Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (49 page)

Roosevelt worked the West through another proxy. James Farley had been the New York state Democratic chairman before becoming Roosevelt’s 1930 campaign manager, and before that he had been Al Smith’s fair-haired Irishman. Smith appointed Farley boxing commissioner, a post that earned him sufficient fame that Lucky Strike paid him to endorse its cigarettes. Farley might have become a rival to Louis Howe among Roosevelt’s supporters, except that where Howe was a policy man at heart, for whom politics was a means to the end of progressive policy, Farley preferred his politics unsullied. The game was what mattered to him, not the final score. Outsiders often expected Farley to be as brusque as the streets of New York, but in fact he spread the charm of the Irish, adapted to local circumstances, wherever he went. Louis Howe thought he was the ideal person to send west. “He has a wholesome breeziness of manner and a frank and open character which is characteristic of all Westerners,” Howe remarked. “In addition, I think he gives a distinct impression of being a very practical and businesslike politician.”

The Westerners thought so, too, at least enough to register their advance approval of a Roosevelt candidacy. On an eighteen-state tour that carried him from Lake Superior to Puget Sound and then south to California and back across the Great Basin and Plains to Chicago, Farley talked up Roosevelt and the need for party unity and listened intently to Democratic committee members, state chairmen, newspaper editors, potential delegates, and anyone else who might influence the outcome of the 1932 convention. Some were coy, others forthright. William Howes of South Dakota was both. “Bill was a canny politician who had been in the game for years, usually working hard for the Democratic ticket only to see it go down under a Republican landslide on election day,” Farley remembered. “He knew the game backwards and forwards. We sat there for some time exchanging generalities, without disclosing what either of us really had in mind. Just before it was time to go, Bill decided to let me know what he really thought. He plumped his fat fist on the table and growled in a deep voice: ‘Farley, I’m damned tired of backing losers. In my opinion, Roosevelt can sweep the country, and I’m going to support him.’”

Similar comments from other Democrats caused Farley to conclude that the West was Roosevelt’s for the taking. “I am satisfied, Governor, that the leaders want to be on the bandwagon…. There are a lot of Democratic candidates for governor and state offices who believe there is a real chance of winning with you as the nominee, and they feel there is absolutely no hope if anyone else is named.”

T
HE
E
AST WAS
another matter. Had Roosevelt been a Republican—or, rather, had the Democratic party operated the way the Republican party did—his approach to the 1932 nomination would have taken the form of a victory parade many months before the convention. But the Democrats’ two-thirds rule meant that a determined minority could hope to stall the candidacy even of a person favored by an otherwise overwhelming majority of delegates. The eastern wing of the party included elements opposed to Roosevelt for various reasons. Economic conservatives of the Grover Cleveland school thought him unreliable on fiscal and business issues. Philosophers of the party considered him shallow. Supporters of Al Smith resented the eclipse of their man by his erstwhile protégé.

Smith himself tried to hide his resentment but didn’t succeed. In December 1931 Clark Howell, the publisher of the
Atlanta Constitution,
visited Smith at his office in the newly completed Empire State Building. Howell and the
Constitution
had supported Smith at some cost to their credibility in the South, and Howell thought his loyalty had earned him an expectation of candor. “He seemed glad to see me,” Howell wrote Roosevelt after the interview with Smith. “For a few minutes we indulged in generalities, and then I got down to business.” Howell wanted to know how Smith would respond to a Roosevelt candidacy. “Governor,” Howell said, “you hold in the palm of your hand the assurance of an overwhelming Democratic victory next year, or you are in a position where you could jeopardize the present prospect of sure success.”

“How?” Smith inquired.

“By your attitude toward Franklin Roosevelt. With your support of him, all opposition to him will vanish, and his nomination will be a mere formality. The country expects you to support him, and it will not believe that you can possibly do otherwise.”

“The hell I can’t!” Smith burst out. He quickly added, “I do not mean that I will not support him.” But he refused to give Roosevelt or anyone else a blank check. “I am for the party first, above any man, and I will support the man who seems best for the party.”

Howell explained why he thought Roosevelt was the best man.

“But you speak for the South,” Smith replied. “You don’t understand the situation up here as I do.”

Howell asserted that Roosevelt would sweep the South and probably three-quarters of the states west of the Mississippi.

“But that is not this section,” Smith countered.

“With your support it is,” Howell responded. He listed the states—New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey—that Roosevelt could easily carry.

Something was eating at Smith. Howell probed to find out what it was. “Governor,” he said, “is there any ground for personal hostility on your part against Roosevelt?”

“No,” Smith answered slowly. “He has always been kind to me and my family, and has gone out of his way to be agreeable to us at the mansion at Albany.” While saying this, Smith rose from his desk and began pacing. “But, do you know, by God, that he has never consulted me about a damn thing since he has been governor? He has taken bad advice, and from sources not friendly to me. He has ignored me!” Smith suddenly slammed his hand down on the desk. “By God! He invited me to his house before he recently went to Georgia, and did not even mention to me the subject of his candidacy.”

Howell explained that Roosevelt wasn’t officially a candidate and didn’t want to put Smith in the awkward position of having to answer questions about something Roosevelt hadn’t yet revealed to the public. Smith refused to be mollified. He complained that Roosevelt’s “damn fool friends” were doing him and the party more harm than good. He ended by saying that he was, at the moment, neither for nor against Roosevelt and that he would take his time deciding what to do.

W
HILE
R
OOSEVELT
pondered how to deal with Smith, he confronted the task of governing the largest state in America in the throes of its worst depression in history. His tools were distinctly limited. He had no control over monetary or trade policy and only marginal influence on taxes, and hence could do nothing about the causes of the depression. He was left to deal with its effects. His first priority was relief: government assistance to those left hungry and homeless by the layoffs that continued to spread from shop to shop, factory to factory, industry to industry. Roosevelt’s political philosophy, like that of most of his progressive generation, had been shaped by the generally good times of the early decades of the twentieth century, when the chief function of government, in the progressive view, had been to restrain the excesses of American capitalism. Busting trusts, capping rail rates, ensuring the safety of food and drugs, protecting the nation’s natural resources: these had been the progressives’ priorities. It hardly occurred to the progressives that government someday might have to sustain, rather than restrain, capitalism and to supplement the incomes of large numbers of people caught short by its collapse.

Nor did this fully occur to Roosevelt yet. But the floundering economy caused him to reconsider the purpose of government and to reconfigure his basic philosophy. “What is the state?” he asked a special session of the New York legislature, which he called in the summer of 1931 to address the needs of the swelling population of unemployed. “It is the duly constituted representative of an organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being.” Roosevelt’s definition wouldn’t have passed muster in any introductory political science class, ignoring those tyrannies and oligarchies that had other aims than the protection and well-being of the people. But he wasn’t addressing a political science class, and his description suited his legislative purpose, which was to get the New York senate and assembly to appropriate funds for unemployment relief. “The duty of the state toward the citizens is the duty of the servant to its master…. One of these duties of the state is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstance as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others. That responsibility is recognized by every civilized nation.”

Here again a picky listener might have taken issue with Roosevelt’s formulation. Most of the countries of Western Europe had recognized the responsibility of the state to support the people in time of distress, but the question inspired heated debate in America. In the 1880s Grover Cleveland had vetoed a bill promising government payments to drought-stricken Texas farmers, on the ground that the measure would foster dependence on the government’s dole. “Though the people support the government,” Cleveland asserted, “the government should not support the people.” Cleveland’s position remained popular almost fifty years later, and though most Americans had come to accept the idea of government relief for certain natural disasters—hurricanes, floods, earthquakes—many Americans, maybe most, had yet to be convinced that business cycles qualified.

Roosevelt therefore had to exert himself to persuade the New York legislators to act. “The economic depression of the last two years has created social conditions resulting in great physical suffering on the part of many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children,” Roosevelt told the lawmakers. “Unless conditions immediately and greatly change, this will, we fear, be aggravated by cold and hunger during the coming winter.” Some observers were looking to the federal government for help. Perhaps the Hoover administration and Congress would act, but even if they did, there was no way of knowing when the help would come. “The State of New York cannot wait,” Roosevelt told the lawmakers.

He proposed the creation of a new agency empowered to deliver relief as rapidly as possible to the people who most needed it. The “Temporary Emergency Relief Administration”—soon shortened to TERA—would find or create jobs for the unemployed, and where jobs couldn’t be provided it would furnish food, clothing, fuel, and housing to the unemployed. Under no circumstances would cash—a dole—be given to individuals. Beyond this, however, the TERA should be granted “the widest latitude and discretion” in apportioning $20 million in emergency funds.

The Republicans grudgingly gave Roosevelt the money and authority he wanted. He appointed Jesse Straus, of the R. H. Macy department store chain, to head the TERA. Straus understood how large organizations operated and gave the relief agency credibility for care in not wasting taxpayers’ money. But he knew little about delivering social services. For this expertise Roosevelt turned to a chain-smoking wraith of a man who headed, ironically, the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Harry Hopkins was a prototype of the modern social worker, having caught the progressive spirit at Grinnell College in his home state of Iowa and spun it into a career on New York’s Lower East Side, not far from where Eleanor Roosevelt had made an avocation out of similar sentiments. He worked in child welfare and later civilian relief during the World War. Meanwhile he discovered a penchant for politics, of both the labor and partisan varieties. He helped found the American Association of Social Workers in the early 1920s and campaigned for Al Smith for governor and president. In the 1928 campaign he encountered Franklin Roosevelt, who appreciated his passion for social work, his aptitude for politics, and his ability to function on less food and sleep than anyone Roosevelt knew.