The Days Ahead Will Be Crowded Days

My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.

An exhausted President Grover Cleveland, addressing five-year-old Franklin Roosevelt

It’s clear why Jean Edward Smith is a renowned biographer. His style is fluid, the facts precisely researched and I found he had a great touch of how and when to use footnotes rather than shoehorn tangential facts into the text. It makes it a sure bet I will circle back to his book on Grant and has me looking forward to his book on Eisenhower, which has always been on the quest reading list. 

I’m especially indebted to Mr. Smith because of the light he shed on shifts in the platforms of America’s two major political parties as FDR took office. Understanding when and how this evolution came about was one of my main goals when starting this presidential reading project. To quote the author directly and at length, “In 1874 Ulysses S Grant, with his veto of the the inflation bill, had weaned the Republican party from its agrarian, antislavery roots and converted it into the political vehicle of American business. In 1932 FDR broke the conservatives’ hold on the Democratic party and made it the instrument of liberal reform. The 1936 election furthered this shift, with FDR forming an odd coalition of big-city bosses, the white South, farmers and labor, Jews and Irish Catholics, ethnic minorities, and African Americans. Leaving the Democratic fold were the hard-money, pro-business crowd. Blacks voted Democratic for the first time, not because FDR was a civil rights leader (he was not) but because the New Deal helped blacks who were disproportionately affected by the Depression.” I tip my fedora to you, sir.

FDR is a fascinating character study. He wanted a huge family but then didn’t really pay attention to it. He was wealthy beyond his means but managed to spend almost every trust fund penny. He came from high society but did more for the “common man” than almost any president before him. He could be bold and visionary but also blinded by arrogance and stubborn to a fault. He knew how to politic and how to bullshit. He knew how to choose the right people (mostly) to lead his administration and how to leverage the media to connect with the electorate. Despite being the progenitor of the most ambitious social welfare system in the country’s history, he had a dismal record on civil rights; which is to say he didn’t have one at all. Still, it is obvious why he remains a favorite president of American historians and American nostalgia. Affable and good natured, brazen and cocksure, FDR had boundless optimism that everything was going to work out starlight. 

There is a lot to say about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Certainly too much to do him justice in one essay. The average length of recommended books about him usually come in around 600+ pages and many of those are just about a few years of his life. Since I am working with a modest piece of literary real estate, let’s have a rundown of those infamous “First 100 Days” that made him a legend even before there was a world war to win, shall we?

FDR’s First 100 Days aka The New Deal: 15 major pieces of legislation and what they meant in simple terms

1. Emergency Banking Act – March 9: From the introduction on the House floor to the president’s signature was less than six hours! FDR signed it with a dime-store pen, demonstrating urgency over ceremony. The act closed banks nationwide for four days so a) people wouldn’t withdraw all their savings and cause a wave of bank closures and b) Congress had time to reopen solvent banks, reorganize failing ones and shitcan ones beyond repair. With renewed confidence in the monetary system, over $1 Billion dollars flowed back into bank vaults when they reopened and the Dow Jones saw what remains to this day the largest one-day percentage price increase ever.
2. Revision of the Volstead Act – March 16: Let the beer flow once again! While it didn’t fully repeal Prohibition (the 21st Amendment was already in the works to do that) this revision re-legalized the manufacture and sale of alcohol. An easy way to get the public to support your policies? Turn the taps back on!
3. Economy Act – March 20: Cut federal spending by $243 Million dollars, largely via reducing salaries and pensions to federal workers (including vindictive Supreme Court Justices) and slashing veteran benefits. The Act was short-lived, unpopular and had little effect on the economic situation as a whole. But hey, he gave it a shot.
4. Civilian Conservation Corps – March 31: The most popular and probably most well known of all the New Deal programs, the CCC provided manual labor jobs for young, single men, especially in rural areas. Over three million young men took part in the nine-year program and the lion’s share of their salaries were sent home to their struggling families. Notable alumni of the program include baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, sound-breaking pilot Chuck Yeager and actors Walter Matthau, Robert Mitchum and Raymond Burr.
5. Federal Emergency Relief Act – May 12: Similar to the CCC and a forerunner of the Works Progress Administration, the FERA gave jobs to unskilled, unemployed workers via federal grants to state and local governments. Jobs included construction, commissions for the arts and  consumer good productions.
6. Agricultural Adjustment Act – May 12: Also know as the Farm Relief Bill, the AAA used federal funding to implement various methods to reduce farm surpluses and keep prices high. While it kept prices up, it often meant destroying food in one part of the country while people in another part were quite literally starving. An inelegant solution to be sure, but another attempt in earnest to help.
7. Emergency Farm Mortgage Act – May 12: Hundreds of millions of dollars of loans were made available exclusively for saving near-foreclosure farms at low interest rates and liberal repayment terms.
8. Tennessee Valley Authority – May 18: Created to aid a particularly hard-hit area of the country during the Depression, the TVA provided navigation, flood control, energy production, fertilizer manufacturing and economic development for the region. The history of the TVA would make a good article some day…
9. Truth-in-Securities Act – May 27: Federally regulated reports on stocks and set a standard for publishing actual profits and losses so investors wouldn’t throw their money at misleading information. Paved the way for the Securities and Exchange Commission a year later, which is still used today.
10. Abrogation of gold clauses in public and private contracts – June 5: Put a freeze on paying out gold similar to the bank holiday in the Emergency Banking Act. This one got hit hard with law suits and was the subject of at least three Supreme Court cases (all ruling in favor of the government), but at the time enacted it helped the U.S. maintain a steady level of gold reserves.
11. Home Owner’s Loan Act – June 13: Provided funds for mortgage assistance to homeowners and refinancing options to those that needed them.
12. Glass-Steagall Banking Act – June 15: Separated commercial and investment banking. It also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, protecting individual savings in federally approved banks.
13. Farm Credit Act – June 15: Formalized and expanded access to capital for farmers of all types and created a reliable system of credit for a perennially cash poor sector.
14. Railroad Coordination Act – June 15: Enforced consolidation of railroads, coordination of the transportation grid and reforms in railroad rates.
15. National Industrial Recovery Act – June 16, 1933: Regulated industry for fair wages and prices. It also created the Public Works Administration to build major infrastructure projects. However, the NIRA didn’t last long: FDR’s own review commission thought it enabled monopolies and the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1935.

Talk about a whirlwind session of Congress. While all these laws were enacted to kick off FDR’s presidency, many would be challenged for years to come in federal court, with a mixed bag of rulings. Some other notable bills outside the First 100 Days included the creation of the Civil Works Administration, which was formed to utilize underused funds from the Public Works Administration and get as many people as possible through the winter of 1933 with temp jobs. Also of note was the Social Security Act of 1935. Like most legislation, it was not ideal. FDR wanted the benefit to be universal but it only covered 60% of the labor force. Farmers and domestics were left out along with teachers, nurses and companies with less than 10 people. (These would-be inclusions were largely torpedoed by the Ways & Means Committee who saw issues getting the payments collected from certain classes.)  

Exclusionary legislation is a prime segue into a section I’d be remiss not to mention. In the rush to get the New Deal over the finish line, sacrifices were made. One of the most onerous (one which still blows my fucking mind) was federal anti-lynching laws being blocked by Southern state’s rights advocates. FDR chose to let it ride, explaining to the secretary of the NAACP, “I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places in most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass…I just can’t take that risk.” That’s right folks, Southern white politicians used the crisis of the Great Depression to ensure that lynching black people could not become a federal crime.

During the 12 years FDR was president not one piece of civil rights legislation became law. He did sign Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government, but it was largely to quell the threat of a 100,000 man march on Washington. Though, to be fair, as noted by the author above, the New Deal had a tremendously positive impact on African-Americans. The Great Depression, as all economic slumps do, disproportionately affected communities of color and minorities. The New Deal was a major boon for those most adversely hit by it. Roosevelt still could have done a lot more for disadvantages communities directly, but the rising tide of social programs did lift all ships.

A person could spend a career writing and teaching about Franklin Roosevelt. There was that time he tried to pack the Supreme Court by adding a Justice for every member currently over 70 (there were six) because he didn’t like how they were ruling on his New Deal program. There was FDR’s role in starting the March of Dimes, originally created to find a cure for polio and the reason Roosevelt’s head is on the diminutive coin. And there is no shortage of ink spent on the history of progressive legislation left in his wake: rural electrification was greatly expanded; Social Security, unemployment benefits, collective bargaining agreements, and regulation on hours and wages remain in place today; the GI Bill educated an entire generation back from war who wouldn’t have been able to afford college prior.

From “The Day in Infamy” to his extra-marital affairs, leadership in the crucial conflict of a century to visits to his Hyde Park home by the King and Queen of England, there is an immense amount to learn about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Some presidents barely left enough of a legacy to fill a whole book. FDR could fill a library. He wasn’t my favorite president on the biography quest, but I came to understand his indelible impact on the American psyche. Next time you cuddle up to the fireside, consider enjoying it with a scotch and a weighty book about America’s 32nd president.

Trivia

• Reagan voted for FDR 4 times.
• Potentially got the polio virus in July 1921 at a Boy Scout Jamboree he was leading up the Hudson River. 
  • Dr. William Keen was staying near the Roosevelt’s summer place in Maine, the doctor who had secretly operated on Cleveland’s mouth cancer, and he thought FDR has a blood clot in the spine that needed heavy massages. 
  • In the Journal of Medical Biography in Oct 2003, Dr. Armond Goldman argued FDR might have had Guillian-Barre syndrome, not polio. It was a moot point either way; there were no effective treatments for either in 1921.
  • FDR organized the March of Dimes in 1938 as the principal fundraising arm of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. These funds contributed heavily to Dr. Jonas Salk’s research that eventually developed a polio vaccine in 1955, ten years after FDR’s death. 
• In 1907, joined Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn as an non-salaried apprentice. Carter had argued for the government before the Supreme Court; Ledyard helped JP Morgan stem the Panic of 1907 (and acted as counsel for Morgan Bank, US Steel, and later Big Tobacco before the Supreme Court); Milburn was counsel for Standard Oil in an antitrust case, clerked for Grover Cleveland and it was at his house in Buffalo that McKinley died and FDR’s cousin, Theodore, was swore in. 
• First chief state executive to suggest implementing unemployment insurance.
• His campaign song was going to be Anchors Aweigh due to his navy days, but his campaign team thought it sounded funereal. “Happy Days are Here Again” was chosen to associate a lively change. 
• Frances Perkins became Secretary of Labor, the first woman in the Cabinet.
• Hattie Caraway was the first women voted into the US Senate in 1932 (Arkansas).
• First president to visit Canada while in office.
• When Albert Einstein arrived in the US in 1933, FDR had the scientist and his wife over to the White House for dinner where they conversed in German. Roosevelt was also fluent in French.
• All four of his adult sons (one was lost in infancy) fought in WWII – James in the Pacific theater; Elliott in Europe flying photo recon; FDR Jr. in the Navy where he won a Purple Heart; and John as a navy lieutenant also in the Pacific. 
• FDR was the first president since James Monroe to serve four years (1932-36) without making a Supreme Court appointment. He made up for it eventually. He filled 8 seats during his presidency.
• Flew to Casablanca to meet the other leaders during WWII – the first time a president flew while in office. 
• Once the Japanese became belligerents abroad, those living in America immediately came under fire via Executive Order 9066, signed two months after Pearl Harbor. The order forcibly removed persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast, including some 80,000 natural born citizens. A direct violation of the 14th amendment and the Supreme Court precedent case of Wong Kim Ark v United States in 1898, the order was struck down, but not before many Japanese-Americans lost their homes along with an estimated $5 billion in assets.
• More medical malpractice – his personal physician refused to believe FDR’s outrageous blood pressure mattered, even with multiple other physicians telling him it was life-threatening. 
• When Churchill was staying with FDR at Hyde Park the Prime Minister got out of a bath stark naked as Roosevelt had wheeled himself in there unawares. When apologizing, Churchill said, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”
  • On Dec 26, 1941 Churchill became the first foreigner since Lafayette in 1824 to address a joint session of Congress.
• The first presidential library?!?!? Where will this argument end?!?!

Follow-up Reading

• Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of FDR by H. W. Brands
• No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the 100 Days that Created Modern America by Adam Cohen

**For anyone disappointed with the lack of WWII discussion in this post, fear not. I’ll be giving that conflict substantial blog space in the future.**