Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (42 page)

The contest became a battle of attrition, with each side battering and bleeding the other. Smith pulled ahead of McAdoo but couldn’t achieve the necessary two-thirds majority. Victory for either side increasingly appeared impossible.

Roosevelt huddled with Smith and, following the ninety-third ballot, again addressed the convention. “I am here to make a brief and very simple statement on behalf of Governor Smith,” he told the delegates. “After nearly one hundred ballots it is quite apparent to him and to me that the forces behind him, the leader in the race, and behind Mr. McAdoo, who is second, cannot be amalgamated. For the good of the party Governor Smith authorizes me to say that immediately after Mr. McAdoo withdraws, Governor Smith will withdraw his name.”

McAdoo declined the offer, but after six more ballots he released his delegates to vote their judgment of the party’s good. A few did so at once, then more and more. The critical break occurred when the women of the California delegation, the most determined of the McAdoo diehards, lowered the flags they had been waving incessantly for their favorite.

The beneficiary of McAdoo’s tacit withdrawal, and of Smith’s more formal version, was John W. Davis of West Virginia. Davis was known to oppose the Ku Klux Klan and excessively powerful corporate trusts, but otherwise he had left few marks on the public record that anyone could object to. The exhausted delegates fell in line behind his candidacy, and on the 103rd ballot he received the nomination.

Y
ET THE REAL
beneficiary of that exhausting week was Roosevelt. “The most popular man in the convention was Franklin D. Roosevelt,” the
New York Times
asserted. “Whenever word passed around the floor that Mr. Roosevelt was about to take his seat in the New York delegation, a hush fell over the Garden. On his appearance each time there was a spontaneous burst of applause.”

The political insiders agreed. Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s counterpart to the late Charles Murphy, told Ike Dunlap, a Pendergast man who knew Roosevelt, “I met your friend Franklin Roosevelt in New York and had just a few words with him. I want to say this, Dunlap—you know I am seldom carried away or become overly enthusiastic in meeting men of all stations of life, but I want to tell you that had Mr. Roosevelt…been physically able to have withstood the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation the first few days of the convention. He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met, and I predict he will be the candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1928.”

17.

R
OOSEVELT HEARD THE PRAISE AND PONDERED HOW TO MAKE THE
most of it. From the state of the economy and the country he assumed that Americans weren’t done with the Republicans yet; a comeback by the Democrats almost certainly would require a stumble by the GOP. But the Democrats would reward their loyalists when that stumble occurred, and Roosevelt positioned himself to be seen as the most loyal son of America’s oldest party. He polled Democratic leaders around the country regarding the most promising steps for the party, and he summarized the replies in a published letter to Thomas J. Walsh, the Montana senator who had been permanent chairman of the Democratic national convention in 1920. A consensus had emerged, Roosevelt said, that what the Democrats needed to do was reiterate the essential difference between themselves and the Republicans. “The Democracy must make it clear that it seeks primarily the good of the average citizen through the free rule of the whole electorate, as opposed to the Republican Party, which seeks a mere moneyed prosperity of the nation through the control of government by a self-appointed aristocracy of wealth and of social and economic power.” To this end the party needed to put national issues above local concerns. The Democrats had divided themselves by region, with the Easterners advocating one thing, the Southerners another, and the Westerners something else. Roosevelt refrained from specifying the divisive issues, lest he reinforce the division by doing so, but Prohibition and the Klan came quickly to attentive minds. The consequence was that voters had no idea what the party, as a national party, believed or advocated. The remedy, Roosevelt said, was to emphasize what the various elements of the party had in common. To facilitate this he recommended a national meeting of state Democratic leaders, to be held in the spring of 1925 and charged with defining what made Democrats Democrats.

Senator Walsh and other party officials responded positively to Roosevelt’s recommendation. But resistance developed precisely where Roosevelt feared it would: among the populists long associated with William Jennings Bryan. The three-time Democratic nominee and former secretary of state had never stopped distrusting the party’s eastern business element, and with the emergence of Prohibition as a polarizing issue, he learned to distrust the party’s eastern ethnic—that is, wet—element too. Bryan countered Roosevelt’s unity plan with suggestions that the Democrats’ southern and western wings join forces against the East.

Bryan’s opposition conjured fears—and hopes, among Republicans—of a confrontation between Roosevelt and Bryan at the annual Jefferson Day dinner in Washington in April 1925. The event had produced some of the most memorable scenes in American history, including Andrew Jackson’s defiant rejection of the secessionism of his own vice president, John C. Calhoun, amid the nullification crisis of Jackson’s first term. “Our Federal Union,” Jackson had thundered, “it must be preserved!” The rift among the Democrats wasn’t quite so deep almost a century later, but Washington quivered with excitement at the thought of a showdown between the crippled champion of liberal unity and the aging lion of agrarian dissent.

It didn’t come to that. A showdown was the last thing Roosevelt wanted, and he wrote the organizers of the Jefferson dinner explaining that his physical recovery required a longer stay at Warm Springs that season than he had anticipated. He couched his regrets in typically upbeat fashion, asserting that after another several weeks of therapy he might be able to “throw away” his crutches. Bryan had no such compelling excuse, but he too begged off, simply saying that his calendar was full.

Yet Roosevelt met Bryan nonetheless. He traveled from Warm Springs to Miami, where Bryan was still selling land, to pitch party unity in person. “He was, at first, fearful that a conference, especially a large one, would result in more trouble than good,” Roosevelt remarked a short while later. But Roosevelt persisted, and Bryan gradually softened. “After we had talked for over an hour he agreed that if the conference were kept small, as I outlined, it would accomplish very great things.” Bryan’s stated concern was that Easterners and city dwellers would dominate the party, as they had during the evil days of Grover Cleveland. “But, as I pointed out to him, there are millions of really progressive Democratic voters in these localities who cannot be read out of the Party by making the Democracy a mere combination of the South and the West, and he agreed that the Party policies and Party effort must be made national instead of sectional.”

B
RYAN’S AGREEMENT
came too late. Other elements of the party had been happy to let Bryan take the blame for frustrating Democratic unity, but as Bryan’s resistance began to melt under the warmth of the Roosevelt sun, they raised objections of their own. Some simply didn’t believe that Bryan’s conversion to party unity was sincere, suspecting the old man—although he was a mere sixty-five, he seemed to have been around forever—of hoping to lead one last revolt. Others questioned Roosevelt’s motives. Was the proposed conference an honest effort to mend the party or a vehicle Roosevelt hoped would carry him to the 1928 nomination?

The objections had the desired effect of delaying Roosevelt’s conference, pushing it back into summer of 1925, when the whole idea of a conference exploded amid events neither Roosevelt nor Bryan anticipated. The Tennessee legislature, at the behest of conservative Christians, had recently approved a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union enlisted a young teacher named John Scopes to challenge the law, and the ensuing trial, in the small town of Dayton, attracted the attention of much of the country. Bryan, one of America’s best-known Christian fundamentalists, took the witness stand as an authority on the Bible. Scopes’s lawyer, celebrated atheist and defense attorney Clarence Darrow, grilled Bryan unmercifully and tied him in logical knots but failed to shake his conviction that the author of Genesis, not Charles Darwin, had got the story of creation right. The Bryan-Darrow confrontation, which was broadcast by radio to a national audience, deepened the rift between traditionalists and progressives in American life, with the former concluding that Bryan had held his ground while the latter thought he was made to look a fool. Scopes was convicted—the verdict was later overturned on a technicality—but the more dramatic, and poignant, conclusion occurred when Bryan suddenly died less than a week later. H. L. Mencken, the acid-penned journalist and social commentator, remarked: “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.”

Roosevelt’s hopes for a party conference died with Bryan, but his desire to discover common ground on which a national ticket might stand persisted. Al Smith remained the favorite of Democrats’ city wing, which grew in numbers and influence with each passing year. Westerners and some Southerners still liked William McAdoo, but after Smith won reelection as New York governor in 1926, by the largest margin in the history of the Empire State, he appeared the odds-on favorite to capture the Democratic nomination for president in 1928.

The only person who potentially blocked his way was Franklin Roosevelt. The longer Smith’s lead over McAdoo stretched, the more desperately party strategists asked themselves whether American voters would embrace a wet Catholic and the more attractive Roosevelt looked as an alternative. Roosevelt had most of what made Smith attractive: a strong eastern presence and credibility with the party’s urban wing. And he traveled without Smith’s heavy baggage, being Protestant and tactfully silent on Prohibition. His physical disability netted out neutrally: what he lost in lack of mobility on the campaign trail he recouped in voter sympathy. The big question was whether he could lead a ticket. Nearly everyone thought he had done well as number two in 1920, but number two wasn’t number one.

There was another question: whether Roosevelt wanted the nomination. As often as his friends and supporters urged him to run, he deflected their appeals in favor of Smith. He would have registered greater interest in the 1928 nomination had he thought there was anything in it, but the Republican prosperity continued, causing most political analysts to doubt that voters would be inclined to dump the GOP for the Democracy. Farmers were hurting, but farmers had been hurting for decades without their injury redounding to the Democrats’ benefit. The nation’s center of gravity now rested in the cities; till something shook the confidence of city dwellers, the Republicans would remain America’s party.

Roosevelt said as much in a confidential letter to Josephus Daniels in the summer of 1927. “Strictly between ourselves,” Roosevelt wrote, “I am very doubtful whether any Democrat can win in 1928. It will depend somewhat on whether the present undoubted general prosperity of the country continues. You and I may recognize the serious hardships which the farmers in the South and West are laboring under, but the farmers in the South will vote the Democratic ticket anyway, and I do not believe that the farmers of the West will vote the Democratic ticket in sufficient numbers even if they are starving.”