The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  “Back in 1932, they were not willing to guarantee collective bargaining.

  “Back in 1932, they met the demands of unemployed veterans with troops and tanks.

  “Back in 1932, they raised their hands in horror at the thought of fixing a minimum wage or maximum hours for labor; they never gave one thought to such things as pensions for old age or insurance for the unemployed.

  “In 1940, eight years later, what a different tune is played by them! It is a tune played against a sounding board of election day. It is a tune with overtones which whisper: ‘Votes, votes, votes.’ ”

  On the subject of economic recovery Roosevelt quoted the financial section of the New York Times against the editorial page. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he taunted, “if the editorial writers of The New York Times could get acquainted with their own business experts?”

  Five nights later, after driving during the day for fourteen hours through New York City streets before probably two million people, Roosevelt charged in Madison Square Garden that the Republican leaders were “playing politics with national defense.” Such a charge was opportune; Italy had just invaded Greece, and several times during the day the President interrupted his street tour to telephone the State Department. He made no “stab-in-the-back” remark in the Garden—only an expression of sorrow for both the Italian and Greek peoples. Most of his speech was a slashing attack on the Republican leaders—Hoover, Taft, McNary, Vandenberg—for opposing defense measures in the past and now condemning the administration for starving the armed forces.

  “Yes, it is a remarkable somersault,” Roosevelt said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I wonder if the election could have something to do with it.”

  While drafting this speech Rosenman and Sherwood had hit on the rhythmic sequence of “Martin, Barton, and Fish.” They handed Roosevelt a draft with this phrase to see if he would catch the rhythm. He did: his eyes twinkled as he repeated it several times, swinging his finger in cadence to show how he would put it across. The crowd in Madison Square Garden guffawed and were soon repeating the phrase with him.

  Willkie was staggered by this assault on him through his weakest allies. As the campaign rose to a new peak of bitterness and intensity, he desperately doubled his bets. On October 30, the day after Roosevelt officiated at the drawing of selective service numbers, Willkie shouted that on the basis of Roosevelt’s record of broken promises, his election would mean war within six months.

  Roosevelt was en route to Boston the day that Willkie made this charge. By now Democratic leaders were more jittery than ever; the Gallup poll showed Willkie almost abreast of Roosevelt nationally and ahead of him in New York and other key states. Each time his train stopped for rear-platform speeches on the way to Boston messages came in from Flynn and others pleading with Roosevelt to answer Willkie’s charges. The President, in fact, had already compromised on the essential issue throughout the whole campaign by stressing his love for peace and neutrality and his record on defense rather than expounding his crucial policy of aiding Britain even at the risk of war. But, as Roosevelt sat in a low-backed armchair in his private car, Hopkins handed him a telegram from Flynn insisting that he must reassure the people again about not sending Americans into foreign wars.

  “But how often do they expect me to say that?” Roosevelt asked. “It’s in the Democratic platform and I’ve repeated it a hundred times.”

  “Evidently,” said Sherwood, “you’ve got to say it again—and again —and again.”

  The President liked the phrase. Then the speech writers ran into a snag on the sentence “Your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars.” Roosevelt in past talks had always added the words “except in case of attack”; he had, indeed, insisted on this qualification during the Chicago convention even when he was willing otherwise to compromise on the foreign policy plank. Now he wanted to drop the proviso. Rosenman asked why.

  Roosevelt’s face was drawn and gray. He had to bend before the fury of Willkie’s attack—but he would not admit it.

  “It’s not necessary,” he said shortly. “If we’re attacked it’s no longer a foreign war.”

  That night in Boston, after a tumultuous reception, Roosevelt catalogued the anti-New Deal voting record of “Martin, Barton and Fish” and compared it with the “soothing syrup” the Republicans spread on thick. Appealing by radio to the farming West, he wondered out loud if Martin—whom Willkie had once described as representing “all that is finest in American public life”—was slated for Secretary of Agriculture. And to the “mothers and fathers of America,” he made the assurance that in years to come would be repeated mockingly by thousands of isolationist orators:

  “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:

  “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

  By now Roosevelt was facing a threat from a new quarter, and he used his next campaign speech two nights later in Brooklyn to counter it. The Republicans had scored a singular coup a few nights before when John L. Lewis not only came out for Willkie but announced that he would resign as president of the CIO if Roosevelt won. The President’s sole motive and goal, said the black-maned old miners’ chief in his Shakespearean voice, was war. By asserting that a victory for Roosevelt would be in effect a vote of no confidence in himself, Lewis was able at last to come to grips with the slippery rival he hated—but he was doing so on the President’s own ground. With the Communists also attacking the administration hysterically, Roosevelt saw his opening and struck hard.

  “There is something very ominous,” Roosevelt said in Brooklyn, “in this combination that has been forming within the Republican party between the extreme reactionary and the extreme radical elements of this country.

  “There is no common ground upon which they can unite—we know that—unless it be their common will to power, and their impatience with the normal democratic processes to produce overnight the inconsistent dictatorial ends that they, each of them, seek.” Toward the end of his speech Roosevelt quoted a Philadelphia Republican leader as having said, “The President’s only supporters are paupers, those who earn less than $1200 and aren’t worth that, and the Roosevelt family.”

  “ ‘Paupers’ who are not worth their salt,” Roosevelt exclaimed,“—there speaks the true sentiment of the Republican leadership in this year of grace.

  “Can the Republican leaders deny that this all too prevailing Republican sentiment is a direct, vicious, unpatriotic appeal to class hatred and class contempt?

  “That, my friends, is just what I am fighting against with all my heart and soul.…”

  While the White House moved fast to turn Lewis’ district leaders against the mine leader, Roosevelt ended the campaign in Cleveland on the lofty note he loved. The Cleveland speech was perhaps the hardest he had ever had to write. Rosenman and Sherwood had not had a chance to start preparing anything until the day before, and they were exhausted. All night the two labored on the campaign train, catching cat naps on beds littered with toast crusts and gobs of cottage cheese. By midday the next day, when the draft was ready, Sherwood was shocked at Roosevelt’s appearance—the dark circles under his eyes, the gray face, the sagging jowls. The President during the morning had been making rear-platform appearances, greeting people, pumping hands; he had felt compelled to say at Buffalo, “Your President says this country is not going to war.” Roosevelt was dreadfully tired.

  But during lunch, as the President told long, dull stories about Maine lobstermen that all present had heard many times, Sherwood saw his enormous powers of recuperation at work. Soon Roosevelt was demanding jocularly, “What have you three cutthroats been doing to my speech?” For six hours straight, except when he had to put on his leg braces and walk out to the rear platform on Pa Watson’s arm, Roosevelt worked on his speech. Out of the noise and dirt of the car, out of the rhythm of the train as it chugged slowly through the falling rain, out of the chatter and scuffle of visiting politicos,
out of the utter weariness of Roosevelt and his advisers, came somehow a superb campaign speech. That night forty thousand men and women cheered their hearts out as Roosevelt stood before them in a vast auditorium. He began quietly but before the end he was striking a personal and passionate note.

  “During these years while our democracy advanced on many fields of battle, I have had the great privilege of being your President. No personal ambition of any man could desire more than that.

  “It is a hard task. It is a task from which there is no escape day or night.

  “And through it all there have been two thoughts uppermost in my mind—to preserve peace in our land; and to make the forces of democracy work for the benefit of the common people of America.

  “Seven years ago I started with loyal helpers and with the trust and faith and support of millions of ordinary Americans.

  “The way was difficult—the path was dark, but we have moved steadily forward to the open fields and the glowing light that shines ahead.

  “The way of our lives seems clearer now, if we but follow the charts and the guides of our democratic faith.

  “There is—there is a great storm raging now, a storm that makes things harder for the world. And that storm, which did not start in this land of ours, is the true reason that I would like to stick by those people of ours—yes, stick by until we reach the clear, sure footing ahead.

  “And we will make it—we will make it before the next term is over.

  “We will make it; and the world, we hope, will make it, too.

  “When that term is over there will be another President, and many more Presidents in the years to come, and I think that, in the years to come, that word ‘President’ will be a word to cheer the hearts of common men and women everywhere.

  “Our future belongs to us Americans.

  “It is for us to design it; for us to build it.…”

  THE FUTURE IN BALANCE

  The campaign spluttered to a surly finish. Willkie, his voice still a hoarse whisper, charged once more that a third term would mean dictatorship and war. On election eve Roosevelt gave his usual “nonpartisan” talk. After urging that all vote the next day and then help restore unity, he ended with an old prayer that he remembered from Groton forty years before:

  “… Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues.…”

  Next day fifty million Americans—millions more than ever before—streamed to the polls. Roosevelt himself was the picture of genial self-confidence when he faced reporters at the Hyde Park polling place. Patiently he posed while the photographers shot him from every angle. “Will you wave at the trees, Mr. President?” he was asked. “Go climb a tree!” Roosevelt said. “You know I never wave at trees unless they have leaves on them.” But then, quickly relenting, he waved at the trees while cameras clicked.

  That night the house stood dark and quiet on its height above the Hudson. On a staff above the portico the presidential flag, with its shield, eagle, and white stars, flapped quietly in the mild November air. Inside the mood was tensely gay. Much of the family was there, along with a host of friends. Little groups clustered around radios throughout the house. Roosevelt sat at the family dining-room table. In front of him were big tally sheets and a row of freshly sharpened pencils. News tickers chattered nearby.

  At first the President was calm and businesslike. The early returns were mixed. Morgenthau, nervous and fussy, bustled in and out of the room. Suddenly Mike Reilly, the President’s bodyguard, noticed that Roosevelt had broken into a heavy sweat. Something in the returns had upset him. It was the first time Reilly had ever seen him lose his nerve.

  “Mike,” Roosevelt said suddenly, “I don’t want to see anybody in here.”

  “Including your family, Mr. President?”

  “I said ‘anybody,’ ” Roosevelt answered in a grim tone.

  Reilly left the room to tell Mrs. Roosevelt and to intercept Morgenthau’s next trip back to the dining room. Inside, Roosevelt sat before his charts. His coat was off; his tie hung low; his soft shirt clung around the big shoulders. The news tickers clattered feverishly.…

  Was this the end of it all? Better by far not to have run for office again than to go down to defeat now. All his personal enemies gathered in one camp—big businessmen like Willkie, Democratic bolters like Al Smith and the rest of them, newspaper publishers like Hearst and Howard, the turncoats like John Lewis, the obstructionists on Capitol Hill, the isolationists, the Communists—would this strange coalition at last knock him down and write his epitaph in history as a power-grasping dictator rebuked by a free people?

  In Hoboken and in St. Louis, in Middletown and in a South Carolina crossroads school, ballots were counted and figures phoned to the court house; numbers were tumbled onto telegraph wires, grouped with other figures, flashed to the state capitals, combined with more figures; and now the little machines were spewing them out. In the black numbers was being struck some cosmic balance—the courageous acts, the forthright utterances, the hard decisions, the great achievements, stretching from the Hundred Days to the destroyer deal, from social security to selective service. Struck in this balance, too, were the compromises and the evasions, the deals and the manipulations, the hopes unrealized, the promises unfulfilled.

  The smoke curled up from the cigarette in the long holder. The Hyde Park returns were not in yet. But they would probably go against him. It was strange, in a way. He had never really left Hyde Park. He had always left part of himself in this world of tranquil estates, hard-working farmers, St. James’s church, the trees and the fields and the river. He had never wholly left the world of his mother, now sitting with friends in another room. Yet this was the world he had never won over politically.

  In the little black numbers marching out of the ticker, not only Roosevelt but the whole New Deal was on trial. The relentless figures were a summation of so much—of the clarion call of 1933, the sultry summer of 1935, the long trips through the country, the court fight, the purge, the pleas to the dictators, the arming of the nation. A generation of American ideas was on trial too. Eighty precincts from New Jersey reporting—what verdict would come from Newark slums and the Jersey flats on a credo that had repudiated McKinley, moved beyond Wilson, and somehow fused a dozen differing doctrines and traditions?

  From all over America the atoms of judgment streamed through the ticker and took their place on the tally sheets. Still Willkie ran strong. Disappointing first returns were coming in from New York—New York, the very image of the America from which the New Deal coalition had been built. New York—the heart of his political empire, the state of Uncle Ted, of law firms like the one he had worked for on Wall Street, of Tammany bosses. New York—the state that had rebuked him in 1914, and again in 1920, then favored him by the tiny margin of 1928 and the huge avalanche of 1930.

  The ash dropped from the cigarette; Mike Reilly stood stolidly outside the door. Was this the end of Jim Farley’s journey to the Elks’ convention; the final landing for the plane that had carried Roosevelt from Albany to the Chicago convention of 1932? Would the whole great adventure follow the Blue Eagle into defeat? New York City returns were coming in—even the city was undependable in this strange election. Here were the urban masses—the Italians, Jews, Negroes, Germans, Irish—who had benefited from the New Deal and who had sustained it. But now the New Deal was no longer new, and other, sharper issues had emerged as Hitler changed the face of politics everywhere. One report had reached Roosevelt that in New York City only the Jews were solid for him.

  And so the returns poured in, filling in the little pieces that would, before the night was over, make up a vast mosaic—and an answer. The voters, in the last analysis, were not passing on a unity, on a completed sum of the New Deal. For when all its
parts were added and subtracted, what remained was less a quantity than a spirit. Seven years were on trial, seven eventful years crammed with deeds; yet it was not the deeds that remained—though their monuments would long endure—so much as a distillation of the pageant of the 1930’s, embodied in the spirit that was the New Deal—boldness, eclecticism, experimentation, a devotion to building the grade crossing and housing the homeless that transcended ideology and spoke the idiom of American tradition. There was in all this not so much a philosophy as a common sense. And it was the common sense of the American people that must speak tonight.…

  Then there was a stir throughout the house. Slowly but with gathering force, the numbers on the charts started to shift their direction. Reports began to arrive of a great surge of Roosevelt strength, a surge that would go on until midnight. New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania—the great urban states were falling in line behind the President. By now Roosevelt was smiling again, the door was opened, and in came family and friends with more reports of victory. Then came the usual torchlight parade from Hyde Park center, lighted by photographers’ flash bulbs, and the usual homey talk by the President: “I will still be the same Franklin Roosevelt you have always known.…”

  In the ballroom of the Hotel Commodore in New York thousands of Willkie supporters had gathered in a celebrating mood. For a time all were jubilant; then, as the sad reports poured in, the crowd slowly dwindled until only a dejected band of Willkieites remained. The candidate appeared for a short talk late in the evening. “Don’t be afraid and never quit,” he cried hoarsely. Not till the next day did he send Roosevelt a congratulatory wire.

  The final results spelled a decisive victory for Roosevelt. The popular vote was 27,243,466 to 22,304,755; the electoral vote was 449 to 82. Besides Maine, Vermont, and six farm states, Willkie carried only Indiana and Michigan. Roosevelt won every city in the country with over 400,000 population except Cincinnati. On the other hand, Willkie had gained five million more votes than Landon had in 1936; Roosevelt’s plurality was the smallest of any winning candidate since 1916. The President’s margin in New York—about 225,000—was his lowest since his hairbreadth victory for governor in 1928.