The Glory And The Dream william manchester pdf

The Glory And The Dream william manchester Wonderful Digest

Viewed in this light, the conduct of Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation can only be called a major political blunder.

In 1932 the congressional leadership finally pushed through an act authorizing the RFC to advance the states 300 million dollars for unemployment relief.

By the end of the year only 30 million had actually reached the states,one-third of the amount Dawes had loaned to his Central Republic Bank and Trust Company of Chicago.

It was perhaps symbolic that when the President telephoned former Senator Atlee Pomerene of Ohio to appoint him Dawes's successor,Pomerene had exactly ninety-eight cents in his pocket, and that on his way to be sworn in, a dozen panhandlers approached him.

As public policy the RFC was broke.

Millions were calling it "a bread line for big business," which was exactly what it had become.

But such phrases, like the demand for Mellon's head, provoked violent reactions from men like General MacArthur, who believed that the national security was endangered.

The well-to-do were becoming genuinely afraid of the hungry, and that fear does much to explain a sudden attack upon one Democratic leader by a former friend in the spring of 1932.

Alfred E. Smith, born in an East Side tenement, had become a checker in the Fulton Fish Market at the age of fifteen and had risen through Tammany's ranks to become governor of New York.

In 1928, during Al Smith's unsuccessful campaign against Hoover,Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to succeed him in Albany.