Franklin Roosevelt’s highly publicized stand against Sheehan did not come without a price. While it made him popular in Progressive circles, it caused nothing but anger and suspicion among most of his fellow Democratic legislators. Boss Murphy and the Tammany faction recognized that his vote for O’Gorman, which many outsiders perceived as a victory for clean government, was in fact a capitulation to political reality. Thereafter, he was tolerated by the Democratic leadership because they needed his vote, but he was never accepted. Once again, he was not “one of the boys.”
Frances Perkins, who had moved up to Albany during the legislative session to lobby for laws to protect female laborers, remembered Roosevelt in operation. “I have a vivid picture of him operating on the floor of the Senate: tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who were more or less avoiding him, not particularly charming (that would come later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling.… Many staunch old Tammany Democrats in those days felt that he did look down his nose at them. I remember old Tim Sullivan, himself the acme of personal amiability, saying after a bout with Roosevelt, ‘Awfully arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt.’”
As the legislative session played out, Franklin found plenty of reason to continue being arrogant. Tammany was taking advantage of the party’s control of both houses and the governorship to advance any number of dubious legislative initiatives calculated to line the pockets of supporters, and Roosevelt stubbornly fought them all. His anti-Tammany activities were warmly welcomed by his constituency back home—the Republican farmers and Democratic urban voters of the Twenty-Sixth Senatorial District—but they were doing him no good whatsoever in Albany, where it counted most.
When the Legislature finally recessed on July 22, Roosevelt was relieved to rejoin his wife and children, who had already decamped for Campobello, and to cruise down the Maine coast in the Half Moon II, the 60-foot luxury schooner he had inherited from his father.
The summer break provided an ample opportunity to assess his immediate future, and it would have been all too clear that while his dramatic entry into politics had been a resounding success, the fact that he remained at odds with those who ran his party strongly suggested he would have to look elsewhere within the Democratic Party if he hoped to live up to the ambitious career path he had so boldly proclaimed in the offices of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn.
One answer to his problem might lie with Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. Wilson, who until recently had been president of Princeton University, had been elected governor the same year FDR entered politics, and within four short months of his inauguration he had pushed through a spectacular series of reform measures, including a corrupt practices law, an employers’ liability law, a primary and direct election law, and a law establishing a strong public utilities commission with rate-setting powers. As a result, Wilson had attracted a lot of attention and was the frontrunner in the early odds for the Democratic nomination for president in 1912. Many Progressive Democrats from around the country were eager to connect with this rising star, and one of them was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Early in October 1911, he arranged an appointment with Wilson at the governor’s office in Trenton. That first meeting between those two men, each destined to become a giant of American politics, was to prove crucial to the 29-year-old Roosevelt. In the way of political trade-offs, he had very little to offer Wilson other than his famous name and his new reputation as an anti-Tammany crusader. But that turned out to be sufficient. The national convention was scheduled for the following June in Baltimore, and the governor asked him how much support he could expect from the New York delegation. Roosevelt told him that he estimated that about a third of the New York delegates might be expected to favor a Wilson candidacy, but that figure meant little since they could not vote for him. The delegation would be bound by the unit rule, he explained, which meant they were already pledged to vote for whoever Charles Murphy told them to vote for, and both men were well aware that Murphy did not favor Wilson.
Roosevelt had further to admit that because he himself was personally out of favor with Murphy, he did not expect to be named a delegate or even an alternate. Wilson was intrigued by Roosevelt’s grasp of the situation and by his obvious energy and enthusiasm. There was one other critical issue that undoubtedly came up, although there is no record either of Wilson’s question or Roosevelt’s response. It concerned FDR’s Uncle Ted. In those closing months of 1911, Theodore Roosevelt was making it increasingly clear that he was frustrated by the way his hand-picked successor William Howard Taft was running the country, and it seemed increasingly likely to many observers that he might try to recapture the Republican nomination at the GOP convention. If TR became the Republican candidate, Woodrow Wilson wanted to know, where would Franklin Roosevelt stand? Would he cross the aisle and support his dynamic cousin, or would he remain loyal to his party?
FDR must have recognized that the question would arise, and he would have long since decided on an answer. In all likelihood, he promised to remain loyal to Wilson if Wilson managed to get the nomination, but if someone else was named the Democratic nominee he would have to reassess his allegiances. Whatever his answer was—and he left no record of it—it apparently satisfied Wilson, for after their meeting the two men left the governor’s office together and continued their conversation on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s short run from Trenton to Princeton Junction, where Wilson still made his home on the university campus.
That first meeting between Roosevelt and Wilson marks the moment when the younger man had to make a critical shift in the twin loyalties that formed his psychological center, gently loosening his ties to family and strengthening them to party. The fact that he was able to do this as easily as he did suggests his growing political skill and self-confidence.