The chief political importance of Roosevelt’s illness was simply in the realm of time. While it interrupted his vast political contacts and correspondence for only a few weeks, it postponed for years the day when he might run for office; he did not want to seek office until he had made as full a recovery as possible. This was something of a blessing, since the mid-1920’s were not auspicious years for many Democrats. As it turned out, his return to politics was delayed until he was much closer to the years of the flood tide of Democratic strength.
DEAR AL AND DEAR FRANK
Right after the November 1921 election victorious Democrats in the state assembly races got letters of congratulation from Roosevelt. This was the signal that he was not through with politics. A few months more, and he was deeply involved in the maneuvers that preceded Al Smith’s attempt to recapture the governorship in 1922.
Events of the 1920’s were to throw Roosevelt and Smith into a tight political embrace. When their careers first intertwined, during the Sheehan shenanigans, they were ranged on opposite sides: Smith was a regular and Roosevelt a rebel; their alliance was to fall to pieces years later with Roosevelt in power and Smith in rebellion. But beginning in 1920, when each seconded the other’s nomination at the Democratic national convention, until 1928, when Smith drafted Roosevelt for party duty, they worked in unison, with Smith as the senior partner.
The reason for the alliance was simple: each needed the other. Together they spanned, geographically, religiously, and socially, the breadth of the Democratic party; to win elections each needed the support that the other could command. Personally they were friendly and respected each other’s political talents. Reporters could draw elaborate contrasts between the patrician and the plebeian, between the upstater and the New Yorker, between the Episcopalian and the Catholic, but both men were too big-minded, too worldly wise, to be concerned with such matters. On the surface during this period their relations were impeccable. Underneath they both had a seasoned tough-minded understanding of the complex mechanics and dynamics of intraparty politics; doubtless they both knew that theirs was essentially a political friendship.
Al’s candor had impressed Roosevelt in the Sheehan fight: Smith as majority leader in the assembly had told the rebels frankly that if they attended the caucus they would have to vote for the caucus candidate. Roosevelt had been something less than candid with Smith in respect to the gubernatorial campaign in 1918; the assistant secretary later proclaimed that he had backed Al for the Democratic nomination, while actually he and Howe had been exceedingly cagey on the matter. He probably expected Smith to lose in 1918 and thus leave the way clear for himself in 1920, but Al won. In 1920 Smith lost his bid for re-election but he won over a million more votes in New York than did Cox and Roosevelt.
Even in defeat Smith remained the leading Democrat in New York. Roosevelt could no longer oppose or evade him, so he had to “join” him. Events of early 1922 gave Roosevelt his opportunity. William Randolph Hearst wanted the Democratic nomination for governor, and Murphy was letting him line up delegates. Smith did not want to leave his profitable trucking business, but he could never forget that the publisher had accused him during his first administration of allowing poisoned milk to be distributed to children in New York City. At the last minute Smith agreed to a draft and Roosevelt was chosen to issue the call. A cordial exchange of “Dear Al” and “Dear Frank” letters followed.
Murphy now wanted Hearst to run for the Senate. Despite tremendous pressure Smith steadily refused to accept the publisher as his running mate, and Hearst pulled out of the race. Roosevelt could probably have had the senatorial nomination, but he did not yet feel ready. Finally, Murphy and Smith compromised on Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a Hearst protégé, for senator. Roosevelt worked for the ticket and served as honorary head of Copeland’s campaign. Smith defeated incumbent Governor Nathan L. Miller, and swept Copeland in with him.
Smith’s victory marked him as a leading candidate for the presidency in 1924. Although Roosevelt carefully maintained good relations with Bryan and other national leaders of the Democracy, he had no alternative but to support his fellow New Yorker. He was keenly concerned, however, that Smith might command insufficient national appeal. Several times he urged Smith to speak out on national questions. But the governor wanted to stick to his New York problems.
Most of all Roosevelt feared that Smith would become irretrievably branded as a “wet” and lose all hope of gaining votes from the dry forces in the party. When the governor was faced with the awkward choice of signing or vetoing a liquor bill, Roosevelt wrote him, “I am mighty sorry for the extremely difficult position in which you have been placed over this darned old liquor question,” and proceeded to outline an elaborate stratagem whereby Smith could veto the bill without alienating either side, and then call the legislature into special session to pass new legislation. Smith rejected the advice. He took a more direct and honest line of action, but one that left him more vulnerable to attacks from the drys.
“If I did not still have these crutches I should throw my own hat in the ring,” Roosevelt wrote a friend in the late summer of 1923. Within a few months, indeed, Howe was lining up complimentary first-ballot votes for his chief among several delegations to the national convention. But this was not a serious gesture. At the end of April 1924 the governor announced that Roosevelt would head the New York Smith-for-President committee. There was talk that the Smith forces wanted Roosevelt for the sake of his name only, but immediately he plunged into the job of winning delegate votes for the governor.
This was no easy task. Democrats everywhere agreed that Smith had been an honest, efficient, progressive governor. But Democratic candidate for president? Impossible. At this time the Ku Klux Klan was not merely a band of nightshirters, it was a powerful subterranean influence that reached into governors’ mansions and state assemblies. Even those Democrats who feared no “popish” control of the White House if Al won were reluctant to gamble on victory with a Catholic and a wet. Nevertheless, Roosevelt set to work. Through a massive correspondence and an elaborate intelligence system he acquired information on the personalities and politics of state delegations. For the first time in his life he saw in detail and on a national scale the confused currents and crosscurrents, the rival personalities and factions, the electoral law and machinery, that lay behind the pushing and hauling in the convention. He won few delegates for Smith but he added a course in his own political education.
Smith, after trying out several other speakers, asked Roosevelt to make his nominating speech. It was Roosevelt’s first important address since 1920, and he rose above the occasion. He won the attention of the delegates with a speech free from claptrap and stentorian phrases, and when he called Smith the “happy warrior of the political battlefield” the phrase was so apt that it galvanized Smith’s rooters and the last few sentences of the speech were drowned out. Mark Sullivan termed the speech a “noble utterance.” Walter Lippmann called it “moving and distinguished.” Ironically, when the “happy warrior” phrase was first suggested to Roosevelt, he was afraid it was too poetic, and, as it turned out, he used it prematurely, instead of waiting for the climactic final sentence. Nevertheless, the speech won him the spotlight and Democrats remembered it for years. Possibly Roosevelt was really drawing a picture of himself in the phrase happy warrior; certainly it was another case of his furthering his own career in the process of aiding Al.
But no speech could affect that convention. Ballot after ballot dragged on in the smoky heat of Madison Square Garden until it became clear that neither the forces centered in the East supporting Smith nor the forces centered in the South and West behind McAdoo could muster the vital two-thirds. Roosevelt took part in the conferences that, on the 103rd ballot, gave John W. Davis the nomination. Davis was a saddlemaker’s grandson who had become ambassador to Great Britain and had been called “one of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever met” by the King himself. The kind of conservative who believe
d in civil liberties, Davis was a lifelong Democrat and a distinguished lawyer. But he was a lackluster compromise, without Al’s color or McAdoo’s Wilsonian background. As a weary, cynical gesture to progressivism the delegates chose the Peerless Leader’s brother, Charles W. Bryan, for the vice-presidency, and departed.
The convention was a disaster for the Democratic party and a setback for Smith, but it was a personal victory for Roosevelt. His eloquent, moderate speeches, his gay, gallant air that made people forget his crutches, his loyalty to Al combined with his friendliness toward other factions, all left a deep imprint on the rank and file of the Democracy. Lippmann congratulated him on his service to New York, and Tom Pendergast, Democratic boss of Kansas City, told a mutual friend that Roosevelt had the most magnetic personality he had ever encountered. Praise from two men near the opposite poles of political life was a tribute to Roosevelt’s broad appeal.
But his triumph was short lived. In accordance with political tradition, Davis men quickly moved in after the convention to take over the machinery of the national Democratic party. Roosevelt was left on the sidelines. Smith ran again for governor, but Roosevelt played little part in the state campaign. Indeed, the whole month before the election he spent in Warm Springs. His pessimism about the Democrats’ chances was amply justified. Coolidge beat Davis by over seven million votes, and the Republicans won decisive majorities in both House and Senate. But Smith in New York breasted the Republican tide. His victory over Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., marked the end of the latter’s political career and laid the ground for the reappearance of Franklin Roosevelt four years later.
The dreary convention fight and the dismal election results of 1924 left the Democrats divided and leaderless. “Something must be done, and done now,” Roosevelt wrote in December 1924, to restore the voters’ confidence in the party. But what? His almost singlehanded effort to rejuvenate the party in 1925 gave him a harsh lesson in the internal power arrangements of the Democratic party.
He had long worried over the condition of the party. His campaign in 1920 had confirmed his suspicions that the party’s machinery was archaic and outgrown, as he wrote to Cordell Hull, national chairman of the party, late in 1921. Hull agreed but could do nothing. Three years later the picture seemed blacker. There was room, Roosevelt said, for but two parties. The Republican party was conservative; “the Democratic Party is the Progressive Party of the country,” he insisted. The progressives had been badly divided in 1924. But there must be no overtures to the La Follette party; all progressives must get together in the Democratic party.
So much was clear to him. But could the Democratic party be made into an instrument for winning elections and governing the country? Not unless it was reformed, he felt. He was appalled by the lack of national organization—the national headquarters consisted of “two ladies occupying one room in a Washington office building,” he said impatiently. The man Davis had bequeathed as national chairman, Clem Shaver, was out visiting millionaires asking them to endorse notes for the party. “Could anything be more of a farce?” Roosevelt demanded. “We have no money, no publicity, no nothing!” He wanted the party to unite more closely, to get rid of its “factionalism” and “localism,” to do a better publicity job, to get on a firmer financial basis.
Roosevelt laid his plans artfully. He feared that the national committee would stymie any reform effort because the committee, consisting largely of old party work horses from each state, was the seedy fruit of the existing arrangements. He decided to bypass the national leaders and appeal directly to local party leaders, including delegates to the recent national convention. To 3,000 of these leaders he wrote a letter that asked for their advice on improving the party but consisted mainly of a statement of Roosevelt’s views on what should be done. “I take it that we are all agreed on certain fundamental truths,” he said casually, and he proceeded to name them: the national party organization should be more active and work more closely with state organizations; publicity should be improved; party leaders should meet more often to plan for united action.
His letters aroused all the ancient vexations among the rank and file: Southerners complained about the party’s liberalism, Westerners about the city bosses, Easterners about Bryanism and the anti-Catholic and antiliquor forces. But most of the several hundred respondents, doubtless taking their cue from Roosevelt’s letter, called for drastic party reform. They wanted more unity, better organization, more leadership, more discipline, less factionalism and localism. “The Democrats are just a mob,” an Iowan said disgustedly. Most, but not all, wanted the party to become or remain a liberal organization.
Fortified by these opinions, Roosevelt proposed a small national conference of the party to discuss issues and organization. At first, prospects for the plan seemed bright. Well-known Democrats including Davis, Cox, Hull, and Daniels backed it, and there was much favorable publicity. Since some elements in the party suspected that the project was a bid by Roosevelt for party leadership on Smith’s behalf or his own, it seemed imperative to Roosevelt and Howe that Shaver as national chairman issue the call for the conference. But this Shaver would not do. The party’s first job, he said, was to cut its organization to the bone and pay off its debt. The harder Roosevelt tried to force Shaver’s hand the clearer it became that the national chairman was following party leaders who opposed reform.
Who were these leaders? Roosevelt had little trouble finding out. They were the Democratic chieftains in Congress, who were far more concerned about keeping their seats from their own states and districts than in re-forming ranks for a presidential victory in 1928. Many of the Democratic leaders were Southerners who had piled up committee seniority as representatives of one-party areas that monotonously returned them to office in election after election. Although these congressmen maintained a congressional campaign committee, they had little unity or organization. Their real fear was that a concerted national effort by the party might jeopardize the position of some congressmen who could survive politically only by deserting the party platform and taking a position congenial to local interests. They would do nothing positive, Howe observed, unless driven to it by a purely local situation—but their districts were usually not of the type to reflect national trends or conflicts. The Democratic congressmen could hardly have been pleased, either, by Roosevelt’s admitted plan of inviting only half a dozen Democratic members from each House.
“We have practically no leaders in a National sense at all,” Roosevelt concluded; it was an “unspeakable groping about in the darkness.” Howe undoubtedly reflected Roosevelt’s feelings when he remarked that the selection of the donkey as the Democratic emblem was prophetic.
Roosevelt was also unsuccessful in reforming methods of party finance. He was indignant that Jesse Jones was raising money from big contributors. When Jones heard of this he wrote Roosevelt a surprised letter—he was paying off the party’s debt, said the Texan, wasn’t this enough? Roosevelt replied that the party should be financed from small contributions. He had estimated that if every election district of one thousand people contributed only five dollars per district, the Democrats could raise half a million dollars. Nothing came of this proposal either.
Nationally the Democratic party remained a divided, leaderless aggregation of state factions and sectional groupings. It followed precisely the policy Roosevelt feared most—a policy of opportunism, or as he described it, a posture of waiting with hands folded for the Republicans to make mistakes. The weaknesses of the party were to affect his plans for re-entering politics; years later they would plague the Democrats as the party in power and Roosevelt as president and party leader.
SUMMONS TO ACTION
Seemingly Roosevelt’s political influence sank to its nadir during the mid-1920’s. Then, in the space of six weeks, he vaulted into the governorship of the nation’s largest state and became automatically a leading presidential possibility. The remarkable thing was not the feat itself but the way it came about. The sudde
n change in Roosevelt’s political fortunes was initially less an act on Roosevelt’s part than a summons by his party.
The collapse of his party reform efforts in 1925 left him as impotent politically as the party itself. He had no position in the party—he was now only the defeated vice-presidential candidate once removed—and some anti-Smith Democrats felt that the whole reform enterprise had been an artifice to promote the Happy Warrior’s candidacy in 1928. Actually, if the project was intended to promote the interest of any one Democrat, it was that of Roosevelt himself.
His position in the state was ambiguous. For a time after the 1924 election he professed to be neutral toward Democratic candidates. “A plague on all individuals who would like to be President!” he wrote. Smith’s capture of a fourth gubernatorial term in 1926, however, confirmed the governor’s power both in New York and in the Democratic presidential race. During the pre-1928-convention period Roosevelt campaigned for Smith, even to the extent of spending two weeks in the Midwest trying to round up delegates.
He was politically close to Smith but not one of the inner circle who confabbed endlessly with their chief in the famous “Tiger Room” in the penthouse of a wealthy Manhattan contractor. During this period—indeed, during all the period between 1913 and 1928—Roosevelt had no office in the state aside from an unpaid position as chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission.
The Definitive FDR Page 14