In parts of Europe, democracy itself had collapsed, and some people had turned to other, more extreme solutions.
Some Americans, too, were disillusioned by their government's response to the crisis and took to the streets in protest.
Shortly after he became president,
FDR had a visitor who said to him,
"Mr. President, you're either gonna be our greatest president, or you're gonna be our worst president,"
and Roosevelt said, "No, if, if I fail,
I'll be our last president."
I think we can wonder whether our descendants... because I think they'll still be here... what they will think about us, and let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt,
that they will believe that we have honestly striven in our day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.
Some of the new legislation would be overthrown by the courts.
Other laws would turn out to have been counterproductive, but in just a little over 3 months, the federal government that had been a mostly passive observer of the people's problems had become an active force in trying to solve them.
Man as Harold Ickes:
It's more than a new deal.
It's a new world.
People feel free again.
They can breathe naturally.
It's like quitting a morgue for the open woods.
Harold Ickes.
The pitch is up.
At the end of the first hundred days in 1933, he goes back to campobello for the first time since he was stricken with polio...
And he goes out in the woods, and he's sitting on a tree stump, and a couple of people he knows are taking a walk in the woods, and when they come upon him, he's got his head in his hands,
and then when he looks up he has a grimace on his face, a look of suffering.
Then he notices that they're there, and it was like a shutter clicking in a camera,
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