Each summer he spent the better part of a month on “inspection tours” of state facilities, usually traveling by water on a small state-owned houseboat that he named The Inspector. Eleanor accompanied him, functioning as his legs, eyes, and ears; she thought in later years that they must have traversed every mile of waterway in the state. She did the actual inspecting while he met with local notables or gave informal talks. Goodwill and party building were major objectives of the tours, but the governor took the inspection mission very seriously. He sent Eleanor to local prisons and hospitals with a mandate to snoop around: look for signs of overcrowding such as folding beds stashed away in closets or behind doors; read the menus, then go to the kitchens and see what was really cooking on the stoves. The tours did not uncover much in the way of flummery or corruption but did reveal a lot of unavoidable overcrowding and provided a basis for demanding appropriations from the legislature for new facilities. They also served as a politically valuable show of gubernatorial concern for the entire state.26
The tours also validated Roosevelt’s claims to good health and extraordinary vitality. “He has proved himself not only a prodigious worker but one of the most mobile governors in the history of the State,” Ernest Lindley wrote in September 1930, during the governor’s run for reelection. “He has surmounted his handicap so handsomely that it can no longer be a feature in his campaign.”27
Roosevelt indeed approached the reelection campaign with justified optimism. He had proven himself a strong, effective, and popular governor, developing a constituency in normally Republican upstate areas and winning a fulsome endorsement from the state branch of the American Federation of Labor. With Albert Ottinger uninterested in another race, the Republican opposition was lackluster.28
The campaign aimed as much to establish a strong national profile as to win another two years in Albany. Roosevelt devoted about two-thirds of a public letter laying out his accomplishments to the issue on which he had temporized throughout the 1920s: Prohibition. His statement demonstrated a clear sense that the once bitterly divisive liquor question was becoming irrelevant a year after the great stock market crash of 1929. It cleverly established a stance in favor of moderate change instead of outright repeal. Each state should be empowered to establish its own rules for intoxicating beverages, right down to continuing a total ban. Local option provisions should give the same discretion to individual cities and towns. State agencies should manage the sale of alcohol. The return of the old-time rowdy saloon should be barred. The formula was yet another application of the Jeffersonian decentralization that Roosevelt had embraced as consistent with the heritage and character of the Democratic Party. It won him widespread praise.29
As had been the case two years earlier, Roosevelt spent much of October on a speaking tour around the state. He also made effective use of radio, taking partisan shots while stressing a willingness to work with Republicans and claiming tangible improvements in state services. Inevitably he drew national attention. Signaling the campaign’s broader significance, three members of President Hoover’s cabinet, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills, and Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, made major speeches attacking him. Roosevelt responded sarcastically, dismissing Hurley as an Oklahoma carpetbagger and Stimson and Mills as politicians whose earlier bids for the New York governorship had been rejected.30
On November 4, 1930, the governor swamped his hapless opponent, former US Attorney Charles Tuttle, by 725,000 votes—nearly doubling Al Smith’s record victory margin of 1922 and carrying the upstate counties by almost 168,000 votes.
His eyes increasingly on the presidency, Roosevelt had no plan for major new programs during his second term. Faced with a dramatically collapsing economy, however, he moved to ameliorate its worst effects.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, Roosevelt, very much in line with most financial watchers, believed the debacle a hiccup that would have mild, transitory effects. In early 1930, with the economy apparently stabilizing, his son-in-law, Curtis Dall, purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at the auction price of $398,000. Roosevelt apparently had no qualms about helping to finance Dall’s transaction with a $50,000 personal loan; Dall got another $250,000 from Eleanor’s cousins and benefactors, Henry and Susie Parish. The transaction did not seem much of a gamble at the time, but the markets and the price of an exchange seat would soon begin a sharp downward trajectory. Dall found himself moving from one firm to another in possession of a debt-laden white elephant. It is unclear whether he was ever able to reimburse the Roosevelts or the Parishes.31
By the fall of 1930, the economy was beginning the protracted collapse that would come to be called the Great Depression. The need to assist the jobless had been a talking point in Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. In December, the collapse of New York City’s Bank of the United States, an institution with hundreds of thousands of small depositors, laid bare the fragility of the banking system and made the governor, who to this point had given scant attention to the problem, a proponent of stronger state banking regulations.32
Roosevelt seems basically to have agreed with President Hoover that government could do little more than enforce elemental honesty within the financial system. He trusted the judgment of many respectable Wall Streeters, including Lieutenant Governor Lehman, that a strong government hand in the industry was likely to be clumsy and do more harm than good. The idea of insuring depositors’ accounts, moreover, seemed extraordinarily radical to him and, in the state context, may not have been feasible.
It was not until January 1932, with a banking crisis spreading across the nation (and his bid for the presidency assuming a high national profile), that Roosevelt asked the legislature for a strong regulatory program. The relatively mild legislation he got established a state banking board to share oversight authority with the state superintendent of banks. The president who would become the scourge of Big Finance loomed nowhere on the Albany horizon.
In New York, as elsewhere, unemployment grew to crisis proportions. Widespread distress, disorderly demonstrations, and Communist Party “hunger marches,” frequently broken up by truncheon-wielding police, revealed a growing cache of social dynamite. State and federal statistics on the jobless in those days were tenuous, but plausible estimates by economic historians suggest that unemployment nationally moved above 10 percent in November 1930, continued up relentlessly through 1931, broke through 20 percent in early 1932, and was above 25 percent by midyear. The New York experience was likely close to the national trend. Increasingly, the Depression was a major humanitarian and political challenge.33
No one was more important in keeping the governor focused on the jobless than Frances Perkins. From her post as industrial commissioner, she could measure with considerable accuracy employment declines in all major lines of business within the state. Convinced, probably correctly, that she had a firmer grip on the issue than US functionaries, she regularly issued news releases that questioned rosy estimates from Washington and documented increasing layoffs in one New York industry after another. Her figures provided a rationale for strong efforts to stabilize the economy and provide help to those out of work.34
Roosevelt moved slowly. In the early spring of 1930, he had appointed a Committee to Suggest a Plan for Stabilization of Industry. The guiding assumption behind its creation seemed to be that careful planning by business leaders and public officials, lubricated by useful public works, could smooth out the business cycle and reduce unemployment meaningfully. By the fall, however, the sharply declining economy was overwhelming the committee’s efforts. Renewing its mandate, the governor designated it as primarily “an emergency commission” with the task of coordinating reemployment and relief efforts. The longer-range concept of a progressive government-business partnership, discussed in many circles as the Depression set in, would remain firmly embedded in Roosevelt’s mind.35
Speaking t
o the New York Federation of Labor convention in August 1930 and laying down a marker for his fall reelection campaign, Roosevelt called for replacement of the dole with an unemployment insurance system in which “the State, the employer and the employee would all be joint premium payers.” Over the next year, strongly seconded by Perkins, he pushed the plan against legislative recalcitrance, getting nowhere with it but burnishing his credentials as a progressive with an interest in the problems of workers.36
By mid-1931, the Depression was generating intense hardship. On the national scene, progressives of all stripes were calling for federal relief and work programs. President Hoover responded that the government would try to speed up planned public works projects, but relief was primarily a state responsibility. Roosevelt, surely sensing both a moral need to do more for the unemployed and a political need to grapple with the crisis, called a special session of the legislature to authorize $20 million for a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). He couched the project in ways to disarm conservatives: It met Hoover’s request for states to accelerate their own public works agendas. It required labor from recipients. It would be fully paid for by a 0.5 percent increase in the state income tax. The state, Roosevelt asserted, possessed a “definite obligation to prevent . . . starvation or dire want.” Threatening to keep the Republican legislature in session until it capitulated, he got everything he wanted.37
Organized that fall and effectively beginning activities in November, TERA was the first state relief agency created to cope with the Depression. Compatible with Hoover’s guidelines, it also placed the governor in the vanguard of progressive activism. To head it up and serve as its public face, Roosevelt selected Jesse Straus, a much respected Democratic businessman. Straus picked as executive director and chief operations officer Harry L. Hopkins, a leading New York social worker. The agency cooperated with and at times subsidized local relief programs, including the very large municipal one in New York City. Hopkins took charge aggressively, organizing a strong staff, rapidly developing work projects, and wheedling discounts from food wholesalers. His energy and improvisational skills caught the governor’s attention. When Straus resigned in the spring of 1932, Roosevelt named Hopkins his successor.38
By the time TERA began operations, New York State’s unemployed totaled more than 1 million workers, the majority with families to support. As the Depression steadily worsened, so did the numbers. In early 1932, the agency estimated 1.75 million jobless. TERA’s $20 million equaled perhaps $500 million in early-twenty-first-century dollars; cities, counties, and private charities provided an additional $19 million. Still, Hopkins estimated that he was able to put to work only 30 percent of the able-bodied unemployed. TERA hired mostly manual labor for the construction and maintenance of roads, parks, and playgrounds. It also had limited funds for various white-collar jobs, mostly clerical in nature.
Hopkins’s first report to the public, covering the period from November 1, 1931, to June 1, 1932, asserted that 85 percent of the initial $20 million appropriation had gone toward wages. Nearly $7 million of the combined state and local money went to “home relief” (direct welfare payments). He claimed that the program had saved 130,000 families from starvation. Roosevelt secured another $5 million from the legislature. Resistance to higher taxes forced him to back a proposal for a $30 million bond issue that would keep the agency going through 1933.39
One idea that Roosevelt pressed on Hopkins was more an indication of his own values than a practical method for coping with the Depression. Bothered by what he saw as a population imbalance, the governor advocated the resettlement of unemployed workers onto subsistence farms. TERA helped several hundred families make such a transition. But few unemployed workers possessed either the skills to make a living at farming or the desire to make it a lifetime pursuit. TERA also funded many “subsistence gardens” in urban areas.40
The agency, for all its limitations, succeeded in providing much needed help to tens of thousands of families. Roosevelt was its foremost cheerleader. All of the program’s facets—work relief, direct welfare, the back-to-the-land scheme, and the inevitable deficit financing—provided models for the national efforts that lay in the future.
Franklin Roosevelt’s last annual message to the New York legislature in January 1932 ranged across a broad swath of issues: land-use planning, criminal justice reform, new taxes to maintain state solvency, and the nationwide Depression and crises in banking and employment, as well as new departures that included public hydroelectric power, old-age pensions, and wage and hours legislation for workers. Acknowledging the crisis enveloping the nation, but trying to depict himself as a man of the progressive center, he said, “Let us not seek merely to restore. Let us restore and at the same time remodel.”41
By about any standard, Roosevelt had been a successful governor. Politically, he had aligned himself with forces of modernization and progressivism while taking care to avoid being typed as a flaming radical. He had transcended the deep divide between urban and rural cultures that had all but wrecked the Democratic Party during the 1920s. No other major northern Democrat was so well liked in the South. Most New Yorkers realized that he was to some degree crippled, but he conveyed an image of energy that overwhelmed the reality of his withered legs and circumscribed work schedule. No other American politician had employed radio so effectively. He had positioned himself as the most likely Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
Chapter 11
Destiny Calls
The Quest for the Presidency, January–July 1932
“If it is the desire of our party leaders in your State that my name be presented at your coming primaries as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, I willingly give my consent,” Franklin Roosevelt declared in an open letter to the secretary of the North Dakota Democratic Party on January 22, 1932. He would, he said, remain at his post as governor of New York, devoting himself to the interests of the people of his state while hoping that his party would give the nation “candidates who stand for progressive ideals of Government, who represent no mere section, no narrow partisanship and no special class.”1
Roosevelt was clearly the leading contender for his party’s nomination. He possessed a famous name, was a well-regarded political personality with a national profile, and governed a state that possessed forty-seven electoral votes, about 18 percent of the total needed for victory. Radio listeners across the country recognized his voice. His part-time residence in Georgia made him an adopted son in the South. He had assiduously maintained contacts in the western United States dating to his vice presidential campaign in 1920.
Though formidable, these advantages carried no guarantees. He faced the biggest obstacles within his own state: his increasingly tenuous relationship with Tammany Hall and Al Smith’s reawakening ambition.
After losing the presidential election to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and “retiring” from politics, Smith had become president of the company that built and managed the Empire State Building. The position made him wealthy, but with Herbert Hoover lurching toward defeat in 1932, Smith’s thoughts and emotions all ran in the direction of another try for the White House. His relationship with Roosevelt had always been one of convenience rather than personal affection. He, not inaccurately, took Roosevelt’s breezy bonhomie as social condescension. Roosevelt found it difficult to find the right tone and body language in communicating with a rough-edged man of Smith’s servant-class origins. When the two got together socially, the conversation was congenial and the liquor flowed. Beneath the surface, the relationship was tense.
Word, perhaps accurate, got back to Smith that Roosevelt had accused him of leaving a mess in Albany. Smith then vocally opposed a state constitutional amendment to fund one of Roosevelt’s pet projects: reforestation. The amendment carried. Roosevelt pointedly recalled that he had kept his mouth shut about occasional disagreements when Smith was in office.2
On November 18, 1931, the two men discussed the state budget over lunch in New York, smiling broadly and behaving genially, but most observers understood, as the New York Times put it, that the meeting had been arranged “purely for its pictorial effect on disturbed Democratic minds throughout the country.” The next day, Roosevelt left for his customary year-end trip to Warm Springs. There he received a letter from his friend and warm supporter Clark Howell, owner of the Atlanta Constitution. Howell recounted a meeting with Smith during a trip to New York, during which he had asked for a candid talk about Roosevelt. Smith had given it to him: “Do you know, by God, that he has never consulted me about a damn thing since he has been Governor? He has taken bad advice and from sources not friendly to me. He has ignored me! By God, he invited me to his house before he recently went to Georgia and did not even mention to me the subject of his candidacy.” Revealing an astonishing detachment from the economic crisis all around him, Smith told Howell that the main issue before the country was Prohibition, not the Depression, and accused Roosevelt of dodging it.
Roosevelt was surely correct in understanding that with unemployment at 20 percent, most Americans were more concerned about jobs and food than about beer. Smith’s tirade, however, had less to do with policy disagreements than with resentment at one perceived slight after another. Howell believed Roosevelt could repair the damage. Roosevelt seems never to have tried.3
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 19