price while banks often put up the rest. They also poured their savings into “investment trusts,” speculative stock-buying syndicates that eventually plunged in value. Ninety percent of the stock purchased in the 1920s, by one estimate, was bought for speculation. It was not only Coolidge Republicans who were swept up. John J. Raskob, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told Ladies’ Home Journal that by diligently investing a portion of their salaries “anyone not only can be rich, but ought to be rich.” There were periodic calls for putting limits on margin buying, but they were quickly beaten back. “If buying and selling stocks is wrong the government should close the Stock Exchange,” the influential newspaperman Arthur Brisbane declared. “If not, the Federal Reserve should mind its own business.”4
Banks had been among the most eager participants in the speculative frenzy. Having piled up large cash reserves, they invested heavily in the stock market. After the crash, which sent stock prices down 85 percent from their highs, the banks found themselves with total assets that were worth less than they owed their depositors. The banks’ loans added to their problems. In many cases, they had accepted as collateral for their margin loans speculative stock that had become all but worthless. When borrowers fell behind on their payments, the banks had nothing of value to collect. Banks in the Midwest and the South had the additional problem that the farm economy had been depressed for more than a decade. Low crop prices meant that many farmers could not meet their farm and home mortgage payments. The land that had been offered as collateral was, like the specul
ative stock, often worth less than the outstanding debts.5
Many banks could not survive. Between 1930 and 1932, 773 national banks and 3,604 state banks, with more than $2.7 billion in assets, had failed. As rumors of impending bank failures spread, depositors rushed to withdraw their money. These bank runs were often chaotic, and traumatic for the people whose life savings were at risk. “Long lines wound in and out of the lobbies of neighborhood banks,” the writer Robert Bendiner recalled, “which proceeded to disgorge currency and gold at a rate to frighten and disgust those who had not yet taken theirs out.” People who managed to retrieve their money hid it under mattresses, buried it in holes in their backyards, or sent it overseas for safekeeping. These panicked withdrawals exacerbated the problem, pushing many more troubled banks into insolvency.6
The bank failures started in Nashville in the fall of 1930, and spread through the South and the Midwest. In Hartford, three banks failed in unison, including the eighty-year-old City Bank & Trust Co. In South Carolina, the collapse of the forty-three-branch Peoples State Bank spread panic across the state. The most spectacular failure of all was the collapse of the New York-based Bank of United States in December 1930. Although it was a private bank, the name made many customers think it had the government’s backing. When it went under, 450,000 depositors, many of them impoverished Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry, lost their savings. Four hundred thousand of the banks’ customers had $400 or less on deposit. For many, it was all that they had. When word of the failure spread, 8,000 depositors lined up outside a single branch in the Bronx, watched over by a phalanx of police officers, in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve their money. Similar stories played out across the country.7
