by FDR
“I accept this nomination with absolute independence,” FDR told the Democratic caucus in Poughkeepsie on October 6. “I am pledged to no man; I am influenced by no special interests.… In the coming campaign, I need not tell you that I do not intend to stand still. We are going to have a very strenuous month [and] we have little to fear from the result on November eighth.”48
Roosevelt opened the campaign with a rally on Bank Square in the center of Fishkill Landing, the home of Senator Schlosser, the idea being to cause as much consternation as possible. The Democratic organization could be counted upon to deliver the votes in Poughkeepsie and the other towns in the district, so Roosevelt carried his fight to the countryside. Election day was only a month away, and to cover the three counties he rented a fire-engine red, open-top Maxwell touring car. To drive the car, which had two cylinders and no windshield, FDR engaged Harry Hawkey, an itinerant Poughkeepsie piano tuner with an encyclopedic knowledge of backcountry roads gleaned from years of calling on customers. The cost for car and driver was $20 a day, a fee few legislative candidates could afford.
The idea of campaigning by automobile was risky. Cars were still luxury items in rural New York, and to use one might remind voters unnecessarily of Franklin’s silk-stocking pedigree. Far more serious was the possibility of an accident. Farmers didn’t like automobiles because they frightened their horses. In fact, New York law gave the right-of-way to horse-drawn vehicles. “When we met a horse or a team—and that was about every half mile or so,” said FDR, “we had to stop, not only the car but the engine as well.”49 But the experiment proved a whopping success. Wheezing along at the dazzling speed of twenty miles an hour, Roosevelt crisscrossed the district as no candidate had done before. The flag-draped little car soon caught people’s attention.* Even the mandatory horse stops worked to FDR’s advantage. Farmers were duly impressed with the candidate’s deference, and Franklin used the halts to chat up the teamsters and anyone else in the vicinity.
For companionship, and to learn the tricks of the campaign trail, Franklin invited Richard E. Connell, the editor of the Poughkeepsie News-Press and perennial Democratic nominee for Congress, to accompany him. Connell was a gifted stump speaker in the florid style of William Jennings Bryan and began each of his orations by referring to his audience as “My Friends”—a phrase Roosevelt quickly adopted as his own. It was also Connell who advised FDR to discard the pince-nez he had worn since Groton. Made him look snooty, said Connell.
For four exhausting weeks, Franklin, Connell, and Hawkey spent day after day on the dusty back roads of Dutchess, Putnam, and Columbia counties, giving the same speeches as often as ten times a day. They spoke from the porches of general stores, atop hay wagons, in dairy barns, at village crossroads, sometimes standing on the backseat of the old Maxwell itself—any place where a group of farmers could be brought together. “I think I worked harder with Franklin than I ever have in my life,” said Hawkey afterward.50
FDR was having the time of his life. Nothing seemed to lessen his enthusiasm for jumping into a crowd, pumping hands, and making friends. He was “a top-notch salesman,” a Hyde Park housepainter, Tom Leonard, remembered. “He wouldn’t immediately enter into the topic of politics when he met a group. He would approach them as a friend and would lead up to that … with that smile of his.”51
No roadside gathering was too small for Franklin. He startled a gang of Italian railroad workers repairing track near Brewster by leaping from his car into their midst, chattering away in what they slowly realized was his own version of Italian—a cross between textbook French and the Latin he had learned at Groton.52
Occasionally Roosevelt’s enthusiasm got the best of him. Campaigning in the Harlem Valley on the eastern edge of the district late one afternoon, he stopped in front of a small-town saloon, rushed inside, and invited everyone to have a drink. “What town is this?” he asked the bartender. “Sharon, Connecticut,” said the man pouring drinks. FDR paid up, passed out campaign buttons, and told the story on himself for years.53
As the campaign wore on, Judge Mack recognized that FDR was a natural. His speech making was still awkward, but he had an uncanny ability to persuade his audience. Women’s suffrage did not come to New York until 1917, but an increasing number of ladies began to attend Franklin’s rallies, especially those in the evening. “They came to see as well as hear the handsomest candidate that ever asked for votes in their district,” said Mack. “Franklin was so good looking he might have stepped out of a magazine cover.”54
Roosevelt was his own campaign manager. He ordered up 2,500 campaign buttons, designed 500 posters for storefront windows throughout the district, and personally wrote checks to pay for advertisements he placed in each of the twenty-four county newspapers, ranging from the Amenia Times to the Wappinger Chronicle. His platform was entirely personal and avoided substantive issues that might trigger opposition. “I want to represent you, the people of these counties, and no one else,” he told an October rally in Hudson. “I am pledged to no man, to no special interest, to no boss. I want to stay on the job representing you twelve months of the year.”55 Later, he would write with disarming candor, “During the campaign … I made no promises in regard to particular legislation.”56 Instead, he identified himself with good government and blasted away at the “rotten corruption of the New York legislature and the extravagant mismanagement of the State administration.”57
Nineteen-ten proved to be a banner year for the Democrats. Riding a wave of protest against the complacency of the Taft administration in Washington, the party picked up ten seats in the United States Senate and more than half the governorships (including Princeton president Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey) and won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1892. The GOP debacle was greatest in New York, where the party lost the governorship, both houses of the legislature, and two thirds of the seats in Congress.
FDR was a direct beneficiary of the Democratic landslide, which, in New York at least, was partially attributable to Cousin Theodore’s reentry into political life. In a preview of the 1912 presidential election, TR took up the cudgels for reform, lambasted the party’s old guard, and split the GOP down the middle. The issues were tailor-made for TR. Governor Charles Evans Hughes had been locked in a bitter struggle with Republican regulars and old-line Democrats over electoral reform. Hughes sought to introduce direct primaries for party nominations to state office—an innovation that threatened the power of both the GOP bosses in Albany and the Tammany leadership in New York City. But Hughes was elevated to the Supreme Court before the battle was won. When the bosses combined to defeat the measure, Teddy jumped into the fight. At the Republican state convention in Saratoga on September 27, TR wrested control of the party apparatus from the old guard, forced the nomination of his friend Henry L. Stimson for governor, and dictated a reformist platform. Party regulars responded by sitting on their hands during the election.
Franklin capitalized on the Republican split. He lashed out at political bosses in both parties, fighting alongside his illustrious cousin against graft, privilege, and corruption. Asked at a farm rally whether he supported Governor Hughes’s policies, FDR replied, “You bet I do. I think he is one of the best governors the State has ever had.”58 Since his opponent, Schlosser, had voted against the election reform bill, the lines were drawn. The cadences of political rhetoric came naturally to Roosevelt: “I don’t know who Senator Schlosser represents,” he told a gathering at the Quaker meetinghouse in Clinton Corners. “But I do know that he hasn’t represented me and I do know that he hasn’t represented you.”59
The Republicans initially paid no attention to FDR. But as the campaign drew to a close, panic set in. In the final week, Hamilton Fish, who represented Dutchess County in Congress,* attacked Franklin as a carpetbagger who lived in Manhattan, not Hyde Park. His automobile campaign, said Fish, was nothing more than a cheap “vaudeville tour for the benefit of the farmers.”60 The Poughkeepsie Eag
le, which had otherwise ignored FDR, now railed against his ties to big business: “Franklin D. Roosevelt represents just the opposite of what Theodore Roosevelt stands for. The News-Press reports him as managing clerk of the firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn of 54 Wall Street. It is well for the electors of this Senatorial District to bear in mind that this firm are the lawyers for some of the great trusts which are being prosecuted by President Taft’s administration, such as the Standard Oil Co., and the Sugar Trust.”61 Schlosser, who had conducted what amounted to a front-porch campaign, joined the fray with a vituperative attack on FDR’s patrician origins and dandified appearance. Roosevelt responded by renewing his attack on Schlosser’s subservience to the GOP bosses in Albany. “I had a particularly disagreeable opponent,” FDR remembered years later. “He called me names … and I answered in kind. And the names I called him were worse than the names he called me. So we had a joyous campaign.”62
FDR closed out the race with an election-eve rally in Hyde Park. With Eleanor and Sara at his side, he told his fellow townsmen, “You have known what my father stood for before me, you have known how close he was to the life of this town, and I do not need to tell you that it is my desire always to follow in his footsteps.”63
November 8, election day, dawned gray and rainy—a good omen for Democrats, who always prayed for bad weather upstate to keep the Republican faithful indoors. FDR voted early and returned to Springwood to await the results. As the returns trickled in that evening, it quickly became apparent that the state and the nation were undergoing one of those defining moments when political power passes from one party to the other. The Democrats swept everything in sight. Republican Henry Stimson suffered a crushing defeat for governor, Richard Connell upset Hamilton Fish in the race for Congress, and Roosevelt carried more than two thirds of the precincts in the Twenty-sixth Senatorial District, defeating Schlosser 15,708 to 14,568—an unprecedented Democratic majority.
But it was not just the Democratic avalanche that propelled FDR into office. He outspent Schlosser five to one; he outcampaigned and outorganized him by an even greater margin; and he led the entire Democratic ticket.64 He ran almost as well in the countryside as he did in Poughkeepsie, carried Hyde Park 406–258, and defeated Schlosser on his home turf in Fishkill.
Sara watched the returns as avidly as Franklin, proudly noting the results in her firm Delano hand on a sheet of personal stationery: “Franklin carried Poughkeepsie by 927 … carried Hudson by 499 … Fishkill 128 … Second Assembly district of Dutchess 900.” Sara was not surprised. “I have always thought Franklin perfectly extraordinary,” she once said, “and, as I look back, I don’t think he has ever disappointed me.”65
At the age of twenty-eight, Roosevelt had found his calling. He passed out two dozen expensive cigars to friends and relatives and settled in to savor his victory. It was a singular personal triumph. He had run strongly in the rural reaches of the district, where party professionals had thought he had little chance. And the pros took notice. When “Big Tim” Sullivan, the Tammany wheelhorse who represented the Bowery in the Senate, heard that TR’s cousin was going to be a colleague, he told friends, “If we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the dock. The Roosevelts run true to form, and this kid is likely to do for us what the Colonel is going to do for the Republican party, split it wide open.”66
New York legislators earned $1,500 a year. The session rarely lasted more than ten weeks, and most members either commuted or stayed in one of the half-dozen tourist-class hotels and boardinghouses that catered to transient lawmakers. Hyde Park was sixty-five miles from Albany on the main Delaware & Hudson rail line and FDR might have easily commuted, yet he chose to convert his election victory into a full-time career as a state senator. Skeptics might argue it was a rich man’s hobby: Franklin could not have established himself in the capital without his trust-fund income and Sara’s largesse. But FDR was committed. As he told the voters in Hudson, he intended to stay on the job in Albany “twelve months of the year.”
In mid-November Franklin went to Albany to find a suitable house. “I suppose I must have gone [with Franklin] and looked at the house which we took, though I have no recollection of doing so,” Eleanor said many years later.67 What the Roosevelts found was a massive three-story brownstone in the Flemish Renaissance style favored by wealthy moguls living upstate. The house was situated on a one-acre lot at 248 State Street, virtually in the shadow of the capitol. “It is quite a big house with a piazza and a big yard … and built more like a country house,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Isabella Ferguson in Tucson.68 Franklin called it “palatial.” Sara said it was “a fine house that could be made comfortable.”69 The large downstairs rooms provided ample space for entertaining, and there was an enormous paneled library at the rear and more than enough room on the second and third floors for their three children, the children’s nurses, and a household staff of six. The rent was $400 a month—$4,800 annually, or more than three times FDR’s senatorial salary. Later the Roosevelts moved into even larger quarters at 4 Elk Street, known as “Quality Row” for the affluent Albany families that lived along it. That mansion had been built by Martin Van Buren when he was governor—the first New York governor to reach the White House—and reflected Little Van’s penchant for lavish living.
The legislature convened on January 4, with the Democrats in control of both houses. The Assembly was led by the thirty-seven-year-old Alfred E. Smith, a seven-term veteran from the Lower East Side, son of an Irish mother and an Italian-German father, a vital cog in the Tammany organization who despite an eighth-grade education had demonstrated a political savvy that catapulted him ahead of a legion of better-educated, more seasoned legislators. In the Senate, the organization turned to thirty-three-year-old Robert F. Wagner, son of a Wiesbaden printer, who had landed in New York at the age of nine, not speaking a word of English. Smith and Wagner exemplified the spirit of urban reform that characterized Tammany in 1911, though FDR had yet to recognize it.
The first order of business was the election of a United States senator. The term of Chauncey Depew, the Republican incumbent, expired March 4, 1911. Under the Constitution, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, and in New York it was done in joint session: 150 assemblymen and 50 state senators, a total of 200 votes, of which a majority (101) was required to elect. Since there were 114 Democrats in the legislature, it was a foregone conclusion that Depew’s successor would be named by the Democratic caucus.
Tammany’s candidate was William F. Sheehan, known throughout the state as “Blue-eyed Billy,” the former political boss of Erie County, lieutenant governor, and assembly speaker who was now practicing law in New York City as the partner of Judge Alton B. Parker, the 1904 Democratic presidential nominee. Sheehan had amassed a considerable fortune in and out of politics, and his current legal practice reflected the ultimate in white-shoe respectability. He was director of a dozen or so public utility companies and, with the conservative Judge Parker, embodied the alliance between big business and machine politics. Sheehan raised money from his clients for the Democrats; Tammany spent the money and remembered from whence it came.
But the caucus was far from unanimous. Sheehan was anathema to old Cleveland Democrats—men like Franklin’s father, upstate WASPs who abhorred political bosses in principle yet as a practical matter were far more hidebound and conservative. Their candidate was Brooklyn attorney Edward M. Shepard, counsel for the Pennsylvania Railroad, an intimate of J. P. Morgan who had long been active in the cause of good government but could scarcely be called a liberal crusader. The fact that Sheehan was Irish Catholic and Shepard a Yankee Episcopalian was of more significance than many would openly admit.
Franklin sided with the Cleveland crowd. “Sheehan looks like [Tammany’s] choice,” he noted in his diary in early January. “May the result prove that I am wrong! There is no question in my mind that the Democratic Party is on trial, and having been given control of the
government chiefly through up-state votes, cannot afford to surrender its control to the organization in New York City.”70 Like Theodore when he first entered the legislature, FDR was itching for a fight. It was a matter of publicity and power, not policy or substance. The issue for Franklin was “bossism,” and the contest for U.S. senator was the first target of opportunity that came into view. Whether Sheehan was more progressive than Shepard was immaterial.
Under party rules the decision of the caucus was binding. A majority of the caucus was fifty-eight votes, and if party discipline prevailed—and it invariably did—those fifty-eight determined how all 114 Democrats would vote on the floor. That gave Tammany the whip hand. The New York City organization controlled far more than the fifty-eight votes required, and Charles F. Murphy, the astute Tammany chieftain, confidently expected to put Sheehan in the Senate come March.* Yet there was a loophole. When asked by FDR, Al Smith confirmed that only those Democrats who attended the caucus were bound. If a member was absent, he was not bound by the caucus’s decision.71
Both parties scheduled their caucuses for nine o’clock on the evening of January 16. The Republicans met briefly and unanimously named Depew. But when the Democrats called their meeting to order, twenty-three members were absent. Those present voted sixty-two for Sheehan, twenty-two for Shepard, and seven for D. Cady Herrick, a former candidate for governor. The caucus formally nominated Sheehan, but only ninety-one Democrats had attended—ten fewer than the 101 votes required to elect.
While the Democrats caucused, twenty-one of the absentees convened nearby in the Ten Eyck Hotel. Some favored Shepard, some favored other candidates, but all were agreed that they would not support Sheehan. A brief press release explained they did not wish their individual votes smothered by the caucus. “The people should know just how their representatives voted … and any majority should be credited to the representatives in the Legislature and not someone outside that body”—a blast at Tammany in general and Charles F. Murphy in particular.72
