Franklin Roosevelt, standing on the front steps of his beloved Springwood in Hyde Park, looked out at the huge crowd of five thousand people who had come to share with him this very important moment in his life—the formal notification of his nomination to be the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate. He was thirty-eight years old, and doubtless he took pride in the fact that he had reached this particular milestone at an age three years younger than Uncle Ted.
He and Eleanor had attended Cox’s notification the day before in Dayton, and had returned home in time for his own. Inside the house, Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas had just finished taking care of the formalities in the library, and now Roosevelt had come out into the noontime sun to make his acceptance speech.
The day was August 9, 1920, stiflingly humid as the Hudson Valley almost always is at that time of year, but the crowd appeared unaffected by the heat, delighted to be present and to help celebrate a local boy who had made good.
Nor was the crowd made up solely of neighbors. There were important people in his audience, people who had come a long way to share this moment: Josephus Daniels, up from Washington to cheer on his assistant, William Gibbs McAdoo, who had lost the presidential nomination to Cox but remained a prominent figure in the party, and Governor Al Smith, his old Tammany colleague from Albany. His mother sat proudly at his side, and Eleanor and the two oldest children were off to his right. Even Sara’s older brother, Warren Delano III, had put aside his Republican convictions for this one day to celebrate his nephew’s entry into national elective politics.
And they had all come to see him. That was important to Roosevelt. For once, he was not an outsider looking in, nor even an honored guest. He was the sole reason for these ceremonies, for this crowd, for all these people who had rearranged their lives that they might be here.
He had worked long and hard on his speech. He would try not to disappoint them.
I accept the nomination for the office of Vice President with humbleness, and with a deep wish to give to our beloved country the best that is in me.—No one could receive a higher privilege or opportunity than to be thus associated with men and ideals which I am confident will soon receive the support of the majority of our citizens.
He was standing less than a hundred feet from the spot where, as a boy more than twenty-five years earlier, he first read The Naval War of 1812, and where he had absorbed so much of Cousin Ted’s vision, his sense of urgency, his world view. What a remarkable amount of living and learning he had crowded into the years since! Those first tentative steps away from home at Groton (where his eldest son James was about to enter in a few weeks), his slow but determined mastery of his social awkwardness there and at Harvard and Columbia Law, his marriage, which bound him so directly to the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and Uncle Ted, his simplistic but astonishingly accurate career plan, which again served to tie him spiritually to Theodore, his entry into politics and his unexpected rise to prominence as a result of the Sheehan battle, his alliance with Louis Howe, part wizard Merlin, part loyal Sancho Panza.
Two great problems will confront the next administration; our relations with the world and the pressing need of organized progress at home.… We must either shut our eyes … close our ports, build an impregnable wall of costly armaments, and live, as the Orient used to live, a hermit nation, dreaming of the past; or we must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.
As for our home problem, we have been awakened by this war into a startled realization of the archaic shortcomings of our governmental machinery and of the need for the kind of reorganization which only a clear thinking businessman, experienced in the technicalities of governmental procedure, can carry out.
There was his embrace of Wilson’s dynamic idealism, and his subsequent single-minded campaign to secure the post of assistant secretary of the Navy, and how the Navy, which had first stirred his interest in the larger world of government, had shaped his understanding of that government; how Josephus Daniels, who could be so maddeningly obtuse at times, had taught him how to deal with those who would try to impose their will on the public good for their own profit; how, in the confused years leading up to America’s entry into the war, he had seen the need for America to prepare for that eventuality and how it had taken Wilson a year to recognize that need; how it was through his own vision and determination that the North Sea Barrage was brought into being.
Let us be definite. We have passed through a great war,—an armed conflict which called forth every effort on the part of the whole population.—The war was won by Republicans as well as by Democrats.… It would, therefore, not only serve little purpose,—but would conform ill to our high standards if any person should in the heat of political rivalry seek to manufacture political advantage out of a nationally conducted struggle.
He had learned to see war as a desperate enterprise that rarely solved the crisis that brought it on, and how it was imperative to find some means of controlling humanity’s tendency toward conflict.
To this end the Democratic Party offers a treaty of peace, which to make it a real treaty for a real peace MUST include a League of Nations; because this peace treaty, if our best and bravest are not to have died in vain, must be no thinly disguised armistice devised by cynical statesmen to mask their preparations for a renewal of greed-inspired conquests later on.
Roosevelt had absorbed a hands-on education, an education like no other, where he had seen his cousinly idol go too far in the pursuit of Nobility and Honor, and his president not go far enough in his pursuit of very different ideals with the same names. He had come to understand the need for strength, and had learned where it lay and how it could be mobilized. He had learned that there would always be critical problems, that when they arose they must be faced, and willy-nilly there would be ways to solve them.
America’s opportunity is at hand. We can lead the world by a great example, we can prove this nation a living, growing thing, with policies that are adequate to new conditions. In a thousand ways this is our hour of test.
For all his brave words, 1920 would not be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s year. America would reject the Democratic ticket in favor of Harding and Coolidge. The country would be content to relapse into the comfort of old and familiar ways. But such would not always be the case. Franklin Roosevelt’s time would come. And when it came, he would be ready.