THE NOMINATION IN HAND , it was time for theatrics. To bring off his act and begin to change the psychology of American politics, Roosevelt knew he needed to enter with a dramatic flourish.
By long-standing tradition, candidates before 1932 did not accept their nominations in person at the convention even if they were present in the hall. Acceptance speeches took place during something called a “notification ceremony” that occurred, usually in the hometown of the nominee, seven or eight weeks after the convention ended, a throwback to the days when traveling took forever and candidates had to pretend to be indifferent to high office. These were elaborate political set pieces, full of bunting and overblown rhetoric, but long since out of date. The lag-time between nomination, notification, and acceptance was, as Roosevelt later told the delegates, among the party’s “foolish traditions.”
So shortly after FDR went over the top in the balloting on July 1, Chairman Walsh read a dramatic statement telephoned in by the nominee. If the convention would stay in session, he would fly to Chicago the following day and accept in person. The galleries, so recently stacked against Roosevelt, went wild with excitement. This was only five years after Charles Lindbergh first crossed the Atlantic and only a small fraction in attendance had ever been in an airplane. No American president or presidential candidate had ever traveled in one.
The plane trip was born of necessity; there was simply no time to arrive by train. But the larger idea of jettisoning tradition was FDR’s brainstorm, originally supported only by the aging Colonel House among his advisers. Roosevelt understood the “drama” and “psychology” of it as a “symbol of new, bold and direct action,” Rosenman remembered. And he loved milking it. A couple of days earlier, when the Albany press learned a Ford trimotor airplane was waiting nearby, FDR teased reporters. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said with a straight face. “I’m going to bicycle out to Chicago. Sam [Rosenman] will follow—on a tricycle.”
Roosevelt had flown a bit during World War I but most of the rest of his traveling party had not. Grace Tully stayed up all night talking with her mother about whether to make the frightening journey (she did). Originally, the party included a total of thirteen Roosevelt family members and aides, but FDR’s superstition over that number led him to bump a couple of passengers and put in a desk instead so he could work on his speech. He didn’t like flying and would not do so again until the wartime Casablanca Conference in 1943; ships were his first love and train travel let him see the country and learn from it.
But he managed to nap on the rough flight, even as his son John got sick. The only one who seemed to enjoy the ride was Eleanor, who would soon fly with Amelia Earhart and try unsuccessfully to convince her husband to let her earn a pilot’s license. With stops for refueling in Buffalo and Cleveland, the plane, facing stiff headwinds, arrived three hours late in Chicago.
Although many Democrats would later write to scold him for taking such a risk, Roosevelt’s reception at Chicago’s tiny Municipal Airport (later Midway) was so tumultuous that his hat was knocked off his head and his glasses almost dislodged by the surging crowd. The hundreds of Chicagoans who turned out felt almost like Parisians greeting Lindbergh at Le Bourget. Present at the airfield were not just Jim Farley and his crew but Louis Howe, who had apparently made a miraculous recovery and left his suite at the Congress Hotel for the first time in a week.
Howe was on a mission to “save” the acceptance speech, which, like all Roosevelt speeches, was a mishmash. Ray Moley had written a draft that was then cut and substantially rewritten in Albany by Rosenman, who had stayed up until dawn eating hot dogs and working on the speech. Roosevelt himself had tried a few drafts of an eloquent peroration amid all the phone calls to Chicago, but when the candidate finished one and read it aloud, the group around him agreed unanimously that it was terrible and he sadly tore it up.
Rosenman’s final section was much better. It contained two vague words that were to stretch and expand to the point that they came to symbolize an era in American political life. The phrase “new deal” had appeared as far back as Andrew Jackson’s day, when Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank of the United States, called for a “new bank and a New Deal.” It appeared in the novels of Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court) and Henry James (The Princess Casamassima) and “A New Deal for Everyone” was David Lloyd George’s campaign slogan when he ran for prime minister of Great Britain in 1919. It made a splash the very week of the convention in a June 29, 1932, cover story in The New Republic by Stuart Chase—entitled “A New Deal for America”—a dense piece of economic analysis arguing, in a sign of the times, that technological innovation was the cause of unemployment and should be stopped altogether. In his memoirs, Rosenman does not mention the New Republic article.
Moley made his own claim to the phrase, noting that he had referred to some kind of “new deal” in a May memo to FDR (the words had been used in passing). Others assumed it was a melding of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” and Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” but Rosenman recalled no discussion of those slogans. It was just another line on a scrap of paper, he recalled, and neither the candidate nor his counsel gave it a second thought.
When the final speech draft was read over the telephone and transcribed in Chicago, Howe’s loathing of Rosenman boiled over. “Mein Gawd, do I have to do everything myself?” he grunted after reading it. “I see Sam Rosenman in every paragraph of this mess.” Howe—whose jealousy over Rosenman’s increased role knew no bounds—stayed up all night dictating an entirely new draft, which he tried to press into Roosevelt’s hand at the airport. Rosenman walked over to the open car where Roosevelt was sitting just in time to hear Howe saying, “I tell you, it’s all right, Franklin. It’s much better than the speech you’ve got now—and you can read it while you’re driving down to the convention hall and get familiar with it.”
“Dammit, Louie, I’m the nominee!” FDR snapped. But the nominee then paid his weary longtime friend the respect of starting to read. Roosevelt later enjoyed describing how he would wave his hand and tip his hat to the thousands of well-wishers lining the route to the Chicago Stadium, as he stole glances down at Howe’s draft.
With delegates itching to leave town after the long delay, there was no time for Roosevelt to go to the hotel to freshen up or change clothes after the exhausting nine-hour journey. As Roosevelt waited in the wings of the Chicago Stadium while the ecstatic crowd cheered his arrival, he took the Moley-Rosenman draft from his pocket and compared it to Howe’s. Then, just moments before beginning the most famous acceptance speech in the history of American politics, he removed the first page from the Moley-Rosenman draft, replaced it with Howe’s first page, and made his way to the rostrum. Like so much else in Franklin Roosevelt’s future, this was slapdash, cavalier—and exactly the kind of improvisation that would serve him so well when he entered the White House the following year.
The delegates remembered that in 1924, he had dramatically hobbled to the podium on a crutch to nominate Smith. In 1928, they knew, he made another memorable entrance and stole some of Smith’s limelight again. Now, straight from the thrilling plane ride, as foreign to most delegates’ own experience as a trip on a rocket would be today, Roosevelt cranked up the theatricality to a new level.
“The whole hall was electrified as he came in on his son’s arm,” recalled Mary Bain, seven decades after she was an excited twenty-year-old school teacher from De Kalb, Illinois, attending her first political convention. “People were crying and hugging each other, even if they didn’t really like him, just because it was so exciting.”
When Moley and Rosenman heard him begin, they were dumbfounded. What’s this? Was he reading Howe’s draft? Then he switched to theirs and they relaxed. Howe was content to write the top:
Let it be from now on the task of our party to break foolish traditions.
And Rosenman the famous end:
I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.
The next day, a cartoon by Rollin Kirby in The New York World-Telegram showed a destitute farmer pausing to look in the sky at Roosevelt’s airplane. On the wings were the words “New Deal.” Until then, the campaign had done nothing to highlight the phrase. It just stuck.