March 4, 1933, was perhaps the Great Depression's darkest hour. The stock market had plunged 85% from its high in 1929, and nearly one-fourth of the workforce was unemployed. In the cities, jobless men were lining up for soup and bread. In rural areas, farmers whose land was being foreclosed were talking openly of revolution. The crowd that gathered in front of the Capitol that day to watch Franklin D. Roosevelt's Inauguration had all but given up on America. They were, a reporter observed, "as silent as a group of mourners around a grave." Roosevelt's Inaugural Address was a pitch-perfect combination of optimism ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"), consolation (the nation's problems "concern, thank God, only material things") and resolve ("This nation asks for action, and action now"). The speech won rave reviews. Even the rock-ribbed Republican Chicago Tribune lauded its "dominant note of courageous confidence." F.D.R. had buoyed the spirits of the American people — and nearly 500,000 of them wrote to him at the White House in the following week to tell him so. Hours after the Inauguration, Roosevelt made history in a more behind-the-scenes way. He gathered his Cabinet in his White House office and had Justice Benjamin Cardozo swear them in as a group, the first time that had ever been done. F.D.R. joked that he was doing it so they could "receive an extra day's pay," but the real reason was that he wanted his team to get to work immediately. And that team came through brilliantly. In the next 100 days — O.K., 105, but who's counting? — his Administration shepherded 15 major bills through Congress. It was the most intense period of lawmaking ever undertaken by Congress — a "presidential barrage of ideas and programs," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, "unlike anything known to American history."
