“Farmers had been crushed by catastrophic price falls, drought, and debt. Unemployment stood officially at 25 percent but was actually closer, Badger estimates, to 33 percent. Banks across the country had been failing for months and thousands more were on the brink as he took the presidential oath. Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had “nothing to fear but fear itself” was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong. Badger writes in FDR: The First Hundred Days, “Americans had never been there before.” The country had always experienced episodic “panics” and “recessions,” but nothing this bad. Since the 1929 stock market crash the economy had been spiraling inexorably downward for more than three years. Herbert Hoover, the departing president, had left behind an economic cataclysm. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn’t know. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, secretary of labor during Roosevelt’s administration and the first woman ever to serve in the US cabinet, circa 1943įew expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933.
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