by FDR
The convention bluster faded quickly. Except for the nation’s farmers, the United States basked in unprecedented prosperity. The GOP hold on the House and Senate seemed secure, and Herbert Hoover, dour though he might be, appeared positively scintillating compared to Calvin Coolidge, who had chosen not to run. Even worse for the Democrats, Smith’s candidacy found little resonance outside the cities of the East Coast. Catholic and wet, he alienated much of rural, fundamentalist America while his ties to big business did little to energize the party’s working-class base. On the stump, Smith proved even more parochial than his city slicker image suggested. As the acerbic Baltimore Sun columnist H. L. Mencken noted, “Al Smith’s world begins at Coney Island and ends at Buffalo.”36
FDR declined Smith’s offer to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and continued to resist efforts to nominate him for governor.37 Both he and Howe recognized that 1928 would not be a good year for Democrats, and Franklin wished to concentrate on regaining the use of his legs so that he might seek the governorship in 1932 and perhaps run for president in 1936. (Roosevelt and Howe assumed that Hoover would be reelected in 1932).38 When the New York State Democratic convention met in Rochester at the end of September, FDR was ensconced at Warm Springs determined not to be drawn into the fray.
By this time, party leaders recognized that Smith’s campaign was in trouble. Unless he could carry New York, with its forty-five electoral votes, he could not hope to win the presidency. And if Smith lost New York, he would likely take the entire ticket down with him. The Republicans had just nominated the state’s crusading attorney general, Albert Ottinger, for governor. Ottinger not only had amassed a superb record fighting price racketeers and stock manipulators but was also of working-class Jewish origin, up from the sidewalks of New York. A formidable campaigner, he would cut deeply into the traditional Democratic vote in the five boroughs. The unanimous consensus of the county chairmen who gathered at Rochester was that the only Democrat who stood a chance of beating Ottinger was Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, they believed, would add another 200,000 upstate votes to the ticket.
FDR was unmoved. On the eve of the gubernatorial nomination he sent a public telegram to Smith restating his decision not to run: AS I AM ONLY FORTY-SIX I OWE IT TO MY FAMILY AND MYSELF TO GIVE THE PRESENT CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT A CHANCE TO CONTINUE.39
Smith was content to take FDR at his word, but Tammany and the upstate leaders refused to accept a substitute candidate. Roosevelt had no enemies within the party and only Roosevelt could rescue the ticket, they said. At the insistence of James A. Farley of Rockland County, secretary of the State Democratic Committee, Smith put in another call to FDR at Warm Springs. The call found Franklin at poolside but he declined to take it, saying “Tell the governor I’ve gone on a picnic and will not be back all day.”40
That evening, with the vote for governor scheduled the next day, Smith sought out Eleanor and implored her to get Franklin on the phone: “He won’t take my calls.” ER told Smith that it was her husband’s decision and she would not attempt to influence him, but she agreed to get him on the phone. Eleanor eventually tracked FDR down, handed the receiver to Smith, and rushed from the room to catch the last train to New York, where she had to teach at Todhunter the next morning. She would not learn what transpired until she read the newspapers next day.
First, Smith put John Jakob Raskob on the phone. Raskob had taken the post of chairman of the National Committee and was one of the party’s principal contributors. (Smith’s campaign headquarters were in the General Motors Building in New York.) Raskob pleaded with Franklin to run on behalf of the national party. FDR replied that he had too much invested in Warm Springs to make that feasible.
“Damn Warm Springs!” Raskob shouted. “We’ll take care of it for you.” Raskob said he would personally underwrite Roosevelt’s losses.* Then he handed the phone to Smith.
The governor bore down: “Take the nomination, Frank. You can make a couple of radio speeches and you’ll be elected. Then you can go back to Warm Springs. After you have made your inaugural speech and sent your message to the Legislature you can go back there again for a couple of months.”
“Don’t give me that baloney,” said FDR.
Herbert Lehman, a senior partner in Lehman Brothers investment bankers, an experienced labor negotiator and one of the most respected figures in the party, came on the phone. If Franklin would take the nomination, he would accept the nomination for lieutenant governor and fill in whenever needed.
Smith came back on. “Frank, I told you I wasn’t going to put this on a personal basis, but I’ve got to. As a personal favor, can I put your name before the convention?” Again Roosevelt declined. His health, Warm Springs, the need to regain the use of his legs, whatever reason he could think of.
The governor heard him out. “Frank, just one more question. If those fellows nominate you tomorrow and adjourn, will you refuse to run?”
FDR hesitated.
“Thanks, Frank. I won’t ask you any more questions.” Smith handed the telephone to Lehman, and in another minute the deal was done.41
Egbert Curtis, the Merriweather Inn manager, drove FDR back to his cottage that evening. Was he going to run? Curtis asked.
“Curt,” said Roosevelt, “when you’re in politics you’ve got to play the game.”42
The following afternoon, Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York placed Roosevelt’s name in nomination. The vote was pro forma. There was no opposition, and FDR was chosen by acclamation. Eleanor telegraphed her condolences: REGRET THAT YOU HAD TO ACCEPT BUT KNOW THAT YOU FELT IT OBLIGATORY.43 Louis Howe smelled disaster. MESS IS NO NAME FOR IT, he wired Franklin. FOR ONCE I HAVE NO ADVICE TO GIVE.44
New York Republicans, taken aback by FDR’s nomination, immediately focused on the health issue. “There is something both pathetic and pitiless in the ‘drafting’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” asserted the New York Post. The Herald Tribune said, “The nomination is unfair to Mr. Roosevelt. It is equally unfair to the people of the state.”45 The Democrats were primed and ready. “A Governor doesn’t have to be an acrobat,” Smith replied. “The work of the governorship is brainwork. Frank Roosevelt is mentally as good as he ever was in his life.”46 FDR joked that most people ran for governor. “I am counting on my friends all over the state to make it possible for me to walk in.”47
Despite his misgivings, Louis Howe set the campaign in motion, establishing headquarters at the Biltmore and organizing a statewide Independent Committee for Roosevelt and Lehman. Working hand in glove with Howe was Edward J. Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx, who had detached himself from the national campaign to work exclusively on the gubernatorial race. An enlightened protégé of Charles Murphy, Flynn hailed from a prosperous Irish background, had graduated from Fordham Law School, and detested the backslapping and glad-handing endemic to the political fraternity. Courteous and cultivated in social relations, Flynn sought to keep his own machine honest and responsive. He hit it off instantly with both FDR and Howe. “Politics has never been my vocation,” Flynn once said, “but it’s been an avocation. I’ve had a lot of fun with politics but I’ve always been in the position where, if anything happened, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference to me.”48
FDR was joined on the campaign trail by Frances Perkins and Sam Rosenman, a young member of the New York legislature assigned to bring Roosevelt up to date on state issues. Like Howe and Missy LeHand, Rosenman would become a permanent fixture of Roosevelt’s entourage, a walking file cabinet of legislative detail.* For his part, Rosenman, who had been initially skeptical of FDR’s patrician origins, was immediately impressed by his uncanny ability to go to the heart of an issue. Rosenman reported that he “had never seen anybody who could grasp the facts of a complicated problem as quickly and as thoroughly as Roosevelt.”49 Frances Perkins, who had not been thrilled by Franklin as a state senator, was also impressed by what she saw now. She was awed by FDR’s stamina and pleasantly surprise
d by his good humor. “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice,” Franklin told her, “You learn to say ‘that’s all right’ and drink it.”50
For four weeks FDR barnstormed the state, sometimes speaking as often as fourteen times a day. Rosenman marveled at his strength and courage, noting that merely to stand up and sit down was, for Roosevelt, “more exercise than the ordinary man takes during an entire day.”51 In Troy on October 26 Franklin delighted a cheering audience with a reference to the effort he was putting forth. He reminded his listeners of the “sob stuff” Republican editorial writers had published about his physical condition: “Too bad about that unfortunate sick man, isn’t it.”52 When he spoke in many upstate cities, the turnout was twice as large as the number of registered Democrats. Initially, bookmakers favored Ottinger 2 to 1. By the end of October the odds had reversed. “I am horribly afraid you are going to be elected,” Howe told Franklin a week before the election.53 FDR ended the campaign in Poughkeepsie, where some 20,000 people paraded down Main Street in his honor.
On the morning of November 6, Roosevelt voted at Hyde Park and then went to campaign headquarters at the Biltmore to listen to the returns. By nine o’clock it was clear that the Democrats were going down, and as the evening wore on the avalanche accelerated. Even the Solid South, which Cox and Roosevelt had managed to hang on to in 1920, had split, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas going Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.* In New York, Smith trailed Hoover by 100,000 votes. FDR was running ahead of the ticket but was still 25,000 votes behind Ottinger, with much of the normally Republican upstate vote still to come in. Shortly after midnight the morning papers appeared, trumpeting a GOP sweep. Franklin browsed through them, took the loss philosophically, and said he was going home to East Sixty-fifth Street to get some sleep. Newsmen and campaign workers drifted away, and the big ballroom in which the Democrats had planned a victory celebration went dark.
One room stayed open. The pros continued to keep watch. Louis Howe, Jim Farley, and Ed Flynn, together with a team of tally clerks and telephone operators, kept a vigil over the late returns. Sitting quietly on a couch in the corner was Frances Perkins, determined to stay until the last vote was counted, hoping her presence might change the result. Beside her sat an elderly woman who was equally determined. “I’ll stay with you,” said Sara. “It’s not over by a long shot.”54
The two women sat quietly, watching the professionals tabulate the results. At 1 A.M. Ed Flynn detected a stronger than expected showing from the returns trickling in from upstate. He telephoned Roosevelt to say there was a glimmer of hope. FDR was running far ahead of Smith and might squeak through. Franklin didn’t believe it. Flynn was “crazy to wake him up,” he said.55
At two o’clock the mood in the room lightened. Flynn could recognize a trend as well as any politician in the country. But he worried about the slow count. It was an article of faith among Democratic politicians that the GOP bosses upstate delayed reporting their results until they knew how many votes they needed. Flynn issued a statement to the press threatening to dispatch a thousand lawyers upstate to prevent the Republicans from stealing the election. The threat evidently had the desired effect, and the laggard upstate counties began to report more rapidly. Sara and Miss Perkins listened as the men kept count. “Forty votes here, one hundred votes there, seventy-five votes somewhere else. They mounted up.”56
By 4 A.M. FDR had pulled ahead. The Democrats would hold the governor’s mansion. The final results gave Roosevelt 2,130,238 votes to Ottinger’s 2,104,630—a majority of 25,608 out of more than 4 million votes cast. Sara and Frances Perkins joined the men in a toast. Then, as Miss Perkins recalled, she shared a taxi with Sara to East Sixty-fifth Street. The seventy-four-year-old matriarch bounded up the steps, eager to get inside and inform her son of his triumph.57
* The waters at Warm Springs have been traced to rain that falls on Pine Mountain, several miles away, runs down 3,800 feet into a vast pocket of rock, where it is warmed by the inner earth, and returns to the surface at a temperature of 88° at a rate of 800 gallons per minute. Editor’s note, 2 The Roosevelt Letters, 448 Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
* William H. Woodin, the president of American Car and Foundry and a registered Republican, became FDR’s first secretary of the Treasury in 1933 but resigned because of ill health a year later. He was succeeded by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served for the remainder of the Roosevelt administration.
* The “March of Dimes” (the name suggested by the comedian Eddie Cantor) was the principal fund-raising arm of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which FDR organized in 1938 and which the historian David Oshinsky called “the gold standard for private charities, the largest voluntary health organization of all time.” The pioneering research of Dr. Jonas Salk was supported in large measure by the foundation. His discovery of a vaccine against polio was announced by Basil O’Connor, chairman of the foundation, on April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of FDR’s death. David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story 53–55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also see Richard Carter, Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk 268 ff. (New York: Trident Press, 1966).
* Eleanor remained active at Todhunter until 1938, although she did not teach after FDR was elected president. In 1939 the school was absorbed by the Dalton School.
* On the eve of the convention, FDR laid out the Democrats’ foreign policy in an article in Foreign Affairs. Scathingly critical of the GOP’s go-it-alone isolationism, Roosevelt urged greater cooperation with the League of Nations and membership in the World Court: “We Democrats do not believe in the possibility or the desirability of an isolated national experience or a national development heedless of the welfare, prosperity and peace of the other peoples of the world. The American people would never be willing consciously to handicap the League in its efforts to maintain peace. Yet since the war, our attitude is that we do not need friends, and that the public opinion of the world is of no importance.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View,” 4 Foreign Affairs 573, 582 (July 1928).
* The New York Times called FDR’s speech “a model of its kind. It is seldom that a political speech attains this kind of eloquence. It was not fitted to provoke frenzied applause, but could not be heard or read without prompting to serious thought and sincere emotion.” The New York Times, June 28, 1928.
† The remaining 251 votes were divided among twelve candidates, Congressman Cordell Hull of Tennessee leading the pack with 71. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections 157 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
* Raskob immediately sent FDR a check for $250,000, which Roosevelt returned with his thanks. It was sufficient to know that Raskob was willing to underwrite him, he said. From 1928 to 1932, Raskob was one of the principal benefactors of Warm Springs, donating more than $100,000. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 255 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
* After observing Rosenman for three days, FDR asked him to prepare a draft for a speech he was to give the next evening. It was a speechwriting relationship that would endure for the next seventeen years. “I get to know people quickly,” said Roosevelt. “Sometimes that is better than a long and careful investigation.”
Rosenman remembers that the campaign
was a difficult one. After the first two days by train, Roosevelt decided that he would continue the rest of the trip by automobile. This would enable him to make speeches at scores of crossroads and villages all through the state.… Two large buses accompanied the automobiles. One was used by the newsmen who were covering Roosevelt. In the other bus were the stenographers, mimeograph machine operators and their equipment. The speeches had to be typed and mimeographed as the bus was speeding along.
After a speech had been delivered in one city, I sat up and prepared a draft of the speech for the next night. It had to be ready for the can
didate to look at the next morning during his breakfast when we would go over it together.
After breakfast the cavalcade of cars and buses would start the journey to the next city. I would get into the bus where the typewriters were, and, with Roosevelt’s corrections and suggestions, would work on the draft. Every once in a while the procession stopped at the center of some small village, where Roosevelt would make a short talk to the crowd. I would get into his car at one of these stops, and, after we started up again, we would discuss some of the changes to the draft. Sometimes he stopped his car at roadside and did some writing on the draft, or sent for one of the stenographers and dictated some new material.…
It was not easy for a crippled man to carry on this kind of campaign. He could not climb stairs, and often we had to carry him up some backstairs to a hall and down again. He always went through this harrowing experience smiling. He never got ruffled. Having been set down, he would adjust his coat, smile, and proceed calmly to the platform for his speech.
Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 21–22, 31 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
* It is easy to overestimate the magnitude of Smith’s defeat. Though he did dismally in rural America, his candidacy solidified the urban, immigrant vote for the Democratic party. For the first time since the Civil War the Democrats carried Massachusetts and Rhode Island and won a plurality in the nation’s twelve largest cities. All told, Smith polled more than 15 million votes, virtually as many as Calvin Coolidge’s winning total in 1924 and almost twice as many as any previous Democratic candidate. In that sense, it can be argued that Smith’s candidacy established the basis of the Roosevelt coalition and paved the way for FDR’s victory in 1932. Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics 28–41 (New York: Harper & Brothers., 1952); Kristi Anderson, The Creation of a Democratic Majority: 1928–1936 2–11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and especially V. O. Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” 17 Journal of Politics 4 (1955); Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 265–288 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
