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A 1932 license plate urges motorists to vote for the national Democratic ticket: Franklin D. Roosevelt for president, John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner for vice president—and a swift end to Prohibition. Roosevelt, like a generation of national politicians before him in both parties, had hoped to avoid taking sides in the ongoing debate between “wets” and “drys.” But Al Smith’s forces at the convention pushed him into standing four-square for repeal of the 18th Amendment.
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Gripping James’s arm, FDR acknowledges the cheers of the delegates at Chicago Stadium, July 2, 1932. “This is more than a political campaign,” he told them, “it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
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FDR campaigns at the Hollywood Bowl.
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In full view of bystanders and at least one photographer, aides help Roosevelt snap his braces into place so that he can stand, grasp James’s arm and his cane, and then begin to make his cautious, awkward way through the enthusiastic throng waiting inside. Once FDR was elected, the Secret Service had orders to discourage photographers from taking pictures like these and to keep crowds at a distance so that he would not be knocked down in the crush.
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Army troops use tear gas and fixed bayonets to rout unemployed veterans from their temporary shelters in Washington, D.C.
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Hoosiers mob Roosevelt in Indianapolis.
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The Out-of-Season Roosevelts
Now, when Americans spoke of “Roosevelt,” they meant Franklin, not Theodore. “The Oyster Bay Roosevelts,” Alexander Wolcott wrote, “have become the ‘out-of-season’ Roosevelts.”
When Theodore Roosevelt’s younger sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, crossed party lines to vote for FDR that fall, her old friend Sara Delano Roosevelt thanked her: “I never expected it, dear.… Some people have fine minds, others have warm hearts, but you have both.”
But Alice Roosevelt Longworth campaigned hard against him aboard President Hoover’s train. “There we were—the Roosevelts—hubris up to the eyebrows, beyond the eyebrows,” she recalled, “and then who should come sailing down the river but Nemesis in the person of Franklin.”
And at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s widow, Edith, was so infuriated at receiving some three hundred congratulatory messages from people who mistakenly thought Franklin was one of her sons that she made an unprecedented appearance at a Republican rally in Manhattan to introduce the Republican incumbent, just to make it clear that this Oyster Bay Roosevelt would also be voting for Herbert Hoover.
Someone once asked Sara Delano Roosevelt why so many of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay seemed so hostile to her branch of the family. She didn’t know, she said. But “perhaps it’s because we’re so much better-looking than they are.”
At Madison Square Garden, Theodore Roosevelt’s widow makes clear to New York Republicans that she is one of them, that she will enthusiastically vote for Herbert Hoover, not her late husband’s distant cousin. “These are trying times for us,” she told a friend that fall, “and the confusion of names does not help. Continually, letters [arrive] congratulating me on my distinguished son the Democratic nominee. His line parted six generations ago from my husband’s.”
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Ted Jr. and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who shared her brother’s belief that he, not Franklin, should be running for president. FDR, she said, was “ninety percent mush and ten percent Eleanor.”
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Theodore Roosevelt Jr., his wife, Eleanor, and their two sons, Theodore Roosevelt III (left) and Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, at home in the Malacanang Palace, the residence of the governor-general of the Philippines in Manila. President Hoover had appointed the late president’s son to the post, and as election day approached he identified himself to a reporter as Franklin Roosevelt’s “fifth cousin, about to be removed.”
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All Light and No Darkness
On election night, November 8, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency by seven million votes and carried forty-two of the forty-eight states. His party took control of both chambers of Congress. It was the greatest Democratic victory in more than three-quarters of a century and, as FDR told his proud mother when he got home to East Sixty-fifth Street, “the greatest night of my life.”
During the four long months between Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration, the Depression steadily deepened. Stocks, bonds, farm prices—everything continued to spiral downward. Nearly four hundred banks failed in January and February alone. At least fifteen million Americans were without work.
They wanted to know what their president-elect was going to do to help them. He did not tell them. President Hoover called repeatedly upon Roosevelt to join him in what he called “co-operative action” to end the crisis, but FDR refused, wary of being trapped into supporting orthodox policies of which he did not approve. Off the record, the president-elect told a reporter that the country’s troubles were not yet “my baby.”
Hoover privately denounced him as a “madman,” a “gibbering idiot.”
“When I talk to [Roosevelt] he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’,” Louisiana Senator Huey Long complained. “But [Senate Majority Leader] Joe Robinson goes to see him the next day and again he says, ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine’ to everybody.”
Roosevelt spent the rest of the fall at Hyde Park, rested at Warm Springs for a time, then went to sea for twelve days, fishing in the Caribbean aboard the Nourmahal, a palatial yacht owned by an old Hudson River neighbor, Vincent Astor. To some it seemed in poor taste for the president-elect to be vacationing in such ostentatious luxury and such privileged company in the midst of so great a crisis. FDR enjoyed himself. “I didn’t even open the briefcase,” he told the press.
“To certain people,” wrote Milton MacKaye in the New Yorker, “Roosevelt must always be a little less than glamorous. The reason is that his outlook on life is perennially optimistic, that he pushes ahead with full speed, always with a confidence that every story has a happy ending. They believe that he is, in short, something of a grown-up Boy Scout. He is all light and no darkness; all faith and no skepticism; all bright hope and no despair. One expects shadow and depth in a great man.”
On the morning after election day, Roosevelt’s broad grin was featured on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the country. Many readers were heartened by his apparent optimism, but some echoed the question of a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania: “What’s he smiling about? Doesn’t he understand how serious the crisis is?”
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The president-elect with some of his advisers, aboard a train that took him from New York to Washington and a fruitless meeting with Herbert Hoover. Left to right: Admiral Gary Crayson, physician to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft; veteran diplomat Norman H. Brown; “brains trusters” Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell; and William H. Woodin, who would become Roosevelt’s first secretary of the treasury.
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FDR sets sail aboard the Nourmahal. Vincent Astor is at the president-elect’s right. To his left are his son James and TR’s son Kermit, who remained friendly with the Hyde Park branch of the family. Later, when a reporter asked Ted Roosevelt to explain how his brother could have gone fishing with FDR, Edith Roosevelt answered for him. “Because his mother was not there.”
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The Turmoil in My Heart
Eleanor was as ambivalent about her husband’s latest victory as she had been when he was elected governor. “I was happy for Franklin, of course, because I knew that in many ways it would make up for the blow that fate had dealt him.… But for myself I was … deeply troubled. As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own.… I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had s
een what it meant to be the wife of the president.… The turmoil in my heart was rather great that night and the next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.”
Her life changed forever the morning after election day when she emerged from the East Sixty-fifth Street house to walk the family’s Scottish terrier and found herself surrounded by a beefed-up New York police detail and reporters who dogged her every step.
In an effort to find something more meaningful to do than “stand in line and receive visitors and preside over official dinners” when the Roosevelts moved to the White House, she asked Franklin if she might handle some of his mail. He looked at her “quizzically,” she remembered, and gently turned her down: Missy LeHand would see it as interference. “I knew he was right and that it would not work,” she recalled, “but it was a last effort to keep in close touch and to feel that I had a real job to do.”
She would have to work out what she called “my own salvation” by herself.
In late January she accepted an invitation from Mrs. Herbert Hoover to come to Washington and look over the White House. She agreed to come but refused to be met at Union Station by a White House car. She would take a taxi to the Mayflower Hotel, instead, spend the night, and then walk to and from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The next morning, Warren Delano Robbins, her husband’s cousin and the chief of protocol at the State Department, turned up at the Mayflower in a limousine, anyway.
Eleanor politely told him she’d rather walk.
“But Eleanor, darling, you can’t do that,” he said. “People will recognize you! You’ll be mobbed.”
She walked.
Eleanor Roosevelt was determined to be a different kind of first lady. She knew she would be criticized, she told a friend, “but I can’t help it.”
Aboard a commercial airplane shortly after election day, the copilot points out landmarks to the future first lady on a flight from New York to Cleveland, where she had a speaking engagement—the kind of independent travel she feared life in the White House would make impossible.
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Eleanor leaves the White House on foot after calling upon Mrs. Herbert Hoover, January 28, 1933. Walking at her side is Ike Hoover (no relation to the outgoing president), who had been chief usher since her uncle Theodore’s time, and who had greeted her at the door as “Miss Eleanor,” just as he had done twenty-nine years earlier. He marveled at the inauguration-day plans she’d already made: which houseguests would stay in what rooms; what the family liked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; what servants would be needed—“everything the Chief Usher could wish to know except what the weather might be on March fourth.”
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These Things Are to Be Expected
The president-elect’s fishing trip ended in Miami, Florida, on the evening of February 15, 1933. Some 25,000 people gathered in Bayfront Park to greet him. His open touring car inched its way into the middle of the crowd and stopped so that he could say a few words. A spotlight was trained on him. He pulled himself up onto the top of the backseat and was handed a microphone. He was no stranger to Florida waters, he reminded the crowd, and he hoped to come back soon to enjoy some more wonderful fishing. The people cheered.
In the darkness less than thirty feet behind the car was an Italian-born bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara. He hated “all presidents,” he said later, and “everybody who is rich.” He had hoped to shoot President Hoover; now, he wanted to kill Roosevelt. He stood just a little over five feet tall and had to climb onto a wobbly folding chair to see his intended target. By the time he’d done so FDR had finished his remarks and slid back down into his seat. Only the top of his head was visible. Zangara missed Roosevelt but managed to get off five shots before bystanders tackled him. Five people were hit, including Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who had been standing next to the president-elect’s car.
FDR never flinched. He refused to take cover, ordered the Secret Service to lift the wounded mayor into his car, and held him during the race to the nearest hospital. “Tony, keep quiet,” he said again and again. “Don’t move. It won’t hurt you if you keep quiet.” Doctors credited Roosevelt with keeping the mayor from going into shock.
Eleanor was in New York. Franklin called to reassure her. “He’s all right,” she said afterward. “He’s not the least bit excited. These things are to be expected.”
Like Theodore Roosevelt nearly twenty-one years earlier, Franklin seemed unaffected by coming so close to death. “There was nothing,” an aide who spent that evening with him remembered, “not so much as the twitching of a muscle, the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of a false gaiety—to indicate that it wasn’t any evening in any other place. I have never seen anything in my life more magnificent.”
President-elect Roosevelt waves to the nighttime crowd that surrounds his car in Miami’s Bayfront Park, moments before Giuseppe Zangara began shooting. Had FDR not slid down from his perch immediately after this photograph was taken, American history might have been very different. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, second from left with his back turned, was among those who were wounded.
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Mayor Cermak, seconds after he was hit, blood already beginning to spread across his shirtfront. The bullet collapsed half of his lung, and may have clipped his colon. He would die of septicemia on March 6, 1933, two days after FDR’s inauguration.
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The would-be assassin enjoys press coverage of the Miami incident and its aftermath. He was tried for attempted murder and sentenced to eighty years in prison. After Cermak died, he was retried for murder in the first degree, found guilty, and electrocuted—all within five weeks of the shootings.
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Roosevelt visits the wounded in Jackson Memorial Hospital the morning after his close call.
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The Only Thing We Have to Fear
At his inauguration seventeen days later, gripping James’s arm, Roosevelt would demonstrate another kind of courage, making his slow, careful, rocking way out of the Capitol Building and onto the inaugural platform in full view of tens of thousands of anxious onlookers waiting under a gray sky for some hint of hope from the new president.
The banks were closed in forty of the forty-eight states. The Stock Exchange had suspended trading. Industrial production had been cut almost in half. Nearly half of all American farmers faced foreclosure. Almost one out of three wage earners was without work, and when their families were included in the grim tally at least forty million people were without a reliable source of income. No one who was still employed felt their job was safe. No one knew what would happen to their savings.
Eleanor remembered the mood of the throng. “It was very, very solemn and a little terrifying.… You felt [people] would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do.… One has the feeling of going it blindly because we’re in a tremendous stream and none of us know where we are going to land.”
“This nation is asking for action, and action now,” Roosevelt said. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.”
That was what Americans had been waiting to hear. A roar of applause swept across Capitol Plaza. Roosevelt was prepared, he said, under his “constitutional duty, to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require,” but if that were not enough to meet the crisis then he would ask Congress to grant him “broad executive powers to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
It was FDR’s bold pledge to act that resonated most powerfully with his frightened fellow citizens that morning—but looking back, it was an earlier passage of his speech that Americans would remember best. It echoed hard-earned lessons that had informed the lives of first Theodore and then Eleanor Roosevelt—and now informed Franklin’s life, as well.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thin
g we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
FDR takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, March 4, 1933.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Weeks before the inauguration, the cartoonist Peter Arno created this New Yorker cover featuring a dour Herbert Hoover and an ebullient Roosevelt riding to the Capitol together, but it never ran because, in light of FDR’s close call in Miami, the editor thought it would have been in bad taste. In this case, life imitated art: Hoover really did remain silent all the way. When the car passed a construction site FDR, desperate to make conversation, found himself saying, “Lovely steel!” The outgoing president did not respond.
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CHAPTER 5
The Rising Road
1933–1939
Roosevelts return to the White House in the spring of 1933. Eleanor holds her first grandson, Curtis Dall (dubbed “Buzzie” by the newspapers). His sister, Eleanor (known as “Sistie”), peeks through the iron railing. FDR and the children’s mother, Anna, are at the right; she had recently separated from her husband and moved with her parents into their new home.
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Franklin Is a Man
The Roosevelts Page 23