Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (45 page)

For what? For party unity? The Democrats, who daily gave new meaning to the concept of self-destruction, couldn’t expect that of anyone. For Al Smith? What had Smith ever done for Roosevelt? For the sake of ambition? Foolish ambition was worse than no ambition at all.

If Howe couldn’t understand Roosevelt’s motives, Roosevelt himself might have been no wiser. He couldn’t have gainsaid Howe’s objections, which made perfect political sense. No doubt the smartest thing would have been to do just what Howe advised: lie low for another few years, write the occasional article, deliver thoughtful speeches, do favors for fellow Democrats, and make ready for 1932.

But logic didn’t get the last word, not this time. Roosevelt’s appearances at the Democratic conventions in 1924 and 1928, and especially the receptions he received there, reminded him how much he loved the game of politics. With those two brief exceptions, he had been out of the game for eight years, and Louis Howe wanted him to stay out another four. He had devoted as much time to his physical recovery as anyone could have, and though he still professed optimism about further improvement, he doubtless realized in his heart that he had gotten back all the leg strength he was going to get. The Warm Springs project was a worthy cause, but other people could manage it.

He was forty-six years old. He knew himself well enough to appreciate his talents. He had a gift for politics—for inspiring people to work with him toward a common civic goal. Polio aside, he was in the prime of life; his gifts wouldn’t increase with the passing years. If anything, they would tend to deteriorate. And in a polio survivor they might deteriorate faster than in other persons.

Roosevelt wasn’t a gambler. But neither was he a slave to calculation. And in 1928 he cast aside calculation and threw himself into a race smart money said he would lose.

A
T FIRST HE
campaigned for Smith, despite the odds against the national ticket. “Smith has burned his bridges behind him,” Roosevelt confided to a friend. He did what he could to repair the damage. In a speech at Rochester he praised Smith’s policies on education and public health. In Syracuse he cited Smith’s contributions to water-power development. In Jamestown he lauded the governor for paving rural roads.

As he warmed to his task, he lashed out at the Republicans—not the ordinary party members, whose votes he courted, but the party leadership, whose record he disdained. “Somewhere in a pigeon-hole of a desk of the Republican leaders of New York State is a large envelope, soiled, worn, bearing a date that goes back twenty-five or thirty years,” he told a crowd in Buffalo. “Printed in large letters on this old envelope are the words, ‘Promises to labor.’ Inside this envelope are a series of sheets dated two years apart and representing the best thought of the best minds of the Republican leaders over a succession of years. Each sheet of promises is practically the duplicate of every other sheet in the envelope. But nowhere in that envelope is a single page bearing the title ‘Promises Kept.’”

As he hit his stride he hammered at what had become the central, if unacknowledged, theme of the Republican presidential campaign. “I have just come from the South,” he told an audience at Binghamton, which had experienced a rash of Klan activity. “I have seen circulars down there in the Southern states that any man or woman in this audience would be ashamed to have in his home. I have seen circulars that were so unfit for publication that the people who wrote and printed and paid for them ought not to be put in jail, but ought to be put on the first boat and sent away from the United States.” Roosevelt tried to shame New York’s bigots into better behavior by associating them with their more virulent southern cousins. He told a tale from Dixie:

Just after I got down to Georgia, an old friend of mine in a small country town, a farmer, came in to see me, and said, “Mr. Roosevelt, I am worried. A lot of my neighbors, all Democrats—we are all Democrats down here—say that they cannot vote for Governor Smith, and I don’t know what the reason is. But there must be some good answer. Will you tell me so I can go back and talk to them? They tell me, these neighbors of mine, and they show me printed handbills saying that if Governor Smith becomes president of the United States, the Methodist and Baptist marriages over here among our neighbors will all be void and that their children will be illegitimate.

Roosevelt’s audience laughed at the improbability of this assertion. “You may laugh,” he continued.

But they were not laughing. They thought it was true, and they were honest, law-abiding citizens. They did not have the education, the contact, to know better. Oh, I could go on and tell you a thousand stories along that line.

Roosevelt expressed relief—or hope—that New Yorkers weren’t so gullible or mean-spirited as to hold a man’s religion against him. “I believe that this year we in the state of New York have got beyond those days of prejudice and bigotry.”

The campaign lasted barely three weeks, but by its midpoint something curious became apparent, at least to certain observers. Perhaps Roosevelt had intended this all along; perhaps it occurred to him in the act; perhaps he never consciously realized it. But the more he spoke of Al Smith’s qualifications for president, the more it sounded as though
he
were running for the White House. In every speech he would start by pointing to Smith’s accomplishments as New York governor, but as he portrayed what a progressive federal government might achieve in the future, his passion for the subject grew intensely personal. He sketched what government could do to develop the hydropower resources of the nation, bringing electricity to rural areas and lowering rates in the cities. He explained how the Republicans had persistently blocked such development, diverting resources and profits into the pockets of their friends. He spoke of the need for government to guarantee pensions for the elderly, who too often ended their lives in the poorhouse. “One of the most oppressing things that I have to do on occasion in this state is to visit the county poorhouse,” he told a crowd at Rochester. “It just tears my heart to see those old men and women there, more than almost anything that I know.” He spoke of the need for stronger labor legislation, to protect workers from excessive hours and to rectify the imbalance between management and workers in strikes and other disputes. The Republicans claimed to be the friends of labor. “How
dare
they say that!” Roosevelt demanded. “How do grown up and ostensibly sane political leaders perjure themselves that way?” He called for government aid to farmers, who had been suffering for years and been neglected by those same Republicans. “I want to see the farmer and his family receive at the end of each year as much for their labor as if they had been working not on a farm, but as skilled workers under the best conditions in any one of our great industries.”

As a candidate for governor, Roosevelt couldn’t well debate the Republicans on foreign policy. But he came close. He returned to the issue of religion in politics as a way of reminding voters of his experience abroad in the World War—and of what Americans had fought and died for in that war. “I go back in my memory ten years ago, ten years ago this autumn,” he said in Buffalo.

I go back to a day in particular when several miles behind the actual line of contact between the two armies I passed through wheat fields, wheat fields with the ripened grain uncut; wheat fields in which there were patches, little patches of color, something in the wheat, and some of those patches wore a dark gray uniform and others of those patches wore an olive drab uniform. As we went through these fields there were American boys carrying stretchers, and on those stretchers were German boys and Austrian boys and American boys being carried to the rear, and somehow in those days people were not asking to what church those German boys or those American boys belonged. Somehow we got into our heads over there and we got into our heads back here that never again would there be any question of a man’s religion in the United States of America….

If any man or woman, after thinking of that, can bear in his heart any motive in this year which will lead him to cast his ballot in the interest of intolerance and of a violation of the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, then I say solemnly to that man or woman, “May God have mercy on your miserable soul.”

V
OTERS CROWDED
Roosevelt’s appearances, responding to his vision and urging him on. Smith’s advisers were less appreciative. “Tell the candidate that he is not running for President but for Governor,” Smith’s manager wired Samuel Rosenman, whom Smith had loaned to Roosevelt for assistance with speeches. “And tell him to stick to state issues.”

It was too late. On election day the contest for president proved to be a Republican rout. Smith held his own in the cities, but he got trounced in the country, losing by six million votes total. He dropped five states of the old Confederacy and, most embarrassingly, New York, where Hoover’s upstate vote outweighed Smith’s large majority in New York City. Whether the country voters rejected Smith for being a Catholic, a wet, an advocate of immigrants, a progressive, or simply a Democrat in a time of Republican prosperity was impossible to tell.

But what
was
possible, indeed inescapable, was that leadership in the Democratic party passed from Al Smith to Franklin Roosevelt that day. As the looming disaster for the Democrats had grown apparent in the weeks before the election, Roosevelt’s chances of carrying New York appeared slim. The early returns on voting day provided little reason for encouragement. Yet Roosevelt refused to concede to Albert Ottinger, his Republican rival, and as the tallies from certain Republican counties were slow in being reported, he sensed he might have a chance. “I have an idea that some of the boys upstate are up to their old tricks of delaying the vote and stealing as many as they can from us,” he told Sam Rosenman. He decided to intervene. He called sheriffs in the tardy counties. “This is Franklin Roosevelt,” he said. “I am watching the returns here at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City. The returns from your county are coming in mighty slowly, and I don’t like it. I shall look to you, if they are unduly delayed, and I want you personally to see that the ballots are not tampered with. If you need assistance to keep order or to see that the vote is counted right, call me here at this hotel and I shall ask Governor Smith to authorize the state troopers to assist you.”

Roosevelt was bluffing. The state troopers lacked the capacity to deal with vote tampering. But the sheriffs probably didn’t know that. Whether or not Roosevelt’s calls were the cause, the returns started arriving more swiftly. When they were totaled they revealed a Roosevelt victory. The margin was narrow: twenty-five thousand votes out of more than four million cast. Yet it was enough.