Transcript: Chapter 17

Narrator: By 1934 Roosevelt had been president for a year, yet in spite of all his New Deal programs, hard times persisted.

David Ginsburg: The Depression was too deep. The origins, the roots of the problem were too deep.

Narrator: The government had spent over $2 billion for relief, but thousands of new people were forced on the welfare rolls each day.

William Leuchtenburg: The numbers of people who are on welfare rise to a quarter of an American city. One reporter in 1934 comes upon a couple living in a cave in Central Park in New York. And there was a sense that the New Deal, although it had improved things greatly from the worst days of the Great Depression, was not really getting the country back to prosperous days again.

Narrator: Despair turned to anger. Violent protests and strikes swept across the country. Bewildered and frightened, many Americans were drawn to agitators calling for reforms more radical than Roosevelt's. Father Charles Coughlin, a maverick Catholic priest from Detroit, turned radio into a pulpit from which he blasted the New Deal, demanding a living annual wage and nationalization of the banks.

Father CHARLES COUGHLIN, National Union: Who then is the inflationist -- Roosevelt or the National Union?

Narrator: Francis Townsend, a retired California doctor, galvanized millions of supporters by advocating a plan for old-age pensions. And Senator Huey Long from Louisiana, with his "Share Our Wealth" program, had his eye on the presidency. "I can take him" Long said of Roosevelt. "He's scared of me. I can out-promise him and he knows it. His mother's watching him and she won't let him go too far. He's living on an inherited income. People will believe me and they won't believe him."

Roosevelt's consensus was beginning to unravel. During the euphoria of his first hundred days in office, even Republicans had supported him. Now they turned against him.

HENRY B. FLETCHER, Chairman, Republican National Committee: The New Deal is government from above. It is based on the proposition that the people cannot manage their own affairs and that a government bureaucracy must manage for them.

Narrator: Republicans charged that government was becoming too big and too intrusive.

HENRY B. FLETCHER: We do not want to see these alphabetical bureaucratic agencies become permanent fixtures in our national political life.

Narrator: Roosevelt grew increasingly frustrated as business began to accuse him of meddling with free enterprise. When he regulated the stock exchange and the banks, the captains of American industry were outraged.

Eli Ginzberg: They thought he had come in, he had done a very good job, those first hundred days were all right, but now he should give us a chance to take back and run the country as we always had been accustomed to running it. He had a different idea about that.

Narrator: With the election just two years away, the attacks on Roosevelt became more intense than ever. Angry businessmen founded the Liberty League, dedicated to stopping further New Deal legislation.

Alistair Cooke: The discovery of what a political wizard he was was what fired a lot of hatred of Roosevelt, because they'd thought of him as somebody they could manipulate -- a splendid, well-meaning, rather genteel type. That's what they thought. Then they discover they have an absolute master politician, mischief-maker, cunning man and they hated him all the more because they'd been fooled.

Narrator: Then, on May 27, 1935, a day New Dealers would remember as Black Monday, the Supreme Court struck at the very heart of Roosevelt's hope to stimulate the economy. They declared the NRA -- the National Recovery Act -- unconstitutional, and it was just the first blow. The court was moving against Roosevelt's efforts to abolish child labor, establish a minimum wage, boost farm prices. Law by law, the court would attempt to dismantle the work of the first 100 days. But with millions still unemployed, Roosevelt continued to use the power of the federal government to relieve the suffering caused by the Great Depression.

William Leuchtenburg: Congress, at Roosevelt's request, enacts the Emergency Work Relief Appropriations Act, which is the largest single peacetime appropriation in the history of this country or any country in the history of the world.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: New York City -- federal jobs for thousands at the rate of a hundred a minute, while all over the nation, Works Progress Administrators are hurrying to transfer millions of idle from relief rolls to work payrolls.

DISPATCHER: One thirty-eight Greene Street, New York, tomorrow morning 9 o'clock. Municipal Building, Borough Hall, Brooklyn tomorrow morning, 9 o'clock.

Narrator: Five billion dollars went to the Works Progress Administration, the WPA. Men and women hired by the government worked on more than 5,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 1,000 landing fields, 13,000 playgrounds. Even artists went to work for the WPA.

But for Roosevelt this was just the beginning. He would bring power to rural America where nine out of every 10 families still lived without electricity. For millions of Americans -- impoverished children, the unemployed, the elderly with no savings, the disabled -- he offered the Social Security Act. He sold it as an insurance policy for everyone, but the poor, Roosevelt was saying, had rights, too.

David Ginsburg: The great tradition in the United States had been private charity, community charity. Families take care of their own and so the notion that somehow the government would take care of the poor or the unemployed or the old -- this is something that was just not part of our tradition. We didn't know of it.

President Franklin Roosevelt: This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

back to top