Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (52 page)

Yet Tugwell still found it curious, for it belied the broader impression of the man. Tugwell taught economics at Columbia University, with a specialty in the business of agriculture. Roosevelt learned about him through Raymond Moley, a Columbia colleague from the political science department who had been advising the governor on prison reform. Roosevelt decided to pick the brains of experts on a variety of subjects important to a prospective president. Moley brought Tugwell up from the city on the afternoon train; they arrived at the mansion in time for dinner.

Eleanor Roosevelt commenced the personal talk. She quickly learned that Tugwell came from Chautauqua County and that his family had been farmers, mostly dairy and fruit. His father had run a business on the side.

Roosevelt pushed the conversation toward public policy. He had long thought that one solution to the unemployment problem was to encourage jobless city dwellers to relocate to the country. What did the professor think?

Tugwell disagreed. Farming was a complex affair, he said. City folks wouldn’t know where to start. And country life was different from city life. They would probably be bored and unhappy.

Roosevelt responded—“a little testily,” Tugwell thought—that at least they would have something to eat.

Tugwell didn’t admit even that. They wouldn’t have something to eat unless they could grow it themselves, and most would be unable to do so.

The discussion continued, but Tugwell found himself unable to take his eyes off Roosevelt. As the dinner ended, the governor rolled his wheelchair from the dining table to the living room, talking all the while. Without dropping a syllable or pausing for breath, he transferred himself easily from his wheelchair to the sofa. Tugwell thought the conversation provided a cover, a disguise for his disability. “The talking was calculated,” Tugwell recalled. “His crippled legs must have led to the invention of many such diversions, finally becoming unconscious.”

The sofa sat low to the floor, and Roosevelt’s legs projected high and forward. He occasionally moved them by putting his hands under his knees and shifting them manually. “When he did this, enormous shoulder muscles bunched under his jacket and relaxed smoothly,” Tugwell wrote. “It occurred to me that, during the eleven years of his struggle to get back the use of his legs, the rest of his body had really become overdeveloped. I wondered what his jacket size must be. I imagined that if Roosevelt had not worn custom-made clothes, he probably could not have found his size in most stores.”

Roosevelt’s large head and thick neck matched his shoulders and torso, yet somewhat oddly. Tugwell could understand how the exercises Roosevelt had done for rehabilitation had developed the muscles of his upper body, but he wondered what exercises had enlarged his head. He had seen pictures of the young Roosevelt, the lean athlete. Something of that younger man remained in the figure seated before him—“immobile but still athletic.”

Roosevelt’s face was as interesting as his body. “It was a mobile and expressive face,” Tugwell said. “It might have been an actor’s.” Tugwell afterward mentioned this to Moley, who agreed. “He said it
was
an actor’s, and a professional actor’s at that. How did I suppose he’d created and maintained the image of authority?”

Tugwell was taken a bit aback. He asked Moley if the Roosevelt he had spent the evening with wasn’t, then, the real Roosevelt.

Moley reflected before answering. His explanation stuck with Tugwell, who recalled it years later:

Yes, he said, in the sense that all this paraphernalia of the governorship had become part of him. It was a real talent; it was a lifetime part that he was playing…. He’d figured out what he ought to be like in order to get where he wanted to get and do what he wanted to do, and that was what was on display. Ray added, thoughtfully, that no one would ever see anything else.

Moley had been studying Roosevelt for some time. His sessions with the governor and then presidential candidate had segued from prison reform to politics generally, and he became, with Tugwell, Adolf Berle, and a few others, a member of what the press soon called the Brain Trust. Moley measured Roosevelt as a politician and a man, and what he perceived impressed him, in a complex way. “You ask what he is like,” he wrote to his sister, who had inquired about Roosevelt. “That isn’t easy to answer, because I haven’t had the chance to confirm a lot of fleeting impressions.” But those fleeting impressions, confirmed or not, added up to a striking portrait of the man who seemed certain to become America’s next president:

One thing is sure, that the idea people get from his charming manner—that he is soft or flabby in disposition and character—is far from true. When he wants something a lot he can be formidable—when crossed he is hard, stubborn, resourceful, relentless. I used to think on the basis of casual observation that his amiability was ‘lord-of-the-manor,’ ‘good-to-the-peasants’ stuff. It isn’t that at all. He seems quite naturally warm and friendly—less because he genuinely likes many of the people to whom he is pleasant (although he does like a lot of people of all sorts and varieties) than because he just enjoys the pleasant and engaging role, as a charming woman does. And being a born politician, he measures such qualities in himself by the effect they produce on others. He is wholly conscious of his ability to send callers away happy and glowing and in agreement with him and his ideas….

The stories about his illness and its effect upon him are the bunk. Nobody in public life since T.R. has been so robust, so buoyantly and blatantly healthy as this fellow. He is full of animal spirits and keeps himself and the people around him in a rare good humor with a lot of horseplay…. The man’s energy and vitality are astonishing. I’ve been amazed with his interest in things. It skips and bounces through seemingly intricate subjects, and maybe it is my academic training that makes me feel that no one could possibly learn much in such a hit or miss fashion. I don’t find that he has read much about economic subjects. What he gets is from talking to people…. When he stores away the net of conversation, he never knows what part of what he has kept is what he said himself or what his visitor said.

U
PON LEARNING
that he had carried the Democratic convention, Roosevelt announced that he would do something historically unprecedented: he would address the delegates in person. Tradition dictated that the nominee receive official notification, which typically arrived several weeks after the convention, before delivering his acceptance speech. Roosevelt refused to wait that long—or to wait at all. The decisive vote in Chicago concluded at half past ten on Friday night; by seven thirty Saturday morning he was on an airplane flying west. Air travel wasn’t a novelty in 1932; Charles Lindbergh’s epic crossing of the Atlantic five years earlier had seen to that. But political candidates didn’t travel by air, in part because they wanted to stop and make speeches along the way. Roosevelt, however, chose to fly, in order both to signal a break from the past and to get to the convention before the excitement surrounding his nomination diminished.

Bad weather slowed the flying, and while he made his way across Ohio and Indiana the convention nominated John Nance Garner for vice president. Roosevelt had almost no say in the decision. Garner let it be known that after thirty years in the House he would like to retire to the vice presidency, and the transfer suited all concerned: the Texas delegation, as honoring their favorite son; the Californians, as giving the West a presence in a Roosevelt administration; the Roosevelt camp, as the least that could be done for Garner and his southern and western supporters. There was one other consideration, unspoken except among Garner’s closest friends. Roosevelt seemed hale enough, but so had Warren Harding before he died. Polio couldn’t be beneficial to one’s long-term health; Garner might inherit the presidency before four years were out. Perhaps this possibility inspired the words of Alabama congressman John McDuffie, who praised Garner to the convention as a “sturdy and rugged character” and a “real red-blooded he-man.” The convention approved Garner unanimously on the first vice presidential ballot.

By the time Roosevelt reached the Chicago Stadium, many of the delegates, including nearly all those pledged to Smith, had departed. But their seats were taken by visitors who voiced their enthusiasm for the nominee when his car finally cleared the heavy traffic from the airport. “As Mr. Roosevelt advanced to the rostrum, the great hall seemed to surge upward, an illusion which accompanied the sight of so many thousands rising simultaneously to their feet,” Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
reported. “It was evident that the thousands of people believed they were in the presence, not only of the nominee of the Democratic party, but of the next President of the United States.”

The thousands in the stadium, and the millions more across the country who listened to Roosevelt’s speech on the radio, heard the nominee embrace the credo of liberalism—proudly, defiantly, confidently. “The Democratic party by tradition and by the continuing logic of history, past and present, is the bearer of liberalism and of progress,” Roosevelt declared. He explained that there were two ways of viewing the role of government in matters touching economics and social life. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped, and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.” But they had not left. Instead they had regathered as Republicans and had administered the lopsided prosperity of the 1920s. Corporate profits had soared but weren’t shared. Consumers and workers were forgotten. The imbalance was unsustainable, and it had inevitably produced the stock crash and the depression. “You know the story. Surpluses invested in unnecessary plants became idle. Men lost their jobs. Purchasing power dried up. Banks became frightened and started calling loans. Those who had money were afraid to part with it. Credit contracted. Industry stopped. Commerce declined. And unemployment mounted.”

Against the Republicans’ approach of every man for himself, Roosevelt posited a Democratic philosophy of all for one another. This had been the essence of liberalism from the beginning; it became even more so under present circumstances. “Never in history have the interests of all the people been so united in a single economic problem,” Roosevelt said. The depression was threatening city and country, farmers and workers, debtors and creditors, management and labor. “Danger to one is danger to all.” The Republicans, refusing to acknowledge the interconnections, had refused to take ameliorative action; a Democratic administration would rectify the Republicans’ failure. “We are going to make the voters understand this year that this nation is not merely a nation of independence, but it is, if we are to survive, bound to be a nation of interdependence.”

The Republicans pleaded helplessness against what they described as inexorable laws of economics. “But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving…. Economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” Farmers knew this and rightly expected more of government than they were getting; Roosevelt proposed strong action to reduce crop surpluses. Homeowners knew this as they struggled with their monthly payments; Roosevelt promised measures to lower interest rates and prevent foreclosures. Workers knew this in their search for jobs to replace the ones they had lost; Roosevelt declared that the federal government should enter the labor market and hire workers to develop the nation’s resources.

As he reached the climax of his speech, Roosevelt asserted that the current troubles wouldn’t have been wasted if Americans discovered how to respond.

Throughout the nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the government of the last years look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth. On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.