America, Empire of Liberty by David Reynolds

Author:David Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

NEW DEAL

Early 1933 was the nadir of America’s Depression. In March at least a quarter of the workforce was unemployed; so grave was the financial crisis that all but ten of the forty-eight states had been forced to close their banks. The only country that matched America’s economic slump was Germany, where Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, and he exploited the crisis to establish a brutal dictatorship. Five weeks later, on March 4, Roosevelt took the oath as president of the United States, promising a New Deal for the American people.

This was a very different inauguration from four years before, when Hoover discerned a future bright with hope. Now Roosevelt faced the worst economic crisis in America’s history. But his message, though grim, was resolute: “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.”29

That line about fear paralyzing action came from the heart. At the end of the Great War, FDR, a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, had been assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration. In 1920 he was the Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency. But in 1921, at age thirty-nine, he was stricken by polio and never recovered the use of his lower body. The waspish general “Vinegar” Joe Stilwell called him “Rubberlegs”—a nickname that was mean but apt. After years of exercising his torso, Roosevelt did manage to move again but only by leaning on somebody’s arm and with heavy metal braces holding his legs rigid so that he walked like a man on stilts. One journalist remembered how difficult it was for FDR even to get up from a chair: “He was smiling as he talked. His face and hand muscles were totally relaxed. But then, when he had to stand up, his jaws went absolutely rigid. The effort of getting what was left of his body up was so great his face changed dramatically. It was as if he braced his body for a bullet.”30

Remarkably, press and cameramen kept the truth under wraps so most Americans believed FDR was lame rather than crippled.31 Yet in reality this was a wheelchair president, who needed help to dress and undress, even to go to the toilet. Each day could have been a succession of humiliations; instead Roosevelt managed to retain his ebullient good humor. Whatever the difficulties, he seemed calm and in control, commenting, “If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy.”32 The long battle to rebuild his career deepened his empathy with human suffering.

So America’s new president understood the power of confidence to vanquish fear and that became the watchword of his presidency. It was needed in his very first crisis: how to get the banking system going again.

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