Roosevelt (29 page)

These made up a collection of general concepts rather than an operating program, and some of Roosevelt’s associates were amazed and even frightened by his receptivity to any notion that might fit under the broad umbrella of his mind. Usually sparing in his use of time, he could spend hours in excited and happy talk with men who seemed little more than cranks. Voracious and prehensile in his quest for information, Roosevelt had a startling capacity to soak up notions and facts like a sponge, and to keep this material ready for instant use. He could overwhelm miners with a vast array of facts about the dismal coal situation; he could impress businessmen with a detailed description of the intricacies of their enterprises. He had, observed Tugwell, a flypaper mind.

Even with this receptivity, though, there was no final commitment. Roosevelt liked people and he liked their ideas, but just as he depended entirely on no one person, he had final trust in no single idea. Even his chief adviser, Moley, Roosevelt let it be known, was to be a clearinghouse for ideas, not a source of definite policy. His mind, Moley noticed, skipped and bounced through subject after subject, just as Roosevelt himself could run through a series of conferences with a variety of people and emerge fresh and relaxed. This lack of final commitment in the long run would have its dangerous aspects, but it had high merit in 1932, when the old dogmas had helped leave the economy prostrate.

Not only the needs of the day, not only Roosevelt’s intellectual make-up, but the American political tradition itself resisted systematic doctrines and unified philosophies. There was a real philosophy neither of the left nor of the right to compel the New Dealers of 1932 to examine first principles and shape an integrated and consistent program. The Socialists had made heavy compromises with ideas of reform and melioration, and even so were not a threat politically. A coherent body of conservative thought hardly existed, except to the extent business philosophers had shaped absolutist ideas of laissez faire to advance the interests of private enterprise. As for the progressive and liberal traditions, both T.R. and Woodrow Wilson had altered their programs in the face of stubborn economic and political facts. Everything conspired in 1932 to make Roosevelt a pragmatist, an opportunist, an experimenter.

All in all, it was hardly surprising that observers in 1932 differed so much on Roosevelt’s capacities. To some he seemed, quite rightly, lacking in persistence, conviction, and intellectual depth and maturity. Others had seen a different side of the man. To them he had a grasp on Jefferson’s deeply humane ends and on Hamilton’s creative means; he had Bryan’s moral fervor without the Great Commoner’s mental flabbiness; he had Wilson’s idealism without his inflexibility; he had some of Bob La Follette’s and Al Smith’s hardheadedness without their hardness and bitterness; he had much of T.R.’s vigor and verve.

Perhaps no one sized up Roosevelt at this time as trenchantly and truly as a picturesque old man was to do. Early the following year, shortly after entering the presidency, Roosevelt paid a visit in Washington to retired Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, now ninety-two, remembered Roosevelt from the war years as a good fellow but with rather a soft edge. After the President had left his study the great jurist sat musing. A friend looked at him inquiringly.

“You know,” Holmes said, “his Uncle Ted appointed me to the court.”

“Yes, Mr. Justice?”

The old man looked at the door through which Roosevelt had just left.

“A second-class intellect.” The words flashed. “But a first-class temperament!”

T
HE EVENING OF
F
EBRUARY
27, 1933, at Hyde Park was cloudy and cold. A stiff northwest wind swept across the dark waters of the Hudson and tossed the branches of the gaunt old trees around the Roosevelt home. Inside the warm living room a big, thick-shouldered man sat writing by the fire. From the ends of the room two of his ancestors looked down from their portraits: Isaac, who had revolted with his people against foreign rule during an earlier time of troubles, and James, merchant, squire, and gentleman of the old school.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pencil glided across the pages of yellow legal cap paper. “I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.” The fire hissed and crackled; the large hand with its thick fingers moved rapidly across the paper. “The people of the United States want direct, vigorous action. They have made me the instrument, the temporary humble instrument”—he scratched out “humble”; it was no time for humility—“of their wishes.”

Phrase after phrase followed in the President-elect’s bold, pointed, slanting hand. Slowly the yellow sheets piled up. By 1:30 in the morning the inauguration speech was done.

But not quite done. During the next two days frightening reports continued to reach Hyde Park. Piece by piece, the nation’s credit structure was becoming paralyzed. Crisis was in the air—but it was a strange, numbing crisis, striking suddenly in a Western city and then in the South a thousand miles away. It was worse than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear. But at Hyde Park the next President was serene, even cheerful. Between conferences with worried advisers he worked over his inaugural, adding phrases, shortening sentences, stepping up the pace.

On March 1 the President-elect left Hyde Park for New York City, where he spent the night. The news in the morning was worse. Twelve more states had closed or constricted their banks.
The crisis now was nearing Wall Street, the last citadel. That day authorities announced that several thousand New York relief workers would be dropped because funds were running low. Newark defaulted on its payroll. Led by police cars with shrieking sirens, followed by a car filled with baggage, Roosevelt was driven to his train for the capital. While the train passed through Pennsylvania and Maryland where the banks were closed, he talked calmly with his advisers.

Washington was somber under a cold March rain. A crowd quietly waited while the train, glistening with its jewellike lights, backed into Union Station. Policemen in black raincoats bustled around the rear car; secret service men, hands in their overcoat pockets, searched through the faces in the crowd. Wearing a gray hat and dark overcoat, hardly visible in the gloom, Roosevelt walked slowly out on the back platform, his wife at his side. His sons James and John helped move him swiftly to a car. He sat back confidently, with a smile. Photographers closed in and aimed their cameras; the flaming flash bulbs blanketed the big figure and his smile in a blaze of light; they faded, and the car pulled away.

Tension in Washington was mounting. The Federal Reserve Board reported that a quarter billion dollars’ worth of gold had poured out of the system in a week. It seemed likely that the New York banks would have to be closed. Word came to Roosevelt’s suite in the Mayflower from an exhausted, heartsick President: Would the President-elect join him in an emergency proclamation? After anxious conferences Roosevelt’s answer went back: The President was still free to act on his own.

In his hotel room, Roosevelt worked over his speech. Nearby was a copy of Thoreau, with the words “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

Only one formality remained before the inauguration—the President-elect’s traditional call on the outgoing Chief Executive. When Roosevelt arrived at the White House on March 3 he found that Hoover planned to use the meeting for a final plea for joint action to stop the bank panic. Sitting stiffly in their carefully spaced chairs, the two politicians sparred with each other. Roosevelt still refused to act. As he rose to go, the President-elect murmured that since the President was so busy, he—Roosevelt—would understand if the President did not return the call. Hoover looked him hard in the face: “Mr. Roosevelt, when you have been in Washington as long as I have been, you will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody.”

Saturday, March 4, dawned cloudy and cheerless. Almost all the nation’s banks were closed. “We are at the end of our string,” Hoover cried. Roosevelt went to church, where old Endicott Peabody of Groton assisted with the services. President and President-elect motored to the Capitol, Roosevelt trying to make conversation, Hoover dully acknowledging the cheers of the crowds. As he waited impatiently in the Capitol Roosevelt scribbled an opening sentence for his speech: “This is a day of consecration.” Out before the Capitol rotunda, a vast crowd waited silently. Slowly, slowly, Roosevelt, coatless and hatless, moved out on the high white platform, between Grecian columns strung with ivy and bedecked with flags.

Chin outthrust, face grave, Roosevelt repeated the oath of office after Chief Justice Hughes in a high, ringing voice. The cold wind riffled the pages of his speech as he turned to face the crowd. The words came clearly to the black acres of people in front of him and the millions at their radios throughout the nation:

“This is a day of national consecration. I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.”

The great crowd waited in almost dead silence.

“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 every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.…”

The trouble, he said, lay in material, not spiritual, things. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.” This was mainly because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods had failed and abdicated. “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” The task now was to apply social values nobler than mere monetary profit. But restoration called not for changes in ethics alone. “This nation asks for action, and action now.”

The undemonstrative crowd stirred somewhat, to the words: “Our
greatest primary task is to put people to work.” This could be done by “direct recruiting by the Government itself.” Resources must be better used, purchasing power raised, homes and farms protected from foreclosure, costs of all government reduced, relief activities unified, transportation and communication planned on a national basis. There must be “an end to speculation with other people’s money,” and provision for an adequate but sound currency.

In foreign relations he would dedicate the nation to the policy of the “good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.…” But international economic relations, though vastly important, “are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.” First things must come first. He would work to restore world trade, but the emergency at home could not wait.

Roosevelt’s face was stern and set. “If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.… We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer.…”

Roosevelt’s voice struck a lower, grimmer note. Leadership and discipline were possible under the Constitution, he said, and he hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative power would be adequate to meet the task. But a temporary departure from normal might be necessary. He would “recommend the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” He would try to get speedy action on his measures or such other measures as Congress proposed.

“But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the 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.”

The people had asked for direct, vigorous action, for discipline and direction under leadership. “In the spirit of the gift I take it.” He closed with a plea for divine guidance.

At the end Roosevelt waved to the crowd and suddenly smiled his great electrifying smile. Herbert Hoover shook hands and left.
Roosevelt rode alone before dense crowds back to an immediate round of conferences.

“It was very, very solemn, and a little terrifying,” Eleanor Roosevelt said afterward as she talked with reporters in the White House. “The crowds were so tremendous, and you felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do.”

It was like a war. While soldiers and sailors marched smartly in the long inaugural parade, while couples waltzed gaily in the inaugural balls, haggard men conferred hour after hour at their desks. In the huge marble buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue the lights burned late, dully illuminating the confetti and debris strewn along the street below. Democrats newly arrived in Washington and Republican holdovers sat side by side, telephoning anxious bankers, feeling the financial pulse of the nation, drawing up emergency orders. Early in the morning they would snatch a few hours’ sleep, then rush back to their posts. Outside, the reporters waited hour after hour, breathlessly interviewing comers and goers for tidbits of news. Washington was electric with rumor and hope.