Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (39 page)

Roosevelt concluded this story by saying that he then began to see the economy of the country as a whole. He had read about low crop prices, but he had never witnessed in firsthand, personal terms what they meant for those honest, struggling farmers who were compelled to accept them. The cost to the present was the poverty, illness, and despair that seemed endemic to much of the South; the cost to the future was the failure of the underfunded schools to educate the children and end the cycle of poverty.

Roosevelt told another story that elaborated his point. On his first visit to Warm Springs he had been jolted to consciousness in the middle of the night by the sound of a train rumbling through the village and blasting its whistle across the slope of Pine Mountain. He lay awake for some time afterward, pondering various subjects but mostly muttering about his interrupted sleep. “So I went down to the station and said to the stationmaster, ‘What is that train that makes so much noise, and why does it have to whistle at half past one in the morning?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the fireman has a girl in town.’” Roosevelt asked what the train carried and where it was bound. “That is the milk train for Florida,” the stationmaster said. Roosevelt assumed the milk came from Georgia or perhaps Alabama. He was surprised to be told that, no, it came from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later he went to the village store to purchase a sack of apples. He had seen apples growing in the southern Appalachians and assumed he’d get some of those. But the local store carried no such local produce; the only apples the storekeeper stocked came from Oregon and Washington. He encountered a similar situation with beef. He couldn’t find any local meat, only cuts sliced and dressed in Chicago and Omaha. The lesson he drew was the same one as in his school tale: southern troubles weren’t the South’s alone but manifestations of national difficulties. Solutions must be similarly national.

Doubtless Roosevelt’s Warm Springs stories improved in the telling. Like many another moralist—and Roosevelt’s stories invariably had a moral—Roosevelt dealt in truths deeper than surface detail. And the moral of his own Warm Springs story was that it connected him emotionally to the plain people of the South and, through them, to the ordinary people of America. Southern poverty wasn’t
news
to Roosevelt; as an intelligent and well-read person, he had long known that the lot of southern farmers was a hard one. Nor had he been unaware, theoretically, that the problems of the South—and of other regions, for that matter—were tied to the condition of the national economy. But for the first time he
felt
what poverty meant to those who lived it daily.

Beyond improving his grasp of economics, Roosevelt’s time at Warm Springs—and his overall experience of polio—made him better able to empathize with victims of misfortune generally. No one could suffer such an arbitrary blow of fate without becoming better attuned to others who suffered similarly. Capricious calamity isn’t part of the American dream, which promises success to those who strive diligently toward reasonable goals. Other cultures have allowed greater scope for accident or the whims of the gods, but fatalism never caught on in America. Yet sometimes bad things
do
happen to people through no fault of their own. Roosevelt now understood this in a way he hadn’t before.

Polio certainly helped people sympathize with
him
as they hadn’t previously. Roosevelt’s first four decades gave ordinary Americans little to identify with in him. His patrician background, mannerisms, and accent would have made him an ideal candidate for president in the age of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, when ordinary Americans expected their leaders to stand above them. But the age of deference had ended with the election of Andrew Jackson; after that candidates for president needed to display a common touch if they hoped to win the people’s confidence. Though some candidates faked it, the most successful were those whose bond with the people was genuine. Comparatively few Americans had suffered the specific disabilities associated with polio, but all had suffered in one way or another. And in their suffering they now could identify with Franklin Roosevelt.

16.

N
OT EVEN
R
OOSEVELT’S WORST RIVALS WOULD HAVE SAID THAT HIS
contracting polio was anything but a misfortune. Yet some could have complained that if a Democrat with presidential ambitions
had
to come down with the disease, he couldn’t have chosen a better time than the early 1920s. The decade after the World War was a wilderness period for the Democrats. The Republicans remained the nation’s majority party, chiefly by virtue of their success in delivering on the promises of the economic revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Republican coalition combined nearly all the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and midwestern farmers to lock up the White House and Congress. Against this coalition the Democrats arrayed nothing nearly so unified but rather the tired dualism of city bosses and southern gentry, with western mavericks shouting from the sideline. Pulled three ways at once, the Democrats went nowhere.

Roosevelt reentered the political lists gingerly. Following the shellacking he and James Cox suffered in 1920, he had no choice but to return to New York state politics, if he intended a political future. His eight years in Washington had weakened his position with the state party, and to maintain his electability he needed to restore his base. If he still wanted to be president—which he did, though the polio complicated the timing and logistics—he had to be able to count on New York’s support. Aside from Wilson, whose capture of the White House owed chiefly to the Republicans’ split in 1912, the only president the Democrats had elected since the Civil War was a New Yorker, Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt might have a chance of repeating Cleveland’s accomplishment but only if he had the strong support of his home state.

With Louis Howe’s help he communicated with the Democratic leaders in New York. He wrote letters to party officials around the state, urging them to keep the faith in the present dark hour for Democrats. The letters let Roosevelt preserve his political visibility even as they obscured his physical visibility, for in his letters he consistently minimized the severity of his illness and maximized the extent of his recovery. The strategy succeeded well enough that Tammany Hall spoke of nominating him for governor in 1922, on a ticket that included Al Smith for senator. Roosevelt let the talk continue for several months before acknowledging that he wasn’t ready for a race just yet.

But he could help determine who
did
run. Smith had been elected governor in 1918, defying that year’s Republican trend, and he had nearly been reelected in 1920, despite the Republican landslide in the rest of the country. Yet Smith didn’t want to be governor again. He had taken a job with the United States Trucking Company and was, in the words of one of his Tammany Hall associates, “making big money for the first time in his life.” Smith was happy to consider a Senate nomination, since the part-time work of Congress would have allowed him to keep his private-sector job. But the governorship was full-time, as he knew from experience. For this reason he had been one of the strongest supporters of the Roosevelt-Smith ticket for governor and senator.

When Roosevelt begged off, the pressure on Smith to make another run for governor intensified. If Smith declined, the nomination might well go to William Randolph Hearst, which was the last thing Tammany wanted. Hearst’s ambitions were as large as Roosevelt’s, and his family fortune—accumulated by his late father, George Hearst, the most successful miner in American history—was many times greater. After helping to provoke the Spanish-American War in 1898, the populist press lord advanced far enough in politics to win election to the House of Representatives in 1902 and 1904. His bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1904 failed, and he subsequently wandered off to splinter parties. But he returned to the Democrats in time to criticize Al Smith’s governorship and threaten a takeover of the party in 1922. Most of Tammany despised Hearst and would quickly have squelched his ambitions had he been an ordinary politician. But his fortune and his newspapers made him a formidable antagonist. Fear of Hearst, as much as love of Roosevelt, inspired the Tammany groundswell for the latter; when Roosevelt withdrew from consideration, Tammany turned in desperation to Smith.

The Tammany chieftains looked to Roosevelt to persuade Smith of his duty to state and party. Roosevelt responded with an open letter to Smith. “In every county the chief topic of political conversation is, ‘Will Al Smith accept if he is nominated?’” Roosevelt declared. “Already unauthorized agents are saying that you will not accept, and many are being deceived and beginning to lose interest as a result.” This would be a shame, in fact a tragedy. Roosevelt reminded Smith—that is, the readers of this open letter—that he had compiled a distinguished record as governor and that he had run a million votes ahead of the national Democratic ticket in 1920. “Many candidates for office are strong by virtue of promises of what they will some day do. You are strong by virtue of what you have done.” Without citing specifics—of which he had none—Roosevelt asserted confidently that voters were tiring of the Republicans and were eager to return good Democrats to office. “You represent the hope of what might be called the ‘average citizen.’” Roosevelt acknowledged that family considerations inclined Smith to seek financial security. “I am in the same boat myself,” he said. “Yet this call to further service must come first. Some day your children will be even prouder of you for making this sacrifice than they are now.”

Roosevelt’s letter flushed Smith into the open, where he had no choice but to agree to accept an offered nomination. And it stymied Hearst, who lacked any comparable endorsement. “It appears to have rather punctured the Hearst boom,” Roosevelt remarked happily. Roosevelt wasn’t ready to declare victory, though. Hearst had money and could generate headlines at will. “Eternal vigilance is necessary in politics,” Roosevelt said, “Al will not be nominated until the votes are actually cast in the convention.”

Roosevelt labored to see that the votes were cast for Smith. He hosted a Hyde Park reception for Smith, who, after two years as governor, didn’t have to be introduced to Roosevelt’s Dutchess County neighbors but who nonetheless benefited from being seen with a local boy. Roosevelt passed up the state Democratic convention, on grounds of health, but sent Louis Howe and Eleanor—this being the first time the state party allowed women to serve as voting delegates. Smith easily won the nomination for governor, leaving Hearst to hope to land the party’s nod for senator. Yet Smith blocked that avenue by vowing to withdraw from the governor’s race if the convention nominated Hearst for senator. Smith tried to talk Roosevelt into accepting the Senate nomination, both to drive the nails into Hearst’s coffin and to turn out a large Democratic vote in the general election. Roosevelt declined, citing the same reasons of health as before.

But on the whole he felt pleased with the results of the convention. The fact that his name kept popping up for office revealed that the Democrats still admired him, disability or no. And they still listened to him, which was no less gratifying. “I had quite a tussle in New York to keep our friend Hearst off the ticket and to get Al Smith to run,” he wrote a friend, “but the thing went through in fine shape.”

R
OOSEVELT COULDN’T CLAIM
credit when Smith won the general election six weeks later. America’s transition from war to peace occurred less smoothly than the Republicans in 1920 had intimated it would under their wise guidance. As the demand for agricultural and industrial products fell off after the armistice, farmers and manufacturers found themselves overplanted, overinvested, and overstaffed. Meanwhile the removal of wartime controls allowed wages and prices to seek their own level for the first time in years. The result was a roller-coaster ride for the economy, which plunged in 1919, rose in 1920 (in time for the elections), and plunged again in 1921 and 1922. The latter drop made the Republicans vulnerable, especially in states like New York, where Prohibition added to voters’ dissatisfaction. The Eighteenth Amendment was as unpopular in New York City as in most other urban areas, and New Yorkers didn’t hesitate to vent their displeasure at those they considered responsible, namely the Republicans. The result was a thumping victory for the wet Democrat Smith and renewed hope among Democrats generally that as New York went in 1922, so the nation might go before long.

Roosevelt imagined, on his best days in the months that followed, that he would be the one leading the party to victory. Not long after the election he wrote to James Cox of the “very successful summer” he had spent at Hyde Park. “The combination of warm weather, fresh air, and swimming has done me a world of good…. The legs are really coming along finely, and when I am in swimming work perfectly. This shows that the muscles are all there, only require further strengthening. I am still on crutches but get about quite spryly.”