by Adam Cohen
Urban and rural Americans were united by a shared sense of desperation. Reinhold Niebuhr, who was then a Detroit pastor with a large number of autoworkers in his congregation, had just published an essay that declared, “Capitalism is dying... it ought to die.” When the novelist John Dos Passos visited Detroit, he found the parks filled with Communists selling The Daily Worker. In the Farm Belt, radical farmers, enraged over the low price of milk, were putting nail-filled boards on the highways to stop delivery trucks. Mobs were showing up at farm foreclosures, stopping the proceedings by force and sending bank lawyers fleeing. In rural areas and small towns, talk of revolution was growing. “You would be astonished if you could attend these township and county meetings of farmers, crowded full of militant farmers—more militant all the time,” Ella Reeve Bloor, the legendary Communist known as Mother Bloor, reported from Sioux City, Iowa. The president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union told a congressional committee that “there are more actual Reds among the farmers of Wisconsin than you could dream about.”8
The most immediate crisis was the collapsing banking system. There had been more than five thousand bank failures, mostly caused by banks’ reckless speculation with their depositors’ assets. Since there was no deposit insurance, customers were losing their money, in many cases their life savings. The failures caused runs on the surviving banks by people desperate to withdraw their deposits while they still could. The runs, in turn, produced more failures. Across the country, states were declaring “bank holidays,” which required banks to close their doors and stop allowing withdrawals. The holidays were necessary, since banks did not have enough cash to pay off all of their depositors, but they were creating new hardships.9
The banking system’s problems were being felt at the inauguration. Some guests learned after they arrived that the banks back home had closed, and that the checks they had intended to use to pay their hotel bills would not be honored. Rexford Tugwell, who would soon become assistant secretary of agriculture, recalled that there was a “strange emptiness” in the air over inauguration weekend. The banking crisis detracted from what should have been a celebratory mood. Tugwell realized, though, that the problems of well-heeled inauguration guests paled beside those of poor people across the country who “faced worse possibilities than not being able to pay a hotel bill.”10
Perkins understood better than almost anyone how the hard times were devastating ordinary Americans. As industrial commissioner, her job had required her to monitor the impact of the Depression on New York. Perkins had sought out some of the worst conditions in the state so she could speak about them later. She had made a point of visiting the Hooverville that had gone up in Central Park near Ninety-first Street, not far from her home. The men lived, she recalled later, in “little packing box carton shelters, with any kind of old rags hung around and little fires going, making their mulligatawny.” Perkins had traveled the country and seen with her own eyes the “lost boys in the railroad yards in St. Louis and Kansas City,” and the “people pulling the baseboards and woodwork out of the houses to chop up and burn” in Detroit. She drew on these experiences when she argued for relief for the unemployed, which she did often. Perkins made her case so crisply and with such command of the facts that The Saturday Evening Post declared that she “talks like an editorial in The Survey,” the national social work magazine.11
There were great hopes riding on Perkins. The Nation magazine had spoken for liberal America when it pronounced her appointment “cause for profound jubilation.” Perkins’s value system, rooted in the Progressive Era and in her Episcopal faith, gave her a deep conviction that government had a duty to help those in need. Her New York friends, many of whom were active in the organized labor and settlement house movements, were imploring her to take quick action. Once Perkins arrived in Washington, however, she found that it was all she could do to locate a place to sleep. The Inaugural Committee, she learned to her dismay, had not reserved rooms for her or her sixteen-year-old daughter, Susanna, even though the city’s hotels had been booked for months. The Department of Labor staff had proven equally indifferent to her arrival. Perkins had been forced to fend for herself, hurriedly contacting a New York friend who knew Mrs. Willard and pleading for a room at the Willard Hotel.12
Perkins was beginning to realize how little she understood Washington. The evening before the inauguration, she had taken a taxi through traffic-clogged streets to go to a reception hosted by the Pan-American Union, an organization promoting closer ties between North and South America. The invitation had been elaborate, and with no one to advise her, she had assumed it was the sort of event she should attend. But after crawling along for more than an hour, she could see when her taxi pulled up that the party was a mob scene. As she was trying to decide whether to go in, and risk not being able to find another taxi to take her home, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, the widow of the former president, emerged and urged her to flee. The reception was “perfectly terrible,” Wilson told Perkins, and it was so overcrowded it would be dangerous to enter. “If you’ll take my advice,” she said, “you’ll go right away.”13
Perkins returned to the Willard after midnight to find a message from Roosevelt’s personal secretary, Stephen Early, marked “very important.” When she called, Early expressed amazement at how she had spent the evening. “Oh goodness,” he said, “didn’t anybody tell you not to go?” The Pan-American Union reception was, he said, “just to entertain the riff-raff.” Early had called to tell her that Roosevelt wanted his incoming Cabinet and any family members they cared to bring along to join him at ten o’clock the following morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church.14
Now, Perkins was on her way, with Susanna in tow, for what would be her first official function as part of the Roosevelt administration. The service was beginning soon, but she had no idea where St. John’s Episcopal Church was or how to get there. The doorman at the Willard was unequivocal: there was no hope of finding a taxi that would get her to the service on time. The church was close enough to walk, he told her. Perkins and Susanna hurried off on foot.15
St. John’s was known as “the Church of the Presidents.” The men who had endowed its building fund in the early 1800s had hoped it would be just that. When construction was complete on the late-Federal-style church, the second building to go up on Lafayette Square after the White House, they offered President James Madison a free pew. Madison joined, but insisted on paying his way. Many succeeding presidents had worshipped at St. John’s, along with numerous Cabinet members and lesser officials, including Roosevelt, who had attended services when he was in the Wilson administration. St. John’s unique history made it a logical place for Roosevelt to hold his inauguration day service, but there was another consideration. Though he took great pains to hide it, Roosevelt’s mobility was severely restricted. He walked with the help of ungainly steel leg braces, leaning on his son James or an aide. He would have had trouble making his way through Washington Cathedral, the soaring gothic edifice that was the seat of the city’s Episcopal diocese. St. John’s was smaller and it had a side door leading directly from the street into the nave, which minimized the walking he would have to do.16
Roosevelt’s disability was caused by polio, which he had contracted in the summer of 1921, a harsh moment of adversity in an otherwise privileged life. He was born in Hyde Park, New York, in 1882, to James and Sara Delano Roosevelt, and had grown up in a sprawling estate on the Hudson River. “All that is in me,” Roosevelt once wrote, “goes back to the Hudson.” The Roosevelts were an entrenched part of New York’s Dutch aristocracy. The Delanos were even more prominent, and wealthier. As the only child of doting parents, Roosevelt had a childhood that was in many ways idyllic, filled with ponies and European vacations. “His youth is summed up,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “in his mother’s words: ‘After all he had many advantages that other boys did not have.’ ” Roosevelt’s childhood was also a solitary one, without siblings, close friends, or even peers hi
s own age, an absence that may have contributed to the keen sense of loneliness he exhibited as an adult. After an early education by tutors, Roosevelt attended prep school at Groton, an Episcopalian academy in Massachusetts that educated the scions of America’s upper class. He went on to Harvard College, leaving in 1904 with a history degree. Roosevelt was not an academic star, generally earning no better than “gentlemen’s C’s,” but he was well liked by his classmates and distinguished himself by being elected president of the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. After college, Roosevelt moved to New York to attend Columbia Law School and married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor, a shy orphan, was the favorite niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave her away at the wedding. If Theodore Roosevelt was pleased by the union, Sara Roosevelt was not. She resented Eleanor’s stealing away her only child at what she regarded as too young an age. After failing to break up the engagement, she would intrude endlessly on the marriage. Roosevelt spent three years at the law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which represented large corporations and wealthy individuals, before deciding that he wanted to pursue another path.17
Tall and charismatic, with an easy speaking style and a famous last name, Roosevelt was a natural politician. Hudson Valley Democrats approached him in 1910 to run for the State Senate from a Republican district. He accepted, and he won the race in a strong Democratic year. Although he had been chosen by the local political bosses, Roosevelt had declared to the nominating convention that he was running “with absolute independence, I am pledged to no man.” In the campaign, Roosevelt had spent little time in the Democratic stronghold of Poughkeepsie, the biggest city in the district, and instead focused on winning over Republican farmers. When he arrived in the legislature, Roosevelt made political reform his chief cause. He played a leading role in blocking the selection of William “Blue-eyed Billy” Sheehan, the Tammany Hall Democratic machine’s choice for United States senator, an office that was still chosen by legislators, not popular vote.18
Mostly, though, Roosevelt was regarded as an upper-class dilettante—his colleagues, playing off of his initials, dubbed him “Feather Duster.” In 1912, Roosevelt supported Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic presidential nominee, over his fifth cousin Theodore’s Bull Moose candidacy. When Wilson was elected, he named Franklin Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy, a position Theodore Roosevelt had once held. Roosevelt made an ill-advised run for the United States Senate in 1914, losing overwhelmingly to James W. Gerard, Wilson’s wealthy and well-respected ambassador to Germany, who was backed by Tammany Hall. Roosevelt took away a lesson from the defeat: he made his peace with Tammany. In future years, it would be a mainstay of his political coalition.19
After his Senate loss, Roosevelt returned to the Department of the Navy, where he remained through the World War. During this period, Roosevelt began an intense relationship with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s beautiful social secretary. Roosevelt and Eleanor came close to divorcing over the affair. In the end, under pressure from Sara, who was worried about the couple’s five children, and Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s political adviser, who was convinced divorce would ruin his prospects for elective office, Roosevelt broke off with Lucy. His political career soon resumed in dramatic fashion. In 1920, the Democratic presidential nominee, Ohio governor James M. Cox, asked the thirty-eight-year-old Roosevelt to be his running mate. “It was an obvious political move,” Roosevelt’s aide Raymond Moley would later say. “He was from the East, his name was Roosevelt and this was about all that figured in his nomination for the vice-presidency.” The Cox-Roosevelt ticket lost to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge in an election that marked the beginning of twelve years of Republican rule.20
It was during the following summer that Roosevelt contracted polio, on a visit to his family’s cottage on Campobello Island, New Brunswick. When the extent of his illness became clear, Sara urged her son, who was working as a bank vice president, to retreat to the life of a country gentleman, amusing himself with his books and stamps. Roosevelt, however, was not ready to retire. Eleanor, who thought retirement would have been a terrible waste, allied herself with Howe, and the two of them persuaded Roosevelt to hold on to his political ambitions. Their arguments, and Roosevelt’s innate determination, won out. He bought a 1,200-acre rehabilitation center in rural Warm Springs, Georgia, where he worked to heal himself, and helped others with polio.21
Many people close to Roosevelt believed that his physical disability prompted a remarkable transformation in his character. Perkins, who knew him in his early years in New York society, and as a young legislator in Albany, had considered Roosevelt something of a prig. “His superficial feeling toward many people was that they were great bores, stupid and nonsensical,” and he “didn’t want to bother with them,” she recalled. “After he was ill, flat, prostrated,” he “had a total change of heart,” she said. “Nobody was dull. Nobody was a great nuisance. Nobody made no sense. Nobody was good for nothing. Because they were human beings who could walk, and run, and exercise, they were all superior to him.” Roosevelt hid his disability as much as he could, in what one historian called his “splendid deception,” and few people knew just how difficult it was for him to move about. The public rarely saw him in his wheelchair, and almost never saw him being carried around like a small child. At the same time, the fact that Roosevelt was afflicted with polio was not a secret. When Time magazine named him its Man of the Year in 1932, it reminded its readers that he was a “helpless cripple,” though it noted approvingly that his “attitude toward his affliction is one of gallant unconcern.”22
A few years after contracting polio, Roosevelt took up politics again with renewed vigor. In 1924, he was chosen to nominate New York governor Alfred E. Smith for president at the Democratic National Convention at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Roosevelt slowly worked his way up to the podium in his heavy braces. The delegates were transfixed, first by his halting but determined movement, and then by his extraordinary nominating address, in which he saluted Smith as a “Happy Warrior.” With this single speech, Roosevelt catapulted himself to national prominence. The New York Herald Tribune declared that he had become “the one man whose name would stampede the convention were he put in nomination.” Despite Roosevelt’s eloquent words, Smith lost the Democratic nomination to John W. Davis, a prominent New York lawyer who went on to lose to Coolidge. Four years later, in 1928, Smith won the Democratic nomination. When he did, he personally appealed to Roosevelt to run for the governorship he was giving up. Smith lost to Herbert Hoover, who assured the voters, “We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men and women than ever before in any land.” Roosevelt, however, bucked the Republican tide and won the New York governor’s race by 25,000 votes. For the next two years, Roosevelt jokingly called himself the “one half of one percent governor,” but in 1930 New Yorkers reelected him by a more than 700,000-vote margin. Roosevelt was widely regarded as his party’s leading candidate for president in 1932. At the Democratic National Convention that year, he defeated Smith, getting the necessary two-thirds vote when Texan John Nance Garner, a third contender, threw Roosevelt his support. Roosevelt made Garner his running mate and rode the nation’s deep dissatisfaction with Hoover’s handling of the Depression to the presidency.23
Now, Roosevelt was about to gather his family and Cabinet for an inauguration day service of thanksgiving and prayer. It came as no surprise to people who knew him well that he would want to begin his presidency in church. During his childhood, Roosevelt and his family had been regular congregants at St. James’s Episcopal, where his father had held the highest lay position. At Groton, he had come under the influence of Reverend Endicott Peabody, the formidable headmaster, who preached a steely, forward-looking brand of Protestantism. “O God, author of the world’s joy, bearer of the world’s pain, make us glad that we have inherited the world’s burden,” one of Peabody’s favorite prayers beseeched, and “Let unconqu
erable gladness dwell.” As an adult, Roosevelt still read the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and quoted liberally from both. Perkins, who was deeply religious herself, believed that Roosevelt’s political views were rooted in his faith. “He saw the betterment of life and people as part of God’s work,” she would later say. James Farley, Roosevelt’s campaign manager, who was about to join the Cabinet as postmaster general, had traveled down from New York on the “Roosevelt Special,” a train that carried the president-elect, his family and friends, and a few reporters and photographers. Farley had been struck that Roosevelt had talked more on the way down about religion than affairs of state. He told Farley about his plans for an inauguration day church service. Roosevelt firmly believed, Farley later said, that “the fundamentally religious sense of the American people would be a great factor in seeing the nation through.”24
Perkins finally found her way to St. John’s Church, and she and Susanna made their way through the crowd that had gathered outside. Inside, about one hundred Roosevelt family members, friends, and Cabinet members and their families had packed into the pews. Perkins did not know most of her fellow Cabinet members, but she recognized some of them from their photographs in the newspaper. Moments before the service began, Roosevelt entered through a side door, accompanied by his son James, Sara, and Eleanor. Roosevelt moved slowly, struggling with his leg braces and grabbing on to James for support. He settled into his pew by the door just as the service was about to start.25