Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  * Twenty-two years later, FDR would capture the nation’s attention by flying from Albany to Chicago to accept the Democratic nomination for president—the first presidential candidate to use an airplane during a campaign.

  * Hamilton Fish [II] was the son of the Hamilton Fish, who served successively as governor of New York, U.S. senator, and Grant’s secretary of state for eight years. Fish II served in Congress for only one term (1909–1911) and is the father of Hamilton Fish, Jr., who subsequently held the seat from 1920 to 1945 and delighted in tweaking FDR.

  * Charles Murphy, who headed Tammany Hall from 1902 until his death in 1924, was the antithesis of his ham-handed predecessors. Known variously as “The Quiet Chief,” “Silent Charlie,” or simply “Mr. Murphy,” he had a cleansing effect on both the organization and New York politics.

  The son of an Irish tenant farmer, Murphy saved enough money driving a Blue Line horse trolley to open a saloon (the first of four) known as Charlie’s Place on Second Avenue, where he learned politics doling out favors to the neighborhood. He rose quickly through the Tammany ranks, attributable in part to his gentlemanly discretion and in part to his innate political instinct, to become the most powerful Democratic leader in the state.

  Reform was in the air when Murphy took control of Tammany, and he put the organization at the head of the parade. As he saw it, reform had too many ramifications to be left to the reformers. Under Murphy, Tammany became the most potent force for effecting economic and social change in New York. It supported Republican governor Charles Evans Hughes in the creation of a Public Utilities Commission, as well as laws regulating banking, insurance, and tenement housing. It pioneered legislation for old-age pensions, workman’s compensation, and five-cent transit fares. Robert Wagner would later refer to Murphy’s Tammany as “the cradle of modern liberalism.” Nancy J. Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858–1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics 27–38 (Northampton, Mass: Smith College, 1968); Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tiger of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); Charles LaCerra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall of New York 43–46 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997).

  * Edward M. Shepard 14, Judge Alton B. Parker 6, former governor Herrick 2, State Supreme Court justice James W. Gerard 2, and Martin W. Littleton 2.

  * Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, one of Al Smith’s closest advisers, said party professionals in New York always laughed a little at FDR for the Sheehan affair. “According to the gospel, FDR won a great victory. But the victory was that instead of getting Sheehan, who was a pretty good upstate lawyer, [Tammany] withdrew him and nominated O’Gorman, whom they would much rather have nominated in the first place.” Interview, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  * ER’s feelings never completely changed. “Franklin was always surrounded by Catholics,” she told her friend Irine Sandifer in 1960. “They were determined to see that he was always surrounded.” Irine Reiterman Sandifer, Mrs. Roosevelt as We Knew Her 86 (Silver Spring, Md.: privately printed, 1975). Also see James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts 143, 196–197 (New York: Grove Press, 2001).

  * FDR’s view of Tammany eventually caught up with the times. When Charles Murphy died in 1924, Roosevelt said feelingly, “In Mr. Murphy’s death, the New York City Democratic organization has lost probably the strongest and wisest leader it has had in generations.… He was a genius who kept harmony, and at the same time recognized that the world moves on. It is well to remember that he had helped to accomplish much in the way of progressive and social welfare legislation in our state.” Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy 21; LaCerra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall 61.

  FIVE

  AWAKENING

  I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  FRANKLIN WAS LITTLE LIKED in Albany. Most of his colleagues found him insufferable. Al Smith wrote him off as a dilettante—“a damn fool” who thought more about political appearances than substantive legislation. Robert Wagner saw him as a stage dandy interested only in publicity: “Senator Roosevelt has gained his point. What he wants is a headline in the newspapers. Let us proceed to our business.” The elderly Tom Grady, who had served in the legislature with TR, thought Franklin the more obnoxious of the two. Even the genial Tim Sullivan, a man of exceptional warmth and kindness, believed him to be “an awful arrogant fellow.”1

  Frances Perkins, fresh out of Mount Holyoke and Columbia Graduate School, was often in Albany lobbying on behalf of labor. She knew the Roosevelts socially in New York City and traveled in the same circles. No one who saw FDR in those years, she wrote, would have been likely to think of him as a potential president.

  I have a vivid picture of him operating on the floor of the Senate: tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.

  I think he started that way not because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had a good education at Harvard, but because he really didn’t like people very much and because he had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot.2

  The fight against Sheehan provided national publicity for Roosevelt. But it exposed his social indifference. On March 25, 1911, while the legislature was still deadlocked, fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which occupied the three top floors of a New York City loft building just off Washington Square. The flames spread quickly. The doors to the only stairwell were chained shut, ostensibly to prevent theft, and there was no fire escape. Forty-six employees fell or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below; one hundred perished in the inferno. All but fifteen were girls and young women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. In the trial that followed, the company was absolved of responsibility and collected $64,925 in insurance damages. Twenty-three families of the dead sued and received an overall total of $1,725. That amounted to $75 for each life lost.

  The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the worst factory fire in New York history, exposed the evils of unregulated working conditions. “This calamity is just what I have been predicting,” said the city’s fire chief.3 Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League put it more pejoratively: “The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred, it matters little if one hundred and forty-six of us are burned to death,” she told a protest rally at the Metropolitan Opera House.4 Political leaders in Albany took up the cry for reform. The legislature immediately established a Factory Investigating Commission with Robert Wagner as chairman, Al Smith as vice chairman, and Frances Perkins as chief investigator. Over the next three years the commission would produce a flood of thirty-two bills that came to serve as models of industrial reform throughout the nation. Franklin Roosevelt stood on the sidelines. He said nothing about the Triangle fire and took no part in the legislative effort the tragedy produced.

  One of the principal pieces of social legislation to come forward at the 1911 session was a bill to limit the workweek of women and children to fifty-four hours. The measure was being held up in committee, and Democrats were divided. Every vote was important. Miss Perkins approached Roosevelt to ask his support and was dismissed abruptly: “No, no. More important things. More important things. Can’t do it now. Can’t do it now. Much more important things.”5

  Thanks to help from Tammany stalwarts like Big Tim Sullivan and The MacManus (“the Devil’s Deputy from Hell’s Kitchen”), Miss Perkins got the measure to the Senate floor a year later on the final day
of the session. Under the rules, an absolute majority—twenty-six votes—was required for passage, and the supporters were two votes shy. At the last moment, Tim Sullivan and his cousin Christy, whom Miss Perkins managed to call back from the night boat that was about to take them down the Hudson to New York, crashed through the chamber door to cast the two decisive votes. “It’s all right, me gal,” Big Tim thundered. “The bosses thought they were going to kill your bill, but they forgot about Tim Sullivan.”6 Pandemonium erupted on the floor. The Senate was swept by a tidal wave of emotion. Callous old politicians found themselves weeping. And at the back of the chamber, Frances Perkins was weeping too.7

  Franklin was absent when the bill passed. “I remember being considerably disappointed because Roosevelt wouldn’t do anything about the 54-hour bill,” said Perkins. “I took it hard that a young man who had so much spirit did not do so well in this, which I thought a test, as did Tim Sullivan and The MacManus, undoubtedly corrupt politicians.”8*

  Whether he could not remember, or whether he simply wanted to cover his tracks, FDR’s version of that night varies substantially—another example of excluding unpleasant facts from the record. Campaigning for governor in 1928, Roosevelt told a labor rally in Manhattan, “One of the first measures that we started in 1911 was the fifty-four-hour law for women and children in industry. In those days a fifty-four-hour law was considered the most radical thing that had ever been talked about.”9 Several years later, Roosevelt ratcheted up his involvement, telling reporters how he and Robert Wagner had been called Communists because they had worked for a fifty-four-hour-a-week law. “It is an old story,” said FDR, “but like an elephant, I have a long memory.”10

  The most blatant reinterpretation was provided by Roosevelt’s principal aide and general factotum, Louis Howe, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1933. In Howe’s version, FDR not only supported the bill but played the central role in its passage. It was “young Senator Roosevelt,” wrote Howe, who held the Senate floor with a filibuster while Sullivan was summoned from the night boat. When told by runners that Big Tim refused to return, Roosevelt is supposed to have said, “Tell him he has to and I said so.”11*

  FDR’s early record on women’s suffrage was little better. Although his district included Vassar College, a hotbed of feminism, Roosevelt initially hewed to the negative attitude of his farming constituency. Under relentless pressure from campus militants, he took cover in public opinion. “I am trying to get the sentiment of Dutchess County,” he wrote Anna Dayley, a Poughkeepsie attorney, in February 1911, “and I shall be guided very largely by the result.”12 At the end of May, he was still equivocal. “I am not opposed to female suffrage,” he allowed, “but I think it is a very great question whether the people of the state as a whole want it or not.”13

  The following year, when the issue of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage was before the legislature, FDR came out in favor. Always fond of a good story, Roosevelt enjoyed telling how he had been convinced by the glamorous suffrage lobbyist Inez Milholland, who perched on his desk in the Senate chamber and dazzled him with Vassar wiles and lawyerly arguments. Milholland was often described as the high priestess of the suffragist cause, and, as FDR would have it, she persuaded him that suffrage was “the only chivalric position for a decent man to hold.”14

  Eleanor supported women’s suffrage reluctantly. Throughout her life she refused to concede Milholland’s role. Nevertheless, Franklin’s conversion left her stunned. “I had never given the question serious thought,” she wrote, “for I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did. I realized that if my husband was a suffragist I probably must be too [but] I cannot claim to have been a feminist in those early years.”15

  FDR’s attitude toward Prohibition was equally equivocal. Never averse to bending an elbow himself, he nevertheless accumulated a perfect voting record in the Senate, according to the Anti-Saloon League. In January 1913, he actually introduced a local option bill for the League and became the subject of a laudatory editorial (“An Advocate of Christian Patriotism”) in its national magazine.16 In this instance, Franklin appears to have been too clever by half. Prohibition was anathema in New York City, and his opponents never tired of tying him to it. Down through 1932 the story persisted that whatever Roosevelt might say, there was a voting record to prove he was “dry” at heart.17

  Following the path blazed by TR, conservation of the state’s natural resources turned Roosevelt progressive. It was as chairman of the traditionally somnolent Forest, Fish, and Game Committee in the Senate that FDR found his voice as a progressive spokesman. He spearheaded the successful fight to update and codify New York’s fish and game laws but lost a bitter battle with the timber industry to enact a similar code to protect the state’s forests. Franklin’s bill for the “Protection of Lands, Forests, and Public Parks” imposed drastic restrictions on harvesting timber—including a clause to restrict cutting trees below a minimum size on private property.

  The state’s timber producers descended on Albany in droves, charging that to tamper with private ownership was unconstitutional. For Roosevelt, it was baptism in a battle he would often revisit. “The same old fight is going on up here,” he wrote to a friend in February 1912, “between the people who see that the Adirondacks are being denuded … and those [timber interests] who succeeded in getting for nothing what they would have to pay well for today. Nobody here has any desire to confiscate property and the bill before my Committee is a conservation measure only.”18 But few believed that. Any attempt to regulate what private landowners could do with their property galvanized the gods of free enterprise. Roosevelt failed to get his bill out of committee. A related bill that FDR introduced to permit the state to flood its own forest lands to provide reservoirs for public power died in the Assembly.

  When the fight over the timber bill was at its height, Roosevelt was invited to give the keynote address to the progressive People’s Forum, meeting in nearby Troy. By this time his concern for conservation had morphed into an awareness of the perils of excessive individualism. The speech comes as close as FDR ever came during his early years in politics to providing a philosophical explanation for his actions. Impatient with abstract ideas, he adroitly translated contentious concepts into phrases his audience could relate to—a preview of the mature Franklin D. Roosevelt. No one was better than FDR at simplifying a complex issue and translating it into words the average American could understand.

  The course of modern history, he suggested, had been a struggle for individual liberty. “Today, in Europe and America, the liberty of the individual has been accomplished.” What was now required was a process by which that liberty could be harnessed for the betterment of the community. “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further. Co-operation, which is the thing that we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” FDR avoided the term “community interest” as too socialistic. He eschewed “brotherhood of man” as too sentimental. Instead, he defined cooperation as “the struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the individual” and said it was “what the founders of the republic were groping for.”

  The answer was regulation. But don’t call it regulation, said Roosevelt. “If we call the method regulation, people will hold up their hands in horror and say ‘unAmerican’ or ‘dangerous.’ But if we call the same process co-operation these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done.’ ”19

  FDR’s embrace of a regulative role for government led him to Trenton and Woodrow Wilson, the fast-rising leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. In 1910, the year Franklin was elected to the Senate in Albany, Wilson was rescued by New Jersey Democrats from a difficult situation at Princeton and elected governor.* Wilson proved more adept at state politics than academic infighting (“The reason academic politics are so vicious is because the stakes are so small” is often attributed to
Wilson) and in his first four months as governor cajoled the legislature into enacting a spectacular series of reform measures including a direct primary law, a corrupt-practices act, a bill establishing a strong public utilities commission with rate-setting authority, and an employer’s liability law. The speed with which Wilson pushed the measures through the statehouse provided a lesson in leadership that made him the odds-on favorite among progressive Democrats for the party’s 1912 presidential nomination.

  Roosevelt was but one of many Democrats who journeyed to Trenton to meet Wilson. The get-together served a common purpose: Wilson was interested in the delegate vote count in New York; FDR was eager to join the Wilson campaign at its inception. They met in Wilson’s office in the autumn of 1911. How many votes could he count upon from New York? the governor asked. The prospects looked bleak, FDR replied. New York had ninety votes at the convention and perhaps a third might support Wilson. But like the Democratic legislative caucus in Albany, the state operated under the unit rule. Charles Murphy would control the delegation, and Murphy’s candidate, who was likely to be anyone other than Wilson, would get all of New York’s ninety votes.20

  Late that afternoon FDR and Wilson resumed their conversation on the train back to Princeton, where Wilson lived. As they sat opposite each other in a Pennsylvania Railroad day coach, the short ride to Princeton Junction gave the man who would become the twenty-eighth president of the United States and the man who would follow twelve years later as the thirty-second an opportunity to appraise each other. At fifty-five years of age, Wilson was the beneficiary of a sudden wave of popularity. But he remained cold, stern, and professorial—a dour Presbyterian academic born to southern privilege who believed God was guiding his every step. Crisply articulate, inflexible, and dedicated to principle, his firm belief in right and wrong evoked in Franklin memories both of his father, James, and, more poignantly, the Reverend Endicott Peabody. Peabody lacked Wilson’s brilliance but shared his righteous certitude. Wilson’s academic writings suggested a highly theoretical approach to the daily cut and thrust of politics, yet this was belied by his stunning pragmatism as governor.21 He was not a man approached easily; he was concerned more with issues than personalities; yet his grasp of political reality was indisputable. Years later, writing from the oval office, FDR drew on his own political experience to contrast Wilson with his early role model, Cousin Theodore. As Franklin saw it, TR lacked Wilson’s depth “and failed to stir, as Wilson did, the truly profound moral and social convictions.” Wilson, on the other hand, failed where TR succeeded in arousing popular enthusiasm over specific events, “even though these events may have been superficial.”22