The Allies

by Winston Groom

  By early 1922 Roosevelt was moving around on the crutches. It was painful, but he endured it, spending hours trying to exercise and strengthen his withered muscles. These efforts were to no avail. To his doctors he said little about the pain, though he told one that a corset he was forced to wear “almost cut me in two.” In time he learned to stand, for nearly an hour at a time, and to get up stairs by hauling himself backward, painfully grappling hand over hand along the rail. By 1923 he was well enough to go to Florida for a fishing vacation aboard a chartered houseboat, where he strapped himself into the fighting chair because his flaccid legs alone could not give him enough purchase. He caught fish weighing up to forty pounds.16

  Subsequently, Roosevelt acquired his own houseboat jointly with a friend. He spent the next three winters aboard it, fishing and swimming in the warm salty Florida waters that he believed were therapeutic for his legs, and enjoying luncheons, cocktails, and dinners with friends and acquaintances. The talk usually began with fishing but soon led to politics. Eleanor was seldom along on these trips, as the houseboat didn’t provide the level of privacy she required.

  Then Roosevelt discovered Warm Springs, Georgia, a run-down spa on Pine Mountain about an hour south of Atlanta, where the water that flowed from the limestone was extremely buoyant and a constant 88 degrees Fahrenheit. After several weeks, Roosevelt said he could feel a tingling in his toes and was soon able to walk around in the water without braces. It was a transformational experience, and Roosevelt ultimately purchased the entire property, which included an old hotel and cottages. Using loans and much of his own fortune, he began renovations and expansions in an effort to turn Warm Springs into a modern complex for the treatment of polio victims.

  In 1927, Roosevelt announced the formation of the Warm Springs Foundation, in which he became “the doctor and physio-therapist, all rolled in one.” Most of the polio victims were children, who arrived from all points of the country. The reputed success of the Warm Springs treatment led droves of journalists to report one of America’s great human interest stories. For Roosevelt, Warm Springs was a terrific restorative tonic both physically and mentally. But still he had his eye on politics.17

  * * *

  Even though he never tried to keep his affliction a secret, Roosevelt keenly attempted to keep the extent of his paralysis from the public eye. It was his notion that if people knew how crippled he actually was, they might get the impression he was enfeebled, or feel sorry for him. When photographers and newsreel cameramen wanted pictures, Roosevelt insisted on being posed while he was standing with the aid of a walking cane, or sometimes on crutches, or in the pool of the springs where he was “as graceful as a seal.” But never in his wheelchair, or being carried, as he sometimes was, from place to place, or being helped in and out of automobiles.

  Photographers and reporters in those days were far more accommodating than today, and the pictures and stories were nearly all to Roosevelt’s liking. He also purchased a convertible car to drive around the property, equipped with special hand controls, which was on-limits for photos with Roosevelt at the wheel. “He had perfected so effective an illusion that most Americans did not recognize until after his death that he was a paraplegic,” wrote biographer Freidel.

  Seven years after being struck by polio, Roosevelt had also become the voice of foreign affairs for the Democratic Party. Whether at Warm Springs or Hyde Park, he wrote frequently for Foreign Affairs and other scholarly magazines, mainly criticizing Republican presidential incumbents. One of his peeves had become the maintenance and expansion of a large navy, which he had once promoted as assistant secretary but now claimed was of no real use except against an expansionist Japan—and, like Winston Churchill, Roosevelt maintained that Japan was at present a sincere and enduring ally of the United States and the other democracies.

  In 1928, broadcasting for the first time over national radio, Roosevelt gave the Democratic presidential nominating speech for his friend Governor Al Smith of New York. It was an elegant speech praised by the New York Times as “the address of a fair and cultivated man.” But Smith, a Catholic, never stood a chance against Herbert Hoover and the exuberant Republican prosperity he claimed for the 1920s.18

  Smith then turned his attention to persuading Roosevelt to run for governor of New York—but astonishingly Roosevelt refused. He made excuses that he needed more time to strengthen his legs, and also that his financial situation was now unstable because of loans made to the Warm Springs Foundation. Both were true. But the reason Roosevelt demurred was one of the most prescient, profound, and pragmatic political assessments in American history.

  After the Democrats lost the election of 1920 when he was on the ticket as vice president, Roosevelt had remarked at the time that he didn’t believe a Democrat could win again “until the Republicans had led us into a serious period of depression and unemployment.” He pointed out that after every war there comes a spirit of “materialism and conservatism,” and that the people would not vote out a Republican administration so long as “the wages are good and markets are booming.” In other words, even if becoming governor of New York was to be his springboard to the presidency, now was not the time, Roosevelt felt.

  It didn’t matter. The Democratic state convention of 1928 nominated him anyway, by acclimation. He could hardly turn it down.

  Republican newspapers immediately began to play up Roosevelt’s infirmity, but he countered this by touring the state in his chauffeured convertible, rising to give speeches from the backseat with his winning smile and sunny disposition. For his part, Al Smith chimed in, “A governor does not have to be an acrobat.”19 Given the prevailing political winds, Roosevelt was not given much chance of winning. But on election night it turned out he’d emerged victorious by a slim 25,000 votes out of 4.2 million cast.

  With a Republican legislature there was little Roosevelt could do to move progressive legislation. But one thing he accomplished in his first year as governor was to prove he was his “own man.” Smith, having lost the presidential election and considering that he was responsible for putting Roosevelt in the governor’s mansion, tried to dictate policy in the office by fiat. Roosevelt would have none of it. He fired several of Smith’s closest aides and proceeded to run things his own way.

  Roosevelt proved to be a talented administrator. But nothing could have prepared him for the calamity that broke toward the end of his first year in office. On October 24 the stock markets, which had been fired up for months, began an ominous decline. The following week—October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday—the markets collapsed with a stupendous sell-off, marking the start of the Great Depression.

  Roosevelt was slow to grasp the ramifications of what was happening, let alone what was going to happen. He knew that prices were falling, factories were laying off workers, banks were failing, the stock market was continuing to shrivel, farmers were going broke, and hungry people were begging in the streets. But into the end of 1930 he favored pay-as-you-go relief programs despite the fact that there was no pay to go with.

  As the Depression deepened and the suffering became more widespread, figures emerged showing that some 10 percent of New York families were on the verge of starvation. Roosevelt persuaded the legislature to enact the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, installing as its director the brilliant and immensely able Harry L. Hopkins. Hopkins persuaded the legislature to go into the red with loans in order to provide an average of $23 a month per impoverished family ($326 in today’s purchasing power): enough to stave off catastrophe. Roosevelt’s views had now swung a hundred and eighty degrees from his opinion that relief should be a matter of private charity to the conviction that in the present circumstance only “massive federal intervention” could save the country.20

  In the months leading up to the presidential election of 1932, Roosevelt concentrated on educating himself on the problems that were facing the United States—namely the Great Depre
ssion, which had only worsened. In Washington, Hoover insisted that recovery was just around the corner. But millions remained unemployed, prices remained deflated, rents went unpaid, factories and retail stores stayed closed.

  Roosevelt began assembling around him what would later be called his “brain trust.” These were talented men with knowledge of economics, many of them with academic backgrounds: Adolf A. Berle of Columbia Law School, Rex Tugwell of the Wharton School, as well as Harry Hopkins and others. Roosevelt would pick their minds for the new ideas he was sure were needed to ease the pain of the Depression and ultimately lift the country out of it.

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT UNDERSTOOD THAT THE timing was perfect to run for president. The irony was that he had nearly refused the governorship a year before. The depression he had sought to sweep the Republicans out of power had come, but faster and with a fury he never could have wanted or predicted. By the early 1930s the country was in despair and there was no end in sight.

  Before he could run, however, Roosevelt had to obtain the nomination of his party, and that was no sure bet. For one thing Al Smith, who had felt betrayed by Roosevelt for cutting him off in Albany, was almost surely going to try again for the White House. For another, some publications were questioning Roosevelt’s fitness for the presidency because of his ongoing health problems; others were critical of him because as governor he had never dealt with the ongoing corruption of New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine. Roosevelt was doing all he could to play down health issues, and Tammany was a sore subject, owing to the fact that he had needed (and received) its votes in the past gubernatorial election. Nevertheless, to head off this criticism, he signed a bill authorizing the legislature to conduct an investigation. What they found was atrocious.

  Graft, payoffs, and just plain stealing were so rife they included even the chief law enforcement officer of New York, as well as the immensely popular mayor Jimmy Walker, who allegedly had stolen nearly a million dollars. Faced with criminal charges, Walker resigned and fled to Paris with his Ziegfeld Follies girlfriend, where he lay low until the danger of prosecution had passed.

  The Democrats’ rulebook in those days put up an immense hurdle for anyone hoping to run for president; fully two-thirds of the delegates had to agree on a single candidate. This forced the prospective nominees to embark on ferocious delegate-gathering campaigns in which the odds seemed to change daily, if not hourly. Roosevelt’s people worked feverishly to keep delegates pledged to him from wavering, while Smith and other potential candidates labored just as tirelessly to snatch them away.

  With Roosevelt chain-smoking on the telephone in the Albany state-house, a raucous Democratic Convention in the heat of Chicago’s summer nominated him by a hairsbreadth on the fourth ballot during the second day of voting. The next morning, despite the fact that he distrusted flying, Roosevelt boarded an airplane for Chicago and rode to the convention hall in an open convertible, waving to the throngs who lined the streets and cheered as he passed by. To deafening applause, Roosevelt took the podium to state his program for a different America: “government economy, Prohibition repeal, regulation of securities sales, self-sustaining public works, reforestation, a reduced tariff, a voluntary crop control program, refinancing of home and farm mortgages, and federal relief.” This was the basis of Roosevelt’s New Deal.21

  All that the hapless Hoover and the Republicans could promise was more of the same, which was intolerable. In his campaign, Roosevelt did something that few presidential candidates did at that point: he courted the vote of the “forgotten man,” meaning the working (or, in this case, nonworking) man. For the first seventy years of the republic, voting was restricted to property holders or taxpayers; as a result, most candidates aimed their speeches at the affluent classes. Women had been given the vote only a decade earlier, and no one was sure of the psychology necessary to win them over. Hoover campaigned on the inane slogan “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”

  Roosevelt campaigned on his New Deal, a shotgun of possibilities aimed at defeating the Great Depression. But he also talked about the rights of men, of men’s economic rights: “the right to make a comfortable living.” These were not privileges guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but Roosevelt made it sound that way. For his part, Hoover retaliated by calling Roosevelt’s proposals radical and collectivist—all but accusing him of being a Socialist, if not a Stalin-style Red. The Democratic philosophy was “the fumes of the witch’s cauldron which boiled in Russia,” Hoover charged. But in the end the Republican’s efforts came to naught.22

  Just as Roosevelt had predicted a decade earlier, it took a depression to sweep the Republicans from the White House. When the returns came in, Roosevelt had piled up 23 million votes to Hoover’s 16 million, carrying forty-two states and winning 472 electoral votes.

  Roosevelt had been listening to the returns in New York’s Biltmore Hotel. When by 11 p.m. it was clear that he’d won, Roosevelt cited his campaign manager Jim Farley and his longtime adviser Louis Howe as “the two people in the United States, who more than anybody else, are responsible for the great victory.” Howe had opened a bottle of sherry he’d put away twenty years earlier and toasted Roosevelt: “To the president of the United States!” About 2 a.m., when Roosevelt finally got back to his mother’s house on East Sixty-fifth Street, she greeted him at the door, crying, “This is the greatest night of my life!”23

  All over America people danced and paraded in the streets, singing the Democrats’ campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT SPENT THE NEARLY THREE months before his inauguration in a seemingly endless round of meetings, trying to decide what his administration would look like. The next big question was how it would deal with the Great Depression that was gripping the nation ever more tightly every day.

  By the time of the election Americans, to their horror, had witnessed more than three thousand bank failures. Depositors, both wealthy and working class, were lining up outside banks each morning in hopes of withdrawing their savings before the institutions closed their doors. This ongoing run on banks of course resulted in more bank failures, until the entire financial system was in peril.

  Soup kitchens sprang up in most cities to feed those with no money to buy groceries. Many of them were living in what had been branded “Hoovervilles”: rough tar paper shanties on the outskirts, built by rent eviction victims. There were ever increasing protest marches, large and small, and violence often broke out in farming communities where prices had fallen well below wholesale (especially when bank representatives arrived to seize a mortgaged property). Numerous bank agents were mobbed, tarred and feathered, and beaten—and at least one was found murdered in Iowa. There was talk of lynch mobs.

  The largest protest was the so-called Bonus March, which had occurred the previous summer. Nearly twenty thousand World War I veterans and at least as many others marched to Washington demanding early payment of a service bonus that Congress had voted them. The crowd, including a cadre of agitators, set up a Hooverville on the edge of the city and conducted ever more violent protests until they were ejected by the U.S. Army.

  Edward O’Neal, president of the Farm Bureau, testified to Congress that if conditions did not change there would be revolution in the countryside within a year. John Stimson, head of the Farmers Union, echoed that prediction when he told the Senate Agricultural Committee that “the biggest and finest crop of little revolutions I ever saw is ripe all over this country right now.” Meantime, Communist agitators toiled diligently at their nefarious occupation.24

  Given what had happened in Russia a decade earlier, Hoover was alarmed enough that he’d considered declaring a national emergency. But after meeting with advisers, he sought help from Roosevelt, whose statements on “sound money” (meaning no deliberate inflation), Hoover felt, might calm the nation. But Roosevelt demurred, claiming he did not w
ish to become involved in governing until he officially became president. In fact, sound money was about the last thing on Roosevelt’s mind; he instead consulted his own advisers for solutions to the predicament.

  One of these, the renowned economist Rex Tugwell, told reporters (without first clearing it with the boss) that he was for sound money and balancing the budget, albeit “through a drastic increase in income and inheritance taxes.” He also suggested borrowing, which would increase the national debt, hovering then at a reasonable $22 billion. (By contrast, today’s debt is a staggering $20 trillion.) “There is just one thing to do,” Tugwell said in a socialistic frame of mind. “Take incomes from where they are and place them where we need them.”25

  This interview, which drew nationwide attention, nearly panicked the wealthy and upper middle classes, which already believed taxes were too high. It also caused Roosevelt to become peeved at Tugwell for going public with such a radical plan. Suddenly disinvited to what was now being dubbed the “Little White House” at Warm Springs, Tugwell rested indignantly on his moral principles, convinced that at least he’d been honest about it.

  There seemed no end to ideas about how to dig out of the Depression. Some, including publisher William Randolph Hearst, promoted a national sales tax to raise money for public works projects while keeping the budget balanced. The British economist John Maynard Keynes stuck his nose in it during a trip to the United States. He agreed with Tugwell that massive government spending was the way to normalcy but, unlike Tugwell, he didn’t care about a balanced budget. Instead of taxing and spending, Keynes promoted taxing and borrowing and spending. This notion horrified the financial world, but most people had stopped paying attention to those types after the crash of ’29.