Franklin Roosevelt

PBS American Experience

Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945):
[The] only thing we have to fear is fear itself …

[There] must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. …

[In] our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order:

• there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments, so that there will be an end to speculation with other people's money; and
• there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency. …

[We] now realize as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other …
[That] we cannot merely take but we must give as well …
(First Inauguration Address, 4 March 1933)

Henry Fletcher (1873 – 1959) [Chairman, Republican National Committee, 1934-6]:
The New Deal is government from above.
It is based on the proposition that the people cannot manage their own affairs and that a government bureaucracy must manage for them.
(David Grubin, FDR, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 1994)

Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945):
The time may be coming when the Germans and the Japs will do some fool thing that will put us in [the war].
That's the only real danger of our getting in.
(1940)

Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the [founding] fathers — the whole structure of modern life [has been] impressed into [a new royal servitude. …]
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, [should reach] out for control over Government itself.
They [have] created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. …
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. …

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business.
They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair.
If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. …

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

(Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Democratic Convention, Philadelphia, 27 June 1936)


A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing.
Sometimes they will call it 'Fascism.'
And sometimes 'Communism.' …
And sometimes 'Socialism.'
But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.
I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies …

[The] simplest way … to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation.
Are you better off than you were last year?
Are your debts less burdensome?
Is your bank account more secure?
Are your working conditions better?
Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded. …

Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty.
[Again,] answer this question out of the facts of your own life.
Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?

(Fireside Chat, No 117, 28 June 1934)


[We] struggle with the old enemies [—] business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism [and] sectionalism …
We know … that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. …

[There are] those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls.
They say that those on relief are not merely jobless — that they are worthless.
Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief — to purge the rolls by starvation. …

[It] is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without … a sense of justice and of moral purpose.

(The Second New Deal, 31 October 1936)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

32nd President of the United States (1933-1945).

• The first 100 days of any US presidency are critical, so what can President Biden learn from Franklin Delano Roosevelt?, ABC Rear Vision, 28 February 2021.
• FDR, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 1994.
  David Grubin.
  
  [On] May 27, 1935 … the Supreme Court [declared] the National Recovery Act [unconstitutional.]
  The court was moving against Roosevelt's efforts to
  • abolish child labor,
  • establish a minimum wage, [and to]
  • boost farm prices.
  Law by law, the court would attempt to dismantle the work of the first 100 days.
  But with millions still unemployed, Roosevelt continued to use the power of the federal government to relieve the suffering caused by the Great Depression.

  William Leuchtenburg [Historian]:
  Congress, at Roosevelt's request, enacts the Emergency Work Relief Appropriations Act, which is the largest single peacetime appropriation in … the history of the world. …

  Five billion dollars went [on building] more than 5,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 1,000 landing fields, 13,000 playgrounds.
  
  [FDR brought] power to rural America where nine out of every 10 families still lived without electricity.
  For millions of Americans — impoverished children, the unemployed, the elderly with no savings, the disabled — he offered the Social Security Act.
  He sold it as an insurance policy for everyone, but the poor, Roosevelt was saying, had rights too. …

  David Ginsburg [FDR Administration]:
  The great tradition in the United States had been private charity, community charity.
  Families take care of their own …
  [The] notion that … the government would take care of the poor or the unemployed or the old [was] not part of our tradition. …

  By the end of his first term, Roosevelt had begun to shift the balance of power in America.
  The rich felt the sting of higher taxes and workers acquired the right to bargain collectively.
  [Great] American industries — steel, rubber, automobiles — would [soon] be unionized for the first time …

  Curtis Roosevelt [Grandson]:
  People who held a position in society that was basically inherited and family-oriented instinctively felt that this was being lost …
  [That Franklin Roosevelt] was a traitor to his class.
  [People] would come up to me … in the 10 or 15 years after he died, and express their vitriolic hate towards [him. …]
  
  Alistair Cooke [Journalist]:
  I don't believe five Americans in a hundred knew he was paralyzed.
  I think if it had been absolutely common knowledge, it would have been very difficult to elect him. …

  Eleanor Roosevelt also came under attack for her tireless advocacy of New Deal reforms, and especially for her sympathies with the struggle of black Americans. …
  
  Wherever African-Americans were allowed to vote, they abandoned the party of Abraham Lincoln to vote Democratic.
  Inner-city immigrants, working men and women, white southerners — Roosevelt … created a new Democratic Party coalition. …
  
  Far away, fascist armies were marching.
  Adolf Hitler's Germany had seized the Rhineland.
  Benito Mussolini's Italy crushed Ethiopia.
  Emperor Hirohito's Japan ravaged China. …
  
  [But, whenever] Roosevelt suggested that the United States play any part on the world stage, he met with violent isolationist opposition.
  Two congressmen even threatened him with impeachment. …

  Robert Dallek [Historian]:
  [If] he had his druthers, he would avoid war not by retreating from international politics, but [by being] assertive and [playing] a significant role in international power politics. …

  [FDR] had an extraordinary vision for post-war America.
  He spoke of guaranteeing everyone a job, a decent home and effective health care.
  He insisted veterans get a free education and access to low-interest loans.
  He designed an international organization dedicated to peace, the United Nations.

Alistair Cooke (1908 – 2004)

[Roosevelt's National Recovery Act] galvanized the country.
It made such an enormous difference.
[When] I went around the country in 1933 … the whole mood had changed.
There was still the poverty … but [the people] felt somebody was looking out for them. …
It was an example of absolutely magnetic leadership that's never been touched since.
(Pebble Mill at One, BBC Television)

In the month before his inauguration, banks were failing every hour, and for two weeks gold and currency were being withdrawn at the appalling rate of $15 million a day.
The government, which had lent over $850 million to the banks, now started to lend heavily to the railroads.
On March 4, 1933, the day of his inauguration, Roosevelt [closed] every bank in the country.
(p 329)

He … shoved through Congress huge federal loans for public works, and at the same time [gave the industrial worker] the right to organize and bargain.
He handed out hard dollars to the unemployed and took three million youngsters off the streets to build highways and plant ten million trees.
He mobilized actors in the federal theater and … hired unemployed scholars, writers, and local historians to produce several hundred … guidebooks to the states.
He stopped the automatic production of groaning farm surpluses, … built enormous dams to hold the flooding of the great river valleys, [and] conserved the soil of the worn-out South …
In all … he established once [and] for all the federal government's right to plan economic and social welfare on a national scale [— just] as the great corporations had done for their industries …
(p 331)

I believe he saved the capitalist system …
(p 332)

(Alistair Cooke's America, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)

Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997)

… Roosevelt stands out principally by his astonishing appetite for life and by his apparently complete freedom from fear of the future; as a man who welcomed the future eagerly as such, and conveyed the feeling that whatever the times might bring, all would be grist to his mill, nothing would be too formidable or crushing to be subdued and used and moulded into the pattern of the new and unpredictable forms of life into the building of which he, Roosevelt, and his allies and devoted subordinates would throw themselves with unheard-of energy and gusto.
(p 615)

So passionate a faith in the future, so untroubled a confidence in one's power to mould it, when it is allied to a capacity for realistic appraisal of its true contours, implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or half-conscious, of the tendencies of one's milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds of the human beings who compose it, of what are impersonally described as social and individual 'trends'.
Roosevelt had this sensibility developed to the point of genius. …
His sense, not only of the movement of American public opinion but of the general direction in which the larger human society of his time was moving, was what is called uncanny.
The inner currents, the tremors and complicated convolutions of this movement seemed to register themselves within his nervous system with a kind of seismographical accuracy. …

Peoples far beyond the frontiers of the United States rightly looked to him as the most genuine and unswerving spokesman of democracy of his time, the most contemporary, the most outward-looking, the boldest, most imaginative, most large-spirited, free from the obsessions of an inner life, with an unparalleled capacity for creating confidence in the power of his insight, his foresight, and his capacity genuinely to identify himself with the ideals of humble people.
(p 615)

[He was] the herald of the bright and cloudless civilisation of the future …
(p 617)

In a despondent world which appeared divided between wicked and fatally efficient fanatics marching to destroy, and bewildered populations on the run, unenthusiastic martyrs in a cause they could not define, he believed in his own ability, so long as he was at the controls, to stem this terrible tide.
He had all the character and energy and skill of the dictators, and he was on our side.
He was, in his opinions and public action, every inch a democrat. …

What the Germans thought Hitler to be, Hitler, in fact, largely was, and what free men in Europe and in America and in Asia and in Africa and in Australia, and wherever else the rudiments of political thought stirred at all — what all these felt Roosevelt to be, he in fact was.
He was the greatest leader of democracy, the greatest champion of social progress in the twentieth century.
(pp 634-5)

But Roosevelt's greatest service to mankind (after ensuring the victory against the enemies of freedom) consists in the fact that he showed that it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human: that the fierce left- and right-wing propaganda of the 1930s, according to which the conquest and retention of political power is not compatible with human qualities, but necessarily demands from those who pursue it seriously the sacrifice of their lives upon the altar of some ruthless ideology, or the practice of despotism — this propaganda, which filled the art and talk of the day, was simply untrue.
Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view

• that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government;
• that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political;
• that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty — a loose texture of society — with the indispensable minimum of organising and authority; and
• [that] in this belief lies what [Abraham Lincoln] once described as 'the last best hope of earth'.

(p 636)

(The Proper Study of Mankind, Vintage, 2013)