The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  Events proceeded as planned, and when Wilson won, he rewarded Roosevelt with an appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels—a post Roosevelt wanted more than “any other position in public life.” Thirty-one years old, with less than three years of political experience under his belt, Roosevelt was now following in his fifth cousin’s footsteps. Teddy had used the same position as a springboard to the presidency. But even beyond the obvious parallels, Roosevelt was ecstatic, given his long-standing love of the sea and belief that naval power was essential to American supremacy. Roosevelt resigned from his second term as state legislator and, with Eleanor and Howe, moved to Washington, where he would serve the Navy for seven years. While Eleanor directed the family’s social world in the nation’s capital, Howe, acting as Roosevelt’s secretary, began building a political organization for his protégé.

  Roosevelt took his position seriously, working diligently to oversee the administrative affairs of the Navy and especially enjoying inspection tours of the Caribbean. In 1915, following a massive political massacre in Haiti, Wilson sent the U.S. Marines to occupy the island. In the winter of 1917, with great fanfare, Roosevelt and an entourage traveled by destroyer to Port-au-Prince to examine the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, composed of seventy-two ships. There he met Smedley Darlington Butler, the quintessential officer in the Marines-have-landed tradition that had stirred Roosevelt’s armchair adventurousness. Donning a marine uniform, Roosevelt accompanied Butler, the commander of the Haitian gendarmerie, along with fifty American soldiers and 150 Haitian militiamen, on a 200-man horseback expedition through the country. Butler ran the Haitian customs, oversaw the country’s finances, and administered a road-building program that forcibly recruited six thousand Haitians to build twenty-one miles of road in five weeks. It “would not do to ask too many questions as to how we accomplished this work,” Butler later wrote to Roosevelt. Exactly the kind of soldier-of-fortune military man that Roosevelt admired, Butler would intersect Roosevelt’s life in deep and mysterious ways in the coming years. So impressed was Roosevelt with Butler in the Haiti theater that he nominated him for a Medal of Honor.

  In July 1918, Roosevelt traveled by destroyer to the European war zone, where for two months he immersed himself in the realities of war—visiting Great Britain, France, and Italy—and strengthened his stature as a dignitary. He returned to Europe the following year to oversee the postwar naval demobilization. By then his visibility had grown to such an extent that the Democrats—impressed with his name and energetic campaign style—nominated him for vice president on the ticket with Ohio governor James M. Cox. Though the ticket was doomed, Roosevelt was an impressive candidate, crisscrossing the country to give more than a thousand speeches. Still, Warren G. Harding, who took 61 percent of the vote, trounced them. The 1920 Republican landslide was seen as a rejection of the progressivism of the Wilson years and a severe curtailment of the thirty-eight-year-old Roosevelt’s ambitions.

  Presciently, Roosevelt sensed that the Republicans would fail miserably at governing, perhaps even usher in a national economic collapse. He felt that the Democrats would remain out of office until that happened, and he determined to wait in the wings while building a political organization and strengthening his résumé. Returned to private life and the prosaic law practice where he had remained a silent partner, he threw himself into the New York speaking circuit and myriad civic doings. He spent much of his first year out of public life fighting off partisan attempts to tarnish him with wartime Navy Department scandals. Beleaguered by congressional inquiries, he leaped at the opportunity to board a yacht for Campobello in the hot summer of 1921 to join Eleanor and the children. Arriving several days later with the hopes of enjoying a prolonged vacation, he engaged in the characteristically vigorous activities that he enjoyed with his family, which now included five children: Anna, James, Elliott, a second Franklin Delano Jr., and John.

  On August 10, he steered the children through an action-packed day of swimming, running, and even fighting a brush fire on the other side of the island. That evening, Roosevelt was taken ill with what seemed to be a cold accompanied by a feverish chill. Suddenly overcome with exhaustion and loss of appetite—“I’d never felt quite that way before,” he later recalled—Roosevelt was alarmed when first his left and then his right leg went numb. Two weeks later, a specialist diagnosed acute anterior poliomyelitis—or infantile paralysis—and soon the muscles in his hips and legs were fully atrophied. He was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to bed, and his political career seemed at an end. Indeed it might have been if not for the fierce determination and ambition of the triumvirate—Roosevelt, Eleanor, and Howe. While his mother predictably advocated that he resign himself to a life of genteel invalidism at the family’s Hyde Park estate, his wife and mentor were united in their passion to force his rehabilitation. Though they had never been close, Eleanor and Howe now forged an alliance, the sole purpose of which was to steer Roosevelt’s course to the White House. Their patient was a man of such resolve and perseverance that failure was not an option. Roosevelt felt tested by God, as if his path and its obstacles were preordained. Resolved to meet and conquer the challenge, he set out to “rebuild his broken body,” as historian David M. Kennedy put it, in order to resume his political journey.

  Though bedridden, Roosevelt maintained a demanding schedule of correspondence, study, and discussion, as well as a tenacious commitment to his physical therapy. By 1922, with his legs fortified with iron braces, he could walk on crutches. Upon discovering the therapeutic benefits of swimming and water exercises—especially in hot mineral springs—his upper-body strength soon compensated for his withering legs. Meanwhile, the ever-vigilant Howe had been carefully cultivating Roosevelt’s public image and had a tacit agreement with the press to never photograph Roosevelt as a cripple. Though the polio had left him dependent on a cane, crutches, or a wheelchair, by 1924 he had made a political comeback and was conspicuously advising New York governor Alfred E. Smith, whom he would nominate for president at the Democratic National Convention. Perspiring and struggling, Roosevelt made his way on crutches to the podium at Madison Square Garden in New York City, where twenty thousand delegates and observers rose to applaud his miraculous victory over the debilitating disease. “No matter whether Governor Smith wins or loses,” the Evening World said, “Franklin D. Roosevelt stands out as the real hero.” Indeed, Smith lost the nomination, but Roosevelt won the hearts of the Democrats, foreshadowing his future.

  Lore has it that Roosevelt never intended to run for president in 1932—as he ultimately would—but rather to run for governor of New York that year and then president in 1936. Such a game plan, scrupulously devised by him and the shrewd and ever-present Howe, provided time for Roosevelt to fully convalesce while also acquiring governing experience. But preemptive circumstances intervened, and the stars lined up to illuminate his ascension.

  It began in 1928, when his political ally, four-term New York governor Smith, decided to run again for president and persuaded Roosevelt to seek the governorship he was vacating. What began as a manipulative power play by Smith turned into a masterful coup by Roosevelt. Smith begged a reticent Roosevelt to run for governor, promising that he would essentially be a puppet for Smith forces and could therefore spend his time recuperating his health. Smith implored Roosevelt to run as a personal favor—implying that if he refused, he would incur the wrath not only of Smith’s powerful New York machine but also of the newly elected Smith presidential administration. “The circumstances of Smith’s importuning,” as Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black put it, “… quickened Roosevelt’s ever-active intuition that destiny might, at last, be knocking.” Roosevelt finally agreed to run. Addressing the issue of Roosevelt’s paralysis head-on, Smith famously noted that the candidate was running for governor, not “acrobat.” But Smith had greatly underestimated the grit and intelligence of his hand-chosen successor, who won the gubernatorial campaign while Smith suffered a humili
ating defeat to Herbert Hoover. “As 1928 drew to an end, Smith must have had an uneasy feeling that he had created a political Frankenstein’s monster,” wrote Black. “In barely six weeks, Al Smith had been eclipsed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had wanted to remain a while longer in the shadows. But he was now the unofficial leader of the opposition … the president in waiting.”

  To add insult to injury, Governor Roosevelt resisted all attempts by Smith to pull the strings in his administration, and Smith began to nurture what the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken described as a “fierce hatred of Roosevelt, the cuckoo who had seized his nest.” The man Smith had misjudged as a malleable invalid proved to have the stamina of a superhero. Roosevelt’s official day began at eight A.M. and often continued late into the night, as he rigorously fulfilled the duties of his office. Despite a hostile Republican legislature, he was able to extend a liberal program that provided Depression-era relief, including unemployment insurance, public works projects, and an old-age pension plan. Now his political views began to take shape in earnest, and as he set his sights on a national political career, he began to formulate possible solutions to America’s burgeoning problems, focusing especially on government’s obligation to its citizenry.

  With Roosevelt’s winning the gubernatorial campaign and his landslide reelection two years later (the terms were not yet four years), the momentum was clearly on his side. The 1932 presidential race was suddenly within reach, prompting Roosevelt and Howe to accelerate their schedule.

  Chapter Three

  A New Deal for the American People

  The country had become a no-man’s land of poverty and unemployment, and the actions of the Hoover administration’s economic stimulus agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), were not working. Intended to finance up to $1.5 billion in self-liquidating public works projects and to advance $300 million to the states for unemployment relief, the RFC was woefully inept, if not corrupt, and had been dubbed “a breadline for big business.” The wealthy began to genuinely fear the wrath of the hungry masses, and the economic catastrophe was becoming a national security threat. Chicago mayor Anton Cermak voiced what many public officials felt, warning Congress that if the government didn’t send food to his city, it would soon need to send troops. “There were miles of highways across the country where people were walking, going nowhere, just walking to get away from what lay behind,” said a journalist who covered the Depression for the popular weekly magazine Liberty. “Sometimes they had a few possessions on carts, like war refugees, and they called the carts Hoover-wagons. On the edge of every town was the collection of tarpaper and orange-crate shacks called Hooverville[s] … There were farmers with shotguns resisting foreclosure … Men shuffled along a few inches at a time to get a bowl of gray gruel and a cup of coffee.”

  President Hoover was increasingly aloof and ineffectual and seemed completely out of touch with the reality of the nation at large. His hollowness was epitomized by his bizarre request to renowned author Christopher Morley. “What this country needs is a great poem,” he told Morley after summoning him to the White House. “Something to lift people out of fear and selfishness. Every once in a while someone catches words out of the air and gives a nation an inspiration … I’d like to see something simple enough for a child to spout in school on Fridays.” Incredulous, Morley reported the exchange to the national press, which saw it as confirmation that Hoover was deluded about the depth and breadth of the crisis. In yet another banal effort, Hoover asked the singer Rudy Vallee to write an upbeat song. Vallee’s effort— “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”—had the opposite effect and would become the sad anthem of the Depression.

  Called a “wild-eyed Utopian capitalist” by historian Richard Hofstadter, Hoover had championed a consolidated, free-enterprise, monopolistic economy unfettered by government restraint. He had fully supported the merging of banks, railroads, manufacturers, and retailers into massive unregulated combines, and saw the resulting concentration of wealth as an embodiment of the American dream. But most of America was not sharing in this dream, instead traumatized—emotionally and materially—by the economy’s continuing downward spiral and the ineffectiveness of Hoover’s recovery initiatives. It was all the more traumatic because the decade leading up to the Depression was one of rollicking abundance, optimism, and prosperity. “During the 1920s business and political leaders spoke of the New Era,” wrote David A. Shannon, a historian of the Great Depression. “The map to the New Eldorado had been found, they said with smug satisfaction. An ever-expanding economy, full employment, and the elimination of poverty were permanent features … Everyone could be rich. One had only to save his money and invest it in stocks of the industrial corporations that were transforming American society.” But despite Hoover’s reassuring public statements, the devastating reality could be seen in nearly all walks of life.

  The 1929 stock market crash soon gave way to collective pessimism, followed by panic that the entire economic system would collapse. Within a few months of the crash, unemployment skyrocketed. Banks failed in record numbers. Farm prices hit rock bottom, and layoffs stymied manufacturing. City coffers were depleted, stalling relief efforts. It was a vicious cycle in which measures that should have brought about recovery had the opposite effect, resulting in what one witness told a congressional committee was “overproduction and underconsumption at the same time and in the same country.” The most discouraging and depressing element of the situation was its seeming endlessness. Previous downturns in America had always reversed course, and the economy returned to normal. But by 1932, the nation had suffered intensely for a long three years, and there was no end in sight. Americans had become “a demoralized people,” as Walter Lippmann wrote at the time, resulting in individual isolation, hopelessness, and deep distrust of government. The term “altruistic suicide” was coined, referring to the thousands of proud men throughout the land who killed themselves out of guilt and shame at their inability to provide for their families and who were determined not to become a burden to their communities.

  President Hoover dug in his heels, resisting the pervasive appeals for the federal government to provide relief to a famished nation and reassure the country’s business leaders that the state of the nation was fine. Known as the “Great Humanitarian,” Hoover—who had coordinated aid to nine million starving Belgian war victims in 1914—had an entrenched stubbornness regarding his own countrymen, which stands as one of history’s remarkable ironies. Ideologically opposed to what was called the “dole,” Hoover thought government assistance to individuals would become addictive and undermine their work ethic. As unemployment swelled to nearly 25 percent, that attitude seemed not only uninformed and indifferent but also morally untenable.

  Talk of political and social revolution became the norm, and many civic leaders anticipated armed rebellion. “Surely, thought thousands of people, the dispossessed and the hungry will revolt against the government and the economic system that had brought them to their desperate situation,” Shannon wrote. “But no revolution came. At least, there was no revolution such as many anticipated, with rioting, blood in the gutters, and violent overthrow of government. Instead, a majority of the electorate switched its allegiance from the party of Herbert Hoover to the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

  An “anyone but Hoover” attitude swept the country, and the Democrats, who had retreated after Hoover defeated his Democratic opponent in the 1928 landslide, were now reenergized.

  An “amiable boy scout” was how Lippmann, the most prominent journalist of the day, described Roosevelt. In words that would come back to haunt him for the rest of his life, the powerful syndicated columnist Lippmann dismissed the then-governor of New York as a lightweight dilettante. In Lippmann’s view, Roosevelt was charming and affable, but not substantive enough to lead the nation. Roosevelt was “a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions … a pleasant man who, without
any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President,” according to Lippmann.

  Lippmann defended this assessment to his “dying day,” contending that in 1932, Roosevelt was in fact a political chameleon and an opportunist, devoid of a track record and guided by vague patrician populist notions. Lippmann was not the only journalist to so vastly underestimate the sheer will and tenacity of Roosevelt, who, after roundly—and disingenuously—denying his interest in the presidency, had suddenly announced his candidacy. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst lambasted Roosevelt as a dangerous Wilsonian internationalist. Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the Nation, said that Roosevelt would lose the nomination if it were decided “on the grounds of great intellectual capacity, or proved boldness in grasping issues and problems, or courage and originality in finding solutions.” The Washington correspondent for the New York Times, Arthur Krock, aligned himself with the stop-Roosevelt camp, and journalist Elmer Davis described Roosevelt as “a man who thinks that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a corkscrew.” Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Mrs. Henry Luce) vowed that if Roosevelt were nominated, she would found a women’s political party. “That they all lived to eat their words made them no less sure of their judgment at the time,” wrote Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel.

  But it was no fluke that in the summer of 1932 Roosevelt was the front-running Democratic presidential candidate. His rise was so stark and unexpected, his maneuvering so stealthy and deft, his strategy so brilliant and cunning, that he appeared suddenly and fully formed on the national stage as if by magic. In fact it was not smoke and mirrors, but the carefully planned machinations of a deeply ambitious and determined man—and his crony, Louis Howe. How he had usurped his political mentor, Al Smith, and leapfrogged into the limelight impressed even the most skillful strategists. His famous name, charisma, affability, and spectacular recovery from polio combined to create a viable candidate. Still, while well known in New York and Washington, D.C., he had little name recognition throughout the rest of the country. When he flew to Chicago on July 2, 1932, to accept his nomination from the Democratic National Convention, he was a virtual unknown to the delegates from the Western states. He was the first presidential contender in American history to appear in person before a nominating convention, setting the precedent for all future conventions.