Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  Eleanor’s respect for Smith had grown during her work for the state Democratic Party. And FDR could not help but like the rollicking governor. “Al Smith could make anybody laugh,” a friend said, and FDR was no exception.

  Did Smith return FDR’s liking and respect? Not so much. The governor saw the younger man as a spoiled upper-cruster just dabbling in politics. And as a proud son of Tammany, Smith resented FDR’s history of fighting the organization.

  But in 1924, affection was beside the point. Smith was getting ready to run for the Democratic nomination for president, and he perceived that FDR might be able to help him.

  Smith’s main rival was William Gibbs McAdoo (MACK-a-doo), a Californian with strong backing from the party’s old rural wing in the West and South. To stand a chance against McAdoo, Smith would need the unified support of his home state’s Democrats. Party members in New York City were no problem. They loved Al. But he also needed support upstate, where most people were Protestant, dry, and deeply suspicious of Tammany Hall. The same was true of Protestant Democrats across the country. That’s where Roosevelt could help. With his popular last name, his reputation for integrity, and his anti-Tammany record, he could soothe the fears of “the better class of Democrats.” If Franklin Roosevelt could support a Catholic “wet” for president, then maybe they could, too.

  So Smith asked FDR to be the chairman of his presidential campaign.

  If Roosevelt had been able to walk, he might be challenging Smith for the nomination. But now Smith regarded FDR as safely and forever on the political sidelines.

  FDR told Al yes, he would be delighted to chair the campaign. Al explained that his staff would do most of the day-to-day work. Roosevelt could hold meetings by phone and in his own home.

  This much he could handle. And it would get him back in the game, at least in a small way.

  Then Smith made a second request: Would FDR agree to give the main speech nominating Smith for president at the Democratic National Convention? It would be held at New York’s biggest arena, Madison Square Garden, in July. Thousands of Democrats from all over the country would be watching his every move and listening to his every word.

  That was an entirely different matter.

  Chapter 8

  “A WILDCAT IN YOUR FACE”

  How could he possibly do it?

  He had been terribly nervous about showing himself in public. Until recently he had refused even to get in or out of an automobile in daylight. Besides, steps and stairs made it all but impossible to move around in most buildings. Just a few weeks earlier, in January 1924, an old friend from Harvard had written to say he hoped FDR could attend their twentieth class reunion, which would be held in the summer of that year. Very unlikely, FDR replied. “The difficulty lies in the fact that I cannot get up steps with the braces, and therefore have to omit all kinds of functions—that is the only thing that may prevent me from getting on for the 20th anniversary. Even the Democratic Convention in New York will not keep me away as I could not attend the Convention anyway.”

  Well, could he or not? To do so would mean taking an enormous risk.

  He knew Madison Square Garden. He could picture the obstacles it presented to a man in his condition. First, there was the curb between the street and the sidewalk, then the stone step up to the outer doors, then the slippery tile floor in the big lobby. Beyond that were corridors that would be crowded with hurrying people, then the giant arena itself, with its long distances across the floor, and at the end of that trek, steep staircases to the raised platform where he would have to give the speech. And it wasn’t just the speech he had to worry about. It was days and nights of acting as Al Smith’s floor leader, the person who would have to meet hour after hour with Democratic delegates in closed rooms with armless chairs, or impromptu clutches in the aisles. Every other minute he would face a new chance of crashing to the floor. Of course, he could avoid all that by using a wheelchair, but that would only confirm the suspicion he was determined to quash—that he was still an invalid.

  FDR had practiced walking with crutches often enough that he could make it across a room on his own power. But he had to keep LeRoy Jones or Eleanor or one of the boys right by his side, ready to steady him if he started to lose his balance.

  What if that happened when he set off across the stage at Madison Square Garden? Every person in that huge arena would remember it forever, including all the reporters.

  All that was on one side of his calculations. On the other was the great opportunity that Al Smith had handed him. As Frances Perkins put it, “Everybody had thought he was near to dead.” This was his chance to prove he was not only very much alive but still a man ready to play a role on the national scene, still a man to reckon with, perhaps even a man who, if only he might walk someday, still had a future in big-time politics.

  How could he give that up? He had to say yes to Smith.

  So he did.

  But he would have to get ready.

  He wanted to show he could walk on his own—with crutches, yes; that was unavoidable—but by himself.

  He could not climb the stairs from the convention floor to the speaker’s platform by himself. He would have to be carried. No way around that, either.

  Then: What would be the setup on the speaker’s platform, and how far would he have to walk? The answer, he learned, was about fifteen feet, the length of a large living room. That was the distance between the top of the stairs to the lectern where he would stand for the speech.

  FDR chose his oldest son, Jimmy, to be his assistant. Jimmy was sixteen now, tall for his age and strong enough to do the job. It would be a nice touch for the convention delegates to see Roosevelt’s son by his side.

  In the library of the Roosevelts’ townhouse, the boys moved furniture and measured off fifteen feet. Then FDR began to practice the distance with his crutches. From the door to the window, from the window to the door, back and forth he went, making sure with each step not to set either crutch too far in front or too far to the side, until he was too tired and sweaty to do it any longer.

  Then again the next day. And the next.

  * * *

  It was not yet noon on June 27, 1924, but the cavernous hall of Madison Square Garden was already roasting. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus had just departed, so the powerful odors of elephants and lions still hung heavy in the damp air. FDR and Jimmy had arrived early, bringing the wheelchair so that FDR could move around and talk with the Democratic delegates gathering on the vast floor of the arena. Up in the galleries, thousands of raucous New Yorkers were starting to yell for their hero, Al Smith. Jimmy could see the beads of sweat rolling down his father’s neck.

  With many people still milling in the aisles, few noticed when two strong men lifted Roosevelt off his feet and hustled him up the steps to the broad speaker’s platform where party leaders were standing, talking, finding their own chairs. Using crutches, with Jimmy standing by, FDR got to his seat.

  That was no simple thing, of course, not with the braces that held his legs rigid under his trousers. In a quick series of moves he had performed many times, he pivoted to turn his back to his chair. Then he and Jimmy gripped each other by the arms. Slowly they lowered FDR until he was sitting with his legs locked straight in front of him. Then he reached behind his knees, undid the locks on the braces and pulled his knees up.

  The man seated next to him was Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, an oil company executive who, like FDR, had been a loyal backer of Woodrow Wilson.

  FDR put a hand to Guffey’s ear and whispered: “Joe, go up to the pulpit and shake it, will you?”

  Guffey gave him a puzzled look. “Why?”

  FDR said, “I want to see if it will surely support my weight.”

  Guffey got it. He went over to the lectern and gave it a hard nudge. It was heavy. FDR could lean against it without pushing it over.

  Finally his name was announced. The crowd settled.

  Jimmy and his dad
now repeated their act in reverse—legs straight, braces locked at the knees, a quick lift and FDR was standing.

  Four years earlier, at the Democrats’ national convention in San Francisco, many of these same delegates had seen Franklin Roosevelt for the first time. He had been a tall, striking young man of thirty-eight who had seized the big banner of the New York delegation and run to the front of the hall, leading a show of support for the retiring President Wilson, who’d been weakened by a stroke.

  Now here he was before them again, the same Franklin Roosevelt, yet different. His legs looked flimsy and unnaturally stiff under his trousers. They saw him grasp his crutches and begin to move. With each step, he carefully placed the crutches in front of him, then pulled his legs along. “Everybody was holding their breath,” Frances Perkins said. “The old-line politicians remembered him as a very vigorous young man at the previous convention. Here was this terribly crippled person … getting himself to the platform somehow, looking so pale, so thin, so delicate.”

  One step … two steps … three steps …

  He did not fall.

  … six steps … seven …

  He let go of his left crutch and seized the edge of the lectern. With his right he held down the pages of his speech.

  Normally, a politician would toss up his hands and wave to the crowd. But if Roosevelt tried that now, he would crash to the floor.

  So instead he tossed up his head—the old gesture that Frances Perkins remembered—and smiled a great, wide smile.

  The crowd exploded.

  “It just tore the place to pieces,” Perkins said.

  When the long roar finally faded, FDR began to speak.

  It was the same strong voice they remembered—a cultured East Coast voice. He told the vast crowd that ordinary New Yorkers adored Al Smith.

  “Ask anyone when you leave this session—ask the woman who serves you in the shop, the banker who cashes your check, the man who runs your elevator, the clerk in your hotel…”

  Perkins, seated nearby, was watching FDR closely. Even as his voice rang through the hall, she could see his body trembling. The hand holding the pages of his speech on top of the lectern “was literally shaking because of the extreme pain and tenseness with which he held himself up to make that speech,” she said.

  “… first in the affections of the people of this state … is the man who has twice been honored with election to the governorship…”

  He scorned the people who had been whispering that Smith, as a Catholic, could not be a loyal American. He called on his party “to be true to ourselves and put from our hearts and minds every sordid consideration, every ignoble personal prejudice.”

  He said Smith fought for the good of common people. He said no other Democrat was more feared by Republicans.

  “He is the happy warrior of the political battlefield … this man of destiny whom our state proudly dedicates to the nation—our own Alfred … E.… Smith!”

  Watching from the press gallery was the famous Will Rogers, a comedian, columnist, and actor whose funny writings on public affairs were read all over the country. When FDR called out Smith’s name, Rogers wrote, “you would have thought somebody had thrown a wildcat in your face. The galleries went wild.”

  The enormous crowd whistled and roared for a full hour—for Al Smith, yes, but also for the electrifying performance given by the man who had returned from the edge of the grave.

  When Governor Smith had finished his own speech, more people wanted to talk to Roosevelt than to the governor himself. Some were whispering that it ought to be Roosevelt getting the nomination for president, not Smith. “Hell, it’s not legs we want in the White House,” said one delegate. “It’s brains!”

  That evening, as FDR rested back at the house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, he heard one of the family’s closest friends, Marion Dickerman, come in through the front door downstairs. He called for her to come and see him. He threw his arms up and cried, “Marion … I did it!”

  * * *

  Over the next few days, the newspapers were full of admiring descriptions of FDR’s appearance in the Garden. Few reporters took the tone of the writer from the Republican-owned Los Angeles Times who sneered at FDR as “hopelessly an invalid … obliged to prop himself against the speaker’s desk once he had been lifted to his feet.” The correspondent from the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, was much more typical: “There was nothing at the Democratic Convention more inspiring than the heroism of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” It wasn’t so much Al Smith as his “nominator that loomed large in the picture, an invalid on crutches, perhaps in pain, who conquered the frailties of body by sheer power of will … The world abhors the quitter who in his full strength goes down and will not get up. It admires the man who fights to the last … Franklin D. Roosevelt showed that this was the stuff he was made of.”

  The convention soon snarled into a deadlock between the angry forces of Smith and McAdoo, with neither candidate winning enough delegates to be nominated. Every day the July sun pushed temperatures inside the Garden a bit higher, baking the delegates and stretching their nerves. Somehow the deadlock had to be broken. Some new candidate must emerge to unite the party. But the only name mentioned with any enthusiasm was that of Roosevelt, disabled or not. By the second week, another reporter said, that name “would stampede the convention were he put in nomination … He has done for himself what he could not do for his candidate.”

  Delegates asked him, pleaded with him. He said no again and again. At one point a smooth-talking, snappily dressed state senator from New York City, Jimmy Walker, soon to be elected mayor, dropped into the chair next to FDR’s and said, “Frank, you are the only man who can be nominated now with any hope.” If either Smith or MacAdoo became the nominee, Walker said, half the party would revolt and sit out the election. Only FDR could hold the warring halves together.

  FDR didn’t even pause to think about it.

  “I appreciate the compliment, Jimmy, but it’s impossible,” he replied. “In the first place, there is my physical condition to consider. And the Smith followers might misunderstand. I’m going to stay with him until the end.”

  He had only one miracle to perform that summer, and he had pulled it off. He had proven to himself and everyone else that he could cross a stage and give a speech. But he could not possibly run for president—not that year.

  Finally, after sixteen days, the exhausted conventioneers turned away from the leaders of their divided party and picked an all-but-unknown lawyer from West Virginia, John W. Davis, as their nominee. FDR and every other savvy Democrat went home knowing that “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the Republican who had become president a year earlier when Warren G. Harding died in office, was about to win his own four years in the White House.

  The convention hadn’t even ended before politicians were sitting down with FDR for quiet conversations, asking how soon he could run for some high office.

  First in line was Al Smith himself.

  Smith had put up a stronger fight for the nomination than many had expected, and already he was planning for another campaign four years hence. He was thinking he might leave the governorship when his term was up at the end of 1924, take a job in private business, save some money, and get ready to run for president again. But he wanted to maintain his power base in New York. For that he needed someone he could control in the governor’s chair. Who better than this suddenly popular cripple with the great name?

  Again FDR said no. “They have been after me to run for the Governorship in this state,” he confided to a friend, “but I have told them that the crutches must go before I run even for dog-catcher.”

  Still, after three lonely years of being pitied and all but forgotten, it was delightful to have people “after him.”

  Encouragement was coming from all over the country.

  “I have the utmost confidence in you,” an Oregon delegate wrote to FDR after the convention, “and would be glad to support you again, if y
ou will get right.”

  “Like the overwhelming majority of the delegates who attended the convention, I became a very ardent admirer of yours,” wrote an Oklahoman, “and had your physical condition permitted, you would have been nominated.”

  Even the most powerful Democrat in the Midwest, “Boss” Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, had become a fan.

  “You know I am seldom carried away,” Pendergast wrote to one of his allies in the party, “… but I want to tell you that had Mr. Roosevelt … been physically able to have withstood the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation the first few days of the Convention. He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met, and I predict he will be the candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1928.”

  All these private conversations, all the talk in the papers about how Roosevelt could have had the nomination if only he had wanted it … It was a new day.

  He had another chance.

  But his basic problem was the same as ever.

  For many months he had been impatient with Dr. Lovett’s cautious, one-step-at-a-time approach to his treatment.

  FDR went to Lovett and said he must find some new way of recovering strength in his legs. What more could be done?

  Lovett hardly knew what to say. Three years had gone by since the virus had attacked FDR. The nerves it destroyed were never coming back to life. Roosevelt’s one chance for improvement lay in the exercises Lovett had already prescribed. With a little more strength and more practice, he could get better and better with his canes and crutches. That was about it.