A revealing account of the critical first days of FDR’s presidency, during the worst moments of the Great Depression, when he and his inner circle launched the New Deal and presided over the birth of modern America
Nothing to Fear brings to life a fulcrum moment in American history—the tense, feverish first one hundred days of FDR’s presidency, when he and his inner circle swept away the old order and reinvented the role of the federal government. When FDR took his oath of office in March 1933, thousands of banks had gone under following the Crash of 1929, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, farmers were in open rebellion, and hungry people descended on garbage dumps and fought over scraps of food. Before the Hundred Days, the federal government was limited in scope and ambition; by the end, it had assumed an active responsibility for the welfare of all of its citizens.
Adam Cohen offers an illuminating group portrait of the five members of FDR’s inner circle who played the greatest roles in this unprecedented transformation, revealing in turn what their personal dynamics suggest about FDR’s leadership style. These four men and one woman frequently pushed FDR to embrace more activist programs than he would have otherwise. FDR came to the White House with few firm commitments about how to fight the Great Depression—as a politician he was more pragmatic than ideological, and, perhaps surprising, given his New Deal legacy, by nature a fiscal conservative. To develop his policies, he relied heavily on his advisers, and preferred when they had conflicting views, so that he could choose the best option among them.
For this reason, he kept in close confidence both Frances Perkins—a feminist before her time, and the strongest advocate for social welfare programs—and Lewis Douglas—an entrenched budget cutter who frequently clashed with the other members of FDR’s progressive inner circle. A more ideological president would have surrounded himself with advisors who shared a similar vision, but rather than commit to a single solution or philosophy, FDR favored a policy of “bold, persistent experimentation.” As a result, he presided over the most feverish period of government activity in American history, one that gave birth to modern America.
As Adam Cohen reminds us, the political fault lines of this era—over welfare, government regulation, agriculture policy, and much more—remain with us today. Nothing to Fear is both a riveting narrative account of the personal dynamics that shaped the tumultuous early days of FDR’s presidency, and a character study of one of America’s defining leaders in a moment of crisis.
Edmund Wilson, the well-known writer, toured Chicago in 1932 and found a “sea of misery.” On one stop, he saw an old Polish immigrant “dying of a tumor, with no heat in the house, on a cold day.” In the city’s flophouses, Wilson encountered “a great deal of t.b.” and “spinal meningitis” that “got out of hand for a while and broke nine backs on its rack.” Worst of all were the garbage dumps, “diligently haunted by the hungry.” In the summer heat, when “the flies were thick,” a hundred people descended on one dump, “falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands.” Even spoiled meat was claimed, since the desperate foragers could “cut out the worst parts” or “scald it and sprinkle it with soda to neutralize the taste and smell.” A widowed housekeeper who was unable to find work showed up with her fourteen-year-old son. “Before she picked up the meat,” Wilson wrote, “she would always take off her glasses so that she would not be able to see the maggots.”
Wilson could have written a variation on this grim dispatch from any city in America. By 1932, the shock waves of the Crash of 1929 had brought devastation to every corner of the country. One-fourth of the nation’s workforce was unemployed and Fortune estimated that 27 million Americans were without a regular income. People with jobs struggled to survive on wages that had plunged to near-starvation levels. An Arizona cotton picker could earn as little as thirty cents a week after food and housing were deducted. In the cities, there were long lines outside soup kitchens and plaintive “hunger marches” by the unemployed. In rural areas, the destitution was less obvious but just as real. The American Friends Service Committee visited the West Virginia and Kentucky hill country and found that up to 90 percent of the children in some schools were underweight, and many were drowsy from malnutrition. Americans were reaching the limit of what they could take. Radicalism was on the march, not only in cities, but in God-fearing parts of the Farm Belt. “The biggest and finest crop of little revolutions I ever saw is ripe all over this country right now,” a National Farmers’ Union leader warned.
The nation was crying out for the government to respond, but President Herbert Hoover refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis. “I am convinced,” he said in the spring of 1930, “we have passed the worst.” As the Great Depression held on for year after brutal year, Hoover began to concede that the crisis was real, but he still refused to provide the sort of relief that was needed. His free-market ideology taught him that private enterprise should be the source of all solutions, and his near-religious commitment to “rugged individualism” convinced him that giving aid to the Depression’s victims would morally damage them. Hoover’s callousness earned him the enmity of the nation’s millions of unemployed, who got their revenge by turning his name into an epithet. They dubbed the bleak encampments they erected in parks and under bridges “Hoovervilles” and they called the old newspapers they covered themselves with at night “Hoover blankets.” When Hoover ran for reelection, mobs of jobless men and women showed up at his campaign rallies and pelted his car with rotten eggs. His opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised a new approach. Roosevelt’s vision of what government should do was so different that Hoover declared the 1932 election to be a choice not between two men, but between two philosophies. Hoover’s philosophy lost in a landslide in which he managed to carry just six states.
When Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, he charted a new course. That course was determined during the first one hundred days of his presidency. The Hundred Days, as the press would later name the period, began with a remarkable inaugural address. After assuring a despairing nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Roosevelt promised “action, and action now.” More than his words and his confident manner, it was the flurry of activity he ushered in that raised the nation’s spirits. During the Hundred Days, Roosevelt offered up what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called “a presidential barrage of ideas and programs unlike anything known to American history.” Roosevelt shepherded fifteen major laws through Congress, prodded along by two fireside chats and thirty press conferences. He created an alphabet soup of new agencies— the AAA, the CCC, the FERA, the NRA— to administer the laws and bring relief to farmers, industry, and the unemployed. In an editorial entitled “Laws for Everything,” The NewYork Times declared Roosevelt’s dizzying pace of accomplishments to be “little short of a marvel.”
The Hundred Days swept the old order away in quick and dramatic fashion. On inauguration day, the nation’s banks were teetering on the brink of collapse. Thousands had already failed, and all forty-eight states had declared bank holidays, preventing more banks from failing by cutting depositors off from their money. Hoover had stood idly by, refusing to intervene. Roosevelt took a more active stance. Within days he had declared a national bank holiday and signed the Emergency Banking Act, which immediately put the banking system on a firmer footing. He then delivered a remarkable fireside chat that restored the public’s faith in the banking system. When the banks reopened, the public rushed to put money in, not take it out, and the crisis was over. Before the Hundred Days had ended, he signed a second law, the Banking Act of 1933, which made deeper reforms.
When Roosevelt was sworn in, farmers were entering the second decade of their own, localized depression. At the end of World War I, commodity prices had plunged so low that for many farmers it no longer paid to plant. Farms were being lost to foreclosure at an alarming rate, and farm families were being thrown off the land. Hoover had made a few halting efforts to address the problem, but his ideology had prevented him from taking more effective steps. Within weeks, Roosevelt had signed a revolutionary new law, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which increased farm prices by paying farmers not to grow crops. He combated farm foreclosures through the Farm Credit Administration, a new federal farm mortgage program.
Roosevelt also brought help to the urban unemployed. Hoover, who believed relief eroded character and encouraged idleness, thought the poor should be cared for by private charity or, as a last resort, by local government. Roosevelt created the nation’s first federal relief program, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which supported the unemployed with federal money dispensed according to federal standards. He established two major public works programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps sent 250,000 jobless young people out into nature to plant trees and reclaim the land. The National Industrial Recovery Act allocated $3.3 billion for a wider range of projects. Roosevelt also created an agency, the National Recovery Administration, charged with helping industry get back on its feet. In exchange for that help, he got companies to agree to minimum wages and maximum hours, a legal right for unions to organize, and a ban on child labor.
There was more. Roosevelt passed a pathbreaking law, the Truth in Securities Act, which for the first time regulated issues of stock. He created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a new form of regional entity, to provide lowcost public power and improve conditions in one of the poorest regions in the country. Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, allowing him to battle deflation, which was causing hardship for anyone with a mortgage, especially farmers.
No presidential administration had ever done so much so fast. “The nation was bewildered, thrilled, happy with hope,” the journalist Ernest K. Lindley wrote. “The new President had delivered with a vengeance the ‘action’ which he promised on March 4.”
Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America by Adam Cohen. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) January 2009.
Nothing To Fear
Introduction
Chapter One
"Action, and Action Now"
Chapter Two
"Moley! Moley! Moley! Lord God Almighty!"
Chapter Three
"The Hardest-Boiled Man in Washington"
Chapter Four
"Good Farming; Clear Thinking; Right Living"
Chapter Five
"Good Lord! This Is a Revolution!"
Chapter Six
" 'Social Justice' . . . Has Been the Maxim of Her Life"
Chapter Seven
"Just So We Get a Public Works Program"
Chapter Eight
"He Must Be Part of This Historic Show"
Chapter Nine
"People Don't Eat in the Long Run—They Eat Every Day"
Epilogue
"A Lot Happened Out of That Determination of a Few People, Didn't It?"
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
“In the veritable library of books about the New Deal, Adam Cohen’s new entry deserves a prominent place on the top shelf. In my judgment, the story of the Hundred Days has never been told so well, nor the cast of characters rendered so compellingly.”
—Joseph J. Ellis, author of American Creation
“This is thrilling history, bringing to life the full-dimensional, extraordinary band of people who shaped the modern United States in a hundred-day dash. Cohen’s character sketches are sharp, his narrative moves along briskly, and the story itself is fresh—and full of drama. We are better off as a nation for having this chapter of our shared past told in page-turner fashion by Adam Cohen.”
—Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time
“FDR brought together brilliant people with divergent beliefs and was able both to manage and juggle them. In this fascinating book about his first hundred days, Adam Cohen looks at his innermost circle and provides wonderful insights about leadership, management, and creativity.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein
“When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933 he issued a spate of reform legislation which transformed America for the better. Now, Adam Cohen, one our finest historians, explains in vivid prose the backstory of how five inner-circle liberals jumpstarted those historic 100 Days. Nothing to Fear is a riveting, indispensable book for our times.”
—Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and Baker Institute Fellow at Rice University and author, The Great Deluge
“Vividly written and profoundly researched, this reprise of FDR’s circle is an exciting New Deal adventure for these troubled times. Adam Cohen's NOTHING TO FEAR is filled with surprises, new stories and unique portraits of FDR's friends and enemies you have never met this way before. The amazing journey of Frances Perkins is simply a marvel. At this critical moment, with our nation imperiled by the ‘starve the beast’ crowd, this book offers hope for what is now again most needed: the restoration of democracy, and the restitution of New Deal agencies to promote dignity and security for all.”
— Blanche Wiesen Cook, University Distinguished Professor, John Jay College & Graduate Center, CUNY and author of Eleanor Roosevelt
“An elucidating, pertinent and timely work on the makings of government. Ambitious, yet well-focused—a marvelously readable study of an epic moment in American history.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“An exemplary and remarkably timely narrative of FDR’s famous first ‘Hundred Days’ as president ... Cohen’s exhaustively researched and eloquently argued book provides a vital new level of insight into Roosevelt’s sweeping expansion of the federal government’s role in our national life.”
—Publishers Weekly “Adam Cohen’s cogent chronicle of the pell-mell opening months of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration couldn’t be timelier. … In a lucid, intelligent narrative as fast-paced as the hectic Hundred Days, Cohen skillfully charts the course of events with just enough detail, building by accretion a portrait of the stop-and-start process by which sweeping change is made.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Timely and engaging… Cohen masterfully renders the backgrounds and personalities of Roosevelt's inner circle. By focusing particularly on Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, budget director Lewis Douglas, relief administrator Henry Hopkins and top aide Raymond Moley, Cohen humanizes the policy process and adds considerable drama to the established storyline.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Cohen’s well-told story belies the cliché about legislation and sausage-making: his narrative is absorbing and enjoyable to read.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Timely… As a blueprint for political fast starts, Nothing to Fear might belong on the current President-elect’s night table, but it would make instructive reading for his advisers as well.”
—TIME
“Thrilling.”
—Esquire
“Cohen displays his strong prose style and research skills in this story of the precedent set by FDR against which later Presidents are judged… [A] crucial human story which goes beyond that found in most FDR biographies. Superbly readable and informative.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
“An indispensable primer.”
—Salon
