Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (155 page)

T
HE
R
EPUBLICANS
were in a fix in the summer of 1944 and knew it. The coming presidential election would be a referendum on the war, whether Roosevelt explicitly declared it one or not. And with the war going well, the incumbent would be nearly impossible to beat. Yet the Republicans could look beyond the war and position themselves for that new era.

The leading Republican candidates going into election season were Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey. Willkie was a known quantity, with a strong following among international-minded Republicans. But the regulars hadn’t liked him in 1940, when Roosevelt seemed at least a little vulnerable, and they liked him even less now, when Roosevelt looked unbeatable. They couldn’t imagine letting him lead the party into the postwar era.

Dewey was the fresh face of the GOP. He had won a reputation in New York City during the 1930s prosecuting gangsters and Wall Street manipulators. He lost a close race for governor in 1938, putting a scare into the Democrats, and captured the office in 1942, becoming the first Republican governor in two decades. Dewey was young: if victorious in 1944 he would be, at forty-two, the youngest person ever elected president. He was energetic and handsome. Like the rest of the party, he understood that he was running for the 1948 nomination as much as for the one at hand. Either way he looked a good bet.

The nomination was effectively decided when Dewey trounced Willkie in the Wisconsin primary in April. Willkie had declared the Wisconsin vote a test of his candidacy; when he lost, badly, he withdrew from the race, leaving the field to the New York governor. Dewey was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago. Taking a page from Roosevelt’s biography, he accepted the nomination in person.

The Democrats arrived in Chicago three weeks later. The delegates knew the script—for the first part of the performance. In response to a White House–inspired query from the Democratic National Committee, Roosevelt declared that, if nominated, he would accept the nomination and, if elected, he would serve. “Every one of our sons serving in this war has officers from whom he takes his orders,” Roosevelt said. “Such officers have superior officers. The President is the Commander in Chief and he, too, has his superior officer—the people of the United States.” The Democratic delegates, standing in for the American people, ordered the president to seek a fourth term.

The scripting of the convention’s second act was less obvious. The campaign for the Democratic vice presidential nomination was, in one sense, very much like the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in that the campaigners and their advocates were looking beyond Roosevelt. Democratic conservatives had always distrusted—or despised—Henry Wallace, deeming the former secretary of agriculture too liberal on most issues and too erratic on the rest. In 1940 they hadn’t been able to organize swiftly enough to block Wallace’s nomination, and in any event the looming war and the need for solidarity behind Roosevelt’s unprecedented third-term try compelled their acquiescence. But in 1944 they were better organized and even more determined not to risk handing the White House to anyone as closely identified with the New Deal as Wallace.

Roosevelt himself had cooled on Wallace the previous year, when the vice president tangled with Jesse Jones, the secretary of commerce, ostensibly over foreign economic policy but really over the direction of the party. Jones, a conservative Texas businessman, thought Wallace a crackpot. Roosevelt almost agreed at times, when the vice president spouted more of his Christian mysticism than usual. All the same, Roosevelt would have much preferred to keep the quarrel inside the administration. But when Wallace and Jones insisted on speaking out, the president took the highly unusual step of rebuking them in public. Wallace was let to know that if Roosevelt was on the ticket in 1944, he—Wallace—would not be.

As the Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago, the president wrote Samuel Jackson, the permanent chair of the convention:

The easiest way of putting it is this. I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President, for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention. At the same time I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the convention. Obviously the convention must do the deciding.

The phrasing was classic Roosevelt. It appeared to endorse Wallace—a spokesman for the vice president professed to be “very happy” with the president’s letter—but in fact it had just the opposite effect. All the regulars remembered how Roosevelt had dictated the selection of Wallace in 1940 by threatening not to run. This time, in leaving the vice presidential nomination up to the convention, Roosevelt implicitly gave Wallace the heave-ho.

He furnished additional guidance. He arranged for Robert Hannegan, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to inquire about the preferences of the White House. “You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas,” Roosevelt replied. “I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.”

There was less to this response than met the eye. William Douglas was as suspect in conservative Democratic eyes as Henry Wallace. Roosevelt mentioned him simply as a sop to the New Dealers. The double endorsement in fact singled out Truman as the vice presidential nominee—and, in effect, the Democratic heir apparent.

The last of Roosevelt’s stage directions was a message to Truman himself. The Missouri senator was in his second term, and though best known as a protégé of the Kansas City Democratic boss, Tom Pendergast, he had lately distinguished himself probing fraud and waste in military procurement. As a midwestern border stater unassociated with the New Deal, Truman was thought to be acceptable to the conservatives and southerners in the party, the ones who were revolting against Wallace.

Truman knew he was being considered, but he balked at putting himself forward until Roosevelt made clear he wanted him on the ticket. The Senate had been the apex of his ambitions. “Hell, I don’t want to be president,” he told a reporter who said what everyone was thinking: that the vice presidential nomination might well lead to the White House. Besides, he had spent years in the Senate trying to rub off the stain of his Pendergast connections; to join the national ticket would stir up the old stories again.

Hannegan told Truman he had a note from Roosevelt endorsing him. But Hannegan’s refusal to let him see it naturally made him suspicious. Hannegan told Truman to come to his suite at the Blackstone Hotel. He placed a call to San Diego, where Roosevelt was inspecting naval installations. Truman could hear Roosevelt’s voice on the telephone from across the room.

“Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?” the president demanded.

“No,” Hannegan replied. “He’s the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever saw.”

“Well, you tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, and maybe lose that war, that’s up to him!” Roosevelt hung up.

“Oh, shit!” Truman said. He felt trapped—just as others had been trapped by Roosevelt before. “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

The selection proceeded as Roosevelt knew it would. Wallace led on the first ballot, receiving 429
¹
/2 votes against 319
¹
/2 for Truman, with the balance scattered among fourteen other candidates. But the votes for Wallace were so many empty gestures, as the second ballot, called immediately, made clear. Truman won in a landslide: 1,100 to 66.

The suddenness of the result caught Truman off guard. He was eating a sandwich on the platform of the convention hall when his victory was announced. Samuel Jackson insisted that he say a few words. Truman put down his sandwich and obliged. “You don’t know how very much I appreciate the very great honor which has come to the state of Missouri,” he said. “It is also a great responsibility which I am perfectly willing to assume. Nine years and five months ago I came to the Senate. I expect to continue the efforts I have made there to help shorten the war and to win the peace under the great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I don’t know what else I can say, except that I accept this great honor with all humility. I thank you.” He sat down and finished his sandwich.

“I
SHALL NOT
campaign, in the usual sense,” Roosevelt said, in accepting the presidential nomination. “In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. And besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time.” Roosevelt was speaking from his rail car on a siding in Southern California. By the middle of his twelfth year in office, the president seemed to many Democrats almost like God, able to manipulate people and things at long distance. In 1932 he had flown into Chicago to address the delegates, descending from the clouds to deliver the news of the party’s rebirth. Now he addressed the delegates from half a continent away. The hall was the same—the cavernous Chicago Stadium. The lights were dimmed, as they had been in 1932. But this time there was no spotlight for the speaker, because there was no speaker. There was only Roosevelt’s voice, rumbling through the building’s amplification system, booming out of the dark as if from on high. As with most of the president’s wartime journeys, this trip to the West Coast had been shrouded in secrecy; no one in the hall knew where he was—Washington? Hyde Park? Cairo?—till he revealed his location in his speech.

“What is the job before us in 1944?” the disembodied voice demanded.

First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible within the foreseeable future. And third, to build an economy for our returning veterans and for all Americans—which will provide employment and provide decent standards of living.

The people of the United States will decide this fall whether they wish to turn over this 1944 job—this worldwide job—to inexperienced or immature hands, to those who opposed Lend-Lease and international cooperation against the forces of aggression and tyranny, until they could read the polls of popular sentiment; or whether they wish to leave it to those who saw the danger from abroad, who met it head-on, and who now have seized the offensive and carried the war to its present stages of success….

They will also decide, these people of ours, whether they will entrust the task of postwar reconversion to those who offered the veterans of the last war breadlines and apple-selling and who finally led the American people down to the abyss of 1932; or whether they will leave it to those who rescued American business, agriculture, industry, finance, and labor in 1933, and who have already planned and put through much legislation to help our veterans resume their normal occupations in a well-ordered reconversion process.

The voice rumbled on. None of the listeners dared move, almost as though the omniscience it conveyed would see them, even in the dark. The instructions concluded with words drawn from another era and the final stages of another mortal conflict, spoken by America’s secular saint: