Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  TR’s successor, William Howard Taft, had proven inept, unexciting, and seemingly dominated by Republican regulars representing the interests of trusts and big bankers. “Insurgents” in both parties fought with machine regulars. Wanting to return control of government to the people, they advocated direct democracy in the form of the initiative, the referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the direct election of US senators.

  Who would lead the people? TR provided a compelling family example. Franklin’s Groton and Harvard educations explicitly prepared young men for leadership. By the summer of 1910, Franklin was plotting a run for a two-year term in the New York State Senate. True to his father’s legacy, he would do it as a Democrat, hoping to capitalize on the bitter Republican split between the Roosevelt and Taft factions.

  Franklin requested Ted’s benevolent neutrality through Theodore’s sister Bamie. In August, she relayed the former president’s response: “Franklin ought to go into politics without the least regard as to where I speak or don’t speak.” Though not exactly ironclad, it was assurance enough. (TR would speak in the district that fall and make no mention of either Franklin or his opponent.)3

  The heavily rural senate district, covering three counties located between the Hudson River and the Connecticut border, was normally solidly Republican. The local Democratic leaders were happy to have a candidate who would finance his own race and provide some extra money to the party coffers. Roosevelt adapted easily and energetically to the demands of campaigning. He spent only a few days at Campobello with Eleanor; pregnant with their fourth child, she vacationed there with the children, their nurse, and Sara. Returning to New York, she gave birth on September 23 to the baby boy they named Elliott. Preoccupied with her children, she remained aloof from the campaign.

  On October 6, a party committee formally nominated Roosevelt for the state senate seat. He spent the next month barnstorming the district, often accompanied by Democratic candidates for other positions. They traveled in a fire-engine-red Maxwell touring car, which Roosevelt hired for $20 a day. The auto had neither top nor windshield, forcing the passengers to wear dusters over their suits and to keep rain slickers at the ready on cloudy days. The rutted rural roads were unwelcoming and the pace grinding: they stopped wherever a group of a few people could be found and usually attended a planned rally in the evening.

  Roosevelt was good at “retail” one-to-one politics. Shaking every hand he could reach, he spoke to farmers, small-town shopkeepers, and immigrant railroad workers with an unforced geniality. He began every speech with the phrase “my friends” and kept his oratory short. Spending freely, he blanketed his district with campaign buttons, posters, and newspaper advertisements.4

  In a normal year Franklin’s wealth and intensity might have been irrelevant. But Theodore Roosevelt, calling for a “New Nationalism” that would establish the power of the people over trusts, bosses, and reactionary judges, was bringing progressivism to a high tide and splitting the Republican Party. Franklin seldom missed an opportunity to declare, “I’m not Teddy,” but he made ample use of TR’s favorite exclamation: “Bully!”5

  He not only did a fair TR impression but also talked like a nonpartisan independent opposed to machine rule and its abuses, determined to restore integrity to democratic government: “I am pledged to no man; I am influenced by no special interests, and so I shall remain.” His rejection of political machines and the corruption they generated, along with his espousal of “honesty & economy & efficiency in our State senate,” resonated with both the tone of the progressive movement and the respectable Democratic conservatism of Grover Cleveland. Appealing to Republican progressives, he praised New York’s chief executive, Charles Evans Hughes.6

  As the campaign entered its last weekend, an exhausted Franklin was perhaps not in his best speaking form. Eleanor, who had not yet heard him make a political speech, came to his last two major appearances. She recalled the occasions vividly:

  He spoke slowly, and every now and then there would be a long pause, and I would be worried for fear he would never go on. . . .

  He looked thin then, tall, high-strung and, at times, nervous. White skin and fair hair, deep-set blue eyes and clear-cut features. No lines as yet in his face, but at times a set look of his jaw denoted that this apparently pliable youth had strength and Dutch obstinacy in his make-up.7

  He gave his final talk to a crowd of friends and well-wishers at Hyde Park. “You have known what my father stood for before me, you have known how close he was to the life of this town, and I do not need to tell you that it is my desire to follow always in his footsteps.” The next day, he won, polling nearly 52 percent of the 30,276 votes cast and benefitting from a national trend of Republican malaise that threw control of the legislature and the governorship to the Democrats in New York and numerous other states.8

  Franklin had displayed energy and earnestness, as well as shrewdness in identifying himself with dominant political sentiments, but it remained to be seen whether this young Galahad was a man of destiny or soon to be yesterday’s story.

  Roosevelt took a four-month lease at $400 a month on a large three-story Albany house a few blocks from the capitol. The $1,600 in rent alone exceeded his $1,500 annual legislative salary. Eleanor rented out their New York town house and supervised the move of the household—the three children, an English nurse, a “German girl,” a wet nurse “who spoke no language known to us,” and three other servants. Pleased that her son had won election to “a really fine & dignified position,” Sara came up for his legislative debut but had no intention of staying. For nearly three more decades, she would always be just over the horizon in the lives of her son and daughter-in-law, seldom an intrusive day-to-day presence.9

  January 2, 1911—inauguration day for the new governor, John Alden Dix—was loud and happy. After the ceremony, Senator Roosevelt returned to his residence, already swarming with as many as four hundred visitors from his district. They consumed large quantities of chicken salad, sandwiches, coffee, beer, and cigars before Franklin and Assemblyman Ferdinand Hoyt marched with them to the railroad station and saw them off.10

  The New York Democratic Party was, like all American political parties, a large, complex aggregation, but it was easily lumped into two factions—the respectables (old stock, northern European, High Church Protestant, affluent, well educated, conspicuously high-minded, with a small cadre of prosperous German Jews at the fringe) and the rabble (more recent immigrant stock, southern and eastern European, mostly Catholic or Jewish, mostly poor and working-class, ill educated, notably pragmatic in their social and political values). In Roosevelt’s world, respectables generally considered themselves the class fit to run things and resented their usurpation by a rabble that sold its votes to roguish machine grafters. The chief rogue in New York politics was Boss Charles Francis Murphy of New York’s infamous Tammany Hall.

  The machines mobilized the votes of the poor and the working classes by providing small favors and rudimentary social services. The men at the top tended to be from older waves of immigration, usually Irish. They invariably parlayed their organizing skills into considerable wealth for themselves. They might often aspire to the role of gentlemen but maintained power by force and fraud when necessary, stuffing ballot boxes, utilizing street thugs, and financially ruining opponents. They tolerated a chain of graft all the way down the line from the mayor’s office to the lowliest license clerk or policeman, while taking the biggest cuts for themselves. Such was the system in one American city after another. Politics was about transactions, not ideals. The organization provided for its followers—jobs, cash handouts, food baskets, buckets of coal—and the followers returned the favor with votes.

  The gulf between a Roosevelt and the bosses involved not just civic idealism; it extended to religion and ethnicity, inviting latent snobbery on Roosevelt’s part and palpable resentment on Murphy’s part. A Sara or Eleanor Roosevelt mi
ght dismiss Tammany grandees such as Tom Grady or Big Tim Sullivan with such adjectives as “horrid.” They might think of Murphy—a former shipyard worker, streetcar conductor, and saloon keeper who affected the appearance of a middle-aged gentleman and maintained a large estate on Long Island—as a lace-curtain Irishman with pretensions beyond his social pedigree. Kinder and gentler than most of his peers, Murphy kept aloof from organized vice and crime, but everyone knew that many lucrative municipal contracts and other favors required his approval and assumed its bestowal was the source of his considerable wealth. Men like Franklin Roosevelt, who genuinely believed in Yankee Protestant high ideals of civic virtue, found the bosses intolerable. Franklin also knew well that Cousin Ted had gotten his start in politics by fighting them.11

  Ted was clearly Franklin’s model during his first year in Albany. There is a story that at the opening legislative session, as the tall young patrician walked down to the well of the senate to present his credentials, Tammanyite Big Tim Sullivan told his colleague Tom Grady, “Well, if we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the dock. The Roosevelts run true to form, and this kid is likely to do for us what the Colonel is going to do for the Republican Party, split it wide open.”12

  Boss Murphy wanted strong leaders in Albany. He had given the nod to Alfred E. Smith for Speaker of the assembly. For Democratic senate leader, he backed Robert F. Wagner, a Tammany loyalist widely respected for his talent, relative independence, and breadth of view. Roosevelt confided to his diary that Wagner “has good intentions; the only obstacle is the pressure of his own machine.”13

  The first task of the legislature, with assemblymen and senators voting together as a committee of the whole, would be to choose a new US senator. (The Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution, providing for direct popular election of senators, was two years away from adoption.) The New York State Assembly comprised 114 Democrats and 86 Republicans. The Democratic caucus would name the party’s candidate by binding majority vote. The reality then was that fifty-eight legislators, mobilized by the machine, would choose New York’s new senator. Murphy let it be known that he backed William F. Sheehan.

  Roosevelt saw Sheehan (“Blue-Eyed Billy” to his friends) as a big, provocative red flag. A wealthy and influential New York corporate attorney, Sheehan was a partner in a prestigious law firm and director of several railroad and public utility companies. Thirty years earlier, as an up-and-coming politician on the make in Buffalo, he had displayed (or so his enemies asserted) flexible political morals and had tangled acrimoniously with then mayor (and later governor) Grover Cleveland. So far as Franklin was concerned, Sheehan had been a political enemy of his father. He joined a fragile and decidedly motley coalition of twenty-one Democratic dissenters—enough in combination with the Republicans to block Sheehan’s election. They backed Edward Shepard, a much respected old Cleveland associate with a reputation for independence but little different from Sheehan in his social and economic views.14

  Roosevelt quickly became the movement’s chief spokesman and public ringleader. He had an attention-grabbing name and, like Theodore before him, was righteously spoiling for a fight. “There is no question in my mind that the Democratic party is on trial,” he wrote in his diary. The insurgents gathered at his house each morning, marched to the capitol to cast their votes against Sheehan, returned in the afternoon after the session adjourned, went their separate ways again for dinner, then came back for late-evening talk that Roosevelt described as mostly sitting and swapping stories “like soldiers at the bivouac fire.”15

  Franklin had far less to lose than most of his comrades, but he had no illusions that the fight would be easy. The insurgents faced mortgage foreclosures, loss of government contracts, and deprivation of patronage. Roosevelt himself was chair of the Senate Forest, Fish and Game Committee; the senate leadership fired a friend he had appointed as committee clerk. Tammanyites, including Al Smith, freely charged the insurgents with anti–Irish Catholic prejudice, although at least three of them were practicing Catholics. The Catholic bishop of Syracuse joined in the attack.16

  Similar battles played out across the country. In New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson was locked in a senate election struggle with the machine that had nominated and elected him. There was a principle greater than loyalty, Wilson declared: that of respect for democracy and duty to support the winner of the nonbinding senatorial primary. By the end of January, Wilson had prevailed, crushing the power of Democratic boss James Smith; in the process, he electrified progressives all over the country.

  So, to a lesser extent, did Franklin Roosevelt. His name, youth, good looks, articulateness, and leadership-class demeanor attracted national attention. A New York Globe writer sketched a man “physically fit to command” with “a glow of country health in his cheeks.” She noted especially his stubborn, aggressive chin and firm lips that “part often in a smile over even white teeth—the Roosevelt teeth.”17

  Always polite and conciliatory, Franklin stood firm and resolute in pursuit of fundamental principles. Were he and his fellows bolting from the Democratic Party? Of course not; they were simply trying to save it from a disastrous mistake. Had the dispute become too personal? Roosevelt went out of his way to maintain cordial relations with Murphy, Wagner, Smith, and other Democratic leaders. He shrugged off personal attacks obviously directed from the top. At the same time, he consistently returned to the theme of fundamental conflict. Tammany was “an insurmountable obstacle in the way of party success.” The row was between principled men and machine hacks. Was he the leader of those principled men? “Leader? I should not claim that title. There really is no leader.” And what of his “uncle-in-law,” the former president? “I am sure that any fight for principle would have his blessing and approval.”18

  This was a difficult act, but one with great appeal to a middle-class public tired of machine mediocrity and unthinking partisanship. Profiled in newspapers and magazines across the country, Franklin Roosevelt had become a household name. Gratifying as all the articles must have been, he probably most cherished a handwritten note he received at the end of January:

  Dear Franklin,

  Just a line to say we are really proud of the way you have handled yourself. Good luck to you! Give my love to dear Eleanor.

  Always yours,

  Theodore Roosevelt 19

  Despite wide recognition by the end of January that his candidacy was hopeless, Sheehan refused for weeks to withdraw. The dissenters held together, but the pressure to break ranks grew increasingly stronger. Murphy suggested replacing him with a respected judge, Victor Dowling. The insurgents agreed. Dowling, however, refused and endorsed Judge James Aloysius O’Gorman, a former grand sachem of the Tammany organization, actually closer to Murphy than Sheehan, but possessing a clean, if undistinguished, record. The rebels had been smoothly baited and switched.

  Half the insurgents proceeded dutifully to the final Democratic senate caucus and voted for O’Gorman. The rest, led by Roosevelt, stayed away but attended the legislative session necessary to ratify the caucus decision. Amid the jeers and catcalls of the Tammany loyalists, Roosevelt struggled to explain his position: “We have followed the dictates of our consciences and done our duty. . . . We are Democrats—not irregulars, but regulars. I take pleasure in casting my vote for the Honorable James A. O’Gorman.”20

  By any objective standard, the insurgency had ended, not with a bang but with a whimper. A sharply critical New York Times editorial observed that Sheehan had been considerably better qualified and far more independent of Tammany. It accused the insurgents of a “miserable surrender” that had rendered Murphy more powerful than ever. The judgment made a lot of sense. At the time, no one could predict that O’Gorman would be far more independent than expected.21

  Roosevelt responded by declaring victory. “I have just come from Albany and the close of a long fight which lasted sixty-four rounds,”
he told a YMCA dinner in New York a day after O’Gorman’s election. “Some got battered, but you can see by me that there were few scratches on the insurgents.” Much depended on whether the insurgency had been about defeating Sheehan or beating Tammany. Roosevelt chose the first version, struck a good pose, and came out of the fight looking strong and confident.22

  However dubious his triumph, he had displayed impressive skills as a spokesman and conciliator. It had been an achievement to hold so disparate a group together for three months. He and his fellows, if outfoxed in the end, had made their point and put themselves on the side with momentum in American politics—that of popular democracy. But how could an anti-Tammany Democrat with a bare majority in a Republican district move beyond a short legislative career in the world of New York politics?

  In 1912, Frances Perkins, a young social worker, lobbied for state legislation to limit the work of women and children to fifty-four hours per week. She had met Roosevelt socially before he was elected to the state senate and written him off as just another Harvard fop. What she saw of him in Albany confirmed that impression: “I have a vivid picture of him operating on the floor of the Senate: tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.” Young Roosevelt, she thought, “really didn’t like people very much,” lacked humility, and displayed a self-righteous certitude. Many legislators heartily disliked him. He did not display the warmth and human sympathy of a Tim Sullivan or Tom Grady. A gap existed between his public democratic persona and his private hauteur.23