Roosevelt's Life & Times

Monday, Apr. 23, 1945

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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 The 18th Amendment was repealed.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.