Status Updates From Freedom from Fear: The Amer...

"The fact is," Moley conceded, "that I found it impossible to discover how deeply Roosevelt was impressed with the seriousness of the crisis." While Moley and Treasury Secretary fretted over the accumulating reports of gold withdrawals and bank closings, Roosevelt remained serenely unperturbed, a monument of inscrutability, exuding "nothing but the most complete confidence in his own ability to deal the any situation

Hoover forged his policies in the tidy, efficient smithy of his own highly disciplined mind. Once he had cast them in final form, he could be obstinate...Roosevelt's mind, by contrast, was a spacious, cluttered warehouse, a teeming curiosity shop continuously restocked with randomly acquired intellectual oddments. He was open to all number and manner of impressions, facts, theories, nostrums, and personalities.

Even his closest advisers at this time,...marveled at Roosevelt's capacity for what Tugwell called "almost impenetrable concealment of intention."...His features were utterly responsive to his will, finely molding themselves to his constantly shifting purposes of persuasion, negotiation, or obfuscation, never ceasing to charm but never opening fully to reveal the soul within.

Both sides were stepping a dangerous political dance around the gathering economic crisis. Hoover seemed more interested in vindicating himself in the historical record than in genuinely enlisting his successor in helpful policies. Roosevelt "either did not realize how serious the situation was or . . . preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation."

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt
speech at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932

On one occasion, speechwriter Moley was left "speechless" when Roosevelt, presented with two absolutely incompatible drafts of addresses on tariff policy—one calling for blanket reductions, the other for bilateral agreements—blandly instructed Moley to "weave the two together." Roosevelt, sniped Hoover, was as changeable as "a chameleon on plaid."

The problems of the world, Roosevelt concluded, were "caused as much by those who fear change as by those who seek revolution." . . . Two obstacles. . . One was "the lack of cohesion on the part of liberal thinkers themselves," who shared a common vision but disagreed on methods of realizing it. The other was "the solidarity of the opposition to a new look, [which] wields together the satisfied and the fearful."

Roosevelt also forthrightly declared that relief "must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty; the State accepts the task cheerfully because it believes that it will help restore that close relationship with its people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government."

But what struck most observers, and mystified them, was the eery docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as the depression grindstone rolled over them. . . "there is silence . . . a vacuum; no life-giving breath of popular enthusiasm or popular indignation . . . Is America growing old? Have we . . . slumped into that sad maturity which submits to events?"

Tugwell astutely recognized that the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corperation constituted a historical pivot. . . By agreeing to the bankers' demands for the RFC...the president had implicitly legitimated the claims of other sectors for federal assistance. Hoover had given up the ground of high principle. He now stood ideologically shorn before a storm of demands for unemployment relief.

At this moment Hoover stood on the shore of a political and ideological Rubicon...Sometimes lumped together as Hoover's second program against the Depression, these measures would eventually help to revolutionize the American financial world. They would also lay the groundwork for a broader restructuring of government's role in many other sectors of American life, a restructuring known as the New Deal.