Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (43 page)

So he put his shoulder to the Smith wheel. If Smith by a miracle won, the country would benefit, as Smith, in Roosevelt’s view, was far preferable to any Republican. And Roosevelt would get credit for party loyalty, which could only help a Roosevelt run eight years later. (Neither Roosevelt nor Smith even considered a ticket with both men on it, as the Twelfth Amendment effectively bars a single-state ticket.) If Smith lost, Roosevelt would still get the loyalty credit, which he could redeem in four years.

Smith needed help in the area of foreign policy especially. The only foreign policy Tammany pursued was friendly relations with the countries that supplied the immigrants that kept the bosses in power. Such relations were harder to ensure in the age of immigration restriction than they had been during the open-door era prior to 1924, but Tammany men still marched in St. Patrick’s Day parades, waved the Italian flag on Columbus Day, and honored as many mother countries as there were ethnic neighborhoods in New York. Smith learned little more about foreign policy in Albany. In a later period governors would venture overseas to drum up foreign business and otherwise represent their states to the world, but in the 1920s such modest drumming as was done remained the province of the federal government.

Roosevelt’s extensive personal experience of the world and his long attention to foreign affairs contrasted sharply with Smith’s inexperience and inattention, and consequently he was the natural choice both to tutor Smith and to define a Democratic foreign policy for the country. In the summer of 1928 he answered an invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York association of internationalists, to present what amounted to the Democrats’ foreign policy platform.

He made his case cautiously. The popular isolationism that had seized American policy since Wilson’s battle with the Senate Republicans over the Treaty of Versailles continued unabated. If anything, the booming economy convinced most Americans that they didn’t need the rest of the world, and various unsettling developments abroad made them think they didn’t
want
the rest of the world. Mussolini had seized control of Italy, and though a certain fascination with Fascist efficiency emerged among America’s business classes, many more Americans wished to have nothing to do with the Duce. The Soviet Union, as Russia’s empire was now called, had dropped off the world map, partly because Stalin wanted things that way while he consolidated his grip on the Kremlin and partly because the capitalist democracies, including the United States, were doing all they could to quarantine the Bolshevik infection. China was a mess, having descended into civil war after the long-expected collapse of the Manchu dynasty. Japan was making more ominous noises than ever about establishing an empire in East Asia.

Germany was a looming question mark. The hyperinflation of the immediate postwar period had been brought under control, but the former autocracy’s attempt at democracy was failing to inspire confidence in anyone, including Germany’s tentative democrats. The gang of thugs and unemployed war veterans who had gathered under the banner of National Socialism had already tried once, in 1923, to topple the German government, and though the leaders had been tossed into jail, they were now back on the streets and in the beer halls, nursing their grievances against democracy, against foreigners, against communists, against Jews, and against the Versailles system. In spirit they weren’t much different from the Ku Klux Klan in America, and their revolt against modernity reflected fears not unlike those that inspired Prohibition and the anti-evolution movement. But the Nazis, and especially their leader, Adolf Hitler, were far more ruthless than anyone in the United States—and far more ruthless than anyone outside their movement knew.

Republican officials in Washington kept America’s distance from the world. They publicly decried the League of Nations as the antithesis of everything George Washington and the other founders had fought for. On certain low-visibility issues like public health and education, they cooperated quietly with the Geneva-based body, but on anything approaching high politics or diplomacy they continued to shun it. They denied the jurisdiction of the World Court over Americans or American actions, preferring that their country and their countrymen remain, in a technical and sometimes practical sense, outlaws to the rest of the world. They raised America’s tariff wall, effectively closing American markets to many foreign goods. And when they finally agreed to reschedule war loans due the United States from foreign debtors, they did so with a conspicuous lack of grace. Calvin Coolidge at first rejected calls for relief of the Europeans’ financial distress with a typically terse retort: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” The Republican president relented only far enough to put Germany in America’s debt, along with Britain and France. The Germans needed money to pay what the Versailles treaty said they owed the British and the French in reparations; the British and French needed the reparations to repay their loans from the United States. Coolidge approved a plan whereby Germany would borrow American money to pay the British and French, who would close the circle by using Germany’s payments to service their American loans. The beauty of the plan, from the standpoint of American bankers, was that they would receive interest all the way around.

Beauty of this sort was mostly in the eyes of the participating bankers. To please the much larger group not in the lending trade, the Coolidge administration endorsed the Pact of Paris of 1928, also called the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, after American secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. On its face, the Paris treaty would revolutionize diplomacy, by the simple expedient of forbidding war. The signatories, eventually including almost every government in the world, solemnly promised not to resort to war to resolve international disputes. The treaty was gloriously innocuous, containing no provisions for enforcement. Its toothless quality was reflected in the 85 to 1 vote in its favor in the U.S. Senate.

This was the record Roosevelt assailed in July 1928. He had help in drafting his Democratic manifesto from Sumner Welles, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker with roots even deeper in America’s upper crust than Roosevelt’s, with similar experiences of school and college at Groton and Harvard, and with an equally international outlook on American policy. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of
Foreign Affairs,
which had been founded six years earlier by the Council on Foreign Relations to keep the Wilsonian dream alive, helped whip the argument into final shape.

Roosevelt rejected the go-it-alone attitude of the Republicans, and he denied that it represented America’s historic traditions. He walked his readers through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along a path of constructive internationalism. The Monroe Doctrine was a formula for hemispheric peace, he said. Disputes with Britain over Canada’s borders and over Civil War damages were settled by arbitration. The Spanish-American War, for all the provocation of the
Maine
’s destruction, was “not a war of revenge, but the offer of a helping hand” to the suffering Cuban people. Annexation of the Philippines, with an eye toward preparing the Filipinos for self-government, was a “precursor of the ‘Mandate’ theory of the League of Nations.” The United States had helped organize the Hague tribunal, the forerunner of the World Court. Theodore Roosevelt had mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

The World War exemplified America’s attachment to internationalist ideals. Woodrow Wilson led the country into the war not for selfish gain but to uphold the principle of neutral rights. During the war he guided the belligerents toward a just and equitable peace. “Slowly, through 1917 and 1918,” Roosevelt said, “the American President brought home to the hearts of mankind the great hope that through an association of nations the world could in the days to come avoid armed conflict and substitute reason and collective action for the age-old appeal to the sword.” At the Paris conference after the war, Wilson resisted attempts by Britain and France to base the peace settlement on the same narrow nationalist designs that had produced the war in the first place.

But then things had gone wrong. The Republican Senate rejected the League of Nations and the internationalist vision it embodied. The Harding administration, Roosevelt asserted, had made a fetish of “caution and small-mindedness” in foreign affairs. The Washington Conference’s limits on naval construction should have been the start toward broader arms control, but the Republicans refused to take the next steps, missing an opportunity that might not recur in a lifetime. Their boycott of the World Court flew in the face of common sense and national interest. No less an authority—and card-carrying Republican—than Elihu Root had endorsed the World Court as “the latest institution wrought out by the civilized world’s general public opinion against war.” But the Coolidge administration, frightened to death that the court might sometime rule in some way against some American, refused to have anything to do with it. The Republicans’ handling of debt reorganization was clumsy and off-putting. The Republicans tried to explain away the hostility their policies provoked by asserting that nobody loved a creditor. “True,” Roosevelt rejoined, “but every creditor is not a hated creditor. In time of general poverty and retrenchment our Government has seemed greedy…. While exacting payment we have by our discriminatory and exorbitant tariff policy made it doubly hard for them to pay.”

The fundamental problem was that the Republicans didn’t take foreign policy seriously. Republican leaders had failed the American people in a matter of the most critical importance. The situation was grave—but not yet irreversible. “If the leadership is right,” Roosevelt said, “or, more truly, if the spirit behind it is great, the United States can regain the world’s trust and friendship and become again of service. We can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; we can cooperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind…. It is the spirit, sir, which matters.”

A
S THE
1928 Democratic convention approached, the groundswell for Smith rose higher and higher. The party went south for the first time since the Civil War, to Houston, where the delegates gathered in Sam Houston Hall. Smith’s longtime partner from their Tammany days, Robert Wagner, headed the platform committee; Roosevelt served as Smith’s floor manager. To the casual observer Roosevelt looked much recovered from his appearance before the national party in 1924. He dispensed with the crutches and relied on his leg braces, a cane, and son Elliott’s arm.

As on that earlier occasion, he gave the speech placing Smith’s name before the convention. He lauded Smith’s leadership, as revealed by the progressive reforms New York had enacted during Smith’s tenure as governor. He noted the overwhelming margin by which Smith had been reelected, and he recounted the confidence Smith continued to inspire among the ordinary people of New York. He spoke of Al Smith the man, asking what was so special about him and supplying the answer:

It is that quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals; that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to all those in sorrow or in trouble; that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow men. Instinctively he senses the popular need because he himself has lived through the hardship, the labor, and the sacrifice which must be endured by every man of heroic mold who struggles up to eminence from obscurity and low estate. Between him and the people is that subtle bond which makes him their champion and makes them enthusiastically trust him with their loyalty and their love.

Roosevelt’s speech was broadcast by radio around the country. The overwhelming majority of those who heard him that evening had never met Smith and never would. They couldn’t tell whether Roosevelt described him accurately or not. But they all felt they learned something about Roosevelt—about what he valued in a man, about the kind of person
he
was.