Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (51 page)

Smith wasn’t so candid in public, but he adopted a strategy designed to deny Roosevelt the nomination and reclaim it for himself. Two weeks after Roosevelt tossed his hat in the ring, Smith issued a statement:

If the Democratic National Convention, after careful consideration, should decide it wants me to lead, I will make the fight; but I will not make a pre-convention campaign to secure the support of delegates. By action of the Democratic National Convention of 1928, I am the leader of my party in the nation. With a full sense of the responsibility thereby imposed, I shall not in advance of the convention either support or oppose the candidacy of any aspirant for the nomination.

It was a shrewd maneuver, one Roosevelt might have admired if it hadn’t come at his own expense. Smith, standing on the disputably high ground of a nomination that had proved to be the worst disaster in the Democrats’ recent history, absolved himself of endorsing Roosevelt and implicitly invited party conservatives to launch a stop-Roosevelt offensive at the convention. Smith knew perfectly well how the two-thirds rule worked; the opponents of the front-runner merely had to impugn his inevitability and hold out till the convention grew exhausted and desperate. At that point the convention could well turn to one who had carried the banner before. The Happy Warrior might take the field again.

R
OOSEVELT DETERMINED
to forestall such an outcome, by a strategy exactly along the lines of what Walter Lippmann criticized. Anyone could see that the depression had opened the door for the Democratic candidate in the general election; the only thing the candidate had to do was to avoid missing the opening by veering too far to the left or the right. Balance was the key to victory, and if balance required placating both progressives and conservatives, Roosevelt was willing to oblige.

Balance required care and effort, though. On two issues, a Democratic candidate might easily misstep. The first was Prohibition, which wasn’t quite as divisive in 1932 as it had been in 1924 and 1928 but still evoked passions. The sentiment in favor of an embargo on alcohol continued to erode with the undeniable failure of the federal government to enforce the law at all thoroughly and with the increasing need of the states for tax revenues to replace what the depression had cost them in sales and income taxes. Yet Prohibition remained symbolically powerful in the rural parts of the country, a last stand against the otherwise irresistible tide of modernity.

Roosevelt initially attempted to straddle the issue. He supported repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment but without vigor or even, for many months, voice. While other Democrats staked out their positions, he kept mum. Walter Lippmann held Roosevelt’s silence against him, as further evidence of his lack of leadership. Al Smith was even more annoyed. With the 1932 election approaching, Smith wanted Roosevelt to join him in a cultural war on those who had voted against him four years earlier, with repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment being the test issue. “Why in hell don’t he speak out?” Smith demanded of Clark Howell, in the interview with the
Atlanta Constitution
publisher. Smith knew that Roosevelt privately opposed Prohibition. “Now ain’t the time for trimming.”

That Smith could say such a thing made clear—to Howell and, more significantly, to Roosevelt—why he had lost so badly in 1928 and why he mustn’t win the nomination in 1932. Not in sixteen years had the stars been so favorably aligned for Democrats; to risk victory by taking a provocative, party-splitting stance on Prohibition would be the height of folly. The Eighteenth Amendment was as good as dead anyway; the movement for repeal hardly required Roosevelt’s support. On the contrary, the good of the party—and of the country, Roosevelt could reasonably extrapolate—required just the trimming that so angered Smith.

Eventually Roosevelt broke his silence on Prohibition. In February 1932 he called for a return of the liquor question to the states, that they might tolerate or continue to prohibit alcohol as they saw fit. This agnostic position, favoring repeal of the federal amendment but allowing states to impose their own bans, placed Roosevelt midway between the wets and the drys. He added a rationale that made his compromise even less controversial: he stressed repeal as a fiscal measure, promising a “large source of additional revenue” to those states that loosened the taps and bungs but taxed what they spouted.

The other issue that threatened to divide the party and derail Roosevelt’s advance to the nomination was the appropriate attitude toward the world beyond America’s borders. Remnant Wilsonians wanted Roosevelt to reembrace the central teaching of their departed philosopher-president: that America and the world were irretrievably interconnected. In 1932 the Wilsonians were still calling for American membership in the League of Nations, at this point primarily as an acknowledgment of the global, or at least transatlantic, character of the depression and a first step toward discovering international remedies. Roosevelt seemed a natural to join such a call, having been an ardent Wilsonian and currently castigating the Republicans for the economic nationalism behind the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But internationalism raised hackles on the neck of middle America, precisely that portion of the electorate that had abandoned Smith in such hordes in 1928. To woo them back into the party required reassurances from Roosevelt that he wouldn’t put the interests of Europeans or other foreigners ahead of American interests.

Roosevelt couldn’t easily rewrite the past, and he didn’t try. “In common with millions of my fellow countrymen, I worked and spoke, in 1920, in behalf of American participation in a League of Nations,” he admitted in early 1932. “For that course I have no apology to make.” Had present circumstances recapitulated those of that earlier time, he said, he would be working just as hard for American membership in the League. “But the League of Nations today is not the League conceived by Woodrow Wilson.” Roosevelt let listeners imagine that things might have been different if the Republicans hadn’t sabotaged Wilson’s vision for the League. Had the United States been a member all these years, the League might have evolved more positively. But there was little to be gained by arguing the point. The League was now an instrument for the advancement of the narrow and often nefarious purposes of the European powers. “Therefore I do not favor American participation.”

H
AVING DODGED,
as he hoped, the bullets of Prohibition and internationalism, Roosevelt advanced toward the convention. A generation after the progressives had specified primary elections as the ideally democratic way of narrowing candidate fields, the Democratic party chose the delegates to its national convention by a combination of primaries, caucuses, state conventions, and backroom back-scratching. Roosevelt’s political labors of the previous decade—his correspondence with state Democratic officials, his cultivation of William Jennings Bryan and Edward House, his convention appearances, his dispatch of Louis Howe and James Farley to consult with southern and western party leaders—had been undertaken with this welter of decision-making in mind, and during the spring and summer of 1932 his efforts paid off. He won an early lead in delegates, and his advantage widened with each passing month.

But he left nothing to chance. He continued to woo southern Democrats especially, hosting events at Warm Springs designed to make this Hudson Valley Dutchman seem a Scots-Irish son of Dixie. He engaged Huey Long, the Louisiana senator, in a good-natured argument about the proper method of eating corn pone with potlikker. “Because I am at least an adopted Georgian, I am deeply stirred by the great controversy,” Roosevelt wrote the
Atlanta Constitution.
“I suggest referring the whole subject to the platform committee of the next Democratic National Convention.” Yet after Long announced for dunking, Roosevelt couldn’t remain silent. “I crumble mine,” he declared.

Several weeks before the convention nearly all the South had climbed aboard the Roosevelt bandwagon. Texas and Virginia were the main exceptions, holding out, respectively, for favorite sons John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, and Harry Byrd, the governor of the Old Dominion. The West was equally enthusiastic, with almost every state but California, where Garner won the primary, pledging for Roosevelt.

Only the East occasioned worry. Al Smith’s partisans joined others intent on stopping Roosevelt, and the alliance campaigned hard in New England, where it captured Massachusetts for Smith and split the rest of the region with Roosevelt’s forces. Smith’s backers fought Roosevelt to a draw in New York.

The result was that Roosevelt entered the Chicago convention with a commanding lead over Smith but not a decisive one, given the party’s two-thirds rule. Roosevelt toyed with trying to repeal the rule, which would have allowed a first-ballot victory, but he rejected the idea as suggesting a lack of confidence. He concentrated instead on wooing Garner, whose Texas and California delegates could put Roosevelt over the top.

Garner at first refused to budge. Having attended conventions since the turn of the century, the wily Texan understood that strange things happened once the balloting began. Smith might stymie Roosevelt but be unable to win himself; the convention might turn to Garner in the belief that any Democrat could defeat the wounded Hoover.

The first ballot went as expected. Roosevelt received 666
¹
/4 votes, substantially more than half but some hundred shy of two-thirds. The second ballot, which was called at once—as dawn began to break outside the Chicago convention hall—was the crucial one, for it would show movement. If Roosevelt gained ground, he could count on victory. But if he slipped, he might lose everything. Roosevelt stayed away from the convention, as candidates did in that era, but Farley worked the hall on his behalf and secured eleven additional votes. Smith meanwhile lost six votes. Roosevelt’s men sighed with relief and encouragement, Smith’s with frustration and foreboding.

A third ballot brought Roosevelt five more votes and cost Smith an additional four. At this point Garner had to make a decision. If he held out too long, Roosevelt might win on his own, leaving Garner with nothing to show for his success in Texas and California. But if he threw his support to Roosevelt too soon, he would give up whatever—admittedly slim—chance he had of winning the nomination for himself. His delegates were committed to him for the duration. William McAdoo, the former candidate who now headed the California delegation, told Sam Rayburn, Garner’s floor manager, “We’ll vote for Jack Garner until hell freezes over if you say so.”

Garner decided not to wait that long. He refused to risk an extended battle that might spoil the Democrats’ first good shot at the White House in sixteen years. As he later recalled, “I said to Sam, ‘All right, release my delegates and see what you can do. Hell, I’ll do anything to see the Democrats win one more national election.’”

Garner’s concession proved the difference. The switch of Texas and California prompted other states to follow suit, and on the fourth ballot Franklin Roosevelt received the Democratic nomination.

20.

R
EXFORD
T
UGWELL MET
R
OOSEVELT AT THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION
in Albany, and one of the first things he noticed was the shoes. “Curiously unworn,” was how Tugwell described them. This shouldn’t have been curious at all. Everyone in New York who cared to know realized that Roosevelt didn’t walk. Not everyone appreciated the extent of his disability, which he continued to minimize. But no one had seen him strolling the sidewalks of Albany or Manhattan, and no one expected to see him. A man who didn’t walk didn’t wear out shoes.