Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  In the ballroom, some fifty people were waiting to join FDR on the speaker’s platform. Some of them watched as he was carried up the fire escape, Perkins among them.

  “Those of us who saw this incident,” she wrote later, “with our hands on our throats to hold down our emotion, realized that this man had accepted the ultimate humility which comes from being helped physically. He had accepted it smiling. He came up over that perilous, uncomfortable, and humiliating ‘entrance,’ and his manner was pleasant, courteous, enthusiastic. He got up on his braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim’s, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual.”

  Sometimes a staircase or a fire escape wasn’t wide enough for FDR and two other men. So if he absolutely had to, he could get up and down stairs by himself, as long as there was a strong railing. Anna saw him perform this feat at Flushing High School in Queens. He didn’t want to walk up the long center aisle of the auditorium, Anna recalled, “for fear people might think he was trying to develop sympathy for himself—a sympathy aimed at making people vote for a physically courageous man rather than for one with the political and statesmanlike qualities necessary for the office.” So here, too, he chose to come in by a fire escape at the rear of the building, one that was apparently too narrow for assistants to carry him. “By using his strong arms and shoulders,” Anna wrote, “he could, slowly but surely, swing first one leg and then the other up one step at a time. It was a tough, slow climb, and Father paused for breath a couple of times. Each time he made a wisecrack to break the tension for those of us who were watching. We weren’t worried that he might fall. But we knew how he hated to have people watch him doing something that was as much effort as this and that drew attention to his paralysis. When he reached the top, his face was streaming with perspiration, and his white shirt was soaked. He paused just long enough to mop his face and catch his breath. Then he walked out on to the stage…”

  Watching FDR at one event after another that week, Perkins recalled, “I began to see what the great teachers of religion meant when they said that humility is the greatest of virtues, and that if you can’t learn it, God will teach it to you by humiliation. Only so can a man be really great.”

  * * *

  Every day, Roosevelt told the crowds that he and Al Smith were on the verge of historic upset victories. But by now it was clear to any realistic onlooker that Smith was about to be buried in a landslide.

  If his campaign had accomplished nothing else, at least it had persuaded the press that his disability was no handicap. “It is a fact,” wrote a New York World reporter, “that Mr. Roosevelt appears in better health today than he did at the outset of his campaign three weeks ago.”

  But toxic rumors continued to circulate. He would be dead within six months. Or if he won and survived, he would soon turn over the governor’s chair to Herbert Lehman.

  “I thought that with Halloween over these ghost stories would be forgotten,” he told listeners at one stop. “All I can say is that if I could keep on in this campaign steadily for another twelve months I would throw away my cane.”

  In the final days he rushed north for meetings and rallies on his home ground. He spent the day before the election in Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, slept in his own bed that night, voted in the morning, and then joined Smith in New York City to await the results.

  At the Biltmore Hotel, he and Eleanor hosted a buffet supper for friends and allies. He went over to see the Democratic faithful at Tammany headquarters, looked in on the party’s national offices at the General Motors Building, then went back to the Biltmore for the long night of waiting.

  Early reports from upstate voting precincts were crushing. Ottinger was racing out to a big lead. By midnight the totals showed that Smith had lost his race against Hoover in all but eight states. His beloved New York State had gone against him.

  Sam Rosenman watched Roosevelt as he leafed through the county-by-county voting returns. He saw FDR’s jaw get set and stony.

  “We’ll stay around until it is over,” he said.

  He suspected Republican county sheriffs were delaying their vote reports and doctoring the totals. He had phone calls put through to several of them.

  “This is Franklin Roosevelt,” he said. “The returns from your county are coming in mighty slowly, and I don’t like it … I want you personally to see that the ballots are not tampered with.”

  Finally he concluded there was no point in staying any longer. Now only Frances Perkins and Sara Roosevelt were left to wait for the party workers to hand over the final tally. “I made up my mind to sit out the night on the ridiculous theory that if I didn’t give up somehow the result would be changed,” Perkins said.

  Precinct by precinct, local totals continued to stream in by teletype. The first editions of the newspapers arrived with headlines announcing Hoover’s and Ottinger’s victories. Still more reports arrived.

  At 4:00 A.M., the men tallying the returns came over to tell Sara and Frances Perkins that FDR had been elected governor by twenty-five thousand votes out of nearly 4.5 million cast.

  The two women embraced. Then Frances Perkins escorted Sara home to East Sixty-Fifth Street just as the sun was coming up.

  Chapter 15

  “HE MUST DO IT HIMSELF”

  Two years later, on November 4, 1930, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a second term as governor of New York by the greatest margin of victory ever recorded in the state. This time, against the Republican Charles H. Tuttle, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he piled up mountains of votes throughout the city; he won in the upstate cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany; he won in rural counties where farmers had been voting the straight Republican ticket since the days of Abraham Lincoln; he won among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. He won by nearly three-quarters of a million votes out of roughly three million cast.

  The day after the election, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, one of the governor’s lieutenants came out of Democratic Party headquarters to talk with reporters.

  This was Big Jim Farley, a friendly Irish American political pro who had moved over from Al Smith’s camp to work for FDR. He and Louis Howe had written a statement for the press. They wrote it on their own that morning. FDR had left early for Albany.

  Farley read the statement slowly so the reporters could get it down word for word.

  “I fully expect,” he said, “that the call will come to Governor Roosevelt when the first presidential primary is held, which will be late next year. The Democrats in the nation naturally want as their candidate for president the man who has shown himself capable of carrying the most important state in the country by a record-breaking majority. I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party, even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.”

  The reporters ran for the telephones.

  Farley said later that he and FDR had never discussed a campaign for president before that day. This was a political superstition: You avoided such talk before the time was right.

  When Farley figured his boss had reached his office up in Albany, he called him to report what he had said to the press, not sure what the response might be.

  FDR just laughed.

  “Whatever you said, Jim, is all right with me.”

  Before the month was out, Louis Howe had rented a new office as a base for a national campaign. And Ed Flynn—the party boss of the Bronx who had urged FDR to run for governor, now Roosevelt’s secretary of state, whom FDR believed to be the smartest political organizer in America—was invited up to the governor’s residence for the weekend.

  Flynn found himself in the governor’s private quarters facing only Howe and FDR.

  “Eddie,” the governor said, “my reason for asking you to stay overnight is that I believe I can be nominated for the Presidency in 1932.”

  * * *

  In 1928, when
Herbert Hoover won the White House in a landslide, no one would have bet much on a Democrat’s chances in 1932. FDR had set his sights on the election year after that, 1936. But in just two years the political landscape had been plowed up as if by a string of tornadoes. The next Democratic nomination was looking much more valuable than anyone had expected.

  Roosevelt’s crushing majority in 1930 had been bolstered by voters who blamed Republicans for a stock market crash in the fall of 1929 and the economic recession it had triggered—a recession so deep that by the fall of 1930 some people were calling it a depression—a frightening mixture of falling prices and production that puts many people out of their jobs, dries up the credit that businesses need to expand, and threatens to last much longer than the downward loop of the normal business cycle.

  But it wasn’t just the struggling economy that had given FDR his landslide. New York Democrats running for Congress in 1930 hadn’t won by nearly such large margins.

  It was what he had done in his short time as governor—not so much the laws he had passed, since the Republicans in the state legislature blocked most of his initiatives, but the powerful impression he had made. Even to people who had seen him as no more than a pale shadow of his Rough Rider cousin, a rich boy dabbling in politics, it was clear that “a new Roosevelt” had come fully and forcefully onto the political scene.

  This had happened in stages.

  First, he had dealt with the problem of Al Smith.

  Smith had been devastated by the loss of both his race for the presidency and his hold on power in New York State. In the wake of the Hoover landslide, he declared that he was out of politics for good, at least as a candidate for high office.

  But Al’s appetite for influence remained strong. As he watched the man he had practically begged to run for governor prepare to take his place in Albany, he began to ruminate on all the reasons he had harbored doubts about FDR.

  So Smith began to think of himself as a kind of powerful coach—on the sidelines, yes, but calling the plays for an inexperienced and spindly freshman quarterback.

  He soon learned that the new quarterback intended to call his own plays.

  Even before FDR took the oath of office, Al made his bid to be the power behind the throne.

  “Well, Frank,” he said, “you won’t have to worry about being governor. You can come to Albany for the inauguration and stay around for a while and get the hang of things, and when you get a chance you can hop back to Warm Springs, and we’ll be here to see that things go all right.”

  “Al,” FDR replied, “did you ever leave Albany for an extended stay during a legislative session?”

  “No,” Smith conceded.

  “Then I won’t either,” FDR said.

  Then Smith urged FDR to reappoint two of his own most trusted aides, especially Belle Moskowitz, whose title was secretary but who in fact was Smith’s most powerful behind-the-scenes operator and his most devoted loyalist.

  No, the new governor said politely, he needed his own people close to him.

  When FDR told Frances Perkins about this exchange, she was struck by his determination to make his own decisions, tempting as it might be to make concessions to Smith just to keep the peace. She had a “very real sense, as I rode home on the train that night, of this man, sick and struggling … just grabbing to keep his will power. He must do it himself. He must think it himself … It must be his.”

  Early in 1929, FDR invited Smith to stay overnight at the governor’s residence for a couple of weekends. But the Saturday dinner table was crowded with guests, and FDR went up to bed before Al could take him aside to talk. In the morning, Smith attended mass while FDR slept in. More guests came in and out all afternoon, and then Smith had to catch the train for New York. For a while, Perkins said, Al “didn’t realize he was getting the brush-off.”

  Finally he did get it, and he began to get angry.

  He had made FDR governor, he would say, and now he got only ingratitude and the cold shoulder?

  FDR wondered who owed whom. Hadn’t he done what Al wanted? Hadn’t he given up his last chance of walking when Al said he needed Roosevelt’s help?

  He had no intention of being anything but his own man as governor. He was in. Al was out. That was it.

  It worked—for the moment. People in Albany saw that Al was indeed out.

  But the former governor nourished a simmering anger.

  * * *

  As a private citizen, FDR had been managing his affairs without much one-on-one contact with strangers. But a governor can’t conduct business from a back office with a couple of aides—not if he wants to get big things done.

  So FDR developed routines for being a public man who couldn’t walk on his own.

  Since 1921 he had learned a lot about managing his movements in public and making people feel comfortable in his presence. Now, in the endless flow of meetings and receptions, he raised that ability to a high art form.

  He made no attempt to hide himself away in inner offices. Quite the contrary: He made himself available to practically everybody. “There is no disguising the fact … that he is a crippled man,” reported Milton MacKaye, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, who spent time watching Roosevelt at work, “and one of the admirable things about Roosevelt is that he never attempts to disguise it. Getting in to see the Governor is hardly more difficult than dropping in on your pastor. He will see anyone, and by anyone I mean that even insurance salesmen have eluded his secretaries.”

  Mobility was a little easier now, since as governor he could hire more help. Irvin McDuffie stayed on as his personal valet, helping especially with morning and evening routines. He was joined by two state policemen, Gus Gennerich and Earl Miller, who acted not only as bodyguards but as physical helpers. These three plus the man FDR appointed as his official secretary, Guernsey Cross, a former All-American basketball player at Cornell University, gave FDR round-the-clock help getting where he needed to go. Any of them—in pairs or even alone, if necessary—could carry FDR quickly up or down steps and stairs, and each became proficient at managing FDR’s wheelchair.

  Since 1921, Roosevelt had relied on his plain wooden wheelchairs to move around inside whatever home or office he happened to be using, whether at East Sixty-Fifth Street, Hyde Park, or Warm Springs. He put on his braces and stood up to walk only when he felt he had to—typically at public appearances where he wanted to display the extent of his physical recovery.

  In other words, walking was essentially for show.

  In private there was no need to walk, so the wheelchair was brought out. It made everything easier and quicker. If new employees were uneasy at first sight of the governor in a wheelchair, they soon became just as used to it as they were to his long cigarette holder. “The first physical thing that struck you on meeting Roosevelt was that huge, powerful body without the use of legs,” Sam Rosenman recalled later. “As you got to know Roosevelt, it was also the first thing you forgot. The wheelchair, always present in the background, soon became a normal part of the furniture of the room. Wheeling him in to dinner or to bed became as routine as offering your arm to your dinner partner. It was something that he himself seemed never to think about much. In fact, when he wanted to end a conversation or a visit, he frequently would say: ‘Well, I’m sorry, I have to run now!’—and I’m sure it never struck him as a strange thing to say.”

  For people outside his inner circle, he developed different habits.

  He preferred to be seen in the wheelchair as little as possible by people who didn’t know him well. He had to talk with them—dozens of them every week—easily and confidentially. So the wheelchair was used, but used carefully.

  When a meeting was about to occur, one of FDR’s attendants would make sure the governor was already seated in a regular chair and ready to welcome his guest. Meanwhile the wheelchair was put away until it was needed next.

  When Al Smith had said a governor didn’t need to be an acrobat, he hadn’t known much ab
out wheelchairs. Moving from a wheelchair to a regular chair or back again—an action FDR performed several times each day—was something of an athletic feat, and his attendant had to be agile, too. Only a few knew how to help—the bodyguards, McDuffie, and the Roosevelts’ sons.

  When FDR was ready to get into the wheelchair, his helper would hold the chair at a right angle to where he was seated, making sure to hold it rock-steady with both hands and a knee to brace one wheel. Then FDR would push hard on the arms of his regular chair, thrust upward, twist his body in midair, and land on the seat of the wheelchair. The family called this “the flip.” There was always a danger that the chair would slip or that FDR would lean too far to one side or the other. He didn’t wind up on the floor often, but it happened. The family always watched the move with a little twinge of nerves. This, too, was a reason he couldn’t use the wheelchair in front of strangers. The risk of an embarrassing fall was too great. So, as often as possible, “the flip” was done behind closed doors. When he was back in a regular chair, the doors were opened, and the guests found a busy executive ready to greet them. He just shook their hands without standing up.

  Often the governor would host receptions where important business was done in casual snatches of conversation. A governor who was able to walk on his own could move around the room, chatting for a moment with this member of the state assembly or that Democratic donor, fitting in dozens of quick exchanges in an evening. He could also evade a windbag who wouldn’t shut up. None of this was possible for FDR, who was stuck in one place for the duration of the reception.