At first, the spectators in the galleries watched silently from above. After a few days, they began to applaud and cheer. Announcer McNamee, prompted by the noise, described the scene to his national audience. Most listeners surely believed they were hearing an account of a determined and courageous man considerably farther along in recovery from polio than he actually was.
Roosevelt made the nominating speech for Smith at noon on June 26, proceeding by wheelchair with Jimmy from the floor to the rear of the platform, then tensely waiting to be introduced. A minute or two in advance, he was helped to his feet and assumed his customary stance, crutch on his right side, son on his left. (Jimmy recalled, “His fingers dug into my arm like pincers.”) He asked one of the dignitaries to test the strength of the rostrum and got assurance he could safely lean on it. Then, when the time came, he took a second crutch from Jimmy and deliberately walked the fifteen feet to his speaking position. Thirty-five years later, Jimmy vividly recalled the scene: “As he slowly swung himself forward he saluted the crowd—since he could not lift his arms—with his big smile. Then, as he reached the rostrum, came the tremendous, roaring ovation. At that moment I was so damned proud of him that it was with difficulty that I kept myself from bursting into tears.”6
Roosevelt “placed both hands on the speaker’s desk and stood with head erect, a vigorous and healthful figure, except for his lameness,” wrote New York Times reporter Elmer Davis. He spoke for thirty-four minutes, making the expected attacks on the Republicans as the party of corruption and special interests, presenting the Democrats as the party of the people, and extolling Smith as a Lincoln-like leader of the common folk. Roosevelt’s strong, assured voice and patrician accent, which denoted authority in the America of his day, distinguished the address from routine convention oratory. Its partisanship was strong but seemed neither angry nor extreme; it focused more on Smith’s virtues than on the defects of his prospective Republican opponent. Oddly, the line everyone remembered was one that Roosevelt had wanted to delete. It came six paragraphs before the conclusion: “He is the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.”7
The address reestablished Roosevelt as a major presence within the Democratic Party. He remained on the platform while Smith’s supporters staged a riotous demonstration, then, after an hour and a quarter, assisted the chair, Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, in quelling it. According to Elmer Davis, a careful and much esteemed journalist, Roosevelt was able to stop that and one other outburst simply by raising a hand high in the air. His oratory buoyed the Smith forces without offending the McAdoo supporters. Many delegates were moved by his appearance and determination to overcome his handicap. Kansas City’s tough, unsentimental boss, Tom Pendergast, told a friend, “Had Mr. Roosevelt . . . been physically able to have withstood the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation. . . . He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met.” The Times called him the most popular man at the convention. The New York World, the nation’s most important Democratic newspaper, said he was “the real hero” of the gathering, commended the “fine courage that flashes in his smile,” and pronounced him “the one leader commanding the respect and admiration of delegates from all sections of the land.”8
John W. Davis, the first choice of almost no one, the candidate of a party in disarray, went through the motions of a campaign in the fall against President Calvin Coolidge and Senator Robert La Follette Sr., the leader of a Progressive Party insurgency. Coolidge won handily. Davis got only 28 percent of the vote and returned to his lucrative law practice. Who better to pick up the pieces than Franklin D. Roosevelt?
While Roosevelt was in the early stages of physical rehabilitation and developing a political identity as the next leader of the Democratic Party, Eleanor was rapidly becoming a major Democratic figure. Louis Howe had suggested to her that she might deliver talks to various groups as a stand-in for her husband. Still afflicted with insecurity and prone to stage fright, she agreed reluctantly. With Howe’s diligent coaching, she learned how to suppress a chronic nervous twitter, speak extemporaneously without awkward pauses, and deliver a prepared text with authority. Her name—“Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” was the universal style then—demanded attention and presumed a position of leadership. The onset of women’s suffrage opened large new opportunities for female political participation. Soon she was a party activist, speaking at dinners, hosting teas, writing articles, driving voters to the polls, and pushing hard in party councils for more recognition of women.
She established her credentials as a tough fighter in the fall of 1924, when Al Smith faced a hard reelection fight against Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Warren G. Harding had appointed Ted to TR’s old office of assistant secretary of the navy. Every bit as much as Franklin, Ted had his eyes on the presidency, with election as governor of New York the primary stepping-stone.
A formidable challenger to Smith, Ted had one big vulnerability. At the direction of Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby, he had signed off on the transfer of the Naval Oil Reserves at Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to the Department of the Interior. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall had then leased the properties to private oil companies in return for huge bribes. “Teapot Dome,” uncovered after Harding’s sudden death in August 1923, was an epic scandal. Ted, although an innocent bystander, was left holding the political bag. That October, Eleanor, standing in for Franklin and accompanied by Louis Howe, followed him around the state by automobile, campaigning for Smith. On the roof of her vehicle they mounted a huge teapot that puffed steam on command. Smith won handily. Ted never ran for elective office again. Looking back a quarter century later, Eleanor admitted that she was guilty of “a rough stunt.”9
Eleanor’s partisan attachment to the Democratic Party was only one dimension of an emerging career as a social activist in the liberated feminist-intellectual world of New York City. Drawn especially to peace causes, she was a vocal promoter of such projects as US entry into the League of Nations and adherence to the World Court. Another enthusiasm was the New York Women’s Trade Union League, with which she worked closely in pursuit of better labor conditions, evening educational opportunities, and social welfare legislation for women workers. She even persuaded her reluctant mother-in-law to cohost a tea that would raise money for the Women’s Trade Union League. The day after the event, Sara wrote to Franklin, “600 invitations sent out about 30 came!!! Hardly worthwhile was it?”10
By then Eleanor was a major Democratic figure in her own right, helping to establish a monthly party magazine aimed at women, spearheading a drive to organize youth through a new Junior Democratic League, speaking to women’s groups, writing articles, and giving occasional radio talks. She was among the most prominent of the women who succeeded in persuading party leaders to grant females full status as members of the state committee. She advocated a woman nominee for at least one important state office. “Women must learn to play the game as men do,” she told the readers of Red Book magazine in 1928. “Our means is to elect, accept and back women political bosses.”11
Also active in a larger world of women’s reform politics, she participated in the League of Women Voters and the Women’s City Club of New York. Serving on the board of the City Housing Corporation, a private developer of cooperative housing projects for wage earners, she learned about the possibilities of planned communities. By 1928, she had involved herself in enough controversy that a group of radicals headed by Clarence Darrow sent her a whimsical invitation to a “blacklist party” of notables barred from speaking at gatherings of the Daughters of the American Revolution (of which she was a member).12
In September 1926, a New York Times Magazine profile described her manner as “that of the young suburban mother,” but she was also an emerging practical politician. Despite her own leanings toward Prohibition, she readily acquiesced in omitting the issue from the state party platform. Criticized for dodging the need to
enforce the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, she shot back that her critics might give thought to enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (which purportedly had given full rights of citizenship to blacks).13
Socially and culturally distant from Al Smith’s Irish Catholic identity and possessing personal qualms about his ample consumption of alcohol, she believed his social progressivism trumped all else. Speaking to the ladies of the Flatbush Democratic Club in 1928, she declared that Uncle Ted had been a foe of religious bigotry who looked forward to the day when a Catholic or a Jew might become president—and she claimed to have letters to prove it. Her speeches and radio talks, delivered in a high-pitched, excruciatingly correct patrician voice, had a tone of the upper-crust lady talking down to common people. But her concern for the less privileged and a sense that socioeconomic issues were more important than cultural controversies won over many Democrats.14
The closest among Eleanor’s many new friends and associates were Nancy (“Nan”) Cook, who worked for the Women’s Division of the New York Democratic Committee, and Marion Dickerman, a teacher at the Todhunter School, an upscale Manhattan academy for girls. Both were college-educated reformers.15
In 1926, Eleanor, Nan, and Marion pooled their funds to build a fieldstone country cottage at Val-Kill, just a few miles from the Roosevelt Springwood estate on land that Franklin had acquired; he let them have the property with the understanding that it would revert to him or his estate at their deaths. A retreat for Eleanor and a primary residence for Nancy and Marion, the house was planned for the three of them right down to a communal bedroom. Franklin called the house “the honeymoon cottage” but lent the venture his moral support and actually designed it. The dwelling indicated the understood, perhaps explicit, agreement he and Eleanor had reached to lead substantially separate personal lives on a basis of mutual respect and political collaboration.
The three women quickly established Val-Kill Industries, a small furniture factory near the cottage to provide work for underemployed rural craftsmen who, they believed, would find the enterprise a liberating alternative to mass-production industry. The business also produced some pewter items and marketed local woven goods. The products were of high quality but the customers few. Franklin and Eleanor probably purchased more Val-Kill products than anyone else. Never profitable, the enterprise closed in 1937.
In 1927, Eleanor and her two friends pooled their resources again to purchase the Todhunter School from its retiring headmistress. For ten years, they all taught there. Eleanor, strongly influenced by theories of progressive education, specialized in American history, literature, and current events. She wanted the school to prepare girls for active citizenship in the here and now.
It is easy to conclude from her deep relationships with other females that Eleanor had crossed over into the world of lesbianism. Clearly she was more comfortable in personal relationships with women than with men. One can only guess whether her intensely affectionate attachments had a physical dimension—and wonder if it really matters.
Not particularly attractive to men, she possessed a magnetic appeal to many women. Her commanding height, intelligence, energy, emerging confidence and authority, and willingness to lead all made her stand out as she had at her old preparatory school, Allenswood. Franklin possessed many of the same characteristics. For the duration of their lives as national political leaders, both he and Eleanor exuded a charisma that aroused strong feelings, negative as well as positive. In their personal lives, admirers surrounded both, jockeying like jealous suitors for their affections.
Eleanor became something more than a female Democratic partisan. A large public found her intriguing and wanted her opinions on social issues involving marriage and the family, the role of women in a modern urban society, and the upbringing and education of children. She welcomed the opportunity, delivering often thoughtful answers that attempted to find a balance between the traditional and the progressive. The nineteenth-century family, she wrote, had been an economic unit, held together by necessity as much as affection. Modern technology had liberated women from many of the traditional functions that had confined them to the home, and higher standards of living forced many of them to work. Children no longer had to perform the various farming tasks expected of them by a bygone rural society. They had to be raised by sympathetic example rather than arbitrary command and encouraged to work out problems themselves.
Addressing the increasing number of divorces, she conceded that some were inevitable. But, arriving at a conclusion more autobiographical than most of her readers or listeners realized, she attributed many to a lack of self-discipline when the first romance of marriage gave way to dissention. Husband and wife had a duty to discipline themselves and achieve a better, more firmly cemented relationship. She surely felt she had done that in her own life.16
In the immediate aftermath of the 1924 election debacle, Franklin had wasted no time in making an implicit bid for a leading position within the party. A letter to every delegate at the Madison Square Garden convention asked for the recipient’s “counsel and thought.” It laid out “certain fundamental truths” that Roosevelt saw as a starting point: (1) the Democratic National Committee should function continuously, not just in election years; (2) it should work much more closely with state Democratic organizations; (3) its activities should be “put on a . . . businesslike financial basis”; (4) its publicity and public information operations “should be greatly extended”; and (5) “party leaders from all sections should meet more frequently in order to exchange views and plan for united party action.” The Republicans, he went on, were the party of conservatism, standing “for the control of the social and economic structure of the nation by a small minority.” The Democrats were “unequivocally the party of progress and liberal thought” but prone to squabble over prospective presidential candidates rather than “organizing for party principles.” If the party could present a “logical and progressive program,” it could gain the confidence of the country.17
Cynics who saw the letter as a launching pad for Roosevelt’s own ambitions could claim accuracy as a defense. It was less a quest for useful information than an attention-getting device. The numerous responses provided no useful consensus. Still, his advice was fundamentally sound and long overdue. In terms of finance and organization, the Democratic Party was in many ways mired in the nineteenth century.
The communication was also a plea for a party identity defined by a coherent programmatic ideology, “progressivism,” that rejected cultural politics. McAdoo and Smith were both progressives, but their common identity was submerged in a poisonous brew of regional, religious, and ethnic hostilities. Roosevelt undertook a calculated effort to show that he, waving the banner of progressive politics, could transcend the party’s divisions.
By then, he had forged a friendship and political alliance with Montana senator Thomas Walsh, a leader of the western Democratic progressives. The two called for a meeting of 150 to 200 Democratic leaders in the spring of 1925 with the objectives of revitalizing the party’s organizational structure and preparing a coherent manifesto of its principles. DNC chairman Clem Shaver, perceiving a challenge to his leadership and unwilling to cooperate in a progressive attempt to seize control of the party, blocked the plan.18
Numerous party eminences feared that any kind of a national meeting would quickly reopen all the unhealed wounds of Madison Square Garden. Three-time nominee and former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan opposed the idea as both premature and an effort to establish top-down control of what should be a bottom-up party. He and Roosevelt met in Florida, where Roosevelt was cruising on the Larooco, and had an amicable, inconclusive discussion.19
First and foremost, Roosevelt believed that the Democrats had to be the nation’s progressive party. But what did the term “progressive” mean and how could he sell it to his fellow partisans? Heavily inspired by the Republican example of Theo
dore Roosevelt, Franklin had come into politics as an advocate of good government, a foe of political machines, and a promoter of conservation. Democrats in general tended to be Jeffersonian decentralizers uneasy with TR’s “New Nationalist” vision of progressivism administered by a strong central government in Washington.
Roosevelt’s gropings for a progressivism congruent with the examples of both Bryan and TR remained at the stage of generalization. In a typical communication, he declared that progressives were, above all, opposed to “the industrial and commercial interests and the privileged classes which now run the government.” They favored “development of our natural resources by the whole people and not by the privileged few.” Encouraging farm life, they wanted to make agriculture profitable enough “to start the flow of population away from, and not to, the cities.” They sought “the reduction of taxes by elimination of unnecessary and wasteful government activities.” They wanted to help the other nations of the world, without entering into entangling alliances, through the encouragement of world trade and opposition to high tariffs imposed for the benefit of “a privileged few.”20
Following TR, he disdained the Republican Party’s leading insurgent, Senator Robert La Follette Sr., whose Progressive Party candidacy in 1924, he argued, was a futile exercise that blurred the line between sound progressivism and extremism. “The Democratic Party is the Progressive Party of the country, but it is not the ultra-radical party of the country,” he told a correspondent. “We cannot surely progress unless each advancing footstep is placed on firm and tried ground.”21
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 16