Winter War Quotes

“The next morning, Joslin found his bank was indeed open, so on the president’s advice he withdrew his money and had his wife do the same with her account, “although I felt unpatriotic in doing so.” He confessed what he had done to Hoover, who told him, “Don’t hoard it, Ted.… Put it in another bank that is safe. I would suggest the Riggs. It is the most liquid.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Like millions of panicking Americans whose self-preserving actions only worsened the crisis, Hoover instructed Rickard that he “better anticipate by drawing out $10,000 in bills for possible emergency use [by] his family and mine.” Hoover did not think he should act in his capacity as president to prevent bank failures, but he did think he should act quietly, as a private citizen, to ensure access to his own money.29”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Ruefully, he observed that a man’s “faith in his fellow man’s ability to pay what he owes him is made of mist, to be dissipated by rumor’s most transient whisper.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Hoover thought that if Roosevelt got Americans to resume their purchasing by meddling with the banks and the money, he might cure the current crisis but would inevitably introduce a deeper, more fundamental rot that would ultimately destroy capitalism. Roosevelt thought that pursuing Hoover’s policy was destroying capitalism now.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“As the panics swelled, Herbert Hoover took a grim position and held to it. It was his job to keep the banks open. Panic was a necessary, if violent, purging of the system. Strong banks would survive.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Roosevelt had several times forsworn, publicly and privately, any interest in establishing autocracy. Eleanor had suggested to him that the country would benefit from a benevolent dictatorship, and he had responded, in apparently genuine puzzlement, that once someone became a dictator, there was no guarantee of continued benevolence. When he said in his inaugural that”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Popular government is unworkable except under the leadership and discipline of a strong national executive.… Any group of 500 men, whether they are called Congressmen or anything”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Even so, upon seeing the first cut of the film, Mayer said, “Put that picture in its can, take it back to the studio, and lock it up.”45 Roosevelt saw the”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“The accession of Hitler was a portent of evil for the United States. He would in the end challenge us because his black sorcery appealed to the worst in men; it supported their hates and ridiculed their tolerances; and it could not exist permanently in the same world with a system whose reliance on reason and justice was fundamental.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“From extreme left to extreme right in Germany the political graph is not a straight line. It is a nearly complete circle.” And the center was weak.29”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“It is clear to me that it is the duty of those who have benefited by our industrial and economic system to come to the front in such a grave emergency and assist in relieving those who under the same industrial and economic”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“headquarters without an effective organization spanning the country.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Most important, she said, she learned how useless it was to have clever staff at national”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“When Roosevelt did meet Walter White at Eleanor’s behest in 1934, it was to explain that he could not fully support anti-lynching legislation, because to do so would divide the Democratic Party and imperil the economic program of the New Deal.45”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“What they wanted was not the absence of federal power, but evidence that the US government was prepared to wield its power in their interest. They”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“By invoking the concept of purchasing power, Roosevelt turned a special interest into a common concern. Farm relief was now an essential first step in reviving the entire US economy, if one understood that farmers were consumers as well as producers.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“I’m going to lay off for six or eight months and then I’m going to start in raising hell. I’ve caught a lot of it in the last four years; now I’m going to give a lot of it. I’m going to talk and write and do any damn thing I want to do.… I’m going to get into the thick of things. Somebody is likely to get hurt. Anyway, I’ll have a lot of fun.”50”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Hoover felt, as he often did, oppressed by the newspapers, and told Stimson the press had exhibited insufficient appreciation of his efforts.45”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Moley noted that Roosevelt “nodded to express his understanding of what had been said. It did not at all mean that he agreed with what had been said.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“When listening, Roosevelt used a rich vocabulary of gestures that implied agreeability without asserting agreement.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“He understood that, despite the political advantage of appearing to hold debtor nations to account, the United States could not well afford to destabilize Britain and France, especially at this perilous moment for democratic government throughout the world.14”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote to the legal scholar Felix Frankfurter that Roosevelt was “all clay and no granite,” because under only slight pressure from Hearst the governor had decided “to repudiate the League of Nations, lock, stock and barrel, and to talk like a Kansas grocery-store oracle about making the European nations pay their debts.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Most voters did not accept the president’s reading of the data, or at least found that it did not reflect their own experience”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Perhaps Hoover was no serious scholar, but he was an important historical actor whose beliefs about the New Deal and what it entailed turned out to be both consequential and correct.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Open almost any account of this critical moment in human history, and you are quite likely to find a description of Roosevelt’s campaign as so devoid of substance and full of “sunny generalities” that at the time of his inauguration his “plans remained largely unknown to the public.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“days before the shooting, to “the transcendent importance of popular government,” acknowledging that “the people determined the election” and saying he could therefore “have no complaint.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“If Roosevelt went, the hope of such a restrained and saving revolution might go too, and whatever change came next would come with furious violence.11”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Perhaps a Dictator, by suspending legality, could accomplish a ruthless clean-up—but we do not want dictators in the United States,” a Roosevelt essay argued in 1932. “The other penalties of dictatorship are too high.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“They knew also that Roosevelt had promised a program of relief. He had given them hope, which he understood was a dangerous thing, telling an aide that “disappointed hope” caused destructive revolutions.”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal

“Zangara had come to the United States in 1923 and afterward attained citizenship. He was a bricklayer, and a member of the union for his trade and of the Republican Party. And he held politicians and capitalists responsible for the chronic pain he suffered in his stomach.7”
― Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal