The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Two days later, as pallbearers prepared to carry his coffin to a hilltop grave at Oyster Bay, a New York police captain said to Roosevelt’s sister Corinne, “Do you remember the fun of him … ? It was not only that he was a great man, but, oh, there was such fun in being led by him.”

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had been unable to attend the funeral. They were at sea, on their way to Europe. He was going back to dismantle naval installations. She insisted she go along, too, to look after him, she said: his health was still fragile. So was their marriage. Theodore Roosevelt’s death stunned them both. He had been Franklin’s hero all his life—“the greatest man I ever knew,” he said. He had been a hero to Eleanor, too, and a vivid link to her beloved father. But Theodore Roosevelt’s death was about to provide Franklin Roosevelt with a great opportunity.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s casket being carried to his grave at Oyster Bay. “I don’t feel sorry for him,” Kermit wrote his grieving mother from France. “He wouldn’t want it, that would be the last thing. There never was anyone like him, and there won’t be.”

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  Edith and Theodore Roosevelt toward the end of their lives together. “My sorrow is so keen for the young who die,” he wrote in 1918, “that the edge of my grief is blunted when death comes to the old, of my own generation; for in the nature of things we must soon die anyhow—and we have warmed both hands before the fire of life.”

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  CHAPTER 4

  The Storm

  1920–1933

  Franklin Roosevelt, leaning heavily on his crutches, manages to attend a Pittsburgh meeting of the National Executive Conference of the Boy Scouts in 1924, the year he had once hoped to run for president. Polio kept him out of politics, but he did his best to keep his name alive by other means.

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  Breaking the Heart of the World

  The Paris Peace Talks were already under way when Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt arrived in the French capital in January 1919. They had no direct involvement; Franklin was abroad on Navy Department business. But it was impossible not to be swept up in the excitement. “I never saw anything like Paris,” Eleanor reported to her mother-in-law. “It is full beyond belief and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends! People wander the streets unable to find a bed and the prices are worse than New York for everything.”

  Much of the world hoped that Woodrow Wilson would succeed at Versailles in helping to build a postwar world based on the lofty principles of his Fourteen Points, that the Great War might really have been what he had once called it—“the war to end all wars.” To achieve that noble goal, he insisted upon the creation of the League of Nations. Without such an organization, he told his fellow delegates, “no arrangement that you can make would either set up or steady the peace of the world.”

  Other Allied leaders proved less interested in Wilson’s postwar vision than in obtaining reparations from the defeated enemy. United States senators, who would be required to ratify any treaty, were not invited to Paris, even as observers.

  In February, Wilson sailed home to sign bills passed in his absence before returning to Versailles for more weeks of negotiation. The Roosevelts boarded the same warship and lunched with the president. “The United States must go into [the League],” he told them, “or it will break the heart of the world for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested.”

  In the end, it was Woodrow Wilson’s heart that would be broken. He returned to the United States in July and personally delivered the treaty to the Senate for its approval, saying it had “come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God,” but his political enemies, led by Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend Henry Cabot Lodge, and his own stubborn refusal to compromise with others in the Senate who would have agreed to membership with reservations, combined to keep America out of the League. The president himself became a virtual prisoner in the White House, partially paralyzed by strokes, unwilling to be seen or heard in public.

  British schoolgirls strew roses in Woodrow Wilson’s path as he arrives at Dover, on his way to the Paris Peace Talks in January 1919. “It is marvelous indeed how all the world is turning to the President!” wrote one of his aides. Wilson himself was more realistic; unless he could engineer a just peace he feared people would “turn about and hiss me.”

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  Eleanor (her back turned) and FDR chat with President Wilson aboard the George Washington, the ship that carried him home from Europe in February. The uniformed young man behind the president is W. Sheffield Cowles Jr., the son of Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Bamie.

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  Wilson rides through San Francisco on September 18, 1919, part of his cross-country campaign to rally support for the League of Nations. Seven days later at Pueblo, Colorado, he would suffer the first of the series of strokes that crippled him and destroyed the last hope of American participation in the international organization.

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  That Fight Can Still Be Won

  By the summer of 1920, things looked very bad for the Democratic Party in the upcoming presidential election. The U.S. Senate had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and rejected membership in the League of Nations. Wilson’s dream, said a triumphant Henry Cabot Lodge, “is as dead as Marley’s ghost.” American voters, plagued by soaring postwar prices and alarmed by labor strife, were weary of reform and increasingly uninterested in events overseas.

  At Chicago in June, the Republicans nominated for president an amiable but undistinguished compromise candidate, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, who promised “not heroism but healing, not nostrums but normalcy.”

  To run against him, the Democrats, meeting in San Francisco, settled on another Ohioan, Governor James M. Cox.

  Cox then picked thirty-eight-year-old Franklin Roosevelt to balance the ticket: he was an easterner with an independent reputation, had a good record in wartime Washington, and—most important—bore a last name the party hoped would appeal to independent voters who had planned to cast their ballots for Theodore Roosevelt that year. “Franklin’s nomination … really didn’t require much shoving,” a friend wrote from San Francisco. “He had played a fine part all through the convention and when Cox was nominated … sublime availability geographically as well as from every standpoint was so apparent … he went through in quick time.”

  Franklin professed to be surprised. When called to the telephone to hear the news, his mother, working in the garden of her father’s old house overlooking the Hudson at Newburgh, New York, did not. She had taught her boy that nothing he ever really wanted was beyond his grasp. She wrote him right away, sending her regards to the son she now believed would be “our future President.” “All my love and interest goes to you,” she said, “and as always is centered in you.”

  The Democratic candidates traveled to Washington and went to the White House to get the ailing president’s blessing. Wilson was wheeled onto the South Portico, a woolen shawl around his shoulders despite the summer heat, his useless left arm dangling. In a voice that could barely be heard, he thanked them for coming.

  Cox told the president how much he admired the battle he’d waged for the League.

  “Mr. Cox,” Wilson said, “that fight can still be won.”

  Cox promised to make the League the central issue of his campaign.

  Wilson said he was very grateful, before being wheeled back inside.

  “His utter weakness was startling,” FDR told reporters afterward, “and I noticed tears in the eyes of Cox.… It was one of the most impressive scenes I have ever witnessed.”

  Franklin Roosevelt would never forget the sight of the president he’d served for seven years, defeated and helpless.

  Franklin (second row, center) was still just another member of the New York delegation as the 1920 Democratic convention opened in San Francisco on July 28. But he, Louis Howe, and a handful of others were already working hard behind the scenes
to impress his fellow delegates with what he and his famous name might bring to the national ticket.

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  James M. Cox and FDR, now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, leave Washington’s Union Station for the White House and a visit with the stricken president. “A huge cheering crowd,” Franklin told Eleanor, “more enthusiastic than any Washington crowd I have ever seen.”

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  We Must Go Forward or Flounder

  The formal ceremony at which Franklin was to accept the vice presidential nomination was held a few weeks later at Springwood. Five thousand people turned out to hear him speak, ruining his mother’s lawn and trooping through her house, where, as Eleanor wrote, “for so many years only family and friends were received.”

  Franklin spoke for nearly an hour. He gamely denied that Americans had tired of reform or had lost interest in the world beyond their borders. To reject the League of Nations would betray the cause of peace for which Americans had gone to war and sacrificed so much, he said. “We cannot anchor our ship of state in this world tempest, nor can we return to the placid harbor of long years ago. We must go forward or flounder.”

  The odds against victory were high, but Franklin hurled himself into the campaign, traveling by train all across the country, sometimes delivering thirteen speeches a day.

  “During three months in the year 1920,” he remembered, “I got to know the country as only a candidate—or a traveling salesman—can get to know it.”

  Theodore Roosevelt had always encouraged his young cousin’s political career, even though Franklin was a Democrat. But in the years after his death, resentment began to surface among the Republican Roosevelts of Oyster Bay. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice and his sister Corinne spoke on behalf of the Harding ticket. Franklin was a nice enough fellow, Corinne said. But “[h]ow could I vote for a man without convictions and not capable of loving anything except the United States Navy and our great big beautiful country?”

  Theodore Roosevelt Jr., still hobbling from war wounds and now a New York assemblyman, saw himself as his father’s rightful successor in national politics. He was sent by the Republican National Committee to dog Franklin’s steps. Franklin was “a maverick,” he told a Wyoming rally of his father’s old Rough Riders, “he does not have the brand of our family.”

  Franklin fired back. He reminded crowds that Warren Harding had once accused Theodore Roosevelt of being a “Benedict Arnold” for running as a Bull Moose Progressive rather than a Republican in 1912. “This is one thing at least some members of the Roosevelt family will never forget.”

  Sara Delano Roosevelt greets her boy on the Springwood portico while in the background local Democrats march up the driveway to see FDR formally accept his nomination for vice president. “I kept wishing for your father,” Sara told him later, “but I believe he knew and was with us.”

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  The Illustrated Current News introduces Franklin, the “live wire,” to its national readership. Eleanor and two of the Roosevelt sons can be seen in the crowd, just above his extended arm; his proud mother looks on from behind.

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  The Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge

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  Striking an incongruous orator’s pose, FDR reads a portion of his vice presidential acceptance speech into a recording horn at the Columbia Graphophone studio in New York. The result, on the Nation’s Forum label, was titled “Americanism” and cost $2.00.

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  Theodore Roosevelt Jr. campaigns against the Democrats. A war hero himself and determined to launch a political career of his own, he denounced Franklin for not having served in uniform, for failing to support his father in 1912, and for being an inauthentic Roosevelt. The Chicago Tribune agreed: “Admirers of Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt family cannot be fooled by a name.… The name is inspiring, the candidate is not.”

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  Campaign button, 1920. FDR’s face was little known as yet, and his family connection to the Roosevelt whom people remembered was still unclear. “I voted for your father!” western voters sometimes shouted. “You’re just like the old man!”

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  The Most Killing Thing

  In late September, Franklin wired Eleanor to join him aboard his campaign train. It may have been that he missed her—but 1920 also marked the first national election in which women had the ballot. Democrats hoped they would rally to the cause of the League and international peace. Seeing Franklin’s wife at his side could only help.

  Eleanor found life aboard the crowded, smoke-filled train claustrophobic. But she was also fascinated by the different kinds of people she met, even grew to enjoy the reporters on board—and found an unlikely new friend in Louis Howe.

  She had initially disdained her husband’s closest aide and chief strategist. She thought him coarse, crude, cynical; she insisted on calling him “Mr. Howe.” But he understood her importance to her husband’s career, encouraged her interest in politics, and consulted her about speeches. “I was flattered,” she remembered. Before long she was calling him “Louis” and they were keeping one another company during the endless card games that filled the candidate’s time between stops.

  She also did her best to keep her mother-in-law up-to-date on her son’s doings. “This is the most killing thing for a candidate I ever knew,” she wrote from Kentucky. “Franklin made two speeches and drove 26 miles over awful roads before we ever got any breakfast. There have been two town speeches since then and at least one platform speech every fifteen minutes all day! … And now he still has to get to Bowling Green for a speech in a hall! I will never be able to do without at least four large cups of coffee every day!”

  And again, a few days later: “Franklin’s head should be turned if it ever is going to be, for there is much praise and enthusiasm for him personally almost everywhere.… And then we get asked if he’s ‘Teddy’ frequently.… It is becoming almost impossible to stop Franklin now when he begins to speak. Ten minutes is always twenty, thirty is always forty-five, and the evening speeches are now about two hours! The men all get out and wave at him in front and when nothing succeeds I yank his coat-tails.”

  Franklin and Anna at Campobello in the summer of 1920. She joined her mother aboard her father’s campaign train for a time that fall. The four pictures that follow come from her personal album.

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  Snapshots from Anna’s album:

  Louis Howe, Tom Lynch (a Poughkeepsie florist’s son who handled campaign finances), Franklin, and Eleanor at a whistle-stop

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  “Father preaching” somewhere in upstate New York

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  Franklin and some of the female admirers who flocked to see him

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  A small-town brass band hired by Eleanor, probably with help from Louis Howe, to wake the train’s hungover passengers

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  People Tire Quickly of Ideals

  At Hyde Park on election day, Sara and Eleanor cast the first votes of their lives for Franklin. They didn’t count for much. Harding and Coolidge won, in a landslide.

  To add insult to injury, the new president appointed Theodore Roosevelt Jr. assistant secretary of the navy, the post both his father and Franklin had held. One Republican newspaper expressed the hope that for this young Roosevelt the job would prove a springboard to the White House, even though for “ ‘Fifth Cousin’ [Franklin] it [had] proved a political scaffold from which he suddenly dropped into oblivion.”

  FDR tried to be philosophical. The race had been “a darned fine sail!” he told a friend. “Every war brings after it a period of materialism and conservatism. People tire quickly of ideals and we are now repeating history.”

  Franklin handed out commemorative gold cuff links to those who had been closest to him during the campaign, including Louis Howe; his advance man, Stephen Early;
his press spokesman, Marvin McIntyre; and his secretary, Marguerite LeHand, whom Roosevelt and everyone else called “Missy.” They were his “Cuff-Links Gang,” he said, and they would remain at his side for years as he tried to build upon the national reputation he had made.

  Until he could mount a serious campaign for the presidential nomination in 1924, he had to earn a living. He practiced law with old friends and went to work as regional vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Company on Wall Street. He admitted that it was “mostly glad-hand stuff.” And like many members of his class, he plunged into the heedless financial speculation of the 1920s—a fleet of dirigibles that was supposed to ferry commuters between Chicago and New York; a plan to corner the market in live lobsters; oil exploration that found only worthless gas; slot machines that peddled premoistened postage stamps—so many dubious schemes that the Society for Promoting Financial Knowledge wrote to protest his misuse of what it called a “distinguished and honored name.”

  The defeated candidate at home, 1920. He joked with friends to hide his disappointment, heading one letter, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ex V.P., Canned. (Erroneously reported dead.)”

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  Franklin’s office as vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Company was in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. He was required to spend just half of every weekday here and enjoyed a salary five times what he had earned at the Navy Department.