Master of His Fate

by James Tobin

  So Eleanor and Frances Perkins—who was now FDR’s top-ranking labor official—devised a system for accomplishing the same ends. They would recruit a few friends to act as scouts, then post the scouts in the crowd with special instructions about who the governor did and didn’t care to speak with. If a scout spotted an unwelcome guest homing in on FDR, she would intercede and start a conversation with that person. If another guest was taking too much of the governor’s time, Eleanor would send a scout to find someone FDR did want to speak with and ask: “Wouldn’t you like to have a little talk with the governor?” Over they would come, sending the too-talkative guest on their way.

  * * *

  There was a danger that the broad voting public would imagine him as a lonely man trapped in an office by his lifeless legs. He prevented any such problem by stepping right into voters’ kitchens and parlors through the still-novel medium of radio. FDR knew very well that one of his best tools was his voice, and he used it to splendid effect in an occasional series of informal radio talks about issues pending in Albany. In a warm, casual tone so unlike the speech of most politicians, he talked about complicated problems of government in a way that anybody could understand. The talks by radio would come to be called FDR’s “fireside chats.” No tactic did more to make FDR popular.

  He devised another means of showing himself to the public as a man in motion.

  In decades long past, the state of New York had built an intricate network of canals linking cities and towns from the Hudson River in the east to the St. Lawrence River in the north to the Great Lakes at the state’s western end. The grand old Erie Canal was only the most famous of these waterways. In all there were hundreds of miles of canals, most of them still navigable and still used to move freight and passengers, despite the coming of trains and automobiles.

  On July 6, 1929, at the town of Waterford, where the Erie joins the Hudson River, FDR with Eleanor and a couple of sons and aides boarded a houseboat-barge and set off on a two-week passage by water to the Niagara country. People in tiny towns where no governor had set foot for a century now shook hands with Franklin Roosevelt down at the canal.

  He used the tour to praise the canal system and inspect state facilities along the way—often sending Eleanor to see the innards of prisons, hospitals, and schools—but he was also offering himself for inspection. Just as in the 1928 campaign, people discovered not the “crippled” man they had heard about but a man on the move, passing through their town by the good old method of the canal boat. It was something to see, fun and unusual.

  And it reinforced a point. Republicans upstate were already spreading a rumor that Roosevelt was too weak to run for a second term as governor in 1930. In fact, reported the New York Times soon after the canal tour, “Mr. Roosevelt, except for his lameness, never has been in better general health. He has had no physical difficulty in performing the duties of Governor. This, it was said, was shown by his recent inspection of the barge canal and state institutions, during which he … showed endurance which was not surpassed by any other member of his party.”

  It had come off so well that he made a tour by canal the next summer, too.

  * * *

  There were times when it was simply impossible to divert the attention of strangers away from his disability.

  Early in 1929, a teenager named Philip Hamburger happened to see the new governor give a talk at a small community hall in Manhattan. Eleanor was there with FDR, who sat at a desk as he spoke. There was only one way out of the hall—down a narrow aisle at the side. Many years later, Hamburger, who became a writer, described what he remembered of Roosevelt’s departure from the hall: “The distance from desk to street could not have been more than a hundred feet, but it took the Governor an agonizingly long time to traverse it. His legs were in heavy braces … The audience, as though hypnotized, did not leave. It stood and watched the Roosevelts depart … The Governor was intent upon the task before him: to reach the street and the sanctuary of his limousine … Occasionally she leaned over to whisper something in his ear, and he smiled and put the other foot forward. The slow procession became extremely impressive. Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to sense that we knew we should not stay but that we could not leave. Moving slowly along, she thanked many of us for coming … Finally the Roosevelts reached the street. The audience, still hypnotized, followed them outside. Mrs. Roosevelt and a chauffeur helped the Governor into his car. His put his head back against the cushions with the expression of a man who has accomplished his mission. Mrs. Roosevelt opened a window of the car and waved … An audience of strangers had become friends.”

  * * *

  His record after two years as chief executive of the nation’s biggest state was progressive—probably the most progressive of any among the main candidates for president in 1932. He pushed for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions for laboring people. He championed the causes of pensions for the elderly and more money for education. He helped farmers. He made moves to reform the use of the state’s great water resources. He shook up old habits for choosing a governor’s assistants. He appointed a fair number of Democratic politicos to state jobs, but he also appointed progressive activists, labor leaders, college professors, and social workers. When the stock market crashed and the economy plunged, he argued that state government should mount compassionate efforts to help the swelling crowds of New Yorkers who had been turned out of their jobs through no fault of their own.

  So if Big Jim Farley had exaggerated when he said no one but FDR could possibly be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 1932, he was surely right that FDR was the man for other Democrats to beat.

  But it was still too early to say out loud what Farley and others close to FDR were sensing—that there was some intangible spark in this man, a promise of something great. Only years later did Farley try to put the feeling into words.

  “He was one of the most alive men I had ever met,” Big Jim would write. “He never gave me the impression that he was tired or bored … He was quick, alert, keen …

  “I had an intuition that there was a touch of destiny about the man, that he was intended to play a big role in the affairs of his fellow countrymen.”

  Chapter 16

  WHISPERS AND SHOUTS

  For a while Americans figured the country was going through nothing much worse than the kind of economic slump that often followed boom times. In May 1930, President Hoover declared: “I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover.” There was no need for more federal action, he said, since “the Depression is over.”

  But all that summer, the season for putting up new buildings, construction workers were losing their jobs. Steel mills and car factories cut production. In the fall, banks here and there began to fail. They could give out no more loans, the lifeblood that businesses needed to grow, and no more mortgages for people buying houses. People who had put their savings into those banks simply lost their money. And fears began to rise that the same might soon happen to many more banks.

  The country looked to the White House for help. Hoover made a few cautious moves. He urged business to do better. He blamed Europeans. But he would not stand for the idea of using federal funds to help people in need. He hated speaking in public, and on the radio he sounded like a nervous old crab. The man who had once been a hero, rescuing war refugees and flood victims, now seemed timid, even frightened.

  * * *

  Shortly before FDR’s campaign for reelection as governor began in 1930, all delegates to the last Democratic National Convention received a printed newsletter, unsigned, in their mail. A copy landed on the desk of Jim Mahoney, an aide to FDR, who passed it along with a note to Louis Howe. The note read: “Honestly, I could murder for much less.”

  The newsletter contained an outrageous lie. It said that FDR had been hiding the truth about his paralysis. It was not the result of poliomyelitis, the letter said. It was the result of syphilis, a dreaded bacter
ial disease usually spread by sexual intercourse. In FDR, as in some other people with syphilis, the bacteria had invaded the spinal cord, causing the person to walk with a jerky, spastic gait. But “the most disgusting, vicious and really dangerous thing about this matter,” the piece went on, “is the fact that Governor Roosevelt (with his loathsome and infectious venereal disease) bathes in the same pool with … poor innocent children at the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia, when he himself visits there for months at a time.”

  As FDR’s aides began to talk with Democrats around the country about the likelihood that he would run for president in 1932, they picked up more rumors on the party’s grapevine. None was quite as bad as the syphilis story, but they were bad enough:

  The truth, said the rumor spreaders, was that FDR had suffered from a heart attack.

  Or cancer.

  Or a syphilitic stroke.

  Or his polio had been an act of God to punish him for terrible sins he had committed.

  Then there was the old story, as a newspaper editor put it, that “a physical cripple is inclined to become an emotional and spiritual cripple.”

  It didn’t take much of this kind of thing before FDR and his lieutenants—Howe, Ed Flynn, and Jim Farley—to realize they would have to defend against this new threat known as the “whispering campaign.” They had little doubt it was being fed by powerful Democrats who hoped to block FDR from winning the nomination for president.

  “I find there is a deliberate attempt to create the impression that my health is such as would make it impossible for me to fulfill the duties of President,” FDR wrote a friend in 1931. “To those who know how strenuous have been the three years I have passed as Governor of this State, this is highly humorous, but it is taken with great seriousness in the southern states particularly. I shall appreciate whatever my friends may have to say in their personal correspondence to dispel this perfectly silly piece of propaganda.”

  The Roosevelt team decided not to ignore the rumors or try to hush them up. They would acknowledge them, then assert they simply were not true—with proof. It was not enough to point to his governorship to show he was capable of running a big executive enterprise. They had to give more evidence.

  So, first, they had three prominent doctors give him a thorough medical exam, then publicized the results. The doctors declared “his organs and functions are sound in all respects … The chest is exceptionally well developed, and the spinal column is perfectly normal … and free of disease.” His physical recovery from polio was likely to continue. “We believe that his powers of endurance are such as to allow him to meet all demands of private or public life.”

  Then they arranged for a journalist, Earle Looker, to spend enough time with FDR to write a definitive article for Liberty, a popular weekly magazine. The story was titled: “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to Be President? A Man to Man Answer to a Nation-Wide Challenge.” Looker began by saying what no other writer had said, at least not so bluntly: “It is an amazing possibility that the next President of the United States may be a cripple.” For the article, three more doctors confirmed the earlier declaration—FDR was fit in every way except that “his legs are not much good to him.”

  The story was published in July 1931, just after FDR had sent Jim Farley on a scouting trip through the western states. If Louis Howe was Roosevelt’s backroom adviser, then Farley was the perfect “outside” man. “As an Irish Catholic,” one astute observer said, “he could talk on equal terms with the big-city bosses. Yet he had no Tammany links; he neither drank nor smoked; he was a man of sterling honesty and great charm; and he could also do business with perfect comfort with rural, dry, southern, and other Democratic leaders of the groups that had tended to vote Republican rather than support Al Smith in 1928.” Many of the Democrats he met were enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s chances and promised to vote for him at the nominating convention—but they also wanted reassurance that he was physically up to the job. Louis Howe was sending them all copies of the Liberty story. “I read the Liberty Magazine article today and think it is a corker,” Farley wrote FDR. “I think it is a mighty fine time to have it appear because it answers fully the question that was put to me many times during the past three weeks.”

  * * *

  But it was not enough.

  Moving into the election year of 1932, as FDR amassed more promises of support, other contenders for the Democratic nomination dropped anything from mild hints to outright bombs about his physical condition. All of them had been friends and allies of FDR in the past. But now their own interests congealed in an anyone-but-Roosevelt movement. The Depression had become the worst economic downturn in the nation’s history, and President Hoover’s insensitive and stumbling responses had capsized his popularity.

  The Democratic nomination for president in 1932 now looked like a first-class ticket to the White House, and every Democrat with half a national reputation wanted it.

  Harry F. Byrd, the former governor of Virginia, told friends that Roosevelt was not strong enough for the presidency.

  Senator William McAdoo of California, Al Smith’s rival for the 1924 nomination and still hoping for the prize, said, “I can’t think of Roosevelt as being equal to the demands the White House must make on its occupant in the next four years.”

  Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, and a close ally of Al Smith, said, “He is crippled both mentally and physically.”

  Then came the most painful blow.

  For ten years FDR had backed Al Smith’s rise to national power. FDR had submitted to Smith’s plea to run for governor, and Al had attested to Roosevelt’s physical fitness for the job. When Smith lost, he had declared he was through with politics, clearing the path for FDR’s pursuit of the presidency.

  But now the glorious chance to reverse the verdict of 1928 shimmered before Al’s eyes. If FDR’s campaign collapsed, Smith would be, once again, the most powerful man in the party and the most likely nominee for president.

  So just before the convention, Smith told the Saturday Evening Post that a national campaign “requires a man of great vigor and bodily strength to stand the physical strain of it, to make no mention whatever of the tax he has to put upon his mental qualities to permit him to conduct the campaign intelligently over so long a period.”

  It was a savage act of sabotage. The two men, close allies for so long, would barely speak again.

  In the face of all these attacks, the Roosevelt forces held strong. When the voting began at the Democratic convention in Chicago, it was touch and go for a couple of ballots. Then John Nance Garner, the powerful Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, instructed delegates pledged to vote for him to shift their support to FDR. Suddenly it was over. Garner was rewarded with the nomination for vice president, and FDR boarded an airplane to fly to Chicago to accept the nomination—the first nominee ever to do so in person, and the first to fly to a convention.

  To the shouting delegates in Chicago Stadium he declared: “These are unprecedented and unusual times …

  “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.”

  * * *

  Even the people closest to FDR—Eleanor, the children, Missy LeHand, Louis Howe—seldom saw him angry. He might snap at someone in a moment of irritation, but his steady state was so cheerful that a moment later he would be smiling again.

  There were times, however, when a deep fury would rise. It tended to happen when he perceived some deliberate challenge that called his character and courage into question.

  It had happened once in 1921, just before he came down with polio.

  A U.S. senator named Henry Wilder Keyes, a Republican from New Hamp-shire, had dragged up a dusty old
charge that FDR had mishandled an investigation at the Navy Department, and he laced his charges with insinuations about Roosevelt’s integrity. It especially bothered FDR that Keyes was a Harvard alumnus, since FDR put great stock in the Harvard connection. He let out his feelings in a scathing letter, accusing Keyes of a “despicable action” and calling him the only Harvard man he had ever known “to be personally and willfully dishonorable … My only hope is that you will live long enough to appreciate that you have violated decency and truth, and that you will pray your maker for forgiveness.” He thought better of sending the letter and filed it away, but he said later the incident had left him so shaken that he had been more vulnerable to the poliovirus.

  It happened again in 1925, in the wake of an otherwise forgettable event at Madison Square Garden.

  FDR was leading a fundraising campaign for the enormous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the mother church of the Episcopal diocese of New York and one of the world’s largest houses of worship. So when a mass meeting was scheduled to launch the cathedral’s new fund drive, naturally he was expected to attend. On the night of the meeting, FDR, with help, returned to the speaker’s platform where he had performed so brilliantly a few months earlier at the Democratic National Convention. Once again, using crutches, he walked to the microphone. He introduced the Reverend William Thomas Manning, Episcopal bishop of New York, then returned to his chair and—with help—sat down.

  What happened next caught the gathering by surprise. Bishop Manning said a message of support had been sent by telegram from President Calvin Coolidge, who had acceded to the White House when Warren G. Harding died of a cerebral hemorrhage two years earlier. The president’s telegram had been received by Justice Edward R. Finch of New York.