Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (14 page)

Franklin’s initial good fortune had been to run his first race for office as the New York Republican party was fracturing between the progressives and the standpatters. The window for Dutchess County Democrats opened just long enough for him to step through, and it began closing almost at once. The 1911 elections for the New York assembly restored the Republican majority to the lower chamber, and the 1912 elections threatened to do the same to the senate. Roosevelt had reason to anticipate retirement from office.

But smiling fate intervened once more—assisted by none other than Uncle Ted. Republican progressives warned the Rough Rider that everything he had accomplished in the White House would be imperiled by another four years of his protégé, William Howard Taft. Rested after his safari and world tour, and restless after three years out of power, TR declared himself a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1912. This Roosevelt insurgency garnered incomparably more attention than Franklin’s fight with Boss Murphy, but it recapitulated the same themes. TR denounced the Taft machine as corrupt and unconcerned with ordinary Americans; the welfare of the people required a fresh blast of democracy. Several states by this time held preference primaries; Roosevelt trounced Taft in most of these, including one held in Taft’s home state of Ohio. But Republican party rules left the majority of the votes at the national convention in Chicago in the hands of the regulars, who rebuffed Roosevelt to renominate Taft. Roosevelt thereupon bolted the convention, trailing a large portion of the party behind him. This insurgent column reorganized under the banner of the Progressive party (nicknamed Bull Moose for TR’s characterization of his rude good health) and girded for combat. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed.

Indirectly they battled for the Democrats, as anyone not blinded by emotion could see. Since the 1850s the Democrats had elected precisely one president (Grover Cleveland, albeit twice). Sixty years after the industrial revolution began transforming American life, the party of Jefferson and Jackson had yet to come to terms with the political meaning of that revolution. The South dominated Democratic congressional politics; southern senators and congressmen sat on important committees and protected the interests of their states and districts. But the South sorely handicapped the party in presidential politics. The blatantly racist politics of the South alienated voters elsewhere, putting southern presidential hopefuls in an impossible bind. To win a name in the South required repeatedly playing the race card, but doing so effectively disqualified one for president.

The Democrats might have mitigated their southern burden by embracing the Democratic machines of the urban North. Yet the notorious corruption of Tammany Hall and its counterparts in other cities caused their favorites credibility problems of their own when seeking higher office. Even had the machines been exemplars of integrity, the cities, with their large and growing immigrant populations, seemed so foreign to rural voters that the graduates of city politics had scant appeal beyond the boroughs. It merely compounded the problem that rural districts were constitutionally overrepresented in most state legislatures, and the rural states in the federal electoral college.

If some charismatic figure could build a bridge between the two pillars of the party—between the South and the cities—the Democrats might again elect presidents as they had before the Civil War. Till then their only hope lay in a civil war among the Republicans.

This was precisely what Theodore Roosevelt’s defection in the summer of 1912 touched off and what enabled the Democrats to envision reoccupying the White House. Since the turn of the century, Democratic conventions had been pro forma affairs, with candidates vying for the dubious privilege of losing, often badly, to the Republican nominee. This time the contest was genuinely bitter because the prize was real.

I
N THE EARLY
summer of 1912 Franklin and Eleanor embarked on what amounted to a second honeymoon. They left the children with the nurse, nanny, and servants, and headed for the Southwest. They crossed the Mississippi on a Louisiana train ferry that handled several cars at a time. No bridge yet spanned the lower Mississippi, partly because the river was so wide but also because the floods that periodically inundated the land on either side of the river would have played havoc with any but the sturdiest approaches and abutments. In fact, a flood that surged downstream in 1912 nearly prevented Franklin and Eleanor from getting across; theirs was the last train ferried over for several days.

They traversed western Louisiana and the entire width of Texas, exiting the train at Deming in southern New Mexico. Bob Ferguson, the British Rough Rider, and his wife, Isabella, had moved from Scotland to New Mexico on account of the tuberculosis that was slowly taking Bob’s life. As with other diseases incurable by contemporary medicine—a large category in the second decade of the twentieth century—treatment consisted of transporting the patient to an environment as supportive as possible of the patient’s immune system. For tuberculosis patients this meant somewhere high and dry. Davos, Switzerland, was famous for its tuberculosis sanatoriums; Bob Ferguson, the cavalryman, preferred the American West. He and Isabella were building a home in the mountains of New Mexico; meanwhile they and their children kept house in a tent.

Eleanor had never been camping, and the visit to the Fergusons opened her eyes to its possibilities. She was amazed at how well the Ferguson children adapted to their new surroundings and regimen. “My city ideas had to be rapidly adjusted when I saw them eating pork and beans and all kinds of canned food which would have been considered absolute death to children of their age in eastern surroundings,” she remembered. She had read about cowboys and heard Uncle Ted tell of his experiences among the cattlemen of Dakota. Now she encountered the hardy breed herself. All were polite, but Isabella informed her that courtesy sometimes concealed darker currents. “Last week I thought I had a really good boy to do the work,” Isabella told Eleanor. “But I found he was wanted for the murder of his brother, so I had to let him go to jail.”

F
RANKLIN AND
E
LEANOR
timed their return east to allow Franklin to attend the Democratic national convention in Baltimore. Two candidates had distanced the field during the primary season: Champ (shortened from James Beauchamp) Clark of Missouri and Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. Clark, a nine-term congressman and the current speaker of the House, appealed to party conservatives; Wilson, the Princeton president who had become New Jersey’s governor, wore the progressive mantle. Some of the same issues that were splitting the Republicans threatened to divide the Democrats, but two factors seemed certain to prevent a full-blown schism. First, because the Democrats lacked an incumbent, the progressive challenge couldn’t well be construed as lese majesty, as it was among the Republicans. Second, because the Democrats had been exiled so long from the White House and appeared doomed, under normal circumstances, to wander the wilderness for decades longer, they were desperate to take advantage of the opportunity of Theodore Roosevelt’s rebellion.

Franklin Roosevelt had liked Woodrow Wilson’s style from the moment the professor had first taken on the New Jersey establishment. After accepting the endorsement of Democratic boss James Smith in the 1910 campaign, Wilson proceeded as governor to topple Smith from power. Smith and his lieutenants cried foul, but other members of the machine sued for peace, on Wilson’s terms. Roosevelt was impressed that a liberal could be so cunning.

He first met Wilson personally in late 1911, traveling to Trenton to pay his respects and indulge his curiosity. Wilson asked what support a progressive presidential candidate might expect in New York. Roosevelt offered his own backing and said other progressives would join him. Wilson inquired what, precisely, this meant; Roosevelt conceded that it might not mean much. New York Democrats operated under a unit rule at national conventions; they all voted with the majority. And because Boss Murphy, who despised New Jersey progressives almost as much as he detested the New York variety, controlled the majority, the prospects for Wilson weren’t good.

Yet Wilson took the long view. Murphy might win the early rounds, but if the progressives went to the people, they couldn’t help triumphing. Perhaps 1912 was their year; perhaps they’d have to wait. But their cause would prevail. Wilson, a devout Calvinist and predestinarian, was certain of that.

His confidence was catching, and Roosevelt enlisted with a group of New York Democrats for Wilson. His anti-Tammany reputation preceded him, and he soon was named chairman of the group’s executive committee. He solicited donations for Wilson—money that funded speakers, articles, and advertisements on behalf of the New Jersey governor. And when the Democrats convened at Baltimore, following the crack-up of the Republicans at Chicago, he headed an unofficial New York delegation committed to Wilson.

Inside the convention hall, Champ Clark led the early balloting, to no one’s surprise. But the Democrats’ two-thirds rule for nominations—adopted in the early days of national conventions, to enforce party discipline—prevented Clark from claiming victory. And with each ballot that failed to put him over the top, his candidacy lost momentum.

The break occurred on the fourteenth ballot. William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ three-time nominee and, despite his three defeats, still the hero of the southern and western wings of the party, rose to announce that he was switching his vote from Clark to Wilson. He explained his decision as a rebuke to Charles Murphy and boss rule; he said that he’d support Wilson only so long as Murphy did not.

But the explanation was lost in the pandemonium that followed the announcement of the switch. A brawl broke out between Clark delegates and Wilson men. One Clark delegate was heard to mutter, in Bryan’s direction, “By God, somebody ought to assassinate him.”

Roosevelt’s role at the convention consisted chiefly of offering moral support to Wilson. He disappointed some onlookers who, hearing that “Roosevelt is coming,” expected Theodore and found only Franklin. But he let out to reporters that he had spoken with Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore’s son, who related that his father, in Franklin’s words, was “praying for Clark.” The story appeared in the papers, as Franklin intended, and bolstered Wilson’s prospects. At a crucial early moment, when a faction of Clark men tried to stampede the convention by staging a noisy demonstration for the Missourian, Franklin Roosevelt led an even louder counter-cheering squad for Wilson. Throughout the convention he took every opportunity to introduce himself around, making a widely, if not deeply, favorable impression.

And he applauded the convention’s outcome, when it finally occurred. “Wilson nominated this afternoon,” he wired to Eleanor, who had taken the children to Campobello. “All my plans vague. Splendid triumph.”