American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Yet more subtle and significant psychological forces were molding young Franklin’s personality. The Roosevelt and Delano families had been established long enough on the banks of the Hudson to despise the vulgar parvenus who were pushing to power and riches in the boom times of the nineteenth century. But the Roosevelts themselves were parvenus compared with the Schuylers and Van Rensselaers who had been living along the river for a century or more. Sara Roosevelt’s father had made his fortune by selling Turkish and Indian opium to Chinese addicts. The comfortably well-off Roosevelts could not ignore the far wealthier families around them; for the rest of his life FDR would show an almost obsessive interest in the homes and trappings of the ostentatious “nouveaux riches,” such as the Vanderbilts’ baronial mansion a few miles to the north.

  Nor could young Franklin escape direct confrontations with the social elite. At Groton he was barred from the inner social and athletic circles; at Harvard he was not tapped by Porcellian, the most exclusive club. He was seared by these rejections far more than he admitted in his breezy, dutiful letters to his parents. Many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, later wondered whether Franklin’s rejection by young patricians, most of whom would go into brokerages and banking, led him to “desert his class” and to identify with life’s outcasts. Being a Porcellian rejectee hardly catapulted Franklin into the proletariat; yet these class and psychic privations had a part in shaping his later views.

  Far more important were the times he lived in—the heyday of turn-of-the-century progressivism, a muckraking press, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal. And always there was the role model, in the other major branch of the Roosevelt family, of “Uncle Ted” himself—the New York City police commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, seemingly single-handed conqueror of San Juan Hill, and, during Franklin’s Harvard years, President of the United States. Even more, there was the President’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Much has been made of Eleanor Roosevelt’s bleak childhood—of her unloving mother who died when she was eight; of her handsome, dashing, adored father who showered endearments on her but deserted her again and again and then for good, dying of drink when she was ten; of her life as an orphan, neglected by her grandmother, tyrannized by her governess, and frightened by her alcoholic uncles. By her early teens she was a timid, sensitive, awkward child, with a wistful shadowed face and a tall figure usually attired in a shapeless, overly short dress. But this was not the Eleanor Roosevelt whom Franklin courted and married. By her late teens she had become far more at ease and poised in her family relationships, and with her warm and sympathetic manner, her expressive face and soft yet alert eyes, and above all her lively intelligence and quick compassion she had won a host of friends of both sexes. Her metamorphosis was largely the product of caring teachers—especially of the extraordinary Marie Souvestre, headmistress of the school Eleanor attended in England, a sophisticated, sharing, and demanding daughter of the French Enlightenment who drew Eleanor to good literature, foreign cultures and languages, and social radicalism.

  The two young Roosevelts who ardently plighted their troth in March 1905 felt very much in rapport, but there were deep potential divisions between them—and within each of them. In her early years Eleanor had developed a compassion for fellow sufferers—for all sufferers—that she was never to lose. She was haunted for months by the tormented face of a ragged man who had tried to snatch a purse from a woman sitting near her. Roosevelt in those years was still moved far more by a patrician concern for people, in the abstract, by noblesse oblige—or by what his mother preferred to call “honneur oblige.” Eleanor showed her concern day after day by teaching children at her settlement house. When Franklin once accompanied her to a tenement where one of her charges lay ill, he came out exclaiming, “My God, I didn’t know people lived like that!”

  Franklin’s ambition seemed to soar with the taste of office rather than in advance of it. Unexpectedly a run for the state senate opened up for him; once nominated, he plunged into the struggle with enormous dash and energy, and won. He entered the state senate as a vaguely progressive anti-Tammanyite; in office he led a fight against Tammany and moved so far to the left as to become virtually a “farm-labor” legislator. A Wilsonian in 1912, he gained the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy without much effort—but once in the job he became the most vigorous and committed navy man since Teddy Roosevelt himself had held the job. Action—and skill in action—spurred further ambition.

  While Eleanor had her own values, commitments, and purposes, she was so self-effacing as to seem to lack ambition. Life closed in around her after her marriage. She had not only a mother-in-law who refused to let her son go but a husband who saw a clear demarcation between his public career and her family role. “I listened to all his plans with a great deal of interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.” Having six babies in ten years—one died at seven months—narrowed and deepened her personal life. Her public role became a pale reflection of her husband’s—entertaining legislators in Albany, doing the rounds of government wives in Washington, helping with Red Cross and other war activities. Her husband was not always supportive. When to Washington’s amusement she blundered into telling The New York Times that in her wartime food-saving effort she had found that “making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable,” he wrote her cuttingly, “All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!”

  Most devastating of all to Eleanor’s self-esteem was her husband’s wartime romance with Lucy Mercer. “Franklin’s love of another woman brought her to almost total despair,” according to Joseph P. Lash, but “she emerged from the ordeal a different woman.” She said years later, “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time. I really grew up that year.” She insisted that he break off with Lucy—or with her. A chastened husband, aware that a divorce would be politically devastating, and probably also under motherly pressure, chose the former. He knew too that his wife could be a great political asset, especially since women at last had won the right to vote in national elections.

  Invited to join his campaign train when he ran for Vice President in 1920, Eleanor Roosevelt got her fill of the most grueling kind of electioneering. The Democratic debacle sent Roosevelt back to private life and gave his wife some hope of liberation from politics. This was not to be. Struck down by polio, Roosevelt endured intense physical and psychological pain with outward stoicism—he was rarely heard to complain—while Eleanor sought to keep the family on an even keel, served as her husband’s political stand-in, and tried desperately to maintain her own composure as the mother of five children ranging from five to fifteen years old.

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt emerged from their ordeal tempered and matured, but not fundamentally changed in their political attitudes. Having twice been defeated—in 1920 and earlier, in 1914, when he had made a try for the U.S. Senate—Roosevelt would proceed slowly, regaining his political base as he sought to regain his ability to walk. He would continue to pursue political office—making necessary compromises to achieve it but proceeding boldly on policy once in power. Eleanor would continue to pursue political goals—peace, help to the poor, women’s rights, clean government—by working in the organizations necessary to achieve them. She became increasingly active in the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903 by Jane Addams, in peace efforts, and in the tedious job of trying to rebuild the New York State Democratic party. Everyday politics still did not excite her; Franklin was the politician, she said later, and she the agitator. So she acted within the boundaries set by her husband, who saw competitive politics as essentially men’s business even while he sought laws that would aid women.

  These two legacies divided the couple, now both in their forties, as they moved back into public life during the twen
ties—as Roosevelt accepted his party’s draft for governor in 1928, as he campaigned vigorously and won a narrow victory while Eleanor intensified her party and campaign work, as he sought to carry out his liberal promises often against recalcitrant Republican legislators, as he won a landslide reelection for governor in 1930. The closer he came to the presidential nomination fight, the more he seemed to compromise, from Eleanor’s standpoint—on the League of Nations, on Prohibition, on Tammany, on states’ rights. But Roosevelt had a far better sense of the electoral complexities. On the League issue in particular he was the target of front-page fulminations by publisher William Randolph Hearst, who, Roosevelt knew, could influence delegates to the 1932 Democratic convention as well as newspaper readers. He caved in to Hearst. Eleanor conspired with her husband’s staff members and friends to stiffen his resolve. When an angry Wilsonian came in to berate him for a “shabby” statement on the League, he expressed regret and then asked his visitor if she would help make peace between Eleanor and him. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days!”

  One hard political fact confronted Roosevelt—the disheveled, fragmented state of the Democratic party, whose convention a candidate could carry only by winning two-thirds of the delegate vote. The party wielded little political muscle as a national organization; during the mid-twenties the Democrats had not even had a national headquarters but rather lived off the largesse of millionaires like John J. Raskob and Bernard Baruch. Nationally the party was composed of ideological and regional shards, each of which seemed to be represented in the candidates who entered the nomination fight after Roosevelt took the lead—Al Smith for the urban Democracy; House Speaker John Garner for the Southwest; demagogic Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma for the rural West; Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland for the old Jeffersonian, states’ rights Democrats; Newton D. Baker for the Wilson internationalists; and a string of favorite sons.

  Such a panoply of rivals both fortified and weakened Roosevelt—they fragmented his opposition but also threatened to slice off chunks of his own nationwide support. But he had many assets, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized them: “a familiar name, a charming personality, demonstrated political popularity, an impressive executive record in Albany, a dramatic personal victory over illness, a wide and well-cultivated acquaintance across the country.” With the devoted and expert help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Jim Farley, Sam Rosenman, and a host of others, Roosevelt’s bandwagon carried him to victory through a string of primaries, aside from a win by the ever-popular Smith in Massachusetts and by Garner in California. The Roosevelt forces arrived at the Chicago convention with a handsome majority of the delegates but tantalizingly short—by about 200 votes—of the necessary two-thirds.

  Feverishly the governor’s foes tried to head him off, clasping hands across ancient fissures in the party. The Roosevelt campaign effort almost blew up in Chicago when a group of FDR enthusiasts launched an attack against the two-thirds rule, thus giving the opposition a moral issue about “changing the rules of the game” and jeopardizing the support of Southerners who had long used the rule to protect racial and regional power. Roosevelt, who had originally planned to challenge the rule but had now lost control of the timing, retreated as gracefully as possible.

  So he would have to attain the magic two-thirds, and he did, through the disarray of his opponents, the unflagging efforts of Farley and other FDR men on the convention floor and in the smoke-filled rooms, and—at a critical moment after the third ballot—the consummation of the candidate’s patient courting of Texas’s Garner and California senator William G. McAdoo and his genuflection before Hearst. Fearing that Baker might win if Roosevelt did not, the Californians and the Texans pooled their poker hands. The big card was the vice-presidential nomination for Garner. Once he agreed—reluctantly, because he had no great wish to quit the Speakership—the deal was made. To McAdoo was given the exquisite satisfaction of settling the convention score of 1924, when he had been denied the nomination by Al Smith.

  “California came here to nominate a President of the United States,” he shouted in the teeth of the howling and booing delegates. “She did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating contest like that of 1924.” More hisses and groans. “California casts 44 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Then bedlam.

  “Good old McAdoo,” Roosevelt exclaimed by his radio at Hyde Park. While Eleanor went to the kitchen to cook bacon and eggs, he began planning for the next morning’s rendezvous with the waiting plane.

  Out of the pandemonium in the Chicago Stadium a young novelist, John Dos Passos, walked down West Madison Street. Gradually the din of speeches faded from his ears. No one in the seedy crowd about him seemed to know of the “historic” event that had just taken place. He stepped down a flight of stairs into the darkness of the roadway under Michigan Avenue.

  “This world too has its leisure class,” he noted. “They lie in rows along the ledges above the roadway, huddled in grimed newspapers, gray sag-faced men in worn-out clothes, discards … men who have lost the power to want. Try to tell one of them that the gre-eat Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the gre-eat state of New York, has been nominated by the gre-eat Democratic party as its candidate for President, and you’ll get what the galleries at the convention gave Mr. McAdoo when they discovered that he had the votes of Texas and California in his pocket and was about to shovel them into the Roosevelt bandwagon, a prolonged and enthusiastic Boooo. Hoover or Roosevelt, it’ll be the same cops.”

  The Democrats had their man. But who was he? Perhaps those who had sized him up best were the convention delegates and their leaders. Roosevelt was attractive, ambitious, electable, a reliable deal-maker; he was “available.” But the press and the pundits were looking for a higher quality—leadership. In this they had found Roosevelt lacking. The New Republic had viewed him as utterly without the kind of “great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina” that underlay strong leadership. He hedged on everything, complained the Washington Post. Wishy-washy, said Henry Mencken. “Too easy to please”—not the dangerous enemy of anything, Walter Lippmann had said earlier in the year. “In boldness of political leadership,” he was “certainly no Cleveland or Wilson,” said The Outlook.

  This criticism galled Roosevelt, but he could only respond privately. “Can’t you see,” he wrote to a Wilsonian outraged over his desertion of the League, “that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours—but have you ever stopped to consider that there is a difference between ideals and the methods of attaining them? Ideals do not change, but methods do change with every generation and world circumstance.

  “Here is the difference between me and some of my fainthearted friends: I am looking for the best modern vehicle to reach the goal of an ideal while they insist on a vehicle which was brand new and in good running order twelve years ago. Think this over! And for heaven’s sake have a little faith.” But his friends felt that he was being fainthearted. They knew, moreover, that on some issues he was consistent and committed—on big questions, such as the need for an activist government and a liberal Democratic party, and on specific issues, such as the vital role of electric power in his state and nation. He was not even consistent in his inconsistency.

  Those who examined Roosevelt’s inner circle for a clue to his fundamental and enduring beliefs were no less puzzled. By campaign time Roosevelt had collected around himself a group of “brain trusters” as diverse as they were talented. There were Columbia University political scientist Raymond Moley, a onetime city reformer who had since become most concerned about the “anarchy of concentrated economic power”; Adolf Berle, a child prodigy at Harvard who had continued to be so prodigious in law and economics that H. G. Wells once said of him that his worldview “seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and thought, but better arranged and closer to reality”; Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economist who was both a romantic and a planner, an i
ntellectual experimenter and a governmental centralizer. These men, united in their concern over the chaos, inefficiency, and cruelty of capitalist breakdown, were divided over monetary and other economic issues.

  Also close to Roosevelt was another penetrating mind but of quite different cast—Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, an irrepressible pursuer of legal justice and good conversation, who abhorred Utopian ideas for social reconstruction and called for economic decentralization and fair play through regulation of banking and securities. He was carrying the flag of his mentor, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, which was also the flag of many progressive—and powerful—Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Of quite different orientation were a number of self-styled “Jeffersonians” who preached states’ rights, limited government, and above all economy and budget-balancing, and who with the help of Louis Howe could gain access to Roosevelt at critical moments. Others operated on the fringe: Cordell Hull, a courtly Tennessean and veteran politico whose suspicion of big business took the form mainly of a near-obsession against high tariffs; General Hugh Johnson, a colorful old army man even at the age of fifty, a Bernard Baruch protégé who believed both in budget-balancing and in central governmental direction of the economy; various monetary theorists; and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  The candidate made no effort to impose intellectual unity on the core group—he had none to impose. But he did establish a clear line between “politics” and “policies.” Farley, after being installed by Roosevelt in place of Raskob as Democratic national chairman, said to Moley, “I’m interested in getting him the votes—nothing else. Issues aren’t my business. They’re yours and his. You keep out of mine, and I’ll keep out of yours.” Roosevelt reposed such confidence in these diverse brains—they never made up a monolithic “trust”—that he left speech- and issue-planning under Moley’s direction while he took off with three of his sons in a forty-foot yawl for a sail along the New England coast.