The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Once again the strategy worked. Roosevelt got 15,590 votes to 13,889 for Southard and 2,628 for George Vossler, the Bull Moose candidate. He ran in his district 800 votes ahead of the Democratic candidates for president and for governor. Vossler received 1,400 fewer votes in the district than Theodore Roosevelt. To be sure, the young senator won about a thousand fewer votes than his opponents combined, but it seems likely that at least half of Vossler’s vote would have gone to Franklin Roosevelt in a straight party fight. A close observer estimated that, on the average, eight Democrats in every election district deserted Roosevelt but thirty Republicans swung over to him.

  Political poster issued by Roosevelt in 1912 campaign for re-election to the New York State Senate

  In the new senate, convening in January 1913, Roosevelt moved with his usual vigor. In their 1912 sweep the Democrats had won majorities in both chambers as well as the governorship, and Roosevelt was now chairman of the Committee on Agriculture. One of his first moves was to redeem a promise made during the election: that he would do something about the wide margin between what the New York City commission merchants paid the farmers for produce, and what the merchants sold it for. Roosevelt promptly introduced a measure providing for the regulation of commission merchants through licensing, inspection, and publicity. While Howe, now employed as a lobbyist, built fires under the state Grange in behalf of the bill, Roosevelt held hearings at the capitol. He received a vivid lesson in interest-group politics: 250 commission merchants showed up in Albany, but practically no farmers. While Roosevelt took a firm stand for his bill, he was willing to make a number of concessions to the merchants.

  Roosevelt introduced several other agricultural bills that he had drafted in collaboration with the Grange and with agricultural experts. These bills would give backing by the state government to farmers’ co-operative associations, both marketing and purchasing; would allow agricultural credit banks to lend money for farm improvements; would provide state aid to county farm bureaus. On conservation matters, too, the senator took advanced positions. He sided with Hughes and other Republican progressives on state development of water power, and he vainly fought to extend state control of forestation, in the face of intense opposition from lumber interests.

  The sweep of Senator Roosevelt’s farm and conservation bills was impressive. Considered with his position on labor legislation, these bills sharply raise the question whether Roosevelt moved essentially to a “New Deal” position on farm and labor matters twenty years before the New Deal was to be inaugurated. In major respects he did. But this shift came not in response to a new philosophy of government but to specific problems that seemed to him to call for specific action. “He probably could not have formulated his political philosophy very well at this time,” Eleanor Roosevelt said later. He was interested less in the philosophy than in the “science of government,” as he called it—how to understand people, how to influence them.

  By the time the farm bills came up for a vote, Roosevelt was no longer in the state senate. A wider field of action had beckoned him.

  THREE

  Washington: The Politician as Bureaucrat

  POLITICAL AFFAIRS SWEPT ALONG pell-mell on the national scene during State Senator Roosevelt’s years in Albany. Early in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt, steadily swinging to the left, began a strenuous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. “I don’t want to fight,” said Taft, but “even a rat in a corner will fight.” Although T.R. won most of the presidential primaries, Taft’s power over office-holding delegates and the party machinery brought him the Republican nomination late in June 1912. The Rough Rider promptly bolted, and the presidential chances of a Democrat soared.

  Who was this Democrat to be? Franklin D. Roosevelt had already made his choice. During 1911 he had watched admiringly as Woodrow Wilson, the new governor of New Jersey, split with the political machine that had ushered him into politics, shouldered Boss Jim Smith out of a United States senatorship, and commanded the progressive forces of the state in a successful fight for public-utilities regulation, workmen’s compensation, a corrupt-practices act, primary and elections legislation, municipal reform. Wilson was Roosevelt’s kind of Democrat—clean, cultivated, and progressive but not too progressive. Late in 1911 Roosevelt visited the governor in New Jersey to tender him his support.

  Wilson’s spare frame, lean, bespectacled face, and grave bearing gave him a scholarly, almost austere look, but his attitude was not academic. After some friendly conversation he went straight to the point. How many New York delegates to the Democratic national convention would be for him? About thirty out of the delegation of ninety, Roosevelt replied, but Murphy would control most of the delegates, and under the unit rule (by which the whole delegation vote is cast for the candidate who has the majority vote of the delegation) the whole ninety would be anti-Wilson.

  Despite the odds, Roosevelt was so enthusiastic for the New Jersey progressive that he went home ready to work with other pro-Wilson Democrats in the state. He hoped to arouse enough Wilson sentiment in New York to weaken Murphy’s hold on the delegation to the convention. Once again Roosevelt ran head on into massed Tammany power. Of a score or more upstate Democrats he invited to a Wilson dinner, only three accepted. At the Democratic state convention Murphy easily put through his slate of ninety delegates. Roosevelt was not even able to become an alternate delegate. He and his friends set up the New York State Wilson Conference, organized some Wilson clubs, and hired Howe to spread propaganda, but it was hardly more than a gesture. Murphy sat tight with his batch of convention votes.

  Late in June 1912 Democrats swarmed into Baltimore to nominate “the next President.” The air was electric, battle lines were fluid and confused. Roosevelt made up in energy for what he lacked in office and influence. With others he opened a Wilson conference headquarters near the convention hall, bombarded the delegates with arguments, and, after the nominating speech for Wilson, set off a demonstration of upstate Wilson men while Murphy’s delegates sat stonily in their places. But he was far from the centers of power—the smoke-filled rooms where Champ Clark’s men and Wilson’s men battled each other desperately for votes. When Murphy, to Roosevelt’s despair, suddenly threw New York’s votes to Clark, William Jennings Bryan redressed the balance by switching to Wilson. Day after day the interminable ballots continued. Slowly Wilson picked up strength; on the forty-sixth ballot he won.

  WILSON NOMINATED THIS AFTERNOON ALL MY PLANS VAGUE SPLENDID TRIUMPH, Roosevelt wired his wife in Campobello. His plans were not vague for long. His own position was suddenly changed; now he was an “original Wilson man” in a state whose delegation had stuck to Clark until the end. He had no doubt that Wilson would win New York over the split opposition. Tammany was boxed in; its leaders might not give Wilson enthusiastic support, but they would not dare knife him. To Roosevelt the time seemed ripe for a jolting blow against Tammany’s influence in the state. He and his friends quickly organized the “Empire State Democracy” made up of pro-Wilson progressives and constituting virtually a party within the Democratic party.

  The strategy was impressive, at least on paper. “This is the year to go ahead and strike,” Roosevelt told two hundred Democrats at an organization meeting late in July, “and we’ve got the club. We hope we won’t have to use it.…” What was this club? It was the threat to introduce a whole separate state ticket and thereby upset Murphy’s plans to win the governorship easily with a mediocre Tammany slate over the T.R. and Taft candidates. To be sure, this was a dog-in-the-manger approach; the slate of the Empire State Democracy would not win either. But the threat would be enough, it was calculated, to force Murphy to accept a “good” Democrat.

  Bad luck, poor management, and Murphy’s astuteness sent the plans awry. The anti-Murphy movement was racked by warring splinter groups, the Empire State Democracy ran out of funds at the crucial moment, and Roosevelt came face to face with the need to win renomination and re-election for state senator in his
own district. In September he bolted the sinking Empire State Democracy. To Roosevelt’s delight Wilson asked Murphy for an unbossed state convention; to Roosevelt’s dismay the Tammany leader was perfectly agreeable. Certainly the convention would be unbossed, he said—and promptly demonstrated his point by dropping his choice for the nomination, lackluster Governor Dix, and leaving the nomination wide open. Amazed and delighted, the anti-Murphy forces let their guard down—and Murphy helped switch the convention to a man with whom he felt he could do business, William (“Plain Bill”) Sulzer of Tammany Hall. The insurgents had no choice but to endorse Sulzer.

  By now Roosevelt was fighting his own battle for re-election to the senate. While he lay sick in bed and Howe scurried round the district, the national campaign roared to a tumultuous climax. “I am fighting,” proclaimed Woodrow Wilson, “not for the man who has made good, but for the man who is going to make good—the man who is knocking and fighting at the closed doors of opportunity.” “We are for liberty,” shouted Theodore Roosevelt, “but we are for the liberty of the oppressed. …” When an anti-third-term fanatic shot him in the breast as he was leaving for a speech, he treated the country to old-time Teddy Roosevelt heroics; “I will make this speech or die,” he said, and he made the speech. Taft and Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, scouted for votes to the right and to the left of the main stars. On Tuesday November 5 the voters gave the verdict: Wilson 6,293,019; Roosevelt 4,119,507; Taft 3,484,956; Debs 901,873.

  The Wilson administration had every reason to make a place for Senator Roosevelt. In January he got an appointment with the President to discuss patronage matters, and at this time Roosevelt may have expressed an interest in going to Washington. Shortly before Wilson’s inauguration, William Gibbs McAdoo, the prospective Secretary of the Treasury, had sounded out the young state senator on a place in his department. But Roosevelt had his eye on something else. On the morning of Inauguration Day he ran into Josephus Daniels, the new Secretary of the Navy. The North Carolina editor-politician liked the stamp of Roosevelt’s progressivism, his reputation as a Tammany-baiter, his bubbling enthusiasm, and the fact that he came from a different part of the country from Daniels and thus would lend geographical balance to the navy office. Roosevelt congratulated him on his appointment as Secretary of the Navy. “How would you like to come to Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy?” Daniels asked.

  Roosevelt beamed. “How would I like it? I’d like it bully well. It would please me better than anything in the world.” An old hand at congressional protocol, Daniels cleared the appointment with Senator O’Gorman. The Senator consented, but without enthusiasm. As a courtesy Daniels also consulted Elihu Root, Republican Senator from New York.

  A queer look came over Root’s face. “You know the Roosevelts, don’t you?” he asked. “Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front.”

  A ROOSEVELT ON THE JOB

  From the start, the new Assistant Secretary did try to ride in front. Two days after his installation, when Secretary Daniels was out of town, he told reporters half-jokingly, “There’s a Roosevelt on the job today. You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?”—a gratuitous reminder of T.R.’s belligerent orders to Dewey two months before the Spanish-American War. Often during the next seven and one-half years Franklin Roosevelt differed with his chief, and made little effort to conceal his feelings. The surprising thing was Daniels’ willingness to put up with the brash young man. Even more surprising was Roosevelt’s quick mastery of the political dimensions of his job.

  Traditionally the Assistant Secretary’s job was a management job. Even in 1913 it was a big one. Most federal agencies of the time were small and somewhat sleepy operations; less than two decades previously, a Vanderbilt was spending more money on farming and forestry than was the United States Government. The United States Navy, however, had heavy and far-flung responsibilities; it employed civilians in scores of yards and installations and maintained a sizable fleet of battleships. Roosevelt, the only Assistant Secretary in the department, had charge of civilian personnel, handled awkward relations between military and civilian officials, helped prepare the navy’s budgets. But his interests were far-ranging. “I get my fingers into everything,” he used to say, “and there’s no law against it.”

  A bureaucracy, it has been said, is no testing field for heroes. It can smother a man in a blanket of rules, customs, formalities, in endless ribbons of influence and deference. It might have smothered Roosevelt, who had had no experience in a large organization. But it did not. He never gained from his job the dramatic effects that his Uncle Ted had, but from the start—with one exception—he showed a capacity for political administration that was to serve him well in later years.

  The exception involved his chief. Josephus Daniels was a man the young Dutchess County patrician took many years to understand. Born in North Carolina during the Civil War, Daniels had grown up among farmers and politicians who were struggling against tobacco and railroad interests. Editor of a small-town newspaper most of his life, he was a Bryanite, a pacifist, a prohibitionist, an agrarian radical. His black string tie, homespun face, and rustic courtliness were the perfect cover for a full grasp of the art of politics and the arts of politicians.

  Daniels was the only administrative superior Roosevelt ever had in his political career. The young man chafed at the older man’s ways: he thought Daniels “the funniest looking hillbilly” he had ever seen, he mimicked the Secretary before society friends, and he wrote him amazingly tactless memorandums. Only Daniels’ large-mindedness and his love for Roosevelt—“love at first sight,” the older man said—saved the Assistant Secretary. It was Daniels, moreover, who handled the main job that faces any department head—the job of getting along with Congress. Roosevelt dealt with Senators and Representatives on a host of secondary matters, but Daniels did the slow, stubborn work of negotiating with the powerful men on Capitol Hill who appropriated money for the navy.

  The admirals, of course, liked Roosevelt, just as they disdained the puritanical Methodist whom Wilson, by some grim joke, they felt, had made their chief. The young Assistant Secretary loved ships, he spoke nautical lingo, he dealt with them as social equals, and his wife was nice to their wives. They may have chuckled a bit at young Roosevelt’s enjoyment of the seventeen-gun salutes fired in his honor, and at his designing an Assistant Secretary’s flag to fly when he was aboard ship. But they respected, too, his ability to pilot a high-speed destroyer through the narrow strait between Campobello Island and the mainland.

  The chief link between Roosevelt and the admirals, however, rose above personalities. He was from the start a “big navy” man. “I hope when you ‘put this uniform on’ you will not, like the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, be carried away by the zeal for a big navy which has eaten up so many Secretaries,” a friend wrote him shortly after he took office. But Roosevelt came out immediately for a “large and efficient navy.” Daniels himself favored naval expansion, but Roosevelt’s enthusiasm outran his chief’s.

  The heaviest organized pressure for a big navy came from the Navy League of the United States, which was run largely by steel, shipping, and financial magnates. Roosevelt gave a “big navy” speech to the League’s convention before he had been in office a month. “This is not a question of war or peace,” he said. “I take it that there are as many advocates of arbitration and international peace in the navy as in any other profession. But we are confronted with a condition—the fact that our nation has decided in the past to have a fleet, and that war is still a possibility.” The speech fell within the bounds of Wilsonian ideology. But behind the scenes Roosevelt showed a cordiality toward the League that was in marked contrast with the pacifism of Secretary of State Bryan and even of Daniels himself. For example, a general meeting to discuss plans for the League’s convention was held in Roosevelt’s office, and the League asked him to preside.

  The lar
gest and potentially most difficult group Roosevelt had to deal with was organized labor. Relations with the thousands of civilian workers in the yards and depots offered plenty of snarls and pitfalls. Many of the men were organized in craft unions of the American Federation of Labor, an organization of importance to the Wilson administration and to any political ambitions Roosevelt might have. At the same time the voters wanted naval economy, the admirals wanted a disciplined labor force, departmental engineers wanted more efficiency in the yards, and congressmen wanted special favors for constituents employed by the navy.

  Roosevelt skirted these formidable shoals in impressive fashion. Typical was his handling of problems involved in “scientific management.” The Taylor “stop-watch” system of timing, standardizing, and routing jobs had been hailed by management as the road to productive efficiency; the unions, however, saw the system as scientific exploitation leading to wage cuts and layoffs. Eager to establish a record for efficiency, Roosevelt became highly interested in the possibilities of the Taylor system. But he was quick to see the objections of the workers. In the end he did not push the system; while there must be authority and discipline, he said, he was impressed with the findings of a congressional investigating committee that “neither the Taylor system nor any other should be imposed from above on an unwilling working force.”

  Some of Roosevelt’s administrative decisions represented compromises that, from a narrow management viewpoint, were defective. But the great lesson he learned during these years was that bureaucrats, workers, and sailors were human beings with human problems and failings. He saw that people wanted recognition as well as promotions or better wages; he tried, for example, to have labor representatives appointed to wage boards. “I want you all to feel,” he told a group of machinists, “that you can come to me at any time in my office and we can talk matters over.” His labor policies worked. After his years as Assistant Secretary Roosevelt was able to boast, with only slight exaggeration, that the navy had not had a single strike during the previous seven and one-half years.