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PROLOGUE

Everything to Fear

March 4, 1933, Inauguration Day for the thirty-second president of the United States, defied the usual temper of national renewal. Cold, overcast weather matched the country’s bleak mood. The weeks leading up to Franklin Roosevelt’s induction into the White House were a nightmare, as an unprecedented economic collapse had quieted the cheerleading about America’s future that business leaders, the press, and politicians had made a hallmark of the 1920s. Optimism was in short supply; voices of despair crowded out the promise of American life. In January 1933, Calvin Coolidge, the retired Republican president, said: “In other periods of depression it has always been possible to see some things that were solid and upon which you could base hope. But as I look about, I now see nothing to give ground for hope, nothing of man.” Herbert Hoover, the defeated incumbent, described “the state of the public mind” as suffering from “a steadily degenerating confidence in the future which had reached the height of general alarm …. We are in a pitiful position,” he said on his last day in office. “… The whole economy [is] in jeopardy …. We are at the end of our string.” Two months before, in a New York Times article, James Truslow Adams, a writer of popular histories, lamented the passing of the American belief in ending famine and poverty. “It is this dream,” he asserted, “in its various aspects, which to many today appears to lie shattered under the debris of the economic crash of the past three years.”

From a listening post in the Soviet Union in Riga, Latvia, George F. Kennan, a twenty-eight-year-old Foreign Service officer, foresaw nothing but disaster for the United States: “There it [i.e., the United States] lies now,” he recorded in a diary, “… in all its ignorance and all its sordidness, a society conceived in selfishness and dedicated to the proposition that one man’s suffering is no other man’s business, incapable of regulating its own public life, waiting stupidly for the advent of catastrophe.” Two months later, a “pall of gloom and anxiety” that gave resonance to Kennan’s prediction shadowed Roosevelt’s arrival in the capital. New York’s mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, warned that unless there were reforms that gave people some kind of economic safety net, there would be “chaos and disorder, and something worse. There is something peculiar about human beings,” he added. “They just simply refuse to go hungry.” Looking back on the days leading up to Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration, a historian declared: “The Republic had virtually ceased to function as a vital organism and lay prostrate, paralyzed, seemingly moribund in the fearful cold.”

Opinion leaders across the nation appeared to be bankrupt for ideas that might bring a recovery. Walter Lippmann, the country’s most distinguished journalist, observed that “the fixed points by which our fathers steered the ship of state have vanished.” The head of the American Bar Association told a Senate committee calling upon America’s best and brightest to propose solutions that he had “nothing to offer, either of fact or theory.” The president of the Pennsylvania Railroad saw “no panacea,” while William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s secretary of the treasury and U.S. senator from California, complained in March 1933 that America’s collapsing banking system “does credit to a collection of imbeciles.”

Many saw Roosevelt as the last chance to rescue the country from a collapse that could permanently alter its economic and political systems. A New York Republican congressman told him that Congress should “give you any power that you may need.” The truth is that Roosevelt had no more idea of how he would restore the country’s prosperity than Abraham Lincoln had in trying to persuade the rebellious Southern states to remain in the Union. Though Lincoln and Roosevelt faced crises more threatening to the national well-being than any since George Washington had launched the Republic, they shared common ground with other presidents in uncertainty about the course of their administrations. Warren G. Harding, the least effective of Roosevelt’s recent predecessors, lamented the absence of a book that could tell him how to manage the national economy, and, he confessed, even if there were one, he doubted that he could understand it. John F. Kennedy, the most candid of Roosevelt’s successors about how he would take charge of the country’s considerable difficulties at home and abroad, privately acknowledged that he had no clue about the path ahead.

For Roosevelt, who believed that his initial task was not to advance an economic program, which was certain to generate demoralizing debate, but to regenerate the country’s trust in its institutions and leaders or, more specifically, in his own leadership, by publicly appealing to a higher authority for guidance in combating the Depression.

Roosevelt, who was a nominally religious man, took refuge in his faith when considering the national crisis facing him as president. As he traveled by train from New York to Washington, symbolically following the route Lincoln had taken to his own first inaugural, Roosevelt asked Jim Farley, a New York political ally and devout Catholic who had been instrumental in assuring his election, to join him in his compartment. He told Farley, who listened with mounting appreciation, that no particular economic plan would save the country, but rather its religious convictions—its attachment to a belief in divine guidance or the expectation that Providence would bring the nation through the crisis. Roosevelt said that he planned to begin his administration with a well-publicized visit to Washington’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he would ask for the Lord’s intervention. He would use the opening line of his inaugural speech to ask Americans to follow his lead and make March 4 “a day of national consecration.”

Roosevelt’s conversation with Farley rested on the assumption that his words would reach a large audience and stimulate the hope essential to a national revival. He instinctively understood that in times of strife and uncertainty, symbols could be more compelling than any substantive executive or legislative act. Eventually, presidential initiatives that could buoy the economy and reduce suffering and unemployment would be necessary. But in the first days of his presidency, these could not counter the almost universal despair and launch the national restoration that would be the foundation for a successful presidential term.

Roosevelt faced a variety of problems that even the staunchest advocates of positive thinking could not confront without doubts about the nation’s future. The most immediate and gravest of these was the economy: the speed and depth of the turn from prosperity to depression that began in 1930.

When Hoover entered the White House in March 1929, he confidently declared, “I have no fears for the future of our country. It is bright with hope.” A year later, the descent into economic disarray was painfully evident, and Hoover’s optimism seemed like empty rhetoric. In a matter of weeks, beginning in late October, stocks on the New York exchange had fallen more than 40 percent in value, a loss of $26 billion, equivalent to a fourth of the country’s gross domestic product. Over the next three years the U.S. economy shrank by 27.8 percent, and the GDP was a little more than half its 1929 value. Deflation matched the drop in stocks and national output, with prices falling between 6 and 10 percent in each of the next three years. Between 1930 and 1933, five thousand banks—20 percent of all the country’s financial institutions—failed, wiping out ninety thousand savings accounts, the loss for many of lifetime investments that generated fears of destitute retirements. As the banks collapsed, hordes of terrified depositors rushed to withdraw their holdings from the institutions one senator described as nothing more than “pawn shops.” The bulk of these banks, which were unaffiliated with the Federal Reserve System (which counted only a third of the country’s banks as members), had nowhere to turn for the on-hand cash that could keep them solvent and assure customers that they would not close their doors. At the end of 1930, when the Federal Reserve System failed to rescue New York’s Bank of United States, the largest private bank in America, the entire national banking system seemed to be in jeopardy.

When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, unemployment stood at an unprecedented 25 percent of the labor force. Prospects of finding work were so bleak that some among the nearly thirteen million jobless had given up looking. Workers’ wages, which stood at $50 billion in 1929, had plummeted to $30 billion by the end of 1932. Desperate for any employment at any sort of wage, men, women, and children accepted as little as two to five cents an hour for as many hours as they could get. Sharecroppers across the southern United States survived on one dollar a day, an income that allowed for a diet more suited to domestic animals. “Emaciated children who never tasted milk,” one newspaper description reads, “wandered the streets, some shoeless in winter, too poorly clad to go to school.” National birth rates declined, as few people wanted to bring children into a world where they would face privation.

Stories of hunger and even starvation haunted the land: Late at night, men kept vigil at restaurants waiting for clean-up crews to throw leftover food in garbage cans, while some hungry families searched city dumps for something to eat. Accounts of former middle-class citizens selling apples on street corners to eke out a living coupled with tales of homelessness, and cities and towns unable to provide the pittance of relief that could sustain the needy through hard times abounded. More than a million desperate Americans—men, women, and children—roamed the country in search of jobs, food, and shelter.

No one could ignore the suffering that reached into every city and rural county across the nation. “Below Riverside Drive in New York City, an encampment of squatters lined the shores of the Hudson from 72nd Street to 110th Street,” the historian William Leuchtenburg writes. “… Along the banks of the Tennessee in Knoxville, in the mudflats under the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey, in abandoned ovens in Pennsylvania’s coal counties, in the huge dumps off Blue Island Avenue in Chicago, the dispossessed took their last stand.” In West Virginia and Kentucky evicted families found shelter in unheated tents in the dead of winter, and stories of people slowly starving amid disintegrating families in New York, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City added to the growing sense of desperation.

American abundance, the conviction that no one in the United States need be impoverished if he was willing to work, was no longer a widespread article of faith. Angry citizens puzzled over the national plenty in food and housing and clothing that was suddenly beyond the reach of honest folks who were humiliated by their dependence and loss of respectability. Franklin Roosevelt captured the national dilemma when he said in his inaugural address that the country’s distress came “from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts,” he declared, invoking the religious imagery that he saw as vital to a national revival. “… Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.”

Some of the anger found an outlet in jokes at Herbert Hoover’s expense. In one, Hoover says to his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, “Lend me a nickel, I want to call a friend.” “Here’s a dime, call all your friends,” Mellon replies. Hoover, who kept insisting that prosperity was right around the corner, became the butt of vaudeville comedians: They would tell their audiences that business was supposedly improving, and then ask “Is Hoover dead?,” or describe the president as the greatest engineer in history, since in just two years he had “drained, ditched, and damned the United States.” His name became synonymous with the worst features of the Depression: “Hoovervilles” for shantytowns; “Hoover blankets” for newspapers used as covering against the cold; “Hoover flags” for “empty pockets turned inside out.” A man with little play of mind and a rigid temperament, Hoover deepened the gulf between him and his critics by accusing them of “unpatriotic” behavior. He understood that the country needed a joke, a song, or story of some kind that would relieve the national despair. But wounded pride prevented him from accepting that presidents were always convenient targets in hard times. No one would compose a rousing anthem to a president leading a nation burdened by a failing economy.

Franklin Roosevelt, refusing to downplay what he called “the dark realities of the moment,” declared in his inaugural that he would address his fellow Americans “with a candor … which the present situation of our people impel. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels … the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. Most important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist,” he added, implicitly reminding people of Hoover’s unconvincing cheerleading, would ignore the disaster that had descended on the nation.

Was the country, then, on the verge of revolution? With the worst economic downturn in U.S. history and no national programs to help the unemployed, sustain the elderly through lifetime pensions, or save banks by guaranteeing the savings of their depositors, millions of Americans felt abandoned by a system of savage capitalism. The head of a national farm bureau federation predicted that without prompt government aid, the countryside would soon erupt in rebellion. A Los Angeles banker warned against a coming upheaval: “The farmers will rise up. So will labor. The Reds will run the country—or maybe the Fascists. Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”

For all the talk of upheaval, little militancy actually existed among the country’s unemployed and impoverished. To be sure, there was a rising resentment and anger against the comfortably privileged’s decrying calls for public relief as calculated to encourage sloth and dependency among the needy. But this anger did not translate into demands for organized action that would redistribute wealth. Instead, afflicted Americans were more apathetic than rebellious, more docile and stoic than indignant with rage at the failure of free enterprise to sustain opportunities for work and prosperity.

However difficult conditions were in 1932–33, they had not been bad enough for long enough to persuade a majority of Americans to abandon the American dream—the idea that national progress was inevitable and that they and their children would enjoy greater creature comforts. In addition, for a country with a dominant tradition of individualism, the unemployed were reluctant to engage in organized group action. If they were out of work, they believed it was their fault. After all, millions of Americans still had work; the unemployed chided themselves for not being among them. And so, jobless men and women clung to the belief that individual initiative remained the best path to the good life. The wisest response to the Depression was not radical change but determined efforts to make ends meet and outdo competitors in the search for a job.

As historian Lawrence Levine has argued, the popular culture of the 1930s continued to reflect traditional views about the virtues of free enterprise by self-made men. The magazine, newspaper, and radio advertisements of the time, for example, emphasized not group action of any kind but individual improvement through using products that could improve your life: “Magazine ads in the early 1930s were filled with pictures of anxious men and women,” Levine writes, “plagued by lack of sleep, lack of confidence, lack of financial means, lack of foresight and planning; beset by the scourge of halitosis, flawed skin, yellow teeth, bad English, caffeine addiction; worried by every fear imaginable.” The path to success was through controlling or ending all these problems with readily available products like Milk of Magnesia (with its appealing acronym, MOM) or particular food and hygiene merchandise. “Jobs could be kept, lovers won, social acceptance assured by bathing with Lifebuoy Soap, shaving with Gillette Razor Blades, drinking Ovaltine [free of caffeine], using Listerine Mouth Wash.”

In the first years of the Depression, the country’s role models were not rebels calling for revolutionary change to replace outdated economic and political habits, but traditional business leaders counseling renewed faith in the virtues of hard work and frugality. “Thrift and prudence,” the president of the National Association of Manufacturers told Americans, were practices that would assure every man’s well-being. Automobile titan Henry Ford decried people’s tendency to shun tough jobs: “There is plenty to do, if people would do it.” The popular 1932 book Cheer Up! condemned the habits of “dishonesty, inefficiency, and general carelessness” that had taken hold in the twenties. Good times would come again with the revival of “moral character,” but only if people had the “courage” to rectify their mistakes through the stoutness of heart it would take to conquer bad habits. And John D. Rockefeller, whose name was synonymous with success and wealth, urged: “Work! Persevere! Be Honest! Save!”

The rhetoric was not lost on millions of suffering Americans. The most popular films and publications of the time embraced the opinion leaders’ advice. The hugely successful Walt Disney film cartoon of 1933, The Three Little Pigs, had audiences singing along with the eldest pig, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Building his house of stones and bricks, he prevented the wolf’s attempt to blow it down. But his younger self-indulgent brothers, who spent their time singing and dancing and took the easier path of building straw houses, learned that there was no defense against the wolf without forethought and “perseverance.”

Similarly, Amos ’n’ Andy, the most popular radio show of 1932–33, with a devoted audience of some forty million Americans, echoed the themes of hard work and frugal living. For fifteen minutes nightly from 7:00 to 7:15, the two black main characters, who had come to Chicago from Georgia, entertained listeners with episodes contrasting the industrious Amos’s life lessons about the virtues of hard work with Andy’s affinity for indolence and quick-rich schemes.

Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest challenge on assuming office was finding ways to combat the Great Depression with effective federal programs that would not agitate public fears of a swing toward collectivism and away from individualism by a president reaching for too much power. As the novelist John Dos Passos described it, “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” The unsettling events of World War I had opened the way to Warren G. Harding’s candidacy, which rested on the promise of “healing,” “normalcy,” and “restoration.” A general national preference for comfortable habits over untried solutions, however, was not the only test of Roosevelt’s political skills. Other enduring problems at home and emerging ones abroad competed for his attention along with the economic crisis.

Not the least of these was the deep cultural divide between urban and rural Americans, or modernists and fundamentalists, as they were described in the 1920s. As some social scientists asserted, the coming economic collapse was partly the result of an imbalance between the farm and urban industrial economies. Instead of a belief in shared prosperity, each side saw themselves benefitting at the expense of the other; they were locked in a contest over whose special interest would be served. If Roosevelt was to find the means to overcome the nation’s crisis, it would have to rest on shared support from every region and every ethnic, religious, and racial group. But tensions across geographic locales and among these many clusters of diverse Americans, who in hard times clung more tenaciously than ever to their group identities, made any prospect of unifying the nation behind White House initiatives especially difficult.

During the 1920s, for the first time in the country’s history, more Americans began living in cities of populations of 100,000 or more than in small towns and on farms. The transformation of the nation into a primarily urban society threatened rural folks who aggressively supported ideas and traditions largely in harmony with their established way of life. The adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 was as much a rejection of city habits as it was of demon liquor. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, Prohibition “was linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life …. It was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”

Millions of immigrants had flooded into the country since the 1870s and taken up residence in northern and midwestern cities. Prohibition was a prelude to the 1924 National Origins Act, which threw up barriers to a continued influx of the southern and Eastern European migrants who had made up the bulk of the roughly twelve million newcomers entering the United States during the previous fifty years. Many of them were Catholics and Jews—Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and other Slavs, to mention just the most prominent nationalities—with religious affiliations and alien languages that made them indigestible masses. They defied the ideal of an American melting pot: Many in the United States doubted that the newcomers could shed old ways or abandon “un-American” habits, as had the northern and western Europeans who had preceded them. To be sure, fears of political radicalism and a competition for jobs in the aftermath of a postwar recession also animated the resistance to allowing more of these immigrants into the country. But the belief that these groups could never be turned into citizens who fully accepted Anglo-Saxon economic and political traditions made them antagonists of assimilated Americans.

If Roosevelt was to give Americans a New Deal, as his presidential campaign promised, he needed to reconcile the urban and rural wings of his Democratic Party. The experience of the 1920s gave little hope that the two sides could find common ground. In 1924, the party had sharply divided over a presidential nominee: The rural wing favored William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, while the urbanites embraced Governor Al Smith of New York, a Catholic with an unmistakable New York accent. A deadlocked convention took 103 ballots before it could settle on John W. Davis, a West Virginia native and Wall Street lawyer. Although the party would nominate Smith in 1928, he suffered an overwhelming defeat in the national election, signaling the extent to which the country remained split between cities and towns, Catholics and Protestants, southern and Eastern Europeans and assimilated voters. For “the older America,” a Southern newspaper editor wrote, Smith’s defeat meant that the country’s “Anglo-Saxon stock” would not be “overturned and humiliated.” The “small communities and rural regions” had “risen up in wrath” against the country’s “great cities.”

No group in the America of the 1920s reflected the antimodern side of the divide more clearly than the Ku Klux Klan. By that decade the Southern, antiblack Klansmen of the post–Civil War era had morphed into a national movement not only in rural communities but in cities as well, where economic imperatives had driven numerous Americans from the countryside. The Klansmen were no longer just a society of vigilantes fighting to preserve Southern racial purity, but a movement fighting to preserve traditional American mores against the social and political disruptions of a polyglot, more materialist, and less spiritual nation abandoning its old-time religion. Hiram Wesley Evans, the Klan’s leader, spoke for millions of Americans when he complained that Nordic Americans had become strangers in their own land: “The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. Those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule.” Evans advocated a return of power to “the everyday, not highly cultured … but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.”

The depths and extent of the national divide facing Roosevelt had registered on the nation in 1925 when the state of Tennessee took John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, into court for violating a statute against teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow, a prominent Chicago attorney who spoke for urban America, came to Dayton, Tennessee, to defend Scopes from the “rubes,” “hicks,” and “yokels,” as sophisticates dubbed them, who seemed hopelessly opposed to the realities of a changing world. William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraska Populist and three-time Democratic presidential nominee, who defended Tennessee’s attempt to preserve biblical wisdom from the “anti-religious, immoral teachings” of modernists like Scopes and Darrow, was ridiculed for his pronouncements during testimony on the state’s behalf. The national press coverage of the trial, which ended in a one-dollar fine of Scopes, deepened the impression that America was two irreconcilable countries. Muting the resentments of the fundamentalists and convincing urban leaders that helping farmers and small towns was essential to the national well-being was an imposing challenge to a new president in the darkest days of the Depression.

For all their devotion to traditional habits, however, modernizing influences did have some appeal to rural Americans. As Lawrence Levine has shown, 1920s popular culture reveals a nation that was drawn in two directions at once. No national figure reflected popular ambivalence more clearly than Charles Lindbergh, the “lone eagle,” whose solo flight across the Atlantic to Paris in 1925 had made him a universally admired hero. For Americans from every walk of life, he represented the “self-sufficient individual of the past,” a pioneer like the timeless folk heroes Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. Lindbergh was the product “not of the city but of the farm, not of schools and formal training but of individual initiative and self-contained genius.” At the same time, though, he demonstrated the triumph of the new technology that provided the wherewithal for his successful flight. Lindbergh gave simultaneous expression to the popular affinity for “the past and the present, the individual and society.”

Clues to the state of the popular mind can be found as well in the films and comic strips of the decade. Movies that reached millions of Americans and dramatized “the new woman [flapper], the new morality, the new youth, the new consumption” also celebrated traditional American virtues. Films like Forbidden Fruit, Flapper Wives, Madness of Youth, Modern Maidens, and Love Mart titillated audiences with risqué portrayals, but they consistently ended with the triumph of familiar moral standards. Flappers invariably entered lives of “middle-class respectability.” The hugely popular The Ten Commandments (1923), for example, was divided between the story of Moses and one in a modern setting in which the commandments were tested in a competition between brothers. Although the wayward brother would eventually come to disaster, his gains along the way were enough to satisfy audiences attracted both to the hedonism of the 1920s and traditional moral verities. As for comic strips, which also reached a vast national audience, Levine points out that they emphasized old-fashioned “steadiness” and celebrated “the average.” But they were featured in newspapers that “heralded the new … and called for change and progress.” These were the two halves of “the cultural equation that characterized the United States throughout the decade.”

In 1933 the stalled domestic economy demanded Washington’s primary attention, but rumblings of trouble abroad could also not escape the attention of a president responsible for America’s long-term safety.

After World War I, the failure of Woodrow Wilson’s inspiring promises—a peace without victors, a war to end all wars, and a war to make the world safe for democracy—frustrated the millions of Americans who had assented to the bloodletting as a great crusade. But the horrors of trench warfare, which cost ten million lives, including fifty thousand Americans in just eighteen months, and was brilliantly captured in the 1930 film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, fueled American isolationism and antimilitarism. The arms manufacturers and bankers who profited from the war became known as “merchants of death.” The fighting and vindictive peace convinced a majority of the population that European and Asian conflicts were of little consequence to the United States and certainly not worth the sacrifice of blood and treasure. The failure of the Associated Powers, as they were called, to pay their war debts to the United States further incensed Americans, who now wished to avoid future overseas involvements. In an era when the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and weak neighbors to the north and south seemed to ensure safety from armed assaults, the country remained convinced that isolationism best served the national interest. Although Britain and France did not enjoy similar geographical advantages in assuring their security, their wartime losses generated a shared affinity for pacifism.

The hope that the 1914–18 conflict had convinced people everywhere of the futility of war found clear expression in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Secretary Aristide Briand. The agreement outlawed war, but without any enforcement provisions, it was no more than a symbolic bow to Wilson’s idealism. Some contemporary critics dismissed it as a harmless international kiss or a greeting card from Santa Claus. The nationally syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann predicted that “the effort to abolish war can come to nothing unless there are created international institutions, an international public opinion, an international conscience which will play the part which war has always played in human affairs.”

Nothing initially gave the lie to the pacifist impulse more clearly than developments in East Asia. In 1921–22, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, seeing Asia as the likely battleground for another world conflict, presided over a Washington Arms Conference that agreed to Nine-Power, Five-Power, and Four-Power treaties. These agreements endorsed naval arms limitations and the preservation of China’s territorial integrity, and pledged Britain, France, Japan, and the United States to consult one another in response to any East Asian crisis.

None of these commitments, however, deterred Japan from seizing control of China’s resource-rich province of Manchuria and setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931–32. The League of Nations, which had been established as a collective security deterrent to aggression, refused to impose meaningful sanctions on Japan, and the United States was equally lax in punishing Tokyo for treaty violations. The closest Washington came to a protest was Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson’s doctrine refusing to recognize Japan’s conquest. Reluctant to undermine Japan’s position as a bulwark against Soviet Communist expansion in East Asia or to provoke a crisis that might lead to war, Hoover and Stimson confined themselves to a verbal rebuke of the Japanese. Their caution reflected the widespread opposition in the United States to anything threatening another overseas conflict and acknowledged America’s focus on its economic collapse: “The President is so absorbed with the domestic situation,” Stimson noted in a diary, “that he told me frankly that he can’t think very much now of foreign affairs.”

Yet some Americans worried that the country was blinding itself to the dangers that unchecked aggression in Asia or Europe represented. In 1933, however, U.S. opinion leaders worried less about an attack on American soil than the likelihood that authoritarian regimes would command the future. Events in Russia, Italy, Germany, and across Asia and Latin America suggested that the world was becoming unsafe for democracy. The economic collapse that had circled the globe by 1933 demonstrated the limitations of free enterprise in dealing with the Depression. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, famously made the trains run on time, and Russia’s state-managed economy seemed more productive than America’s private markets. In January, when the New York Times reported that Joseph Stalin, Soviet Russia’s Communist dictator, told his Central Committee that a Five-Year Plan had tripled Soviet industrial output by 219 percent compared with a downturn in the United States of 56 percent, it gave advocates of centralized economic control a compelling argument.

Nothing was more troubling to democracy’s advocates in Britain, France, and the United States than the 1933 collapse of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s experiment with democracy, and the rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi or National Socialist Party. Exploiting a decade of resentment toward the Allies, who had imposed a punitive treaty on Germany, Hitler had convinced millions of Germans that Weimar’s republican leaders had betrayed the German army by agreeing to an unnecessary surrender. He further appealed to German national pride with denunciations of the despised Versailles Treaty, which had placed the blame for World War I on Germany, compelling reparation payments that had led to runaway inflation in 1923. France’s occupation of the Rhineland dictated by the treaty, coupled with lost territories in the East, created a witch’s brew of rage that Hitler took advantage of in bringing himself to power. His appeal to ancient antagonisms to Jews as the architects of German miseries gave him an additional hold on public support.

Weimar’s fall deepened convictions in the United States that only “a strong executive making unpopular decisions” could rescue the country from its current plight. “Popular government,” Walter Lippmann wrote in a column, “is unworkable except under the leadership and discipline of a strong national executive. Any group of 500 men, whether they are called congressmen or anything else, is an unruly mob unless it comes under the strict control of a single will.” Others shared his belief. The conservative American Legion declared “existing political methods” insufficient to deal with the national crisis. Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler praised the greater effectiveness of “totalitarian societies,” which he believed had leaders of “far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage” than electoral systems.

At the start of 1933, there was little to give Americans eager to preserve traditional habits of mind and action hope that the country could avoid radical change. If Herbert Hoover, the man many saw as the greatest economic manager of their lifetimes, could not restore the national economy to sustained growth, what could succeed except some untried reform experiment?

The prospect of a Franklin Roosevelt presidency presiding over a period of uncertain change generated little optimism among some of America’s most astute observers. Although the ninety-one-year-old justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had said that Theodore Roosevelt had a first-class temperament but a second-class mind, the observation had entered into the popular discussion as applying to his distant cousin Franklin, as well. Hoover dismissed his rival for the highest office as a “chameleon on plaid,” and New York Times journalist Elmer Davis observed that Franklin Roosevelt was the kind of “man who thinks that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a corkscrew.” Lippmann as well complained of Roosevelt’s equivocating, decrying his efforts “to be such different things to such different men.” In addition, he belittled Roosevelt’s intellectual limitations, simply saying he didn’t “have a very good mind.” He had never come to grips with the great issues of the day and was no more than a “kind of amiable boy scout.”

Mindful of his critics’ complaints, Roosevelt would take much future pleasure in confounding his harshest detractors. They could not foresee the political mastery and competence he would bring to bear in dealing with the Great Depression and world crisis that shadowed his coming years in office. When he promised that he and the Democrats would become prophets of a new order, no one could imagine the extent to which they would transform the federal government over the next twelve years by creating a welfare state and making the United States into the world’s greatest power.

Robert Dallek

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

A Political Life

ALLEN LANE

Preface

PROLOGUE

Everything to Fear