During the Great Depression the capitalist system in the United States neared the point of collapse.  The stock market plunged to its lowest point in the century, the banking system was at risk of failing, and unemployment peaked at a quarter of the workforce.  Just as the country reached its economic nadir, Franklin Roosevelt‘s New Deal came to the rescue.  During FDR’s famed first hundred days in office, his administration took initiatives that restored confidence in the banking system, provided unprecedented government relief for the poor, and launched a wide array of conservation projects that created jobs for millions of workers.  How was it possible that there was no FDR national memorial in Washington D.C. until 1997, over fifty years after his death?  The conundrum of the absence of a shared American memory of FDR and his New Deal response to the Great Depression is the focus of University of Mississippi historian Darren E. Grem’s book project, Hard Times USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory.

If there was one FDR memorial site that, for a time, did resonate it was the Little White House in Warm Springs Georgia.  This was the place where FDR first came in 1924 for polio treatment because of its natural springs.  He continued to return for more than twenty years, building a house in 1932, where he died of a brain hemorrhage while still serving as president, on April 12, 1945.  The Little White House, Darren Grem argues, became a shrine to sanctify the president and his New Deal.  From the placement of his desk to the toilet paper in his bathroom, everything was carefully preserved and frozen in time to eternalize the memory of FDR and his achievements.  FDR became a Christ-like figure who, through his own physical suffering and ultimate death, experienced the pain and sacrificed his life for the nation.  For a nation reeling from the shock of the death of this bigger than life president, Warm Springs became the gravitational epicenter for the memorialization of FDR drawing millions of visitors well into the 1960s.  

Ironically for a town that became home to the memorial to the man who helped reverse the hard times of the Great Depression, Warms Springs itself eventually succumbed to the hard times of the postwar period.  The economic downturn in the 1970s hollowed out Warms Springs and many other towns across the nation.  When Jimmy Carter came to Warms Spring to launch his presidential campaign, the town was already a shadow of its former self.  Once bustling businesses were on the decline and in a state of disrepair.  Reporting on a visit to the town in 1973, New York Times journalist Jonathan Reynolds commented that Warms Springs wasn’t exactly a ghost town because people still lived there but it was “in a state of terminal dilapidation.”  With the town and surrounding region on the decline, much like the aging and often poorly maintained infrastructure from the New Deal era, it became harder for the Little White memorial to serve as an eternal shrine to all that was possible with bold government initiatives.

Other attempted sites of FDR memory were even more short-lived.  The Roosevelt Memorial Foundation was established on November 2, 1945 with then President Truman as its first honorary chairmen and FDR’s widow, Eleanore Roosevelt, as the honorary chairwoman.  The aim of the Foundation was to respect the wishes of FDR who wanted to be remembered not with conventional memorials made of stone or concrete but rather through living memorials that would more lastingly preserve and spread his ideas and ideals.  In this spirit the Foundation proposed the creation of a Franklin D. Roosevelt School of Human Relations in Washington D.C. and merit awards to students who most embodied FDR’s hopes and aspirations.  In the end this open-ended approach to memorialization proved too costly and too time consuming.  Despite the political connections of the Foundation‘s board members, they failed to raise sufficient funds.  Moreover, many either eventually retired from active life or moved on with busy careers.  The Foundation limped on for years until its offices finally closed in 1955.  

The presence or lack of memorials regarding Roosevelt suggests how or why postwar Americans won or lost fights to make sense of their experiences during the Great Depression, and the meaning of the New Deal itself. What postwar Americans concluded about the public stories that could or should be enshrined in space and time, in stone and mortar, or in story and song, suggest what Americans have been and are willing to sanctify about capitalism itself, not only when it creates but also when it cripples.  Darren E. Grem, A Shrine for the State: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Religious Remembrance at Warm Spring, Georgia. St. George Tucker Society Annual Meeting Jackson, Mississippi. July 27-29, 2017. 

If there was one early example of an enduring concrete, or more accurately, metallic monument to FDR it was the dime. First minted in 1796, the dime experienced multiple modifications and face changes in its lifetime. From 1837 to 1946 various versions of lady liberty crested the face of the dime. FDR first appeared on the dime on January 30th, 1946, the anniversary of his birthday and soon found its way into the pockets of millions of Americans. But even this monetary memorialization of FDR had little to do with the memory of the triumph over the Great Depression or even the defeat of the Axis powers. Instead, it was largely in recognition for his support for the March of Dimes, an organization he helped found. The March of Dimes name originated with comedian Eddie Cantor who came up with a “March of Dimes” fundraising campaign based on a call for Americans to support the fight against polio with change from their pockets. “Nearly everyone can send a dime, or several dimes,” Cantor pitched to the public in his 1938 donation campaign.

Beyond the difficulties of creating lasting memorials to FDR, there was also a powerful desire among conservatives to revise and alter the memory of the New Deal and the Great Depression.  First and foremost, FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, felt personally slandered by accusations of his incompetance or insensitivity to the plight of ordinary American. Living to the age of 90, dying only in 1964, almost twenty years after FDR, Hoover had decades to work on restoring his reputation.  From his presidential library in his native state of Iowa to the Hoover Institution at Standard University, his alma mater in California, Hoover had powerful institutional resources to deploy toward this end.  A quick Google search under “Hoover, blame for the Great Depression,” will bring you first to the page on the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, where you can read about the array of initiatives Hoover took to reign in the crisis.  From his efforts to promote spending and jobs creation on public works projects to his attempts to protect families from losing their homes, showcasing the accomplishments of Hoover, however valid, necessarily reduces the novelty and diminishes the shine of FDR and the New Deal.  

Hoover didn’t just focus on challenging his reputation as the worst president in modern American history, he also helped pioneer modern American conservatism.  Hoover became a leading critic of the expanding role of government and its threat not just to American liberty, but also to American initiative, innovation, and leadership.  “We cannot extend the master of government over the daily life of people without somewhere making it a master of people’s souls and thoughts,” Hoover warned in his 1934 book, The Challenge To Liberty. Hoover influenced a new generation of Republican leaders, including Barry Goldwater, whom Hoover endorsed just before his death in the 1964 presidential campaign.  Goldwater became a lightning rod for American voters who resented the growth and expansion of the government since the New Deal.  Reducing the size and influence of government, Goldwater argued, was the best way to expand freedom.  

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation Goldwater was unfairly labeled as a right-wing extremist which doomed his 1964 presidential campaign. However, Goldwater himself was overwhelmingly reelected to the Senate in Arizona in 1968 while his former presidential opponent, Lyndon Johnson, announced his decision not to run for reelection that same year.  The true vote on Goldwater’s ideas, the Heritage Foundation asserts, was the landslide election of Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Reagan would make the rolling back of big government and many of the protections it offered one of the central objectives of his administration.  Reagan is still fondly remembered by conservatives today for his famous quip that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” 

Beyond the conviction that big government infringed on our individual liberty, Reagan’s policies were also informed by a new generation of economists.  Most prominent among these economists was Nobel Prize winning Milton Friedman.  Rather than remember the Great Depression in terms of FDR and the New Deal rescuing the country from its worst economic crisis, Friedman emphasized that it was bad government that caused the Great Depression.  If the Federal Reserve had properly used its mandate and resources the Great Depression could have been averted, Friedman argued.  While not criticizing the New Deal emergency measures, Friedman lamented that governments tended to respond to their own failures by creating new agencies, expanding the bureaucracies and becoming even more burdensome.  Less government, less bureaucracy, and less regulation were the keys to revitalizing the economy.  

By the time we get to the 1970s and the country plunges into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the memory of FDR and the New Deal have become splintered.  There is no collective memory of all that the New Deal did to transform the relationship between government and the economy in ways that protected and unlifted millions of Americans. Instead, recollections of the Great Depression shrink to individual memories of all that was required to make it through those hard times.  From Rooseveltania and Depression era glassware to popular television series like the Waltons, the Great Depression is never forgotten.  Instead, it becomes something you can collect, trade, and consume as a marketable past.  

Ironically, when the FDR memorial was finally unveiled in Washington D.C. in 1997 the conservative reinterpretation of this era was already triumphant.  The bold initiatives of the New Deal had long since been discredited as part of the story of the growth of an invasive, stifling, inept, big government that needed to be reigned in and rolled back to restore freedom and liberty to the American people.  The remnants of New Deal infrastructure, allowed to fall into despair, became supporting evidence for arguments about government incompetence rather than reminders of a heroic past.  The heroes from the Great Depression who did live on in American memory were not the New Dealers but rather the ordinary men of the Greatest Generation whose grit, determination and character empowered them to survive the hard times and triumph in World War II.