American Experiment (287 page)

“As we enter this new battle, let us keep always present with us some of the ideals of the Party: The fact that the Democratic Party by tradition and by the continuing logic of history, past and present, is the bearer of liberalism and of progress, and at the same time of safety to our institutions.” The failure of the Republican leadership—he would not attack the Republican party but only the leadership, “day in and day out,” he promised— might bring about “unreasoning radicalism.”

Roosevelt was speaking in his full, resonant voice. “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.

“This, and this only, is a proper protection against blind reaction on the one hand and an improvised, hit-or-miss, irresponsible opportunism on the other.”

The candidate then challenged members of both parties: “Here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us; here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past, and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their Party.” The people wanted a genuine choice, not a choice between two reactionary doctrines. “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.”

Roosevelt then made a series of positive—and prophetic—promises to the Democracy’s constituencies: protection for the consumer, self-financing public works for the jobless, safeguarding land and timberland for the farmer, repeal of the Prohibition amendment for the thirsty, jobs for labor, a pared-down government for businessmen. But Roosevelt repeatedly sounded a higher note, especially as he concluded.

“On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.

“This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

“He had come in an airplane, symbol of the new age, touching the imagination of the people,” wrote a reporter. But his roots lay in a horse-and-buggy era that had transmuted relentlessly into the railroad epoch, and then into the age of the automobile. Both in his heritage and in his growth he could say with Walt Whitman that he embraced multitudes.

He was born January 30, 1882, in a mansion high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. Breast-fed for a year by his mother, Sara, he grew up in a home of enveloping security and tranquility. An only child, he lived among doting parents and nurses, affectionate governesses and tutors, in a house that was warm and spacious though by no means palatial. Outside lay the grounds peopled by gardeners, coachmen, stable boys, farmhands. North and south along the river towered the mansions of the truly wealthy. It was the world of Currier & Ives come to life—sleighing on country rides past farmhouses wreathed in snow, stopping with his father in barnyards filled with horses and dogs, swimming and fishing in the majestic river, digging out of snowstorms—most memorably the great blizzard of 1888.

Occasionally the long mournful whistle of a train passing below carried into the home, but it brought no hint of the hates and fears simmering in the nation’s urban and industrial world in the 1880s—no hint of the wants and needs of immigrants pouring by the hundreds of thousands into the city a hundred miles to the south, of the desperate strikes that swept the nation’s railroads, of the bone-deep misery of countless southern and western farmers and their wives, of the massacre of workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The Roosevelts traveled by rail but never left their protected environment of family carriages, private railroad cars, of ships where there were always, as Sara said, “people one knows.” Places they visited teemed with cousins and aunts and friends of their own social class. Nor did young Franklin leave this social cocoon when he departed for
Groton, one of the most exclusive schools in the nation, and later for Harvard’s “Gold Coast.”

It was hardly a life to ignite political ambition or a passionate lust for power, if these result from early material or psychological blows to self-esteem, as Harold D. Lasswell and others have contended. It was easy to understand how Roosevelt’s future friends and rivals strove to overcome a sense of insecurity and inferiority in childhood: Winston Churchill, virtually ignored by his socially ambitious mother and by a father slowly going insane from syphilis, cabined and bullied in the cruel and rigid world of Victorian boarding schools; Benito Mussolini, son of a half-socialist, half-anarchist father, a mean-spirited and fiery-tempered youth, expelled from school at the age of ten for stabbing and wounding another boy; Adolf Hitler, orphaned in his teens and cast out into vagrancy; Josef Dzhugashvili, later Stalin, living in the leaky adobe hut of a peasant cobbler in Georgia, a land seared by ancient hatreds.

Yet more subtle and significant psychological forces were molding young Franklin’s personality. The Roosevelt and Delano families had been established long enough on the banks of the Hudson to despise the vulgar parvenus who were pushing to power and riches in the boom times of the nineteenth century. But the Roosevelts themselves were parvenus compared with the Schuylers and Van Rensselaers who had been living along the river for a century or more. Sara Roosevelt’s father had made his fortune by selling Turkish and Indian opium to Chinese addicts. The comfortably well-off Roosevelts could not ignore the far wealthier families around them; for the rest of his life FDR would show an almost obsessive interest in the homes and trappings of the ostentatious “nouveaux riches,” such as the Vanderbilts’ baronial mansion a few miles to the north.

Nor could young Franklin escape direct confrontations with the social elite. At Groton he was barred from the inner social and athletic circles; at Harvard he was not tapped by Porcellian, the most exclusive club. He was seared by these rejections far more than he admitted in his breezy, dutiful letters to his parents. Many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, later wondered whether Franklin’s rejection by young patricians, most of whom would go into brokerages and banking, led him to “desert his class” and to identify with life’s outcasts. Being a Porcellian rejectee hardly catapulted Franklin into the proletariat; yet these class and psychic privations had a part in shaping his later views.

Far more important were the times he lived in—the heyday of turn-of-the-century progressivism, a muckraking press, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal. And always there was the role model, in the other major branch of the Roosevelt family, of “Uncle Ted” himself—the New York
City police commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, seemingly single-handed conqueror of San Juan Hill, and, during Franklin’s Harvard years, President of the United States. Even more, there was the President’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt.

Much has been made of Eleanor Roosevelt’s bleak childhood—of her unloving mother who died when she was eight; of her handsome, dashing, adored father who showered endearments on her but deserted her again and again and then for good, dying of drink when she was ten; of her life as an orphan, neglected by her grandmother, tyrannized by her governess, and frightened by her alcoholic uncles. By her early teens she was a timid, sensitive, awkward child, with a wistful shadowed face and a tall figure usually attired in a shapeless, overly short dress. But this was not the Eleanor Roosevelt whom Franklin courted and married. By her late teens she had become far more at ease and poised in her family relationships, and with her warm and sympathetic manner, her expressive face and soft yet alert eyes, and above all her lively intelligence and quick compassion she had won a host of friends of both sexes. Her metamorphosis was largely the product of caring teachers—especially of the extraordinary Marie Souvestre, headmistress of the school Eleanor attended in England, a sophisticated, sharing, and demanding daughter of the French Enlightenment who drew Eleanor to good literature, foreign cultures and languages, and social radicalism.

The two young Roosevelts who ardently plighted their troth in March 1905 felt very much in rapport, but there were deep potential divisions between them—and within each of them. In her early years Eleanor had developed a compassion for fellow sufferers—for all sufferers—that she was never to lose. She was haunted for months by the tormented face of a ragged man who had tried to snatch a purse from a woman sitting near her. Roosevelt in those years was still moved far more by a patrician concern for people, in the abstract, by noblesse oblige—or by what his mother preferred to call “honneur oblige.” Eleanor showed her concern day after day by teaching children at her settlement house. When Franklin once accompanied her to a tenement where one of her charges lay ill, he came out exclaiming, “My God, I didn’t know people lived like that!”

Franklin’s ambition seemed to soar with the taste of office rather than in advance of it. Unexpectedly a run for the state senate opened up for him; once nominated, he plunged into the struggle with enormous dash and energy, and won. He entered the state senate as a vaguely progressive anti-Tammanyite; in office he led a fight against Tammany and moved so far to the left as to become virtually a “farm-labor” legislator. A Wilsonian in 1912, he gained the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy without
much effort—but once in the job he became the most vigorous and committed navy man since Teddy Roosevelt himself had held the job. Action—and skill in action—spurred further ambition.

While Eleanor had her own values, commitments, and purposes, she was so self-effacing as to seem to lack ambition. Life closed in around her after her marriage. She had not only a mother-in-law who refused to let her son go but a husband who saw a clear demarcation between his public career and her family role. “I listened to all his plans with a great deal of interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.” Having six babies in ten years—one died at seven months—narrowed and deepened her personal life. Her public role became a pale reflection of her husband’s—entertaining legislators in Albany, doing the rounds of government wives in Washington, helping with Red Cross and other war activities. Her husband was not always supportive. When to Washington’s amusement she blundered into telling
The New York Times
that in her wartime food-saving effort she had found that “making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable,” he wrote her cuttingly, “All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!”

Most devastating of all to Eleanor’s self-esteem was her husband’s wartime romance with Lucy Mercer. “Franklin’s love of another woman brought her to almost total despair,” according to Joseph P. Lash, but “she emerged from the ordeal a different woman.” She said years later, “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time. I really grew up that year.” She insisted that he break off with Lucy—or with her. A chastened husband, aware that a divorce would be politically devastating, and probably also under motherly pressure, chose the former. He knew too that his wife could be a great political asset, especially since women at last had won the right to vote in national elections.

Invited to join his campaign train when he ran for Vice President in 1920, Eleanor Roosevelt got her fill of the most grueling kind of electioneering. The Democratic debacle sent Roosevelt back to private life and gave his wife some hope of liberation from politics. This was not to be. Struck down by polio, Roosevelt endured intense physical and psychological pain with outward stoicism—he was rarely heard to complain—while Eleanor sought to keep the family on an even keel, served as her husband’s political stand-in, and tried desperately to maintain her own composure as the mother of five children ranging from five to fifteen years old.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt emerged from their ordeal tempered and matured, but not fundamentally changed in their political attitudes.
Having twice been defeated—in 1920 and earlier, in 1914, when he had made a try for the U.S. Senate—Roosevelt would proceed slowly, regaining his political base as he sought to regain his ability to walk. He would continue to pursue political
office
—making necessary compromises to achieve it but proceeding boldly on policy once in power. Eleanor would continue to pursue political
goals
—peace, help to the poor, women’s rights, clean government—by working in the organizations necessary to achieve them. She became increasingly active in the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903 by Jane Addams, in peace efforts, and in the tedious job of trying to rebuild the New York State Democratic party. Everyday politics still did not excite her; Franklin was the politician, she said later, and she the agitator. So she acted within the boundaries set by her husband, who saw competitive politics as essentially men’s business even while he sought laws that would aid women.

These two legacies divided the couple, now both in their forties, as they moved back into public life during the twenties—as Roosevelt accepted his party’s draft for governor in 1928, as he campaigned vigorously and won a narrow victory while Eleanor intensified her party and campaign work, as he sought to carry out his liberal promises often against recalcitrant Republican legislators, as he won a landslide reelection for governor in 1930. The closer he came to the presidential nomination fight, the more he seemed to compromise, from Eleanor’s standpoint—on the League of Nations, on Prohibition, on Tammany, on states’ rights. But Roosevelt had a far better sense of the electoral complexities. On the League issue in particular he was the target of front-page fulminations by publisher William Randolph Hearst, who, Roosevelt knew, could influence delegates to the 1932 Democratic convention as well as newspaper readers. He caved in to Hearst. Eleanor conspired with her husband’s staff members and friends to stiffen his resolve. When an angry Wilsonian came in to berate him for a “shabby” statement on the League, he expressed regret and then asked his visitor if she would help make peace between Eleanor and him. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days!”