The 1932 national election was another landslide, this time in favor of a Democrat: Franklin D. Roosevelt, a twice-elected governor of New York about whom the public knew little—except that he was not Hoover. Despair deepened and bank runs spread everywhere in the winter of ’33. On FDR’s inauguration day, March 4, both the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had suspended trading, not a single bank was open in twenty-eight states, and millions had already lost their savings.
