Transcript: Chapter 16

Narrator: March 4, 1933 -- Roosevelt's first day in office. With the banks closed, investment at a standstill, many Americans believed that the free enterprise system was failing. One aide wrote, "We were confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution or a violent overthrow of the whole capitalist structure." Roosevelt could hope, like Hoover, that the economy would repair itself or he could try something that had never been done before in America -- intervene on a massive scale with the power of the federal government.

ROBERT NATHAN, FDR Administration: And I had a professor that taught the course in business cycles, and I remember he reached in his pocket and took a rubber band out and he held it and then he pulled it and he said, "This is boom." And then he let go of one end, it snapped back, he said, "Bust." And he says, "This happens to a capitalistic economy and you can't do anything about it. Let nature take its course." And Roosevelt, of course, brought around him a lot of people that didn't believe that bunk and thought you got to do something to turn it around.

Narrator: Roosevelt's advisers offered him a range of programs. In the end, he would work from no systematic plan. Instead, he would experiment.

William Leuchtenburg: "Try one idea and if it doesn't work, we'll try another." He likened himself to a quarterback. You try a play. If that play doesn't work, you turn to another play.

Narrator: "It is common sense," Roosevelt said, "to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all, try something." In his first 100 days in office, Roosevelt managed to put tens of thousands of people back to work. He pledged billions to save their farms and their homes from foreclosure. He provided relief to unemployed. He restored confidence in the banks and guaranteed the savings of millions of Americans.

President Franklin Roosevelt: I can assure you that it is safer for you to keep your money in a re-opened bank than to keep it under the mattress.

David Ginsburg: His key was somehow to prop up capitalism. That was unquestionably in back of his mind, but he was a pragmatist. He was seeking to find solutions to the practical problems that beset people today. The banks were closed: get the banks open.

Narrator: And to sell the centerpiece of his program, the National Recovery Administration, he orchestrated an extraordinary publicity campaign. The NRA was designed to tame the unruly cycles of American capitalism by encouraging business and government to work together. Each industry was allowed to set its own wages and prices. Labor was promised the right to bargain collectively.

Alistair Cooke, Journalist: I went to the top of the Empire State Building on a day in, I think, June 1933. There was this enormous National Recovery Act parade, you know with -- they had this symbol, the blue eagle, everywhere. It was on cigarette packages, in stores and so on. It was an immensely moving thing. I mean, there must have been two million people, it seemed like, up and down Fifth Avenue and everywhere, all just cheering, and the country just lifted itself up.

Chalmers Roberts: This was a great thing that was happening. The country was coming out of this incredible mood. Roosevelt was changing national despair to hope.

DICK POWELL, Actor: [NRA featurette] [singing] There's a new day in view / There is gold in the blue / There is hope in the hearts of men. / All the world's on the way / To a sunnier day / For the road is open again.

Narrator: When the hundred days were over, Roosevelt had signed 15 major bills into law and created an alphabet soup of new government agencies. "We have had our revolution," one magazine reported, "and we like it."

Eli Ginzberg: Everything was up for grabs in a country that was basically a conservative country, but now had a leader to whom anything and everything was possible. The least ideological person that ever lived -- that's why I think he was such a great success.

President Franklin Roosevelt: A few timid people who fear progress will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it fascism and sometimes communism and sometimes regimentation and sometimes socialism. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical. I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies.

Narrator: Roosevelt used the radio to speak directly to the American people and they listened to his "fireside chats" as if he were a close friend.

President Franklin Roosevelt: In the present spirit of mutual confidence, the present spirit of mutual encouragement, we go forward.

Narrator: By the end of 1933, many of Roosevelt's most skeptical critics had been converted. An aide who worked with him during the Wilson years marveled, "That fellow in there is not the fellow we used to know. There's been a miracle here." If Roosevelt ever had any doubts about his ability to do the job, they evaporated quickly. The White House, which for some presidents was a prison, was for FDR home.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Biographer: Oh, I think there's no question that Roosevelt loved being president. You know how he used to say, "I love it"? I suspect if somebody said to him, "How do you like being president?" that's what he would have said, "I love it." It just seemed to fit his temperament. I have a feeling he loved getting up in the morning, loved going to his office, enjoyed the people that came in. I can't imagine another president being more suited for the presidency and enjoying it as much as Roosevelt did.

William Leuchtenburg: Roosevelt believed that he belonged in the White House. His idea of who a president should be was himself as president. He thought it was the grandest job in the world.

David Ginsburg: This was a man of great ebullience. He was a man of constant cheer. He was a man of cigarettes. It would be a constant flow of laughter and jokes. There was never a moment that one had a feeling that he suddenly felt helpless or suddenly uncertain of what to do. He knew what to do and he would do it.

Alistair Cooke: He was immensely cunning, and what people had not realized was his extraordinary guile. I mean, I think he was quite capable of telling what Winston Churchill called "a terminological inexactitude" and never blush. And he had this marvelous face of, you know, total, placid sincerity and earnestness and he had a great gift of seeming to think that you were about the wisest man that he'd ever consulted on anything until you found he had no use for you the moment you left.

Narrator: Franklin Roosevelt had always imagined himself as president, but the White House was the last place Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to be. "I never wanted to be a president's wife," she said, "and I don't want it now." By 1933, Eleanor and her husband were leading all but separate lives. Fifteen years earlier, Roosevelt's affair with Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer had ended the intimacies of their married life, but they had developed a political partnership and Eleanor had built a life of her own.

Curtis Roosevelt, Grandson: My grandmother had real reservations about moving into the White House. She knew the social role. She knew how all consuming it could be. She had become a figure in her own right, and within the Democratic Party even somewhat of a power. And the thought of going to Washington -- she was appalled.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: All she saw was social, ceremonial jobs, which she hated. She always said she was never good at small talk. I'm sure she imagined that in the first ladyship she'd be talking small talk for all the years they were in there.

Narrator: "At the first few receptions," Eleanor wrote, "my arms ached, my shoulders ached, my back ached. I was lucky in having a supple hand, which never ached. I realized," she said, "that if I remained in the White House all the time, I would lose touch with the rest of the world."

Edna Gurewitsch, Roosevelt Family Friend: She wanted her freedom. She didn't want to be curtailed by protocol, by being the wife of the head of a government. She wanted to pack up her bag, get into her little car and go out into the country.

Narrator: During her husband's first year as president, Eleanor traveled more than 40,000 miles, reporting back to the White House on the New Deal.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Never before had a first lady taken to the road and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on her own, supporting her husband. What she was looking for was the human detail that she could bring back to her husband to let him understand what the people of his land were thinking, feeling and hoping.

Chalmers Roberts: She became his legs. She became his emissary. She could go places that he couldn't go, and she went everywhere.

Narrator: Eleanor wrote a daily column, called "My Day," held weekly press conferences, received hundreds of thousands of letters. Her popularity ratings were sometimes even higher than her husband's.

Alonzo Fields, White House Butler: He could make a great speech, but Mrs. Roosevelt went out and intermingled with the people. Well, she would sometimes pick up someone off the street and bring him in for lunch, and she would invite people to the White House to dinner for a state dinner. And they had never had a tuxedo on in their lives and they'd come there and on track and no tuxedo and they're supposed to be at the dinner, say, "What will we do?" We would take them to the locker where we had supplies of uniforms for the butlers and fit them out in that.

Narrator: The woman who never wanted to be first lady revolutionized the role. More and more, Eleanor became the White House advocate for women, factory workers, tenant farmers, blacks, often pressing her husband to move faster than he was prepared to move.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Eleanor sent so many memos into his bedroom at night that after a while he had to create an "Eleanor" basket just to hold all these memos. And then, after a while, he had to make a deal with her, saying, "Eleanor, three memos a night -- not 12, not 20, not 30. I will initial them and deal with them by morning." Sometimes she kept her bargain, but my sense is that more than three went in there many nights.

Curtis Roosevelt: What they had together -- our grandmother and grandfather -- was what I call a creative tension. They both basically believed in the same things, but they had different roles to play. He had to work with the Congress. He was president of the United States, which meant not the liberals in the United States. It meant everybody in the United States.

She was able to influence issues and he was delighted, but he could also disown her and did with the press. He would say, "Well, you know my missus. I don't dictate what she says," or "I don't control her." He was very charming about it, but in a way it was just a, "Oh, she can say what she likes, that doesn't represent my position," which was very, very convenient -- very convenient for him to, through her, sense how far he could go.

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