The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Although not the initiator of the revolt, Roosevelt gradually became its leader. He was informally chosen chairman at an early meeting and he usually spoke for the group. Acting essentially as a presiding officer rather than a dominant chieftain, he conducted diplomatic negotiations with the Tammany forces. His leadership was partly due to the proximity of his home, and to the fact that he was a senator and the others virtually all assemblymen. It was also due to his resoluteness, good humor, and resourcefulness.

  As the struggle deepened the Insurgents won nationwide attention. The fight against bossism struck a popular note. Progressives had long denounced the United States Senate as a “millionaires’ club” packed with hirelings of the trusts. The national Senate was under a drumfire of criticism for holding up a proposed constitutional amendment to require direct election of senators. Woodrow Wilson, just installed in the governor’s mansion in Trenton, was battling a move in the New Jersey legislature to send a noted boss to the Senate, and Theodore Roosevelt, who had come out in 1910 for direct primaries, seemed to favor popular election of senators. These changes, along with the initiative and referendum, were key parts of the Progressives’ apparatus of reform.

  Newspapers throughout the country featured the fight that this new Roosevelt was making against bossism. Even more gratifying to the young senator were the hundreds of letters he received from his constituents. “Stand firm,” most of them urged. A few letters were hostile. “You know what they done to your Uncle Teddy,” he was warned. But his mail from the district ran heavily in favor of the Insurgents.

  Early in the fight Sheehan warned Roosevelt to his face that he would go into the Insurgents’ constituencies and “show up their characters.” The Tammany politician carried out his threat, but his invasion of Dutchess County was a conspicuous failure. Regular Democratic leaders in Poughkeepsie, seeking to keep on friendly relations with the powerful Tammany elements in the party, gave a dinner for Sheehan and collected 265 names on a petition demanding that Roosevelt go along with the caucus decision. The petition did not worry Roosevelt. The more opposition from regular Democrats, the more popularity he gained with independents and Republicans.

  On January 30 Murphy himself sought out Roosevelt. Was there any chance the Insurgents would change their minds? “No, Mr. Murphy,” Roosevelt answered. The Insurgents held strategic ground. They would not give in.

  To hand out statements to the press, to deal with Murphy on equal terms, to assume heroic proportions in the eyes of voters back home—all this was heady stuff for the twenty-nine-year-old Roosevelt. But before the end his appetite for the fight palled.

  For one thing, the struggle became unduly protracted. Week after week went by with no break in the deadlock. Staying in session these extra weeks was expensive and inconvenient for the legislators, who received only $1,500 a year and ordinarily were in Albany only one or two days a week during the first three or four months of the year. They tended to blame the Insurgents. Pressures on the small group steadily built up, and Roosevelt and Terry had trouble holding their cohorts in line. Moreover, the struggle became increasingly complex as time passed. As Sheehan’s chances dwindled, more and more candidates—at least a score of them—entered the lists. Every new candidate changed the pattern of pressures and loyalties amid which the Insurgents were operating.

  Even more important, at least for Roosevelt, was the change in the moral climate of the struggle. It was easy to soar on a high ethical plane, to be on the side of righteousness against wickedness. But was the issue this simple? Tammany was not a monolithic evil. Roosevelt could not but respect the honesty and integrity of men like Wagner and Smith. The machine, he discovered, was not really a machine, but a collection of men with crisscrossing loyalties and motivations. Revolts against Murphy flared in the strongest Tammany districts. Even more surprising, Murphy himself was not a dead-ender for Sheehan; as the deadlock continued and Sheehan’s chances faded, Murphy quietly began to line up support for Dan Cahalan, his lieutenant and son-in-law. Boss Barnes and his Republican minions played a crafty game, negotiating at one point with Tammany, at the next with the Insurgents. Instead of a grand rally between clean-cut opposing forces, the struggle began to look like Tolstoi’s picture of war as a confused scramble of men and groups.

  Strange maneuverings took place on the Insurgent side too. Unable to make headway with Barnes, Roosevelt tried to arrange a bipartisan deal with influential Republicans through a group of eminent and conservative Cleveland Democrats, most notably Francis Lynde Stetson, attorney for J. P. Morgan. Roosevelt hoped to win over Republican support for a conservative, clean-government Democrat for senator. But some of the Stetson group apparently wanted a quid pro quo—an understanding that the anti-Tammany Democrats would continue as an anti-Progressive group pledged to oppose bills such as the then pending income-tax amendment. When Samuel Untermeyer looked like a possible compromise candidate, this same group, remembering Untermeyer’s antitrust and anti-Morgan activities, helped destroy his chances. Murphy did not miss his opportunity. He charged that the Insurgents were but a front for the reactionary Stetson group.

  By late March the struggle had become a bitter war of nerves. Roosevelt and Terry were losing control of their small group; “we came near going on the rocks several times,” Roosevelt said later. Tammany was still uneasy about a possible deal between Republicans and Insurgents. At this point Murphy staged an elaborate maneuver. He suggested a compromise candidate in Justice Victor J. Dowling. Knowing that the Insurgent tail could not wag the Democratic dog, Roosevelt and his group agreed. But a day later, as the Insurgents met just before going to the caucus they had boycotted so long, word came that Dowling had refused the nomination and Murphy had substituted the name of Justice James A. O’Gorman, formerly Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall.

  Could the Insurgents swallow O’Gorman? Could they afford not to? O’Gorman, despite his Tammany connections, had shown independence from the machine. Moreover, he was ex-president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and beloved by the Irish. Some of the Insurgents had previously said they would accept O’Gorman. Two of the group left immediately to enter the caucus and vote for O’Gorman. The rest, badly divided, debated the matter for hours during that afternoon. Finally a majority, with Roosevelt and a few others still opposed, decided to go along with O’Gorman, after Smith and Wagner promised that there would be no reprisals. Roosevelt’s little band was deserting him.

  The end was inglorious. Hoots, groans, and hisses greeted the Insurgents as they filed into the chamber for the final vote. They had done their duty as they saw it, Roosevelt said lamely. “We are Democrats—not irregulars, but regulars.” The press felt that the Insurgents had been outgeneraled. Roosevelt maintained that the Insurgents had won, but a defensive note crept into his letters to his constituents. And he was wary about future Insurgent strategy. “I believe it will be a mistake for us to try to get all of the former Insurgents together again,” he wrote to a friend, “but there are ten or twelve of us who can form a pretty good nucleus to work.”

  Roosevelt could mark up some gains from the struggle. He had won national attention, he had strengthened his position in his district, and Progressives probably remembered his lengthy fight against Tammany long after they forgot the anticlimactic ending. Perhaps more important in the long run, the young politician had been given a telling education in the tactics of pressure and intrigue.

  But he had suffered losses too. Midway in the struggle Sumner Gerard had urged him toward moderation. “If you go too far, needlessly, you run the danger of impairing your future political effectiveness.” Roosevelt knew what Gerard meant by his “future political effectiveness.” An aroused Tammany would spike any statewide ambitions the senator might have. But Roosevelt was in no mood to compromise. When a constituent warned him of the Tiger’s long memory, Roosevelt said, “No, right is right, no matter who it hurts.”

  He was not willing to let the issue die. Months after the Sheehan fight he t
old a Buffalo audience that Murphy “and his kind” must be destroyed, that the “beasts of prey have begun to fall.” Tammany lashed back. The “silly conceits of a political prig,” said a Murphy lieutenant. The party should not tolerate these fops and cads, these political accidents who “come as near being political leaders as a green pea does a circus tent.” The Tammany man compared Roosevelt’s education and background with his own leadership, which, he said, depended on “human sympathy, human interest, and human ties among those with whom I was born and bred.…”

  The struggle between the high-minded patrician and the earthy, human bosses was to go on a long time. But perhaps the last words in the Sheehan struggle were uttered by Roosevelt to Frances Perkins many years later when he was President: “You know,” he said, “I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.”

  FARMER-LABOR REPRESENTATIVE

  The fight against Sheehan over, the senate settled down to the business of legislating. Senator Roosevelt threw himself into the work. Years later Frances Perkins remembered him on the floor of the senate: “… very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up.” During his two years in the senate Roosevelt seemed to be looking down his nose at people, but he was learning the craft of parliamentary politics with remarkable speed.

  Roosevelt’s early legislative activities were not all of one pattern. Much of the time he was fighting a running battle with Tammany; on occasion he would go along with a dubious project of the bosses. Fie noisily held aloft the banner of clean government, yet he filled many minor positions with patronage appointments carefully cleared with Democratic leaders in his district; making appointments in this way, he said privately, was “vitally necessary if there is to be any organization in the party.” He paid special attention to the interests of his constituents, yet on one occasion he moved to strike out of an appropriation bill a bridge-repair item for his district. He hewed close to the local farm interests, yet in October 1912 the New York State Federation of Labor said that Roosevelt’s record on their bills was “excellent.” Roosevelt’s record as state senator was compounded in parts of insurgency, orthodoxy, and trial and error.

  When “moral” issues arose he could still vault onto his white charger and attack the enemy with vim, to the delight of his constituents. Although occasionally he himself gambled in a small way, Roosevelt opposed legalizing race-track gambling. He criticized prize fighting and Sunday baseball. He drew laudatory letters from clergy in his district by working hard for the “one day of rest in seven” bill. He hedged on Prohibition through the time-honored device of the state politician: coming out for “local option,” which would allow voters to decide the issue for their own local areas. He favored a national uniform divorce law, and won unanimous support from the legislature—and from the National Christian League for Promotion of Purity.

  In his early months Senator Roosevelt’s progressivism was political in content rather than economic or social. He introduced a well-received resolution urging New York State congressmen to work for direct election of senators, he supported municipal home rule, and, after some vacillation, he came out for woman suffrage. The direct primary for party nominations was the kind of reform that enlisted his full energies. Considered but not adopted by previous legislatures, endorsed by both parties in 1910, direct primaries for party nominations came before the legislature not long after the “Sheehan business” and touched off another angry brawl. Roosevelt, so uncompromising in the Sheehan fight, was more willing to negotiate with the bosses in this matter, although some of his Insurgent colleagues were not. After holding out strenuously for a strong primary bill in July 1911, two months later he voted for a weak primary bill, riddled with concessions to Tammany; the following year, after helping to arouse the voters, he worked with a bipartisan group of Progressives to bring about changes that would cut down the party organization’s influence in the primaries, but he made little progress against the regulars.

  Labor legislation—the dull and grimy side of progressivism—was something else. When Roosevelt first came to Albany his views on labor, to the extent he had any, were benevolently paternalistic. He favored help for foreign seamen coming into New York City; he wanted purer milk for needy children. He flatly opposed legislation to legalize boycotts by unions, and took an evasive stand on workmen’s compensation and on measures to forbid working boys of sixteen to twenty-one more than fifty-four hours per week. But in the next two years his attitude changed sharply. He not only backed the fifty-four-hour bill but during the debate on this bill held the senate floor with a talk on birds until none other than Big Tim Sullivan himself could be routed out of bed to supply a vitally needed vote. He came out for workmen’s compensation legislation despite opposition from some constituents. By February 1913 he was willing to speak at a legislative hearing in favor of the whole batch of thirty-two bills drawn up by the Factory Investigating Commission.

  How account for this change? The cause did not lie in a shift in Roosevelt’s basic social outlook, for he had not developed a philosophy of government. Partly, no doubt, Roosevelt was influenced by his cousin Theodore, who by mid-1912 was vociferously supporting workmen’s compensation, limited injunction in labor disputes, and social welfare legislation for women and children. Partly it was the climate of the times: America was moving toward a climax of progressive debate and action in the election of 1912. Partly it was the realization that his Tammany colleagues, whatever their failings, had a concern for social justice that rivaled his own. Most important, the investigations, reports, and debates in the senate gave him a vivid, harsh lesson in how the “other half” lived.

  Indeed, the whole senate experience was a political education for Roosevelt. He learned quickly from old Albany hands like Smith and Wagner, from newspapermen, lobbyists, and state officials. He mastered knacks of the political trade: how to avoid taking a stand on issues and becoming involved in destructive local squabbles, how to deal with local party leaders, how to handle patronage without making an undue number of enemies, how to attract publicity, how to answer importunate letters. Above all, he learned the lesson that democratic politicians must learn: that the political battle is not a simple, two-sided contest between opposing parties, or between right and wrong, or between regulars and irregulars, but, as in the Sheehan episode, a many-sided struggle that moved over broad sectors and touched many interests. A simple farm bill, for example, involved not merely individual farmers but county agricultural societies, canneries, university professors, merchants, railroads, and government officials, and divisions over policy might occur not merely between such groups but within them.

  Sometimes education came at painful cost. Tammany could still outmaneuver the young senator when it had a mind to. Backed by reformers, Roosevelt late in 1911 attacked a charter for New York City that was sponsored by Tammany. Senate lines were closely drawn and Roosevelt was in a position to kill the charter, but Tammany closed in on him from the rear: it threatened to reshuffle congressional districts and put Dutchess County into a hopelessly Republican area. Under pressure Roosevelt faltered. He came out for the charter, then, after progressive outcries, again took a stand against it. This was not the only time that Roosevelt vacillated as he tried to balance the perversely conflicting factors of his own political ambitions, his various principles about the right thing to do, the complex relationships of state leaders in both parties, the welfare of his constituents, and the multifarious strands of public opinion in district, state, and nation.

  Climbing the political ladder to the presidency, according to one theory, is essentially a matter of luck; the winner has simply won an incredible run at throws of the dice. This theory can easily be applied to Roosevelt; his wealth, name, family connecti
ons, appearance were bestowed upon him, and he had the good luck to run for office during two Democratic years. Yet he had bad luck too. In 1912, in the middle of his campaign for re-election to the state senate, he was stricken by typhoid and put out of action for the rest of the contest.

  In this emergency he called in Louis McHenry Howe to run his campaign. Albany correspondent for the New York Herald and a kind of minor political operator around the capitol, Howe, with his dwarfish body, ferret-like features, and untidy clothes, looked like a troll out of a Catskill cave. He was out of a job in 1912 and glad to work for a man who, he felt, seemed likely to have a shining political future. To the little man Eleanor Roosevelt took an immediate dislike that lasted many years, but her husband saw his many uses. While Roosevelt lay in bed, on occasion despairing of the outcome, Howe managed the fight with verve, imagination, and guile. Armed with substantial funds, he sent thousands of “personal” letters from Roosevelt to farmers throughout the district. He published large advertisements in the newspapers. He played up specific measures that Roosevelt had proposed—or would propose—for his constituents, including lower license fees for shad fishermen along the Hudson and legislation for standard-size barrels for apple growers. He dealt with complaints from regular Democrats about Roosevelt’s handling of patronage and his attitude toward Tammany.

  Howe had some twists of his own, such as his denunciation of Roosevelt’s opponent, a banker and utility president named Jacob Southard, for not visiting Columbia County during the campaign; his rather free distribution of five-dollar checks to scores of campaign workers; and his crafty ways of arousing discord within the Republican ranks. But his strategy was essentially that of his chief two years before: to proclaim Roosevelt’s agrarian progressivism, his bipartisanship, his antibossism, and his concern for the specific needs of his constituents.