Fear Itself (6 page)

The president’s own inaugural rhetoric, announcing that fear itself was unjustified, had the virtue of avoiding fearmongering, of not promoting hysteria, and thus not worsening the quality of democratic thought and deliberation. Unlike some appeals to fear, it was not a free-floating invocation of insecurity, without content, the all-too-familiar kind that can open the door to demagoguery, manipulation, and control.
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Insisting that “we are stricken by no plague of locusts,” but by a crisis caused by speculative greed and misguided policy decisions, Roosevelt called for “an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing,” and he identified “safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.”

By presenting a sober and realistic account of danger without crossing the line into apprehension so acute as to be paralyzing, FDR offered reassurance. His political narrative featured how public policy could overcome fear. This was how his formulation about fear itself was intended, and this, as it turned out, was how he later would represent his administration’s achievements. Accepting his party’s nomination for a second term in June 1936, Roosevelt laid claim to having vanquished fear itself. “In those days, we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes—we have conquered fear,” he stated, patently ignoring the developing maelstrom that was laying siege to the European and Asian continents.
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Moving from deep trouble to a positive resolution, this appealing rendering soon became the norm for historians, journalists, and social scientists. It successfully organized many strands into a coherent story. But this came at a high price, bypassing, as the literary critic Alfred Kazin remarked, “the permanent crisis that is the truth of our times,” thus letting pass “the truth that cannot be fitted in, the jagged edges that would detract from the straight frame and the smooth design.”
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Among historians, this theme of rescue and salvation was first projected by Arthur Meier Schlesinger in
The New Deal in Action, 1933–1937,
the earliest serious assessment by a member of his profession and one that set the main contours for later scholarship.
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In just thirty-six printed pages, he represented the New Deal as a successful response to economic catastrophe and political crisis. This text famously distinguished the First New Deal’s measures of relief and recovery to prevent starvation, ameliorate suffering, and jolt the capitalist economy from the Second New Deal’s long-term measures of economic regulation and social policy, including the 1934 Securities Exchange Act and the 1935 Social Security Act. By radically transforming the range and scale of the national state, by curbing and controlling market excesses, and by adding social rights to citizenship, the New Deal, he argued, had restored trust and loyalty, hopefulness and popular support.

Like Schlesinger, the great majority of historians have underscored these achievements, stressing how they redrew the country’s lines of civil society and the geometry of political pressure, and how, in just over half a decade, President Roosevelt’s program transformed not only the range and scale of government but also the character of the country’s economy and the scope of American citizenship. It is impossible to write about this subject without attending to these matters. This book is no exception. From the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt to the 1939 outbreak of World War II in Europe, the New Deal substantially increased the domestic scope of government. A federal civil service that had 572,000 employees grew to one of 920,000 in just those six years, and spending nearly doubled, going from $4.6 billion to $8.8 billion, as a host of alphabet agencies and programs—AAA, CWA, PWA, REA, TVA, WPA, NRA, SEC, NLRB, FLSA, FHA, FSA, and more—undertook unprecedented responsibility for public employment and public works, relief payments, labor policy, and the regulation of capitalism.
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“More than anything else,” Hubert Humphrey recalled in 1970, “the New Deal was a change in the scope of public responsibility.”
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After World War I, the liberal intellectual Harold Stearns had reflected on the lessons conveyed by that war’s massive bloodletting, enhanced state power, reduction to the scope of freedom, and jingoistic hysteria. He perceptively predicted an uncertain future for the liberal democratic political tradition in the West. He thought such governments could not survive as effective actors unless they could devise social revolutions without violence to carve out a space for reason in the face of the intensifying conflict between labor and capital, and the virulent nationalism characterizing relations among countries.
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The familiar story of the New Deal as a movement from fear to expectation, brought about by retrofitting capitalism and shaping a welfare state, appropriately focuses on how the New Deal achieved what Stearns meant by a social revolution without violence. It captures, as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, how the remarkable combination of Roosevelt’s “opportunistic virtuosity” and his administration’s policy improvisations, “in their totality, carried the politics and administration of the United States farther from the conditions of 1914 than those had been from the conditions of 1880.”
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But it misses both the perception and the reality of persistent fear.
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To be sure, despondency and insecurity at the New Deal’s founding has long been a familiar theme. The stock market crash and capitalism’s global crisis starkly posed the question whether prosperity and liberty could be renewed simultaneously under democratic auspices. “The Politics of Hard Times” and “Winter of Despair” open William Leuchtenburg’s classic
Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
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Following in his father’s footsteps, the no less venerable Arthur Schlesinger Jr. defined the subject of his evocative trilogy,
The Age of Roosevelt,
as “The Crisis of the Old Order.”
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He recalled how, from 1929 to 1932, farm income had dropped by 70 percent, automobile production by 65 percent, and the value of the stock market by over 80 percent. Industrial production dropped precipitously. Thirteen million Americans had lost their jobs. Before the crash in October and November 1929, some 3 percent of Americans had been out of work. The proportion of unemployed thereafter had reached a calamitous 24 percent, and those lucky enough to keep their jobs often had their pay cut.
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Farmers who could not keep up with their mortgage payments lost their land; many homeowners, a minority at the time, lost their homes; and tenants who could not pay their rent lost their dwellings. More broadly, the system of credit and banking had broken down, posing a major threat to the continuation of market capitalism. With factories “ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes,” families sleeping “in tarpaper shacks and tin-lined caves,” and “thousands of vagabond children . . . roaming the land,” Schlesinger wrote, the country faced a “mood of helplessness.” A “contagion of fear” and “a fog of despair hung over the land.”
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But in these, and in a great many other, estimable histories, fear and uncertainty drop out too soon.
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Stirred perhaps by President Roosevelt’s “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the New Deal is presented as a story of how assertive economic policies overcame doubt and restored confidence during President Roosevelt’s first term.
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Measuring where things stood late in 1936, Schlesinger applauded how “the fog began to lift.” The president, he wrote, “was apparently succeeding; and people could start to believe again in the free state and its capacity to solve problems of economic instability and social injustice. Free society, in consequence, might not yet be finished; it had a future; it might have the strength and steadfastness to surmount the totalitarian challenge.”
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With successful legislative and policy achievements, Franklin Roosevelt’s initial term had transformed the politics of upheaval into a politics of hope.
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III.

I
N FACT,
the entire New Deal period, lasting until the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, reflects an unremitting sense of fragility. From the Great Depression to the blood-filled battlefields in Korea, persistent, nearly unremitting anxiety conditioned the era’s “normal politics” of voting, public opinion, pressure groups, federalism, and the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Faced with desolation, the New Deal proceeded in an anguish-filled environment. In such a world, the most constant features of American political life continually threatened to become unstable, if not unhinged. The ability of leaders to cope with menacing economic, ideological, and military threats never could seem quite sure.

It must be underscored that fear was not banished after just four years of the New Deal. To the contrary, it only deepened. Schlesinger’s temporal limits, substantive foci, and vivid theatrical structure in
The Age of Roosevelt
understate the sheer range of tests American democracy faced as it lacked assured policies to rescue capitalism, confront the dictatorships, and deal with global power and conflict. The presentation of the era’s challenges to liberal democracy as primarily those of American economic suffering had also been too limited. The Depression deepened and spread virally across the globe, sparing virtually no place and no economic sector. Collapsing production and consumption, shrinking markets, diminishing trade, the loss of credit and liquidity, and especially a sweeping increase in unemployment were not countered by effective remedies anywhere for something like half a decade. First responses, including high tariffs and stringent austerity policies, only made things worse. Among all social classes and groups, confidence about capitalism plummeted, and the prestige of private business fell off radically. The World Economic Conference of 1933 failed. Even when economic recovery began, it proved fitful, remaining well below late 1920s levels for most of the 1930s.

The global crisis to which the New Deal had to respond, moreover, transcended economic duress. During the period covered by
The Age of Roosevelt,
international and multilateral institutions to keep the peace and prevent a return to the carnage of World War I, most notably the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, began to collapse in the face of imperial Japan’s conquest of Manchuria and its attack on Shanghai.
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The range of political repression also broadened. The Soviet Gulag as a branch of State Security was officially born in 1930 to manage camp complexes, most in Siberia, that ultimately housed millions. Many were mobilized for immense projects of rapid industrialization, including the White Sea Canal. A growing network of German concentration camps imprisoned people for who they were and what they believed rather than for how they had acted, thus housing “a particular type of noncriminal, civilian prisoner, the members of an ‘enemy’ group, or at any rate a category of people who, for reasons of their race or presumed politics, are judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.”
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Though the majority of Americans were not yet alert to the severity and consequences of these distant developments, the country’s leaders were keenly aware that threats to liberal democracy were proliferating in a way that was without precedent.

The pressures on liberal democracy did not stop in the second half of FDR’s first term. At home, the economic recovery left many millions in dire circumstances. An environmental crisis ravaged agriculture.
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Racial violence erupted. Anti-Semitism reared its head. Labor unrest grew. Demagogues talked louder.
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Of course it would be an exaggeration to state that the United States was on the verge of joining the democratic collapse that was spreading like a domino effect during the 1930s. But there were plenty of dangers at home and a continuing atrophy for liberal democracy abroad.

The United States possessed many of the same features that Hannah Arendt was soon to associate with the rise of totalitarianism. These included racism as a robust ideology, imperial expansion, and the control of subject populations. Proud of their diaspora nationalism, there was much ethnic admiration, even loyalty, to German and Italian Fascism, ideological attachment to the USSR to the point of spying, and there was a good deal of anti–civil liberties counterpunching by Congress, the courts, and the executive branch. American democracy may not have risked the same apocalyptic fate as the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, there was a real set of pitfalls. At issue were prospects of executive usurpation and excessive congressional delegation, the projection of antidemocratic (and racist) mass populism and instances of private violence against targeted groups, an increase in surveillance and pressures on civil liberties, suspensions of due process, and, most broadly, a loss of democratic legitimacy.

The period’s various forms of political tyranny—including Fascism, Nazism, Stalinist Bolshevism, Peronist populism, and Japanese militarism—grew in number and became more confident and overbearing. Over the course of the decade, these various regimes that sought to move “forward from liberalism”
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claimed to make constitutional democracy obsolete, a mere stage of history. Emerging like an irresistible tide and professing to be riding the wave of the future, these various governments legitimated torture, police terror, and show trials. They also concentrated power, extinguishing all but the ruling party. They geared “the whole of society and the private life of the citizen to the system of political domination.”
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By late 1938, “only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia” had experienced success “in any sense preserving those ‘liberal’ freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789.”
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“The outstanding feature of our time is insecurity,” England’s leading political analyst, Harold Laski, declared in 1939. “The liberal society of the epoch before 1914 is unthinkable in our age.”
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