Roosevelt’s Life & Times

People hoped for much, but expected a lot less, from the man with the powerful shoulders and crippled legs who stood before them, tightly gripping the rostrum, on that cloud-hung, windy March 4 in 1933. They had not voted for him; they had voted against Herbert Hoover. They knew him as a pretty good governor of New York, a man with a strong-chinned patrician face and the magic name of Roosevelt, a man with a broad Harvard accent and the wealthy, aloof heritage of Groton and Crum Elbow.

Walter Lippmann had written: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything. The notion . . . that Wall Street fears him is preposterous. . . . [He] is no crusader. …’. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

Pundit Lippmann overlooked the impetus of one episode on Roosevelt’s life, because few talked aloud about the crippling paralysis that came in 1921 and Roosevelt’s courageous comeback.

Standing before the nation’s Capitol on March 4, 1933, he said, “This nation asks for action, arid action now.”

So began the exhilarating Hundred Days. The banks were summarily closed, but were reopened soon and people were reassured by the vibrant, intimate, confident voice of the President, coming to them . in the first of the famed radio “Fireside Chats.” Congress, caught in the electric mood, convened in special session and passed bills, hardly looking at them, written by college professors. Beer came back. The 18th Amendment was repealed.

New emergency agencies, with impressive titles and alphabetical nicknames, sprang up, and more were to come : PWA, NRA, HOLC, SEC. CCC meant unemployed boys from grey Brooklyn streets in the green Pacific Northwest woods; PWA meant big concrete dams rising on the Tennessee and the Columbia. WPA meant leaf-raking and boondoggling — and succor for the hungry. A big song hit of 1932 was Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? In 1933, people whistled Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? “Kerensky.”

Editorialists spoke of the “Roosevelt Revolution,” and one Dr. Wirt of Gary, Ind. had a brief vogue when he discovered that Roosevelt was really a Kerensky in Brooks Brothers clothing. But it only looked like a revolution. Actually New Deal roots were deep in Populism, and in the Wisconsin of the La Follettes ; its very name was a blend of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” and Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal.” As Franklin Roosevelt once said: “If it was a revolution, it was a peaceful one.”

Inevitably, the first bloom wore off. Many a disciple, alarmed by the New Deal’s hunger for power, and by the growing debt, broke with Roosevelt: men like Raymond Moley, the Blue Eagle’s swash buckling Hugh Johnson, Lew Douglas. Republicans spoke words like “regimentation,” “bureaucracy”; many a thoughtful man repeated them.

Leftists, too, discovered that Roosevelt would listen to them, but not always follow them: he played by ear. Beneath these doubts, millions of plain people were all for him. They liked his jauntiness, admired his ability to make tough decisions by what often seemed to be sheer intuition — and then sleep peacefully. They idolized him as the leader who would always look after their interests.

Their devotion, along with the organizing genius of city bosses and union leaders, and the one-party tradition of the South, formed a coalition that kept Roosevelt in power longer than any man in U.S. history. In 1934, the year of Dillinger, the Dionnes, Primo Camera and It Happened One Night, the party in power actually gained seats in Congress, the first time in an off-year election since 1902. In 1936, only Maine and Vermont voted Republican.

“Forces of Selfishness.” All this was heady stuff for a President; and the angle of Franklin Roosevelt’s cigaret-holder, always a barometer of his mood, tilted higher & higher. The title of an F.D.R. book bespoke the optimism of the planners: On Our Way. Franklin Roosevelt saw his 1936 election asa mandate: the “forces of selfishness . . . the princes of privilege” would discover that they had “met their master.”

In one of his most ill-advised maneuvers, he took on the Supreme Court. Though he failed to pack it, he forced it to go easier on New Deal measures. In a way, he won, but many were disturbed by his cynical, indirect attack on “a subject of delicacy . . . the question of aged or infirm judges.”

Many were troubled, too, by the lawless 1937 sitdown strikes, and the Government’s tacit acquiescence in them. They were alarmed as well by the 1937-38 business setback (euphemistically known as a “recession”) which made people ask: is there no other remedy but constant pump-priming and debt-piling? Loyal Democrats took fright at Harry Hopkins’ “purge” that failed. The New Deal could be thankful that the 1938 election was for Congressmen only, and not a Presidential year.

The Paperhanger. That was the low point, but Franklin Roosevelt had new highs ahead. He had come to office just 33 days after Adolf Hitler, the Austrian paperhanger, had taken over Germany. At first, Franklin Roosevelt’s inclinations were at least partly isolationist: he scuttled the 1933 London Economic Conference because he believed that the U.S. could best make its comeback alone.

But he and Cordell Hull also negotiated reciprocal trade treaties, and set out to convince Latin America of U.S. Good Neighborliness. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia the year that America danced to the nonsense of The Music Goes Round & Around. But as Hitler’s menace grew. Franklin Roosevelt saw the menace.

His “quarantine the aggressor” speech in 1937 heightened his immense prestige abroad. Many Americans who also saw the Hitler menace wanted the President to act more boldly, but Franklin Roosevelt well knew that the politician’s is the “art of the possible,” and in his time no abler politician lived.

There followed those acts “short of war”: cash & carry, Lend-Lease, the 50 destroyers and one million rifles to help Britain save herself after Dunkirk; the peacetime draft; the declaration of “emergency,” the branding of Germany as an “international outlaw” in June 1941.

Whether Franklin Roosevelt consciously led the U.S. to war, or hoped to keep the U.S. out by a daring support of its periled friends, will be historians’ debating ground for years to come. The strength of the opposition and the political daring of what he did, could be measured by the one-vote margin in the House, when the draft came up for extension four months before Pearl Harbor.

Crisis, Crisis. The imminence of war in 1940, and the crisis of it in 1944, unquestionably helped give Franklin Roosevelt Terms III and IV. Precedent, a longing for new faces, the obvious aging of the President and his Administration were all against it. But World War II was.also a time for greatness; most of the U.S. believed that the President measured up to the time.

A disjointed economy was kept from runaway inflation. Franklin Roosevelt set his production sights high, but they were met. There was bumbling, confusion, a spate of name-calling. But the war was fought and fought well. And with it, mainly by the good offices of its President, the U.S. took its rightful place of responsibility for the peace.

History had yet to judge whether his labors, and those of Stalin and Churchill, Would bring a just and durable peace. But Franklin Roosevelt brought nis Acme nation triumphantly through a great war and started it on the road toward peace.