Roosevelt (80 page)

“And we will make it—we will make it before the next term is over.

“We will make it; and the world, we hope, will make it, too.

“When that term is over there will be another President, and many more Presidents in the years to come, and I think that, in the years to come, that word ‘President’ will be a word to cheer the hearts of common men and women everywhere.

“Our future belongs to us Americans.

“It is for us to design it; for us to build it.…”

The campaign spluttered to a surly finish. Willkie, his voice still a hoarse whisper, charged once more that a third term would mean dictatorship and war. On election eve Roosevelt gave his usual “nonpartisan” talk. After urging that all vote the next day and then help restore unity, he ended with an old prayer that he remembered from Groton forty years before:

“… Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues.…”

Next day fifty million Americans—millions more than ever before—streamed to the polls. Roosevelt himself was the picture of genial self-confidence when he faced reporters at the Hyde Park polling place. Patiently he posed while the photographers shot him from every angle. “Will you wave at the trees, Mr. President?” he was asked. “Go climb a tree!” Roosevelt said. “You know I never wave at trees unless they have leaves on them.” But then, quickly relenting, he waved at the trees while cameras clicked.

That night the house stood dark and quiet on its height above the Hudson. On a staff above the portico the presidential flag, with its shield, eagle, and white stars, flapped quietly in the mild November air. Inside the mood was tensely gay. Much of the family was
there, along with a host of friends. Little groups clustered around radios throughout the house. Roosevelt sat at the family dining-room table. In front of him were big tally sheets and a row of freshly sharpened pencils. News tickers chattered nearby.

At first the President was calm and businesslike. The early returns were mixed. Morgenthau, nervous and fussy, bustled in and out of the room. Suddenly Mike Reilly, the President’s bodyguard, noticed that Roosevelt had broken into a heavy sweat. Something in the returns had upset him. It was the first time Reilly had ever seen him lose his nerve.

“Mike,” Roosevelt said suddenly, “I don’t want to see anybody in here.”

“Including your family, Mr. President?”

“I said ‘anybody,’ ” Roosevelt answered in a grim tone.

Reilly left the room to tell Mrs. Roosevelt and to intercept Morgenthau’s next trip back to the dining room. Inside, Roosevelt sat before his charts. His coat was off; his tie hung low; his soft shirt clung around the big shoulders. The news tickers clattered feverishly.…

Was this the end of it all? Better by far not to have run for office again than to go down to defeat now. All his personal enemies gathered in one camp—big businessmen like Willkie, Democratic bolters like Al Smith and the rest of them, newspaper publishers like Hearst and Howard, the turncoats like John Lewis, the obstructionists on Capitol Hill, the isolationists, the Communists—would this strange coalition at last knock him down and write his epitaph in history as a power-grasping dictator rebuked by a free people?

In Hoboken and in St. Louis, in Middletown and in a South Carolina crossroads school, ballots were counted and figures phoned to the court house; numbers were tumbled onto telegraph wires, grouped with other figures, flashed to the state capitals, combined with more figures; and now the little machines were spewing them out. In the black numbers was being struck some cosmic balance—the courageous acts, the forthright utterances, the hard decisions, the great achievements, stretching from the Hundred Days to the destroyer deal, from social security to selective service. Struck in this balance, too, were the compromises and the evasions, the deals and the manipulations, the hopes unrealized, the promises unfulfilled.

The smoke curled up from the cigarette in the long holder. The Hyde Park returns were not in yet. But they would probably go against him. It was strange, in a way. He had never really left Hyde Park. He had always left part of himself in this world of tranquil estates, hard-working farmers, St. James’s church, the trees and the
fields and the river. He had never wholly left the world of his mother, now sitting with friends in another room. Yet this was the world he had never won over politically.

In the little black numbers marching out of the ticker, not only Roosevelt but the whole New Deal was on trial. The relentless figures were a summation of so much—of the clarion call of 1933, the sultry summer of 1935, the long trips through the country, the court fight, the purge, the pleas to the dictators, the arming of the nation. A generation of American ideas was on trial too. Eighty precincts from New Jersey reporting—what verdict would come from Newark slums and the Jersey flats on a credo that had repudiated McKinley, moved beyond Wilson, and somehow fused a dozen differing doctrines and traditions?

From all over America the atoms of judgment streamed through the ticker and took their place on the tally sheets. Still Willkie ran strong. Disappointing first returns were coming in from New York—New York, the very image of the America from which the New Deal coalition had been built. New York—the heart of his political empire, the state of Uncle Ted, of law firms like the one he had worked for on Wall Street, of Tammany bosses. New York—the state that had rebuked him in 1914, and again in 1920, then favored him by the tiny margin of 1928 and the huge avalanche of 1930.

The ash dropped from the cigarette; Mike Reilly stood stolidly outside the door. Was this the end of Jim Farley’s journey to the Elks’ convention; the final landing for the plane that had carried Roosevelt from Albany to the Chicago convention of 1932? Would the whole great adventure follow the Blue Eagle into defeat? New York City returns were coming in—even the city was undependable in this strange election. Here were the urban masses—the Italians, Jews, Negroes, Germans, Irish—who had benefited from the New Deal and who had sustained it. But now the New Deal was no longer new, and other, sharper issues had emerged as Hitler changed the face of politics everywhere. One report had reached Roosevelt that in New York City only the Jews were solid for him.

And so the returns poured in, filling in the little pieces that would, before the night was over, make up a vast mosaic—and an answer. The voters, in the last analysis, were not passing on a unity, on a completed sum of the New Deal. For when all its parts were added and subtracted, what remained was less a quantity than a spirit. Seven years were on trial, seven eventful years crammed with deeds; yet it was not the deeds that remained—though their monuments would long endure—so much as a distillation of the pageant of the 1930’s, embodied in the spirit that was the New Deal—boldness, eclecticism, experimentation, a devotion to building the grade
crossing and housing the homeless that transcended ideology and spoke the idiom of American tradition. There was in all this not so much a philosophy as a common sense. And it was the common sense of the American people that must speak tonight.…

Then there was a stir throughout the house. Slowly but with gathering force, the numbers on the charts started to shift their direction. Reports began to arrive of a great surge of Roosevelt strength, a surge that would go on until midnight. New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania—the great urban states were falling in line behind the President. By now Roosevelt was smiling again, the door was opened, and in came family and friends with more reports of victory. Then came the usual torchlight parade from Hyde Park center, lighted by photographers’ flash bulbs, and the usual homey talk by the President: “I will still be the same Franklin Roosevelt you have always known.…”

In the ballroom of the Hotel Commodore in New York thousands of Willkie supporters had gathered in a celebrating mood. For a time all were jubilant; then, as the sad reports poured in, the crowd slowly dwindled until only a dejected band of Willkieites remained. The candidate appeared for a short talk late in the evening. “Don’t be afraid and never quit,” he cried hoarsely. Not till the next day did he send Roosevelt a congratulatory wire.

The final results spelled a decisive victory for Roosevelt. The popular vote was 27,243,466 to 22,304,755; the electoral vote was 449 to 82. Besides Maine, Vermont, and six farm states, Willkie carried only Indiana and Michigan. Roosevelt won every city in the country with over 400,000 population except Cincinnati. On the other hand, Willkie had gained five million more votes than Landon had in 1936; Roosevelt’s plurality was the smallest of any winning candidate since 1916. The President’s margin in New York—about 225,000—was his lowest since his hairbreadth victory for governor in 1928.

But, while Roosevelt lost some support in almost every major group, he dropped off only slightly in the huge lower and lower-middle income groups. His continued substantial support among the “masses” was the key to his victory. Labor, including coal miners, stayed with the President. Lewis’s efforts had fallen flat, and he duly surrendered the CIO presidency as a symbol of his total defeat by Roosevelt in the political arena. There were indications that class voting in 1940 was more solid than four years before. “I’ll say it even though it doesn’t sound nice,” a Detroit auto unionist told reporter Samuel Lubell shortly after the election. “We’ve grown class conscious.”

If Willkie’s appeals to the workers on economic issues had proved unavailing, his raising of the war issue did cut into Roosevelt’s vote.
Pro-German and Italian and anti-British elements swung sharply against the President, and these were only partly offset by the Jews, eastern seaboard Yankee internationalists, and national groups such as Poles and Norwegians who could not forget Hitler’s occupation of the “old country.” Roosevelt actually increased his vote in northern New England over 1936, though by a small margin.

Unquestionably Roosevelt had been lucky in at least two respects: the crisis in Europe and the first flush of returning prosperity. The former took the force out of Willkie’s main foreign policy appeal; the latter took the sting out of his main domestic argument, namely the Depression. Poll after poll showed that the sharper the crisis, the more the voters clung to Roosevelt. The emergency situation seemed also wholly to counteract Willkie’s third-term warnings.

Luck—but marvelous skill as well. The President’s political timing had never been better, his speeches for the most part had never been more skillful, his thrusts at enemy weak points never more telling. More than this, he had exploited his one great line of communication to the people—the radio—while countering Willkie effectively in the very medium—the newspapers—that the latter could claim as peculiarly his own. Willkie was ineffective over the radio; and, while Willkie got more favorable mention in the press, Roosevelt got more
attention
in the press. The old political adage held: bad publicity is better than no publicity.

In the last analysis Roosevelt himself was the issue. His campaign poses with the guns and ships had paid off; but his captaincy of a generation paid off too. His victory was largely a personal one; the Democrats gained only six seats in the House in 1940 after the slump of 1938, and lost three in the Senate. The future had been made possible for Roosevelt, but what was foretold for his party, his program, his country, and his world, no man could tell.

A
UTHOR’S NOTE
:
The war years are treated synoptically for reasons explained in the preface. The concluding observations on Roosevelt’s character in the third section of this Epilogue are based mainly upon the previous chapters, but these observations, I hope, may throw some light on the events pictured in broad strokes in this Epilogue.

A
MONTH AFTER ROOSEVELT’S ELECTION
Hitler threw down the gage of world battle. In a fiery speech to the Berlin armaments workers the Fuehrer pictured the global conflict as a gigantic class struggle. Britain and America, rich nations ruled by capitalists, had millions of unemployed; in Germany all had jobs, and work was the supreme value. “There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other.… With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. … I can beat any other power in the world.…”

Three weeks later Roosevelt answered the challenge. Quoting Hitler’s words, he said in a fireside chat that the Axis “not merely admits but
proclaims
that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” Hence, he said, the United States could not encourage talk of peace until the aggressors abandoned all thought of conquering the world.

The President interpreted the election as a mandate for the United States to become a great “arsenal of democracy.” In the last weeks of 1940 he slowly worked out the policies underlying Lend-Lease, under which the President would be empowered to lend or lease equipment to nations whose defense he considered necessary to the security of the United States. Britain was being stripped to the bone, Churchill had warned the President privately, and Roosevelt told reporters that he was merely trying to get rid of the “silly, foolish, old dollar sign.” When Lend-Lease passed Congress, Roosevelt scored a legislative victory that was a milestone in the organizing of world resistance to Hitler.

So far, so good—even the isolationists could hardly deny that the act was a logical projection of the election mandate to step up aid
to the democracies, especially at a time when Hitler was scoring a series of striking victories in the Balkans and elsewhere. But what would happen if circumstances called for something more than material help from the arsenal? Forced back on the defensive during the election, Roosevelt had made peace the supreme issue. Rearmament, aid to Britain, the destroyer deal, hemispheric unity—all these he had proclaimed as means of keeping America out of war. To be sure, in his December fireside chat he faced up to the perils involved. “If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take.” But then he drew quickly back on the limb. The cardinal aim was not American security, not democratic survival, not destruction of Nazism, but peace.