indication that we haven't been held back. and, and of course it hasn't been either. i've had sell each one of these programs, but i think we've got south of port au prince and we've got a lot of proposal. i'm sorry. i'm going to have to interrupt. i'd like to go on indefinitely. your guest today, ladies and gentlemen, has been marianne b folsom, the secretary of health, education and welfare. thanki am prepared under my

constitutional duty to recommend the that are stricken making in the midst. a second world may require these measures or such other measures as congress may build out of its experience. wisdom, i shall seek within my constitutional to bring it up. and that was president franklin roosevelt at his first inauguration on march 4th, 1933. he told americans that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. and he promised quick decisive action to try to pull the country of the great depression. well, welcome to our american history series. the first 100 days where look at the early months of a new presidential administration. it's and setbacks and impact up to present day it was franklin roosevelt who coined the term

100 days in 1933 and since then milestone has become a benchmark by which other presidents have been judged. our guest for the next hour is nicole hemmer, a professor of history at vanderbilt university in nashville nicole hemmer. is it a milestone or milestone to have the 100 days label? well, i think these days it's probably of a milestone because r raised r so high with his first hundred days that what you have seen in the decades since is president is trying to hit that same mark. but i think it really a high watermark and something that it been very challenging other presidents to measure up to who came up with the concept? well, the concept up in a few different ways. the idea of calling it the 100 days was roosevelt's as he looked back over this first special session of congress, which so many bills had been passed and so many sort of green

shoots had been planted, were starting to sprout. but the idea that he needed to call a special session was the idea of fdr and the brain trust of men and women around him who understood there is a real emergency here. and we need to meet it with media force and action. and so you can kind of hear that in his inaugural address. he is calling for bold persistent experimentation. it really, you know, as they get underway those first few weeks and they realize that it's going to take you know two or three months of really consists action g the nation up and running again it's sort of of those people working on itr who turned 100 days into a reality. now professor hammer we've looked at some the earlier presidents and their first 100 days andrew jackson grant george washington and we're now in the modern era. time really speeded up, hasn't

it? it absolutely has. i mean, in those earlier eras, sometimes the president barely in washington, d.c. or in the nation's by the time that there presidency was getting started, they didn't have a full staff up and running. but by the time you get to franklin roosevelt's not only, is it a much more modern time when? communications are happening much more rapidly, but it is also of the most serious economic emergencies that the nation has ever faced. and roosevelt's believes that he needs to start acting, you know, as soon as he's cleared himself out from a swearing into office that he needs to start to do things. so what you see is congress getting called back into session right away. they're able to get there immediately in order to start passing bills. and even before underway. franklin roosevelt is to make executive actions in order to try to start addressing the crisis. and so there is a real speed and

fullness to this first 100 days that, even if you had consequential first 100 days before, they never looked like this. well, in 1928, herbert hoover, one in a landslide. four years later, he lost in a landslide. franklin roosevelt. received 472 electoral votes. 23 million popular votes, 57% of the vote. herbert hoover, nine electoral votes. and 16 million in the poppy vote. did roosevelt address and lay out specific proposals goals in the 32 campaign that he enacted in the 32 campaign. he sort of a sense that he wanted to be an active and he believed that the government should in the crisis but wasn't running around saying well i'm going to build all of these new agencies and i'm going to act this way with. the banking system and with the

with wall street, these are the moves i'm going to make. there was a general philosophy and a general vibe of action around that 32 campaign, but it wasn't necessarily as concrete as what you would get as soon as bills started having to be. it really was after won the presidency and realized was going to have to start putting these plans together, that you start to get a kind of real specificity to his plans. but the campaign itself was a little more presenting himself as a man of action than it was specific programs that he was going to enact. well, the c-span archives here's a bit more of franklin roosevelt's fourth, 1933 initial inaugural address. in the event that the congress shall fail to take one of these two passes in the event that national emergency is still of critical i shall not evade clear

possibility that will then confront me i shall ask congress for the one remaining instrument to make the process broad executive power to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in invaded by a foreign wall. well, the president proposed. may i have a written the courage and the devotion that at the time i can do no less. we face arduous days that lie before us in the war. the courage of national unity with a clear of seeking, old and precious moral value, with the

clean satisfy that comes the stern performance duty by old and young. we aim the assurance of a rounded a permanent national life. we do not distrust distrust the future of a central government. the people, the united states have not failed in their. they have registered a mandate that they want direct vigorous act. they have as well discipline and direction under the leadership they have made the present instrument of our wishes and the spirit of the game. i take.

in this dedication of our nation. we humbly have the blessing of the man he protect each and one of them. may guide me in the day to. and you're watching the american history tv the first 100 days where we look at the early of different presidential administrations were focused on fdr in 1933. our guest nicole hemmer of vanderbilt nicole hemmer. that was march 4th, 1933. that just saw. march six, 1933, fdr action. what was it? his very first action on that very first monday of his presidency was to declare a bank holiday. and this was something that was absolutely necessary, given the

state of the country at the time. the financial system over course, of the four months between the election, his inauguration had really slow road to a near stop, was sclerotic. it wasn't moving. banks were closing all across the country and a number of financial institutions were already in an emergency holiday. herbert bank crisis. they'd shut their doors the. new york stock exchange was shut indefinitely. 34 of the 48 states had closed their. and so fdr realized that the first thing they had to do was restore in the banking system and get those banks back open because but those banks closed the economy was collapsing in on itself. the government was going to have trouble paying its bills. and so he calls this a holiday, which is a good marketing technique. and he says look, we're going to close the banks. and over the course of next week, we're going to begin to test them.

we're going to going to figure out which of these banks is which is doing really well. we can open it up. and when we open a bank, you can be assured that this bank is going to be stable for you to take the money out from under your mattresses where americans been storing it because they were concerned about bank collapses. you could take that money out of your mattress and put it back the bank. and this was big move to close all the banks in the country. and it was one of those things that could have caused a kind of panic the country, because nobody would have access to money that they didn't have on hand, which a bit of a problem in various parts of the country because people didn't have enough cash on hand and there was a lot of bartering that was happening. people were being paid in scrip, which is just sort of like a kind of an iou. and yet because of that first inaugural address and because americans had bought into that idea that it was going to take

some bold moves in order to try to get this economy up running again, you do have a of buy in from the public where make their peace with the that the banks are going to be closed. and in that period of time that they're closed, they're able to settle, rebuild the confidence in the banks, do open and get those deposits again. well, it was eight days after his inaugural oration. march 12th, 1933, fdr, his very first fireside chat. here are some of the audio. as the president about action on the nation's banks. what then happened during the last few days of february and the first few days of march because of undermine confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush, a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold. a rush so great that soundest banks couldn't enough currency to meet the demand.

the reason for this that on the spur of the moment it was of course impossible to sell a perfect would have assets of a bank and convert them into cash except at the panic prices far below their real value. why are they of march 3rd? a week ago friday, scarcely a bank, the country was open to do business proclamations closing them in whole or in part had been issued by the governors in almost all of the states. it was then that i issued the proclamation providing for the national holiday and was the first step in the government's reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric. the second step last, thursday, was the legislation promptly and patriotically passed the congress, confirming proclamation and broadening my

powers so that it became possible, in view of the requirement time to extend the holiday and lift the ban of that gradually in the days to come. this law also gave authority to develop a program of rehabilitation of our banking facilities. and i want to tell our citizens and every part of nation that the national congress, republicans and alike, shown by this action, a devotion to public welfare and a realization of the emergency and the necessity for speed, that it is difficult to match in all our history. the third stage has been the series of regulation permitting the banks to continue their functions to take care of the distribution of food and, household necessities and payment of payroll. this bank holiday, while resulting in many cases and great inconvenience, is

affording us the opportunity to supply currency necessary to meet the situation. remember that no sound bank is a dollar worse than it was when it closed its doors last week. neither is any bank which may turn not to be in a position for immediate opening. the law allows the federal reserve bank to issue additional currency on good assets and thus the banks that reopen will be able to meet every legitimate. the new currency is being sent out by the bureau of engraving printing in large volume every part of the country. it is sound currency because. it is backed by actual good assets. another question that you will ask is this why are all the banks not to be reopened at the same time? the answer is simple and i know you will understand it. your government does not that the history the past few years shall be repeated.

we do not want and will not have another epidemic of bank failures. no, this is less than 100 years ago, and i think it's fair to say that. 1933 is in the early modern era. but it's really something we can relate to. today is it? it's very difficult to imagine because of the things that would happen after. i mean, nowadays, the financial sector and the banking have many more regulation in place. one of the things that comes out of the first hundred days is known as the fdic, the federal deposit insurance corporation, in which the government sort of backstops your deposits. so if your bank fails, the federal government will step in and you'll your money, you won't lose your life savings. and so there's just so much more in the system. and it's also the case, like we use a lot of digital money now. we're no longer on the gold, but at the time there was a real limit to money supply. and when there were runs on that

money was taken out of the system. in some ways. and so there was this real concern that nation was running out of paper money. it was running out of gold, and that shrinking the economy. and we don't have to worry about those kinds of things these days. we have other concerns, but just the structure of the financial system and the lack of regulation and makes it look very different from what it looks like today. did fdr close the banks via executive order and what was the public reaction? so yes, he first sort of declares it to a bank holiday and he does that through executive because congress isn't in session yet. but what he does, as soon as he calls the special section session of congress that comes on march 9th. so just a little later on that week is he begins to get a congressional backstop for it, not just for the bank holiday, also to start to put place the fixes that were going be needed in order to get these banks open again. and he also issues other

executive orders, that sort lay out how banks will be. so it begins to set out a process and a struck measure for the benchmarks that banks need to meet, how they'll be labeled, what need to do in order to get back up and running again. so it is a it's a bold claim of power. on his very second day in office, they're day in office. but it is also something that americans tolerate. the courts congress tolerates. i think in large part because there was a sense that somebody needed to do something and noad bn doing enough. and so people sort of let this one ride. well, we should note that the republicans lost over hundred ats in the 1932 election in congress in 1933, when the special session started. democrats had 313 seats. the republicans only 117 that's in the house in the senate.

60 democrats seats and 36 republicans. how quickly did congress act on fdr proposed legislation or did they come up with their own congressman? quickly. and a lot the legislation was going to be driven by the administration as opposed to by congress, especially in these very early days. so the banking bill, for instance, is coming out of the roosevelt administration. in fact, it is introduced. it is not read. it is passed and it is signed into law 7 hours after it's introduced. this is unusual. that's not going be how most legislation is passed during the new deal period. but that that we're just going to we're going to back with the administration is doing in order try to deal with this very immediate crisis because there was a real chance that the entire government of the united states could fail within a week or two of roosevelt taking office if the economic collapse

had been allowed to sort of sort of sprawl out throughout the rest of the system. so in that case, congress is acting as a rubber stamp and there would be other pieces of legislation that they would relatively same way they were reading a little bit more of the legislation after time passed. and there were certainly bills that they took much more seriously. and took much more authorship much more ownership of. especially that emergency banking and especially in those first few days of the special session, they were up for passing on just about anything. who were some of fdr main supporters and detractors in congress at that? so in the congress i mean he had on the supporters, obviously, democrats had enormous majorities in both the house and the senate. he was working closely with sam rayburn, who was the leadership in the senate, the democratic leadership from texas. his main.

detractor was actually one of his earliest supporters. so he had been supported a senator from louisiana named huey long, who had really pushed forward his candidacy and then his his campaign in 1932. but long was a populist. he was somebody who kind of wanted fdr his job, and he was radical than fdr was. and so pretty early on, he taking shots at fdr administration because he believes it doesn't go enough. they're not willing to money the way that huey long would like the programs, the public works programs and job programs he think don't go anywhere near far. and so long because he is such a big character a big personality. he makes masterful use of radio. he becomes, one of fdr main antagonist, the congress. some of the legislation passed in that first 100 days of fdr was first administration.

the emergency banking act. the federal emergency relief act. the national industrial recovery act. the agricultural adjustment act. civilian corps was passed as well as the tennessee valley authority was created. which of these drew some of the sharpest debate and do we feel the effects of these today? this is a great question because these enormous pieces of legislation and it's kind of hard to pick from them. i mean the ones that generated the most debate, i think, were the agricultural adjustment act and the national industrial relations. and that is because they were such a huge direct interventions in the economy. you know, we talked about banking and the need to get the financial system up and running again. but the other problem that fdr was facing, was that the the economy had kind of seized up. people were unemployed and because there wasn't much investment happening. and the farms were in crisis.

people weren't making any money. factories weren't hiring. there was this real sense that there just weren't opportunities. and so fdr believed the government could intervene to get that sector of the economy and running again so people would have good pangobs, they would be able to buy things that would spur growth in both farms and in factories. and so something like the agricultural adjustment act, the idea here was farms had been overproducing that had driven prices way, way and farmers were going bankrupt. so in order to get those prices back up, you had to pay farmers to produce. so paid end to plow under their fields and corn fields. pay them to slaughter their ps and cattle. and that was really controversial in a country where people were going hungry, where they didn't have close this idea that you were going to destroy agricultural. but the end goal to get those

farm prices back up, to get the farm industry out of a depression. and i.r.a., the national industrial relations recovery act, was controversial for a lot of the same reasons it was. it allowed price fixing for in order to try to hold down inflation, it empowered workers in new ways in order to bargain, in order to push for minimum wages and wages. and so it was restructuring the relationship workers business and among government and the people, even in those very days. and so that is not without controversy the time. what was the reaction from the business community to some of these pieces of legislation during first 100 days? businesses not complaining too much. i mean, something like the national industrial recovery act actually gets a lot business by it because it allows businesses

to collude on their pces. and so they feel like they have some agency in the market and th they're benefiting from this new government program. they might not like what's bein put forward about wages and about. but especially in first hundred days, businesses are on board. they're on board becaey see something useful in what' happening and they're on board because there's a lot of public support for what's happening. and they don't necessarily to be seen as the bad guys who are slowing down this effort at getting the economy going again now that will come. and it was it was clear the campaign that business was not on roosevelt side that you had maybe like one big corporate donor. and that was that was about. but in these first hundred days businesses too, were giving roosevelt some leewayfter the 100 days, they start organizing in order to pushagainst new deal that they'reappy with. but he gets a little bit of a breather when he first comes

into office. nicole hemmer did any of these pieces of legislation end up in the courts? a lot of them did. now don't end up in the courts in a big or in the supreme court in these first hundred days. but there are a number of court challenges as at the federal level that are going in the first hundred days. there are 99 court cases. and the roosevelt administration wins three quarters of them. so to the extent that they're in court, the roosevelt is not facing a lot of pushback in these early days. that is going to change. so supreme court picks up a couple of cases state direct intervention 1934. they say okay it's for the states to do employment program and different things. so that seemed like a hopeful sign. but you get to the start of 1935, the supreme court direct aim at these new deal programs and begins to these are unconstitutional. they they dust off something

called the non delegation clause and constitution. they say congress can't give these powers to the executive branch. and so most of the big programs that come out of the first hundred days get shot down between 1935 and 1937. and every time one of them gets bounced by supreme court, then the roosevelt administration back to the drawing board, and they try new so that experimentation keeps happening during these periods of court chlenges. and i think the reason that you get more success in the new deal auset takes cou years before those court challenges really set in. and by then you have two years of this experimentation and trying to get the economy up and running again. but there is there are definitely some showdowns that happen within. the first administration. well, in that first 100 days, 50 major laws were passed more than 75 laws in total.

and nine presidential executive order signed. were consequential as well. we're used to contemporary presidents signing a lot executive orders these days. so the executive orders not as monumental as the legislation. it was many more executive orders than presidents had previously issued in their first 100 days. certainly a lot of them had to do with and trying to figure out veterans pay and benefits. there was an executive order that made it holding, hoarding gold, illegal. so this was a way of trying keep gold in the economy. and so that sort of showed some of the stresses that the administration was. but actually, one of the reasons that you have so many executive orders, because you have so much legislation, the legislation gets passed to do something like the civilian conservation corps, which was one of these jobs programs, or the niagara, the national industrial recovery act. and then you need executive orders to.

activate the agencies in order to tell them what to do, in order to set priorities. and so you get a lot legislation around that as well. so there's a flurry of activity, both the legislature and the executive and they're kind of working together to build this program that roosevelt envisioned. how quickly did americans feel the impact some of these pieces of legislation? you know, the federal emergency act, etc.? so some americans feel it relatively quickly. so farmers are going to get some of those direct payments, which is huge innovation of the new deal to start paying people directly. within several months, you're going to start getting people who are hired for these public works programs. so people are getting jobs. they're getting. but i think especially know any any government program is going to take while to really settle in the regulations take a while to get off the ground other than

the banking act which immediately gets the financial system up and running again. most of these are going to take time. and the big immediate experience for most americans was that all of this and this sends you had people in the government who were figuring out how to deal with national nightmare this emergency that had really brought the nation the brink. people were hoping us when franklin roosevelt office and all of this activity breaks that hopelessness and it encourages people to reengage. they start putting their money back into the banks. they start getting jobs and they just start believing that things are going to get better. i think that more than anything in those hundred days is the big felt impact of the administration. it'll it'll be a while before all those jobs get moving,

before people feel the touch of the federal government. but in those first 100 days, they begin to hope again and that is one of the things that they really needed at the time. nicole hemmer any student of history has heard of the glass-steagall act, which passed in the first 100 days, and the securities? what exactly were those and what was their impact? one of the big things that roosevelt was trying to figure out was how do we prevent this kind of economic implosion from ever happening again? and, you know, he'd taken care of getting the banks up and running again. but how could you make those banks safer? how could you make speculation less of a threat to the national and global economy? and that's what these two bills were about. the glass eagle act was about telling banks be banks don't be risky investors. if you want to do risky investment, go find another vehicle for that. but you can't take, you know, ordinary people's investment in

what is supposed be secure and stable like a bank and then start gambling with them. so what it does is it sets a regulaon to make ban jt more conservative and secure places for people to put their money. and then the securities act is the first real regulation for. so it requires more transparency and more reporting on the kinds of a speculation and investment that people are making that companies are making so that you can whether they're making really risky investments, are they overleveraged they in bad shape is this bad debt. it's not extensive regulation that you would later have around the securities market, but it is first effort to try to rein some of this speculation simply by making it more transparent. what are doing and what kinds of risks they're getting involved with. so it begins to set the stage, both of these, for a significant apparatus, for regulation of banking and that would the

american economy throughout much of the century. well, fdr was alone in his first 100 days. of course, he had the cabinet helping him in his book nothing to fear. author adam looks at some of the key players. so to come up with the specific program that emerged in the hundred days roosevelt look to the people around a more ideological would have surrounded himself with people who shared his particular vision. but fdr chose cabinet members and top aides with diverse beliefs, reflecting his own divided vision of where country should go in 100 days. his advisers included social workers who advocated ambitious programs and businessmen who argued for cutting the budget. there were supporters of factory workers, farmers and bankers. roosevelt listened to all of them. in my book nothing to fear, i argue that. there were five members of fdr, his inner circle in particular, who played an extraordinary role

in developing the policies of the days and in building modern. and i believe that history gives these five too little credit. these men and one woman raymond moley, louis douglass. henry wallace, harry hopkins and frances perkins did not necessarily have the biggest in the administration. they weren't all members of the cabinet, and they were not necessarily the closest to roosevelt. they were simply people who, by virtue of their jobs, talents, rapport with the president, enforced personality, were able to leave the greatest mark. so remained just to start. he was at the center of roosevelt's inner circle. he's up from the bootstraps rise to taken him from small town in ohio to columbia university. and he was there. the head of the famous roosevelt trust during the campaign and as chief speechwriter fdr became more he became fdr is most white house aide and he played a particularly important role in helping to solve the banking crisis. pragmatic, not ideological. molly, was fdr his closest, most intimate advisor.

time magazine. according to a popular vote, roosevelt was so powerful he could get you a meeting with raymond moley. so that's moley. then there's louis douglas, the director of the budget. douglas did have an ideology free market capitalism. he was born into a family of wealthy arizona copper barons with a record of mistreating their workers. douglas, his father and were responsible for the notorious. bisbee deportation, in which 1000 union activists rounded up in bisbee, arizona forced onto railroad cars at gunpoint and abandoned the middle of the desert as congressman. douglas was the strongest voice in washington for slashing government spending. douglas, whose conservatism made him a surprising choice to play such prominent role in the new deal. but he appealed to roosevelt's fiscally cautious side. douglas was the star of the first few months of the roosevelt administration. the second major law that was passed during new deal after the emergency banking act was douglas's own economy act, which cut government spending by 25%.

at the opposite end of the political spectrum was frances perkins fdr as labor secretary. perkins, the first woman cabinet member. she was born into a conservative new england family. broke, and she broke from it after college to go to chicago and work with jane addams at hull house, working with the with the immigrant poor. after to new york, she became the nation's leading advocate for workers and served as roosevelt's commissioner when he was governor during hundred days when douglas was fighting slash the budget. perkins was the leading advocate for a federal relief program and to get emergency relief to the unemployed. fdr asked her to an eye out for a good plan, and she found one quickly while, while perkins was championing the urban workers, wallace, the agriculture secretary, did the same thing for the nation's farmers. wallace was a brilliant farmer, scientist and journalist, iowa. he was a leading proponent of allotment. the plan for propping up prices that was adopted during the hundred days and the agricultural adjustment act. major, major law was his doing.

number four, harry hopkins. sorry. number five. harry hopkins was the last to join the administration. he started actually on day 79 of 100 days. another iowan had moved from iowa to new york's lower east side after college to work with immigrant immigrant poor. he was one of the nation's most prominent social workers. and after perkins got, fdr, to adopt a relief program which, hopkins had largely designed, roosevelt appointed hopkins to run it. hopkins the money flowing right away. in his first 2 hours, he said $5 million to eight states that were on the brink of shutting down their own relief programs. and hopkins responded to critics of his program forcefully when a said glibly that there was no need to. spend a lot of money to spend a lot of relief because things would work out for the unemployed the long run. hopkins shot back. people don't eat in the long run. they eat every day. so these are five advisers around fdr who were all influencing him during hundred days.

they didn't work a team. far from it. the liberals, wallace and hopkins were trying pull roosevelt to the left. douglas and his allies on wall street were pulling fdr to the right, trying to slash spending. molly was somewhere in the middle, the fiercest battle of the entire days. and the most important was over works when meetings were held to. draft the national industrial recovery act. the major industrial relief bill that the administration was developing. perkins clear that her highest priority just about her only priority was that it include major public works component. but louis douglas and his fellow conservatives were dead set against that. they indicated that there was no money for public works. for the first few weeks or 100 days, roosevelt public works. worried about the cost. but then during the hundred days, perkins and her liberal allies persuaded him that they had to be a major program, and fdr agreed to put $3.3 billion into the national industrial act. and this is american tv's new

series, the first 100 days. we're talking about fdr in 1933, in the early months of, his first administration. our is nicole hemmer of vanderbilt universal city. professor hemmer, besides the cabinet, did he have some outside advisers who were guiding him, helping him. absolutely. fdr was somebody who took advice on just about everything he wanted to hear when everyone thinking. he played advisers off of one another to try to test out these ideas. so he had his cabinet, which was full of aides who he was constantly trying out ideas with. but he also had what was called his brain trust was made up of people both with in the administration and outside the administra who he would consult on a regular basis just to kind of see what am i not thinking of when it comes to a certain proposal. so he all of these advisers. he also eleanor roosevelt. his wife, eleanor was, a

political intellectual partner. know she had her own expansive role as first lady. but i think that she was an important adviser who was also hearing these ideas. would go, as she called herself, the eyes and ears of the new deal. she would go out to civilian conservation corps sites. works. progress. works. projects. administration sites in order to see how people were experi in seeing these government programs and are they working and what things weren't working needed to be changed. she pushed franklin roosevelt, things like civil rights making. that was part of his agenda to the extent that she could. so there were this whole kind of panoply of advisers him that he made pretty sustained use of throughout his presidency. most of the pieces of legislation that we've been talking about our economic nature. you mentioned civil rights. anything in the first 100 days when it came to civil rights? not in the first hundred days. and civil rights would not be a core component of fdr.

his administration. it was something that he was occasionally pushed on, but because he was part of this democratic coalition, the power in the congress was largely held by white southern democrats who had seniority in in congress and sort of held held of the reins when it came to through legislation. roosevelt interpreted that as not having the room to do anything on civil rights, that he would have to create these programs. while folding in the ideas about jim crow, about the economic displacement of black, that that would still be part of the new deal. and he's known a lot for his economic achievements, much less well-known for civil rights achievements, because it was not something prioritized in his presidency. nicole hemmer did he have any

relationship or communication, do you know, with his predecessor, herbert hoover, this period and and the 117 republicans in the house in the republicans in the senate. did they have a voice so? the relationship between franklin roosevelt and herbert hoover was pretty frosty. they had been friends back in the 19 teens and 1920s. but things cooled considerably between them and campaign in 1932 really broke any sort of relationship up that they might have had. and part of that was personal, and part of that was ideological hoover was conservative. he didn't think that the things that roosevelt was doing were the correct things to do. he didn't believe that government should be so active and. in fact, by 1933, 1934, he's calling programs fascistic. he's that they've gone too far that roosevelt is trying to be a dictator. and so hoover's role was really as a critic, the administration throughout the new deal when it

came republicans, it was a party that like the democratic party was split. you had some northern and western republicans who progressive and who signed on to the new deal. and then, of course you had republicans that were part of the opposition. and roosevelt worked with the ones who were more progressive and you know wasn't necessa required to give a ton of of voice to his conservative opponents. but of course, sometimes he did have to listen to them because conservative democrats and conservative republicans would team up together to try to sort of scale back or even in its tracks. new deal legislation, certainly mostly after the first hundred days, but later on in the new deal, there was a kind of real opposition and the republicans were able to leverage that because of the conservative in roosevelt's own party nicole hemmer it it feels this first 100 days was pretty breathless and a very, very pace.

absolutely. because there were new huge bills coming out on a regular basis. you mentioned like 15 giant pieces of legislation. and, you know, dozens of other piec of legislation were coming out at the same time. there was sense of real activit and it was being reported on. and actually it was being on in a ratively approving way and most newspapers in the united states during the 1930s were owned by republicans. and later on in presidency even by 1934 a lot of those newspapers hadurd against the new deal had turned the roosevelt administration. but again, in those first 100 days, that's probably it's calledhe honeymoon period. there is a sense that they shouldn't hit too hard. you do get some editorials that say your roosevelt is going too

far. have we opened our door to a dictator, but you had many more that were like we have opened our doors to a dictator and maybe that's america needs. there is real sense that they need to give roosevelt space. and so in the even though in the after the first hundred days, the years after the first hundred days, the relationship between and many of americans would grow very frosty in these first hundred days. he just had a little bit more breathing room than he would have after. well, it was at the two month mark in may of 1933 that the president spoke about what had occurred in the first two months and to look ahead this is from the national archives. this is about first legislation that would have, frankly, the mortgage distress, the farmers and among the homeowners by providing for the easing the burden of debt, but not by so

heavily upon millions of our people working on conservative measures. likewise, being proposed, what what will affect the industry or workers of the country. a fair way to prevent cutthroat competition, to prevent unduly long hours for labor. but at the same time when each industry to provide provide. i have no expectation of making a hit every time i go. what seek is the highest possible batting average not only for myself, but for the team. there are a said to me if i can be right. some 85% of the prime i shall come up to the fullest measure of my hopes. it will. people of this country, all of us in washington, the members of the congress, the members of

this administration owe a profound debt of gratitude throughout. the depression. you have been patient. you have granted us wide parts. you have encouraged us with a widespread approval of our purposes. every ounce of strength every resource at our command we have devoted. and we devoted to the end. justifying your confidence. we are encouraged to believe that a wise and beginning has been made in the present spirit of mutual confidence, the present spirit of encouragement. we go forward. and we are back with our guests. nicole of vanderbilt university, looking at the first 100 days of fdr, first administration in 9033. nicole hemmer did he keep the american public in about what he was doing? this was a pretty important

innovation that roosevelt had his administration. he wanted people to know what was going on. he started to institute twice weekly press conferences where he was constantly talking with reporters. now it was often background or off the record, but he wanted the press to understand what he was doing, and he wanted to report that to the american people. so there was a real sense that, you know, in this back doorway, he was letting the american people know what was happening in the administration. but, of course, much famously, he also delivered some of his now famous fireside, going to the radio in order to explain to the american people what was in the administration, why they were making the choices they had made, what laws been passed. and he approached these as a moment of intimate connection with the american people. you know, he started these these fireside chats by saying, my

friends, and he thought as he was talking, like, if somebody is just come off from a day of building a mass and comes home and turns on the radio or woman has spent day taking care of children and and she sits down in front of the radio, somebody who hasn't had education sits down and, listens to this program. how can i help them sense of what the has been doing. and so it's a very plain state, very plain spoken, very intimate speaking style that is meant to draw americans in to the conversation. and that is something americans had not heard before from a president, other presidents had used radio. but the old of using radio was, you know, like project your voice and in a way where it sounds like you're giving these big, grandiose. and what roosevelt understood lloyd was that there was something different about radio that could allow this kind of

personal connection. if you spoke in a more conversational and a kind more soft spoken wayt would be inviting people in and making them even though they're the ones listening to you in a way, making them feel. and that's what the american people, in response to these fireside chats, was, that they felt like the president had stepped into their living room and was having a conversation with them. and i think that, too, sort of helped with the buy in during vs vs zielinski.

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