Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (55 page)

In a series of speeches he would have considered beneath him just months before, Hoover blasted Roosevelt for attempting to provoke class warfare and for frightening investors who, the president claimed, were poised to return to the markets and revive the economy. Hoover couldn’t decide whether Roosevelt was naïve or cynical in blaming American speculators and the Republican administration for the depression—whether Roosevelt simply didn’t understand that the depression was an international phenomenon or, understanding, nonetheless chose to make it appear the fault of rich Republicans. The roots of the crisis, the president contended, ran backward to the World War and outward across the Atlantic and Pacific to Europe and Asia. The international debt and reparations tangle had greatly magnified otherwise manageable domestic troubles. Anyone who argued otherwise was a liar or a fool. Hoover charged Roosevelt and the Democrats with constructing a “labyrinth of inaccurate statements,” of being “false prophets of a millennium promised through seductive but unworkable and disastrous theories of government.” The solution to the depression was not government intervention in the economy but patient adherence to the principles that had constructed the economy in the first place. When October’s statistics revealed that nearly a million men had gone back to work in the most recent quarter, Hoover claimed confirmation of the soundness of the administration’s policies. “To enter upon a series of deep changes now, to embark upon this inchoate ‘new deal’ which has been propounded in this campaign would not only undermine and destroy our American system, but it will delay for months and years the possibility of recovery.”

Beyond the current quarter, and beyond the present campaign, Americans faced a choice between two visions for their country. “This campaign is more than a contest between two men,” Hoover asserted. “It is a contest between two philosophies of government.” Hoover characterized his own conservative philosophy as that which had built the nation; it put its faith in the individual and the private sector. He described Roosevelt’s philosophy as one that looked to government. In this it was novel and threatening. “You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people’s souls and thoughts,” Hoover said. Roosevelt talked of the government controlling the economy, as though the government would stop there. It would not. “Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.”

J
IM
F
ARLEY ASSERTED,
safely after the fact, that he had been confident of the outcome of the 1932 election well in advance. “As the campaign moved down the homestretch…,” he said, “it was as certain as anything humanly could be that the American electorate was getting ready for one of those periods of drastic upheaval which result in the ‘ins’ being tossed out rather unceremoniously while the ‘outs’ take over the government.” The evidence took various forms. “President Hoover was out on the stump frantically endeavoring to regain the magic of his lost prestige. Larger and larger crowds flocked to the Roosevelt rallies to get a glimpse of him, one of the best signs that popular sympathy was running in his direction.” Another signal was even more telling. “The ‘fence-sitters’ and the gentlemen who love to bet on the winner were flocking into headquarters to congratulate me and others on the manner in which the campaign was conducted. There are always large numbers of those folks, whom I once heard described as invincible in victory and invisible in defeat.”

Roosevelt could read the signs as well as Farley, and while he shared Farley’s confidence he determined to keep the pressure on. He intended not to coast to election but to win in a rout. He was convinced that the country needed a change of direction. He had been convinced of this for a decade—convinced that the capitalist-tilting, status quo policies of the Republicans were unfair to the ordinary people of America and counterproductive to America’s abiding national interests. But only now did the country appear to agree. Roosevelt insisted that the agreement be rendered as loudly and clearly as possible.

He wrapped up his campaign where Democrat candidates had finished for decades: at Madison Square Garden, on the Saturday before the election. “Our case has been stated and made,” he told the eager throng of party faithful. “In every home, to every individual, in every part of our wide land, full opportunity has been given to hear that case, and to render honest judgment on Tuesday.” Roosevelt didn’t quite declare victory, but he came close.

From the time that my airplane touched ground at Chicago up to the present, I have consistently set forth the doctrine of the present-day Democracy. It is the program of a party dedicated to the conviction that every one of our people is entitled to the opportunity to earn a living, and to develop himself to the fullest measure consistent with the rights of his fellow men. You are familiar with that program. You are aware that it has found favor in the sight of the American electorate…. Tonight we set the seal upon that program. After Tuesday, we go forward to the great task of its accomplishment.

D
EMOCRACY DOESN’T
delve into voters’ minds; it merely counts their votes. Certainly many of those who voted for Roosevelt on November 8, 1932, were drawn to the polls by his vision of an America united by equality of opportunity. Just as certainly, many were driven to the polls by their dissatisfaction with Hoover’s management of America’s political economy. But there was no way of telling where the balance lay between the two groups—between those who voted for Roosevelt’s New Deal and those who voted against Hoover’s old one.

The distinction would be crucial, but it wasn’t on that day. Roosevelt cast his own ballot at Hyde Park, as he always did, and he traveled to New York to await the returns. Four years earlier, from the same Biltmore Hotel, he had felt obliged to threaten to send the sheriffs to ensure a fair tally in the race that narrowly made him governor; this time a whole army couldn’t have halted the landslide that made him president. He beat Hoover by 7 million popular votes (23 million to 16 million), and 413 electoral votes (472 to 59). He carried forty-two of forty-eight states, losing only Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (which came back to the Republicans in the presidential contest, after its earlier defection to the Democrats).

The landslide extended to the congressional races. The Democrats added 97 seats to their existing majority in the House, giving them a margin of 310 to 117. They captured the Senate almost as decisively, by 60 to 35. Overnight the Republicans were transformed from the dominant party in the country to a footnote. Roosevelt and the Democrats, if they could maintain even a semblance of unity, could essentially ignore the party of Lincoln, McKinley, and the first Roosevelt.

This final formulation—the
first
Roosevelt—lingered in Franklin Roosevelt’s mind as he prepared to become the second President Roosevelt. “Give my regards to all the family,” he told Theodore’s son Kermit, who dropped by the Biltmore to offer congratulations. Kermit said he would. “But I don’t know how welcome this news is going to be.”

21.

“I
WISH
I
KNEW WHAT YOU ARE REALLY THINKING AND FEELING,”
Franklin said to Eleanor on election night. She had congratulated him on his victory, but with less enthusiasm than might have been expected in the next First Lady of the United States.

She declined to enlighten him. “From the personal standpoint, I did not want my husband to be president,” she explained afterward. “I realized, however, that it was impossible to keep a man out of public service when that was what he wanted and was undoubtedly well equipped for. It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.” She didn’t have to. She and Franklin had been together for three decades, and he could sense her misgivings even if he didn’t know their precise nature. She was later more forthcoming, although not to him. “As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own,” she said. “I knew what traditionally should lie before me. I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect…. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night.”

Franklin’s election sealed the bargain Eleanor had made with him fourteen years earlier. They had decided against divorce in part to preserve his political career. Now that he had grasped the holy grail of American politics, he could ask no more of her. Had she stepped back, perhaps playing the White House hostess but otherwise leaving politics to him, he could have had no complaint. Most other First Ladies had been retiring; she could have followed their lead.

But she didn’t. Instead she became even more active in politics than she had ever been. In the process she revealed the hidden part of her bargain with Franklin—hidden from him for years, and perhaps from herself for some substantial period. In standing by him in public, even as she refused to lie beside him in private, she preserved not only his political career but her own. Politics came naturally to the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, although she didn’t awaken to its possibilities until after she had married Franklin and borne him six children. Probably not coincidentally, her political awakening occurred shortly after her bargain with Franklin, in the 1920 campaign in which Louis Howe mentored her. She discovered she liked the thrill of the contest. Her encouragement to Franklin to return from polio to politics was for his benefit but also for hers. Politics added meaning to her life—the meaning of participation in important endeavors and of working toward worthy ends.

Franklin’s election as governor had broadened Eleanor politically. A lifelong liberal of the noblesse oblige school, she embarked as New York’s First Lady on the same kinds of improving initiatives that had first attracted her to progressivism on Rivington Street. Franklin insisted on visiting various state institutions, to determine whether they were providing value for taxpayer money, but he often discovered on arrival that he couldn’t get past the front door, as the buildings that housed the agencies weren’t designed for paraplegics. So he would send Eleanor inside. At first he provided lists of items to observe and questions to ask—how many beds there were in each asylum room, whether prison inmates received the food the legislature had appropriated monies for. Soon Eleanor was poking around on her own. “Before the end of our years in Albany,” she said without the modesty that sometimes shrouded her accomplishments, “I had become a fairly expert reporter on state institutions.”

Roosevelt’s election as president expanded her vistas still further. The federal bureaucracy was denser and more elaborate than New York state’s; she would have to sharpen her reporting skills to uncover its secrets. But Franklin would need her more than ever, if only because the country was so much bigger than the state and because the demands on a president made a governor appear a part-timer. Eleanor would lose some of the personal independence she had come to cherish, but her compensation would be political influence of a degree wielded by very few.