FDR - Jean Edward Smith [196]
The House of Representatives convened as scheduled at noon, Thursday, March 9. Congress would remain in session until June 15, exactly one hundred days, the most productive legislative session in history. As soon as the members were sworn in and officers elected, the president’s banking message was read: “I cannot too strongly urge upon the Congress the clear necessity for immediate action.”23 At 2:55 P.M. House majority leader Joseph Byrns of Tennessee introduced the legislation (H.R. 1491) under a closed rule that permitted no amendments. Debate was limited to forty minutes. Minority Leader Snell asked Republican support: “Give the President what he says is necessary.”24 The printed bill was not yet available, and Chairman Steagall of the Banking and Currency Committee read aloud from a typewritten copy. Before he finished, shouts of “Vote! Vote!” echoed through the chamber. There was no debate. There had been no hearings, no committee consideration, no action by either caucus. Members took on faith what the leadership presented, and the leadership took on faith what FDR requested. Shortly before four o’clock Speaker Henry T. Rainey of Illinois asked for the yeas and nays. The bill passed with a unanimous whoop of approval. There was no request for a roll call. The New York Times reported that the members appeared like poker players “who throw in their last chips in the belief they will win.”25*
By the time the Senate turned to the bill, printed copies were on hand and the debate was less perfunctory. Huey Long sought greater aid for the “little banks at the forks of the creeks,” while western populists, led by Robert La Follette, wanted FDR to nationalize all the banks. The amendments were shouted down, and just before seven-thirty the Senate passed the bill 73–7, the opposition coming primarily from Progressives, who believed the bill did not go far enough in asserting federal control.26 An hour later the measure was at the White House. FDR whipped out a dime-store pen Nancy Cook had given him and quickly added his signature. The entire legislative process, from the bill’s introduction in the House to the president’s signature, took less than six hours. After signing the bill into law Roosevelt extended the bank holiday. Originally, he hoped some banks might reopen Friday. But officials at Treasury and the Federal Reserve needed more time to separate the sound banks from those that needed help.
Under regulations promulgated by the president, banks wishing to reopen required a license from the secretary of the Treasury. Reviewing assets and liabilities was a time-consuming process, but within a month, eight out of every ten banks were open again. By and large this was a bureaucratic process. The exception was the Bank of America, A. P. Giannini’s West Coast goliath, with 410 branches in California and more than a million depositors. Woodin and Comptroller of the Currency F. Gloyd Awalt, a Hoover holdover, believed the giant bank was no worse off than any other California bank and to keep it closed could cause enormous distress with ramifications throughout the country. Lined up on the other side was the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, headed by John U. Calkins, an old-line banker with strong ties to California’s economic and social elite. The clubby West Coast banking community, of which Calkins was a charter member, despised and feared Giannini, an upstart Italian immigrant whose vigorous expansion threatened their supremacy. Calkins was adamant in his opinion that the Bank of America was insolvent, although the evidence was mixed.
Woodin and Awalt took the case to the president. Roosevelt’s handling of the situation was masterly. He declined to take direct action and order Giannini’s bank reopened. Instead, he shifted the decision to Calkins. FDR instructed Woodin to call the San Francisco director and either convince him to agree to the bank’s opening or require him to take personal responsibility for keeping it closed. “The conversation was punctuated by some