Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (37 page)

It is not hard to imagine Smith rolling his eyes as he read about Roosevelt’s vacation plans. Smith, a child of the Lower East Side, was not much for shooting trips or, for that matter, any other kind of diversion other than the care and feeding of the eccentric menagerie of house pets he kept in Albany. Self-taught and hardworking, he often thought of his privileged colleague from Hyde Park as something of a lightweight—“a little boy,” in the words of Roosevelt’s devoted political adviser, Louis McHenry Howe. Smith might well have wondered why FDR seemed to think they were equally knowledgeable about upstate politics and party organization matters. After having served as governor, as majority leader and speaker of the State Assembly, and as a delegate to the state Constitutional Convention, Smith certainly understood New York state politics as few others did.
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Roosevelt, on the other hand, had left Albany for Washington in 1913, only months after beginning his second two-year term in the State Senate. His departure was unlamented, for he made few allies and more than a few enemies during his short career in the legislature. (While presiding over a debate in the State Senate in 1911, Robert Wagner cut off FDR by saying, “Senator Roosevelt has gained his point. What he wants is a headline in the newspapers.”) If FDR considered himself Smith’s equal on matters such as party organization, he very likely was alone in that judgment.
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Tall, impossibly handsome, and even more impossibly ambitious, Franklin Roosevelt entered politics in 1910 at the age of twenty-eight, when he won election to the State Senate as a Democrat in a rural Republican district in Dutchess County. His path to power was eased considerably thanks to the machinations of the local party leaders, who arranged for his appointment to the party’s district convention—the very convention that would decide on nominations for State Senate. But after Roosevelt won the general election, he made a point of saying that he owed nothing to those who helped arrange his nomination and subsequent election. As a Democrat in Republican territory, Roosevelt knew that he could hardly do otherwise. But his distaste for traditional partisan politics was more than just an acknowledgment of Dutchess County demographics. His voters were skeptical of cities, especially New York City, and the political organization that represented all that seemed wrong with politics, Tammany Hall. Roosevelt cast himself as a progressive reformer in the tradition of his distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, except that TR was a Republican and Franklin was a Democrat.

Cousin Theodore was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished men—a writer, a scientist, an environmentalist, a soldier, a diplomat, a president. In 1910, Franklin Roosevelt was none of the above. But he yearned for more, to the amusement of his colleagues in Albany, who regarded him as a political amateur.

By the electoral disaster of 1920, however, Franklin Roosevelt was more mature and a good deal more partisan than he had been as a freshman state senator. He and Smith already had become friendly before the election, but in the following years Roosevelt went out of his way to court Smith’s good opinion. Smith responded in kind, although he still regarded Roosevelt as a lightweight.

But Roosevelt’s letter to Smith after their defeats in 1920 reveals that there was a good deal more steel in his character than Smith realized. Unlike Smith, Roosevelt was not prepared to concede the field to the victorious Republicans, and, in fact, he seemed convinced that in New York, the Republican victory would be short-lived. His instincts proved to be correct. The Democratic Party in New York revived quickly during the two-year term of Nathan Miller, who defeated Smith in 1920.

And FDR and Smith did, of course, run for office again. Beginning in 1923, they presided over New York politics for a decade, becoming national figures because of their progressive accomplishments during a time of reaction and laissez-faire politics in Washington. The strategic partnership they formed, the imperfect political friendship they enjoyed, and the coalition they built changed not just New York, not just the Democratic Party, but the very nature of U.S. politics during the height of the American century. Roosevelt and Smith represented a coming together of two traditional antagonists—the elite Protestant reformer and the urban, ethnic Tammany politician—in an alliance that would have been impossible during the height of the Progressive Era, when reformers still saw machine politicians as part of the problem rather than a potential source of change, and when Irish-Catholic machine politicians automatically viewed reformers as dreamy-eyed idealists at best, bigoted nativists at worst. The combination of Tammany Hall’s Smith and the reform movement’s Roosevelt proved to be electoral magic in New York during the 1920s and served as an important building block in the construction of the New Deal coalition, which dominated U.S. politics from the Great Depression to the 1960s.

Roosevelt’s relationship with Smith and, more broadly, his cautious embrace of Tammany Hall in the 1920s is critical to understanding how FDR transformed himself from a prototypical Anglo-Protestant reformer into a patron of some (although not all) urban political machines during his years as president. Likewise, Tammany and Smith offered Roosevelt a chance to remain active in New York politics after his loss in 1920 despite his earlier opposition to the machine.

During those years, Roosevelt paid close attention as Smith built on Tammany’s post-Triangle progressive credentials to create historically important relationships with such open-minded progressive reformers as Frances Perkins, Belle Moskowitz, Joseph Proskauer, Herbert Lehman, and Robert Moses—two women, four Jews, and one WASP (Perkins), hardly the traditional talent pool that filled Tammany’s ranks and payrolls. Through vehicles like the state’s postwar Reconstruction Commission, created in 1919 to devise a more assertive role for state government in twentieth-century society, Smith brought together elite progressives, labor activists, and prominent business leaders as his partners in building a new governing paradigm in Albany. By doing so, Smith obliterated outdated distinctions between progressive reformers and traditional machine politics, welcoming as he did the advice and guidance of outside experts and policy advocates while remaining an unapologetic and indeed staunch son of Tammany Hall.

The work of the Reconstruction Commission, chaired by reformer Abram Elkus, is perhaps as important as the work of the Factory Investigating Commission in understanding Tammany’s evolution and the ways in which some progressive reformers found common ground with political leaders like Murphy, Smith, and Wagner. If, as Tammany’s Jeremiah Mahoney asserted, the FIC’s work marked “the beginning of the liberal program of the Democratic Party,” the Reconstruction Commission’s agenda sought to expand on that liberal program through more aggressive government action in fields ranging from chronic unemployment to housing to public health.
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Coincidentally, Smith’s Reconstruction Commission issued its recommendations within months of another report that endorsed similarly progressive goals. In fact, the Catholic bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction was to the left of Smith’s commission, endorsing not a minimum wage but a more generous living wage. The bishops also called for government commitment to public housing; comprehensive social insurance covering disabilities, unemployment, and old age; stronger child labor laws; and encouragement of trade unions. The bishops’ proposals reflected the new thinking in Catholic social teaching that developed alongside the social-welfare policies put into place by Tammany’s conspicuously Catholic leadership. The driving force behind the bishops’ program was Monsignor John Ryan, who would go on to earn the nickname of “Monsignor New Deal” in the 1930s. Ryan saw the proposals as an extension of the teachings of Pope Leo XIII, who had inspired the likes of Jeremiah Mahoney and other young Catholic politicians in the early twentieth century.
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The goals of both the bishops’ program and Smith’s commission were at odds with the prevailing postwar mood of the country in general and some New Yorkers in particular. Indeed, as he opened the new session of the State Assembly in January 1919, Republican Speaker Thaddeus Sweet of upstate Oswego County noted that New Yorkers “had heard much . . . Socialistic and Bolshevik propaganda advocating social and civic reforms” in the months since Smith’s election in November 1918. To drive home his point, Sweet asserted that “the foremost advocates of socialistic doctrines” happened to be “the most ardent proponents of liquor license,” an argument that in essence joined together leftist social reformers and Tammany politicians.
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In its statement of principles, Smith’s Reconstruction Commission issued a ringing call to arms on behalf of better government, asserting that democracy “does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections.” The wording and tone were the work of Robert Moses, chief of staff of the commission’s retrenchment committee, and they reflected the high-minded sentiments of the reform movement. But it took a Tammany politician, Al Smith, to implement them and to bring together these disparate interests and personalities. When critics charged that the commission’s call for expanded government was merely a patronage grab by Tammany, Smith was careful to note that among those who supported the commission’s work were prominent Republicans Henry Stimson (FDR’s future secretary of war) and former governor and future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes. Referring to Hughes, Smith pointedly noted that “nobody ever accused him of being a member of Tammany Hall.” Under Smith’s leadership, traditional foes of Tammany-style politics—from individuals like Hughes to organizations like the Citizens Union—found themselves working together with Tammany figures on behalf of proposals that represented the ideals of progressive reformers yet also had the support of machine politicians.
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Before Franklin Roosevelt, then, there was Al Smith. The fates of these two men were intertwined through the 1920s. Not only were they involuntarily returned to private life together in 1920, they played important roles in each other’s comebacks. Roosevelt publicly urged Smith to run for governor again in 1922, when Smith was inclined to remain in the private sector. Smith returned the favor in 1928, urging—indeed, practically commanding—Roosevelt to put aside doubts about his health and run for governor. Smith, the Irish-Catholic, city-dwelling, beer-drinking voice of immigrant culture, and Roosevelt, the patrician Protestant progressive from rural Dutchess County who was partial to martinis, created a new Democratic Party—urban, ethnic, and tilted in favor of the industrial states of the North—after the disaster of 1920. Smith relied on Roosevelt as a Protestant advocate for a Catholic politician, as the scion of a famous family who was eager to champion the cause of a son of the Lower East Side. (Smith, it must be said, did not always welcome the assistance; it took Joseph Proskauer, one of his aides, to remind Smith that “you’re a Bowery mick and [Roosevelt’s] a Protestant patrician and he’d take some of the curse off of you.”)
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Roosevelt, for his part, often relied on Smith for the bridges he built between reformers and Tammany, for his credibility with immigrant-stock voters, for the talented advisers he brought into government, and for his famously exhaustive knowledge of state government. Even after FDR succeeded Smith as governor in 1929, at a point when many historians see the beginnings of tension between the two men, Roosevelt continued to seek out his predecessor’s advice. When Smith was on vacation in Florida in 1930, Roosevelt wrote to him about pressing business in Albany. “Let me know when you get back to New York,” Roosevelt wrote. “I want to talk to you about lots of things, including the Power bill.”
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The relationship went beyond politics, as FDR’s letter to the vacationing Smith showed. “A few weeks ago,” Roosevelt wrote, “when my granddaughter was here, your granddaughter came to the house to spend the afternoon and five minutes after I had joined the party, Mary [Smith’s granddaughter] was calling me ‘Ganpa.’ I felt highly honored and have certainly cut you out.” Destined though they were to fight a bitter battle for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt clearly came to appreciate each other during the cultural and political battles of the 1920s—battles that found them on the same side rather than aligned as antagonists, as would have seemed natural a decade earlier. Throughout their relationship, in good times and bad, they addressed each other as “Frank” and “Al.” It seems fair to say that none of FDR’s Harvard and Hudson Valley friends referred to the squire of Hyde Park as “Frank.”
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It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of Al Smith and Tammany Hall in understanding the rise and success of Franklin Roosevelt in New York politics in the 1920s. Roosevelt’s unlikely relationships with Tammany, with Murphy, and with urban machines in general were the result of the equally unlikely relationships that Smith formed with progressive reformers in New York even as he retained his bona fides as a Tammany politician. The eagerness with which Smith welcomed advisers such as Robert Moses, Frances Perkins, and Belle Moskowitz—all of whom entered politics as opponents of bosses and machines—anticipated the New Deal marriage of machine politicians like Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx and social-welfare reformers like Harry Hopkins, both of whom were great admirers of Smith.

In showing that the cultural gap between elite reformers and machine politicians could be bridged if both sides acknowledged the good intentions of the other, Smith created political space for FDR to construct spans of his own, albeit from a different starting place. This, however, required a dramatic change in FDR’s attitude toward political bosses and his own elitist definitions of reform. FDR’s transformation from a “political prig” with no “human sympathy, human interests, human ties” (in the words of a legislative staffer in 1911), to a more empathetic and personable public figure is often attributed to the humbling experience of polio and to the influence of his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, an indomitable advocate for social justice. But it would seem equally possible that this shrewd, ambitious man learned valuable lessons about politics as he observed the wiles and ways of the down-to-earth, pragmatic, and likable Tammany figures who dominated his home state’s political culture during the first two decades of his public life.
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