Roosevelt (76 page)

By now the convention was in a churlish temper. The delegates had gone down the line for Roosevelt; now they wanted to go ahead on their own. On a happy inspiration Eleanor Roosevelt was induced to fly from Hyde Park to talk to the delegates, but her pleasant, high-minded remarks brought only a brief calm. By Thursday evening the delegates’ sore and mutinous feelings rose to a pitch. Bankhead was nominated and seconded in bitter speeches. McNutt’s withdrawal announcement was almost drowned out. The galleries, packed with claques for other candidates, greeted the speeches for Wallace with jeers, hisses, and catcalls. On the platform sat Mrs. Wallace. Sadly she asked Eleanor Roosevelt: “Why are they so opposed to Henry?”

His face grim and set, Roosevelt sat by the radio in the Oval Room, playing solitaire. He listened to the convention uproar, heard the commentators describe the feeling as a revolt against presidential bossism. As the balloting neared, he put aside the cards and started writing on a pad. He asked Rosenman to “smooth it out” quickly—he might have to deliver it soon. Rosenman glanced at the paper. In a sharp and biting statement, Roosevelt had written that he could not go along with a party divided between liberalism and reaction; he would enable the party to make the choice by declining the nomination. It ended: “I so do.”

The President returned to his solitaire. Outside the room Pa Watson wanted to tear the message up. “I don’t give a damn who’s Vice-President and neither does the country,” he angrily told Rosenman. “The only thing that’s important to this country is that fellow in there.” When Rosenman came back into the room with the completed statement, Watson was almost in tears. Miss Le Hand, long opposed to a third term, was all smiles. As for the President, Rosenman had never seen the President look so determined.

In Chicago the balloting was under way. Back and forth the lead wavered between Wallace and Bankhead. Byrnes darted from delegation to delegation crying, “For God’s sake, do you want a President or a Vice President?”

In the Oval Room Roosevelt tallied the vote. Tension mounted. The race stayed close; Bankhead led at the end, but several urban states that had passed on the roll call now threw their votes to
Wallace. The President had won his fight. By now Roosevelt was tired and bedraggled, his shirt clung to him, heavy and damp in the July heat. While word went to Chicago that he would shortly address the convention, the President was wheeled into his bedroom. Now Watson was smiling and Missy was in tears. In a few moments Roosevelt reappeared in a fresh shirt, his hair combed, as jaunty as ever.

In Chicago his voice came through strong, smooth, even, measured.

“It is very late tonight; but I have felt that you would rather that I speak to you now than wait until tomorrow.

“It is with a very full heart that I speak tonight. I must confess that I do so with mixed feelings—because I find myself, as almost everyone does sooner or later in his lifetime, in a conflict between deep personal desire for retirement on the one hand, and that quiet, invisible thing called ‘conscience’ on the other.…

“Lying awake, as I have, on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country or to train themselves to serve and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my personal capacity, if I am called upon to do so by the people of my country.

“In times like these—in times of great tension, of great crisis—the compass of the world narrows to a single fact. The fact which dominates our world is the fact of armed aggression, the fact of successful armed aggression, aimed at the form of Government, the kind of society that we in the United States have chosen and established for ourselves. It is a fact which no one any longer doubts—which no one is any longer able to ignore.…

“Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction, a life of that kind to begin in January, 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.…

“Only the people themselves can draft a President. If such a draft should be made upon me, I say to you, in the utmost simplicity, I will, with God’s help, continue to serve with the best of my ability and with the fullness of my strength.…”

“A
S YOU MAY IMAGINE
,” the President wrote his Uncle Fred Delano on July 18, “the events of the past few days have filled me more with a sense of resignation to my fate than any feeling of exaltation.” Expressing to Norris his amazement at the conservatives’ “terrific drive” to produce a situation in the convention that would force him to decline the nomination, the President ended, “even though you and I are tired and ‘want to go home,’ we are going to see this thing through together.”

Roosevelt could feel well satisfied with the final results of the convention. He had soundly drubbed the conservatives, including many of the anti-Roosevelt men who had been thwarting him ever since the Supreme Court fight. The platform was a stout defense of the New Deal. He had secured a running mate who was, as he said to Norris, a “true liberal.” He had gained for himself the draft he needed. Broadly speaking, his tactics of delay and indirection had worked. As the first ballot tally showed, no strong candidate had been left to threaten him. The opposing forces had never got together. He had beaten “The Hater’s Club,” made up, he told Norris, of “strange bedfellows like Wheeler and McCarran and Tydings and Glass and John J. O’Connor and some of the wild Irishmen from Boston.” His trump card—keeping open the possibility of declining the nomination until the very end—had paid off handsomely.

On the other hand, Roosevelt had lost the thing he wanted most—an unquestioned draft by acclamation. Farley and the others had spoiled the stage effects for a clamorous and categorical summons by the party. The situation had its irony. Roosevelt’s nomination was truly a draft in the sense that the impetus toward his nomination had come not from himself but from the administration and party leaders, and his own efforts had been indirect. But his very attempt to forego leadership brought about a chaotic convention situation in which leadership fell into Hopkins’ hands simply because he was believed to hold the credentials from the President. In the eyes of many delegates Hopkins was Roosevelt’s cat’s-paw. The
forced nomination of Wallace completed the picture of a White House dictatorship over the party.

The price of victory was steep. Hundreds of delegates left Chicago for home in a bitter and rebellious frame of mind. Feeling against Wallace was so strong that he had to be dissuaded from delivering an acceptance speech at the convention. Party leadership was shaken. Farley was determined to quit the chairmanship. Other party regulars—notably Flynn—would not assume leadership unless Hopkins was sidetracked. Ickes, McNutt, and other administration leaders were hurt and angered by the President’s selection of Wallace. Bankhead was telling people how Roosevelt men had sold him out at Chicago. Garner prepared to pack up and go home to Texas for good.

Republican newspapers gleefully headlined a flurry of anti-third-term Democrats who bolted the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket in the wake of the convention. Some of these had deserted their party in 1936, but they made fresh copy again four years later. The newspapers also played up the convention as a packed New Deal caucus manipulated by White House stooges, radicals, city bosses, and the “voice from the sewer.” The press, of course, was heavily anti-Roosevelt. Yet the President was vulnerable. The show in Chicago had not quite come off: he had won his draft in such a way as to intensify popular suspicion of his deviousness. It was not surprising that polls showed a Republican resurgence. The parties, according to some polls, were entering the presidential battle on even terms.

The President’s main trouble, though, lay in none of these, but in a big, shaggy man who, during the late July lull, was busy pumping hands and visiting rodeos in Colorado. A glittering new figure had emerged on the political scene.

Legends were sprouting profusely around Wendell Willkie by midsummer 1940, but the facts were striking enough. Born in 1892, the fourth of six children, he was descended from Germans who had left their homeland after the revolutionary disturbances earlier in that century. He grew up in Indiana amid an intellectually and politically fertile family; his father was a teacher, lawyer, and Bryanite Democrat, his mother a lawyer and a gifted public speaker. After stints at teaching, law, and the army, young Willkie spent ten years in Akron as a lawyer-businessman, then moved to New York City in 1929, where he made a meteoric rise in the utilities field. In January 1933, a few weeks before Roosevelt’s first inauguration, he became head of the huge Commonwealth and Southern Corporation.

During the next seven years Willkie became the most articulate and effective business critic of the New Deal. Scorning Liberty League tactics, he shouted his denunciations from hundreds of platforms across the country and in scores of magazine articles. He sold himself as the chief victim of the New Deal, as an honest, enterprising businessman overwhelmed by big government. He had, indeed, been beaten time and again by the New Deal—beaten in his attempts to hold off the TVA, beaten in his fight against the “death-sentence” clause of the public utility holding company bill, beaten in his campaign efforts for Landon, beaten finally in the courts. It seemed a monumental piece of poetic justice that now he could take on, in direct and open combat, the author of all his misfortunes.

He was the perfect foil for Roosevelt. Like the President, Willkie was a big, attractive man, who liked to talk and to laugh; but the two antagonists were cut from sharply different cloth. Willkie’s touseled hair, broad face and jaw, bulky frame, baggy, unpressed clothes gave him a countrified look that appealed to middle-class America. “A man wholly natural in manner, a man with no pose, no ‘swellness,’ no condescension, no clever plausibleness … as American as the courthouse yard in the square of an Indiana county seat … a good, sturdy, plain, able Hoosier,” Booth Tarkington said in a description that set off the Indianan from the slick figure in the White House.

Inside this rustic form was an urbane New York cosmopolitan. Widely read and traveled, Willkie was literate enough to write book reviews for reputable journals, facile and knowledgeable enough to steal the show on “Information Please,” the phenomenally popular radio program of the day, and versatile enough to win over a wide range of audiences in his vigorous, “man-to-man” talks. He was, a newspaperman noticed, “a master of timing releases, issuing denials before edition time, adding punch to a prepared speech, or making one on the spur of the moment letter-perfect enough to have been memorized, treating publishers, editors, and reporters with the skill needed to suggest to each that they were the sole beneficiaries of his gratitude and his confidence.” Moreover, in seven years of crisscrossing the country in his one-man battle against the New Deal, Willkie had won the friendship of the very publishers—notably Roy Howard and Henry Luce—who had become increasingly alienated from the White House.

From the start Roosevelt saw the Republican candidate as a serious threat. Here was no solemn engineer, like Hoover, no raw novice in national politics, like Landon. Roosevelt had first met Willkie in December 1934. Their talk was friendly, but not their feelings; afterward Roosevelt told how he had outdebated his visitor and reduced him to stammered admissions, while Willkie wired
his wife, an anti-New Dealer,
CHARM EXAGGERATED STOP I DIDN’T TELL HIM WHAT YOU THINK OF HIM.
The President felt that Willkie’s utility background would hurt his opponent’s chances, but the Republican selection for Vice-President of Senator McNary, a long-time supporter of public power and farm aid, was bound to take some of the sting out of any attempt to tie Willkie with the “interests.”

Nor could Willkie himself easily be labeled a reactionary. He had come out publicly for many of the chief New Deal reforms. A bitter and active foe of the Klan during the 1920’s, he had a deserved reputation as a friend of civil liberties. And he was an internationalist who had said, a month before the Republican convention, that “a man who thinks that the results in Europe will be of no consequence to him is a blind, foolish and silly man.” Willkie was as flexible in his views as most other politicians panting for a presidential nomination. But this made him a hard man for the Democrats to label. Indeed, the Indianan himself was a Democratic bolter: he had been a delegate to the 1924 Democratic convention, he had voted for Roosevelt in 1932, and he was calling himself a Democrat as late as 1938.

All in all, Willkie and McNary were formidable opponents—the strongest ticket the Republicans could have named, Roosevelt felt. The nature of the two conventions also strengthened Willkie’s hand. The Republican convention had appeared as open and unbossed as the Democratic had seemed tawdry and rigged. In fact, however, Willkie’s build-up had been spurred by a great deal of money and an avalanche of propaganda; yet his sixth-ballot triumph in the convention over the Dewey and Taft “steam rollers” left him looking like a Galahad.

In mid-August Willkie made his acceptance speech in his home town in Indiana. A colossal shirt-sleeved crowd—a quarter-million strong, some said—stood in a grove in the stifling heat and heard Willkie lambaste the third-term candidate. “Only the strong can be free,” he shouted in his slurred, twangy way, “and only the productive can be strong.” In this speech and in the ones that followed, as his voice turned husky and then hoarse and finally became a scratchy croak, Willkie’s initial strategy became clear. He would accept the major foreign and domestic policies of the New Deal. He would attack Roosevelt on three main counts: seeking dictatorial power, preventing the return of real prosperity, and failing to rearm the country fast enough in the face of foreign threat.