He had developed a powerful new empathy, allowing him to connect emotionally with all manner of people to whom fate had also dealt an unkind blow. He had inspired the entire Warm Springs community with his optimistic spirit, infusing his fellow polios with his own indomitable courage. “It was,” one patient recalled, “a place which changed forever our feelings about ourselves and the man who made this . . . possible.” And he, in turn, had experienced the intense fulfillment of linking his ambitions to the betterment of others, of creating an institution from the ground up that would serve for generations as a model for the treatment of people with disabilities.
At Warm Springs, he had found a cure different from what he had initially sought. He had come to restore his ability to walk (a condition he thought requisite to run for public office). He knew that no one so paralyzed had ever been active and successful in politics. Could a propped-up leader, a wheeled or carried leader, lead and uplift? Were crutches antithetical to American command? He knew the answers to those questions now. He had developed a different concept of leadership. The deep affection and respect accorded him from the shared community he had created at Warm Springs made it clear that a polio victim who needed help to walk was fully able to exercise leadership of the highest order. He had made a separate peace with his recovery and in his heart was ready to recommence with a life fully in the public glare.
* * *
Opportunity knocked in 1928, when Al Smith, having won the Democratic nomination for president, pressured Roosevelt—as a service to both the party and himself—to run for governor of New York. The Roosevelt name, Smith figured, would boost voter turnout in a state that had to be won. All the Democratic Party hoped from Roosevelt, Smith assured him, were four or five radio addresses to strategically punctuate the month-long campaign. As soon as the campaign was done, Roosevelt could turn over the heavy lifting to the lieutenant governor and return to Warm Springs and recuperation.
While Al Smith had rightly calculated the impact of the Roosevelt name in New York, he had badly miscalculated the man himself. Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. “When you’re in politics you have to play the game,” he told a friend. He resolved to prove to himself and to the public that he had the physical vigor and the capacity for sustained hard work that would outstrip any ordinary campaign effort. Often speaking fourteen times a day, he delivered thirty-three major speeches in thirty different venues, together with scores of informal talks and clusters of meetings.
“It was a dreadful physical business to make this campaign,” Perkins observed. “He really was kind of scared.” As she watched him being carried up a fire escape to enter a third-floor hall, “a perilous, uncomfortable” ordeal, she said to herself, “My God, he’s got nerve.” Moreover, he accepted his “humiliating entrance” with grace and dignity. He was “good-natured” with everyone, “conserving his strength” by never complaining about small things or wasting time over trifles: “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say, ‘That’s all right,’ and drink it.”
Roosevelt eked out a narrow victory in the gubernatorial race, but in the national election Smith went down to defeat when a Republican wave swept Herbert Hoover into the White House. Stunned by the devastating loss, Smith retreated to Albany, determined to be the power behind the governor whose nomination he had engineered at the Democratic State Convention.
Just as Roosevelt had not waged a token campaign, however, so he made it clear during the transition that he would not be a proxy governor. Shortly before Christmas, Roosevelt later recounted, “Al came to see me and told me that Mrs. Moscowitz [Belle Moskowitz, Smith’s political manager and chief aide] was preparing my Inaugural Address and Message to the Legislature. Honestly I think he did this in complete good faith . . . but at the same time with the rather definite thought that he himself would continue to run the Governorship. His first bad shock came when I told him that I had already prepared my Inaugural Address and that my Message to the Legislature was nearly finished.”
Roosevelt faced a second challenge to his independence when Smith strenuously recommended that he appoint Belle Moskowitz his chief secretary. Brilliant, dynamic, and domineering, Moskowitz had been as indispensable to Smith as Louis Howe was to Roosevelt. Roosevelt promised to consider her appointment, but in the end, after much waffling, patter, and calculated delay, he balked. “I realized that I’ve got to be Governor, and I’ve got to be myself,” Roosevelt explained to Frances Perkins, who would serve in his cabinet in Albany and as his labor secretary in Washington. When he first agreed to run, he recalled, he wasn’t sure if he could handle the rigors of the campaign, “but,” he proudly noted, “I made it.” Nor had he been certain that he was “sufficiently recovered to undertake the duties of Governor of New York, but here I am.” Roosevelt’s rejection provoked an irate response from Smith: “I created you and now what are you doing to me!” This brutal, personal struggle at the start of Roosevelt’s term as governor, Eleanor recalled, “ended the close relationship between my husband and Governor Smith.”
Formulating his own team in his own way was particularly important for Roosevelt because, as he had realized early on, his team would be a vital extension given his restricted mobility—its members serving as his “eyes and ears”—going forth into the field to localities he could not easily traverse, gathering information in the form of stories and human anecdotes that would animate issues and problems. When the narrow corridors and stairways of state institutions for the blind, the aged, the insane, and the deaf made it difficult for him to navigate, he encouraged Eleanor to go as his surrogate, to glean information and return with insights on how well the institutions were carrying out their stated missions.
“At first my reports were highly unsatisfactory,” Eleanor acknowledged. “I would tell him what was on the menu for the day and he would ask, ‘Did you look to see whether the inmates were actually getting that food?’ ” She learned to sample pots on the stove, notice if beds had been folded up and placed behind doors to hide overcrowded sleeping quarters, observe the patients’ interactions with the staff. These were the details her husband craved and taught her to discern. Before long, under Roosevelt’s mentoring, Eleanor became a first-rate investigative reporter, becoming so adept it was as if he had secured the data firsthand.
Roosevelt sought team members whose experiences and specific knowledge amplified his own far-flung curiosity. He was endlessly “educable,” said Frances Perkins, at the time his commissioner of industry. He filled the Governor’s Mansion with a steady stream of visitors from all walks of life who joined him at lunch, dinner, and frequently stayed overnight. If he couldn’t go out into the world, he would funnel the world into him. Having been away from state politics for a decade and a half, he asked Sam Rosenman (a young lawyer who had recently served three terms in the state legislature) to be his counselor. While Rosenman was considering Roosevelt’s offer, the story of his appointment appeared on the front page of an Albany newspaper. “I made up your mind for you,” Roosevelt gleefully informed him. Rosenman was not offended. How could one resist such affability? Soon he became one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers, so intimate that Franklin and Eleanor invited him to move into the Governor’s Mansion. Long afterward, Rosenman asked of his boss why he had been willing to place such a young man whom he barely knew into such a “close and confidential relationship.” Roosevelt replied, “I get to know people quickly and I have a pretty good instinct about them,” adding, “Sometimes that instinct is better than a long and careful investigation.”
To shore up Roosevelt’s knowledge in various pertinent fields affecting his prospective agenda, Rosenman recruited three Columbia professors, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle, to form the nucleus of what would become known as the “brain trust.” This inner circle, in turn, reached out to experts in various fields—business,
agriculture, labor—who then filled the Governor’s Mansion with a parade of interesting and useful guests. Soon, expanding circles of experts revolved around the governor as a little Ptolemaic universe around the earth.
“The routine was simple,” Ray Moley recalled. The atmosphere at dinner would be pleasant and casual. Roosevelt encouraged his visitors to talk about their work, their families, and themselves, making each person feel that “nothing was so important to him that day as this particular visit, and that he had been waiting all day for this hour.” Dessert done, they moved to the governor’s small study where “random talk came to an end.” There Roosevelt would throw questions to the experts “at an exciting and exhausting clip.” As the night wore on, the questions became “meatier, more informed—the infallible index to the amount he was picking up” in the course of the evening. Moley marveled at “the amount of intellectual ransacking Roosevelt could crowd into the evening.” From hindsight, it was clear to Moley that Roosevelt “was at once a student, a cross-examiner, and a judge.”
* * *
The Depression did not fall upon the land like a moonless night. Even as the stock market was thriving, there were signs of a darkening and protracted twilight. The very operating method Roosevelt had devised from the beginning of his governorship—sending people out to inspect and retrieve information while simultaneously bringing in a stream of selected experts—sensitized him early on to the fact that something was fundamentally wrong. From Perkins he learned of a puzzling “irregularity” in the labor market—“many people were out of work for longer periods than was comfortable.” When an inspection of the State Public Employment Service revealed many of its undermanned offices were overwhelmed by applicants, he called for an overhaul of the system—a small but important step before the October 1929 stock market crash.
As usual, Roosevelt was galvanized into action by way of the stories of specific needs and grievances. He could understand a problem, Perkins realized, “infinitely better” when baffling statistics and facts could be translated into a human story. Upon visiting a sweater mill in a small village near Poughkeepsie, he found both the owner and the workers “frightened and confused.” Before the crash, the mill had employed 150 people making high-quality knitted sweaters. The workers received good wages, the owner made a good profit, and the community thrived. As the Depression deepened and demand fell, the owner was forced to halve his work, reduce wages, and use a lower-quality yarn to produce cheaper sweaters. He kept the mill going as long as he could, even to the point of forgoing any personal profit. He lived in the village; his employees were friends. Still, demand continued to plummet and was soon insufficient even to cover costs. This small sweater mill, which was eventually forced to close, served as an emblem and an allegory to lend a human dimension to the abstract economic term “the descending spiral.”
Roosevelt had no overarching remedy for handling the Depression. He began with piecemeal solutions, trial-and-error methods to spread available jobs to a greater number of people: part-time work, a shortened workweek, a reduced workload, small make-work community projects. “What was clear to Roosevelt,” Perkins recalled, “was that we must find some answers and stimulate some immediate activities.” Although he mobilized charities to respond, coordinated local relief efforts, and called on local towns and cities to use their borrowing capacity to the fullest, the growing magnitude of the Depression burst the bounds of all these institutions.
After waiting through the winter and spring of 1931 for federal initiatives from President Hoover and the Republican administration, Roosevelt resolved in late summer to “assume leadership for himself and to take action for the State of New York.” He summoned the Republican legislature into an extraordinary session to pass what was then considered a radical idea—a state-sponsored comprehensive program of unemployment insurance. He knew from the start that the Republican majority would block his proposal. Like President Hoover, the state Republican leaders believed that private enterprise, charity, and local governments were the sole institutions capable of meeting the economic challenge. Relief brought from the distant level of the state or federal government, they insisted, would only impair the enterprise of the American people and worsen the problem.
Roosevelt spent several days preparing his message to the legislature. He had schooled his speechwriters Rosenman and Moley on how to communicate to the people at large in order to circumvent the legislators: Avoid dull facts; create memorable images; translate every issue into people’s lives; use simple, everyday language; never use big words when small words will do. Simplify the concept that “we are trying to construct a more inclusive society” into “we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”
“What is the State?” Roosevelt began. The State was created by the people for their “mutual protection and well-being.” One of its central duties is to care for its citizens who are unable, through adverse circumstances, to maintain their lives without help. In normal times, such aid would be provided by private or local contributions. But these were not normal times. The prolonged unemployment had exhausted the savings and credit of millions of families; the state had a responsibility to do its share, not out of charity, but out of duty. He called on the state, through a tax on citizens fortunate enough to be able to pay, to “provide public work for its unemployed citizens,” and “if no work could be found,” to provide unemployment insurance in the form of “food, clothing and shelter from public funds.” The Republican leaders rejected the bill. They substituted what the governor termed a “wishy-washy” measure and prepared to adjourn. Roosevelt threatened to veto the bill and to call the legislators back into a second extraordinary session until an effective bill was passed. Finally, the Republican leaders yielded.
First in the country, New York’s comprehensive relief program became a model for other states, establishing Governor Roosevelt as the leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In a celebrated radio address in April 1932, Roosevelt called on the country to rebuild its lost prosperity from “the bottom up and not from the top down,” to “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” For Roosevelt, that image was “not merely an oratorical abstraction,” as Sam Rosenman had directly witnessed; the forgotten man “was a living person”—a farmer facing crushing debt; a small businessman unable to compete against monopoly; a housewife incapable of making ends meet. Roosevelt’s hands-on leadership style, tireless search for information, and demand for stories that enlivened statistics with the flesh and blood of a shared humanity had acquainted him with the suffering and distress of individuals and afforded him a visceral understanding of the impact of the Great Depression.
Cast as a voice for the common man, Roosevelt sought the nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Despite a substantial majority of the delegates on the first ballot, Roosevelt fell 104 votes short of the two-thirds total then required for nomination. His opponents represented the old-guard conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Standstill prevailed through two additional ballots, but after much wrangling, the Roosevelt forces finally broke the deadlock. It was agreed that John Nance Garner of Texas would be nominated as the vice presidential candidate. In return, both the Texas and the California delegations would switch to Roosevelt, pushing him over the magic two-thirds number.
No sooner had he received word that he had won on the third ballot than Roosevelt took the unprecedented action of traveling to the Coliseum to accept the nomination in person. Tradition had dictated that a committee chosen by the convention visit the winning candidate in a leisurely month or six weeks to deliver official notification. Roosevelt decided to break with what he later called the “absurd” idea that he should remain for weeks “in professed ignorance”; instead, he provided a novel, bold, activist approach to leadership. At a time when airplane travel was still uncommon, he flew from Albany to Chicago in a tri-motor plane. Conventiona
l methods and old remedies would not help the country now. He had come in person to show that he was ready and eager to lead the battle against inaction, timidity, and hidebound thought. “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” he concluded. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms.”
* * *
The battle between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt illuminated how strikingly different characters, temperaments, and leadership styles responded to the enormous stress and uncertainty of the country. Both men had been progressive protégés of Woodrow Wilson. As assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had urged the Democratic Party to nominate Hoover for president in 1920. An enlightened businessman who had served with spectacular success as head of the Commission for Relief of Belgium during World War I, Hoover was deeply respected by both parties. In 1928, the Republicans nominated him for president. In his acceptance speech, delivered at the height of prosperity, Hoover proclaimed that Americans were “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”
His profound belief in individualism, voluntarism, and the fundamental strength of the American economy blinded him from realizing, until too late, that government had to exert a primary role in helping people through what was fast becoming the worst Depression the country had ever known. At the slightest uptick in the stock market, Hoover believed and summarily proclaimed that the worst was over. When the economy continued to flounder, he came under blistering assault. Still, he would not admit that voluntary activities had failed. He adopted a bunker mentality, refusing to countenance the worsening situation.
Leadership Page 24