Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  16. Lovett Papers, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.

  17. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 591.

  18. Dr. Bennett to Dr. Lovett, August 31, 1921, Lovett Papers.

  19. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 415–416.

  20. The New York Times, September 16, 1921.

  21. FDR to Ochs, September 16, 1921, FDRL.

  22. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, September 24, 1921, Lovett Papers.

  23. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 204 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).

  24. FDR to Daniels, October 6, 1921. FDRL.

  25. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, October 11, 1921, Lovett Papers.

  26. Lovett notes, October 15, 1921, Ibid.

  27. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, November 19, 1921, Lovett Papers.

  28. ER to SDR, December 15, 1921, FDRL.

  29. Mrs. Lake to Dr. Lovett, December 17, 1921, Lovett Papers.

  30. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 147 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).

  31. Ibid. 58, 146–147.

  32. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 118 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

  33. Interview, Frances Perkins, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  34. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 616.

  35. Ibid. 616–617.

  36. ER, Autobiography 117.

  37. Ibid. 117–118.

  38. Mrs. James [Sara] Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin 101 (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1933).

  39. WW to FDR, April 30, 1922, FDRL.

  40. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, March 30, 1922, Lovett Papers.

  41. Ibid., July 10, 1922.

  42. Dr. Lovett to FDR, August 14, 1922, FDRL.

  43. FDR to Dr. Lovett, September 28, 1922, FDRL.

  44. Anna Roosevelt Interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  45. FDR to Smith, August 13, 1922, FDRL. “I had quite a tussle in New York to keep our friend Hearst off the ticket and to get Al Smith to run, but the thing went through in fine shape,” FDR wrote his friend Joseph E. Davies shortly after the election. FDR to Davies, November 18, 1922, FDRL.

  46. Smith to FDR, August 15, 1922, FDRL.

  47. Howe to FDR, September 29, 1922, FDRL.

  48. Smith to FDR, October 9, 1922, FDRL.

  49. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 277 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Eleanor’s recollection differs slightly: “I was pushed into the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee, not because Louis cared so much about my activities, but because he felt that they would make it possible for me to bring into the house people who would keep Franklin interested in state politics.” Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 30 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  50. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 319–320 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).

  51. Dickerman ran a strong second against the conservative Speaker of the Assembly, Thaddeus C. Sweet, and effectively eliminated him as a potential gubernatorial candidate. Marion Dickerman interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  52. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 320–321.

  53. Because most of the correspondence between ER and Cook and Dickerman has disappeared, it is impossible to reconstruct the precise dimensions of their friendship. Blanche Wiesen Cook tackled the task with gusto, and her account should be a starting point for any who wish to untangle the relationship. Ibid. 319–328 and the notes pertaining thereto.

  54. Roosevelt was particularly concerned to organize the distaff vote. “Get the right kind of woman in every election district,” he wrote Caroline O’Day of the Women’s Division. “There are thousands of election districts upstate where it is not only unfashionable to be a Democrat, but even where Democrats are rather looked down upon. It is absolutely necessary for us to restore in the country districts … the prestige of the party. Democratic women have too often in the past been rather apologetic for calling themselves Democrats. This should end, and they should let the world and their neighbors know that they take great pride in their Party.” FDR to Caroline O’Day, January 28, 1922, FDRL.

  55. ER, This I Remember 32.

  56. FDR to Cox, December 8, 1922; FDR to Byrd, November 21, 1921; FDR to Wood, May 22, 1922. FDRL.

  57. Turnley Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story 7–9 (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1953). Walker’s account is based on the eyewitness recollection of Basil O’Connor.

  58. FDR to Livingston Davis, October 11, 1922.

  59. FDR to Black, September 24, 1924.

  60. Roosevelt and O’Connor began working together in early 1923 but did not formally announce their partnership until January 1, 1925. See O’Connor to FDR, December 8, 1924, FDRL.

  61. FDR to Byron R. Newton, December 20, 1922, FDRL.

  62. FDR to Dr. Draper, February 13, 1923, FDRL.

  63. ER, This Is My Story 345–346.

  64. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 662.

  65. FDR to SDR, March 15, 1923, FDRL.

  66. FDR to Carter Glass, March 27, 1923, FDRL.

  67. Kathleen Lake to Dr. Lovett, March 30, 1923, Lovett Papers.

  68. Lovett examination, May 28, 1923, Lovett Papers.

  69. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, February 11, 1924, Lovett Papers.

  70. Louis Depew interview, January 5, 1948, FDRL.

  71. FDR to John Lawrence, April 30, 1925, FDRL.

  72. The most complete depiction of life aboard the Lorooco is provided by Donald S. Carmichael, “An Introduction to the Log of the Lorooco,” 1 The Franklin D. Roosevelt Collector 1–37 (November 1948).

  73. FDR to Davis, February, 1924.

  74. Franklin, Jr., once told a friend that it was Missy, not Louis Howe, whom he most resented as a youth. He especially resented the time she spent with FDR. “Are you always so agreeable?” he once asked her. “Don’t you ever get mad and flare up? Do you always smile?”

  “Missy looked as if she would burst into tears,” he remembered. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir 210 (New York: Doubleday, 1964).

  75. Felix Frankfurter, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, Joseph P. Lash, ed., January 18, 1943 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriter, told Frankfurter that he “always regarded Missy as one of the five most important people in the U.S. during the Roosevelt Administration.” Ibid.

  76. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 294.

  77. Frank Freidel, interview with Frances Perkins, May 1953, FDRL.

  78. ER to FDR, February 24, 1924, FDRL.

  79. FDR to John Lawrence, April 25, 1925, FDRL.

  80. FDR to SDR, postscript to letter originally written March 26, 1926, 2 Roosevelt Letters 479–480.

  81. Typewritten copy of statement, FDRL.

  82. New York Herald Tribune, April 29, 1924.

  83. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 170 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).

  84. George Herman Ruth to FDR, June 13, 1924, FDRL.

  85. Judge Joseph Proskauer interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  86. Ibid.

  87. David Burner, “The Election of 1924,” in 2 Running for President: Candidates and Their Images, 1900–1992 125, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  88. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 205.

  89. Morgan Hoyt interview, FDRL.

  90. Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollection of Marion Dickerman 30 (New York: Atheneum, 1974).

  91. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 205.

  92. Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior 18 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).

  93. Davis, Invincible Summer 31.

  94. The New York Times, July 10, 1924; New York Herald Tribune, July 1, 1924; Pendergast’s comment is quoted in Ike B. Dunlap to FDR, July 10, 1924. Pendergast predicte
d Roosevelt would be the nominee in 1928. FDRL.

  95. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  96. Davis, Invincible Summer 31.

  ELEVEN | Governor

  The epigraph is from a letter Sara wrote FDR after learning of his decision to run for governor. “Eleanor telephoned me before I got my papers that you have to ‘run’ for governorship,” said Sara. “If you do run, I want you not to be defeated.” SDR to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL (Sara’s emphasis).

  1. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 316 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).

  2. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  3. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 631 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

  4. Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollections of Marion Dickerman 35 (New York: Atheneum, 1974).

  5. FDR to Elliott Brown, August 5, 1924, FDRL.

  6. Quoted in Davis, Invincible Summer 50.

  7. Quoted in Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 325.

  8. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 740.

  9. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 334.

  10. Mary McLeod Bethune, “My Secret Talks with FDR,” Ebony (April 1949).

  11. FDR to SDR, October, 1924, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 445, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).

  12. Editor’s note, ibid. 447–448.

  13. FDR to SDR, October 1924, 2 Roosevelt Letters 447.

  14. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 203–205 (New York: Knopf, 1962). Blanche Wiesen Cook suggests Howe and Sara opposed the Warm Springs venture but offers no evidence. Cf. 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 336.

  15. FDR lent the $201,677.83 to the Warm Springs Foundation and in return received a demand note for that amount, dated February 29, 1928. The money was gradually repaid over the years, the last installment after the president’s death. The repayment history is printed in Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 367–368 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  16. “Mrs. Ford and I are deeply impressed with the wonderful work which is being carried out at Warm Springs,” Ford wrote FDR on March 15, 1928. “I am sending herewith a check for twenty-five thousand dollars which I hope you will accept for the Foundation with our best wishes for its complete success.” 2 Roosevelt Letters 500n.

  17. FDR to Paul Hasbrouck, Hasbrouck papers, FDRL.

  18. Ward, First-Class Temperament 770.

  19. Ibid. 758.

  20. Roosevelt received 97.8 percent of the votes in Merriweather County in 1932; 94.6 percent in 1936; 93.7 percent in 1940; and 92.0 percent in 1944. His Dutchess County totals were 43.5 percent (1932); 45.0 percent (1936); 44.1 percent (1940); and 40.8 percent (1944). America at the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential Election Statistics 100–106, 313–317, Richard M. Scammon, ed. (Pittsburgh: Governmental Affairs Institute, 1965).

  21. Ward, First-Class Temperament 765 (italics in original).

  22. Rexford Tugwell papers, FDRL.

  23. FDR to SDR, October 13, 1926, 2 Roosevelt Letters 486.

  24. Editor’s note, ibid. 492.

  25. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 398–408.

  26. ER to Jane Hoey, April 9, 1930, FDRL.

  27. The New York Times, October 10, 1929.

  28. The New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1932.

  29. Jan Pottker, Sara and Eleanor 230–232 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

  30. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 161 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).

  31. Howe to FDR, n.d. (summer 1926), FDRL.

  32. In a two-man race, Smith received 1,523,813 votes to Republican Ogden Mills’s 1,276,137. Mills, a sitting member of Congress, was a Harvard classmate and Dutchess County neighbor of FDR and later served as Herbert Hoover’s secretary of the Treasury.

  33. ER to FDR, June 15, 1928, FDRL.

  34. FDR to Lippmann, August 6, 1928, FDRL.

  35. Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior: Alfred E. Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). Louis Howe, for one, was not taken in by the public display of affection for Smith. “Al’s enemies will nominate him, then knife him at the polls,” he told FDR. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 227.

  36. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 289 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

  37. FDR to SDR, July 14, 1928, 2 Roosevelt Letters 504. Eleanor accepted the co-chairmanship, along with former Wyoming governor Nellie Tayloe Ross, of the Women’s Division of the national Democratic party and worked arduously on Smith’s behalf.

  38. “Strictly between ourselves,” FDR wrote Josephus Daniels, “I am very doubtful whether any Democrat can win in 1928.” FDR to Daniels, June 23, 1927, FDRL. Also see Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 226–234.

  39. FDR to Smith, September 30, 1928, FDRL.

  40. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 12 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931). Also see James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 79 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).

  41. Quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 254–255 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).

  42. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 794. Later, FDR wrote to his uncle Frederic Delano that he “would not allow the use of my name before the convention, but … if, in the final analysis the convention insisted on nominating me, I should feel under definite obligation to accept the nomination.” FDR to Frederic A. Delano, October 8, 1928, FDRL.

  43. ER to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL. Interviewed later at Democratic National Headquarters, Eleanor said she was “very proud” FDR had accepted the nomination, though she “did not want him to do it. In the end you have to do what your friends want you to do. There comes to every man, if he is wanted, the feeling that there is almost an obligation to return the confidence shown in him.” Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years. 1928–1933 29 (New York: Random House, 1985).

  44. Howe to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL.

  45. New York Post, October 2, 1928; New York Herald Tribune, October 3, 1928.

  46. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 21.

  47. New York Herald Tribune, October 9, 1928.

  48. “So long as we have a two-party system of government,” Flynn wrote, “we will have machines. Whether they are good or bad depends upon the interest of citizens in their party government.” Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 231 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).

  49. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 21 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).

  50. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  51. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 22.

  52. 1 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 53–54, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).

  53. New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1928.

  54. Francis Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  55. Flynn, You’re the Boss 71–72.

  56. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  57. Ibid.

  TWELVE | Albany Redux

  FDR was one of three speakers (and the only Democrat) to address the Washington newsmen’s Gridiron Dinner in 1929. The epigraph is from the song sung by the newsmen to greet FDR. The New York Times, April 14, 1929.

  1. The New York Times, November 13, 1928.

  2. Quoted ibid., December 5, 1928.

  3. Ibid., November 12, 1928. Samuel Rosenman, who accompanied FDR to Warm Springs after the election, reports that “strangely” no one speculated about the presidency, so busy were they planning for the governorship. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 28 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).

  4. FDR to Adolphus Ragan (unsent), 3 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 772–773, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1950). “No man,” said FDR, “ever willingly gives up public life—no man w
ho has ever tasted it.”

  5. The New York Times, January 1, 1929.

  6. FDR to Adolphus Ragan, 3 Personal Letters 772–773. Also see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 49–53 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).

  7. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 291 (New York: Knopf, 1974).

  8. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University. Caro cites a confidential source for Moses’s characterization of ER and reports that Adolf A. Berle, professor of law at Columbia at the time, said Moses “always talked badly about Eleanor Roosevelt.” The Power Broker 1194.

  9. Emily Smith Warner and Hawthorne Daniel, The Happy Warrior: A Biography of My Father, Alfred E. Smith 240 (New York: Doubleday, 1956).

  10. FDR to Adolphus Ragan, 3 Personal Letters 772–773.

  11. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 30. Mrs. Moskowitz complained bitterly to Frances Perkins about being replaced. “Franklin Roosevelt can never run that show. It’s going to be terrible. He’s got that dreadful Louis Howe up there. Louis Howe will poison his mind about everything. Howe hates Smith. He’s that kind of sour person. It’s going to be very bad.” Elisabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith 207 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  12. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Women’s Field in Politics,” Women’s City Club Quarterly (1928).

  13. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 259 (New York: Knopf, 1962).

  14. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 62.

  15. As Tugwell remembers dinners in Albany, Sam Rosenman and Basil O’Connor “were so disillusioned with the cuisine and so prone to be annoyed with Eleanor’s well-meant probing that they often turned up after dinner rather than before. [Sam] could stand it as long as Missy LeHand was there. Her presence was like a quiet blessing on any company she graced,” Rexford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust 53–54 (New York: Viking Press, 1968).

  16. Betsey was the eldest daughter of the famous brain surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. Dr. Cushing had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1925 biography of Sir William Osler, physician in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1889–1905) and regius professor of medicine at Oxford University (1905–19).

  When ER learned of the engagement, she wrote Franklin that Betsey was “a nice child, family excellent, nothing to be said against it.… Perhaps it will be a good influence and in any case we can do nothing about it.” ER to FDR, November 22, 1928, FDRL.