the presidents of the united states: episode 6 - 1913-1945 (history documentary)

Disappointed that his hand picked successor taft had abandoned many of his policies, Roosevelt had actually tried to rest the Republican nomination away from it. He failed, and at that point, could have chosen to bow out gracefully, but this was Teddy Roosevelt. He said, I stand at Armageddon to do battle for the lord. Running under the banner of the new Progressive Party, the popular Roosevelt capsized taft's reelection bid. But TR's candidacy had an unintended consequence by splitting the Republican vote, he allowed the Democrat Wilson to win The White House. Number 28 Woodrow Wilson, Democrat, 1913 to 1921, 56 years old, from New Jersey. Woodrow Wilson is neither fondly remembered or very well understood by most Americans today. 

However, he occupies a secure position in that exclusive Pantheon of great presidents. A southerner by birth, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an academic. The only president to hold a PhD. He served as president of Princeton University from 1902 until 1910, when he left to become governor of New Jersey. That would be his only elected office before he became president of the United States. Wilson was a thoughtful religious man, an avid golfer, he enjoyed movies and vaudeville shows. Publicly he was perceived as a human machine, cold and academically methodical about his decision making. Privately, at home he could be by charming rather footing, like the sing song from Broadway shows at that time. But that was very much the private was the public Wilson was exceeded often to most people rather cold. He was not a person that people often warmed up to. Wilson's most important political asset was his skill with the spoken word, and he wasn't afraid to use it. 

He was the first president since John Adams to deliver his State of the Union messages to Congress in person. When he became president, Wilson tried to bring a bit of the ivory tower to the Oval Office. Wilson was a collegial leader. He's been a college president that makes sense. They said in cabinet meetings, he wasn't the boss. It was more like the first among equals, and they would discuss things very freely. In his first term, Wilson focused on fulfilling the progressive domestic agenda he called the new freedom. One of his enduring contributions was to create the Federal Reserve to manage the U.S. currency system. It was one of the remarkable successes of Wilson's administration. It has persisted since 1913, and it has done a remarkably good job of maintaining the stability of the American currency. In the summer of 1914, Woodrow Wilson faced two great crises. 

Just as the guns of August signaled the start of World War I in Europe, the president's wife Ellen died of a kidney ailment. Ellen Wilson died. And Wilson was heard to whisper. My God. What am I going to do? As he privately mourned his wife, Wilson was faced with an increasingly difficult public dilemma. Most Americans wanted nothing to do with the great war in Europe, so Wilson pledged neutrality. But that was problematic, especially with German submarines targeting British passenger ships that often carried American civilians across the Atlantic. In one incident, the sinking of the lusitania in 1915, 128 Americans were killed. Despite public outrage over the lusitania, most Americans wanted Wilson to keep his head which he did and save them from Europe's awful mess. 

They simply did not think that this was America's fight. In 1915, 17 months after his wife died, Wilson remarried. His bride was a Washington widow named Edith bolling galt. The following year he was narrowly reelected as president, making him the first democratic incumbent to win reelection since Andrew Jackson in 1832. With Germany declaring early in 1917 that American shipping would no longer be spared the wrath of submarine warfare, it would be a challenging second term for the domestic minded president. Wilson marked a friend. He would be an irony of fate if my administration were consumed by foreign affairs. Well, it wasn't of course a tragic irony of faith that of course that is exactly what happens by the second administration. 

On April 2nd, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. In this famous war message, he minted what would become an enduring theme in American foreign policy. The world must be made safe for democracy. Peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. That's how we ended the speech. It was really one of the great speeches in American history. From the beginning of America's involvement in the war, Wilson was focused on his vision for the peace. And central to that vision was his idea for the League of Nations and international body that could settle disputes without bloodshed and bring an end to war. The league would become his great obsession. As a war president, Wilson mostly kept his hands off and let U.S. Army general John blackjack Pershing take care of the details. 

John J. Pershing said that Woodrow Wilson gave him only one order. Maintain a separate American army. Wilson had brought the United States into the war late and for our own reasons, and one of the ways to make sure that we emphasized how separate our commitment to the war was was to keep a separate army. The first family aided the war effort by grazing sheep on The White House lawn, and auctioning off the wall to raise money for the Red Cross. But the man who sought to make the world safe for democracy turned a blind eye to democratic suppression at home. When Congress passed the sedition and espionage acts of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the government. Wilson really did not set this emotion in a direct way, but he acquiesced in the suppression of fundamental civil liberties for the duration of the war. Overseas, the arrival of the American army proved decisive for the allies. 19 months after Wilson declared war, Germany surrendered. The final terms of the peace would be decided at a conference in Paris. 

Although no sitting U.S. president had ever traveled to Europe, there was no question that Woodrow Wilson would make the trip. He set sail for France on December 4th, 1918. Carrying with him the hopes of the world for a piece that would last for all time. He was greeted rapturously. He was regarded as the embodiment of this fresh new force from the other side of the Atlantic that had brought this horrible bloody conflict to an end. He wiped to Paris to London to Rome. Children threw roses as his feet, millions of people turned out to see him. He was the hero, the savior out of the west. Wilson had to make many compromises in Paris, but when the treaty was finally signed at the Palace of Versailles, he had gotten what he wanted most. A provision for the establishment of the League of Nations. Still, as he sailed for home, there was one stumbling block remaining, approval by the Republican controlled U.S. Senate. In Washington, Wilson faced vehement opposition from senator Henry Cabot lodge, the powerful Republican chairman of the foreign relations committee. When Wilson came home from Paris, he consists on hand delivering the treaty to the Senate. And when he got to the Senate door, Henry Cabot lodge asked Wilson. 

If he could carry in the treaty and Wilson turned to lodge and said, not on your life, senator. Refusing to negotiate with the Senate, Wilson sought to rally public opinion for the treaty. To do so, he set out on a physically demanding cross country speaking tour. He never listened to his Doctor Who kept saying take it easy on this trip. Don't strain himself insisted on doing it. He was in Pueblo Colorado. He suddenly was overcome. He was a physical collapse at that point, and he had to curtail his modern story around the country. Returned to Washington where he suffered a severe stroke. Wilson really was seriously impaired by that stroke. From October 1919 till March 1921, the United States really didn't have much of a chief executive and Woodrow Wilson. Edith Wilson was fiercely protective of her husband. She kept most visitors away and tried to cover up the severity of his condition. She also took it upon herself to relay important matters of state to the president, and report back on what Wilson was thinking. 

For the 18 months remaining the presidency went to almost say that, indeed, misses Wilson was a kind of president. It was an extraordinary moment in American history. Wilson's illness clearly clearly contributed to the political gridlock that spread over the capitol at this terrible crucial moment with the league and the treaty at stake. On March 19th, 1920, the ailing president was informed that the treaty and therefore the League of Nations had met its final defeat in the Senate. He replied, they have shamed us in the eyes of the world. Wilson's failure to compromise had far reaching implications. Without U.S. support, the League of Nations proved ineffective, setting the stage for another generation to fight another World War. I happen to think if Wilson had been healthy, he would have given enough ground so that the Senate would have had to go along with the Treaty of Versailles. The United States would have joined the League of Nations and the course of world history over the next 20 years might have been materially different. 

Despite his failure to get the treaty ratified, Woodrow Wilson had succeeded in laying the cornerstone for a new relationship between America and the world. That idea of what the proper role of the United States Vis-à-vis the world ought to be, Wilson knows the first president to grapple with that whole set of problems and ideas. We're still trying to sort that out today. Woodrow Wilson appeared on the $100,000 bill, the largest American denomination ever printed. Never circulated, it was only used by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. By 1920, Americans were tired of war abroad and progressive programs at home. The high minded rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson had lost its appeal. The country was in a conservative mood. Number 29 Warren G. Harding, Republican, 1921 to 1923, 55 years old, from Ohio. 

Warren Harding is the only president to be elected on his birthday. In his successful campaign, he touted a return to normalcy. We're not going to do anything big in ambitious. We're going to create a period in which things are quiet and calm. A former newspaper man, Harding was the 7th president born in the state of Ohio. No one ever accused him of being a cold fish. He was an extrovert, a gambler, a drinker, and allegedly a womanizer. He also played the susa phone. He liked to be around people, like to glad hand, but to slap people in the back. That's actually a rather valuable political skill. Harding has been portrayed as someone who wasn't fit to be president, that he lacked intellect and ambition. People will say that he didn't want to be president or that he didn't have the self confidence to do it. He did want to be president. He was a savvy man in his politics, and he did have a very strong sense for what he wanted to accomplish. Harding wasn't the type of president who thought he had all the answers. Mister Harding said that he was inviting the best minds into the cabinet. In a very real sense, this was the case. 

His Secretary of State was Charles Evans Hughes, who was a distinguished man, his secretary of commerce was Herbert Hoover. This was a good cabinet. Harding's most important achievement was the budget and accounting act of 1921. Passed at Harding's urging, it gave the executive branch greater control over federal spending. And for the first time in history, required the president to submit an annual budget to Congress. Harding scored the other great success of his presidency when he convened an international conference in Washington that resulted in an historic arms reduction agreement between the naval powers of the world. The Washington naval conference was the only serious arms limitation arrangement that was made in the 20s and 30s. That was mister Harding. In the summer of 1923, Harding took a train trip west, becoming the first sitting president to visit Alaska. But his health was failing. 

On July 29th he arrived at the palace hotel in San Francisco and checked into the presidential suite to recuperate. Four days later, with his wife Florence at his bedside, the president suffered a heart attack. Florence pleaded with the doctors to save him, but it was too late. Harding was dead. Those people who have any image of Harding at all, remember him as a kind of joke. And certainly is a failure. We hard for such people to understand the enormity of the response to Harding's death. It would be a short lived period of grief and reverence, less than a year after his death, several scandals came to light that forever shattered Harding's image. The most significant scandal involved Harding secretary of the interior, Albert fall. He was accused of improperly leasing navy oil reserves at Elk hills, California, and teapot dome in Wyoming, to a pair of wealthy oilmen in exchange for an illegal kickback. Teapot dome, as the affair came to be known, was the most infamous presidential scandal prior to Watergate. I don't know of any evidence that Harding actually was complicit in these scandals or that he personally benefited from them. But he certainly was guilty of appointing mediocre, not very honest people, the very significant positions. Harding's reputation was further tarnished by the publishing of two scandalous books. 

One insinuated that the president's wife, Florence, had poisoned him. Another was written by nan britton, a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Harding and given birth to his daughter. These sensational tales were dubious at best, but widely believed at the time. Today, Harding is remembered more for the scandals that swirled around him, both real and imagined than anything else. One historian who has reexamined Harding's record thinks history has been particularly unfair to our 29th president. He was a good president, even verging on an excellent president. His great tragedy was that physically he was unable to live out his term. He was good with the Senate. He was good on foreign affairs. He was good with the budget. And I asked what more do you wish? When president Harding died, vice president Calvin Coolidge was at his father's home in rural Vermont. Coolidge's father, a justice of the peace, swore him in by lantern light over the family Bible. 

Number 30 Calvin Coolidge, Republican, 1923 to 1929, 52 years old from Massachusetts. He was a kind of cramped, somewhat mean spirited, not very sociable or genial man. Before being tapped as Harding's vice president, Coolidge had been a lawyer and governor of Massachusetts. The man they called silent Cal was indeed quiet, and when he did speak, it was in a high nasal voice. Despite claiming that his only hobby was running for office, Coolidge was an avid fisherman. He also had a dry New England wit. There's a story of him at a state dinner and a woman sitting next to him trying to engage him, says, I'll bet you, mister president, that I can get you to say more than two words in the course of this evening. And he turned to her briefly and said, you lose. Coolidge had a novel way of getting exercise. By writing this mechanical horse in his White House bedroom. The president would write it before dinner in the evening. He would ride the horse and get all sweaty. Get off the horse down and eat. History hasn't recorded whether the president preferred to gallop or trot. Although normally stoic, Coolidge was always game to play dress up for a good photo opportunity. In 1924, less than a year into his presidency, voters were content to keep cool with Coolidge. By electing him to a full term of his own. 

On March 4th, 1925, he was sworn in by chief justice William Howard Taft. The first time in history an ex-president gave the oath of office to a president. During his administration, Coolidge kept a tight reign on the federal budget. He used his veto power to kill pay raises for postal workers and bonuses for World War I veterans. He also lowered taxes twice. His goal was to keep government small and business booming. He believed in American business as the dominant force in American life. He once said he who builds a factory builds a temple. He who works there worships there. Coolidge presided over a period of prosperity, but his economic policies failed to anticipate the future, and the calamity of The Great Depression that lay ahead. Coolidge did what the time seemed to require. If he made a mistake, it was in the economics of the time which he did not understand, and I think most of the people of his generation did not understand. The president may have missed the increasing signs of economic instability because his management style was to rely heavily on his cabinet. The case in point was Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury. 

He was the third richest man in the country at no recession, not to mention depression could touch him. And I think he didn't understand what was going on and Coolidge trusted in melon. And thereby made an error. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge decided not to run for a second term and his secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover won The White House. Popular in his day, Coolidge is now largely a forgotten figure. A quiet president who presided over a roaring era. President Harding often hosted poker games at The White House and once gambled away a set of presidential China from Benjamin Harrison's administration. Before The Great Depression turned Herbert Hoover's name into a synonym for presidential failure, he was actually one of the most respected men in America. After the outbreak of World War I, Hoover had organized a relief effort that saved millions from starvation in war torn Belgium. He was later the food administrator under Woodrow Wilson. And secretary of commerce for both Harding and Coolidge. 

History is badly blighted his reputation because he had the huge misfortune to be in office during the depression. Hoover was elected president in 1928 because he was universally understood as probably the largest public figure of the entire proceeding decade. Number 31 Herbert Hoover, Republican. 1929 to 1933, 54 years old from California. Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi. Orphaned as a boy in Iowa and taken in by relatives on the West Coast, Hoover was a shy loner with a tendency toward melancholy. After graduating from Stanford, he built a successful mining company that made him a millionaire. Like many presidents, fishing was his favorite pastime. And then there was Hoover ball. Told by a White House doctor that he needed to exercise, Hoover came up with his own game. Who have always one of those ways of not only stimulating physical exercise, but encouraging the leaders and of the government to get together every morning before they started their work day to share ideas. Hoover was often seen as a big business Republican who didn't relate to the common man. 

He wore those stiff and double breasted suits and the big high collar and so on and his personal demeanor was quite stiff and reserved. So it was easy to lampoon it, and caricature him as a stereotypical big businessman. Hoover was indeed a businessman, one of an early handful of international capitalists, but he also had a highly developed sense of social obligation. Herbert Hoover once said that the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. There are two damned greedy. So I don't think as we look at big business today and we look at things like enron and other corporations. That Herbert Hoover would have approved at all. He would have been appalled at those industry leaders and what they did. Ashamed, indeed. Hoover did try to apply the efficiency of business management to his task as president. It's true that George W. Bush is the first MBA to be president of the United States, but Herbert Hoover was a very successful business person. And he had a very crisp executive style. Herbert Hoover was what we had now called a workaholic. I mean, this was a man who really believed in work. He's the man who's always on the job and believes that if only I could work harder and only I could put more hours in on it. I'll solve the problem. With his strong work ethic and proven management skills, Hoover seemed destined for presidential greatness. The only problem was that the economy totally tanked as of October 1929. 

Many of the qualities that made him look that he would be so good for leading a period of prosperity were really not up to dealing with the challenges of the depression. As a depression president, Hoover was handicapped by his innate lack of charisma. His lackluster public speeches did little to inspire confidence. What are people need? Is the restoration of their normal jobs? The recovery of agricultural prices and a business. Hoover didn't believe in using direct government intervention to ward off the depression. Instead, he relied on what he called voluntarism, asking corporations to voluntarily improve working conditions and wages. If I could have counseled Herbert Hoover in 1930 or 1931, I would have said, mister president, the government needs to do more. Volunteerism isn't going to work. Unfortunately, I think what happened to Hoover was that the depression traumatized him. He made his plight much worse by becoming extremely defensive, he just didn't have the temperament among other things to deal with the crisis of this magnitude. Hoover had the misfortune of running for reelection in the depths of the depression. In 1932 campaign turned his name into a permanent punchline. 

A Hoover hotel was a cardboard shack. A hooverville was a collection of cardboard shacks. A Hoover flag was an empty pocket turned inside out. The summer of 1932 was miserable for Hoover. He hit the campaign trail and tried to put on a brave face. Wherever he appeared, there were angry Americans, with signs, critical of him. There were people who shouted, we want bread and everywhere he went, was the specter of hunger. It must have hurt him tremendously to keep him. In June, a contingent of desperate World War I veterans arrived in Washington to demand early payment of bonuses that weren't due to be paid until 1945. When these bonus marchers occupied several buildings in downtown Washington, Hoover enlisted the help of general Douglas MacArthur to clear them out. Macarthur exceeded his authority, not only evacuated the buildings, but pressed all the way on to anacostia flats. Where there was this encampment of the so called bonus marchers. And he torched the encampment, burned it to the ground. 

Macarthur never took the rap for this. He exceeded his orders and exceeded his authority from president hoop. Hoover took the blame for this. Politically, and this was in a sense the last nail in his political coffin. When Hoover's challenger, Franklin Roosevelt heard about the debacle, he told an adviser, this elects me. What Roosevelt offered was a sense of hope that even if today I don't have enough to eat or even if today I don't have a job, it will be better tomorrow. Whereas it seemed that during Hoover's administration, it just wasn't getting any better. Still, some historians think that looking at Hoover through the prism of FDR is unfair. Imagine if somebody like FDR had been in office. In 1929. You know, some of the real public charmer in a glad hander. By 1932, they would have been clamoring for somebody different. Somebody who's not a politician, somebody who understands the economy. Somebody like Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover was the first president to have a telephone on his Oval Office desk, and the first to hire an executive staff. Intelligent, but not brilliant. 

Pampered from birth as the only child of aristocrats and crippled by polio. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hardly predestined for a rendezvous with presidential greatness. But his political flexibility and infectious charisma made him perfectly suited to meet the unprecedented challenges of his presidency. Dwayne knew for the American people. Number 32 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat, 1933 to 1945, 51 years old from New York. FDR is different from its predecessors as only a difference of degree. About a 180 of them. FDR was the 5th cousin of Theodore Roosevelt. He was a C student at Harvard, enjoyed sailing and stamp collecting. Although he could be very private, FDR brought an easy charm to The White House. It must have been amazing to meet Franklin Roosevelt. Everybody talks about it. What a strong personality he had. Winston Churchill compared meeting him to opening your first bottle of champagne. He was a person of enormous personal charm, but so many of his contemporaries say that at bottom they didn't know what made him tick, what was really going on behind what they frequently called the actor's mask of his face. Mister Roosevelt's daughter Anna said that he was very difficult to know that no one really knew him. He was a loner. 

FDR was stricken with polio at the age of 39. He was virtually confined to the homemade wheelchair that he personally designed using a kitchen chair. During his presidency, the handicap was downplayed. He tried to be photographed standing, even though he had to lock these ten pound leg braces to actually get in the standing position and had to brace himself on something a lectern or the arm of an associate. Clinging to someone's arm, he could disguise his painful steps. He also had a customized Ford that he drove with hand controls. In newsreels, he appeared to be an able bodied man. What the newsreels wouldn't show was how he managed to get out of the car. He would have had to have been lifted up. All those images are kept from the public by choice of the media. Roosevelt's executive leadership, like his Oval Office desk, was often cluttered and chaotic, pitting advisers against each other. It was an unorthodox management style. Somehow he is the model of the successful president. Frankly, I think he's an unfortunate model. 

A notion that it's rather nice to, I have a certain amount of administrative chaos and I have your subordinates competing with each other and fighting with each other because that's supposed to make things more creative. But he was not a perfect president by any means. And I think it's a shame that he has been taken as some sort of standard of perfection ever since. What looks to others that sometimes like his messy management style of allowing too many people into the room and letting them all ventilate and so on. I think that's a mistake. I think this was part of his political genius was to build a political house, I can put it this way where all those voices could be heard. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States. FDR used radio to bring the presidency closer to the people. It is estimated that as many as 60% of Americans tuned in for some of his fireside chats. Roosevelt was a master broadcaster. 

This nation will remain a neutral nation. But I can not ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. He just had the sense of drama that could take a brother dull political speech. And emphasize just the right points. Bring it to the crescendo, right when you needed to be at the crescendo. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. During his first hundred days in office, FDR pushed an unprecedented slate of legislation through Congress to fight the depression. This was the start of the new deal. New deal is a series of initiatives. That imparted a much greater degree of security and safety and stability to American life in all kinds of sectors than the banking sector, investment sector and home building home owning sectors I employment and so on. Franklin Roosevelt had a great political partner in the new deal, his First Lady. 

The crippling effects of the president's polio made Eleanor indispensable to him. She could be his eyes and his ears and his legs, and she could tour the country, and she could reach out to people, and then she could bring the country back to him. She was always pushing the new deal and him to do more in terms of social welfare and helping Americans. And I think that in many ways, we can really see her as the conscience of the new deal. The new deal expanded beyond those first hundred days. In 1935, Congress passed the social security act, creating a safety net for the elderly, disabled and unemployed. Despite the passage of the social security act, FDR's new deal didn't put an end to the depression. It would take the industrial mobilization of World War II to achieve that goal. In a sense, he didn't succeed any better than Herbert Hoover did, economically. Where rosal succeeded was in exuding public confidence. Making the depression more palatable to people, giving people the impression that he really was doing something that he really cared. 

FDR clearly had the country believing that happy days were here again. In 1936 he was reelected in one of the great landslides in American political history. 61% of those who voted cast a ballot for Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was feeling invincible. People talk about Roosevelt's perfect pitch as a politician. Well, that perfect pitch deserted him in his second term. To solemnly swear. We really see a series of serious missteps after this incredible landslide victory in 1936. From Texas by his second inauguration, FDR was worried that the conservative Supreme Court would nullify the legislative successes of his first term. He concocted a plan to tip the balance of the court by increasing the number of justices. This seemed to many people to be a kind of power grab that went beyond what was necessary to deal with social problems and reflected a desire for power by Roosevelt himself. The court packing plan failed and Roosevelt's second term became mired in legislative gridlock. The heady days of the new deal were over, and FDR's claim on presidential greatness was yet to be fulfilled.