The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The stalemate dragged on for more than two months—and might have gone on even longer if a fire hadn’t gutted the state capitol building, requiring the weary and impatient Democrats to caucus in cramped quarters across the street.

  Finally, after sixty-four days, the Tammany boss named a new candidate, an Irish American judge every bit as pliant as Sheehan. Roosevelt and the remaining insurgents gave in—and then worked hard to make a defeat seem like a victory. “I have just returned from a big fight,” Franklin told the press, “a fight that went 64 rounds, and there was fighting every second of those 64 rounds.… This fight was a free-for-all … and many on 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.”

  Theodore Roosevelt was impressed. “We are all really proud of the way you have handled yourself,” he wrote from Sagamore Hill. “Good luck to you.”

  Eleanor was fascinated by the Sheehan battle and pleased at her own ability to function apart from her mother-in-law in a wholly new world. She organized a big reception for constituents, supplied food and drink every evening for Franklin and his fellow insurgents, and got to know all kinds of people—including a number of politicians who were unable to resist her but couldn’t stand her husband. “Here in Albany,” she recalled, “began … a dual existence for me which was to last all the rest of my life. Public service, whether my husband was in or out of office, was to be part of our daily life from now on.”

  In the state senate, Roosevelt “was a very uncertain factor,” one reformer remembered. “No one could ever tell how he was going to vote.” He battled hard for a direct primary that would have allowed voters, not bosses, to choose their senators—a cause for which Theodore Roosevelt had actively campaigned—but then backed away at the last minute from a reform charter for New York City. After a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company killed 146 women, a special commission produced a flood of thirty-two reform bills. Roosevelt voted for all of them, but when the most hotly contested vote came—on a bill setting a fifty-hour-per-week work limit for women and children—he didn’t bother to show up for the debate and later pretended he had helped to lead it.

  And throughout, he maintained an earnest, pious air, compounded by what one observer remembered as “the unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up [which], combined with his great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.”

  “Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt,” Big Tim Sullivan, a ward boss, said. Looking back many years later, Franklin himself agreed. “You know,” he told an old friend, “I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.”

  Franklin Roosevelt made headlines from the moment he arrived in Albany. The New York Times hailed him as “the chief insurgent” in the struggle over the Democratic senate.

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  The very first caricature of FDR appeared in the New York Herald.

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  Tammany leaders attend the funeral of one of their own, the Bowery ward boss Big Tim Sullivan. At the left is Assemblyman Thomas J. McManus—known as “the McManus”—who had once threatened to toss Theodore Roosevelt in a blanket. Boss Charles Murphy—“Silent Charlie”—who would be Franklin Roosevelt’s antagonist for years, is at the right.

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  248 State Street, the home the Roosevelts rented during Franklin’s time in the state senate. “We had 250 constituents to lunch on inauguration day,” Eleanor wrote shortly after moving in, “and since then I have met so many people that I feel quite bewildered and I pay calls at every spare moment!”

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  In the grisly aftermath of the Triangle fire, grieving friends and family members try to identify their dead, laid out on the floor of the Twenty-sixth Street morgue. Although the doors of the sweatshop had been locked when the fire broke out, no one was found legally at fault in the trial that followed, and the owners of the building were allowed to collect $65,000 in insurance on their damaged property.

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  As late as 1913, when this photograph was taken in Washington, FDR still struck some observers as smug and superior. Many years after FDR had died, a ninety-year-old Tammany veteran would remember him as “a patronizing son of a bitch.”

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  We Stand at Armageddon

  On February 24, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt announced that he was once again a candidate for president of the United States. “My hat is in the ring,” he said, “the fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.”

  His son-in-law, Ohio Congressman Nick Longworth, said that at the prospect of a return to action, TR suddenly seemed ten years younger, “in such wonderful spirits, that he behaved like a boy.” But Edith saw what was coming: she was sure the Old Guard would deny him the Republican nomination and could see no “possible result which could give me aught but keen regret.”

  But Roosevelt was determined to run, and seven out of nineteen Republican governors promised their support.

  State party machines still picked most delegates to the Republican convention, but a dozen states were slated to hold direct primaries that year. If Roosevelt could demonstrate in those that voters overwhelmingly wanted him, he reasoned, the bosses would be unable to resist.

  The fight went on for almost four months—bitter, damaging, personal. Roosevelt called Taft a “puzzlewit,” “a fathead,” “disloyal to every canon of decency and fair play.” “Once Roosevelt gets into a fight,” one friend explained, “he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” Taft said. “But when I do fight, I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.” He denounced Roosevelt as a “freak,” a “demagogue,” “the most dangerous man we have had in this country since its origin.” But his heart wasn’t in it. One evening, a reporter came upon an exhausted Taft aboard his train. “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” the president said, and began to weep.

  When the primary season ended, Roosevelt had captured nine states—including Taft’s own home state of Ohio. It was clear that most Republican voters wanted change.

  But just as Edith had predicted, when the party met in the Chicago Coliseum in June, the Old Guard regulars who ran things were immovable. They awarded all but 19 of the 254 contested delegates to Taft. Roosevelt declared that he was being robbed and told his followers not to bother sitting through the roll call. They walked out. “The parting of the ways has come,” Roosevelt said. The Republican Party must stand “for the rights of humanity or else it must stand for special privilege.” The next day, he appeared before his supporters and prepared them for battle: “the victory shall be ours, and it shall be won as we have already won so many victories, by clean and honest fighting for the loftiest of causes. We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes. We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

  They cheered him for forty-five minutes. If they wished to form a new Progressive Party and have him make the fight, he told them, “I will make it, even if only one state should support me.”

  Roosevelt’s blood was up. He championed positions far more radical than any he had espoused before, positions that had been put forward for decades by Americans who felt left out. The Progressive platform recognized a woman’s right to vote and labor’s right to organize, and promised to curtail campaign spending, defend natural resources, limit the workday to eight hours and the workweek to six days, and provide federal insurance for the elderly, the jobless, and the sick. (Only the aspirations of African Americans were ignored: Roosevelt rejected a plank drafted by W. E. B. Du Bois calling for an end to lynching and segregation because he believed it would kill any hope of winning white votes in the South; Du Bois was so angered that he urged black voters to vote for the Democratic nominee; Roosevelt’s ol
d ally Booker T. Washington sadly said he’d stick with Taft.)

  If judges dared interfere with the new laws, Roosevelt said, they should be recalled by the voters. “When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong.”

  Roosevelt was confident he could beat Taft, but his hope of defeating the Democrats rested on their picking what he called “a reactionary.” Two of the three leading candidates were just the kind of opponents he’d hoped for, but after forty-six ballots the Democrats settled on Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. He’d only been in politics for two years, but he appealed to reformers because he’d beaten his own party machine to pass progressive legislation in his state. TR dismissed him as “merely a less virile me,” but both men understood that Wilson was the worst possible opponent from Roosevelt’s point of view. “Nothing new is happening in politics except Mr. Roosevelt,” Wilson said, “who is always new, being bound by nothing in the heavens above or in the earth below. He is now rampant and very diligently employed in splitting [his] party wide open—so that we may get in.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The gaudy spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt’s return to presidential politics, splitting the Republican Party and threatening to unseat the incumbent president he himself had helped elect, was catnip to cartoonists. J. Keppler Jr. drew Roosevelt as Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, squawking “Nevermore” to President Taft’s prospects for reelection. In his “It’s Comin’ After Us—A Graveyard Is No Place to Be on Halloween,” the angry ghost of the once-united Republican Party pursues the men who have torn it apart.

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  In “The American Newspaper Office,” cartoonist Samuel D. Ehrhart spoke for nearly everyone in the press; whatever reporters and publishers thought of TR, he always produced excitement—and reams of copy. He was, as a writer for the New York Times said, “a fountain of perennial energy, a dynamic marvel.”

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  Keppler’s “Will the History of Napoleon’s Return Repeat Itself?” Here, TR, as the ex-emperor of France, returns from exile on the island of Elba and is confronted by an army commanded by Taft but made up of men who had once been loyal to him. In Napoleon’s case he dared them to shoot him, many soldiers came over to his side, and the Bourbon king was forced to flee.

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  On August 6, 1912, TR returns in triumph to Chicago, the city where the Republican Party had denied him its nomination two months earlier. In “A Confession of Faith,” the two-hour formal acceptance speech he made to the Progressive Party convention, he dismissed the two traditional parties as “husks, … boss-ridden and privilege-controlled,” and promised bold action to protect what he called “the crushable elements” at the bottom of the American ladder. California Governor Hiram Johnson was picked as his running mate. The proceedings ended with chorus after chorus of “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”

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  The quasi-religious fervor of the Progressive Party is evident in these handouts: Progressives were called upon to sing “hymns,” not campaign songs, and to follow a “creed” rather than a platform.

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  Roosevelt campaign paraphernalia, 1912. TR’s followers officially called themselves Progressives, but because their nominee was fond of saying he was “strong as a bull moose,” they would be remembered as the Bull Moose Party.

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  Woodrow Wilson on the stump. “Of course I do not for a moment believe that we shall win,” TR told Kermit once the Democrats had picked their nominee. “The chances are overwhelmingly in favor of Wilson, with Taft and myself nearly even, and I hope with me a little ahead.”

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  Your Slave and Servant

  The 1912 election would divide the Hyde Park Roosevelts from their Oyster Bay cousins for the first time. Franklin’s mother told her son how much she wanted him to be reelected to the state senate “because I know how honest and fearless you are and that nothing will change when you are honest and right.” But she also hoped the Bull Moose Party would endorse him. “Of course it ought to, to be true to its principles.”

  Franklin Roosevelt could not help but admire the battle Theodore Roosevelt was waging. “It is indeed a marvelous thing,” he told an old friend. But he was already enlisted in the opposing army. Long before the Bull Moose Party was created, he had been a vocal supporter of Woodrow Wilson.

  In the end, Sara visited Progressive headquarters and sent money to TR’s campaign. Eleanor remained of two minds. “Franklin is … well satisfied with Mr. Wilson’s nomination,” she wrote a close friend. “But I wish [he] could be fighting now for Uncle Ted, for I feel he is in the Party of the Future.”

  Franklin would be unable to fight for himself or anyone else that fall. He was up for reelection, but he and Eleanor had both come down with typhoid fever and were confined to their house on East Sixty-fifth Street.

  Luck brought him an able stand-in. That fall, the same red Maxwell that had introduced Franklin Roosevelt to his constituents two years earlier prowled Dutchess County again in search of votes—but this time it was carrying a very different kind of passenger.

  Louis McHenry Howe was a veteran Albany newspaperman, gruff and diminutive, chain-smoking and so famously homely he sometimes answered the phone by saying, “Medieval Gnome here.” Howe loved politics and political maneuvering, was drawn to power but knew he could never win it for himself, and came to believe that the closest he could ever get was to make himself indispensable to young Franklin Roosevelt. He had already begun to address his employer, only partly joking, as “Beloved and Revered Future President.”

  Howe crisscrossed Roosevelt’s district. He shook hundreds of hands, promised jobs on behalf of the candidate wherever he could, and introduced a shrewd innovation: mimeographed “personalized” letters to farmers, fishermen, and apple growers promising each group special legislation. And he placed newspaper ads denouncing Republican bosses and promising support for woman suffrage.

  Dear Mr. Roosevelt …

  Here is your first ad.… 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. Please wire O.K., if it’s all right.

  Your slave and servant,

  Louis Howe

  Louis Howe (left) at work as an Albany stringer for the New York Herald a year or two before he was asked to take over State Senator Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign for reelection in 1912. Howe “had an enormous interest in … having power,” Eleanor once explained to a friend, “and if he could not have it … himself, he wanted it through someone he was influencing, he loved power.”

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  Ill with typhoid in the fall of 1912, FDR needed to find a way to be reelected without displaying the kind of ebullient charm he demonstrates here, greeting his former pastor on a street in Oswego.

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  Advertisements like this one, written by Louis Howe and paid for by the candidate, helped turn the trick—and won their author a lifelong job.

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  The Great Fight for Righteousness

  From the first, Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party campaign was crippled. Many of those who had urged him to challenge Taft—including five of the seven Republican governors—backed off when he became a Bull Moose. Those who did rally to him were devoted but disorganized and often amateurish.

  Taft mostly stayed off the campaign trail, convinced his cause was hopeless, but he issued statements denouncing what he saw as Roosevelt’s dangerous radicalism. “One who so lightly regards constitutional principles, and especially the independence of the judiciary,” was unfit for the presidency, he said, adding, “I say this sorrowfully, but I say it with the conviction of the truth.”

  Conservative newspaper publishers, Republican
and Democratic alike, shared Taft’s alarm. TR, said the Houston Post, had been “the first president whose chief personal characteristic was mendacity, the first to glory in duplicity, the first braggart, the first bully.”

  Roosevelt and Wilson each traveled the country by train, and TR sometimes delivered thirty whistle-stop speeches a day, shadowboxing through the caboose to maintain his energy before stepping out onto the platform. He professed to love what he called “the deluge of travel and dust.”

  Again and again, he denounced his Democratic opponent as a secret advocate of state’s rights, a false progressive masquerading as a friend of an active federal government. But when an aide suggested that something be made of rumors concerning the married Democratic candidate’s relationship with a divorcée, TR laughed it off: “You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like an apothecary clerk.”

  Both he and Wilson shared Wilson’s view that “the President is at liberty in both law and conscience to be as big as he can,” and both men lashed out at the giant trusts and monopolies at every stop. But Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” called only for their regulation, while Wilson’s “New Freedom” seemed to suggest that his policies would actually break them up.

  On the evening of October 14, Theodore Roosevelt was in Milwaukee standing in his open automobile in front of the Gilpatrick Hotel, waving his hat to the crowd. A delusional German immigrant named John Schrank, standing just seven feet away, aimed a pistol at his chest. He had been stalking his target for a month, convinced the ghost of William McKinley was directing his hand, that it was his sacred duty to prevent Roosevelt from winning a third term.