ON A WARM AUTUMN AFTERNOON in the 1920’s, at the height of what Charles and Mary Beard later called the summer solstice of Normalcy, the head of Burns Bros., coal dealers, embarked on the Berengaria for a vacation in Europe. Halfway up the gangway he turned and looked down at a group of his clerks assembled on the pier to see him off. With a cry, “Here’s luck, boys!”, he pulled from his pocket a handful of silver and gold coins and sent them clattering on the cobblestones. He watched for a moment with relish as his clerks grabbed for the coins, and then turned and disappeared into the ship.
Reading about the incident in the next day’s Herald Tribune, Louis Howe was shaken out of his usual hard-boiled attitude toward his fellow man. Grown-up men scrambling like so many starving children in the dirt—this, he exploded in a letter to Roosevelt, was a perfect example of the business attitude of the day. More, it was an illustration of the Republicans’ economic philosophy of money trickling down from rich to poor. He urged his boss to use the story in future speeches.
If this was normalcy to Howe, others looking back on the 1920’s had their own memories of something that seemed to symbolize the decade. Perhaps it was the monkey trial in Tennessee, or mah-jongg, or bathtub gin, or Teapot Dome, or the Lone Eagle, or Al Capone, or the expulsion of five socialists from the New York State Assembly as “traitors,” or the frenetic chattering of stock market tickers late on an October day in 1929. Historians looking back noted more basic facts—the low level and instability of farm income, the slow decline of labor unionization during the decade, the spread of crime. Business boomed: automobiles, radios, refrigerators, cosmetics, telephones. Stocks climbed erratically upward; profits soared. Advertising became a big industry. It was a decade given over to Business, without muckrakers.
As for Roosevelt, he adjusted to the business decade with ease. He became a businessman. Shortly after his defeat in the fall of 1920 he took a job as vice-president of a large surety bonding firm, the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland, in charge of its New York office at $25,000 a year (five times his navy salary), and he returned to the practice of law. During the next eight years he took part in a variety of business ventures. The most important of these involved foreign investments. Roosevelt backed a Canadian corporation that was buying up devalued German marks to purchase stock in various German corporations, and which later liquidated with high profits. He bought shares in another company that invested in German securities, and he was an incorporator of the Federal International Investment Trust, designed to help American investors take securities guaranteed by foreign banks in payment of credit balances due for American exports. Of these speculations, only the Canadian venture brought Roosevelt any profit.
These investments were conservative compared with some of Roosevelt’s other speculations, however. He bought two thousand shares of stock in a company that unsuccessfully wildcatted for oil in Wyoming. He lost over $25,000 in a scheme to buy lobsters and hold them off the market until prices rose; lobster prices failed to rise. With Owen D. Young and others he started an enterprise to run dirigibles between New York and Chicago, but this soon proved to be, technologically, a misguided enthusiasm. A chain of resort hotels, the harnessing by General Electric of tidal power at Passamaquoddy Bay, vending machines, commercial forestry, selling advertising space in taxicabs—these and other schemes Roosevelt conceived with the enthusiasm and imagination of an old-time investment plunger.
A plunger Roosevelt was. To some at the time, this behavior seemed entirely out of character, yet it showed a side of the man that came into view many times in his career. As war administrator, as businessman, as President, he liked to try new things, to take a dare, to bring something off with a flourish. Taking a plunge, moreover, was easy for him. He had the security—his and Eleanor’s inherited income and the availability of Sara’s help in case of need—that allowed it. There was an interesting parallel between his business and his intellectual ventures. He could speculate with money because he had a financial heritage; he could speculate with ideas because he had a vague but deep-rooted ideological heritage to fall back on.
Even so, many of his business activities had more of a political than a commercial tinge. If he exhibited the daring of the speculator, he displayed, too, the cautiousness of a politician who refuses to gamble all on one election. Roosevelt in the end neither lost nor gained heavily because he seldom invested very much at a time. The political atmosphere was thickest at Roosevelt’s Fidelity and Deposit Company office. The bonding business was a key part of the company’s activities, and city and state politicians controlled a good deal of bonding. Roosevelt not only boasted of how he got business through his political connections in Albany and Washington but criticized associates for failing to cultivate the “big men” who had contracts to give out. He could later contend quite rightly that he had made a success of this business.
The most curious of Roosevelt’s business activities was a post he took early in the ‘20’s as a “czar” of the building industry. During the war and postwar years builders had lost the confidence of the public as a result of profiteering, shoddy work, and high prices. Their aim in setting up the American Construction Council was to form an organization embracing 250 national organizations, including architects and engineers as well as contractors and building trades laborers, and capable of policing itself. The builders wanted, also, to head off further demands for forthright prosecution of building trades associations under the antitrust laws. Roosevelt served as a respectable figurehead; more than that, he took a keen interest in gathering data and in long-range planning to iron out sharp seasonal fluctuations in the industry.
To some extent Roosevelt absorbed the political attitudes of the businessmen and promoters who surrounded him in the 1920’s. Just before taking his building industry post he struck out at government regulation: it was too unwieldy and expensive, he said. Education, rather than protective legislation, he asserted on another occasion, was the only way to stop investors from losing money on securities. When he denounced governmental subsidies to the merchant marine as being too costly, he was probably reflecting the antagonism that other small shippers like himself had toward the big shippers who were getting most of the favors from Washington.
On the other hand, Roosevelt did not adopt all the root postulates that governed the business approach. He never accepted the idea that the businessman should make the essential decisions in society, or that government should pursue a strictly hands-off policy toward business, or that popular government was dangerous. Even as a businessman he was still something of a Wilsonian. He did accept, especially in his building-industry job, the doctrines of a basic harmony of interests among economic groups and of a measure of self-regulation by business. These ideas would crop up again after he became President.
One reason that Roosevelt spurned business doctrine was his aversion to any kind of sweeping theory; he thought and acted in terms of immediate problems, not of eternal absolutes. Another reason was his distaste for the cardinal goal of most of his business friends: money-making. He was more absorbed in the game of speculation itself than the financial outcome. Above all, even as a businessman he was keeping his eye on the main chance, which to him was politics.
And well he might, for no one fades from the limelight faster than a defeated vice-presidential candidate. Roosevelt’s situation could have been especially vexing, since now another Roosevelt—Theodore, Jr.—was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was inspecting navy yards and receiving salutes. But Franklin had no intention of fading away. He became president of the Navy Club, chairman of the New York organization of Boy Scouts, and a trustee of Vassar; he raised money for the American Legion and for the (Episcopal) Cathedral of St. John the Divine; he remained active in Harvard affairs, and he took a leading part in organizing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, to help commemorate his old chief’s ideals.
This period was to be but an interlude in his political career. He would lie low for a while until “this bunch in Washington show either that they can make good or that they are hopeless failures,” he wrote to a friend. He told Stephen Early that he looked to him for many things in the days to come—“Thank the Lord we are both comparatively youthful!” But his prospects were suddenly changed.
The summer of 1921 was an unpleasant one for Roosevelt. In line with American political tradition, Republicans were raking through the ashes of the preceding administration in a search for political ammunition. They felt they had a good case in a situation at Newport, Rhode Island, where after the war immoral practices involving liquor, drugs, and homosexuality had sprung up. Roosevelt had looked into the situation and appointed an investigating squad to get evidence. The investigators themselves, however, had used improper and revolting methods; when he discovered this Roosevelt had ordered them to stop. Republican members of a Senate investigating committee accused him of direct responsibility for the improper methods, which he denied. Roosevelt went to Washington in July 1921 to present his case, only to find that the committee majority was publishing its report unchanged before he could present his testimony. He was galled by what he felt was a breach of faith. He looked tired when he finally left New York for his vacation at Campobello.
Then on a sunny day in mid-August Roosevelt slipped and fell overboard while cruising off Campobello. He suffered a slight chill, but the next day resumed his usual vigorous vacation life. That day, spying a forest fire from their small boat, he and his family landed and spent several hours beating out the flames. Then in rapid succession Roosevelt went for a swim in a nearby lake, dogtrotted a mile and a half, took a dip in the piercingly cold waters of the Bay of Fundy, and sat in a wet bathing suit for half an hour reading some mail.
Suddenly feeling chill, he went to bed. The next day he had severe pain in his back and legs and a high fever. Mrs. Roosevelt sent for a doctor, who diagnosed simply a cold. One more day and Roosevelt could not walk or move his legs. Another doctor—an “expert diagnostician” who happened to be in the vicinity—thought it was a blood clot that had settled in the lower spinal cord, and then changed his mind and decided it was a lesion in the spinal cord. Only after two weeks of illness did another specialist make a correct diagnosis—poliomyelitis.
During much of the time Roosevelt was in agony. His bladder and the rectal sphincter were paralyzed and he had to be catheterized. At one time his arms and back were paralyzed. His temperature varied from very high to subnormal. He suffered also from acute mental depression, heightened by the indecision of the doctors and his failure to improve. All this time—and for weeks afterward—he was flat on his back.
Sleeping on a couch in her husband’s room, Mrs. Roosevelt nursed him night and day during the first month of illness. “The jagged alternations between hope and despair; the necessity of giving blind trust to a physician even when the physician, cruelly pressed, could scarcely trust himself; the fearsome responsibility involved; above all the unpredictable oscillations of mood in the patient himself, which had to be ministered to with the utmost firmness, subtlety, and tenderness” were part of the ordeal she went through, as described by John Gunther. Sara Roosevelt had been in Europe and arrived home at the end of August to get a carefully written letter from Eleanor: “Franklin has been quite ill and so can’t go down to meet you on Tuesday to his great regret.…”
Howe had gone to Campobello earlier in the summer and was fortunately still there when Roosevelt was stricken. His first instinct was to keep the public from knowing the extent of the attack. He issued vague announcements to the press, and he and Eleanor told the less immediate members of the family that Roosevelt was ill from the effects of a chill and was recovering. Howe finally let out the dread word poliomyelitis only when he could quote doctors as saying that there definitely would be no permanent effect. When Roosevelt was finally able to be taken to New York in mid-September, Howe managed to get him moved in his stretcher from a launch onto a luggage dray and then into a private railway car while the hopeful onlookers, by a ruse, were gathered elsewhere.
Roosevelt spent six weeks in Presbyterian Hospital in New York. After the first week there his specialist, Dr. George Draper, reported that he was “much concerned at the very slow recovery both as regards the disappearance of pain, which is very generally present, and as to the recovery of even slight power to twitch the muscles.” The lower extremities, he found, presented a depressing picture. There was a little motion in the toes of each foot, but the patient could not extend his feet. Roosevelt could not sit up; only by pulling himself up by a strap over his head could he even turn in bed. When he was discharged from the hospital at the end of October the medical record reported, “Not improving.”
Dr. Draper was most concerned about Roosevelt’s psychological condition. “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism,” he reported, “that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.” Partly because of careful handling by Eleanor and the doctors, partly because of some inner strength and stability, he became cheerful once the initial period of nervous collapse was over.
It took Roosevelt years to realize that he would never walk again. He was eternally hopeful. In the hospital he was convinced that he would leave in two or three weeks on crutches. Soon he was stating in cheery letters that he would completely recover. Repeatedly during the following years he told friends that he would soon walk independently on crutches, and eventually with nothing more than canes. Almost six years after his attack he wrote to one of his doctors: “My own legs continue to improve,” but “I cannot get rid of the brace on that left leg yet. It is still a mystery as to why that left knee declines to lock.…”
Roosevelt spent seven years searching for a cure. He found a doctor in Marion, Massachusetts, who taught him some exercises. He spent parts of four winters on a houseboat off Florida; sometimes he swam and crawled around lonely beaches for hours. His great discovery was Warm Springs, Georgia, where warm waters heavy with mineral salts allowed extended exercise without over-tiring or enervating the patients. He went there winter after winter and from a rather seedy resort developed it into a leading hydro-therapeutic center.
So much for the medical story. What effect did polio have on Roosevelt the politician?
A vast legend has grown up on this subject—namely, that his illness converted Roosevelt from a rather supercilious young socialite and amateur politico into a political leader of ambition and power and democratic convictions. The reason for this legend is clear. Roosevelt’s battle with polio has all the drama and plot of a modern folk saga. The young man who had strode down convention aisles “looking like a Greek God” now had to be carried around like a baby, or pushed in a wheel chair. The man of only forty who had struck everyone with his animation and vitality spent hours crawling on the floor as he tried to learn to walk again. People jumped from the fact of physical change to the fiction of personality transformation.
The evidence is that Roosevelt’s illness did not alter but strengthened already existent or latent tendencies in his personality.
Polio, for example, did not teach him patience. He had already shown this trait to a marked degree in his lengthy maneuverings in state politics, in his dealings with local politicians, in his handling of the endless trivia of patronage and position. Nor did his illness give him a sudden new confidence in himself. His confidence in his capacity to win battles, political or otherwise—“cockiness,” his political rivals called it—had steadily expanded as his public activities broadened.
There was no basic change in his political ideas. Those who see a new humanitarian rising from the sickbed ignore Roosevelt’s decade of immersion in Wilsonian progressivism. Actually, he showed himself after his illness, just as he did before it, as a shrewd politician who kept his eye on the main chance and who was willing to bend his own views in adjusting to political realities. His position on the political spectrum remained the same—a little left of center. While insisting that he was a good liberal or progressive—he used the terms interchangeably—he insisted, too, that his position was one of “constructive progress” between conservative Republicanism and the “radicalism” of La Follette and the Progressives. On matters like the League of Nations and prohibition, too, he took a politician’s straddling position.
Doubtless his illness gave him opportunity for thinking out some of his ideas, but he took little advantage of this opportunity. He started two rather ambitious intellectual and creative projects—a history of the United States and an analysis of the practical workings of American government. In each case he wrote a dozen or so pages and then dropped the project. Neither fragment reflects any new or original ideas, although the few pages of the history reveal a marked socio-economic interpretation, as against the “great man” theory of history. He did a good deal of reading during his long convalescence—some biography and history, practically no economics, poetry, or philosophy, but both before and after his illness he liked books of travel and adventure best.
He was a man of many thoughts, not a man of trenchant ideas. A talk he gave at Milton Academy—a talk he considered of some importance and which was published in 1926 as a book with the pretentious title Whither Bound?—shows a wide-ranging mind in action but only a grab bag of thoughts. He skipped along, touching dexterously on the revolution of science, the need to accept change, the importance of equality of opportunity, the tendency of the majority to be progressive in outlook but divided over means. Utterly lacking was a central idea or unifying thread. Columns he wrote later for newspapers in Georgia and New York show the same tendencies.
Was there ever a time during this period when Roosevelt’s future as a politician trembled in the balance? Clearly a conflict rose between Eleanor and Sara Roosevelt as to whether Franklin should carry on an active political career, as his wife hoped, or retire to the ease of Hyde Park, as his mother wanted. However intense the struggle between wife and mother, it was of little long-run significance. There was never the slightest chance of Roosevelt’s retiring from politics. If anything, his illness made him want to be more active, more involved. “You are built a bit like me,” he wrote to a close friend within a year of the attack, “you need something physically more active, with constant contact with all kinds of people in many kinds of places.” In 1924 he left the law firm of Emmet, Marvin and Roosevelt, which he had helped form in 1920, mainly because estates and wills and the like “bored him to death,” for a new firm of Roosevelt and O’Connor, where he would be working with “live people” directly involved in more active ventures.
All this does not mean that polio had no major consequences for Roosevelt and his political career. Physically he went through a transformation; as if compensating for his crippled legs, he developed heavy, muscular shoulders and chest which, he exclaimed delightedly, “would make Jack Dempsey envious.” His disablement meant that he could move about only in a wheel chair or on people’s arms—Howe ruled that he must never be carried in public—but his attendants became adept in these arrangements. His legs became, actually, something of a political asset. They won him sympathy—something he might never have had otherwise. Millions of Americans were electrified in later years by Roosevelt’s public appearances—the tense, painfully awkward approach to the center of the stage, the bustle of aides and politicians around him, climaxed with Roosevelt’s radiant smiles and vigorous gestures.
His handicap was also a convenience. Since he was perfectly natural about the state of his legs, he was able again and again to use his disability as an excuse for not taking part in political activities he wished to avoid. It was an excuse no one could contradict, until Al Smith did so successfully in pressuring him to run for governor in 1928. His illness also had the highly advantageous effect of bringing Eleanor Roosevelt more actively into politics than might otherwise have been the case. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League and became a leader in Democratic women’s organizations in the state. She often brought her Democratic and trade-union “girls” to see her husband. Howe, too, who had planned to go into business in 1921, stayed on with his chief during and after the crisis.
The chief political importance of Roosevelt’s illness was simply in the realm of time. While it interrupted his vast political contacts and correspondence for only a few weeks, it postponed for years the day when he might run for office; he did not want to seek office until he had made as full a recovery as possible. This was something of a blessing, since the mid-1920’s were not auspicious years for many Democrats. As it turned out, his return to politics was delayed until he was much closer to the years of the flood tide of Democratic strength.
Right after the November 1921 election victorious Democrats in the state assembly races got letters of congratulation from Roosevelt. This was the signal that he was not through with politics. A few months more, and he was deeply involved in the maneuvers that preceded Al Smith’s attempt to recapture the governorship in 1922.
Events of the 1920’s were to throw Roosevelt and Smith into a tight political embrace. When their careers first intertwined, during the Sheehan shenanigans, they were ranged on opposite sides: Smith was a regular and Roosevelt a rebel; their alliance was to fall to pieces years later with Roosevelt in power and Smith in rebellion. But beginning in 1920, when each seconded the other’s nomination at the Democratic national convention, until 1928, when Smith drafted Roosevelt for party duty, they worked in unison, with Smith as the senior partner.
The reason for the alliance was simple: each needed the other. Together they spanned, geographically, religiously, and socially, the breadth of the Democratic party; to win elections each needed the support that the other could command. Personally they were friendly and respected each other’s political talents. Reporters could draw elaborate contrasts between the patrician and the plebeian, between the upstater and the New Yorker, between the Episcopalian and the Catholic, but both men were too big-minded, too worldly wise, to be concerned with such matters. On the surface during this period their relations were impeccable. Underneath they both had a seasoned tough-minded understanding of the complex mechanics and dynamics of intraparty politics; doubtless they both knew that theirs was essentially a political friendship.
Al’s candor had impressed Roosevelt in the Sheehan fight: Smith as majority leader in the assembly had told the rebels frankly that if they attended the caucus they would have to vote for the caucus candidate. Roosevelt had been something less than candid with Smith in respect to the gubernatorial campaign in 1918; the assistant secretary later proclaimed that he had backed Al for the Democratic nomination, while actually he and Howe had been exceedingly cagey on the matter. He probably expected Smith to lose in 1918 and thus leave the way clear for himself in 1920, but Al won. In 1920 Smith lost his bid for re-election but he won over a million more votes in New York than did Cox and Roosevelt.
Even in defeat Smith remained the leading Democrat in New York. Roosevelt could no longer oppose or evade him, so he had to “join” him. Events of early 1922 gave Roosevelt his opportunity. William Randolph Hearst wanted the Democratic nomination for governor, and Murphy was letting him line up delegates. Smith did not want to leave his profitable trucking business, but he could never forget that the publisher had accused him during his first administration of allowing poisoned milk to be distributed to children in New York City. At the last minute Smith agreed to a draft and Roosevelt was chosen to issue the call. A cordial exchange of “Dear Al” and “Dear Frank” letters followed.
Murphy now wanted Hearst to run for the Senate. Despite tremendous pressure Smith steadily refused to accept the publisher as his running mate, and Hearst pulled out of the race. Roosevelt could probably have had the senatorial nomination, but he did not yet feel ready. Finally, Murphy and Smith compromised on Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a Hearst protégé, for senator. Roosevelt worked for the ticket and served as honorary head of Copeland’s campaign. Smith defeated incumbent Governor Nathan L. Miller, and swept Copeland in with him.
Smith’s victory marked him as a leading candidate for the presidency in 1924. Although Roosevelt carefully maintained good relations with Bryan and other national leaders of the Democracy, he had no alternative but to support his fellow New Yorker. He was keenly concerned, however, that Smith might command insufficient national appeal. Several times he urged Smith to speak out on national questions. But the governor wanted to stick to his New York problems.
Most of all Roosevelt feared that Smith would become irretrievably branded as a “wet” and lose all hope of gaining votes from the dry forces in the party. When the governor was faced with the awkward choice of signing or vetoing a liquor bill, Roosevelt wrote him, “I am mighty sorry for the extremely difficult position in which you have been placed over this darned old liquor question,” and proceeded to outline an elaborate stratagem whereby Smith could veto the bill without alienating either side, and then call the legislature into special session to pass new legislation. Smith rejected the advice. He took a more direct and honest line of action, but one that left him more vulnerable to attacks from the drys.
“If I did not still have these crutches I should throw my own hat in the ring,” Roosevelt wrote a friend in the late summer of 1923. Within a few months, indeed, Howe was lining up complimentary first-ballot votes for his chief among several delegations to the national convention. But this was not a serious gesture. At the end of April 1924 the governor announced that Roosevelt would head the New York Smith-for-President committee. There was talk that the Smith forces wanted Roosevelt for the sake of his name only, but immediately he plunged into the job of winning delegate votes for the governor.
This was no easy task. Democrats everywhere agreed that Smith had been an honest, efficient, progressive governor. But Democratic candidate for president? Impossible. At this time the Ku Klux Klan was not merely a band of nightshirters, it was a powerful subterranean influence that reached into governors’ mansions and state assemblies. Even those Democrats who feared no “popish” control of the White House if Al won were reluctant to gamble on victory with a Catholic and a wet. Nevertheless, Roosevelt set to work. Through a massive correspondence and an elaborate intelligence system he acquired information on the personalities and politics of state delegations. For the first time in his life he saw in detail and on a national scale the confused currents and crosscurrents, the rival personalities and factions, the electoral law and machinery, that lay behind the pushing and hauling in the convention. He won few delegates for Smith but he added a course in his own political education.
Smith, after trying out several other speakers, asked Roosevelt to make his nominating speech. It was Roosevelt’s first important address since 1920, and he rose above the occasion. He won the attention of the delegates with a speech free from claptrap and stentorian phrases, and when he called Smith the “happy warrior of the political battlefield” the phrase was so apt that it galvanized Smith’s rooters and the last few sentences of the speech were drowned out. Mark Sullivan termed the speech a “noble utterance.” Walter Lippmann called it “moving and distinguished.” Ironically, when the “happy warrior” phrase was first suggested to Roosevelt, he was afraid it was too poetic, and, as it turned out, he used it prematurely, instead of waiting for the climactic final sentence. Nevertheless, the speech won him the spotlight and Democrats remembered it for years. Possibly Roosevelt was really drawing a picture of himself in the phrase happy warrior; certainly it was another case of his furthering his own career in the process of aiding Al.
But no speech could affect that convention. Ballot after ballot dragged on in the smoky heat of Madison Square Garden until it became clear that neither the forces centered in the East supporting Smith nor the forces centered in the South and West behind McAdoo could muster the vital two-thirds. Roosevelt took part in the conferences that, on the 103rd ballot, gave John W. Davis the nomination. Davis was a saddlemaker’s grandson who had become ambassador to Great Britain and had been called “one of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever met” by the King himself. The kind of conservative who believed in civil liberties, Davis was a lifelong Democrat and a distinguished lawyer. But he was a lackluster compromise, without Al’s color or McAdoo’s Wilsonian background. As a weary, cynical gesture to progressivism the delegates chose the Peerless Leader’s brother, Charles W. Bryan, for the vice-presidency, and departed.
The convention was a disaster for the Democratic party and a setback for Smith, but it was a personal victory for Roosevelt. His eloquent, moderate speeches, his gay, gallant air that made people forget his crutches, his loyalty to Al combined with his friendliness toward other factions, all left a deep imprint on the rank and file of the Democracy. Lippmann congratulated him on his service to New York, and Tom Pendergast, Democratic boss of Kansas City, told a mutual friend that Roosevelt had the most magnetic personality he had ever encountered. Praise from two men near the opposite poles of political life was a tribute to Roosevelt’s broad appeal.
But his triumph was short lived. In accordance with political tradition, Davis men quickly moved in after the convention to take over the machinery of the national Democratic party. Roosevelt was left on the sidelines. Smith ran again for governor, but Roosevelt played little part in the state campaign. Indeed, the whole month before the election he spent in Warm Springs. His pessimism about the Democrats’ chances was amply justified. Coolidge beat Davis by over seven million votes, and the Republicans won decisive majorities in both House and Senate. But Smith in New York breasted the Republican tide. His victory over Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., marked the end of the latter’s political career and laid the ground for the reappearance of Franklin Roosevelt four years later.
The dreary convention fight and the dismal election results of 1924 left the Democrats divided and leaderless. “Something must be done, and done now,” Roosevelt wrote in December 1924, to restore the voters’ confidence in the party. But what? His almost singlehanded effort to rejuvenate the party in 1925 gave him a harsh lesson in the internal power arrangements of the Democratic party.
He had long worried over the condition of the party. His campaign in 1920 had confirmed his suspicions that the party’s machinery was archaic and outgrown, as he wrote to Cordell Hull, national chairman of the party, late in 1921. Hull agreed but could do nothing. Three years later the picture seemed blacker. There was room, Roosevelt said, for but two parties. The Republican party was conservative; “the Democratic Party is the Progressive Party of the country,” he insisted. The progressives had been badly divided in 1924. But there must be no overtures to the La Follette party; all progressives must get together in the Democratic party.
So much was clear to him. But could the Democratic party be made into an instrument for winning elections and governing the country? Not unless it was reformed, he felt. He was appalled by the lack of national organization—the national headquarters consisted of “two ladies occupying one room in a Washington office building,” he said impatiently. The man Davis had bequeathed as national chairman, Clem Shaver, was out visiting millionaires asking them to endorse notes for the party. “Could anything be more of a farce?” Roosevelt demanded. “We have no money, no publicity, no nothing!” He wanted the party to unite more closely, to get rid of its “factionalism” and “localism,” to do a better publicity job, to get on a firmer financial basis.
Roosevelt laid his plans artfully. He feared that the national committee would stymie any reform effort because the committee, consisting largely of old party work horses from each state, was the seedy fruit of the existing arrangements. He decided to bypass the national leaders and appeal directly to local party leaders, including delegates to the recent national convention. To 3,000 of these leaders he wrote a letter that asked for their advice on improving the party but consisted mainly of a statement of Roosevelt’s views on what should be done. “I take it that we are all agreed on certain fundamental truths,” he said casually, and he proceeded to name them: the national party organization should be more active and work more closely with state organizations; publicity should be improved; party leaders should meet more often to plan for united action.
His letters aroused all the ancient vexations among the rank and file: Southerners complained about the party’s liberalism, Westerners about the city bosses, Easterners about Bryanism and the anti-Catholic and antiliquor forces. But most of the several hundred respondents, doubtless taking their cue from Roosevelt’s letter, called for drastic party reform. They wanted more unity, better organization, more leadership, more discipline, less factionalism and localism. “The Democrats are just a mob,” an Iowan said disgustedly. Most, but not all, wanted the party to become or remain a liberal organization.
Fortified by these opinions, Roosevelt proposed a small national conference of the party to discuss issues and organization. At first, prospects for the plan seemed bright. Well-known Democrats including Davis, Cox, Hull, and Daniels backed it, and there was much favorable publicity. Since some elements in the party suspected that the project was a bid by Roosevelt for party leadership on Smith’s behalf or his own, it seemed imperative to Roosevelt and Howe that Shaver as national chairman issue the call for the conference. But this Shaver would not do. The party’s first job, he said, was to cut its organization to the bone and pay off its debt. The harder Roosevelt tried to force Shaver’s hand the clearer it became that the national chairman was following party leaders who opposed reform.
Who were these leaders? Roosevelt had little trouble finding out. They were the Democratic chieftains in Congress, who were far more concerned about keeping their seats from their own states and districts than in re-forming ranks for a presidential victory in 1928. Many of the Democratic leaders were Southerners who had piled up committee seniority as representatives of one-party areas that monotonously returned them to office in election after election. Although these congressmen maintained a congressional campaign committee, they had little unity or organization. Their real fear was that a concerted national effort by the party might jeopardize the position of some congressmen who could survive politically only by deserting the party platform and taking a position congenial to local interests. They would do nothing positive, Howe observed, unless driven to it by a purely local situation—but their districts were usually not of the type to reflect national trends or conflicts. The Democratic congressmen could hardly have been pleased, either, by Roosevelt’s admitted plan of inviting only half a dozen Democratic members from each House.
“We have practically no leaders in a National sense at all,” Roosevelt concluded; it was an “unspeakable groping about in the darkness.” Howe undoubtedly reflected Roosevelt’s feelings when he remarked that the selection of the donkey as the Democratic emblem was prophetic.
Roosevelt was also unsuccessful in reforming methods of party finance. He was indignant that Jesse Jones was raising money from big contributors. When Jones heard of this he wrote Roosevelt a surprised letter—he was paying off the party’s debt, said the Texan, wasn’t this enough? Roosevelt replied that the party should be financed from small contributions. He had estimated that if every election district of one thousand people contributed only five dollars per district, the Democrats could raise half a million dollars. Nothing came of this proposal either.
Nationally the Democratic party remained a divided, leaderless aggregation of state factions and sectional groupings. It followed precisely the policy Roosevelt feared most—a policy of opportunism, or as he described it, a posture of waiting with hands folded for the Republicans to make mistakes. The weaknesses of the party were to affect his plans for re-entering politics; years later they would plague the Democrats as the party in power and Roosevelt as president and party leader.
Seemingly Roosevelt’s political influence sank to its nadir during the mid-1920’s. Then, in the space of six weeks, he vaulted into the governorship of the nation’s largest state and became automatically a leading presidential possibility. The remarkable thing was not the feat itself but the way it came about. The sudden change in Roosevelt’s political fortunes was initially less an act on Roosevelt’s part than a summons by his party.
The collapse of his party reform efforts in 1925 left him as impotent politically as the party itself. He had no position in the party—he was now only the defeated vice-presidential candidate once removed—and some anti-Smith Democrats felt that the whole reform enterprise had been an artifice to promote the Happy Warrior’s candidacy in 1928. Actually, if the project was intended to promote the interest of any one Democrat, it was that of Roosevelt himself.
His position in the state was ambiguous. For a time after the 1924 election he professed to be neutral toward Democratic candidates. “A plague on all individuals who would like to be President!” he wrote. Smith’s capture of a fourth gubernatorial term in 1926, however, confirmed the governor’s power both in New York and in the Democratic presidential race. During the pre-1928-convention period Roosevelt campaigned for Smith, even to the extent of spending two weeks in the Midwest trying to round up delegates.
He was politically close to Smith but not one of the inner circle who confabbed endlessly with their chief in the famous “Tiger Room” in the penthouse of a wealthy Manhattan contractor. During this period—indeed, during all the period between 1913 and 1928—Roosevelt had no office in the state aside from an unpaid position as chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission.
The American politician clings to power by keeping a foothold in one level of party or government even when he is dislodged from some other level. Ironically, Roosevelt’s influence dwindled in his local Dutchess County party during the 1920’s. One reason was his long absences from Hyde Park. He tried to break the grip of the old “courthouse gang” on the party, but with no success. He had about given up on the Dutchess County Democracy by 1928. There were “too many local leading Democrats,” he complained, “tied up for financial reasons with the Republicans.”
In view of all this, what is the explanation of Roosevelt’s continued political standing—a standing so great that the Democratic leaders of New York hoped he would take the nomination for United States Senator in 1926 and drafted him for governor two years later?
Part of the answer is that Roosevelt continued to work hard at politics during this period. He wrote thousands of letters—letters of congratulation to winning Democrats, of commiseration to losers, of inquiry and advice to friends throughout the state and nation dating from his senatorial and navy days. Passing through Washington he made a point of meeting Democratic congressmen. Even in the South he managed to cultivate political friendships: he invited AFL officials to his houseboat in Florida, visited Bryan in Miami (before the latter’s death in 1925), conferred with Southern political leaders at Warm Springs.
His position on party issues helped him politically. He was moderately liberal in a moderately liberal party. He believed the party should stand for “progressivism with a brake on,” not “conservatism with a move on.” He followed closely and commented knowledgeably on a variety of international and national issues, such as war debts, banking, conservation, the one-party press, and Mississippi River flood control. On touchy matters like prohibition he took a position midway between the party extremes. He managed in a state convention keynote speech for Smith to tread the liquor tightrope so adroitly as to win from Daniels, a dry, the encomium: “I think you took only a light bath and came out in fine shape. From that speech nobody would call you an immersionist like Al Smith; they would rather think you took yours by sprinkling or pouring.…”
It was easy for Roosevelt to turn down the senatorial nomination in 1926. He had just begun his Warm Springs cure and he hoped for rapid progress in the next years. Moreover, he did not feel cut out to be a Senator. Most important were considerations of his career. If he ran for senator and lost, he would have accumulated a string of three consecutive defeats. If he ran and won, he must, perforce, take positions in the Senate that would antagonize some wing of the divided Democratic party.
But the situation in 1928 was different. In that year Smith went to the Democratic convention with a commanding lead. Roosevelt again nominated the governor, in a speech notable chiefly for the fact that it was written with the radio audience specifically in mind; Roosevelt already had sensed the future political importance of this new medium, and he made effective use of it at Houston. “A model of its kind,” the New York Times commented, “—limpid and unaffected in style and without a single trace of fustian.” He also served as Smith’s floor manager, but the show was largely in the hands of Smith’s immediate associates. The affair—for a Democratic convention—was rather tranquil. Smith easily won the nomination on the first roll call.
Knowing of Roosevelt’s business contacts, Smith asked him to organize business and professional men for the campaign, while Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become increasingly active in state Democratic affairs, helped run the Bureau of Women’s Activities. Roosevelt did not participate too actively in the campaign; Howe usually represented him at headquarters. Roosevelt, in fact, was not happy over the way the campaign was managed. He objected to Smith’s choice of John J. Raskob for national chairman, for Raskob was a wet, a Catholic, and a wealthy General Motors executive—factors, Roosevelt feared, that would only intensify the already strong anti-Smith feeling in the Protestant South and the Progressive West.
“Smith has burned his bridges behind him,” he wrote his close friend Van Lear Black late in July. “My own particular role will be that of the elder statesman who will not be one of the ‘yes men’ at headquarters.” He felt that Smith’s lieutenants were excluding him from the top campaign councils. He was unhappy about the publicity program, which was being handled by a Smith underling with the help of the General Motors advertising experts. “In other words, it is a situation in which you and I can find little room for very active work, but we shall be in a more advantageous position in the long run.…”
What did Roosevelt mean by “in the long run”? Perhaps these words give some clue to his motives in the confused situation that shortly developed.
In mid-September Roosevelt went to Warm Springs. He knew before leaving New York that party leaders wanted him to run for governor; Smith had already approached him. Why was Roosevelt so unwilling? First of all, there was his health. In one brief exhilarating moment at Warm Springs he had taken a few steps without canes. Two more years of Warm Springs, he felt, and he might discard them entirely (but not, of course, his braces, which he must have accepted by then as permanent). He was also concerned about the success of Warm Springs, in which he had invested a large sum of money.
But his main motives were those of a politician. He had long been pessimistic about the Democrats’ chances in 1928 and his hopes had not risen after the convention. The country was prosperous; Hoover was a strong candidate for the Republicans; and Smith’s vulnerability as a Catholic and a wet became increasingly evident as the campaign progressed. To run in 1928 might mean going down with the ship; but if Smith lost, all sorts of possibilities would open up for the future.
Late in September the state Democratic convention met in Rochester. Smith and his lieutenants anxiously canvassed the gubernatorial prospects. How much Smith himself wanted Roosevelt to run is uncertain. Most of the pressure came from state leaders who feared that the Republicans, with Al out of the way, would regain control in Albany. Howe, who was dead set against his chief’s running in 1928, wired Roosevelt that only the jobholders really wanted him. He warned: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
Whatever his own feelings, Smith took the lead in pressuring Roosevelt. Roosevelt made himself inaccessible during the first day of the convention, but Smith finally got him on the telephone. One by one the governor pushed Roosevelt’s objections aside. Raskob would help finance Warm Springs. The governor’s duties were not arduous enough to interfere with his program of recovery. Above all, the party needed him; it wanted to draft him.
Undoubtedly it was this last argument that moved Roosevelt. His long-term political hopes clearly limited his personal choice in the matter. Smith and the other leaders pressed their demands to the point where further refusal would appear as an act of disloyalty, an act that in itself might cause a bitterness in the party toward Roosevelt that would jeopardize his future prospects.
Smith seemed to sense the weakness. Would Roosevelt decline to run if the convention nominated him?
Roosevelt hesitated. This was a situation that he could not control. Smith saw his advantage and hung up. On October 2, 1928, the Rochester convention nominated Roosevelt for governor of New York. Thus it happened that Roosevelt, against his own intentions and the advice of Howe and with his wife unsure of her own mind, took the first direct step to the presidency. It was significant that his return to politics, like his original entrance eighteen years before, came about chiefly at the behest of his party.
When news of Roosevelt’s nomination by acclamation reached Warm Springs the little cottage had an air more of gloom than of triumph. From Howe came a sour wire: BY WAY OF CONGRATULATIONS DIG UP TELEGRAM I SENT YOU WHEN YOU RAN IN SENATORIAL PRIMARIES—a reminder of Howe’s opposition to his chief’s ill-fated effort against Gerard in 1914. Soon Roosevelt’s cheerful voice rang out: “Well, if I’ve got to run for governor, there’s no use in all of us getting sick about it!”
The Republicans promptly took the line that the crippled Roosevelt was a sacrificial offering to Smith’s presidential ambitions. The drafting was pitiless and pathetic, one newspaper said. Smith met the attack head on. “We don’t elect a Governor for his ability to do a double back flip or a handspring,” he said. “The work of the Governorship is brainwork.” Roosevelt’s answer was a bit more calculated. He had not been dragooned into running, he asserted. Smith had been willing to abide by his reluctance to run. “I was drafted because all of the party leaders when they assembled insisted that my often-expressed belief in the policies of Governor Smith made my nomination the best assurance to the voters that these policies would be continued.” But the best answer, Roosevelt felt, would be a vigorous campaign around the state.
Both party tickets mirrored the New York melting pot. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent was Albert Ottinger, a prominent Jew and an experienced politician who had won the state attorney generalship despite Smith’s hold on the governorship. Running with Roosevelt for lieutenant governor was Herbert Lehman, also a Jew, head of a lucrative private banking firm and a heavy contributor to Smith’s campaigns. Senator Copeland was up for a second term.
Roosevelt already had the nucleus of the staff that would go on with him to the White House. Recognizing his limited knowledge of current state problems, he asked Maurice Bloch, his campaign manager and the Democratic leader in the assembly, to find someone to help him. Bloch recommended Samuel I. Rosenman, a young former state legislator who had served on the legislative bill drafting commission for the past three years. In charge of the Roosevelt headquarters in New York City was James A. Farley, a contractor and state boxing commissioner who had recently been appointed secretary of the state Democratic committee. Edward J. Flynn, boss of the turbulent Democracy in the Bronx, worked for Roosevelt in New York. Howe, quickly overcoming his pique, had his hand in everything; one of his main jobs was setting up a number of “independent” committees for Roosevelt that catered to special groups such as businessmen and professional men.
Lugging suitcases filled with red Manila envelopes neatly marked “Labor,” “Taxes,” and other state issues, Rosenman met Roosevelt on the Hoboken ferry as the campaign party left for the 1,300-mile campaign around New York. It was mid-October, with three weeks to election. Rosenman had heard stories that Roosevelt was something of a playboy, that he was weak and ineffective. “But the broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands”—these, Rosenman said later, did not fit the picture.
For three days Roosevelt ignored Rosenman. The campaign seemed to be a curiously unplanned affair. At first Roosevelt concentrated on national issues to such an extent that Bloch wired Rosenman: TELL THE CANDIDATE THAT HE IS NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT BUT FOR GOVERNOR.… Roosevelt, however, enjoyed little freedom of action. He had to run on Smith’s record as governor—an excellent record, but one that did not enable Roosevelt to proclaim bold new plans. And he had to run in the midst of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice that was strong in New York State as well as the rest of the country.
This bigotry Roosevelt denounced in his first major talk, and he did so in a city—Binghamton—that had been a Ku Klux Klan stronghold earlier in the century. He told of the printed handbills he had seen in Georgia stating that if Smith became president Protestant marriages would be void and children made illegitimate. “Yes, you may laugh,” he said, but it was a serious problem. “I believe that the day will come in this country when education—and, incidentally, we have never had a Governor in the State of New York who has done more for the cause of education than Alfred E. Smith—when education in our own State and in every other State, in the cities and the hamlets and the farms, in the back alleys and up on the mountains, will be so widespread, so clean, so American, that this vile thing that is hanging over our heads in this Presidential election will not be able to survive.”
For two days the campaign train chugged through the tier of agricultural counties above the Pennsylvania line. In Jamestown, Roosevelt endorsed the state platform’s pledge to name a commission to study the problem of farm taxes and distribution, but he openly went beyond the platform to say that he wanted to see “the farmer and his family receive at the end of each year as much for their labor as if they had been working … as skilled workers under the best conditions in any one of our great industries.” In 1928 this was an extreme version of “parity”—more extreme than Roosevelt probably realized.
By the time he reached Buffalo he was using Rosenman’s meaty envelopes of facts on state legislation. He showed Rosenman the art of converting a dull sheaf of facts into a political speech—how to make a speech sparkle with wit and irony, how to turn statistics into a broadside without seeming to use statistics, how to gird details around a central dramatic theme. Not that Roosevelt himself had become the accomplished speaker he was later to be. Many of his speeches had the air of improvisation, lacking any central theme. He made the mistake of repeatedly mentioning Ottinger’s name. On the other hand, he knew and used such devices as attacking the Republican leadership—especially the leaders in the state legislature—rather than the Republicans as a whole. Generally his speeches ran the register nicely from cheery good will to indignation at the promises and “misrepresentations” of the enemy.
Because he wanted close contact with the voters, the candidate switched to an automobile for the campaign in the western counties and for the long trip through the Mohawk Valley in central New York to the Albany area, and then down to New York City. Behind lurched two buses, one for newsmen and the other for stenographers, mimeographers, and their equipment. Traveling by car enabled Roosevelt to shake hands at the crossroads. Speaking in halls was difficult; sometimes the candidate had to be carried up fire escapes and back stairs. Watching one of these entrances, Frances Perkins realized that this man had accepted the ultimate humility that comes from being helped physically, and accepted it smiling. “He came up over that perilous, uncomfortable, and humiliating ‘entrance,’ and his manner was pleasant, courteous, enthusiastic. He got up on his own braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim’s, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual.”
Roosevelt delighted in telling his audiences of his strenuous campaign—of the seven speeches in one day, the side trips, being “kidnapped” to make extra appearances. “Too bad about this unfortunate sick man, isn’t it?”
Batavia, Rochester, Canandaigua, Syracuse—slowly the caravan wound its way through country brilliant with fall colors. In Rochester the candidate advocated a broader state health program, a better old-age pension law, and repeal of the state’s archaic poor law. In Syracuse, one hundred miles south of the outlet of the St. Lawrence into Lake Ontario, he declared that the people wanted “their” power sites—like the Long Saulte Rapids on that river—developed by a state power authority and not by a private corporation. In Utica, a center of dry feeling, he came out flatly against a “baby Volstead act” that would establish state enforcement of prohibition side by side with national—a position that made him almost as wet as Smith himself. Back in Manhattan he promised that the Democrats would enact a “real 48-hour law.” In the Bronx he outlined an ambitious program of judicial reform. In Yonkers he mentioned scornfully that a leading magazine had featured an article under the title, “Is Hoover Human?” No one in his wildest dreams, he proclaimed, could ask the same question about Al Smith.
Did his campaign win votes for Roosevelt? Undoubtedly—but it was probably no more important an element than others hidden far below the surface of events. Ottinger was badly knifed in Erie County by a Republican faction there. In New York City some whispered that he was not a “good Jew”—and the candidate had to state publicly that he was “bar mitzvah [confirmed] in the Central Synagogue.” But it was Smith who suffered real desertions. Thousands of New Yorkers who had given him their votes for governor failed to support him for the presidency. His Bowery mien, his harsh resonance over what he called the “raddio,” his natty dress with the bright pocket handkerchief—all these clashed with their idea of the man who should occupy the White House.
On election eve Smith and Roosevelt glumly listened to the election returns in a New York armory. By midnight it was clear that Smith had lost both New York and the nation. “Well,” Al is reported to have said, “the time just hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House.” The race for governor was close, and returns came in slowly. Knowing the reputation of some Republican election officials upstate for holding back returns until they could estimate their party’s needs, Roosevelt and Flynn telephoned warnings to upstate sheriffs that a “staff of 100 lawyers” would leave the next morning to hunt for election frauds. This was partly bluff, but it may have helped. Roosevelt went to bed. Flynn told him in the morning that he had won. Final returns were 2,130,193 for Roosevelt to 2,104,629 for Ottinger—a margin of 25,564 votes.
It was a hairbreadth victory for Roosevelt and an ironic defeat for Smith in his own state. The former ran about 73,000 votes ahead of the latter upstate, but only 33,000 behind him in New York City. Thus Roosevelt’s tactic of nursing his upstate strength while at the same time keeping friendly with Tammany seemed to pay off. On the whole he emerged relatively unscathed from the maelstrom of factional desertions and party shifts. Even so, Roosevelt’s showing was not impressive. He ran behind Lehman and Copeland; the latter had had the backing of Hearst, who openly opposed Roosevelt.
The Republicans won the presidency on the prosperity as well as the religious issue. The day after the election a “victory boom” in Wall Street roared the stock exchange to the second biggest day up to that time.