FDR - Jean Edward Smith [194]
Secretary Woodin, meanwhile, had run into difficulty. Drafting comprehensive banking legislation on the spur of the moment was not as simple as it had first appeared. Bankers summoned to Washington on Sunday gave conflicting advice, and Treasury officials were uncertain how best to reopen the banks and ensure an adequate supply of currency after so much had been withdrawn. After forty-eight hours of nonstop discussions at the Treasury, Woodin broke off the talks and went to bed. “I’ll be damned if I [will] go back into those meetings until I get my head cleared,” he told Moley.11
Monday night Woodin dozed a little, strummed his guitar a little, and thought through the various proposals to restore the nation’s money supply. He rejected the idea of issuing temporary scrip as the government had done during the panic of 1907, and settled on the Federal Reserve’s proposal to issue new currency under the Federal Reserve Act. “It won’t look like stage money,” he told Moley Tuesday morning. “It’ll be money that looks like money. And it won’t frighten people.”12†
Relying largely on intuition and common sense, Woodin had cut through a fog of financial advice and adopted the simplest of all possible solutions: the government would simply print new money. It would be backed not by gold or silver but by the assets of the banks in the Federal Reserve system. Woodin laid the plan before Roosevelt at ten o’clock Tuesday morning and in twenty minutes had FDR’s approval. With the currency issue decided, the rest of the banking bill fell into place, although putting the provisions into statutory language by noon Thursday proved a near-run thing.13
On Wednesday morning, at the height of the banking crisis, FDR held his first press conference in the White House. Coolidge had met the press regularly, but his comments had always been off the record. Hoover had held weekly news conferences but the sessions had been brief and exceedingly formal, the president standing behind a podium in the East Room of the White House. Both Coolidge and Hoover had required that the questions be submitted in writing beforehand and answered only those they wished to. Roosevelt received reporters sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. He met them every Wednesday and Friday and answered off the cuff. Correspondents could ask whatever they wished.14 Nearly 125 members of the White House press corps crowded into FDR’s office at ten o’clock March 8 for a remarkable give-and-take with a president who clearly enjoyed every minute. After shaking hands with each reporter, Roosevelt set the ground rules. He would not answer “iffy” questions or those “which for various reasons I do not wish to discuss, or am not ready to discuss, or I do not know anything about.” He said he did not wish to be quoted directly unless Press Secretary Steve Early provided the quotation in writing. Straight news should be attributed to the White House. Some of his remarks would provide background information that could be used but not attributed. And then there would be confidential off-the-record material, which was not to be divulged to anyone.15 Nearly all of FDR’s comments that morning were for background or off the record. The one item of hard news was that he would send his banking bill to Congress the next day and his message would be brief. For forty minutes the president bantered with reporters, answered candidly, and gave them almost nothing they could use directly. “Mr. Roosevelt looked fresh and fit,” reported The New York Times. “There was little sign of the strain he has undergone—and is still under—since he became President.”16
It was a virtuoso performance. When Francis Stephenson of the Associated Press intoned the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President,” hard-bitten Washington reporters broke into spontaneous applause. Every correspondent in the room had a sense that he or she was participating in the new administration,