Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (112 page)

The Roosevelt stampede started slowly. Mayor Kelly welcomed the delegates to his city, and when he mentioned the president’s name in his opening address the Chicago delegates were supposed to erupt into a mad ovation. But they either misunderstood what was expected or simply missed their cue; the reaction to Kelly’s phrase “our beloved President—Franklin Delano Roosevelt” was no more than tepid.

Jim Farley tried to keep it that way. Farley had accepted a job in the front office of the New York Yankees but hadn’t begun his duties; his appearance at the convention, as exiting party chairman, was supposed to be his swan song, with the possibility that the delegates would, at the eleventh hour, discover his charms. As it happened, the swan song was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” played by the convention band at the request of persons unknown. A flustered Farley banged the gavel against the laughter that rolled across the floor of the Chicago Stadium.

Roosevelt kept quiet and mostly out of sight—sailing on the Potomac, weekending in Hyde Park—while the convention conducted its business. Everyone assumed that he would be nominated, but no one seemed to understand how his nomination would occur. Roosevelt’s strategy exasperated even some of his oldest associates. “The President’s refusal to take anyone, with the possible exception of Harry Hopkins, into his confidence annoyed me,” Harold Ickes recorded in his diary. “I have thought for some time that he was overplaying his role of indifference and was displaying too much coyness. It is all very well for him to try to create the impression generally that he had nothing to do with the third-term movement and was indifferent to it, but I know that this has not been his state of mind.” Ickes had particular reason to be miffed. He had been the first member of the administration to go public with support for a third term and for months had waged the fight on his own. “Having declared for him, I persisted, keeping the issue alive, speaking and writing on the subject, to say nothing of doing a great deal of work.” Ickes had made certain that Roosevelt’s name appeared on primary ballots, thereby frustrating Farley and other potential opponents and securing for the president sufficient delegates to control the convention.

Ickes’s suspicions notwithstanding, Hopkins evidently didn’t know any more about Roosevelt’s intentions than Ickes did. Hopkins’s only instruction from Roosevelt was a handwritten note, addressed to William Bankhead, the temporary chairman of the convention:

Dear Will,

When you speak to the Convention on Monday evening will you say something for me which I believe ought to be made utterly clear?

You and my other close friends have known and understood that I have not today and have never had any wish or purpose to remain in the office of the President, or indeed anywhere in public office after next January.

You know and all my friends know that this is a simple and sincere fact. I want you to repeat this simple and sincere fact to the Convention.

A change of schedule caused the note to be read by Alben Barkley, the permanent chairman of the convention, rather than by Bankhead. But it remained the sum of Roosevelt’s spoken or written advice to his supporters and the rest of the convention.

Yet Hopkins took it upon himself to organize the pro-Roosevelt forces in Chicago. They didn’t organize easily, given the resentment many veteran Democrats felt toward Hopkins and the New Dealers. Ickes and Frances Perkins arrived in Chicago expecting to lead the Roosevelt charge, only to discover that Hopkins had established headquarters already, in the Blackstone Hotel, and was giving orders as though in the president’s name. The effort nearly backfired, in that many of the delegates found Farley much easier to work with than Hopkins. Some muttered against Hopkins; others simply stayed away from the convention, leaving hundreds of seats empty.

The interim result was mass confusion. “Apparently I am not the only one around here who does not know anything,” Farley remarked to reporters. Farley was realizing that he had no chance for the nomination, but by now he was worrying that the party would look foolish. He concluded that the only recourse was to keep a sense of humor. “If we can go through this without taking it too seriously, or taking ourselves too seriously,” he said, “it will be all right.”

The confusion deepened even as it began to be resolved. Amid Senator Barkley’s reading of Roosevelt’s statement of lack of interest in another nomination, an electronically amplified voice rumbled through the arena, calling, “We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” The cry was echoed by Mayor Kelly’s minions and then spread across the convention floor. A curious reporter traced the mysterious voice to the basement, where a Kelly placeman—the superintendent of sewers, appropriately—commanded the sound system, reading from a printed script.

The spontaneity may have been contrived, but the enthusiasm for Roosevelt was sincere enough, once it got going, and the convention proceeded to renominate him by acclamation. The delegates might have retired in good order and comparatively good feeling had Roosevelt not taken the unusual step of dictating his running mate. In this regard, as in so many others, Roosevelt broke with accepted practice. Conventions still expected to exercise their own prerogative in selecting vice presidential candidates. But Roosevelt wanted to get rid of Garner, who was too close to the southern conservatives he had been trying to purge. Garner wasn’t sad to go, yet neither he nor just about anyone else was happy at the replacement Roosevelt named: Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture. Harold Ickes and Cordell Hull had each hoped to be named. But neither fitted Roosevelt’s specifications. Precisely what those specifications were he never said, but one, presumably, was the potential to be president. Hull came up short. “He goes about looking like an early Christian martyr, and people think that he is wonderful just on the basis of his looks,” Roosevelt told Ickes. “However, no one has ever attacked him on the basis of his record, and I regard him as the most vulnerable man we could name.” If Roosevelt told Hull why Ickes wouldn’t do, the secretary of state declined to record the explanation.

Why Roosevelt chose Wallace was hardly clearer. Perhaps he saw a president in Wallace, but he soon changed his mind, as events would prove. Doubtless he thought the formerly Republican agriculture secretary would appeal to farmers who might be tempted to return to the Republican fold. Quite possibly he liked Wallace because the rest of the party didn’t. The animus toward this latecomer to the party was palpable. “Just because the Republicans have nominated an apostate Democrat,” one angry delegate told the convention, referring to Willkie, “let us not, for God’s sake, nominate an apostate Republican.” Frances Perkins put the matter more diplomatically but no less accurately when she recalled, “The party longs to promote its own, and Wallace was not its own.” Roosevelt might well have calculated that an unpopular Wallace nomination would leave him free to tap his successor after his reelection.

But the Wallace nomination almost produced a revolt. Ickes, calling it a “damned outrage,” threatened to leave the administration and the party; the convention as a whole prepared to nominate its own choice. Only when Roosevelt let out that he was drafting a speech refusing the nomination and would deliver it if the convention rejected Wallace did reality prevail and the delegates decide they would rather have Roosevelt with Wallace than someone other than Roosevelt without Wallace.

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT
learned for certain that her husband intended a third term at the same time the rest of the world did: during the convention. She hadn’t originally liked the idea. “I had luncheon today with Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House,” Harry Hopkins wrote in the spring of 1939.

She asked Diana to come with me, and together with two or three of her friends we lunched out on the porch. After luncheon we went out in the gardens—Mrs. Roosevelt had her knitting—and discussed for three hours the state of the nation.

Mrs. Roosevelt was greatly disturbed about 1940. She is personally anxious not to have the president run again…. She feels the President has done his part entirely…. She thinks that the causes for which he fought are far greater than any individual person, but that if the New Deal is entirely dependent upon him, it indicates that it hasn’t as strong a foundation as she believes it has with the great masses of people. Mrs. Roosevelt is convinced that a great majority of the voters are not only with the President, but with the things he stands for, and that every effort should be made to control the Democratic Convention in 1940, nominate a liberal candidate, and elect him.

Eleanor’s feelings on an extension in the White House gradually changed. No liberal candidate emerged except for Roosevelt, who made certain that no such candidate
could
emerge. Eleanor meanwhile reconsidered what a third term would mean for her. On one hand it would lengthen the period of her political juvenility, when she could not speak or write without weighing her words against the wishes and policies of her husband. It would also postpone the reclamation of her private life, which she had all but surrendered after the disastrous West Coast trip with Lorena Hickok. On the other hand, a third term would afford her a continuation of her unique political influence. Eleanor didn’t underrate her intelligence or insight, but she appreciated full well the leverage her position as presidential spouse gave to her innate talents. If Franklin retired, she would be much freer than at present, and much less influential.

She followed the proceedings of the convention by radio from the Val-Kill cottage at Hyde Park. She heard Alben Barkley read Franklin’s letter to the delegates. She saw the newspaper accounts of disarray among Roosevelt’s lieutenants at Chicago, and she received a call from Frances Perkins pleading with her to come and calm things down. She inquired of Franklin whether her presence would be appropriate. “It might be very nice for you to go,” he answered. “But I do not think it is in the least necessary.”

It wasn’t necessary for Roosevelt’s renomination, which followed shortly. Yet it seemed, if not strictly necessary, at least strongly advisable as the battle for the vice presidency broke out. Jim Farley added his voice to those urging her to come lest the party fall ignominiously apart. “The situation is not good,” Farley said. “I think it desirable, if not essential, that you come.” She took a chartered plane to the Chicago air field, where a throng of reporters awaited her at the American Air Lines hangar. “Are you happy about the nomination?” one shouted.

“Happy?” she responded, without the smile expected of a nominee’s wife. “I don’t know how anyone could be particularly happy about the nomination in the present state of the world. It is a tremendous responsibility to be nominated for the presidency.”

“Was the president willing for you to come? Did he wish you well?”

“I don’t remember that he wished me well.” She smiled now, to soften what she realized sounded harsh. “I suppose, of course, that he was willing for me to come—or I would not have come.”

A car whisked her to the convention hall, where she was rushed to the podium to quell the revolt against Roosevelt’s selection of Henry Wallace. She stressed the need for party unity, for all to pull behind the president in this hour of world peril. “No man who is a candidate or who is president can carry this situation alone. This is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it to the fullest of their ability, with the highest ideals, with a determination that their party shall be absolutely devoted to the good of the nation as a whole.”

Eleanor’s statement was just the touch necessary to bring the anti-Wallace factions into line. Perhaps their revolt was chiefly symbolic; perhaps they would have found their own way back into the fold. But with Eleanor lecturing them on the obligation to party and country, they had no choice.