I am the Edison Hosea. Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor mightily. Ask not what your country can do to you.
Kennedy has been shot. One more left. It is true to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It was May of 1932. It's a spectacle unparalleled in the history of the country. And something was very wrong in the land of plenty.
A day of bloodshed and riot. There were those of us who felt that America was teetering on the brink of revolution. For three years the Great Depression had tormented Americans.
Now 20,000 Army veterans and their families came pouring into Washington to find out what the government was going to do about it. They were bearded. They were ragged.
They were desperate. You could see it in their eyes. They'd been promised a bonus for their service in World War I, but it was not due to be paid until 1945. The desperate veterans wanted their money now. They were called the Bonus Army. On July 28th, the Bonus Army came to blows with Washington police.
Shots were fired. President Herbert Hoover barricaded himself in the White House and called out the troops. Soldiers have ordered to burn down the unsanitary and illegal camps.
And the roaring flames sound the death knell to the fantastic Bonus Army. When the smoke cleared, two veterans and an infant were dead. It's absolutely shameful.
The sacrifice of the young American boys left such an impression on me, I have never forgotten it. They were just trying to feed their families. Millions of Americans could no longer provide for their families. With nowhere to turn for help, they were angry and they were approaching their breaking point.
Three years into the Depression, the American system was in grave danger. Unless it could change, and change quickly, it might not survive. Bad times had arrived without warning. After a decade of expanding prosperity, almost overnight, the Wall Street crash of 1929 shattered America's confidence in its economy.
I was 11 years old, but how well I remember it. It was like the skies had grown dark. Thunder.
And all of a sudden faces were tragic. And people were walking around in the hallways of our building and in the streets with inquiring eyes and saying, has it happened to you? Has it happened to us?
What is happening? The living telegrams at that time, and pretty soon you could feel a horror behind the door you was knocking. When you knock on the door, when the voice come out, yeah, who is it, who is it? I say, I have a telegram.
Well, slide it under the door, slide it under, or go away, get away from me, get away from me. The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 was only the most visible sign of a massive economic crisis. A crisis that spread quickly from Wall Street to Main Street.
Miriam Johnson was living in California when the Great Depression arrived at her house. I was 11 when the crash came. My father at that time, along with a few friends, owned a small grocery store. One day he came home and he laid two dollars on the table in the kitchen. And he said, no more store.
Everything is gone. And that was the end. For us, it was the end.
Every day produce more bankruptcies, more layoffs, more people with less money in their pockets. Even US Steel, a symbol of American industrial might since the turn of the century, was brought to its knees. In three years, the entire full-time payroll was laid off. 225,000 workers.
The Depression hit this country all over. It hit the farm areas, it hit the cities. We were just there out of work and out of food and everybody was baffled you know nobody had ever had that experience before.
I had been saving for maybe five six years a piggy bank and money in a piggy bank nickels pennies dimes the most. It turns out that I was the only one in the family that had any money. Because one day I came home, and I grabbed hold of my piggy bank just to give it a shake, and there was nothing in it.
My mother was looking at me, and she said, your father borrowed the money. He has to go out to look for work and he needed money to go downtown. He came home and I didn't say anything but my eyes, face was swollen with tears my eyes were blinking with tears and my father took me in his arms and he said I'm sorry I had to have money but it's a loan I'll pay it back to you.
He never did. He never did. My family had exhausted all its credit with the local merchants.
And on one occasion, my father came home and asked what was for dinner that night, and my mother said, there's nothing. How could that be? How could there be nothing? It was one of the few times in my life that I was fearful for myself. Fearful of losing what little they had left, people rushed to the banks to withdraw their savings.
But the banks, too, were short of cash. One year after the crash, 800 of them had failed. Nine million savings accounts were wiped out.
There was a janitor called George Gellis. who had a thousand dollars in the bank of the united states it had taken galley's 40 years to save a thousand dollars after spending two nights and two days in the pouring rain outside this shuttered locked back beating literally beating on the walls with his hands in frustration he realized he was never going to see 10 cents of his money He went back to the basement where he lived, and he hanged himself in despair. That's what bank failures did. They crushed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of ordinary people like George Gellis.
With their savings gone and layoffs increasing, people were forced to sell their cars, their furniture, their wedding rings. Before long, half the country's home mortgages were in default. Families across America found themselves facing eviction. I remember my brother and I and my mother just couldn't stand to see it happen. So we left my father there to face the auctioneers.
When we came home that evening, evening and we met my father who told us yes the house was sold it was gone and everything that we had had was no longer ours the land was gone the house was gone and we had 30 days in which time to move up and my mother sat on the side of the bed and cried it was the first time I'd ever seen her cry I'll never forget that moment. That's how our family was affected. And we were not unique.
You know what hurt me most about it was the look of pain on my mother's and father's faces. I couldn't bear to look at them, to look at their misery, to look at their disgrace. They felt they had only themselves to blame.
This was a different generation. This was a generation that had grown up. With the old faith, the faith self-reliance, the people had to stand on their own two feet.
They said the government has failed me. They said, I'm to blame. I failed in this American system of ours.
It's my fault. One year after the crash, four million American families were without any means of support. Worse, they didn't know how to ask for help, and their government didn't know how to provide it.
In 1930, the American people had almost no sense of the national government. There was the post office. Occasionally, you'd see a soldier on the street. The national government had very little direct impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.
There were no... No parachutes in those days. There was no Social Security, no unemployment insurance, no nothing. We're on your own.
By 1931, hard times seemed to be everywhere. But if you could still spare a dime, you could slip into a glamorous world where the roaring 20s had never ended. If you go to the Grand Lake Theater, I hear Horace...
and his orchestra play for half an hour. Then they'd have the movie tone news. And then they'd have the feature story. And then they would have Bugs Bunny or the equivalent comic. And then they'd have the second film.
feature. By that time the orchestra was getting ready to play again. So you could spend about six or seven hours for 15 cents.
There was no television, there was only radio. So this visual escape into a dark theater, you could literally forget your troubles and get happy. Many people tried to dance their troubles away, off into the carefree, irresistible rhythms of a new generation of jazz music.
Music that was sweeping the country. Swing. Swing it, honey child. Ossie Q's going to town and home. Meet Richard Colmer as Boston Blackie.
Enemy to those who make him an enemy. Friend to those who have no friend. Many more were transfixed by the gripping dramas of radio. During the Depression, the radio was the one appliance people could not live without.
I used to watch the radio. It was like gathering my television. The shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows.
Turn off the lights! We're going to clean them out today. You didn't know that they were standing on a stage reading from scripts. You just thought they were doing it.
Alright boys, let's head out! What I liked most was to go into my room. and turn off all the lights. I didn't want any interference and just listen to it.
My father thought I was a little weird, and he'd always come in and turn the lights on and say, what's wrong with you? And I said, nothing's wrong with me. This is really a great way to listen to it.
But sooner or later people had to turn the radio off. They had to leave the movie theater. And when they did, the depression was still there, awaiting. It advanced upon the farmers of the South and Midwest in terrifying storms of dry dust.
It was one of the worst droughts in American history. The land itself was blowing away. It looked like a tornado coming, big black clouds of dust coming across the desert there.
It was terrible. You couldn't breathe. You'd put something over your face, a handkerchief, and try to breathe through it. And you'd spit out mud balls.
25,000 square miles of farmland became known as the Dust Bowl. For farmers who'd been suffering through their own economic crisis since the 1920s, it was the final blow. Leaving their farmhouses and barns to rot, they fled westward for the promised land, California. Dust-weary farmers joined millions of other penniless people who were wandering the country looking for a second chance. The transportation of choice was the freight train.
Riding the rails was dangerous. The trains were patrolled by vicious guards. But the price was right.
When they're going to leave, they give you the highball. And that's two shorts and a long. Man, you better get ready then because he's pulling out. A couple of lies and sightless fools along the way I've taken. Sightless windows stare the empty streets.
No love beckons me save that which I have forsaken. The anguish of my solitude is sweet. The actor Robert Mitchum wrote his poem in 1932 when he was just another teenager in search of salvation. Time. There were so many people on the train that the train crew couldn't walk the tops.
I met former bankers, college professors, all sorts of people riding freight trains. A lot of them didn't really have a destination, they were just trying to get away from where they were. But everywhere they got to seemed just as hopeless as the place they'd left behind.
Numbers of towns would arrest those people who came there. There was particular concern about what were called the wild boys of the road. President Hoover sent undercover agents to ride the rails and assess the danger. One of them was a young law student named Melvin Belli.
You saw a part of America at that time that gave fear to everybody in Washington. There's something wrong with the country and it's so wrong that these people are going to want a revolution. Strikes and protests were spreading, becoming angrier and more violent. Belli Wheeler was a 19-year-old truck driver when he witnessed a demonstration in New York. The square was just filled with mobs of...
They were demonstrating, it turned out, for unemployment relief, unemployment benefits. And the police and the firemen were mowing them down with fire hoses. Cops were beating them on the head. It was unbelievable. Ladies and gentlemen, the fire police!
Radical movements like the Communist Party were gaining influence and converts. President Hoover misread the danger signals and still did nothing to ease the suffering. We are convinced that we have overcome a major financial crisis, a crisis in severity unparalleled... For some, the loss of faith was so profound that they simply fled the country.
Three years after Joseph Stalin had predicted the death of capitalism, a hundred thousand Americans moved to the Soviet Union to help build communism. There was work for anybody that wanted to work. There was none of this going around with your hat, your hand, tears in your eyes, begging for a job. It seemed to be a land of great promise at that time. This was the only time in history that more people were leaving America than coming to it.
In time, the Great Depression spread like a virus far beyond American borders. Underwater. Signs of a political times.
In Germany, the situation was becoming dangerous. The depression only made worse the already harsh conditions brought on by Germany's loss in World War I. There was real poverty. There was mass unemployment. Because of this, there were protest marches, demonstrations, street fightings. Unemployed people, they walked through the town and they shouted slogans, give us bread, give us work.
There was so much unrest, so much disorder. That the cry for a... We needed a powerful leader, a powerful man to lead us out of it.
The first time I saw the Nazis, they marched around in town with brown shirts on, they had proper uniforms and they had music and they had flags. And I remember how it impressed me, something military. The children belong along them and try to sing their songs. The leader of the Nazi movement knew instinctively that Germany's suffering was his opportunity.
Adolf Hitler told the demoralized Germans that he could cure what ailed them. His speeches, they were rousing. He started always off quietly. Then he talked about ordinary things and then he worked himself up. Saying something like Our enemies they think we are the foot map of the world and I promise you I will erase all that We demand our place in the sun which is rightly ours And I will lead you there.
I will lead you there. I promise it We had tears in our eyes When will we be able to stand up again? In 1932, Hitler's rapidly growing Nazi party took 37% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Though not a majority, he had outpolled all the other parties. Hitler used his new strength to seize the chancellorship of Germany and destroy opposition to his rule.
On January 30th, 1933, his followers celebrated his ascension to power with a torchlight victory parade through Berlin. Propelled by hard times, the Nazi era had begun. The procession moved on through the Wilhelmstraße. Martian music could be heard, the torchlights were...
were gleaming and there was this strange light in the street. And there was this atmosphere of irreality almost. It's almost black magic. Hitler was able to. to arouse the masses in such ways that they forgot reason.
But he had charisma, no doubt about that. And he promised the people that they would get work. People were desperate, you see. People being desperate, they will run after a man like Hitler.
1932 was also a year of decision for Americans. Republican President Herbert Hoover campaigned for re-election. Only to find that everywhere he went, his name had become synonymous with failure.
Shanty towns of unemployed men were now called Hoovervilles. Newspapers were Hoover blankets, empty pockets, Hoover flags. The very first task of this country is to see that no man, woman or child shall go hungry. It was said of Hoover that even dogs took an instinctive dislike to him. We have yet to go a long ways and to capture...
And in the 1932 campaign, one man wired him, vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous....strategy which we have established... California! Cast 44 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt. New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic Party candidate.
He had been struck by polio in 1921. He was known more for his charm than his accomplishments. Most people were not sure what he meant when he promised a new deal to the American people. Neither was he.
But Roosevelt appeared optimistic, confident, and he wasn't Herbert Hoover. What's our campaign slogan, Sissy? Happy days are here again. Good, that's right.
Roosevelt won in the greatest electoral landslide America had ever seen. And he faced perhaps the greatest challenge ever presented to an American leader. The 4 million unemployed of 1930 had turned into 16 million by 1933. 25% of the American workforce.
I mean, the American economy was in free fall. Colonists disagree to some extent on this, but we could have lost everything in 1933. It was that bad. On Inauguration Day, nearly 100,000 people braved a cold March morning to hear what the new president would do.
This great nation will endure as it has endured. that magnificent resonance coming out. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We had nothing to fear but fear itself, and everybody would look at each other, they'd nod their head. And then we'd say, my friends, everybody could feel he was talking to him.
That was one of his friends, that was one of his people. And me, a little black boy, down in Georgia, hearing that voice over the radio, you know, I felt it. It wasn't that he told it to daddy and daddy told it to me.
I told it to mama and then... No, he was talking to little Ossie sitting there listening to him. He could, through the magic of his voice and radio, reach out and involve you in the great adventure of the world. of building, making America work again.
Roosevelt moved decisively to restore confidence in the country's financial system. In one daring move, he closed the nation's banks and ordered the treasury to rush them $2 billion in new currency. Let me make it clear that the banks will take care of all needs.
The reaction was to his closing the bank, thank God somebody has come in and had done something. When the banks reopened, deposits easily exceeded withdrawals. Rescuing the banks was only the beginning. In his first hundred days in the White House, Roosevelt moved at a breathtaking pace, regulating business, helping farmers, pumping new money into the economy.
It was the most massive intervention in the lives of the American people the country had ever known. Roosevelt put people on the government payroll when private business didn't hire them fast enough. The wild boys of the road became part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, planting trees and building roads across America. They shipped us out to the bottom of Grand Canyon. We'd build trails, you know, for people coming in sightseeing.
We got $5 a month, and they sent $25 home for your family to live on. His was the federal government stepping in to help people. It may not have been enough. In some cases it didn't help.
But somebody was trying. And one had that feeling that maybe it was going to work. Millions of Americans had been helped in the first year of the New Deal, but for millions more, the year 1933 ended in frustration. President Roosevelt had lifted their spirits, but not their circumstances. After a time, the haunting thought could not be put down that maybe this Great Depression was never going to end.
But with the sense of rising expectations, people are stirred out of their lethargy. And in 1934, there's the most radical mood of any year of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt had contributed to that radical mood when he became the first American president to say that labor had a right to unionize.
But businessmen remained defiantly anti-union. In the spring of 1934, emboldened dock workers closed ports all along the Pacific coast. In San Franklinco, their strike turned violent. We heard on the radio that all this terrible stuff was going on in the waterfront. My husband was down there and I remember my mother and I were frightened and very upset with would Harold make it.
It got so bad that two men were killed. They were killed by bullets, ostensibly from the police. Nobody really ever figured that one out totally.
Harold was right on the corner where one was killed. Shocked the city. Killings then used to shock people. The funeral for the two murdered strikers drew 50,000 people.
That funeral was so... It so shocked the city. It was so impressive.
That was enough to infuriate the people of San Franklinco so much they said we've had it every day we'll watch these lawn shrubs and the seamen getting beaten and clubbed we've had it up to our eyebrows by God whatever it takes to win this fight we're gonna win it and they stopped all work even a barber says we refuse to give a haircut to anybody until the strike is over we're sympathized with the Union we sympathize with the men and so they shut the port down shut the city down little stores closed until our boys win the city was quiet as hell Nothing moved for four solid days. The Longshoremen won virtually all their demands, encouraging workers across the country to move against management. In 1934, there were more than 1,800 strikes for union recognition. Coal miners, steelworkers.
We're different people packing out. They said if a bunch of starving seamen and longshoremen weathered the storm, then we could do it back in Pittsburgh. Or we could do it here, we could do it there. Labor unrest was only one of Roosevelt's problems in 1934. Economic recovery had stalled, and critics complained that he'd gone too far.
The constitutionality of some New Deal programs were being challenged in the courts, and business leaders were warning that FDR had steered the country recklessly to the left. But Roosevelt knew that his program still hadn't reached millions of desperate Americans, and he didn't know how long they would wait. Discontent and frustration gave rise to any number of demagogues, including the charismatic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin.
Shelterless children and shelterless men and women. Dr. Franklin Townsend, self-proclaimed advocate for the elderly. Radical spellbinders who claimed the New Deal was dying.
During 1934, one of these would-be saviors developed a national following and presidential ambitions. He was called the Kingfish. Senator and former Louisiana Governor He Long.
After we told you people that Hoover was a numbskull... The best entertainment you had was when He came to town to speak....put it in to plow up Elisade, Roar Boston. Everybody went to hear him, whether they were for him or against him. He was marvelous.
The Lord has answered the prayer. He has called the barbecue. He used such expressive language.
He said the one hundred and fifty-five million Americans... And when people listened, many discovered they liked what they heard. What He Long was saying was that he was going to soak the rich and he was going to give that money to the poor.
His plan was never really carefully worked out, and in his own state in Louisiana, he fell notably short of redistributing the wealth. But... It had a kind of direct appeal that the more complex programs of the New Deal lacked and also provided a focus for the animus against the rich that had been building during the years of the Great Depression.
Long promised every American a house, a car, a radio. In return, he wanted power. Absolute. power. You couldn't do anything in Louisiana unless you got his okay.
He was vicious and if you told him no, he'd knock you down. He had built up a private police force. He had shown his contempt for the democratic processes, and that created a great deal of worry in Washington.
Not just Southerners, but Midwestern farmers and New York factory workers were joining Long's Share Our Wealth clubs. By 1935, Franklin Roosevelt was privately calling He Long the most dangerous man in America. They sat up and called General Hugh S. Johnson down here to take charge of that.
When you have food riots, you have the makings of a dictatorship. Don't think you wouldn't do it too. You might vote the wrong way.
He rose on the votes of the people, and He Long was rising on the votes of the people too. He Long never got the chance to run for president. He was cut down by an assassin in September 1935. By then, President Roosevelt was hard at work on a populist agenda of his own, pushing Congress to create the social security programs, welfare for the poor, and jobs for eight million people on public projects of every description. This was called the second hundred days, and it reshaped American life. The legislation of the second hundred days gives an underpinning to the economy that's not been there before.
There's now a system of unemployment compensation, of old age pensions. The United States for the first time has a centralized banking system. And by 1936 there are visible scenes of recovery. Six years after he lost his grocery store, Miriam Johnson's father found a steady job with the Works Progress Administration.
He was so happy to get up in the morning. My father was so happy, even though the work by this time he wasn't a kid, and it was picking shovel work, you know. But he was so happy to have something to do and to get paid for it. To me, the Roosevelt era revolutionized the perception of what government owes the people and what its role is.
We are fighting, fighting to save a great and precious form of government. The programs that he put in were imperative for that period. And I think it was a godsend that we had him, and we maintained the democracy that we had all cherished. Campaigning for a second term in 1936, Roosevelt told a cheering crowd, you look happier today than you did four years ago. And they were.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected. by the greatest margin in the history of American politics. In the four years since President Roosevelt had taken office, America had experienced a revolution, and it had been led by the President himself. The New Deal programs of the Depression era transformed the country's landscape. One project alone, the Tennessee Valley Authority, built dams, brought electricity, ended floods, and lifted families out of poverty in seven states.
But as he took office for his second term in January 1937, Roosevelt's New Deal still had not completely overcome the Depression in America. By 1937, the depression in Germany was over. Adolf Hitler had kept his promise to give the people work. Unemployed people disappeared practically overnight.
There were no young, healthy men. standing at the corners of Berlin and begging around for pennies. People had jobs, were happy. The secret of Germany's new prosperity was rearmament.
There were plenty of jobs making powerful new weapons and building a highway system as much for tanks as for cars. It was also a kind of new deal. He was preparing for war.
The first step came in March of 1936 when German troops marched unopposed into the Rhineland to reoccupy territory lost to France after the First World War. He was leading us to the place of the sun. And I sincerely and honestly believed in all that.
At home, until my father's arguments started and my mother often said, No, Fritz leaves that boy alone. He can't help it that he's so brainwashed. And then I started again with my mother, what do you mean by brainwashed?
Now, of course, I realize my parents were right, but... I... It's all too late.
Now Adolf Hitler would try to keep another promise to the German people. To build a new German Empire. One, he said, that would last a thousand years. A DEMONS'DREAM Depression and desperation had unleashed a force that would alter the course of the 20th century. We'll see that on the next episode of The Century, America's Time.
I'm Peter Jennings. Thank you for joining us.