Attorneys Gregg Locascio and Tom Clare and government driver Charles Brown didn’t pause a second when asked if they knew their bank deposits were insured against loss.
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Absolutely, they said recently, as they withdrew cash from an automatic teller machine. Could they name the president who was responsible for deposit insurance?
Brown thought at first it must have been either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan but then guessed: “Was it Eisenhower?”
Clare confessed he didn’t know. After some hesitation, Locascio correctly said, “It probably happened sometime in the ’30s, during the Depression.”
A memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt will be dedicated Friday, but the real FDR monuments–landmark achievements such as government protection of bank accounts–have become such a basic part of American life that they often are taken for granted.
No 7.5-acre plot, not even the prime real estate near the Potomac River where the memorial is located, can contain the full legacy of what Roosevelt did during the years of the Great Depression and World War II.
Critics point to the rise in big government that spawned deficits, waste and corruption, as well as burdensome regulation. Still, despite major changes in some of his programs, much of his legacy endures.
It stands among us in brick and mortar–Chicago’s State Street subway, courthouses and post offices, Miami’s Orange Bowl, the Grand Coulee Dam–or in grand social institutions: Social Security and the Western economic and security system that emerged from World War II.
Laid-off workers still put food on the table because of Roosevelt’s unemployment compensation plan. He introduced the minimum wage and strengthened labor and child labor laws. He turned America into a world power and paved the way for today’s bustling global economy.
Roosevelt swept into power in 1932 with the country mired in Depression, with a mandate to act swiftly and with the votes in Congress to do it. He took the country off a gold standard that depressed the economy and moved to build confidence in banks and the markets. Though his efforts raised hope, it took World War II to end the economic hard times.
Roosevelt changed presidential politics forever. He was the first U.S. politician to shape public opinion by going directly to the people by using his famous “fireside chats” on radio and transcontinental travel.
He was also the first presidential candidate to accept the nomination of his party in person. He did so in Chicago in 1932, riding in a Ford Trimotor plane on a rough flight to the city to answer critics who said that Roosevelt, who used a wheelchair after being stricken by polio in 1921, wasn’t physically or mentally up to the job. At the time he was governor of New York.
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” Roosevelt told the delegates. It was the first time he used the phrase that will always identify him.
Though he was popular, his 12 years in office also sparked the push for the 22nd Amendment to the constitution that limits the president to two terms in office. Roosevelt died shortly after the start of his fourth term.
Roosevelt rescued capitalism at its weakest moment and is as much responsible for the prosperity that Americans enjoy today as any president. While leading the country through a devastating world war against the fascism of Nazi Germany and the militarism of Japan, he also helped launch the scientific boom in research and development that produces jobs and gives the country its economic edge.
Wartime defense money poured into California, launching the state’s economic boom and the nation’s thriving aircraft industry. He made the Florida Keys accessible by car and bridged the Mississippi River at Davenport, Iowa. He gave the U.S. cheap power through the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration.
“The recovery of American capitalism was the direct result of policies followed by Roosevelt from 1935 to 1945,” said Garry Gerstle, professor of history at the Catholic University in Washington.
Critics found much to fault in Roosevelt–the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, segregation in government work programs he created and for his failure to act more aggressively to prevent the Holocaust. Civil libertarians complain that he was the first president to use the Social Security number as an identifier–a widespread practice today.
Under Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of “tax and spend” to Republicans, who also complain that regulators from his agencies often imposed too many burdens on businesses.
Indeed, Roosevelt’s approach to government fueled a conservative counterrevolution that now poses a threat to the social welfare system he pioneered.
With President Clinton’s acquiescence, the welfare system has been overhauled, ending the guarantee of federal assistance Roosevelt put into law. Social welfare programs inspired by the Roosevelt tradition, such as Medicare or Medicaid, also may be trimmed.
Congress last year largely junked Roosevelt-era farm price supports in favor of free-market reforms in agriculture, ending a half-century of heavy reliance by farmers on the federal purse.
Social Security, Roosevelt’s’s crowning domestic achievement, is often said to be in long-range financial trouble. The reason is ironic: A more confident, prosperous country emerged from the Roosevelt years and produced a huge Baby Boom that the Social Security system cannot support without revision.
Despite its troubles, the Social Security system, highly popular with middle-class voters, likely will survive.
Roosevelt would have not have objected to politicians tinkering with the programs he created. He was a great tinkerer himself, the epitome of government experimentation and innovation, and probably would have agreed to reforming a welfare system that clearly was not working as intended.
Michael Kazin, a history professor at American University, said, “People still want the government to help them. They just want it to do a better job.” He noted that Republicans are joining Democrats in a new federal undertaking–providing health care to the nation’s uninsured children.
“Republicans have never been able to roll back the New Deal,” Kazin said. “And they don’t want to because they realize it would be political suicide.”
Polls indicate that Americans have less faith in the ability of politicians to deliver in the same way that Roosevelt did. Rampant cynicism is perhaps the biggest threat to the Roosevelt legacy.
“There is a suspicion that government can’t pull off a big coup anymore,” said Mary Ellen Guy, political science professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In the short run, Guy sees the possibility of more trimming of the New Deal social-welfare system that Roosevelt established, but in the long run, she said, the pendulum will swing back.
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Anything “Rooseveltian” has come to mean a monumental undertaking, such as his Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb or the array of social programs that made up the New Deal.
Roosevelt made the University of Chicago world renowned by funding research that led to the development of the first controlled nuclear reaction as part of the Manhattan Project.
“We still glow from that project,” quipped Robert J. Richards, director of the university’s Fishbein Center on the History of Science and Medicine.
Richards said the Manhattan Project became the catalyst for government-funded research at universities, powering scientific discoveries in many fields, including the biotechnology revolution.
Though Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to “pack” the Supreme Court in his second term, the justices named during his 12 years in office made the high court much more activist.
The court assumed an unprecedented role in protecting individual rights by its application of the Bill of Rights to state law. Local controversies that had been shunned by the White House and Congress, such as abortion and capital punishment, became national issues.
Many Roosevelt programs have such strong support that few politicians would dare try to jettison them. When Americans go to the drug store for a prescription, they do so with confidence because of the Food and Drug Administration’s power, strengthened in 1938 under Roosevelt, to guarantee that drugs are pure and safe.
Roosevelt created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to protect bank deposits and the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect investors against fraud.
“Even Ronald Reagan and (House Speaker) Newt Gingrich haven’t proposed abolishing the SEC, which has much reduced security fraud,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., professor emeritus at the City of New York Graduate School.
When the Depression lingered through the 1930s, Roosevelt put people to work by creating government jobs. The Works Project Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed thousands of workers when there was no private work to be found.
Thousands of painters, sculptors, writers, actors and directors were sustained during the Depression by the WPA. They painted murals on the walls of post offices, airport terminals and other public buildings; authoring government pamphlets and other publications; and writing, producing and performing plays.
Among those who existed partly or entirely off government work were many famous authors and artists–including authors Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, playwright Arthur Miller, actors Orson Welles and John Houseman and painters Jacob Lawrence and Ben Shahn. Chicago’s Studs Terkel also benefited.
The Treasury Department even commissioned Irving Berlin to write a song entitled “I Paid My Income Tax Today,” part of a propaganda campaign to win public support for paying Roosevelt’s newly broadened income tax in 1942, which boosted tax rates to over 70 percent on wealthy Americans.
In a special twist, Roosevelt’s tax increases turned actor Ronald Reagan into a Republican and eventually spawned the Reagan revolution. In 1980, Reagan won the presidency on a platform of lower taxes and less regulation.
While their policies were different, Reagan and Roosevelt charmed Americans with their optimism. “Optimism was Roosevelt’s big legacy,” said Reagan speechwriter Craig Smith. “He was the zeitgeist for Reagan’s presidency.”