The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Crucial in the plan was the election of Farley as secretary of the Union; since he was already secretary of the Democratic state committee he could co-ordinate all party activities. This role Farley performed brilliantly. In endless trips about the state he patched up local factional quarrels, invigorated dead committees, hunted out political talent. Local leaders got used to receiving almost daily his urgently written letters, signed in green ink, imploring their ceaseless attention to the vital minutiae of political campaigns: registration, absentee ballots, first voters, election inspectors, literacy tests, endless lists of names. In 1930 Roosevelt eased Bray out of the chairmanship and Farley took his place.

  Roosevelt tackled another problem he had long worried about—the Republican-dominated rural press. “I am not concerned about prejudice, personal stupidity or wrong thinking,” he wrote to his friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., after looking over a survey of opinion in rural areas, “so much as by the sheer, utter and complete ignorance displayed by such a large number of farmers.” On Morgenthau’s suggestion a press bureau was set up in Albany mainly to feed Democratic material to upstate rural newspapers.

  Frequent tours of the state, radio talks, press handouts, and, above all, stepped-up party activity—this kind of intensive activity lay behind what was to be, statistically at least, Roosevelt’s greatest election triumph.

  “You and I have the same kind of sense of obligation about going through with a task once undertaken,” Roosevelt wrote to Lehman in May 1930. The thought of not running probably never occurred to him. A confident state convention at Syracuse heard Smith laud the governor’s “clear brain” and “big heart”; it unanimously renominated him. His doctrine, the governor said in accepting the renomination, was the same as two years before: “that progressive Government, by its very terms, must be a living and a growing thing, that the battle for it is never ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.”

  The Democrats had good reason for confidence. The deepening Depression was tying the Republicans into a political noose of their own making: having claimed credit in 1928 for past prosperity, now they had to take the blame for current hard times. Roosevelt had used Republican obstructionism skillfully to dramatize his program, and he was far better known than anyone the Republicans could nominate. Despite his protestations of nonpartisanship, his governorship had been a continuous campaign for re-election.

  Two possible danger areas loomed for the Democrats. One of these was prohibition. Roosevelt had long hedged on this issue; he had expressed the fervent hope that it would disappear from politics. It did not, but it changed in a direction favorable to the Democrats. By the end of the 1920’s—a decade of speakeasies, raids by Treasury men, gang wars, and intemperance—New York Republicans were finding prohibition to be a political liability. Roosevelt had no intention of running as a wet. But when he heard that the probable Republican nominee was about to come out for repeal, the governor moved fast to outflank him on the wet side. In a letter to Senator Wagner in September 1930 he favored outright repeal and the restoring of liquor control to the states.

  It was a potent move. The Republicans failed to pick up much wet support, yet they outraged the drys upstate. The outcome was nomination of a prohibitionist candidate, which threatened to split off a sizable segment of the Republican vote.

  The other problem was not so easily managed. The corruption issue, which had been seething for over a year, erupted a month before the election, after evidence had come to light of traffic in judicial offices. Roosevelt turned the case over to the state’s attorney general, a Republican, and designated a Republican Supreme Court justice to convene an extraordinary grand jury. He also asked the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court to make a general investigation of the magistrates’ courts. Roosevelt was directly involved in the situation because he had made a routine short-term appointment of a Tammany man to a General Sessions judgeship, and the judge was alleged to have bought his place from Tammany for thirty thousand dollars. The Republicans saw a grand opportunity to force Roosevelt into a political trap: if he cracked down on Tammany, they figured, he might lose election support from the organization, and if he failed to act he could be dubbed a Tammany pawn. Staking most of their hopes on this move, they nominated for governor the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, a pugnacious redhead named Charles H. Tuttle, who had nosed along the labyrinthine trail between Tammany and the judges and had won some well-publicized indictments.

  Roosevelt evaded the net by the tactic of compromise. He took formal steps to enable the Republicans to investigate Tammany, but he never allowed a situation to arise where he was arrayed directly in an investigatory attack on Tammany. This awkward posture took considerable explaining, especially to friends who wondered why a man who had a reputation for acting quickly and firmly in some fields should stand on legal niceties in this one. The situation, Roosevelt wrote to an anxious Harvard classmate and rector in New York City, was not one between Tammany and himself; “it is one between constitutional government and a political campaign. More than that, it is one between the retention of constitutional government and a breaking down of the safeguards of liberty in the same way that they have been broken down both in the Italy of Mussolini and in the Russia of Lenin.” He went on to describe the limitations on the power of the governor to investigate.

  “In thinking this over, for the love of Mike,” Roosevelt ended his letter, “remember that I am just as anxious as you are to root out this rottenness, but that on January 1st, 1929, I took a certain oath of office.” Undoubtedly Roosevelt’s stand lost him the support of some independent Democrats in New York City. While the Democratic New York Times and the independent Republican Sun backed him, the World, which was strongly pro-Smith, withheld its support and the News came out for Tuttle.

  The campaign revolved around Tuttle’s ceaseless hammering at Roosevelt on the corruption issue and the governor’s insistent attempt to focus the debate on water power, agriculture, labor, public works, utility regulation, and other general state matters. Was his opponent running for governor or district attorney? Roosevelt asked caustically. Following his usual procedure, he devoted each campaign speech to a defense of a major state program. In Buffalo he read a strong letter of endorsement by President Green of the AFL. In Rochester he talked about prisons, hospitals, public works. In Syracuse he described the high cost of electricity to the housewife in terms so vivid and concrete that people around there long after were talking about the “waffle iron campaign.”

  But people were interested in another issue, too: jobs. Democratic candidates throughout the country were taunting the Republicans for failing to cope with depression after all the talk about the “full dinner pail” in 1928. Secure in the White House for at least another two years, President Hoover was already beginning to play the historic role he was to hold for more than a generation: the scapegoat for hard times. In his speech in Buffalo—an especially hard-hit city—Roosevelt quoted some of the Republican claims of 1928. He looked out at his audience. “Those extracts read strangely tonight.” He cited them, he added, not to gain partisan advantage but to show that no party had any monopoly on prosperity.

  The Republicans counterattacked Roosevelt later in the campaign by bringing up reserves from Washington in the form of cabinet members, most notably the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. By this time Tuttle needed help; his one-issue campaign was losing public interest, partly because, busy electioneering, he was running low on new revelations. In a radio speech from Washington, Stimson said that Roosevelt had “shown his unfitness to deal with the great crisis now confronting New York State.”

  Roosevelt’s reply—given in New York City on the eve of the election—carefully played on state pride and resentment against the national administration. “I say to these gentlemen: We shall be grateful if you will return to your posts in Washington,
and bend your efforts and spend your time solving the problems which the whole Nation is bearing under your Administration. Rest assured that we of the Empire State can and will take care of ourselves and our problems.”

  Roosevelt defeated Tuttle by 1,770,342 to 1,045,341, a margin of 725,001 votes. More remarkable, he won forty-one out of the fifty-seven counties outside New York City, carrying upstate New York by 167,784, an unprecedented feat for a Democrat. Most of this margin was due to the splitting tactics of the prohibitionist candidate; but even without this helpful intervention, Roosevelt would have run close to Tuttle upstate. His half-million plurality in New York City vindicated his straddling policy on the corruption issue.

  It was a strikingly personal victory. All the other statewide Democratic candidates won by smaller majorities than Roosevelt; more important, the Republicans still held majorities in the state senate and assembly, and the Democrats failed to capture a single one of the twenty Republican congressional seats upstate. Despite all Farley’s work, it was an executive, not a legislative—and thus not a party—victory.

  But it was no time for cavil. A Republican-controlled legislature had its uses for Roosevelt. And bigger things lay ahead. Three weeks after the election he wrote Farley about the latter’s work: “It is not merely a fine record, but a great opportunity for us to consolidate the gains.

  “When I think of the difficulties of former State Chairmen with former Governors and vice versa (!), I have an idea that you and I make a combination which has not existed since Cleveland and Lamont—and that is so long ago that neither you nor I know anything about it except from history books.”

  SEVEN

  Nomination by a Hairbreadth

  THE DAY AFTER HIS re-election Farley and Howe threw Roosevelt’s hat into the presidential ring. “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party,” Farley proclaimed in a victory statement, “even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.” When Farley notified the governor of this move, Roosevelt laughed. “Whatever you said, Jim, is all right with me.”

  Never before this occasion, according to Farley, had he discussed Roosevelt’s candidacy with his chief. This is not surprising. Even with his associates Roosevelt had maintained the fiction of concentrating solely on New York affairs. He had a politician’s superstition against planning campaigns too far ahead; moreover, he knew that a victory in 1930 was the decisive step to victory in 1932. The effect of his re-election was to fix the timetable; 1932 was to be the year.

  “Eddie,” the governor said to Flynn a week or two after his election, “… I believe I can be nominated for the Presidency in 1932 on the Democratic ticket.”

  He might have added, “and elected.” With every new slump in economic conditions in 1930, Democratic hopes for 1932 went soaring. Rarely has a party been caught so neatly in a cul-de-sac of its own making as the Republicans during the Depression. Prosperity was safe under the G.O.P., their orators had chanted in 1928; they had made it the chief issue of the campaign, HOOVER AND HAPPINESS OR SMITH AND SOUP HOUSES? WHICH SHALL IT BE? G.O.P. signs had demanded. The position was as intellectually dishonest as it was politically dangerous for the Republicans, following in general a laissez-faire ideology, shrank from any real commitment to national governmental action to prevent depression. But the strategy had worked.

  And now breadlines were stretching block after block, soup kitchens were handing out thin porridge and coffee, and “Hoover-villes”—little settlements of shacks, discarded cars, and packing boxes—were springing up near the dumps and mud flats of big cities. Yet the Depression was a remarkably passive affair. There were few riots or even strikes. The American people seemed benumbed. Or perhaps they were simply waiting—waiting for the upturn that had always come in past depressions, perhaps waiting for their leaders to act. Hoover acted: he organized private relief activities, ordered federal departments to economize, asked businessmen to maintain wage standards, created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend funds to banks and other institutions, reluctantly supported federal aid to states for relief. But nothing he did seemed to help.

  Roosevelt’s first reaction to the stock market crash in 1929 was more that of a Republican businessman than a Democratic politician. While the market was tumbling on October 24 a newspaper asked for his outlook. He did not know detailed conditions, Roosevelt wired back, but he firmly believed fundamental industrial conditions to be sound. Shortly afterward, in a Poughkeepsie speech, he assailed speculation. Five weeks later, after stock prices had reached their 1929 low point, he told Howe, “It is just possible that the recent little Flurry down town will make the prices comparatively low,” and asked him to check on the condition of certain stocks.

  Curiously, it took Roosevelt some time to realize that finally there had come the hard times he had long prognosticated would break the Republicans’ grip on the White House. By the fall of 1930, however, he was exploiting the situation in his campaign speeches. In December of that year came a warning to his office from William Allen White in Kansas.

  “These are great days for you Democrats but don’t be too cagey,” wrote the editor of the Emporia Gazette. “If the old brig rights herself within the next year, whether by reason of good seamanship or by the chance of wind or wave, the people will forget that she ever listed. But what I fear is that if she does not right herself soon the crew will come running out of the Fo’c’s’le, and throw the whole brass colored quarter deck crowd into the sea, Democrats, Republicans, and all.”

  But the old brig did not right herself. As the “black depression” came to grip the urban sections of his state, Roosevelt took increasingly drastic action. His first major step had been to set up in March 1930 an emergency unemployment committee, headed by a banker, to consider long-range proposals for stabilizing unemployment, and later in the year steps were taken for immediate relief of distress and for expanded public works. At a time when the American Federation of Labor was still opposed to compulsory unemployment insurance as a “dole or handout,” Roosevelt favored such a plan, and eventually he proposed a state program. In August 1931 he got the legislature to create the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Twenty millions were appropriated to tide desperate New Yorkers over the melancholy winter of 1931-32, and a sallow, sharp-faced young social worker named Harry Hopkins came in to run the agency.

  During most of the early Depression years Roosevelt did not differ fundamentally from Hoover over domestic relief and recovery policies. Both opposed direct relief spending by the federal government; both favored putting main reliance on state and private agencies; both believed that government should cut its regular expenses to the bone. Yet each presented a different image to the public—Roosevelt, that of a man in motion, Hoover, a man stuck fast. Roosevelt, of course, made the most of his position. Early in 1931 he called and presided over a well-publicized regional conference in Albany of governors of industrial states. And he skillfully used opposition in the legislature as a foil.

  “I am glad that you believe with me,” Roosevelt wrote Bernard M. Baruch in December 1931, “that issues this coming year will be more economic than anything else.” The nation demanded, he added, a more definite leadership.

  THE POLITICAL USES OF CORRUPTION

  The story of Roosevelt’s presidential nomination is the story of how a battle almost won in the early stages was almost lost by mistake after mistake during the last critical months of the contest.

  Roosevelt began the fight with tremendous advantages. The Democrats were hungry for a presidential winner; after the gubernatorial victory in 1930 he became a leading choice for 1932. His rural appeal impressed a party whose strength in the East was grounded in urban areas. His good record as governor, his name, his standing in the most populous state, his Wilsonian background, his radio voice, and his appearance all gave him a long head start. How could he lose?

  The dangers were threefold. Scenting Democratic victory, a host of
Democratic candidates, including favorite sons, was entering the fray. Roosevelt’s lead made him the object of concerted action by his rivals. And he had to win not a mere majority but two-thirds of the votes in the convention, for the Democrats still had their century-old rule requiring a candidate to poll this fraction of votes for the party nomination.

  Partly to cloak his front-runner position, Roosevelt long kept up the pretense that he was not a candidate for President. “I am sitting tight, sawing wood, and keeping my mouth shut—at least for the present!” he said in March 1931. How anyone could want to be President in such a period he could not understand, he remarked even to friends. His tactic was in sharp contrast to that of Albert C. Ritchie, governor of Maryland, who was eying the nomination race. Asked by a newspaper if he would like to be President Ritchie said, “Of course I would. Who wouldn’t?”

  Roosevelt’s method was to leave the actual management of the campaign to Howe and Farley in New York City and to his friends throughout the country, while making the key decisions himself. His two lieutenants formed a remarkable combination. Howe—more gnarled and hollow-eyed than ever—served as the governor’s adviser, spur, and confidant. Implacably jealous of anyone who got too close to his “Franklin,” darkly suspicious of anyone who was not 100 per cent for Roosevelt’s cause, armed with a Machiavellian flair for hunting out the complex trails of influence, Howe tirelessly played the game of plot and counterplot, working off his frustrations in tirades against his rivals and enemies. Quite the opposite was Farley. He could get along with anybody, even with Howe, which was part of his effectiveness. He had a large limber body to insert between warring factions, and a smooth pink face that looked as if it were sanded and buffed by his intermediary’s role. He was a joiner, a mixer, a glad-hander who could remember names—anybody’s name.