The long campaign tour was a triumphal procession. Everywhere, Roosevelt drew friendly crowds, whether speaking to huge audiences or making off-the-cuff rear-platform appearances at small junctions. He displayed the rare gift of empathetic communication, however fuzzy the specifics. His press coverage was sympathetic, due partly to his winning personality but also to the deft facilitation of Steve Early, a loyalist since he had covered Roosevelt as a reporter during the 1920 campaign. By the time the candidate returned to New York, his victory seemed all but certain.
Walter Lippmann ratified a growing consensus. Recanting his caustic putdown at the beginning of the year, he declared that Roosevelt had managed the Walker hearing brilliantly, displayed prudence in avoiding promises that he could not keep, and demonstrated independence from outside manipulation. As for Hoover, Lippmann believed the president would be unable to govern in the face of a Democratic Congress. “I shall vote cheerfully for Governor Roosevelt,” the columnist announced.12
Other fence-sitters fell into line. Most predictable were the independent progressives. Senator George Norris, the most beloved of the group, appeared jointly with Roosevelt in Nebraska and tendered a fulsome endorsement. Almost all the rest followed, including Senators Hiram Johnson of California (TR’s 1912 running mate), Bronson Cutting of New Mexico (like FDR, a Grotonian), and Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin.13
As the campaign entered its final month, the raw breach with Al Smith was healed. Smith remained bitter, but he was too good a party man to take a walk. At the New York Democratic state convention, he and Roosevelt exchanged a cordial handshake. Too honest to endorse the increasingly discredited Tammany leadership, Smith aligned himself with Roosevelt by backing Herbert Lehman for the gubernatorial nomination. During the campaign, he delivered addresses for the ticket. “Radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin’s strong support for Roosevelt also helped mightily with Smith’s Irish Catholic constituency.
Although his general inclinations were pretty clear, Roosevelt still made vague and sometimes conflicting pronouncements. He blatantly evaded the issue of the veterans bonus and regularly condemned the Smoot-Hawley tariff while promising some measure of protectionism for agriculture. Presented with drafts of a speech, one advocating freer trade, the other strongly protectionist, he airily told his writers to weave the two together. Having intimated the need for large-scale and costly government programs, he delivered a speech at Pittsburgh in the waning days of the campaign that promised to balance the budget. With some justice, Hoover roused a crowd in Indianapolis by comparing his opponent’s position on the tariff to that of a “chameleon on Scotch plaid.”14
Hoover, assuming that the public would agree with his disparaging evaluation of Roosevelt and appreciate his tireless engagement with the problems of the Depression, had planned to remain hard at work in the White House. By October he realized that he had miscalculated badly. He spent much of the month making several major speeches and numerous rear-platform talks. He fired up partisan audiences at rallies in Republican strongholds such as Des Moines and Indianapolis, but in Detroit hostile demonstrators booed him at the railroad station and lined his four-mile route to the arena. In his last effort of the campaign, a nationally broadcast speech at Madison Square Garden on October 31, he warned that if the Democrats won the election and repealed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, “grass will grow in a hundred cities. . . . [T]he weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms.” By then, much of the electorate had tuned him out.15
Millions of voters had personally experienced joblessness and financial ruin. On October 31, Roosevelt reached out to them with his own nationally broadcast address, timed to follow Hoover’s, from a packed arena in Boston. Declaring that “grim poverty stalks throughout our land,” he asserted that the government owed “a positive duty that no citizen shall be permitted to starve.” Calling relief for the unemployed “the immediate need of the hour,” he also promised “a tariff benefit” for farmers.16
Election Day was November 8. That evening, Roosevelt, in the company of family and close friends in a small suite next to the Democratic headquarters at New York’s Biltmore Hotel, listened to the radio as returns came in from across the country. By 11:00 p.m., it was clear that he was the beneficiary of an enormous landslide. Louis Howe opened a twenty-year-old bottle of sherry, filled glasses, and proposed a toast. The victor accepted congratulations, listened to returns from the West, and finally left for his Sixty-Fifth Street town house. When he arrived at around 2:00 a.m., he found his mother, now two months past her seventy-seventh birthday, waiting for him. Putting her arms around him, she said, “This is the greatest night of my life.”17
Final returns confirmed triumph by more than 7 million popular votes. Roosevelt had won forty-two of the forty-eight states; Hoover took only one big prize, Pennsylvania, an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse wedded to a high tariff. The winner now had a little less than four months to prepare for the daunting task of governing a nation in a time of economic prostration.
Roosevelt remained governor of New York through the end of the year but handed off most of his responsibilities to his successor, Herbert Lehman, probably the most capable and active lieutenant governor in the state’s history. The president-elect had to build an administration that would exceed Hoover’s failing efforts to deal with an ever-worsening economy. Neither he nor his advisers could have imagined how much worse it would get over the next 115 days as the nation edged toward total collapse. Major bank failures wiped out the deposits and savings of millions of Americans, removing large reserves of credit and financing essential to the functioning of a sound economy. Agriculture and industry came close to paralysis. By the end of February 1933, governors had attempted to stem the financial crisis by temporarily closing banks in thirty-two states. Almost everywhere else, banks were subjected to strict limitations on their transactions. Unemployment was somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. American capitalism was on the verge of shutting down.
Hoover, although he had lost badly, remained convinced that his course of defending the dollar and protecting the government’s credit was right. He hoped that with the election campaign in the past, he could persuade Roosevelt to fall in with his policies. At his request, the president-elect, accompanied by Raymond Moley, met with him and Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills at the White House on November 22 for an excruciating two hours and twenty minutes.
The atmospherics alone would have prevented a meeting of the minds; the two comrades from the Wilson administration had passed the point of no return in their hostility toward each other. They had also developed radically different understandings of the Depression. Hoover deemed it an international phenomenon that demanded international stabilization measures. Most salient among these was continuation of a moratorium on war debt payments to the United States, which he had accepted in June 1931. The debt payments constituted a serious drain on the economies of several European nations, endangered the stability of their currencies, and impaired their potential for economic recovery. Hoover feared that a wave of sovereign debt defaults would have catastrophic consequences. He hoped, in addition, that a World Economic Conference, scheduled for mid-1933, could effect an agreement on international financial stabilization. His acceptance of the debt moratorium and the pending conference, widely unpopular at home, had rightly received acclaim abroad as an act of statesmanship. (Somewhat inconsistently, however, Hoover was unwilling to press for a mutual lowering of tariff barriers that were strangling foreign trade. Neither was Roosevelt.)
Roosevelt, along with most of his advisers, viewed the Depression as a domestic issue requiring domestic solutions. The president-elect also wanted to preserve absolute freedom of action and surely felt that linking his name to a Hoover policy would be politically poisonous. The nation, he believed, could have only one chief executive at a time; he had no constitutional authority to take joint action with Hoover. Rejecting further delays on war
debt payments, he expected them to resume as scheduled on December 15, 1932, whatever the damage to the Europeans. (As it turned out, two of the four largest debtors, Britain and Italy, paid on schedule; the other two, Belgium and France, did not. The end was near for the debt repayment system.)
Roosevelt and Hoover would meet again at the White House on January 20. The disdain they felt for each other enveloped the room. The meeting made no progress, ended with intensified ill feelings, and unavoidably contributed to the pervasive sense of drift afflicting the country.
Through all this, Roosevelt found some time for two brief visits to Warm Springs, a satisfying Christmas holiday at Hyde Park, and, at the beginning of February, a relaxing cruise on Vincent Astor’s luxurious yacht, Nourmahal. The cruise—beginning in Jacksonville, Florida, proceeding to the Bahamas, and concluding in Miami—gave him time to think about numerous serious matters. It ended in Miami on the evening of February 15.
A large crowd gathered at the waterfront to greet him. Sitting on the top of the back seat in an open car, Roosevelt told his audience of the fine fishing he had enjoyed, lamented the ten pounds he had gained on the trip, and promised to return. He then slid down into a normal seated position. As he did, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who had come to Florida to meet with the president-elect about assistance to his desperately strapped city, came over to talk.
Suddenly, there were pistol shots.
Cermak slumped to the ground. A Secret Service bodyguard took a round through the hand. Three bystanders were hit. The driver started the car and began to move it forward. The shooting stopped after police, members of the crowd, and a woman who had grabbed his arm as he emptied his revolver subdued the would-be assassin. Roosevelt ordered the car backed up, had Cermak put in next to him, and told the driver to get them to the nearest hospital. “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt if you keep quiet.”18
The shooter, an inconspicuous little man named Giuseppe Zangara, defiantly told the world that he was an anarchist who hated all presidents. In all, he wounded five people, Cermak gravely. In critical condition when he got to the hospital, the Chicago mayor rallied but then developed an infection that took his life. The state of Florida swiftly tried Zangara, who almost certainly had acted alone, convicted him of first-degree murder, and executed him on March 20, 1933.
Zangara’s confession must have stirred in Roosevelt’s mind memories of the 1919 bombing of A. Mitchell Palmer’s house and of the bomb mailed to him, perhaps also by an anarchist, shortly after he became governor of New York. His calm demeanor greatly impressed those closest to him. He returned to the yacht that night, Raymond Moley recalled, utterly unfazed, even after having had time to take it all in and understand how close he had come to death. The attitude, Moley thought, was “magnificent.” It also likely revealed a man who had become convinced after the ordeal of polio that God, or perhaps simply destiny, had marked out a plan for him.19
Roosevelt had by now accumulated a large entourage of supporters and advisers pursuing power, recognition, and policy influence. Three were millionaires—Wall Street operator and World War I industrial mobilizer Bernard Baruch (often with his close aide, General Hugh Johnson, at his side), industrialist William Woodin, and speculator-financier Joseph P. Kennedy. Baruch, the largest contributor to the campaign, leaked to the press that he would like to be secretary of state or the Treasury or perhaps some sort of economic czar. Testifying before Congress after the election, he urged economic policies that struck progressives as positively Hooverian. Woodin, the second-largest contributor, was a registered Republican but nonetheless close to Roosevelt and a trustee of the Warm Springs Foundation. Kennedy hoped to play a big role in financial regulation.20
Many of the rest were politicians, attracted in various measures by Roosevelt’s personality, electability, and ideology. Among them were Governor George Dern of Utah and Senators Cordell Hull of Tennessee, Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, and Claude Swanson of Virginia. Independent progressives had organized for him; the most eminent, after George Norris, were Harold Ickes of Chicago and Henry A. Wallace of Iowa. Finally, in the innermost circle were personal loyalists with attachment rooted in the sands of time: Ed Flynn, Jim Farley, Louis Howe, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Steve Early, Marvin McIntyre, Missy LeHand, and Grace Tully.
The assembly of an official family involved a strategy of recognizing Democratic Party notables, then appealing to the independent progressives. The White House staff, still quite small, would consist of tried-and-true Roosevelt loyalists, indebted to no one else.
The incoming administration rolled out the cabinet choices a week after the assassination attempt. For secretary of state, Roosevelt selected Hull, much esteemed on Capitol Hill and a political friend with whom the new president had long enjoyed a cordial relationship. Baruch would have to settle for status as a friend and confidential adviser. With some misgivings, Roosevelt first offered the Treasury to Virginia senator Carter Glass, a primary author of the Federal Reserve Act and for two years secretary of the Treasury under Wilson. When Glass demurred, the post went to William Woodin. For secretary of war, the president-elect designated George Dern, a valuable preconvention backer. For secretary of the navy, he picked Senator Claude Swanson of Virginia, a valuable link to the southern Democrats.21
The attorney general was to be Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, a longtime ally and reliable progressive. On March 2, while traveling by train to Washington with his new bride, Walsh died of a heart attack. Roosevelt replaced him with Connecticut Democratic leader Homer Cummings. As secretary of commerce, Dan Roper of South Carolina was probably the most conservative member of Roosevelt’s cabinet and a conduit to the business community. He would have scant influence on policy.
As expected, Jim Farley became postmaster general and chief patronage dispenser. Postmasters in those days had to pass a basic qualifying examination but otherwise served at the pleasure of the president; a change of party in the White House signaled a wholesale turnover in post offices across the country. Farley would also exercise informal authority over many other nonmerit federal positions reserved not just for Democrats but for Roosevelt Democrats.22
Roosevelt named Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, a stunning selection not simply because she would be the first woman cabinet officer but also because she was a social worker with a direct relationship only to women’s trade unions. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) openly lobbied against her appointment. She herself tried to turn it down. Never hostile to unions as such, Perkins would be more interested in promoting broad-gauged reform programs aimed at ordinary working people, first and foremost social security.23
Two key slots went to independent progressives. Henry Morgenthau Jr. had hoped to become secretary of agriculture but had no support among southern and midwestern farm leaders. The appointment went to Henry A. Wallace, scion of a noted family of Iowa farm leaders and the third member of his clan to edit Wallace’s Farmer, an influential Corn Belt weekly founded by his grandfather, “Uncle Henry” Wallace, who in his day had turned down an offer to become secretary of agriculture. Henry A.’s father, Henry C. Wallace, had served unhappily in that office under Harding and Coolidge. A plant geneticist of genuine distinction, Henry A. had played a major role in the development of hybrid corn, thereby qualifying as a pioneer in the struggle against world hunger. Although a registered Republican, he had endorsed Al Smith for president in 1928 and Roosevelt in 1932. Forty-four years old at the beginning of 1933, Wallace seemed a more or less practical, orthodox midwestern farm advocate; stylistically, he was a bit rustic. No one discerned the strains of mysticism and collectivist radicalism within his multilayered personality.
Two progressive Republican senators, Hiram Johnson of California and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, declined appointment to the Interior Department, long a focus of suspicion and concern among conservationists. Roosevelt then fixed on Harold Ickes, a
crusty old Chicago progressive Republican who had backed TR in 1912 but supported Cox and Roosevelt in 1920. Anathema to the Chicago machine, he had the warm support of Johnson and Cutting. Roosevelt learned how to pronounce his name (“Ik-ees,” not “Iks”), spent perhaps five minutes with him, and gave him the job.
Just a few weeks short of his fifty-ninth birthday, Ickes would bring to his post, in the words of historian Linda Lear, “unsurpassed energy, ego, and administrative virtuosity.” He also possessed a hair-trigger temper, a near paranoid suspicion of others’ motives, and a voracious appetite for territorial aggrandizement. From the day he took office, he schemed to wrest control of the Forestry Service from the Department of Agriculture, and he forever resented that Roosevelt (and Senator Norris) established the Tennessee Valley Authority as an independent agency. No other member of Roosevelt’s cabinet would offer a resignation so many times. Roosevelt always rejected the tenders, seeing him, warts and all, as a sound administrator and a valuable token of independent progressivism.24
That left the personal White House staff, tiny by post-1945 standards. In 1932, Congress had provided for three “secretaries” who served as aides to the chief executive. (Woodrow Wilson had gotten by with only one.) Roosevelt’s selections were largely predictable. He named Louis Howe, Steve Early, and Marvin McIntyre.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 23