Ed led the applause, and the cheers that came from twenty thousand people bounced off the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower itself where Colonel McCormick was probably looking down at the gathering in disgust. But the crowd agreed with Roosevelt. The worst was over.
The president continued, speaking about the prosperity he’d been seeing across the country. But then his pace slowed. His words were very deliberate. He said that he had chosen “this great inland city and this gala occasion to speak on a subject of definite national importance.”
The political situation in the world was a cause of grave concern and anxiety. FDR said that although fifteen years ago sixty nations had signed a peace pact agreeing not to “resort to arms to further their national aims,” a reign of terror and international lawlessness had now begun. He said that the very foundations of civilization were being threatened.
“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice.”
The crowd went silent. “Innocent people,” Roosevelt said, “innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to greed for power and supremacy, which are devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.” He warned “every treasure garnered through two millennia will be lost or wrecked or utterly destroyed.”
Roosevelt clutched the podium supported by those iron leg braces, but really held up by his own will. He thundered the next words.
“If those things come to pass in other parts of the world let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this western hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and arts of civilization. If those days come there will be no safety by arms. The storm will rage ’til every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in vast chaos.”
Something must be done, Roosevelt told us.
“It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of disease … War is a contagion whether it is declared or undeclared … We are determined to keep out of war yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. If civilization is to survive, the principles of the Prince of Peace must be restored. Most important of all, the will for peace must express itself to the end that nations that may be tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from such a course … America hates war. America hopes for peace, therefore America actively engages in the search for peace.”
When Roosevelt concluded his speech, once again Ed led the applause. He shook Roosevelt’s hand, smiled for the newsreel cameras, directed the president toward me. Ed gestured at Milton Goldman who stepped up along with his brother. I heard him say to the president, “Thank you.”
Then all hell broke loose. The Tribune called Roosevelt a warmonger. But Ed stood firm. Every time he gave a speech, whether he was opening a new Park District field office or the guest of honor at a Knights of Columbus dinner, Ed talked about Hitler and Mussolini. He didn’t pussyfoot around like Roosevelt had—railing against the forces of terror and lawlessness but not naming names—Ed was blunt. “We Irish,” he’d say, “know what it is like to have a tyrant’s boot on our necks. One million of us starved to death because we were too weak to fight back, while the rest of the world turned a blind eye. But we’re strong now. America gave us our chance. We stood up for the people of Ireland and helped them win their independence. And now other forces are threatening to destroy people who cannot defend themselves. We must not sit on the sideline. We have to prepare ourselves—not only militarily but in our minds and spirits.”
Word of these speeches got to the president. Ed had scared Roosevelt. The mayor was being too blunt. The isolationists who were shouting “America First” were very powerful.
I was there in Ed’s office when the call from the president came through. “You want to get me impeached?” he asked Ed, shouting over the telephone. I heard Ed say, “You have to be straight with the people. Let them know that it won’t just be the working people, the little guy, who will make the sacrifices when war comes. Tell them that the whole country will act together. The rich as well as everyone else. The voters aren’t stupid. They know things are bad. They just want to be sure that someone they believe in will lead them and tell them the truth. That has to be you.”
Ed listened, shaking his head. When he hung up he said to me, “Roosevelt said that with only two years left in his term there was only so much he could do. Most of the Republicans aren’t getting involved in a European war. So if they win the next election…”
Dear God, I thought, I couldn’t imagine the country without Roosevelt as our leader.
* * *
In April 1939, Ed was reelected with 55 percent of the vote, a landslide in any normal election, but a red flag in Chicago. His vote had gone down.
“You see?” Ed said. “Voters don’t always think that deeply. They like variety. They were loyal to Roosevelt but will they support another Democrat for president? I’m scared,” he said to me.
We were in his office, a week after his inauguration. Roosevelt’s second term would end in a year, and that would be that. How could the party find any kind of comparable candidate to run in 1940?
“James Farley thinks the nomination is his by right. And there’s a few other guys that are going to try for it. Why don’t they just back off. If there were no other candidates the president would have to run again,” Ed said. “Nothing in the constitution says that FDR couldn’t serve a third term. We need him.”
And did we ever. In September, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and the world tipped into war, except for the United States. Most Republicans were against getting American involved in a European war. Public opinion supported them. What if a Republican became president and we turned our backs on the world? Let Hitler rule Europe? It didn’t bear thinking about. Only Roosevelt could mobilize the nation, but he was getting ready to retire to Hyde Park.
Ed had a plan to change the president’s mind. First, he would convince the Democratic National Committee to have the convention in Chicago that summer. He did, winning approval by one vote, in February. He had until July to convince Roosevelt to run again. But Roosevelt himself was Ed’s biggest obstacle.
In June, Ed came back from Washington in despair. I was having coffee with him in his kitchen. Margaret and the kids were in Eagle River.
“The president is worried about how history will judge him. I told him we don’t have time for history. If he doesn’t lead this country, history will be over. But sitting in the Oval Office does something to a man. Roosevelt kept telling me that George Washington walked away after two terms when the country would have made him king. I guess Washington gave some speech about how no president should serve more than two terms.”
“Well,” I said, “that puts it in perspective. A hundred and fifty years of tradition and George Washington is the father of our country.”
“Yeah,” Ed said. “Well he’s dead and buried and if he were alive I wouldn’t trust him to turn out the vote in the Eleventh Ward.” I laughed at the image of George Washington going door to door in Bridgeport. Ed was sure that Roosevelt really wanted a third term but he was being coy. He had to appear to be forced by the convention to accept the nomination.
Ed asked me to stay in the city. He wanted me to photograph him with various delegates—a good way to disguise his politicking. “And I’m going to need some moral support to pull this off, Nonie.”
“Of course,” I said. “Glad to be asked, and excited to be part of this crusade. The redheads to the rescue!” He manage
d a smile.
* * *
July 15, 1940, was the first night of the Democratic convention. Ed welcomed the delegates with a speech that praised Roosevelt. They had to nominate the president. That was the only way to save the country.
But the next day Roosevelt himself put the kibosh on Ed’s efforts. It was early evening when the chairman of the convention, Alben Barkley, stepped up and read a statement from the president:
“Tonight at the specific request and authorization of the president, I am making this simple fact clear to the convention: the president has never had, and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of president, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the convention for that office. He wishes in all earnestness and sincerity that all delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate. This is the message I bear to you from the president of the United States.”
“Oh my God,” I said to Ed. I was standing next to him on the convention floor. I must have taken his picture with twenty different delegates, as he went from state to state, talking up Roosevelt’s nomination. “So that’s it. It’s over.”
“Oh no, it’s not,” Ed said.
Now what happened next has been turned into a tall tale. The newspapers joked about “The Voice from the Sewer” who stampeded the convention for Roosevelt, but believe me, what Ed accomplished was significant. In fact, if I saved Roosevelt’s life by telling Cermak to move closer, Ed may have saved the world by ensuring FDR’s nomination. I mean can you imagine if Jim Farley had been president when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor?
That night, July 16, 1940, there must have been eighteen thousand people with us in the stadium—a big barn of a place, in a literal sense, the venue for rodeos and horse shows as well as prize fights and every kind of sporting event. The state delegations were set up on the floor of the stadium where cowboys had ridden bulls and lassoed calves. The delegates were packed together and though there were folding chairs, most of them stood chatting to each other and moving across state lines. Each group had a chairman whose job was to keep them in order and round up votes. After Barkley read Roosevelt’s statement everything stopped.
I stood with Ed behind the Illinois delegation. I’d photographed him with various members, but now the whole back row turned to look at Ed. What now? He smiled, pointed up toward the balconies. The seats up there were filled with city workers. The Streets and Sanitation Department had sent every garbage truck driver, every maintenance worker, and all their paper pushers over to the stadium. Off-duty cops and firemen had joined them as well as building inspectors and the staff of every single one of the fifty ward offices. Five thousand people at least.
Now from every loudspeaker in the stadium a voice boomed out filling the entire place: “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt.”
Ed raised his hands as if he were a band leader and drew an arc in the air. The fellows in the gallery above turned to their people. “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt,” they began to chant. Then they marched out of the balconies, down the ramps and onto the floor of the stadium, stamping their feet while they bellowed, “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt.”
“What happened,” I yelled to Ed. “Who was that voice?”
“Tom Garry is in the basement,” he shouted.
“The guy who’s head of Streets and Sanitation?”
Ed nodded.
All around me the chants of “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt” got louder. Then the organ started to play “Happy Days Are Here Again” in counterpoint to the shouting. This was no ordinary organ. Over one thousand pipes up there and the organist could mimic any instrument. Now we heard trumpets, bass drums, tubas. All those men in dark suits and the white shirts their wives had so carefully ironed began to dance. Yes, dance.
Conga lines broke out all over the floor. Jackets were thrown off. Ties were loosened. “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt. Happy days are here again.”
Yes, we knew that France had surrendered the month before and that the Nazis were probably going to invade England. The world was going to hell in a handbasket. But here in the Chicago Stadium there was hope, defiance. “We want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt.” Screw George Washington. Forget 150 years of tradition. Ignore all objections to a third term. Roosevelt was our religion and we were like some sect of ecstatic worshippers, whirling and singing and pounding our fears away. Hadn’t the Holy Spirit on Pentecost transformed a band of terrified men into the fellows who would change the world? Not many saints among the delegates but they were on fire. The demonstration lasted an hour and I found myself hanging on to Ed’s waistband as we joined a line that snaked in and out of the delegations. And there was William Dawson, three people ahead of us. “FDR, FDR.” Roosevelt was going to be nominated, like it or not.
And of course Ed knew that the president really wanted the nomination. He was determined to serve another term, but only some kind of spectacular event could allow him to accept.
“You did it, Ed. You did it,” I said as we stopped to take a breath. But there are just some men that don’t understand what’s happening before their very eyes. Jim Farley got up to the podium, pounded the gavel, and tried to call the convention to order. Pounding and pounding until finally the singing and the chanting subsided.
“We are a democratic institution,” he said. “We have a very serious task. We must nominate a candidate and it cannot be Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
“Convention adjourned,” Ed shouted out. And voices from all the delegations joined in. “Convention adjourned.” What could Farley do? He adjourned the convention. The organ started up again and we all filed out singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
It was after midnight. Later I heard that the taverns and bars surrounding the stadium did more business that night than they had since Prohibition ended six years before. Happy days indeed.
The next day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated by acclamation. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who addressed the convention. Softer looking in person than her photographs, but her voice had a high-pitched and listen-to-me-dear quality that would become so familiar on the radio. Mrs. Roosevelt delivered the president’s message. These were no ordinary times, she told the assembly. Eighteen months later our sense of the ordinary collapsed completely. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we joined the rest of the world—at war.
Part III
THE WAR
1
APRIL 1942
“She’s not a hundred percent Irish, but she has two brothers who are priests,” Rose said when she introduced me to Mariann Williams, Mike’s fiancée, that Easter Sunday at the apartment on Yates. Fiancée! And they would marry in June. Impossible to believe that the little boy who guarded his mother’s door against death was now a soldier in this endless war. Not a soldier exactly, thank God, not one of those poor Army fellows chasing Rommel through the deserts of North Africa, or, even worse, among the Marines getting slaughtered on South Pacific islands. Mike was in the Navy. Not on a ship but as a pilot, a naval aviator.
“Princes of the sky,” one woman had told Rose and me when we’d gone to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for his graduation from flight school last month. Rose had pinned wings of gold onto Mike’s navy blue uniform. Both she and I sniffed back tears, thinking of Mame, her sister, my pal, his mother. Mike told me he remembered her. Rose had always kept that family portrait Mabel Sykes had taken front and center in the apartment on Yates Avenue.
Now young Mike was an officer and a gentleman by order of the president of the United States and the Navy. Handsome and fit in his uniform with the brass buttons shining and a gold stripe on his sleeve, he was a lieutenant, JG. Mike told me that meant “junior grade,” but he would soon become a second lieutenant. He was assigned to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn where he’d be escorting the ships carrying men and supplies across the Atlantic. The sea was full of Nazi U-boats, he said, and they’d been sinking American merchant ships a
mile outside of New York Harbor.
“They were using the lights of the Coney Island roller coaster as a beacon,” Mike told me when he came home on leave that Easter of 1942. But now the Navy was taking on the U-boats. He said the ships were traveling in convoys protected by special Navy vessels, with Mike flying above watching out for the submarines.
“I have special equipment that lets me see the U-boats. I notify one of the escort vessels and they drop depth charges, and then I let go with a bomb. One less member of Hitler’s wolf pack,” he said. “My job is to make sure the convoy gets safely to Derry.”
“Derry?” I’d said. “What do you mean?”
“Naval Operating Base, Londonderry. That’s the homeport of the destroyer escorts that shepherd the convoys across the ocean. It’s the largest naval base in the European theater. I hear they have a state-of-the-art ship repair yard and a very modern hospital.”
“Derry, Ireland?” I’d said.
“Well Northern Ireland,” he’d said. “Part of Britain.”
“Don’t say that, Mike.”
“Say what?”
“Part of Britain. Derry is in the north of Ireland. It’s only a political accident that it’s not united with the rest of the island and it will be one day.”
“Funny, Aunt Nonie, that’s what the fellows stationed there call the place. North Ireland. It’s the brass who insist on ‘Northern Ireland.’”
“I’ve never heard of this base. I would have noticed if there was something in the newspapers,” I said.
“Oh the whole operation was top secret. The Seabees started building it six months before Pearl Harbor, but they wore civilian clothes. President Roosevelt didn’t want the isolationists here to know what he was up to, but we were bound to get into the war and the Navy convinced him that it took time to get a base up and running. We aren’t the Army where you can throw up a few tents and call it a camp, or the Marines who just sleep on the ground,” Mike said.
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