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Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address (1933)

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In January 1933, President Herbert Hoover found himself in a position familiar at that point to millions of Americans: He was about to lose his job. Unsure of what the future might hold, he considered whether to accept an offer of a regular appearance on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Old Gold tobacco company. Hoover found the idea distasteful-becoming a speaker on a show whose ultimate purpose was to advertise cigarettes seemed to him a debasement of the presidency-but it was a desperate time. As he wrote to his press secretary, Theodore Joslin, "It is probably something I cannot do, but, well, I hate to say it, but I need that $150,000, Ted."

Meanwhile, the financial structure of the United States was approaching collapse. At the start of Hoover's presidency, 24,000 banks had been open for business throughout the country. By 1933, 10,000 of these had shut their doors. One state after another-Nevada, Iowa, California-was suspending normal bank operations in order to keep frightened depositors from withdrawing their cash. Publicly, Hoover insisted that the solution to the panic was a recommitment to the gold standard by nations that had recently abandoned it, such as Great Britain; he blamed the impending Roosevelt administration for sowing fear and discord. But privately, only a day before Michigan declared a bank holiday to protect its faltering financial system, he told Edgar Rickard, an old friend from Hoover's days as a mining engineer and executive, to withdraw "$10,000 in bills" for emergencies.

The story of an angst-filled Hoover quietly squirreling away funds while lecturing the country about the moral necessity of keeping the banks open is one of the pleasures of Eric Rauchway's Winter War, a crisp narrative of the four-month interregnum between Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory in November 1932 and his assumption of the presidency in March 1933. To write a whole history of what is essentially a prelude may seem odd. But Rauchway, who teaches at UC Davis, argues that in the conflict between the lame-duck Hoover and the incoming Roosevelt, we can already see the tension between the New Deal and the opposition to it that would structure American politics for much of the rest of the 20th century.

The New Deal, he maintains, was not a matter of invention and experimentation, as it has sometimes been interpreted to be. On the contrary, it reflected a clear ideological direction-one that American voters had consciously chosen in the fall of 1932. What is more, he suggests that these four months marked a distinctive moment of uncertainty and crisis in American history-a time of panic, anxiety, and political violence, when the basic economic and political structures of the United States were challenged in ways that they had not been since the Civil War. Rauchway presents a Roosevelt for our own polarized age, an act of historical imagination that delivers real insights yet also simplifies a complex period.

The timing of the presidential inauguration was just one of the American traditions jettisoned under the pressure of the Great Depression. The first of the nation's inaugurations was held on April 30, but thereafter they were scheduled for March 4-to mark the anniversary of the day the federal government began its operations in 1789. This changed with the Twentieth Amendment, which was ratified early in 1933 and moved the inauguration date up to January 20, starting in 1937.

Winter War makes clear the problems of such a long transition, certainly in late 1932 and early 1933. The nation was in a state of emergency, but the outgoing president could not take any action, while the new one still did not possess the power to lead. In February, Roosevelt was almost shot by Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed and unstable bricklayer who showed up at a Miami rally eager to assassinate the "big men" he believed were responsible for his anger and stomach pains. (Chicago's mayor, Anton Cermak, was hit by a bullet and died a few weeks later.) Eleven million people-about one-quarter of the workforce-were unemployed. In Germany, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor. In the United States, some people (including the publisher William Randolph Hearst) wondered whether America was in need of a similar strongman.
Hoover quietly squirreled away funds while lecturing the country about the moral necessity of keeping the banks open.
Roosevelt and Hoover had once been respectful acquaintances. But by November 1932, their relationship had chilled. One of the most powerful themes in Winter War is Hoover's intense political and personal hostility to Roosevelt, shared by his aides. Apparently, many in Hoover's circle had been eager to see their man face the New York governor in the election of 1932, believing that FDR's partial paralysis rendered him obviously incapable of fulfilling the duties of the presidency. "What is he, himself, thinking about when he allows himself to aspire to that office?" Hoover's congressional liaison, James MacLafferty, mused about Roosevelt. "When I see a man of Hoover's physical and mental power almost groggy from the blows that rain upon him I cannot make myself believe otherwise than that the election of Roosevelt to the presidency would be a crime against the nation."

Throughout the campaign, Hoover had attacked what he considered a "social philosophy very different from the traditional philosophies of the American people," warning that these "so-called new deals" would "destroy the very foundations" of American society. As Hoover later put it, the promise of a "New Deal" was both socialistic and fascistic; it would lead the country on a "march to Moscow." Even as he prepared to leave office, he was setting himself up as the leader of the resistance and the opposition. Rauchway suggests that he did his utmost to limit the incoming administration's ability to maneuver (an impulse that may sound familiar in the wake of the 2018 midterms in Wisconsin). For example, he attempted to establish a commission to deal with Europe's overdue war debts that would have been staffed by his appointees even after FDR took power.

Rauchway portrays Roosevelt, too, as farsighted from early in the 1932 campaign onward: Rejecting the fantasy of 19th-century individualism espoused by the Republican Party, he was committed instead to a vision that assigned government some responsibility for shaping economic life, and to quasi-Keynesian programs to achieve that vision. Previous historians have generally taken a very different tack. They have emphasized FDR's improvisatory qualities, styling him (to quote Richard Hofstadter's acerbic 1948 book, The American Political Tradition) "the patrician as opportunist"-a wealthy dilettante of the Hudson River Valley who managed to seize an opening for political power without a well-articulated sense of what he might do with it. In the Cold War, Roosevelt's experimentalism was judged an asset-a virtuous alternative to harsh ideology. More recent interpretations of the New Deal have focused on the conservative and pragmatic elements of the program-the limits of the welfare state it created and the ways that it enshrined rather than challenged corporate capitalism. Political constraints-namely Roosevelt's dependence on the Southern Democrats-meant that even though he was critical of segregation, he was reluctant to take meaningful action against it.

Rauchway counts on a close dissection of the president-elect's writings during the winter before he took office to back up his case for FDR's well-formed social vision. Writing in December 1932 about what he might accomplish, Roosevelt blamed the continuing Depression on the "political failure to grasp the fact of economic interdependence." On the campaign trail earlier in the year, he had presented what might have seemed like narrowly targeted policy proposals-for example, price supports for farmers-in ways that broadened the issue beyond a specific interest group. In November 1932, after the election, he argued for the price supports in terms of "purchasing power," and thus linked agricultural interests to the interests of consumers across the country. In contrast to the sunny optimist who proclaimed that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," Rauchway's Roosevelt was given to occasional worries about political apocalypse. He watched Hitler's rise with deep anxiety, and he feared that if the distress of America's jobless wasn't addressed, they might look to a dictator as well. Rauchway praises FDR's choice of Frances Perkins as labor secretary and the implicit feminism it embodied. (The chapter on Perkins is titled "Social Justice Warrior.")
Even Roosevelt sometimes seemed to back away from what might appear now to be the most basic precepts of the New Deal.
Rauchway does devote a chapter to Roosevelt's reluctance to combat southern segregationists, showing that the NAACP and other activists were watching him carefully to see whether he would extend any support to the cause of racial justice. But overall, his Roosevelt is a liberal hero who consistently advocated an expansion of public programs both to ameliorate the immediate suffering of the Depression and to stabilize the economy over the long term. Had Zangara's bullets gone a different way, had Roosevelt's running mate (the far more conservative John Nance Garner) ascended to the presidency, the fate of the country would have been profoundly different.

That is surely true, even if-as was often commented on at the time-the New Deal was not a clear-cut agenda that Roosevelt had ready-to-hand before he came into office. Rauchway's revisionist emphasis shouldn't eclipse the fact that the legislative efforts that went into the New Deal reflected many different interpretations of the problems facing the country in the 1930s. Even Roosevelt sometimes seemed to retreat from what might appear now to be the most basic precepts of the New Deal. He threw the economy back into recession in 1937 when he tried to balance the federal budget. The federal jobs programs he created were conceived as emergency measures that would last only a few years, revealing his underlying ambivalence about a welfare state.

Roosevelt and his advisers were pushed by events they did not control and by political actors representing a broad range of ideas -communists, socialists, and labor radicals, as well as the followers of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and Francis Townsend. By the end of the 1930s, many in Washington believed that the New Deal, whatever it was, had failed. Although unemployment had fallen from its peak and some of the worst pain of the Depression had been mitigated, the economy had not recovered-and wouldn't until World War II. Even the power and stability of the unions were truly secured only during the war. As the economist Alvin Hansen put it in 1940, when asked whether he believed the "basic principle" of the New Deal was economically sound: "I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is."

To make the New Deal seem as though it was a program that Roosevelt had worked out well ahead of time is to simplify this history, and to cut against the sense of crisis and contingency that Winter War so powerfully evokes. This version of events also makes the New Deal appear somehow a project of Roosevelt alone, rather than a political response to the wave of protests against the economic inequality and poverty that swept up millions of Americans. That surge of discontent may have been-even more than FDR-the real subject of Hoover's wrath.

Today, liberal nostalgia for Roosevelt comes easily. The country is mired in crises lacking obvious resolutions; the move toward greater equality that began to unfold during the 1930s has been largely undone. How much easier the situation would be if there were a standard-bearer in the Democratic Party, someone with an inspiring vision to move the country forward! But Roosevelt did not create the New Deal alone; it was the product of a generation of struggle and upheaval, of political unrest and agitation that extended well beyond Washington, D.C.

The same is true for the fight against it. The last pages of Winter War tell the story of Roosevelt's Inauguration Day. The crowds that thronged to the Capitol were perceived by Roosevelt's supporters as "a conquering army-as, in a sense, we were." So wrote the Democratic National Committee secretary in his diary. Hoover's men saw "a tough-looking crowd" that resembled a political convention, with (as one put it) "many negroes smoking vile cigars." After Roosevelt was sworn in, Hoover left Washington immediately, sitting apart on the train and weeping during some of the trip. He then began, with little pause, what would be the work of the rest of his life: fighting against Roosevelt and his policies.

For the remainder of the 1930s, Hoover embedded himself in the circles of the resistance, talking to businessmen who seemed "terrorized just as surely as the people in Moscow." He continued to be active in conservative circles, inspiring Richard Nixon, among others, and helping to lead the right-wing factions within the Republican Party. He died shortly before Barry Goldwater's electoral collapse in 1964. But his long crusade might serve as inspiration for people today who are fighting against the rightward shift that has carried the country so far from the New Deal. A journalist is said to have asked Hoover late in life how he had managed to win arguments with the moderate and liberal Republicans who seemed to be in control of the Republican Party. His answer: "I outlived the bastards." Not too bad for someone who had once debated signing up as an announcer with Old Gold.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline "The Fight Over Big Government Was Bitter From the Start."

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The Bitter Origins of the Fight Over Big Government

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What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us

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By Kaleena Fraga

On July 24, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave one of his iconic radio addresses to the nation. In this address, Roosevelt referenced: "the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal."

His administration had had a productive couple of months. In the first 100 days of his term-as the Great Depression raged-Roosevelt and his team jammed 15 bills through Congress. In the future, the first 100 days of subsequent presidents would be examined closely.

So, what were FDR's first 100 days like? What did he accomplish?

FDR's First 100 Days in Office

Like Joe Biden, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the helm of a country in crisis. In his first year in office, the American unemployment rate would reach its peak at around 25%. Over 12 million Americans were out of work.

Roosevelt equated fighting the Great Depression to fighting a war-an analogy that has also been used to describe the fight against coronavirus. Roosevelt said:

"I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis - broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

Then he got to work.

Two days after his inauguration on March 4th, 1933, Roosevelt declared a national "bank holiday" to stem the tide of people trying to withdraw their money from failing banks. A few days later, he signed the Emergency Banking Act, which allowed banks to reopen if the government found them sound. Aware that the country could plunge into deeper crisis, Congress rushed the passage of the bill-even though there were no available copies to read.

On March 12th, FDR gave his first "fireside chat" -a radio address to the nation to explain his actions and to reassure Americans that it was safe to put their money in the bank.

Roosevelt gives his first "fireside chat", March 12, 1933 | National Archives

"My friends," Roosevelt said, "I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking-to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks."

He reassured the country that it was: "Safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress."

FDR's direct communication worked. In the following weeks, Americans returned nearly a billion dollars to banks that the governments had declared sound. Raymond Moley, one of Roosevelt's closest aides, remarked that "capitalism was saved in eight days."

Roosevelt didn't stop there. In the next 100 days- technically, 105-his administration would usher 15 bills through Congress. They had a three-pronged goal: to boost employment, to help Americans in rural states, and to enact financial reforms.

A year later, unemployment started to drop and the country's GDP began to rise. Arguably, it would take the ultimate stimulus of WWII-and the ramping up of production -to end the Great Depression. But FDR brought relief to millions of Americans.

In his actions, FDR not only helped steer the United States away from crisis-he redefined the role of the federal government. Roosevelt believed it was a matter of "social duty" for the government to help where it could. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was well aware of this. A free-market capitalist, Hoover remarked that the 1932 election between Roosevelt and himself would be not: "a contest between two men" but "two philosophies of government."

Roosevelt also erected a bar for future presidents to scale. His successors would face pressure to have a productive 100 days in office like he had.

What Have Other Presidents Done In the First 100 Days?

John F. Kennedy was well-aware of the pressure of his first 100 days when he became president in 1961. In his inauguration, Kennedy said: "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

George W. Bush reluctantly attended a luncheon with lawmakers to mark his first 100 days in office-Bush saw 100 days as an arbitrary milestone-and noted: "We've had some good debates, we've made some good progress, and it looks like we're going to pass some good law."

Barack Obama, like Kennedy, remarked that the first 100 days of a presidency were only a starting point. "The first hundred days is going to be important, but it's probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference."

Obama-like Roosevelt-had inherited a country in crisis, in the throes of the Great Recession. Obama's first 100 days in office were pretty productive-he passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in January, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February, and started laying the groundwork to pass his healthcare bill.

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Presidents may dislike the pressure to perform in their first 100 days-but it looks like the standard is here to stay. Simply Google "100 days" and you'll find a glut of articles speculating about what Biden's will look like. Time, US News, Fidelity,and NPR have all run pieces about Biden's agenda for his first 100 days in office.

Ultimately, Kennedy had a point. The first 100 days of a presidency may set the tone. But presidencies are judged as part of a whole that's much longer than 100 days-or even four or eight years.

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By Kaleena Fraga On July 24, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave one of his iconic radio addresses to the nation. In this address, Roosevelt referenced: "the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal." His administration had had a productive couple of months.

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On March 12, the day before the first banks were to reopen, President Roosevelt gave the first of his many fireside chats—radio talks about issues of public concern, explaining in clear, simple language his New Deal measures. These informal talks made Americans feel as if the president were talking directly to them. In his first chat, Roosevelt took time to calm Americans’ fears about the bank crisis. He acknowledged that closing the banks had caused stress and hardship. But he reassured his listeners that the banks would reopen and the American financial system would return as strong as ever.

As Roosevelt explained, the banking crisis was caused in large part by panic. When too many people demanded their savings in cash, banks would fail. This was not because banks were weak but because even strong banks could not meet such heavy demands. Over the next few weeks, many Americans returned their savings to banks.

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WATCH ONLY UNTIL MINUTE 2:25

Congress took another step to reorganize the banking system by passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This act established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC provided federal insurance for individual bank accounts of up to $5,000, reassuring millions of bank customers that their money was safe. It also required banks to act cautiously with their customers’ money.

Congress and the president also worked to regulate the stock market, in which people had lost faith because of the crash of 1929. The Federal Securities Act, passed in May 1933, required corporations to provide complete information on all stock offerings and made them liable for any misrepresentations. In June 1934 Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock market. One goal of this commission was to prevent people with inside information about companies from “rigging” the stock market for their own profit.

In addition, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to approve a bill allowing the manufacture and sale of some alcoholic beverages. The bill’s main purpose was to raise government revenues by taxing alcohol. By the end of 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment had repealed prohibition altogether.

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What is the Glass-Steagall Act and why does it matter?

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Topic on Module 19, Lesson 1
Read everything

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FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian - FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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But the fiscal orthodoxy of budget balancing did not match the reality of the economic situation of an America with nearly a quarter of its working population unemployed. From 1933 to 1937, FDR maintained his belief in a balanced budget, but recognized the need for increased government expenditures to put people back to work.

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By the mid-1930s conservative opposition to the New Deal had received a boost from two Supreme Court decisions. In 1935 the Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional. It declared that the law upset the established system of checks and balances by giving legislative powers to the executive branch. Additionally, the Court said that the enforcement of industry codes within states went beyond the federal government’s constitutional powers to regulate interstate commerce. The next year, the Supreme Court struck down the AAA on the grounds that agriculture is a local matter and should be regulated by the states rather than by the federal government.

President Roosevelt feared that further Court decisions might dismantle the New Deal. To prevent such a Court action, in February 1937 he asked Congress to enact a court reform bill. If passed, the bill would reorganize the federal judiciary and allow FDR to appoint six new Supreme Court justices. Most observers saw this bill as a clumsy effort to “pack” the Supreme Court with friendly justices. They also viewed it as a dangerous attempt to upset the constitutional balance of power. Some of the Supreme Court’s rulings had been based on the belief that the executive branch had usurped too much legislative power. The court reform bill would further shift the relationship between the branches by allowing the executive to use legislation to interfere with judicial independence.

As it turned out, the president got his way without reorganizing the judiciary. In 1937 an elderly justice retired, and Roosevelt appointed the liberal Hugo S. Black, shifting the balance of the Court. Rulings of the Court began to favor the New Deal. Over the next four years, because of further resignations, Roosevelt was able to appoint seven new justices.

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Every Sunday, Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest from a suburb of Detroit, broadcast radio sermons that combined economic, political, and religious ideas. Initially a supporter of the New Deal, Coughlin soon turned against Roosevelt. He favored a guaranteed annual income and the nationalization of banks. At the height of his popularity, Father Coughlin claimed a radio audience of as many as 40–45 million people, but his increasingly anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish) views eventually cost him support.

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Another critic was Dr. Francis Townsend, a physician and health officer in Long Beach, California. He believed that Roosevelt wasn’t doing enough to help the poor and elderly, so he devised a pension plan that would provide monthly benefits to the aged. The plan found strong backing among the elderly, thus undermining their support for Roosevelt.

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Perhaps the most serious challenge to the New Deal came from Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. Like Coughlin, Long was an early supporter of the New Deal. But he, too, turned against Roosevelt. Eager to win the presidency for himself, Long proposed a nationwide social program called Share-Our-Wealth. Under the banner slogan “Every Man a King,” he promised something for everyone.

Long’s Share-Our-Wealth program was very popular. By 1935 he boasted of having perhaps as many as 27,000 Share-Our-Wealth clubs and 7.5 million members. That same year, however, at the height of his popularity, Long was assassinated by a lone gunman.

As the initial impetus of the New Deal began to wane, President Roosevelt started to look ahead. He knew that much more needed to be done to help the people and to solve the nation’s economic problems.