("CHARLESTON" PLAYS)
"Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord.
"His seed shall be mighty upon the earth,
"wealth and riches shall be in his house."
When John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, founded in the 1640s
the Puritan Society of New England,
he laid it down that the economic failure of a godly society
was a sign of God's curse.
He took his text from the Book of Deuteronomy.
"Thou shalt remember the Lord thy God,
"for it is He that giveth the power to get wealth."
So it would not be blasphemous to old John Winthrop
if he'd found us here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,
because in this history we've come to the 1920s,
the decade which more than any since the original Puritans
believed in piety with profit.
We tend to forget this in the legend of a Charleston-crazy,
cocktail-shaking era of wonderful nonsense.
But a New York financier of the time, echoing Winthrop, said,
"Prosperity is the fruit of good deeds."
And the Americans had just performed the supreme good deed
of making certain the defeat of the Kaiser.
Since we were the victors, the victory was, of course, a moral one.
The President of the United States said so.
"It will be our fortunate duty to establish a just democracy
"throughout the world."
Quite an undertaking. Then as now.
But America was led at the time
by the perfect prototype of a 17th-century Puritan,
reincarnated in the 20th century.
A former college president, Governor of New Jersey,
he liked best to be called the Reverend Dr Woodrow Wilson.
(CONGREGATION SINGS "O, COME ALL YE FAITHFUL")
In this small South Carolina chapel, Woodrow Wilson, it is recorded,
accepted Christ.
There are, I think, three things about Woodrow Wilson
that elevated him for a dizzy year or so
to the status of a world saviour,
and which in the end brought him down:
His high moral tone,
his splendid eloquence,
And his true concern for the dispossessed.
I believe that of all the presidents before or since,
John Winthrop would have chosen him as one of God's elect.
He was steeped in Presbyterian blood down many generations,
and the last of them was his father, a minister of the strictest piety.
From boyhood, Wilson retained an absolute confidence in his principles
and a collateral belief that compromise was moral treason.
Secondly, he was able to convey through the grandeur of his speeches,
at a time when Americans were flushed with victory,
that his righteous feelings were theirs.
The third thing was as rooted in his childhood as his piety.
He was nine years old when the Civil War ended.
And he grew up in a wasteland of impoverished Southerners
being treated as beaten aliens in their own country.
So when the First World War ended,
he was deeply moved by the similar plight, on a huger scale,
of the broken countries of Central Europe.
Then, as in an Old Testament dream, he had a revelation.
He would give them, and all smaller countries,
the right to govern themselves, and he would draft and dictate
a new world order under a league of nations pledged to universal peace.
He went to Europe in 1919 to do this,
the first president to leave the country in office.
And to a Europe reeling after 20 million casualties,
his coming was like the entry into Jerusalem.
But beyond the dazzled crowds were populations too listless to cheer,
the unemployed in every land and Germany in famine.
In the long business of drafting the Treaty of Versailles,
the noble allies seemed to Wilson to be haggling for colonies,
and to the Allies, Wilson seemed more of a preacher than a negotiator
on the model of Lloyd George, Orlando and Clemenceau.
He left to rising outrage that America should want
repayment with interest of the huge sums she had loaned the Allies.
Uncle Sam had arrived as Moses.
He was soon to be known as Uncle Shylock.
After the formal cordiality of his homecoming, domestic disillusion was swifter still.
Russia had succumbed to Communism,
and in 1919 America was seized with a fear
that the last great wave of immigrants had brought the infection with them.
There were mass raids on socialist and liberal rallies,
arrests and deportations without trial.
Old soldiers failed to find the homes for heroes that they'd been promised.
The protests spread to labour, which had kept its wartime pledge not to strike.
With prices rising and munitions factories closing,
there was a railroad strike, a steel strike, and race riots in 23 cities.
All this was put down to high-minded American intervention in Europe
and most of all to the intervener himself.
America wanted no part of Europe and ditched the League of Nations.
She wanted to slide back into a bath of nostalgia
for the 19th-century America that had obeyed its first presidents
and avoided all foreign entanglements.
America turned in on herself and looked for a homespun leader,
and found him in the small Midwestern town of Marion, Ohio.
A newspaper editor, a clubbable and genial buddy,
and a United States senator, Warren Gamaliel Harding.
The party bosses called him in during a deadlocked convention and asked,
"Is there anything in your past that might embarrass the presidency?"
He went into an inner room and thought
and then came back to confess to no fault or flaw.
He had, in fact, had a flaming extramarital love affair in Ohio
and then had a mistress who bore him a child
and made a best-seller out of the experience when he was dead.
But in such matters in 1920,
senators and reporters jointly observed a quaint tradition of silence.
But Harding did have one rare presidential qualification.
He looked as if he'd been ordered up by Hollywood Central Casting.
Unfortunately, this buddy had other buddies,
including cabinet officers who quietly pilfered the public treasury,
and five of them later went to jail.
The knowledge of this scoundrelism and his private turmoil
griped him with a bellyache that killed him.
He was buried here in his hometown,
and here, in respectful ignorance, the American people sent him to Valhalla.
"He was not a bad man," said Roosevelt's daughter,
"he was simply a slob."
Harding said it more truly and touchingly. "I was a small-town editor.
"I could not grasp I was President of the United States."
It took time for the news of Harding's death in San Francisco
to travel 3,000 miles east to a small town in Vermont,
where Vice-President Calvin Coolidge was staying with his widowed father,
a deputy sheriff known locally as the Colonel.
But eventually, a telephone operator 11 miles away got the message.
It came first to the Colonel after the household had gone to bed.
So he called to his son upstairs. Calvin wakened his wife and dressed.
And then in an episode that is now part of the folklore,
he knelt down by this bed and asked God to bless the American people.
Now, by long custom, a new president is always sworn in
by the Chief Justice of the United States, who was in his hammock
and 500 miles away.
Father and son rummaged around the house for a copy of the Constitution
and they found one.
They found also that it does not specify who shall administer the oath.
Since the Colonel was a notary public, a commissioner of oaths,
they decided to risk doing it here.
The family Bible was brought. The old man adjusted his spectacles.
He read aloud the single sentence written over 130 years before
that signifies the transfer of power from one president to another.
"I, Calvin Coolidge, do solemnly swear
"that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,
"and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend
"the Constitution of the United States."
The US now had a lord and master from a country store in Vermont.
He was to reaffirm the faith in country stores and the people bred in them.
Like Jefferson, he believed in as little government as possible.
Soon the country was wallowing in what was to be called the Coolidge Prosperity,
in which every man was to have a piece of the pie.
And it was prosperous, as no modern nation had dreamed of being.
Its unbombed industries had burgeoned on the first assembly lines.
It was the world's creditor nation, had the highest income,
made more steel than Europe,
and Henry Ford built a motor car for Everyman.
When he sought backing, the House of Morgan told him
to keep such daydreams to himself.
It must've been a galling day for old JP
when Ford drove his millionth car off the assembly line.
The Model T wove the first network of paved highways.
People who'd never taken a holiday beyond the nearest lake or mountain
now could explore the South, New England, the West.
In fact, Ford opened up the horizon of the whole United States.
Most of all, the Model T gave to the farmer and the rancher miles from anywhere
a new pair of legs.
And there was something else that flourished in the '20s
that was probably more revolutionary still
to people who lived, say, 100 miles from the nearest town.
I remember an advertising tycoon
said to me in the 1940s when we were in a dither about the Russians,
"What we ought to do is send up a flight of 1,000 B-29s
"and drop a million of these things all over Russia."
This is what he was talking about.
The mail-order catalogue.
Now, the farmer, the cowboy, the miner, the rancher,
they got this in the mail and they looked it over,
and they realised that, without making a move,
they could make American big business their lackey.
The farmer could get all his equipment, from wagons, road scrapers, down to his jeans.
His wife would turn to the beginning
and have about 60 pages of clothes she could buy,
the kind of clothes that people wore in New York and Chicago.
And his daughter could get for 95 cents
the very hat that was worn by the "It" girl Clara Blow,
who was then the raving idol of the movies.
# Ain't she sweet? See her comin' down the street
# Now, I ask you very confidentially Ain't she sweet?
# I repeat Don't you think that's kinda neat?
# And I ask you very confidentially Ain't she sweet? #
# Yes, sir, that's my baby No, sir, don't mean... #
This is the America of the 1920s which has passed into the file of the world's memory.
Not steel, not the sudden flowering of a brilliant literature,
but a kind of mass idiocy and frivolity.
# Black bottom, a new twister It's sure got 'em and oh, sister
# They clap their hands and do a raggedy trot
# Hot
# Old fellas with lumbago High yeller, away they go
# They jump right in and give it all that they got #
# Running wild, lost control Running wild #
Europe might jeer,
but Europe was drained of life and invention after the First World War,
and eagerly copied these hectic fads -
cocktails, bobbed hair, the Charleston, nightclubs,
because at least they offered a sign of life.
America was now top dog, consumed with what Mr Justice Holmes called
"An itch for the superlative".
It worshipped the unbeatable in any field.
This baseball player Babe Ruth,
the first athlete to earn more than the President of the United States,
was crowned as the Sultan of Swat.
Footballer Red Grange had his jersey embalmed for posterity
like the Declaration of Independence.
The first mother to swim the English Channel had to be an American,
Gertrude Ederle.
And suddenly, the overnight hero of the world was an American.
On a drizzly May morning in 1927,
three airplanes lined up on a primitive, muddy runway on Long Island.
They were all going for a shot at a $25,000 prize for a non-stop transatlantic flight.
Of the three, this was the strangest and smallest.
27 feet, three inches long. No radio, no sextant.
An instrument panel less pretentious than your automobile dashboard,
and, unlike his rivals, its pilot was going it alone.
It cost $6,000, and every inch of its construction
was carefully watched over by the man who was to fly it.
And he was a skinny, blond 25-year-old from Minnesota,
had been a parachute jumper and a pioneer airmail pilot.
And it was this plane, this very plane,
that wobbled and bounced into those heavy skies on that May morning.
We had watched the newspapers for the time he was going,
but suddenly he was gone.
And the whole world, that had never heard his name before,
was seized with a tension that I don't believe we could feel today.
Because, you see, there was no contact with him.
He would make it or he would be gone for good.
And that night, 40,000 baseball fans in New York
stood up and prayed for him.
And in Tokyo, people swarmed onto the streets at their midnight.
The stock exchanges of London, Berlin and Amsterdam
interrupted their regular quotations with the word that there was no word.
And as the second night came on,
in Paris an appeal went out to everybody who owned a motor car,
which would be 70-80,000 maybe,
to head for a landing field at Le Bourget,
line up in two files, put their headlights on,
and this created a broad shaft of white fog and a rudimentary glide path.
And into it, 33 hours after missing the telephone wires on Long Island,
this plane trundled and stopped and was engulfed by 100,000 Parisians.
When they lifted the pilot out, if he'd said he was Alexander the Great,
they'd have believed him.
All he said was, "I am Charles Lindbergh."
The ticker-tape parade was to become New York's special accolade
for a few carefully chosen national gods.
Down the decades, the biggest blizzards of torn paper
were reserved for such returning heroes as General Eisenhower,
General MacArthur, astronaut John Glenn,
and, three years after Lindbergh's parade, this man.
And who, pray, was he?
He was Robert Tyre Jones Jr,
a weekend golfer, the best of his time, some people think the best of all time.
The only man to win in one year the American Amateur,
the British Amateur, the British Open,
and the American Open.
His grace on and off the course made him the idol of two continents,
to people who didn't know a putter from a stair rod.
But his universal appeal was not as a golfer.
What, then?
Well, the word that comes to mind is a dying word. Gentleman.
And I think that Jones embodied it.
And I would say it is a combination of goodness and grace,
an unwavering courtesy, self-deprecation, consideration for other people.
And this, allied to complete supremacy in one sport,
was what made him a hero in Scotland and England
as much as in his native Georgia.
Once, in a national championship,
he pushed his ball into the woods and he went after it
and he was there alone, of course.
And in standing to the ball, he just barely touched it.
He came out at once, signalled his fault, penalised himself two strokes,
and lost the championship by one stroke.
And when he was praised for this
and similar acts of sportsmanship, he was disgusted. He said,
"You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank."
In his middle forties, he was paralysed by a rare disease.
A friend asked him what was the medical outlook.
He said, "I will tell you privately.
"It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse.
"But don't fret. Remember, we play the ball where it lies.
"And now, let's not talk about this ever again."
And he never did, down 23 years
of increasing and, in the end, dire physical agony,
retaining his humour and his generosity
and his cat-like sense
of the stranger being left out in the corner of the room.
So what we're talking about is not the hero-as-golfer
but something that the 1920s, the brash 1920s, hungered for and found.
The best performer in the world who was also a hero-as-human-being.
In the flesh, what Gary Cooper was in the movies,
the gentle, chivalrous, wholly self-sufficient male,
Jefferson's lost American hero,
the wise innocent.
At the age of 28, still an amateur, he retired,
all the world conquered.
And he built this exquisite course.
And it suffices as his only memorial.
(SAXOPHONE)
Innocence was something that most mothers wished their daughters had.
A novelty that struck terror into parents was, of all things,
the saxophone.
Magistrates and city fathers condemned it as a siren sound
beckoning young girls to a losing battle with a fate worse than death.
Yet many brave girls were willing to risk their lives on that battlefield.
I'm sitting here in the favourite dugout for night manoeuvres, the rumble seat.
They always say that the sexual licence is due to the strain of war.
Then when the war's over that it's due to the letdown from the strain of war.
But in the 1920s, there were also the writings of Sigmund Freud,
which became a scandalous fashion.
And both young and old picked up a grotesque misunderstanding
of Freud's theory of unconscious repression,
which is when people repress an instinct and don't know they're doing it.
What everybody thought he said
was that consciously to suppress an instinct,
any instinct, would make you break out in insanity or pimples.
Sexual freedom was a mania, and it strikes me only now
that for the past 50 years,
every generation is convinced that it was the pioneer
in breaking with Victorian morals.
That breakthrough, as an historical fact, occurred in the Garden of Eden.
Anyway, sex drenched the magazines and the movies and the theatre
until the notably sophisticated theatre critic of the "New Yorker" wrote this.
"I am sick of rebellious youth
"and I am sick of Victorian parents,
"and I don't care if all the little girls in the United States are ruined,
"or want to be ruined, or keep from being ruined.
"All I ask is they stop writing plays about them."
There was one other thing and it was worse than the saxophone,
or bobbed hair, if not sex,
because it stimulated every other vice.
It was the old demon rum,
demon gin,
in the form of the hip flask, carried both by night and day.
(BLARING MUSIC)
This is a nightclub in Chicago today,
dedicated to the proposition that the 1920s are immortal
and should be preserved in loving restoration.
Like most periods recreated by enthusiasts who weren't there,
they get a little mixed up.
This is supposedly the flat-chested '20s,
indulging in furtive drinking in the speakeasy,
with its slightly gilted innocence,
keeping one ear cocked for the approach of the cops.
The sideburns are incidentally authentic
but they were worn only by what were known as lounge lizards.
These contemporary swingers are, they hope,
watching the flappers of the 1920s,
who now, it's a jolt to reflect, are in their seventies
and probably lamenting the sins of their grandchildren.
The speakeasy, as the temple of surreptitious drinking,
usually clumsily disguised in teacups and mugs,
came about because in the moral fervour of the war,
Congress had passed a constitutional amendment
which long-suffering wives of drunken husbands on the frontier
had been howling for for half a century:
The total, national prohibition of the manufacture, sale and use of alcohol.
When the war was over, it became law.
It was known as the noble experiment.
It did not endow Americans with more nobility than they already had.
On the contrary, it gave rise to an underground industry
based here in Chicago
which turned small-time safe-crackers and brothel owners into millionaires,
bootleggers who fought for each other's territory.
And when, after a difference of opinion, one of them died,
a $10,000 coffin was followed by $50,000's worth of flowers
contributed in loving memory by the opposition.
It took America 13 years to concede
the noble experiment was a squalid disaster.
But these scenes, periodically flashed from Chicago,
were mere excrescences on the general health.
The country momentarily shuddered, then went back to its pleasures and prosperity.
A good man was in the White House. He interfered as little as possible
with the states, with government, with business.
"The business of America," he said, "is business."
And business was booming out John Winthrop's original promise
of piety rewarded with profits.
Some explanation of these providential blessings had to be found.
It came from another Chicagoan, a parson's son,
who helped to found a giant advertising company.
His name was Bruce Barton.
And he wrote a book.
It was called "The Man Nobody Knows".
It could've carried the subtitle "The Puritan Promise Fulfilled".
It sold half a million.
Now, like men before and since,
Barton recreated God in the image of his time.
He took a second look at the carpenter of Nazareth
and saw him as Jesus Christ Supersalesman.
From this, we learn that Jesus was an advertising genius
and that businessmen should study his slogans.
"Arise, take up thy bed and walk."
"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."
Models of copyrighting.
In the next chapter, we learn that he is the founder of modern business,
who took 12 men from the bottom ranks of business
and forged them into an organisation that conquered the world.
Above all, says Barton, he made no distinction
between business and my father's business,
that's to say, between work and religion.
And neither did Coolidge.
Did he have some foreboding of what would happen to this earthly paradise?
He gave no hint of it.
Nevertheless, in the spring of 1928,
he abruptly announced he was not going to run again.
A volcano, wrote HL Mencken, was burning under him.
But he did not know it and he was not singed.
It was his successor Herbert Hoover who was roasted and fricasseed.
22. And he's got 5,000.
He's offering 5,000.
One.
Well, this was where the volcano erupted.
The New York Stock Exchange.
These are pros, confidently handling the accounts of corporations, banks, businessmen.
In 1929 they would have been putting in bids also
from taxi drivers, charladies, janitors and chorus girls.
Everybody was riding high in what President Hoover called
"The final triumph over poverty".
On the 24th of October, the dam broke.
Prices tumbled down and down.
Blocks of shares went down the river in ten- and twenty-thousand lots.
But five days later, on October 29th 1929,
a day that will forever be known as Black Tuesday, came the deluge.
It became clear, years too late, that this torrent of liquidation
was caused not so much by the big traders and the bankers
who rushed in to plug the flood with a quarter of a million dollars,
but was caused by legions of wretched small-timers
who had no margins to speak of.
In other words, the Everest of the 1929 stock market
was a mountain of credit on a molehill of actual money.
Now, to the very Puritans who had seen the hand of God
in the Coolidge Prosperity, the crash was a punishment.
Other analysts, more secular,
saw, though admittedly by hindsight, other explanations.
Today, you cannot buy without meeting high margin requirements.
In 1929, you could buy a dollar stock with ten cents in your hand.
Today, it would have to be 60-65.
The Federal Government regulates investing
and insures brokerage accounts
as it also insures the smallest bank deposit.
But none of these safeguards existed in the 1929 casino of the stock market.
And the theatrical trade journal "Variety"
said it all in five sassy, grim words.
(READS)
# They used to tell me I was building a dream
# And so I followed the mob
# When there was earth to plough or guns to bear
# I was always there right on the job
# They used to tell me I was building a dream
# With peace and glory ahead
# Why should I be standing in line
#Just waiting for bread?
# Once I built a railroad Made it run
# Made it race against time
# Once I built a railroad Now it's done
# Buddy, can you spare a dime? #
Nowhere was the going so rough as in the idle factories,
for this had been the first nation to transfer skill on a mass scale
from the man to the machine.
And yet, within three months,
men who worked in big factories and small,
men who'd merrily played the stock market,
were warming their hands before scrapwood fires
in the underpass beneath the Chicago Opera House.
By 1932, unemployment had gone to 13 millions,
which meant that one American family in three had nothing coming in.
I don't think that anybody who lived through it will forget the American Depression,
because it was not just a blow to the extremes of the millionaire and the coal miner.
It blighted everybody except the bottom layer of society,
the very poor, who had nothing to lose.
And when steel stock prices went from 90 down to 12,
the automobile factories simply let half their workers go.
There were skyscrapers just finished but they had no tenants.
A secretary was a ridiculous luxury,
truckers with nothing to truck, crops went unharvested,
milk undelivered to people who couldn't afford it.
When I first arrived in this country as a student in a college town,
I couldn't go out in the evening to mail a letter
without being stopped by a dozen men, very nicely dressed,
who told their wives that they were out looking for night work.
So they were. They were out on the streets cadging quarters and dimes.
There were young people who'd do anything for a few square meals.
Seeing who could win a prize, dancing continuously for two days and nights.
Someone had to take the blame.
It fell on Coolidge's unlucky successor, President Herbert Hoover,
a world-famous engineer who had organised the feeding of starving Europe after the First War.
He'd been at Versailles. An English observer, John Maynard Keynes,
called him the only man there with the knowledge, reality, magnanimity,
to have given us, if he'd been the president, the good peace.
Now he was president, he was the football coach who had lost the big game.
His bitter memorial was the shanty towns of the unemployed.
They called them Hoovervilles.
Outside the cities were the bankrupt farmers,
who fed the armies of Europe in the fat years
and had known only collapsing prices ever since.
They were the forgotten men of the Coolidge Prosperity.
The rural South had been forgotten since the Civil War,
overploughing its cotton land for generations till the topsoil crumbled
and the hillsides were trenched with erosion.
Out on the plains, an unending drought helped the west wind
turn wheatland into a Sahara.
In the rural hinterland, what Mencken contemptuously called the Bible Belt,
God-fearing farmers saw the punishment of the Old Testament God
in the whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon.
Long before the drought and the dustbowl,
long-ignored by the prospering cities,
was the nation's chronic poor relation, the South.
For three quarters of a century, Southern tenant farmers had been
pretty sad citizens,
the victims of worn-out cotton land
and a diet of corn, fatback pork and no green vegetables.
They were not shiftless people, just exhausted
from the twin diseases of malnutrition: Scurvy and pellagra.
More than the rest of us, they were to find their redeemer
in a man who lived 1,000 miles away from them
and a million light years away from their experience
of the life and death of an American family.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
mostly of English blood with a dash of Dutch,
was born amid a flutter of servants
and a household agog with the wonder of a ten-pound baby.
His father was a dim, amiable country squire of substantial means and already over 50,
his mother an adoring, imperious matriarch.
I forget who said, "Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure never occurs to him."
It was a highly cushioned life he led in his birthplace,
a house 90 miles north of New York City,
with a noble prospect over the Hudson River.
Not the usual nest for a fledgling president.
Anyway, Roosevelt led a charmed life here, and all through his life he was a charmer.
His mother didn't want to have him coarsened by contact with the rabble of other boys,
so she brought him private tutors until he was ready for Groton,
the American Eton, where he was no student,
but he was mad for boats and the history of naval warfare.
If the navy had been at the disposal of his mother,
she would've given it to him for Christmas.
Then he ambled socially through Harvard.
He married into the opposition, so to speak.
Eleanor, the niece of the former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.
After Harvard he went to law school. He never graduated
but, through high connections, joined a prosperous law firm,
and in the First World War wangled the only job he wanted,
Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
In 1920, the glamour of the Roosevelt name
was appropriated by the Democrats and they ran him for Vice-President.
He was buried in the Harding landslide with the other apostles of Wilson.
12 years later, he was resurrected as a presidential candidate -
and not the most acceptable White House material.
For while such social types in England move automatically from Eton into the Cabinet,
it's a heavy handicap for an American politician
to have gone to Harvard and have an upper-crust accent.
So here he was, not Wilson the scholar-statesman,
not Harding, the all-American buddy,
not Coolidge, the symbolic earthy Yankee,
but a mother's boy from the landed gentry.
And to compound his disabilities, there was another thing.
In his 40th year, he was paralysed by poliomyelitis.
And for the rest of his life, he never had the use of his legs.
And yet throughout the 12 years of his presidency,
the press, including the most smart-aleck photographers,
respected a convention - I wonder if they'd do it today? -
never to photograph him in movement.
I remember seeing him once by accident,
being lifted out of his car like a sack of potatoes
and put on his feet, and given two sticks and two helping hands,
his hat stuck on his head for him.
It was a most eerie sight, but this was not the Roosevelt the public saw.
They saw the big upper body and the tossing head
and the dynamic, confident saviour of the republic in a very dark time.
We must act. We must act quickly.
And finally in our progress towards 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, credit and investments.
There must be an end to speculation with other people's money.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have to fear is...
...fear itself.
So, he was elected president in 1932, not to mention '36, '40 and '44,
the only man to break the record of two terms in the White House.
On March 4th 1933, the very morning of his inauguration,
he hurled a thunderbolt at the headlines.
He closed every bank in the country.
You see, in the 1929 crash,
many people found that their banks had no more assets
than the credit-swollen stock exchange.
Roosevelt would decide which banks deserved support
and which ought to go under.
It was the day the money stopped. Literally. You had to cadge a meal.
Live on tick. Pay with a cheque for a cab ride or a shoeshine.
Let me make it clear that the banks will take care of all needs.
And it is my belief that hoarding during the past week
has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime.
It needs no profit to tell you that when people find they can get their money,
that they can get it when they want it,
for all legitimate purposes,
the phantom of fear will soon be laid.
And then Roosevelt asked Congress for powers beyond the Constitution.
Since there were 13 million unemployed, he got them.
He proclaimed something called the NRA, the National Recovery Administration.
And for two dizzy years, America flirted with national socialism.
Anti-trust laws were suspended. It was government by trade association.
Prices fixed, wages fixed, for everybody from steelworkers
to burlesque strippers.
This man had promised to take government back to the states.
Instead, he seized it at the centre.
He was a dictator, but a benevolent one, and the country loved it.
When I first came to this country,
I'd been teaching school in east Germany,
and pictures of Frederick the Great were on the walls of every home,
public place, barbershop, and it was the same with Roosevelt.
He was a godhead throughout the 48 states. I didn't know this.
I remember being tossed out in the middle of the night
by a saloon keeper in the Rockies,
when I suggested to him that maybe his picture of Roosevelt over the bar
was a little... romanticised.
Well, in time,
all this became too much for the nine old men on the Supreme Court.
They decided national socialism was not the same as the Constitution -
the Federal Government couldn't control everything,
couldn't control the trade between one state and another.
And as so often happens with the Supreme Court, they took a tiny pretext to destroy a mighty power.
They decided in the decisive case
that President Roosevelt could not punish two brothers
for rearing a sick chicken in New Jersey and selling it in New York.
That was New Jersey's business.
They destroyed the whole structure of the Recovery Administration
and gave America back to the Constitution.
And Roosevelt fumed... for a while.
Because he was never down for long.
(TRAIN WHISTLE)
# Happy days are here again... #
He resolved to make his campaign song a reality.
Since private capital had dried up,
he shoved through Congress huge loans for public works
and gave the industrial worker who'd been hounded by company spies
the right to organise and bargain.
He handed hard dollars to the unemployed
and took three million youngsters off the streets to plant trees.
He mobilised actors in a federal theatre,
writers to produce 100 volumes of guidebooks to the States.
He stopped the growing of useless farm surpluses,
paid Southern farmers to diversify crops,
and built dams to hold the floods, bring electric power to the farmer,
and water to his barren soil.
To the horror of the old guard,
he signed a government cheque for several billion invisible dollars.
What strikes me about him now is the triumphant contradiction
between his genial, fluty manner and his extraordinary, tough hide.
He'd make up to anybody he needed, a labour leader in one state
and a conservative Republican governor in another.
He'd overlook the race bigotry of a Southern senator
because he wanted to do something for poor white farmers.
On behalf of what he called the forgotten man, and then the little man,
he allied himself to corrupt city governments in Memphis, Jersey City, Chicago,
because, as he once privately said,
"They may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches."
Not since Lincoln had there been such a manipulator
of the good, the bad and the bewildered in between.
I believe he saved the capitalist system by deliberately forgetting to balance the books,
by transferring the gorgeous resources of credit from bankers to government,
no matter what the national debt might be.
A journalist, a ferocious talent, I think has written his best epitaph.
"He looked nice and dressy back there in 1932,
"but he's tricky, stubborn and strong as a bull.
"Anybody who gentles Mr Roosevelt is simply imposing a handicap on himself,
"for he won't gentle you back.
"But never in our time have people been so conscious
"of the meanness of a complacent upper class,
"and of the government's duty to do something
"for the assistance of those who are so far down
"that they can't help themselves.
"If the country doesn't go absolutely broke in his time,
"it will be a more intelligent and a better country after him."
And yet he came in on the promise to do something that has boggled
governments of every ideological brand before and since -
to guarantee full employment in peacetime. He didn't make it.
By the end of 1939, there were six, seven million unemployed still.
And the stacks of the steel mills didn't begin to belch smoke again
until the first war orders came in from the British and the French.
(PATRIOTIC WAR SONG)