Among the friends and family members invited to watch Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural parade from the reviewing stand was his forty-two-year-old sixth cousin, Daisy Suckley. She was quiet, good-humored, unmarried—and already deeply devoted to Franklin Roosevelt. His invitation had been so exciting, she told a relative, that when the weekend was over she thought she’d have to enter a convent.
“My seat,” she noted that evening, “was on the President’s stand, section B, top row, from where I saw the White House grounds, the parade, & the President’s head throughout the afternoon. He had a high chair to sit on, which gave the effect of his standing.… The first part [of the parade] was dignified, the last part a sort of circus—Tom Mix cavorting in white on a black horse—Movie actresses on a float—Bands in fantastic feather costumes, etc. Democracy!”
For many Americans, democracy itself seemed under siege that morning. They were in the third year of a great worldwide Depression so crippling that it seemed that unless the new president acted with unprecedented boldness, the American experiment itself might be at an end. Self-government seemed to be failing in much of the larger world: Mussolini’s fascists already controlled Italy; Adolf Hitler was poised to become Germany’s dictator; a new military government in Japan had seized the Chinese province of Manchuria.
And there were many who feared that the magnetic but essentially untried man in the reviewing stand could not possibly be equal to the task.
Still, eleven years earlier, Daisy had witnessed firsthand Roosevelt’s gallant struggle against the ravages of polio. “Franklin is a man—mentally, physically and spiritually,” she confided to her diary. “What more can I say?”
The rest of the country could only hope that she was right.
Holding on to a specially built railing and perched on a high stool hidden from the crowd so that he appears to be standing, the new president reviews his inaugural parade.
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Daisy Suckley’s invitation to the inauguration, treasured by her all her life, even though the inaugural committee misspelled her name
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An exultant FDR spots an old friend in the crowd that lined the street from the Capitol to the White House.
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Take a Method and Try It
A president could never be judged great, Theodore Roosevelt once explained, unless he had faced and overcome a great crisis. Franklin Roosevelt would find himself confronted by the two greatest crises since the Civil War.
He had been taught since boyhood to believe himself capable of succeeding at anything to which he put his mind and hand—and in part because of that belief, he proved to have the power to make a majority of his fellow citizens believe it, too. “I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “I never heard him say [that] there was a problem that he thought it was impossible for human beings to solve.… I never knew him to face life or any problem that came up with fear.”
For all his ebullience and high spirits, FDR was essentially a lonely man. No one was allowed to know all that was going on within what one aide called his “thickly forested interior.” Ideology did not interest him. Once, asked for his “philosophy,” he said he was a Christian and a Democrat and that was all. He was steeped in tradition and conservative by instinct, but he was also utterly unafraid of experimentation. “It is common sense to take a method and try it,” he said. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Roosevelt moved fast. He had his entire cabinet sworn in at once, something that had never been done before. It included Harold Ickes, an old Progressive Party follower of the president’s cousin Theodore, as interior secretary, and southern democrats like Senator Cordell Hull from Tennessee, who became secretary of state. Henry Wallace, the Republican editor of a farm journal from Iowa, was named secretary of agriculture; and Frances Perkins took the oath of office as secretary of labor, the first woman ever to serve in any cabinet. Over the next dozen years, the ranks of government would for the first time come to include more talented women—as well as Catholics, Jews, and African Americans.
Within forty-eight hours, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress, proclaimed a national “bank holiday,” and ordered his secretary of the treasury to draw up a bill aimed at providing government help to private bankers to reopen their institutions. Meanwhile, Americans would have to get along with whatever cash they had in their pockets.
On inauguration day, White House Chief Usher Ike Hoover (second from left) welcomes Eleanor, Franklin, and James Roosevelt to their new home.
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Democratic license plate attachment celebrates the party’s return to power after a dozen years of Republican rule.
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FDR meets with his first cabinet in the Oval Office, its walls hung with his own nineteenth-century prints of life along the Hudson. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes is second from the left. Postmaster General James A. Farley, who had helped guide FDR’s presidential campaign, sits to Ickes’s left. Secretary of State Cordell Hull is at the president’s right. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins is at the far right, next to Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace.
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“He’s a Roosevelt All Right”: On March 14, just ten days after FDR’s inauguration, the speed and vigor with which he had already taken charge reminded a cartoonist for the Kansas City (Missouri) Star of the first President Roosevelt.
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My Friends
I want to be a preaching president,” FDR said, “like my cousin Theodore.” He believed, just as TR had believed, that the presidency was “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
From the moment he took office, FDR understood that no program—and no presidency—could work unless the president communicated effectively with the voters. To do that, he welcomed the press into his office twice a week. Except for Theodore Roosevelt, most presidents before him had treated reporters as little better than spies. FDR called them by their first names, claimed to be a newspaperman himself because he’d once edited the Harvard Crimson, and would provide a constant stream of copy that kept him always at the center of events.
Then, on Sunday evening, March 12, just four days after his first press conference, eight days after his inauguration, Roosevelt asked the radio networks for time to address the people of the country. The CBS announcer introducing him said, “The President wants to come into your home and sit at your fireside for a little fireside chat.”
The new medium baffled most politicians; they still orated into the microphone, as if trying to reach the farthest edges of a crowd. Roosevelt had already mastered radio while governor of New York: he was warm, reassuring, intimate.
Some sixty million Americans gathered around their radios to hear him. He began by calling them all “my friends.”
I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.… To talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks.
In fourteen and a half minutes, he explained how the banking system was supposed to work and how it had failed, and what he and Congress had done together to remedy the situation. The banks were to reopen the following morning and some feared that so many panicked depositors would withdraw their savings that it would bring about the total collapse of the banking system. And so he ended by appealing for calm. “I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.… Let us unite in banishing fear. It is your problem, my friends—your problem, no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”
The people believed him. The following morning, when banks reopened more people deposited money than withdrew it. The immediate crisis was over. “Capitalism,” one of Roosevelt’s advisers rememb
ered, “was saved in eight days.”
FDR welcomes reporters to the Oval Office for the first of the 998 press conferences he would hold as president, March 8, 1933. “I am told that what I am about to do will become impossible,” he told them, “but … we are not going to have any more written questions.” Some answers would have to be off the record, he added, and he would not answer what he called “iffy” questions, but everything else was fair game. The gaunt man behind the president is Marvin McIntyre, an original member of the Cuff-Links Gang, who would become appointments secretary. Seated at the president’s desk is his stenographer, Henry M. Kannee, whose job it was to make sure his boss was not misquoted.
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When the grossly mismanaged—and misleadingly named—Bank of the United States failed in New York in 1930, terrified depositors lined up through the night at all fifty-seven branches, hoping to withdraw their money. Tens of thousands of people, most of them of modest means, lost their savings. New Deal legislation would stabilize the banking system; during the 1920s some five hundred banks had failed every year, but fewer than ten would go under annually after 1933.
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The First One Hundred Days
The first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration were without precedent. Never in American history had so much transformative legislation been passed by Congress in so little time. Republicans as well as Democrats voted for it. During the first hundred days, fifteen major bills granted the federal government the power to decide which banks should reopen and which should be allowed to fail; to guarantee depositors’ bank deposits and to definitively separate commercial and investment banking activities, in the Glass-Steagall Act; to demand greater transparency in the selling of stocks and dictate the gold value of the dollar; to make loans to homeowners to save them from foreclosure and keep farm income high by paying farmers not to produce; to provide public jobs for those who needed work; and to provide public power and flood control to the vast Tennessee River basin that sprawled across six states, through the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA.
No New Deal program created to stimulate the economy and combat unemployment was dearer to the president’s heart than the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. Pushed through Congress in less than a week after Roosevelt’s inauguration, it eventually put more than three million jobless young men to work preserving the American landscape—controlling erosion, developing national parks, planting hundreds of millions of trees. The men earned thirty dollars a month, and sent twenty-five of it home to help their families.
FDR’s most ambitious—and daring—program was the National Recovery Administration, which set prices and wages in 541 industries. Roosevelt was asking businesses to keep wages up and simultaneously keep prices down. Two million employers signed up.
The NRA was initially so popular that when a parade it sponsored marched down Fifth Avenue, more than two million New Yorkers came out to cheer. “There is a unity in this country,” FDR said, “which I have not seen since we went to war in 1917.”
Some of the legislation enacted during the first hundred days would eventually be overturned by the courts. Other laws would turn out to have been counterproductive. But in just a little over three months, the federal government that had been a mostly passive observer of the people’s problems had become an active force in trying to solve them. “It’s more than a New Deal,” Harold Ickes noted in his diary. “It’s a new world. People feel free again. They can breathe naturally. It’s like quitting a morgue for the open woods.”
FDR surrounded by CCC youths in Shenandoah National Park, one of four camps he visited on the same day in August 1933. The CCC, he would later boast, “has probably been the most successful of anything we have done.” Louis Howe and Harold Ickes are seated second and third from left; to the president’s left are Henry Wallace and one of Roosevelt’s original “brains trusters,” Rexford Tugwell.
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“A Young Man’s Opportunity,” a recruitment poster for the Illinois branch of the CCC, the most popular of all New Deal programs: by 1936, 82 percent of those responding to a national poll approved of it, including nearly two-thirds of all Republicans, and most Americans shared FDR’s hope that it would become a permanent agency.
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In the oppressive heat of Washington in June, exhausted, shirt-sleeved members of the joint Senate and Congressional Finance Committees struggle to wind up their work at the end of the first hundred days.
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An elderly, out-of-breath Congress struggles to keep up with the fast-moving new president in Clifford Berryman’s cartoon “Jus’ Mindin’ His Business and Goin’ Along,” which appeared in the Washington Star, March 25, 1933. “Congress doesn’t pass legislation anymore,” Will Rogers said. “They just wave at the bills as they go by.” Throughout his administration, Roosevelt’s vigorous leadership would cause cartoonists to ignore his handicap and show him walking, leaping, running.
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Enthusiasm for the NRA was not universal. Here, a communist cartoonist takes literally the words of Earl Browder, the party general secretary: “For the working class, the [National Recovery Act] is truly an Industrial Slavery Act, … a forerunner of American fascism.”
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In 1933, the blue eagle NRA sticker, meant to show a business’s adherence to codes set by the National Recovery Administration, seemed to be everywhere—including on the door of Val-Kill Industries, the furniture shop that Nancy Cook (left) and Eleanor Roosevelt had started to aid local craftsmen.
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New Yorkers crowd rooftops along Fifth Avenue to watch the mammoth National Recovery Act parade, September 13, 1933. A quarter of a million marchers passed by in a procession that lasted from early afternoon to well past midnight.
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A Working Woman
Traditionally, first ladies were often seen but rarely heard; Mrs. Hoover, for example, had confined her public remarks largely to her enthusiasm for the Girl Scouts. That sort of life would have smothered Eleanor Roosevelt. She had been an important person in her own right before her husband’s election, and refused to become a mere appendage now.
She organized family life in the White House and took seriously her ceremonial role—she once shook the hands of 3,100 guests in 90 minutes—though she had little patience with formalities; the chief usher was appalled when she insisted on running the elevator herself and asked to have a swing for her grandchildren hung from a tree on the White House lawn.
Behind the scenes, she lobbied her husband hard on issues important to her—the creation of at least one CCC camp for women; the appointment of more women to government positions; the assurance that labor would not suffer under the NRA.
But she swiftly began to assert herself in public, as well. She announced that she would hold weekly press conferences of her own. Since only men could attend her husband’s meetings with the press, she allowed only female reporters to attend hers. When a reporter warned her to be careful what she said for fear of embarrassing her husband, Eleanor explained that when she said things that caused criticism she would often do so deliberately—to “arouse controversy” and to “get the topics talked about and so get people to thinking about them.” “At the President’s press conferences all the world’s a stage,” Bess Furman of the Associated Press wrote; “at Mrs. Roosevelt’s all the world’s a school.”
She also signed on to speak over the radio, agreed to write regularly for the Woman’s Home Companion and the North American Newspaper Alliance, and began work on her first book, It’s Up to the Women, in which she argued that the modern woman was “a working woman who wanted to be able to do something which expresses her own personality, even though she may be a wife and mother.”
And she insisted on being allowed to travel as she always had, on her own. Despite her uncle Theodore’s wounding in 1912, despite her husband’s brush with death in Mi
ami just a few weeks earlier, Eleanor refused Secret Service or police protection. The American people are “wonderful,” she explained. “I simply can’t be afraid of going among them.” Her aunt Corinne, Theodore Roosevelt’s younger sister, told a friend that Eleanor was more like her brother “than any of his [own] children.”
By the end of the first hundred days, a friend remembered, “Eleanor as much as her husband had come to personify the Roosevelt era.”
An official portrait of the new first lady, made in the White House by the fashionable firm of Harris & Ewing in 1933. Posing for photographs was always an ordeal for Eleanor Roosevelt.
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In 1933, the Roosevelt children pooled their resources and commissioned the artist Otto Schmidt to paint this portrait of their mother as a surprise birthday gift for their father. According to her son Elliott, when it was unveiled at dinner on January 30, 1933, its subject burst into tears and left the room. “It’s hateful,” she said; she would never be able to live up to such a prettified portrayal of herself. But FDR liked it so much he had it hung above the door in his second-floor Oval Study, where it remained throughout his presidency.
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Newspaperwomen surround Eleanor Roosevelt in the Monroe Room on the second floor of the White House living quarters, at the second press conference ever held by a first lady, March 13, 1933. Scornful male reporters dismissed their female rivals as worshipful “incense-burners” because some were seen seated at the first lady’s feet in this photograph, and editors muttered that no real news would ever emerge from such a meeting—until early the following month, when Mrs. Roosevelt announced that, while she did not drink alcohol herself, once Prohibition had formally ended, first beer and then wine would be served again in the White House. It made headlines across the country.
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