Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Western CIV. Episode five hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty five. Muddling through. So we last left the United
Speaker 1: States the summer of nineteen thirty three, while we jumped
Speaker 1: forward with Europe and Asia. This point's the hottest days
Speaker 1: the year. Settling over DC, and for the first time
Speaker 1: in months, as you'll recall, the men running the United
Speaker 1: States government can actually pause and catch their breath because
Speaker 1: behind them was one of the most astonishing stretches in
Speaker 1: the history of American politics, one hundred days, in which
Speaker 1: a new president and a willing Congress rewrote the relationship
Speaker 1: between citizens and their governments. Banks reopened, farmers got relief,
Speaker 1: A million young men were put to work clearing forests
Speaker 1: and trails. The country, which in March had felt like
Speaker 1: it was sliding off a cliff, now felt, at least
Speaker 1: for some people, like it had grabbed the edge. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing people forgets. The one hundred days was
Speaker 1: actually the easy part. What came next the next six
Speaker 1: years be harder, messier, and in many ways far more consequential.
Speaker 1: It's the story of how the New Deal grew, hit
Speaker 1: a wall, and then reshaped American life anyway, and today
Speaker 1: it's a story about the president who won the biggest
Speaker 1: landslide in modern history and then managed to somehow almost
Speaker 1: wreck his own presidency a few months later. And of course,
Speaker 1: because of what we've talked about in the last two episodes,
Speaker 1: we can't ignore the interconnectedness of the world. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: this isn't the episodes that I was doing about the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century or the seventeenth century, or hack even the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. To some extent, the world was woven together.
Speaker 1: And so the affair is in Asia and Europe that
Speaker 1: are happening in the late nineteen thirties, those are impacting
Speaker 1: the United States too, in ways that are incredibly profound.
Speaker 1: So today I'm going to tell the story in the
Speaker 1: United States from the one hundred Days to that day
Speaker 1: in September when the tanks rolled into Poland. So let's
Speaker 1: set the table. The famous First hundred Days ran from
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's inauguration in March nineteen thirty three through the middle
Speaker 1: of June. By the time Congress goes home that summer,
Speaker 1: fifteen major pieces of legislation are on the books. The
Speaker 1: banking crisis has been stopped. Basically, there's an alphabet soup
Speaker 1: of new agencies, the CCC, the AAA, the TVA, and
Speaker 1: the NRA, not that one a different one, each one
Speaker 1: a piece of enormous, improvised legislative experiment trying to pull
Speaker 1: the nation out of the Great Depression. But Roosevelt's presidency
Speaker 1: doesn't pause when the legislation does. And one of the
Speaker 1: most interesting things about this period is that while everyone's
Speaker 1: attention is on the domestic emergency, Roosevelt is already making
Speaker 1: moves on the world stage, moves to tell you a
Speaker 1: lot about him. The first big one comes that very summer,
Speaker 1: and it's a foreign policy decision that infuriated a lot
Speaker 1: of people. In June and July of nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: the leading economic powers gathered in London for what was
Speaker 1: called the World Monetary and Economic Conference. The idea was
Speaker 1: pretty grandiose. Get the major nations to stabilize their currencies, coordinate,
Speaker 1: and then lift the whole world out of the depression together.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting is that Roosevelt blew it up. He
Speaker 1: said what became known as his Bombshell Message, essentially telling
Speaker 1: the delegates that the United States would not tie its
Speaker 1: hands to some international currency agreement. America's recovery he said,
Speaker 1: came first. He was not going to sacrifice his freedom
Speaker 1: to inflate the dollar and raise prices at home just
Speaker 1: to please the banker in Europe. And so the conference collapsed.
Speaker 1: Internationalists and globalists were horrified, But it told you Roosevelt's
Speaker 1: priority in nineteen thirty three and one move. The American
Speaker 1: President was focusing on the table in front of him,
Speaker 1: and that mattered a heck of a lot more than
Speaker 1: any abstract global copper operation concept. It was America first,
Speaker 1: in other words. Now, at the very same time, he
Speaker 1: was doing something that looked very opposite because he was
Speaker 1: reaching outward. In November of nineteen thirty three, Roosevelt did
Speaker 1: something no president had done since the Russian Revolution. He
Speaker 1: formally recognized the Soviet Union. For sixteen years, the United
Speaker 1: States had just simply pretended the Bolshevik government didn't exist.
Speaker 1: But what's that on the map, that enormous space, you know,
Speaker 1: that's kind of above China and right next to the
Speaker 1: rest of Europe. Well, that's nothing, We'll just ignore that.
Speaker 1: So that policy came to an end in nineteen thirty three. Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: the pragmatic man he was, looked at the situation and
Speaker 1: He saw two things, a potential trading partner during a
Speaker 1: depression and a possible counterweight to Japan, which was expanding
Speaker 1: aggressively in Asia. So he opened up relations. The hope
Speaker 1: for it of trade never really materialized, and the diplomatic
Speaker 1: relationship would be rocky for years, but it was a
Speaker 1: signal this was a president who intended to deal with
Speaker 1: the world as it was, not as he wished it
Speaker 1: to be. And then there's the policy that may be
Speaker 1: his most durable foreign achievement of the whole decade, what
Speaker 1: was called the good neighbor policy. For a generation, the
Speaker 1: United States had thrown its weight around in Latin America
Speaker 1: like an arguing landlord, Marines landing in this country, customs
Speaker 1: houses seized over here, the long shadow of gunboat diplomacy. Basically,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt announced, starting in his inaugural address and then indeeds,
Speaker 1: that the this was over, the United States would be
Speaker 1: a good neighbor, one that respected the sovereignty of other states.
Speaker 1: At the Montevideo Conference in late nineteen thirty three, the
Speaker 1: US signed on to the principle that no state had
Speaker 1: the right to intervene in the international affairs of another.
Speaker 1: The following year, the hated Platt Amendment, which had given
Speaker 1: the US a legal right to medal in Cuba, was
Speaker 1: officially ended, and the Marines that were stationed in Haiti,
Speaker 1: we brought those home. Two. Why does this matter? Well,
Speaker 1: I want you to hold that thought, because in just
Speaker 1: a few years, when the world catches fire, Roosevelt is
Speaker 1: going to want the entire Western hemisphere standing behind him,
Speaker 1: and the goodwill he's banking now is going to pay off.
Speaker 1: So if nineteen thirty three was the year of rescue,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four was the year of construction and the
Speaker 1: year the opposition starts to find its voice on the
Speaker 1: domestic side. The big achievement is the one we still
Speaker 1: live with every single day. In June of four, Congress
Speaker 1: passed the Securities Exchange Act, which created the Securities and
Speaker 1: Exchange Commission as we call it today, the SEC. Remember
Speaker 1: the stock market crash in nineteen twenty nine was the
Speaker 1: symbolic beginning of the whole catastrophe, and the markets in
Speaker 1: the twenties had been in a wild west of insider
Speaker 1: deals and manipulations. The SEC was built to bring the
Speaker 1: cops to Wall Street. Now there'd be disclosure requirements, registration
Speaker 1: rules against fraud. And here's a detail people love. Roosevelt's
Speaker 1: choice to run the new SEC was Joseph P. Kennedy. Yes,
Speaker 1: that Kennedy, the father of a future president, the man
Speaker 1: who had made himself a fortune doing exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of stock manipulation the SEC was designed to stop. When
Speaker 1: advisers objected, Roosevelt supposedly said that to catch a thief,
Speaker 1: you need a thief. Kennedy turned out to be an effective,
Speaker 1: no nonsense chairman. Sometimes I guess being cynical is the
Speaker 1: right decision. Also in nineteen thirty four, Roosevelt Secretary of
Speaker 1: State Cordell Hall, a man with an almost religious faith
Speaker 1: in free trade, got his signature achievement, the Reciprocal Trade
Speaker 1: Agreements Act. This let the president negotiate teriff reductions with
Speaker 1: other countries on his own authority. In the long run,
Speaker 1: this would quietly reverse decades of American protectionism and laying
Speaker 1: the groundwork for the trading world that would be built
Speaker 1: after the next war. It was a little bit of
Speaker 1: a sleeper, but it was a hit. But nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four is also when the political weather starts to shift,
Speaker 1: because Roosevelt is now getting attacked from both directions at once.
Speaker 1: From the right came the American Liberty League, founded in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four by conservative Democrats and business titans, including
Speaker 1: members of the DuPont family in Al Smith, the man
Speaker 1: Roosevelt has succeeded as the great hope of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: They saw the New Deal as a march towards social
Speaker 1: a betrayal of the Constitution, an assault on free enterprise.
Speaker 1: They had money, and they had voluminous microphones. Let's just
Speaker 1: put it that way. But honestly, the attacks from the
Speaker 1: right were the ones that Roosevelt could push off in
Speaker 1: his sleep. It was the attacks from the left are
Speaker 1: more precisely from a strange, populous flank, that genuinely scared him.
Speaker 1: Because those men weren't promising less than the New Deal.
Speaker 1: They were promising more, and they were brilliant at reaching ordinary,
Speaker 1: frightened people. Let me tell you about three of them.
Speaker 1: I talked about these a little bit last time, But
Speaker 1: the first and the most important one was Huey Long,
Speaker 1: the Kingfish, a senator and former governor of Louisiana who
Speaker 1: ran the state very much like a personal kingdom. Corrupt, ruthless,
Speaker 1: and massively popular. Long had a slogan that landed like
Speaker 1: a thunderclap in the middle of the depression. Share our wealth,
Speaker 1: cat big fortunes, he said, and guarantee every fing family
Speaker 1: a homestead and a decent annual income. He also said,
Speaker 1: every man a king. It was economically impossible and politically electric.
Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty five, his organization claimed millions of members,
Speaker 1: and there were whispers, serious whispers, and he might run
Speaker 1: for president and split the vote. Second was another gud
Speaker 1: that I talked about, Father Charles Kaughlin, the radio priest
Speaker 1: of Detroit. At his peak, tens of millions of Americans
Speaker 1: tuned into his Sunday broadcasts. He started out a passionate
Speaker 1: Roosevelt supporter. Roosevelt are ruined, he said, but he soured
Speaker 1: attacking bankers and the gold standard, and over time his
Speaker 1: rhetoric curdled into something darker and openly antisemitic. But in
Speaker 1: the mid thirties his reach was staggering. Radio was the
Speaker 1: new mass medium, and Kauflin had mastered it. The last
Speaker 1: one I want to talk about is doctor Francis Townsend,
Speaker 1: a mild mannered California physician with one big idea pay
Speaker 1: every American over sixty a generous monthly pension on the
Speaker 1: condition that they spend it within thirty days. It would
Speaker 1: care for the elderly and pump money into the economy.
Speaker 1: Townsend clubs sprang up across the country, especially among older
Speaker 1: Americans who would watch their savings vanish. Now, why does
Speaker 1: any of this matter to this story? Because Roosevelt was
Speaker 1: a master politician, and a master politician doesn't just crush
Speaker 1: his rivals. He steals from him. He steals their best ideas.
Speaker 1: The pressure from long, Claughlin and Townsend, combined with a
Speaker 1: Supreme Court that was about to start swinging a wrecking
Speaker 1: ball at his programs, is going to push Roosevelt sharply
Speaker 1: to the left in nineteen thirty five. The critics, they
Speaker 1: thought they were cornering him, but they were actually writing
Speaker 1: his next chapter. Now, one more thing about nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 1: That's a little bit of an anomaly, and that's the
Speaker 1: midterm elections. Almost always, the party in power loses seats
Speaker 1: in a midterm, that's almost an iron rule of American politics. Instead,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's Democrats gained seats, building even bigger majorities in both houses.
Speaker 1: The voters were saying, keep going and Roosevelt he intended to.
Speaker 1: Nineteen thirty five is the year that's really the hinge
Speaker 1: of our whole story. It's the year the New Deal
Speaker 1: kind of gets a second wind. Historians actually refer to
Speaker 1: it as the Second New Deal, or sometimes the Second
Speaker 1: hundred Days, but it begins with a bit of a blow.
Speaker 1: On May the twenty seventh, nineteen thirty five, the day
Speaker 1: the administration called Black Monday, the Supreme Court of the
Speaker 1: United States struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act. The
Speaker 1: case is famous Schnecktor Poultry Corporation versus United States, and yes,
Speaker 1: it really did come from a Brooklyn kosher chicken business.
Speaker 1: The court ruled unanimously that the the NRA had handed
Speaker 1: the executive branch far too much lawmaking power and had
Speaker 1: reached too far into local commerce. The centerpiece of the
Speaker 1: New Deal, the Great experimented industrial planning with its blue
Speaker 1: eagle posters in every shop window, was officially dead. Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was furious. He gave a press conference complaining that the
Speaker 1: court had dragged the country back to a horse and
Speaker 1: buggy definition of interstate commerce. But here is where his
Speaker 1: genius shows. Instead of retreating, he charged forward, and the
Speaker 1: legislation that poured out of Congress in the summer nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five was bolder, more permanent, and more clearly aimed
Speaker 1: at ordinary working people than anything in the First New Deal.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the Big four. Number one, the WPA,
Speaker 1: or Works Progress Administration, set up in the spring of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five under the absolutely relentless Harry Hopkins. The
Speaker 1: WPA was a jobs program on a colossal scale. Over
Speaker 1: its lifetime, it would employ around eight and a half
Speaker 1: million Americans. It built and listened to the scale of
Speaker 1: this hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of bridges, thousands of schools, parks, airports, and public buildings.
Speaker 1: But Hopkins did something visionary too. He hired artists, writers, actors, painters, musicians,
Speaker 1: the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the idea
Speaker 1: that a starving painter or a laid off actor deserved
Speaker 1: just as much as a laid off bricklayer. That was
Speaker 1: a genuinely radical statement about what a society owes its people.
Speaker 1: Number two, and this is the biggie. The Social Security Act,
Speaker 1: signed into law on August the fourteenth, nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: just sit with how revolutionary this was before social security.
Speaker 1: Growing old in America with no money meant very often destitution,
Speaker 1: moving in with relatives if you were lucky, poorhouse if
Speaker 1: you weren't. Roosevelt created a system of old age insurance
Speaker 1: funded by payroll taxes plus unemployment insurance and aid for
Speaker 1: dependent children that disabled. And notice how he answered doctor Townsend.
Speaker 1: From the beginning. He took the popular demand security for
Speaker 1: the elderly and built a real, sustainable system around it.
Speaker 1: Roosevet himself was clear eyed about politics. He insisted it
Speaker 1: be funded by worker's own contributions, specifically so that, in
Speaker 1: his words, no future politician could ever take it away.
Speaker 1: And guess what he was right. Ninety years later, and
Speaker 1: it's still here, arguably the most important piece of domestic
Speaker 1: legislation of the twentieth century. Now, Unfortunately, as I said
Speaker 1: here recording this, it's about four years away from running
Speaker 1: out of money. Hopefully someone in Congress can share Roosevelt's
Speaker 1: vision and get on board. The Number three was the
Speaker 1: National Labor Relations Act, better known as the Wagner Act
Speaker 1: after Senator Robert Wagner of New York, passed in July
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty five. This was a charter of rights
Speaker 1: for organized labor. It guaranteed workers the right to form
Speaker 1: unions and bargain collectively, and it created the National Labor
Speaker 1: Relations Board to enforce those rights and referee disputes. With
Speaker 1: the NRA. Struck Down labor had lost its earlier legal footing.
Speaker 1: The Wagner Act gave it something far stronger. An American
Speaker 1: union membership, as a consequence, was about to explode. The
Speaker 1: last one is number four, and that's the Revenue Act
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty five, which opponents nicknamed the Wealth Tax.
Speaker 1: It sharply raised taxes on the highest incomes, on big
Speaker 1: est states and on corporations. Now in dollar terms, didn't
Speaker 1: actually raise that much money. His real purpose was as
Speaker 1: much symbolic and political as was fiscal. It was Roosevelt
Speaker 1: planting a flag, drawing a line between himself and the
Speaker 1: men of great wealth, and frankly stealing a march on
Speaker 1: Huey Long's share our wealth policy before Long could run
Speaker 1: on it. And of course there was more. A Banking
Speaker 1: Act that centralized real power in the Federal Reserve under
Speaker 1: the able Mariner Eccles, giving Washington genuine control over the
Speaker 1: nation's money. Supply for the first time, a rural electrification
Speaker 1: administration to bring electric light to the millions of American
Speaker 1: farms that still in nineteen thirty five had none. Think
Speaker 1: about that. I mean, there were whole stretches of rural
Speaker 1: America essentially living as their grandparents had in the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, with kerosene lambs and no refrigeration. It was
Speaker 1: the New Deal that changed, that put it all together,
Speaker 1: and you can start to see the shift. The first
Speaker 1: New Deal was about rescue and recovery, just propping up things,
Speaker 1: stabilizing prices. The second New Deal was about reform and security,
Speaker 1: building permanent structures to protect ordinary people from I guess,
Speaker 1: the raw edges of capitalism. This is the moment modern
Speaker 1: American welfare state is born. And it's the moment the
Speaker 1: New Deal coalition, working people, union members, immigrants, black voters
Speaker 1: in the North, shifting away from the Party of Lincoln, farmers,
Speaker 1: white Southerners, intellectuals, locks into places the dominant force in
Speaker 1: American politics for the next thirty five years. Now. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: while Roosevelt is rebuilding America at home, the international sky
Speaker 1: is getting darker by the month, and Congress is reacting
Speaker 1: in a way that's going to tie Roosevelt's hands for years.
Speaker 1: The mood of the American people in the mid nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties can be summed up in one word, never again
Speaker 1: and never again. The trenches, the gas, the slaughter of
Speaker 1: the Great War, and a powerful idea took hold, pushed
Speaker 1: hard by Senate committee led by Gerald and I of
Speaker 1: North Dakota, that the United States had been dragged into
Speaker 1: that war, dragged by greedy bankers and arms manufacturers, the
Speaker 1: so called merchants of death, who only cared about profit.
Speaker 1: The NI Committees here in running through nineteen thirty four
Speaker 1: and nineteen thirty six, hammered this theme, and they convinced
Speaker 1: millions of Americans that the way to stay out of
Speaker 1: the next war was simply to pass a law against
Speaker 1: getting involved. And so Congress did. Beginning in August of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five. It passed the first of the Neutrality Acts,
Speaker 1: when the President proclaimed that a state of war existed
Speaker 1: somewhere and embargo would automatically slam down on shipping American
Speaker 1: arms to anyone involved, aggressor and victim alike. More acts
Speaker 1: followed in nineteen thirty six and nineteen thirty seven, tightening
Speaker 1: the rules no loans, no arms, and eventually thinking about
Speaker 1: the Lusitania, No American could travel on a belligerent ship.
Speaker 1: Here's the problem, and Roosevelt saw it immediately by treating
Speaker 1: the aggressor and the victim exactly the same. These laws
Speaker 1: didn't keep American neutral in any moral sense. They just
Speaker 1: helped whoever was doing the attacking. They removed America's ability
Speaker 1: to put a on the scale for the side that
Speaker 1: deserved it. Roosevelt disliked the neutrality acts intensely, but in
Speaker 1: the mid thirties, isolation as sentiment was just so overwhelming
Speaker 1: that he couldn't fight it hand on. So he signed them,
Speaker 1: and he waited, and he hoped for room to maneuver,
Speaker 1: and events that proved his point came almost immediately. In
Speaker 1: October of nineteen thirty five, Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia, one
Speaker 1: of the only remaining independent nations in Africa, and the
Speaker 1: world watched as a modern army with aircraft and poison
Speaker 1: gas crushed a country that was defending itself with little
Speaker 1: more than rifles. The League of Nations, as I talked
Speaker 1: about two episodes ago, wrung its hands and did effectively nothing.
Speaker 1: The lesson that dictators took was unmistakable, aggression pays, and
Speaker 1: no one's going to stop you. Then, in July of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, the Spanish Civil War erupted, a brutal
Speaker 1: conflict in which Hitler and Mussolini openly backed the Fascist
Speaker 1: rebels under Franco, testing their new weapons and tactics, while
Speaker 1: the Western democracies stood aside, and as to their credit,
Speaker 1: the Soviets did chip in to try to help out
Speaker 1: the Congregationalists. Roosevelt, hemmed in by the neutrality laws and
Speaker 1: by American Catholic opinion, kept the United States out. It
Speaker 1: haunted many on the left for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: The world is sorting itself into democracies and dictatorships, and
Speaker 1: the dictatorships are winning all the early rounds. But at home,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six belonged to Franklin Roosevelt. The year opened
Speaker 1: with another slab from the Supreme Court in January, in
Speaker 1: the case of United States versus Butler, the Court struck
Speaker 1: down the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which had been the cornerstone
Speaker 1: of New Deal farm policy. Roosevelt's lawyers scrambled to find
Speaker 1: new legal footing to keep helping farmers, and they largely did.
Speaker 1: But the pattern was now glaring. An aging Conservative Supreme
Speaker 1: Court was systematically dismantling the New Deal peace by peace.
Speaker 1: File that away because he's going to detonate nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: seven for now. Though it was election season and Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was about to win one for the ages, the Republicans
Speaker 1: nominated Alf Landon, the moderate governor of Kansas, a decent
Speaker 1: man who, let's be fair, had no chance at all.
Speaker 1: The campaign was a referendum on the New Deal, and
Speaker 1: Roosevelt leaned all the way in. He didn't run from
Speaker 1: his enemies among the wealthy, in the bankers. He ran
Speaker 1: against them, gleefully. In a thunderous speech at Madison Square
Speaker 1: Garden on the eve of his election, he listed the
Speaker 1: forces of organized money arrayed against them and declared that
Speaker 1: they were unanimous in their hatred of him, and said,
Speaker 1: quote and I welcome their hatred end quote. The crowd
Speaker 1: absolutely roared. The result on November the third, nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six was one of the greatest landslides in American history.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt carried forty six of the forty eight states. Landon
Speaker 1: won exactly two, Maine and Vermont, and a grand total
Speaker 1: of eight electoral votes against Roosevelt's five hundred and twenty three.
Speaker 1: The old saying had been as Main goes, so goes
Speaker 1: the nation. Roosevelt's campaign manager joked that it was now
Speaker 1: as Main goes, so goes Vermont. And there's a famous
Speaker 1: footnote here. A popular magazine called Literary Digest ran a
Speaker 1: huge poll and confidently predicted Land and would win. They
Speaker 1: were catastrophically wrong. Their sample was skewed toward wealthy Americans
Speaker 1: who could afford telephones and automobiles, and the magazine was
Speaker 1: so humiliated it soon folded. But there's the story is
Speaker 1: interesting for this because there was a young polster who
Speaker 1: used smarter scientific sampling, and he got it right, and
Speaker 1: he started to create methods that we still use to
Speaker 1: measure public opinion in the United States today. His name
Speaker 1: was George Gallup. Oh and one of Roosevelt's most dangerous
Speaker 1: rivals never made it at the campaign trail at all.
Speaker 1: By the way, remember Huey Long. He was shot in
Speaker 1: the Louisiana State capitol in September of nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: and he died two days later. We'll never know how
Speaker 1: much trouble the Kingfish might have caused in nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: But as it was, Roosevelt stood at the absolute summit
Speaker 1: of his power, which, as anybody who studied power nos,
Speaker 1: is exactly the moment that you need to watch out.
Speaker 1: Franklin Roosevelt became in nineteen thirty seven the most powerful
Speaker 1: president since Abraham Lincoln. He had just won a historic mandate,
Speaker 1: he had enormous majorities in Congress, and he was about
Speaker 1: to make the worst political miscalculation of his career. The
Speaker 1: target of his frustration was the Supreme Court, nine men,
Speaker 1: several of them quite elderly, who had been striking down
Speaker 1: his programs one after another. Roosevelt looked ahead and saw
Speaker 1: the Wagner Act, social Security itself, the whole edifice of
Speaker 1: the New Deal, heading toward those same nine justices, and
Speaker 1: he feared they'd tear it all down. He just won
Speaker 1: forty six states. Why should an unelected, ancient court overrule
Speaker 1: the clear will of the people. So in February nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven, he sprang a plan on a stunned Congress.
Speaker 1: He framed it disingenuously as a matter of efficiency. He said,
Speaker 1: the courts were overburdened and the older justices needed help
Speaker 1: with the workload. His proposal was that for every federal
Speaker 1: judge over the age of seventy who didn't retire, the
Speaker 1: president could appoint a new one, an additional one to
Speaker 1: help carry the load, up to six new justices on
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. Everyone saw through this instantly. This wasn't
Speaker 1: about efficiency, It was about packing the court with friendly
Speaker 1: justices to get the outcomes he wanted. The press dubbed
Speaker 1: it the Court packing Plan, and the name stuck, and
Speaker 1: the reaction was ferocious, including from his own side. Many
Speaker 1: Democrats were appalled. To them, this looked like a president
Speaker 1: trying to neuter an independent, coequal branch of government, the
Speaker 1: very kind of power grab they were watching dictators make
Speaker 1: in Europe. The separation of powers, the checks and balances,
Speaker 1: these were sacred, and Roosevelt seemed to be treating them
Speaker 1: as obstacles. For the first time, a powerful block of
Speaker 1: conservative Democrats openly broke with him and made common cause
Speaker 1: with the Republicans. This is the birth of what's called
Speaker 1: the Conservative Coalition, and it would frustrate liberal legislation in
Speaker 1: Congress for decades. And then something strange happened that abruptly
Speaker 1: pulled the rug from under the whole plan. That spring
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. That same Supreme Court started to rule
Speaker 1: for the new deal. In March, in a minimum wage
Speaker 1: case West Coast Hotel versus Parish, Justice Owen Roberts switched
Speaker 1: his vote to the liberal side. In April, the Court
Speaker 1: actually upheld the Wagner Act. It became known as the
Speaker 1: switch in time that saved nine. Then one of the
Speaker 1: conservative justices, Van Devanter, announced his retirement, giving Roosevelt a
Speaker 1: vacancy to fill, you know, the honest way. Suddenly Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was getting the Court he wanted without the plan, which
Speaker 1: meant the plan now had no purpose except to look
Speaker 1: like a power grab. The Court packing Bill died in
Speaker 1: the Senate that summer. It was a humiliating defeat, the
Speaker 1: first real one of his presidency, and it was entirely
Speaker 1: self inflict. Roosevelt eventually got to a point a string
Speaker 1: of justices and reshaped the Court for a generation. So
Speaker 1: in the long run he arguably won, but the political
Speaker 1: cost was enormous. The aura of invincibility was gone. The
Speaker 1: Conservative coalition now was a permanent fact of life, and
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's command over Congress would never again be what it
Speaker 1: was in nineteen thirty three or nineteen thirty five. Nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven had more pain in store on the labor front.
Speaker 1: The Wagner hacked had unleashed a wave of union organizing,
Speaker 1: and it sometimes turned violent. The great drama was the
Speaker 1: sit down strike, workers occupying the factory itself, refusing to
Speaker 1: leave so the company couldn't bring in replacements. The most
Speaker 1: famous was at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, over the
Speaker 1: winter of nineteen thirty six into nineteen thirty seven. After
Speaker 1: a tenths weeks long standoff, GM caved in and recognized
Speaker 1: the United Auto Workers, a stunning victory that supercharged the
Speaker 1: new industrial union movement, the CIO. But not every fight
Speaker 1: ended so well. A Memorial Day nineteen thirty seven, police
Speaker 1: in Chicago opened fire on a crowd of striking steel
Speaker 1: workers in their families, killing ten people in what became
Speaker 1: known as the Memorial Day Massacre. The country was raw,
Speaker 1: and the question of labour's power was being settled in
Speaker 1: the streets. And then the economy, which looked like it
Speaker 1: had been clawing its way back for four years, suddenly
Speaker 1: collapsed again. Historians call it the Roosevelt Recession. Starting in
Speaker 1: the late summer and fall of nineteen thirty seven, industrial
Speaker 1: production fell off a cliff, and unemployment, which had been dropping,
Speaker 1: shot back up by millions. The cause is still debated,
Speaker 1: but a big factor was Roosevelt himself. Worried about deficits
Speaker 1: and inflation. He had cut back on relief spending, slashing
Speaker 1: the WPA, and the new Social Security payroll taxes were
Speaker 1: suddenly now pulling money out of workers' paychecks. The economy,
Speaker 1: it turned out, wasn't yet strong enough to stand on
Speaker 1: its own. When the government stepped back, it stumbled. This
Speaker 1: was a genuine intellectual crisis for the administration. One camp said,
Speaker 1: we cut too soon. We need to spend our way
Speaker 1: back out, as the British economist John Maynard Keynes had
Speaker 1: been arguing. Another said said, no, we need to balance
Speaker 1: the budget and reassure business. Roosevelt wavered, and then in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight came down on the side of spending,
Speaker 1: asking Congress for a big new round of relief in
Speaker 1: public works, which helped slowly pull the economy back up.
Speaker 1: It was, in a sense, the first deliberate use of
Speaker 1: deficit spending to fight a downturn in American history, but
Speaker 1: the damage to Roosevelt's reputation as a miracle worker was real.
Speaker 1: And all the while, while this is all going on domestically,
Speaker 1: the rest of the world kept darkening and in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven, and Roosevelt started very carefully to try to
Speaker 1: wake his country up to the growing threat. In October
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty seven, in Chicago, the heartland of isolationism,
Speaker 1: he gave what became known as the Quarantine Speech. Without
Speaker 1: naming names. He warned that an epidemic of world lawlessness
Speaker 1: was spreading, and he suggested that peace loving nations might
Speaker 1: need to quarantine the aggressors the way you'd isolate a
Speaker 1: patient with a contagious disease to stop the infection from spreading.
Speaker 1: It was a trial, a test. Roosevelt was trying to
Speaker 1: see whether Americans were ready to think about collective action
Speaker 1: against aggression, and the answer came back loud and clear no.
Speaker 1: The isolationist reaction was so hostile that Roosevelt backed off
Speaker 1: almost immediately. He later said something to the effect that
Speaker 1: it's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when
Speaker 1: you're trying to lead and find no one there. He
Speaker 1: had gotten too far ahead of his people. He filed
Speaker 1: that lesson away and resolved to bring them along more slowly.
Speaker 1: The lesson got sharper. Just two months later, in December
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty seven, Japanese aircraft attacked and sank an
Speaker 1: American gunboat, the USS Panae, on the Yanksee River in China,
Speaker 1: in broad daylight, with American flags clearly visible. Several old
Speaker 1: men were killed. In a later decade this might have
Speaker 1: met war, but in nineteen thirty seven, the public reaction
Speaker 1: was almost a desperate desire to avoid a confrontation. Japan
Speaker 1: apologized and paid an indemnity, and the incident was smoothed over.
Speaker 1: It was a vivid measure of just how deep the
Speaker 1: will to just stay out of it all ran. In
Speaker 1: American politics, nineteen thirty eight is on the domestic front,
Speaker 1: a kind of year of a stalemate. The Conservative coalition
Speaker 1: is dug in. The recession has kind of bruised Roosevelt's popularity.
Speaker 1: The reforming energy of nineteen thirty five is mostly spent,
Speaker 1: but the year does produce one last huge piece of
Speaker 1: New Deal legislation. In June of nineteen thirty eight, Congress
Speaker 1: passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. If you've ever earned
Speaker 1: a minimum wage, or gotten time and a half for
Speaker 1: working over time, or simply lived in a country where
Speaker 1: it's illegal to send children into factories, that's this law.
Speaker 1: It established a federal minimum wage, a maximum work week,
Speaker 1: in a ban on most child labor. It was the
Speaker 1: last major reform of the New Deal, and like Social Security,
Speaker 1: it became a permanent part of American life. But Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was frustrated, and that frustration led to another political misstep.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirty eight primaries, he tried to purge
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party of the conservative members locked him, campaigning
Speaker 1: openly against sitting Democratic senators and congressmen in their own primaries,
Speaker 1: trying to get them replaced with loyal New Dealers. It
Speaker 1: mostly failed. Voters didn't like the President reaching into their
Speaker 1: states to tell them who to elect, and most of
Speaker 1: his targets survived. It reinforced the lesson of the court
Speaker 1: packing scheme. Even at the height of his popularity, there
Speaker 1: were limits to what Roosevelt could do. He couldn't just
Speaker 1: bend the entire nation to his will. Then, in November
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight came the midterms. The Republicans, who had
Speaker 1: been nearly wiped out two years earlier, came roaring back,
Speaker 1: picking up dozens of seats in the House and several
Speaker 1: in the Senate. Combined with the Conservative Democrats, this meant
Speaker 1: that the era of sweeping New Deal reform was for
Speaker 1: all practical purposes over. Roosevelt would spend his remaining domestic
Speaker 1: energy defending what he built, rather than expanding it. There's
Speaker 1: one more in nineteen thirty eight development worth paying attention to,
Speaker 1: because its shadow is long. That year, Congress created what
Speaker 1: we become the House on American Activities Committee under Martin
Speaker 1: Dyes of Texas. It was ostensibly set up to investigate
Speaker 1: Nazi and communists aversion, but it quickly developed a taste
Speaker 1: for going after New Dealers and labor unions as supposed radicals.
Speaker 1: It's a thread that runs forward through the next two
Speaker 1: decades and into an era that this podcast, at least
Speaker 1: for now, isn't going to cover the Macarthy era of
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties. But by nineteen thirty eight, and awe honesty,
Speaker 1: the domestic story has simply been overtaken. Because in Europe,
Speaker 1: the storm Roosevelt had been warning about was now plainly
Speaker 1: and undeniably arriving in March of nineteen thirty eight. Hitler
Speaker 1: next Austria, marching German troops across the border to absorb
Speaker 1: a whole country into the Reich, and as we know,
Speaker 1: the war did nothing. Then he turned to Czechoslovakia, demanding
Speaker 1: the Sedate in Land, the border region with a large
Speaker 1: German speaking population, and here, as we know, we come
Speaker 1: to the most well, I guess, one of the most
Speaker 1: infamous moments of the twentieth century, because in late September
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty eight, the leaders of Britain and France.
Speaker 1: I don't know why Neville Chamberlain, by the way, gets
Speaker 1: all the crap for this, because France did go and
Speaker 1: they met Hiller at Munich, and desperate to avoid war,
Speaker 1: just gave him the Sudate Land and the promise that
Speaker 1: this was his last territorial demand. As we know, the
Speaker 1: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew home waving a piece
Speaker 1: of paper and declaring that he had quote unquote secured
Speaker 1: peace for our time end quote. It was the high
Speaker 1: water mark for a policy that we called appeasement. The
Speaker 1: word that has now become a synonym for shameful weakness.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's role in Munich was limited. America was on the sidelines,
Speaker 1: bound by neutrality and public opinion, and he sent message
Speaker 1: is urging a peaceful settlement. But he watched what unfolded
Speaker 1: with growing dread. He understood that the democracies had just
Speaker 1: bought a few months of peace by feeding a country
Speaker 1: to a dictator, and that it would not be enough.
Speaker 1: Within six months, Hitler would tear up the Munich Agreement
Speaker 1: entirely and swallow the rest of Czechoslovakia, proving the whole
Speaker 1: thing of fraud. And then in November nineteen thirty eight
Speaker 1: came Krystolknock the Night at Broken Glass, a coordinated wave
Speaker 1: of Nazi violence against Germany's Jews, Synagogues burned, businesses smashed,
Speaker 1: tens of thousands sent to concentration camp. Roosevelt responded by
Speaker 1: recalling the American ambassador from Berlin, then publicly condemning it
Speaker 1: in sharp terms. He said he could scarcely believe such
Speaker 1: things could occur in a twentieth century civilization. But and
Speaker 1: this is one of the genuine moral failures hanging over
Speaker 1: this administration. America's restrictive immigrant laws and the anti Semitism
Speaker 1: and anti immigrant feeling baked into American politics in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. It kept the door largely shut to the
Speaker 1: Jewish refugees trying to flee, and Roosevelt he didn't spend
Speaker 1: his political capital to force it open, to stain on
Speaker 1: that administration that history has not forgotten. What Roosevelt did
Speaker 1: do in late nineteen thirty eight was to begin quietly
Speaker 1: but urgently to prepare. He looked at what German airpower
Speaker 1: had done to intimidate Europe at Munich, and became convinced
Speaker 1: that the United States needed, above all, to build airplanes,
Speaker 1: thousands of them, and to start rearming in earnest. He
Speaker 1: began laying the groundwork to become, in a phrase he'd
Speaker 1: later make famous, the arsenal of democracy. He couldn't yet
Speaker 1: say that out loud, but the pivot of his presidency
Speaker 1: away from domestic reform and toward the coming war was
Speaker 1: now fully underway, and so our story now takes us
Speaker 1: to nineteen thirty nine year of uneasy peace, though almost
Speaker 1: no one knew yet just how little of it was left.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt opened the year with the State of the Union
Speaker 1: address in January that marked a real turning point in
Speaker 1: his rhetoric. He told Congress and the country in effect,
Speaker 1: that the days of comfortable isolation they were coming to
Speaker 1: an end. He warned that there were times when a
Speaker 1: nation's neutrality laws could actually help an aggressor and hurt
Speaker 1: the victim. A direct shot at the neutrality acts he'd
Speaker 1: been forced to sign. He argued that America's own security
Speaker 1: was bound up with the fate of democracy abroad. He
Speaker 1: was trying carefully to turn the country's gaze outward and
Speaker 1: to prepare it for the idea that staying truly safe
Speaker 1: might require more than hiding behind two oceans. The concrete
Speaker 1: fight that spring and summer was over those neutrality acts.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt and his allies pushed hard to revise them, specifically
Speaker 1: to repeal the arms embargo, so that if the war came,
Speaker 1: the democracies could at least buy weapons from the United States.
Speaker 1: The principle was called cash and carry. You pay cash,
Speaker 1: you carry the goods away in your own ships, so
Speaker 1: America takes no financial and shipping risk. It was a
Speaker 1: way to help Britain in France without sending American boys
Speaker 1: or even American vessels into Harm's way. But the isolationists
Speaker 1: in Congress dug in and in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine they blocked him. In a now legendary meeting,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Warren senate leaders that
Speaker 1: war was coming in Europe. Within months, one key isolationist
Speaker 1: senator reportedly insisted that there would be no war, that
Speaker 1: the President was crying wolf. Congress adjourned for the summer
Speaker 1: without revising the law. Roosevelt's hands were still tied. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the news from Europe got worse and worse, and March,
Speaker 1: Hitler had seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, exposing Munich as
Speaker 1: the sham. Roosevelt knew that it was Selni grabbed Albania
Speaker 1: in April. The Spanish Civil War ended the spring with
Speaker 1: Franco's fascist victory. Hitler began to menace Poland, demanding the
Speaker 1: city of Danzing and a corridor through Polish territory, and
Speaker 1: then in late August of nineteen thirty nine came the
Speaker 1: thunderbolt that stunned the entire world. Nazi Germany and the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, bitter ideological enemies, fascism and communism signed a
Speaker 1: non aggression pact. Hitler and Stalin were shaking hands. Secretly
Speaker 1: they agreed to carve up Poland and Eastern Europe between them.
Speaker 1: It meant that Hitler could now attack Poland in the
Speaker 1: west without fear of the Soviet striking him in the east.
Speaker 1: Last barrier was gone, and everyone who knew what the
Speaker 1: pact meant was about to get a wake up call. Literally,
Speaker 1: Franklin Roosevelt is going to be woken up in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night on September the one, nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: He's going to be told what has happened. This stretch
Speaker 1: that began in the summer of nineteen thirty nine started
Speaker 1: with honestly FDR trying to keep the nation alive. But
Speaker 1: by the time this episode has ended in September of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, he'd become something else, the leader of
Speaker 1: the world's greatest democracy, staring down the most dangerous moment
Speaker 1: for that institution in history. In between, he transformed his
Speaker 1: own country social security, the minimum wage, the right to union,
Speaker 1: federal insurance for your bank deposits. A cop looking at
Speaker 1: Wall Street, electricity strung out to the countryside these weren't
Speaker 1: here when he started, but most of them are still
Speaker 1: here today. He built a coalition that would dominate American
Speaker 1: life for a generation. He permanently expanded what people expected
Speaker 1: their government to do for them. That's the New Deals legacy,
Speaker 1: and we'd definitely so argue about it. That argument is
Speaker 1: American politics in a lot of ways. But he also
Speaker 1: learned his limits. The court packing fight and the failed
Speaker 1: purge revealed a man who could overreach badly, who could
Speaker 1: mistake a landslide for a blank check. The Roosevelt recession
Speaker 1: showed that he hadn't even fully solved the code of
Speaker 1: the depression. It would take the war and the colossal
Speaker 1: spanning it demanded to finally end it. And on the
Speaker 1: great moral question of refugees fleeing Hitler's grasp, let's just
Speaker 1: say history has rendered Roosevelt a pretty hard verdict. And
Speaker 1: then there's this foreign story by which the end of
Speaker 1: this has kind of swallowed everything else. Roosevelt spent these
Speaker 1: years trying to walk a tightrope the catastrophe coming, trying
Speaker 1: to warn his people, and being yanked back every time
Speaker 1: you got too far ahead of them. He learned patience.
Speaker 1: You learned to lead from just half a step in front,
Speaker 1: never more. And as the curtain falls on our story
Speaker 1: on September the first, nineteen thirty nine, he's a president
Speaker 1: boxed in by neutrality laws. He despises, watching the world
Speaker 1: he feared come true, knowing the hardest chapter of his
Speaker 1: life and his countryes is about to begin. And so
Speaker 1: we're going to pick that up next time in a
Speaker 1: third term that no president has ever sought, a desperate
Speaker 1: effort to arm the democracies, and we're going to walk
Speaker 1: through and what is going to be the last ever
Speaker 1: story arc for this podcast, for something that I started
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. Maybe it's finally coming to an end
Speaker 1: in the