Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (18 page)

As a public wife Eleanor began to entertain. She couldn’t enter the all-male clubs—the Chevy Chase and Metropolitan—where Franklin golfed and drank with his friends and those he hoped would become his friends. James Roosevelt recalled caddying for his father on Sunday mornings; the attraction was the twenty-five-cent pay and the excuse to skip church. One regular Roosevelt links partner was Republican senator—and future president—Warren G. Harding. “All I remember about Harding was that he seemed amiable and that Father enjoyed golfing with him,” James said.

Eleanor wouldn’t have joined Franklin’s clubs even if she could have; she remained shy and retiring. It was an effort for her merely to open her house to the friends and acquaintances he brought home from work. But Sunday gatherings became semiregular. Eleanor served scrambled eggs and cold cuts to William Phillips of the State Department; Franklin Lane, the secretary of the interior; Adolph Miller, a Lane aide who transferred to the staff of the new Federal Reserve Board; and their wives. They all found Franklin delightful in a middleweight way. “I knew him then as a brilliant, lovable, and somewhat happy-go-lucky friend,” Phillips remembered of Roosevelt. “The qualities that made him great matured later.” As for Eleanor, she was appealing in an unassuming manner. “She seemed to be a little remote, or it may have been that Franklin claimed the attention, leaving her somewhat in the background,” Phillips explained. “She was essentially domestic, and her interest in public affairs was centered in her husband’s career rather than in any thought of a career of her own.”

Yet Eleanor had her moments and her methods. Phillips recalled sharing breakfast with Franklin and Eleanor one morning. She asked Franklin if he had received a letter from a particular person.

“Yes,” he answered, continuing to drink his coffee.

“Have you answered it, dear?” she inquired.

“No,” he said, still drinking.

“Don’t you think you should answer it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think you should answer it now?”

“Yes.”

Phillips concluded the story: “And he answered it then and there. I gathered that the letter might never have received a reply without the watchful eye of his wife.”

A
S MUCH AS
Roosevelt relished life in the nation’s capital, he realized that Washington was a wasteland of elective politics. No one was ever elected senator or governor or president from the federal district; every viable candidate had a base in his home state. With this in mind, Roosevelt spent as much energy worrying about the affairs of New York as about those of the Navy Department, and he took few steps in his capacity as assistant secretary without weighing their effects on politics back home.

His first avenue of influence was patronage. As a large employer, the Navy Department could function much like one of the urban machines, bestowing jobs on supporters in the same way that Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall did. The process was complicated by civil service rules, which limited firings and complicated hirings. But Roosevelt managed to install allies and their friends in navy yards and other places of employment about New York. He simultaneously expanded his reach beyond the navy. He ingratiated himself with Daniel Roper, his counterpart in the Post Office Department, who allowed Roosevelt to identify worthy recipients of postmasterships. With his knack for self-promotion, Roosevelt soon claimed—discreetly, since much of what he was doing violated the spirit if not the letter of the civil service laws—that anyone who wanted a federal job or contract in New York needed to talk to Franklin Roosevelt.

He might have been even more assertive had Wilson not refused to alienate Tammany Hall. As a progressive, Wilson regarded Tammany with distaste, but as a practical politician—far more practical than most people knew—he appreciated that he couldn’t carry New York without Tammany. In this regard, Wilson’s interests differed from those of Roosevelt, who had won his reputation attacking Murphy and who had to remain on the offensive if he wished to return to elective politics.

The difference became apparent during the summer and early autumn of 1914. Roosevelt hadn’t held the assistant secretaryship for even eighteen months, but he itched to proceed on his path to the White House. Uncle Ted had moved on after fourteen months; time was passing. Besides, the career benefits of a bureaucratic job diminished dramatically over time; eventually the refusals and rejections that formed an inevitable part of the bureaucrat’s life piled up till they were all anyone remembered. Roosevelt’s charm might postpone the day of reckoning but couldn’t forestall it forever.

Consequently Roosevelt decided to make a run for the Senate. The 1914 elections would be the first under the provisions of the Seventeenth Amendment, which finally let voters themselves, rather than the state legislatures, choose senators. That same year New York joined the ranks of progressive-minded states in selecting its Senate nominees by primary election. Between them, primaries and the direct election of senators dealt a double blow to bosses, pushing Charles Murphy and his ilk to the edge of extinction.

Or so the progressives hoped. In fact the bosses proved more resourceful than their opponents expected. After Roosevelt had Louis Howe launch a trial balloon in early 1914, he tried to persuade Wilson to take a public anti-Tam-many stand. The president demurred and indicated that other officials of the executive branch should follow his lead. “My judgment is that it would be best if members of the administration should use as much influence as possible but say as little as possible in the politics of their several states,” Wilson wrote Roosevelt.

Wilson’s directive might have determined the issue for an assistant secretary of lesser ambition. And indeed for a time Roosevelt kept quiet. He had been mentioned, by Howe among others, for governor as well as for senator, and he kept denying interest in the former office long enough to convince those who might have pushed his candidacy that he really didn’t want it. When a final attempt by some supporters to win an endorsement from Wilson fell short, Roosevelt issued a definitive denial. “To repeat what I have now said more than half a dozen times, I am not a candidate for nomination for Governor of New York,” he told reporters.

But only three weeks later, to the surprise of many who knew him, including Howe, he declared his candidacy for the Senate. “My senses have not yet left me,” he assured Howe, who was fairly certain they had.

Somehow Roosevelt had gotten the impression Wilson wanted him to run. William G. McAdoo said so, Roosevelt told Josephus Daniels, and McAdoo, Wilson’s Treasury secretary and son-in-law, should have known. Daniels cautioned Roosevelt, predicting he’d have a hard time against the Tammany candidate in the primary and perhaps a harder time against the Republican nominee in the general election. Daniels urged Roosevelt to check with Wilson before making a decision.

Roosevelt declined the advice and ignored the discouragement. Perhaps he exaggerated what McAdoo had actually said; perhaps he feared that if he asked Wilson directly, the president would tell him to stay out of the race. Perhaps he hoped to force Wilson’s hand in the contest. But Wilson kept aloof, and when Tammany tapped James Gerard, a machine man yet one respectable enough to have won Wilson’s nomination to be ambassador to Germany, Roosevelt realized he’d been outflanked. Roosevelt initially hoped Gerard would decline the endorsement, as the war in Europe had just begun and the ambassador presumably wouldn’t want to vacate his post. Gerard accepted the Tammany endorsement but remained in Berlin during the primary campaign, leaving Roosevelt to flail against an absent opponent.

He did so energetically. He visited navy yards, courting the union vote. He motored across the rural districts, reaching out to farmers. He wrapped himself in the mantle of the administration, although the mantle slipped whenever Gerard’s supporters rejoined that the president had refused to choose between these two members of his administration. He denied disrupting the party, even as he criticized Boss Murphy. A reporter asked what kind of Democrat he considered himself to be. “I am a regular organization Democrat of Dutchess County, a New York State Democrat, and a National Democrat,” he answered. “I am not an anti-Tammany Democrat, but, in this campaign, as in many others, I have taken a consistent position against the control of the Democracy of this state by Charles Francis Murphy, believing that he is a handicap to our Democracy.”

The primary contest resulted in the worst defeat Roosevelt would ever suffer. Gerard received 210,000 votes to his 77,000. As Murphy and Tammany gloated, Roosevelt put on his bravest smile and congratulated the winner. “Will make an active campaign for you,” he added, “if you declare unalterable opposition to Murphy’s leadership and all he stands for.” Gerard saw no reason to make such a declaration, logically deeming Murphy’s support more valuable than Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt affirmed Democratic regularity but sat on the sidelines as Republican James Wadsworth buried Gerard in the general election.

8.

E
LEANOR REMEMBERED HER FATHER BY NAMING HER THIRD SON FOR
him, and of all the Roosevelt children Elliott took the greatest interest in family history. It was Elliott who, inquiring after the cause of his grandfather’s premature death, was told by his mother that her father had suffered from a brain tumor for which alcohol offered the only pain relief. Whether or not he believed this version—which almost certainly wasn’t true, given the etiology of alcoholism and brain tumors—he reported it without comment in the memoir he wrote as an old man.

He reported much else, with extended comment. His first memories were of life in Washington while his father was the assistant secretary of the navy. He remembered what a dashing figure his father cut as he came down to breakfast each morning dressed in a starched high collar, an expensive English-tailored suit that hung impeccably on his lanky frame, and polished leather shoes purchased straight from London. His father was always a bit behind schedule but was never the least concerned on account of it. “Good morning, Babs,” he would say to Elliott’s mother, who had been up for hours. He would kiss her on the cheek and then turn to the children. “Good morning, chicks—how are we all today?” He would kiss them too. As he sat down, Eleanor would ring a silver bell, which signaled the servants that the master of the house required his morning meal.

Elliott recalled his father as the model of cheerfulness, despite the demands his office placed on him. “He invariably woke in a high good humor, ready and eager to tackle anything the day might bring,” Elliott wrote. “I do not remember a breakfast time when there wasn’t a smile on his lips and in his eyes.” As he inquired of Eleanor and the children what their day might hold or mentioned something on his own calendar, he appeared oblivious to the passage of time. Not so Eleanor, who constantly checked the clock to ensure the punctual departure of her husband and the school-bound children.

Typically the doorbell would ring before Franklin finished his coffee. A servant would answer, and Louis Howe, who had become Franklin’s chief aide at the Navy Department, would be shown in. “Good morning, Boss. Good morning, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Howe would say. Franklin and Eleanor would smile in response—he with true warmth, she out of politeness. “Mother made no pretense that she liked him,” Elliott said of Howe. “She felt somehow excluded from the intimacy he and Father shared, the affectionate bantering that went on between them, the secrets they kept exclusively to themselves.” She also found Howe’s manner crude and his hygiene deficient. But she smiled nonetheless. “Would you care for some breakfast, Mr. Howe?” she would say. “No, thank you,” he would answer, “but I would like some coffee, please.”

Howe survived on caffeine and nicotine, and on the adrenaline stimulated by proximity to power. The combination kept his weight a bit above one hundred pounds and his lungs in a chronic state of rebellion. “Don’t you think you should see a doctor about your cough?” Eleanor would inquire as he hacked across her breakfast table. He would respond, “It’s an old friend. I once saw a doctor in Albany who gave me two months to live. That was nearly ten years ago.”

Franklin would finish his breakfast and Howe his coffee. Franklin would kiss Eleanor and the children again, grab his hat—a felt bowler in winter, a straw boater in summer—and head out the door. Elliott, summoning testimony, memory, and imagination, recalled the fifteen-minute journey to the Navy Department:

He must have loved striding down Connecticut Avenue every weekday morning with Louis hurrying along at his side, the two of them looking uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho setting out to battle with giants. Government girls on their way to their typewriters turned their heads to watch. Society gossips rated Father to be among the handsomest men in town, long-muscled, superbly fit from weekend exercise. His good friend Nigel Law, Third Secretary at the British Embassy, who had arrived aboard the
Lusitania
in November, 1914, thought that he was “the most attractive man whom it was my good fortune to meet during my four years in America.”