Roosevelt's Revolution: How FDR Led America From The Great Depression | Impossible Peace

Hi everyone, welcome to this Timeline documentary. Just before you watch, I want to tell you about my new history channel. It's called History Hits. It's like the Netflix for history. It's got hundreds and hundreds of documentaries on there and interviews with some of the world's best historians. We're adding new stuff all the time. For example, today I'm filming in this one of the few remaining Lancaster bombers for a show about the Dam Busters raid in 1943. If you want to know more about History Hits, follow the information just below this video or search online for History Hits and make sure you use the code Timeline to get a special introductory offer. Now enjoy this show. Two world wars tore the heart out of the 20th century. They are a wreck in the fabric of history and at the center of the bungled journey from war to war is a story of global want, despair and hopelessness of the Great Depression, its awful consequences and its heroes. You look at the 1920s and you think, you know, there were some good leaders there. There was Briand in France. There was Streisand in Germany. You know, there was a potential for Europe to really get back to a normality and you look at the disappearance of those people from the scene and you look at who is actually in power when a real crisis hits the world and the real crisis that hits the world in this period is the Great Depression and it hits a number of countries very hard indeed. In the United States, the depression bottomed out in 1932. Production had fallen by 25%. Investment, 50%. Prices, 10%. Only unemployment had risen to more than 20%. In 1929, American corporations booked $10 billion in profits. In 1932, it was $3 billion in losses. Our entire banking system, declared former Treasury Secretary McAdoo, does credit to a collection of imbeciles. There are 40 million people in the developed states unemployed. Millions more on half-time. World trade is halved in that period. You can't imagine that and the consequences were profound. Massive poverty everywhere. A strong sense of social dislocation. Also a strong sense that capitalism didn't work and growing fears that perhaps communism would come out of the wings and suddenly begin to threaten the western world. It was not a depression exclusively for industry. It was the Great Depression and it was for everyone. 150,000 American homeowners lost their properties in 1930, 1,000 in 31 and 250,000 in 32. In 1929, global business had been worth about $32 billion to the American economy. By 1932, that had shrunk to barely a third and it seemed that there was nothing much that anyone could properly trust. As low, as menacing a point as any, came at the end of July. The Battle of Anacostia Flats, as good as sounded the death knell of Hoover's presidency. When he sent troops to contain several thousand First World War veterans assembled in Washington to demand early payment of the war service bonus they'd been promised. It's war, the greatest concentration of fighting troops in Washington since 1865. Using armed cavalry, tear gas and tanks, the army commander grossly exceeded his authority, driving the protesters from their camping grounds at Anacostia Flats and putting their shelters to the torch. Hoover, who had not been responsible for these excesses, was vilified. The commander who was responsible went on to become a national hero. His name was Douglas MacArthur. There's a very famous film called I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, where the hero who has tried to play straight, follow the American dream, has lost out at every, every chance. He's been introduced by and betrayed by the American state in one way or another. And at the end, his girlfriend, he comes back and he sees her very briefly. You've escaped a year ago. Why haven't you been in touch? I can't. They're following me. They're there. They're everywhere. And she said, well, will you stay? No, I can't. I've got to go. But how do you, how do you live? How do you, how do you eat? And he says, I steal. And that line, whispered line, I steal. It's, it's, it's, it's, it makes the hairs of your back As the votes in the 1932 presidential election were tallied, rural America was in a desperate state. Cattle are dying off by the thousands from starvation and from thirst. A veritable plague has visited the once prosperous farms of a section. We'll have a revolution in the countryside in less than 12 months, warned Ed O'Neill of the Conservative Farm Bureau Federation. The Democratic nominee, the governor of New York, had as his signature tune for the 1932 presidential campaign, Happy Days Are Here Again. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He swept aside the incumbent in the most one-sided election since Abraham Lincoln's victory in 1864. And look, my friends, like a real landslide this time. He's by nature an experimenter, a pragmatist. Let's try that. Let's try this. Let's see what works. If something doesn't work, don't get discouraged. We'll try something else. That mood of optimism, gaiety, empathy, experimentalism, and a deep, deep faith in the American experiment and republic, which he never lost, is what makes him a politically indispensable figure. Convicted of tax evasion, the once all-powerful Al Capone faced 1932 in a less upbeat mood. Public enemy number one, they don't come any bigger than Alphonse Capone. From the nothingness of a small-time bouncer, Scarface Al has risen to control a crime and vice syndicate that grosses $100 million a year. His identity card at the state penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, records the following details. Sentence begins May 4th, 1932. Date of birth, January 17th, 1899. Occupation, gambler. And there is a careful description of the three scars on his face. Scarface. In Britain, the politically and personally promiscuous politician Oswald Mosley formed a fascist party in 1932. He'd been to Rome, and that's what Mussolini had advised him to do. So he did it in imitation of Mussolini. Black shirts, for which followers paid five shillings each. Stiff arms salute, the lot. It was quid pro quo for the substantial amounts that Italy was sending to fund his movement. We will meet him again. The world capital of adoring fans was in Soviet Russia, where the orchestrated elevation of Stalin beyond the horizon of mere humanity cranked into overdrive in 1932, when Pravda, the official party newspaper, told its readers of an astonishing discovery. All of the articles it had published under Lenin's name had, it recently learned, been ghostwritten by comrade Stalin. You had to lie, you had to repeat the party's slogans and so on, otherwise Stalin would kill you. As the Russian Maxim had it, you lied like an eyewitness. Stalin's image was everywhere, and communism was no longer a political movement. It had morphed into a religion. And the most delectable scent produced by the government perfume factory was called Breath of Stalin. Propaganda was the air people breathed during the 1930s, and you could see it in particular in Russia. Alexander Wolcott, writing from Moscow in 1932, noted, I have been here long enough to learn what the major industry of Soviet Russia is. It is printing pictures of Stalin. Stalin, you know, was quite open about it. He said to Nadezhda Krupskaya that if she didn't behave, he would make someone else Lenin's widow, which was rather nice, sort of creating his own piece of history. The official view found little to applaud. A British embassy report of 21st June 1932 described a record of overstaffing, overplanning and complete incompetence at the centre of human misery, starvation, death and disease among the peasantry. Men, women and children, it continued, are left to die in order that the five-year plan shall at least succeed on paper. It would have undermined the propaganda of the Soviet Union to admit that after 15 years of socialism, of Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union, that they're not able to feed their own population. The minutes of Politburo meeting 93 of December the 6th, 1932, concludes. The Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee call upon all collective and private farmers who are honest and dedicated to Soviet rule to organise all their efforts for a merciless struggle against kulaks in order to defeat in their villages the kulak sabotage of grain collection obligations to Soviet authorities. You could easily become being labelled a kulak by just having two cows instead of the average one. That hardly makes you a major capitalist, right? You might be branded a kulak because you hired other workers, okay? You're engaging in capitalist mechanisms of paying other people to work on your farm. But that actually discriminates against some of the most vulnerable people in society. It discriminates against the elderly or the disabled. In Italy, in the doctrine of fascism of 1932, Benito Mussolini wrote, If the 19th century was the century of the individual, it may be expected that this one may be the century of collectivism and therefore the century of the state. In Ireland, where the Eucharistic conference was attended by more than a third of the population, it would be the long-fought-for time of self-government. And in 1932, Eamon de Valera came to power. Eamon de Valera was an austere and school-masterly figure, but he was a brilliant politician. And in many ways, he becomes the dominant figure in Irish politics when he is elected premier in 1932. And in so many regards, the Ireland that you see for the next 30 years is the Ireland that has been created by Eamon de Valera. De Valera would introduce a constitution which, among other things, was a major setback for women, embracing, as it did, all the rigidity of his Catholicism. 97% of Irish people attended religious services once a week, so he was one of the highest figures in the world. In Japan, ultra-nationalists planning to kill 20 moderates succeeded in murdering two. Dan Takuma and Inoue Janosuke. As in Nazi Germany, murder was a powerful political tool. The attempted coups that take place, the incidences of violence that take place during the early 1930s are clearly scary. People do worry. You know, leading politicians had very good reason to worry that they might be the one who was attacked next, and fear is a powerful thing, I think. On January the 29th, 1932, Japanese carrier-based aircraft bombed the Chapay district of Shanghai, atomizing the fragile buildings. It was, perhaps, the first major bombing of civilians. It ruffled feathers, but no one did anything, and President Hoover made clear the basis for abstention from any intervention. These acts, he said, do not imperil the freedom of the American people. It was a fatal indifference which would rebound against America almost 10 years later, when unchecked Japanese aggression reached the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The Nazi election slogan of 1932 was simple to the point of banality. Sad, depressed, dejected faces look at us in a drawing. It is an election poster, but it does not name any political party. It says, Our last hope. Then, in very large letters, one name. Hitler could not conceivably have risen to power had it not been for the fact that millions of Germans were out of work. They were dissatisfied, and Hitler notoriously said, There are no economic problems, and there are no economic solutions. There are only political solutions. The rotten democracy of Weimar is responsible for your hardships and your sufferings, and what is required is a transformation of Germany led by me, a charismatic leader, who will punish the people responsible for your ills, and that is the Jews and the Bolsheviks. On February the 26th, Hitler swore his oath as a civil servant in the Office of State Culture and Measurement in Brandschweig. It was a hastily contrived arrangement which technically gave the Austrian German citizenship, allowing him to become a candidate in the presidential election. In 1932, 13 million Germans voted for the Nazis, but this was not enough to put Hitler in power. He was not to achieve the chancellorship by his own efforts. He was put there by fools whose arrogance persuaded them they could manage this vulgarian. You know, you had all those people from those old families who thought Hitler was just a little junktop corporal, and they didn't take him seriously until it was too late. We engaged him for our own ends, said the deplorable Franz Josef Hermann Michael Born into nobility and wealth, von Papen's appointment as chancellor was, according to France's ambassador to Berlin, met with incredulity. André-François Pensey said that Papen was taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies. German people desire nothing more than to live in peace in order to turn all the energies which they possess to the great problems which will have to be solved to bring about reconstruction of the world after the war. Papen called fresh elections following Hitler's resounding defeat by Hindenburg in the presidential election. At the general election, support for the Nazis continued to fall. The movement's appeal had clearly peaked, and we won't get to an absolute majority this way, Goebbels confided to his diary. Prussia went to the polls after the presidential election, and the Nazis increased their presence in the Landtag. Campaigning with energy and an airplane, Hitler lifted his party's representation from six seats won in 1928 to 162 seats. Other states, Bavaria, Wittenberg, Anhalt, followed the trend. It's a fantastic victory, said Goebbels. Their success revealed the Nazis to be, in Richard J. Evans' phrase, a rainbow coalition of the discontented. By 1932, the SA, the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts, outnumbered the small army allowed under the peace settlement by four to one. So too did the Reichsbanner, paramilitary wing of the Social Democrats, and the 300,000-strong Stahlhelm, a paramilitary veterans' organization. There were 400,000 stormtroopers in uniform. It's hard to imagine, now or then, such a private army being tolerated, much less applauded, in any more mature democracy. Its influence on the democratic vote as people entered polling booths past scowling thugs is hard to assess. Fear was already sending people across the borders. Between 1901 and 1932, Germany had 25 Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry, compared to the USA's five. The majority would flee national socialism. Eight such refugee scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, building the atom bomb. The peace conference that opened in Geneva in February 1932 had been six years in the making, and there was an almost universal optimism that it would secure the peace that had been a general aspiration and was seeming increasingly fragile. Almost universal. Representatives from 64 different countries are arriving at the conference hall Geneva for the meeting which it is hoped will result in a world reduction of armaments. They were buoyed by petitions from every continent comprising millions of signatures. For 18 months, they would debate. Then Hitler would pull his delegation out, which euthanized the whole affair. To what climax are the millions of loyal followers being led by their forceful leader, Adolf Hitler, withdrawing from the disarmament conference, resigning from the League of Nations? Hitler has frayed the world's nerves of bread. There's so many what-ifs, you know, could it have been stopped? Because of course, the thing is, when you begin to get the breakdown of the international order, if one person gets away with something or one country gets away with something, that encourages others. Aldous Huxley's chilling future vision was published in 1932. He called it Brave New World. On January the 1st, 1933, the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung proclaimed, the mighty Nazi assault on the democratic state has been repulsed. And the Vosicher Zeitung declared, the republic has been rescued. In just 30 days, Adolf Hitler would be installed as chancellor. And it's no accident, I think, that when the Weimar Republic ended in 1933, it ended through a small conspiracy by those conservative elites, who thought that here was their chance, they could get Hitler into power, they could manipulate him and they would restore somehow what they'd lost in 1919. In January 1933, Hitler, through royalties from Mein Kampf and gifts from supporters, was comfortable. Indeed, already a millionaire. His home was a large apartment in a fashionable part of Munich. His transport was a chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine. He never learned to drive. And party headquarters was, literally, palatial. Its staff had grown from 56 in 1930 to 275. He was rarely out of bed before noon, and frequently holidayed in the chalet he'd bought in the Bavarian Alps. So life for him, unlike that of most of his fellow Germans, was not bad. And then, at half past eleven, on the morning of Monday, January the 30th, 1933, it got better. President Paul von Hindenburg administered the oath of office, installing him as chancellor. The people around President Hindenburg felt they could use Hitler and use the Nazis and use their support, that they'd use them to establish a conservative authoritarian government, and then they'd just get rid of them. Of course, the fatal mistake they made was not to understand that Hitler was thinking exactly the same thing, and he was going to get rid of them. And so I think human error has a lot to do with people such as Hitler. Hitler swore to uphold what he had long since vowed to destroy, the laws and constitution of the republic. The weekly newsreel, shown in cinemas throughout Germany, comprised six stories in the first week of February. They included a ski jump, horse racing, and a horse show. The swearing in of Adolf Hitler was the sixth and final item on the program. Adolf Hitler, leader of a German national movement, is made chancellor of Germany, and Berlin goes wild in celebration of his victory. Torchlight's parade, like the Berlin night, as backers commemorate his victory by marching through the streets and through the Brandenburg Gate. The appointment of Hitler was not a miracle, though it confirmed his view of himself as an unstoppable man of destiny. It was just a shabby, shameful bungle. What were they thinking? Under the Weimar constitution, the office of chancellor was little more than cabinet chairman, and government decisions had to be by cabinet vote, so cleverly as they thought. President Hindenburg and his advisors made Hitler agree to limit the Nazis in cabinet to three, and accepting von Pappen as his vice-chancellor. This meant that Pappen would always have an eight-three majority in cabinet, and within two months, Pappen said, we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he will squeak. Hitler assumed power without ever acting unconstitutionally. The Nazis ascended on the rubble of a disintegrating political system. I think what really brought Hitler to power in terms of success was the electorate, and later, the people who used to be the electorate, the mass of Germans who became sort of, well, hostages to a dictatorial system, was actually the support of important media organizations like Alfred Hugenberg's Media Empire. It's really Hugenberg's support for Hitler's party and his agenda, I believe, that made a decisive difference to the success of his campaign between 32 and 33, and the rise of what we now know as his charisma, which I think in 32 still wasn't at all unequivocal. I mean, he looked really quite ridiculous to many people. Many people didn't take him very seriously. That man Hitler certainly knows how to sway a crowd. He has the art of magic touch. You would think that the end of the world is coming. Proclaiming the dawn of a new nation, but calling on all not to let Germany forget what Within two days of his appointment as Chancellor, on January the 30th, Hitler called an election in which the Nazis so improved their position in the Reichstag that when the new parliament assembled, Hitler had no difficulty pushing an enabling act into law, permitting the Chancellor to bypass the Reichstag and rule by decree. What had drifted close to being an authoritarian dictatorship under Hindenburg became a totalitarian one under Hitler. The constitutional crisis had led to the death of a republic too shallow-rooted to survive the collapse of coalitions. The direct appointment of non-parliamentary chancellors, or the Hindenburg-facilitated lurch to the right. Weimar is often held up as being an exemplar for political weakness, for democratic failure. But when you begin to compare it to other states in Europe, it is actually one of the longest surviving democracies after the First World War. Early in the transition to Third Reich, just after midnight on the evening of the 27th of February 1933, passers-by heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the Reichstag and shortly afterwards saw flames lighting the interior of the building. Arriving on the scene, Hitler, Goerning and Goebbels declared the Arsenal attack to be a communist plot, using fire and terror, wrote Goebbels in his diary, to sow confusion in order, in the general panic, to grasp power for themselves. Sefton Delmer, reporting for the London Daily Express, arrived on the scene and Hitler confided in him. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer, Hitler said. Delmer's verdict on Hitler, reached after attending a rally at the Berlin Sports Palace, along with 15,000 others, was that he was a crackpot. The morning after the fire, the cabinet, which still had a non-Nazi majority, met to draw up an emergency decree that abrogated civil liberties across Germany. It abolished freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press. By the summer, all opposition had been crushed. More than 100,000 communists, social democrats and other opponents of the Nazis had been sent to concentration camps. Most to a new camp, outside a town named Dachau. The Nazis were the only legal party and Hitler had still not in any way acted unconstitutionally. Indeed, his actions received 95% support in a plebiscite. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference in October and Sir Horace Rumbold remarked from his post as His Majesty's Ambassador to Berlin, that many in the diplomatic corps have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand. Fear had now become the engine driving German public life. Fear had forced 500 leading municipal civil servants and 70 town mayors out of office. Such was the real and palpable fear of something suddenly unyielding, seemingly uncaring, that the 56% of Germans whose votes had not gone to the Nazis acquiesced. There was some resistance, some bravery, but not much. People made the gestures and mouthed the slogans demanded of them, some with enthusiasm. People were afraid of each other, of their neighbours, of thugs in uniform. Goebbels' Reich Ministry for Popular Culture and Propaganda was formally launched on March 13th. The American movie trade press coined a term for the material the Goebbels machine fed them. They called it Nazi-gander. So Hitler was photographed from the front, from the back, from the right, from the left, from every angle. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. The musical comedy My Weakness was refused German release on the grounds that the lace panties of the girls would contaminate the morals of New Germany. King Kong, one of the sensational movies of the year, was damned as repugnant to German race instincts. And on May the 10th, at universities throughout Germany, cartloads of books were tipped onto bonfires to the chant, for the education of the nation in the spirit of military preparedness. Goebbels invited Fritz Lang, the outstanding German filmmaker of the day, to become chief of German film industry. You understand, Lang said, that my grandmother was Jewish. I decide who's Jewish, Goebbels said. Lang left Germany soon after. Britain was beginning to see signs of Apache recovery. But still, John Maynard Keynes, one of the world's leading economic theorists, could do no better than declare that the economy was in a frightful muddle. Among British intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, there was a strong sense of morbidity. A strong sense that an old age was disappearing, and that new threats were emerging, which might be entirely destructive of the British way of life. Wherever we went, wrote J.B. Priestley, of his journey through the northeastern England in 1933, there were men hanging about. Not scores of them, but hundreds and thousands of them. Shipbuilding had been a strength in the region. In 1933, the industry was at 7% of its 1914 level. Before 1914, the civilization in the capital sea really meant that the British could march around part of their empire, while maintaining a class structure which kept a very large part of the population completely impoverished. As early as March the 29th, 1933, the date of its first issue, Claude Coburn's notorious news sheet, The Week, was describing Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald's visit to Rome as a new phase of the pre-war situation in Europe. We have had most interesting conversations, and I hope that the result will be a very big improvement in the peace conditions of Europe. Post-war had become pre-war, and Munich was still five years away. It was a time when America felt itself to be launching just a little boldly into the unknown with a new president. Between FDR's election and inauguration, another wave of bank failures rolled across America. It was the failure of Detroit's Guardian Trust Company, controlled by Henry Ford's son Edsel, that turned the wave into a national flood. On February the 14th, 1933, the governor of Michigan proclaimed an eight-day bank holiday. Residents awoke on St. Valentine's Day to find that for a full week, they would have to get by with only the cash in their pockets, or biscuit tins, or piggy banks. Again, the psychological response was irrational but real, as governor after governor followed Michigan's lead. Then shots were fired at the president-elect by an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe who had bought a revolver for eight dollars from a pawn shop. His target was FDR's car, and his collateral victim was the mayor of Chicago. Mayor Cermak, critically wounded, is carried to Mr. Roosevelt's car. Resting in the arms of the president-elect, he is rushed to a hospital. Above the mayhem, a voice could be heard loud and clear. I'm all right, Roosevelt shouted. I'm all right. And people suddenly felt that perhaps he was. On March the 2nd, two days before FDR's inauguration, the New York Fed fell below its minimum gold reserve ratio. On the 3rd, it lost a further 350 million dollars. 200 million dollars in the form of wire transfers out of the country. When Charles Evans Hughes administered the oath on the Dutch Bible, which had been in the Roosevelt family for 300 years, there was a sense of urgency about the place. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured. When Roosevelt did take the Oval Office, the banks in most states were closed, and in others there was a limitation on how much you could withdraw. And this is as close to paralysis in a capitalist system as we can get. Banks in 28 states were wholly closed. Those in the remaining 20 were partly closed. Half of all household mortgages were in default. And the automobile industry that had been producing 20,000 vehicles a day was now building 2,000. In the wealthiest nation on earth, 34 million Americans out of a total population of 120 million had no apparent source of income. It was time for a new deal. FDR's first action as president was to close the banks until March the 9th. Surprisingly, Americans coped. He's not necessarily a systematic thinker when it comes to domestic policy, but he's a political realist and he knows first and foremost that any president in 1933 has got to try and get America back on its feet again. IOUs were issued, accepted and honoured. BARTA flourished. A store exchanged a dress for three barrels of Saginaw Bay herrings. The box office for a boxing tournament admitted fans on presentation of anything assessed as being worth 50 cents. On Sunday, March the 12th, Roosevelt began the first of his radio fireside chats with... My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. 60 million people were listening, including the humorist Will Rogers, who said the president had taken the subject of banking and made everyone understand it, even the bankers. The chat lasted less than 15 minutes. The audience for his broadcasts are phenomenal. More than 70% of Americans are tuning into these broadcasts. These are things that are permeating every home, almost every home in America. No one knew what would happen when the banks reopened. Would the panic resume? Long lines formed outside banks all over the country. It was the day after the president's speech, and these Americans were queuing to put their money back where the president had promised them it would be safe. So although we're used to thinking of the fireside chats as these major moments of presidential leadership, there are surprisingly few, some years as few as two a year. So he would ration them, and again, that was a more effective way. He wasn't overexposing himself. He was turning these things into big events so that people would actually, you know, must have something important to say. By the end of March, $15 billion had been taken from socks, pots, and pillowcases, and put back into banks. By 1933, U.S. unemployment hit 12 million, a quarter of the workforce, half of those involved in chemicals, steel, and machine industries. The city's free employment agency was scheduled to open at nine o'clock, and by three, several thousand job seekers were already in line. All day, they came in a never-ending stream. The scene was remarkably free of trouble, although occasionally, someone tried to sneak up ahead of his turn. Even so, on March the 15th, the Stock Exchange ticker tape signed off with the words, happy days are here again. Part of the problem facing Roosevelt was that there was no clear agreement in 1933 as to what had actually caused the Depression. No clear agreement on why it had become so bad. So therefore, Roosevelt's New Deal embarks on a number of different initiatives. Among our objectives, I place the security of the men, women, and children of the nation first. On April the 18th, Roosevelt announced to his advisors, whose reaction was apoplectic, that he had effectively unhitched the dollar from gold, allowing the currency to substantially devalue to the astonishment of the entire financial world. In printing this additional money, Mr. Roosevelt has resorted to inflation, which is no longer the dreaded bogey it used to be. And the Dow went up like a rocket. Orders for new machinery increased by 100%, and overall industrial output lifted by 50%. The $10 billion spent in the US under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was part, but not all, of the story of recovery. It paid, amongst much else, for 122,000 public buildings, more than a million kilometers of road, 77,000 bridges, and 285 airports. About 450,000 Americans wrote to their president in his first week in office, and mail continued to arrive at between 4,000 to 7,000 items each day. During Hoover's presidency, one person had worked in the White House mailroom. For FDR, the staff was increased to 70. Most Americans had never heard their president speak before, so they believe that he wants them to do well. And when his policies fail, they begin to say, our president is being failed by bankers, corporate heads. We're going to take things into our own hands because we know this is what the president wants us to do. By the time the emergency session of Congress ended on June the 16th, the session that the president had summoned on taking the oath of office, FDR had signed 15 bills into law. These had been the 100 days. Central to the reform package was what led the New York Herald Tribune to exclaim, seldom, if ever, has so sweeping a piece of legislation been introduced to the American Congress. It was the Farm Bill, and it sought to arrest the decades-long slide in the agricultural sector that by 1933 had banks foreclosing on farm mortgages at an approximate rate of 20,000 every month. It was to try and bring a cooperative order to all of this that the World Economic Conference, assembled in a museum in London's Royal Borough of Kensington, amidst the rocks and fossils. In 1933, a second World Economic Conference is convened in London, and it's sort of a matching conference to the disarmament conferences taking place in Geneva at the same, more or less the same time. It's partly why it's in London. It's because all the hotels are full of the military guys in Geneva. The fate of generations may well depend upon the courage, the sincerity, the width of view, which we are to show during the next few weeks. Let the world know that we can show decision and give leadership. Then FDR scuttled the initiative with what has come to be known as his bombshell message of July the 3rd. He made it plain that fixing the national economy took precedence over an international arrangement. So the tragedy of the World Economic Conference in the summer of 1933 is that the three major democratic powers aren't able to do an economic and a financial deal, which was there. I mean, they had the right kind of plans, but there was no political will to cooperate. And that then meant that everything that followed on from that when they then tried to face Germany or Italy or Japan was much more problematic. And of course, their economies didn't recover from the depression, which just rumbled on all the way through the 1930s. So it was a catastrophe. In 1933, Hitler made his first speech as chancellor. And Fred Astaire, real name Friedrich Austerlitz, teamed up for the first time with Ginger Rogers. Real history is always the story of lots of things going on at the same time. In 1933, General Moller, who would direct the failed coup that became the Spanish Civil War, wrote that Hitler is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews remain embedded in the nation. That is why, Moller wrote, he persecutes them without quarter. In 1933, the Brown Book of Hitler Terror appeared in 27 languages, calmly and with verification, cataloguing the excesses of the Nazi regime, so people knew. In 1933, a German Catholic newspaper described Hitler's appointment as chancellor as a leap into the dark. It turned out rather to be a leap into the darkness.