Roosevelt (18 page)

But his triumph was short lived. In accordance with political tradition, Davis men quickly moved in after the convention to take over the machinery of the national Democratic party. Roosevelt was left on the sidelines. Smith ran again for governor, but Roosevelt played little part in the state campaign. Indeed, the whole month before the election he spent in Warm Springs. His pessimism about the Democrats’ chances was amply justified. Coolidge beat Davis by over seven million votes, and the Republicans won decisive majorities in both House and Senate. But Smith in New York
breasted the Republican tide. His victory over Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., marked the end of the latter’s political career and laid the ground for the reappearance of Franklin Roosevelt four years later.

The dreary convention fight and the dismal election results of 1924 left the Democrats divided and leaderless. “Something must be done, and done now,” Roosevelt wrote in December 1924, to restore the voters’ confidence in the party. But what? His almost singlehanded effort to rejuvenate the party in 1925 gave him a harsh lesson in the internal power arrangements of the Democratic party.

He had long worried over the condition of the party. His campaign in 1920 had confirmed his suspicions that the party’s machinery was archaic and outgrown, as he wrote to Cordell Hull, national chairman of the party, late in 1921. Hull agreed but could do nothing. Three years later the picture seemed blacker. There was room, Roosevelt said, for but two parties. The Republican party was conservative; “the Democratic Party is
the
Progressive Party of the country,” he insisted. The progressives had been badly divided in 1924. But there must be no overtures to the La Follette party; all progressives must get together in the Democratic party.

So much was clear to him. But could the Democratic party be made into an instrument for winning elections and governing the country? Not unless it was reformed, he felt. He was appalled by the lack of national organization—the national headquarters consisted of “two ladies occupying one room in a Washington office building,” he said impatiently. The man Davis had bequeathed as national chairman, Clem Shaver, was out visiting millionaires asking them to endorse notes for the party. “Could anything be more of a farce?” Roosevelt demanded. “We have no money, no publicity, no nothing!” He wanted the party to unite more closely, to get rid of its “factionalism” and “localism,” to do a better publicity job, to get on a firmer financial basis.

Roosevelt laid his plans artfully. He feared that the national committee would stymie any reform effort because the committee, consisting largely of old party work horses from each state, was the seedy fruit of the existing arrangements. He decided to bypass the national leaders and appeal directly to local party leaders, including delegates to the recent national convention. To 3,000 of these leaders he wrote a letter that asked for their advice on improving the party but consisted mainly of a statement of Roosevelt’s views on what should be done. “I take it that we are all agreed on certain fundamental truths,” he said casually, and he proceeded to name them: the national party organization should be more active and work more closely with state organizations; publicity should be improved; party leaders should meet more often to plan for united action.

His letters aroused all the ancient vexations among the rank and file: Southerners complained about the party’s liberalism, Westerners about the city bosses, Easterners about Bryanism and the anti-Catholic and antiliquor forces. But most of the several hundred respondents, doubtless taking their cue from Roosevelt’s letter, called for drastic party reform. They wanted more unity, better organization, more leadership, more discipline, less factionalism and localism. “The Democrats are just a mob,” an Iowan said disgustedly. Most, but not all, wanted the party to become or remain a liberal organization.

Fortified by these opinions, Roosevelt proposed a small national conference of the party to discuss issues and organization. At first, prospects for the plan seemed bright. Well-known Democrats including Davis, Cox, Hull, and Daniels backed it, and there was much favorable publicity. Since some elements in the party suspected that the project was a bid by Roosevelt for party leadership on Smith’s behalf or his own, it seemed imperative to Roosevelt and Howe that Shaver as national chairman issue the call for the conference. But this Shaver would not do. The party’s first job, he said, was to cut its organization to the bone and pay off its debt. The harder Roosevelt tried to force Shaver’s hand the clearer it became that the national chairman was following party leaders who opposed reform.

Who were these leaders? Roosevelt had little trouble finding out. They were the Democratic chieftains in Congress, who were far more concerned about keeping their seats from their own states and districts than in re-forming ranks for a presidential victory in 1928. Many of the Democratic leaders were Southerners who had piled up committee seniority as representatives of one-party areas that monotonously returned them to office in election after election. Although these congressmen maintained a congressional campaign committee, they had little unity or organization. Their real fear was that a concerted national effort by the party might jeopardize the position of some congressmen who could survive politically only by deserting the party platform and taking a position congenial to local interests. They would do nothing positive, Howe observed, unless driven to it by a purely local situation—but their districts were usually not of the type to reflect national trends or conflicts. The Democratic congressmen could hardly have been pleased, either, by Roosevelt’s admitted plan of inviting only half a dozen Democratic members from each House.

“We have practically no leaders in a National sense at all,” Roosevelt concluded; it was an “unspeakable groping about in the darkness.” Howe undoubtedly reflected Roosevelt’s feelings when
he remarked that the selection of the donkey as the Democratic emblem was prophetic.

Roosevelt was also unsuccessful in reforming methods of party finance. He was indignant that Jesse Jones was raising money from big contributors. When Jones heard of this he wrote Roosevelt a surprised letter—he was paying off the party’s debt, said the Texan, wasn’t this enough? Roosevelt replied that the party should be financed from small contributions. He had estimated that if every election district of one thousand people contributed only five dollars per district, the Democrats could raise half a million dollars. Nothing came of this proposal either.

Nationally the Democratic party remained a divided, leaderless aggregation of state factions and sectional groupings. It followed precisely the policy Roosevelt feared most—a policy of opportunism, or as he described it, a posture of waiting with hands folded for the Republicans to make mistakes. The weaknesses of the party were to affect his plans for re-entering politics; years later they would plague the Democrats as the party in power and Roosevelt as president and party leader.

Seemingly Roosevelt’s political influence sank to its nadir during the mid-1920’s. Then, in the space of six weeks, he vaulted into the governorship of the nation’s largest state and became automatically a leading presidential possibility. The remarkable thing was not the feat itself but the way it came about. The sudden change in Roosevelt’s political fortunes was initially less an act on Roosevelt’s part than a summons by his party.

The collapse of his party reform efforts in 1925 left him as impotent politically as the party itself. He had no position in the party—he was now only the defeated vice-presidential candidate once removed—and some anti-Smith Democrats felt that the whole reform enterprise had been an artifice to promote the Happy Warrior’s candidacy in 1928. Actually, if the project was intended to promote the interest of any one Democrat, it was that of Roosevelt himself.

His position in the state was ambiguous. For a time after the 1924 election he professed to be neutral toward Democratic candidates. “A plague on all individuals who would like to be President!” he wrote. Smith’s capture of a fourth gubernatorial term in 1926, however, confirmed the governor’s power both in New York and in the Democratic presidential race. During the pre-1928-convention period Roosevelt campaigned for Smith, even to the extent of spending two weeks in the Midwest trying to round up delegates.

He was politically close to Smith but not one of the inner circle who confabbed endlessly with their chief in the famous “Tiger Room” in the penthouse of a wealthy Manhattan contractor. During this period—indeed, during all the period between 1913 and 1928—Roosevelt had no office in the state aside from an unpaid position as chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission.

The American politician clings to power by keeping a foothold in one level of party or government even when he is dislodged from some other level. Ironically, Roosevelt’s influence dwindled in his local Dutchess County party during the 1920’s. One reason was his long absences from Hyde Park. He tried to break the grip of the old “courthouse gang” on the party, but with no success. He had about given up on the Dutchess County Democracy by 1928. There were “too many local leading Democrats,” he complained, “tied up for financial reasons with the Republicans.”

In view of all this, what is the explanation of Roosevelt’s continued political standing—a standing so great that the Democratic leaders of New York hoped he would take the nomination for United States Senator in 1926 and drafted him for governor two years later?

Part of the answer is that Roosevelt continued to work hard at politics during this period. He wrote thousands of letters—letters of congratulation to winning Democrats, of commiseration to losers, of inquiry and advice to friends throughout the state and nation dating from his senatorial and navy days. Passing through Washington he made a point of meeting Democratic congressmen. Even in the South he managed to cultivate political friendships: he invited AFL officials to his houseboat in Florida, visited Bryan in Miami (before the latter’s death in 1925), conferred with Southern political leaders at Warm Springs.

His position on party issues helped him politically. He was moderately liberal in a moderately liberal party. He believed the party should stand for “progressivism with a brake on,” not “conservatism with a move on.” He followed closely and commented knowledgeably on a variety of international and national issues, such as war debts, banking, conservation, the one-party press, and Mississippi River flood control. On touchy matters like prohibition he took a position midway between the party extremes. He managed in a state convention keynote speech for Smith to tread the liquor tightrope so adroitly as to win from Daniels, a dry, the encomium: “I think you took only a light bath and came out in fine shape. From that speech nobody would call you an immersionist like Al Smith; they would rather think you took yours by sprinkling or pouring.…”

It was easy for Roosevelt to turn down the senatorial nomination
in 1926. He had just begun his Warm Springs cure and he hoped for rapid progress in the next years. Moreover, he did not feel cut out to be a Senator. Most important were considerations of his career. If he ran for senator and lost, he would have accumulated a string of three consecutive defeats. If he ran and won, he must, perforce, take positions in the Senate that would antagonize some wing of the divided Democratic party.

But the situation in 1928 was different. In that year Smith went to the Democratic convention with a commanding lead. Roosevelt again nominated the governor, in a speech notable chiefly for the fact that it was written with the radio audience specifically in mind; Roosevelt already had sensed the future political importance of this new medium, and he made effective use of it at Houston. “A model of its kind,” the New York
Times
commented, “—limpid and unaffected in style and without a single trace of fustian.” He also served as Smith’s floor manager, but the show was largely in the hands of Smith’s immediate associates. The affair—for a Democratic convention—was rather tranquil. Smith easily won the nomination on the first roll call.

Knowing of Roosevelt’s business contacts, Smith asked him to organize business and professional men for the campaign, while Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become increasingly active in state Democratic affairs, helped run the Bureau of Women’s Activities. Roosevelt did not participate too actively in the campaign; Howe usually represented him at headquarters. Roosevelt, in fact, was not happy over the way the campaign was managed. He objected to Smith’s choice of John J. Raskob for national chairman, for Raskob was a wet, a Catholic, and a wealthy General Motors executive—factors, Roosevelt feared, that would only intensify the already strong anti-Smith feeling in the Protestant South and the Progressive West.

“Smith has burned his bridges behind him,” he wrote his close friend Van Lear Black late in July. “My own particular role will be that of the elder statesman who will not be one of the ‘yes men’ at headquarters.” He felt that Smith’s lieutenants were excluding him from the top campaign councils. He was unhappy about the publicity program, which was being handled by a Smith underling with the help of the General Motors advertising experts. “In other words, it is a situation in which you and I can find little room for very active work, but we shall be in a more advantageous position in the long run.…”

What did Roosevelt mean by “in the long run”? Perhaps these words give some clue to his motives in the confused situation that shortly developed.

In mid-September Roosevelt went to Warm Springs. He knew
before leaving New York that party leaders wanted him to run for governor; Smith had already approached him. Why was Roosevelt so unwilling? First of all, there was his health. In one brief exhilarating moment at Warm Springs he had taken a few steps without canes. Two more years of Warm Springs, he felt, and he might discard them entirely (but not, of course, his braces, which he must have accepted by then as permanent). He was also concerned about the success of Warm Springs, in which he had invested a large sum of money.