FDR's Bold Proclamation for Power Grab

Good morning. It’s March 4, 2013, the date in U.S. history featuring two of the most memorable presidential speeches – the first inaugural addresses of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln beseeched as he closed his 1861 inaugural address. “We must not be enemies.” The new president challenged a bitterly divided nation to dream of a day when “the bonds of affection” between North and South would be restored and Americans would once again embrace “the better angels of our nature.”

Franklin Roosevelt was the last president sworn in on March 4. It became clear in 1932-1933 that the lengthy transition between Election Day and Inauguration Day was not only a needless vestige, but a perilous one: the United States was essentially leaderless as it sank into the economic maw of the Great Depression.

“Let me assert my firm belief,” FDR said near the beginning of that first inaugural speech, “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Herbert Hoover had been cautioning his countrymen against succumbing to fear for the better part of a year, but few Americans were still listening to him. And the famous line now associated with Franklin Roosevelt -– but not original to him -- wasn’t in the draft of the speech handed to the president-elect by its author, Columbia University law professor Raymond Moley, in FDR’s suite at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

When Roosevelt asked former newspaperman Louis McHenry Howe to review the speech, Howe added the famous line that would help define FDR’s persona. Little remembered now, Howe served as an advance man, speechwriter, political strategist, and trusted personal confidant to both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. He did not survive the Roosevelts' first term in the White House, but FDR publicly credited him – along with James Farley – with his 1932 victory.

But Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address had a great deal more material in it than an inspiring line, and much of this material is highly relevant today. FDR was assuming office at a time of great economic hardship in this country. To meet this challenge, the new president served notice of his intention to invoke extraordinary, if unspecific, executive authority.

If Lincoln took pains to assert Constitutional authority for the great executive powers he wielded, Roosevelt is not so fussy. He paid lip service in his inaugural to his “constitutional duty to recommend” his plans to Congress, but suggests he’ll circumvent rival branches of government, if necessary, in pursuit of “a larger good.”

Like Lincoln, FDR also employs Biblical references. But in Roosevelt’s allegories, he assumes the role of Jesus himself, chastising “unscrupulous money changers [who] have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilizations.” And although Roosevelt’s speech is also full of religious imagery, the message at the end is bolstered by a martial metaphor.

“But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me,” Roosevelt says. “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”