Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (41 page)

The auto boom echoed in other industries. The steel industry rolled square miles of sheet metal for fenders; the rubber industry tapped whole rain forests to make tires; the glass industry floated and cooled acres of windscreens and side panes. Big Oil was an even bigger winner: the millions of cars required billions of gallons of gasoline. (As a bonus to the petro-men, railroads and ships converted from coal to diesel during this same era.) The road-building industry benefited as the various levels of government discovered that averting mayhem on the highways required constructing wider, smoother, straighter roads than horses and buggies had needed.

The auto boom reshaped American housing. The lifting of the wartime caps on construction would have triggered a modest surge in home building, but the advent of the auto age allowed builders to venture much farther from the centers of cities. New neighborhoods—suburbs—sprang up where truck gardens and orchards had grown. Cheap land translated into lower costs to builders and lower prices to purchasers, who secured mortgages and signed contracts while the carpenters and plumbers were still pounding and fitting away.

The new houses demanded new furniture and new appliances. Electricity for the first time entered the average home, lighting rooms, washing clothes, refrigerating food. Telephones kept families in touch with friends and one another; radios gradually connected households to the wider world of public affairs, music, and sports.

Americans looked out upon the material world that surrounded them and, with the exception of those farmers, accounted it good. No one knew how long the bounty would last; no one ever knew such things. But while it did last, Americans were likely to stick with the party that presided over the prosperity.

F
OR THIS REASON
the Democratic convention of 1924 was something of a charade, having as much to do with auditioning future candidates as with selecting a leader to send against the Republicans. When the delegates gathered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the contest came down to Al Smith and William McAdoo. Oscar Underwood had faded after his rejection of the Klan, and the handful of minor candidates weren’t generating appreciable support. McAdoo led, but Smith was closing, partly on account of the Klan controversy but also because of a scandal involving Republicans. In 1922 the
Wall Street Journal
had broken a story relating that Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, had allowed a private petroleum company to lease the navy’s oil reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, without the customary competitive bidding. As the tale unfolded during the next two years, it revealed a web of corruption that reached from Washington to California. Harding appeared honestly surprised and was undeniably distraught. “I have no trouble with my enemies,” he told journalist William Allen White. “I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my God-damn friends, White, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!” Albert Fall was tried and convicted of taking bribes. Several others joined him in the dock and a few behind bars; a couple escaped justice, or at least prison, by killing themselves. Teapot Dome entered the vocabulary of American political corruption alongside the Tweed Ring and Crédit Mobilier.

All this delighted the Democrats, with William McAdoo being the signal exception. One of Fall’s tempters was Edward Doheny, a Californian who had hired McAdoo as legal counsel, on an annual retainer of $25,000. No one alleged malfeasance in McAdoo, but clearly it was his access to official Washington—rather than his competence as a lawyer, for example—that made him attractive to Doheny. Although McAdoo’s Teapot Dome connection didn’t prevent his accumulating enough support to roll into the 1924 convention with a lead in committed delegates, it tainted him in the eyes of the uncommitted, who fretted that a McAdoo nomination would deprive the Democrats of the biggest stick they hoped to swing against the Republicans that autumn.

The Smith forces rallied behind their leader and his first lieutenant, Franklin Roosevelt. The death of Charles Murphy had deprived Smith of an obvious campaign manager, and the candidate’s eye naturally fell on Roosevelt, who could bring to the Smith campaign a polish and national presence it conspicuously lacked. Roosevelt could write and call influential people Smith didn’t know; Roosevelt, the old-stock Protestant, could reassure delegates that a Smith nomination wouldn’t hand the party to immigrant Catholics.

For Roosevelt, heading the Smith campaign suited his comeback plans perfectly. He could tell that this wasn’t the year to be the Democratic nominee. The Teapot Dome scandals had damaged the Republicans as a group but were sparing the top of the ticket, chiefly because Harding’s sudden death in August 1923 had eliminated the man in charge at the time of the influence peddling. Calvin Coolidge, the current occupant of the White House, could believably claim that he had had nothing to do with the whole affair. Roosevelt thought the Democrats should try to keep the scandal before the voters, but he doubted the effort would do much good.

So he focused on the convention. He contrived to break custom and deliver the speech putting Smith’s name before the convention. Candidates had typically enlisted the party’s most celebrated orators for this function, but times were changing, and with them standards of political speech. Although no one knew it then, the 1924 convention marked William Jennings Bryan’s final appearance before the full party; yet even that summer it was clear that the days when successful rhetoric required Bryanic lung power to fill a hall were passing. Electric amplification allowed speakers to lower their voices, to draw listeners into a realm of intimacy denied their pre-Edison forebears. Radio would shortly reveal the full effect of this change, and no one would employ radio more effectively than Franklin Roosevelt. But aspects of the change were already in evidence when Roosevelt addressed the Democratic convention of 1924.

He carefully plotted his path to the dais. Several times he rehearsed his steps, his left arm holding the right arm of his son James, his right arm and shoulder supported by a crutch, his legs cocooned in their steel braces. He taught James the art of the clenched-teeth smile, the seemingly effortless nod of the head accomplished amid great muscular and psychological strain. On the night of his address, when he and James reached the platform, he took his second crutch from his son and turned to a delegate nearby. Motioning with his head toward the speaker’s stand, he said, “Go up and shake it, will you?” The delegate hesitated, puzzled. “Shake it!” Roosevelt insisted. “I must know if the speaker’s stand will bear my weight.”

As the delegate tested the stand’s sturdiness, Roosevelt began his solitary final steps forward. Every eye in Madison Square Garden followed his progress; every breath hesitated, awaiting his fall. When he reached the stand the delegates and the visitors in the galleries erupted in sustained applause. Roosevelt smiled and nodded the more, but where another speaker, or Roosevelt himself a few years earlier, would have waved to the thousands clapping and shouting his name, he now didn’t dare release his grip on the speaker’s stand, either to acknowledge the applause or to wipe the sweat that poured from his face.

Gradually the hall fell quiet. “To meet again so many friends whom I have not seen since the last Democratic national gathering gives me a thrill of pleasure,” Roosevelt began. The audience cheered again. He continued to smile, and to grip the stand. The cheering gradually died.

He reintroduced the delegates to Al Smith with a self-deprecating reminder of the Democrats’ woes in 1920. “When our national ticket in the state of New York went down to defeat under a plurality of 1,100,000, he lost this state by only 74,000,” Roosevelt said. “He got one million more votes than I did—and I take my hat off to him!” McAdoo’s supporters were claiming for their candidate the title progressive reformer; Roosevelt countered the claim by citing Smith’s record on behalf of the less fortunate:

He obtained laws prohibiting night work for women and the employment of small children. He secured state pensions for widowed mothers and state aid for the promotion of the health of rural communities. That is progressive!

He has sponsored a practical workmen’s compensation law, and has established labor boards to mediate disputes between employer and employee; he was responsible for the best factory laws ever passed in any state. That is progressive!

Under his leadership, cooperative marketing, the extension of state highways built for miles, not votes; diversification of crops and the reforestation of denuded lands have marched hand in hand. That is progressive!

Roosevelt summoned the spirit of the Democrats’ progressive former president, only recently deceased, on behalf of Smith’s vision. “It was the illustrious Woodrow Wilson, my revered chief and yours, who said, ‘The great voice of America does not come from the university. It comes in a murmur from the hills and the woods, from the farms, the factories, and the mills—rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us from the homes of the common people.’” The common people were the core constituency of the Democrats, and among the common people the dreams of America never flagged. “Four years ago, lying opponents said that the country was tired of ideals—they waged a campaign based on an appeal to prejudice, based on the dragging out of bogies and hobgoblins, the subtle encouragement of false fears.” But America had not lost her faith, Roosevelt insisted. “Idealism is of her very heart’s blood. Tricked once we have been. Millions of voters are waiting today for the opportunity next November to wreak their vengeance on those deceivers.”

Al Smith was the man who would lead them. “He has a power to strike at error and wrongdoing that makes his adversaries quail before him. He has a personality that carries to every hearer not only the sincerity but the righteousness of what he says. He is the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.”

A
S
R
OOSEVELT FINISHED,
the crowd erupted once again. Some were cheering for Smith; all were rooting for Roosevelt. “A noble utterance,” conservative journalist Mark Sullivan called the speech. “It will rank as the high point of the present convention and it belongs with the small list of really great convention speeches.” The
New York Herald Tribune
described Roosevelt as “the one man whose name would have stampeded the convention were he put in nomination.” The
Herald Tribune
added, “He is the only man to whom the contending factions could turn and at the same time save their faces and keep square with the folks at home…. From the time Roosevelt made his speech in nomination of Smith, which was the one great speech of the convention, he has been easily the foremost figure on floor or platform.” The
New York Evening World
asserted, “No matter whether Governor Smith wins or loses, Franklin D. Roosevelt stands out as the real hero of the Democratic Convention of 1924. Adversity has lifted him above the bickering, the religious bigotry, conflicting personal ambitions and petty sectional prejudices. It has made him the one leader commanding the respect and admiration of delegations from all sections of the land…. Roosevelt might be a pathetic, tragic figure but for the fine courage that flashes in his smile. It holds observers enchained.”

Roosevelt’s reputation for lighthearted courage—many delegates decided
he
was the Happy Warrior, the one the more literate recalled Wordsworth characterizing in the poem that began “Who is the happy warrior? Who is he / That every man in arms should wish to be?”—only increased when the convention got down to the bruising business of choosing a nominee. As most expected, McAdoo led early but lacked the votes to put Smith away. A dozen ballots produced little movement; a dozen more, then another dozen, and another and another left the delegates gasping for air but no closer to a decision. Roosevelt returned to the rostrum after sixty-six ballots to move that Governor Smith be allowed to address the convention in person. This was a breach of tradition so egregious as to require the assent of two-thirds of the delegates; the Smith delegates naturally supported the motion, as did some quaverers on the McAdoo side. But the defections weren’t numerous enough to open the convention-hall door to the governor, and the balloting continued with the candidates kept off the premises.