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  When the time came to make a final decision about how to proceed, Roosevelt called in Cabinet members, congressmen, and advisers to weigh the alternatives, and then he made his ruling. He was evaluating what he believed to be the best policy, but also what he thought would work politically. He took into account what the public wanted, what Congress would pass, and what was acceptable to his electoral coalition—from farm leaders, to union bosses, to Wall Street financiers. Sam Rayburn, the Texas Democrat who later became House speaker, said Roosevelt was “the best jury to listen and decide that I ever saw.” From informal meetings like these, the policies of the Hundred Days fitfully emerged. The idea of Roosevelt imposing from on high a program to restore the nation to health could not be more wrong, according to those who were there. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not invent the New Deal; he does not own it,” wrote John Franklin Carter, one of the era’s leading journalists. “He is its master of ceremonies, not the manager of the theater; its chief croupier, not the owner of the casino.”11

  Roosevelt’s distinctive leadership style meant that his inner circle had enormous influence—and a rare chance to shape history. Five of Roosevelt’s advisers—Raymond Moley, Lewis Douglas, Henry Wallace, Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins—had the greatest impact on the Hundred Days. They did not have the biggest titles in the administration, although Perkins and Wallace were both Cabinet members. They were also not necessarily the closest to Roosevelt, although Moley and Douglas spent as much time with him as anyone. They were simply the people who, by virtue of their jobs, talents, rapport with the president, and force of personality, were able to leave the greatest mark.

  Raymond Moley was at the center of Roosevelt’s inner circle. His up-from-the-bootstraps rise had taken him from small-town Ohio to Columbia University. After heading the Brain Trust and serving as chief speechwriter in the campaign, Moley accepted an offer to join the administration as a top aide to Roosevelt. His work on the emergency banking law put him in the middle of the most serious crisis of the Hundred Days. Moley was Roosevelt’s “closest, most intimate adviser,” Time magazine said when Moley appeared on the cover. Moley wrote most of Roosevelt’s speeches and congressional messages, helped recruit for the administration, and drafted key bills. He was also part of the two-man “bedside Cabinet” that met with Roosevelt each morning. Moley’s early roots were in midwestern progressivism, but he had begun to move to the political center. He was, like Roosevelt, a pragmatist, less concerned with ideology than with identifying ideas that would work.12

  Lewis Douglas, the director of the budget, was the other member of Roosevelt’s “bedside Cabinet.” Unlike Moley, he did have a strong ideology. Douglas was the scion of one of Arizona’s wealthiest mining families, copper barons with a record of mistreating their workers. When he was elected to Arizona’s at-large House seat, he became the strongest voice in Congress for slashing spending. His conservatism made him a surprising choice to play a prominent role in the New Deal, but Douglas appealed to Roosevelt’s fiscally cautious side. Many progressives believed that his prescription was precisely the wrong one for the Depression, but Roosevelt made Douglas the star of the first months of his administration, and helped him push a major budget reduction measure, the Economy Act, through Congress. If Douglas had continued to enjoy the same level of support from Roosevelt that he did in these first months, the New Deal would have looked very different.13

  At the opposite end of the political spectrum was Frances Perkins, the secretary of labor. Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member, was born into a conservative New England family, but she broke away after college and went to work with Jane Addams at Hull House, ministering to Chicago’s immigrant poor. After moving to New York, she became an advocate for workers. Perkins was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which took 146 lives, and after it became one of the nation’s leading crusaders for improved factory safety. She had served as Roosevelt’s state industrial commissioner, and as a result had worked with him longer than almost anyone else in the administration. Before accepting her Cabinet position, Perkins had gotten Roosevelt to agree to support her ambitious progressive agenda: a major unemployment relief program; large-scale public works; and an array of workers’ rights protections, including minimum wage and maximum hours laws and an end to child labor. In large part due to her efforts, much of this agenda was achieved in the Hundred Days.14

  While Perkins championed urban workers, Henry Wallace did the same for the nation’s farmers. Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, was a brilliant farmer, scientist, and journalist from Iowa, the third Wallace generation to edit Wallaces’ Farmer, his family’s farm journal. He came of age when agriculture was in a deep depression, and was determined to rescue the Farm Belt. Wallace became one of the nation’s leading proponents of domestic allotment, the plan for propping up crop prices that was adopted during the Hundred Days. Working with Tugwell, his assistant secretary, Wallace got the first—and most sweeping—relief program of the Hundred Days signed into law. He then went to work setting up the elaborate administrative structure necessary to implement it.15

  Harry Hopkins was the last to join the administration, arriving on day 79. After graduating from college in his native Iowa, Hopkins moved to New York’s Lower East Side, where he worked in a settlement house. He became a prominent social worker, and after the Depression hit, headed the emergency relief agency that Roosevelt created in New York. With the help of Perkins and congressional progressives, Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to create a $500 million federal relief program, which he went on to run. Within months, Hopkins established something America had never seen before: a relief program that distributed federal funds to the states and imposed national standards. Hopkins quickly moved beyond relief. Proclaiming the idea that people preferred to remain idle “100 percent wrong,” he pushed to substitute jobs for relief, and eventually became the leading public works administrator of the New Deal.16

  These five advisers did not work as a team. Far from it. There was a deep fault line, with Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins on one side, Douglas on the other—and Moley in between. The Perkins group and Douglas represented two clashing traditions in American politics. Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins were committed liberals—heirs to the Progressive Era—who argued that the government should take an active role in improving the lives of workers, poor farmers, and the unemployed. Douglas was a strict conservative who believed in the free market, low taxes, and small government. While the public story line of the Hundred Days was about how Roosevelt, through his eloquent public statements and legislative initiatives, rallied a desperate nation, behind the scenes his advisers were battling over what shape the New Deal would take. Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins worked with members of Congress, farm leaders, union officials, and other progressives to promote their agenda. Douglas worked with business leaders and other conservatives to pull Roosevelt in the opposite direction. In the first month of the Hundred Days, through the passage of the Economy Act, Douglas’s side prevailed. For the rest of the Hundred Days, Perkins’s side did. While Douglas won the early battles, Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins won the war.

  The Hundred Days was more than the greatest burst of legislation in American history—it was a revolution. Roosevelt had promised as much in the fall of 1932, when he told a group of campaign workers in Indianapolis that the election would be not only a landslide but “a revolution—the right kind, the only kind of revolution this nation can stand for—a revolution at the ballot box.” When the Hundred Days was over, administration insiders and journalists returned to that word again and again. Tugwell called his memoir of the time Roosevelt’s Revolution. Lindley gave his book, which was written as the events were unfolding, the title The Roosevelt Revolution: First Phase. “No other word seems strong enough,” he wrote, “to describe a change so swift and so fundamental.”17

  The Hundred Days was the third great revolution in American history. George Washington had guided the nation from breakaway Br
itish colony to constitutional republic. Abraham Lincoln had led the nation through a civil war that determined that it would be an indivisible union, with a single standard of citizenship. The Roosevelt revolution created modern America. When he took office, the national ideology was laissez-faire economics and rugged individualism, and the federal government was small in scope and ambition. “The sole function of government is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise,” Hoover had declared in 1931. Roosevelt and his advisers introduced a new philosophy, one that held that Americans had responsibilities to one another, and that the government had a duty to intervene when capitalism failed. He proselytized for this new philosophy in his speeches, fireside chats, and press conferences, and he made it a reality with the policies he put in place.18

  The Hundred Days laid the groundwork for the rest of the New Deal. The relief and public works programs would be expanded into larger initiatives that put tens of millions of people to work, and established a safety net for the elderly, the unemployed, and poor children. The regulations imposed on banks and stock issuers would be the first building blocks of the elaborate regulatory state that emerged during Roosevelt’s four terms, and after. The voluntary workers’ rights protections introduced in the National Industrial Recovery Act would eventually be turned into mandatory national minimum wage and maximum hours standards, and a federal ban on child labor. Perhaps the most important transformation of the Hundred Days was Roosevelt’s decision to engage in large-scale deficit spending to fund federal relief efforts. That decision to spend heavily, which he reached with considerable reluctance, would be one of the driving forces behind the New Deal.

  The New Deal had its critics from the start. They were muted during the Hundred Days, when even conservatives were inclined to give Roosevelt a chance. As time passed, they became more outspoken. A small but entrenched minority called for a return to the Hoover approach to government. There was no question, however, that the great majority of Americans embraced the New Deal. In the 1934 midterm election, the Democrats added to their majorities in the House and Senate. In 1936, Roosevelt won in a bigger landslide than he had in 1932. In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt declared that the American people had changed their philosophy in the previous four years. They had come to appreciate, he said, that “we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people,” and that the federal government had become “the instrument of our united purpose.” There were still naysayers, as there would be throughout Roosevelt’s presidency, but they were now relegated to the margins. Tugwell dismissed these stubborn anti-New Dealers as “willful beneficiaries of the Old Order, who—in the words of a gifted Englishman—sat ‘waiting for the twentieth century to blow over.’ ” But the twentieth century did not blow over. A new America had been born.19

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Action, and Action Now”

  On the morning of March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins, wearing a black dress and her trademark tricorn hat, strode through the ornate lobby of the Willard Hotel. The Willard held a venerable place in American history. Abraham Lincoln had slipped into its side door in early 1861, one step ahead of the pro-Confederate conspirators who were said to be plotting his assassination, and spent the night before his inauguration sleeping fitfully in one of its best suites. Later the same year, Julia Ward Howe returned to the hotel after reviewing Union troops near the Capitol and wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In March 1933, America faced a crisis every bit as dire as the one it confronted in 1861, and Perkins was on her way to an inauguration as momentous as Lincoln’s. She was about to walk into history as the first woman Cabinet member, and as an officer in the New Deal army that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had assembled to fight the Great Depression. First, however, she had to locate a taxi, and there were none to be found.1

  Perkins had spent a lifetime getting to this moment. As a young woman, she had fled a traditional New England upbringing in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her father’s conventional plans for her, to join Jane Addams at Hull House, ministering to Chicago’s immigrants. Perkins made a brief stop in Philadelphia to work for a fledgling organization that helped the poor, and rescued young women who were in danger of being lured into prostitution. From there it was on to New York, where she studied at Columbia University for a master’s degree and did social science research in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. She went on to become New York State’s industrial commissioner, and an influential champion of working men and women.

  Perkins was America’s leading industrial reformer, and the scourge of unscrupulous factory owners. People who knew her only by reputation were invariably surprised when they met her. “Miss Perkins, though she was once a social worker, is not at all the settlement-house type; nor is she the type of fighting woman labor leader,” Edmund Wilson observed. “She is an attractive lady from Boston, who dresses with considerable elegance.” George Creel, a prominent journalist, considered Perkins “intense,” but found her “intensities masked by suavity, splendid judgment, and a nice sense of humor.” Even “in her crusading days she never called names,” wrote Creel, “marching to her goals with a gay, disarming amiability that won over many an opponent.” Still, people underestimated Perkins at their peril. One reporter who followed the career of this “small, determined woman” noted that those who had not observed her up close were unaware of “her skill at repartee, her scornful replies to vapid criticism, or her intellectual preparation for her job.”2

  Perkins had come down from New York by railroad the previous afternoon. When her train pulled into Union Station, Washington’s soaring Roman-style terminal, the scene was “bedlam,” she would later recall. The station was filled with out-of-towners who had flooded the capital for Roosevelt’s inauguration. It was a long-awaited moment for Democrats, who had last seen one of their own sworn in as president sixteen years earlier, and for the entire nation, which was desperate for more forceful leadership.3

  The bedlam at Union Station reflected a broader chaos. The nation was in the grip of a depression of unprecedented magnitude. Since the crash of October 1929, stock prices had plunged 85 percent. Manufacturing had all but ground to a halt. The automobile industry was operating at 20 percent of capacity, and the steel industry at just 12 percent. Between one-quarter and one-third of the workforce was jobless. People leapt at the mere possibility of a paycheck. An advertisement for 750 men to dig a canal in Birmingham, Alabama, for twenty cents an hour drew 12,000 applicants. New York City’s streets were filled with unemployed people selling apples from makeshift stands. The city had almost no shoeshine boys before the crash, but now there were thousands. A reporter counted nineteen on a single Midtown block. Even many people who had jobs were scraping by on sharply reduced hours. In Pennsylvania, only 40 percent of workers were employed full-time. People were forced to work for sweatshop wages. A New York World-Telegram exposé told of girls in a Brooklyn pants factory earning six cents an hour, and of one worker who, after paying for carfare, lunch, and child care, took home just ten cents a week. “Hospitals were filling with women who had worked themselves into a state of collapse for a pittance,” Time magazine reported.4

  America had never before faced such despair. “Panic was in the air,” Harold Ickes, the incoming secretary of the interior, recalled. “Millions of people were half-fed . . . barely clothed, and living more like kennelless dogs than human beings.” Grim jokes abounded, like the one about the hotel desk clerk who inquired when people asked for a room, “For sleeping or for jumping?” In the cities, families were forced to double and triple up in small apartments. “Only the other day a case came to my attention where a family of ten had just moved in with a family of 5 in a 3-room apartment,” reported Dorothy Kahn, a Philadelphia relief worker. “It is almost an everyday occurrence in our midst.” Worst off were the residents of “Hoovervilles,” the grim encampments that were springing up in parks and under bridges, who had only wood planks, tar paper, an
d cardboard to protect them from the elements. People slept in rusted old hulks of cars and, in the case of one large family, an old piano crate.5

  Soup kitchens ladled out meager portions to millions of hungry people, but they could not keep up with the demand. “You could hardly believe what they live on,” Atlantic Monthly wrote of a Youngstown, Ohio, family of six whose breadwinner had lost his job. “The mother mixes a little flour and water, and cooks it in a frying pan. That is their regular meal.” Fathers deserted families, wives moved back in with their parents, and children were left at orphanages. The Hoover administration insisted no one was starving, but that was willful ignorance. “There were great numbers of hospital cases of malnutrition reported, of babies dying, of men falling dead in parks, and frozen unemployed found in abandoned warehouses during the winter,” recalled Matthew Josephson, an editor at The New Republic. More than 20 percent of New York City schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, the city’s Bureau of Health Education reported, which could “be attributed directly to unemployment.”6

  Conditions were no better in rural America. Farm income had plunged from $6.7 billion in 1929 to just $2.3 billion in 1932. Crop prices were so low that farmers could not cover their expenses. Many had stopped planting, and farm workers and sharecroppers were being thrown off the land. Large numbers of the dispossessed poured into the cities or headed west in search of work. Alabama congressman George Huddleston lamented that many of his constituents, especially the black tenant farmers, were “practically without food and without clothes, and without anything else, and how are they going to live?” In Iowa, one of the wealthiest farm states, fully one-seventh of the farms had already been lost to foreclosure. “The most discouraging, disheartening experiences of my legal life have occurred,” a rural lawyer from Iowa declared, “when men of middle age, with families, go out of bankruptcy court with furniture, team of horses, a wagon and a little stock as all that is left from twenty-five years of work.”7