The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The American politician clings to power by keeping a foothold in one level of party or government even when he is dislodged from some other level. Ironically, Roosevelt’s influence dwindled in his local Dutchess County party during the 1920’s. One reason was his long absences from Hyde Park. He tried to break the grip of the old “courthouse gang” on the party, but with no success. He had about given up on the Dutchess County Democracy by 1928. There were “too many local leading Democrats,” he complained, “tied up for financial reasons with the Republicans.”

  In view of all this, what is the explanation of Roosevelt’s continued political standing—a standing so great that the Democratic leaders of New York hoped he would take the nomination for United States Senator in 1926 and drafted him for governor two years later?

  Part of the answer is that Roosevelt continued to work hard at politics during this period. He wrote thousands of letters—letters of congratulation to winning Democrats, of commiseration to losers, of inquiry and advice to friends throughout the state and nation dating from his senatorial and navy days. Passing through Washington he made a point of meeting Democratic congressmen. Even in the South he managed to cultivate political friendships: he invited AFL officials to his houseboat in Florida, visited Bryan in Miami (before the latter’s death in 1925), conferred with Southern political leaders at Warm Springs.

  His position on party issues helped him politically. He was moderately liberal in a moderately liberal party. He believed the party should stand for “progressivism with a brake on,” not “conservatism with a move on.” He followed closely and commented knowledgeably on a variety of international and national issues, such as war debts, banking, conservation, the one-party press, and Mississippi River flood control. On touchy matters like prohibition he took a position midway between the party extremes. He managed in a state convention keynote speech for Smith to tread the liquor tightrope so adroitly as to win from Daniels, a dry, the encomium: “I think you took only a light bath and came out in fine shape. From that speech nobody would call you an immersionist like Al Smith; they would rather think you took yours by sprinkling or pouring.…”

  It was easy for Roosevelt to turn down the senatorial nomination in 1926. He had just begun his Warm Springs cure and he hoped for rapid progress in the next years. Moreover, he did not feel cut out to be a Senator. Most important were considerations of his career. If he ran for senator and lost, he would have accumulated a string of three consecutive defeats. If he ran and won, he must, perforce, take positions in the Senate that would antagonize some wing of the divided Democratic party.

  But the situation in 1928 was different. In that year Smith went to the Democratic convention with a commanding lead. Roosevelt again nominated the governor, in a speech notable chiefly for the fact that it was written with the radio audience specifically in mind; Roosevelt already had sensed the future political importance of this new medium, and he made effective use of it at Houston. “A model of its kind,” the New York Times commented, “—limpid and unaffected in style and without a single trace of fustian.” He also served as Smith’s floor manager, but the show was largely in the hands of Smith’s immediate associates. The affair—for a Democratic convention—was rather tranquil. Smith easily won the nomination on the first roll call.

  Knowing of Roosevelt’s business contacts, Smith asked him to organize business and professional men for the campaign, while Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become increasingly active in state Democratic affairs, helped run the Bureau of Women’s Activities. Roosevelt did not participate too actively in the campaign; Howe usually represented him at headquarters. Roosevelt, in fact, was not happy over the way the campaign was managed. He objected to Smith’s choice of John J. Raskob for national chairman, for Raskob was a wet, a Catholic, and a wealthy General Motors executive—factors, Roosevelt feared, that would only intensify the already strong anti-Smith feeling in the Protestant South and the Progressive West.

  “Smith has burned his bridges behind him,” he wrote his close friend Van Lear Black late in July. “My own particular role will be that of the elder statesman who will not be one of the ‘yes men’ at headquarters.” He felt that Smith’s lieutenants were excluding him from the top campaign councils. He was unhappy about the publicity program, which was being handled by a Smith underling with the help of the General Motors advertising experts. “In other words, it is a situation in which you and I can find little room for very active work, but we shall be in a more advantageous position in the long run.…”

  What did Roosevelt mean by “in the long run”? Perhaps these words give some clue to his motives in the confused situation that shortly developed.

  In mid-September Roosevelt went to Warm Springs. He knew before leaving New York that party leaders wanted him to run for governor; Smith had already approached him. Why was Roosevelt so unwilling? First of all, there was his health. In one brief exhilarating moment at Warm Springs he had taken a few steps without canes. Two more years of Warm Springs, he felt, and he might discard them entirely (but not, of course, his braces, which he must have accepted by then as permanent). He was also concerned about the success of Warm Springs, in which he had invested a large sum of money.

  But his main motives were those of a politician. He had long been pessimistic about the Democrats’ chances in 1928 and his hopes had not risen after the convention. The country was prosperous; Hoover was a strong candidate for the Republicans; and Smith’s vulnerability as a Catholic and a wet became increasingly evident as the campaign progressed. To run in 1928 might mean going down with the ship; but if Smith lost, all sorts of possibilities would open up for the future.

  Late in September the state Democratic convention met in Rochester. Smith and his lieutenants anxiously canvassed the gubernatorial prospects. How much Smith himself wanted Roosevelt to run is uncertain. Most of the pressure came from state leaders who feared that the Republicans, with Al out of the way, would regain control in Albany. Howe, who was dead set against his chief’s running in 1928, wired Roosevelt that only the jobholders really wanted him. He warned: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

  Whatever his own feelings, Smith took the lead in pressuring Roosevelt. Roosevelt made himself inaccessible during the first day of the convention, but Smith finally got him on the telephone. One by one the governor pushed Roosevelt’s objections aside. Raskob would help finance Warm Springs. The governor’s duties were not arduous enough to interfere with his program of recovery. Above all, the party needed him; it wanted to draft him.

  Undoubtedly it was this last argument that moved Roosevelt. His long-term political hopes clearly limited his personal choice in the matter. Smith and the other leaders pressed their demands to the point where further refusal would appear as an act of disloyalty, an act that in itself might cause a bitterness in the party toward Roosevelt that would jeopardize his future prospects.

  Smith seemed to sense the weakness. Would Roosevelt decline to run if the convention nominated him?

  Roosevelt hesitated. This was a situation that he could not control. Smith saw his advantage and hung up. On October 2, 1928, the Rochester convention nominated Roosevelt for governor of New York. Thus it happened that Roosevelt, against his own intentions and the advice of Howe and with his wife unsure of her own mind, took the first direct step to the presidency. It was significant that his return to politics, like his original entrance eighteen years before, came about chiefly at the behest of his party.

  When news of Roosevelt’s nomination by acclamation reached Warm Springs the little cottage had an air more of gloom than of triumph. From Howe came a sour wire: BY WAY OF CONGRATULATIONS DIG UP TELEGRAM I SENT YOU WHEN YOU RAN IN SENATORIAL PRIMARIES—a reminder of Howe’s opposition to his chief’s ill-fated effort against Gerard in 1914. Soon Roosevelt’s cheerful voice rang out: “Well, if I’ve got to run for governor, there’s no use in all of us getting sick about it!”

  The Republicans promptly took the line that the cri
ppled Roosevelt was a sacrificial offering to Smith’s presidential ambitions. The drafting was pitiless and pathetic, one newspaper said. Smith met the attack head on. “We don’t elect a Governor for his ability to do a double back flip or a handspring,” he said. “The work of the Governorship is brainwork.” Roosevelt’s answer was a bit more calculated. He had not been dragooned into running, he asserted. Smith had been willing to abide by his reluctance to run. “I was drafted because all of the party leaders when they assembled insisted that my often-expressed belief in the policies of Governor Smith made my nomination the best assurance to the voters that these policies would be continued.” But the best answer, Roosevelt felt, would be a vigorous campaign around the state.

  Both party tickets mirrored the New York melting pot. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent was Albert Ottinger, a prominent Jew and an experienced politician who had won the state attorney generalship despite Smith’s hold on the governorship. Running with Roosevelt for lieutenant governor was Herbert Lehman, also a Jew, head of a lucrative private banking firm and a heavy contributor to Smith’s campaigns. Senator Copeland was up for a second term.

  Roosevelt already had the nucleus of the staff that would go on with him to the White House. Recognizing his limited knowledge of current state problems, he asked Maurice Bloch, his campaign manager and the Democratic leader in the assembly, to find someone to help him. Bloch recommended Samuel I. Rosenman, a young former state legislator who had served on the legislative bill drafting commission for the past three years. In charge of the Roosevelt headquarters in New York City was James A. Farley, a contractor and state boxing commissioner who had recently been appointed secretary of the state Democratic committee. Edward J. Flynn, boss of the turbulent Democracy in the Bronx, worked for Roosevelt in New York. Howe, quickly overcoming his pique, had his hand in everything; one of his main jobs was setting up a number of “independent” committees for Roosevelt that catered to special groups such as businessmen and professional men.

  Lugging suitcases filled with red Manila envelopes neatly marked “Labor,” “Taxes,” and other state issues, Rosenman met Roosevelt on the Hoboken ferry as the campaign party left for the 1,300-mile campaign around New York. It was mid-October, with three weeks to election. Rosenman had heard stories that Roosevelt was something of a playboy, that he was weak and ineffective. “But the broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands”—these, Rosenman said later, did not fit the picture.

  For three days Roosevelt ignored Rosenman. The campaign seemed to be a curiously unplanned affair. At first Roosevelt concentrated on national issues to such an extent that Bloch wired Rosenman: TELL THE CANDIDATE THAT HE IS NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT BUT FOR GOVERNOR.… Roosevelt, however, enjoyed little freedom of action. He had to run on Smith’s record as governor—an excellent record, but one that did not enable Roosevelt to proclaim bold new plans. And he had to run in the midst of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice that was strong in New York State as well as the rest of the country.

  This bigotry Roosevelt denounced in his first major talk, and he did so in a city—Binghamton—that had been a Ku Klux Klan stronghold earlier in the century. He told of the printed handbills he had seen in Georgia stating that if Smith became president Protestant marriages would be void and children made illegitimate. “Yes, you may laugh,” he said, but it was a serious problem. “I believe that the day will come in this country when education—and, incidentally, we have never had a Governor in the State of New York who has done more for the cause of education than Alfred E. Smith—when education in our own State and in every other State, in the cities and the hamlets and the farms, in the back alleys and up on the mountains, will be so widespread, so clean, so American, that this vile thing that is hanging over our heads in this Presidential election will not be able to survive.”

  For two days the campaign train chugged through the tier of agricultural counties above the Pennsylvania line. In Jamestown, Roosevelt endorsed the state platform’s pledge to name a commission to study the problem of farm taxes and distribution, but he openly went beyond the platform to say that he wanted to see “the farmer and his family receive at the end of each year as much for their labor as if they had been working … as skilled workers under the best conditions in any one of our great industries.” In 1928 this was an extreme version of “parity”—more extreme than Roosevelt probably realized.

  By the time he reached Buffalo he was using Rosenman’s meaty envelopes of facts on state legislation. He showed Rosenman the art of converting a dull sheaf of facts into a political speech—how to make a speech sparkle with wit and irony, how to turn statistics into a broadside without seeming to use statistics, how to gird details around a central dramatic theme. Not that Roosevelt himself had become the accomplished speaker he was later to be. Many of his speeches had the air of improvisation, lacking any central theme. He made the mistake of repeatedly mentioning Ottinger’s name. On the other hand, he knew and used such devices as attacking the Republican leadership—especially the leaders in the state legislature—rather than the Republicans as a whole. Generally his speeches ran the register nicely from cheery good will to indignation at the promises and “misrepresentations” of the enemy.

  Because he wanted close contact with the voters, the candidate switched to an automobile for the campaign in the western counties and for the long trip through the Mohawk Valley in central New York to the Albany area, and then down to New York City. Behind lurched two buses, one for newsmen and the other for stenographers, mimeographers, and their equipment. Traveling by car enabled Roosevelt to shake hands at the crossroads. Speaking in halls was difficult; sometimes the candidate had to be carried up fire escapes and back stairs. Watching one of these entrances, Frances Perkins realized that this man had accepted the ultimate humility that comes from being helped physically, and accepted it smiling. “He came up over that perilous, uncomfortable, and humiliating ‘entrance,’ and his manner was pleasant, courteous, enthusiastic. He got up on his own braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim’s, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual.”

  Roosevelt delighted in telling his audiences of his strenuous campaign—of the seven speeches in one day, the side trips, being “kidnapped” to make extra appearances. “Too bad about this unfortunate sick man, isn’t it?”

  Batavia, Rochester, Canandaigua, Syracuse—slowly the caravan wound its way through country brilliant with fall colors. In Rochester the candidate advocated a broader state health program, a better old-age pension law, and repeal of the state’s archaic poor law. In Syracuse, one hundred miles south of the outlet of the St. Lawrence into Lake Ontario, he declared that the people wanted “their” power sites—like the Long Saulte Rapids on that river—developed by a state power authority and not by a private corporation. In Utica, a center of dry feeling, he came out flatly against a “baby Volstead act” that would establish state enforcement of prohibition side by side with national—a position that made him almost as wet as Smith himself. Back in Manhattan he promised that the Democrats would enact a “real 48-hour law.” In the Bronx he outlined an ambitious program of judicial reform. In Yonkers he mentioned scornfully that a leading magazine had featured an article under the title, “Is Hoover Human?” No one in his wildest dreams, he proclaimed, could ask the same question about Al Smith.

  Did his campaign win votes for Roosevelt? Undoubtedly—but it was probably no more important an element than others hidden far below the surface of events. Ottinger was badly knifed in Erie County by a Republican faction there. In New York City some whispered that he was not a “good Jew”—and the candidate had to state publicly that he was “bar mitzvah [confirmed] in the Central Synagogue.” But it was Smith who suffered real desertions. Thousands of New Yorkers who had given him their votes for governor failed to support him for the presidency. His Bowery mien, his harsh resonance over what he called the “
raddio,” his natty dress with the bright pocket handkerchief—all these clashed with their idea of the man who should occupy the White House.

  On election eve Smith and Roosevelt glumly listened to the election returns in a New York armory. By midnight it was clear that Smith had lost both New York and the nation. “Well,” Al is reported to have said, “the time just hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House.” The race for governor was close, and returns came in slowly. Knowing the reputation of some Republican election officials upstate for holding back returns until they could estimate their party’s needs, Roosevelt and Flynn telephoned warnings to upstate sheriffs that a “staff of 100 lawyers” would leave the next morning to hunt for election frauds. This was partly bluff, but it may have helped. Roosevelt went to bed. Flynn told him in the morning that he had won. Final returns were 2,130,193 for Roosevelt to 2,104,629 for Ottinger—a margin of 25,564 votes.

  It was a hairbreadth victory for Roosevelt and an ironic defeat for Smith in his own state. The former ran about 73,000 votes ahead of the latter upstate, but only 33,000 behind him in New York City. Thus Roosevelt’s tactic of nursing his upstate strength while at the same time keeping friendly with Tammany seemed to pay off. On the whole he emerged relatively unscathed from the maelstrom of factional desertions and party shifts. Even so, Roosevelt’s showing was not impressive. He ran behind Lehman and Copeland; the latter had had the backing of Hearst, who openly opposed Roosevelt.

  The Republicans won the presidency on the prosperity as well as the religious issue. The day after the election a “victory boom” in Wall Street roared the stock exchange to the second biggest day up to that time.

  SIX

  Apprenticeship in Albany

  AMID POMP AND circumstance and the booming of guns Roosevelt took the oath as governor of the state of New York on the first day of 1929. An audience of notables watched the ceremony in the brightly draped assembly chamber in Albany. Making his farewell speech, Al Smith described the progress of the state in the quarter-century since he had first come to Albany. Then he turned and looked up at the man standing next to him.