Hope and change. We’ve heard that seemingly inseparable combination rather often the past 13 months from a man who would be president. Seventy-five years ago this coming Tuesday, the man who had just become president inaugurated a period of hope and change at a time when the nation was desperate for both, and talk of revolution, dictatorship and the end of democracy was rife on the street and among what today might be called public intellectuals. The speech initiating that period, delivered by a man who could neither stand nor walk without assistance, is now remembered mostly for a rhetorically powerful turn of phrase: "So 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."
In truth, there was a great deal to fear, and that inspirational phrase didn’t make a good deal of sense.
Nonetheless, so began the longest presidency in American history, one which transformed the executive branch both in what it actually undertakes and in what citizens expect of it. The presidency as we understand it began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His inaugural address that March 4 three-quarters of a century ago was the preface to the legendary "Hundred Days," a rapid-fire flurry of presidentially directed "New Deal" legislation and executive orders. As William Leuchtenburg wrote in The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy, Congress "did not so much debate the bills it passed ... as salute them as they went sailing by." A political honeymoon.
Whether you count from the inaugural or, as historians do, from March 9, the Hundred Days, like the Hundred Years’ War, didn’t actually add up to a hundred, but they have nonetheless been the measure – usually in negative terms – for what succeeding administrations have accomplished. A study has even gone so far as to determine how effective presidents before Roosevelt were in their first 100 days. None came close. During the emergency session of Congress FDR called 15 major laws were passed and signed, all by June 16.
That legislation – some of it conservative, most of it moderate, none of it radical, all of it experimental – derived from no over-arching plan, and certainly not from any liberal ideology that Roosevelt presented during the campaign and brought with him into the White House. Rather than a package of legislation, as implied by the Hundred Days label, what Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust" of academics and economic theorists produced was a mish-mash, exactly what would be expected of experimentation in the face of a daunting crisis. "The notion that the New Deal had a preconceived theoretical position is ridiculous," said Frances Perkins, who would become FDR’s, Secretary of Labor from 1933-45, the first woman ever to serve in the Cabinet.
The experiments worked not just for what they actually achieved – which was a mixed bag – but also for how their very coming into being changed the nation’s somber mood. As Roosevelt said at his inaugural: "This nation asks for action, and action now"; "We must act, we must act quickly"; People want "direct, vigorous action." As Jonathan Alter wrote in The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, "In the argot of a later age, Roosevelt was relentlessly on message." He spurred hope in the face of despair by force of personality.
Upon that action and FDR’s avid wooing (some would say, manipulation) of the press and populace alike, in stark contrast to his predecessor, was forged an unprecedented shift in American governance that remains with us today. Roosevelt the icon, who, like many such figures, is adored as much by what he accomplished (and did not) as he is misremembered and misrepresented. What he did do, time and time again, was refuse to abide by the old rules.
Combining his skills of deception and persuasion, a never-failing personal optimism and an extraordinary ability to match the right person with the right job, he gave the country what it seemed most to need at the time: a sense of on-the-move leadership. For the first time in more than three years of economic crisis, rank-and-file Americans had a sense that somebody was working on it. As one of the Brain Trusters, Columbia University Professor Raymond Moley, wrote years later, it didn’t make much difference to many people what the specific policies would be: "It was enough to know that something was happening that had not happened before. The American people wanted their government to do something, anything, so long as it acted with assurance and vigor." That was Roosevelt’s forte.
Within a few days of the inauguration, the White House received nearly half-a-million letters and telegrams. That connection lasted through Roosevelt’s 12 years as president. By contrast, President Hoover had assigned one person to sort and answer the mail. Roosevelt required a staff of 50 to answer an average of 8000 letters a day.
This connection with the people FDR accomplished by becoming the first president adept at electronic media via his famous radio broadcasts, the fireside chats, and his deceptively casual relationship with reporters.
For decades before him, reporters had hated assignment to the White House because it was a rare day news emerged on that front. Hoover himself had required written questions presented in advance. But on March 8, 1933, sitting in the Oval Office, Roosevelt individually greeted each of a hundred reporters with a smile and handshake at the first modern press conference. His clever goal was to grant much-coveted "access" in the belief that this would give reporters less time and motive to dig. Answering some questions openly, others "on background," and "off the record," he seemingly yielded to the desire of so many reporters, then and now, a sense, as Alter, wrote, "of being on the inside, part of the action, privy to the president of the United States thinking out loud. It was heady and it would prove a powerful asset for Roosevelt."
In their presence, FDR was all charm. Outside their hearing, he came to consider them hacks and sycophants. The apparent candor and bonhomie often concealed his real plans and motives.
On top of this there was his ability to persuade many who came to him with ideas and proposals to walk away after his "fine, fine, fine" believing that he had adopted their point of view. It was partly that characteristic for which Herbert Hoover once called Roosevelt a "chameleon on plaid."
For the Hundred Days and beyond, FDR’s temperament and skills paid dividends. In every speech, every press conference, every fireside chat, every public appearance, Roosevelt exuded the confidence Americans craved. His voice, strong and at ease, compelled audiences to listen. If you didn’t have a radio, you found a neighbor who did. As Leuchtenburg has noted, Americans for the previous century and a half had never even seen a President; "now almost all of them were hearing him, in their own homes. It was literally and figuratively electrifying." Long before that nickname was applied to Ronald Reagan, FDR became the nation’s Great Communicator. He became its chief legislator as well.
The rarefied nature of his upbringing, his "country squire" lifestyle, his private tutoring, his outsider status in school and college, a kind of innate nerdiness, the mostly accurate perception that he was a mama’s boy, his academic lackadaisicalness, and, since 1921, being crippled, all combined to allow otherwise keen observers to misjudge Roosevelt. On the eve of the Democratic Convention in Chicago where half the people who had job four years before were now unemployed, Roosevelt was viewed as an intellectual and political lightweight by the best-known pundits of his time – Walter Lippman and H.L. Mencken.
In Chicago, plenty of Democrats didn’t care for him either. The view was that anyone who hadn’t won the nomination by the third ballot was toast. When that vote passed with nobody a winner, Alter recalls, bookies were pulling 5-1 odds against Roosevelt being nominated. But now there was the possibility that the disaster of the 103 ballots at the 1924 Convention would be repeated. That specter spurred an aged two-time seeker of the nomination, William McAdoo, to throw his weight behind Roosevelt. On July 1, the fourth ballot gave FDR the nomination.
He immediately began his trademark political theatrics by engaging in what would be numerous firsts. Traditionally, nominees made no public appearance at Conventions and the acceptance speech came weeks later. Roosevelt instead decided to fly from Albany to Chicago, the first president or presidential candidate to travel by airplane. When he arrived the next day, making his laborious way to the podium on his son’s arm, even the delegates who had been firmly opposed to him 24 hours previously cheered wildly. He ended his speech:
I pledge you myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophet of a new order of competence and courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people."
After his landslide loss in November, Herbert Hoover grew to loathe Roosevelt even more than before. Among numerous reasons, one stood out, Roosevelt several times refused to make joint statements with Hoover regarding European debt repayment and, more importantly, dealing with the growing banking crisis. It was all part of Roosevelt’s calibrations. He wanted a free hand once he took over the presidency. Or, at least, the appearance of one. For when the Emergency Banking and Relief Act passed on March 9, FDR’s fifth day in office, that legislation was almost entirely the handiwork of Hoover’s men working with Roosevelt’s transition team.
During the transition, it was Frances Perkins, appointed in great part because Eleanor Roosevelt has pushed her, who urged FDR to adopt the concepts that today we often think of as typifying the "New Deal." This ultimately meant a rewriting of the social contract, the invention of the safety net, a modest social welfare program that Republicans and Democratic enablers have been eagerly trying with some success to dismantle since 1981. The specifics weren’t audacious or radical or untested. Europe and some states had been trying some of them for decades: minimum wages, federal support to the states for unemployment relief, old-age insurance, welfare for widows, the building of more public works, an end to child labor, and national health insurance. Roosevelt invented the term "cradle to grave" coverage, but it was years before he uttered it in public.
As March 4 drew near, and Roosevelt filled the last posts on his bipartisan Cabinet, he made another of his bold firsts. Alter wrote:
In an inspired move, FDR decided to withhold filling the sixty thousand patronage jobs at the disposal of Democrats until well into the new administration. Because so many constituents wanted these posts, this gave him a whip over Congress to enforce party discipline and drive his agenda. The Hundred Days would not have been nearly as productive without it. He was determined to learn a lesson from Woodrow Wilson, who fell into a huge argument with fellow Democrats over patronage in 1913 and as a result had less to show legislatively for his first year in office than he had hoped. FDR would use patronage jobs as legislative carrots, dangling just over the horizon, which left legions of desperate job seekers in suspended animation.
Just how desperate the situation was when Roosevelt arrived at the inaugural podium after a silent ride in an open limousine with Herbert Hoover that cold, gray March day 75 years ago is difficult to imagine for most Americans today. A fourth of the workforce was jobless, foreclosures on homes and farms were rampant, hoarding of gold and paper money had helped generate 11,000 bank failures, and the ideas of totalitarian leadership – particularly some brand of fascism – had gained considerable currency. Alfred Toynbee, the British historian, opined: "In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work." And, in the summer of 1932, John Maynard Keynes, who was to have significant influence on the later New Deal but none on the Hundred Days legislation, replied to a journalist’s question about whether there had been anything like the Depression in the past: "Yes, it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."
As Arthur Schlessinger wrote in The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the Hundred Days:
Who can now imagine a day when America offered no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, no food stamps, no Federal guarantee of bank deposits, no Federal supervision of the stock market, no Federal protection for collective bargaining, no Federal standards for wages and hours, no Federal support for farm prices or rural electrification, no Federal refinancing for farm and home mortgages, no Federal commitment to high employment or to equal opportunity - in short, no Federal responsibility for Americans who found themselves, through no fault of their own, in economic or social distress?
Many people, elite and rank-and-file alike, fully expected (and some hoped) FDR would employ dictatorial means to set matters right. He didn’t. Nor did he take much action of the sort the democratic left preferred. As for the hard left, he became anathema. After the Emergency Banking Act and Economy Act passed before the President had been in office a month, Communist Party leader Earl Browder said that Roosevelt was "carrying out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack against the masses."
What action FDR did press forward in the Hundred Days rescued and regulated the banks, made the stock market more transparent, raised farm income, kept hundreds of thousands of people from losing their homes and farms, provided basic relief payments to millions, put 2 million men to work planting trees and cutting trails, built vast amounts infrastructure, and forever reshaped attitudes about what role the federal government should play in the economy.
But even the New Deal initiatives that came later did not end the Depression. After considerable economic improvement, a new downturn almost as bad as 1929 occurred in 1937 – the "Roosevelt Recession." By 1940 the jobless rate had been cut by nearly two thirds, to 9.3 percent of the labor force from 25.2 percent in 1933. Still, 5 million people lacked jobs, and full employment wasn’t really established until 1942, when much of the economy was rejiggered to fight the war. By then, no new New Deal legislation had been passed for nearly four years.
Back in March 1933, emboldened by an eager citizenry, Roosevelt melted the opposition and began the New Deal with a flourish. On March 5, he called the 73rd Congress into extraordinary session with Proclamation 2038. On March 6, he stopped all transactions in gold and ordered a bank "holiday," closing those banks that remained open after most of the states had already closed theirs in order for the Emergency Banking Act that actually came from Hoover’s advisers to get through Congress. He helped speed passage of that and subsequent Hundred Days’ legislation by stamping the bills emanating from his office with a big red EMERGENCY and accompanying them with a presidential message. The banking act was put together so quickly that there wasn’t time for the printer to provide copies, and it was read aloud by a clerk. It passed the House in 40 minutes, then the Senate and was signed by the President the same day it was introduced. Confidence was immediately restored and deposits exceeded withdrawals the day after some banks were adjudged solvent by federal regulators and allowed to reopen on March 12.
Originally, Roosevelt planned to get the banking act passed and allow Congress to adjourn. But when the law passed within eight hours of its introduction, he decided to keep moving.
What follows are condensed versions of the major legislation of the Hundred Days:
Emergency Banking Relief Act (March 9): This authorized the Federal Reserve Board to issue currency secured by bank assets, directed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide capital to private businesses to buy preferred bank stock, extended government control over gold holdings including the right to confiscate gold in exchange for paper, and mandated Treasury Department supervision of the permanent closing of insolvent banks and the reopening and reorganization of others. Some banks opened a week after the law passed, and within 300 days, 5,000 banks had reopened.
The Economy Act (March 20): Roosevelt was an orthodox fiscal conservative who strongly believed in balanced budgets. The law cut government salaries by 15%, reduced veterans pensions, and slashed budgets of government departments by 25 percent, for a total savings of half-a-billion dollars a year. Much of the savings came from dropping war veterans who were not disabled from the pension rolls, by cutting all Federal salaries 15%. Ninety House Democrats broke ranks. In June, Roosevelt admitted he had made a mistake and restored $50 million in veterans' pensions. Congress restored $46,000,000 more. The act prompted the share-the-wealth campaign launched in 1934 by Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana.
Beer and Wine Revenue Act (March 22): Besides legitimizing beer, and leading to the opening of breweries employing half a million people, the act imposed a $5 per barrel tax on beer and wine.
Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) Act (Civilian Conservation Corps) (March 31): One of the most successful laws of the Hundred Days and all New Deal legislation, and widely known at Roosevelt's Tree Army, the CCC eventually employed 2 million men and a few women who planted an estimated 3 billion trees, fought fires, built flood-control levees and engaged in other conservation work that restored eroded soil, much of it in the South, and laid the foundation for tree plantations that still provide timber for the lumber industry. At the time, the chief opposition came from organized labor, appalled at the dollar-a-day wages CCC workers would earn , the loss of jobs for union workers and the involvement of the Army, which they union leaders thought might lead to regimentation of labor in other areas.
Agricultural Adjustment Act (May 12): The act, the foundation upon which the idea of agricultural subsidies remain with us, was meant to stabilize farm prices by subsidizing farmers to limit how much livestock and corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco and milk they produced. Farmers plowed under millions of acres of cotton, and in an extremely unpopular move at a time when many Americans were going without adequate food, growers were forced to slaughter 6 million "surplus" baby pigs and 220,000 pregnant cows. The Supreme Court ruled the law in 1936 on the grounds that it taxed some farmers to pay others. A revised version dealing with this matter was subsequently passed by Congress. Partly as a consequence of the AAA, farm income rose 50 percent during the first three years of the New Deal, although most of this came from government subsidies because farm prices did not rise as FDR had hoped.
Tennessee Valley Authority Act(May 18): The act led to the enhanced navigability of the Tennessee River, provided flood control, reforestation and improvement of marginal farm land, helped industrial and agricultural development, created a government-owned nitrate and phosphorus manufacturing facility, and generated The cheap electric power and housing to an impoverished area. Hugely successful, the TVA’s socialist overtones spurred conservatives to make sure its concept never extended beyond the Tennessee River.
National Industrial Recovery Act (June 16): The act was set up to promote industrial growth, creating the National Recovery Administration, which had two purposes: stabilizing business with codes of "fair" competitive practices and, generating more consumer purchasing power by providing jobs, setting labor standards, and boosting wages. Trade unions like the NRA because it included their hopes for protection of basic hour and wage standards; liberals and some leftists saw in it the possibility for comprehensive planning. But the law was never enforced to benefit workers. Big business liked it because it established legal cartels and allowed them to write many of the rules. Small business hated it because the code – more than 3,000 administrative orders, 5,000 covered practices eventually - was so specific and intrusive, and sometimes contradictory. On top of this were interpretations and supplemental codes. The NRA was represented in business and factory windows across the nation with the famous blue eagle. But displaying one did not mean a merchant or manufacturer wasn’t secretly violating the codes, which were highly specific. The Supreme Court declared the codes unconstitutional in May 1935 in the case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, which ruled that the Act infringed upon states' authority, unreasonably stretched the Commerce Clause, and gave legislative powers to the executive branch in violation of the nondelegation doctrine. By then, the law was highly unpopular and no attempt was made to rewrite as was done with the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
Federal Emergency Relief Act (May 12): The act funded unemployment compensation programs of the states, all of whose resources had been long before swamped by the scale of the depression. The objectives were to work cooperatively with state governments to make relief measures adequate and find or create jobs for employable people on the relief rolls. Run by Harry Hopkins, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration would eventually put 15 million people to work. One of the most important aspects of the law was that it established the concept that adequate public relief is a right of citizens.
Federal Securities Act (May 27): Also known as the Truth in Securities Act," the act required that investors received significant information concerning securities being offered for public sale and prohibited misrepresentations and other fraud in their sale. Prior to this time, only state laws (commonly referred to as blue sky laws for obvious reasons) governed securities sales. So began transparency in the sale of securities, something later backed up by the Securities and Exchange Act passed in 1934.
National Employment System Act (June 6): The act established the United States Employment Service to assist in coordinating the state-run public employment services throughout the country. One provision made it the purview of the Secretary of Labor to assure that unemployment insurance and employment service offices in each State were adequate.
Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act (June 16): The act created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, insuring bank deposits up to $5,000, and separated commercial banking and investment banking, a move that met ferocious opposition in the banking community. With one stroke of his pen, Roosevelt, who had objected to the idea of insurance, calmed nervous depositors and ended the prospect of bank "runs." Within six months, bank failures characteristic of the 1929-33 period ceased.
Home Owners Refinancing Act (June 13): The act, which later led to Federal Housing Administration and Federal National Mortgage Association, was passed at a time when 40 percent of the country’s 4 million homeowners faced foreclosure. The agency refinanced mortgages, made new loans, and extended advances to help with tax payments and repairs.
Farm Relief Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (May 12): The act allotted $200 million for refinancing mortgages to help farmers facing foreclosure.
Farm Credit Act (June 16): The act established a system of corporations and associations to provide operating loans to farmers on a short-term basis. That legislation also brought into the Farm Credit Administration the banks for cooperatives. (Taken together, the homeowners act and farm acts saved as many as one-fifth of the nation's homes and farms from foreclosure.