TO FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S ADORING MOTHER, his devoted aide, Howe, and the crucible of polio, add one more indispensable influence: a complex and ultimately poisonous relationship with his occasional patron and rival—Al Smith. It’s a sign of FDR’s complicated feelings toward Smith that a picture of the two men happily shaking hands in the early days of FDR’s governorship hung in Roosevelt’s bedroom at Hyde Park the day he died, and hangs there still.
Smith, who in 1932 would do everything he could to destroy Roosevelt’s political career, did not feel the same. When a reporter later asked him why their friendship went sour, he replied: “Frank Roosevelt just threw me out of a window.” That seems unfair to Roosevelt. It was more like two men of different ages wrestling on the window ledge. The older lunges with a snarl toward the passive-aggressive upstart, then falls.
For FDR, besting Smith was critical to his self-confidence. A decade older, Smith represented all of the people throughout Roosevelt’s life who underestimated him, belittled his skills, and thought he was too weak—both physically and mentally—to be president. To beat someone with such a legendary common touch boosted his faith in his own connection to voters. It must have been privately exhilarating to move his wrecked body from the side of the road, then pass Smith at high speed en route to the presidency.
Frances Perkins once said that the two driving forces in Franklin Roosevelt’s life were to outshine Smith and to outshine his cousin Theodore. These motivations “were so deeply buried in his subconscious that he could hardly have been aware of them, but they were always driving elements, driving him to do things. They were partly what made him so active when there was a great deal of indolence in his nature.”
Alfred Emanuel Smith’s second-generation multi-ethnic Catholic background was a world away from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. Fatherless at fourteen, young Al put food on his family’s table icing fish at the Fulton Fish Market (he later joked that he had an “FFM” degree). He proved so outgoing and loud that he got a job yelling out the results of boxing matches—including Jim Corbett’s famous victory over John L. Sullivan—as they clattered over the wires. He won a patronage job at twenty-one and began making his way up the ladder, a streetwise politician with backslaps and a ready “Noo Yawk” line of banter for every “poissun” who was willing to “woik.”
But there was more to Smith than his street personality. Elected to the State Assembly in 1903 at age thirty, the young lawmaker developed his own unusually strong work habits, and with the help of a German immigrant legislator named Robert Wagner became a master of the legislative and administrative process. When he met FDR in Albany in 1911, he resented him immediately as a showy upstart with more money than sense. The best judges of talent in both parties agreed. By contrast, all respected Smith for his wit, force of character, and deep knowledge of politics and government.
Smith was elected governor in 1918, and served for most of the next decade as perhaps the most successful governor in the history of the state. Throughout that time, an enduring fiction developed in the press that “Al” and “Frank” were close personal friends. This was mainly peddled by FDR, who worked successfully (and with Eleanor’s help) to create the impression that he was still a force in New York politics. In truth, while Franklin and Eleanor invited the Smiths to Hyde Park a few times for barbecues, the men had little more than an uneasy political partnership.
Smith was clearly the senior partner, and not just because he was governor and FDR—despite his base among upstate Democrats—an ailing political bench warmer. When Smith first ran for president in 1924, he asked Roosevelt to be chairman of his campaign, figuring that a well-known New Yorker who wasn’t part of Tammany Hall was an asset. But Smith assumed that the young polio victim was just a figurehead and would let Smith aides handle everything. This set the pattern for how the Smith camp viewed Roosevelt, and FDR came to resent it.
Their relationship first deteriorated in 1924 over a New York State sinecure FDR wanted for Louis Howe. Smith’s aide, Robert Moses—who was known to call Roosevelt “a pretty poor excuse for a man” and Howe “lousy Louie”—wrote to FDR that if he “wanted a secretary or valet,” he would have to pay for it himself, not out of the funds of the Taconic State Park Commission, which FDR chaired. Smith backed up Moses, a decision Roosevelt never forgot.
In 1927 and 1928, Roosevelt started to complain to Smith about Moses withholding funding for the commission (“I wasn’t born yesterday”). This prompted a patronizing response that captured Smith’s true feelings toward FDR. First, the governor laid it on thick: “I will not get into a fight with you for anything or anybody.” Then he lowered the boom: “But that does not prevent me from giving you a little tip and the tip is: Don’t be so sure about things that you have not the personal handling of yourself.”
Howe later argued that this condescension actually helped Roosevelt: “Smith considered Franklin a little boy who didn’t know anything about politics; that left Franklin free.” But if being underestimated by his rival carried advantages for Roosevelt, it must have hurt, too. Smith, with little formal education, was clearly more intelligent and knew more of the policy details of government, a reality that no amount of pride could erase from Roosevelt’s mind. And for all of FDR’s political skills, he was simply incapable of being one of the boys. Local politics before the era of television entailed a sense of loyalty and obligation, even honor, nurtured by a web of tribal relationships. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t belong to this club.
Nor did he want to. Tammany—Smith’s base—was still alien territory, as it had been early in his career. Roosevelt, despite his get-rich-quick schemes, was still committed to a genteel world of understatement at odds with the ethos of the Roaring Twenties; Smith was friends with New York’s flashy mayor, Jimmy Walker, and liked to pal around with self-made businessmen. FDR didn’t approve of his mother directing little snooty barbs at Smith behind his back. But he sensed that perhaps Smith and his crowd were directing a different kind of barb at him. It was snob versus reverse snob. Both men had their shoulders chipped by the other, but couldn’t admit it.
The year 1928 seemed to be the peak of their partnership, but it also marked their breach. After another fine nominating speech by FDR, the Democratic Convention in Houston chose Al Smith as its candidate for president, which meant that the party needed a candidate for governor who could help carry New York for the national ticket. It was always reported that Smith handpicked Roosevelt to succeed him, and FDR believed this himself at the time. Only in the 1990s did details of a private meeting surface showing that Smith didn’t want FDR to be his successor; he thought he was too weakened by polio (Smith preferred Herbert Lehman). But as the first Catholic presidential nominee, Smith was worried about losing his home state because of defections to the GOP by Protestant votes in upstate New York, a fear that proved justified. He was finally persuaded by Rockland County chairman Jim Farley and other New York State political operatives that Roosevelt—with his unusual profile as a rural New York Democrat—might help. When Smith called FDR on a scratchy telephone line to Warm Springs with the request that he run, it was Eleanor who helped close the deal.
Smith quickly rationalized the decision. When an associate, Dan Finn, asked him whether he wasn’t afraid “you are raising up a rival who will some day cause you trouble?” Smith replied: “No, Dan, he won’t live a year.” A decade later, when finally told by Finn of Smith’s remark, Roosevelt recalled that many people “believed—some honestly and some because they wanted to—that I was headed for a tombstone.”
At first, FDR himself did not want to run for governor in 1928. He thought it would interrupt his polio treatment and end any hope of his walking again. Howe, too, was opposed, in part because it looked like a Republican year. “If ever a man was ‘drafted’ for an office, that man was ‘Frank’ Roosevelt in 1928,” Time magazine later reported. The Republican press savaged him as a “cripple” and a “joke.” But FDR found that he loved campaigning. “If I could campaign another six months, I could throw away my canes,” he wrote Sara.
It was hardly an easy adjustment. When he learned of the absence of a ground-floor stage entrance at one speech venue, Roosevelt insisted that it would inspire too much pity for him to “walk” painstakingly up the long center aisle, with a cane and the arm of his bodyguard. So he climbed the backstage fire escape with his strong arms, moving with great difficulty up the ladder, and entered through a second-floor window. When he arrived just in time for the speech, his shirt was soaked with sweat.
On election night, 1928, Franklin and Eleanor went to bed believing he had lost. The morning newspapers would report the same. Then, just as Howe saved his career in 1912 with the 16½ inch apple barrel gambit, a newer friend, Bronx boss Ed Flynn, unveiled a brilliant bluff that spared Roosevelt’s political life. Flynn knew that the longer upstate votes remained uncounted, the greater the chance for ballot-tampering. So at 2:00 a.m. he told the press that a hundred high-powered lawyers and prosecutors would be on the 8:30 a.m. train to upstate cities where Republican vote fraud was suspected. It was a total fiction, but the bluff worked. Returns started flowing in more rapidly, and as dawn neared, Roosevelt was narrowly elected governor. His mother and Frances Perkins (now helping FDR’s campaign) were the only ones still at the headquarters to hear the news.
Smith, meanwhile, was crushed by Herbert Hoover. “The time hasn’t come when a man can say his [rosary] beads in the White House,” he said bitterly. His mood fouled, the outgoing governor apparently didn’t think his successor could function in Albany. First Smith and Roosevelt squabbled over the details of the New Year’s Day Inauguration, with Smith insisting that the swearing in be held indoors, where the new governor would not have to negotiate steps. The event was held outdoors, as FDR preferred, but that Smith would presume to arrange someone else’s Inaugural was indicative of his attitude that he was still in charge. Then he suggested that FDR might want to spend the winter months after he was sworn in resting in Warm Springs while he continued to look after state business back in Albany. Smith went so far as to take a suite at the Hotel DeWitt Clinton nearby and even kept some clothes in the Governor’s Mansion after the Roosevelts moved in just in case.*
The breaking point came over Belle Moskowitz, Smith’s domineering secretary and link to his old power base. Roosevelt knew and respected Moskowitz but resisted suggestions that he retain her. Smith sent Frances Perkins—soon to be FDR’s state industrial commissioner—to find out why Moskowitz had to go. When she arrived, Roosevelt looked out the window, went silent a moment, and then opened himself up to Perkins in ways he seldom would in the years to come with anyone.
You know, I didn’t feel able to make this campaign for governor, but I made it. I didn’t feel that I was sufficiently recovered to undertake the duties of Governor of New York, but here I am. After Al said that to me [about appointing Moskowitz], I thought about myself and I realized that I’ve got to be Governor of the state of New York and I’ve got to be it myself. If I weren’t, if I didn’t want to do it myself, something would be wrong in here.
When she looked back on it, Perkins believed this moment marked a rite of passage for Roosevelt, like a younger sibling coming out from the shadow of his older brother or a protégé surpassing his mentor. The consequences of the rift would eventually be damaging to FDR’s ascent to the White House, but indispensable for the independent character he showed once he arrived there.
It’s tempting when analyzing a successful leader to work backwards—to assume every event in his background prefigures his performance in office. Life is always messier than such determinism, and Franklin Roosevelt’s pre-presidential career is no exception.
Even so, FDR does seem to have carried a critical series of qualities into the 1930s. If he had not been preternaturally secure, he could not have convincingly conveyed such security to others. If he had not been manipulative and theatrical, he could not have won the prize in the first place, or inspired the country as president. And if his character had not been deepened by suffering, the steel within it might never have materialized in public view.
As it was, he continued to be underestimated throughout 1932 and early 1933, which played perfectly into his hands.
*Roosevelt didn’t help matters when he promised Smith he would show him an advance copy of his Budget Message and then neglected to do so.