Roosevelt (9 page)

Roosevelt’s early legislative activities were not all of one pattern. Much of the time he was fighting a running battle with Tammany; on occasion he would go along with a dubious project of the bosses. Fie noisily held aloft the banner of clean government, yet he filled many minor positions with patronage appointments carefully cleared with Democratic leaders in his district; making appointments in this way, he said privately, was “vitally necessary if there is to be any organization in the party.” He paid special attention to the interests of his constituents, yet on one occasion he moved to strike out of an appropriation bill a bridge-repair item for his district. He hewed close to the local farm interests, yet in October 1912 the New York State Federation of Labor said that Roosevelt’s record on their bills was “excellent.” Roosevelt’s record as state
senator was compounded in parts of insurgency, orthodoxy, and trial and error.

When “moral” issues arose he could still vault onto his white charger and attack the enemy with vim, to the delight of his constituents. Although occasionally he himself gambled in a small way, Roosevelt opposed legalizing race-track gambling. He criticized prize fighting and Sunday baseball. He drew laudatory letters from clergy in his district by working hard for the “one day of rest in seven” bill. He hedged on Prohibition through the time-honored device of the state politician: coming out for “local option,” which would allow voters to decide the issue for their own local areas. He favored a national uniform divorce law, and won unanimous support from the legislature—and from the National Christian League for Promotion of Purity.

In his early months Senator Roosevelt’s progressivism was political in content rather than economic or social. He introduced a well-received resolution urging New York State congressmen to work for direct election of senators, he supported municipal home rule, and, after some vacillation, he came out for woman suffrage. The direct primary for party nominations was the kind of reform that enlisted his full energies. Considered but not adopted by previous legislatures, endorsed by both parties in 1910, direct primaries for party nominations came before the legislature not long after the “Sheehan business” and touched off another angry brawl. Roosevelt, so uncompromising in the Sheehan fight, was more willing to negotiate with the bosses in this matter, although some of his Insurgent colleagues were not. After holding out strenuously for a strong primary bill in July 1911, two months later he voted for a weak primary bill, riddled with concessions to Tammany; the following year, after helping to arouse the voters, he worked with a bipartisan group of Progressives to bring about changes that would cut down the party organization’s influence in the primaries, but he made little progress against the regulars.

Labor legislation—the dull and grimy side of progressivism—was something else. When Roosevelt first came to Albany his views on labor, to the extent he had any, were benevolently paternalistic. He favored help for foreign seamen coming into New York City; he wanted purer milk for needy children. He flatly opposed legislation to legalize boycotts by unions, and took an evasive stand on workmen’s compensation and on measures to forbid working boys of sixteen to twenty-one more than fifty-four hours per week. But in the next two years his attitude changed sharply. He not only backed the fifty-four-hour bill but during the debate on this bill held the senate floor with a talk on birds until none other than Big Tim Sullivan himself could be routed out of bed to supply a
vitally needed vote. He came out for workmen’s compensation legislation despite opposition from some constituents. By February 1913 he was willing to speak at a legislative hearing in favor of the whole batch of thirty-two bills drawn up by the Factory Investigating Commission.

How account for this change? The cause did not lie in a shift in Roosevelt’s basic social outlook, for he had not developed a philosophy of government. Partly, no doubt, Roosevelt was influenced by his cousin Theodore, who by mid-1912 was vociferously supporting workmen’s compensation, limited injunction in labor disputes, and social welfare legislation for women and children. Partly it was the climate of the times: America was moving toward a climax of progressive debate and action in the election of 1912. Partly it was the realization that his Tammany colleagues, whatever their failings, had a concern for social justice that rivaled his own. Most important, the investigations, reports, and debates in the senate gave him a vivid, harsh lesson in how the “other half” lived.

Indeed, the whole senate experience was a political education for Roosevelt. He learned quickly from old Albany hands like Smith and Wagner, from newspapermen, lobbyists, and state officials. He mastered knacks of the political trade: how to avoid taking a stand on issues and becoming involved in destructive local squabbles, how to deal with local party leaders, how to handle patronage without making an undue number of enemies, how to attract publicity, how to answer importunate letters. Above all, he learned the lesson that democratic politicians must learn: that the political battle is not a simple, two-sided contest between opposing parties, or between right and wrong, or between regulars and irregulars, but, as in the Sheehan episode, a many-sided struggle that moved over broad sectors and touched many interests. A simple farm bill, for example, involved not merely individual farmers but county agricultural societies, canneries, university professors, merchants, railroads, and government officials, and divisions over policy might occur not merely between such groups but within them.

Sometimes education came at painful cost. Tammany could still outmaneuver the young senator when it had a mind to. Backed by reformers, Roosevelt late in 1911 attacked a charter for New York City that was sponsored by Tammany. Senate lines were closely drawn and Roosevelt was in a position to kill the charter, but Tammany closed in on him from the rear: it threatened to reshuffle congressional districts and put Dutchess County into a hopelessly Republican area. Under pressure Roosevelt faltered. He came out for the charter, then, after progressive outcries, again took a stand against it. This was not the only time that Roosevelt vacillated as he tried to balance the perversely conflicting factors of his own
political ambitions, his various principles about the right thing to do, the complex relationships of state leaders in both parties, the welfare of his constituents, and the multifarious strands of public opinion in district, state, and nation.

Climbing the political ladder to the presidency, according to one theory, is essentially a matter of luck; the winner has simply won an incredible run at throws of the dice. This theory can easily be applied to Roosevelt; his wealth, name, family connections, appearance were bestowed upon him, and he had the good luck to run for office during two Democratic years. Yet he had bad luck too. In 1912, in the middle of his campaign for re-election to the state senate, he was stricken by typhoid and put out of action for the rest of the contest.

In this emergency he called in Louis McHenry Howe to run his campaign. Albany correspondent for the New York
Herald
and a kind of minor political operator around the capitol, Howe, with his dwarfish body, ferret-like features, and untidy clothes, looked like a troll out of a Catskill cave. He was out of a job in 1912 and glad to work for a man who, he felt, seemed likely to have a shining political future. To the little man Eleanor Roosevelt took an immediate dislike that lasted many years, but her husband saw his many uses. While Roosevelt lay in bed, on occasion despairing of the outcome, Howe managed the fight with verve, imagination, and guile. Armed with substantial funds, he sent thousands of “personal” letters from Roosevelt to farmers throughout the district. He published large advertisements in the newspapers. He played up specific measures that Roosevelt had proposed—or would propose—for his constituents, including lower license fees for shad fishermen along the Hudson and legislation for standard-size barrels for apple growers. He dealt with complaints from regular Democrats about Roosevelt’s handling of patronage and his attitude toward Tammany.

Howe had some twists of his own, such as his denunciation of Roosevelt’s opponent, a banker and utility president named Jacob Southard, for not visiting Columbia County during the campaign; his rather free distribution of five-dollar checks to scores of campaign workers; and his crafty ways of arousing discord within the Republican ranks. But his strategy was essentially that of his chief two years before: to proclaim Roosevelt’s agrarian progressivism, his bipartisanship, his antibossism, and his concern for the specific needs of his constituents.

Once again the strategy worked. Roosevelt got 15,590 votes to 13,889 for Southard and 2,628 for George Vossler, the Bull Moose candidate. He ran in his district 800 votes ahead of the
Democratic candidates for president and for governor. Vossler received 1,400 fewer votes in the district than Theodore Roosevelt. To be sure, the young senator won about a thousand fewer votes than his opponents combined, but it seems likely that at least half of Vossler’s vote would have gone to Franklin Roosevelt in a straight party fight. A close observer estimated that, on the average, eight Democrats in every election district deserted Roosevelt but thirty Republicans swung over to him.

Political poster issued by Roosevelt in 1912 campaign for re-election to the New York State Senate

In the new senate, convening in January 1913, Roosevelt moved with his usual vigor. In their 1912 sweep the Democrats had won majorities in both chambers as well as the governorship, and Roosevelt was now chairman of the Committee on Agriculture. One of his first moves was to redeem a promise made during the election: that he would do something about the wide margin between what the New York City commission merchants paid the farmers for produce, and what the merchants sold it for. Roosevelt promptly introduced a measure providing for the regulation of commission
merchants through licensing, inspection, and publicity. While Howe, now employed as a lobbyist, built fires under the state Grange in behalf of the bill, Roosevelt held hearings at the capitol. He received a vivid lesson in interest-group politics: 250 commission merchants showed up in Albany, but practically no farmers. While Roosevelt took a firm stand for his bill, he was willing to make a number of concessions to the merchants.

Roosevelt introduced several other agricultural bills that he had drafted in collaboration with the Grange and with agricultural experts. These bills would give backing by the state government to farmers’ co-operative associations, both marketing and purchasing; would allow agricultural credit banks to lend money for farm improvements; would provide state aid to county farm bureaus. On conservation matters, too, the senator took advanced positions. He sided with Hughes and other Republican progressives on state development of water power, and he vainly fought to extend state control of forestation, in the face of intense opposition from lumber interests.

The sweep of Senator Roosevelt’s farm and conservation bills was impressive. Considered with his position on labor legislation, these bills sharply raise the question whether Roosevelt moved essentially to a “New Deal” position on farm and labor matters twenty years before the New Deal was to be inaugurated. In major respects he did. But this shift came not in response to a new philosophy of government but to specific problems that seemed to him to call for specific action. “He probably could not have formulated his political philosophy very well at this time,” Eleanor Roosevelt said later. He was interested less in the philosophy than in the “science of government,” as he called it—how to understand people, how to influence them.

By the time the farm bills came up for a vote, Roosevelt was no longer in the state senate. A wider field of action had beckoned him.

P
OLITICAL AFFAIRS SWEPT ALONG
pell-mell on the national scene during State Senator Roosevelt’s years in Albany. Early in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt, steadily swinging to the left, began a strenuous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. “I don’t want to fight,” said Taft, but “even a rat in a corner will fight.” Although T.R. won most of the presidential primaries, Taft’s power over office-holding delegates and the party machinery brought him the Republican nomination late in June 1912. The Rough Rider promptly bolted, and the presidential chances of a Democrat soared.

Who was this Democrat to be? Franklin D. Roosevelt had already made his choice. During 1911 he had watched admiringly as Woodrow Wilson, the new governor of New Jersey, split with the political machine that had ushered him into politics, shouldered Boss Jim Smith out of a United States senatorship, and commanded the progressive forces of the state in a successful fight for public-utilities regulation, workmen’s compensation, a corrupt-practices act, primary and elections legislation, municipal reform. Wilson was Roosevelt’s kind of Democrat—clean, cultivated, and progressive but not too progressive. Late in 1911 Roosevelt visited the governor in New Jersey to tender him his support.