Transcript: Chapter 15

Narrator: "In all the years I knew him," Franklin Roosevelt's eldest son remembered, "there was only one time when my father worried about his ability. It was the night he was elected president."

On March 2, 1933, as a Baltimore & Ohio train sped from Hyde Park, New York toward Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat all alone in the last car. In two days, this man with legs crippled by polio, whose greatest strength seemed to be his charm, would become the 32nd president of the United States.

Title Card: Part Three -- The Grandest Job in the World

Narrator: Over 70 years before, Abraham Lincoln had traveled by train to his inauguration to lead a country about to be torn apart. Now, Roosevelt would have to face the nation's gravest crisis since the Civil War. Fourteen million Americans were out of work. Nine million had lost their life savings. The economy had collapsed.

Eli Ginzberg, FDR Administrator: People were down and out in their feelings, not only in their stomachs and in their pocketbooks. It was a tremendously depressing period of time. There were not a few people who really saw the possibility that the country was going to disintegrate.

Narrator: The train clattered through New Jersey where Newark had defaulted on its payroll and rolled on through Pennsylvania and Maryland, where the banks were closed. Halfway across the country, Iowa farmers threatened to hang a lawyer foreclosing on their farms, and in Detroit, men who had lost their jobs were stealing food from grocery stores.

As the president-elect's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, no one knew what to expect from this man who had promised "a new deal for Americans."

Chalmers Roberts, Journalist:The country was in a hell of a mess, and everybody was looking to this new man to do something about it. They didn't know what. His promises had been all over the lot, but action, action, action was what they were looking for.

Narrator: "If the New Deal is a success," a friend told Roosevelt, "you will be remembered as the greatest American president." "If I fail," Roosevelt replied, "I will be remembered as the last one."

Inauguration Day began with a service at St. John's Episcopal Church, with hymns selected by Roosevelt himself. His secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, described the scene. "We were in a terrible situation," she wrote. "Banks were closing, the economic life of the country was almost at a standstill. If ever a man wanted to pray, that was the day. He did want to pray and he wanted everyone to pray for him."

The weather was cold and bleak. General Douglas MacArthur had prepared his troops for a possible riot. On his last morning in office, President Herbert Hoover said, "We are at the end of our strength. There's nothing more we can do."

Hoover detested Roosevelt, thought him an opportunist, sure to drag the country even deeper into despair. On the ride to the Capitol, Roosevelt tried to make conversation, but Hoover sat stony-faced. "The two of us simply couldn't sit there on our hands, ignoring each other and everyone else," Roosevelt recalled, "so I began waving my top hat, and I kept waving it until I got to the inauguration stand." "It was very, very solemn," Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters later, "and a little terrifying. The crowds were so tremendous and you felt that they would do anything if only someone would tell them what to do."

As he made his way to the podium, Roosevelt appeared to be walking, but it had taken years of practice to perfect that illusion. In fact, he was pressing down on his son's arm with an iron grip, propelling himself forward with the help of a cane and his powerful upper body. Americans everywhere waited.

William Leuchtenburg, Historian: One has to imagine millions of people clustered around their radio sets in towns all across the country. They don't know what to expect of this new president -- he's not shown them much yet -- and then they hear, coming through their loudspeakers, this voice ...

President Franklin Roosevelt: This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth frankly and boldly.

William Leuchtenburg: ... so filled with courage, with self-confidence, with a sense of leadership.

President Franklin Roosevelt: This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

David Ginsburg, FDR Administration: Suddenly this man came in and he made clear to the country that there was really nothing to fear except the fear that was in one's own heart.

President Franklin Roosevelt: Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.

Eli Ginzberg: The country was so excited that one had a live leader finally, at long last in the White House, that he could have suggested we all get ready to walk to the moon and we would have followed him. It was just an unbelievable change in mood.

William Leuchtenburg: It has an electrifying effect. Nearly a half a million people write to him. This is unheard of. American presidents in the past generation have gotten as few as 200 letters in a week. Now, nearly a half a million write to Franklin Roosevelt and overnight he establishes himself as the leader that the country has been looking for.

Narrator: "Dear Mr. Roosevelt, I am writing to you for help. We have eight children to take care of and nobody working but my husband. He's getting such little pay for his work and we have a sick child. Please, Mr. Roosevelt, don't let them take our home away from us. Please, sir."

"Dear Mr. Roosevelt, I have never as yet begged, but I would appreciate some kind of help. I have always put up a good fight and have worked many a day until I was almost unable to stand up, but all to no avail."

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