Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (57 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
What were the New Deal and the Hundred Days?
When he took the Democratic nomination with a ringing acceptance speech, Roosevelt promised the people a “new deal.” In his inaugural, he promised a special session of Congress to deal with the national economic emergency. He came through on both promises.
The legislative centerpiece of Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, the New Deal was a revolution in the American way of life. A revolution was required because Roosevelt’s election did not signal a turnaround for the depressed American economy. Between Election Day and the inauguration, the country scraped bottom. Bank closings continued as long lines of panicky depositors lined up to get at their savings. Governors around the country began to declare “bank holidays” in their states. On March 5, his first day in the White House, Roosevelt did the same thing, calling for a nationwide four-day bank holiday. That night he talked to Americans about how banking worked in the first of his “fireside chats”—radio addresses aimed at educating the public, soothing fears, and restoring the confidence and optimism of a nation that had little left.
Then he called Congress to a special emergency session. From March through June, the One Hundred Days, the U.S. Congress passed an extraordinary series of measures, sometimes without even reading them. Roosevelt’s approach was, “Take a method and try it. If it fails, try another.”
The result was the “alphabet soup” of new federal agencies, some of them successful, some not.
Like the other President Roosevelt of an earlier era, FDR looked to the nation’s human resources and created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided jobs for young men from eighteen to twenty-five years old in works of reforestation and other conservation.
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was created to raise farm prices by paying farmers to take land out of production. This plan had two major drawbacks. The nation was outraged to see pigs slaughtered and corn plowed under by government decree to push up farm prices while there were so many people starving. And thousands of mostly black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, lowest on the economic pecking order, were thrown off the land when farmers took their land out of production.
The object of even greater controversy, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federally run hydroelectric power program, was one of the most radical departures. Under the TVA Act, the federal government created a huge experiment in social planning. The TVA not only produced hydroelectric power, but built dams, produced and sold fertilizer, reforested the area, and developed recreational lands. (The TVA also created the Oak Ridge facility, which later provided much of the research and development of the atomic bomb.) It was an unprecedented involvement of government in what had once been the exclusive—even sacred—domain of private enterprise, and was wildly condemned as communistic.
The Hundred Days also saw creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), designed to protect savings; the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced mortgages and prevented foreclosures; and a Federal Securities Act to begin policing the activities of Wall Street. In 1934, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created, and Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy, a notorious speculator in his day, to be its first chief. The thinking was that Kennedy would know all the tricks that any crooked brokers might try to pull. In May 1933, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was created and given $500 million in federal relief funds for the most seriously destitute, the beginning of a federal welfare program.
One of the final acts of the Hundred Days was passage of the most controversial New Deal bill, the National Industrial Recovery Act, aimed at stimulating industrial production. This act was a huge attempt at government control of production, labor, and costs. To gain the acceptance of business and labor, it contained goodies for both. It allowed manufacturers to create “business codes,” a legal form of price fixing that would have been forbidden under antitrust laws while giving workers minimum wages, maximum hours, and collective bargaining rights.
To its organizers, the act took on the trappings of a holy crusade. To oversee the law, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was created, with its Blue Eagle symbol. Companies and merchants pledged to the NRA displayed the eagle and the motto “We Do Our Part,” and consumers were advised to buy only from those places that displayed the NRA symbol. Massive marches and parades in support of the program took place across the country. A million people marched in an NRA parade in New York City.
But abuses by industry were widespread. Prices were fixed high, and production was limited in most cases, creating the opposite of the intended effect of increasing jobs and keeping prices low. The NRA did spur labor union recruitment, and the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis (1880–1969) grew to half a million members. A barrel-chested dynamo, Lewis then joined with other unions to form the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which splintered off from the conservative AFL in 1938 but soon was its rival in numbers and influence.
The first Hundred Days came to an end with passage of the NIRA bill, but the Great Depression was still far from over. Yet in this short time, Roosevelt had not just created a series of programs designed to prop up the economy. His New Deal marked a turning point in America as decisive as 1776 or 1860. It was nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of the federal government from a smallish body that had limited impact on the average American into a huge machinery that left few Americans untouched. For better or worse, Roosevelt had begun to inject the federal government into American life on an unprecedented scale, a previously unthinkable reliance on government to accomplish tasks that individuals and the private economy were unwilling or unable to do. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, there is little in modern America that is unaffected by the decisions made in Washington. It is difficult to imagine a time when a president, creating the federal machinery designed to carry the country out of crisis, was viewed as a Communist leading America down the road to Moscow.
The New Dealers worked overtime, but the Depression went on. While production and consumption rose, they remained well below precrash levels. The unemployment figures never fell much below 10 percent, and they were much higher in some cities. The mid-thirties brought the droughts and winds that created the Dust Bowl of the plains states, sending thousands of farmers off the foreclosed farms and on the road. This was the woeful exodus immortalized by John Steinbeck in
The Grapes of Wrath
.
With the “try anything” approach, Roosevelt set up new programs. For each program that died or failed to do its job, he was ready to create a new one. When the Supreme Court unanimously killed the NRA as unconstitutional, Roosevelt tried the WPA. The Works Progress Administration, created in 1935 with Harry Hopkins (1890–1946) as its head, was set up for federal construction projects. (In 1939 its name was changed to the Work Projects Administration.) Critics immediately called the WPA a “make-work boondoggle,” and it provoked the common image of the workman leaning on a shovel. But under Hopkins, the WPA was responsible for 10 percent of new roads in the United States, as well as new hospitals, city halls, courthouses, and schools. It built a port in Brownsville, Texas; roads and bridges connecting the Florida Keys with the mainland; and a string of local water supply systems. Its large-scale construction projects included the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River connecting New York and New Jersey; the Triborough Bridge system linking Manhattan to Long Island; the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C.; the East River Drive (later renamed the FDR Drive) in Manhattan; the Fort Knox gold depository; and the Bonneville and Boulder dams. (Boulder Dam was renamed Hoover Dam by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1946.) Apart from building projects, the WPA set up artistic projects that employed thousands of musicians, writers, and artists.
But Roosevelt’s greatest contribution may have been psychological rather than simply legislative. He possessed a singular, natural gift for restoring confidence, rebuilding optimism, and creating hope where all hope seemed to have been lost. Herbert Hoover had embarked on some of the same paths that FDR took toward recovery. But the stern, patrician Hoover, totally removed from the people, lacked any of the sense of the common person that FDR possessed naturally, despite being a child of wealth and privilege. His “fireside chats” over the radio gave listeners the distinct impression that Roosevelt was sitting in their parlors or living rooms speaking to them personally. While Roosevelt’s name was unmentionable in conservative Republican households, where he was referred to as “that man,” he was practically deified by the larger American public, including blacks, who began to desert the Republican Party, their home since Reconstruction days, for Roosevelt’s Democrats.
Why did Franklin D. Roosevelt try to “pack” the Supreme Court?
The New Deal and the NRA in particular were bitter medicine to conservative Wall Streeters and corporate leaders, most of them Republicans. To them, they reeked of socialism and Communism. Even though things were getting better, obscene whispers and cruel jokes were common about the crippled Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor: Eleanor had given FDR gonorrhea, which she had contracted from a Negro; she was going to Moscow to learn unspeakable sexual practices. Some of the rumors were tinged with anti-Semitism, like the one that Roosevelt was descended from Dutch Jews who had changed their names. Roosevelt was undaunted by the critics. He was interested only in results. And the larger public seemed to agree.
The first proof came in the 1934 midterm elections. Traditionally the party in power loses strength between presidential contests. Instead, the Democrats tightened their control of both the House and the Senate. In the presidential race of 1936, Roosevelt’s popularity climbed to new heights. He told Raymond Moley, the Columbia professor who led Roosevelt’s “brain trust” of academic advisers, that there was only one issue in the campaign of 1936: “It’s myself,” said Roosevelt. “The people must either be for me or against me.” Opposed by Kansas Governor Alf Landon, a progressive Republican, FDR racked up an overwhelming reelection victory with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, carrying every state but Maine and Vermont. After the election, someone suggested FDR balance the budget by selling the two states to Canada.
Following his reelection, FDR seemed at the peak of his power and prestige. But he was about to be dealt the most crushing defeat of his political life. A year after it was created, the National Recovery Administration was killed. In
Schechter v. United States
(May 1935), the Supreme Court, dominated by aging, conservative Republicans, ruled that the NRA was unconstitutional. This was followed by Court decisions that killed off the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Securities and Exchange Act, a coal act, and a bankruptcy act. In all, the conservative judges shot down eleven New Deal measures. Emboldened by his recent victory, Roosevelt went on the offensive against the Court. Reviving an old proposal that would allow the president to appoint an additional justice for each member reaching the age of seventy, Roosevelt wanted to “pack” the Supreme Court with judges who would be sympathetic to New Deal legislation.
It was, perhaps, the greatest misjudgment of his career. Even when one of the older judges retired and Roosevelt was able to appoint Hugo Black, a New Dealer, FDR remained committed to the bill. But he was almost alone. Alarmed by the measure’s threat to the system and constitutional checks and balances, the Senate beat it back. It was Roosevelt’s first loss in Congress in five years, and it opened a small floodgate of other defeats. In 1938, Roosevelt, looking to avenge his Court measure defeat, targeted a number of southern senators who had opposed his Supreme Court plan for defeat in the midterm elections. The strategy backfired, resulting in a costly Election Day defeat for Roosevelt’s handpicked candidates. Roosevelt’s once-invincible armor seemed to be cracking.
But even after the court-packing debacle and his 1938 political defeats, Roosevelt remained the most powerful man in the country and perhaps the world. Only one man might have rivaled FDR’s power at the time. Ironically, he had come to office in March 1933, a few days before Roosevelt’s first inauguration. Like Roosevelt, he had come to power largely because he offered a desperate nation a means of dealing with its economic crisis. He, too, would have the young men of his country go into the countryside in a uniformed group like Roosevelt’s CCC. But these young men would be called Brownshirts. When the Reichstag (the German parliament building) burned to the ground in February 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was only the chancellor of Germany, appointed to the post by an aging and weak German president Hindenburg. Blaming the Communists for the fire that destroyed the seat of Germany’s parliament, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had the scapegoat it needed to unite the country behind its cause and its fuehrer.
Roosevelt may have lost the fight with the “nine old men” of the Supreme Court in 1937, but he was looking to Europe and what surely would be much bigger battles.
What happened to Amelia Earhart?
After Charles Lindbergh, the most famous flier of the day was Amelia Earhart (1897–1937). Born in Kansas, she graduated high school in Chicago in 1915 and became something of a wanderer, taking up flying along the way. In 1928, she flew across the Atlantic with two men, becoming overnight an outspoken American heroine and a model of “rugged feminism.” When she married the publisher George Putnam in 1931, Earhart made it clear that she would continue her career. By 1932 she had set the record for a transatlantic flight and was going on to pile up an impressive list of achievements.
