by FDR
In FDR, Wilson saw a tall, young (Roosevelt was twenty-nine), ebullient Harvardian, somewhat full of himself, a shade too eager, not unlike many young men he had met at Princeton. He was smooth, bordering on glib, yet he spoke truthfully and reported the New York situation accurately. He would be of little help at the convention, assuming he was a delegate, but he was a Roosevelt and a Democrat, and obviously shared a commitment to reform. If Wilson got the nomination—a very big “if” in the autumn of 1911—the young man sitting opposite would be most useful building an organization in New York that could help carry the state in November. If TR became the Republican candidate, a Democratic Roosevelt would be even more valuable.
In the ensuing months, Wilson’s political fortunes eroded. His honeymoon with New Jersey legislators ended abruptly—the governor had shed none of his sanctimonious rectitude—and early backers lost interest. Supporters on Wall Street, who saw Wilson as a conservative counter to the populism of William Jennings Bryan, became disenchanted with his increasingly progressive agenda and were now working actively against him.23 Campaign funds dried up, and other candidates, led by House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri, entered the field.24
The political tide was running strongly against Wilson when New York Democrats convened for their nominating convention in New York City on April 12, 1912. FDR organized a dinner for Wilson supporters at the Belmont Hotel the evening before. He invited close to a hundred upstate delegates, but fewer than twenty replied and of those only three accepted. Murphy dominated the convention from start to finish. A slate of ninety uninstructed delegates was chosen, Tammany held a decisive majority, and Roosevelt was pointedly passed over, as either delegate or alternate.25
If Franklin was discouraged he did not show it. Following a month’s vacation in the Caribbean with his brother-in-law Hall Roosevelt (at TR’s request, Colonel George Goethals gave them a VIP tour of the Panama Canal), FDR accepted the chairmanship of the New York State Wilson Conference, a splinter group of disaffected Democrats, including William Gibbs McAdoo, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and, to everyone’s surprise, Senator James Aloysius O’Gorman. The organization was paper thin but provided cover for Roosevelt to organize a rump of 150 Wilson supporters to attend the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore—an offset to the official New York delegation under Murphy. FDR’s team set up headquarters in the Munsey Building across from the convention and bombarded delegates with manifestoes urging Wilson’s nomination. No Democrat—save Madison and Buchanan—had ever won the White House without the electoral vote of New York, and winning New York, they asserted, required a progressive candidate. Senator O’Gorman interceded with the Democratic National Committee to obtain seats for the Wilson Conference in the gallery, where they chanted incessantly for Wilson.26 Franklin obtained credentials from the sergeant at arms who admitted him to the convention floor. These were countersigned by Joseph E. Davies, the pro-Wilson national committeeman from Wisconsin who many years later would serve as FDR’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.
The 1912 Baltimore convention was Roosevelt’s first exposure to national politics and he reveled in the excitement. He spent hours working hotel lobbies and dining rooms, shaking hands and touting Wilson’s virtues. Reporters and delegates alike flocked to meet the Democratic Roosevelt. One was Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, who had been a fan of FDR since “Blue-eyed Billy” Sheehan had been denied a seat in the U.S. Senate. Daniels was also the Democratic national committeeman from North Carolina and a prominent fixture in the Wilson campaign. “Franklin and I became friends at that convention,” Daniels wrote later. “It was a case of love at first sight.”27 Another new friend who would play an important role in FDR’s political life was the taciturn Tennessee congressman Cordell Hull, an old-school Appalachian liberal who drove the Wilson bandwagon in the South.
The Democratic convention operated under the two-thirds rule, a tradition that not only gave the South veto power over the nominee but also ensured that voting would continue for at least several days. In 1912, there were 1,088 delegates; 545 constituted a majority, but two-thirds (726) were required to nominate. Most states voted under another historic relic, the unit rule: all votes from a state must be cast for a single candidate. This smothered individual delegates’ preferences and gave each state organization effective control of the vote count. Balloting began June 28. After the roll of the states was called, Champ Clark led with 440 votes; Wilson was second with 324; Judson Harmon, the conservative governor of Ohio, had 148; and Congressman Oscar Underwood of Alabama trailed with 117.* The New York delegation, in a holding pattern, cast its ninety votes for Harmon. Murphy preferred Clark but was waiting for the opportune moment to swing the Empire State’s vote and start a stampede that would put his candidate across.
The summer of 1912 was one of the hottest on record in Baltimore, and the delegates sweltered through roll call after roll call. On the tenth ballot Murphy decided the time had come and threw New York’s support to Clark. That gave the Speaker a majority, but he was still well short of the 726 votes required. Nevertheless, his momentum appeared unstoppable. At that moment William Jennings Bryan rose from his seat in the Nebraska delegation to address the convention. The “Great Commoner” had three times led the party to defeat, but he retained the affection of many southern and western delegates, and his voice had lost none of the resonance that electrified convention after convention. “So long as the ninety wax figures of the New York delegation vote for Clark,” said Bryan, he was withdrawing his support and casting his vote for Wilson. Bryan’s intercession derailed the victory train. For the next dozen ballots Clark’s strength hovered around 550; then it began to erode. On the thirtieth ballot Indiana’s favorite son, Governor Thomas R. Marshall, withdrew and shifted the Hoosier State’s 31 votes to Wilson, who pulled ahead 460–455. With each succeeding ballot Wilson gained strength. On the forty-third ballot, four days after the voting started, Illinois switched its 58 votes from Clark to Wilson, and the landslide began. Three ballots later, Wilson was nominated with 990 votes. Tammany voted for Clark to the bitter end. Governor Marshall was later rewarded for his switch with the vice presidential nomination.28 Bryan would become Wilson’s secretary of state. FDR, who did little but lead cheers and organize demonstrations, made ready to work for Wilson in the coming election. WILSON NOMINATED THIS AFTERNOON, he wired Eleanor at Campobello. ALL MY PLANS VAGUE. SPLENDID TRIUMPH.29*
The day after Wilson was nominated, FDR called on the governor at his summer residence in Sea Girt, New Jersey. With Murphy temporarily persona non grata, Franklin sought and obtained the candidate’s permission to organize pro-Wilson New York Democrats to fight the November election. Two weeks later, at a much-ballyhooed press conference in New York City, Roosevelt proclaimed the Empire State Democracy, a grassroots progressive movement with a national agenda. Backed by Ralph Pulitzer’s New York World, the Sun, and a sprinkling of upstate papers, the movement quickly picked up speed. “We are not a small minority,” Franklin told a second organizational meeting of two hundred Democrats at the Hotel Astor on July 29. “We are a big majority.” If state party leaders cannot release themselves from their bondage to Tammany, he said, then “true party loyalty demands that bondage be broken by the rank and file. If this be party treason, let those who are responsible for such conditions make the most of it.”30
The Republicans meanwhile were self-destructing. TR and President Taft traded barbs throughout 1911 and then broke irrevocably in February 1912. The issues were initially political. TR pressed a reform agenda; Taft preferred the status quo. But the dispute soon became personal. Taft denounced Teddy and his supporters as “neurotics” who sought to “pull down the pillars of the temple of freedom.” TR dismissed Taft as a “blackguard,” a “fathead,” and a “puzzlewit” with an intellect slightly less developed than a guinea pig’s. “My hat is in the ring and the fight is on,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters on February 21, 1912.31
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p; The GOP convened in Chicago in mid-June. Taft forces controlled the convention machinery; TR commanded the party’s rank and file. “It is a marvelous thing” wrote Franklin, “that [Cousin Theodore], acting with the support of untrained militia, has succeeded in overcoming the well-organized opposition of the trained soldiers of the Republican Party.”32 Almost, but not quite. The credentials of some two hundred delegates were contested, and the Taft forces prevailed in virtually every case. That ensured the president’s renomination. TR charged that the deck had been stacked and dramatically instructed his delegates to walk out of the convention. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord,” said Theodore, with his penchant for understatement. Seven weeks later TR accepted the nomination of the newly formed National Progressive party and, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, took the social conscience of the Republican party with him. Claiming to be “as fit as a bull moose,” he posed a threat of unknown dimensions to both parties.33
Woodrow Wilson believed his election was preordained.34 His campaign staff was less convinced. And with TR added to the race and threatening to siphon off a sizable portion of the progressive vote, all bets were off. The rupture of the Democratic party in New York now took on alarming proportions. If Taft had been the only opposition, FDR’s Empire State Democracy and half a dozen other splinter groups could have been tolerated. Wilson could oppose bossism and let the devil take the hindmost. But now every vote counted, and the Wilson campaign could not afford to alienate Tammany and the regular party organization. For his part, Charles F. Murphy was a constant Democrat. Candidates come and go, but the party continues. He had no difficulty supporting the ticket, even though he had opposed Wilson at the convention.
Wilson and Murphy made no explicit deal. But FDR soon found himself outmaneuvered. The issue came to a head in early October, when the state Democratic party met in Syracuse to nominate its candidate for governor. Murphy supported another term for the complacent John Dix and had the votes to win, though it would likely split the party. Wilson opposed Dix and demanded an open convention. The delegates, he told The New York Times, “must be left free from personal control of any sort.”35
With barely a month before the election, neither Wilson nor Murphy could afford a total break. So while Wilson continued to attack the New York machine publicly, Colonel Edward M. House, his principal adviser and alter ego, negotiated with Murphy to find a compromise candidate: “some unobjectionable Tammany man … who could not bring discredit upon the party,” as House expressed it.36 The charade that followed was carefully choreographed. For the first three ballots Tammany dutifully supported Dix. On the fourth, Murphy shifted his support to Congressman William “Plain Bill” Sulzer of New York City, a public champion of progressivism who had been a Tammany insider for years. Sulzer was exactly the type of common denominator behind whom the party could unite. As with Sheehan two years before, Murphy lost the battle over Dix but won the war.37
Sulzer’s nomination appeared open and above board. House’s role was not revealed. Wilson claimed victory and hailed the “freedom of action which the convention exercised.”38 The party split was healed, the Empire State Democracy dissolved, and FDR said he was proud to be a Democratic regular. “I believe in unity,” he told the Times.39 The only discordant note was sounded by Thomas Mott Osborne, the financial angel of the Empire State Democracy. Wilson, he said afterward, was “perfectly willing to put the ten commandments to a vote and reject them if the vote were adverse.”40 Senator Robert Wagner called Osborne a poor loser.41
FDR’s practical education continued. He began to appreciate that life in the political arena involved more than bossism and good government. He saw House negotiate with Murphy and recognized how expendable he himself had been. He also recognized that he had to get through the eye of the Democratic needle and be renominated for his Senate seat. After that he faced a general election against not just a single Republican opponent but a Bull Moose acolyte of Cousin Theodore as well. Franklin saw the handwriting on the wall and made peace with Tammany. As one scholar expressed it, FDR became a Democratic regular and a Tammany irregular.42 There were even rumors that if a Democratic victory in the gubernatorial race had been in doubt, Murphy would have held his nose and backed Roosevelt—just as the Republicans had nominated Theodore in 1898 to avoid defeat.*
After FDR pulled in his horns he was nominated unanimously by the Democratic caucus in Poughkeepsie. Past differences were brushed aside, and Franklin once again hired Harry Hawkey’s red Maxwell convertible to barnstorm the district. But before the campaign commenced, Roosevelt was struck down with a particularly virulent attack of typhoid. Eleanor, who was also hit, but not as seriously, blamed the drinking water aboard the steamer returning from Campobello.43 Franklin’s political career appeared to have come to an abrupt end. He could not possibly win a three-way race without mounting a strenuous backcountry campaign similar to the one he had waged two years before. But he was feverish and bedridden. To make matters worse, he had been stricken in New York City, not Hyde Park, and the old carpetbagger accusation was certain to resurface. In desperation, Franklin asked Eleanor to send for Louis Howe.44
Eleven years older than FDR, Louis Howe was the Albany reporter for the New York Herald. A veteran newsman with a hopeless addiction to politics, Howe gloried in an atmosphere of racetracks, gambling casinos, and the ornate watering holes of East Coast society. He was barely five feet tall, emaciated, his face scarred by a childhood bicycle accident. A malodorous Sweet Caporal cigarette dangled perpetually from his lips, the ashes falling randomly on his rumpled three-piece suits. Even when freshly scrubbed, which was not often, he looked dirty and unkempt. Howe took perverse pride in his appearance, claiming to be one of the four ugliest men in New York. “Children take one look at me on the street and run.”45 A fellow reporter once called him a “medieval gnome,” and Howe accepted the designation with delight. For most people, Louis Howe was an acquired taste. But he was blessed with superabundant energy, uncanny political insight, and a penchant for intrigue. His cynical view of human nature rarely left him disappointed. And he was always broke. His job with the Herald was seasonal and provided a precarious living at best. As a result, he hired himself out as a ghostwriter whenever possible, but the pickings in Albany were slim. “I’m in a hole,” he wrote FDR after Wilson’s nomination. “If you can connect me with a job during the campaign, for heaven’s sake help me out.”46
Howe leaped for joy when Eleanor’s message arrived. He had admired Franklin’s fight against Sheehan, provided valuable advice to the insurgents on legislative strategy, and interviewed Roosevelt at length for the Herald—FDR’s first exposure to the national media. “Almost at that very first meeting,” Howe said later, “I made up my mind that nothing but an accident could keep him from becoming President.”47 Howe needed a hero, and Roosevelt—who in personal appearance and patrician background was everything Howe was not—fit the bill. FDR, for his part, needed practical political guidance, and Louis Howe provided it. Except for a basic attachment to the Democratic party, Howe was indifferent to ideology. Yet he was an astute tactician with a litmus ability to distinguish a sound political move from one that was likely to cause trouble. Roosevelt became virtually unbeatable once Howe joined his entourage. It was a symbiotic relationship in which each supplied what the other could not.
Franklin turned his Senate campaign over to Howe. For the next six weeks Howe became FDR’s surrogate. He moved to Poughkeepsie, decorated Harry Hawkey’s Maxwell with Roosevelt banners, and hustled the countryside for votes. He was as energetic as Franklin had been two years earlier, but he focused more sharply on specific constituencies. To win the farm vote, Howe devised a scheme to protect farmers from New York City commission merchants, the middlemen who pocketed the difference between what the farmer got for his crop and what the consumer paid. Howe pointed out that if reelected, Roosevelt would become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There he would ensure passage o
f an agricultural marketing act with real teeth in it. Howe mailed hundreds of personal letters over FDR’s signature informing farmers of the proposal. Each letter contained a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the farmer’s reply. Similar letters promised apple growers that Franklin would introduce a bill to standardize the size of barrels, another sore spot for farmers whose apples were often measured in oversized barrels. Shad fishermen were assured that license fees on the Hudson would be lowered. Altogether, Howe dispatched more than eleven thousand letters on FDR’s behalf.48
No voter was left uncourted. Howe took out full-page newspaper advertisements, unprecedented in upstate races, in which Roosevelt pledged his support for women’s suffrage, identified with the concerns of the workingman, and bashed the Republicans for standing pat. Howe worked at the end of a long leash. FDR was consulted, but often after Howe had already acted. “Here is your first ad,” he wrote the bedridden Roosevelt in late October. “As I have pledged you in it I thought you might like to know casually what kind of a mess I was getting you into.… Your slave and servant, Howe.”49
