Roosevelt (23 page)

The Republicans counterattacked Roosevelt later in the campaign by bringing up reserves from Washington in the form of cabinet members, most notably the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. By this time Tuttle needed help; his one-issue campaign was losing public interest, partly because, busy electioneering, he was running low on new revelations. In a radio speech from Washington, Stimson said that Roosevelt had “shown his unfitness to deal with the great crisis now confronting New York State.”

Roosevelt’s reply—given in New York City on the eve of the election—carefully played on state pride and resentment against the national administration. “I say to these gentlemen: We shall be grateful if you will return to your posts in Washington, and bend your efforts and spend your time solving the problems which the whole Nation is bearing under your Administration. Rest assured that we of the Empire State can and will take care of ourselves and our problems.”

Roosevelt defeated Tuttle by 1,770,342 to 1,045,341, a margin of 725,001 votes. More remarkable, he won forty-one out of the fifty-seven counties outside New York City, carrying upstate New York by 167,784, an unprecedented feat for a Democrat. Most of this margin was due to the splitting tactics of the prohibitionist candidate; but even without this helpful intervention, Roosevelt would have run close to Tuttle upstate. His half-million plurality in New York City vindicated his straddling policy on the corruption issue.

It was a strikingly personal victory. All the other statewide Democratic candidates won by smaller majorities than Roosevelt; more important, the Republicans still held majorities in the state senate and assembly, and the Democrats failed to capture a single one of the twenty Republican congressional seats upstate. Despite all Farley’s work, it was an executive, not a legislative—and thus not a party—victory.

But it was no time for cavil. A Republican-controlled legislature had its uses for Roosevelt. And bigger things lay ahead. Three weeks after the election he wrote Farley about the latter’s work: “It is not merely a fine record, but a great opportunity for us to consolidate the gains.

“When I think of the difficulties of former State Chairmen with former Governors and vice versa (!), I have an idea that you and I make a combination which has not existed since Cleveland and Lamont—and that is so long ago that neither you nor I know anything about it except from history books.”

T
HE DAY AFTER HIS
re-election Farley and Howe threw Roosevelt’s hat into the presidential ring. “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party,” Farley proclaimed in a victory statement, “even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.” When Farley notified the governor of this move, Roosevelt laughed. “Whatever you said, Jim, is all right with me.”

Never before this occasion, according to Farley, had he discussed Roosevelt’s candidacy with his chief. This is not surprising. Even with his associates Roosevelt had maintained the fiction of concentrating solely on New York affairs. He had a politician’s superstition against planning campaigns too far ahead; moreover, he knew that a victory in 1930 was the decisive step to victory in 1932. The effect of his re-election was to fix the timetable; 1932 was to be the year.

“Eddie,” the governor said to Flynn a week or two after his election, “… I believe I can be nominated for the Presidency in 1932 on the Democratic ticket.”

He might have added, “and elected.” With every new slump in economic conditions in 1930, Democratic hopes for 1932 went soaring. Rarely has a party been caught so neatly in a cul-de-sac of its own making as the Republicans during the Depression. Prosperity was safe under the G.O.P., their orators had chanted in 1928; they had made it the chief issue of the campaign,
HOOVER AND HAPPINESS OR SMITH AND SOUP HOUSES? WHICH SHALL IT BE?
G.O.P. signs had demanded. The position was as intellectually dishonest as it was politically dangerous for the Republicans, following in general a laissez-faire ideology, shrank from any real commitment to national governmental action to prevent depression. But the strategy had worked.

And now breadlines were stretching block after block, soup kitchens were handing out thin porridge and coffee, and “Hoover-villes”—little settlements of shacks, discarded cars, and packing boxes—were springing up near the dumps and mud flats of big
cities. Yet the Depression was a remarkably passive affair. There were few riots or even strikes. The American people seemed benumbed. Or perhaps they were simply waiting—waiting for the upturn that had always come in past depressions, perhaps waiting for their leaders to act. Hoover acted: he organized private relief activities, ordered federal departments to economize, asked businessmen to maintain wage standards, created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend funds to banks and other institutions, reluctantly supported federal aid to states for relief. But nothing he did seemed to help.

Roosevelt’s first reaction to the stock market crash in 1929 was more that of a Republican businessman than a Democratic politician. While the market was tumbling on October 24 a newspaper asked for his outlook. He did not know detailed conditions, Roosevelt wired back, but he firmly believed fundamental industrial conditions to be sound. Shortly afterward, in a Poughkeepsie speech, he assailed speculation. Five weeks later, after stock prices had reached their 1929 low point, he told Howe, “It is just possible that the recent little Flurry down town will make the prices comparatively low,” and asked him to check on the condition of certain stocks.

Curiously, it took Roosevelt some time to realize that finally there had come the hard times he had long prognosticated would break the Republicans’ grip on the White House. By the fall of 1930, however, he was exploiting the situation in his campaign speeches. In December of that year came a warning to his office from William Allen White in Kansas.

“These are great days for you Democrats but don’t be too cagey,” wrote the editor of the Emporia
Gazette.
“If the old brig rights herself within the next year, whether by reason of good seamanship or by the chance of wind or wave, the people will forget that she ever listed. But what I fear is that if she does not right herself soon the crew will come running out of the Fo’c’s’le, and throw the whole brass colored quarter deck crowd into the sea, Democrats, Republicans, and all.”

But the old brig did not right herself. As the “black depression” came to grip the urban sections of his state, Roosevelt took increasingly drastic action. His first major step had been to set up in March 1930 an emergency unemployment committee, headed by a banker, to consider long-range proposals for stabilizing unemployment, and later in the year steps were taken for immediate relief of distress and for expanded public works. At a time when the American Federation of Labor was still opposed to compulsory unemployment insurance as a “dole or handout,” Roosevelt favored such a plan, and eventually he proposed a state program. In August 1931 he got the legislature to create the Temporary Emergency
Relief Administration. Twenty millions were appropriated to tide desperate New Yorkers over the melancholy winter of 1931-32, and a sallow, sharp-faced young social worker named Harry Hopkins came in to run the agency.

During most of the early Depression years Roosevelt did not differ fundamentally from Hoover over domestic relief and recovery policies. Both opposed direct relief spending by the federal government; both favored putting main reliance on state and private agencies; both believed that government should cut its regular expenses to the bone. Yet each presented a different image to the public—Roosevelt, that of a man in motion, Hoover, a man stuck fast. Roosevelt, of course, made the most of his position. Early in 1931 he called and presided over a well-publicized regional conference in Albany of governors of industrial states. And he skillfully used opposition in the legislature as a foil.

“I am glad that you believe with me,” Roosevelt wrote Bernard M. Baruch in December 1931, “that issues this coming year will be more economic than anything else.” The nation demanded, he added, a more definite leadership.

The story of Roosevelt’s presidential nomination is the story of how a battle almost won in the early stages was almost lost by mistake after mistake during the last critical months of the contest.

Roosevelt began the fight with tremendous advantages. The Democrats were hungry for a presidential winner; after the gubernatorial victory in 1930 he became a leading choice for 1932. His rural appeal impressed a party whose strength in the East was grounded in urban areas. His good record as governor, his name, his standing in the most populous state, his Wilsonian background, his radio voice, and his appearance all gave him a long head start. How could he lose?

The dangers were threefold. Scenting Democratic victory, a host of Democratic candidates, including favorite sons, was entering the fray. Roosevelt’s lead made him the object of concerted action by his rivals. And he had to win not a mere majority but two-thirds of the votes in the convention, for the Democrats still had their century-old rule requiring a candidate to poll this fraction of votes for the party nomination.

Partly to cloak his front-runner position, Roosevelt long kept up the pretense that he was not a candidate for President. “I am sitting tight, sawing wood, and keeping my mouth shut—at least for the present!” he said in March 1931. How anyone could want to be President in such a period he could not understand, he remarked
even to friends. His tactic was in sharp contrast to that of Albert C. Ritchie, governor of Maryland, who was eying the nomination race. Asked by a newspaper if he would like to be President Ritchie said, “Of course I would. Who wouldn’t?”

Roosevelt’s method was to leave the actual management of the campaign to Howe and Farley in New York City and to his friends throughout the country, while making the key decisions himself. His two lieutenants formed a remarkable combination. Howe—more gnarled and hollow-eyed than ever—served as the governor’s adviser, spur, and confidant. Implacably jealous of anyone who got too close to his “Franklin,” darkly suspicious of anyone who was not 100 per cent for Roosevelt’s cause, armed with a Machiavellian flair for hunting out the complex trails of influence, Howe tirelessly played the game of plot and counterplot, working off his frustrations in tirades against his rivals and enemies. Quite the opposite was Farley. He could get along with anybody, even with Howe, which was part of his effectiveness. He had a large limber body to insert between warring factions, and a smooth pink face that looked as if it were sanded and buffed by his intermediary’s role. He was a joiner, a mixer, a glad-hander who could remember names—anybody’s name.

Part of Roosevelt’s strength stemmed from the pains he took not to alienate any major faction of the party. To be sure, he had come out for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1930, but he played down the subject in following years. He had fully retreated from his support in 1920 of American entry into the League of Nations—so much so as to bring scores of bitter letters from disappointed League supporters who remembered his stand in 1920. He favored U.S. adherence to the World Court, but refused to come out publicly for it. Even on the historic Democratic issue of the tariff Roosevelt straddled; he placated high-tariff groups in the West by suggesting to them that the tariff was really a local matter. On most economic and social matters, however, Roosevelt was ahead of the drift of opinion.

The upshot of this situation was that the South looked on Roosevelt as a wet but a reasonable wet, the West saw him as a progressive (largely because of his water-power policies), the East rated him as mildly wet and reasonably liberal.

Roosevelt’s first real move for the nomination was well disguised. In July 1931 Farley set out for Seattle to attend a convention of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, of which he was a high dignitary. Armed with a map, he and Roosevelt had laid out an elaborate trip through eighteen states, where Farley could stop off for chats with state chairmen ostensibly about party affairs but actually to sound out sentiment for the New York governor. For
nineteen days Farley shook hands, carefully noted names, and warily discussed candidates. Where he found Roosevelt supporters he urged them to try to get their state delegations pledged to his chief as early as possible. “Have indicated that they must all get away from the ‘favorite-son’ idea,” Farley reported to the governor, “on the theory that it is only used for the purpose of tying up blocks of delegates to be manipulated.” He warned delegates not to expect that by plumping for their governors or senators they could trade off support for the vice-presidential nomination.

Farley’s findings showed the extent of Roosevelt’s strength even before his active candidacy. In California he found “no sentiment for any one else at the moment except for the Governor.” He thought everything was “all right in Illinois.” Roosevelt’s friends in Indiana would have “absolute control of the delegation.…” In half a dozen more states the situation was at least satisfactory. Farley was bubbling over with optimism by the time he returned to New York.

Actually, Farley’s reports were generally far too enthusiastic and in some cases misleading. A newcomer to national politics, he did not realize the extent of factionalism in some states; his one- or two-day trips did not give him time to explore the many centers of power. Party leaders who promised to deliver solid delegations simply were not able to come across. The attachments of delegates to presidential candidates were inextricably tied up with conflicting loyalties to a variety of candidates for state and local offices.

This miscalculation was important, for it led Farley to pin his hopes and strategy on an overwhelming show of strength at the convention and to make repeated predictions of victory on the first ballot. To be sure, these predictions helped bring some delegates off the fence, but they also helped concentrate the pack in opposition to the front runner. And they prompted the question: What if Roosevelt does not win on the first ballot?