Down at the podium of the Chicago Stadium John E. Mack was about to deliver a lackluster speech putting Roosevelt’s name in nomination. Already the party had adopted an appalling platform promising a 25 percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced budget, loyalty to the gold standard, laissez-faire economics, and, its saving grace, repeal of Prohibition. The Roosevelt supporters didn’t even have a theme song. Smith had preempted “The Sidewalks of New York.” Since the governor’s home town of Hyde Park didn’t have sidewalks anyhow, Howe had decided to use “Anchors Aweigh” as a tribute to his man’s naval service. While the judge approached the podium, Howe’s secretary burst in on him and said “Anchors Aweigh” wouldn’t do at all; it was being used in a radio commercial for a cigarette company. Instead she suggested a song written the year of the Crash for the MGM film Chasing Rainbows. She skipped up and down the bedroom of suite 1502, humming and snapping her fingers. Wearily agreeing, Howe picked up the phone and said, “Tell them to play ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’” thus giving a generation of Democrats its anthem. The judge finished, the demonstration began, and from the cheap pipe organ came:
Happy days are here again!
The skies above are clear again!
Let’s all sing a song of cheer again—
Happy days—are—here—a-gain!
Although rousing, it wasn’t enough; after three ballots the convention was still deadlocked. Some Roosevelt delegates were wavering. Under the unit rule the switch of a single vote in the Mississippi caucus would mean the loss of the entire state. The Roosevelt floor managers, led by a Long Island politician named Jim Farley, promised Garner the Vice Presidency. William Randolph Hearst was afraid that disintegration of FDR strength would bring in a League of Nations advocate, and on his advice Garner accepted the deal. From Washington, Garner phoned Sam Rayburn, his man on the floor. California switched—and the galleries, packed with Smith men, erupted in rage. Smith’s delegates refused to make the party’s choice unanimous; instead they ran around tearing up Roosevelt posters. Will Rogers said, “Ah! They was Democrats today. They fought, they fit, they split and adjourned in a dandy wave of dissension. That’s the old Democratic spirit.” Others were less kind. Heywood Broun jeered that Roosevelt was the “corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention.” H. L. Mencken wrote in the Baltimore Sun that the Democrats had picked their weakest candidate. The San Francisco Chronicle concurred, and so, during his daily medicine-ball workout with friends next morning, did President Hoover. They nodded; one assured him that the country was still conservative. Another said it was inconceivable that voters would elect a hopeless cripple. Already that whispering campaign had begun.
Roosevelt flew to Chicago in a trimotor Ford, writing his acceptance speech on the two-stop, turbulent, nine-hour flight from Albany. No one had ever accepted a presidential nomination with such alacrity, but this nominee believed that the Depression called for all sorts of unprecedented action; standing before the convention, his leg braces locked in place, he said he hoped the Democratic party would make it its business to break “absurd traditions.” He cried, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.” Some delegates thought the phrase a brilliant combination of Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom. Reporters, however, were discovering that FDR was a great borrower. “The forgotten man” had come from a speech delivered by William Graham Sumner in 1883, and Stuart Chase had just published a book entitled A New Deal. Roosevelt didn’t much care about the genesis of a word, an idea, or a program. His statecraft was summed up in a speech at Oglethorpe University, when he said, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation…. Above all, try something.” He had already begun recruiting college professors to generate suggestions. James Kieran of the New York Times called them “the brains trust”; then everyone else, Roosevelt included, borrowed that and shortened it to “brain trust.”
If one definition of genius is an infinite capacity to make use of everyone and everything, the Democratic nominee certainly qualified. He reminded John Gunther of “a kind of universal joint, or rather a switchboard, a transformer,” through which the energy and intelligence of other people flowed. Within a year he would become obscured by the mists of legend, but as a candidate he was still seen as mortal—a big, broad-shouldered man of fifty whose paralyzed legs were partially offset by his long arms and huge, hairy, freckled hands. His hair was gray and thin, and he had a small paunch, deep blue eyes set close together over permanent brown shadows, and two long wrinkles that formed parenthetical curves around his mouth. Undoubtedly his breeding as a country gentleman, guided by the old-fashioned morality of Groton headmaster Endicott Peabody, contributed immeasurably to his inner strength; he was perhaps the only politician in the country who thought of economics as a moral problem. Rooseveltian confidence was striking—someone said “he must have been psychoanalyzed by God”—and so was his memory. He remembered Italian streets and buildings he hadn’t seen since his youth. Once in wartime a ship sank off Scotland; either it had been torpedoed or it had struck a rock. FDR said it was probably the rock, and then proceeded to reel off the height of the tide at that season on that coast and the extent to which that particular rock would be submerged. One of his favorite performances (and he was always a showman) was to ask a visitor to draw a line in any direction across an outline map of the United States; he would then name, in order, every county the line crossed. He was an apostle of progress; as soon as he saw the Sahara he wanted to irrigate it. Now in a world bereft of progressive action he was already a world figure. In Brussels Demain was investigating his horoscope. Among other things, the astrologers found excessive idealism, zeal for too rapid reformation, and “great good judgment.” After 1941 he would be in danger of accidents.
He was telling the country that “to accomplish anything worthwhile… there must be a compromise between the ideal and the practical.” That wasn’t at all what the ideologues wanted to hear. Roosevelt, Harold Laski sneered, was “a pill to cure an earthquake.” Lippmann called him too soft, too eager to please and be all things to all men. The country yearned for a Messiah, Ernest K. Lindley reported, and Mr. Roosevelt did not “look or sound like a Messiah.” John Dewey felt the argument that Governor Roosevelt was the lesser of two evils was “suicidal.” Organized labor, such as it was, refused to endorse any candidate.
Disenchantment with the two major parties ran high. Will Rogers concluded, “The way most people feel, they would like to vote against all of them if it was possible.” In Kansas, Republican gubernatorial candidate Alfred M. Landon was threatened by a third-party adventurer named Dr. John “Goat Glands” Brinkley; in California, District Attorney Earl Warren of Alameda County, running for reelection, was threatened by a half-dozen crank candidates. In FDR’s own party he had the dubious honor of receiving support from Huey Long, the pasha of Louisiana, who packed a gun and who, in Roosevelt’s private opinion, was one of the two most dangerous men in the country. (The other was General MacArthur.)
Lippmann saw “no issue of fundamental principle” between Roosevelt and Hoover, and defections on the left were particularly heavy. “If I vote at all,” said Lewis Mumford, “it will be for the Communists. It is Communism which desires to save civilization.” Professor Paul H. Douglas of the University of Chicago, later to become a brilliant ornament of the Democratic party, declared then that its destruction would be “one of the best things that could happen in our political life.” John Chamberlain wrote in September that progressivism “must mean either Norman Thomas or William Z. Foster, ineffectual though one or both may be.” Thomas supporters included Stephen Vincent Benét, Reinhold Niebuhr, Stuart Chase, Elmer Davis, Morris Ernst, and the editors of both the New Republic and the Nation. Villard continued his litany of the left; of Roosevelt he wrote: “He has spoken of the ‘forgotten man,’ but nowhere is there a real, passionate, ringing exposition of just what
it is that the forgotten man has been deprived of or what should be done for him. …we can see in him no leader, and no evidence anywhere that he can rise to the needs of this extraordinary hour.”
This was overstated, but when TRB wrote in the New Republic of “the pussyfooting policy of Roosevelt’s campaign,” and Time said the governor “emerged from the campaign fog as a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding” who “lacked crusading convictions,” they were reading the record correctly. The candidate delivered only one really radical speech, to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on September 23. It was not repeated. His own convictions at this time were largely conservative; he believed in the gold standard, a balanced budget, and unregulated business competition. Moreover, he had to hold his party together. For every Huey Long on the left there were ten men like Al Smith, who said, “We should stop talking about the Forgotten Man and about class distinctions” and Garner, who sent word to Roosevelt that if he went too far with “wild-eyed ideas” they would have “the shit kicked out of us.” FDR didn’t go too far. His speeches were laced with ambiguities and contradictions. Many passages seem to reflect a shallow optimism, and one address, delivered in Pittsburgh, was a dreadful blunder. Among the new members of his brain trust was General Hugh S. “Ironpants” Johnson, a friend of Baruch’s who had been Douglas MacArthur’s classmate at West Point and had later shared a tent with George Patton on the Mexican border. As a child he had chanted, “Everybody’s a rink-stink but Hughie Johnson and he’s all right.” That was still his attitude; to him the other brain-trusters were rink-stinks, and during their absence from the campaign train he persuaded the Democratic standard-bearer to embrace the platform plank calling for a 25 percent slash in the federal budget. FDR would hear about that four years later.
But his audiences were less interested in his stand on tariffs and the power business than in taking the measure of the man, and what they saw was a magnificent leader—his leonine head thrown back, his eye flashing, his cigarette holder tilted at the sky, his navy boat cloak falling gracefully from his great shoulders. He was the image of zest, warmth, and dignity; he was always smiling; he always called people “my friends.” If his speeches were inadequate as statements of public policy, politically they were brilliant. Editors read, “The only real capital of the nation is its natural resources and its human beings,” and they groaned. Voters felt the governor’s obvious sincerity and were moved. To them his messages were lucid, specific, and illumined by homely metaphors. He cared about people. They could feel that. And the campaign was as much of an education for him as for them. Heading westward across the plains, he realized for the first time just how desperate the country’s economic situation had become. “I have looked into the faces of thousands of Americans,” he told a friend. “…They have the frightened look of lost children.”
Meanwhile, back at the White House, Herbert Hoover had come alive. Roosevelt’s speeches hadn’t done it. The Literary Digest poll predicting a Roosevelt victory may have helped; so may the gambling odds, which were running seven to one against the President. The real shock, however, came from Maine. Maine still voted in September then, and when the ballots were counted it turned out that the state had elected a Democratic governor and two Democratic Congressmen—the first such slippage from the GOP since the Civil War. Hoover had carried forty states in 1928; he was bewildered. He told his secretary that this meant “we have got to fight to the limit.” Earlier he had said that in four months of campaigning Roosevelt would lose the confidence of business, which in some mysterious way would, he thought, decide the election. Such firms as the Ford Motor Company had in fact notified their employees that “To prevent times from getting worse and to help them get better, President Hoover must be elected.” But apparently workers weren’t listening to their employers. Furthermore, there had been several startling desertions from Republican ranks, notably Senators Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California.
So Hoover put on his high-button shoes and celluloid collar and went to the people. He was lucky to come back alive. He deliberately chose the low road; to a member of his cabinet he confided that there was “hatred” for him in the country, and that the only way to win was to incite “a fear of what Roosevelt will do.” In Des Moines he said of his tariff, “The grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms if that protection is taken away.” They jeered and paraded Hoovercarts bearing signs that read, WE’LL GET THERE REGARDLESS OF HOOVER, AND THIS AIN’T NO BULL. In Indianapolis he told listeners that Roosevelt was peddling “nonsense… misstatements… prattle… untruths… defamation… ignorance… calumnies,” and they hissed. In Cleveland he promised that no “deserving” citizen would starve, and they hooted. In St. Paul, referring to the rout of the bonus marchers, he said, “Thank God we still have a government in Washington that still knows how to deal with a mob,” and the crowd replied with one vast snarl. Detroit was the worst. The city was carrying a quarter-million people on its relief rolls. At the station he was greeted with boos and catcalls. Mounted police, swinging batons, scattered the throng, but all along his limousine route tens of thousands more shouted “Hang Hoover!” and shook their fists. Signs read, DOWN WITH HOOVER, SLAYER OF VETERANS!; BILLIONS FOR BANKERS, BULLETS FOR VETS. Afterward a Secret Serviceman told a reporter, “I’ve been traveling with Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt’s time, and never before have I seen one actually booed, with men running out into the streets to thumb their noses at him. It’s not a pretty sight.” Chief Agent Sterling looked at Hoover and saw a man stricken. The President could hardly talk. By now people were throwing eggs and tomatoes at his train as it moved across the stricken land. He didn’t know what else to do, so he phoned Calvin Coolidge.
Coolidge said his throat was bothering him and, what’s more, “I find it terribly hard to know what to say.” His difficulty was understandable. In Northampton, Massachusetts, his own bank was collapsing. Finally he agreed to speak in Madison Square Garden. Republicans thought the magic of his name would pack the Garden. Instead fewer than a third of the seats were filled, and frantic ushers ran outside begging passersby to come hear the country’s only living ex-President. Inside, the party faithful gave him a two-minute ovation which he throttled by holding out his watch, showing that the cheers had wasted $340 of radio time. “That’s Cal!” someone shouted. But it wasn’t the Cal of old, nor was this the kind of audience he had known. He said, “The Republican party believes in encouraging business in order that the benefits from such business may minister to the welfare of the ordinary run of people.” He waited for applause. There was silence. He began another sentence, “When I was in Washington—” and they roared with laughter. Baffled, he shook his head. No one had ever laughed at a Coolidge speech before. He stumbled through the text and went home declaring himself “burned-out”; in fifteen weeks he would be dead.
Now the party in power was really desperate. The Secretary of Agriculture maligned the New York governor as “a common garden variety of liar”; the Secretary of the Navy predicted, “If Roosevelt is elected, the homes and lives of a hundred million Americans might be in danger.” Hoover cried, “My countrymen! The fundamental issue that will fix the national direction for one hundred years to come is whether we shall go in fidelity to American traditions or whether we shall turn to innovations.” His shoulders sagged, the crow’s-feet about his eyes deepened, the lines around his mouth grew harder. In his final radio plea to the electorate he premonished against “false gods arrayed in the rainbow colors of promises,” and William Allen White noted “how infinitely tired” his voice was and “how hollow and how sad in disillusion” his words had become.
The contrast with Governor Roosevelt could not have been greater. “You may not have universally agreed with me, but you have universally been kind to me,” FDR said to his radio audience; “…Out of this unity that I have seen we may build the strongest stran
d to lift ourselves out of this Depression.” He was magnanimous and sure of himself, and no presidential challenger ever had better reason. Sitting in Democratic headquarters in New York on election night at the Hotel Biltmore, his Phi Beta Kappa key gleaming on his dark blue vest, he listened to reports of the growing avalanche until, at 12:17 A.M., Hoover conceded. The President-elect had carried 42 of the 48 states—all but Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Pennsylvania—and had won 472 electoral votes; the “President-reject,” as Time cruelly called him, had but 59. It was the greatest victory in a two-party presidential race since Lincoln beat McClellan 212 to 21, though there were those who noted that the popular vote for Norman Thomas had jumped from 267,240 to 728,860. Louis Howe broke out a twenty-year-old bottle of sherry. Three babies born that night at Brooklyn’s Beth-El Hospital were named Franklin Delano Mayblum, Franklin Delano Finkelstein, and Franklin Delano Ragin.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt retired to his town house at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street, where his mother embraced him and said elatedly, “This is the greatest moment of my life.” Her son, however, seemed to have lost some of his campaign assurance. Upstairs his twenty-five-year-old son lifted him into bed, leaned over, and kissed him goodnight. Looking up, the President-elect said, “You know, Jimmy, all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight I think I’m afraid of something else.” The young man asked, “Afraid of what, Pa?” and his father replied, “I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job.”
Next morning, propped in bed, he was heartened by the nation’s editorial comment. Even the Chicago Tribune said that his “personality and his ideas pleased the people. They were impressed by his good will and good faith.” Those qualities were there, but they could not be traded upon. He had not won the Presidency without a shrewd eye for hidden motives, and he needed it that morning. Hoover’s congratulatory telegram had arrived; it must be answered. At first he wrote on the back of it that he was prepared “to cooperate with you” in the months ahead. Then he paused and struck that out. In its place he scrawled that he was “ready to further in every way the common purpose to help our country.” In 1932 Presidents were not inaugurated until March 4. A four-month interregnum lay ahead. He had a hunch that Hoover would try to tie him to the discredited policies of the outgoing administration, and he was right.
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