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FDR stands at the convention podium without crutches, June 27, 1928. “Here on the stage is Franklin Roosevelt,” Will Durant wrote in the New York World, “beyond comparison the finest man that has appeared at either convention.… A figure tall and proud, even in suffering; a face of classic profile; pale with years of struggle against paralysis.… For the moment we are lifted up.”
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Roosevelt returns to the Hyde Park depot after his nomination for governor. He grips the arm of his friend and Dutchess County neighbor Henry Morgenthau Jr. as he makes his gingerly way across the uneven tracks, swinging his foot forward in a semicircular arc. Later, pictures that so clearly showed his awkward gait would rarely be published.
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Carefully braced against his automobile, an apparently nonchalant FDR arrives at the Hyde Park town hall to vote on election day, November 6, 1928.
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In a ballroom at the Biltmore Hotel, grim prominent Democrats, including Franklin Roosevelt (third from left in the first row) and Al Smith (over Roosevelt’s right shoulder), watch the early returns on election night. It was already clear that Smith was going to be beaten, and for a time that evening FDR thought he, too, had been defeated.
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I Cannot Give It Up
The morning after the election, a reporter asked Eleanor if she was excited by her husband’s triumph. “No,” she answered. “If the rest of the ticket didn’t get in what does it matter?” “I felt Governor Smith’s election [as president might have] meant something,” she would later explain, “but whether Franklin spends two years in Albany or not matters … comparatively little. It will have pleasant and unpleasant sides for him and the good to the State is problematical. Crowds, newspapers, etc. mean so little, it does not even stir me.”
As the first lady of New York, she reluctantly resigned her political and lobbying posts. But she refused to give up the job that meant the most to her: teaching American history and nineteenth-century literature three days a week at the Todhunter School for girls in Manhattan. It gave her an opportunity to instill in her students some of the qualities her own beloved schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Souvestre, had instilled in her: open-mindedness, independent thinking, social consciousness. “I teach because I love it,” she explained. “I cannot give it up.”
She organized the household in Albany, assigning Missy LeHand a bedroom larger than hers, found space for her circle of friends as well as Franklin’s, and toured prisons and hospitals on her husband’s behalf, remembering his exhortation to lift the lids on cooking pots to check whether people were getting the quality of food they were supposed to get.
And she sometimes stood in for him at political events, as well. “Dear Franklin,” she wrote after attending a Staten Island Democratic Club luncheon: “Arrived at [12:30], stood and shook hands till 1:30; ate till 3:30; talked till 5:20; home here at 6:40 nearly dead! … You are the finest Governor ever and I have all the Virtues and would gladly have dispensed with half [of them] could I have left at four!”
Eleanor looks on from the sideline as her husband is escorted into the Governor’s Inaugural Ball in Albany. She found trying the wholly ceremonial role she was expected to play at events like this.
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Eleanor Roosevelt meets with students at the Todhunter School, which she, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook had purchased together just a year before her husband ran for governor. She enjoyed the classroom but loved even more shepherding her wealthy charges through courtrooms and settlement houses and past the same crowded tenements that had opened her eyes to the plight of the less fortunate when she was young.
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The Pirate and the Lady
Early in his first term as governor, Franklin began to worry that his wife, who insisted on driving her own automobile when undertaking inspection tours for him and who wanted the least possible fuss made over her wherever she went, might someday get into trouble without someone to protect her. Finally, he assigned one of his own bodyguards to remain at her side wherever she went.
Corporal Earl Miller of the New York State Police had been Al Smith’s bodyguard, as well as a navy boxing champion, judo instructor, trick rider, and circus acrobat. He was handsome and high-spirited—Marion Dickerman called him “brazen”—and quickly became devoted to his new charge, whom he called “the Lady.” He taught her to shoot, gave her tennis lessons, bought her a horse, encouraged her to “try to smile” whenever photographers came near. She was flattered by his attention, grateful for the appreciation her husband and four sons only rarely expressed for her. When the Roosevelts were at home in the Governor’s Mansion, she saw to it that Miller was seated at the family dinner table. She sometimes cooked for him, visited his mother, and was pleased to be asked for advice about his many girlfriends. (He would be married three times.)
Invariably, just as there were rumors about the governor and Missy LeHand, there were whispers concerning the governor’s wife and her strapping companion. Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman worried that he sometimes seemed to “manhandle” their friend. Louis Howe fretted because there was already talk.
Miller always denied that he had ever had a romantic relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt. And in 1949, when the last of Miller’s wives threatened to sue Eleanor for alienation of affection, her son, Franklin Jr.—who had agreed to defend his mother if the case ever got to court—asked her to tell him everything. Of course, she had loved Earl, she said, but “in the sense you mean there was nothing.”
Earl Miller and Eleanor during a trip to Chazy Lake, New York
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Eleanor and Earl Miller, in his uniform as a state trooper, look on as Governor Roosevelt confers a medal on the explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd after his return from the South Pole in 1929.
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In three frames from “The Pirate and the Lady,” a home movie made at Chazy Lake in 1934 by Marion Dickerman, Earl Miller, costumed like the film star Douglas Fairbanks, kidnaps a giggling Eleanor Roosevelt—who was by then the first lady of the United States.
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A Matter of Social Duty
Al Smith had been a great governor of New York. FDR was merely a good one, at least at first. He provided help for small farmers, expanded the work begun by his predecessor in conservation and public power—and learned how to use the radio in an informal way to explain to voters all that he was doing. His admiring cousin the journalist Joseph Alsop once summed up his early governorship this way: “[H]e poked no political hornet’s nest for ideological reasons, yet was humane, liberal, efficient and … popular.”
When he opened his New York Times on Friday morning, October 25, 1929, he was no better prepared than any other governor to understand what was about to happen to his state, his country, and much of the world, as well. “The most disastrous decline in the biggest and broadest stock market of history rocked the financial district yesterday,” the paper reported. “It carried down with it speculators, big and little in every part of the country.… Losses were tremendous and thousands of prosperous brokerage and bank accounts, sound and healthy a week ago, were completely wrecked in the strange debacle due to a combination of circumstances, but accelerated into a crash by fear.” Investors called it “Black Thursday,” but its losses would be eclipsed four days later by “Black Tuesday,” October 29, the worst day in Wall Street history.
The next day, President Hoover assured the country of the soundness of the economy. Like many people in both parties, Roosevelt initially believed that what he privately joked was “the little tussle downtown” was simply a painful but necessary correction to a wildly overvalued stock market. But as the weeks went by it was clear that something else was happening: the economy steadily spiraled downward, banks collapsed, homes were foreclosed, millions lost their jobs. The Great Depression had begun.
Everyone seemed to feel its i
mpact. FDR’s own son-in-law, Curtis Dall, would lose his job and the home he had bought in Westchester County and have to move with Anna and FDR’s first two grandchildren into the Roosevelt house on East Sixty-fifth Street.
In early 1930, while the White House was still insisting that employment was rebounding, Roosevelt resolved to act. “The situation is serious,” he said, “and the time has come to face this unpleasant fact dispassionately.” FDR came out publicly for unemployment insurance—then still a radical notion—and established the country’s first state commission to establish reliable jobless figures and stabilize employment.
Americans differed—and still differ—over what caused the Depression and what should have been done to end it. But Herbert Hoover’s grim personality, his repeated unconvincing promises that recovery was just months away, and his fondness for appointing commissions—sixty-two of them in all—to study the problem without any seeming outcome combined to persuade a growing majority of Americans that new leadership was needed.
And FDR, working with his three closest advisers—Louis Howe; James A. Farley, the chairman of the state Democratic Party; and Ed Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx—sought to make sure he would be the man chosen to bring it about. With his advisers’ help—and his wife’s seasoned skill at rallying Democratic women—he was reelected governor in 1930 by almost three-quarters of a million votes. “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party,” Farley told the press the next morning, “even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.”
“This country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, this country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” FDR told a Georgia audience—and he set about to provide it. He created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration—TERA—the first state agency in the country to provide public relief for the jobless, and he named as its executive director a dynamic young social worker from Iowa named Harry Hopkins. (In the six years that followed, TERA would assist some five million people—40 percent of the state’s populace, most of whom would eventually return to the workforce.) “I assert,” Roosevelt said, “that modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.… To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.”
That basic belief would animate Roosevelt’s New Deal.
A Manhattan bread line operated by the Salvation Army. By 1931 there were 82 bread lines in New York, serving some 85,000 meals a day to those who had no other source of nourishment.
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Just a few blocks west of the Roosevelts’ Manhattan home, an American flag flies bravely over a cluster of wood-and-tar-paper shacks built by homeless men in the heart of Central Park. Like hundreds of thousands of desperate people all across the country, they named their temporary village “Hooverville,” after the president whom they had come to blame for everything that was happening to them.
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A big county fair crowd turns out to hear FDR campaign for reelection in 1930. Upstate New York had traditionally been Republican territory, but by providing help to small farmers and arguing that “if the farmer starves today, we will all starve tomorrow,” Roosevelt persuaded many rural voters to change their allegiance—and impressed Democratic leaders in rural states with his vote-getting ability among people like theirs.
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Governor Roosevelt enjoys his big victory on the morning after election day, 1930. “Well, as far as I can see, the Republican ship went down with all on board,” Theodore Roosevelt Jr. wrote to his mother that day. “Cousin Franklin now, I suppose, will run for the presidency and I am already beginning to think of nasty things to say concerning him.”
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To Meet Any Demand
The most serious hindrance to FDR’s winning the nomination was the persistent rumors about his health. People whispered that infantile paralysis had affected his mind, even that he was suffering from syphilis.
To offset those rumors, Roosevelt obtained a $500,000 life insurance policy and then secretly encouraged a freelance journalist named Earle Looker to “challenge” him to prove his fitness for office, and to write up the results in Liberty magazine, then the nation’s most widely read magazine.
Then, also behind the scenes, Roosevelt provided the money to pay three leading diagnosticians to look him over. The examination itself was wholly legitimate. All three doctors signed a statement declaring, “[W]e believe his powers of endurance are such as to allow him to meet all the demands of public or private life”—though one of them, an unshakable Republican, privately told his colleagues that he wanted it understood that “so far as I’m concerned this doesn’t go for above the neck.”
Earle Looker expressed his relief to the potential presidential candidate: “Well sir, we got away with the Liberty article despite all obstacles.… I think we can be sure that at least seven and a half million readers are sure you are physically fit!”
FDR would never again feel the need to speak in detail about his health to any journalist.
The telegram sent to Earle Looker attesting to FDR’s “health and powers of endurance”
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Looker’s Liberty magazine article, meant to put permanently to rest any questions about Roosevelt’s fitness to serve as president
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Propped against his car door but otherwise the picture of smiling good health, Franklin Roosevelt returns to Groton School to visit his son FDR Jr., 1932.
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An Unprecedented and Unusual Time
As the 1932 Democratic convention opened in Chicago, Roosevelt was the clear front-runner, with a reputation as the most activist and effective governor in the country. Still, he had nine rivals, including his embittered old ally, Al Smith, and the conservative Speaker of the House, John Nance Garner of Texas. It took four ballots—and the second place on the ticket for Garner—for Roosevelt to secure the nomination.
Custom still required the candidate to wait weeks to be formally notified of his nomination. With the country in such a desperate condition and communications so much more immediate than they once had been, that delay struck Roosevelt as pointlessly anachronistic. He decided to board a small Ford TriMotor and fly from Albany to Chicago to accept the nomination right away.
It was a stormy flight through dense clouds with three refueling stops, but FDR slept serenely through much of it while Sam Rosenman, his chief speechwriter, put the final touches on what he should say to the convention. When they arrived in Chicago, Louis Howe—who had looked forward to this day almost as eagerly as had the candidate himself—handed FDR a wholly different speech. Rather than wound his most cherished adviser, Roosevelt used Howe’s opening page when he reached Chicago Stadium and began to speak:
My friends of the Democratic national convention of 1932, I appreciate your willingness after these six arduous days to remain here, for I know well the sleepless hours which you and I have had.… The appearance before a national convention of its nominee for president to be formally notified of his selection is unprecedented and unusual, but these are unprecedented and unusual times.
Twenty-nine years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promised the American people a “Square Deal.” Now, eleven years after polio seemed to many to have crushed his political hopes forever, Franklin Roosevelt went on to make a promise of his own.
Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major parties stood out in such striking contrast as they do today. Republican leaders have not only failed in material things, they have failed in national vision.… Throughout the nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of these last years, look to us for guidance and for a more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.…
Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.
I pledge you—I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.
President Hoover had grown so unpopular that one of Roosevelt’s defeated rivals for the nomination told FDR all he had to do to win was to stay alive till November.
With the Depression deepening, a double line of policemen armed with rifles now ringed the U.S. Capitol to keep out demonstrators. When seventeen thousand mostly jobless veterans of the Great War and their families descended on Washington to demand immediate payment of a bonus not officially due for several years, Hoover called out the army. The veterans were brutally driven from the capital. Roosevelt told an aide, “This will elect me.”
Still, he took no chances. With the bold but sometimes contradictory counsel of three Columbia University professors—Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolph Berle Jr.—whom the press called his “brains trust,” he campaigned hard all across the country, promising help for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” attacking Hoover for inaction—and simultaneously pledging to slash the federal budget by 25 percent. Hoover denounced him as “a chameleon on … plaid.”
FDR, about to take off from Albany for Chicago to accept his party’s nomination for president. “We have a perfect day for this trip,” he shouted to reporters over the sound of the tiny plane’s engines. “I’m very happy to be going out to Chicago, and everybody knows the reason why I’m so happy.”
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