Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

Perkins led the second seminar, on conditions in the cities during the Great Depression. She talked about the kind of inspired improvisation that had guided the New Deal. The CCC was, she said, a good example. It had begun as an idea of Roosevelt’s that sounded completely impractical, but the Cabinet departments stepped in and made it practical. Labor put together a system for recruiting and selecting workers. The army developed a plan for provisioning the corps with uniforms and tents. The Forest Service supervised the workers. It was how many New Deal programs had become a reality.58

  To the Cornell undergraduates, the Great Depression was ancient history—they had not been born when Perkins and Wallace arrived in Washington in March 1933 and ran through the mud to get to the inauguration before Roosevelt’s address was over. The students could not appreciate how bad things had been, or how much the two elderly former government officials in their midst had accomplished. Perkins told the students the animating spirit of the New Deal, as she saw it. The goal—hers, Wallace’s, and Roosevelt’s—was a simple one, she said: “to take the edge off human misery.”59

  Harry Hopkins was only in the administration for the last twenty-one of the Hundred Days, but he more than made up for his late start. Even before he joined, Hopkins had played an important role in shaping the Federal Emergency Relief Act. Once he became relief administrator, he put together one of the most dynamic departments in the federal government. Hopkins was not only passionate and fast-moving; he was thoughtful and innovative. The new relief law had established for the first time the principle that providing destitute people with food, clothing, and other necessities was a federal responsibility, not something that could be left to the states, localities, or private charities. In administering the program, Hopkins took this principle a step further and created a social welfare system that operated by a single set of national standards. For the first time, destitute people in South Carolina and Mississippi could have the same hope of having their basic needs met as poor people in New York City or Philadelphia.60

  Once he had the relief system in place, Hopkins pushed to create public works jobs—real jobs that paid prevailing wages, not assignments to relief recipients to work off the value of the benefits they received. The NIRA public works program, the Public Works Administration, got off to a slow start under Ickes, who was extremely cautious about spending government money. “Ickes insisted on almost extravagant safeguards against waste and corruption,” Tugwell noted. “This earned him the title of Honest Harold; but it did not relieve unemployment.” Hopkins worried that the unemployed would not make it through the winter of 1933-34, and insisted on doing something about it. In the fall of 1933, he persuaded Roosevelt to let him start a new public works program, the Civil Works Administration. It would focus on smaller projects than the massive undertakings of the PWA, ones that could be started up quickly. Hopkins transferred the FERA work relief recipients into the CWA and also began hiring unemployed workers directly into the program. As usual, Hopkins spent with abandon. He was “aware a certain amount would be wasted—because it was more important to get the non-wasted ninety percent than to avoid the wasting of ten percent,” recalled Jerome Frank, who served as counsel to the FERA. Hopkins “knew he was taking chances, very personal chances,” Frank said, but he also believed that getting immediate help to the unemployed “mattered terribly.” When the CWA began, 814,511 workers were on the payroll. “He was not priming the pump,” Ickes complained. “He was turning on the fire plug.” Adding to Ickes’s unhappiness, Hopkins was doing it with his money, because the CWA’s $400 million budget came from Ickes’s Public Works Administration. In early 1934, when the CWA was disbanded, it was putting more than four million people to work. After being criticized for assigning FERA workers to “leaf-raking” make-work jobs, Hopkins promoted—sharing Perkins’s formulation—jobs that were “socially useful.” The 200,000 projects CWA workers undertook ranged from tearing down dilapidated houses in Alabama to extending a municipal sewer system in Texas. Hopkins’s workers rebuilt rural schools, built playgrounds and swimming pools, and engaged in tick eradication and malaria control.61

  The CWA was short-lived, but it was the biggest public works program that had existed in America. It turned the New Deal’s focus even more toward providing the unemployed with jobs and salaries. Later in 1934, Hopkins lobbied Roosevelt to create more public works, and Roosevelt agreed to a new $4.8 billion program. Ickes and Hopkins both wanted to run it and Roosevelt divided it between them. Hopkins turned his part into the Works Progress Administration, and he proved adept at getting control of much of the available money. In its lifetime, the WPA employed 8.5 million people and supported 20 million, more than 20 percent of the population. “Hopkins, who was already the great alms-giver, became the greatest employer,” The New Republic noted. In June 1939, federal public works programs still supported almost 19 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population.62

  In addition to helping millions of American families survive the Depression, the WPA left a rich legacy of socially useful projects. Its workers constructed or repaired more than 125,000 buildings, including 83,000 schools; 800 airports; 950 sewage plants; and 650,000 miles of roads. They built or improved 78,000 bridges and 25,000 playgrounds; terraced 271,000 acres of eroded land; and taught two million people to read. They also ran a famous Federal Art Project, which hired destitute artists to create murals for public buildings, posters, and paintings. The WPA produced a highly regarded series of state guidebooks and an acclaimed collection of interviews with former slaves, and it played a major role in building the San Antonio Zoo, New York City’s LaGuardia and Washington’s Reagan airports, and the presidential retreat at Camp David. In 1965, on the program’s thirtieth anniversary, The New York Times quoted a dispossessed North Carolina tenant farmer living in an abandoned gas station, who had been rescued by a WPA job. “I’m proud of our United States, and every time I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ I feel a lump in my throat,” he said. “There ain’t no other nation in the world that would have the sense enough to think of W.P.A.”63

  Hopkins, predictably, became a lightning rod for the New Deal’s opponents. Some of the criticism, especially charges that local administrators were using jobs for political patronage, had merit. Hopkins rooted out such abuse when he learned of it, firing employees who broke the rules. He gave no ground, however, to charges that he presided over boondoggles, a word that quickly came into vogue. As always, he was adept at answering his detractors. “With the smug complacency which apparently goes with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Fletcher has seen fit to accuse me of playing politics because I am feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the destitute, regardless of their sex, age, creed, color, race or place of residence,” Hopkins said in answer to one critic. “If that be politics, I plead guilty, but decline to enter into argument with Mr. Fletcher. Hunger is not debatable.”64

  Hopkins’s position seemed precarious. “It is only a matter of time when a ‘going out of business’ sign will be hung on the shop of Harry L. Hopkins, Tailor to the Existing Order,” The Nation predicted. The promotion to head the WPA had thrust him into the limelight and, the magazine said, “no man can long survive such eminence in the nation’s capital.” Against all predictions, Hopkins’s rise continued. After Louis Howe’s death in April 1936, a bond developed between Roosevelt and Hopkins that rivaled the one that had existed between Roosevelt and Howe. When Barbara Hopkins died of cancer the following year at the age of thirty-seven, the two men grew even closer. “Harry Hopkins is uniquely the President’s friend, counselor, confidant,” Time wrote. “Somewhere within the lean and hungry Hopkins frame, the burning Hopkins mind, the President found a quality and a kinship which he found in no other human being.” Roosevelt “was a person who relied on people he sort of chemically got along with,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., said, and Hopkins was one of them. Perkins believed the friendship was based on a shared outlook. Hopkins “was t
ruly another self for President Roosevelt,” she said. “The mutual trust between the two men sprang partly, of course, from personal sympathy and temperamental harmony, but more from a common devotion to the idea that their mission in life was to make things better for the people.”65

  Roosevelt wanted Hopkins to succeed him as president, but that was not to be. He was regarded as too ideological to have broad appeal in a national election. His FERA and WPA work had left him with a reputation as “the world’s greatest spender,” and one profile noted that he had attracted, along with many admirers, “the frank hatred of many of the President’s foes.” His divorce would also be a problem, especially since he and Ethel had not ended their marriage on good terms. At the end of 1938, Roosevelt appointed Hopkins secretary of commerce. The final blow to Hopkins’s presidential ambitions came the following year when he became seriously ill with a disease that interfered with his ability to digest food. As war spread across Europe, Hopkins became involved in confidential efforts to prepare America’s response. He helped Roosevelt plan his campaign for a third term and was his personal representative to the July 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.66

  A month later, Hopkins resigned as secretary of commerce and moved to New York. He played a major role in Roosevelt’s reelection and, in the lead-up to World War II, became a key foreign policy aide. Hopkins served as Roosevelt’s envoy to the British government and headed up the Lend-Lease program, which ensured that Britain and other allies had the military supplies they needed to defend themselves against Nazi Germany. When the United States entered the war, Hopkins traveled to Moscow and London to discuss strategy. “We came to think of Hopkins as Roosevelt’s own, personal Foreign Office,” a British official told Hopkins’s biographer, Robert Sherwood. The ailing Hopkins had by now moved into a suite in the White House. In 1942, Hopkins married Louise Macy, a former Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who moved into the White House with him. He suffered a painful blow two years later, when eighteen-year-old Stephen Hopkins, his and Ethel’s youngest child, died in battle in the Marshall Islands. At the war’s end, Hopkins attended the Yalta Conference, where he took an active role in the negotiations, despite his declining health. In January 1946 Hopkins died, at the age of fifty-five. The nature of the illness that had plagued him for eight years was, the hospital declared, “obscure.”67

  As historic as Hopkins’s wartime service was, his leadership of the FERA, the CWA, and the WPA was his most enduring legacy. The relief and public works programs that he set in motion were as important as any part of the New Deal in changing the relationship between the federal government and its citizens. In the summer of 1940, when Hopkins resigned as commerce secretary, apparently leaving government service for good, Perkins wrote him a farewell letter. She thanked him for “putting a decent, reasonable, human relief system into operation,” which she called “perhaps the most creative thing that has been done in the whole New Deal.” Perkins also indulged in a brief, uncharacteristic moment of nostalgia. “My mind can’t help but run back to that evening in March 1933 when you and I and Bill Hodson argued out the urgency of the relief situation and devised ways and means of bringing it to the attention of the President,” she told Hopkins. “A lot happened out of that determination of a few people, didn’t it?”68

  By the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of the Hundred Days, in March 2008, Franklin Roosevelt was firmly entrenched as one of America’s greatest presidents. In surveys of historians and of the general public, he regularly ranked in the top three, alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the two presidents who held office in equally cataclysmic times. The principles of the Hundred Days had not merely survived—they had become integral to American life. Roosevelt’s critics had not been able to derail them during his lifetime or in the two decades that followed. In the early 1960s, the spirit of the New Deal seized the country once again. In a 1964 speech at the University of Michigan, Lyndon Johnson unveiled his own progressive agenda, which he called the Great Society. Johnson was consciously attempting to build on the New Deal legacy. Richard Goodwin, the Johnson aide who coined the phrase “Great Society,” would later say that his boss’s goal had been nothing less than to “out-Roosevelt Roosevelt.” This time, the impetus was not to overcome a devastating depression, but to share the wealth in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Some of the Great Society programs, such as Vista and the Job Corps, had a relatively modest impact. Others, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps, expanded the promise of the New Deal in significant and lasting ways.69

  There have been repeated efforts over the years to undo the New Deal and its central philosophy of the government’s duty to care for its citizens. As the Great Society was being launched, the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater for president. Goldwater, who had attacked his fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower for presiding over a “dime store New Deal,” ran in 1964 on a platform of shrinking big government. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but his ideas lived on. The modern conservative movement was born out of his failed candidacy, and his successors scored some significant successes in chipping away at the New Deal legacy. Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980 on a promise to scale back the welfare state, appointed a budget director, a modern-day Lewis Douglas, who called for “starving the beast,” or cutting taxes to force a reduction in government spending. When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, Congress passed a welfare reform bill that ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance to poor children that dated back to 1935. A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed it into law. Also in the Clinton years, the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of commercial and investment banking, a major reform of the Hundred Days, was repealed. When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, he pushed through tax cuts so tilted toward the rich that when they took full effect, wealthy Americans would pay the lowest taxes since the Hoover years. The Bush administration weakened New Deal-era federal regulations and appointed pro-business agency heads, creating an environment that contributed to corporate scandals and a home foreclosure crisis.70

  Despite these challenges, the fundamental elements of the New Deal proved resilient. Bush began his second term with an energetic campaign to privatize Social Security. He had to back down, however, in the face of strong bipartisan opposition. He went on to sign a Medicare prescription drug law, sponsored by congressional Republicans, which significantly expanded the scope of the welfare state. The political discussion quickly moved on to health insurance, with a majority of Americans telling poll takers that they supported universal access to health care. Even with the ebbing and flowing of the federal regulatory regime, which varied depending on the administration in power, the idea that government had a duty to protect the public from dishonest stock offerings, unsafe food and drugs, and failed banks, which was revolutionary in 1933, had ceased to be controversial. In the fall of 2008, when a Republican president and a Democratic Congress united to enact a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, it was clear that the whole country had accepted the fundamental principles of the New Deal.

  No serious presidential candidate would run again on Hoover’s platform of rugged individualism and laissez-faire economics. After seventy-five years, the principles that emerged during the Hundred Days are still a flashpoint in American politics. At the most basic level, however, the debate has ended. Roosevelt, Perkins, Wallace, Hopkins, and the rest of the New Dealers—like George Washington and the Founders, and Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet and generals—built something that has become an essential part of America.71

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of the pleasures of writing history is the chance to spend time with people from the past. In researching this book, I got to know a group of extraordinary individuals. Frances Perkins’s lively intelligence and keen sense of moral purpose come across powerfully in the interviews she gave to the Columbia Oral History Project. Henry Wallace�
��s deep feeling for the nation’s beleaguered farmers jumps off the pages of the articles he wrote for Wallaces’ Farmer. Raymond Moley recounted his triumphs and defeats in absorbing detail in two classic New Deal histories. Harry Hopkins shared his passion for social welfare programs and his compassion for the Depression’s victims in his fine memoir, Spending to Save. Lewis Douglas expressed himself frankly—at times, too frankly—in handwritten letters home to his father in Arizona. My thanks begin with these four men and one woman for leading such remarkable lives.

  As each of these examples suggests, even in this digital age the research for a book like this begins with words on paper—and in libraries. I am grateful to the dedicated staffs of the libraries that hold the papers of the book’s protagonists. Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library is home to Frances Perkins’s papers and an array of other important collections, including the papers of the Christodora House, the settlement house at which Harry Hopkins began his social work career. The Columbia Oral History Project has not only Frances Perkins’s oral history, but ones from Henry Wallace and early New Dealers Jerome Frank and Charles Wyzanski. Moley, who ended his life a passionate conservative, left his papers to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, whose staff could not have been more helpful. The same is true of the staff of the University of Arizona library, which holds Lewis Douglas’s papers, and of the Georgetown University library, which has some of Harry Hopkins’s papers. The staff of the University of Iowa library made spending a week there one summer reading Henry Wallace’s papers a delight. My enormous thanks also to the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York, who do a laudable job of tending to the New Deal flame.

  I benefited from the help of three talented students. Mizue Aizeki of Vassar assisted me in mining the files of the Roosevelt Library. Vilja Hulden, at the University of Arizona, uncovered a trove of valuable material on Lewis Douglas. Sara Marcus, a Columbia University graduate student who came to me through a Hertog research fellowship, pored through periodicals from the 1930s and came up with gold.