as heard on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” this morning
“The Fireside Chat the FDR Threw Away”:
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As frightening as life had become since the Great Depression began, this was the bottom, though no one knew that at the time. The official national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, but that figure was widely considered to be low. Among non-farm workers, unemployment was more than 37 percent, and in some areas, like Toledo, Ohio, it reached 80 percent. Business investment was down 90 percent from 1929. Per capita real income was lower than three decades earlier, at the turn of the century. If you were unfortunate enough to have put your money in a bank that went bust, you were wiped out. With no idea whether any banks would reopen, millions of people hid their few remaining assets under their mattresses where no one could steal them at night without a fight. The savings that many Americans had spent a lifetime accumulating were severely depleted or gone, along with 16 million of their jobs. When would they come back? Maybe never. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked by a reporter the previous summer if there were any precedent for what had happened to the world’s economy. He replied yes, it lasted 400 years and was called the Dark Ages.
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That word—“dictator”—had been in the air for weeks, endorsed vaguely as a remedy for the Depression by establishment figures ranging from the owners of the New York Daily News, the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, to Walter Lippmann, the eminent columnist who spoke for the American political elite. “The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers,” Lippmann had told FDR during a visit to Warm Springs on February 1, before the crisis escalated. Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, recalled with some exaggeration that “during the World War we wrapped the Constitution in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over.” The Depression, Smith concluded, was a similar “state of war.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, privately suggested that a “benevolent dictator” might be what the country needed. The vague idea was not a police state but deference to a strong leader unfettered by Congress or the other inconveniences of democracy. Amid the crisis, the specifics didn’t go beyond more faith in government by fiat.
Within a few years, “dictator” would carry sinister tones, but—hard as it is to believe now—the word had a reassuring ring that season. So did “storm troopers,” used by one admiring author to describe foot soldiers of the early New Deal, and “concentration camps,” a generic term routinely applied to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps that would be established by summer across the country. After all, the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini, in power for a decade, had ginned up the Italian economy and was popular with everyone from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers to Lowell Thomas, America’s most influential broadcaster. “If ever this country needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” said Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania, outgoing President Hoover’s closest friend on Capitol Hill. The speech draft prepared for FDR brought to mind Mussolini addressing his Black-Shirt followers, many of whom were demobilized veterans who joined Il Duce’s private army.
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The most powerful American publisher, William Randolph Hearst, seemed to favor dictatorship. The Hearst empire extended to Hollywood, where Hearst that winter had personally supervised the filming of an upcoming hit movie called “Gabriel Over the White House” that was meant to instruct FDR and prepare the public for a dictatorship. The movie’s hero is a president played by Walter Huston who dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad. FDR not only saw an advance screening of the film, he offered ideas for script rewrites and wrote Hearst from the White House that he thought it would help the country.
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In the days ahead, FDR moved far from where that unused American Legion draft would have taken him, passing the word on Capitol Hill that he did not believe in a constitutional dictatorship and asking his friend Felix Frankfurter to tell Lippmann to stop hawking dictatorship and disrespect of Congress in his columns. It was not as if Roosevelt was letting the cup pass; for the next 12 years, he would fully exploit the authority of the presidency, sometimes overreaching to the point where his enemies accused him of becoming a dictator. He would flirt with fascistic (or at least corporatist) ideas like the National Recovery Administration and in 1937 try to pack the Supreme Court. But even then, he would do so in the context of democracy, without private armies or government-by-decree. Even at his worst, he would eventually submit his schemes for the approval of Congress. Instead of coercion, he chose persuasion; instead of drawing the sword, he would draw on his own character and political instincts. He would draw, too, on the subconscious metaphor of his own physical condition. Although it was only rarely mentioned in the press, the American people knew at the time that he had polio (though not the extent of his disability) and it bound them to him in ways that were no less powerful for being unspoken: If he could rise from his paralysis, then so could they.
II. Hmmmm….
1) The communist movement, in its various incarnations was very strong in the US immediately prior to (and maybe during) this period if I remember right. An indicator of the desperation.
2) I seem to remember that Chile’, once a virtual paragon of …national honesty and competence… in south america (especially compared to most of its immediate neighbors) found itself in a roughly similiar position to the depression era US some decades back. Combination of corruption and economic problems. (CIA might also have been involved). In desperation, they turned to the military to `fix things`, and the country basically went to hell in a handcart as a direct result.
3) Bush II seems to be working real hard to create a disaster similiar to the Great Depression in the 21st century. Somehow, I don’t envision him as having the `strength of moral character’ that Roosevelt employed to avoid going the dictatorship route. Rather, he would embrace the dictator route, and so would those pulling his strings (he is a puppet, afterall).
III. Yes But,
We get around the law during a crisis by creating a facade and re-interpreting said law.
First, because the president had no explicit power to close banks, they urged him to use the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, an obscure wartime provision that was intended to prevent gold transfers that could help the Germans. The original wartime measure was temporary and had long since expired. But when economic conditions worsened in 1932, a clever legislative draftsman at the Hoover Treasury had dusted off the bill and taken the legally questionable step of changing the “implementation language” to make the 1917 act permanent.
This was probably illegal, but the Hoover men were frightened and not in the mood for legal niceties. FDR agreed, and invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act to declare a national bank holiday. Second, the group, under the leadership of Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, developed banking reform legislation; FDR called Congress into special session to pass it.
Fluid as all get out.
IV: When Hoover, Roosevelt, Lincoln, ect `stepped outside the bounds’ they did so with the clear and limited intent of `fixing’ problems that were so nasty they had a good chance of destroying the country.
On the other hand, when the the Bush II crew has `stepped outside the bounds’ their decisions have been anything but `clear and limited’. Some of them (Homeland Security) have the potential to make things much, much worse.
V: As per Roosevelt. I read through a batch of news articles from the era, and ran into an obituary for a deceased dictator, circa 1935 or therabouts, from Venezuela… apparently ran the place for 30 years, himself or via thinly disguised puppets. The upshoot is the tone of the orbituary, which congratulated him on his endurance and tenacity to cling to power, and suggested that in “previous time” we’d not admire his traits, but “these days” the practical benefits of a concentration camp and a ruthless tyrant, et al, have been manifested in the world at large.