Free The Plots Against the President by Sally Denton Page A

Machiavellian terms. “He let the outgoing president hang himself—and the American economy—so that he could enter stage left as a hero … He understood that the lower Hoover and the country slid, the better he would look upon assuming office.” Even Moley, one of his closest advisers, ultimately took a similarly cynical view, later commenting that Roosevelt “either did not realize how serious the situation was or … preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation.”
    But most of Roosevelt’s supporters thought his position unavoidable. Aside from that during the run-up to the Civil War, it was the most dangerous interregnum in the history of America. Roosevelt was convinced that Hoover was setting a trap for him—a suspicion confirmed when he learned that a Hoover cabinet member had said of Roosevelt, “We now have the fellow in a hole that he is not going to be able to get out of.” It seemed that Hoover, like Al Smith before, had grossly underestimated his adversary. As it was, Roosevelt decided to keep his own counsel and wait until he could grab the helm of a country rocking dangerously on turbulent seas.
    In the short span of 150 years—from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the twentieth century—the democracy envisioned by the founding fathers was an evolving work-in-progress. As in the “Jeffersonian Era” and the “Age of Jackson,” the stakes were astronomical, the threats were both internal and external, and the perils were potentially fatal. The nation’s financial order had collapsed. Powerless, Roosevelt was relegated to the dugout while Hoover presided over the nation’s wallowing. Roosevelt could do nothing but watch as unemployment rose to seventeen million and thousands of banks and businesses failed. And that was just on the home front.
    The global economy was disintegrating. Events in Europe and Asia signaled the inevitability of another world war. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was at the peak of his civil disobedience against the British occupation. Blood was flowing in the streets of Havana, where a dictator had suspended the Cuban constitution. People throughout the world, it seemed, were in varying states of unrest.
    The impulse that had swept America to overwhelmingly elect Franklin Roosevelt, the upheaval that was shuffling the world order, and the global reassessment of philosophies and ideologies were all colliding as 1933 began. The year was a gateway to the modern half of the twentieth century, a turning point in America’s direction—in the powers of the presidency, in the relationship between the government and the people, and in the expansion of a new mass media.
    It was a decisive moment in American history, one when the country, born fifteen decades earlier out of hope and idealism might have toppled.

Chapter Ten
    Year of Fear
    â€œThe situation is critical, Franklin,” Walter Lippmann told the president-elect in early 1933. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”
    The columnist was not alone in his anxiety that the revolutionary climate could spawn a demagogue. Many had a deep premonition that American democracy as it had existed was coming to an end. For his part, Lippmann—a “reluctant convert” to Roosevelt—now believed that the state of emergency demanded measures that transcended the routine methods of government. Congress should not be allowed “to obstruct, to delay, to mutilate, and to confuse,” he wrote, recommending that it suspend debate for a year, giving Roosevelt free rein to rescue the country from its deathbed. “The danger we have to fear is not that Congress will give Franklin D. Roosevelt too much power, but that it will deny him the powers he needs. A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such