Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear

Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (2009, Penguin Press)

(pp. 1-2):

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 flophouses, 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, "dilligently 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, sine 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."

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 revolutionaries I ever saw is ripe all over this country right now," a National Farmers' Union leader warned.

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.

(pp. 10-12):

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."

The Hundred Days was the third great revolution in American history. George Washington had guided the nation from breakaway British 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.

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.

Just as an aside, it occurs to me that all the hoopla over Reagan's presidency as a revolution was a hopeful attempt to add his name to the Washington-Lincoln-Roosevelt list above, and thereby to claim that America has again definitively changed course. It hadn't really, but the delusion that we did, combined with a general dumbing down of politics and damn near everything else, caused a lot of pain.

March 1933, at the inauguration (pp. 14-16):

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. [ . . . ]

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, and 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.

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."

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 left with furniture, team of horses, a wagon and a little stock as all that is left from twenty-five years of work."

Urban and rural Americans were united by a shared sense of desperation. Reinhold Niebuhr, who was then a Detroit pastor with a large number of autoworkers in his congregation, had just published an essay that declared, "Capitalism is dying . . . it ought to die."

(p. 22):

Many people close to Roosevelt believed that his physical disability prompted a remarkable transformation in his character. Perkins, who knew him in his early years in New York society, and as a young legislator in Albany, had considered Roosevelt something of a prig. "His superficial feeling toward many people was that they were great bores, stupid and nonsensical," and he "didn't want to bother with them," she recalled. "After he was ill, flat, prostrated," he "had a total change of heart," she said. "Nobody was dull. Nobody was a great nuisance. Nobody made no sense. Nobody was good for nothing. Because they were human beings who could walk, and run, and exercise, they were all superior to him." Roosevelt hid his disability as much as he could, in what one historian called his "splendid deception," and few people knew just how difficult it was for him to move about. The public rarely saw him in his wheelchair, and almost never saw him being carried around like a small child. At the same time, the fact that Roosevelt was afflicted with polio was not a secret. When Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1932, it reminded its readers that he was a "helpless cripple," though it noted approvingly that his "attitude toward his affliction is one of gallant unconcern."

(p. 31):

The incident that cemented Hoover's reputation for callousness came in the summer of 1932. The Bonus Army, which was made up of impoverished veterans of the World War, rolled into Washington. They were seeking early payment of a bonus that Congress had awarded to returning soldiers, which was scheduled to come due in 1945. Thousands of veterans camped out in Anacostia Flats, in southeast Washington, clamoring for relief. The Hoover administration did not merely turn down the Bonus marchers. It crushed them. Federal troops attacked, using tanks, bayonets, and tear gas, and they set fire to the shacks the veterans were living in with their families. The public was not entirely sympathetic with the veterans' demands for early payment of their bonuses, but they had even less sympathy with the Hoover administration's brutal response. Movie theaters across the country were soon showing newsreel footage of the clashes, which the narrator described as "a day of bloodshed and riot." The villain of the story was the current occupant of the White House.

(p. 83):

The Emergency Banking Act was the administration's first triumph, and it was a dramatic one. "Capitalism was saved in eight days," Moley exulted. Saving capitalism, or at least saving the banking system, did not sit well with all of Roosevelt's supporters. American banking was, The New Republic told its readers, "rotten to the center," and it had to be "made over." Some urban liberals and western progressives had been hoping for a public takeover of the banks, something Tugwell had also advocated. To some progressives, Roosevelt's first week in office seemed like an epic lost opportunity. "I think back to the events of March 4, 1933, with a sick heart," Senator Bronson Cutting, a pro-Roosevelt Republican from New Mexico, wrote in Liberty magazine the following year. "For then," he declared, "the nationalization of banks by President Roosevelt could have been accomplished without a word of protest." Roosevelt was not among those feeling regret. Although he promised he would do more to reform the system with a later banking act, there were limits to how far he was willing to go. "Nothing reveals so clearly Roosevelt's continued faith in the private enterprise system," Samuel Rosenman said, "as his refusal -- even in banking -- to change in the slightest degree our private property economy, or to curtail in any way the private enterprise system under which he had lived and America had grown."

(p. 84):

When Roosevelt took office his views were, Moley later said, "as frostily thrifty" as those of Calvin Coolidge. In the 1932 campaign, he had embraced the Democratic Party platform, which called for cutting the federal budget by 25 percent. In a major address in Pittsburgh, he had railed against President Hoover's budget deficits, calling them "a veritable cancer in the body politic and economic." Now, he was about to introduce the Economy Act, a bill to slash federal spending. If there had not been a banking crisis when he took office, the Economy Act would have been Roosevelt's first legislative initiative.

(p. 85):

Roosevelt also had political reasons for wanting to cut federal spending. He had assiduously courted business leaders and wealthy individuals during the general election, and both groups were pressuring him to balance the budget. Bernard Baruch, the influential financier, who had contributed heavily to the Roosevelt campaign, was one of the loudest voices for government economy. "With the monotony and persistence of old Cato, we should make one single and invariable dictum the theme of every discourse," he declared. "Cut government spending -- cut it as rations are cut in a siege." The views of Baruch, who, it was said, "owned 60 Congressmen," were not easily ignored. The National Economy League, which was funded by some of the nation's most affluent families, was also pushing for budget cuts and lower taxes. Its chief lobbyist, William Marshall Bullitt, a former solicitor general of the United States, urged Roosevelt and Congress not to pander to special interests, particularly veterans' groups that were trying to defend their current benefit levels.

Veterans benefits were a significant part of the federal budget, and therefore a large share of the Economy Act budget cuts. The Economy Act was largely the work of Budget Director Lewis Douglas, previously an Arizona congressman, scion of copper magnates, and an extreme conservative.

(p. 140):

While the Senate was considering the farm bill, Roosevelt made an important addition. Wallace's draft had not addressed foreclosures, the issue roiling the Farm Belt. To placate Farm Belt radicals, and members of Congress from farm states, on March 27 Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Farm Credit Administration. The new agency, which he appointed his old friend Henry Morgenthau to head, would use $1 billion in new bonds to lower the principal on farmers' loans; cap interest rates at 4.5 percent; and postpone mortgage payments for up to fifteen years. The new program would put an end, Roosevelt told Congress, "to the threatened loss of home and productive capacity now faced by hundreds of thousands of American farm families." The plan appealed not only to farmers, but to mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and other holders of farm debt, which were losing hope of ever seeing some of their loans repaid.

(p. 141):

While the Senate wrestled with the agriculture bill, Roosevelt turned to two related issues. He introduced the Home Owners' Loan Act of 1933, which would extend to home mortgages the sort of relief he had just provided for farm mortgages. Homeowners had gotten less attention than farmers, but they were also being squeezed by the gap between what they were able to earn in the Depression economy and what they owed on their mortgages. One thousand urban homes were being foreclosed on every day. The bill would create a Home Owners' Loan Corporation that would refinance home loans at 5 percent interest and lengthen repayment schedules. The government loans would be capped at $20,000, to ensure that benefits were reserved for poor and middle-class homeowners. When he signed the bill, Roosevelt urged lenders to institute a moratorium on foreclosures until the program could get up and running. The new law was a great success. The HOLC would soon hold one-fifth of all urban mortgages.

(pp. 146-147):

With Roosevelt's election, public power had a new life. Roosevelt had championed public power since his days in the New York legislature. It was an issue he felt deeply about. "When he talked about the benefits of cheap electricity he did not think in terms of kilowatts," his counsel, Samuel Rosenman, said. "He thought in terms of the hired hand milking by electricity, the farm wife's pump, stove, lights, and sewing machine." As governor, he had established a public power authority, fought to construct hydroelectric plants on the Saint Lawrence River, and battled to keep the rates of private power companies in check. The power companies had attacked his efforts as socialism, but Roosevelt firmly resisted the label. It was wrong to call public power supporters "Bolsheviks or dangerous radicals," he insisted. Roosevelt believed that public power worked on the same principle as the Post Office -- that government should undertake activities that it could perform better than anyone else.

The TVA was the first fruit of Roosevelt's interest in public power.

(p. 162):

[Frances] Perkins's unmistakable New England manner would not stop political opponents, later in her life, from questioning her lineage. Clare Hoffman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, attacked her as "the wife of someone, though God alone knews what her true name may be, and no man yet has published the place of her birth." The DAR would launch an investigation, at the height of the New Deal, into whether Perkins was actually a Russian Jew. Perkins produced the prominent doctor who had delivered her, while insisting "I know that I am I." She further infuriated the DAR by declaring that had she been Jewish, she would have been proud of it.

(pp. 168-169):

Perkins had supported unions since her Hull House days, but she did not see them as the answer. "I'd much rather get a law than organize a union," she insisted. Like many middle- and upper-class reformers, Perkins believed the reach of unions was too limited. A union contract only regulated working conditions for the workers covered by it, while a workers' rights law protected everyone. Perkins also thought unions cared only for their own members, which was largely true at the time. Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor's president, insisted that all improvements for workers had to come by union-negotiated contracts. If they were won by legislation, he believed, workers would not feel the need to join unions. Following his lead, unions opposed minimum wage, maximum hour, and workmen's compensation laws. Perkins saw this opposition firsthand when she tried to rally labor support for the Consumers' League's legislative agenda. When she and a colleague spoke to a labor meeting in upper Manhattan seeking support for a bill to reform workmen's compensation, the audience was "as near ugly to us as I ever met," she said. It was clear to her that the men did not care about injuries to workers who were not union members.

(pp. 187-188):

In the late summer, with economic conditions continuing to worsen, Roosevelt called the legislature into special session. On August 28, he delivered a historic address to the legislature in which he set out a new philosophy of government. "What is the State?" he asked. It was, he declared, an "organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being." One of the state's primary duties, he said, was "caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others." To fulfill the obligations that he had just described, Roosevelt asked the legislature to allocate $20 million for relief for the unemployed, to be administered by the newly created Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. In the interst of avoiding "the dole," Roosevelt wanted as much of the money as possible to be used for public works, so the recipients would have to work for their benefits. If it had to be dispensed as relief, he wanted it to be given, as much as possible, in the form of food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. The legislature was reluctant to sign off on the plan, but that the special session "had more to do with making Roosevelt the national figure that he became than anything else."

Harry Hopkins was chosen to run TERA. He went on to run numerous New Deal jobs programs, such as the WPA.

(pp. 228-229):

Moley and Tugwell supported industrial planning for different reasons. Tugwell, one of the administration's most liberal members, had been greatly influenced by the two months he had spent in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1927, when it was about to embark on its first Five Year Plan. New Deal critics would later charge that he had become a Marxist on the trip. Tugwell scoffed at the charge -- "as though," he would later say, "communism could be caught by contagion like mumps or measles." He was not a Communist, but the Soviet influence on his thinking was noticeable. He believed that the United States could benefit from greater centralized economic planning. He also argued that "profits must be limited and their uses controlled."

Moley, who had grown increasingly close with business leaders, came to the issue from the opposite direction. He was interested not in limiting corporate profits, but in expanding them, and promoting "business confidence." Economic conditions were so desperate that big business was eager for government planning. The same industrial leaders who extolled laissez-faire in the 1920s were now pleading with the government to step in. They argued that unfair competition had driven prices so low that they could not operate. Business leaders supported a law that would authorize the government to convene meeting of each industry at which mandatory minimum prices would be set. If companies sold their goods below these prices, they would be fined or shut down. Meetings of this kind would require suspending the antitrust laws, something business had been seeking sine they were adopted. When 1,400 corporate leaders gathered in Washington for the United States Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting in the first week in May, most of the speakers called for greater government control over industry. "We have failed to take the necessary steps voluntarily, so the element of force, government compulsion, becomes necessary," Paul W. Litchfield, president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., told the group. [ . . . ]

Perkins would not actively oppose a program of industrial planning, but neither would she fight for one. What she cared about was using whatever industrial relief bill emerged to enact workers' rights protections. The pro-business Supreme Court had repeatedly held workers' rights laws unconstitutional, in cases like Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state maximum hours law for bakers, and Hammer v. Dagenhart, which invalidated a federal ban on products made with child labor. Given the court's hostility, Perkins thought the best way of establishing minimum wages, maximum hours, and a ban on child labor was to get businesses to agree to them voluntarily, which they might do in exchange for greater freedom to meet to agree on pricing. Most of all, Perkins was intent on seeing that the bill included public works. "I don't care about what they do about anything else," she said. "Let them do anything else they want to try -- just so we get a public works program."

(p. 235):

The department that put up the biggest fight of all was the army. Douglas proposed substantial cuts, and MacArthur, the army chief of staff, demanded a hearing to challenge them. MacArthur, who appeared at the Budget Bureau in full uniform, spoke for forty minutes about the damage the cuts would do to the national defense. His appeal was, Douglas conceded, "one of the most dramatic and one of the most brilliant displays of oratory fireworks that I have ever heard." When MacArthur was done, Douglas did what he would later say was "one of the meanest things I have ever done in my life." He asked MacArthur if he was anticipating violent dysentery breaking out in the following year. "No," the general replied. "Why, may I ask, do you ask?" Douglas said the army had put in for 378,000 sheets of toilet paper for each enlisted man and officer. "You could see the rage rising within him," Douglas later recalled. MacArthur stormed out of the hearing.

Douglas was so successful in implementing his budget cuts that Raymond Clapper, United Press's Washington bureau chief, dubbed him "The Great High Executioner of Department Spending." Douglas extracted $80 million from the army, $75 million from the Post Office, and tens of millions more from other departments. Farley, the postmaster general, had a bitter view of Douglas's cuts, and his motives. As Farley saw it, Douglas reflexively represented big business and the wealthy, and his interest in government did not extend beyond balancing the budget and keeping taxes low. "He never, as far as I could discover, had anything definite to offer on how to feed the millions of people who were suffering from loss of jobs, loss of income, and loss of savings," Farley said.

(pp. 242-243):

On May 17, Roosevelt sent the National Industrial Recovery Act to Congress. The bill's purpose was to address a national emergency of "widespread unemployment" and "disorganization of industry." Title I gave business leaders what they wanted: the right to work through trade or industrial associations to develop "codes of fair competition." Industries would be able to set standards for what constituted "destructive . . . price cutting." If the president determined that a company violated its industry's code, he was authorized to revoke its license to do business. For workers, the bill provided that the codes of fair competition could include minimum wages, maximum hours, and child labor protections. It also included the union organizing protections of Section 7(a). Title II authorized $3.3 billion in public works. The bill enumerated a wide array of projects that the money would be used for, including construction and improvement of highways and public buildings; conservation of public lands; water power and electricity development; slum clearance; and construction of public housing. [ . . . ]

Businesses rallied to the NIRA. Henry Harriman, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, declared that he considered it "one of the most important measures ever presented at any time to any Congress." The National Electrical Manufacturers Association, representing companies that had employed 250,000 people in 1929, called the NIRA "wholly and utterly revolutionary" and gave the bill its enthusiastic endorsement. Organized labor also urged Congress to pass the NIRA. William Green declared it "the most outstanding, advanced and forward-looking legislation designed to promote economic recovery" that had ever been proposed, and predicted it would create six million new jobs.

(pp. 248-249):

The Depression challenged the nation's beliefs about the poor. After the economic crisis threw millions of Americans out of work, it was clear that poverty could be caused by brutal economic circumstances, not just weak character. It was difficult to blame a once-successful lawyer who had lost all of his clients due to the Depression or a steelworkers whose entire industry had ground to a standstill for being unable to earn a living. The economic crisis had also broken down the traditional methods of caring for the poor. Even wealthy cities like Philadelphia had run out of money to help their unemployed citizens. In less well-off parts of the country the situation was far worse. John L. Lewis, the United Mine Workers president, pointed out that many of his members lived in remote mining towns that barely had local governments, much less relief programs for destitute families. Private charities were unable to take up the slack. When the Depression began, charities were providing one-quarter of the relief nationwide, but they could not keep up with the fast-growing demand. Between 1929 and 1932, about one-third of the private agencies that cared for the poor closed down for lack of money. Many of the remaining ones teetered on the brink of insolvency.

(pp. 272-273):

Almost as soon as he set up the federal relief program, Hopkins was looking to make it obsolete. Although he insisted that cash benefits were often necessary, Hopkins believed that they were a poor substitute for work. "There is nothing nice about this relief business from beginning to end," he said. "None of the relief officials like it, but you may bet the unemployed like it a lot less." Even though it was more costly and more administratively difficult, Hopkins was committed to finding ways to provide the unemployed with the dignity of earning their own living. Perkins would later say that he "understood intuitively the moral gain" of providing jobs to people on relief. "Yes, work relief was more expensive than cash relief," she observed. "Yes, both were more expensive than soup kitchens and barracks. But Harry Hopkins thought it was the people that mattered." Once the FERA was up and running, Hopkins began pushing to transform it into a work relief program. In this effort, he had the strong support of Roosevelt, who had always preferred relief programs that put the recipients to work. By the fall, Hopkins had won Roosevelt's approval for the Civil Works Administration, which put onetime relief recipients to work on a wide array of government projects. Hopkins's conviction that people wanted to work proved correct. When he made two million jobs available through the CWA, nine million people applied.

Hopkins tried to give people more to do than wield a rake or a shovel. Millions of white-collar workers were unemployed, including large numbers of artists and writers. The American Federation of Musicians surveyed its members and found that two-thirds were without work. Ninety percent of architects, according to a Columbia University study, were unemployed. Hopkins supported projects that used their talents. He used CWA funds to hire architects and draftsmen to work on the Historic American Buildings Survey. He put painters, musicians, and writers to work on artistic and literary projects, forerunners of the public art programs the Works Progress Administration would later sponsor. Relief funds were used to pay actors in New York, through a project sponsored by the Actors Equity Association, to put on plays in hospitals, libraries, and schools. In communities nationwide, the CWA paid musicians to put on public performances.

(p. 274):

Other observers brought back similar reports. Roosevelt had Frank Walker, a friend who would later become postmaster general, examine Hopkins's early efforts. Walker did his own relief tour and came back with a glowing report. "I saw old friends of mine -- men I had been to school with -- digging ditches and laying sewer pipe," Walker related of a trip to his home state of Montana. "They were wearing their regular business suits as they worked because they couldn't afford overalls and rubber boots. If I ever thought, 'There, but for the grace of God --' it was right then." One of his old friends told him: "I hate to think what would have happened if this work hadn't come along. The last of my savings had run out. I'd sold or hocked everything I could. And my kids were hungry. I stood in front of the window of the bake-shop down the street and I wondered just how long it would be before I got desperate enough to pick up a rock and heave it through that window and grab some bread to take home."

(pp. 276-277):

The popular anger was fanned in early 1933 by Senate hearings into the financial industry, led by former New York prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora. The picture of Wall Street that emerged from the Pecora hearings was as unsavory, one journalist noted, as "the inside of Tammany Hall." The hearings put a particular spotlight on National City Bank, among the nation's largest, which had blurred the line between commercial and investment banking. National City, as the hearings made abundantly clear, had profited handsomely by pushing its customers into reckless stock purchases. One victim, Edgar Brown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, testified that his portfolio had fallen from $225,000 to $25,000, leaving him indigent. "If you steal $25, you're a thief," The Nation explained. "If you steal $250,000, you're an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000 you're a financier."

(pp. 277-279):

The most controversial reform being proposed [in the Banking Act of 1933] was federal deposit insurance. Progressives strongly supported deposit insurance, which they saw as the best way to guard against runs on banks and bank failures. It was also being pushed by the small-bank lobby, which considered it a way of helping small banks to hold off competition from larger banks. Steagall, who had supported federal deposit insurance for fifteen years, included it in his House bill. But deposit insurance also had some powerful enemies, including the American Bankers Association and many large Eastern banks. They argued that it would unfairly require healthy banks to bail out struggling ones, and in the process put a strain on the entire system. Opponents of deposit insurance also insisted that it would encourage bankers to act recklessly, since they would know their mistakes would be covered. New York banks were among the most outspoken critics. With one-quarter of the nation's deposits, they would end up paying a large portion of the insurance fees.

The administration did not take a strong stand for or against the Glass-Steagall bill, which was formally called the Banking Act of 1933, but Roosevelt made clear his opposition to federal deposit insurance. Vice President Garner, who supported it, had raised the issue with Roosevelt before the inauguration and had gotten nowhere. "It won't work, Jack," Roosevelt replied. "The weak banks will pull down the strong." William Woodin told Congress of the administration's opposition, but deposit insurance had enormous support in both the House and Senate. Roosevelt spoke out against deposit insurance at a May 23 Cabinet meeting and threatened to veto the whole banking reform bill if it stayed in. Support in Congress, however, remained overwhelming, and Huey Long declared that if the bill was vetoed there were enough votes in Congress to override. In the end, Roosevelt yielded to congressional sentiment and agreed to sign a bill with deposit insurance. [ . . . ]

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency set up by the law, would be one of the New Deal's most important creations. In their history of American monetary policy, the economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz called federal deposit insurance "the structural change most conducive to monetary stability sine state bank notes were taxed out of existence immediately after the Civil War." In later years, few people would remember where Roosevelt had stood. "Roosevelt at first endured and then embraced it," Moley wrote. "I am convinced that finally he made himself believe he had favored it from the beginning."

(pp. 284-286):

The Hundred Days' greatest impact, though, was one of national philosophy. In just over three months, the federal government changed from being a nearly passive observer of its citizens' problems to an active force in solving them. From this point on, it would be a matter of concern to Washington when farmers were unable to support themselves, when depositors lost their life savings in failed banks, and when parents could not afford to feed their children. The relationship between the American people and their government would never be the same again. "We have had our revolution," Collier's declared, "and we like it."

The accomplishments of the Hundred Days were in large part a matter of timing. Roosevelt took office at a moment of unprecedented national crisis. The journalist Ernest K. Lindley spoke for many when he warned that Roosevelt had less than a year to save the country from complete collapse. The desperate economic conditions made the American people rethink their fundamental values. They were willing to consider things when there was 25 percent unemployment that they would not have contemplated in better times. The 1932 election put Roosevelt in a strong position to deliver on this clamoring for change. He took office with vast reservoirs of political capital after his landslide victory. He also had a new Congress with lopsided Democratic majorities -- and a good number of Republicans who were inclined to follow his lead. Congress was not a rubber stamp. It fought him on some issues and prevailed on a few. Still, The New Republic was not far off when it declared that "no legislature in modern history, ever yielded more completely to the wishes of the head of state than did the Seventy-third Congress."

Roosevelt arrived in Washington prepared to seize the moment. The Hundred Days has been called a hodgepodge -- as thrown together, Moley said, as the stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, chemistry sets, and other things in a boy's bedroom. It was improvised, and often chaotic, but as Tugwell observed, "a bright thread of intention ran through the confusions and contradictions." That intention was to bring an end to the national philosophy of "rugged individualism," and to replace it with one of mutual responsibility. The Hundred Days created an affirmative government duty to protect workers and help the needy that would be expanded on repeatedly throughout the New Deal. The spirit of the Federal Emergency Relief Act would animate Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and the federal unemployment insurance program. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration would lead to the other important public works programs, including the Works Progress Administration. The voluntary minimum wage, maximum hour, and anti-child labor provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act codes of fair competition would evolve into the mandatory workers' rights standards of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The Hundred Days also established the principle that laissez-faire capitalism could not be relied on to protect the public interest. The Truth in Securities Act laid the groundwork for the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 and the broader regulation of capital markets that followed. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act would be expanded into the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the National Labor Relations Board, which enforced workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. With the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the federal government took responsibility for sustaining the nation's farmers and protecting them from the vagaries of the free market. The system of government price supports, which was supposed to be an emergency measure, lasted into the twenty-first century, doing considerable damage along with the good.

(pp. 286-287):

Another American tradition was born during the Hundred Days: opposition to the New Deal. Conservatives, whose most cherished ideals were under attack, started to speak out, objecting that Roosevelt was trying to become a dictator, and that his programs were un-American. The more time passed, the more outspoken the critics became. "Private fulminations and public carpings against the New Deal have become almost a routine of the business day," Time magazine declared in the fall of 1934. H.L. Mencken, who frequently railed against the New Deal, insisted that it had done nothing of value. The Brain Trust was "the sorriest mob of mountebanks ever gathered together at one time," he insisted. The best of them were merely "uplifters and do-gooders," while the rest were "a miscellaneous rabble of vapid young pedagogs, out-of-work Y.M.C.A. secretaries, third-rate journalists, briefless lawyers and soaring chicken-farmers." As the 1936 election approached, William Randolph Hearst mobilized his twenty-eight newspapers, thirteen magazines, and eight radio stations against Roosevelt. "MOSCOW BACKS ROOSEVELT," blared one headline that ran in all of the Hearst papers. Roosevelt was frequently denounced as a "traitor to his class." He did not, however, let the denunciations deter him. "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today," he declared on the eve of the 1936 election. "They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."

Cohen notes that there was also dissatisfaction on the left, citing Norman Thomas, sharecropper advocates, and Afro-Americans, but leaves the subject quickly. The fact is, there wasn't much leftist opposition, even though there were plenty of counts on which the New Deal could have done better. On the other hand, the Right Wing Noise Machine goes back quite a ways, eternally funded by the unsatisfied greed of the superrich.

(p. 313):

In its lifetime, the WPA employed 8.5 million people and supported 20 million, more than 20 percent of the population. "Hopkins, who was already the great alms-giver, became the greatest employer," The New Republic noted. In June 1939, federal public works programs still supported almost 19 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population.

In addition to helping millions of American families survive the Depression, the WPA left a rich legacy of socially useful projects. Its workers constructed or repaired more than 125,000 buildings, including 83,000 schools; 800 airports; 950 sewage plants; and 650,000 miles of roads. They built or improved 78,000 bridges and 25,000 playgrounds; terraced 271,000 acres of eroded land; and taught two million people to read. They also ran a famous Federal Art Project, which hired destitute artists to create murals for public buildings, posters, and paintings. The WPA produced a highly regarded series of state guidebooks and an acclaimed collection of interviews with former slaves, and it played a major role in building the San Antonio Zoo, New York City's LaGuardia and Washington's Reagan airports, and the presidential retreat at Camp David. In 1965, on the program's thirtieth anniversary, The New York Times quoted a dispossessed North Carolina tenant farmer living in an abandoned gas station, who had been rescued by a WPA job. "I'm proud of our United States, and every time I hear 'The Star Spangled Banner' I feel a lump in my throat," he said. "There ain't no other nation in the world that would have the sense enough to think of W.P.A."

posted 2009-10-16