by FDR
Roosevelt spoke to Congress in a special evening session—the first president to do so—and to the delight of wildly cheering Democrats pulled every partisan plug. A vast radio audience heard FDR lambaste the “resplendent economic autocracy” that threatened to retard the nation’s recovery. “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed,” said FDR with evident relish. Now these sinister forces were conspiring to recapture power. “Autocrats in small things, they seek autocracy in bigger things.… Give them their way and they will take the course of every aristocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”9 It was the language of class war that Long might have used. Speaking to the party’s annual Jackson Day celebration several days later, FDR identified with Old Hickory, who like himself had
an overwhelming proportion of the material wealth of the Nation arrayed against him.
The great media … fought him. Haughty and sterile intellectualism opposed him. Musty reaction disapproved him. Hollow and outworn traditionalism shook a trembling finger at him. It seemed sometimes that all were against him—all but the people of the United States.… History so often repeats itself.10
On January 25, 1936, Roosevelt’s autocrats of privilege made their rebuttal. Two thousand guests decked out in formal evening attire gathered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel for the Liberty League’s annual dinner. The New York Times reported that the audience “represented, either through principals or attorneys, a large portion of the capital wealth of the country.”11 John W. Davis and Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland were there, as were Newton D. Baker, Winthrop Aldrich, and assorted du Ponts, Mellons, and Vanderbilts. The keynote speech was given by Al Smith, in white tie and tails, who assailed the New Deal and FDR for more than an hour. Smith said that if Roosevelt was nominated, he planned to take a walk in November. “It is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas or Karl Marx or Lenin … but let me give one solemn warning: There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clean, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia.”12
Smith’s audience went giddy with delight. “It was perfect,” crowed Pierre S. du Pont.13 But as a political effort, the night proved a disaster—“one of the major tactical blunders of modern politics,” in the words of Jim Farley.14 Senate majority leader Joe Robinson of Arkansas, who had been Al Smith’s running mate in 1928, gave the administration’s response. His voice dripping with sarcasm, Robinson told a national radio audience, “It was the swellest party ever given by the du Ponts.” Smith, “the unhappy warrior,” had turned his back on the sidewalks of New York. “Now his gaze rests fondly upon the gilded towers and palaces of Park Avenue.”15 Roosevelt’s popularity soared. The Liberty League bubble collapsed so completely that by June the GOP was frantically trying to disown it.
A pall was cast over the campaign in April, when Louis Howe died. Howe had been ailing more than usual for the past year and in August 1935 had been moved from the White House to the U.S. Naval Hospital where he died peacefully in his sleep a little before midnight, April 18. “Franklin is on his own now,” Howe confided to a visitor shortly before his death.16 Roosevelt and Eleanor had visited the little man almost daily during his confinement, and his death was a heavy blow. For ER it meant the loss of a dear friend and mentor, an ally who had continued to mediate the differences between her and Franklin. After Howe’s death “communication grew harder for each of them,” wrote Blanche Wiesen Cook, “and for their work together.”17 For FDR it meant the loss of his most intimate friend and adviser—the only person except for Missy who spoke frankly regardless of the consequences. “For one reason or another, no one quite filled the void,” said Eleanor many years later. “There are not many men in this world whose personal ambition is to accomplish things for someone else, and it was some time before a friendship with Harry Hopkins … again brought Franklin some of the satisfaction he had known with Louis Howe.”18
FDR handled the funeral arrangements himself: formal services in the East Room of the White House; flags at half-staff; interment in the Episcopal cemetery at Fall River, Massachusetts. The president and his sons stood bareheaded on the snow-covered ground as Howe’s body was carried gently from the hearse to the gravesite.19 The New York Times reported that Roosevelt “appeared oblivious to everything around him, both during the service and when he returned to his car.”20 Later, FDR appointed Howe’s widow postmaster of Fall River. Admiral Richard E. Byrd, a family friend, named a peak in Antarctica “Mount Louis McHenry Howe.”21 As one historian has written, Howe’s influence will always remain hidden. He talked to FDR daily, but no one knows what they said. “His major service was relentless criticism. He was the ‘no’ man from whom the Boss could never quite escape.”22*
Howe’s death marked the departure of the last of Roosevelt’s original advisers. As FDR veered left, one after another of the early brain trusters fell by the wayside: first Lewis Douglas, then James Warburg, then Moley himself. A new set of acolytes took their places—a changing of the guard that inaugurated a new direction of march. There was the former journalist Stanley High, once editor of the Christian Herald, an easy-to-get-along-with speechwriter with a gift for memorable expressions. Sam Rosenman called him the best phrasemaker he ever worked with, and it was High who gave Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign speeches their remarkable polish.23 There were Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen, gifted legal technicians who had come to Washington under Felix Frankfurter’s aegis. The garrulous Corcoran was Mr. Outside to Cohen’s Mr. Inside—a remarkable team that not only provided Roosevelt in-house expertise in legislative drafting (sadly lacking in 1933) but was equally adept at lobbying the bills through Congress. Additional legal and economic talent was provided by Robert Jackson, William O. Douglas, and Isador Lubin, who weaved in and out of the White House.
The Republican National Convention convened in Cleveland on June 10, 1936. Caught between self-styled constitutionalists who wanted to repeal the New Deal and progressives like William E. Borah, Hiram Johnson, and Gifford Pinchot, the Grand Old Party turned to Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas. A former Bull Moose who had deserted the party in 1924 to vote for La Follette instead of Coolidge, Landon had survived Democratic tidal waves in 1932 and 1934, balanced the state budget, and, aside from an ingrained fiscal conservatism, was regarded as far more liberal than the party’s mainstream on social issues and civil rights. “America bids fair to join the procession of nations of the world in the march toward a new social and economic philosophy,” he said in his 1935 Topeka inaugural. “Some say this will lead to socialism, some communism, others fascism. For myself I am convinced that the ultimate goal will be a modified form of individual rights and ownership of property out of which will come a wider spread of prosperity and opportunity.”24
Landon’s greatest advantage was that he was not Herbert Hoover. His liability (aside from Roosevelt’s immense popularity) was his blandness. For better or worse, Landon personified Kansas: honest, decent, self-contained, hard-working, and dull. After listening to Landon on the radio, Harold Ickes said, “the Democratic Campaign Committee ought to spend all the money it can raise to send him out and make speeches.”25 Unlike the GOP platform, Landon did not seek to dismantle the New Deal and generally refrained from attacking FDR personally.26 He deplored the Liberty League and vainly sought labor’s support. As his running mate he chose the affable Chicago publisher Frank Knox, another Bull Moose, who had charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt. In World War I Knox had enlisted as a private at the age of forty-three, seen combat in France, and ended the war as a colonel of field artillery. He was more energetic and more stridently nationalist than Landon, and still looked on TR as his political idol. What the nation needed, he told an audience in 1935, was “fewer and better Roosevelts.”27
Three days after Landon was nominated, Gerald L. K. Smith announced from Chicago that he, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsen
d were joining hands to form a new political party—the Union party—dedicated to defeating Franklin Roosevelt and “the communistic philosophy of Frankfurter, Ickes, Hopkins, and Wallace.” Smith claimed more than 20 million adherents ready to join forces and elect two-term North Dakota congressman William Lemke, a weathered agrarian populist who had devoted his brief legislative career to rescuing the nation’s farmers from mortgage indebtedness. “I look upon Roosevelt,” said Lemke, “as a bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government. He doesn’t know where he came from or where he is going. As for Landon he represents the dying shadow of a past civilization.”28 Added together, Lemke’s farm constituency, Coughlin’s urban Catholic base, Townsend’s following among the elderly, and the remnants of the Share Our Wealth movement made the Union party, at least on paper, a formidable opponent.
If Roosevelt was concerned, he did not show it. The Democrats met in Philadelphia on June 23. The first order of business was repeal of the two-thirds rule, which had given the South a veto over presidential nominees since the days of Andrew Jackson. “Now that the party is in power and there is no question about my renomination,” FDR told Farley, “we should clear up the situation for all time.”29 Roosevelt gave notice to the party well in advance of the convention that he sought a rule change, and Farley entrusted the task to Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, whose father had fallen victim to the two-thirds rule in 1912.30 Clark was selected to chair the convention’s committee on rules and resolutions and, as South Carolina’s James Byrnes said afterward, pursued his goal “with all the energy of an avenging fury.”31 The committee voted 36–13 to abrogate the two-thirds rule, and the committee report was accepted by acclamation. To mollify the South (and with Roosevelt’s blessing), a provision was included that in future conventions a state’s Democratic voting record would be considered in the allocation of delegates. The significance of the repeal of the two-thirds rule—virtually without a contest—is difficult to overstate. Not only did the power of the South in the Democratic party diminish, but without repeal it is open to question whether FDR could have been renominated in 1940.
The 1936 Democratic National Convention was the most placid on record. There was no fight over the platform, no contested delegations, and, for the first time since 1840, no roll calls. Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky treated the delegates to another spellbinding keynote and brought down the house with a slam at the Supreme Court. The trouble lay not with the Constitution, said Barkley, but with the men who interpreted it. The Democratic party wanted the Court to treat the Constitution “as a life-giving charter, rather than an object of curiosity on the shelf of a museum.” When he asked rhetorically whether the Court was too sacred to be criticized, the convention roared its dissent.32 Both Roosevelt and Garner were renominated by acclamation, but it required a full day to do so. The president’s nomination was seconded by a delegate from every state and territory—fifty-five in all—and more than seventeen delegates spoke on behalf of Garner.
The high point came Saturday night, June 27, when Roosevelt addressed the convention. A crowd of more than 100,000 crammed into the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field to hear the president while millions more tuned in their radios to listen. A light drizzle had fallen but the sky had cleared, and a pale half-moon rose overhead. Instead of the usual brass bands, the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski played Tchaikovsky. When the incomparable coloratura soprano Lily Pons sang “Song of the Lark” from The Seasons, even reporters were on their feet cheering. “Something had happened to that audience,” wrote the Washington journalist Raymond Clapper. “It had been lifted, not to a cheap political emotional pitch, but to something finer. It was ready for Roosevelt.”33
Shortly before 10 P.M.—seven o’clock on the West Coast—the president’s limousine entered the stadium, circled the field, and stopped near the platform from which Roosevelt was to speak. As FDR was helped to his feet and began his laborious walk to the lectern on the arm of his son James, Stokowski led the orchestra in a stirring “Hail to the Chief” while a dozen spotlights illuminated the president’s progress. The stadium shook with applause. Smiling broadly and shaking hands as he went, Roosevelt made his way to the stage. He recognized the unmistakable white beard of the elderly poet Edwin Markham, whose “Man with a Hoe” had been a battle cry for the forgotten man during TR’s time.34 As Roosevelt reached out to greet Markham, he was jostled and lost his balance. The brace on his right leg came open and FDR went down, the pages of his speech spilling into the crowd. Mike Reilly of the Secret Service dived and got his shoulder underneath the president before he hit the ground. Farley and others clustered around to hide the scene, while Gus Gennerich knelt down and snapped FDR’s brace back into place.
Roosevelt was pale and shaken as he was helped to his feet. “Clean me up,” he ordered. “And keep your feet off those damned sheets.” While Farley and Gennerich brushed the dirt from the president’s clothes and straightened his tie, James retrieved the manuscript. “I was the damnedest, maddest white man at that moment you ever saw,” said Roosevelt. “It was the most frightful five minutes of my life.”35 When everything was in order, FDR said “Let’s go.” He started toward the platform, but, catching sight of Markham, who was quietly sobbing, the president stopped again, smiled, and took the old man’s hand in his for a moment.
When Roosevelt reached the platform, he was greeted with another thunderous ovation. He had regained his composure and stood waving and smiling as he unobtrusively reassembled his speech and put the crumpled pages in order. When the applause died down, the president struck a bipartisan pose: “I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He thanked the members of all parties who had put partisanship aside to help defeat the Depression.
“In those days we feared fear. That is why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.”
Roosevelt reminded the audience that political tyranny had been wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. But new tyrannies had arisen to threaten American liberty.
Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution.
Roosevelt’s voice rose and fell as he lifted the audience through the rhythmic cadences:
Governments can err. Presidents do make mistakes. But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
The vast audience gave Roosevelt another tumultuous ovation. When quiet settled over the stadium, the president lowered his voice and continued, reciting the sermon’s lesson, as it were:
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is asked. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
Another thundering ovation. FDR looked up, acknowledged the response, smiled, and threw his head back. He had reached his conclusion. “I accept the commission you …”36 But the cheers and applause that cascaded through the stadium drowned his last words. For ten minutes the shouting continued. FDR raised his hands over his head like a boxer. Then he raised Garner’
s. They were joined on the podium by Sara and the president’s family. The Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra played “Auld Lang Syne.” Roosevelt requested another chorus, began singing himself, and soon the whole stadium joined in. Soon the president returned to his car. With the top down, FDR took two victory laps around the track to an intense ovation. Even after he left the stadium the crowd remained, mesmerized by the evening’s events.37
As he had done after winning the nomination in 1932, Roosevelt left after the convention for a two-week sailing vacation, this time on the Sewanna, a fifty-six-foot schooner owned by New York lawyer Harrison Tweed. Once again James, John, and Franklin, Jr., crewed for the president, joined by two professional seamen provided by Mr. Tweed. “I haven’t the faintest idea where I’m going except to work to the east’ard,” FDR told reporters on July 14 as he set sail from Maine’s Pulpit Harbor.38 Instead of heading immediately to Campobello, Roosevelt sailed across the Gulf of Maine and the mouth of the Bay of Fundy to the southern tip of Nova Scotia. He made the 108-mile crossing in thirty hours and, when the weather turned heavy, personally took the 9 P.M. and 3 A.M. watches.39 For twelve days FDR sailed in and out of the small coves on Nova Scotia’s south shore before recrossing the Bay of Fundy for Campobello. “His seamanship was tested by the sail in rough, white-capped seas,” reported The New York Times. “The decks were awash in a run before a stiff southeast wind. The president, at the wheel, clad in oilskin, brought the Sewanna through the treacherous Grand passage between Digby Neck and Brier Island, where high seas and cross-currents make navigation hazardous.”40 James said later that one of the escort destroyers had attempted to follow them, hoping to pick up survivors, but “thanks to Pa’s elegant navigating we soon lost her.”41 Roosevelt spent a day and a night at Campobello and then returned to Hyde Park by train, stopping for a weekend visit in Quebec City at the invitation of Canada’s governor-general, Lord Tweedsmuir.42
