On February 7, 1932, Smith, claiming the continuing leadership of the Democratic Party, announced his availability for the presidential nomination. His chances were almost nil, but he remained a formidable presence. Two of his closest allies controlled the Democratic National Committee: John Raskob, still national chairman, and Jouett Shouse, the party’s executive director.4
The next day, Smith and Roosevelt met again and talked for about an hour. Roosevelt later quoted Smith as saying he had thrown his hat in the ring only at the urging of bitter Massachusetts Democrats and had not countenanced a “stop Roosevelt” movement. His dissembling notwithstanding, the long, uneasy partnership was over, the fight to a finish begun.5
The rift with Smith underscored Roosevelt’s still tenuous relationship with Tammany Hall and by extension other big-city Democratic organizations. Tammany and similar machines operated in an ethical twilight zone where the sale of positions and favors at best violated strict standards of morality and at worst degenerated into grand larceny. Such machines functioned in most American metropolitan areas during the 1920s, fueled by a general prosperity, bootleg booze, the rise of organized crime, and a widespread rejection of old moral standards.
As the nation’s largest city, New York provided a conspicuous example, with judgeships and judicial decisions for sale, prosecutors uninterested in prosecuting obvious targets, police vice squads more prone to extortion than enforcement, and cops who occasionally hired out as underworld hit men. Presiding over it all was Mayor James J. (“Jimmy”) Walker, dapper, charming, roguish, and conspicuously enjoying a high life far beyond his known financial means.
So long as the 1920s roared, New Yorkers did not seem to care. The forces of reform—respectable Republicans, the Socialist Party, and assorted independent liberals—had little basis for a common alliance and no organization capable of mobilizing voters. They could, however, make noise, which no one did better than their strongest political candidate, Congressman Fiorello La Guardia. Napoleonic in both stature and ambition, determined to become mayor of New York, and ideologically a social democrat, he ran as a Republican against Walker in 1929, mobilizing all the forces for honest government save the Socialists.
Walker crushed him, winning by nearly 500,000 votes. Governor Roosevelt got the message. Exuberant crusaders might fight the good fight to the last ditch. A working, ambitious politician with big goals had to keep the machine at arm’s length while striving for a modus vivendi. Hard-eyed and realistic, the assessment exposed Roosevelt to damaging contrasts between the good Franklin, the youthful crusader against Boss Charles Murphy, and the bad Franklin, a pussyfooting pol playing winks and nods with Murphy’s successor, Charles Curry.
The most sensational example of Roosevelt’s acquiescence to Tammany may have been his appointment of Joseph Force Crater to the New York Supreme Court. Crater, who for a time served as secretary to Robert F. Wagner before Wagner’s election to the US Senate, appears to have purchased the Tammany endorsement for the going rate of $20,000, then used his position to recoup his investment rapidly. A familiar figure in the New York nightclub scene, invariably accompanied by the showgirl du jour, he was last seen in Midtown Manhattan on the evening of August 6, 1930. Probably the victim of a gangland assassination, the judge was never found.6
The Crater episode was embarrassing but not lethal for Roosevelt, who covered himself by requesting three separate inquiries into New York judicial corruption. He surely expected the wheels to grind slowly and take the issue out of the 1930 election campaign. Few voters held him personally responsible for Tammany’s misbehavior, and the gathering Depression was a far more immediate concern.7
The issue would not die, however. In 1931, the Republican legislature established a special committee to investigate New York City corruption. Its chairman, Senator Samuel Hofstadter of Manhattan, designated Samuel Seabury as committee counsel. Seabury, like Roosevelt, was a Democratic blueblood of impeccable ancestry, but unlike the governor he was a crusading reformer determined to expose sin wherever he found it. The city reformers cheered him on.
The ultimate target of the reformers was Mayor Walker, hard-pressed to explain the large sums of money that gravitated toward his person and his frequent appearances after hours with a Broadway beauty who was not his wife. Walker, a former Tin Pan Alley lyricist, was quick-witted and smart enough to avoid hypocrisy. When Al Smith advised him against running for reelection in 1929, he countered that Smith, puritanical in his marital attitudes, was against him “because I have a girl.”8
Seabury submitted a list of charges to the governor in early 1931, but it was difficult to show that Walker, who defended his right to receive “beneficences” from friends, had crossed the line between impropriety and outright illegality. Colonel Edward M. House, once Woodrow Wilson’s grey eminence and now a political adviser to Roosevelt, told the governor that he had no choice but to reject Seabury’s bill of offenses. On April 28, to the reformers’ dismay, Roosevelt issued a categorical dismissal, gratuitously remarking that he had debated whether Seabury’s indictment merited his comment.9
The governor’s efforts at artful dodging created a hail of journalistic criticism. In early 1931, Time magazine accused him of “buck-passing.” An extended acrimonious correspondence followed between its publisher, Henry Luce, and Roosevelt’s secretary, Guernsey Cross, who signed letters drafted by his boss.10
Responding to a harsh attack from the New York World-Telegram while on vacation at Warm Springs in late 1931, Roosevelt indeed passed the buck: “I am not pleading the constitutional fact that Herbert Lehman is the Acting Governor of the State and that when outside the State I have absolutely no jurisdiction as Governor, but I may suggest that at this distance I have just about as much knowledge of what is going on in the Seabury investigation as if I were in South America. . . . May I suggest also that if the World-Telegram wants some kind of action immediately you take it up with the Acting Governor of the State.”11
In June 1932, just before the start of the Democratic convention, the World-Telegram on five consecutive days published a series of articles, written in a prosecutorial muckraking tone, condemning Roosevelt as subservient to Tammany Hall and calling him a disgrace to his family name. Roosevelt no doubt told himself that he had to move ahead in the world that existed rather than the one that he would prefer, but his earlier identity as an anti-Tammany crusader kept getting thrown in his face. Devoted supporters would stand by him. A larger public and an emerging critical commentariat with the ability to sway middle-class independent voters might see indecision and weakness.12
No member of that commentariat was more influential than Walter Lippmann, America’s most important independent syndicated news columnist. On January 8, 1932, newspapers across the country carried his thoughts on Roosevelt’s presidential aspirations. Lippmann viewed the New York governor as an opportunist adroit at carrying water on both shoulders with no strong underlying convictions. He was “highly impressionable” and “an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses” but “not the dangerous enemy of anything,” careful “to offend Tammany just as little as he dared,” constant only in the pursuit of his own ambition—“a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”13
Lippmann’s column appeared just days after Roosevelt received a report from the Hofstadter committee documenting that Sheriff Tom Farley of New York County (Manhattan) had during his seven years in office accumulated at least $250,000 that he could not explain. Many observers believed the money represented payoffs from illegal gamblers, one of whom openly ran games in Farley’s Tammany clubhouse. Roosevelt took his time going over the charges, asked Farley for a written reply, then conducted a public hearing, which left no reasonable doubt of Farley’s impropriety. On February 24, Roosevelt removed him from office but did not press for criminal charges and promptly accepted Tammany’s recommendation for a success
or.14
Independent observers failed to perceive a profile in courage. Reform movement leaders John Haynes Holmes and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise submitted to Roosevelt a petition for the removal of the sheriff of Kings County (Brooklyn) and in a separate communication requested the ouster of the chief clerk of the Queens County Surrogates Court. Seabury delivered a radio speech asserting Tammany influence over an unnamed candidate for president of the United States, leaving his listeners to decide whether he was talking about Roosevelt or Smith. Roosevelt rejected the Holmes-Wise demands with a barbed response that charged them with “rushing into print early and often with extravagant and ill-considered language [that] causes many of our decent citizens to doubt your own reliance on law, on order and on justice.”15
In May 1932, Seabury questioned Mayor Walker under oath about more than $1 million traced either to Walker or to a bookkeeper who used the money to pay Walker’s bills. The mayor’s answers were unconvincing. Another request for removal made its way to Albany, accompanied by a more damning bill of particulars. Roosevelt, attempting to maintain a frayed relationship with Tammany, resented the pressure. “This fellow Seabury is merely trying to perpetrate another political ploy to embarrass me,” he told Colonel House just weeks before the opening of the Democratic National Convention.16
Compared to the untidiness of New York politics, Roosevelt’s drive for the presidential nomination was a model of efficiency. Louis Howe, playing the role of “Mr. Inside,” ran a small office in New York; it produced pamphlets and other literature, carried on a wide correspondence, and facilitated a first-rate campaign biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy, by respected journalist Ernest K. Lindley. State Democratic chairman James Farley (no relation to the sheriff) was “Mr. Outside.” He traveled widely, made friends easily, tirelessly promoted the Roosevelt candidacy, and kept in touch with Democratic Party leaders from coast to coast.17
In mid-1931, Farley, using the excuse of attending the national convention of the Benevolent Order of Elks in Seattle, traveled across the country and back, covering eighteen states in nineteen days, sounding out sentiment for a Roosevelt candidacy. It would have been indiscreet to send an Irish Catholic from New York into the South, where Roosevelt relied on such friends as Josephus Daniels, Clark Howell, and Tennessee senator Cordell Hull. Farley was perfect for the rest of the nation. There was little of the clichéd Irishman about him. Tall, imposing, genial, and discreet, he was a teetotaler and as good a listener as a talker.
Meeting with Democratic officials, he found widespread sentiment for Roosevelt, most of it based on limited personal contact, a few radio speeches, and two gubernatorial wins in New York. South Dakota’s national committeeman told him, “Farley, I’m damned tired of backing losers. In my opinion, Roosevelt can sweep the country, and I’m going to support him.” Farley returned to Washington with 1,100 names and addresses of state and local Democratic officials, most of whom he had met personally. The trip persuaded him that his man was the only candidate with a truly national appeal and that a groundswell of historic proportions was building.18
The trick would be to develop a mood of inevitability that would overwhelm the one remaining barrier to nomination: the Democratic Party’s rule requiring two-thirds of the delegate votes at the convention for nomination. Roosevelt had to go into the gathering with a strong simple majority, hoping that favorite sons and waverers would accept him as inevitable. At the beginning of April 1932, the Roosevelt camp disseminated a slightly optimistic tally that claimed 701 of the 770 votes the two-thirds rule required.19
Roosevelt still faced a gaggle of favorite sons and party princes. None were plausible candidates, but all seemed capable of controlling their delegations. Most appeared motivated by delusional egos and the faint hope that lightning might strike if the convention deadlocked. A few were genuine heavyweights: Speaker of the House of Representatives John Nance Garner of Texas; California party leader William Gibbs McAdoo; Ohio’s Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war; and Owen D. Young, chairman of the board of General Electric and the most progressive business leader in the country.
McAdoo, Baker, and Young neither announced as candidates nor got around to declaring an unequivocal withdrawal. McAdoo controlled the California Democratic Party. Ohio’s fifty-two votes were Baker’s for the asking. William Randolph Hearst, whose communications empire included more than two dozen newspapers, a dozen and a half magazines, several radio stations, and the popular Movietone newsreels seen weekly across the country by regular filmgoers, backed Garner, who had his state’s forty-six votes in his pocket. Young seems never to have attempted even a covert campaign.
Considered one by one, these rivals mostly paled beside Roosevelt. As a collective mass, united solely by their opposition to him, they could block his nomination. But doing so would involve a replay of the bitter deadlock of 1924 and sow widespread doubts about whether the Democrats were capable of governing a nation in crisis.
Ample cash fueled Roosevelt’s drive. Among the early big contributors were Frank Walker, a prominent New York attorney; both Henry Morgenthau Sr. and Jr.; William Woodin, president of a large corporation that manufactured railway equipment; Macy’s department store head Jesse Straus; Robert Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal; and Massachusetts financier and movie producer Joseph P. Kennedy.20
Roosevelt was a consumer of ideas. Colonel House, seventy-three years old at the beginning of 1932, may have fancied himself as reprising his role as closest confidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson. In fact, Roosevelt valued him chiefly as a prestigious ornament and instead drew on a new class of university intellectuals actively seeking public service and ambitious to take their expertise beyond the classroom.21
Professor Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School had been a close friend and informal adviser to Roosevelt since 1917, when he had come to Washington to chair the War Labor Board. He was especially important on the electrical utilities issue during Roosevelt’s terms as governor. A protégé of the great “people’s lawyer,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and a major scholar in his own right, Frankfurter operated behind the scenes and avoided publicity.22
Proximity conferred power and attention to three New Yorkers, all associated with Columbia University: Raymond Moley, Adolf A. Berle Jr., and Rexford G. Tugwell. All were men of progressive inclinations, as were others who seemed to flit in and out of the advisory group, most notably General Hugh S. Johnson and Henry Morgenthau Jr. As these policy advisers gained visibility, journalists grasped for a label that would explain their function. A New York Times reporter came up with the phrase “brains department,” then, even better, “brains trust.” The latter phrase, often modified to “brain trust,” would stick.23
Moley, forty-six years old and perceptibly balding, was a political scientist best known as an eminent authority on criminal justice. Often pictured puffing reflectively on a bent-stem pipe, he was at heart a man of moderation attuned to the need for gradual change. Berle, the youngest of the three at thirty-seven, was a law professor deeply concerned with and troubled by the political and legal implications of the modern corporation’s separation of ownership from management. The forty-one-year-old Tugwell was the only professional economist of the trio. A radical critic of capitalism in his younger days, he had imprudently written poetry about rolling up his sleeves and remaking America. More recently he had journeyed with a number of political pilgrims to the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Roosevelt admired his unorthodoxy. For the moment, all agreed that the Great Depression was the result of a chaotic laissez-faire economy requiring a degree of rationalization and organization that only government could impose. Roosevelt was more than receptive to their message.
In the early twentieth century, candidates generally did not campaign intensively for a presidential nomination. Instead, supporters and proxies shepherded their causes through state conventions or spoke
on their behalf in primary elections. This saved Roosevelt from arduous travel but deprived him of his best asset, his personal presence, and required the construction of a mostly fictional image of a vigorous man ready to seize the reins of the presidency.
As early as the spring of 1930, publicists had distributed photos of the governor on horseback and planted the story that his treatments at Warm Springs had restored his ability to ride at a vigorous trot. The New York Evening Journal published one such picture with captions that read, “Roosevelt’s Rough Ride” and “Governor Wins Health Fight.” The campaign maintained a clipping service that ranged far and wide, enabling a riposte to an editor in Huron, South Dakota: “My physical condition is about 100%, with the exception, of course, that after catching Infantile Paralysis in the epidemic in New York a good many years ago, I still have to wear braces on my legs and my locomotion is slow!” Roosevelt also “corrected” the editor of the Butte Standard: “I don’t use a wheel chair at all except a little kitchen chair on wheels to get about my room while dressing, before I am dressed, and solely for the purpose of saving time. . . . [I]n my work in the Capitol and elsewhere I do not use one at all.”
In the spring of 1931 and again in 1932, eminent physicians issued public statements certifying Roosevelt’s robust health and continuing recovery from the effects of polio.24
Roosevelt took advantage of a few prominent speaking opportunities to convey a general sense of what he might do as chief executive. Convinced that issues of foreign policy had for the moment become irrelevant, he focused solely on the domestic crisis of the Depression and aligned himself with the party’s radical wing.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 20