Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (15 page)

T
HOUGH VAGUE,
Roosevelt’s plans weren’t unconsidered. He traveled from Baltimore to Sea Girt, New Jersey, where Wilson, in line with tradition, had kept his distance from the convention and where, while taking the salt air, he was simultaneously measuring the temperature of various elements of the party. With Taft and Theodore Roosevelt dividing the Republican vote, Wilson could count on New York’s bloc of electors, the largest in the country. But he couldn’t count on the post-inaugural cooperation of New York’s congressional delegation unless Charles Murphy fell from power. By one line of reasoning, in fact, Murphy was more dangerous than ever, for the Republican rift at the top of the ballot would make almost any down-ballot Democratic slate of candidates easy victors. Murphy wouldn’t have to appease the progressives but could pack his people onto the Wilson bandwagon, whether they agreed with Wilson or not. Wilson doubtless realized it already, but Roosevelt reminded him that the true battle for New York would be fought not at the polls in November but at the Democrats’ nominating convention in October.

Wilson accordingly blessed Roosevelt’s strategy of building up a pro-Wilson, anti-Tammany organization of Democrats. This group, calling itself the Empire State Democracy, gathered at the Hotel Astor in Manhattan in late July to indict Murphy politically on multiple charges of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance. “In imbecility, in greed, and in suspected partnership in violence,” the new group’s manifesto asserted, “the small clique claiming control of the party organization has been bound to abhorrent criminal forces, to predatory special interests, to favored corrupt contractors, and to unscrupulous patronage-mongers…. The patriotism of self-respecting men requires, and true party loyalty demands, that at whatever cost that bondage shall be broken by the rank and file.”

Roosevelt endorsed the Empire State manifesto but supplied his own interpretation. “They refer to us as ‘irregular,’” he said of Murphy and his henchmen. They were wrong. “We are the regulars. The system, Tammany, has prevented the Democrats from having control in New York for sixteen years.” The time had come to restore the Democrats—the real Democrats, which was to say the ordinary, honest people of New York—to their rightful place in charge of their own destiny. “This is the year to go ahead and strike, and we’ve got the club.”

To the surprise of many progressives, their declaration of war against Tammany prompted Murphy to seek a truce. He offered to let the Tammany delegates at the state convention vote their consciences, and he accepted the nomination of a moderately progressive candidate for governor in place of the incumbent regular. Finally, he acquiesced in the renomination, by a unanimous vote of the nominating committee, of Franklin Roosevelt for state senator.

As things transpired, Murphy’s retreat was tactical rather than strategic, and Tammany survived the 1912 campaign season as it had survived every other season for more than a century. All the same, Roosevelt could plausibly claim credit for another victory over the forces of bossism and corruption.

H
AD THE
1912 presidential campaign been designed expressly for the purpose of educating Franklin Roosevelt in competing theories of government power, it could hardly have unfolded more enlighteningly. William Howard Taft, the conservative among the three presidential candidates, believed that government ought generally to defer to the wisdom of the marketplace. Taft’s Justice Department prosecuted certain industrial monopolies, including Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which was dismantled by order of the Supreme Court. But by and large Taft trusted Adam Smith’s invisible hand to promote the interests of the nation and produce the greatest good for the greatest number of the American people.

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were far less enamored of the capitalist status quo. Each believed that capitalism was running away with democracy, that the invisible hand was strangling economic opportunity and holding millions of Americans in thrall to corporate greed. Each endorsed the progressive idea that government must intervene in the marketplace on behalf of the private sector’s victims.

But they differed sharply on the nature of the intervention. Theodore Roosevelt contended that the optimal riposte to the power of corporations was the power of the people, as exercised through government. In a widely reprinted speech he outlined what he called the “New Nationalism,” a philosophy premised on the belief that combination—the establishment of ever-bigger corporate entities—was an ineluctable fact of modern economic life. “Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation,” Roosevelt asserted. This being so, political wisdom consisted in controlling rather than dismantling the combinations. “The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.” The federal government, with powers enhanced for the purpose, was the single body competent to bring the great corporations to heel.

Woodrow Wilson took less comfort in big government. As a professor Wilson had studied government historically, and he became convinced that government operated better as a policeman of the economy than as its overseer. He concurred with Theodore Roosevelt that the fundamental problem of American life was the excessive power of corporate capital. “The inventive genius and initiative of the American people,” he said, “is being held back by the fact that our industrial field is so controlled that new entries, newcomers, new adventurers, independent men, are feared, and if they will not go partners in the game with those already in control of it, they will be excluded.” The function of government ought to be to level the field among the industrial and commercial contestants. But where Theodore Roosevelt proposed to accomplish this by expanding the power of government, Wilson advocated reducing the power of business. “What I am interested in is laws that will give the little man a start, that will give him a chance to show these fellows that he has brains enough to compete with them and can presently make his local market a national market and his national market a world market.” Wilson’s “New Freedom” would break up the trusts, restore the conditions of competition that had prevailed in the nineteenth century, and then let the little man have his day.

Franklin Roosevelt had special reason to follow the arguments of Colonel Roosevelt and Professor Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt was a progressive, but his progressivism remained amorphous on most subjects not directly related to the politics of New York state. He could learn directly from the contest between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom as theories of governance; he could also learn indirectly, by observing how American voters responded to the competing versions of progressivism. Moreover, he had a personal stake in the fight. He had committed publicly to Wilson, and his career stood to advance if Wilson won. At the same time, having modeled himself on Theodore Roosevelt, he couldn’t help wondering whether this part of Uncle Ted’s career would be worth emulating, too.

Unfortunately for Franklin Roosevelt’s political education, the meaning of the 1912 campaign was confused by the three-way nature of the race, and never more than on election day. Wilson received 6.3 million votes, to 4.1 million for Roosevelt and 3.5 million for Taft. Translated into electors, the result gave Wilson 435 against 88 for Roosevelt and 8 for Taft. Obviously progressivism had won, but how much of Wilson’s popular vote reflected simple Democratic loyalty, as opposed to endorsement of his small-government progressivism over TR’s big-government version and Taft’s comfort with the status quo, was impossible to determine. Equally puzzling was how long the distinction would persist in practice, once the campaign faded into memory.

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT’S IMMEDIATE
memories of the campaign were clouded by an illness that afflicted him during its final weeks. Following his convention-shortened vacation at Campobello, he and Eleanor cruised down the coast to New York, where they planned to meet friends for an evening on the city. But he felt weak and feverish and had to beg off. The next day he was worse. Eleanor called a doctor, who was mystified at the patient’s symptoms. “No one could understand what was the matter with him,” Eleanor recalled. She nursed Franklin for several days, till she started feeling poorly herself. She summoned the doctor back, and he diagnosed her illness as typhoid fever. Franklin had had typhoid as a child, which was why no one thought to test him for it. But in fact he had contracted it again, and though Eleanor’s infection burned itself out fairly quickly, his reinfection kept him bedridden for weeks.

While Eleanor and the doctor reasoned backward to figure out how she and Franklin had contracted the water-borne disease—she eventually identified a pitcher of water on the boat from Campobello; they had taken care not to drink the water but had rinsed their toothbrushes in it—Franklin wrestled with the problem of conducting his reelection campaign from his sickbed. Heretofore his style had been intensely personal and physical. He had insisted on meeting as many constituents as possible, pumping their hands, patting the heads of their children, and doing whatever else he could to diminish the patina of inherited wealth that still clung to him. Now that he was an invalid, if only temporarily, he had to adopt an alternative plan.

Luckily he had help. Louis McHenry Howe was a Hoosier by birth, the son of one of Indianapolis’s most prominent families. But the Panic of 1873 bankrupted his father and forced the family to seek refuge with relatives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Louis grew up. He became a reporter and then, for a time, editor and owner of the
Saratoga Sun.
He developed a passion for politics and might have entered the arena himself if not for an off-putting appearance—Howe described his own face as “one of the four ugliest” in New York state, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, who learned to love him dearly, called him a “gnome-like looking little man”—and an impatience with posers and fools. Instead he sought a candidate he could devote himself to, a man who could serve as the vehicle for his intelligence and ambition. Likely figures were few in Albany, but when Franklin Roosevelt arrived in 1911, Howe decided he qualified.

Roosevelt’s acuity in judging character would prove to be one of his greatest gifts; his first important verdict—in the case of Louis Howe—was perhaps the most insightful of all. Many people couldn’t stand Howe. Beyond his unprepossessing physiognomy were personal habits that repelled the fastidious. He rarely changed his suit, which was chronically covered with ash from the cigarettes he never stopped smoking. His wicked sense of humor impaled friends nearly as often as it skewered enemies. But Roosevelt managed to see past Howe’s idiosyncrasies to his distinctive gifts. Howe understood New York state politics as almost no one else did. He knew where Tammany buried the bodies (metaphorically, for the most part). In an age before scientific polling, he had an uncanny feel for public opinion. And Roosevelt liked him—liked his irreverence, liked his passion for politics, liked his capacity for intrigue.

Howe recognized this, and during the summer of 1912, when the newspaper business was slow, he appealed to Roosevelt for work. “If you can connect me with a job during this campaign,” he wrote, “for heaven’s sake help me out.” Roosevelt threw him some small assignments, and then, after being hit by typhoid, hired him to manage his reelection campaign.

Howe delivered a virtuoso performance. He drafted letters from Roosevelt to all the important constituencies in his district. In Roosevelt’s name he asked farmers for advice on strengthening agriculture. He consulted commercial fishermen on how to conserve the shad run. He assured apple growers that their crops would be fairly measured and marketed. He declared Roosevelt’s support for woman suffrage. On one occasion he drafted a full-page newspaper advertisement specifying the Roosevelt platform; upon its completion he sent Roosevelt a proof, with a note: “As I have pledged you in it, I thought you might like to know casually what kind of a mess I was getting you into.” Howe traveled the district in Roosevelt’s stead, reminding audiences that Roosevelt had faced down Tammany and contending that such integrity ought to earn him the support of all honorable Hudson Valley voters, Republicans as well as Democrats.