The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (5 page)

By the time FDR took office on March 4, 1933, credit and credibility were at a low ebb. Industrial production as a whole had fallen by more than half since 1929, and in key industries such as steel and iron ore, the losses were far greater. Investment in new factories and machinery, $11 billion in 1929, was a meager $3 billion (in 1929 dollars) in 1933. Construction of new houses had fallen by more than 80 percent. Net income of farm production had declined by at least 70 percent. Total income of American workers in the form of wages and salaries was sliced by 42 percent from 1929 to 1933, and, of course, those cuts were quite unevenly shared, with millions losing everything. Overall income per capita had receded to where it had been three decades earlier, wiping out all of the gains since the 1890s. No one knows how many were out of work, but one in four, or fifteen million people, is a conservative estimate. Of these, millions were homeless, and many had turned migrants. The young suffered especially from unemployment, and the elderly also fared worse than the middle-aged. Those who suffered most of all in this respect were African Americans and other racial minorities, as prejudice, poverty, and political impotence ground them further down.
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Hoover and Roosevelt en route to FDR’s inauguration, March 4, 1933. (Library of Congress)

The challenge for Roosevelt on Inauguration Day, then, was to embody a credible new spirit of optimism and to chart a new course in fighting the Depression, economically, politically, and emotionally. On their frosty drive together in an open car from the White House to the inaugural platform at the Capitol, Roosevelt attempted to make small talk, but Hoover wrapped himself in angry silence, his head down, his face grim, ignoring the cheering crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue. “The two of us simply couldn’t sit there on our hands, ignoring each other and everyone else,” FDR later recalled. “So I began to wave my own response [to the crowd] with my top hat and I kept waving it until I got to the inauguration stand and was sworn in.” The contrasting moods of the two men, if not Roosevelt’s precise gestures, had been anticipated by the cartoonist Peter Arno in a drawing he prepared for
The New Yorker
several weeks earlier depicting Hoover’s sour gloom and Roosevelt’s gleaming grin. The drawing was scrapped by editors, however, after the February 15 attempt on Roosevelt’s life in an open car, in which the gunman missed FDR but fatally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago.
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Once at the Capitol, Roosevelt shed his overcoat, wishing to appear fit and energetic, and then “walked” to the rostrum, escorted by his son James. This apparently simple act of walking had been practiced for years as part of his performance of his own putative recovery, demonstrating his fitness for high office. Though his bout with polio was well known, the overwhelming public impression, carefully cultivated by Roosevelt, his family, and staff, was of a man who had achieved a triumphant victory over the disease. He remained paralyzed from the waist down, yet in the public mind he was merely lame. His very cane might seem a fashionable accessory, and his wheelchair was never mentioned. Photographers honored the injunction not to show the president being obviously assisted or carried, and Roosevelt himself went to great lengths to create a semblance of walking, one he could sustain only for a very short distance. He supported himself by his cane on his right side and tightly gripped the arm of a son or aide on his left, heaved one wasted leg forward in its heavy steel brace, resumed his balance, and then swung the other in a slow, toddling gait, head and torso rocking side to side. Always when performing this maneuver in public, he sweated profusely, no matter what the weather. He had his trousers cut long so their cuffs lapped the heels of his unworn shoes, covering the braces. So concealing his arduous effort, he made his way to the podium.
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Roosevelt’s inaugural address is among the most famous in American history, and its most famous sentence spoke directly to the Depression as an emotional crisis: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The metaphor of paralysis could not have been a casual one for Roosevelt. Implicitly, he drew an analogy between his own determined recovery from polio, with all of its attendant fears, and the challenge of national recovery. After a broad survey of the devastated nation, he acknowledged, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” He castigated the stubbornness and incompetence of leading financiers and mocked their tearful pleas for restored confidence. In rhetoric charged with biblical righteousness and militant patriotism, he pledged “action, and action now” in a bold, massive, and united attack on the obstacles to national recovery. If congressional measures were insufficient, he warned, he would then ask Congress for “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Of all the lines of his address, this one received the heartiest immediate approval.
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Roosevelt’s great cymbal crash of a sentence facing down fear, his repeated drumbeats promising bold, decisive action, the strength and power of his address as a whole—these instantly brought the confidence that had eluded his predecessor. His voice, gestures, and bearing as well as his words instilled new hope. “Over the vast throngs there hung a cloud of worry, because of the economic and business outlook,” the
New York Times
reported. “The new President’s recurrent smile of confidence, his uplifted chin and the challenge of his voice did much to help the national sense of humor to assert itself.” As the movie actress Lillian Gish said, the president seemed “to have been dipped in phosphorus.”
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His confident spirit was contagious. Having languished under a sense of leaderless drift, politicians and much of the public were suddenly infused with vigor and purpose, akin to that of a nation at war. To address the financial crisis, FDR immediately declared a national bank “holiday” lasting a week and called Congress into special session, beginning Thursday, March 9.

So began the celebrated “Hundred Days,” the most frenzied and productive in congressional history. The Hundred Days has sometimes been described as a one-man show, in which Roosevelt easily bent a pliant Congress to his will and vision. In fact, Roosevelt unleashed a pent-up demand for action from members of both parties, who reflected numerous interests and ideologies. As a whole, the break with the past was breathtaking. By the end of the session Roosevelt and Congress had decisively ended the banking panic, and they had created unprecedented institutions to manage vast sectors of the economy, including banking, agriculture, industrial production, and labor relations. With the Tennessee Valley Authority, they launched a massive government experiment in hydroelectric power, flood control, and regional development. They instituted the largest public-works program in American history and decisively committed the federal government to relief for the unemployed. They provided means to rescue homes and farms from foreclosure, insured small bank deposits, and established federal regulation of securities. Far from expressing a unitary political philosophy, Roosevelt pragmatically accommodated a host of contentious conceptions of the role of government, including fiscal conservatism and large-scale government spending, centralized government planning, public-private partnerships, localism, and states’ rights.
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To be sure, many problems remained. Spending on public works and job creation, which in 1933 appeared startlingly bold, proved in retrospect to be insufficient. In fact, full recovery came only with the truly massive government spending required by the Second World War. Moreover, the deeply entrenched inequities based on racial discrimination went untouched. Only gradually and incompletely would African Americans’ plight become a part of the New Deal. Yet in spring 1933, after many had despaired of the ability of the capitalist system and democracy itself to triumph over the economic catastrophe, Roosevelt had fulfilled his inaugural pledge. In the midst of the frenzied Hundred Days, California’s Progressive Republican senator Hiram Johnson wrote, “We have exchanged for a frown in the White House a smile. Where there were hesitation and vacillation, weighing always the personal political consequences, feebleness, timidity, and duplicity, there are now courage and boldness and real action.” Financial investors agreed. After trading resumed on the New York Curb Exchange on March 15, the stock ticker concluded the day with the joyful message “Goodnight . . . Happy days are here again.”
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As Roosevelt won congressional support to launch his New Deal, he also made masterful use of the press and radio to appeal to the public at large. In previous press conferences, Hoover had insisted on written questions submitted in advance, as had Harding and Coolidge before him, and the antagonism between Hoover and the Washington press corps deteriorated to such an extent that he finally stopped giving press conferences altogether. Immediately upon taking office, a smiling and laughing Roosevelt invited accredited Washington correspondents (all of whom were white males) to the White House and announced a new policy of open press conferences twice a week in which all pertinent questions might be asked without advance notice. He poured on all of his considerable charm: shaking hands with each correspondent, calling them by their first names, holding his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, smiling broadly, impressing them with his exact information and broad command of issues, lavishing confidences and “background information,” delighting in the give-and-take of the exchange. The contrast with Hoover could not have been more complete. At the end of the session reporters broke out in spontaneous applause. “The press barely restrained its whoopees,” one hard-bitten reporter wrote. “Here was news—action—drama! Here was a new attitude to the press! . . . The reportorial affection and admiration for the President is unprecedented.” Although this euphoria inevitably cooled in time, Roosevelt made the White House, rather than Congress, the liveliest press beat in Washington. In the process he carried his message to a broad public and countered the stiff editorial resistance his programs faced from Republican newspaper publishers.
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Roosevelt’s superb command of radio was still more novel. Radio had only recently become a truly mass medium, and ownership and use of radios continued to swell over the decade, much as television did in the 1950s.
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As with television later, the very novelty of radio gave it special power. People listened with great attention and absorption, characteristically in groups with family or friends, and they responded actively, discussing the programs they heard and frequently writing letters to radio personalities, whether these were politicians, announcers, entertainers, or even fictional radio characters. Of all new forms of entertainment, radio most intimately brought people in their private settings into contact with public and commercial appeals. In the depths of the Depression, when the workings of the federal government seemed especially distant, impersonal, and opaque, radio provided an instrument to restore a sense of vital political community with millions of ordinary Americans.
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The transformative effect of radio began at the precise moment that Roosevelt became president. His was the first inauguration to be widely broadcast, and 450,000 letters and telegrams deluged the White House during his first week in office, compared with the average of 800 a day in the Hoover administration.
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Some correspondents identified their professions: clergyman, attorney, businessman, banker, teacher, salesman, judge. Others placed themselves among the broad multitude of the American people, “undistinguished and unknown but a part of the vast herd known as The Majority,” as one writer put it. They included people of all ages, all levels of education, and all areas of the country. These messages eloquently testified to the tumultuous response to Roosevelt’s address from Democrats and Republicans alike. A man in Montgomery, Alabama, declared, “Your brilliant inaugural address, with the vigor and personality that radiated from it, has, in this part of the country, taken the people literally by storm. Everywhere there is a very definite and out-spoken feeling that at last, after wallowing in the trough without a rudder for four years, we have someone who is going to do things.” A “small town one-vote Democrat” man from Clinton, Connecticut, wrote, “Thank God for this message of courage, confidence and decision; thank God . . . for the fresh hope you have inspired.” He added, “The entire nation rejoices that the White House is again OUR White House, occupied by and presided over by friendly folks, who by their smiles, are encouraging all of us to smile again.”
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Other writers echoed this stress on the contagious nature of FDR’s smile and confidence. A Terre Haute, Indiana, man reported, “I feel certain that your inaugural address was happily received by eighty five per cent of our people. The thought of a ‘new deal’ has again renewed their hopes; the handshake, the smile and hospitality seems to radiate from most every one.” A Cleveland man wrote, “To-day sitting among a gathering of the all but ‘forgotten men’ during your inaugural address, I seen those worried looks replaced by smiles and confidence, eyes fill up with tears of gratitude, shoulders lifted and chest out.”
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