The Plots Against the President (7 page)

Chapter Twelve

The
Nourmahal
Gang

By the end of January 1933, conditions in the United States and around the world were menacing. Japan was escalating its movements into China, having already invaded Shanghai. Forebodings of America's possible embroilment in a war in the Far East were palpable, especially given Roosevelt's strong commitment to an independent China. His sympathy with China against Japanese imperialism was borne out of familial affection for the country that had made his maternal grandfather wealthy. With Hitler's rise to power in Germany through the brutal intrigues of the Nazi Party that so far had left hundreds dead, Europe was in political upheaval in addition to economic collapse. Roosevelt had an immediate and visceral dislike of Hitler and saw him as a dangerous threat to global stability, telling Rexford Tugwell that he anticipated a German-Japanese alliance that could conceivably lead to war with the United States. (That Roosevelt and Hitler came to office within weeks of each other—and would die in office within weeks of each other—is one of history's great parallels, as the pair symbolized the stark distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.) At the same time, Mussolini's Italy was arming Fascists in Austria.

The domestic situation was also in a nosedive, with the Depression hitting its lowest point. Personal incomes had dropped by more than half. National exports were essentially stalled as production and distribution came to a standstill. The country was broke and the U.S. Treasury didn't have enough cash to meet the federal payroll. The national banking system was beginning the final stage of its collapse, with banks closed or closing in twenty-one states, unable to meet the demands of depositors trying to withdraw their money. Stock prices had dropped by 75 percent since the crash of 1929, and most Americans blamed Wall Street and crony capitalism for the entire catastrophe. “Wall Street was not merely accountable for the country's dilemma,” historian Steve Fraser said of the widespread perception, “it was its perpetrator, the principal villain in a national saga of guilt, revenge, and redemption.” Joseph P. Kennedy, himself a businessman and Wall Street speculator, wrote of the pervasive loss of confidence in the system: “The belief that those in control of the corporate life of America were motivated by honesty and ideals of honorable conduct was completely shattered.”

Despite his landslide election just three months earlier, Roosevelt—“waiting affably but without authority in the wings”—was now perceived as yet another fat-cat politician and upper-crust playboy. America's ruling elite was under fire, and Roosevelt seemed utterly evocative of that despised, exploiting class. This image of a gallivanting dabbler was not dispelled when movie theater newsreels showed him relaxing in the swimming pool at Warm Springs while the rest of the country was falling apart. Then, following his two-week vacation in Georgia, Roosevelt headed to the Caribbean for yet another twelve days of leisure and sportfishing.

On the evening of February 3, he boarded a special overnight train from Warm Springs to Jacksonville, Florida, to embark on a cruise to the Bahamas on one of the largest private yachts in the world. The German-built
Nourmahal
—flagship of the New York Yacht Club—belonged to his longtime friend, neighbor, and relative through marriage, Vincent Astor, one of America's richest men. The 263-foot vessel was the fastest oceangoing yacht ever built and was appointed with teak paneling and mahogany furnishings. Astor, a multimillionaire philanthropist whose father had died on the
Titanic
, was hosting the president-elect and five other wealthy men: Theodore Roosevelt's alcoholic son, Kermit; Justice Frederic Kernochan; William Rhinelander Stewart, a prominent New York and Florida landowner who was a major fixture on the Manhattan nightclub scene; George St. George of Tuxedo Park, New York; and Dr. Leslie Heiter of Mobile, Alabama.

Raymond Moley and another close aide, the veteran Bronx political boss Edward J. Flynn, rode with Roosevelt on the private train from Georgia to Florida. They were both appalled by the ostentation of such a holiday, and especially that Roosevelt's host was the “scion of a family whose huge income derived in good part from Harlem slum property,” as one account put it. Still, they found Roosevelt to be mentally engaged in addressing the colossal problems of the nation, and whatever doubts they harbored about the seriousness of the man were completely allayed. He was attentive, determined, and thoughtful, and he had settled on a clear path of action to bring remedy to the nation. Roosevelt asked Moley to draft the inaugural address while he was at sea, and the two men discussed the ideas to be included, with Moley taking notes.

Moley wrote in his notebook: “1. World is sick. 2. America is sick. Because failure to recognize Eco[nomics]. Changes in time, vast development of machine age in 20 years from point of view of replacing manpower [have] moved faster than in 100 years [before] producer capacity in agri[culture]—capacity in industry outrun consumption … Time to face the facts and get away from idea we can return to conditions of 29-30 … What is needed is action along … new lines … Action … Action … [If necessary] I shall ask Cong[ress] for … broad executive powers to conduct a war against the world emergency just as great as the powers that would be given if we were invaded by a foreign foe.”

Nearly twenty-five thousand people gathered in Jacksonville to cheer Roosevelt, including the city's mayor and the governor of Florida. The local American Legion drum and bugle corps joined a police band to play the Roosevelt theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Touched by the enthusiastic turnout, he gave an impromptu speech praising the city. If Americans were disappointed with the incoming president—as was the conventional wisdom—South Florida was an apparent exception.

In any event, both Moley and Flynn retained their qualms about the wisdom of Roosevelt's grand cruise on the luminous white luxury liner. In addition to the logistical and security complications it posed—Roosevelt's advisers would by necessity communicate in code by ship-to-shore radio—the excursion was a public relations nightmare. Watching them depart from the Jacksonville dock at Commodore Point, Flynn remarked sarcastically to Moley: “The Hasty Pudding Club puts out to sea,” referring to the Harvard theatrical society. Donning bright sports clothes and boyish grins, the men were more suggestive of boisterous fraternity brothers than a head of state and his councillors. Even his own son James was forever “fascinated by the mystery” of how Roosevelt could enjoy the companionship of “the
Nourmahal
Gang” at a moment when “he was doing so much to change the sort of world of which the
Nourmahal
was a symbol.”

Indeed, both the Left and the Right made hay of the event. Liberal journalists decried Roosevelt for going on such a highbrow extravaganza at a moment of such desolation in the land, and conservatives lambasted his populist facade. The famously right-wing
New York Sun
lampooned the president in a poem, “At Sea with Franklin D.,” which included the lines:

On the splendid yacht in a climate hot

To tropical seas they ran

Among those behind they dismissed from mind

Was the well-known Forgotten Man.

Among those disgusted by the jaunt were Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who saw it as confirmation of Roosevelt's hollowness. Likewise, President Hoover—stuck in Washington overseeing the demise of the nation's banking industry—was apoplectic at Roosevelt's seeming frivolity. In fact, he had come to believe that Roosevelt was responsible for the current emergency by refusing to cooperate with him and thereby sabotaging the recovery the Hoover administration had under way. The building crisis reached a climax on February 14, when the governor of Michigan ordered a bank moratorium, closing all 550 banks in the state for eight days. It became clear on that day that the bottom had fallen out of the economy and that the Michigan panic “could be neither stemmed nor localized,” Moley would later write. Those bank failures set off a chain reaction, as anxiety spread, and six days later the governor of Maryland followed suit, closing that state's 200 banks. Rumors swept the land that the money held in banks was no longer safe, and depositors rushed to retrieve their savings. Ordinary Americans stashed their money under their mattresses or the floorboards of their Model T Fords, or placed it in tins and buried it in their backyards. The wealthy shipped their gold fortunes to Europe; nearly every vessel traveling across the Atlantic was carrying a treasure.

The president-elect was blissfully uninvolved with the spiraling events on shore, basking in what he rightly sensed would be “the last holiday for many months.” He penned a letter to his mother from aboard the
Nourmahal
, stating that he was “getting a marvelous rest—lots of air and sun” and looking forward to returning “full of health and vigor.”

Chapter Thirteen

Magic City

Miami was a notorious trouble spot with a long-standing history of political violence and searing racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism. The least populous of its Confederate counterparts, Florida had been controlled since Reconstruction by a Democratic machine that governed with an iron fist. (The only Republican presidential candidate to carry the state had been Herbert Hoover, who walloped Catholic Al Smith in 1928.) Nearly 40 percent of the state's inhabitants were African Americans, who, along with the large population of poor whites, were systematically disenfranchised through poll taxes and literacy exams, along with the more manifest brutality of lynching.

A hotbed of race-based conservatism, South Florida had been hit hard by the Depression, which had slammed the area several years earlier than it had the rest of the country. Flying high during the economic prosperity of the 1920s, Miami was the epicenter of the modern real estate boom, with thousands of middle-class Americans moving into what was nicknamed “Magic City” for its supernatural growth. In a five-year period, Miami's population had doubled. New York speculators invested in hotels and retirement communities, luring Northerners to the tropical paradise on Biscayne Bay. Creating a classic bubble, thriving commercial banks loaned easy money collateralized with inflated property values. By 1925, potential investors were already starting to steer clear of what seemed to be a shady land grab, and federal revenue agents were inspecting the “orgy of speculation.” Then, in 1926, the Category 4 “Great Miami Hurricane”—at the time, the most destructive hurricane to ever hit the United States—was dubbed “the blow that broke the boom.” By the time of the 1929 stock market crash, Miami was already on the skids.

What followed during the next four years of the Depression was a level of insolvency, unemployment, and foreclosures to rival the country's poorest locales. There were few Jews or Hispanics in Miami; “Gentiles Only” signs were ubiquitous at the resort city's many hotels, and the large black population was relegated to second-class citizenry. The Ku Klux Klan—with thirty thousand members throughout Florida—was a visible and powerful presence in Miami and openly colluded with local police against Catholics, immigrants, and labor leaders, and intimidated Jews and African Americans. They were especially on the lookout for “radicals”—the all-inclusive word that captured Socialists, Communists, and anarchists.

“Columns of hooded, robed Klansmen marched for blocks during parades, funerals and other public displays in the city,” wrote a former Florida prosecutor. In the winter of 1933, the Klan was very much in evidence in Miami, with local and state government officials and prominent figures in the community among its members.

It was into this atmosphere of xenophobia and hatred, fear and want, that the gleaming
Nourmahal
and its happy-go-lucky passengers glided gracefully into Biscayne Bay on the evening of February 15. Roosevelt had initially intended to disembark from the yacht and travel immediately by train to New York to prepare for his swearing-in on March 4. But his grand reception in Jacksonville two weeks earlier, where thousands of well-wishers had turned out to see him, gave Miami's boosters an idea for a “welcome home” celebration in their benighted city.

While the
Nourmahal
had been idly skirting the coastline, Robert H. Gore, the publisher of the
Fort Lauderdale Daily News
, was promoting a massive rally. Gore conceived of the plan with the goal of raising the morale of a dejected populace while also providing local political leaders and influential Miami businessmen an opportunity to meet and greet the president-elect. He had contacted the ship by radio and proposed the event, which Roosevelt embraced. Louis Howe had insisted that Moley's negotiations with prospective cabinet appointees were too delicate to be set forth in a letter to Roosevelt, transmitted by radio to the ship, or delivered by an intermediary. The rally would provide Moley with the opportunity to meet Roosevelt in Miami, report his findings personally, and accompany him on the train back to New York, and Roosevelt could simultaneously use the event to gin up support for his new administration.

Gore and his cohorts lost no time in planning the historic event—an official visit by a U.S. president-elect. The local newspapers promoted the upcoming rally, explicitly detailing plans for the presidential motorcade route and a parade with several bands, honor guards, and drum and bugle corps, culminating with Roosevelt's speech from the bandstand at Bayfront Park. Roosevelt would ride in an open car from the pier to the park, snaking through streets lined with people, to the amphitheater, where he would make a few remarks and then proceed several blocks west to the train station for his departure. A parade would follow him to the station, and from the platform of his railway car he would wave to the crowd as his train pulled away.

Upon learning of the celebration, several local and national notables decided to attend. Anton Cermak, Chicago's mayor and the Democratic Party boss of Illinois, who was hoping to mend fences with Roosevelt after opposing his nomination, owned a vacation home in Miami Beach. He decided to travel to Miami on a “begging expedition” for patronage for friends and financial aid for his city, which owed its teachers twenty million dollars in back pay, according to Alex Gottfried, author of
Boss Cermak of Chicago
. Along with national political figures and presidential advisers, according to the newspapers, mayors and judges from nearby communities and the governor of Florida would also appear.

As the yacht docked at seven P.M., the men on board were relishing a lavish farewell dinner. Roosevelt's vacation with what his wife, Eleanor, called “those people” was apparently beneficial. He looked tan, fit, and well rested. “I didn't even open the briefcase,” he boasted to the newsmen who rushed on board to interview him, hoping to glean the identities of the incoming cabinet. “We fished and swam … We went to a different place each day. Usually we fished in the morning and came back to the yacht for lunch. One day we had an all-day trip to the middle bight of Andros Island after bone-fish. The only difficulty is that you can't talk and fish for bone-fish. It's silent fishing and that put an awful crimp in it.” He refused to discuss presidential business—doggedly speaking only of the laid-back days at sea filled with swimming and fishing and more swimming and fishing—and the frustrated reporters left him alone with Moley.

Moley, by now his chief economic adviser, quickly summarized the confidential cabinet negotiations, and the group left the yacht for three automobiles that were lined up on the pier. They were running ten minutes late for the nine P.M. gathering, and thousands had congregated in the streets, at the park, and at the train station to see him. Roosevelt, wearing a gray suit selected by his appointments secretary, Marvin H. McIntyre, ten-pound leg braces, and no hat, was helped down the gangplank and into the backseat of the lead car—a green Buick convertible. Seated next to him was his official host, Miami mayor Redmond Gautier. McIntyre, Augustus “Gus” Gennerich, his personal bodyguard and aide, and Robert Clark, a Secret Service agent, got into the front seat. Fitzhugh Lee, a Miami policeman, drove the convertible.

The second automobile, also with its top down, carried five more Secret Service operatives. In the third convertible were Moley, Vincent Astor, Kermit Roosevelt, and William Rhinelander Stewart.

Ever since the assassination by an anarchist of President William McKinley in 1901, the Secret Service—a division of the U.S. Treasury—had become the full-time security detail for American presidents. Traditionally, the Secret Service relied heavily on assistance from local law enforcement officers, and Miami was no exception. Close to two hundred police officers had been pooled from nearby communities—one hundred patrolled Bayfront Park, sixty were stationed along the route, and twenty motorcycle police escorted Roosevelt's car.

The caravan crawled through the throngs of people—the largest crowd ever assembled in Miami history. Estimated at over twenty-five thousand, the mass cheered and applauded, yelled out and thrust toward Roosevelt's car. The police tried to maintain control, but the unexpected swarm created chaos that was exacerbated by the murky darkness. The bands were blaring, cheers filled the warm air, and red, white, and blue floodlights bathed the stage. Rows of palm trees presented a path, their fronds waving gently in the breeze. Thousands lined the roads, and the seven thousand seats in front of the brightly lit stage were filled. On the garish, ocher-colored three-story bandstand were the dignitaries, including Cermak. Several in the motorcade found the situation unnerving.

“It would be easy,” Astor said to Moley and the others in his car, “for an assassin to do his work and escape.” Night was falling, and an assassin could slip into the darkness. Astor was so edgy that he made a second remark about how risky it was to subject Roosevelt to such a crowd. Moley would later remember Astor's comments as “one of those improbable coincidences that never seem believable after.” Moley assured him that they had passed through many such crowds before on the campaign trail when they had only one personal bodyguard and were forced to rely solely on the assistance of the local police. At least now they had the Secret Service.

Roosevelt's vice president–elect, John Nance Garner, had recently warned him of the danger of assassination, especially in times of such national anxiety. Roosevelt had dismissed the concern. “I remember T.R. [Teddy Roosevelt] saying to me ‘The only real danger from an assassin is from one who does not care whether he loses his own life in the act or not. Most of the crazy ones can be spotted first.' ” Naturally, Roosevelt understood that the presidency carried inherent danger. “Sono gli incerti del mestiere”—“These are the risks of the job,” King Umberto of Italy famously remarked in 1897 after escaping the knife of a would-be assassin. Indeed, it was a newspaper clipping of that attack that had inspired McKinley's assassin.

For his part, Roosevelt was buoyed by the turnout, smiling and waving exuberantly with no apprehension. In just seventeen days, he would
finally
become president.

Twenty minutes after disembarking from the
Nourmahal
, the lead car arrived at a paved area in front of the bandstand. The crowd erupted with cheers and then became respectfully silent as Gennerich stealthily hoisted Roosevelt onto the top of the Buick's backseat.

“We welcome him to Miami,” Mayor Gautier spoke into the microphone. “We wish him success and are promising him cooperation and support, and we bid him Godspeed. Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect of the United States of America.”