Roosevelt (17 page)

The evidence is that Roosevelt’s illness did not alter but strengthened already existent or latent tendencies in his personality.

Polio, for example, did not teach him patience. He had already shown this trait to a marked degree in his lengthy maneuverings in state politics, in his dealings with local politicians, in his handling of the endless trivia of patronage and position. Nor did his illness give him a sudden new confidence in himself. His confidence in his capacity to win battles, political or otherwise—“cockiness,” his political rivals called it—had steadily expanded as his public activities broadened.

There was no basic change in his political ideas. Those who see a new humanitarian rising from the sickbed ignore Roosevelt’s decade of immersion in Wilsonian progressivism. Actually, he showed himself after his illness, just as he did before it, as a shrewd politician who kept his eye on the main chance and who was willing to bend his own views in adjusting to political realities. His position on the political spectrum remained the same—a little left of center. While insisting that he was a good liberal or progressive—he used the terms interchangeably—he insisted, too, that his position was one of “constructive progress” between conservative Republicanism and the “radicalism” of La Follette and the Progressives. On matters like the League of Nations and prohibition, too, he took a politician’s straddling position.

Doubtless his illness gave him opportunity for thinking out some of his ideas, but he took little advantage of this opportunity. He started two rather ambitious intellectual and creative projects—a history of the United States and an analysis of the practical workings of American government. In each case he wrote a dozen or so pages and then dropped the project. Neither fragment reflects any new or original ideas, although the few pages of the history reveal a marked socio-economic interpretation, as against the “great man” theory of history. He did a good deal of reading during his long convalescence—some biography and history, practically no
economics, poetry, or philosophy, but both before and after his illness he liked books of travel and adventure best.

He was a man of many thoughts, not a man of trenchant ideas. A talk he gave at Milton Academy—a talk he considered of some importance and which was published in 1926 as a book with the pretentious title
Whither Bound?—
shows a wide-ranging mind in action but only a grab bag of thoughts. He skipped along, touching dexterously on the revolution of science, the need to accept change, the importance of equality of opportunity, the tendency of the majority to be progressive in outlook but divided over means. Utterly lacking was a central idea or unifying thread. Columns he wrote later for newspapers in Georgia and New York show the same tendencies.

Was there ever a time during this period when Roosevelt’s future as a politician trembled in the balance? Clearly a conflict rose between Eleanor and Sara Roosevelt as to whether Franklin should carry on an active political career, as his wife hoped, or retire to the ease of Hyde Park, as his mother wanted. However intense the struggle between wife and mother, it was of little long-run significance. There was never the slightest chance of Roosevelt’s retiring from politics. If anything, his illness made him want to be more active, more involved. “You are built a bit like me,” he wrote to a close friend within a year of the attack, “you need something physically more active, with constant contact with all kinds of people in many kinds of places.” In 1924 he left the law firm of Emmet, Marvin and Roosevelt, which he had helped form in 1920, mainly because estates and wills and the like “bored him to death,” for a new firm of Roosevelt and O’Connor, where he would be working with “live people” directly involved in more active ventures.

All this does not mean that polio had no major consequences for Roosevelt and his political career. Physically he went through a transformation; as if compensating for his crippled legs, he developed heavy, muscular shoulders and chest which, he exclaimed delightedly, “would make Jack Dempsey envious.” His disablement meant that he could move about only in a wheel chair or on people’s arms—Howe ruled that he must never be carried in public—but his attendants became adept in these arrangements. His legs became, actually, something of a political asset. They won him sympathy—something he might never have had otherwise. Millions of Americans were electrified in later years by Roosevelt’s public appearances—the tense, painfully awkward approach to the center of the stage, the bustle of aides and politicians around him, climaxed with Roosevelt’s radiant smiles and vigorous gestures.

His handicap was also a convenience. Since he was perfectly
natural about the state of his legs, he was able again and again to use his disability as an excuse for not taking part in political activities he wished to avoid. It was an excuse no one could contradict, until Al Smith did so successfully in pressuring him to run for governor in 1928. His illness also had the highly advantageous effect of bringing Eleanor Roosevelt more actively into politics than might otherwise have been the case. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League and became a leader in Democratic women’s organizations in the state. She often brought her Democratic and trade-union “girls” to see her husband. Howe, too, who had planned to go into business in 1921, stayed on with his chief during and after the crisis.

The chief political importance of Roosevelt’s illness was simply in the realm of time. While it interrupted his vast political contacts and correspondence for only a few weeks, it postponed for years the day when he might run for office; he did not want to seek office until he had made as full a recovery as possible. This was something of a blessing, since the mid-1920’s were not auspicious years for many Democrats. As it turned out, his return to politics was delayed until he was much closer to the years of the flood tide of Democratic strength.

Right after the November 1921 election victorious Democrats in the state assembly races got letters of congratulation from Roosevelt. This was the signal that he was not through with politics. A few months more, and he was deeply involved in the maneuvers that preceded Al Smith’s attempt to recapture the governorship in 1922.

Events of the 1920’s were to throw Roosevelt and Smith into a tight political embrace. When their careers first intertwined, during the Sheehan shenanigans, they were ranged on opposite sides: Smith was a regular and Roosevelt a rebel; their alliance was to fall to pieces years later with Roosevelt in power and Smith in rebellion. But beginning in 1920, when each seconded the other’s nomination at the Democratic national convention, until 1928, when Smith drafted Roosevelt for party duty, they worked in unison, with Smith as the senior partner.

The reason for the alliance was simple: each needed the other. Together they spanned, geographically, religiously, and socially, the breadth of the Democratic party; to win elections each needed the support that the other could command. Personally they were friendly and respected each other’s political talents. Reporters could draw elaborate contrasts between the patrician and the plebeian,
between the upstater and the New Yorker, between the Episcopalian and the Catholic, but both men were too big-minded, too worldly wise, to be concerned with such matters. On the surface during this period their relations were impeccable. Underneath they both had a seasoned tough-minded understanding of the complex mechanics and dynamics of intraparty politics; doubtless they both knew that theirs was essentially a political friendship.

Al’s candor had impressed Roosevelt in the Sheehan fight: Smith as majority leader in the assembly had told the rebels frankly that if they attended the caucus they would have to vote for the caucus candidate. Roosevelt had been something less than candid with Smith in respect to the gubernatorial campaign in 1918; the assistant secretary later proclaimed that he had backed Al for the Democratic nomination, while actually he and Howe had been exceedingly cagey on the matter. He probably expected Smith to lose in 1918 and thus leave the way clear for himself in 1920, but Al won. In 1920 Smith lost his bid for re-election but he won over a million more votes in New York than did Cox and Roosevelt.

Even in defeat Smith remained the leading Democrat in New York. Roosevelt could no longer oppose or evade him, so he had to “join” him. Events of early 1922 gave Roosevelt his opportunity. William Randolph Hearst wanted the Democratic nomination for governor, and Murphy was letting him line up delegates. Smith did not want to leave his profitable trucking business, but he could never forget that the publisher had accused him during his first administration of allowing poisoned milk to be distributed to children in New York City. At the last minute Smith agreed to a draft and Roosevelt was chosen to issue the call. A cordial exchange of “Dear Al” and “Dear Frank” letters followed.

Murphy now wanted Hearst to run for the Senate. Despite tremendous pressure Smith steadily refused to accept the publisher as his running mate, and Hearst pulled out of the race. Roosevelt could probably have had the senatorial nomination, but he did not yet feel ready. Finally, Murphy and Smith compromised on Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a Hearst protégé, for senator. Roosevelt worked for the ticket and served as honorary head of Copeland’s campaign. Smith defeated incumbent Governor Nathan L. Miller, and swept Copeland in with him.

Smith’s victory marked him as a leading candidate for the presidency in 1924. Although Roosevelt carefully maintained good relations with Bryan and other national leaders of the Democracy, he had no alternative but to support his fellow New Yorker. He was keenly concerned, however, that Smith might command insufficient national appeal. Several times he urged Smith to speak
out on national questions. But the governor wanted to stick to his New York problems.

Most of all Roosevelt feared that Smith would become irretrievably branded as a “wet” and lose all hope of gaining votes from the dry forces in the party. When the governor was faced with the awkward choice of signing or vetoing a liquor bill, Roosevelt wrote him, “I am mighty sorry for the extremely difficult position in which you have been placed over this darned old liquor question,” and proceeded to outline an elaborate stratagem whereby Smith could veto the bill without alienating either side, and then call the legislature into special session to pass new legislation. Smith rejected the advice. He took a more direct and honest line of action, but one that left him more vulnerable to attacks from the drys.

“If I did not still have these crutches I should throw my own hat in the ring,” Roosevelt wrote a friend in the late summer of 1923. Within a few months, indeed, Howe was lining up complimentary first-ballot votes for his chief among several delegations to the national convention. But this was not a serious gesture. At the end of April 1924 the governor announced that Roosevelt would head the New York Smith-for-President committee. There was talk that the Smith forces wanted Roosevelt for the sake of his name only, but immediately he plunged into the job of winning delegate votes for the governor.

This was no easy task. Democrats everywhere agreed that Smith had been an honest, efficient, progressive governor. But Democratic candidate for president? Impossible. At this time the Ku Klux Klan was not merely a band of nightshirters, it was a powerful subterranean influence that reached into governors’ mansions and state assemblies. Even those Democrats who feared no “popish” control of the White House if Al won were reluctant to gamble on victory with a Catholic and a wet. Nevertheless, Roosevelt set to work. Through a massive correspondence and an elaborate intelligence system he acquired information on the personalities and politics of state delegations. For the first time in his life he saw in detail and on a national scale the confused currents and crosscurrents, the rival personalities and factions, the electoral law and machinery, that lay behind the pushing and hauling in the convention. He won few delegates for Smith but he added a course in his own political education.

Smith, after trying out several other speakers, asked Roosevelt to make his nominating speech. It was Roosevelt’s first important address since 1920, and he rose above the occasion. He won the attention of the delegates with a speech free from claptrap and stentorian phrases, and when he called Smith the “happy warrior of the political battlefield” the phrase was so apt that it galvanized Smith’s
rooters and the last few sentences of the speech were drowned out. Mark Sullivan termed the speech a “noble utterance.” Walter Lippmann called it “moving and distinguished.” Ironically, when the “happy warrior” phrase was first suggested to Roosevelt, he was afraid it was too poetic, and, as it turned out, he used it prematurely, instead of waiting for the climactic final sentence. Nevertheless, the speech won him the spotlight and Democrats remembered it for years. Possibly Roosevelt was really drawing a picture of himself in the phrase happy warrior; certainly it was another case of his furthering his own career in the process of aiding Al.

But no speech could affect that convention. Ballot after ballot dragged on in the smoky heat of Madison Square Garden until it became clear that neither the forces centered in the East supporting Smith nor the forces centered in the South and West behind McAdoo could muster the vital two-thirds. Roosevelt took part in the conferences that, on the 103
^rd
ballot, gave John W. Davis the nomination. Davis was a saddlemaker’s grandson who had become ambassador to Great Britain and had been called “one of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever met” by the King himself. The kind of conservative who believed in civil liberties, Davis was a lifelong Democrat and a distinguished lawyer. But he was a lackluster compromise, without Al’s color or McAdoo’s Wilsonian background. As a weary, cynical gesture to progressivism the delegates chose the Peerless Leader’s brother, Charles W. Bryan, for the vice-presidency, and departed.

The convention was a disaster for the Democratic party and a setback for Smith, but it was a personal victory for Roosevelt. His eloquent, moderate speeches, his gay, gallant air that made people forget his crutches, his loyalty to Al combined with his friendliness toward other factions, all left a deep imprint on the rank and file of the Democracy. Lippmann congratulated him on his service to New York, and Tom Pendergast, Democratic boss of Kansas City, told a mutual friend that Roosevelt had the most magnetic personality he had ever encountered. Praise from two men near the opposite poles of political life was a tribute to Roosevelt’s broad appeal.