BY THIS TIME , Roosevelt had decided not just to campaign hard for president but to show Hoover no mercy. As the Depression deepened, FDR dictated this memo to Howe:
Here is a subject for a campaign cartoon:
Caption: Are you carrying the Hoover banner?
Below this: Picture of a man holding his trouser pockets turned inside out.
Underneath: The words “nuff said.”
This suggests FDR not only had an instinct for the jugular but fancied himself competing with the legendary publicist Charlie Michelson (known as “the Ghost”), the former Hearst reporter and pioneer of yellow journalism hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to castigate Hoover at every opportunity. It’s often forgotten that Hoover didn’t just sink under the waves of the Depression; he was drowned anew every day by Michelson.
The popularization of the folk epithets “Hoovervilles” to describe encampments of the unemployed on the outskirts of cities and “Hoovercarts” for cars drawn by mules because the drivers could not afford gas were only two of the successful gambits of Michelson and his DNC research department. Nearly every day, Michelson issued a savage press release. Through repetition he spread the myth that Hoover said “prosperity is just around the corner” (Hoover never actually said it, though he said many similar things) and popularized a joke that the president had asked Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon for a nickel because he wanted to call a friend. Mellon is said to have replied, “Here’s a dime. Telephone both of them.”
Hoover’s woes helped Roosevelt, but FDR still had to execute some delicate maneuvers within his own party. At the March 1931 meeting of the DNC, Al Smith and his “wet” friends—who controlled the party apparatus—were disturbed to learn that their proposal for an unequivocal stand for repeal of Prohibition was opposed by none other than the governor of New York. He wasn’t dry, but he wasn’t wet either. A straddling FDR was known as a “damp,” a politician favoring a compromise that dumped the issue back in the lap of the states.
This was a pivotal moment in Roosevelt’s march to the 1932 nomination. The southern “drys” in the party were turning to FDR not out of any affection but as “the most effective way of killing off Smith,” in the words of Tennessee senator Cordell Hull, a dry. They hoped to pull together North and South and “bury the hatchet—in Al Smith’s neck.”
Smith did harbor hopes of running again, and he saw FDR’s temporizing on Prohibition as sleeping with the enemy. To him, it all went back to 1928 and the hate campaign against him when he ran for president. The southern and rural anti-Catholic bigots who wrecked his chances against Hoover that year were also the “drys.” Anyone who decried what happened to him in 1928 should also decry Prohibition, he thought. “Why in hell don’t he [Roosevelt] speak out?” Smith complained. “This ain’t the time for trimming.”
But FDR was focused on the relevant issues. For Smith to make legalizing booze his big concern in the Depression year 1932 was like complaining about the absence of a “Happy Hour” on board the Titanic. Desperate for money, Smith was throwing in his lot with the high hats, who hoped to profit off the repeal of Prohibition. The millions of newly unemployed did not seem to register with him. After returning from Albany, he had moved from First Avenue to Fifth, and not just physically. As H. L. Mencken put it, “the Al of today is no longer a politician of the first chop. His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him.”*
Eventually, it showed. In April 1932, FDR gave one of his most famous and important speeches, penned by Raymond Moley, the political science professor on whom he increasingly relied. Roosevelt said that sound prosperity depends upon plans “that build from the bottom up and not the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Moley had bastardized a concept originated by William Graham Sumner, a famous Yale professor in the 1880s. Sumner’s original “forgotten man” was not a poor worker, but in the same family as Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” ninety years later: solid, middle-class men of thrift and hard work who, in Sumner’s words, “attend no meetings, pass no resolutions, never go to the lobby, are never mentioned in the newspapers, but just work and save and pay.”
Smith, whose close ties to labor had once made him the tribune of such “forgotten” men, fired back fiercely at FDR, anticipating all of the GOP “class warfare” arguments to come: “I will take off my coat and fight to the end any candidate who persists in any demagogic appeal to the masses of the working people of this country to destroy themselves by setting class against class and rich against poor.” Thus the gist of the anti–New Deal argument was developed, ironically, by FDR’s onetime ally more than two years before it was taken up by Republicans.
At the time, Roosevelt responded with charming indifference. When told by the press that Smith was attacking him, he replied with a grin: “Attacking me? I haven’t read the papers, not closely….” After a Hearst reporter said that of course he must have heard it on the radio, FDR joked, “My radio isn’t working now.”
Roosevelt was showing a national audience how to deflect attacks with a bit of humor; nothing especially witty, just light and dismissive. This natural skill would serve him well in the years ahead (most famously during World War II when Republicans accused him of sending a destroyer to transport his dog and he delivered a hilarious speech defending the wounded pride of “my dog Fala”). The difference between first-rate politicians and ordinary ones is often no more than their capacity to deprive a big story of oxygen, and to disarm an opponent or score on him with a quip.
Most of FDR’s governorship had been taken up playing defense against the Depression. By 1932, unemployment in New York State was surging past 30 percent, up fivefold since he arrived in Albany. At first, Roosevelt had been reluctant to act, even when two large New York City banks failed, the biggest bankruptcies in history. He blamed the legislature for not passing a banking protection bill when he hadn’t introduced one. Although he remained popular in New York and any governor of the Empire State was then automatically a potential presidential candidate, that tardiness hurt his reputation nationally. “Whaddya mean—‘progressive’?” a midwestern editor gibed. “The guy just doesn’t have any stuff.”
But Roosevelt was slowly building a progressive record he would borrow from in the presidency. He expanded public works projects and workmen’s compensation and pioneered unemployment insurance. It was merely a start. Combined, these programs helped fewer than one tenth of the nearly 1.5 million New Yorkers who had lost their jobs.
FDR’s main innovation was to begin changing the terms of debate. Government owed a “definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want” of its citizens, he said in 1931. Roosevelt was talking about state government then; he was actually well behind several other governors in calling for large-scale federal relief. But by 1932 FDR came around to supporting a federal role in directly helping the unemployed—a watershed in his thinking.
This notion—that Washington had a duty to fight poverty—had been considered a radical idea, until the radicals began moving further left toward overhauling the whole capitalist system. Now it increasingly went by the resurrected label “liberal,” which had traditionally been used in Europe and the United States more to describe individual freedom than social obligation to the less fortunate. Those on the other side, who didn’t believe government owed any such “obligation,” were increasingly called “conservatives.” They thought charities could handle the problem, with some coordination from above. The question of what government owed the afflicted had come into sharp relief after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 reverberated through the middle and southern part of the country. The failure of the feudal barons who ran Louisiana to respond more forcefully helped pave the way for a young populist firebrand named Huey Long, who was elected governor in 1928 and proclaimed “Every Man a King.”
FDR hardly had the pedigree of a populist; he was more in tune with the Progressive movement embodied by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But Progressives hadn’t focused much on direct government aid to the needy. So, because these issues were new to national politics, Roosevelt stayed vague. Exactly how government should fulfill its obligation to “the forgotten man” was a detail that would be worked out later. For now, FDR just wanted to establish the principle that action to help ordinary people was part of the president’s job description.
In May 1932, a month before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, four of the reporters assigned to cover his presidential campaign didn’t think he was getting that message across. At a picnic with the governor and Missy LeHand at Dowdell’s Knob near Warm Springs, they told him good-naturedly that his speeches so far were timid and unfocused. Roosevelt had a commencement speech coming up at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and he threw down a challenge:
“Well, if you fellows think my speeches are so bad, why don’t you write one for me?”
Ernest K. Lindley, then of the New York Herald-Tribune (later a longtime Newsweek columnist), replied: “All right, I will!”
The reporter’s speech—which today would get him fired for unethical behavior—became what Sam Rosenman called a “watchword for the New Deal.” Toward the end, Lindley wrote and Roosevelt said: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” And then, in wise words for every president with a thorny problem, he added, “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
For a politician with a reputation for being unprincipled, this was a masterstroke: flexibility as a principle! But it was a principle that, in the right hands, might change the world. In the years ahead, Roosevelt could not “admit failure frankly”—no president does. But he did come to embody the long-standing American spirit of innovation and pragmatism. For conservatives, “bold, persistent experimentation” was a generally bad idea; they believed in those days that the government tended to mess things up when it experimented or acted quickly. But the idea of trying one thing, trying another—above all, trying something—was central to Roosevelt’s success for the rest of his life.
In that era before presidential debates, the only time President Hoover and his presumed challenger saw each other during the entire election year was at a Governors’ Conference dinner held at the White House in late April 1932. There’s no record of the two men conversing, but the dinner apparently loomed large in each one’s impression of the other. It simultaneously fed FDR’s resentment of Hoover and increased Hoover’s underestimation of Roosevelt. It foreshadowed the confrontation ten months later that would paralyze the country.
When the governors arrived, the president was detained upstairs. So before Hoover came down to receive his guests, they waited and circulated in the East Room. Twice, FDR, awkwardly propped up in his metal braces, was offered a chair and twice he declined; protocol called for remaining standing until making one’s way through the receiving line. The day was hot and the New York governor was perspiring heavily and in need of a seat. His legs ached. Finally, at least a half hour behind schedule, Herbert and Lou Hoover appeared.
For Eleanor, this was more than an ungracious oversight; it was a grave and intentional insult directed toward her husband, who could not stand for long in his leg braces without great pain and fatigue. (Eleanor was further annoyed that the musicians, many of great national reputation, were not asked to stay for dinner.) Franklin and Eleanor nursed this grievance for years.
There was certainly bad blood. Since the day after his smashing 1930 reelection, FDR had been the front-runner to challenge Hoover. The president felt that the governor of New York had primary responsibility for supervision of the Stock Exchange, which was located in his state, and he resented that FDR had not been held more responsible for the Crash. In Hoover’s moments of self-pity, Roosevelt’s social ease no doubt reminded him of all the swells at Stanford who had rejected him.
Even so, it is hard to believe that Hoover would intentionally treat a crippled man in such a cruel way; he later wrote that the very thought of it was absurd and he was probably right. Most likely, he was just careless of the time of the governors or had important business to attend to; the need to prepare for a disabled guest must have escaped everyone’s attention, which was hardly unusual in those days.
And yet FDR’s handicap clearly left an impression on Hoover that evening. A White House usher, Alonzo Field, vividly recalled the moment Roosevelt entered the White House dining room to sit down at last. “Dragging his legs from his hips,” Field remembered, the governor “literally fell in the seat.” The scene was witnessed by the Hoovers and all of the dinner guests. “Everybody said, ‘That man, what is he thinkin’ about?’ ” Field recalled. “ ‘How is he gonna be president? He’s only half man.’ ”
President Hoover did not appear to be greatly sympathetic. He had certainly seen FDR before he finally sat down and done nothing to ease his apparent discomfort. Hoover later told his friend James MacLafferty (who recorded it in his diary) that he noticed that when Roosevelt arrived at the White House to attend the dinner, his aides shielded him from the cameramen as he was helped from his automobile.
This raises an intriguing question. How did Hoover know this? Did the president witness the maneuver in the driveway from the window of an upstairs room where he was supposedly detained for half an hour by pressing business? Is it possible that Hoover figured that if FDR wanted to deceive the public about his disability, he would make no special effort to accomodate it at the White House?
Whatever the truth that night, it set the stage for an epic confrontation between the two men less than a year later.
*Smith had invested heavily in the construction of the Empire State Building. When low occupancy rates nearly wiped him out, he grew dependent on John J. Raskob, the General Motors executive and “wet” conservative who changed parties and took over the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.