Toward the end of summer, as soon as he had secured his renomination for the 26th Senatorial District, Roosevelt headed north to join his family at Campobello for a brief respite before throwing himself into the campaign for reelection. Then, early in September, he and Eleanor closed up the cottage and took the steamer south. After depositing the children at Hyde Park, they took the train into the city for what they expected to be a single night at their house on East 65th Street before returning upstate to begin campaigning. But such was not to be.
Early that evening, Franklin became violently ill with a high fever and severe stomach pain. He was unable to eat or even stand up. The next day he was no better, and when Eleanor summoned help, the doctor was unable to diagnose her husband’s condition. Franklin remained in bed for ten days with no improvement, nursed by Eleanor, who began showing symptoms of the same mysterious illness. Finally the malady was diagnosed as typhoid fever, and Eleanor was ordered to bed as well. No one was sure how they had contracted the disease, but Eleanor thought it might have been due to the possibility that both of them had brushed their teeth with contaminated water on board the steamer from Campobello.
Franklin was far too ill to attempt anything as physically challenging as a political campaign, and time was getting increasingly short. He needed help. He remembered a newspaper man named Louis Howe, the upstate political correspondent for the James Gordon Bennett papers, the New York Herald and the Telegram. The two men had come to know each other in Albany, and they had become friendly. Howe admired Roosevelt’s dash and determination, and it was he who had written that the battle against Sheehan was “the most humanly interesting political fight in many years.” His reporting had done much to enhance Roosevelt’s reputation throughout the state. Their relationship had grown closer when Roosevelt hired Howe to handle the publicity for the New York Wilson Conference at Baltimore. Franklin asked Eleanor to contact Howe and ask him to come down to New York and take over the campaign.
Roosevelt’s decision to seek out Howe to deal with this newest emergency must have seemed an obvious choice. But whatever the reasoning behind it, the choice was more than simply fortuitous. In terms of FDR’s future career, his sickbed selection of Louis Howe was almost certainly the most important decision he made in the seminal year of 1912.
Louis McHenry Howe was a chain-smoking wizened gnome of a man who was one of the first people to recognize the young Roosevelt’s enormous potential. As events would soon reveal, he was also a brilliant strategist and publicist. He was vacationing on the Massachusetts shore when he received Eleanor’s telegram asking for help, and he immediately caught the next train to New York. On his arrival, the two men huddled together in the sickroom and, over the course of the next few days, put together a plan for a campaign that in all likelihood might have to be conducted without a single appearance of the candidate. Constituencies were defined, needs assessed, budgets estimated, and schedules established. Louis Howe was brought on board for $50.00 a week plus expenses.
Howe immediately moved his small family to a boardinghouse in Poughkeepsie to be closer to the action, and again leased the same red two-cylinder Maxwell that FDR had used in his first run for office and hired its owner to drive him around the district. Simultaneously, he threw himself into the preparation of something still comparatively new in American politics—an advertising campaign.
Soon subscribers to the local papers in Dutchess, Columbia, and Sullivan counties found themselves reading full-page ads—a distinct novelty at the time—trumpeting Roosevelt’s agrarian progressivism, his support of women’s suffrage and fair labor practices, his bipartisanship, his anti-boss credentials, and his knowledge of and concern for the specific needs of his constituents.
Howe developed “a great farmer stunt,” a proposal for a bill to protect farmers from commission merchants, the middlemen who pocketed the difference between the low prices they paid to farmers and the high prices they charged consumers. A poster addressed to fruit-growers who sold their produce on a per-barrel basis and were often cheated when buyers used oversized barrels to measure the fruit, gives an idea of Louis Howe’s style of targeted, specific political promises:
TO FRUIT GROWERS!
I am convinced after careful investigation that the present law making a 17 1/8 inch barrel the legal standard for fruit unjust and oppressive to fruit growers.
I pledge myself to introduce and fight for the passage of an amendment to the law making a Standard Fruit Barrel of 16 1/2 inches.
This barrel to be the legal standard for fruit and to be marked, “Standard Fruit Barrel.”
The justice of this seems so plain that I feel assured of the passage of the amendment.…
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Candidate for State Senator
When Franklin Roosevelt says he will fight for a thing, it means he won’t quit until he wins—you know that.
In addition to running an advertising campaign and giving the occasional speech, Howe also had to recruit the army of volunteers necessary for a tri-county race, and then organize them and supervise their efforts. Shrewd, sharp-witted, and delighted with his new career, Louis Howe took to campaigning with the same alacrity Franklin had shown two years earlier. “I’m having more fun than a goat,” Howe told his boss.
On Election Day, November 5, all of Louis Howe’s efforts paid off handsomely. That night, he was able to telephone Roosevelt and tell him he had won big. Wilson and the Democratic candidate for governor, William Sulzer, also won; but in his district FDR had received more votes than either, and he could claim that he had helped them far more than they had helped him.
In the national campaign, Wilson won the White House with a popular vote of 6,293,019 to Uncle Ted’s 4,119,507 and Taft’s 3,484,956. The Electoral College tally was even more definitive: 435 for Wilson, 88 for Theodore Roosevelt, and a mere 8 for the incumbent Taft.
Franklin had won an important victory, an election that proved his vote-getting abilities to the people who would now judge him for possible inclusion in the upcoming administration in Washington. But in the process he had won something just as important—in fact, arguably more important: the fealty of a very smart and totally dedicated Louis Howe, who could offer him the same fierce love and loyalty he had always had from his mother, but with none of the imperious second-guessing, none of the controlling mechanisms that could on occasion try the patience and thwart the vision and ambitions of this remarkable young man.