FDR's 100 days transformed Sonoma County

<p>President Barack Obama’s 100 Days are coming to a close. His success in this arbitrary period depends on which op-ed pundit you read, which talking (shouting) heads you watch on television, which political network your car radio is stuck on.</p><p>Some say “Hooray!” Others a mournful “Nay.”</p><p>Many of us just shake our heads in wonder at the problems we have asked him to solve.</p><p>There hasn’t always been this 100 Days thing for new presidents. It was coined, in fact, as recently as 1933 to describe the jump-start made by another president who came to office in a time of great economic stress.</p><p>We thought it might be interesting to take a look back — not to compare, you can do that for yourself — but to see how Sonoma County received the news of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days.</p><p>FDR’s trial by fire began in 1933 on March 4 and ended June 13. Inauguration Day, prescribed in a time when travel was slow and arduous, came a full four months after Election Day in 1932. (In 1937, the inauguration date was moved to Jan. 20.)</p><p>The stock market crash that began the Great Depression had occurred three years and five months earlier. And the federal government had taken virtually no action. Relief measures for the unemployed (there were 6 million), the homeless, the people who couldn’t afford food, had been the business of the cities and the states, and the coffers were empty.</p><p>While the cities seemed to suffer the most, rural areas like Sonoma County did not escape. In the 1930 Census, some 25,000 of the county’s 66,000 people were “rural farm” residents. While the city dwellers were organizing soup kitchens and bread lines to feed the hungry, farmers were fending off foreclosure threats from the bankers, pleading to be allowed to harvest “one more crop” in an effort to make their payments. Those who grew grapes and hops had been in financial trouble for several years before the Crash, as Prohibition of alcoholic beverages took their market away.</p><p>We rely on Ernest Finley, who had been editor and publisher of The Press Democrat for 35 years, to tell us how people were reacting in the county. There were no letters to the editor in 1933, no place for the public to speak out as they do in our pages today.</p><p>But we know that editor Finley, who insisted on sitting beside the door so everyone who visited the newspaper office passed his desk, was a good street-corner journalist. His daughter Ruth Person told me once that she was sure that her father preferred standing on the corner talking to the farmers who came to town over the business chores that awaited him in the office.</p><p>So you have to think that Finley’s reaction to the 15 extraordinary measures that FDR sent to Congress in those first three months was an indication of what the man on the street was thinking.</p><p>Sonoma County voters elected Democrats to public office, but they were conservative Democrats and reflected the farm-county culture. Unlike the big city newspapers controlled by Republicans, editor Finley was vocal in his condemnation of the Hoover administration for “doing nothing” in the face of economic crisis.</p><p>He supported FDR (who, by the way, was not called FDR in those days. If his full name was shortened in a headline it was “F.R.” and sometimes “F.D.”) but seemed to watch him closely as he took charge.</p><p>In his front-page editorial on Inauguration Day, Finley wrote: “Boldly and as a man who realizes he has been fairly chosen for the performance of a great service, President Roosevelt takes command of the forces about to be arrayed in the struggle for economic betterment. ... The country welcomes a man who says he is going to get somewhere and knows how he is to do it. We are all tired of empty platitudes. ... The nation is with him in what he plans to do.”</p><p>When Roosevelt called the Congress to special session, declared a bank holiday and announced plans to cut federal spending, Finley cheered, warned against hoarding money once the banks opened, and marveled in “what can be accomplished when a determined executive who knows what he is about, takes charge of things.”</p><p>When the president sat down before a CBS microphone on Sunday, March 12, to “explain” the banking crisis to the country, he was breaking new ground with a new idea he called his “Fireside Chat.” Finley called it “a personal and practical message from a practical man heard by millions of Americans.”</p><p>When the banks reopened and people began to make deposits, Finley was ready with a reassuring front-page piece saying that “Santa Rosa Banks Are Sound,” and exhorting readers to open accounts, to pay by check instead of cash, to keep the money moving.</p><p>A month later he would admit, “Constructive action is coming almost too fast to be grasped by the average citizen.” But, he continued, “The world applauds a man who has a new idea and who isn’t afraid to put it into operation.”</p><p>The Press Democrat’s front page in 1933 was a clutter of stories, some local, some from the wire services, as many as 25 stories on a good day. While Roosevelt’s actions made the top headlines, there were other things going on. Japanese troops had invaded China. Jack Dempsey was going to fight Gentleman Jim Corbett. The week before the inaugural, ground had been broken for the Golden Gate Bridge in a show of anticipation and pageantry attended by 200,000 people.</p><p>It became evident quickly that, while the opposition of the Iowa farmers to the Farm Bill was important, it wasn’t as important here as the hurry-up measures FDR proposed to hasten the repeal of Prohibition.</p><p>Even before the banks re-opened, the president apparently felt that Americans could use a drink. To pacify the “drys,” who were a powerful lobby (something like the NRA today), he limited his plan to 3.2 beer, saying that just this pale substitute for the real thing would bolster spirits and, furthermore, he intended to tax it and wine — when the repeal was ratified — as revenue.</p><p>Prohibition did not officially end until Dec. 5 of that year. But, in this hop-growing county, even “near beer” was good news indeed.</p><p>Arthur Brisbane, a nationally syndicated columnist who ran daily on the front page, wrote: “For one day, plenty of news. President Roosevelt demands beer ‘at once!’ And since HE orders it, you will get it.”</p><p>Later, with beer back, Brisbane would have his fun: “Weak little glasses of 3.2 beer seems powerful when multiplied by the thirst of 123,000,000 people. Government will get in taxes one hundred and fifty million a year, perhaps more ... thousands of young women have found work twisting pretzels into the right shape.”</p><p>Santa Rosa banker, brewer and hop rancher Joe Grace wasn’t kidding around when he heard of beer’s impending return. “I know of no other spot in the United States that has a more favorable outlook nor that will share more in the prosperous times fast returning to America, than Sonoma County,” Grace said.</p><p>“We are at last on the upgrade,” he added, exuding the prevailing optimism. “I expect to see a material improvement in all lines of business by fall.”</p><p>“The return to better times can be speeded along,” Grace added, “if everyone will cease to complain, resume normal living and start planning for the brighter and happier and busier days that will soon be with us again.”</p><p>Sonoma County’s congressman, Clarence Lea, declined support for a 3.2 wine, describing it as “undrinkable” and persisted in his efforts for early legalization of “real wine.” Which didn’t happen.</p><p>But hop growers were pleased. Hop prices rose in the month following the return of beer from 35 cents a pound to 75 cents and many growers were “holding out for a dollar.”</p><p>Of the 100 Day measures we remember — the Federal Reserve, the discontinuance of the gold standard, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Public Works Administration, National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration — none would have more immediate impact here than the unemployment measure we came to know as the Civilian Conservation Corps.</p><p>The CCC, referred to in those early days as a “reforestations program,” would bring several thousand young men 18 to 25 to Sonoma County to create drainage systems and build culverts in the Gold Ridge orchards and to build the amphitheater and the buildings at Armstrong Grove that created the public park.</p><p>The men received $30 a month, of which $25 was sent to their families. They had room and board at two camps, one at the foot of O’Farrell Hill east of Freestone and the other in Armstrong Grove, plus $5 a month for their “social life.”</p><p>Most were from the southern states and a surprising number stayed or returned after the war, remembering that the CCC had “saved our lives.”</p><p>“Isn’t it lucky for us,” wrote editor Finley, “that the president’s hobby is reforestation.”</p>