The Plots Against the President (11 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Fear Itself

Early on the morning of March 4, 1933, Roosevelt's valet, Irvin McDuffie, and bodyguard, Gus Gennerich, helped him with his steel leg braces and dressed him in the formal morning attire of striped trousers, black astrakhan-collared coat, and silk top hat. At ten fifteen, accompanied by his wife, mother, and oldest son Jimmy, he rode by open car to a religious ceremony at St. John's Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. He had requested that the seventy-six-year-old Reverend Endicott Peabody conduct the service—apparently unaware that his onetime spiritual mentor had voted for Hoover—and invited nearly a hundred friends, family members, secretaries, cabinet officers, and advisers to attend. Throughout the twenty-minute service, he held his head in his hands, and remained in that position for several minutes after the final blessing: “Oh Lord … most heartily we beseech Thee, with Thy favor to behold and bless Thy servant, Franklin, chosen to be President of the United States.”

After church, he returned to the Mayflower Hotel, where he conferred quickly with Moley, who briefed him on the current tally of more than ten thousand bank closures. He made final edits to his speech and decided on new measures to address the financial emergency immediately after taking the oath of office, though he kept what Tugwell called an “almost impenetrable concealment of intention.”

He and Eleanor arrived at the north entrance of the White House a few minutes before eleven A.M., where they waited in their open touring car until a hostile President Hoover and his amiable wife, Lou, appeared. Roosevelt flashed his trademark smile at Hoover, who remained silent, unmoved, and surly as he slid into the seat on Roosevelt's right. The two wives followed in a second car, and five vehicles carrying Secret Service agents shadowed the motorcade. Roosevelt had refused to allow his bodyguards to construct a glass barrier to protect him from the crowd, so a trotting cavalry surrounded the car, forming a solid rectangle. “Here was a president who would not barricade himself at Rapidan,” one historian said. “He was right there with them in this time of crisis. The pilgrims could not believe their luck.”

As they made their way up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, onlookers cheered and clapped, pushing against the ropes for a closer look. At first Roosevelt maintained the decorum—and fiction—that the crowds were there to honor the outgoing president. But when Hoover sat there “grim as death, looking stonily forward” and refusing to acknowledge them, Roosevelt finally began waving his hat and beaming to the enormous crowd. “Protocol or no protocol, someone has to do something,” Roosevelt said of his thoughts at the moment. “The two of us simply couldn't sit there on our hands, ignoring each other and everyone else. 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.” More than half the population of Washington—over four hundred thousand people—had turned out, and while the crowd was more somber than usual, the excitement was palpable.

Once they arrived at the Capitol, Roosevelt was wheeled into a Senate chamber, where he watched as Vice President John Garner and several new senators were sworn in. He continued rewriting his inaugural address until the presidential procession began at one o'clock. He remained in his wheelchair until he arrived at the entrance to the canopied stand. A lone bugle cried out, and when the Marine Band began playing “Hail to the Chief,” Roosevelt stood with the help of his son, Jimmy, and began his laborious “walk” to the rostrum. Before he reached the platform, the hundreds of thousands of spectators, spread out over forty acres of Capitol grounds, erupted in applause. Placing his hand on the three-hundred-year-old Roosevelt family Bible, open at the thirteenth chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, he repeated the oath after the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court: “I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.”

Without pausing to absorb the wild ovation, he turned to the crowd—one of the largest audiences to ever attend an inauguration—unfolded the longhand manuscript he had been writing for weeks, and immediately began his address. “This,” he began slowly for effect, “is a day of
national
consecration.” He had added the opening sentence just moments earlier, determined to set a religious tone to the somber state of affairs. The audience listened in silence.

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.

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 reconvert retreat into advance.

Uncharacteristically intense and unsmiling—his shoulders thrown back, his posture regal, his voice strong—he castigated the bankers and emboldened the masses.

We are stricken by no plague of locusts … Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated … The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.

His words struck a deep chord, not only with the hundreds of thousands in the capital but also with the many millions throughout America gathered around radios to hear their new president. “The radio networks carried his ringing voice out across the suffering land, over the sweatshops and flophouses, the Hoovervilles and hobo jungles, the rocky soil tilled by tenant farmers, the ragged men shivering in the iron cold outside factory gates,” William Manchester wrote in
The Glory and the Dream
.

Restoration and recovery would come only when Americans banded together, Roosevelt said, “as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” He vowed to go immediately to Congress with a course of action for a national program to put Americans back to work, to prevent foreclosures and regulate banks, to enact a “good neighbor” foreign policy that respected the rights of others, and to ensure a “sound currency.” Above all, Roosevelt called for “action and action now.”

We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

Then, to underscore his sincerity, he pledged to take unprecedented steps if Congress or any other force sabotaged his efforts.

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.

He ended the speech at one thirty-four P.M., and as he gave a broad smile and final wave, the sun broke through the clouds.

Conservative and liberal newspapers alike praised the speech for its courage and confidence. Even Roosevelt thought it divinely inspired and would eventually consider it “sacred ground,” according to his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. Italy's
Il Giornale d'Italia
praised it as a Mussolini-like edict. “President Roosevelt's words are clear and need no comment to make even the deaf hear that not only Europe but the whole world feels the need of executive authority capable of acting with full powers of cutting short the purposeless chatter of legislative assemblies. This method of government may well be defined as Fascist.” The
New York Herald Tribune
seized on his proclamation that he intended to ask Congress for “broad executive power,” publishing the banner headline: FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY. The
New York Daily News
—America's largest-circulation newspaper—took the unprecedented step of announcing a yearlong moratorium from criticizing the new president. “A lot of us have been asking for a dictator,” the
News
editorialized. “Now we have one. His name is not Mussolini or Stalin or Hitler. It is Roosevelt … Dictatorship in crises was ancient Rome's best idea … The impression we get from various quarters is that practically everyone feels better already. Confidence seems to be coming back with a rush, along with courage.”

The “fear itself” phrase did not elicit applause when Roosevelt spoke it, though it would go down in history as one of the greatest presidential quotes of all time. Several would take credit for it, but in fact it had been Eleanor who had given Roosevelt a book of Henry David Thoreau's writings with the line “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” He had the book with him at the Mayflower Hotel that morning while finalizing his speech.

People around the world, listening on shortwave radio, welcomed the speech almost as much as Americans did. Congratulatory telegrams poured into the White House from England, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand.

Among the tens of millions who listened on America's 180 radio stations was Anton Cermak—now on his deathbed in a Miami hospital room. In the two and a half weeks since he had told Roosevelt “I'm glad it was me instead of you,” Cermak had declined steadily. First he had developed colitis, then he had contracted pneumonia, and finally gangrene had settled in his punctured lung. As it turned out, surgeons should have removed the bullet embedded in his spine.

Chapter Nineteen

Bank Holiday

In keeping with his inaugural vow to “act, and act quickly,” Roosevelt went to work even before the inaugural ball had commenced. While nearly two thousand guests mingled at a White House reception hosted by Eleanor, Roosevelt sent his cabinet nominations to the Senate and obtained unprecedentedly rapid confirmation. Then he gathered them all in the Oval Office and had a Supreme Court justice swear them in as a group. After a brief pep talk, in which he urged them to work together to solve the nation's many crises, Roosevelt directed Secretary of the Treasury William Woodin to draft an emergency banking bill that could be submitted to Congress when it convened the following Thursday. As fireworks filled the sky near the Washington Monument and the formal ball began, Roosevelt closeted himself with Louis McHenry Howe in the Lincoln Study until he retired for the night.

The next morning, Sunday, March 5, he awoke for the first time in the White House. After breakfast in bed, he rode in his new presidential limousine to St. Thomas's Parish, an Episcopal church off Connecticut Avenue. Returning to the White House, he summoned his cabinet. “The President outlined more coherently than I had heard it outlined before, just what this banking crisis was and what the legal problems involved were,” recalled Secretary of Labor Perkins, the first female cabinet secretary ever appointed. Woodin reported on myriad conversations he had had with the bankers who had arrived in the capital from around the country to meet with the new president. The bankers themselves were panicking and clueless about how to rescue the industry, he told the president. Many banks had been invested heavily in the stock market and had “leant recklessly to speculative investors,” according to one account, finding “themselves without sufficient capital and in many cases without reserves.”

Before taking office, Roosevelt had already settled on his primary course of action. He had written two presidential proclamations, which he now showed to his cabinet. One called for a special session of Congress to begin Thursday, March 9. The other declared a bank holiday until Congress convened, which would close every bank in America. Then, relying on a little-known provision of a World War I act designed to prevent gold shipments to foreign foes, he stopped the export and private hoarding of all gold and gold bullion in the United States. The order also prohibited any foreign exchange transactions. His new attorney general, Homer Cummings, quickly provided him with the constitutional authority to invoke the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, and Roosevelt's bold proclamations were issued within hours.

Next he spoke with congressional leaders, including Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry B. Steagal of the respective banking committees, and informed them of his call for a special session to address three emergencies: the banking crisis, unemployment, and the federal budget.

That evening, his press secretary invited four newspaper correspondents to meet with Roosevelt in the Red Room. Roosevelt was in top form—
Washington Daily News
reporter Raymond Clapper portrayed him as a genuinely sanguine and an optimistic new leader. “Behind the plain desk … looking across under the shaded desk lamp,” Clapper wrote, “sat the President, in a blue serge business suit. Sturdy-shouldered, smiling, calm, talking pleasantly, with an occasional humorous sally, he was a picture of ease and confidence. As he talked, he deliberately inserted a fresh cigarette in an ivory holder. It was as if he was considering whether to sign a bill for a bridge in some far away rural county.” All he asked of the journalists, whom he stroked by giving them the big news scoop about his proclamations, was that they refer to the bank closures as a “holiday”—in stark contrast to Hoover's depressing term, “moratorium.”

At eleven thirty P.M. eastern standard time, Roosevelt gave the first radio address of his thirty-four-hour-old presidency. Directed to the American Legion, the short speech was carried live across the nation by all radio networks and may have been a calculated attempt by Roosevelt to rally the million-member veterans' organization in the event of civil unrest. “With so many banks involved, the U.S. Army—including National Guard and Reserve units—might not be large enough to respond,” Jonathan Alter wrote in
The Defining Moment
. “This raised the question of whether the new president should establish a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law.” Alter, in researching his book on Roosevelt's first one hundred days in office, located a never-before-published draft of this speech, which included this “eye-popping sentence”:

As new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.

While it is not known who in Roosevelt's inner circle wrote the phrase and inserted it into his text—and can only be guessed why Roosevelt chose not to utter it—the nature of it was, as Alter described it, “dictator talk—an explicit power grab.” Instead, Roosevelt delivered a five-minute speech about the merits of peace but calling upon “all men and women who love their country” to provide the same “sacrifice and devotion” that would be expected of them in wartime.

Then, at one A.M. on Monday, March 6, he signed the proclamation. With the flourish of a pen, and the assumption of wartime powers, he had seized control by the government of all the banks in the land and all the gold in the Federal Reserve. “For the first time since the Civil War, the dollar had been cut adrift from the gold standard,” according to a history of America's finance capitalism. Finally, he retired for the night. When he awakened in the morning, his first full working day as president, he asked Irwin McDuffie to take him down the newly installed wheelchair ramp to the Oval Office. There, left alone, he was startled by the emptiness. “Hoover had taken everything movable except the flag and the great seal,” said one account. “There was no pad, no pencil, no telephone, not even a buzzer to summon help.” The walls were bare, the desktop cleared. He saw it as symbolic of the plight of the nation—that its heart center had come to an absolute standstill. It also brought him a moment of sheer terror, in which he was reminded of his utter helplessness and forced to shout for help. When his secretary rushed in, his equilibrium returned. It would be the only moment in the Roosevelt presidency in which the office was not pulsating with activity.

To the surprise of many in the administration, government, and industry, the overall reaction to the bank holiday was joyous, ushering in “almost a springtime mood” that raised Americans' spirits and elicited nationwide cooperation. It was as if the closures signified that the economy had hit rock bottom and had nowhere to go but up. Merchants readily extended credit to their customers, and dozens of municipalities issued more local scrip to keep things running. Americans suddenly found comfort in the fact that they were all in the same boat, and a camaraderie was born. Nearly half a million jubilant telegrams and letters poured in to the White House during the first few days after the inauguration. The fear had miraculously evolved into hope, and if in fact Roosevelt did not know precisely what the outcome would be, at least
someone
had finally done
something
. “If he had burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say ‘Well, at least we got a fire started anyhow,' ” Will Rogers wrote of the national mood in his Monday morning syndicated column. “We have had years of ‘don't rock the boat.' Go ahead and sink it, Franklin, if you want to. We might just as well be swimming as floundering around the way we are.”

Roosevelt saw the role of president as equivalent to that of school principal. The chief executive of the nation, like the strong predecessors in his party—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson—should essentially be a preacher and lecturer. His job, as he articulated it, was to use the office for “persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.”

Closing the nation's banks was a far-reaching experiment with unknown consequences, prompting one of Roosevelt's friends to tell him that if he succeeded, he would go down in history as the greatest American president; and if he failed, he would be known as the worst. “If I fail I shall be the last one,” he responded, fully comprehending the precipice on which America tottered.

While a sense of excitement and euphoria filled the White House during those first few days of Roosevelt's presidency, Eleanor was apprehensive. She thought her husband's inaugural address “very, very solemn and a little terrifying,” she said during her exclusive first-ever interview of a First Lady, which she gave to her closest friend, Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok. The audience was “so tremendous and you felt that they would do
anything
—if only someone would tell them what to do.” She had been particularly alarmed by the crowd's exuberant response to Roosevelt's vow to assume wartime powers. What went unsaid between the two women, as Hickok later recalled, was the precariousness of democracy and its vulnerability to the ascendance of a demagogue such as Huey Long or some other charismatic firebrand. “One had the feeling of going it blindly because we're in a tremendous stream and none of us know where we're going to land,” Eleanor said, her thoughts turning inevitably toward Adolf Hitler, who had risen to power just a month earlier and vowed to replace the German republic with a dictatorship. Eleanor “feared the kind of desperation that had upended Germany,” her biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote, “and she feared the random acts of violence and assassination aimed at her husband.”

Indeed, hourly bulletins over the inaugural weekend brought reports from Miami of Mayor Cermak's sudden and rapid deterioration. On Inauguration Day, his physicians gave him twenty-four to forty-eight hours to live and issued a statement:

Mayor Cermak, last evening, developed pain in the right shoulder, together with tenderness over the right lower chest and liver. This together with his general septic appearance, caused us to suspect the presence of either a subphrenic abscess or pleural empyrema.

For this reason the space between the liver and the diaphragm was aspirated with negative results. The pleural cavity yielded old bloody serous fluid.

The lung itself, on aspiration, yielded a very foul, fetid air, but no pus, giving evidence that a gangrenous process was occurring in the lung.