FOURTEEN

NOTHING TO FEAR

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, MARCH 4, 1933

“THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in a political campaign is to make as few mistakes as possible,” wrote Ed Flynn, and the 1932 Democratic presidential campaign was nearly flawless. Roosevelt “seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled him to do the right thing at the right time.”¹ Add Farley’s meticulous organization, Louis Howe’s encyclopedic knowledge of the nation’s political byways, and the well-adapted speeches flowing from Moley’s brain trust, throw in the ineptitude of the Hoover campaign, and FDR would probably have won even if the country had not been gripped by economic despair. As Brooklyn’s Democratic boss, John H. McCooey, noted, “Roosevelt could have spent the entire summer and fall in Europe and been elected just the same.”²

So it seemed in retrospect. FDR captured the initiative with his dramatic flight to Chicago and his rousing acceptance speech, and never looked back. Before Roosevelt left the platform that evening he had received the endorsement of Nebraska’s senior senator, George W. Norris, the grand old man of American progressivism, followed quickly by Norris’s fellow Republicans Hiram Johnson of California, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico. The wheels were coming off the Republican wagon.

With his progressive flank secure, FDR turned right to repair the breach in his own party. Following his acceptance speech, Roosevelt dined with the ninety-six members of the Democratic National Committee at the Congress Hotel. Raskob presided for the last time, and FDR devoted the bulk of his remarks to soothing old wounds, going far out of his way to praise “my very good and old friend, John Raskob” and “my old friend Jouett Shouse.” He thanked his former adversaries for their service to the party and invited their help in the coming campaign.³

Al Smith posed another problem. He had left Chicago in a huff, and the campaign worried that he would blast FDR when he arrived in New York. His train was intercepted at Harmon-on-Hudson by mutual friends, and the Happy Warrior was persuaded to hold his peace. When the dust settled, Smith rallied to the ticket. He and Roosevelt forced the gubernatorial nomination of Herbert Lehman over Tammany’s objections and, to the delight of onlookers, made up publicly on the floor of the state Democratic convention in Albany. “Hello, you old potato,” shouted Smith as he pumped FDR’s hand. “Hello, Al, I’m glad to see you too—and that’s from the heart.” Farley remembers the pair grinning like schoolboys, “with hands clasped together, while the excited photographers took picture after picture.”⁴

Perhaps only Roosevelt could have launched his campaign by sailing with three of his sons—James, Franklin, Jr., and John—in a battered thirty-seven-foot yawl three hundred miles from Port Jefferson, Long Island, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “My son Jimmy has rented a yawl for $150,” FDR told his first postconvention press conference. “It was cheap and that’s why we could afford it. We are going to do our own navigating, cooking, and washing. I’m going to do the navigating.”^5*

On July 11, 1932, nine days after accepting the Democratic nomination, FDR set sail across Long Island Sound into the New England waters he knew so well. Because the yawl had no engine, a wharf boat towed it from the dock into the harbor and the stiff breeze whipping across the water. “Get out of my wind,” Roosevelt jokingly called out to reporters aboard the press boat following behind.⁶ The drama of Roosevelt and his sons sailing a choppy sea captured the public’s imagination. Daily press and newsreel accounts showed a robust blue-water sailor, muscular and self-confident, beaming and laughing with a remarkable zest for life—a stark contrast to the starchy, buttoned-up demeanor of Herbert Hoover in the White House. “I think [grandfather] instinctively knew there would be a general sense of admiration for someone who could sail a boat with his sons that distance,” said FDR’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt.⁷

Aside from putting to rest questions about FDR’s health, the sail allowed him to mend fences with Smith’s supporters in New England. When his boat anchored in Stonington, Connecticut, and again in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Roosevelt played host to visiting state delegations. In Swampscott he charmed Massachusetts governor Joseph B. Ely, a Smith loyalist who had delivered the Bay State to the Happy Warrior in the primary. At the conclusion of the voyage FDR motored to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, to deliver his first speech of the campaign to a throng of 50,000 persons gathered at the fairgrounds.⁸

The final disaffected organization brought into line was that of Frank Hague in New Jersey.⁹ Like most old-line bosses, Hague was a Democrat first and foremost. Candidates come and go, platforms wax and wane, but the party survives. Hague had opposed Roosevelt fiercely at Chicago but had no problem extending an olive branch. If FDR would come to New Jersey early in the campaign, he told Farley, he would provide the largest political rally ever held in the United States. Roosevelt agreed, and Hague kept his word. In early August FDR went to Sea Girt, New Jersey, to address a summer crowd bused in from across the state estimated at 115,000 persons. “If it wasn’t the biggest rally in history, it must have been very close to it,” Farley recalled.¹⁰

Throughout the campaign Farley relied on the regular state organizations, whether they had supported FDR before the convention or not.¹¹ This brought muted protest from Roosevelt backers, but Farley remained adamant. A united party was central to FDR’s campaign, and that meant keeping the regulars on board. When Hull complained that Roosevelt’s early supporters in Texas were being sidetracked, Farley showed little sympathy: “To be very frank with you, Senator, I think we will make a terrible mistake if we fail to carry out the campaign through the regular organization in Texas. If we do otherwise we are going to be in trouble.”¹²

The fact is, Farley was centralizing the party structure to a degree unprecedented in American politics, and it was more effective to work with organizations already in place than to create something new. At Howe’s suggestion, the various state chairmen were called to campaign headquarters in small groups for several days of conferences with Farley and others and were forcefully impressed with the fact that they were solely responsible for the campaign in their territory. “The success of this radical experiment was instantaneous,” Howe recalled. “Every state chairman went back feeling he was a person of real importance, of real responsibility, and determined to work as he had never worked before for the success of the Democratic party.”¹³

At the same time, Farley accelerated his practice of corresponding individually with each of the 140,000 or so precinct captains throughout the country. Altogether, almost 3 million letters were mailed out from Roosevelt’s headquarters, a significant percentage signed personally by Farley. “The fellow out in Kokomo, Indiana, who is pulling doorbells night after night respectfully asking his neighbors to vote the straight Democratic ticket, gets a real thrill if he receives a letter on campaigning postmarked Washington or New York; and we made sure that this pleasure was not denied him.”^14*

Farley and Howe, assisted by Ed Flynn, directed the campaign like field marshals deploying their troops in battle. Politics, organization, and turnout were their responsibility. Policy was handled by the brain trust. They were the staff officers of the campaign, preparing speeches and memoranda for the candidate. Roosevelt made twenty-seven major addresses between August and November, each devoted to a single subject. He spoke briefly on thirty-two additional occasions, usually at whistle-stops or impromptu gatherings to which he was invited. Hoover, by contrast, made only ten speeches, all of which were delivered during the closing weeks of the campaign.¹⁵

The Democratic campaign’s distinction between politics and policy was pure Roosevelt. He worked seamlessly with Howe, Farley, and Flynn on strategy and dealt directly with Moley’s team on substance. Campaign headquarters was at New York’s Biltmore Hotel; the brain trusters were billeted at the Roosevelt. “The relations between our organization and Moley’s brain trust were always pleasant,” Flynn recalled, “for we attempted to keep a strict differentiation between the job of organization and that of policy-making as reflected in the speeches the candidate was to make.”¹⁶ Brain truster Sam Rosenman saw it the same way. “We did not attempt to participate in their political activity, and they scrupulously refrained from interfering with us in any way.”¹⁷

Campaign finances were a problem initially, but as Roosevelt developed momentum the money poured in. The Democrats, who began the race still in the hole after 1928, raised a total of $2.4 million versus the Republicans’ $2.6 million.^18* Expenditures followed roughly the same ratio, with both parties spending slightly more than they took in. Radio was the largest cost item. An hour of prime-time broadcasting over the combined CBS and NBC networks in 1932 cost $35,000.¹⁹ The Republicans spent $551,972 for airtime; the Democrats $343,415. Reflecting the nation’s depressed economy, the 1932 campaign was the least expensive in the twentieth century. The final figures filed by each party indicate that the Democrats and Republicans spent an average of thirteen cents for each vote cast.²⁰ In 2004, the two major parties spent $547,966,644 and 115 million voters went to the polls; that translates into $4.76 per vote.

Events broke for Roosevelt. Throughout the late spring and early summer of 1932, unemployed veterans from World War I flocked to Washington to petition Congress for early payment of wartime bonuses that were due in 1945.²¹ They set up a shantytown on the banks of the Anacostia River in southeast Washington and, when space there ran out, occupied several vacant government buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. At its height, the Bonus Army, as it was called, numbered more than 20,000. When the Senate rejected their petition, most went home, but many others, homeless and jobless, remained in the capital.

Washington officials coped as best they could. Police Chief Pelham Glassford did his utmost to provide tents and bedding for the veterans, furnished medicine, and assisted with food and sanitation. Maintaining order was never a problem. The men were camped illegally, but Glassford (who had been the youngest brigadier general with the AEF in France) chose to treat them simply as old soldiers who had fallen on hard times. He resisted efforts to use force to dislodge them.²²

Hoover did not share Glassford’s equanimity. The specter of Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace soon dominated administration thinking. The president refused to meet with the leaders of the Bonus Army, ordered the gates to the White House chained shut, and reinforced the guard to contain any demonstration. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, convinced that the nation faced a Communist uprising of vast proportions, lamented that the veterans had been so orderly and longed for an incident that might justify the imposition of martial law.²³

On July 28, under prodding from the White House, the District of Columbia commissioners ordered Glassford to clear the abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans were squatting. Brief resistance followed, shots rang out, two veterans were killed, and Hurley had his incident. The commissioners asked the White House for federal troops to maintain order. Hoover passed the request to Hurley, who ordered Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur to take the appropriate action.²⁴ That was at 2:55 P.M. Within the hour troopers from the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, led by their forty-seven-year-old executive officer, Major George S. Patton, clattered across Memorial Bridge into Washington. They were joined by elements of the 16th Infantry from Fort Washington, supported by tanks and machine guns.²⁵ MacArthur, who normally wore mufti to the War Department, changed into Class A uniform (replete with Sam Browne belt, medals, and decorations) and took command. At his side was his aide-de-camp and military secretary, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, also in Class A.^*

By five o’clock Army units had surrounded the buildings in downtown Washington occupied by the veterans. Cavalrymen drew sabers and cleared the streets while infantry with fixed bayonets emptied the buildings. The air was saturated with tear gas. Prodded by horses and tanks the veterans fell back to their encampment on the Anacostia Flats. As evening fell, the Army troops paused to allow women and children to be evacuated. At 10:14 P.M. MacArthur gave the order to advance. After a tear gas barrage the cavalry swept the camp, followed by infantrymen, who systematically set fire to the veterans’ tents and shanties lest anyone return. Coughing, choking, and vomiting, the veterans and their families fled up Good Hope Road into Maryland and safety. “Had President Hoover not acted when he did,” said MacArthur at a War Department news conference afterward, “he would have been faced with a very serious situation.” The “mob,” as MacArthur saw it, was animated by the “essence of revolution.”²⁶

The nation’s press bannered the eviction across its front pages. A few, citing Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman strike in 1895, praised Hoover for acting decisively; most lambasted the administration for excessive force. “What a pitiful spectacle,” said the normally Republican Washington Daily News. “The mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”²⁷ The New York Times devoted its first three pages to the coverage, including a full page of photographs. In the months ahead, the torching of the veterans’ camp on the Anacostia Flats came to symbolize the insensitivity of the Hoover administration to the plight of the unemployed.

Rexford Tugwell, who was in Albany on a speechwriting chore, recalls entering FDR’s bedroom at breakfast and finding the morning newspapers spread all around. Pointing to the pictures in the Times, Roosevelt said they were “scenes from a nightmare.” He pointed to soldiers hauling resisters, still weeping from tear gas, through the wreckage to police wagons, while women and children, incredibly disheveled and weary, waited for some sort of rescue.

Roosevelt told Tugwell he regretted having recommended Hoover for president in 1920. “There is nothing inside the man but jelly; maybe there never had been anything.” FDR said he might feel sorry for Hoover if he didn’t feel sorrier for the people who had been burned out, eleven thousand of them, according to the Times. “They must be camping right now alongside the roads out of Washington. And some of them have families. It is a wonder there isn’t more resentment, more radicalism, when people are treated that way.”

“What Hoover should have done,” Roosevelt said, “was to meet with the leaders of the Bonus Army when they asked for an interview. When two hundred or so marched up to the White House, Hoover should have sent out coffee and sandwiches and asked a delegation in. Instead, he let Pat Hurley and Doug MacArthur do their thing.” “MacArthur,” said FDR, “has just prevented Hoover’s reelection.”²⁸

At lunch that day Roosevelt took a phone call from Huey Long, who berated FDR for playing up to the party’s right wing. Roosevelt placated the Kingfish as best he could and promised to bring him into the campaign. “Keep your shirt on. It’ll be all right.” When he hung up, FDR turned to Tugwell.

“You know, that’s the second most dangerous man in this country. Huey’s a whiz on the radio. He screams at people and they love it. He makes them think they belong to some kind of church. He knows there is a promised land and he’ll lead ’em to it.”^*

Tugwell could not resist. “You said Huey was the second most dangerous person.”

“You heard right,” smiled Roosevelt. “Huey is only second. The first is Douglas MacArthur. You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home.”²⁹

Roosevelt approached the campaign with his usual optimism, and his enthusiasm was contagious. “We had one tremendous advantage, even at the very beginning of the 1932 campaign,” wrote Farley. “This was the genuine conviction shared by Governor Roosevelt himself and those connected with him that his election to the Presidency was a foregone conclusion.”³⁰ Farley said FDR had an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important. “He was one of the most alive men I have ever met. He never gave me the impression he was tired or bored. His ability to discuss political issues in short, simple sentences made a powerful impression. There was a touch of destiny about the man. He would have been a great actor.”³¹

By contrast, Hoover was pessimistic and bitter. He exuded defeat. Not hangdog, whipped-puppy defeat but the vanquishment of the proud, done in by hubris and conceit. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson deplored Hoover’s preference “for seeing the dark side first.” To be in the same room with the president, said Stimson, “was like sitting in a bath of ink.”³² Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, observed that “if you put a rose in Hoover’s hand it would wilt.”³³

When Hoover asked Stimson to take to the hustings and attack FDR, the secretary of state declined. Stimson admired Hoover and believed his great intellectual gifts were not sufficiently appreciated. But he thought even more strongly that foreign affairs should be above partisan politics. “To use the great office of Secretary of State to launch a purely personal attack on Roosevelt is quite inconsistent with my dignity and that of the office,” wrote Stimson. “Two years ago I was dragged into an attack on Roosevelt in the [New York gubernatorial] campaign, and I have regretted it ever since.”³⁴

Colonel Stimson (as he liked to be called³⁵) went not to Groton and Harvard but to Andover and Yale. Yet Endicott Peabody would have given him high marks for character. It is not surprising that he was venerated by a younger generation looking for heroes: men as varied as McGeorge Bundy, Lucius D. Clay, and George Herbert Walker Bush. Hoover never forgave Stimson for not participating in the campaign.³⁶ Roosevelt never forgot. When war clouds gathered in 1940 and bipartisanship became essential, FDR reached out to Stimson and asked him to become secretary of war for a second time.^*

As the campaign progressed, Roosevelt demonstrated an uncanny ability to say the right thing at the right time to the right audience. Hoover, in a rare turn of phrase, called him “a chameleon on Scotch plaid.”³⁷ Roosevelt traveled more than thirteen thousand miles, speaking to ever-increasing crowds. The rhetorical high point occurred in Baltimore on October 25, when Roosevelt castigated the Four Horsemen of the Republican apocalypse: Destruction, Delay, Deceit, and Despair.³⁸

Hoover’s voice found little resonance. He was so unpopular that it was unsafe for him to appear in public without heavy police escort.³⁹ Isolated and out of touch, he came across as a master of malapropism. “Nobody is actually starving,” he told the Washington journalist Raymond Clapper. “The hobos, for example, are better fed than they have ever been.”⁴⁰ It was difficult to credit a candidate who attributed the high unemployment rate to the fact that “many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”⁴¹ Or who asserted, as Hoover did on October 31 at Madison Square Garden, that if the sky-high rates of the Smoot-Hawley tariff were reduced, “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of a million farms. Their churches and school houses will decay.”⁴²

The message of fear was all that remained. As Hoover would have it, Roosevelt was the precursor of revolution. Speaking in Saint Paul three days before the election, an exhausted Hoover equated the Democratic party with “the same philosophy of government which has poisoned all of Europe … the fumes of the witch’s cauldron which boiled in Russia.” He accused the Democrats of being “the party of the mob.” When he added, “Thank God, we still have a government in Washington that knows how to deal with the mob,” an angry murmur rolled through the audience.⁴³Ashen and shaken, Hoover swayed on the platform. “Why don’t they make him quit?” a prominent Republican asked White House security chief, Colonel E. W. Starling. “He’s not doing himself or the party any good.”⁴⁴

On election day FDR and Eleanor voted at Hyde Park and then went into the city, where Eleanor hosted a buffet supper for family and friends at East Sixty-fifth Street. Early in the evening Sam Rosenman noticed two unidentified men in dark suits enter the house unobtrusively and take up positions near Roosevelt. When Rosenman inquired, he was told they were from the Secret Service.⁴⁵

The outcome was never in doubt. The turnout, almost 40 million, was the greatest in American history. The GOP suffered a crushing defeat. Roosevelt received 22,825,016 votes to Hoover’s 15,758,397 and carried forty-two states with 472 electors.⁴⁶ The result was as much a repudiation of Hoover as it was a triumph for FDR. The president received 6 million fewer votes than he had in 1928 and carried only six states, all in the Northeast. The Democrats gained an unprecedented ninety seats in the House to give them a virtual 3-to-1 majority (310–117) and won control of the Senate, 60–36.

At campaign headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel the celebration began early. Hoover, at his home in Palo Alto, conceded shortly after midnight. After receiving Hoover’s message Roosevelt made his way to the Biltmore’s grand ballroom, where he spoke briefly to hundreds of jubilant campaign workers. He singled out Louis Howe and James Farley as the “two people in the United States, more than anybody else, who are responsible for this great victory.”⁴⁷

Howe did not hear FDR’s tribute. Unwilling to be seen in public on election night, he tabulated the results at his hideaway office on Madison Avenue. Eleanor and Farley joined him shortly after eleven, only to find him, in Farley’s words, poring over the returns “like a miser inspecting his gold.” They tried to persuade him to come back to the main celebration at the Biltmore, but he declined. He extracted an ancient bottle of Madeira from his desk that he had put away after the fight against Blue-eyed Billy Sheehan in 1911. It was not to be opened until FDR was elected president. Carefully Howe filled the glasses and raised his own: “To the next President of the United States.”⁴⁸ At the age of fifty, Franklin Roosevelt had become president. He would remain president for the remainder of his life.

Eleanor, who did not work directly in the presidential campaign, continued to have mixed feelings about FDR’s election:

I was happy for my husband, of course, because I knew that in many ways it would make up for the blow that fate had dealt him when he was stricken with infantile paralysis; and I had implicit confidence in his ability to help the country in crisis.… But for myself, I was probably more deeply troubled than even [Chicago Tribune reporter] John Boettiger realized.^* As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own. I knew what traditionally should lie before me; I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect. By earning my own money, I had recently enjoyed a certain amount of financial independence, and had been able to do things in which I was personally interested. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night, and the next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.⁴⁹

Roosevelt was elected on November 8. Inauguration was not until March 4.^* That four-month hiatus, coinciding with the fourth winter of the Depression, proved the most harrowing in American memory. Three years of hard times had cut national income in half. Five thousand bank failures had wiped out 9 million savings accounts. By the end of 1932, 15 million workers, one out of every three, had lost their jobs. U.S. Steel’s payroll of full-time workers fell from 225,000 in 1929 to zero in early 1933.⁵⁰ When the Soviet Union’s trade office in New York issued a call for six thousand skilled workers to go to Russia, more than one hundred thousand applied. “No one can live and work in New York this winter,” noted Tugwell, “without a profound sense of uneasiness. Never in modern times has there been so widespread unemployment and such moving distress from sheer hunger and cold.”⁵¹ From Chicago, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote, “There is not a garbage dump in the city which is not diligently haunted by the hungry.”⁵²

The situation in the countryside was equally bad. Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell—rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.⁵³

Children went hungry in every corner of the land. In the coal-mining areas of West Virginia and Kentucky, more than 90 percent of the inhabitants were suffering from malnutrition. In the nation’s major cities, only one out of four unemployed workers was receiving any relief whatever. In Philadelphia, those fortunate enough to be on the relief rolls received $4.23 per week for a family of four. Many state and local governments, including the city of Chicago, ran out of money to pay their teachers. In Alabama, 81 percent of the children in rural areas went schoolless. Georgia closed more than a thousand schools with a combined enrollment of more than 170,000.⁵⁴ Homeowners were being foreclosed at a rate of well over one thousand a day. Farmers lost their land because they could not pay taxes or meet mortgage payments. On a single day in April 1932, one fourth of the entire state of Mississippi went under the hammer of auctioneers at foreclosure sales.⁵⁵

Violence simmered beneath the surface. In Iowa, farmers declared a farm holiday, blocked highways with logs and telephone poles, smashed headlights, and punctured tires with their pitchforks. When authorities in Council Bluffs arrested fifty-five demonstrators, more than a thousand angry farmers threatened to storm the jail unless they were released. Wisconsin dairy farmers dumped milk on the roadsides and fought pitched battles with deputy sheriffs. In Nebraska, farm holiday leaders warned that unless the legislature took beneficial action, “200,000 of us are coming to Lincoln and we’ll tear that new State Capitol Building to pieces.” In Idaho and Minnesota, the governors declared moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures until state legislatures could enact debt relief measures. In North Dakota, Governor William Langer mobilized the National Guard to halt farm foreclosures.⁵⁶

Hoover’s doctrinaire attachment to the free market precluded government intervention. Even more serious in terms of long-term recovery, the president did his utmost to inveigle FDR into endorsing the administration’s policy. “I am convinced,” Hoover wrote Roosevelt, “that an early statement by you will help restore confidence.” What Hoover had in mind was that FDR pledge to retain the gold standard, adopt a balanced budget, and impose additional taxes rather than raise money through government borrowing.⁵⁷ Roosevelt should also disavow any effort to insure home mortgages, rule out loans to states and municipalities for public works, disclaim proposals for government development of hydroelectric power in the Tennessee Valley, and desist in his opposition to a national sales tax. “I realize that if these declarations be made by the President-elect,” Hoover wrote Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania a few days later, “he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican Administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90% of the so-called new deal.”⁵⁸

Roosevelt refused to be drawn in. He delayed ten days replying to Hoover’s “cheeky” letter and then brushed the president’s request aside. “I am equally concerned with you in regard to the gravity of the present banking situation, but my thought is that it is so very deep-seated that the fire is bound to spread in spite of anything that is done by way of mere statements.”⁵⁹

An exception to FDR’s refusal to bail the Republicans out was in foreign policy. During the campaign Roosevelt virtually ignored international affairs—“I think Hoover’s foreign policy is about right,” he told Raymond Moley—and he chose not to make an issue of it after the election.⁶⁰ At FDR’s invitation, Secretary of State Stimson visited Hyde Park on January 9, 1933, a cold, blustery Monday morning with rain turning to sleet and then to snow. Stimson was closeted with Roosevelt from eleven in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon and later said he was “touched, overwhelmed by the kindness he showed me.… We both spoke with the utmost freedom and informality.” Roosevelt endorsed the administration’s efforts to embargo the shipment of arms to belligerents,^* remained lukewarm to a world economic conference, and raised a number of questions about Latin America. Most important, he agreed fully with the most controversial aspect of Republican foreign policy, the so-called Stimson Doctrine, by which the United States refused to recognize the fruits of military aggression, specifically the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. “I had never had a talk with him before,” Stimson confided to his diary that evening, “but had no difficulty getting on.… I was much impressed with his disability and the brave way in which he paid no attention to it whatever.”⁶¹

Roosevelt’s endorsement of the Stimson Doctrine created a tizzy among his advisers. Moley and Tugwell told FDR his commitment might trigger war with Japan. The president-elect was unmoved. War might indeed occur, he allowed. In fact, it might be inevitable, given Japan’s imperial ambitions. And if that were the case, “it might be better to have it now than later.”⁶² Roosevelt said he had taken to speaking with Stimson daily over the telephone and that he intended to see the policy through. As Moley remembered the meeting, “Roosevelt put an end to the discussion by looking up and recalling that his Delano ancestors used to trade with China. ‘I have always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese. How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?’ ”⁶³

Roosevelt used the four months between November and March to prepare for the presidency. The brain trust continued to work on policy, while FDR concentrated on putting his team together. Howe would be going to Washington, of course, as chief of staff to the president (the post was called secretary to the president in those days), as would Farley as postmaster general—the traditional post for the dispenser of party patronage, with a hundred thousand jobs at his disposal. Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would take over the White House secretarial duties, joined by Louise Hackmeister as chief telephone operator.^* Hacky, as she was called, had manned the switchboard in all of Roosevelt’s campaigns and had a legendary feel for who should speak to the Boss and who should not. Rounding out the presidential office were Marvin McIntyre as appointments secretary and Steve Early as press secretary, charter members of the Cuff Links Club dating from FDR’s run for the vice presidency in 1920.

The cabinet proved more complicated. For the senior positions at State and Treasury, Roosevelt turned to two old Wilsonians, Cordell Hull and Carter Glass. Hull in many ways epitomized the up-from-poverty yearnings of the New Deal. The son of a hardscrabble dirt farmer from the mountains of southern Appalachia, Hull had served in the Spanish-American War as a captain of Tennessee volunteers and been elected to Congress in 1906 and to the U.S. Senate in 1930. For more than a generation he had led the liberal cause in the South. He had been for Wilson before Baltimore and for Roosevelt before Chicago. Except for a lifelong devotion to free trade, his knowledge of foreign affairs was limited and his administrative skills were untested. But Roosevelt genuinely admired Hull’s idealism and personal dignity.^* And he had a political base FDR could not ignore. “Cordell Hull is the only member of the Cabinet who brings me any political strength that I don’t have in my own right.”⁶⁴

For Treasury, Carter Glass of Virginia had no competition. The architect of the Federal Reserve Act while a member of the House, secretary of the Treasury under Wilson, and now ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the seventy-four-year-old Glass had been the party’s senior spokesman on public finance so long as anyone could remember. This was the one cabinet post on which Roosevelt had no wiggle room, and he made the offer to Glass at the same time he approached Hull. Both FDR and Glass were apprehensive. Glass was committed to hard currency, fiscal restraint, and a sound dollar. He deplored deficit spending. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was pragmatic: “We’re not going to throw ideas out of the window simply because they are labeled inflation.”⁶⁵ When Glass declined because of ill health, the Roosevelt camp breathed a sigh of relief. To head Treasury, FDR immediately turned to Republican William H. Woodin, a respected New York industrialist who had helped bankroll each of Roosevelt’s campaigns. Woodin, too, was reluctant, but Basil O’Connor convinced him to take the post during an hour-and-a-half cab ride circling through Central Park. Like Glass, Woodin was uneasy about inflation, but he was not obsessive about it, and his personal loyalty to FDR was absolute. Like Hull, he would be easy to work with.⁶⁶

When Glass decided to remain on the sidelines, Roosevelt turned to his senior senatorial colleague, Claude A. Swanson, to head the Navy Department. Swanson, dapper in frock coats and winged collars, had chaired the Naval Affairs Committee when FDR had been assistant secretary, and he shared Roosevelt’s love for the service. His appointment not only ensured that the admirals would remain in charge but cleared a Virginia Senate seat for Roosevelt’s old friend Governor Harry F. Byrd.

For the War Department, Roosevelt selected Governor George Dern of Utah. FDR was indebted to Dern for his preconvention campaigning in the West and had originally slated him for Interior. When conservationists objected, he moved Dern to War. One of the few non-Mormons to hold elective office in Utah, Dern knew little about the Army, but in those days of small budgets and international isolation it seemed of little consequence.

When Dern proved unacceptable at Interior, Roosevelt turned first to Senator Hiram Johnson of California, then to his Republican colleague Bronson Cutting of New Mexico. Both declined. At the last moment Roosevelt asked Harold Ickes of Chicago, whom he did not know but who was recommended by Johnson and Cutting. Ickes had originally hoped to be appointed commissioner of Indian affairs but was elevated to the secretaryship almost by default. “Well,” Louis Howe quipped, “that’s the first break the Indians have had in a hundred years.”⁶⁷

For attorney general Roosevelt went again to the Senate and named Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, who had chaired both the 1924 and 1932 Democratic conventions. Walsh had devoted much of his public life to investigating corporate malfeasance, and his appointment sent a clear signal that special interests were no longer immune. Another septuagenarian, Walsh led an active social life and suffered a fatal heart attack on March 2—two days before the inauguration—having just courted and married a much younger Cuban sugar heiress in Havana. He was replaced by Homer Cummings of Connecticut, whom FDR had planned to name governor-general of the Philippines.

For Commerce FDR had intended to appoint Jesse Straus of R. H. Macy, a position Straus’s uncle had occupied in TR’s cabinet. But old party hands like Daniels, McAdoo, and Colonel House insisted that Daniel Roper of South Carolina be given a cabinet post, and Commerce seemed the best fit. As a consolation prize, Straus drew the embassy in Paris. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., sought to be appointed secretary of agriculture, but when farm organizations objected he was posted to the Farm Board, soon to become the centerpiece of the New Deal’s Farm Credit Administration. For Agriculture, Roosevelt settled on Iowa publisher and crop experimenter Henry A. Wallace. Like Ickes, Wallace was a nominal Republican; also like Ickes, he was unknown to the president-elect before his appointment. For the final cabinet post, secretary of labor, there was no question. From the beginning FDR wanted to appoint a woman, and Frances Perkins was a shoo-in. Organized labor filed a ritual reclama, but Miss Perkins had demonstrated her ability as a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet in New York, and she was as much a part of FDR’s political family as Farley or Flynn.

As Roosevelt described it, the cabinet was “slightly to the left of center.” Three members (Hull, Swanson, and Roper) were old Wilsonians. Three were Republicans: either Republican-progressive (Ickes and Wallace) or Republican-conservative (Woodin). Two had served in the Senate (three, counting Walsh), and one (Dern) was a governor. There were two Catholics (Farley and Walsh), and for the first time a woman joined the ranks. All regions of the country were represented, and all the appointees had been FRBC—For Roosevelt Before Chicago. FDR had a fingertip feel for political nuance. He was also the most calculating and hard-nosed politician of his generation. His preconvention rivals, Al Smith and Newton D. Baker, were not consulted about, let alone appointed to, any position in the administration, nor were their supporters. The same was true of Maryland’s governor, Albert C. Ritchie. FDR’s former antagonists on the National Committee, John Raskob and Jouett Shouse, were consigned to outer darkness. Roosevelt reached out to Republican progressives and independents, but he snuffed out rivals in his own party.

FDR’s hostility was political, not personal. Baker, Raskob, Ritchie, and Smith represented the probusiness wing of the party: a conservative, hard-money tradition dating at least to the era of Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt, standing far to the left, had put together a remarkable coalition of western populists, white southerners, ethnic minorities, and big-city machines. He was not about to share the victory with his rivals nor to divert the Democratic party from the progressive path he had staked out. In 1874 Ulysses S. Grant, with his veto of 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.

Eleanor remained at loose ends and speculated what role she might play in the new administration. “I tentatively suggested to my husband that perhaps merely being hostess at the necessary formal functions would not take all my time and he might like me to do a real job and take over some of his mail. He looked at me quizzically and said he did not think that would do; that Missy, who had been handling his mail for a long time, would feel I was interfering. I knew he was right and that it would not work,” Eleanor wrote, but FDR’s rebuff did little to improve her spirits as the inauguration approached.⁶⁸

On February 4 FDR departed for an eleven-day Caribbean cruise aboard his friend Vincent Astor’s sleek 263-foot yacht, Nourmahal.⁶⁹ It would be Roosevelt’s final relaxation before assuming his responsibilities as president—an escape back to the world of Groton and Harvard, of Fly Club and the Crimson. Astor, the founder and owner of Newsweek, was a Hyde Park neighbor and the nephew of FDR’s late half-brother, Rosy.^* Joining them were four familiar faces from New York society pages: Kermit Roosevelt, a son of TR and the only one of the Oyster Bay clan to speak kindly of FDR; William Rhinelander Stewart, the wealthy scion of a Four Hundred family and generous contributor to Republican causes; George Baker St. George of Tuxedo Park, another wealthy Republican; and Justice Frederic Kernochan, also of Tuxedo Park, a patrician Democrat, but at least a Democrat. They were all Harvard men, shared the same exclusive clubs, traveled in the same circles, and enjoyed one another’s company. “The Hasty Pudding Club puts out to sea,” Ed Flynn joked as Nourmahal sailed from Jacksonville’s Commodore Point. Less kindly was the New York Sun:

They were just good friends with no selfish ends

    To serve as they paced the decks;

There were George and Fred and the son of Ted

    And Vincent (he signed the checks);

On the splendid yacht in a climate hot

    To tropical seas they ran,

Among those behind they dismissed from mind

    Was the well-known Forgotten Man!⁷⁰

After two days at sea FDR wrote Sara that he was “getting a marvelous rest—lots of air and sun. Vincent is a dear and perfect host. George and Kermit and Freddie are excellent companions. When we land on the 15th I shall be full of health and vigor—the last holiday for many months.”⁷¹

In the early evening of February 15, Nourmahal docked at Miami and Roosevelt hurried to Bay Front Park, where he was scheduled to address the annual encampment of the American Legion. Some 20,000 legionnaires crammed the brightly lit park to greet the president-elect. Roosevelt spoke briefly, perched on top of the backseat of his open car. When he finished, he slid back into his seat and chatted amiably with Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was standing alongside, having made the pilgrimage to Miami to eat political crow.^* Suddenly, from a distance no more than forty feet away, five shots rang out in quick succession. Blood spurted from the hand of a nearby Secret Service agent, Mayor Cermak crumpled to the ground, a woman standing behind FDR was hit twice in the abdomen, and two other people were wounded. Roosevelt sat immobile and unflinching, his jaw set, ready for what might follow. He had been spared by inches. At the critical moment an alert spectator, Mrs. Lillian Cross, had hit the assassin’s arm with her handbag and spoiled his aim.⁷²

“I heard what I thought was a firecracker; then several more,” Roosevelt wrote later.

The chauffeur started the car. I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak doubled up.… I called to the chauffeur to stop. He did—about fifteen feet from where we started. The Secret Service man shouted to him to get out of the crowd and he started forward again. I stopped him a second time [and] motioned to have [Mayor Cermak] put in the back of the car, which would be first out. He was alive but I didn’t think he was going to last. I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn’t find any pulse.… For three blocks I believed his heart had stopped. I held him all the way to the hospital and his pulse constantly improved. I remember I said: “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt if you keep quiet.”⁷³

The assassin, an unemployed thirty-two-year-old Italian bricklayer, Giuseppe Zangara, acted alone. He had bought his revolver at a pawnshop on North Miami Avenue for eight dollars. “I have always hated the rich and powerful,” he told police. “I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally. I hate all presidents, no matter from what country they come.” After Cermak died on March 6, Zangara was tried, convicted, and executed for murder.⁷⁴

After the shooting Roosevelt remained at Jackson Memorial Hospital until Cermak was brought out of the emergency room. He spoke with him for several minutes and then visited the other shooting victims. About 11:15 he returned to the Nourmahal. If he had been unnerved, it did not show. “All of us were prepared, sympathetically, for any reaction that might come from Roosevelt now that the tension was over and he was alone with us,” wrote Moley.

There was nothing. Not so much as the twitching of a muscle to indicate that it wasn’t any other evening in any other place. Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances unmoved.

FDR had talked to me once or twice during the campaign about the possibility that someone would try to assassinate him. But it is one thing to talk philosophically about assassination and another thing to face it. I confess that I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt’s calm that night on the Nourmahal.⁷⁵

Roosevelt’s matter-of-fact reaction to his brush with death, his cheerful contempt for danger, brought forth a national surge of confidence. It was abundantly clear that FDR lacked physical fear, and his courage rallied the country behind him. It provided a tonic on the eve of the inauguration; a vital pickup for a nation grappling with unprecedented unemployment, widespread hunger and need, and a banking system that teetered on the brink of collapse.

As Roosevelt’s train tracked northward, the nation was deluged with news of bank failures. Already 389 banks had shut their doors since the beginning of the year. The real panic had begun in Detroit when two of Michigan’s largest banks, Union Guardian Trust and First National, could not meet their obligations. On February 14, Governor William Comstock declared an eight-day bank holiday, freezing the funds of 900,000 customers and tying up $1.5 billion in deposits. From Michigan the panic spread like wildfire, triggering a rapid fall in stock prices and the flight of gold to Europe. On February 24, following a run on Baltimore banks, Governor Ritchie declared a three-day bank holiday. By the end of the month, banks in every section of the country were in trouble. People stood in long lines clutching satchels and paper bags, determined to take their money and stash it safely at home. Thomas W. Lamont, now chairman of J. P. Morgan, wrote Roosevelt that the situation “could not be worse.”⁷⁶ Piece by piece the nation’s credit structure was falling apart.

At Hyde Park FDR worked over his inaugural address. Moley arrived on February 27 with a draft he had prepared from notes taken on the train. Roosevelt rewrote the draft in longhand on yellow legal pads, reading the sentences aloud, cutting here, adding there, committing the words to memory. At 1:30 on the morning of February 28 the draft was complete, save for the reference to fear, which FDR added the next day.^* The final paragraph, invoking God’s guidance, was written by Roosevelt after his arrival in Washington.⁷⁷

On March 1, the president-elect left Hyde Park for New York City, where he spent the night. That day the governors of Kentucky and Tennessee declared bank holidays, followed in the evening by California, Louisiana, Alabama, and Oklahoma. By March 4, thirty-eight states, including New York and Illinois, had closed their banks. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on March 4, as did the Chicago Board of Trade.

Roosevelt’s response to the crisis was similar to his reaction in Miami: serene and confident, unruffled and unafraid. His outward demeanor betrayed no sign of worry. Franklin is not a worrier, Sara told Jim Farley. “His disposition is such that he can accept responsibilities and not let them wear him down.”⁷⁸ Roosevelt declined to make any public comment or take any action until he had the constitutional authority to do so. In his view, Hoover, as president, should do as he thought best. FDR would act when the time came. In the meantime he refused to make any joint statement and declined to give blanket approval to whatever action the Hoover administration might take. That was less of a problem than it might appear because Hoover still clung to his restricted view of executive power. On March 2 and again on March 3 he rejected the advice of his secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board that he invoke the emergency powers given the president under World War I’s Trading with the Enemy Act (which was still on the books⁷⁹) and issue a proclamation closing the nation’s banks, embargo the shipment of gold abroad, and limit the exchange of dollars into foreign currency.

Saturday, March 4, dawned dull and dreary in Washington, the sky overcast with the final days of winter. Homeless men, disheveled and threadbare, wandered the deserted streets in search of a breakfast handout. Under the leafless trees the flags flew at half-mast in honor of Senator Walsh. It was as if the nation’s gloom had settled over the city. Roosevelt began the day at 10 A.M. with a precedent-setting prayer service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, directly across Lafayette Square from the White House.^* He was joined by his family and personal staff, plus the members of the cabinet and their families, some hundred people altogether. At FDR’s request, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, still paterfamilias to a growing legion of Groton old boys, presided over the brief service. After reading the appropriate selections from the Book of Common Prayer, the elderly Peabody offered a special request, asking God “Thy favor to behold and bless Thy servant, Franklin, chosen to be President of the United States.” Roosevelt selected the hymns and psalms and joined in heartily as the choir led the small congregation in “Faith of Our Fathers” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” When the service ended, FDR remained on his knees for some time, his face cupped in his hands, in private prayer, his thoughts to himself.

Shortly before eleven, Roosevelt, in striped pants, cutaway, and silk hat, arrived at the porticoed north entrance to the White House. Breaking with custom again, FDR remained in the car while the presidential party assembled in the East Room. Soon President Hoover joined him, sitting to his right as protocol required. Eleanor rode in the second car with Mrs. Hoover. The seven-car procession, escorted by a troop of cavalry, began its two-mile journey up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Roosevelt attempted to make conversation, but except for a brief exchange in which Hoover asked FDR if he might provide a position for the president’s administrative assistant, the two sat in silence.⁸⁰ Happily, the ride was a short one. After the inaugural ceremonies they never saw each other again, although they were often in the same city. Hoover, the scapegoat from central casting, retired into domestic exile only to reappear every four years at Republican conventions, much to the delight of Democratic carnivores.

As required by statute, the vice president was sworn in first. Standing in the well of the Senate chamber, Vice President Charles Curtis, president of the Senate, swore in John Nance Garner as his successor. He then declared the Senate of the Seventy-second Congress adjourned sine die.Garner called the Seventy-third Senate to order and then recessed it until two o’clock, when it would reconvene to consider FDR’s cabinet nominees. When the ceremony ended, there was a rush to the inaugural stand at the east front of the Capitol. When the thousand or so guests were seated, a bugle sounded, followed by ruffles and flourishes, and the Marine Band, resplendent in scarlet and gold, broke into the “President’s March.” Franklin Roosevelt, braced on the arm of his eldest son, James, began his laborious walk to the rostrum, 146 feet away. Watching the scene, the veteran broadcaster Ed Hill observed that if this man had the courage to lift himself by sheer willpower from the bed of invalidism, had the determination and patience to make himself walk, then he must have within him the qualities to lead the nation to recovery.⁸¹

Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice of the United States, wearing the black robes of office, stood at the center of the platform to meet him. On the table beside Hughes rested the Dutch family Bible brought to the New World by Claes van Rosenvelt in the 1650s—upon which Roosevelt had twice taken the oath as governor of New York. It was opened to the thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, all three; but the greatest of these is charity.” FDR had proposed, and Hughes agreed, that he should repeat the oath word for word rather than simply say “I do.”⁸² As Hughes intoned the constitutional text, Roosevelt recited after him: “I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The chief justice ritually added the words “So help me God,” which Roosevelt repeated.⁸³

Roosevelt shook hands with Hughes, then pivoted to face the audience drawn up in front of the inaugural stand: 150,000 people spread over forty acres facing the Capitol. In the background, the howitzers of the 5th Field Artillery fired a twenty-one-gun salute. As the cannons boomed, the sun briefly broke through the clouds, and the new president was on cue. “This is a day of national consecration,” said FDR, invoking divine guidance as he would throughout the speech. The vast crowd stilled, sensing the destiny of the moment. Roosevelt’s voice was firm and reassuring, instilling confidence by tone and example. “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Roosevelt spoke for fifteen minutes—brief as inaugural addresses go, but the words were memorable, exceeding even Lincoln’s magnificent second inaugural in their immediate impact. The most pressing problem was to put people to work, said FDR, and the government must take the lead. “We must act and act quickly.” After briefly laying out his program, Roosevelt said he would recommend to Congress “the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” Should Congress fail to act, “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” For a nation desperate for leadership, Roosevelt had assumed the burden. He closed by asking God’s blessing: “May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.”⁸⁴

Frances Perkins said the scene was like a revival meeting.⁸⁵ Roosevelt understood the spiritual need of the people, the need for hope, not despair, and he provided it. FDR did not wear his religion on his sleeve. Neither did he believe he was the instrument of God’s will. His beliefs, while deeply held, were basically very simple.^* And he never hesitated to share them with his audience.

The effect of the speech was electrifying, the praise all but unanimous. The dreary years of Hoover’s excuses passed into oblivion. No one doubted that a new era had begun. Myron C. Taylor, the chairman of United States Steel Corporation, said “I hasten to re-enlist to fight the depression to its end.” Frederic E. Williamson, president of the New York Central, liked the speech’s brevity and force: “I feel that its directness presages immediate and forceful action.” Francis H. Sisson, head of the American Bankers Association, said, “I regard the message as a very courageous and inspiring appeal to the American people for their cooperation and confidence.” Newspaper and congressional support was overwhelming. Raymond Moley boasted, “He’s taken the ship of state and turned it around.” Eleanor said simply, “It was very solemn and a little terrifying.”⁸⁶

After a brief buffet luncheon at the White House, Roosevelt took his place on the reviewing stand, a replica of the portico of Andrew Jackson’s “Hermitage” in Nashville. For partisan Democrats, the fighting spirit of Old Hickory (not the intellectual reflections of Thomas Jefferson) was the lifeblood of the party, and no effort was spared to cast FDR in Jackson’s image. Roosevelt loved parades, and the inaugural procession of 1933—six miles in length, with forty marching bands and delegations from every state—was one of the largest on record. FDR had wanted General John J. Pershing to be grand marshal, but the elderly Pershing was ill in Arizona and General Douglas MacArthur acted in his stead. For almost three hours Roosevelt and MacArthur stood side by side reviewing the passing contingents. The State of New York was represented by the braves of Tammany Hall in full regalia, led by Al Smith striding along on foot. He waved his famous brown derby at the reviewing stand and Roosevelt wagged his silk hat in return. The sharpest political statement was made by a well-rehearsed troupe of African Americans pushing whirring lawn mowers down Pennsylvania Avenue—a parody of Hoover’s prediction that grass would grow in the streets following Roosevelt’s victory.

At dusk the president left the reviewing stand and returned to the White House, where a reception for several thousand guests was in progress. Roosevelt avoided the throng and slipped upstairs to the Lincoln Study, where the members of his cabinet, confirmed that afternoon, had assembled. He then presided over a joint swearing-in of the entire cabinet as Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo administered the oaths in order, beginning with Secretary of State Hull. “No Cabinet has ever been sworn in before in this way,” said FDR. “I am glad all of you were confirmed without opposition.”⁸⁷

From the study Roosevelt rushed back downstairs to greet thirteen children on crutches who had come at his invitation from Warm Springs to attend the inauguration. That evening the president and Eleanor dined with seventy-two Roosevelts and their kin in the State Dining Room. Cousin Alice called it “a riot of pleasure. I went with great alacrity and enthusiasm and had a lovely, malicious time.”⁸⁸ Afterward Eleanor took five carloads of relatives to the inaugural ball, a massive gala at the Washington Auditorium attended by eight thousand guests who had paid the equivalent of $150 a couple, the money donated to charity.^*

Roosevelt did not attend. After dinner he returned upstairs to the Lincoln Study, where he and Louis Howe talked over the events of the day. They had waited for this day for twenty-two years, and the two old fighters reminisced. At 10:30 the president turned out the lights and went to bed.

^* The Roosevelts were accompanied by FDR’s old sailing companion George Briggs and FDR’s cousin Bobby Delano, son of Sara’s brother Lyman. The boat, Myth II, was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Prescott Butler Huntington of St. James, New York, and was described by Mrs. Huntington as “ancient.” “It was an old boat. It leaked, and everybody knew it leaked.” James said, “I was nervous the whole trip because if heavy weather came out we might lose both a father and a presidential candidate.” Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 58 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

^* Farley signed his mail in the evening, sometimes devoting six hours to the task. “I have been asked if my hand gets cramped or tired from steady letter-signing. On occasion it does, but not often. When that happens, I hold it under the cold water for a few moments, then flex the fingers back and forth, repeating each process until the circulation returns. After five or ten minutes it is usually possible for me to resume without any ill effects. If there were no interruptions, I have been able to sign very close to 2,000 letters an hour.” James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 195 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938).

^* To convert 1932 dollars, multiply by 14. Robert C. Sahr, “Currency Conversion Factors, 1700 to estimated 2012,” Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon.

^* In fairness to Ike, he urged MacArthur to remain at the War Department and leave the operation to the troop commanders but was overruled. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” the chief of staff replied, speaking as he often did in the third person. “There is incipient revolution in the air.” William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 150 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978). Also see Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends 216 (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

^* “We underrated Long’s ability to grip the masses,” wrote Farley after the election. “He put on a great show and everywhere he went we got the most glowing reports of what he had accomplished for the Democratic cause.… If we had sent Huey into the thickly populated cities of the Pennsylvania mining districts, the electoral vote of the Keystone State would have gone to the Roosevelt-Garner ticket by a comfortable margin.” Farley, Behind the Ballots 171.

^* Stimson served as secretary of war under Taft from 1911 to 1913 and as secretary of state under Hoover, 1929–1933. He was FDR’s secretary of war (and then President Truman’s) from 1940 to 1945.

^* In January 1935 John Boettiger married Franklin and Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, following her divorce from Curtis Dall.

^* The Twentieth (“Lame Duck”) Amendment, changing inauguration day from March 4 to January 20, was not added to the Constitution until January 23, 1933, and did not become effective until 1937.

^* One of FDR’s first acts upon assuming office was to ask Congress for authorization to impose an embargo on the shipment of weapons to Bolivia and Paraguay, then engaged in a war for control of the headwaters of the Chaco River. Congress complied; Roosevelt proclaimed the embargo; and Curtiss-Wright Corporation violated it by attempting to ship sixteen machine guns to Bolivia, setting the stage for one of the landmark decisions of the Supreme Court pertaining to the nature of foreign affairs and the scope of executive authority, United States v. Curtiss-Wright, 299 U.S. 304 (1936). Justice George Sutherland, speaking for the Court, held that the authority to conduct foreign affairs was inherent in the national government and did not depend upon express grants in the Constitution. Sutherland’s dictum that the president is the “sole organ” of American foreign relations is often quoted, frequently out of context.

^* FDR was the first president to use the telephone extensively. Wilson had a telephone installed at the White House, but it was not in his office. Hoover was the first to have one on his desk, but he rarely used it. Perhaps because of his immobility, Roosevelt had learned the advantages of telephoning and was a master at the instrument. He had the entire White House wired and by his own testimony spent about a third of each day on the phone. Roughly a hundred people had direct access to FDR, and Hackmeister put them through without reference to Missy or Howe. Charles Hurd, When the New Deal Was Young and Gay 117 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965); John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 125 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

^* When five Democratic senators suggested to Raymond Moley that Hull was too idealistic and might not be up to the job of secretary of state, Roosevelt dismissed their concern out of hand. “You tell the senators I’ll be glad to have some fine idealism in the State Department.” Raymond Moley, After Seven Years 114 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).

^* James Roosevelt Roosevelt (“Rosy”), who died in 1927, had been married to Helen Astor, the daughter of the Mrs. Astor, the fabled arbiter of New York society.

^* Cermak had stacked the galleries at Chicago Stadium with Smith supporters and needed forgiveness. Chicago’s schoolteachers were working without salary, and Cermak was desperately seeking federal assistance. Farley wrote later that Cermak would not have had to go to Miami “if he had jumped on our bandwagon” after the first ballot. James A. Farley, The Jim Farley Story 21–22 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).

^* Louis Howe’s draft introduction, which Roosevelt received on February 28, contained the sentence “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR added the sentence and embellished it. Some have noted the resemblance to Henry David Thoreau’s “nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” but Moley, who was with Roosevelt when the speech was put in final form, discounts the link. Raymond Moley, The First New Deal 96–124 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966). And the fact is, the concept has a lengthy history. Francis Bacon said essentially the same thing in De Argumentis Scientiarum, Book VI, chapter III, early in the seventeenth century: “Nil terrible nisi ipse timor.” 2 The Works of Francis Bacon 476, James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds. (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872).

^* Roosevelt laid on the service at the last moment. “I think a thought to God is the right way to start off my administration,” he told Jim Farley. “A proper attitude toward religion, and belief in God, will in the end be the salvation of all peoples. For ourselves it will be the means of bringing us out of the depths of despair into which so many have apparently fallen.” Jim Farley’s Story 36. Also see Farley, Behind the Ballots 208.

^* Frances Perkins, who observed FDR at close range for many years, said “he had no doubts. He just believed with a certainty and simplicity that gave him no pangs or struggles. The problems of the higher criticism, of the application of scientific discoveries to the traditional teachings of the Christian faith and the Biblical record, bothered him not in the least. He knew what religion was and he followed it. It was more than a code of ethics for him. It was a real relationship of man to God, and he felt as certain of it as of the reality of his life.” The Roosevelt I Knew 141 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).

^* The 1933 inaugural ball was the first since William Howard Taft’s in 1909. Wilson was too sanctimonious to permit such indulgence, and Harding apparently lacked the self-confidence to resume the practice. In 1925 and 1929 the Republican National Committee organized unofficial celebrations, but Coolidge and Hoover ostentatiously stayed away and there was no formal ball as such.