February 17, 2008
FOLLOW ME
The Charisma Mandate
By KATE ZERNIKE
TAKING office in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted a country in crisis. Four in 10 working-age Americans were jobless. Banks were collapsing. There were long lines outside tellers windows as people rushed to withdraw their savings.
On March 4, Roosevelt gave his now famous inaugural address, promising that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Within days he had secured legislation guaranteeing the banks, and on March 12, he took to the radio for the first of his fireside chats. When the people find out that they can get their money — that they can get it when they want it — the phantom of fear will soon be laid, he soothed an anxious nation. I can assure you, it is safer to keep your money in a re-opened bank than under your mattress.
When banks re-opened the next morning, the lines were gone, as Robert A. Caro recounted in the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power. People put money back in, so much that on the first day after the chat, deposits outweighed withdrawals by $10 million.
It was the legislation, but mostly, Mr. Caro writes: Their confidence was restored by his confidence. When he smiled on the crisis, it seemed to vanish.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/weekinreview/17zernike.html?_r=1&sq=wil...
Robert Sean Wilentz (pronounced /ˈʃɔːn wɨˈlɛnts/) is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979.
Writings.
"On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America," Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982), pp. 4563 in JSTOR
"Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working Class History, 26 (Fall 1984): 1-24,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Merrill, Michael, and Sean Wilentz, eds. The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, "A Laborer," 1747-1814 (1993)
Johnson, Paul E., and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias. (1994) excerpt and text search
Andrew Jackson (2005) excerpt and text search
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) excerpt and text search
Wilentz, Sean and Greil Marcus, eds. Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (2005)
Wilentz, Sean, and Jonathan Earle, eds. Major Problems in the Early Republic (1992; 2nd ed. 2007)
The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2008) excerpt and text search
[edit]About Wilentz
Altschuler, Glenn C. "Democracy as a Work in Progress," Reviews in American History, Volume 34, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 169175 in Project Muse, review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
John Ehrman, "There He Goes Again: A review of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, Sean Wilentz" The Claremont Institute (2008), review by conservative scholar.
Robert Wilentz
Department/Program(s):History
Position: Professor
Title: Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era. Professor of History.
Area(s): United States
Field: Early National and Jacksonian history; U.S. political history since 1945
Office: 134 Dickinson Hall
Phone: 609-258-4702
Email: swilentz@princeton.edu
History Department, Princeton University
129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton NJ 08544-1017
Phone: 609-258-4159 Fax: 609-258-5326 Email: history@princeton.edu
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