The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e05 Episode Script

1 Previously on "The Roosevelts" Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with a mysterious disease.
His legs felt funn and he felt feverish, and he never walked without help again.
But his secret wouldn't keep him from the White House.
I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people! And now part 5 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
" Funding for this program was provided by members of The Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Americans about their history through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John Fullerton.
The Pfeil Foundation Joan Wellhouse Newton.
Bonnie and Tom McCloskey.
And the Golkin Family.
Additional funding was provided by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to strengthening America's future through education; by the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor; by Mr.
Jack C.
Taylor And by Rosalind P.
Walter.
Major funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the generous contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Before the names Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin were indelibly etched into the American consciousness and the course of human history was forever changed by their individual endeavors, a prominent family made a point of teaching the value of altruism, the power of perseverance, and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
This great nation will endure, will revive, and will prosper.
So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified By the time FDR takes office, there are at least 15 million unemployed, probably more, at least a quarter of the nation, maybe a third.
And action now.
To get a sense of this, imagine that you're one of 100,000 people in a football stadium and that as you file out you're handed a piece of paper saying, "you're fired.
" Imagine the next week 100,000 more come into that stadium, and as they leave, each of them is told, "you no longer have a job," and imagine that happening for 52 weeks of the year for 3 straight years.
You will then have approximated the total of unemployed when Franklin Roosevelt takes office.
By 1933, it was hard to put down a chilling thought "maybe the depression is never going to end.
" There's a sense of fear that pervades the country.
John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, was asked if there'd ever been anything before like the great depression? He said, "yes.
It was called the dark ages, and it lasted 400 years.
" We humbly ask the blessing of God.
May he protect each and every one of us.
May he guide me in the days to come.
Saturday, March 4, 1933, was inauguration day.
Among the friends and family members invited to watch Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural parade from the reviewing stand was the new president's 42-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 was on the president's stand, section "B," top row, from where I saw the White House grounds, the parade, and 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, et cetera.
Democracy! The inauguration symbolized almost a century and a half of American continuity, but on that day in 1933, Americans were in the third year of a great depression so crippling that it seemed to some that unless the new president acted with unprecedented boldness, American democracy itself might be at an end, and there were many who feared the magnetic but essentially untried man in the reviewing stand could not possibly be equal to the task.
Still 11 years earlier, Daisy had witnessed first-hand 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.
S01E05 The Rising Road There've been 3 presidents who were larger than the office they inherited.
One was Washington, who fairly invented the office; there was Lincoln, who preserved the country at the center of which sits that office, and then there was Roosevelt, who fundamentally changed the relationship of the citizen to the central government.
The presidency is like a soft leather glove, and it takes the shape of the hand that's put into it, and when a very big hand is put into it and stretches the glove, stretches the office, the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was.
So we are all living today with an office enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt.
A president could be judged great, Theodore Roosevelt once explained, only if 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.
The best of the new deal programs was Franklin Roosevelt's smile.
He was armored with Christian faith that the universe is well-organized and with the American faith that history is a rising road and things are going to be all right.
Had that enormous head and that wonderful grin, and it was the tonic the country needed.
The country was depressed.
We use the word depression in lots of ways, and what they needed was a man who was incapable of depression.
I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security.
I never heard him say 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.
Franklin Roosevelt 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.
" That becomes a habit in your life, to not reveal yourself to others, as if there's a scar that you're afraid that someone else will see.
You always have to be the one that's up.
You always have to be the one that's doing well, and it means that you're not in touch, in a certain sense, with some of those emotions within yourself.
It makes it harder for you, but it also makes you more mysterious, more magical, perhaps, to the outside world.
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.
" "I want to be a preaching president," FDR said, "like my cousin Theodore," and he believed, just as Theodore Roosevelt had believed, that the presidency was "preeminently a place of moral leadership.
" Building on the work of the first Roosevelt, the second Roosevelt gave us the idea, the shimmering, glittering idea of the heroic presidency and with it the hope that complex problems would yield to charisma.
This sets the country up for perpetual disappointment.
He set lofty goals for himself and his country and pursued them with a cheerful deviousness that sometimes appalled his allies and often disappointed his wife.
He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical.
That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people.
Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome.
I was one of those who served his purposes.
The Roosevelts would become perhaps the most admired and the most reviled couple ever to occupy the White House.
Franklin would be denounced as a dictator, a socialist, a traitor to his class.
Eleanor was dismissed as naive, meddling, dangerously radical.
They needed each other, too.
One was strong where the other was weak.
FDR was not as idealistic as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt was not as good a politician as Franklin Roosevelt.
Together they represented both the better angels of our nature and a sense of how to get it done, how to let those angels actually have some authority and run things.
5,000 banks have failed.
9 million savings accounts have been wiped out, and Roosevelt declares a national bank holiday.
And this is a happy term, not at all like Hoover's "Moratorium," and for several days, the country operates without cash.
Pickpockets are no longer able to ply their trade.
The floating crap game disappears.
The new movie "King Kong" plays at the radio city music hall to empty houses, and the expectation is that when the banks are reopened in the following week there's gonna be a massive withdrawal.
On Sunday evening, March 12, 8 days after his inauguration, the new president spoke to the american people.
The president wants to come into your home and sit at your fireside for a little fireside chat.
Some 60 million Americans gathered around their radios.
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.
I want to tell you Roosevelt did for speaking what bing Crosby did for singing.
They called it crooning.
Before that for all of human history, leaders had talked to their people Like this.
They had had to orate because the microphone hadn't been invented.
And Roosevelt was the first one to understand that you could have this new relationship with the audience that was an intimate relationship.
Let me make it clear to you that the banks will take care of all needs, and it is my belief that hoarding during the past week has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime.
He spoke to them like a father, like a favorite Uncle, speaking to them on a Sunday night.
Many of them had already gone to bed, but they were huddled under their covers.
It was a cold night.
They turned out the lights to save on electricity, and his voice came over the radio, and it reassured them that things were gonna be ok.
In less than 15 minutes, he explained how the banking system was supposed to work.
He explained how it had failed.
Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds.
They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans.
He explained what his administration and Congress had done.
This bank holiday is affording us the opportunity to supply the currency necessary to meet the situation.
Remember that no sound bank is a dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last week.
And then he spoke to them as an equal, and he said that "all that we've done "in Washington will mean nothing without the support of the American people.
" After all, there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people themselves.
Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan.
Let us unite in banishing fear.
It is your problem, my friends your problem, no less than it is mine.
Together we cannot fail.
Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States has spoken to you from the White House in Washington, D.
C.
And in 14 1/2 minutes, he utterly changed the mindset of Americans.
When he says in that first fireside chat "hoarding has become a terribly unfashionable pastime.
"Please take your money out from under your mattresses "and redeposit it in the banks when they reopen," people actually did it.
The same people who had been lining up, pushing each other out of the way to get their money out of the banks, they now after listening to the new president on the radio, they lined up to redeposit the money.
Now that's leadership.
Dear sir, while listening to your broadcast Sunday night, our little home seemed a church, our radio the pulpit, and you the preacher.
Thank you for the courage and faith you have given us.
Every time it rains My dear Mr.
President, no sooner had your voice died on the air when mother, a hard-shelled Republican, jumped from her chair saying, "isn't he a fine man?" And father with tears in his eyes said, "I feel one hundred percent better already.
" This, I am certain, is the effect your talk must have had on all who heard you tonight.
There'll be pennies from heaven "Capitalism," one of Roosevelt's advisers remembered, "was saved in 8 days.
" The banks are open.
The headlines tell a new story, new confidence, new spirit.
Billions in untapped wealth begin to flow.
New money backed by real assets pours from Uncle Sam's treasury to revitalize the country's commerce.
The leader leads, and the nation heeds.
Roosevelt had 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 coming years, the ranks of government would for the first time come to include more talented women, as well as Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans.
The Roosevelt administration is run by a man who never knew any of those people when he was young, but he was so secure and so unthreatened, and if you are, then you can employ the talents of anyone you like.
FDR understood that no program and no presidency could work unless the president continued to communicate effectively with the voters.
To do that, he welcomed the press into his office twice a week 997 times before he was through.
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 provided a constant flow of copy that kept him always at the center of events.
Ha ha ha! Is it on straight? We are planning within a few days to ask the Congress for legislation to enable the government to undertake public works, thus stimulating directly and indirectly the employment of many others in well-considered projects.
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 of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, 15 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 6 states, the TVA.
Got a handful of nothing and I watch it like a hawk Well, I'm doing ok I'm living in a great big way The AAA, the PWA, the FDIC among the alphabet soup of programs Roosevelt's new deal created to stimulate the economy and combat unemployment was one especially dear to the president's heart.
He had pushed it through Congress in less than a week after being inaugurated, the civilian conservation corps.
The CCC eventually put some 3 million jobless men to work preserving the American landscape, controlling erosion, developing national parks, planting hundreds of millions of trees.
They earned $30 a month and sent 25 of it home to help their families.
I'm the salt in the ocean I'm the sun in the sky I'm Franklin D.
Roosevelt I'm a million dollars as long as I've got a snap in my fingers got a rhythm in my walk got the devil to pay I'm living in a great big way Inspiring his forest army by a personal visit, President Roosevelt makes his first tour of the civilian conservation corps camps in the Shenandoah Valley.
After inspecting skyland, the commander-in-chief takes a seat at the head of the table to eat with the boys, and he enjoys every bite of the plain, wholesome food furnished at the camp.
I wish that I could take a couple of months off from the White House and come down here and live with them because I know I'd get full of health the way they have.
The only difference is that they put on an average of about 12 pounds a piece since they got here, and I'm trying to take off 12 pounds.
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 so popular that when a parade it sponsored marched down 5th Avenue, more than a quarter of a million New Yorkers came out to cheer.
My father took me there.
I was 10 years old, and to this day, it is the greatest parade in the history of New York City.
Garment workers, tailors, barbers, marched like medieval guilds down 5th Avenue.
It went on all through the afternoon, all through the evening, past midnight.
People went to movies, they came out, and paraders were still going by.
They were saying, "we do our part," that the American people were going to be in league with the American government in seeing that the country could lift itself out of the great depression.
"There is a unity in this country," FDR said, "which I have not seen since we went to war in 1917.
" What he did in the first hundred days was demonstrate that the federal government was capable of acting swiftly.
We tend to forget, partly because we want to forget, that at about that time the word dictator, dictatorial, dictatorship did not have an unambiguously bad ring, not just in America but in Europe, as well, where people were simply terrified by the sense that things had spun out of control, and respected people talked to Franklin Roosevelt about the need for dictatorial powers, and the president shrank from those, rightly so, but he did infuse his rhetoric with strong appeals to collective, almost military action "we're all in this war together.
" It rang tellingly reassuring to a lot of Americans at that point.
The United States was not alone in its suffering.
Everywhere, countries had been devastated by the worldwide depression.
In parts of Europe, democracy itself had collapsed, and some people had turned to other, more extreme solutions.
Some Americans, too, were disillusioned by their government's response to the crisis and took to the streets in protest.
Shortly after he became president, FDR had a visitor who said to him, "Mr.
President, you're either gonna be our greatest president, or you're gonna be our worst president," and Roosevelt said, "No, if, if I fail, I'll be our last president.
" I think we can wonder whether our descendants because I think they'll still be here what they will think about us, and let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe that we have honestly striven in our day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.
Some of the new legislation would be overthrown by the courts.
Other laws would turn out to have been counterproductive, but in just a little over 3 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.
It's a new world.
People feel free again.
They can breathe naturally.
It's like quitting a morgue for the open woods.
Harold Ickes.
The pitch is up.
At the end of the first hundred days in 1933, he goes back to campobello for the first time since he was stricken with polio And he goes out in the woods, and he's sitting on a tree stump, and a couple of people he knows are taking a walk in the woods, and when they come upon him, he's got his head in his hands, and then when he looks up he has a grimace on his face, a look of suffering.
Then he notices that they're there, and it was like a shutter clicking in a camera, Roosevelt, then he notices that they're there, "picking flowers, Billy?" And the mask was back on.
This evening, Virginia hunt told me that Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt evidently don't get on together.
She is always off somewhere, though always on hand for dinners and receptions.
It is very sad as they are both such splendid people and must miss a happy married life.
Daisy Suckley.
When Eleanor Roosevelt first came to the White House after her husband's election, the long-time chief Usher greeted her as "Miss Eleanor," just as he had during her uncle's presidency, and she hurled herself into her duties as first lady with all the energy for which Theodore Roosevelt was famous.
She began holding weekly press conferences of her own.
She allowed only female reporters to attend because only men could attend her husband's.
Politics was officially off limits, but no previous president's wife had ever done anything remotely like it.
She would go on to write a syndicated newspaper column called "My Day" and have a network radio program of her own.
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.
" The White House, Washington.
Hick dearest, it was good to talk to you.
The one thing which reconciles me to this job is the fact that I begin to think there may be ways in which I can be useful.
I am getting some ideas which I want to talk over with you.
A world of love to you and good night and God bless you, "light of my life.
" E.
R.
Lorena Hickok "Hick" to Eleanor Roosevelt had been one of America's top newspaperwomen in 1932, when she was assigned by the associated press to cover the Democratic candidate's wife and found herself so in love with her subject that she quit her job because she could no longer be objective.
The result was one of the most intense friendships of Eleanor Roosevelt's life.
When apart, the two women wrote one another daily.
Hick darling, remember always, no one is just what you are to me.
I'd rather be writing this minute than anything else, and yet I love many other people and some often can do things for me probably better than you could, but I've never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.
The important thing about Lorena Hickok is that when Eleanor first became first lady, Lorena's the one who gave her the confidence to become something other than a ceremonial first lady, and more importantly, she loved Eleanor.
It was the first person, perhaps, that loved Eleanor completely for her own self more than she loved anybody else.
I mean, Franklin loved her but loved the world.
Lorena fell in love with Eleanor, and it gave her, I think, the self-assurance that she needed for this whole new role as first lady.
In July of 1933, they quietly took off together in Eleanor's blue buick convertible for a month-long vacation on the back roads of new England and the gaspe peninsula in Canada.
The Secret Service wanted to send an escort.
The first lady refused to have one but did agree to carry a revolver in her glove compartment, though she carried no ammunition with which to load it.
In most of the little towns they visited, she went unrecognized.
That kind of anonymity would not last long.
Eleanor Roosevelt's frequent travels would soon help make her the best-known woman in the world.
Lawndale, California.
Most honorable president, I am writing you this morning in all faith that if I can get word to you of our horrible plight you will not pass it by unnoticed.
I am a mother of 7 children and utterly heartbroken in that they are hungry.
Have only 65 cents in money.
The father is in L.
A.
trying to find something to do.
Provisions all gone.
Our pride isn't all gone, and if we have a chance, we can care for ourselves and be happy.
President Herbert Hoover's mail had been handled by a single clerk.
The Roosevelts needed 50.
During the week following FDR's inauguration, 450,000 Americans wrote the White House.
During the 145 months that followed, FDR and his wife received an average of between 5,000 and 8,000 letters every single day.
"Never before have we had leaders "in the White House to whom we felt we could go to with our problems," one woman wrote, "for never before have our leaders seemed conscious of the masses.
" They wrote because they felt they knew him, but there was a lot they did not know.
It still amazes me to realize that even though the public knew that he had had polio, they had no idea, really most people, that he could not walk on his own power.
If you look at the photographs of him through the years, there are thousands of pictures of him standing.
He is always in some way leaning on something.
He's balanced.
Sometimes his hand is behind his back, leaning on the cane, or he's holding a car door, but the extraordinary thing is that there are lots of accounts of people who said they visited him in the oval office and that he rose to greet them.
He never once rose to greet anyone.
He could not rise without locking his braces, but he was so outgoing and so magnetic that people thought they saw him doing things he did not do, just the power of his own personality.
His press secretary Steve Early turned away all reporters' questions about the president's disability.
"It's not a story," he'd say.
When guests filed into the formal dining room at the White House, they found the president already seated at the head of the table.
No one was to see him being wheeled down the hall.
The secret service became expert at installing and removing special ramps to allow the president to enter a building without anyone seeing him being carried.
And when the White House imposed rules on how he could be filmed and photographed, few complained, at least at first.
No images of FDR in his wheelchair or getting in or out of cars were permitted.
No visual record was to be made of the arduous effort it took him to move just a few feet.
Photographers who defied the rules, including ordinary tourists, had their film confiscated by the secret service.
The thing that's different from our time is that the press cooperated, and people bought it in the thirties and forties.
They bought it.
They thought it was intrusive on the whole.
I don't think anyone as afflicted as he was could ever be elected to national office today.
I think it would be impossible, which is sad.
What I want you to do is to go out around the country and look this thing over.
Go talk with preachers and teachers, businessmen, workers, farmers.
Go talk with the unemployed, those who are on relief and those who aren't, and when you talk with them, don't ever forget that but for the grace of God, you, I, or any of our friends might be in their shoes.
Harry Hopkins.
When Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok ended their vacation in the summer of 1933, Hickok moved into her own room at the White House and then went to work traveling the country as chief investigator for Harry Hopkins, the head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Able and impatient, fueled by cigarettes and black coffee, Hopkins combined the hard-eyed sensibilities of a seasoned political operative with the conscience of a committed social worker.
Told a new federal program was likely to succeed in the long run, he answered that wasn't good enough.
"People don't eat in the long run," he said.
Hopkins would remain one of Roosevelt's most effective and devoted advisors throughout his presidency, eager always to know from Lorena Hickok what was really happening outside Washington.
It was the worst place I'd ever seen.
In a gutter along the main street, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable.
On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most americans would not have considered fit for pigs, and in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor.
Lorena Hickok.
Eleanor read every one of the reports Lorena Hickok wrote for Harry Hopkins and made sure they were among the papers she left on FDR's bedside table each evening so that he could read them, too.
In late August, Hickok telephoned Eleanor at the White House.
If she wanted to see for herself how bad things were, she should come to Scotts run, West Virginia.
The first lady of the United States came, driving alone in her Buick.
The American Friends Service Committee had been working in the region to help unemployed coal miners and their families.
Some men had been without work for 8 years.
There was already a plan by West Virginia University to shift some families to a big plot of gently rolling land nearby owned by a family named Arthur.
This is the worst place in depression America.
Eleanor Roosevelt goes down there with Lorena Hickok, and they say these folks are gonna be out of these caves and culverts within a year and a new community called Arthurdale is going to arise.
Eleanor returned to Washington, committed to take over the project and make "Arthurdale" a model community.
FDR shared Eleanor's enthusiasm.
Both believed that the lives of the rural poor should be improved so that they would not be tempted to shift into the already overcrowded industrial cities.
165 families were eventually chosen.
Each was to be given a furnished home, a plot of land, farm equipment, and livestock with 30 years to pay the government back for its investment.
The project was troubled from the beginning.
The first 50 prefabricated houses did not fit their foundations.
The finished homes cost 4 times what had been budgeted.
When interior secretary Ickes complained to FDR, he just shrugged.
"My missus," he said, "hasn't any sense about money at all.
" When she tried to attract small-scale industries, congressional opponents torpedoed her plans.
A vacuum cleaner plant failed.
So did a shirt maker and a tractor manufacturer.
Eleanor refused to give up.
She was as dedicated to Arthurdale as her husband was to warm Springs.
When federal funds proved insufficient, she contributed nearly all her earned income and canvassed wealthy friends to underwrite projects, including a progressive high school that allowed miners' children to get advanced schooling their parents could not have imagined.
She adopts a whole community, and she goes every year to the graduation at Arthurdale, to the elementary school graduation, the high school graduation, and she square dances, and she plays with the folks at Arthurdale, the whole community.
She had this brilliant notion that it's better for everybody when it gets better for everybody.
It was always individual by individual.
To its critics, Arthurdale came to symbolize everything wrong with the new deal.
They charged that it was wasteful, overambitious, socialistic, but for those who lived there, Eleanor Roosevelt was a godsend, and Arthurdale was a triumph.
"We woke up in hell," one of the first homesteaders remembered, "and went to bed the next night in heaven.
" Portsmouth, Virginia.
Mr.
President and wife, we is just in a place where we don't know what to do.
Some of we colored peoples is so ragged we is ashamed to get out among the peoples, and it's getting cold, no wood, and if we don't get something to do, we will freeze to death during the winter.
Some of these peoples here where we rents houses from, if a person can't pay house rent, some of them will take the window out and take the doors off.
So please do what you can for we peoples, please.
Most americans suffered during the depression but African-Americans suffered most.
3 out of 4 still lived in the Jim Crow south.
More than half of them were without work, and federal relief almost always went first to needy whites.
Some 400,000 desperate people migrated north during the 1930s only to discover that, in many big cities, there was no work to be had.
Theodore Roosevelt had once sought to deal with african-american citizens through a single representative Booker T.
Washington.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt understood that the world had changed, and his administration would prove more sympathetic to african-american aspirations than any of its predecessors.
Eleanor Roosevelt obtained for her friend, the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, several posts within the administration.
When Bethune came to the White House for dinner for the first time, a gardener stopped her.
"Hey there, auntie," he said.
"Where y'all think you're going?" She looked him up and down, then asked, "Which one of my sister's children are you?" No one ever tried to stop her again.
Following the advice of Bethune and others, FDR appointed an informal network of second-level officials, who came to be called his "black cabinet," and Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins struggled to ensure that new deal relief programs did not discriminate.
By 1935, 1/3 of all black americans would be receiving federal help of some kind, and african-americans all over the country were shifting their allegiance from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
But local prejudice persisted in federal programs.
Most CCC camps were segregated.
The coal miners of Arthurdale voted to keep out black homesteaders.
Black reporters were barred from the president's press conferences, and the shame of lynching persisted.
In 1933, 26 americans died at the hands of mobs, 3 times as many as had been lynched the year before.
New York senator Robert Wagner and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado introduced a bill to make lynching a federal crime.
Southern politicians denounced it as an assault on state's rights and kept it locked up in committee.
FDR had denounced lynching as "a vile form of collective murder" and was willing to sign the bill if it was passed, but he felt he could not back the bill in public.
Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked to see the president.
His Appointments Secretary said the boss was far too busy.
Then Eleanor invited white to tea on the south portico with the president.
There was really nothing he could do, FDR said.
The speaker of the house believed the bill unconstitutional.
If it reached the senate floor, it would be filibustered to death.
Eleanor persisted.
So did the president's mother.
FDR was immovable.
Seniority had given Southern Democratic senators and congressmen more than their share of chairmanships.
"I did not choose the tools with which I must work," he finally told white.
If he came out for the anti-lynching bill, he would be unable to pass legislation the whole country needed, including african-americans.
We were very disappointed.
The interesting thing was that particularly african-american people had such a strong feeling about Franklin Roosevelt and all the things that he was doing that they saw clearly that his own party was defeating him at every step.
The good thing was that Mrs.
Roosevelt encouraged young people to act.
She was always there to say, "stay within the law "and keep yourselves in hand, but always stand for what you believe.
" And I think it was that that gave us a kind of strength.
The president liked to remind critics who thought him too cautious that "you have to wait, even for the best things, until the right time comes.
" Although bills to end lynching would be revived again and again during his administration, that time would never come, but Eleanor Roosevelt would continue to argue for all of them.
Any president gets lied to by all the yes-men around him.
They all need to go around that chain of command and find out what's really going on on the ground.
She was a tremendous asset to him in telling him what was working, not working in the new deal.
She would fill the inbox next to his bed, and he would then say to his cabinet, "my missus tells me, WPA's not working too well in Texas.
" The Roosevelt marriage was a partnership in which each played a very important part, each admired the other, each wanted very much the approval of the other.
That was true throughout their lives together, even when they were mad at each other.
They lived very separate lives.
Even when they were in the White House, they were very separate lives, and she took a sort of cold view of his fame and the kind of popularity he had.
She knew who he was, and he wasn't quite who they thought he was.
And he sought her approval, but he had all sorts of practical political decisions that he felt he had to make, some of which she disapproved of, and it bothered him when she didn't like it.
It is a happy privilege to talk to you once again about Georgia Warm Springs Foundation and its fight against infantile paralysis.
It is a privilege because I can tell you of the accomplishments of those who are fighting this battle.
Whenever he could manage it, the president escaped to Warm Springs, Georgia.
A few days there, always restored his energy and lifted the spirits of all the polio patients struggling to regain their feet.
To have the president of the United States be a sufferer from the same thing you had struggled with was enormous benefit to them.
He was the example.
They just loved to be in his presence.
They loved to see him lead games and play water polo and preside at Thanksgiving dinner, which he did with enormous ceremony every year no matter what he was doing.
He was always there for Thanksgiving.
And the first thing we do is to, uh, distribute the spinach, which you're all so fond of.
And then at last, we get busy, and we commit murder.
During his early days at Warm Springs, he had lifted his own spirits by fitting out a farmer's old Model with hand controls and setting out alone along the back roads of meriwether county.
He'd get out in his car, and he'd ride all over the community, and if he saw you outside the road there, he would toot his horn, say, "may I speak to you just a minute?" And he'd say, uh, "how you and your family getting along?" Once he found out that you was all right there, if you if you needed some supplies, anything, or didn't have enough to eat, "I'll have my farm supervisor, Otis bring you something.
" And when he got that settled down, he found out you gonna be all right, uh, "you have any ideas, any suggestions "that'll to help us in the situation "we in today? I'll be glad to listen to them.
" It's that simple.
By the spring of 1935, the panic that had gripped America on inauguration day was over, and Roosevelt had launched 3 sweeping new programs the national youth administration to provide training for young people without work; the rural electrification administration that would light up the american countryside; and the works progress administration, that would change the face of much of the american landscape.
It built or rebuilt 2,500 hospitals, 6,000 public schools, 10,000 airport landing fields, and enough miles of roadway to pave the continent from coast to coast more than 200 times.
Jobless artists and writers, composers and musicians benefited from the WPA, as well Saul Bellow and Thomas Hart Benton, Ralph Ellison and Orson Welles, Berenice Abbott and Alan Lomax and hundreds of others.
It turned out nearly a thousand publications, including guides to all 48 states, staged plays and performed symphonies in small towns that had never seen a live performance, revived the art of mural painting on the walls of schools and post offices, commissioned photographers to chronicle the human cost of the depression, and transcribed the memories of american slaves and collected the folk songs all kinds of americans sang.
A northern and a Southern time that'll be falling down Whoo A few timid people will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing.
Sometimes they will call it "fascism" and sometimes "communism," and sometimes "socialism," but in so doing, they are trying to make very complex something that is really very simple and very practical.
Roosevelt asserted, and the country in this dire straits of the depression willingly accepted, that the role of the central government from now on would be to secure the material well-being of the American people.
Hitherto from the founding to that point, the general american orthodoxy had been that our federal government existed to defend the shores, deliver the mails, protect rights, and get out of the way.
Roosevelt had bigger ideas.
But despite everything he had done, the United States was still in its fifth year of depression.
While 2.
5 million americans had returned to work, another 10 million remained jobless.
A drought afflicted most of the 48 states.
In the dust bowl, the topsoil of the southern plains was being blown away, and hundreds of thousands of americans were on the move toward California in search of work.
People everywhere were growing impatient.
On the right, the American Liberty League, organized by some of America's most powerful industrialists, charged that the new deal was only making things worse, that Roosevelt had become a dictator, defying the constitution, encouraging "class warfare.
" Their best-known spokesman was FDR's old ally Al Smith, the former Democratic governor of New York.
The new dealers, he said, were hell-bent on socialism.
"There can only be one capital," Smith said, "Washington or Moscow.
"There can be only one flag, "the stars and stripes or the flag of the godless Soviets.
" Some of Roosevelt's enemies called him "that man in the White House," because they could not bear even to say his name.
When someone unwisely mentioned FDR in the presence of J.
P.
Morgan, whose own father had earlier done battle with TR, Morgan is said to have exploded, "goddamn all Roosevelts.
" The people among whom he was brought up, an awful lot of them learned to hate him.
He seemed to be betraying everything that they had believed.
And it just eNRAged people.
On the left, socialists and a handful of communists took to the streets, denouncing Roosevelt as a captive of capitalism, incapable of bringing about real change.
Other men were peddling other schemes.
Dr.
Francis Townsend, an elderly California physician, promised to grant a monthly pension to every worker over 60 who was willing to retire and spend the money within 30 days.
Father Charles coughlin, the Detroit radio priest, preached in favor of inflated currency and against Wall Street and international bankers, but the biggest threat to FDR's reelection chances in 1936 came from the south.
There was widespread speculation that Senator Huey P.
Long, the flamboyant, populist, ex-governor of Louisiana, planned to lead a third party coalition against him.
We've tried the Republican Party, we've tried the Democratic Party, then we've gone back and tried the Republican Party, and now we're back trying the Democratic party, and, unfortunately, whenever we get into power with either one of these parties, we find that the one crying need of our people, the redistribution of wealth so that none will be too poor and none will be too rich, is always neglected by the party that is in power.
Long called his program "share our wealth," and hundreds of thousands of voters signed up all across the country.
Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley feared long would start out with at least 12% of the vote, enough to deny FDR several important states.
Then, on Monday, May 27, 1935, things got even worse.
The United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in a case brought by a kosher chicken producer from Brooklyn, which invalidated the national recovery administration on the grounds that the NRA had unconstitutionally delegated legislative power.
The NRA was already understood to be a failure.
It had only raised prices and lowered wages, exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, but the narrow grounds on which the NRA decision was made seemed to suggest that other new deal programs might also be swept away.
From the first moments of our republic on, we argued how much the federal government is restrained by the doctrine of limited, delegated, and enumerated powers.
Roosevelt, with that cheerful indifference to detail said, "listen, the preamble stipulates "certain things a more perfect union, "provide for the general welfare.
Implicitly," he said, "the constitution gives "the federal government any power requisite for fulfilling the goals listed in the preamble.
" End of constitutional reflection as far as he was concerned.
The president put a handful of advisors to work studying how the powers the court had taken away could be restored before it was too late.
In June, just as congressmen were preparing to leave town for the summer, Roosevelt seized back the initiative, calling upon them to enact 5 major pieces of legislation by autumn.
In part to steal a little of what FDR called "Huey's thunder," he proposed new taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
He also wanted the federal reserve system strengthened and a new law to break up monopolistic holding companies, and in the interest of achieving for ordinary americans something of the sense of security that had been his since boyhood, rew himself something of the sense behind two bills initially championed by the Democratic senator from New York Robert F.
Wagner.
They would turn out to be two of the most momentous pieces of legislation in american history.
The first, called the Wagner Act, created the national labor relations board and for the first time provided a federal guarantee of labor's right to organize and bargain collectively, but it was the second, the Social Security Act, that would be the most far-reaching.
It would provide old-age insurance paid for by taxes on employees and their employers, share with the states responsibility for insuring the unemployed, and provide federal aid to the states to help care for dependent mothers and children, the handicapped and the blind.
Social security represents a redefinition of the american social contract of what we owe each other as a people.
In old age and should they be widowed, they deserved some help from the government, and for that reason, he considered it to be the centerpiece of the new deal.
He put it in through a regressive payroll tax so that it couldn't be taken away, so as he said, "no damn politician can ever take this away.
" Like all great pieces of social legislation, you've got to start somewhere, and the bill just barely cleared committee.
So he knew that if he did too much for the liberals, he was gonna blow the bill.
If he did too much for the conservatives, then he'd lose his liberal support.
And it was his political genius to know just how much the system could take, and people sometimes say now is, "why can't we "have a leader like FDR who just gets it done the way he wants it done?" Nothing could be further from the truth.
It was all compromise, playing people off each other, pushing the system a little here or there, putting the foot on the gas, then on the brake, back and forth.
There's an artistry to politics, and social security wouldn't exist if he hadn't been a brilliant political artist.
This law represents also a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete, a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions.
To act as a protection to future 1935 saw a sweltering, bruising, summer-long struggle on Capitol Hill, and compromises did reduce the impact of some of the legislation, but newspapermen called it the "Second Hundred Days" and the beginning of a second new deal.
Roosevelt's prospects for reelection were all but assured.
And in September, FDR's most serious third-party rival huey long was cut down by an assassin's bullet.
September 23, 1935.
Dear Daisy, do you know that you alone have known that I was a bit "cast down" these past weeks? I couldn't let anyone else know it, but somehow, I seem to tell you all those things, and what I don't happen to tell you, you seem to know, anyway! That when we open the building to the public In public, Franklin Roosevelt always projected cheerful optimism.
Even in private, he rarely let anyone know how he really felt, but beginning in the late summer of 1935, he began making an exception for his admiring distant cousin Daisy Suckley.
One afternoon that month in Hyde Park, he took her for a drive in his hand-controlled car to a favorite picnic spot, the crest of a forested Ridge on the Roosevelt property he and Daisy named "our hill.
" There, they began what they both called their "voyage," confessing to one another the loneliness each felt, speaking of a special bond of friendship, agreeing to share confidences by letter and long-distance telephone.
He even spoke to her of the pain of his braces, something he never mentioned to his wife.
Daisy Suckley was a great secret.
He got from her the kind of total admiration that he needed.
He told her when he was feeling sort of down.
He didn't tell anybody else.
Really an extraordinary relationship, which was kept secret even from his closest aides.
She was the drab little cousin who took care of his dog fala that was how she was known in the world, but she was in fact, I think, central to him.
Franklin addressed her as "M.
M.
" For "My Margaret," and carried her letters with him wherever he went.
She sometimes signed her letters "Y.
M.
" "Your Margaret.
" They planned together a stone cottage to be built on their hilltop where, after he had finished the traditional two terms, she began to hope she might live with him as his nurse and companion.
Dear F.
Do you mind if I do a little thinking aloud? The subject is friendships and the way they start and grow an introduction, a shake of the hand, a few casual words to begin and the friendship usually finds very definite limits not so far from the surface.
On rare occasions, however, it seems to start in the deepest depths, a never-ending voyage howeof discoverys to with never a feeling of fear because of the safe and solid ship one knows is underfoot.
Daisy often remained at his side throughout his presidency, so quiet and unassuming and discreet that the president's own secretaries, puzzled by her presence, dismissed her as "the little mud wren.
" Roosevelt was surrounded by people all the time, and he gave little pieces of himself to different people, but nobody ever got all of him.
A fatherly kiss seals No president's family since the time of Theodore Roosevelt had ever received such incessant coverage as FDR's, though the picture it presented was always incomplete.
The public read Eleanor's column "My Day" that appeared 6 times a week in newspapers all across the country, but she made little mention of the domestic difficulties of her 5 children, among whom there would eventually be 19 marriages.
James served for a time as his father's assistant despite charges that he was using his position to further his own business interests.
Stress-related ulcers eventually forced him out of the White House.
Anna, who had married early to get away from the tensions within her family, left her husband for a newspaperman.
Elliott, named for Eleanor's troubled father, was troubled, as well.
He refused to attend college, rarely stayed in one place for long, used his famous name to get ahead in a series of speculative businesses.
Franklin, Jr.
, who inherited his father's looks and charm, earned a reputation at Harvard as a playboy.
And John, who had only been 5 when his father developed polio and virtually vanished from his life, did what he could to avoid the spotlight, working quietly as a clerk at filene's basement in Boston.
"One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a president," FDR once said.
"It's a terrible life they lead.
" There's a dark and a troubled side of life but there's a bright and a sunny side, too Though you meet with the darkness and strife the sunny side you also may view Every house I visited, mill worker or unemployed, had a picture of the president.
These ranged from newspaper clippings in destitute homes to large colored prints, framed in gilt cardboard, and the feelings of these people for the president is one of the most remarkable phenomena I have ever met.
He is at once god and their intimate friend.
He knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems.
And though everything else fails, he is there and will not let them down.
Martha Gellhorn.
There's a poll taken by a New York radio station of "who is the greatest man?" And Roosevelt comes out first, and God comes a distant second.
One mill worker in the south says, "Roosevelt is the only president we've ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch.
" On the evening of June 27, 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled to Philadelphia to accept his party's nomination for a second term as president of the United States.
Once again, the nation was listening.
As the crowd just, just indescribable.
What should have been the greatest night of his life.
He went to be renominated in front of 100,000 people at Franklin field in Philadelphia.
The night shall be filled with music, and the sound of the crowd will explode like 10,000 hand grenades that smash against the sky.
They drove into the stadium.
People went crazy.
The bands played.
Well, he got out of his car out of sight of the cameras and started toward the back entrance to the stage.
His son Jimmy was was carrying his speech and holding his father's arm, and his bodyguard was on the other side.
He was moving along and somehow got jostled.
The lock on his brace opened, and he really started to go to the ground, and Jimmy dropped the speech.
The bodyguard grabbed him before he actually hit the ground, but the whole you know, the whole crowd back there saw him.
And he said "Clean me up, goddamn it.
" And they but they got him cleaned.
He managed to get onto the stage and put his speech back together.
He said it was the most frightful 5 minutes of his life.
He then gave one of the great speeches of his administration.
"I was still mad when I began the speech," Roosevelt said later.
"It wasn't until I reached the line "about economic royalists that I knew I had them, and then I gave it to them.
" These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America.
What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
Governments can err.
Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events.
To some generations much is given.
Of other generations much is expected.
This generation of americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
Roosevelt's Republican opponent was alf Landon, the able but unassuming governor of Kansas, who had once enlisted in Theodore Roosevelt's bull moose crusade in 1912.
When Landon promised to retain useful elements of the new deal, FDR mocked the Republicans for trying to steal Democratic thunder.
"We believe in social security.
"We believe work for the unemployed.
"We believe in saving homes.
"Cross our hearts and hope to die.
"We believe in all these things, "but we do not like the way "the present administration is doing them.
"Just turn them over to us.
"We will do all of them, we will do more of them, "we will do them better, and most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.
" Frustrated, the Republicans changed tactics, accusing FDR of being a socialist in disguise.
The Oyster Bay Roosevelts joined the attack.
Theodore Roosevelt's oldest son Ted addressed the president himself in a Pennsylvania speech.
"You have been faithless," he said.
"You have urged Congress to pass laws "you knew were unconstitutional.
"You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible.
" Alice Roosevelt longworth, Theodore Roosevelt's oldest child, went still further.
Her father had conquered his illness childhood asthma and therefore had championed the "strenuous life," she said, but because Franklin remained in a wheelchair, he had become a "mollycoddle," peddling a "mollycoddle philosophy.
" No one who really knew both men could make that contrast.
No man who has brought himself back from what might have been an entire life of invalidism to physical, mental, and spiritual strength can ever be accused of preaching or exemplifying a mollycoddle philosophy.
Nothing any critic said seemed to matter.
"The forces of organized money are unanimous in their hatred for me," he told a cheering New York crowd, "and I welcome their hatred.
" Wherever FDR went, he asked the crowds if they were better off than they had been when he took office.
They were.
National income had now more than doubled, unemployment had nearly been cut in half.
Voices called out, "Thank you, Mr.
President!" And, "you saved my home!" Some people bowed their heads in prayer as his train rattled past.
In Denver, someone had scrawled in chalk on a boxcar, "Roosevelt is my friend.
" Hick dearest, I have never seen on any trip such crowds or enthusiasm.
If they really have all this faith, I hope he can do a good job for them.
I realize more and more that FDR is a great man, and he is nice to me, but as a person, I'm a stranger, and I don't want to be anything else! P.
S.
How I hate being a show, but I'm doing it so nicely! On election day, the Roosevelts voted at the Hyde Park town hall.
Name, please? Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
At Springwood on election night, as the returns began coming in, FDR blew a big smoke ring and murmured, "wow.
" He would win 60.
8% of the popular vote, the largest percentage anyone had ever won, and this time carried 46 of the 48 states.
And he carries all but two of the states, Maine and Vermont.
It was long said, "as Maine goes, so goes the nation.
" Now it was said, "as Maine goes, so goes Vermont.
" The election map of America has been transformed.
FDR had forged a new Democratic Party, a Roosevelt coalition that brought together Western farmers and big-city industrial workers, immigrants and african-americans and the solid south.
Almost anything seemed possible.
We love Franklin! At his second inaugural, held for the first time on January 20, Roosevelt promised to finish the job he'd started.
I see 1/3 of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
But it is not in despair that I paint that picture for you.
I paint it for you in hope because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice of it, proposes to paint it out.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much.
It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
The great works program has removed a vast army from relief roles.
It revived lagging industry, restored morale, and renewed courage.
Roosevelt believed that his reelection as president in 1936 had essentially confirmed popular approval of the new deal and what he was trying to accomplish.
The executive branch had spoken, the legislative branch had spoken, the only branch of the government that wasn't getting the message was the supreme court.
The Supreme Court had continued on its conservative course.
It had already overturned a number of new deal statutes, the NRA and AAA.
It seemed only a matter of time before it moved against the national labor relations and social security acts, and all future reforms seemed to be in jeopardy, as well.
Buoyed by his big victory, Roosevelt determined to act.
He had been reelected without the help of his old friend and closest advisor Louis Howe, who had recently died.
Howe's political duties had been taken over by others, but no one had replaced him as the man who could tell FDR when he was about to be a "damned fool.
" Roosevelt genuinely believed that in compelling the supreme court to pay attention to modern conditions he was doing the work of democracy.
These justices had been in office in some cases for decades, and they weren't listening to what the american people wanted and needed.
The plan the president sent to Capitol Hill without any warning to the leadership stunned enemies and friends alike.
He asked for the power to name a new justice for every sitting member of the court who did not resign 6 months after reaching the age of 70.
Roosevelt claimed the retirement of elderly judges would improve the court's "efficiency.
" Almost no one believed that was his real purpose.
He wasn't honest about it, and when the Democrats on the hill recognized that they really weren't being dealt with straight by the White House, then that legislation ran into trouble.
Daisy Suckley asked the president to explain the plan during a weekend visit to Hyde Park.
He did his high-minded best.
When he was finished, she asked "don't you mean that you are packing the court?" FDR roared.
"I suppose you're right, Daisy," he s "I suppose you're right!" President's Roosevelt's supreme court bombshell has started a telegraphic barrage aimed at Congress the like of which hasn't been seen in years.
The polls of that day show that the country was evenly divided on the supreme court plan, and it seemed highly likely, so large were the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, that Roosevelt would have gotten that plan through if the supreme court had gone ahead and struck down minimum wage legislation, struck down the national labor relations act, and struck down the social security law.
But then the court itself began suddenly to shift, upholding a series of laws most observers had expected it to overturn.
In the end, Roosevelt's bill was allowed to die.
Over the coming years, the president would be given the opportunity to replace 8 members of the court.
He may have lost the battle, Roosevelt said, but he had won the war.
Still, his court-packing plan had made him a host of enemies within his own party and strengthened a growing conservative congressional coalition that would make substantive new legislation far more difficult to pass.
In August of 1937, there was still more trouble.
The economy had been steadily improving since 1933, so steadily that american output had finally outpaced 1929 levels.
FDR and some of his advisers began to worry about inflation.
In response, the president slashed funds for relief and public works in the interest, he said, of balancing the budget.
There is a serious argument to be made that Roosevelt stopped too soon, that far from being bold, he wasn't bold enough because the recession within the depression that came along in 1937 came because they prematurely declared victory.
The result was a sudden, precipitous economic decline that continued for 9 frightening months.
Republicans called it the "Roosevelt recession.
" Industrial production fell again by more than 1/3.
So did wages.
Widespread strikes by workers demanding union recognition slowed factories still further.
4 million additional americans found themselves out of work.
FDR's own advisers were divided as to what he should do.
Some urged him to continue to hold the line on spending.
Other, more left-leaning new dealers, including his wife, wanted him to return to the stimulus programs that had seemed to be working earlier.
In the end, FDR sided with the liberals, persuading Congress to pump billions of dollars more into public works and public housing.
The decline halted.
"We are on our way again," Roosevelt said, and he won passage of the fair labor standards act, which for the first time set federal minimum wages and maximum hours.
I am very glad Meanwhile, the midterm elections were approaching.
Furious at conservative members of his own party who had joined forces with Republicans on Capitol Hill to defeat his court plan and stall new deal legislation, the president barnstormed the country, urging voters to oust conservative incumbents and elect liberal challengers.
Voters still admired Roosevelt but resented his intrusion into local races.
All but one of his targets survived his assault.
As a political blunder, it was enormous.
After the election of 1938 and the revival of conservative Democrats and Republicans, there was not a liberal legislating majority in the Congress of the United States until 1965.
Newspapermen began writing that FDR was finished as an effective leader, a lame duck whose last two years as president were likely to be without real achievement.
"President Roosevelt could not run for a third term," one wrote, "even if he so desired.
" September 11, 1938.
Dear Daisy, the situation in Europe is full of world dynamite, and I don't dare be off the scene because it needs hourly watching.
Did you hear Hitler on the radio today? His shrieks, his histrionics and the effect on the huge audience.
They did not applaud.
They made noises like animals.
Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany at almost precisely the same moment Franklin Roosevelt first became president.
Americans had looked on with horror as he crushed his domestic opposition, persecuted German Jews Supported a fascist uprising in Spain Reclaimed the Rhineland from France in 1936, and annexed Austria two years later.
Americans also deplored the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini's brutal attack on Ethiopia And sympathized with China in her struggle against invasion by imperial Japan.
But most americans saw events overseas as none of their business.
More than one hundred and 116,000 american lives had been lost in the great war, and few americans thought it had been worth it.
In the intervening years, their representatives on Capitol Hill had worked to ensure that the United States would not again become entangled in events overseas.
They shrank the army, kept America out of international organizations, limited immigration, and enacted 3 neutrality acts barring arms sales to either side in any future war.
Roosevelt was an internationalist in an isolationist age, and so when he watched Europe and Asia heading toward war in the late 1930s, he realized that the United States was going to have to get involved in those conflicts sooner or later but that if he led America into war, if another war became known as "Roosevelt's war" the way the first world war was "Wilson's war," then he risked undoing all the good american participation might have done, and so he engaged in a very careful, very slow, but sometimes very duplicitous campaign of public education.
Franklin Roosevelt believed, as Theodore Roosevelt had also believed, that the United States had an important role to play overseas, but he had been consumed with the economic crisis during his first years as president, needed the support in Congress of progressive Republicans, who were also implacable isolationists and for the most part had been willing to go along with public sentiment.
"What worries me," he had told a friend as the violence increased worldwide, "is that public opinion over here is patting itself "on the back every morning, thanking god for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
" At first, his efforts at informing the american public of the dangers it faced did not go well.
The present reign of terror and international lawlessness When the president compared fascist aggression to a spreading disease that needed to be quarantined, pacifists charged Roosevelt was starting America down the slope to war.
Isolationist congressmen threatened to impeach him.
The leaders of his own party remained silent.
The president took no action.
"It is a terrible thing," he told an aide, "to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.
" By September of 1938, Hitler was demanding to annex the german-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland.
At Munich, at the end of that month, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed not to oppose him in exchange for a promise of what Chamberlain called "peace in our time.
" The newspapers these days are becoming more and more painful.
I was reading my morning papers on the train not so long ago and looked up with a feeling of desperation.
Up and down the car, people were reading, yet no one seemed upset.
To me, the whole situation seems intolerable.
We face today a world filled with suspicion and hatred.
On the evening of November 9, 1938, all over Germany, Hitler's paramilitary thugs looted Jewishj homes, smashed jewish shops, it was remembered as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
Scores of Jews died.
Thousands were imprisoned.
The rest were required to pay what the Nazis called an "atonement fine" for the damage done to their own property and then had the rest of their assets confiscated.
FDR told a press conference he could "scarcely believe such things could occur in a 20th century civilization.
" He ordered the visas of 15,000 german and austrian resident aliens extended so that they would not be forced to return to Nazi rule, and he recalled his ambassador from Berlin, something neither Britain nor France dared do.
A gallup poll taken early in 1939 would show that 85% of American protestants and 84% of Catholics opposed offering sanctuary to uropean refugees.
So did more than 1/4 of American Jews.
What has happened to us in this country? If we study our own history, we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunate from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand-fold by what they have brought us.
There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend not their homes alone but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very foundations are set.
The defense of religion, of democracy, and of good faith among nations is all the same fight.
To save one, we must now make up our minds to save all.
In march of 1939, Hitler sent his armies into what remained of Czechoslovakia.
Poland looked to be next, and Britain pledged to go to war if Germany invaded her.
Roosevelt begged Congress to allow arms sales to Britain and France.
The house watered down his proposal, and it never even reached the floor.
That spring, FDR sent a list of 31 sovereign nations to Hitler, asking the dictator to pledge that he had no plans to attack any of them.
Hitler launched a two-hour tirade of contempt directed at Roosevelt.
It was clear that the Fuehrer of Germany believed he had nothing to fear from the president of the United States.
In June of 1939, FDR invited King George VI and his wife Elizabeth to visit the United States to foster american sympathy for England as she faced the growing threat from Nazi Germany.
The president and Mrs.
Roosevelt asked them to spend a day in Hyde Park.
I arrived at St.
James Church at 10:00, and the doors did not open until 11:00.
The king and queen walked out together, smiling from side to side followed by the Roosevelt ladies and FDR, "stumping along," as he put it, as fast as he could.
Then I went along to top cottage for the picnic.
One dish of hot dogs was served on the porch.
It is said that the king asked for a second one! After lunch, there was an interesting Indian program organized by Mrs.
Roosevelt by a man and woman in lovely full-dress Indian clothes a little long, perhaps.
There was something incredibly moving about this scene river in the evening light, the voices of many people singing this old song The train slowly pulling out with the young couple waving good-bye.
One thought of the clouds that hung over them and the worries they were going to face and turned away from the scene with a heavy heart.
If you were to come to this country and you were at Laguardia Airport, you would be at an airport that Roosevelt and the new deal had built, and that if you went over the Triborough Bridge and then through the Lincoln Tunnel and continued west across the country on the Blue Ridge Parkway, on the Skyline Drive, took Chicago's subway, went all the way across to the great dams of Bonneville and Grand Cooley, all of this was done under Roosevelt and the new deal, and that's our legacy in America today.
I think what FDR was able to do somehow was to make the government, which is all of us I mean, we think of the government as something out there, but he saw it as the collective responsibility of the people to people in need.
He changed the relationship between government, business, and labor forever, but those words are just so abstract.
What he did in those programs was to bring the force of the collective power of the country to bear on helping people to get through their daily lives.
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there had been no unemployment compensation or social security, no regulation of the stock market, no federal guarantee of bank deposits or labor's right to bargain, no national minimum wage or maximum hours, no federal commitment to high employment, and no price supports for farmers or federal funds for electric power with which to light their homes.
But for all the new deal's achievements, the american economy was still struggling in 1939.
Many of those who most needed help were still not getting it, and Congress was no longer willing to follow Roosevelt's lead.
The president's attention was already beginning to turn away from reform toward readyin a reluctant country for the new crisis that now threatened to engulf the world, and FDR had begun seriously to consider doing something no man, not even Theodore Roosevelt had dared to do, run for a third consecutive term as president of the United States.
How can we study history? How can we live through the things that we have lived through and complacently go on allowing the same causes over and over again to put us through these same horrible experiences.
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as suicide.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Tomorrow night on "the Roosevelts," FDR begins an unprecedented third term.
Why is it do certain moments produce exactly the right human beings? Eleanor campaigns for civil rights.
There was that confidence that Mrs.
Roosevelt would get it done.
And America goes to war.
I ask that the Congress declare a state of war.
"The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" tomorrow night.
Tuesday, September 23 on PBS, American masters presents "The Boomers".
People of my generation were in a hurry to be the first of everything.
The new theory of consciousness.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
I never set out to shock anybody.
Women's liberation.
Inventing the personal computer.
To participate in space flight.
We thought we could rule the world.
Anything was possible.
Meet these and other boomers who made the list, "The Boomer List.
" Oh, right, okay.
On American Masters, Tuesday, September 23, only on PBS.
To learn more about the rich history and legacy of one of the most influential families in American history, go to PBS.
org/theRoosevelts.
An intimate history" is available on Blu-ray and DVD.
The companion book is also available.
To order, visit shoppbs.
org or call 1-800-play-pbs.
Also available for download from iTunes.