therapy, learned to stand using iron leg braces, to walk with the aid of crutches, and even to drive his own car. He ran for governor of New York and won, bringing to the state such progressive measures as the development of public power utilities, civil-service reform, and social-welfare programs.
When he decided to run for president, Roosevelt faced opponents who objected that he was neither intellectually nor (obviously!) physically fit for the White House.
FDR proved his opponents dead wrong. Having overcome the odds in his personal fight against polio, Roosevelt set about proving himself capable of overcoming the even grimmer odds in the national fight to lift America out of Depression. FDR flew to Chicago and addressed the 1932 Democratic National Convention, pledging to deliver to the American people a “New Deal,” a federally funded, federally administered program of relief and recovery.
Government Redefined
When he accepted the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” Following Roosevelt’s inauguration, the phrase “New Deal” caught on in a way that transformed the federal government. Within the first three months of the new administration—dubbed with Napoleonic grandeur by the press the “Hundred Day”—FDR introduced to Congress his relief legislation. The legislation promised to stimulate industrial recovery, assist individual victims of the Depression (something Hoover and all previous presidents had refused to do), guarantee minimum living standards, and help avert future crises.
Most of the actual legislation of the Hundred Days was aimed at providing immediate relief. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was established to protect depositors from losing their savings in the event of bank failure. The measure did much to restore confidence in the nation’s faltering banking system. The Federal Reserve Board, which regulates the nation’s money supply, was strengthened. The Home Owners Loan Corporation was established to supply funds to help beleaguered home owners avoid foreclosure. A Federal Securities Act reformed the regulation of stock offering and trading—an effort to avert the kind of wild speculation that helped bring about the crash of 1929.
Next, the Civilian Conservation Corps—the CCC—put thousands of men to work on projects in national forests, parks, and public lands; the National Recovery Act (NRA), most sweeping and controversial of the early New Deal legislation, established the Public Works Administration (PWA) and imposed upon industry a strict code of fair practice.
The act set minimum wages and maximum working hours and gave employees the right to collective bargaining. Private industry fought FDR tooth and nail on the NRA, but such was the depth of the Depression crisis and the personal charisma of Roosevelt that the administration prevailed.
In sharp contrast to the world’s communist regimes, the Roosevelt administration showed equal concern for the industrial worker and the agricultural worker. Farmers were in a desperate plight during the Depression, and in May 1933, FDR prevailed on Congress to create the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a program of production limits and federal subsidies. Perhaps the single most visible manifestation of the New Deal program of agricultural reform was the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built roads, great dams, and hydroelectric plants in seven of the nation’s poorest states.
More programs followed the Hundred Days. In 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was formed, which put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943—when the program ended. The employees built public projects out of concrete and steel, and they also created cultural works through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Writers’ Program, and the Federal Art Project. The most enduring of the New Deal programs was Social Security, introduced in 1935, which created old-age pension funds through payroll and wage taxes. None of the New Deal programs brought full recovery, but they helped restore confidence in the American government and propelled Roosevelt to a landslide second-term victory over Republican Alf Landon in 1936. A “Second New Deal” went into effect, which concentrated on labor reforms.
Urban War
In the end, it would take the approach of World War II, with its demand for the materials of strife, to end the Great Depression. But years before the United States entered that war, another, different kind of combat was being waged on the streets of the nation’s cities. Prohibition had spawned a gangster culture in the 1920s, which many Americans found colorful, almost romantic. After all, the urban outlaws supplied the public with the good times that government denied them.
Then came St. Valentine’s Day, 1929, the day Al Capone decided to eliminate rival Chicago gangland leader “Bugs” Moran. Capone dispatched gunmen, disguised as policemen, who rounded up seven members of the gang, stood them up against the wall of Moran’s commercial garage, and brutally executed them with Tommy guns. (Moran himself wasn’t present and escaped assassination.) Mobsters had been rubbing one another out for years, but the blatant butchery of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre finally outraged the public. Capone and other gangsters were no longer viewed as Robin Hoods, but as cold-blooded murderers. Yet, as gangsters became more viciously violent, they also became increasingly organized.
In the same year as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Capone proposed to the gang leaders of New York and other cities that they meet to organize crime throughout the United States. The meeting took place in Atlantic City and included such underworld luminaries as Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Alberto Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky. The national crime Syndicate was born, consolidating nationwide gambling, prostitution, extortion, and liquor trafficking. After 1933, when the 18th Amendment was repealed, thereby ending Prohibition, the Syndicate began to enter the trade in narcotics, hoping it would replace booze as the public’s illicit substance of choice.
The economic conditions of the 1930s produced at least two durable legacies into American life: one, a federal government that takes an active role in the welfare of its citizens (even today, when many conservative politicians clamor to slash “welfare budgets,” few are foolhardy enough to suggest reducing the Social Security program) and two, organized crime.
A New War
The Great Depression brought the United States close to the brink of revolution, but a deeply ingrained tradition of democratic capitalism, combined with FDR’s ability to restore and maintain faith in the government, averted a violent breakdown. In Europe, also hard hit by the Depression, the people of Italy and Germany hungered not for democracy, but for the strongman leadership promised by a journalist named Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and a failed artist, sometimes house painter, and full-time political agitator named Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Exhausted humanity had assumed that the horrors of World War I, combined with the peaceful prosperity of the 1920s, guaranteed the permanent rise of international stability and liberal constitutionalism. But Germany, crippled by the harsh conditions of the Versailles treaty, was robbed of postwar prosperity. Then the Depression drove its people to desperation. In Germany and Italy, militaristic authoritarianism burst into iron blossom with promises of a return to national glory and national prosperity.
Europe Darkens, Then Dies
In Germany, Hitler and his Nazi party won a popular following that propelled him to the position of
