Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (44 page)

T
HE GENERAL CAMPAIGN
of 1928 started mean and grew meaner. After the Democrats chose Smith, the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, an Iowa orphan who became a millionaire mining gold and baser minerals, and then an international hero organizing refugee relief during the World War. President Harding had drafted him to be commerce secretary in the early 1920s, and after the administration covered itself in scandal, Hoover was one of the few to emerge untainted. He strongly seconded Coolidge’s view that the business of America was business, and when Coolidge announced, with customary succinctness, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928,” Republicans looked to the administration’s businessman-in-chief to succeed him. Hoover garnered the GOP nomination without difficulty, pledging to extend the prosperity of the current decade into the next.

Hoover was as reassuring to American traditionalists as Al Smith was disconcerting. His Quaker background might have appeared exotic in another year, but compared with Smith’s Catholicism it landed Hoover squarely in the Protestant mainstream—especially after Hoover abjured the most distinctive of the Friends’ tenets, pacifism. His endorsement of Prohibition was sincere and strong and contrasted sharply with Smith’s opposition. Hoover’s midwestern roots gave him a grip on the heartland Smith couldn’t come close to matching. Hoover stood for the country against the city, and especially against the immigrants and corrupt political machines that characterized the city in the mind of middle America.

Hoover likely would have won even had the Republicans campaigned solely on the prosperity their party had delivered, or at least presided over. But public-opinion polling in the 1920s was immature and inaccurate, and Hoover’s advisers had little way of knowing how their candidate stood. The Republicans took no chances, employing every device of speech, print, broadcast, rumor, and innuendo to damage Smith in voters’ eyes. They traced his Tammany origins to Boss Tweed of Gilded Age infamy, and they refused to allow that the machine might have mellowed in sixty years. “Tammany is Tammany,” declared William Allen White, the Kansas editor who grew famous lambasting the Populists in the 1890s. “And Smith is its prophet.” Some Republicans whispered, others shouted, that Smith’s support for the repeal of Prohibition reflected a lushness in his personal behavior. The Prohibitionist temperament typically conflated any use of alcohol, or any desire for any use of alcohol, with full-blown alcoholism; when some Republicans reported, credibly, that Smith had sipped from time to time, other Republicans magnified the reports into falling-down drunkenness.

The most virulent assaults centered on Smith’s religion. In an era when racism was institutionalized across the South and indulged informally in much of the North, when anti-Semitism went unremarked in clubs, colleges, and corporate boardrooms, and when the Ku Klux Klan paraded boldly down the main street of the nation’s capital, anti-Catholicism barely bothered to hide its face. “Shall we have a man in the White House who acknowledges allegiance to the Autocrat on the Tiber, who hates democracy, public schools, Protestant parsonages, individual right, and everything that is essential to independence?” demanded Dr. Charles Luther Fry, a prominent Lutheran divine, addressing a large group of his co-denominationalists in New York. The anonymous attacks on Smith’s religion were still more scurrilous. “To Murder Protestants! And Destroy American Government! Is the Oath Binding Roman Catholics,” screamed one handbill. Anti-Catholic lecturers toured the country, some claiming spuriously to have been priests or nuns before seeing the Protestant light and describing in lascivious detail what carnal sinning occurred behind closed doors in the rectories and convents of America, starting with satanic orgies and culminating in the murder of the ill-gotten offspring.

Hoover did little to restrain the Republican low-roaders. “I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit,” he said. Doubtless he was sincere. But intolerance was the organizing principle of his party that year. The critical gains occurred not among Republicans, who would have voted for Hoover anyway, but among rural Democrats. “The Republican headquarters was the parlor affair,” an Oklahoma Democrat explained of the GOP operations in his state. “The real place of activity was across the street in the so-called Hoover-Democrat Headquarters, a combination of Ku Klux and ultra-protestants with four times the clerical force and activity of the Republican headquarters, and every item of expense paid by the Republican headquarters, numerous paid speakers, big and little, constantly speaking all over the state with the most horrid stories of what the Pope would do to the people of this country.”

R
OOSEVELT HADN’T
intended to enter the fight. He left the Houston convention convinced he had done for the Democratic party about all he could or ought to that season. He wasn’t one to get carried away by the inspirational rhetoric of a convention, even his own, and in any case Louis Howe regularly reminded him that 1928 was not the Democrats’ year. The still-rising economy made the Republicans irresistible. Roosevelt should give a few speeches on Smith’s behalf, Howe said, but otherwise retreat to Warm Springs, continue his exercises, and prepare for 1932. The boom couldn’t last forever.

Roosevelt listened and nodded agreement. And he did retreat to Warm Springs. But he neglected to sever all communications with the North, and when the New York Democrats gathered in state convention at Rochester at the end of September he heard their appeals for him to come to the party’s rescue in the governor’s race. He was the only one with the political stature to follow Smith in Albany, they asserted. Besides, the presidential race was going badly in New York, especially upstate where the Klan had grown alarmingly strong. Smith wouldn’t stand a chance if he couldn’t carry his home state and its nation-leading forty-five electoral votes. Roosevelt was the only person who could bring New York voters to their favorite-son senses.

Roosevelt refused to take telephone calls from the Rochester convention or the top officials of the Democratic party. Smith and John Raskob, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, pleaded with Eleanor, a delegate to the state convention, to intercede with her husband. “They told me how much they wanted him to run, and asked me if I thought it would really injure his health,” she remembered. “I said I did not know; that I had been told the doctors felt that if he continued with his exercises and swimming at Warm Springs he might improve.” Eleanor’s equivocation was all the encouragement Smith and Raskob needed. They assured her they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize Roosevelt’s recovery. It would be an easy race, and a relaxed governorship. They then inquired whether there might be other reasons behind Roosevelt’s reluctance. She mentioned the $200,000 he had invested in Warm Springs, and by her words or the worried tone in her voice she made Raskob—the party’s money man—understand that this wasn’t something her husband could treat lightly. Raskob asked whether it would have any effect on Roosevelt’s decision in the governor’s race if he was relieved of his financial worries. “I told him I was sure it would not,” Eleanor wrote. She was less than convincing, as events at once proved.

Smith and Raskob worked Eleanor by turns. She said she never interfered in her husband’s politics, and she certainly wouldn’t attempt to persuade him to do something he didn’t want to do. They said they wouldn’t dream of asking her anything of the sort. But would she agree to let them make their own case to him? She allowed she might. Would she get him on the telephone? She said she would try.

Perhaps Roosevelt hadn’t decided about the governor’s race; perhaps he simply liked being wooed. But as time ran out for the Rochester convention, he made himself deliberately scarce. He motored ten miles to Manchester, Georgia, to give an address. The third-floor auditorium was packed when he got word that Eleanor had been calling the phone at the corner drug store down the street; he kept talking a half hour longer than expected—ironically, lauding Smith to the local Democrats. When he finally finished, he visited the drug store. Eleanor was about to leave Rochester on the late train to New York City, but she managed to get him with a final call. “He told me with evident glee that he had been keeping out of reach all day and would not have answered the telephone if I had not been calling,” she wrote afterward. She explained that she had to go and passed the handset to Smith.

Smith spoke, then shouted, into the phone, but the connection was poor and the operator had to interrupt to ask Roosevelt to try using the telephone in the Warm Springs hotel when he got back to the resort. This additional delay made Smith and Raskob even more anxious, not least since the telephone link to Warm Springs was notoriously undependable. Yet when Roosevelt arrived at the hotel and the phone rang, Raskob’s voice came through quite well. The Democratic chairman urged Roosevelt to accept the nomination, for the good of the party. Roosevelt balked, citing his commitment to Warm Springs and the Warm Springs Foundation. Raskob responded impatiently: “Damn the Foundation! We’ll take care of it.”

He passed the phone to Smith. “Take the nomination, Frank,” Smith said. He explained that Roosevelt wouldn’t have to campaign very hard—just make a few speeches and he’d be sure to be elected. And he could run the governor’s office at his convenience. He would have to open the legislature in January, but then he could go back to Warm Springs for a couple of months while the lawmakers moved as slowly as they always did. He could return to Albany toward the end of the session, sign the bills, send the boys home, and be in Georgia again eighteen hours later.

Roosevelt scoffed at this projected schedule. He knew he couldn’t govern that way, and he knew Smith wouldn’t have been able to, either. “Don’t hand me that boloney,” he said.

At this point Herbert Lehman came on the line. Lehman was being touted for lieutenant governor, and he said he’d relieve Roosevelt whenever he required a break.

Smith grabbed the phone back. “Frank,” he said, “I wasn’t going to put this on a personal basis, but I’ve got to.” He said he needed Roosevelt at the top of the state ticket if he—Smith—were to have any chance of winning the national race.

Roosevelt still resisted. He said things weren’t as grim as Smith made out. Hoover might still be beaten.

Smith snorted, and stated the question to Roosevelt directly: “If those fellows nominate you tomorrow and adjourn, will you refuse to run?”

This was Roosevelt’s final chance to close the door. If he told Smith he would refuse, the governor would have to find someone else. But if he didn’t say that—if he simply said nothing—Smith would take his response as a yes and the convention would nominate Roosevelt, leaving him no alternative but to accept.

Maybe Roosevelt was still ambivalent. Maybe he just wanted to squeeze all the advantage out of playing hard to get. He repeated that he wasn’t ready to resume public life. He said he couldn’t authorize putting his name before the convention. But he didn’t declare explicitly that he would repudiate the nomination.

This was what Smith wanted to hear—or not hear. “All right,” he said. “I won’t ask you any more questions.”

The deal was concluded the following day. Roosevelt’s name was put into nomination at Rochester. The weary delegates hardly bothered to applaud, and they didn’t bother to call the roll. They approved the nomination on a voice vote and departed.

“M
ESS IS NO
name for it,” Louis Howe telegraphed Roosevelt. “For once I have no advice to give.”

Roosevelt’s chief political strategist couldn’t imagine what had come over his man. They had agreed months before that 1928 was a Republican year. And the reaction to Smith’s candidacy simply reinforced the conclusion that this was a good season to be out of politics. Smith would break his sword on the Republican boom and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant bigotry, leaving Roosevelt as the most credible Democrat standing. But now Roosevelt had spoiled everything by volunteering for a lost cause. With luck a man might have one chance at the presidency; Howe had been working for nearly two decades to get Roosevelt that chance. And Roosevelt had thrown it away.