9781439154496

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal began as a program of short-term emergency relief measures and evolved into a truly transformative concept of the federal government's role in Americans' lives. More than an economic recovery plan, it was a reordering of the political system that continues to define America to this day. With The New Deal: A Modern History, Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Michael Hiltzik offers fresh insights into this inflection point in the American experience. Here is an intimate look at the alchemy that allowed FDR to mold his multifaceted and contentious inner circle into a formidable political team. The New Deal: A Modern History shows how Roosevelt, through the force of his personality, commanded the loyalty of the rock-ribbed fiscal conservative Lewis Douglas and the radical agrarian Rexford Tugwell alike; of Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins, one a curmudgeonly miser, the other a spendthrift idealist; of Henry Morgenthau, gentleman farmer of upstate New York; and of Frances Perkins, a prim social activist with her roots in Brahmin New England. Yet the same character traits that made him so supple and self-confident a leader would sow the seeds of the New Deal's end, with a shocking surge of Rooseveltian misjudgments. Understanding the New Deal may be more important today than at any time in the last eight decades . Conceived in response to a devastating financial crisis very similar to America's most recent downturnborn of excessive speculation, indifferent regulation of banks and investment houses, and disproportionate corporate influence over the White House and Congressthe New Deal remade the country's economic and political environment in six years of intensive experimentation. FDR had no effective model for fighting the worst economic downturn in his generation's experience; but the New Deal has provided a model for subsequent presidents who faced challenging economic conditions, right up to the present. Hiltzik tells the story of how the New Deal was made, demonstrating that its precepts did not spring fully conceived from the mind of FDRbefore or after he took office. From first to last the New Deal was a work in progress, a patchwork of often contradictory ideas. Far from reflecting solely progressive principles, the New Deal also accommodated such conservative goals as a balanced budget and the suspension of antitrust enforcement. Some programs that became part of the New Deal were borrowed from the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover; indeed, some of its most successful elements were enacted over FDR's opposition. In this bold reevaluation of a decisive moment in American history, Michael Hiltzik dispels decades of accumulated myths and misconceptions about the New Deal to capture with clarity and immediacy its origins, its legacy, and its genius.

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Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Sage of the Building of Hoover Dam. He and his family live in Southern California.

Prologue: The Long Winter	p. 1
The Hundred Days
"Action Now"	p. 25
A Good Crisis	p. 38
A River Out of Eden	p. 58
Wall Street in the Dock	p. 79
Agony on the Land	p. 95
The New Deal Rising
The General	p. 115
The Gold Standard on the Booze	p. 134
Harry and Harold	p. 155
So Many Sinners	p. 173
The Little Red House	p. 192
Pied Pipers	p. 213
The Cornerstone	p. 237
Black Monday	p. 261
Federal One	p. 285
The Most Forgotten Man	p. 308
Return to Earth
Backlash	p. 329
Nine Old Men	p. 348
Roosevelt's Recession	p. 376
Purgatory	p. 393
Epilogue: Defining the New Deal	p. 421
Notes	p. 433
Bibliography	p. 465
Acknowledgments	p. 473
Index	p. 475
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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1

“ACTION NOW”

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT BEGAN Inauguration Day at a 10 A.M. religious service with his family, his cabinet appointees, secretaries, aides, and a few close friends. The location was St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Park from the White House, chosen because it had no steps to complicate the wheelchair-bound President-elect’s entry from the street. Inside, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, rector of Groton, FDR’s old school, read from the Protestant Book of Common Prayer and beseeched the Almighty to favor and bless “Thy servant, Franklin, chosen to be President of the United States.”

The official party dispersed as soon as the service ended, Roosevelt to the White House for the start of the ritual procession toward the 1 P.M. oath-taking in front of the U.S. Capitol. The wisest among the other attendees had hired cars for the day and promptly drove off. Frances Perkins, the new secretary of labor, found herself standing forlorn on the sidewalk with her daughter, Susanna, and a couple she recognized as Mr. and Mrs. Henry A. Wallace. They introduced themselves to each other, joined forces to hail a passing cab, and tried to figure out how to reach the Capitol entrance reserved for dignitaries.

The members of the new administration drew what encouragement or counsel they could from the faces of the crowds lining the ceremonial routes and assembling before the Capitol. Tugwell remarked on the public’s apparent determination to squeeze just a little enjoyment from the festive inaugural parade, “squads and squadrons of marching clubs, fraternal drill teams, silk-hatted and frock-coated Tammany braves, military detachments and uniformed bands,” all in such contrast to “the morning’s solemnity.” Perhaps FDR’s decision to proceed with the celebration despite the hard times was the right move after all.

Perkins, who had finally reached her spot on the platform by elbowing her way through the crowds behind Wallace in shoes soaking wet from tramping across the sodden Capitol lawn, could not help being moved by “the terror-stricken look on the faces of the people,” many of whom were hearing for the first time the bleak rumors that the last of the banks had closed that morning. “An enormous crowd had come for the inauguration, but they looked frightened, worried, depressed. It was not the kind of gay Democrats that you saw later on. They were just worried to death.”

Roosevelt made his way from the White House to the Capitol seated next to Herbert Hoover in an open car. Along the teeming processional route he tried to make conversation with the grim visage to his right, but could elicit no more than the occasional grunt. As he related the tale later to his secretary Grace Tully, he finally decided that the cheering of the throng warranted a more suitable acknowledgment than Hoover’s dour scowl. “So I began to wave my own response with my top hat and I kept waving it until I got to the inauguration stand and was sworn in.”

After taking the oath of office from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Roosevelt prepared to deliver his inaugural speech. Hoover did not wait to hear it; at the completion of the oath-taking, the ex-president ceremoniously shook his successor’s hand, left the platform, and, trailed by two or three of his cabinet members, continued walking until he reached his car and settled in, at which point it promptly drove off.

“President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends,” the new president began, then uttered a phrase he had scribbled at the top of his draft just before coming out from the Capitol building to the inaugural stand: “This is a day of national consecration.” The addition was so belated that the phrase did not make it into the official text of the speech.

He continued: “First of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . . nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Roosevelt’s flawless delivery, his pausing for dramatic effect before the words “fear itself,” invested the phrase with his own confidence and assurance. His critics would later assert that in doing so, Roosevelt was himself taking Hoover’s approach to the Depression, reassuring the people that the worst would be over in due course. Yet that is to ignore the context. Hoover’s repeated reassurances served a policy of complacency and limited federal action, even inaction; Roosevelt’s words heralded “action, and action now,” a pledge of direct government employment of the jobless and the construction of projects to exploit national resources, of “definite efforts” to raise the value of farm products, of the prevention of home and farm foreclosures, of the broadening and coordination of relief.

The rest of the speech was a model of concise presidential oratory, not quite 1,900 words requiring not quite twenty minutes to deliver. The text outlined the principles of the coming administration and some of its legislative goals, albeit shrouding them in inspirational flourishes and, here and there, veiled censuring of the departing leadership.

In the most assertive (and to many listeners unnerving) moment of the speech, the new president vowed, if “the national emergency is still critical,” to not shrink from asking Congress “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis . . . broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Roosevelt’s admirers and detractors alike would long debate whether those words were a promise or a threat, and in either case whether or when he might deliver on them.