Roosevelt (79 page)

Most upsetting of all were the public opinion polls. During September they had shown Roosevelt comfortably leading Willkie. The President, however, was disturbed as well as pleased by these figures. He feared that the final polls might show Willkie gaining and give the impression of a horse race with his adversary likely to pass him just before the tape. Roosevelt even speculated to Ickes that if George Gallup, the head of the American Institute of Public Opinion, ever wanted to sell out, this would be his best chance; Gallup could deliberately manipulate the figures to hurt the Democrats and arrange to sell his business for a good round sum. Roosevelt was wrong about Gallup but he was right about the next poll returns. Influenced by Willkie’s cries of warmonger and by a lull in the Battle of Britain, among other things, the October returns showed Willkie rapidly cutting down the President’s lead.

This shift was all that was needed to put the Roosevelt camp into a state of near panic. For weeks letters and telegrams had streamed into the White House urging the President to come out of his corner and fight; now the stream rose to a flood. With a single voice the party turned to its leader with a cry for help. Ickes haunted the White House pleading that the fight was lost unless the President acted. Deeply angered by Willkie’s campaign Roosevelt on October 18 announced that he would answer the Republican “deliberate falsification of fact” in five election speeches. He passed out word that his lieutenants could go after Willkie with their bare hands.

“I am fighting mad,” Roosevelt said to Ickes.

“I love you when you are fighting mad, Mr. President,” the old gamecock replied.

No commander has ever sized up the terrain more shrewdly, rallied his demoralized battalions more tellingly, probed the enemy’s weak points more unerringly, and struck more powerfully than did Roosevelt against the Republican party during the climactic two weeks before the election. Nor has any commander taken more satisfaction in the job. For it was Roosevelt’s supreme good fortune that the circumstances of the election had brought together, in a sorry alliance, the reactionaries, the isolationists, the obstructionists, and the cynical laborites and left-wingers who had bruised and cut him for four years—all now under the leadership of a candidate who, the President believed, had sold out to the worst elements in his party.

Roosevelt hungered to get on the stump—yet he had to proceed cautiously. At all costs he wanted to preserve his symbolic role of commander in chief. He had said that he would not travel more than twelve hours from Washington, in case he was needed there in an emergency; and despite frantic pleas for personal appearances elsewhere, he stuck to this plan. A Secret Service ban on the presidential use of airplanes meant that the President could campaign only in parts of the Northeast. Roosevelt managed to make some automobile tours that were both defense inspections and campaign trips, but he knew that his greatest weapon was the radio, through which he could reach the whole country. Exploitation of the radio seemed all the more urgent because of Republican supremacy in the press, and it seemed all the more agreeable because Willkie was at his most graceless and ineffective at the microphone.

Roosevelt opened his campaign in Philadelphia on the night of October 23. He declared that he welcomed the chance to answer falsifications with facts. “I am an old campaigner,” he proclaimed, “and I love a good fight.” The huge crowd roared.

Never had the old campaigner been in better form, reporters agreed. He was in turn intimate, ironic, bitter, sly, sarcastic, indignant, solemn. He lifted his eyes in mock horror, rolled his head sidewise, shook with laughter. “He’s all the Barrymores rolled in one,” a reporter exclaimed.

Slowly and deliberately Roosevelt answered Willkie’s charge of secret understandings.

“I give to you and to the people of this country this most solemn assurance: There is no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other Government, or any other nation in any part of the world, to involve this nation in any war or for any other purpose.”

The President struck out at a Republican charge, as he described it, that his administration had not made one man a job.

“I say that those statements are false. I say that the figures of employment, of production, of earnings, of general business activity—all prove that they are false.

“The tears, the crocodile tears, for the laboring man and laboring woman now being shed in this campaign come from those same Republican leaders who had their chance to prove their love for labor in 1932—and missed it.

“Back in 1932, those leaders were willing to let the workers starve if they could not get a job.

“Back in 1932, they were not willing to guarantee collective bargaining.

“Back in 1932, they met the demands of unemployed veterans with troops and tanks.

“Back in 1932, they raised their hands in horror at the thought of fixing a minimum wage or maximum hours for labor; they never gave one thought to such things as pensions for old age or insurance for the unemployed.

“In 1940, eight years later, what a different tune is played by them! It is a tune played against a sounding board of election day. It is a tune with overtones which whisper: ‘Votes, votes, votes.’ ”

On the subject of economic recovery Roosevelt quoted the financial section of the New York
Times
against the editorial page. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he taunted, “if the editorial writers of
The New York Times
could get acquainted with their own business experts?”

Five nights later, after driving during the day for fourteen hours through New York City streets before probably two million people, Roosevelt charged in Madison Square Garden that the Republican leaders were “playing politics with national defense.” Such a charge was opportune; Italy had just invaded Greece, and several times
during the day the President interrupted his street tour to telephone the State Department. He made no “stab-in-the-back” remark in the Garden—only an expression of sorrow for both the Italian and Greek peoples. Most of his speech was a slashing attack on the Republican leaders—Hoover, Taft, McNary, Vandenberg—for opposing defense measures in the past and now condemning the administration for starving the armed forces.

“Yes, it is a remarkable somersault,” Roosevelt said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I wonder if the election could have something to do with it.”

While drafting this speech Rosenman and Sherwood had hit on the rhythmic sequence of “Martin, Barton, and Fish.” They handed Roosevelt a draft with this phrase to see if he would catch the rhythm. He did: his eyes twinkled as he repeated it several times, swinging his finger in cadence to show how he would put it across. The crowd in Madison Square Garden guffawed and were soon repeating the phrase with him.

Willkie was staggered by this assault on him through his weakest allies. As the campaign rose to a new peak of bitterness and intensity, he desperately doubled his bets. On October 30, the day after Roosevelt officiated at the drawing of selective service numbers, Willkie shouted that on the basis of Roosevelt’s record of broken promises, his election would mean war within six months.

Roosevelt was en route to Boston the day that Willkie made this charge. By now Democratic leaders were more jittery than ever; the Gallup poll showed Willkie almost abreast of Roosevelt nationally and ahead of him in New York and other key states. Each time his train stopped for rear-platform speeches on the way to Boston messages came in from Flynn and others pleading with Roosevelt to answer Willkie’s charges. The President, in fact, had already compromised on the essential issue throughout the whole campaign by stressing his love for peace and neutrality and his record on defense rather than expounding his crucial policy of aiding Britain even at the risk of war. But, as Roosevelt sat in a low-backed armchair in his private car, Hopkins handed him a telegram from Flynn insisting that he must reassure the people again about not sending Americans into foreign wars.

“But how often do they expect me to say that?” Roosevelt asked. “It’s in the Democratic platform and I’ve repeated it a hundred times.”

“Evidently,” said Sherwood, “you’ve got to say it again—and again —and again.”

The President liked the phrase. Then the speech writers ran into a snag on the sentence “Your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars.” Roosevelt in past talks had always added the
words “except in case of attack”; he had, indeed, insisted on this qualification during the Chicago convention even when he was willing otherwise to compromise on the foreign policy plank. Now he wanted to drop the proviso. Rosenman asked why.

Roosevelt’s face was drawn and gray. He had to bend before the fury of Willkie’s attack—but he would not admit it.

“It’s not necessary,” he said shortly. “If we’re attacked it’s no longer a foreign war.”

That night in Boston, after a tumultuous reception, Roosevelt catalogued the anti-New Deal voting record of “Martin, Barton and Fish” and compared it with the “soothing syrup” the Republicans spread on thick. Appealing by radio to the farming West, he wondered out loud if Martin—whom Willkie had once described as representing “all that is finest in American public life”—was slated for Secretary of Agriculture. And to the “mothers and fathers of America,” he made the assurance that in years to come would be repeated mockingly by thousands of isolationist orators:

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:

“Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

By now Roosevelt was facing a threat from a new quarter, and he used his next campaign speech two nights later in Brooklyn to counter it. The Republicans had scored a singular coup a few nights before when John L. Lewis not only came out for Willkie but announced that he would resign as president of the CIO if Roosevelt won. The President’s sole motive and goal, said the black-maned old miners’ chief in his Shakespearean voice, was war. By asserting that a victory for Roosevelt would be in effect a vote of no confidence in himself, Lewis was able at last to come to grips with the slippery rival he hated—but he was doing so on the President’s own ground. With the Communists also attacking the administration hysterically, Roosevelt saw his opening and struck hard.

“There is something very ominous,” Roosevelt said in Brooklyn, “in this combination that has been forming within the Republican party between the extreme reactionary and the extreme radical elements of this country.

“There is no common ground upon which they can unite—we know that—unless it be their common will to power, and their impatience with the normal democratic processes to produce overnight the inconsistent dictatorial ends that they, each of them, seek.” Toward the end of his speech Roosevelt quoted a Philadelphia Republican leader as having said, “The President’s only supporters are paupers, those who earn less than $1200 and aren’t worth
that,
and the Roosevelt family.”

“ ‘Paupers’ who are not worth their salt,” Roosevelt
exclaimed,“—there speaks the true sentiment of the Republican leadership in this year of grace.

“Can the Republican leaders deny that this all too prevailing Republican sentiment is a direct, vicious, unpatriotic appeal to class hatred and class contempt?

“That, my friends, is just what I am fighting against with all my heart and soul.…”

While the White House moved fast to turn Lewis’ district leaders against the mine leader, Roosevelt ended the campaign in Cleveland on the lofty note he loved. The Cleveland speech was perhaps the hardest he had ever had to write. Rosenman and Sherwood had not had a chance to start preparing anything until the day before, and they were exhausted. All night the two labored on the campaign train, catching cat naps on beds littered with toast crusts and gobs of cottage cheese. By midday the next day, when the draft was ready, Sherwood was shocked at Roosevelt’s appearance—the dark circles under his eyes, the gray face, the sagging jowls. The President during the morning had been making rear-platform appearances, greeting people, pumping hands; he had felt compelled to say at Buffalo, “Your President says this country is not going to war.” Roosevelt was dreadfully tired.

But during lunch, as the President told long, dull stories about Maine lobstermen that all present had heard many times, Sherwood saw his enormous powers of recuperation at work. Soon Roosevelt was demanding jocularly, “What have you three cutthroats been doing to my speech?” For six hours straight, except when he had to put on his leg braces and walk out to the rear platform on Pa Watson’s arm, Roosevelt worked on his speech. Out of the noise and dirt of the car, out of the rhythm of the train as it chugged slowly through the falling rain, out of the chatter and scuffle of visiting politicos, out of the utter weariness of Roosevelt and his advisers, came somehow a superb campaign speech. That night forty thousand men and women cheered their hearts out as Roosevelt stood before them in a vast auditorium. He began quietly but before the end he was striking a personal and passionate note.

“During these years while our democracy advanced on many fields of battle, I have had the great privilege of being your President. No personal ambition of any man could desire more than that.

“It is a hard task. It is a task from which there is no escape day or night.

“And through it all there have been two thoughts uppermost in my mind—to preserve peace in our land; and to make the forces of democracy work for the benefit of the common people of America.

“Seven years ago I started with loyal helpers and with the trust and faith and support of millions of ordinary Americans.

“The way was difficult—the path was dark, but we have moved steadily forward to the open fields and the glowing light that shines ahead.

“The way of our lives seems clearer now, if we but follow the charts and the guides of our democratic faith.

“There is—there is a great storm raging now, a storm that makes things harder for the world. And that storm, which did not start in this land of ours, is the true reason that I would like to stick by those people of ours—yes, stick by until we reach the clear, sure footing ahead.