The Defining Moment

FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

Jonathan Alter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780743246019
• eBook ISBN: 9781416535102
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

This is the story of a political miracle -- the perfect match of man and moment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March of 1933 as America touched bottom. Banks were closing everywhere. Millions of people lost everything. The Great Depression had caused a national breakdown. With the craft of a master storyteller, Jonathan Alter brings us closer than ever before to the Roosevelt magic. Facing the gravest crisis since the Civil War, FDR used his cagey political instincts and ebullient temperament in the storied first Hundred Days of his presidency to pull off an astonishing conjuring act that lifted the country and saved both democracy and capitalism.

Who was this man? To revive the nation when it felt so hopeless took an extraordinary display of optimism and self-confidence. Alter shows us how a snobbish and apparently lightweight young aristocrat was forged into an incandescent leader by his domineering mother; his independent wife; his eccentric top adviser, Louis Howe; and his ally-turned-bitter-rival, Al Smith, the Tammany Hall street fighter FDR had to vanquish to complete his preparation for the presidency.

"Old Doc Roosevelt" had learned at Warm Springs, Georgia, how to lift others who suffered from polio, even if he could not cure their paralysis, or his own. He brought the same talents to a larger stage. Derided as weak and unprincipled by pundits, Governor Roosevelt was barely nominated for president in 1932. As president-elect, he escaped assassination in Miami by inches, then stiffed President Herbert Hoover's efforts to pull him into cooperating with him to deal with a terrifying crisis. In the most tumultuous and dramatic presidential transition in history, the entire banking structure came tumbling down just hours before FDR's legendary "only thing we have to fear is fear itself" Inaugural Address.

In a major historical find, Alter unearths the draft of a radio speech in which Roosevelt considered enlisting a private army of American Legion veterans on his first day in office. He did not. Instead of circumventing Congress and becoming the dictator so many thought they needed, FDR used his stunning debut to experiment. He rescued banks, put men to work immediately, and revolutionized mass communications with pioneering press conferences and the first Fireside Chat. As he moved both right and left, Roosevelt's insistence on "action now" did little to cure the Depression, but he began to rewrite the nation's social contract and lay the groundwork for his most ambitious achievements, including Social Security.

From one of America's most respected journalists, rich in insights and with fresh documentation and colorful detail, this thrilling story of presidential leadership -- of what government is for -- resonates through the events of today. It deepens our understanding of how Franklin Delano Roosevelt restored hope and transformed America.

The Defining Moment will take its place among our most compelling works of political history.

Part One

Lightweight Steel

BEFORE MAN MET MOMENT in 1933, there was little on the public record to recommend Franklin Roosevelt as a world-class leader. He had thought about being president at least since Harvard at the turn of the century, when his distant cousin Theodore moved into the White House. Young Franklin consciously imitated TR’s idiosyncrasies by wearing a pince-nez and pronouncing himself “dee-lighted!” But this hardly made him seem closer to his extraordinary relative or a plausible future president; if anything, it caused his sophisticated classmates to laugh at him. And with good reason. Beyond possessing a Roosevelt gene for exuberance, FDR did not seem a compelling and formidable figure until much later.

Yet in the half century from his birth in 1882 until 1933, certain legacies, experiences, and relationships shaped his political character in ways that would prove decisive in a crisis. His family background offered enormous security and a sense of ease and confidence that he learned to convey to others. The manipulative skills he developed to handle his father’s illness and his mother’s meddling were essential emotional equipment. His marriage to a strong-willed woman, Eleanor, and his political marriage to a talented handler, Louis Howe, showed self-knowledge, even wisdom. In Woodrow Wilson’s sub-Cabinet from 1913 to 1921, he became an effective operator with an understanding of the levers of power. Although effete and seemingly out of touch, he stood up to the streetwise and widely respected governor of New York, Al Smith, which provided him a critical psychological lift. Most of all, the polio he contracted at age thirty-nine in 1921 changed the way he related to other people; the iron braces on his legs helped to forge his iron will. He learned to reject received opinion and respect “the common man” who had previously escaped his attention. His establishment of a rehabilitative clinic at Warm Springs, Georgia, offered Franklin matchless experience in lifting the spirits of afflicted people even if he could not greatly change their medical condition—the perfect preparation for the Hundred Days, when he restored hope without changing the material condition of the country.

This unusual combination of being underestimated yet well seasoned, calculating yet intuitive, would help FDR’s grand debut in 1933. It was as if he had been preparing for a life in the theater: the theater of the modern presidency, with its emphasis on dramatic entrances, perfect timing, and an instinct for performance.

Chapter One

Security

F DR COULD CONVINCINGLY EMBODY a sense of security for millions of Americans in part because he possessed so much of it himself. Even when he felt a trifle insecure among his dismissive peers at school, he could always fall back on his proud heritage and storied name as a source of strength. Character development is always a mystery, but in Franklins case the combination of the entrepreneurial success of his mother’s family, the Delanos, and the old-money stability and impeccable social standing of the Roosevelts seemed to protect him behind a double-bolted door of invulnerability, reinforced by the unusually strong love and attention of his parents.

Security for his family was Warren Delano’s aspiration when he first sailed for China in 1833, a hundred years before his grandson was sworn in as president. Delano could trace his roots back to a Huguenot, Philippe de la Noye (eventually shortened and conjoined), who arrived in Plymouth Colony just months after the Mayflower. But lineage has never been a convertible currency in the United States; even the most aristocratic American families must replenish the family fortunes every few generations, as Warren Delano did by trading opium and other commodities in China. Delano was an autocrat and what later came to be known as a rock-ribbed Republican. He liked to say that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, it was his experience that all horse thieves were Democrats.

Delano’s daughter Sara accompanied her father to China as a girl and would pass on her family’s sense of adventure to her son. As a young woman, she had fallen for the famous architect Stanford White, but her father disapproved and it seemed for a time as if she might not marry. Sara was twenty-six, with impeccable posture and a strong will, when she met a country squire named James Roosevelt, whose mutton chops made him look less like the British lord he aspired to be, sniped one relative, and more like the lord’s coachman. “Mr. James” was twice her age—fifty-two—a widower and father (his first son, James “Rosy” Roosevelt, was FDR’s little-remembered and much older half brother) who had found success in business and become a reliable Democrat, thanks in part to a post–Civil War friendship with General George B. McClellan, the 1864 Democratic presidential candidate.

James was descended from the Dutchman Claes Van Rosenvelt, who arrived in the New World about 1650. The family fortune was founded when James’s great-grandfather, Isaac, imported sugar from the West Indies to make rum, then used the profits to invest heavily in New York real estate. FDR would boast that Isaac led George Washington’s horse in the first Inaugural Parade, though this was likely one of his embellishments.

James’s father (Franklin’s paternal grandfather, whom he never knew) was a medical doctor afraid of the sight of blood, insecure to the point of being a shut-in. James learned not to say anything that might upset the old man, a sense of discretion passed on to Franklin. Perhaps rebelling against his father’s nervous disposition, James also developed an easy equanimity. This, too, would be bequeathed.

To opium dealing in the Delano line, add draft avoidance among the Roosevelts. James had been thirty-two when the Civil War began, still young enough to take part. Like many gentlemen of his day, he paid a substitute to serve for him in the Union Army. FDR’s Hudson River Valley branch of the Roosevelt family felt none of the embarrassment experienced by cousin Theodore over his father having shirked service in Lincoln’s war. In fact, after two decades of ambitious ventures in the business world—including an abortive effort to finance a canal through Nicaragua and the presidency of the largest railway in the South—James developed a sense of ease about his position in the world. Recriminations, his son later learned, were for others.

Buffeted by the Panic of 1873 and forced to resign as president of the coal company he founded, James Roosevelt’s fortune slipped below that of other prominent families in the Hudson Valley. But he appeared unflappable amid this personal setback, perhaps because he still held enough assets to assure that his branch of the family would remain relatively wealthy for at least another generation. Outside the business world, James was perhaps best known for breeding horses at “Spring-wood,” as he called the estate he built near the tiny village of Hyde Park, New York, ninety miles north of New York City. With sweeping views of the Hudson River, the house at Hyde Park would become the anchor of this branch of the Roosevelt family for the next two generations. By the 1880s, he had also bought a fifteen-room Victorian summer “cottage” on Canada’s Campobello Island, just off the coast of Maine.

The circumstances of FDR’s birth may have contributed to his sense of security because the trauma made him all the more precious to his parents. Sara was in labor for twenty-five hours and nearly died. To save her, chloroform was administered, with the assumption that the baby would be stillborn. When the boy was born on January 30, 1882, he was blue and not breathing; the nurse was sure he was gone. But the doctor began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and he came around. He was named after Sara’s childless uncle, Franklin Delano.

Chapter Two

“My Boy Franklin”

THE INTENSITY OF SARA’S LOVE for her son was destined to make him either a basket case or the most self-possessed of men. It proved to be the latter. Sara was a walking advertisement for the benefits of ceaseless, even suffocating devotion—the only source of consistent affection in her son’s life, a rock not just of financial security but of the deep maternal love so central to instilling genuine self-confidence. Although a self-satisfied and often imperious woman of the 19th century, she nonetheless possessed a warmth and generosity that held her family together.

Roosevelt was Sara’s only child,^* so the bond went far. She breast-fed Franklin for nearly a year, bathed and dressed him, and took him everywhere, holding and carrying him with a constancy highly unusual for women of her station, who normally left such duties to wet nurses. She couldn’t bear to leave her baby behind, in part because he seemed to have been born with such a nice disposition. Baby Franklin “crows and laughs all the time,” Sara wrote. He is “always bright and happy” and “never cries,” which, if true, suggests that some of his famous temperament may have been present from birth.

When he was two and a half, the age when first memories are often formed, Franklin experienced his greatest childhood shock. It occurred during a visit he made with his mother to the Delano estate at Algonac, New York. As the Delanos dressed one morning, they heard an explosion, then Sara’s younger sister, Laura, screaming. She had been heating curling irons over an alcohol lamp, a common household task more often performed by servants. When the lamp was somehow knocked over, burning alcohol spilled all over her robe. Her father Warren later wrote: “Laura flashed down the stairway a cloud of fiery flame.” Outside on the grass, others in the household, including Sara, tried to smother the flames with a carpet, too late.

There is no record of Roosevelt ever writing or even speaking of his aunt’s death, but he almost certainly heard her shrieking and may have witnessed the gruesome scene on the lawn. After contracting polio, he admitted that the possibility of fire haunted him; he sometimes practiced crawling out of his bedroom to safety. As he told his son James on the night of his 1932 election as president, fire was the only thing he ever truly feared in life.

A few months after Laura’s death came another moment of trauma, though this one ended differently. James, Sara, and Franklin were on the way home from England on the ocean liner Germania, when the ship plunged sharply beneath a huge freak wave. As passengers shrieked in terror, Mr. James said calmly, “We seem to be going down.” Franklin called out for his toy jumping jack as it floated past their berth.

“I never get frightened,” Sara later recalled. “And I was not then.” According to family lore, she took her fur and wrapped it around three-year-old Franklin, who had awakened as water began to fill their compartment. “Poor little boy. If he must go down, he’s going down warm.” The captain was knocked unconscious by the force of the wave, but he was revived and eventually righted the ship, which made it back to Liverpool. This scene—and his parents’ calm fatalism—left enough of an impression on Franklin that he recalled it often to friends.^* Whether the “shipwreck story” helped shape Roosevelt (it did nothing to dampen his love of the sea), his associates over the years would consistently remark on his calmness in a crisis.

But if Franklin was surrounded by family love, he grew up with few playmates and little company beyond parents and tutors. The Roosevelts were snobs. They reminded the historian Richard Hofstadter of “secondary characters in Edith Wharton novels who provide the climate of respectable and unfriendly opinion in which her characters live.” (Wharton, a resident of the Hudson River Valley, was an acquaintance of the Roosevelts.) Although they lived practically next door, Mr. James and Sara declined an invitation from the far wealthier Vanderbilts to dine, for fear of having to invite the arrivistes back.

However, unlike many aristocrats, the Roosevelts never wrote off politicians as socially inferior. When Franklin was older, Sara told her son it was a “fallacy” that anyone could be too refined or well-bred for the White House. If Roosevelt was not bred to be president, he was raised to believe that the presidency was entirely within reach, should he be interested. In the winter of 1887, the Roosevelts lived in Washington, D.C., for a few months, where they socialized with James’s old friend from upstate New York Democratic politics, President Grover Cleveland. Just before leaving town, James dropped by the White House to say good-bye to the president with his five-year-old son. “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you,” the president, besieged by political problems, told Franklin, patting him on the head. “It is that you may never be president of the United States.” Fifty years later, FDR enjoyed telling that story when children visited him in the White House.

Another family story told by Sara (who, unlike her son, usually resisted embellishment) reflects Franklin’s almost supernatural confidence that fortune would always smile on him. One day, Franklin came in the house looking for his gun. He had spotted a winter wren in a tree by the river and wanted to shoot it for his taxidermy collection. His mother laughed at the idea of the wren waiting patiently for him to return. “He looked surprised but quite unperturbed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said confidently. ‘He’ll wait.’ ” And the bird did.

Sara was clearly obsessed with her son but took pains to assert that she was not overprotective. In My Boy Franklin, an odd little memoir she wrote with a ghostwriter (and with plenty of help from FDR) just before the 1933 Inauguration, Sara couldn’t quite decide how Franklin had developed his sense of social command. The same child who ordered playmates around was “self conscious when he talked to anyone other than members of the immediate family.”

These are the classic signs of a “mama’s boy.” Here was a solitary, bossy child who developed perfect pitch in telling his parents what they wanted to hear. He played instinctively on the knowledge that his mother would do anything for him, even sacrificing much of the socializing of others in her set. Despite chafing occasionally under Sara’s rigorous schedule for him and the schooling of private tutors, he doesn’t seem to have been lonely, and he developed none of the brooding quality of the lonely affluent child.

Most of the time, he preferred the company of adults, particularly his father. Mr. James took “Master Franklin” skating, horseback riding, and on his rounds of civic activities in Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie, where his quiet authority and Episcopalian reverence left an impression on the townspeople and on his son. Even so, FDR’s burgeoning sense of noblesse oblige may have come less from his father directly than from the image of his father that was built within his family.

At the other extreme, FDR’s much older half brother, Rosy, became an object lesson, playing an underappreciated role in Franklin’s later development. Rosy married an Astor and led a life of conspicuous languor, punctuated by outbursts of embarrassingly crude anti-Semitism (he complained endlessly about having to see Jews in New York and on vacation). Sara, who took a second wife’s view of her grown stepson, often used Rosy as a prod to make FDR aspire to something more useful and noble in life and to sound less vulgar in his opinions. Whatever the explanation, FDR’s early correspondence, unlike Eleanor’s, contains little of the casual anti-Semitism that characterized their social class.

There’s also no record in their correspondence of any grief or other unpleasantness. The Roosevelts wrote scores of letters each year throughout FDR’s youth, and several mention a boy named Archie Rogers, a Hyde Park neighbor who had become Franklin’s best friend. But there’s no mention of Archie’s death from diphtheria when Franklin was nearly eight. This suggests a childhood devoted to keeping up appearances and masking one’s true feelings behind a screen of tranquility and good humor. The Roosevelts did so not out of status anxiety but because poise and propriety were so highly valued in their family circle. This couldn’t have been much comfort for a child, but it offered exquisite training.

*Many American presidents have been the products of exceptionally strong mothers. Lincoln’s frontier stepmother, Sarah, was a critical influence. The same goes for Rebekah Johnson, Hannah Nixon, Lillian Carter, Nelle Reagan, and Virginia Kelley, mother of Bill Clinto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• PrologueSunday, March 5, 1933
• Part One Lightweight Steel
• Part Two The Ascent: 1932
• Part Three The Crisis: Winter 1933
• Part Four The Hundred Days
• Coda Social Security
• Epilogue “Dr. New Deal”
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author