Days of shock and awe, horror and fear

摘要

Seventy years ago this month, America's new leader summed up Germany's new leader. "Hitler," Franklin D. Roosevelt told a White House visitor, "is a madman." But Adolf Hitler's mental health placed far down the list of presidential concerns in the spring of 1933. Roosevelt was flooding Congress with proposals to rescue America from the Great Depression. For what would be known as the "Hundred Days," he and a desperate Congress halted a banking panic, created the nation's biggest public works program, directed billions of dollars for relief to the jobless, and invented a host of institutions restructuring vast sectors of the economy, from Wall Street to the Corn Belt. America, in the words of Stanford historian David Kennedy, was "infused with Roosevelt's own contagious optimism and hope."