American Experiment (288 page)

One hard political fact confronted Roosevelt—the disheveled, fragmented state of the Democratic party, whose convention a candidate could carry only by winning two-thirds of the delegate vote. The party wielded little political muscle as a national organization; during the mid-twenties the Democrats had not even had a national headquarters but rather lived off the largesse of millionaires like John J. Raskob and Bernard Baruch. Nationally the party was composed of ideological and regional shards, each of which seemed to be represented in the candidates who entered the nomination fight after Roosevelt took the lead—Al Smith for the urban
Democracy; House Speaker John Garner for the Southwest; demagogic Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma for the rural West; Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland for the old Jeffersonian, states’ rights Democrats; Newton D. Baker for the Wilson internationalists; and a string of favorite sons.

Such a panoply of rivals both fortified and weakened Roosevelt—they fragmented his opposition but also threatened to slice off chunks of his own nationwide support. But he had many assets, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized them: “a familiar name, a charming personality, demonstrated political popularity, an impressive executive record in Albany, a dramatic personal victory over illness, a wide and well-cultivated acquaintance across the country.” With the devoted and expert help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Jim Farley, Sam Rosenman, and a host of others, Roosevelt’s bandwagon carried him to victory through a string of primaries, aside from a win by the ever-popular Smith in Massachusetts and by Garner in California. The Roosevelt forces arrived at the Chicago convention with a handsome majority of the delegates but tantalizingly short—by about 200 votes—of the necessary two-thirds.

Feverishly the governor’s foes tried to head him off, clasping hands across ancient fissures in the party. The Roosevelt campaign effort almost blew up in Chicago when a group of FDR enthusiasts launched an attack against the two-thirds rule, thus giving the opposition a moral issue about “changing the rules of the game” and jeopardizing the support of Southerners who had long used the rule to protect racial and regional power. Roosevelt, who had originally planned to challenge the rule but had now lost control of the timing, retreated as gracefully as possible.

So he would have to attain the magic two-thirds, and he did, through the disarray of his opponents, the unflagging efforts of Farley and other FDR men on the convention floor and in the smoke-filled rooms, and—at a critical moment after the third ballot—the consummation of the candidate’s patient courting of Texas’s Garner and California senator William G. McAdoo and his genuflection before Hearst. Fearing that Baker might win if Roosevelt did not, the Californians and the Texans pooled their poker hands. The big card was the vice-presidential nomination for Garner. Once he agreed—reluctantly, because he had no great wish to quit the Speakership—the deal was made. To McAdoo was given the exquisite satisfaction of settling the convention score of 1924, when he had been denied the nomination by Al Smith.

“California came here to nominate a President of the United States,” he shouted in the teeth of the howling and booing delegates. “She did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating
contest like that of 1924.” More hisses and groans. “California casts 44 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Then bedlam.

“Good old McAdoo,” Roosevelt exclaimed by his radio at Hyde Park. While Eleanor went to the kitchen to cook bacon and eggs, he began planning for the next morning’s rendezvous with the waiting plane.

Out of the pandemonium in the Chicago Stadium a young novelist, John Dos Passos, walked down West Madison Street. Gradually the din of speeches faded from his ears. No one in the seedy crowd about him seemed to know of the “historic” event that had just taken place. He stepped down a flight of stairs into the darkness of the roadway under Michigan Avenue.

“This world too has its leisure class,” he noted. “They lie in rows along the ledges above the roadway, huddled in grimed newspapers, gray sag-faced men in worn-out clothes, discards … men who have lost the power to want. Try to tell one of them that the
gre-eat
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the
gre-eat
state of New York, has been nominated by the
gre-eat
Democratic party as its candidate for President, and you’ll get what the galleries at the convention gave Mr. McAdoo when they discovered that he had the votes of Texas and California in his pocket and was about to shovel them into the Roosevelt bandwagon, a prolonged and enthusiastic
Boooo.
Hoover or Roosevelt, it’ll be the same cops.”

The Democrats had their man. But who was he? Perhaps those who had sized him up best were the convention delegates and their leaders. Roosevelt was attractive, ambitious, electable, a reliable deal-maker; he was “available.” But the press and the pundits were looking for a higher quality—leadership. In this they had found Roosevelt lacking.
The New Republic
had viewed him as utterly without the kind of “great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina” that underlay strong leadership. He hedged on everything, complained the Washington
Post.
Wishy-washy, said Henry Mencken. “Too easy to please”—not the dangerous enemy of anything, Walter Lippmann had said earlier in the year. “In boldness of political leadership,” he was “certainly no Cleveland or Wilson,” said
The Outlook.

This criticism galled Roosevelt, but he could only respond privately. “Can’t you see,” he wrote to a Wilsonian outraged over his desertion of the League, “that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours—but have you ever stopped to consider that there is a difference between ideals and the methods of attaining them? Ideals do not change, but methods do change with every generation and world circumstance.

“Here is the difference between me and some of my fainthearted friends:
I am looking for the best modern vehicle to reach the goal of an ideal while they insist on a vehicle which was brand new and in good running order twelve years ago. Think this over! And for heaven’s sake have a little faith.” But his friends felt that
he
was being fainthearted. They knew, moreover, that on some issues he
was
consistent and committed—on big questions, such as the need for an activist government and a liberal Democratic party, and on specific issues, such as the vital role of electric power in his state and nation. He was not even consistent in his inconsistency.

Those who examined Roosevelt’s inner circle for a clue to his fundamental and enduring beliefs were no less puzzled. By campaign time Roosevelt had collected around himself a group of “brain trusters” as diverse as they were talented. There were Columbia University political scientist Raymond Moley, a onetime city reformer who had since become most concerned about the “anarchy of concentrated economic power”; Adolf Berle, a child prodigy at Harvard who had continued to be so prodigious in law and economics that H. G. Wells once said of him that his worldview “seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and thought, but better arranged and closer to reality”; Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economist who was both a romantic and a planner, an intellectual experimenter and a governmental centralizer. These men, united in their concern over the chaos, inefficiency, and cruelty of capitalist breakdown, were divided over monetary and other economic issues.

Also close to Roosevelt was another penetrating mind but of quite different cast—Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, an irrepressible pursuer of legal justice and good conversation, who abhorred Utopian ideas for social reconstruction and called for economic decentralization and fair play through regulation of banking and securities. He was carrying the flag of his mentor, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, which was also the flag of many progressive—and powerful—Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Of quite different orientation were a number of self-styled “Jeffersonians” who preached states’ rights, limited government, and above all economy and budget-balancing, and who with the help of Louis Howe could gain access to Roosevelt at critical moments. Others operated on the fringe: Cordell Hull, a courtly Tennessean and veteran politico whose suspicion of big business took the form mainly of a near-obsession against high tariffs; General Hugh Johnson, a colorful old army man even at the age of fifty, a Bernard Baruch protégé who believed both in budget-balancing
and
in central governmental direction of the economy; various monetary theorists; and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The candidate made no effort to impose intellectual unity on the core group—he had none to impose. But he did establish a clear line between
“politics” and “policies.” Farley, after being installed by Roosevelt in place of Raskob as Democratic national chairman, said to Moley, “I’m interested in getting him the votes—nothing else. Issues aren’t my business. They’re yours and his. You keep out of mine, and I’ll keep out of yours.” Roosevelt reposed such confidence in these diverse brains—they never made up a monolithic “trust”—that he left speech- and issue-planning under Moley’s direction while he took off with three of his sons in a forty-foot yawl for a sail along the New England coast.

Roosevelt had several acute questions of campaign strategy to ponder as he sailed contentedly under sunny July skies, occasionally stopping at sleepy ports for political confabs. One was how to appeal to progressive Republicans. The inheritors of the cause of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette were still active in the GOP—and still frustrated. Rejecting Hoover, they had other alternatives besides Roosevelt: form a new progressive party, support Norman Thomas’s Socialist party, or sit the election out. Some progressives, especially in the East, doubted Roosevelt’s character and convictions. Why support a tweedledum Democrat? One progressive of impeccable credentials—George W. Norris of Nebraska— announced for Roosevelt early and staunchly, however, largely because of Roosevelt’s consistent support of public electric power. Some progressives followed. A national progressive league for Roosevelt and Garner was formed under Norris. Hiram Johnson endorsed the Democratic candidate, as did Robert La Follette,Jr., despite his doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to social justice. Other progressives held back.

An easier question was whether Roosevelt should actively campaign at all. Some urged that he conduct a front-porch campaign, as presidential candidates had done in olden times. They felt that a campaign tour was unnecessary, that he might not be up to it physically. Garner, visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park, advised that all the boss had to do was to stay alive until election day. Farley, passing on the mixed views of party leaders, favored an active campaign. Roosevelt took little urging. His Dutch was up, he told Farley. Soon he, Farley, and Howe were planning an election drive that became even more ambitious once the candidate got underway.

The toughest question of campaign strategy was whether the candidate should offer a coherent, challenging set of ideas or tailor his views to expedient campaign needs. Not only did Tugwell and other advisers want their boss to speak out; they wanted him to present a
program,
comprehensive, consistent, with focus and priorities. He was “weak on relations, on the conjunctural, the joining together of forces and processes, especially in the national economy,” as Tugwell saw it. Roosevelt’s scattered approach to policy gave force to acid comments by left-wing commentators,
Tugwell felt; he himself had boiled over in Chicago when he picked up a newspaper with a column by Heywood Broun calling Roosevelt “the corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention.”

Roosevelt continued to be disappointed and even hurt by the liberal intellectual critics. The intellectuals never allowed a politician the least leeway, he said to Tugwell; they were positively fearful of being caught in an approving mood. But what he was trying to do, Roosevelt continued, was to get elected, not simply arouse agitation and argument. Let Hoover be the ideologue—and be cramped by this. The Democrats, by staying more “flexible,” could become the majority party. Leadership with such support might continue to win elections, perhaps for a generation.

By following a wobbly line somewhere between the middle and somewhat left of middle Roosevelt made himself a difficult target for Hoover, but he also invited attacks from both right and left. The financier and industrialist Owen D. Young, after visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park in midsummer, had the feeling that the governor “was avoiding real issues” with him and perhaps had met with him only for campaign cosmetics. A few days later Roosevelt reaped a whirlwind on the left. Sitting at lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, Tugwell, and others, he took a call from Huey Long, whose angry voice carried to the others at the table. As Tugwell remembered the conversation, Long was furious because Roosevelt had seen that “stuffed shirt Owen Young” while the Kingfish sat down in Louisiana and never heard from anybody.

“God damn it, Frank, who d’you think got you nominated?”

“Well,” said Roosevelt, “you had a lot to do with it.”

“You sure as hell are forgettin’ about it as fast as you can.” Long complained that there was a “regular parade” of people like Young seeing the governor.

“Oh, I see a lot of people you don’t read about. The newspaper boys only write up the ones their editors like.”

If Roosevelt didn’t stop listening to people like that, Long said, Roosevelt wouldn’t carry the South. “You got to turn me loose.”

“What d’you mean, turn you loose?” Roosevelt said. “You
are
loose.”

“That Farley,” said Long, “that’s what I mean, and that Louis.” They wouldn’t give him any money. He wanted to work with Roosevelt directly. Was the governor coming South?

“No, I don’t need to; your country there is safe enough.”

“Don’t fool yourself—it ain’t safe at all. You’ve got to give these folks what they want. They want fat-back and greens.…” Long went on and on, shouting expletives and demands. When he finally hung up, Roosevelt sat ruminating for a few moments about how Long was leading people to
the promised land. “You know,” he said, “that’s the second most dangerous man in America.” Pressed as to who was the
most
dangerous man, he said, “Douglas MacArthur.”