Nothing to Fear Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - “Action, and Action Now”

  CHAPTER TWO - “Moley! Moley! Moley! Lord God Almighty!”

  CHAPTER THREE - “The Hardest-Boiled Man in Washington”

  CHAPTER FOUR - “Good Farming; Clear Thinking; Right Living”

  CHAPTER FIVE - “Good Lord! This Is a Revolution!”

  CHAPTER SIX - “ ‘Social Justice’ . . . Has Been the Maxim of Her Life”

  CHAPTER SEVEN - “Just So We Get a Public Works Program”

  CHAPTER EIGHT - “He Must Be Part of This Historic Show”

  CHAPTER NINE - “People Don’t Eat in the Long Run—They Eat Every Day”

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY ADAM COHEN

  American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley:

  His Battle for Chicago and the Nation

  (with Elizabeth Taylor)

  The Perfect Store: Inside eBay

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  First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Adam Cohen, 2009

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Cohen, Adam (Adam Seth)

  Nothing to fear: FDR’s inner circle and the hundred days that created modern America / Adam Cohen.

  p. cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68567-5

  1. United States—Politics and government—1933-1945. 2. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano),

  1882-1945—Friends and associates. 3. Moley, Raymond, 1886-1975. 4. Perkins, Frances, 1880-1965.

  5. Douglas, Lewis W. (Lewis Williams), 1894-1974. 6. Wallace, Henry A. (Henry Agard), 1888-1965.

  7. Hopkins, Harry L. (Harry Lloyd), 1890-1946. 8. United States—Economic policy—1933-1945.

  9. United States—Social conditions—1933-1945 10. New Deal, 1933-1939. I. Title.

  E806.C5925 2009

  973. 917092—dc22 2008029791

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  To Beverly and Stuart Cohen

  The beginning is the most important part of any work . . . for that is the time at which the character is being formed.

  —PLATO, The Republic

  INTRODUCTION

  Edmund Wilson, the well-known writer, toured Chicago in 1932 and found a “sea of misery.” On one stop, he saw an old Polish immigrant “dying of a tumor, with no heat in the house, on a cold day.” In the city’s flop-houses, Wilson encountered “a great deal of t.b.” and “spinal meningitis” that “got out of hand for a while and broke nine backs on its rack.” Worst of all were the garbage dumps, “diligently haunted by the hungry.” In the summer heat, when “the flies were thick,” a hundred people descended on one dump, “falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands.” Even spoiled meat was claimed, since the desperate foragers could “cut out the worst parts” or “scald it and sprinkle it with soda to neutralize the taste and smell.” A widowed housekeeper who was unable to find work showed up with her fourteen-year-old son. “Before she picked up the meat,” Wilson wrote, “she would always take off her glasses so that she would not be able to see the maggots.”1

  Wilson could have written a variation on this grim dispatch from any city in America. By 1932, the shock waves of the Crash of 1929 had brought devastation to every corner of the country. One-fourth of the nation’s workforce was unemployed and Fortune estimated that 27 million Americans were without a regular income. People with jobs struggled to survive on wages that had plunged to near-starvation levels. An Arizona cotton picker could earn as little as thirty cents a week after food and housing were deducted. In the cities, there were long lines outside soup kitchens and plaintive “hunger marches” by the unemployed. In rural areas, the destitution was less obvious but just as real. The American Friends Service Committee visited the West Virginia and Kentucky hill country and found that up to 90 percent of the children in some schools were underweight, and many were drowsy from malnutrition. Americans were reaching the limit of what they could take. Radicalism was on the march, not only in cities, but in God-fearing parts of the Farm Belt. “The biggest and finest crop of little revolutions I ever saw is ripe all over this country right now,” a National Farmers’ Union leader warned.2

  The nation was crying out for the government to respond, but President Herbert Hoover refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis. “I am convinced,” he said in the spring of 1930, “we have passed the worst.” As the Great Depression held on for year after brutal year, Hoover began to concede that the crisis was real, but he still refused to provide the sort of relief that was needed. His free-market ideology taught him that private enterprise should be the source of all solutions, and his near-religious commitment to “rugged individualism” convinced him that giving aid to the Depression’s victims would morally damage them. Hoover’s callousness earned him the enmity of the nation’s millions of unemployed, who got their revenge by turning his name into an epithet. They dubbed the bleak encampments they erected in parks and under bridges “Hoovervilles” and they called the old newspapers they covered themselves with at night “Hoover blankets.” When Hoover ran for reelection, mobs of jobless men and women showed up at his campaign rallies and pelted his car with rotten eggs. His opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised a new approach. Roosevelt’s vision of what government should do was so different that Hoover declared the 1932 election to be a choice not between two men, but between two philosophies. Hoover’s philosophy lost in a landslide in which he managed to carry just six states.3

  When Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, he charted a new course. That course was determined during the first one hundred days of his presidency. The Hundred Days, as the press
would later name the period, began with a remarkable inaugural address. After assuring a despairing nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Roosevelt promised “action, and action now.” More than his words and his confident manner, it was the flurry of activity he ushered in that raised the nation’s spirits. During the Hundred Days, Roosevelt offered up what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called “a presidential barrage of ideas and programs unlike anything known to American history.” Roosevelt shepherded fifteen major laws through Congress, prodded along by two fireside chats and thirty press conferences. He created an alphabet soup of new agencies—the AAA, the CCC, the FERA, the NRA—to administer the laws and bring relief to farmers, industry, and the unemployed. In an editorial entitled “Laws for Everything,” The New York Times declared Roosevelt’s dizzying pace of accomplishments to be “little short of a marvel.”4

  The Hundred Days swept the old order away in quick and dramatic fashion. On inauguration day, the nation’s banks were teetering on the brink of collapse. Thousands had already failed, and all forty-eight states had declared bank holidays, preventing more banks from failing by cutting depositors off from their money. Hoover had stood idly by, refusing to intervene. Roosevelt took a more active stance. Within days he had declared a national bank holiday and signed the Emergency Banking Act, which immediately put the banking system on a firmer footing. He then delivered a remarkable fireside chat that restored the public’s faith in the banking system. When the banks reopened, the public rushed to put money in, not take it out, and the crisis was over. Before the Hundred Days had ended, he signed a second law, the Banking Act of 1933, which made deeper reforms.

  When Roosevelt was sworn in, farmers were entering the second decade of their own, localized depression. At the end of World War I, commodity prices had plunged so low that for many farmers it no longer paid to plant. Farms were being lost to foreclosure at an alarming rate, and farm families were being thrown off the land. Hoover had made a few halting efforts to address the problem, but his ideology had prevented him from taking more effective steps. Within weeks, Roosevelt had signed a revolutionary new law, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which increased farm prices by paying farmers not to grow crops. He combated farm foreclosures through the Farm Credit Administration, a new federal farm mortgage program.

  Roosevelt also brought help to the urban unemployed. Hoover, who believed relief eroded character and encouraged idleness, thought the poor should be cared for by private charity or, as a last resort, by local government. Roosevelt created the nation’s first federal relief program, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which supported the unemployed with federal money dispensed according to federal standards. He established two major public works programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps sent 250,000 jobless young people out into nature to plant trees and reclaim the land. The National Industrial Recovery Act allocated $3.3 billion for a wider range of projects. Roosevelt also created an agency, the National Recovery Administration, charged with helping industry get back on its feet. In exchange for that help, he got companies to agree to minimum wages and maximum hours, a legal right for unions to organize, and a ban on child labor.

  There was more. Roosevelt passed a pathbreaking law, the Truth in Securities Act, which for the first time regulated issues of stock. He created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a new form of regional entity, to provide low-cost public power and improve conditions in one of the poorest regions in the country. Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, allowing him to battle deflation, which was causing hardship for anyone with a mortgage, especially farmers.

  No presidential administration had ever done so much so fast. “The nation was bewildered, thrilled, happy with hope,” the journalist Ernest K. Lindley wrote. “The new President had delivered with a vengeance the ‘action’ which he promised on March 4.”5

  It is hard to imagine the Hundred Days without Roosevelt in charge. He was so confident and charismatic, he spoke so eloquently and with such compassion, that the American people, whose hope had been all but defeated, trusted him unreservedly. “If he burned down the Capitol,” Will Rogers declared, “we would cheer and say, ‘Well we at least got a fire started anyhow. ’ ” Ordinary Americans, who had seen Hoover as part of the problem, felt a personal connection to their new president. In Roosevelt’s first week in office, 450,000 letters arrived at the White House. The following week, after he had revived the banking system and spoken to the nation in his first fireside chat, even the skeptics were won over. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper baron, declared, “I guess at your next election we will make it unanimous.”6

  Roosevelt was such a compelling leader that history has generally laid credit for all of the accomplishments of the Hundred Days at his feet, and they are often thought of as his carefully planned response to the crisis. The truth is more complicated, and more chaotic. Roosevelt had vowed in a campaign speech at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University to respond to the depression with “bold, persistent experimentation.” It was “common sense,” he insisted, “to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” When he became president, Roosevelt was true to his word. “The notion that the New Deal had a preconceived theoretical position is ridiculous,” insisted Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor. “The pattern it was to assume was not clear or specific in Roosevelt’s mind, in the mind of the Democratic party, or in the mind of anyone else.” Raymond Moley, Roosevelt’s top aide, agreed. “To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan,” he said, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”7

  Roosevelt arrived in Washington with no firm commitments, apart from his promise to “try something.” At a time when Americans were drawn to ideologies of all sorts, he was not wedded to any overarching theory. Once, when a young reporter had asked Roosevelt his philosophy, he had replied, “I am a Christian and a Democrat—that’s all.” Roosevelt had just completed four years as a progressive governor of New York State, and his instincts were undeniably liberal, but on many of the most important issues facing the nation, his views were in conflict. The question he was most torn over was whether to undertake large-scale, and enormously expensive, programs to help the Depression’s victims. Roosevelt cared about the people who were suffering, and as governor he had established the nation’s first state relief program. In the 1932 campaign, he had vowed to help the unemployed, struggling farmers, and “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” He was also, however, a fiscal conservative who believed government budgets should be balanced. In the campaign, he had attacked Hoover for heading up “the greatest spending Administration in peace time in all our history,” and promised to adopt “a stern and unremitting administration policy of living within our income.” Roosevelt was committed both to spending more and to spending less, a conflict that created a built-in tension in the Hundred Days. There were other important issues on which he was torn. Roosevelt was highly skeptical of corporations and wanted to put in place greater regulations to force them to act in the public interest. At the same time, he believed strongly in market capitalism, which, Perkins said, he took “as much for granted as his family.”8

  Roosevelt did not have a deep understanding of many of the problems facing the nation. Moley, who played a major role in the banking crisis, said he doubted “either Roosevelt or I could have passed an examination such as is required of college students in elementary economics.” Advisers like Perkins and Rexford Tugwell, the assistant secretary of agriculture, were struck at times by Roosevelt’s inability or unwillingness to follow the details of the reforms they proposed. He was more focused on outcomes. Roosevelt’s “mind may have been a tabula rasa, but the tabula had clearly labeled pages to be written on,” Tugwell said
. “He did not very much care what kind of farm relief, or how the principle of cheap and universally available power was arrived at. Banking regulations might be of any practicable sort, and the methods used for relieving the unemployed were open to argument. But he was committed to some action in all these matters.”9

  Roosevelt had an open mind, and he was willing to listen. He learned “not from books but from people,” according to Adolf Berle, a Columbia University professor who counseled him on economics. At the start of the 1932 campaign, Roosevelt had asked Moley, a Columbia government professor, to establish a group of academics to advise him on policy. The Brain Trust, as the group was quickly dubbed, developed proposals for farm policy, industrial recovery, and unemployment relief that worked their way into campaign speeches. After Roosevelt was elected, several members of the Brain Trust were given important positions in the new administration. “Instead of a kitchen, or a tennis cabinet, he preferred to lean on a cap and gown cabinet,” one profile of the new president declared. Roosevelt’s intention, the press reported, was to establish a new form of government—a “factocracy.”10

  A more ideological president would have surrounded himself with people who shared his single-minded vision. Roosevelt chose Cabinet members and top aides with a range of beliefs, reflecting his own conflicted views. In the Hundred Days, his advisers included social workers who advocated ambitious relief programs and businessmen who argued for cutting the budget. Factory workers, farmers, and bankers all had their champions. The pragmatic Roosevelt listened to all of them, looking for ideas that would work. Many of the initiatives adopted during the Hundred Days were thought up by Roosevelt’s closest advisers, but others came from members of Congress, and even holdover members of the Hoover administration.