Roosevelt (49 page)

But the convention did make one decision of potential importance. The President was still determined on the abrogation of the two-thirds requirement for nomination, and Bennett Champ Clark, son of the victim of the rule in 1912, had the satisfaction of moving the adoption of the majority rule. Mollified by a promise of increased convention representation for their section, the Southerners put up only a token fight; but the governor of Texas wondered out loud about the implications of the change for 1940.

By the time Roosevelt’s neighbor John E. Mack placed the
President’s name in nomination, the convention had become a wild political jamboree. “With our decks cleared for battle,” shouted Mack, “with justice and right and progress with us, we are ready for more action under the inspired leadership of that great American whose name I give you as your candidate for President, no longer a citizen merely of one State, but a son of all the 48 States, Franklin Delano Roos—“ An hour-long political demonstration followed the climactic uttering of the magic name: delegates milled about, cheering hoarsely, waving banners, tooting horns, jabbering, whistling.

Hardly less enthusiastic was the candidate himself. To Mack he exclaimed over the telephone: “John, you were grand! You had the jury right in the hollow of your hand—perfectly grand. I hope they will find for your client. It’s all right. You were in grand voice. It came over the air marvelously. It’s great stuff.…”

While the seconding speeches—no less than fifty-six of them—droned on, Roosevelt was putting the last touches on his acceptance speech. This speech would set the tone for the campaign. Once again Roosevelt faced the problem of whether to give a “sweetness and light” address appealing to all groups or a partisan talk to a partisan throng; and once again he was for a time undecided. At first he turned to Moley for a draft stressing the theme of unity and co-operation; later he got from Rosenman and High a “militant, bare-fisted statement of the necessity for economic freedom,” as Rosenman later described it. The night before he was nominated, with the embattled speeches of party militants in Philadelphia still echoing in his ears, the President hammered out a rough draft— “so rough that I didn’t like it,” he told reporters the next day, “being a peaceful man.” Sweetness and light were still in it—and something else too.

A theatrical setting awaited the President in Philadelphia Saturday night. Masses of humanity—over one hundred thousand persons—sat in great banks in the Franklin Field stadium. Rain had been falling, but by the time Roosevelt’s long black car slid up the ramp to a curtained-off area behind the platform, stars were showing through the splotchy clouds. Behind the curtain the smiling President started his slow, stiff-legged walk toward the stage. Suddenly he spotted in the crowd around him the benign, white-bearded face of Edwin Markham. Reaching out to seize the poet’s outstretched hand, the President was thrown off balance, and down he went. Pulled back to his feet, white, shaken, and angry, he snapped, “Clean me up.”

But only for an instant did he lose his composure. A moment later, when the curtain was parted, there stood the President—calm, erect, smiling. The crowd burst into frenzied, ecstatic cheering.

Roosevelt opened serenely on a note of national unity. “I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He thanked members both of his own party and of other parties for their unselfish and nonpartisan effort to overcome depression.

“America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived. In those days we feared fear.… We have conquered fear.”

The President’s voice sounded clearly in the soft summer air. “But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places.” Even in America, the rush of modern civilization had raised new problems that must be faced if Americans were to preserve the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson had fought. Political tyranny had been wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. But economic tyranny had risen to threaten Americans.

A hundred spotlights set the President off brilliantly from the dark masses around him. “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.…

“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

Roosevelt’s voice was rising in crescendo after crescendo. “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” The crowd roared its approval. “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution.” Roosevelt’s phrases cut through the cheering—“democracy, not tyranny … freedom, not subjection …
dictatorship by mob rule and the overprivileged alike … the resolute enemy within our gates …”

Roosevelt lowered his voice. “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…”

Roosevelt looked up at the crowd.

“I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—”

A clamorous roar swept through the stadium, drowning out the last words “—with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.” Like a prize fighter, Roosevelt held his clasped hands over his head, then seized John Garner’s. Slowly the President made his way back to his car. As the ecstatic crowd cheered, he circled the field twice; then his car disappeared into the night.

From the center of the stage Roosevelt moved back into the wings. He gave two or three “nonpolitical” dedicatory speeches, and then he entered the fullest blackout a President can enjoy, by cruising for two weeks off the New England coast. The President’s vacation was carefully timed. He was perfectly willing to let the Republicans take over the stage; his time would come later. “The Republican high command,” he wrote Garner, “is doing altogether too much talking at this stage of the game.”

Others were not so serene. Watching the Landon build-up in the press, Ickes grumbled that the Democratic campaign was drifting and the President was defeating himself. Eleanor Roosevelt warned that the Landon headquarters was moving quickly into action. Without Roosevelt’s direct control things fell into disorder; even Early and High were disturbed. “The President smiles and sails and fishes,” Ickes complained, “and the rest of us worry and fume.”

Roosevelt could afford to smile and sail. In a broad sense he had been campaigning for re-election ever since taking office, and he had begun setting his campaign machine in action months before his nomination. He had asked many of his ambassadors abroad to come back for the campaign; he had assigned propaganda jobs, including the preparation of a “Life of Governor Landon” that would picture the Kansan as a pleader for federal relief; he had directed the setting up of special campaign groups like the Good Neighbor League, reviewed campaign tracts, helped draft Lehman for renomination as governor to strengthen the whole ticket in New York,
instructed his campaign aides not to mention any Republican candidate. When Farley forgot this last precept and referred to the Republican candidate as the governor of a “typical prairie state,” the President chided him none too gently. It would have been all right if Farley had said “one of those splendid prairie states,” the President wrote him, but the word “typical” coming from a New Yorker was meat for the opposition.

Within a few weeks after the Philadelphia convention Farley had campaign headquarters actively functioning in New York. The national chairman wrote 2,500 local Democratic leaders for their appraisal of the situation in their area. “I want the true picture,” Farley warned, and it was on the basis of these and succeeding estimates that he later made his remarkably accurate prediction of the election results.

Farley set up the usual campaign divisions, including business, veterans, foreign language, and the like. The Democrats paid special attention to labor. Lewis and other CIO chiefs organized Labor’s Nonpartisan League, a wholly partisan agency for mobilizing Roosevelt votes in the industrial centers. Perhaps its most important contribution to the campaign was a gift of half a million dollars. In the face of the widening labor schism between Lewis’s CIO and the American Federation of Labor, the Democrats were careful not to jeopardize their good relations with the AFL. Administration officials lobbied among Federation chiefs to hold labor’s ranks together at least until November. Roosevelt kept in close touch with Green, and the AFL chief publicly promised after a visit to Hyde Park that 90 per cent of labor’s vote would go to the President.

While Farley framed a party campaign during midsummer, while Landon and his hard-driving running mate, Frank Knox, stumped the country, the President serenely kept his posture of nonpartisanship. Actually he was closely directing aspects of the campaign, even to the extent of specifying the kind of paper and color process to be used in pamphlets. Publicly, however, the President seemed occupied with his presidential duties. Of course, as President he could continue to exploit the politics of the deed. He deflated Republican criticism of the Democratic spoils system by putting postmasters under civil service regulations. He anticipated a Landon pronouncement on farm problems by creating a crop insurance committee for protection against farm surpluses.

As President, too, Roosevelt could make pronouncements of nonpartisan character but with wide popular appeal. Such an occasion was his Chautauqua address. “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. … I hate war.” Carefully skirting dangerous political shoals, the President fell back on his old formula of shunning political
commitments, such as those involved in the League, but warning that peaceful nations could be involved as long as war existed anywhere in the world. “I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.…”

Nature, too, aided the President’s guise of nonpartisanship. By the summer of 1936 a belt of land running from Canada to Texas had been seared and baked by drought. With the sun remorselessly drying up streams and killing off crops, the President decided on one of his “look-sees.” Any politics on the drought trip? reporters asked. “It is a great disservice to the proper administration of any government,” the President said piously, “to link up human misery with partisan politics.”

The trip was a political master stroke. The President made a score of back-platform speeches in nine states; he saw, and was seen by, tens of thousands of voters. Never did he mention the campaign, except in an offhand, humorous way, and never did he mention the Republican opposition. But he often pointed out the contrast between the conditions he had seen in 1932 and the conditions he saw now, even in the drought areas. As the politician joked and politicked with local officials, the inspection train took on the aura of a campaign train. Roosevelt himself seemed to take on magical qualities as his trips through the parched country time and again brought rain.

But the tour was a work trip, too, and the President had a chance to talk with scores of federal and local officials. The climax came in Des Moines when Roosevelt conferred with state governors—including the governor of Kansas. The meeting was called in part to put Landon “on the spot” in regard to farm relief, but the Kansan held his own. Roosevelt took care to be thoroughly briefed for the encounter. “You will not remember,” Landon said at one point, “but the first talk with me when you invited me to Washington in 1933—”

Roosevelt cut in: “About the water?”

“I am amazed you remember,” Landon said.

The President’s main difficulties came at the hands not of Landon but of blunt-talking Governor Ernest Marland of Oklahoma, where drought conditions were at their harshest. At the end the Oklahoman demanded: “Mr. President, what are we going to tell the 100,000 hungry farmers in Oklahoma tomorrow when we go home?”

“You are going to tell them that the Federal agencies are getting busy on it just as fast as the Lord will let them.… You can accomplish something in one week, but you cannot accomplish the impossible.”

“That is small consolation for a hungry farmer,” the governor persisted.

“What more can you say to the hungry farmer, Governor? The machinery will be put in gear just as fast as the Lord will let you.”

The grand strategy in this battle, Herbert Bayard Swope wrote Roosevelt in August, “is to be firm without being ferocious; to be kindly rather than cold; to be hopeful instead of pessimistic; to be human rather than to be economic; to be insistent upon every man having a chance, and above all, to make yourself appear to be the President of
all
the people.…”