How FDR redefined charity in 1933
In March 1933, the United States stood on the brink of ruin. Twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed; many people had not worked for several years. The situation was even worse in cities with major industries, where unemployment surpassed the national average.
Yet the real worry of the era cannot be captured by statistics alone. There was a sense of fear that was palpable to those who lived in this uncertain time. As historian Ira Katznelson puts it, “Hope proved elusive. The rumble of deep uncertainty, a sense of proceeding without a map, remained relentless and enveloping. Nothing was sure.” This was the situation Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited when he was inaugurated that month as the 32nd president.
The challenge before Roosevelt was of such immensity that only the Bible captured for him, and for much of the nation, the task ahead. As he delivered his inaugural address in the cool March air, under overcast skies, the new president offered his listeners a story of devastation and redemption drawn directly from scripture. The economy was in tatters and hardworking men and women were destitute. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated,” Roosevelt told the crowd in Washington, D.C. Like the biblical story of Jesus forcibly expelling the moneychangers and merchants from the Temple, he promised to restore Christian morality to the nation:
