In 1909, Herbert Croly wrote in The Promise of American Life: “We may distrust and dislike much that is done in the name of our country by our fellow countrymen; but our country itself, its democratic system, and its prosperous future are above suspicion.” Indeed, Americans believed that democracy served to ensure not only the persistence of prosperity, but also the possibility of more and more Americans sharing in it. Thus, Croly spoke for many of them when he warned: “In case the majority of good Americans were not prosperous, there would be grave reasons for suspecting that our institutions were not doing their duty.”1
Twenty years later Americans confronted just such circumstances in the extreme.
In October 1929 the stock market crashed and the Great Depression proceeded to devastate American life. Factories, businesses, and banks closed. Close to 15 million workers went jobless, many more were reduced to part-time labor, and those who were employed suffered lower wages, the loss of benefits, increased hours, and “speed-ups.” Savings were wiped out. Families were evicted from their homes. Farmers saw their incomes drop still further and one-third of them would lose their homesteads—a tragedy made all the worse when drought struck the Great Plains and turned vast stretches of the region into the “Dust Bowl.” While union rolls shrank still further, welfare rolls skyrocketed, draining municipal treasuries and overwhelming charities. Hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the road in search of work. People went hungry. Marriage and birth rates declined. Crime increased. Fear of losing one’s job, one’s home, one’s everything, became a common concern and, for many, a terrible reality. To this day, three images stand out: “the bread line, the apple peddler, and the shantytowns.”2
Blacks and other minorities suffered most. They not only lost their jobs along with millions of other Americans, but prejudice helped direct the remaining jobs to whites. One of every two African-American workers ended up unemployed. Horrifically, lynching increased down south. And in the Southwest, nearly 350,000 Mexicans were deported or repatriated in the first few years of the new decade.3
With good cause Americans called the new shantytowns “Hoovervilles.” As pressure intensified for governmental action, Hoover resisted, fearing direct federal intervention would undermine the “American system” he believed in. In terms of policy, that belief translated into the hope that the economy would right itself before local resources ran out and the next elections came. Eventually, he did act, but it would be too late to save his presidency.4
With the federal government reluctant and slow to respond, people took to the streets in protest and, sometimes, took the law into their own hands. Recruiting the jobless into councils, leagues, and committees, respectively, Communists, socialists, and progressives organized marches to demand work or relief and rallied neighbors to physically prevent families from being evicted from their houses and apartments. Joining together in the Farmers’ Holiday Association, midwestern agrarians not only turned out to block foreclosures on neighbors’ homes and holdings, but lobbied state governments to regulate agricultural prices. When that failed, they tried to push up prices themselves by withholding produce from the market and blocking shipments by the uncooperative. And in 1932, twenty thousand out-of-work World War I veterans from all around the country—white and black, quite a few accompanied by wives and children—made their way to Washington, D.C., in hopes of securing early payment of the “veterans bonus” that Congress had approved in 1924 for disbursement in 1945.5
Authorities met many demonstrations with violence. In March 1930, New York City police brutally attacked a rally of thirty-five thousand people organized by the Unemployed Councils. In March 1932, Dearborn, Michigan, police opened fire on a “Hunger March” of three thousand outside Ford’s River Rouge plant, killing four and wounding fifty others. And on July 28, 1932, General Douglas MacArthur ordered fully armed cavalry and infantry troops to storm the “Bonus Marchers” ’ encampments and drive the veterans and their families out of the capital, killing several and bloodying hundreds.6
The unemployed were acting not simply out of desperation. They were also essentially fighting for what would come to be articulated as the Four Freedoms. They believed in America’s promise and they wanted to redeem it. They rallied, marched, and petitioned to try to get the nation’s economic and political elites to acknowledge and act in favor of that promise. As one journalist reported, Dearborn’s Hunger Marchers—citizens “white, black and brown”—were “ordinary Americans” seeking a “redress of grievances.” Organized by Detroit’s Unemployed Council, they demanded not just jobs and assistance. They also demanded, among other things, an end to Ford’s “spying on workers,” a shorter workday for the still-employed, and “the right to organize.” But their assemblies and petitions were answered with truncheons and bullets.7
With the governing elites declaring America’s political development accomplished, Americans began to ask whether democracy could meet the worsening crisis. Reporting on the refugees from the Bonus March, the left-wing writer Malcolm Cowley quoted one veteran to testify to the not just desperate but supposedly scornful mood overtaking the country: “I used to be a hundred-percenter, but now I’m a Red radical. I had an American flag, but the damn tin soldiers burned it. Now I don’t ever want to see a flag again. Give me a gun and I’ll go back to Washington.”8
Communists fantasized revolution and, nightmarishly, so, too, did many among the nation’s elites, some of whom now spoke openly, if not longingly, of the need for a strongman—someone like Italy’s Fascist chief, Benito Mussolini—to take charge before all hell broke loose. Warning of the peril facing “American civilization,” Vanity Fair editorialized in its June 1932 issue, “Appoint a dictator!” And after surveying the many and various calls for authoritarian initiatives emanating from the ranks of the rich and important, even the editor of the American Political Science Review wondered aloud if “Perhaps we shall have a dictator. Perhaps we shall go fascist. Who can guarantee that we may not even some day go communist?”9
• • •
The incipient insurgencies captured press attention; but most Americans remained politically passive. Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times remarked in August 1931 that “Un-American as it sounds, we are all waiting, waiting for something to turn up.” A year later, she feared that “The contemporary American . . . has lost his early zest for citizenship.” More pointedly, the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes admonished: “We had for twenty years been overthrowing the burden of libertarian ideals; we were not the country of free speech or free press or free assembly; we were not the country of the rights of labor; we were not free of religious prejudice; we were not interested in social justice . . .”10
Seldes reflected the profound pessimism that gripped many, but hardly all, Americans. Referring to popular efforts around the country to pull together and share skills and resources—events that did not grab headlines—McCormick perceptively noted: “Something is happening . . . the citizen is not so much dead as dazed. And not so much dazed as painfully coming to life . . . They call it nationalism, but in that they are mistaken. It is what might be named Americanism.”11
Indeed, Americans were beginning to stir and they were doing what generations before them had done in times of grave national crisis. They were looking back—back to those who had first articulated the nation’s ideals and fought to advance them. And in doing so they were beginning to remember who they were and what they were about.
Bearing the Stars and Stripes, rebellious farmers recalled their rebellious forefathers. One of them told a reporter: “They say blockading the highway’s illegal . . . Seems to me there was a Tea-party in Boston that was illegal too.” The Conference on Progressive Labor Action, led by the former minister A. J. Muste, developed an “American Approach” to organizing and issued a “Declaration of Workers and Farmers Rights” modeled after the Declaration of Independence. And returning to their campuses after delivering aid to striking Kentucky miners, young New York Communists grabbed hold of not the Communist Manifesto, but the U.S. Constitution to defend the strikers’ cause in terms of American “civil rights and liberties.”12
Radicals were not alone in reaching back. Under the auspices of the Woman’s National Democratic Club, thirteen leading liberal politicians and intellectuals published Democracy at the Crossroads, a manifesto of sorts in which they declared, “In a true republic the rights of man must come first” and “There can be no breadlines in a democracy.” Insisting on a “right to work” and the need to raise workers’ purchasing power, Senator Robert Wagner of New York urged federal investment in public works. And reminding Americans that “democracy did not come . . . without a struggle,” the historian Claude Bowers made the case for a new politics of social justice that, starting with “unemployment insurance and old-age pensions,” would afford working people a “sense of security.”13
Yet the finest testimony to a continuing belief in the nation’s historic purpose came from a contingent of Bonus Marchers who, driven from Washington by General MacArthur’s assault, had made their way to New York. There, along the city’s Hudson River shoreline, they built a multiracial and cooperative Hooverville and—flying the Stars and Stripes over nearly every hut—named it “Camp Thomas Paine,” after the revolutionary pamphleteer who first called for an independent and democratic America.14
With the 1932 elections in view, McCormick declared, “Never were we more aware of America.” Moreover, she wrote, Americans were beginning to develop a “consciousness, still hardly more than a subconsciousness, that we have in our hands the magnificent makings of a new society, a really new economic era. It waits only for the liquidation of our biggest frozen asset, the active and responsible citizen.”15
Of course, McCormick had qualified her argument with a mighty big “if,” since by her own formulation most Americans were apparently still “waiting for something to turn up.” And yet it would turn out that Americans had been waiting not for “something,” but for someone—someone who shared their continuing faith in America and could speak to and engage their democratic memories and yearnings.
• • •
On the evening of October 31, 1932, Herbert Hoover told a campaign rally of 22,000 Republicans in New York’s Madison Square Garden: “This campaign is more than a contest between two men. It is more than a contest between two parties. It is a contest between two philosophies of government.” And Hoover went on to portray his new Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, as a dangerous radical, “proposing changes and so-called new deals which would destroy the very foundations of the American system of life.”16
Roosevelt’s life spoke of the Establishment, not radicalism. The only child of Hudson Valley aristocrats, educated at Groton and Harvard, and related to Theodore Roosevelt—both on his own and by way of marrying TR’s niece Eleanor—FDR had practiced corporate law and served as a New York state senator, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, Democratic candidate for vice president in 1920, and governor of New York twice.
And yet Hoover was not so wrong in viewing his opponent as he did. While Roosevelt was no socialist, he was, in a very American way, a radical. He utterly rejected the idea that the political and social order ruled and revered by the Republicans, with the collusion of so many Democrats, represented the pinnacle of American progress and the “culmination of civilized government.” To FDR, that very “order” presented the foremost “danger” to a more fundamental America—the America the Founders had envisioned as a grand experiment in popular self-government and which generations of Americans, native-born and immigrant, had labored to make ever more free, equal, and democratic. Unlike so many of his station, Roosevelt did not fear Americans’ democratic impulses. He feared what might happen if they were too long thwarted, with Fascist Italy and Communist Russia as prime examples. He told his friend John Kingsbury in 1930: “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for a generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” While Roosevelt was not interested in fomenting a revolution, he was dedicated to pursuing America’s promise. “Democracy is not a static thing,” he said. “It is an everlasting march.”17
Roosevelt described himself as “a Christian and a Democrat,” coyly adding at times, “a little left of center.” But he meant what he said. Raised Episcopalian, he took his religion seriously. While no saint in either his private or public life, he attended church, relished hymn singing, read the Bible, subscribed to Christian moral teachings—which required, as he had learned at Groton, service to “God, the nation, and humanity”—and believed in “an external guidance.” Still, he was neither dogmatic nor chauvinistic about his faith. He hated religious intolerance and believed strongly in freedom of worship.18
Inheriting his party affiliation as well, FDR took it no less seriously. Whatever “Democrat” meant in a coalition that encompassed northern liberals, western progressives, and southern conservatives and reactionaries, he continually pressed the “party of the people” to become the “party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.”19
Roosevelt revealed his “progressive and liberal” beliefs from his first days in the New York senate in 1911, and he continued to do so in the years to come. Winning the governorship in 1928, he laid out his political vision in his first inaugural address. Pushing beyond the simple dichotomy of individualism versus collectivism to describe the advances New York had already made, he declared his aims were “To secure more of life’s pleasures for the farmer; to guard the toilers in the factories and to insure to them a fair wage and protection from the dangers of their trades; to compensate them by adequate insurance for injuries received while working for us; to open the doors of knowledge to their children more widely; to aid those who are crippled and ill . . .”20
Friends and scholars alike have speculated on the origins of Roosevelt’s political ideas and allegiances. Knowing FDR from his days as a state senator and, then, by way of serving as his Industrial Commissioner in Albany and Secretary of Labor in Washington, Frances Perkins offered the most moving explanation. Recollecting a young man who had “little, if any, concern about social reforms . . . and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot,” she said that he matured somewhat during his years in the Wilson administration. Yet the real change, she insisted, came in his battle with polio: “The man emerged completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit and with a deeper philosophy. Having been to the depths of trouble, he understood the problems of people . . .” Moreover, Perkins noted, his convalescence involved continuing “liberal education,” dispensed by Eleanor, even as she herself became more active in politics and reform efforts.21
Whatever their precise origins, Roosevelt’s “politics” were motivated not simply by ambition, but also by a powerful faith in America and in his fellow citizens—all of it firmly grounded in a deeply felt sense of history. In 1938, the progressive writer Max Lerner predicted that Roosevelt “will be remembered . . . as a man who, without being of the people . . . was able to grasp and to some degree communicate what the common man dimly felt.” What made that possible was not only that FDR was “wholeheartedly a democrat,” and not only that FDR constantly wanted to know what Americans were thinking, but also that he imagined them possessing the same democratic memories, impulses, and longings as he did.22
Experience—especially his 1920 bid for the vice presidency as the running mate to the Democratic presidential nominee, James Cox—had taught Roosevelt that political struggle entails a struggle for American memory, a struggle over the meaning and making of America. When Republicans questioned Cox’s and his “Americanism” during the campaign because the two Democrats had called for the United States to join the League of Nations, FDR retorted that his opponents were trying to “take out an exclusive patent on the American flag and all the great accomplishments of our history.” Even more affirmatively, he set himself in defeat to preparing a new history of the United States, for the existing texts, he said, “lacked movement” and failed to show “The nation was clearly going somewhere right from the first.” And though he would soon discover that unlike his heroes Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson he was not “a writing man,” he would not allow literary failure to deter him from seeking other ways of cultivating a more progressive American narrative.23
In 1925, FDR essentially revealed his view of not only American history, but also his own possible place within it, when he reviewed Claude Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton for the New York Evening World. He celebrated the book, which presented the 1790s contest between Jefferson and Hamilton and their followers as a struggle between democratic and aristocratic visions of government, for providing a vision of Jefferson’s ideas that Americans could use to address the “often essentially similar problems that still lie unresolved before us.” Roosevelt himself discovered in Bowers’s work a truly “radical-democratic” Jefferson whom he could brandish against those conservatives, both Republican and Democratic, who made the Virginian out to be a proponent of limited government. Citing the accelerating concentration of capital ownership and how it threatened American democratic life, FDR told the attendees of the 1930 Jefferson Day dinner in New York, “If Thomas Jefferson were alive he would be the first to question this concentration of economic power.”24
In his embrace of the landed Founder who believed so fervently in America’s democratic prospects and possibilities, Roosevelt was projecting the man he wished to become and the history he hoped to make: “Jefferson’s faith in mankind was vindicated; his appeal to the intelligence of the average voter bore fruit; his conception of a democratic republic came true.” In fact, FDR said: “I have a breathless feeling . . . as I wonder if . . . the same contending forces are not again mobilizing. Hamiltons we have to-day. Is a Jefferson on the horizon?” Defeating Hoover in 1932, he would endeavor to answer his own question.25
• • •
By 1936, Roosevelt had good reason to imagine himself another Jefferson. While he had yet to lead Americans out of the Great Depression, he had mobilized them to undertake not simply relief and recovery, but also reconstruction and reform—indeed, to pursue progressive, if not revolutionary, changes in the nation’s constitutional order, the state of the public weal, and the “We” in “We the People.”
Most historians deny Roosevelt had radical transformations in mind. They contend that while he brought exceptional verve and determination to the presidency—as well as an uplifting voice and a winning smile—he brought along no comprehensive plan to address the depression. They further insist that his vision of the New Deal projected not struggle but the formation of a “concert of interests” to pursue the “common good.”
Roosevelt himself would never speak of the New Deal as a break with America’s past—that is, its historical as opposed to immediate past. He spoke of it in seemingly conservative terms. In a June 1934 message to Congress he would say: “Our task of reconstruction does not require the creation of new and strange values. It is rather the finding of the way once more to known, but to some degree forgotten, ideals and values.” And reiterating that point in a Fireside Chat a few weeks later, he added: “I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing—a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals . . . All that we do seeks to fulfill the historic traditions of the American people.”26
It was more than mere rhetoric. Roosevelt set out to engage Americans’ democratic memories and yearnings, to rally their spirits and energies to confront not only the depression, but also the order that had spawned it. He wanted to renew the narrative and politics that projected the nation as a continuing effort to extend and deepen freedom, equality, and democracy. As he would explain in his 1936 Brotherhood Day radio address: “I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.” And in an address at a World War Memorial dedication ceremony in St. Louis later that year, he would say: “A true patriotism urges us to build an even more substantial America where the good things of life may be shared by more of us, where the social injustices will not be encouraged to flourish.”27
In his 1932 presidential campaign, Roosevelt clearly registered his determination to institute radical changes. Calling for “plans . . . that build from the bottom up and . . . put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” he promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” Recognizing Americans’ pronounced need for “work and security,” citing the imperative of a “more equitable distribution of the national income,” and insisting that “economic laws are not made by nature [but] by human beings,” he “pledged” a “New Deal” that would include overseeing financial transactions, developing public-works projects, rehabilitating the nation’s lands and forests, easing the burdens of debt-ridden farmers and homeowners, raising workers’ purchasing power, and establishing a system of “old age insurance.” And decrying how economic advances—aided by government largesse to railroads and other private companies—had led to the “concentration of business” in the hands of a class of “financial Titans” and the decline of economic opportunity and freedom for the majority of Americans, he proposed an “economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” to renew the nation’s original “social contract” as articulated in the Declaration’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the plainest of terms, he said: “Every man has a right to life; and this means he has also a right to make a comfortable living . . . Our Government . . . owes to everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of [America’s] plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work.”28
FDR’s conception of political change emphasized legislation more than activism, but Roosevelt intended Americans to understand he wanted more than their votes. Accepting his party’s nomination in Chicago in July 1932, he stated: “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and courage. This is more than a political campaign: it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.” Addressing a Sunday gathering in Detroit that October, he delivered a sermon on his “philosophy of social justice through social action.” And speaking in St. Louis a few weeks later, he celebrated laboring peoples’ historic struggles as if to alert their descendants to what they, too, might have to do: “You American farmers and American workmen are entitled, by all the fundamental rights that you have acquired in generations of fighting, to a free and untrammeled election day . . . The man who tries . . . to chip away these rights is an untrustworthy leader in business or politics.” 29
Hearing labor’s own aspirations echoed in those arguments, both the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, a Republican, and the Clothing Workers’ Sidney Hillman, a Socialist—the former, “behind the scenes,” the latter, openly—backed Roosevelt. And with the ballot-box support of not only Democrats, but also many Republicans and, most promisingly, first-time voters and working people of all ethnic identities and religious persuasions, he won a landslide victory and laid the groundwork for a new Democratic Party electoral coalition.30