Episode 555: Muddling Through

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1:18Hello and welcome to Western Civ. Episode 555. We last left the United States in the summer of 1933, while we jumped forward with Europe and Asia. This points the hottest days of the year settling over DC. For the first time in months, the men running the United States government can actually pause and catch their breath. Because behind them was one of the most astonishing stretches in the history of American politics. One hundred days in which a new president and a willing congress rewrote the relationship between citizens and their governments. Banks reopened, farmers got relief, a million young men were put to work, clearing forests and trails. The country which in March had felt like it was sliding off a cliff, now fell at least for some people, like to grab the edge. But here's the thing people forget. The hundred days was actually the easy part.

2:19What came next the next six years, be harder, messier and in many ways far more consequential. It's the story of how the new deal grew, hit a wall and then reshaped American life anyway. And today it's a story about the president who won the biggest landslide in modern history and then managed to somehow almost wreck his own presidency a few months later. And of course, because of what we've talked about in the last two episodes, we can't ignore the interconnectedness of the world now. This isn't the episodes that I was doing about the 18th century or the 17th century or hack even the 19th century to some extent. The world was woven together. And so the affairs in Asia and Europe that are happening in the late 1930s, those are impacting the United States too in ways that are incredibly profound. So today I'm going to tell the story in the United States from the hundred days to that day in September when the tanks rolled into Poland.

3:21So let's set the table. The famous first hundred days ran from Roosevelt's inauguration in March 1933 through the middle of June. By the time Congress goes home that summer, 15 major pieces of legislation are on the books. The banking crisis has been stopped basically. There's an alphabet soup of new agencies, the CCC, the AA, the TVA, and the NRA, not that one, a different one. Each one, a piece of enormous, improvised legislative experiment trying to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. But Roosevelt's presidency doesn't pause when the legislation does. And one of the most interesting things about this period is that while everyone's attention is on the domestic emergency, Roosevelt is already making moves on the world stage, moves to tell you a lot about him. The first big one comes that very summer, and it's a foreign policy decision that infuriated a lot of people. In June and July of 1933, the leading economic powers gathered in London for what was called

4:26the World Monetary Economic Conference. The idea was pretty grandiose, get the major nations to stabilize their currencies, coordinate, and then lift the whole world out of the Depression together. And what's interesting is that Roosevelt blew it up. He said what became known as his bombshell message, essentially telling the delegates that the United States would not tie its hands to some international currency agreement. America's recovery, he said, came first. He was not going to sacrifice his freedom to inflate the dollar and raise prices at home just to please the bankers in Europe. And so the conference collapsed. The internationalists and globalists were horrified, but it told you Roosevelt's priority in 1933 and one move. The American president was focusing on the table in front of him and that mattered a heck of a lot more than any abstract global cooperation concept. It was America first, in other words.

5:27Now at the very same time, he was doing something that looked very opposite because he was reaching outward. In November of 1933, Roosevelt did something no president had done since the Russian Revolution. He formally recognized the Soviet Union. For 16 years, the United States had just simply pretended the Bolshevik government didn't exist. But what's that on the map? That enormous space. That's kind of above China and right next to the rest of Europe. That's nothing. We'll just ignore that. So that policy came to an end in 1933. Roosevelt, the pragmatic man he was, looked at the situation and he saw two things. A potential trading partner during a depression and a possible counterweight to Japan, which was expanding aggressively in Asia. So he opened up relations. The hope for it to trade never really materialized. And the diplomatic relationship would be rocky for years. But it was a signal. This was a president who intended to deal with the world as it was, not as he wished it

6:30to be. And then there's the policy that may be his most durable foreign achievement of the whole decade. What was called the good neighbor policy. For a generation, the United States had thrown its way around in Latin America like an arguing landlord. Marines landing in this country, customs houses seized over here. The long shadow of gunboat diplomacy basically. Roosevelt announced, starting in his inaugural address, and then indeed, that this was over. The United States would be a good neighbor, one that respected the sovereignty of other states. At the Montevideo Conference in late 1933, the US signed on to the principle that no state had the right to intervene in the international affairs of another. The following year, the Hated Platte Amendment, which had given the US a legal right to metal and Cuba, was officially ended. And the Marines that were stationed in Haiti, we brought those home too. Why does this matter?

7:31Well, I want you to hold that thought, because in just a few years when the world catches fire, Roosevelt is going to want the entire Western hemisphere standing behind him. And the goodwill he's banking now is going to pay off. So if 1933 was the year of rescue, 1934 was the year of construction, and the year the opposition starts to find its voice. On the domestic side, the big achievement is the one we still live with every single day. In June of 1934, Congress passed the Securities Exchange Act, which created the Securities and Exchange Commission, as we call it today, the SEC. Remember, the stock market crash of 1929 was the symbolic beginning of the Holocaust catastrophe, and the markets in the 20s had been in a wild west of insider deals and manipulations. The SEC was built to bring the cops to Wall Street. Now there'd be disclosure requirements, registration, rules against fraud. And here's a detail people love. Roosevelt's choice to run the new SEC was Joseph P. Kennedy.

8:35Yes, that Kennedy, the father of a future president. A man who had made himself a fortune doing exactly the kind of stock manipulation the SEC was designed to stop. When advisors objected, Roosevelt supposedly said that to catch a thief, you need a thief. Kennedy turned out to be an effective no-nonsense chairman. Sometimes I guess, being cynical is the right decision. Also in 1934, Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hall, a man with an almost religious faith in free trade, got his signature achievement, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. This led the president negotiate terror reductions with other countries on his own authority. In the long run, this would quietly reverse decades of American protectionism and lane the groundwork for the trading world that would be built after the next war. It was a little bit of a sleeper, but it was a hit. But 1934 is also when the political weather starts to shift, because Roosevelt is now getting

9:38attacked from both directions at once. From the right came the American Liberty League, founded in 1934 by conservative Democrats and business titans, including members of the DuPont family in Al Smith. The man Roosevelt has succeeded as the great hope of the Democratic Party. They saw the new deal as a march towards socialism, a betrayal of the Constitution, a assault on free enterprise. They had money, and they had voluminous microphones. Let's just put it that way. But honestly, the attacks from the right were the ones that Roosevelt could push off in his sleep. It was the attacks from the left, or more precisely from a strange populist flank, that genuinely scared him. As those men weren't promising less than the new deal, they were promising more, and they were brilliant at reaching ordinary frightened people. Let me tell you about three of them. I talked about these a little bit last time, but the first and the most important one was

10:40Huey Long, the kingfish, a senator and former governor of Louisiana who ran the state very much like a personal kingdom, corrupt, ruthless, and massively popular. Long had a slogan that landed like a thunderclap in the middle of the Depression. Share our wealth. Cat big fortunes he said. And guarantee every family a homestead and a desanual income. He also said, every man a king. It was economically impossible and politically electric. By 1935, his organization claimed millions of members. And there were whispers, serious whispers, and he might run for president and split the vote. Second was another guy that I talked about. Father Charles Kaufland, the radio priest of Detroit. At his peak, tens of millions of Americans tuned into his Sunday broadcasts. He started out a passionate Roosevelt supporter, Roosevelt ruined, he said. But he soured, attacking bankers and the gold standard. And over time, his rhetoric curled into something darker and openly anti-Semitic.

11:42But in the mid-30s, his reach was staggering. The video was the new mass media, and Kaufland had mastered it. The last one I want to talk about is Dr. Francis Townsend, a mild-mannered California physician with one big idea. Pay every American over 60, a generous monthly pension on the condition that they spend it within 30 days. It would care for the elderly and pump money into the economy. Townsend clubs sprang up across the country, especially among older Americans who had watched their savings vanish. Now why does any of this matter to this story? Because Roosevelt was a master politician, and a master politician doesn't just crush his rivals. He steals from them. He steals their best ideas. The pressure from Long, Kaufland and Townsend combined with a Supreme Court that was about to start swinging a wrecking ball at his programs is going to push Roosevelt sharply to the left in 1935. The critics thought they were cornering him, but they were actually writing his next

12:47chapter. Now one more thing about 1934 that's a little bit of an anomaly, and that's the mid-term elections. Almost always, the party in power loses seats in the mid-term that's almost an iron rule of American politics. Instead, Roosevelt's Democrats gained seats, building even bigger majorities in both houses. The voters were saying, keep going! And Roosevelt, he intended to. Shop the Sirwin Williams Labor Day Sale and get 35% off paints and stains, August 28th through September 9th. Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life, and with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever. Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sirwin Williams store. With the banner to learn more, retail sales only some exclusions apply, see store for details, delivery available on Fall of Buying Orders.

13:491935 is the year that's really the hinge of our whole story. It's the year the New Deal kind of gets a second win. Historians actually refer to it as the second New Deal, or sometimes the second 100 days. But it begins with a bit of a blow. On May 27th 1935, the day the administration called Black Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act. The case is famous, Schnechter Poultrick Corporation versus United States. And yes, it really did come from a Brooklyn kosher chicken business. The court ruled unanimously that the NRA had handed the executive branch far too much lawmaking power, and had reached too far into local commerce. The centerpiece of the New Deal, the great, experimented industrial planning with its blue eagle posters in every shop window, was officially dead. Roosevelt was furious.

14:50He gave a press conference complaining that the court had dragged the country back to a horse and buggy definition of interstate commerce. But here is where his genius shows. Instead of retreating, he charged forward. And the legislation that poured out of Congress in the summer 1935 was bolder, more permanent, and more clearly aimed at ordinary working people than anything in the first New Deal. So let's talk about the big four. Number one, the WPA or Works Progress Administration. Set up in the spring of 1935 under the absolutely relentless Harry Hopkins. The WPA was a jobs program on a colossal scale. Over its lifetime, it would employ around 8.5 million Americans. It built and listened to the scale of this. Hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, tens of thousands of bridges, thousands of schools, parks, airports, and public buildings. But Hopkins did something visionary too. He hired artists, writers, actors, painters, musicians.

15:55The Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the idea that a starving painter or a laid-off actor deserve just as much as a laid-off bricklayer. That was a genuinely radical statement about what a society owes its people. Number two, and this is the Biggie, the Social Security Act. Signed into law on August 14, 1935, just sit with how revolutionary this was. For a Social Security, growing old in America with no money meant very often, destitution. Moving in with relatives if you were lucky, the poor house if you weren't. Roosevelt created a system of old age insurance, funded by payroll taxes, plus unemployment insurance and aid for dependent children that disabled. And notice how he answered Dr. Townsend from the beginning. He took the popular demand, security for the elderly, and built a real sustainable system around it. Roosevelt himself was clear-eyed about politics. He insisted it be funded by workers' own contributions, specifically so that in his words,

17:01no future politician could ever take it away. And guess what? He was right. 90 years later, and it's still here, arguably the most important piece of domestic legislation of the 20th century. Now, unfortunately, as I sit here recording this, it's about four years away from running out of money. Hopefully, someone in Congress can share Roosevelt's vision and get on board. The number three was the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the Wagner Act, after Senator Robert Wagner of New York. Past in July of 1935, this was a charter of rights for organized labor. It guaranteed workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively, and it created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce those rights and referee disputes. With the NRA struck down, labor had lost its earlier legal footing. The Wagner Act gave it something far stronger, and American Union membership as a consequence was about to explode. The last one is number four, and that's the Revenue Act of 1935, which opponents nicknamed

18:04the Wealth Tax. It sharply raised taxes on the highest incomes on biggest states and on corporations. Now in dollar terms, it didn't actually raise that much money. Its real purpose was as much symbolic and political as it was fiscal. It was Roosevelt planting a flag, drawing a line between himself and the men of great wealth, and frankly, stealing a march on Huey Long's share our wealth policy before a long run on it. And of course, there was more, a banking act that centralized real power in the Federal Reserve under the able Mariner Eccles giving Washington genuine control over the nation's money supply for the first time. A rural electrification administration to bring electric light to the millions of American farms that still in 1935 had none. Think about that. I mean, there were whole stretches of rural America, essentially living as their grandparents had in the early 19th century with kerosene lamps and no refrigeration. They was the new deal that changed that.

19:06Put it all together and you can start to see the shift. The first new deal was about rescue and recovery, just propping up things, stabilizing prices. The second new deal was about reform and security. Building permanent structures to protect ordinary people from, I guess, the raw edges of capitalism. This is the moment modern American welfare state is born. And it's the moment the new deal coalition, working people, union members, immigrants, black voters in the North, shifting away from the party of Lincoln farmers, white southerners, intellectuals, locks into place as the dominant force in American politics for the next 35 years. Now, unfortunately, while Roosevelt is rebuilding America at home, the international sky is getting darker by the month. And Congress is reacting in a way that's going to tie Roosevelt's hands for years. The mood of the American people in the mid-1930s can be summed up in one word.

20:07Again and never again, the trenches, the gas, the slaughter of the Great War. And a powerful idea took hold, pushed hard by Senate committee led by Gerald Nye of North Dakota, that the United States had been dragged into that war, dragged by greedy bankers and arms manufacturers, the so-called merchants of death who only cared about profit. The Nye committee's hearings running through 1934 and 1936 hammered this theme and they convinced millions of Americans that the way to stay out of the next war was simply to pass a law against getting involved. And so Congress did, beginning in August of 1935, it passed the first of the neutrality acts. When the President proclaimed that a state of war existed somewhere, an embargo would automatically slam down on shipping American arms to anyone involved, aggressor and victim alike. More acts followed in 1936 and 1937 tightening the rules. No loans, no arms, and eventually thinking about the Lucettania, no American could travel

21:12on a belligerent ship. Here's the problem. And Roosevelt saw it immediately. By treating the aggressor and the victim exactly the same, these laws didn't keep American neutral in any moral sense. They just helped whoever was doing the attacking. They removed America's ability to put a bomb on the scale for the side that deserved it. Roosevelt disliked the neutrality acts intensely. But in the mid-30s, isolation to sentiment was just so overwhelming that he couldn't fight it hand on. So he signed them and waited and hoped for room to maneuver. And events that proved his point came almost immediately. In October of 1935, Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia, one of the only remaining independent nations in Africa and the world watched. As a modern army with aircraft and poison gas crushed a country that was defending itself with little more than rifles. The League of Nations, as I talked about two episodes ago, wronged its hands and did

22:14effectively nothing. The lesson that dictators took was unmistakable, aggression pays, and no one's going to stop you. And in July of 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted. A brutal conflict in which Hitler and Mussolini openly backed the fascist rebels under Franco, testing their new weapons and tactics. While the Western democracies stood aside, again as they get into their credit, the Soviets did chip in to try to help out the congregationalists. Roosevelt, hemmed in by the neutrality laws and by American Catholic opinion, kept the United States out. And it haunted many on the left for the rest of their lives. The world is sorting itself into democracies and dictatorships, and the dictatorships are winning all the early rounds. But at home, 1936 belonged to Franklin Roosevelt, the year open with another slap from the Supreme Court in January, in the case of United States, versus Butler, the courts struck

23:15down the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which had been the cornerstone of New Deal Farm Policy. Roosevelt's lawyers scrambled to find new legal footing to keep helping farmers, and they largely did. But the pattern was now glaring. A aging conservative Supreme Court was systematically dismantling the New Deal piece by piece. File that away because it's going to detonate in 1937. For now though, it was election season, and Roosevelt was about to win one for the ages. The Republicans nominated Al Flandin, the moderate governor of Kansas, a decent man who let's be fair had no chance at all. The campaign was a referendum on the New Deal, and Roosevelt leaned all the way in. He didn't run from his enemies among the wealthy and the bankers, he ran against them briefly. In a thunderous speech at Madison Square Garden on the eve of his election, he listed the forces of organized money arrayed against them, and declared that they were unanimous in their hatred of him, and said, quote, and I welcome their hatred.

24:18End quote. The crowd absolutely roared. The result on November the 3rd, 1936 was one of the greatest landslides in American history. Roosevelt carried 46 of the 48 states. Landin won exactly two main envermont, and a grand total of eight electoral votes against Roosevelt's 523. The old saying had been, as main goes, so goes the nation. Roosevelt's campaign manager joked that it was now, as main goes, so goes Vermont. And there's a famous footnote here, a popular magazine called Literary Digest, ran a huge poll and confidently predicted landed with win. They were catastrophically wrong. Their sample was skewed toward wealthy Americans who could afford telephones and automobiles, and the magazine was so humiliated, it soon folded. But the story is interesting for this, because there was a young pollster who used smarter

25:20scientific sampling, and he got it right, and he started to create methods that we still use to measure public opinion in the United States today. His name was George Gallup. Oh, and one of Roosevelt's most dangerous rivals never made it to the campaign trail at all, by the way. Remember Huey Long? He was shot in the Louisiana State Capitol in September of 1935, and he died two days later. We'll never know how much trouble the Kingfish might have caused in 1936, but as it was, Roosevelt stood at the absolute summit of his power, which, as anybody who studied power knows, is exactly the moment that you need to watch out. Franklin Roosevelt became, in 1937, the most powerful president since Abraham Lincoln. He had just won a historic mandate. He had enormous majorities in Congress, and he was about to make the worst political

26:25miscalculation of his career. The target of his frustration was the Supreme Court. Nine men, several of them quite elderly, had been striking down his programs one after another. Roosevelt looked ahead and saw the Wagner Act, Social Security itself, the whole edifice of the new deal heading toward those same nine justices, and he feared they'd tear it all down. He'd just won 46 states. Why should an unelected, ancient court, overrule the clear will of the people? So in February 1937, he sprang a plan on a stunned Congress. He framed it disingenuously as a matter of efficiency. He said the courts were overburdened, and the older justices needed help with the workload. His proposal was that for every federal judge over the age of 70 who didn't retire, the president could appoint a new one, an additional one, you know, help carry the load up to six

27:28new justices on the Supreme Court. Everyone saw through this instantly. This wasn't about efficiency. It was about packing the court with friendly justices to get the outcomes he wanted. The press dubbed it the court packing plan and the name stuck. And the reaction was ferocious, including from his own side. Many Democrats were appalled. To them, this looked like a president trying to neuter an independent, co-equal branch of government, the very kind of power grab they were watching dictators make in Europe. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, these were sacred, and Roosevelt seemed to be treating them as obstacles. For the first time, a powerful block of conservative Democrats openly broke with him and made common cause with the Republicans. This is the birth of what's called the conservative coalition. And it would frustrate liberal legislation in Congress for decades.

28:29And then something strange happened that abruptly pulled the rug from under the whole plan. That spring, the Supreme Court, that same Supreme Court started to rule for the new deal. In March, in a minimum wage case, West coast hotel versus parish, just as Owen Roberts switched his vote to the liberal side. In April, the Court actually upheld the Wagner Act. It became known as the switch in time that saved nine. Then one of the conservative justices, Van DeVanter, announced his retirement, giving Roosevelt a vacancy to fill, you know, the honest way. Suddenly Roosevelt was getting the court he wanted without the plan, which meant the plan now had no purpose, except to look like a power grab. The court packing bill died in the Senate that summer. It was a humiliating defeat, the first real one of his presidency, and it was entirely self-inflicted.

29:32Roosevelt eventually got to appoint a string of justices and reshaped the court for a generation. So in the long run, he arguably won, but the political cost was enormous. The aura of invincibility was gone. The conservative coalition now was a permanent fact of life. When Roosevelt's command over Congress would never again be what it was in 1933 or 1935, 1937 had more pain in store. On the labor front, the Wagner Act had unleashed a wave of union organizing, and it sometimes turned violent. The great drama was the sit-down strike, workers occupying the factory itself refusing to leave, so the company couldn't bring in replacements. The most famous was at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, over the winter of 1936 and 1937. After retains weeks-long standoff, GM caved in and recognized the United Auto Workers, a stunning victory that supercharged the new industrial union movement, the CIO.

30:35But not every fight ended so well. A memorial day in 1937, police in Chicago opened fire on a crowd of striking steel workers and their families, killing ten people in what became known as the memorial day massacre. The country was raw, and the question of labor's power was being settled in the streets. And then the economy, which looked like it had been clawing its way back for four years, suddenly collapsed again. Historians call it the Roosevelt Recession, starting in the late summer and fall of 1937, industrial production fell off a cliff, and unemployment, which had been dropping, shot back up by millions. The cause is still debated, but a big factor was Roosevelt himself. Worried about deficits and inflation, he had cut back on relief spending, slashing the WPA, and the new Social Security payroll taxes were suddenly now pulling money out of workers' paychecks.

31:36The economy turned out wasn't yet strong enough to stand on its own. When the government stepped back, it stumbled. This was a genuine intellectual crisis for the administration. One camp said, we cut too soon, we need to spend our way back out, as the British economist John Maynard Keen said, been arguing. Another said, no, we need to balance the budget and reassure business. Roosevelt wavered, and then in 1938 came down on the side of spending, asking Congress for a big new round of relief in public works, which helped, slowly, pulled the economy back up. It was, in a sense, the first deliberate use of deficit spending to fight a downturn in American history. But the damage to Roosevelt's reputation as a miracle worker was real. And all the while, while this is all going on domestically, the rest of the world kept darkening. And in 1937, Roosevelt started very carefully to try to wake his country up to the growing threat.

32:36In October of 1937, in Chicago, the heartland of isolationism, he gave what became known as the quarantine speech. Without naming names, he warned that an epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. And he suggested that peace loving nations might need to quarantine the aggressors, the way you'd isolate a patient with a contagious disease, to stop the infection from spreading. It was a trial, a test. Roosevelt was trying to see whether Americans were ready to think about collective action against aggression. And the answer came back loud and clear. No. The isolationist reaction was so hostile that Roosevelt backed off almost immediately. He later said something to the effect that it's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you're trying to lead and find no one there. He had gotten too far ahead of his people. He filed that lesson away and resolved to bring them along more slowly. The lesson got sharper just two months later.

33:37In December of 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked and sank an American gunboat, the USS Panai, on the Yangtze River in China, in broad daylight, with American flags clearly visible. Several men were killed in a later decade. This might have met war. But in 1937, the public reaction was almost a desperate desire to avoid a confrontation. Japan apologized and paid an indemnity in the incident with smooth over. It was a vivid measure of just how deep the will to just stay out of it all ran in American politics. In 1938, the domestic front, a kind of year of stalemate. The conservative coalition is dug in. The recession has kind of bruised Roosevelt's popularity. The reforming energy of 1935 is mostly spent.

34:39But the year does produce one last huge piece of new deal legislation. On June of 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. If you've ever earned a minimum wage, or gotten time in a half or working overtime, or simply lived in a country where it's illegal to send children into factories, that's this law. It established a federal minimum wage, a maximum work week, and a ban on most child labor. It was the last major reform of the new deal. In light social security, it became a permanent part of American life. But Roosevelt was frustrated, and that frustration led to another political misstep. In the 1938 primaries, he tried to purge the Democratic Party of the Conservative members who had blocked him, campaigning openly against sitting Democratic senators and congressmen in their own primaries, trying to get them replaced with loyal new dealers.

35:40It mostly failed. Voters didn't like the president reaching into their states to tell them who to elect, and most of his targets survived. Reinforce the lesson of the court packing scheme. Even at the height of his popularity, there were limits to what Roosevelt could do. He couldn't just bend the entire nation to his will. Then in November 1938 came the midterms. The Republicans who had been nearly wiped out two years earlier came roaring back, picking up dozens of seats in the House and several in the Senate. Combined with the Conservative Democrats, this meant that the era of sweeping new deal reform was for all practical purposes over. Roosevelt would spend his remaining domestic energy defending what he'd built rather than expanding it. There's one more 1938 development worth paying attention to, because it's shadow is long. That year, Congress created what would become the House on American Activities Committee

36:42under Martin Dye's of Texas. It was a stensibly set up to investigate Nazi and communist subversion, but it quickly developed a taste for going after new dealers and labor unions as supposed radicals. It's a thread that runs forward through the next two decades, then into an era that this podcast, at least for now, isn't going to cover the McCarthy era of the 1950s. By 1938, on all honesty, the domestic story has simply been overtaken, because in Europe, the storm Roosevelt had been warning about was now plainly and undeniably arriving. In March of 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, marching German troops across the border to absorb a whole country into the Reich. And as we know, the world did nothing. And he turned to Czechoslovakia demanding the Sedejland, the border region with a large German-speaking population. And here, as we know, we come to the most, well, I guess one of the most infamous moments

37:44of the 20th century, because in late September of 1938, the leaders of Britain and France, I don't know why, Neville Chamberlain, by the way, gets all the crap for this, because France did go. And they met Hitler at Munich and desperate to avoid war. He just gave him the Sudejland and the promise that this was his last territorial demand. As we know, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew home, waving a piece of paper and declaring that he had, quote, unquote, secured peace for our time. And, quote, he was the high water marv for a policy that we call appeasement, the word that has now become a synonym for shameful weakness. Roosevelt's role in Munich was limited. America was on the sidelines bound by neutrality and public opinion. And he said messages urging a peaceful settlement, but he watched what unfolded with growing dread. He understood that the democracies had just bought a few months of peace by feeding a country to a dictator, and that it would not be enough.

38:45Within six months, Hitler would tear up the Munich agreement entirely and swallow the rest of Czechoslovakia, proving the whole thing a fraud. And then in November 1938 came Kristlnok, the night of broken glass, a coordinated wave of Nazi violence against Germany's Jews, Seneca's burned businesses smashed, tens of thousands sent to concentration camp. Roosevelt responded by recalling the American ambassador from Berlin, then publicly condemning it in sharp terms. He said he could scarcely believe such things could occur in a 20th century civilization. And this is one of the genuine moral failures hanging over this administration. America's restrictive immigration laws and the anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant feeling baked into American politics in the 1930s, it kept the door largely shut to the Jewish refugees trying to flee. And Roosevelt, he didn't spend his political capital to force it open, to stain on that

39:48administration that history has not forgotten. But Roosevelt did do, in late 1938, was to begin quietly but urgently to prepare. He looked at what German air power had done to intimidate Europe and Munich and became convinced that the United States needed, above all, to build airplanes, thousands of them, and to start rearming an earnest. He began laying the groundwork to become, in a phrase he'd later make famous, the arsenal of democracy. He couldn't yet say that out loud, but the pivot of his presidency away from domestic reform and toward the coming war was now fully underway. And so our story now takes us to 1939, the last year of uneasy peace. But almost no one knew yet just how little of it was left. Roosevelt opened the ear with the state of the Union address in January that marked a real turning point in his rhetoric. He told Congress and the country in effect that the days of comfortable isolation, they

40:49were coming to an end. He warned that there were times when a nation's neutrality laws could actually help an aggressor and hurt the victim, a direct shot at the neutrality acts he'd been forced to sign. He argued that America's own security was bound up with the fate of democracy abroad. He was trying carefully to turn the country's gaze outward and to prepare it for the idea that staying truly safe might require more than hiding behind two oceans. The concrete fight that spring and summer was over those neutrality acts. Roosevelt and his allies pushed hard to revise them, specifically to repeal the arms embargo so that if the war came, the democracies could at least buy weapons from the United States. The principle was called cash and carry. You pay cash. You carry the goods away in your own ships. So America takes no financial and shipping risk. It was a way to help Britain and France without sending American boys or even American vessels

41:50into harm's way. But the isolationist in Congress dug in. And in the summer of 1939, they blocked him. In a now legendary meeting, Roosevelt and his secretary of state warned Senate leaders that war was coming in Europe within months. One key isolationist senator reportedly insisted that there would be no war. But the president was crying wolf. Congress adjourned for the summer without revising the law. Roosevelt's hands were still tied. Meanwhile, the news from Europe got worse and worse. And March Hitler had seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Exposing Munich as the sham Roosevelt knew that it was Mussolini grabbed El Mania in April. The Spanish Civil War ended the spring with Franco's fascist victory. Hitler began to menace Poland, demanding the city of dancing and a corridor through Polish territory. And then in late August of 1939, came the thunderbolt that stunned the entire world, not

42:53see Germany, and the Soviet Union, bitter ideological enemies, fascism and communism, signed an onaggression pact. Hitler installed and were shaking hands. They agreed to carve up Poland and eastern Europe between them. It meant that Hitler could now attack Poland in the west without fear of the Soviet striking him in the east. The last barrier was gone and everyone who knew what the pact meant was about to get a wake up call. Like literally, Franklin Roosevelt's going to be woken up in the middle of the night. On September 1, 1939, he was going to be told what has happened. This stretch that began in the summer of 1939 started with, honestly, FDR trying to keep

43:54the nation alive. By the time this episode is ended in September 1939, he'd become something else, the leader of the world's greatest democracy, staring down the most dangerous moment for that institution in history. In between, he transformed his own country, social security, the minimum wage, the right to union, federal insurance for your bank deposits, a cop looking at Wall Street, electricity strung out to the countryside. These weren't here when he started, but most of them were still here today. He built a coalition that would dominate American life for a generation, and he permanently expanded what people expected their government to do for them. That's the new deal's legacy, and we definitely saw a argue about it. That argument is American politics in a lot of ways. But he also learned his limits. The court packing fight in the failed purge, revealed a man who could overreach badly,

44:55who could mistake a landslide for a blank check. The Roosevelt recession showed that he hadn't even fully solved the code of the depression. It would take the war and the colossal smanning it demanded to find the end it. And on the great moral question of refugees fleeing Hitler's grasp, let's just say history has rendered Roosevelt a pretty hard verdict. And then there's this foreign story by which the end of this has kind of swallowed everything else. Roosevelt spent these years trying to walk a tightrope, seeing the catastrophe becoming, trying to warn his people and being yanked back every time he got too far ahead of them. He learned patience. He learned to lead from just a half a step in front, never more. And as the curtain falls on our story on September 1st, 1939, he's a president boxed in by neutrality laws. He despises. Watching the world he feared come true, knowing the hardest chapter of his life, and his

45:59countries is about to begin. So we're going to pick that up next time in a third term that no president has ever sought a desperate effort to arm the democracies. And we're going to walk through and what is going to be the last ever story arc for this podcast for something that I started 15 years ago. Maybe it's finally coming to an end in the abyss.