Word: hoovers
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...first order of business was to save the nation's banks. The largely unregulated banking system, which Democratic Senator William Gibbs McAdoo of California said "does credit to a collection of imbeciles," was on the brink of total extinction. During the last week of the Hoover regime, $250 million in gold had been withdrawn by frightened depositors. Overall bank reserves now stood at a mere $6 billion against liabilities of $41 billion. Roosevelt decided that he had no choice but to proclaim a nationwide "bank holiday" to last until he could push a recovery bill through Congress...
Hopkins violated the rules that most Americans had learned in childhood: that taking charity was shameful; that unemployment was shameful; that a man who couldn't feed himself and his family was hardly a man at all. "Under our political system," Hoover had said in 1930, "Government is not, nor should it be, a general employer of labor." Federal aid to the unemployed, Hoover said, would weaken their "moral fiber." Hopkins disagreed. "People don't eat in the long run, Senator," he said to one legislator, "they eat every...
...week, and those too proud to beg got nothing. When Hoover said that nobody had starved, FORTUNE magazine used his statement as the title of a bitter dissent: 95 people suffering starvation were admitted to New York City hospitals during 1931, and 20 of them died; 27% of the schoolchildren in Pennsylvania in 1932 were suffering from malnutrition. Roosevelt's first bill for federal relief passed Congress in May ("God save the people of the United States," protested Republican Senator C.L. Beedy of Maine), but the $500 million appropriation had to be disbursed through the states. By nightfall...
...immense importance of radio as a means to reach and unite people, and with his sonorous voice he brilliantly exploited the new medium in the periodic "fireside chats" that always began: "My friends . . ." Roosevelt was equally adept at manipulating the press. He invented the modern press conference, canceling Hoover's stiff insistence on written questions and inviting White House reporters to gather around his desk for bantering but far-ranging exchanges on his new programs...
...American people responded. At the White House mail room, where two or three functionaries had dealt with fewer than 800 letters a day in the Hoover era, 22 clerks were swamped by nearly 50,000 letters after fireside chats during Roosevelt's first