A few months ago, my sister and I started a blog called “The Alternative History of the World.” We ended up getting distracted by other things, but I wanted to continue what we started on this blog.
During the Great Depression, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for “bold, persistent experimentation” to fix the ailing economy. The result lead to a massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government, but it was his littlest program that proved to be most successful — Shirley Temple.
Shirley Temple (which stands for “Serving Homesteads In Rousing Laughs and Emotions Yearly and Triggering Excitement for Movies, People, Love and Entrepreneurship”) actually began as a pilot program in 1932 under the Herbert Hoover administration. Hoover, an engineer, believed that a small dose of cuteness could help cure the economic collapse that plagued his presidency. Hoover also thought that associating himself with such childish cuteness would endear him to voters, who thought him a grumpy old douche.
Herbert Hoover pretending to listen to his mother-in-law.
It was too little, too late for Hoover, who couldn’t shake the grump factor in time for the election. Later, Hoover became a philanthropist and, on weekends, a clown at children’s parties who went by the pseudonym of “Belly.”
As Roosevelt prepared to take office in March 1933 after a landslide victory, Roosevelt’s top aide/hot-dog aficionado Felix Frankfurter received a series of letters from renowned economist/mustache aficionado John Maynard Keynes. In the letters, Keynes articulated his economic rationale for continued and expanded support of Shirley Temple using a series of charts, mathematical equations, and personal asides.
Felix Frankfurter later went on to become a Supreme Court justice who looked a lot like the warden from the Shawshank Redemption
“I mean, have you seen Shirley Temple?! She’s so f***ing cute!!! I can’t stand it!!!! LOL 
,” Keynes wrote to Frankfurter.
After investigating the matter himself, Frankfurter could see that Keynes was right. He replied, “U R right, ROFLMAO.” For as much as Roosevelt wanted to set himself apart from his predecessor, Temple had to stay, Frankfurter thought.
Frankfurter enlisted the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two convinced Franklin, who sold Congress on continuing funding to Shirley Temple during the 100 days, a period of time known for major legislative changes and extreme day counting.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a big fan of the Shirley Temple program.
But not everyone was pleased with Temple. After initially supporting the New Deal, populist radio talk show host Father Coughlin believed that, despite the expanded role, Temple didn’t go far enough with her dancing and sweet-talking antics. Leading conservative Sen. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, attacked from the other end of the spectrum, saying he appreciated the intention behind Temple, but didn’t believe she was constitutional. Temple, he said, gave the government too much cuteness, and, therefore, too much power over the movie-going habits of the American people.
A group of ugly, angry lawyers then followed Taft’s lead and challenged Temple’s constitutionality in court. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court along with other challenges to the New Deal. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the nation’s highest court declared both the National Recovery Administration and Shirley Temple to be unconstitutional.
Penning the court’s unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes declared that Temple’s “intolerable cuteness” qualified as cruel and unusual punishment on the general public. Temple looked doomed to dance her way out of people’s hearts.
Jealous old man Charles Hughes
The Schechter Poultry decision drew the ire of Roosevelt and other New Dealers. While much of the media believed Roosevelt was upset with the massive NRA’s dismantling, Roosevelt was privately more upset with the court’s decision on Temple, who had become the centerpiece of his plan to pull the country out of economic and literal depression.
In response, Roosevelt first threatened to pack the Supreme Court with younger, cuter justices that were more favorable to his policies. However, the public quickly turned on his plan.
Shirley Temple cuts a cake celebrating both FDR's birthday and her success in Super Friends Court
Fearing a broader political backlash, Roosevelt backtracked and said that what he meant to say was that he wanted the Supreme Court members to “pack up for a road trip full of fun and adventure!” He then agreed to allow the NRA’s dismantling, but took the rare step of appealing the Temple decision to the Super Friends, a secret panel within the judicial branch of the Shadow Government. Chief Justice Superman, who, at the time, was still an American citizen, wrote the majority opinion for the nearly-unanimous decision. Wonder Woman was the lone dissenter because she hated children.
Although Shirley Temple was a Republican program, her success cemented a bond between Democrats and Hollywood that exists to this day.
Temple continued through the Depression, and the result was an unmitigated success in the eyes of New Deal liberals. Temple raised the spirits of Americans during troubled economic times and is widely credited with helping to defeat those bad, bad Nazis in World War II by figuratively and literally melting their hearts.
Conservatives, however, argue that Temple might have actually prolonged the Great Depression by forcing Americans to spend what little money they had on Shirley Temple movies and by distracting top policymakers and businesses from noticing that a tremendous amount of people were out of work.
Shirley Temple expired in 1949 under the Truman administration and was not renewed during a military buildup in the wake of the Cold War. The funding was needed to halt the expansion of the Soviet Union, which had acquired two top U.S. military secrets: a nuclear weapon and Col. Sanders’ original recipe.
In the 1970s, Richard Nixon was advised by Henry Kissinger to revive Temple as a foreign policy program after Kissinger watched a Temple movie one night because there were only, like, three channels back then and nothing else was on. Nixon sweatily followed suit. Although certainly not as cute as it once was, Shirley Temple enjoyed some limited success abroad during the Nixon years.
The Jerry O'Connell program did well for itself.
Recent attempts by modern presidents to re-create the success of Shirley Temple have not gone as well and usually fell apart after a few years. George H.W. Bush’s Macaulay Culkin program was quashed by Bill Clinton’s administration and puberty; Bill Clinton’s Haley Joel Osment program was wildly popular at first, but became irrelevant as times changed; and the Gary Coleman program never grew due to deficits during the Reagan administration (although Reagan is now credited for starting Jerry O’Connell, a program that was bloated and slow-moving in its infancy, but is now married to Rebecca Romijn.)
