Roosevelt (22 page)

In the case of labor legislation Roosevelt faced both a hostile legislature and a nationwide problem. During his first term he won from the legislature measures providing a half-holiday a week for women working in factories and stores, changes in the use of labor injunctions, and a slight expansion of workmen’s compensation. Only in 1931 did the legislature pass a bill limiting women and children to a six-day, forty-eight-hour week. More sweeping proposals, such as minimum-wage measures, met the inevitable—and often in some cases unanswerable—argument that the resulting higher costs might force industry to leave the state.

Thus the limited nature of the state program was a gauge of hard political circumstances, not of Roosevelt’s own philosophy.
Operating even then a “little left of center,” to use his later term, he anticipated many of the New Deal programs in his continuous search for specific ways to meet specific problems. As the severity of the problems broadened during the Depression, so did the scope of his solutions. In his thinking he was ranging somewhat ahead of most politicians in the Northeast. “Is there any possible device to be worked out along volunteer lines,” Roosevelt wrote a Nebraska bank president early in 1930, “by which the total wheat acreage of the nation could gradually be exhausted to the point of bringing it in line with the actual national consumption figure?” Long before TVA he was talking about the need of public competition with private utilities, “at least as a yardstick.”

The outlook of his major appointees was further testament to Roosevelt’s general liberalism. His industrial commissioner was Frances Perkins, the slim, pretty, serious-minded woman who had been a social worker when she first met Roosevelt in his senate years, and who for ten years had served as a member, and then chairman, of Smith’s Industrial Board. In making her commissioner, Roosevelt put her in an administrative post with supervision over many men—at the time a move that caused some lifting of eyebrows—and he left her free rein in running the agency. His advisers on water power and utilities included men who were later to become prominent in the New Deal: Morris L. Cooke, Leland Olds, James C. Bonbright, and, unofficially, Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School. Other future New Dealers advised him on farm policy, social security problems, and relief.

On the whole, Roosevelt made an impressive record as governor. Considering that brilliant achievements were impossible in the wake of Smith’s eight productive years in the office, considering, too, that the legislature stood ready to spike any ambitious effort at reform, Roosevelt made the most of what opportunities he had. He won no single striking victory, but he operated with telling results in a wide range of state activities, including social welfare, government efficiency, prison reform, and utility regulation, as well as in the face of more serious problems stemming from the crisis in field and factory. And as the Depression deepened and state problems multiplied, Roosevelt showed growing power and vigor in meeting them.

Above all, the governor possessed the indispensable quality of accepting the need for change, for new departures, for experiments. He recognized that government was not a bogy but an instrument for meeting the problems of change. And he had the capacity to learn. It was these things that made his governorship truly an apprenticeship in politics and statecraft.

Early in his first term Roosevelt discovered that the state had a small boat for inspecting canals. Why not take it over for his own inspection trips? This was just the kind of innovation he liked. It was a comical sight—the large figure of the governor and his ample family and crew perched on the small craft as it poked slowly from lock to lock, with the official car and chauffeur and a horde of state police tagging along on the nearest highway. But it was also, politically, a shrewd move, dramatizing Roosevelt’s interest in upstate affairs.

These excursions were genuine inspection trips for the governor, even though Mrs. Roosevelt had to serve as his eyes and ears. Carried from the barge to a car, he could do little more than drive around the grounds of hospitals, asylums, and other state institutions, but she quickly learned to find out the things her husband wanted to know: Did the inmates actually get what the menus listed? Were beds too close together, or folded up during the day, indicating congestion? How did the patients seem to feel and act toward the staff? “We have got to de-institutionalize the institutions,” Roosevelt wrote to Howe in the summer of 1929.

Roosevelt also began his famous “fireside chats” during his first term. Direct and pleasing in tone, these radio talks were aimed especially at upstate New Yorkers, who got most of their information through the Republican press. Radio still faced a host of technical difficulties, and Farley had to send questionnaires throughout the state asking local Democrats how good the reception was from various stations. Roosevelt, of course, began the first of his talks with the claim that they would be nonpartisan reports. Actually, most of them were highly partisan thrusts at the Republican legislators.

Indeed, Roosevelt played politics expertly and tirelessly throughout his gubernatorial days. While he occasionally donned the cloak of nonpartisanship, he was essentially a party politician. The American governor is usually the leader of his state party, operating through lieutenants of his choice. Such was Roosevelt. But in leading the New York State Democracy he ran into the same weaknesses that he had found—and vainly tried to solve—in the national party in previous years.

An investigation by Farley confirmed Roosevelt’s worst suspicions. “There is no such thing as a Democratic organization upstate,” Farley reported bluntly. The few militant local organizations to be found were interested only in local elections; in some cases they traded votes with the enemy, backing Republicans for state and national office in exchange for local offices. Farley found much apathy
and discouragement; there was little sense of “being part of a triumphant state organization.” The state committee was moribund. Its lists of upstate workers were almost useless; its chairman, William Bray, installed by Smith, was an aged politico, lacking energy and imagination.

Together, Roosevelt and Farley worked out a scheme to bypass Bray and the committee and to strengthen the Democracy’s roots upstate. The scheme bore the earmarks of Roosevelt’s earlier thinking. A new organization—the Union of Democratic Clubs—would be constituted, not out of committeemen, but directly out of rank-and-file Democrats with energy and enthusiasm. With the help of the Union, stagnant local leadership would be weeded out and aggressive young Democrats put in command.

Crucial in the plan was the election of Farley as secretary of the Union; since he was already secretary of the Democratic state committee he could co-ordinate all party activities. This role Farley performed brilliantly. In endless trips about the state he patched up local factional quarrels, invigorated dead committees, hunted out political talent. Local leaders got used to receiving almost daily his urgently written letters, signed in green ink, imploring their ceaseless attention to the vital minutiae of political campaigns: registration, absentee ballots, first voters, election inspectors, literacy tests, endless lists of names. In 1930 Roosevelt eased Bray out of the chairmanship and Farley took his place.

Roosevelt tackled another problem he had long worried about—the Republican-dominated rural press. “I am not concerned about prejudice, personal stupidity or wrong thinking,” he wrote to his friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., after looking over a survey of opinion in rural areas, “so much as by the sheer, utter and complete ignorance displayed by such a large number of farmers.” On Morgenthau’s suggestion a press bureau was set up in Albany mainly to feed Democratic material to upstate rural newspapers.

Frequent tours of the state, radio talks, press handouts, and, above all, stepped-up party activity—this kind of intensive activity lay behind what was to be, statistically at least, Roosevelt’s greatest election triumph.

“You and I have the same kind of sense of obligation about going through with a task once undertaken,” Roosevelt wrote to Lehman in May 1930. The thought of not running probably never occurred to him. A confident state convention at Syracuse heard Smith laud the governor’s “clear brain” and “big heart”; it unanimously renominated him. His doctrine, the governor said in accepting the renomination, was the same as two years before: “that progressive Government, by its very terms, must be a living and a growing thing, that
the battle for it is never ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.”

The Democrats had good reason for confidence. The deepening Depression was tying the Republicans into a political noose of their own making: having claimed credit in 1928 for past prosperity, now they had to take the blame for current hard times. Roosevelt had used Republican obstructionism skillfully to dramatize his program, and he was far better known than anyone the Republicans could nominate. Despite his protestations of nonpartisanship, his governorship had been a continuous campaign for re-election.

Two possible danger areas loomed for the Democrats. One of these was prohibition. Roosevelt had long hedged on this issue; he had expressed the fervent hope that it would disappear from politics. It did not, but it changed in a direction favorable to the Democrats. By the end of the 1920’s—a decade of speakeasies, raids by Treasury men, gang wars, and intemperance—New York Republicans were finding prohibition to be a political liability. Roosevelt had no intention of running as a wet. But when he heard that the probable Republican nominee was about to come out for repeal, the governor moved fast to outflank him on the wet side. In a letter to Senator Wagner in September 1930 he favored outright repeal and the restoring of liquor control to the states.

It was a potent move. The Republicans failed to pick up much wet support, yet they outraged the drys upstate. The outcome was nomination of a prohibitionist candidate, which threatened to split off a sizable segment of the Republican vote.

The other problem was not so easily managed. The corruption issue, which had been seething for over a year, erupted a month before the election, after evidence had come to light of traffic in judicial offices. Roosevelt turned the case over to the state’s attorney general, a Republican, and designated a Republican Supreme Court justice to convene an extraordinary grand jury. He also asked the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court to make a general investigation of the magistrates’ courts. Roosevelt was directly involved in the situation because he had made a routine short-term appointment of a Tammany man to a General Sessions judgeship, and the judge was alleged to have bought his place from Tammany for thirty thousand dollars. The Republicans saw a grand opportunity to force Roosevelt into a political trap: if he cracked down on Tammany, they figured, he might lose election support from the organization, and if he failed to act he could be dubbed a Tammany pawn. Staking most of their hopes on this move, they nominated for governor the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, a pugnacious redhead named Charles H. Tuttle, who had nosed
along the labyrinthine trail between Tammany and the judges and had won some well-publicized indictments.

Roosevelt evaded the net by the tactic of compromise. He took formal steps to enable the Republicans to investigate Tammany, but he never allowed a situation to arise where he was arrayed directly in an investigatory attack on Tammany. This awkward posture took considerable explaining, especially to friends who wondered why a man who had a reputation for acting quickly and firmly in some fields should stand on legal niceties in this one. The situation, Roosevelt wrote to an anxious Harvard classmate and rector in New York City, was not one between Tammany and himself; “it is one between constitutional government and a political campaign. More than that, it is one between the retention of constitutional government and a breaking down of the safeguards of liberty in the same way that they have been broken down both in the Italy of Mussolini and in the Russia of Lenin.” He went on to describe the limitations on the power of the governor to investigate.

“In thinking this over, for the love of Mike,” Roosevelt ended his letter, “remember that I am just as anxious as you are to root out this rottenness, but that on January 1st, 1929, I took a certain oath of office.” Undoubtedly Roosevelt’s stand lost him the support of some independent Democrats in New York City. While the Democratic New York
Times
and the independent Republican
Sun
backed him, the
World,
which was strongly pro-Smith, withheld its support and the
News
came out for Tuttle.

The campaign revolved around Tuttle’s ceaseless hammering at Roosevelt on the corruption issue and the governor’s insistent attempt to focus the debate on water power, agriculture, labor, public works, utility regulation, and other general state matters. Was his opponent running for governor or district attorney? Roosevelt asked caustically. Following his usual procedure, he devoted each campaign speech to a defense of a major state program. In Buffalo he read a strong letter of endorsement by President Green of the AFL. In Rochester he talked about prisons, hospitals, public works. In Syracuse he described the high cost of electricity to the housewife in terms so vivid and concrete that people around there long after were talking about the “waffle iron campaign.”

But people were interested in another issue, too: jobs. Democratic candidates throughout the country were taunting the Republicans for failing to cope with depression after all the talk about the “full dinner pail” in 1928. Secure in the White House for at least another two years, President Hoover was already beginning to play the historic role he was to hold for more than a generation: the scapegoat for hard times. In his speech in Buffalo—an especially hard-hit city—Roosevelt quoted some of the Republican
claims of 1928. He looked out at his audience. “Those extracts read strangely tonight.” He cited them, he added, not to gain partisan advantage but to show that no party had any monopoly on prosperity.