Free The Plots Against the President by Sally Denton

decade,” Kennedy wrote. These notes were coming due, and Europe, never having fully recovered from the war, had fallen into a deep economic depression. The Allies were in varying stages of default on their loans, and Great Britain was threatening to suspend payment of its ninety-five-million-dollar installment, due December 15, 1932. While Congress and most Americans predictably favored holding the Europeans liable for their financial obligations, many intellectuals, financiers, and economists advocated forgiving the war debts in order to stimulate the international economy. Integrally tied to the debt issue was the question of whether every nation should return to the gold standard—in simplistic terms, a method requiring each monetary unit throughout the world to be backed by a fixed quantity of gold bullion, thereby stabilizing international currency exchange rates. Indeed, the system had worked for the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, but Great Britain had abandoned it in 1914 to finance World War I with treasury notes, which then forced several other countries off the standard.
    Hoover strongly opposed cancellation of the debts and was so emotionally attached to gold that he once described it as a sacred substance “enshrined in human instincts for over 10,000 years.” For his part, Roosevelt had not yet formulated a policy on the war debt issue. As for the gold standard, Roosevelt repeatedly joked that he didn’t even know what it was—a remark that unhinged the humorless Hoover, whose biggest fear was that Roosevelt would abandon the gold standard and thereby destroy America.
    If Hoover’s gambit “had all the appearance of a magnificent gesture of statesmanship,” as David M. Kennedy said in his magisterial Freedom from Fear , it “also contained sinister political implications.” Ultimately, Roosevelt came to see Hoover’s overture as a presumptuous power play and an effort to deflect blame away from himself, who, as president for four years and secretary of commerce for eight years before that, bore personal responsibility for the current disaster.
    In any event, the pressure from Hoover had the unintended effect of prodding Roosevelt into deep analysis of the domestic and foreign policy issues that had only received perfunctory examination during the campaign. Ironically, Hoover’s not-so-subtle scheming sparked Roosevelt’s musings on what would become the New Deal. On December 22, 1932, Roosevelt diplomatically dismissed Hoover’s advances—though not without implying that he did not appreciate the lame-duck president’s “attempt to mousetrap him into agreement with the policies of a discredited and defeated administration”—and began in earnest his preparations for governing.
    Cloistered with his advisers, Roosevelt began designing his program for recovery. “By March 4 next we may have anything on our hands from recovery to revolution,” Adolph Berle told him. “The chance is about even either way. My impression is that the country wants and would gladly support a rather daring program.” Even the habitually confident Eleanor wondered whether anyone could “do anything to save America now.”
    As the nation slipped deeper into distress, Roosevelt was powerless to act until he was sworn in on March 4, 1933. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified two months earlier, moving the presidential inauguration from March to January 20 of the year following the election. But since that amendment would not take effect until 1937, the old rules currently applied.
    Some observers—contemporaneous journalists and later historians—found it cruel and calculating for Roosevelt to sit on the sidelines as the economy sank and the misery widened. Roosevelt “used Hoover as a foil,” wrote author Jonathan Alter, seeing the situation in the most