by FDR
The legislature met in joint session the next morning. When the ballots for U.S. senator were tabulated, Sheehan had ninety-one votes from the Democratic caucus, all eighty-six Republicans voted for Depew, and the remaining Democratic votes were split among a number of sentimental favorites.* No candidate had received the 101 votes required for election. For the next ten weeks battle lines hardened and the legislature ground to a halt. “Never in the history of Albany have 21 men threatened such total ruin of machine plans,” the veteran newsman Louis Howe reported in The New York Herald.73 The rebels “are the talk of the capital,” said The New York Times. “They are not radicals. They speak with moderation, and have made clear that while they will resist to the last any attempt at coercion, they are keenly alive to the necessary processes of government by party.”74
FDR was not the instigator of the insurgency or even its prime organizer. Yet he quickly emerged as its spokesman and informal chairman. He was always available to the press, he had no political baggage from past campaigns, and he was articulate and self-confident. “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight,” he told The New York Times on January 22. “I never had as much fun in my life as I am having right now.”
The name Roosevelt fascinated reporters bored with statehouse routine. Comparisons with TR were inevitable. The New York Post told its readers that Franklin had “the strong insurgent tendencies of the family.”75 The American reported, “His face is boyish, but those who remember Theodore Roosevelt when he was an Assemblyman say the Senator bears a striking likeness to the Colonel.”76 According to the New York World, FDR was “of spare figure and lean intellectual face, suggesting a student of divinity rather than a practical politician.”77 The New York Globe depicted a matinee idol: “Tall, with a well set up figure, he is physically fit to command. His face is a bit long but the features are well modeled, the nose is Grecian, and there is a glow of country health in his cheeks.… It is the chin, though, aggressive and somewhat prominent, that shows what a task the leaders in Albany have if they have thoughts of making this young man change his mind. His lips are firm and part often in a smile over even white teeth—the Roosevelt teeth.”78
FDR’s house, just one block from the capitol, became insurgent headquarters. It was our “harbor of refuge,” said Kings County assemblyman Edmund R. Terry.79 Every morning the insurgents gathered in the Roosevelts’ library, walked together to the legislature, cast their votes against Sheehan, returned after the session, went out again for supper, and came back for a long evening of drinks and cigars. The sessions were as much social as political. “There is very little business done at our councils of war,” FDR confided to a Times reporter. “We just sit around and swap stories like soldiers at a bivouac fire.”80 There were shouts and laughter and a blue haze of cigar smoke that engulfed everyone and everything. The smoke became so pervasive that Eleanor eventually moved the children to the third floor so they might breathe more easily.
The fight against Sheehan gave Eleanor her initial taste of political life. “It was a wife’s duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books or a particular dish for dinner. That was the attitude with which I approached that first winter in Albany,” she said later.81 Eleanor watched proceedings from the Senate gallery, entertained the insurgents at home, prepared their drinks and snacks, and forged some unlikely friendships. Veteran Tammany pols like Tom Grady and Tim Sullivan—who had little use for Franklin—found Eleanor delightful. “Be with the insurgents, and if needs be with your husband every day in the year but this,” wrote Grady to ER on Saint Patrick’s Day. “But this day be with us.”82 Eleanor’s understanding of the personal aspects of politics seemed instinctive. She softened Franklin’s self-righteousness and made him appear less arrogant. When Lord Bryce, Great Britain’s ambassador to the United States, addressed a joint session of the legislature, ER stepped forward and hosted a massive reception where Tammanyites, insurgents, and Old Albany society mingled freely. That first year in the state capital was a seminar in practical politics, and Eleanor enjoyed every minute. As one of her most sympathetic biographers has written, “Franklin’s entrance into politics saved them both from the kind of ordinary upper-class life, vapid and fatuous, that ER associated with society—at least that part of society where she had never felt welcome, comfortable, or understood.”83
Tammany exerted maximum pressure on the insurgents. Pet projects were shelved, patronage dried up, hometown constituents were mobilized, local newspapers counseled against delay, county chairmen, bankers, and prominent businessmen threatened to withdraw support. More than once, FDR had to raise funds for his colleagues to pay off mortgages called suddenly by their banks.84 When intimidation failed, the Sheehan forces turned to favors and inducements. Al Smith did not say “to get along, you have to go along,” but the capital was rife with rumors of judicial posts and other perks offered to the rebels. Charles Murphy journeyed to Albany to meet with FDR; Sheehan and his wife had lunch with Franklin and Eleanor—all to no avail. At the end of March the rebels still held out. The legislature had been in session ten weeks, and not one measure of substance had been enacted.
Both sides were becoming restive. Governor John Dix, in despair for the state budget, called for Sheehan to withdraw. A number of compromise candidates emerged, and finally Charles Murphy settled on State Supreme Court justice James Aloysius O’Gorman, a former Tammany sachem (underboss) and longtime president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. O’Gorman had been on the bench for ten years and his reputation for integrity was unassailable. Unlike Sheehan and Shepard, he had no ties to the corporate world or big business. Yet he was far more a creature of Tammany than Sheehan had ever been. He would be hard for the rebels to accept, but even harder for them to reject.
When Smith and Wagner promised there would be no reprisals, the insurgents broke ranks. A majority voted to accept O’Gorman. FDR sought to hold out, but with his troops thinning, further resistance was futile. He embraced the inevitable: “We would have taken Justice O’Gorman at the very beginning and been perfectly satisfied,” he later told the Times.85
On the afternoon of March 31, 1911, when the rebels filed into the chamber for the final vote, jubilant regulars let out a raucous cheer. There were cheers and more cheers, and then an Irish voice burst into song: the rhythmic anthem of the New York City organization: “Tam-ma-nee … Tam-ma-nee.” The regulars joined in, chorus after chorus, including the improvised
Tam-ma-nee, Tam-ma-nee
Franklin D., like Uncle “The,”
Is no match for Tam-ma-nee;
Tam-ma-nee, Tam-ma-nee
Eventually order was restored and the clerk called the roll—the sixty-fourth ballot for U.S. senator. When his name was called, Roosevelt stood to explain his vote, struggling to make himself heard above an undercurrent of hisses. “We have followed the dictates of our consciences and have done our duty as we saw it. [Hisses.] I believe that as a result the Democratic Party has taken an upward step. [Groans and hisses.] We are Democrats—not irregulars, but regulars. [Silence]. I take pleasure in casting my vote for the Honorable James A. Gorman. [Tepid applause.]”86 The results were predictable. One hundred twelve Democrats voted for O’Gorman; eighty Republicans for Depew. The insurgency was broken. All but three of the twenty-one members who had rebelled with FDR would be defeated in upcoming elections.
The fight against Sheehan became another myth Roosevelt could not resist embellishing. Two days after the vote in Albany, Franklin addressed the YMCA of Greater New York and claimed victory. “I have just returned from a big fight,” he announced. “A fight that went sixty-four rounds. This fight was a free-for-all … and many of the other side got good and battered.… The battle ended in harmony, and we have chosen a man for the people who will be dictated to by no one.”87
Over the years the public forgot how ignominiously the insurgents had been beaten and remembered only that Sheehan had not been elected. This became
gospel for FDR, who never tired of retelling the tale of his first political victory.* “Do you remember the old Sheehan fight of 1911?” he asked a longtime friend in 1928 when he was running for governor. “When the final Murphy surrender came, the flag of truce was brought to me by Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and State Senator Bob Wagner. What a change has taken place all along the line.”88
FDR harvested a bumper crop of national publicity from the Sheehan fight, and for some he became a youthful symbol of political reform. The Cleveland Plain Dealer tabbed Franklin as TR’s successor: “May it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty? Franklin D. Roosevelt is, to be sure, a Democrat, but this is a difference of small import. In other respects, he seems to be thoroughly Rooseveltian.”89 In North Carolina, Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, wrote an editorial praising FDR’s stand against Tammany entitled “A Coming Democratic Leader.”90 In Trenton, New Jersey’s reformist governor Woodrow Wilson took notice, and TR wrote his congratulations: “Just a line to say that we are really proud of the way you have handled yourself.”91
The downside of the Sheehan struggle was that FDR was tagged as anti-Catholic and anti-Irish—a label that proved hard to shake. The Reverend Patrick Ludden, the Roman Catholic bishop of Syracuse, claimed that Franklin and his colleagues reflected a resurgence of “the old spirit of Knownothingism” that prevented Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, from getting ahead.92 Daniel O’Connell, political boss of Albany for several generations, put it more pungently. Franklin, he said, “was a bigot. He didn’t like Tammany. He didn’t like poor people. He was a patronizing son of a bitch.”93 FDR’s denials were more fervent than convincing. Both he and Eleanor shared the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic prejudices of their time and class.* Franklin would learn tolerance, and over the years he and the nation’s Irish pols would use each other for their mutual benefit. But their affection never ran deep. James A. Farley, who served FDR for a dozen years as campaign manager and party chairman, had as one of his tasks to persuade his fellow Irish leaders that they could work with Roosevelt in spite of what they might have heard about his youthful anti-Catholicism. Farley did a superb job, but he was never personally convinced. Later he lamented that his relationship with FDR had been purely professional. “Strange as it may seem, the President never took me into the bosom of his family, although everyone agreed I was more responsible than any other single man for his being in the White House.”94
A lasting legacy of the Sheehan fight was the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct election of U.S. senators by the voters in each state, not the legislatures. In April 1911, the New York legislature took up a bill previously introduced by Roosevelt instructing the state’s congressional delegation to support such an amendment. The direct election of senators was popular with the progressive movement throughout the country and had been one of the planks in the Democratic platform. FDR led the debate in the State Senate, which on April 20 passed the measure 28–15. Four days later the Assembly adopted it 105–30. The Democrats in both houses voted solidly in favor, most Republicans against. The Sheehan battle, taken together with similar struggles in New Jersey and Illinois, launched a groundswell of popular sentiment behind the amendment. Congress adopted it by the required two-thirds vote on May 13, 1912, and upon ratification by three quarters of the states, it became part of the Constitution on May 31, 1913. (New York was the fourth state to ratify, acting January 15, 1913.)
Fighting “bossism” came naturally to FDR. He challenged Tammany over a bill to reorganize the State Highway Commission, pressed for adoption of a direct-primary bill, and struck a puritanical pose against such Tammany-endorsed measures as Sunday baseball, legalized prizefighting, and betting at the racetrack. “Murphy and his kind must, like the noxious weed, be plucked out root and branch,”95 he told an audience in Buffalo. These stands were popular with Roosevelt’s churchgoing constituency of upriver farmers and small-town businessmen. But they ignored the economic issues of the day, failed to address the growing problems of industrialization, and tagged Tammany with an out-of-date label more appropriate to the days of the Tweed Ring than the progressive leadership of Murphy, Wagner, and Smith.* As one legislative veteran put it, FDR’s ideas in 1911 were “the silly conceits of a political prig [devoid] of human sympathy, human interests, human ties,” a characterization with which most members would have agreed.96
* Written in pencil by Roosevelt on the flyleaf of his copy of Professor Henry S. Redfield’s Selected Cases on Code Pleading and Practice in New York. Redfield was one of two professors who failed FDR.
* Except for the wicker furniture, there was little rustic about the Kuhn-Roosevelt “cottage.” In addition to the extensive manicured lawns extending to the water’s edge, there were four full baths, two butler’s pantries, seven fireplaces, and a full-size laundry. It required a staff of eight to operate. After FDR contracted polio, the cottage was used sparingly. In 1952 the house and all of its furnishings were sold to the financier Armand Hammer. Hammer carefully restored it, installed electricity, and offered Eleanor full use whenever she wished. After ER’s death in 1962 Hammer donated the property to the U.S. and Canadian governments, which jointly established the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. See Jonas Klein, Beloved Island: Franklin and Eleanor and the Legacy of Campobello (Forest Dale, Vt.: Paul S. Eriksson, 2000).
* FDR received approximately $5,000 annually from the trust fund his father established. ER’s inheritance produced a little over $7,000, the principal invested primarily in New York Central Railroad stocks and bonds, administered by Cousin Henry Parish, vice president of the Chemical Bank.
† Anna Eleanor (May 3, 1906); James (December 23, 1907); Franklin Delano, Jr. (March 18, 1909–November 8, 1909); Elliott (September 23, 1910); Franklin Delano, Jr. (August 7, 1914); and John Aspinwall (March 13, 1916).
* Even within the family, FDR kept his feelings largely to himself. After the death of their infant son Franklin, Jr., in 1910, Roosevelt quietly joined the board of the New York Milk Committee, to help combat infant mortality. Franklin, Jr., had been bottle-fed, and the death rate for bottle-fed infants in the city was extremely high—over a thousand babies died in Manhattan alone the summer Franklin, Jr., fell ill. The trouble was traced to unpasteurized or adulterated milk drunk from unsterilized bottles. The Milk Committee ran a chain of storefront milk stations in the poorest sections of the city, which provided pure milk and free medical advice to mothers unable to afford either. See Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt 102–103 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
* FDR proved adept at the law when he chose to apply himself. Legend at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn holds that when Franklin was managing clerk he was one day sent by John Milburn to municipal court to settle eight or nine minor suits against the American Express Company, one of the firm’s principal clients. Milburn instructed FDR to take $1,000 from the cashier and pay what was necessary. Later that afternoon the firm’s cashier reported to Milburn that Roosevelt had just come back and returned the $1,000. Milburn immediately called Franklin into his office and demanded an explanation. “Oh,” said Roosevelt. “When they called the cases, I tried them all and won.” Francis M. Ellis and Edward F. Clark, Jr., A Brief History of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn 115–116 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter E. Randall, 1988).
* At first blush, FDR’s statement appears somewhat grandiose. Until his election in 1932, only three New York governors had been elected president: Martin Van Buren (1836), Grover Cleveland (1884 and 1892), and TR (1904). But from the perspective of 1907, when FDR was speaking, his assertion warrants greater credence. New York cast almost 10 percent of the total electoral vote, and three of the last six presidential victors had indeed been New York governors.
* In the 1909 election, the Democrats won all countywide offices and twenty of the twenty-seven town supervisors. See Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 18 (Ne
w York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
* On election eve in November 1932, Roosevelt received a letter from Edwin De Turck Bechtel, a leading partner at Carter, Ledyard, who had been a fellow clerk with FDR at the firm and had been in the bullpen with him when Judge Mack discussed Dutchess County politics. “It thrills me,” Bechtel wrote, “to realize that your decision in 1910 as you sat at your old roll-top desk at 54 Wall Street and the political principles which you chose then and have always followed should have led to such a marvelous goal.” Enclosed with the letter were photostats of two pages from the ledger FDR kept as managing clerk “as a reminder of old times.” Legal Papers, Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.
* Sara, understandably, was never happy with the rough-edged politicians and less-than-couth newsmen FDR brought to Springwood, nor with the mannish social workers Eleanor escorted in the 1920s, but she was always gracious to them. “I have always believed that a mother should be friends with her children’s friends,” she gamely put it. The one exception was Louisiana senator Huey Long, whom she could not abide. In the autumn of 1932, Senator Long visited Hyde Park to discuss campaign strategy with FDR. (The Kingfish had personally intimidated the wavering Arkansas and Mississippi delegations to keep them in line on the crucial third ballot at the Democratic convention, and Roosevelt owed him.) Always a flamboyant dresser, Long was attired in a loud checkered suit, orchid shirt, and a watermelon pink necktie, which was garish even for him. FDR received Long affably and invited him to lunch, where they continued their conversation, leaving the other guests to talk among themselves. During a momentary lull in the conversation, Sara could be heard sotto voce from her end of the table: “Who is that awful man sitting on my son’s right?” When asked later by newsmen about his opinion of FDR, Long said, “I like him. But by God, I feel sorry for him. He’s got even more sonsofbitches in his family than I got in mine.” T. Harry Williams, Huey Long 601–602 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).
