The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  There was little interest in the League of Nations, Early concluded. Wilson had failed to arouse interest in it on his tour. As Roosevelt moved on, the reports on League sentiment were even more discouraging. Almost everywhere, it seemed, the situation varied between apathy and downright opposition. “New Hampshire is hopeless,” Early reported, “the Irish are rampant.” In Minneapolis, McIntyre found a lack of interest in the League-people were thinking of their “breadbaskets and not of their war allies.”

  But Roosevelt stuck to the League issue. Desperately he tried to put the opposition on the defensive with a direct question to the Republican candidate. “If the United States can enter the existing League of Nations in such a way that the will of the League cannot be imposed on us against our will, and if it is made clear that our Constitutional and Congressional rights regarding war are in every way preserved, would you then, Senator Harding, favor our going in?” Roosevelt knew that he would get no answer, that Harding would remain silent for fear of alienating either the anti-League Republicans headed by Senator Hiram Johnson or the pro-League Republicans led by ex-President Taft. In his maddening way Harding continued to utter banalities on his porch.

  Roosevelt did not spend all his ammunition on the League issue, however. He touched on a variety of subjects—the tariff, Harding’s reported espousal of dollar wheat for the farmers, excessive campaign spending by the Republicans, control of Harding by a small gang of men. He advanced a program that in a rough way antedated later ones: better marketing facilities and living conditions for farmers, a billion-dollar conservation and development program, higher labor standards, improved relations with Latin America, and closer economic relations with all nations. He endorsed the legislation passed under the Wilson administration.

  Most of the time Roosevelt waged a skillful, aggressive campaign which drew attention without stealing the show from the star, Governor Cox. He also committed mistakes, the worst of which occurred at Butte. Stung by Republican charges that Britain would control six votes in the League Assembly, Roosevelt said that the United States would control a dozen—namely those of her little brothers to the South. Indeed, he went on, he and Daniels really controlled two of these votes, for they “had something to do with the running of a couple of little republics.” He added with a smile that while in the navy he had written Haiti’s constitution himself.

  It was a dreadful boner. Republicans pointed with alarm, Latin Americans felt insulted, and the State Department was upset. Roosevelt took the politician’s way out—he claimed he was misquoted and “clarified” his remarks.

  The Roosevelt name continued to exert its spell. Pressing up to the candidate people would say, “I voted for your father” and “You’re just like the Old Man.” To offset this annoying misapprehension the Republicans sent young Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., on his cousin’s trail. “He is a maverick,” the colonel said of his distant cousin; “he does not have the brand of our family.” More important, Harding finally left his porch and delivered some stump speeches.

  Although he knew that a candidate tends to be carried away by his cheering audiences and well-wishers, Roosevelt was in high hopes the day before the election. His hopes were soon dashed. The Republicans won the presidency by over seven million votes, 16,152,220 to 9,147,553, one of the most sweeping victories in presidential history. Republicans would control the House 300 to 132, the Senate 59 to 37. Harding polled more than twice as many votes as Cox in Roosevelt’s own state.

  Wilson was bitter. “We had a chance to gain the leadership of the world,” he said. “We have lost it, and soon we shall be witnessing the tragedy of it all.” Cox accepted defeat with the grace of a veteran. So did Roosevelt, but he looked forward. The moment of defeat, he said to a friend, was the best time to lay plans for Democratic victories in the future.

  THE RISING POLITICIAN

  One Sunday evening late in 1917 Sara Delano Roosevelt sat, book in hand, in the living room that she had recently added in the new south wing of her Hyde Park home. She enjoyed this gracious, comfortable room, with the Gilbert Stuart portrait of James’s great-grandfather, large windows, marble fireplaces, high bookshelves. But this evening her heart was heavy. Franklin and Eleanor had been up for the week end and there had been a long talk that ended in something unusual at Hyde Park—a family argument. In part it was a disagreement that had at its core a devoted mother’s attempt to keep her son at home in the safe arms of his family estate, an attempt that was doomed to failure. But more than that it was based on her inability to understand why a man born to aristocracy should wish to identify himself with the crowd and with the crudities and compromises of political life. The young couple had just left, and she thought of them as they neared their home in New York. At length she closed her book, walked to her Snuggery next to the living room, and sat down at her writing desk to pour her thoughts out to her son and daughter-in-law.

  “… Perhaps dear Franklin,” she wrote, “you may on second thoughts or third thoughts see that I am not so far wrong.… One can be democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor, we owe a great example.” She deplored the trend to shirt sleeves, she said, to the giving up of the old-fashioned virtues of family life, of tradition and dignity, to the tendency of some to be “all things to all men.” “I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself.” For Sara Delano Roosevelt, it was the duty of the aristocrat to be better than others, to serve as an example for the less fortunate to follow. To her—and to many others like her—welfare was more personal than public and the past was more precious than the future. But her son, though understanding and affectionate, had moved beyond the perimeter of Hyde Park.

  The letter was a mother’s despairing effort to keep a hold on her son; it was, even more, a forlorn cry from the Hyde Park of old to the rising political man who had to be “all things to all men.” In hardly a dozen years Roosevelt had moved from the narrowly circumscribed life of Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard into the varied and strenuous roles of politician, legislator, bureaucrat, and war leader. The descendant of country squires, of Hudson Valley aristocrats, was dealing on equal terms with the shirt-sleeved men of labor, with the derby-hatted men of Tammany. No wonder the mother wondered why her son had journeyed so far from Hyde Park. But the journey had begun many years ago.

  The family has been well called a miniature political realm in which habits relating to later political life are ingrained. In childhood, the most striking trait apparent in young Franklin’s personality was his responsive receptivity to his family and, after a time of shyness, to servants. He was usually willing to come to terms easily with the dominant forces in his environment. It was not merely the ability to adjust but to find ways of getting along with a variety of dissonant groups and personalities at the same time without upsetting the delicate equilibrium that made him into the man he was. At Groton he had so little trouble with the masters that he had to redress the balance by deliberately incurring a penalty at the hands of “Old Nutty” to keep in favor with his mates. At Harvard, he managed to keep one foot in the exclusive clubs with the other in class political affairs. At Albany he won and kept the backing of farm groups even while establishing close relations with labor and other groups important to his political future. In the navy, he was on good terms simultaneously with admirals, labor leaders, “big navy” men, local politicians, and leaders of the Wilson administration, as well as some groups hostile to Daniels and the President.

  The breadth and ease of Roosevelt’s associations apply in a class sense as well. Born a patrician, he never gave up his class associations and activities. Even in the busiest days of the war he took time and pains to sponsor friends’ admissions to exclusive New York clubs, to maintain relations with leading Dutchess County families, to participate in Washington social life. His friendships reached across party lines; he kept on friendly terms with Henry Cabot Lodge, Augustus P. Gardner, and other Republicans even when t
hey vigorously attacked Wilson and Daniels. His class contacts were of enormous help to him: they provided entree to a remarkable variety of important people. Indeed, his class, cutting across political parties, had something of the power and influence of a city machine, except that it was bound together by personal ties of family and social rank rather than by patronage and food baskets.

  Sara Roosevelt was probably troubled more than she needed to be that Sunday night at Hyde Park. For, in the supreme sense, Roosevelt never left home. Somehow he traversed almost a cross section of American life, moving ever into new groups and activities, without tearing his roots from Hyde Park. The general precepts and values he had learned from his parents and from Peabody were always very much part of him. His mother sometimes could not see in him the hard deposit of Hyde Park simply because Roosevelt could move out into other worlds with such outward assurance.

  Outward assurance—but with a good deal of inward assurance too. The latter was another product of his formative years. Roosevelt was born with security, position, status. He had a powerful sense of belonging; he “knew who he was.” He had no reason to feel loss of identity or a cutting of roots when he launched into new fields. He could shift roles with ease because he never doubted where he had come from and where some day he would return. There was ever continuity in change. So too, Roosevelt had no need of an elaborate social philosophy; unlike the intellectual, who constructs an ideology and then throws himself into it for the security it offers, he had a home of his own. He was content with its simple moralities, duties, and benevolence.

  Roosevelt’s later career was so dazzling that it has tended to obscure his earlier political attainments. Actually his rise before November 1920 was a spectacular one. He had made a notable record and drawn considerable attention both in Albany and Washington. He had won the vice-presidential nomination of a major party at the age of thirty-eight; even T.R. had been four years older when the Republicans nominated him for vice-president in 1900.

  It is easy to explain all this away. Only a chain of fortuitous circumstances, it can be argued, could be responsible for the early career. If the Dutchess County Democrats had not needed a candidate in 1910, if 1910 and 1912 had not been good years for upstate New York Democrats, if the Sheehan incident had not occurred, Roosevelt would have remained a respectable New York corporation lawyer. One trouble with this “if” approach is that it can be completely turned around. If Roosevelt had played his cards differently in the Sheehan fight—if, for example, he had acted as intermediary between Tammany and the rebels instead of leader of the latter—he would have been a likely compromise choice for statewide office in 1912 or 1914 or 1916. If he had won such office he probably would have entered the cabinet or gone into uniform during the war; and in either case he would have been a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920.

  Such an “if” approach is a fruitless one. On the contrary, Roosevelt’s early career can be understood only as the dynamic interaction of an emerging political personality and a responsive environment. Despite his outward coyness during the decade between 1910 and 1920, Roosevelt almost constantly had his eye out for the main chance. If on occasion the situation was hostile to his ambitions, as in 1914, most of the time it was favorable. The political environment was not merely passively receptive to his ambitions; it was not simply a static backdrop; it had a life and momentum of its own. Both in 1910 and 1920, for example, the Democracy turned to Roosevelt, just as he had turned to the party in 1914. Time and place, prevailing ideology, and political configuration all played their part. Maturing in a time of social flux and flow, living in a strategic place in a strategic state, exploiting prevailing hostility to bossism and corruption, attaching himself to a party that enjoyed a decade of success after a half-century of repeated defeat, Roosevelt was in a favorable position from the start.

  Roosevelt’s success, however, was not simply a matter of sheer luck. Luck there was, of course—in his name, in his family and class connections, in his comfortable income, and in the assurance that he gained from all these. But these elements of good fortune would not have been enough without two other qualities of his: keen ambition and a capacity to learn.

  Compared to his Uncle Ted’s fierce drive to excel as boxer, cowboy, soldier, politician, and big-game hunter, the younger Roosevelt’s ambition might have looked puny indeed. But it was there, and the more he became involved in competitive relationships the more it seemed to grow. The fact that Roosevelt could try for United States Senator from the most populous state in the union only four years after entering politics and at the age of thirty-two was a measure of that ambition.

  To some extent Roosevelt’s drives fed on his inadequacies. He could adjust quickly to new situations, he could act with assurance—but he could not always excel. At Groton he was neither an admired athlete nor a notable scholar. At Harvard he failed to make Porcellian. In New York City he made no special mark as a lawyer. When he aspired too high in state politics he came down with a bad jolt. In the navy he was not top dog; more important, he was not in uniform at a time when his country and his class expected its able-bodied young men to go to war.

  Roosevelt’s request, following the war, that Groton put him on the first division of the school’s war tablet was ludicrous, yet highly revealing too. Clearly he wanted the kind of recognition that Uncle Ted had tasted so fully after his exploits as a Rough Rider. Following the war Franklin Roosevelt applied for membership in the American Legion. As the years passed his stories of his military experiences and risks overseas became more and more expansive—to the point where he was claiming that he had probably seen more of the war than anyone else.

  But directing Roosevelt’s ambition was a capacity to learn quickly from experience. In two major instances in his early political career he did not come quickly to terms with his environment, and in both cases his failure furthered his political education. The first of these was his attack on Tammany: it brought happy immediate returns in publicity and applause but only at the cost of endangering his hopes for state-wide political office. His response was to bury the hatchet with Tammany, although doing so discreetly enough not to antagonize much of his good-government support. The campaign on the League of Nations issue in 1920 was another example of defying political realities without avail. Cox and Roosevelt knew that the League was a dangerous issue, but by a combination of circumstances they campaigned largely on this plank. It was a gallant gesture and it failed. Indeed, the result was worse than failure: actually the election had been lost for many other reasons besides the League, but the Republicans could interpret the result as an endorsement of isolationism.

  Roosevelt never forgot these lessons. He was to show keen appreciation throughout his later career of the principle that politics is the art of the possible. He profited from Uncle Ted’s warning at Groton that being good was not enough—a man must be shrewd and he must be courageous. He had learned at first hand the wisdom of Machiavelli’s advice to princes that they must act at times with great valor and at times with great prudence—that they must be something of a lion and something of a fox.

  PART 2

  The Rise to Power

  FIVE

  Interlude: The Politician as Businessman

  ON A WARM AUTUMN AFTERNOON in the 1920’s, at the height of what Charles and Mary Beard later called the summer solstice of Normalcy, the head of Burns Bros., coal dealers, embarked on the Berengaria for a vacation in Europe. Halfway up the gangway he turned and looked down at a group of his clerks assembled on the pier to see him off. With a cry, “Here’s luck, boys!”, he pulled from his pocket a handful of silver and gold coins and sent them clattering on the cobblestones. He watched for a moment with relish as his clerks grabbed for the coins, and then turned and disappeared into the ship.

  Reading about the incident in the next day’s Herald Tribune, Louis Howe was shaken out of his usual hard-boiled attitude toward his fellow man. Grown-up men scrambling like
so many starving children in the dirt—this, he exploded in a letter to Roosevelt, was a perfect example of the business attitude of the day. More, it was an illustration of the Republicans’ economic philosophy of money trickling down from rich to poor. He urged his boss to use the story in future speeches.

  If this was normalcy to Howe, others looking back on the 1920’s had their own memories of something that seemed to symbolize the decade. Perhaps it was the monkey trial in Tennessee, or mah-jongg, or bathtub gin, or Teapot Dome, or the Lone Eagle, or Al Capone, or the expulsion of five socialists from the New York State Assembly as “traitors,” or the frenetic chattering of stock market tickers late on an October day in 1929. Historians looking back noted more basic facts—the low level and instability of farm income, the slow decline of labor unionization during the decade, the spread of crime. Business boomed: automobiles, radios, refrigerators, cosmetics, telephones. Stocks climbed erratically upward; profits soared. Advertising became a big industry. It was a decade given over to Business, without muckrakers.

  As for Roosevelt, he adjusted to the business decade with ease. He became a businessman. Shortly after his defeat in the fall of 1920 he took a job as vice-president of a large surety bonding firm, the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland, in charge of its New York office at $25,000 a year (five times his navy salary), and he returned to the practice of law. During the next eight years he took part in a variety of business ventures. The most important of these involved foreign investments. Roosevelt backed a Canadian corporation that was buying up devalued German marks to purchase stock in various German corporations, and which later liquidated with high profits. He bought shares in another company that invested in German securities, and he was an incorporator of the Federal International Investment Trust, designed to help American investors take securities guaranteed by foreign banks in payment of credit balances due for American exports. Of these speculations, only the Canadian venture brought Roosevelt any profit.