ELEVEN

GOVERNOR

Now what follows is really private. In case of your election I know your salary is smaller than the one you get now. I am prepared to make up the difference to you.

—SARA TO FRANKLIN, OCTOBER 2, 1928

FROM 1925 TO 1928 Franklin and Eleanor were together infrequently.¹ The children were away, at either boarding school or university; Eleanor had begun her career teaching at the Todhunter School with Marion Dickerman; and FDR was in the South, either on the Larooco or at Warm Springs, Georgia, hoping to regain the use of his legs. Both remained in close contact with Democratic politics. Eleanor edited the newsletter of the Women’s Division (Women’s Democratic News), while Franklin continued his voluminous correspondence with party officials all over the country. In many respects ER operated as Roosevelt’s surrogate, but it was not always a frictionless relationship. “One of the great quarrels Eleanor had with her lot,” said Frances Perkins, “is that Franklin didn’t listen to her.… He liked her as a reporter, but when most men would have asked their wives what they thought, he didn’t.”²

FDR was genuinely fond of Eleanor’s friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman—whom he called “our gang”—and often assumed the role of a gracious and generous paterfamilias.³ They, in turn, were devoted to promoting his career and enjoyed the bonds of friendship established through Eleanor. It was Franklin, in fact, who originated the idea of a home for the three women on Val-Kill at Hyde Park, donated the land, and supervised the construction.

Dickerman remembered a wonderful Saturday afternoon in the late summer of 1924 when she, Eleanor, Nan Cook, and FDR were picnicking on the wooded banks of Val-Kill, two miles east of the Roosevelt house. ER noted that it was likely their last picnic of the year because Sara would soon close the estate for the winter.

“But aren’t you girls silly?” said Franklin. “This isn’t mother’s land. I bought this acreage myself. And why shouldn’t you three have a cottage here of your own, so you could come and go as you please? If you’ll mark out the land you want, I’ll give you a life interest in it, with the understanding that it reverts to my estate upon the death of the last survivor.”⁴

A deed was drawn up and witnessed by Louis Howe, and on August 5 FDR wrote a contractor friend of his, “My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods and want, instead of a beautiful marble bath, to have the stream dug out so as to form an old-fashioned swimming hole.”⁵ The resulting retreat was far from a shack in the backwoods. It was agreed that the cottage should be built of fieldstone in the traditional Hudson River Dutch style. Franklin handled the design, paid for a proper swimming pool, and added a big gray stucco building at the rear in which Eleanor and her friends hoped to establish a furniture workshop.

FDR christened the finished house “The Honeymoon Cottage,” which was not far off the mark. Initially Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy slept together in a single, loftlike dormitory bedroom. Much of the furniture, made by Nancy Cook and her assistants, bore the women’s initials: E. M. N. Eleanor embroidered towels and linens for the cottage, likewise emblazoned E. M. N., and the three women received housewarming gifts of silver, crystal, and china engraved with their initials intertwined. Franklin frequently gave Eleanor presents for the cottage, especially plantings and picnic accessories. He inscribed a children’s book, Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, to Dickerman: “For my little Pilgrim, whose progress is always upward and onward, to the Things of Beauty and the Thoughts of Love, and of Light, from her affectionate Uncle Franklin.”⁶ He autographed a favorite speech, “Another first edition for the library of the Three Graces of the Val Kill.”⁷

The cottage became the focus of the women’s lives. Nancy and Marion retained their Greenwich Village apartment, but it was merely a place to stay during the week until they could go home to Val-Kill. For Eleanor, the life she now led came close to re-creating the rebellious feminism she had enjoyed under the tutelage of Mlle. Marie Souvestre at Allenwood. The swimming pool was always open to Franklin and his friends, and there was a special barbecue pit where he could grill his hamburgers, but Val-Kill was a woman’s world, a place where shared confidences became the rule, where Eleanor’s earnest sense of duty yielded to spontaneous and casual pleasures.

Sara accepted the arrangement with remarkable grace. “Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don’t tell her so,” she wrote FDR soon after Val-Kill opened.⁸ When she saw that her daughter-in-law was fully committed to her new life, Sara became an ardent supporter. She appeared with Eleanor at political luncheons and dinners, and became a patron of almost all of ER’s activities, whether they advanced Franklin’s political career or not.⁹

On one such occasion Sara hosted a luncheon Eleanor was giving for thirty-five board members of the National Council for Women in the double dining room on East Sixty-fifth Street. Among the guests was Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women. “I can still see the twinkle in Mrs. James Roosevelt’s eyes,” Bethune remembered,

as she noted the apprehensive glances cast my way by the Southern women who had come to the affair.

Then she did a remarkable thing. Very deliberately, she took my arm and seated me to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt, the guest of honor! I can remember too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride. From that moment on, my heart went out to Mrs. James Roosevelt. I visited her at her home many times subsequently, and our friendship became one of the most treasured of my life.¹⁰

While Eleanor settled in at Val-Kill, Franklin pursued his quest for a cure at Warm Springs, Georgia. He learned of the therapeutic effect of the thermal waters at the hill country resort during the Democratic convention in 1924. The Wall Street banker George Foster Peabody, a member of the New York delegation who wintered in Columbus, Georgia, told Franklin of the wondrous cures wrought by the warm mineral waters that bubbled from the earth. Peabody had recently bought the Merriweather Inn, a genteel ruin of a hotel that bordered the spring, and urged Franklin to go down and try the waters for himself.

FDR was initially unimpressed by the prospect, but during the summer of 1924 Peabody directed a stream of testimonials to Franklin that eventually piqued his interest. In October, he, Eleanor, and Missy went down to see for themselves. Eleanor stayed for a day, found the rigid segregation and tumbledown poverty not to her liking, and returned to New York to assist in the final days of Al Smith’s gubernatorial campaign. Franklin and Missy remained three more weeks.¹¹

Roosevelt found the magnesium-laced waters astonishingly buoyant. Swimming in the warm Merriweather pool, he found that his unbraced legs would hold him upright and that by thrashing his powerful arms and shoulders he could move himself back and forth across the water. In his three weeks at Warm Springs he felt that he had made more progress than in the preceding three years. For the first time since August 1921 he thought he felt life in his toes and rejoiced at being able to stay in the water two hours at a time without becoming fatigued.^12*

When Franklin returned to New York, he laid plans to purchase Warm Springs and convert it into an aftercare facility for polio victims. “I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could be established,” he told Sara.¹³ Eleanor fretted that Franklin was squandering his resources and lacked the patience to succeed at so ambitious an undertaking; Basil O’Connor was concerned that Franklin was overcommitting himself; and George Peabody was asking $200,000 for the property—roughly twice what he had paid for it a few years earlier. But Louis Howe was supportive and immediately set about raising funds for the project; Missy never questioned the effort; and, most important, Sara added her backing.¹⁴

For FDR, Warm Springs offered the opportunity to be in complete charge of a significant undertaking—a means of reestablishing his self-esteem. Warm Springs would be his alone, a haven much like Val-Kill was for Eleanor: a place where he could do as he pleased, when he pleased, free from the formality of Hyde Park and East Sixty-fifth Street. More to the point, it provided an opportunity to participate in the fight against polio. Roosevelt had no special training in physiotherapy, but he became an authentic pioneer in its application. His infectious enthusiasm galvanized polio victims hitherto without hope. By instinct and example he infused others with his own unconquerable spirit as he led exercises at the pool or lolled in the sun, chatting happily with anyone who passed by. He called himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt” and took a genuine interest in those who came to Warm Springs to exercise under his care.

In April 1926 FDR completed his negotiations with Peabody and purchased the Merriweather Inn, its cottages and pools, plus 1,200 acres of undeveloped land for $201,667.83—approximately two thirds of his fortune.¹⁵ Shortly afterward he bought an additional 1,750 acres. With the help of Sara—who organized exclusive dinners for potential donors—and the indefatigable Louis Howe, Roosevelt organized the Warm Springs Foundation (later the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) with a panel of distinguished backers, including Wall Street bankers George Foster Peabody and Russell Leffingwell; businessmen Herbert Straus and William H. Woodin; his friends Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Basil O’Connor; and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors.^* Edsel Ford personally contributed $25,000 to provide a glass enclosure for the swimming pool.¹⁶

Warm Springs provided a challenge, and Roosevelt threw himself into every detail. He persuaded Dr. LeRoy Hubbard, a respected orthopedic surgeon who supervised rehabilitation care for the New York State Department of Health, to come down and take charge of the patients’ treatment. Hubbard brought with him a trained nurse and physiotherapist, Miss Helena Mahoney, who hired a dozen young phys ed graduates from Peabody College in Nashville to work with the patients in the pool. “Our rate is $42 a week,” FDR wrote Paul Hasbrouck, a polio victim in Poughkeepsie. “This includes board, lodging, medical and therapeutic treatment, pool charges, etc.—in fact, everything except your traveling expenses and cigarette money.”¹⁷ But no one was turned away for lack of money. Indigent patients were supported by a Patients’ Aid Fund that Roosevelt established, and when that was depleted, he asked that the bills be sent to him personally at Hyde Park.¹⁸

From the fall of 1926 until the autumn of 1928, FDR spent well over half of his time at Warm Springs. He ordered a cottage built for himself, all on one level with a driveway designed so he could enter the house directly at grade level. He also engineered an ingenious set of hand controls for an automobile to drive through the Georgia countryside. A local mechanic converted an old Model T Ford to Roosevelt’s specifications, and by the end of 1926 Franklin was whizzing about Warm Springs at twenty-five miles an hour. Roosevelt was a confident driver and controlled the car with ease. And after five years of being dependent upon others, nothing gave him greater pleasure. He became as familiar to the people along the dusty roads of Merriweather County as the rural mail carrier—except, one resident remembered, “the mail carrier did take Sunday off.”¹⁹

Roosevelt became the leading citizen of Merriweather County, thrilled at his exposure to the life of ordinary people in rural Georgia. When he ran for president, he carried the county by margins ranging from 50 to 1 in 1932 to 16 to 1 in 1944—a result significantly different from Hyde Park and Dutchess County, which he never managed to win.²⁰ Georgians were open and friendly, FDR liked to say. He remembered their names and considered many of them his friends. He often ventured out alone in his Model T, pulling into farmyards to talk crops and cattle, parking in front of the drugstore, honking his horn and ordering a Coke, nosing into a hollow to buy corn liquor from the local bootlegger. “He was a man that could talk to you,” a farmer remembered. “He had sense enough to talk to a man who didn’t have any education, and he had sense enough to talk to the best educated man in the world; and he was easy to talk to. He could talk about anything.”²¹

Roosevelt also listened. The stories of low farm prices, failed banks, and rural poverty stayed with him into the White House. From the poor people of Merriweather County, Franklin learned what it meant to be without electricity and running water; for children to be without shoes and adequate clothing; for a simple grade school education to be beyond the reach of many who lived in the hardscrabble backwoods. Merriweather County raised corn and short-staple cotton, but drought, falling prices, and the boll weevil made it all but impossible to turn a profit. Farms were small, plowing was done by mules, not tractors, and mortgage indebtedness increased annually. FDR tried his hand at farming and experimented with cattle and timber, but without success. “It pleased him because it offered a challenge,” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell remembered. “But there was never a more dismal prospect than was offered by farming that ridge at Pine Mountain.”²²

Warm Springs, on the other hand, more or less held its own. “You needn’t worry about my losing a fortune,” Franklin assured Sara. “Every step is being planned either to pay for itself or to make a profit.”²³ The American Orthopedic Association approved Dr. Hubbard’s treatment program, and by the end of 1927 seventy-one patients had visited the resort. The number grew to eighty in 1928—as many as the facilities could accommodate—and the staff totaled 110.²⁴ Warm Springs would not be free of financial worry, however, until FDR became president and the March of Dimes was organized, first to raise money for the foundation, then to aid polio research nationally.^*

While Franklin toiled at Warm Springs, Eleanor found herself fully engaged teaching history, English, and current affairs at the Todhunter School for Girls on East Eightieth Street, just off Park Avenue. In 1927 ER, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook purchased Todhunter—an elite private school for daughters of wealthy New Yorkers—from its founder, Winifred Todhunter, who was returning to England. Dickerman became principal and Eleanor associate principal. Todhunter resembled Allenwood in its commitment to female achievement, and, like Marie Souvestre, Eleanor set the tone for the school.²⁵ A naturally gifted teacher, she urged her students to challenge authority and, consciously or unconsciously, proselytized relentlessly for the social ideals of the Democratic party. “I am very anxious to send a class which has been studying with me … to see the various types of tenements in New York City,” she wrote her friend Jane Hoey, who directed the city’s Welfare Council. “I would like them to see the worst type of old time tenement. They need to know what bad housing conditions mean.”²⁶

Eleanor became a role model for many of her students and urged them to assume responsibility for their lives. “In the future,” she said, “there will be nothing which is closed to women because of their sex.”²⁷ For Eleanor herself, teaching at Todhunter represented enormous personal fulfillment. “I like it better than anything else I do,” she told The New York Times in 1932.^28*

While FDR exercised at Warm Springs and Eleanor taught at Todhunter, a great deal of the responsibility for the children fell to Sara. When James was confirmed at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, it was Sara who stood in for his parents, just as it was she and Cousin Susie Parish who chaperoned Anna’s social debut. Twice Sara took Anna and James to Europe, and Elliott, unhappy at Groton, asked permission to live with his grandmother and attend high school at Hyde Park. (Permission refused.) Anna and the two younger boys, Franklin Jr., and John, who were at school in New York City, usually spent each weekend at Hyde Park.²⁹ “Looking back on this period,” said James, “I must say in all honesty that neither Anna, my brothers, nor I had the guidance and training that I think father would have given us had he not been involved in his own struggle to re-establish a useful life for himself.”³⁰

That struggle was going remarkably well. By 1926 FDR had learned to walk short distances with a cane in his right hand and a crutch under his left arm. But the difference in height between the cane and crutch made him appear distressingly awkward. He also tried walking with two canes, but the lateral lurch that entailed was equally disconcerting and the slightest nudge could knock him to the ground. Neither method resembled normal walking, and neither would convince an audience that Roosevelt was on the road to recovery. Working closely with Miss Mahoney, FDR developed a technique of walking with a cane in one hand while tightly gripping the arm of a companion with the other. In 1924 he had made his way up the aisle at the Democratic convention leaning on a crutch while holding fiercely to James. By substituting a cane for the crutch the effort looked more natural, and it became Franklin’s chosen method of locomotion at public events.

Politics was never far from FDR’s mind at Warm Springs. In 1926 he came north to give the keynote address at the New York Democratic convention and successfully fended off well-wishers who sought to nominate him for the U.S. Senate. “Please try to look pallid and worn and weary,” counseled Louis Howe, “so it will not be too exceedingly difficult to get by with the statement that your health will not permit you to run for anything for 2 more years.”³¹

Al Smith was reelected overwhelmingly in 1926 and immediately became the front-runner for the party’s nomination for president.³² After the bloodletting in 1924, the rural and urban wings of the party papered over their differences, McAdoo chose not to run again, and, in a reciprocal gesture of party unity, the Smith forces accepted Houston, Texas, as the convention site—the first time since 1860 that the party would meet in a southern city. Once again Smith asked FDR to deliver the nominating speech at the convention. For Roosevelt, it was another turn in the spotlight and the opportunity to demonstrate to the delegates how far he had come since 1924. “I’m telling everyone you are going to Houston without crutches,” Eleanor wrote Franklin at Warm Springs, “so mind you stick at it.”^33*

FDR left Warm Springs early for the convention, traveling by train through the Middle West, speaking at whistle-stops on Smith’s behalf, and practicing with his son Elliott the cane-and-arm technique of walking to the rostrum. Franklin cautioned Elliott to appear jovial regardless of the tension he felt. No one should perceive the difficulty their effort entailed.

As in 1924, FDR was floor manager of Smith’s campaign. Except for a scattering of favorite sons from the South, there was no serious opposition, and Roosevelt tailored his nominating speech to the 15 million or so who would be listening on the radio. “I tried the experiment of writing and delivering my speech wholly for the benefit of the radio audience and the press,” Franklin wrote Walter Lippmann. “Smith had the votes anyway and it seemed to me more important to reach out for the republicans and independents throughout the country.”³⁴ FDR recognized the challenge of writing for the new medium, which required a significant departure from the forensic flourishes of traditional campaign oratory. In the years ahead, Roosevelt would master the technique of projecting his personality over the air better than any other American politician of the twentieth century.^*

FDR was in top form at the convention. As he and Elliott made their way to the platform, without the crutches that had been so evident in 1924, the 15,000 delegates and spectators roared their approval. Franklin’s healthy appearance and evident high spirits belied any impression that he was an invalid. At the podium he seemed perfectly relaxed, perfectly natural, nodding left and right, looking up at the galleries, waving with his right hand to acknowledge the applause.

The speech was one of Roosevelt’s finest. Again and again he described the qualities Smith brought to the race, culminating with what in retrospect seems an almost autobiographical refrain. To be a great president, said FDR, required “the quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals, that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to those in sorrow or trouble, that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow man.”

The Roosevelt who delivered those lines was a far different man from the callow young assistant secretary of the Navy who had run for vice president in 1920. His concluding remarks invoking the image of the Happy Warrior brought the delegates to their feet in a remarkable display of party unity.³⁵ Smith was nominated on the first ballot with 849 votes.^† Senate Minority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas accepted the nomination for vice president, and the convention adjourned ready to take on Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis in November.

The convention bluster faded quickly. Except for the nation’s farmers, the United States basked in unprecedented prosperity. The GOP hold on the House and Senate seemed secure, and Herbert Hoover, dour though he might be, appeared positively scintillating compared to Calvin Coolidge, who had chosen not to run. Even worse for the Democrats, Smith’s candidacy found little resonance outside the cities of the East Coast. Catholic and wet, he alienated much of rural, fundamentalist America while his ties to big business did little to energize the party’s working-class base. On the stump, Smith proved even more parochial than his city slicker image suggested. As the acerbic Baltimore Sun columnist H. L. Mencken noted, “Al Smith’s world begins at Coney Island and ends at Buffalo.”³⁶

FDR declined Smith’s offer to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and continued to resist efforts to nominate him for governor.³⁷ Both he and Howe recognized that 1928 would not be a good year for Democrats, and Franklin wished to concentrate on regaining the use of his legs so that he might seek the governorship in 1932 and perhaps run for president in 1936. (Roosevelt and Howe assumed that Hoover would be reelected in 1932).³⁸ When the New York State Democratic convention met in Rochester at the end of September, FDR was ensconced at Warm Springs determined not to be drawn into the fray.

By this time, party leaders recognized that Smith’s campaign was in trouble. Unless he could carry New York, with its forty-five electoral votes, he could not hope to win the presidency. And if Smith lost New York, he would likely take the entire ticket down with him. The Republicans had just nominated the state’s crusading attorney general, Albert Ottinger, for governor. Ottinger not only had amassed a superb record fighting price racketeers and stock manipulators but was also of working-class Jewish origin, up from the sidewalks of New York. A formidable campaigner, he would cut deeply into the traditional Democratic vote in the five boroughs. The unanimous consensus of the county chairmen who gathered at Rochester was that the only Democrat who stood a chance of beating Ottinger was Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, they believed, would add another 200,000 upstate votes to the ticket.

FDR was unmoved. On the eve of the gubernatorial nomination he sent a public telegram to Smith restating his decision not to run: AS I AM ONLY FORTY-SIX I OWE IT TO MY FAMILY AND MYSELF TO GIVE THE PRESENT CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT A CHANCE TO CONTINUE.³⁹

Smith was content to take FDR at his word, but Tammany and the upstate leaders refused to accept a substitute candidate. Roosevelt had no enemies within the party and only Roosevelt could rescue the ticket, they said. At the insistence of James A. Farley of Rockland County, secretary of the State Democratic Committee, Smith put in another call to FDR at Warm Springs. The call found Franklin at poolside but he declined to take it, saying “Tell the governor I’ve gone on a picnic and will not be back all day.”⁴⁰

That evening, with the vote for governor scheduled the next day, Smith sought out Eleanor and implored her to get Franklin on the phone: “He won’t take my calls.” ER told Smith that it was her husband’s decision and she would not attempt to influence him, but she agreed to get him on the phone. Eleanor eventually tracked FDR down, handed the receiver to Smith, and rushed from the room to catch the last train to New York, where she had to teach at Todhunter the next morning. She would not learn what transpired until she read the newspapers next day.

First, Smith put John Jakob Raskob on the phone. Raskob had taken the post of chairman of the National Committee and was one of the party’s principal contributors. (Smith’s campaign headquarters were in the General Motors Building in New York.) Raskob pleaded with Franklin to run on behalf of the national party. FDR replied that he had too much invested in Warm Springs to make that feasible.

“Damn Warm Springs!” Raskob shouted. “We’ll take care of it for you.” Raskob said he would personally underwrite Roosevelt’s losses.^* Then he handed the phone to Smith.

The governor bore down: “Take the nomination, Frank. You can make a couple of radio speeches and you’ll be elected. Then you can go back to Warm Springs. After you have made your inaugural speech and sent your message to the Legislature you can go back there again for a couple of months.”

“Don’t give me that baloney,” said FDR.

Herbert Lehman, a senior partner in Lehman Brothers investment bankers, an experienced labor negotiator and one of the most respected figures in the party, came on the phone. If Franklin would take the nomination, he would accept the nomination for lieutenant governor and fill in whenever needed.

Smith came back on. “Frank, I told you I wasn’t going to put this on a personal basis, but I’ve got to. As a personal favor, can I put your name before the convention?” Again Roosevelt declined. His health, Warm Springs, the need to regain the use of his legs, whatever reason he could think of.

The governor heard him out. “Frank, just one more question. If those fellows nominate you tomorrow and adjourn, will you refuse to run?”

FDR hesitated.

“Thanks, Frank. I won’t ask you any more questions.” Smith handed the telephone to Lehman, and in another minute the deal was done.⁴¹

Egbert Curtis, the Merriweather Inn manager, drove FDR back to his cottage that evening. Was he going to run? Curtis asked.

“Curt,” said Roosevelt, “when you’re in politics you’ve got to play the game.”⁴²

The following afternoon, Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York placed Roosevelt’s name in nomination. The vote was pro forma. There was no opposition, and FDR was chosen by acclamation. Eleanor telegraphed her condolences: REGRET THAT YOU HAD TO ACCEPT BUT KNOW THAT YOU FELT IT OBLIGATORY.⁴³Louis Howe smelled disaster. MESS IS NO NAME FOR IT, he wired Franklin. FOR ONCE I HAVE NO ADVICE TO GIVE.⁴⁴

New York Republicans, taken aback by FDR’s nomination, immediately focused on the health issue. “There is something both pathetic and pitiless in the ‘drafting’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” asserted the New York Post. The Herald Tribune said, “The nomination is unfair to Mr. Roosevelt. It is equally unfair to the people of the state.”⁴⁵ The Democrats were primed and ready. “A Governor doesn’t have to be an acrobat,” Smith replied. “The work of the governorship is brainwork. Frank Roosevelt is mentally as good as he ever was in his life.”⁴⁶ FDR joked that most people ran for governor. “I am counting on my friends all over the state to make it possible for me to walk in.”⁴⁷

Despite his misgivings, Louis Howe set the campaign in motion, establishing headquarters at the Biltmore and organizing a statewide Independent Committee for Roosevelt and Lehman. Working hand in glove with Howe was Edward J. Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx, who had detached himself from the national campaign to work exclusively on the gubernatorial race. An enlightened protégé of Charles Murphy, Flynn hailed from a prosperous Irish background, had graduated from Fordham Law School, and detested the backslapping and glad-handing endemic to the political fraternity. Courteous and cultivated in social relations, Flynn sought to keep his own machine honest and responsive. He hit it off instantly with both FDR and Howe. “Politics has never been my vocation,” Flynn once said, “but it’s been an avocation. I’ve had a lot of fun with politics but I’ve always been in the position where, if anything happened, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference to me.”⁴⁸

FDR was joined on the campaign trail by Frances Perkins and Sam Rosenman, a young member of the New York legislature assigned to bring Roosevelt up to date on state issues. Like Howe and Missy LeHand, Rosenman would become a permanent fixture of Roosevelt’s entourage, a walking file cabinet of legislative detail.^* For his part, Rosenman, who had been initially skeptical of FDR’s patrician origins, was immediately impressed by his uncanny ability to go to the heart of an issue. Rosenman reported that he “had never seen anybody who could grasp the facts of a complicated problem as quickly and as thoroughly as Roosevelt.”⁴⁹ Frances Perkins, who had not been thrilled by Franklin as a state senator, was also impressed by what she saw now. She was awed by FDR’s stamina and pleasantly surprised by his good humor. “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice,” Franklin told her, “You learn to say ‘that’s all right’ and drink it.”⁵⁰

For four weeks FDR barnstormed the state, sometimes speaking as often as fourteen times a day. Rosenman marveled at his strength and courage, noting that merely to stand up and sit down was, for Roosevelt, “more exercise than the ordinary man takes during an entire day.”⁵¹ In Troy on October 26 Franklin delighted a cheering audience with a reference to the effort he was putting forth. He reminded his listeners of the “sob stuff” Republican editorial writers had published about his physical condition: “Too bad about that unfortunate sick man, isn’t it.”⁵² When he spoke in many upstate cities, the turnout was twice as large as the number of registered Democrats. Initially, bookmakers favored Ottinger 2 to 1. By the end of October the odds had reversed. “I am horribly afraid you are going to be elected,” Howe told Franklin a week before the election.⁵³ FDR ended the campaign in Poughkeepsie, where some 20,000 people paraded down Main Street in his honor.

On the morning of November 6, Roosevelt voted at Hyde Park and then went to campaign headquarters at the Biltmore to listen to the returns. By nine o’clock it was clear that the Democrats were going down, and as the evening wore on the avalanche accelerated. Even the Solid South, which Cox and Roosevelt had managed to hang on to in 1920, had split, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas going Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.^* In New York, Smith trailed Hoover by 100,000 votes. FDR was running ahead of the ticket but was still 25,000 votes behind Ottinger, with much of the normally Republican upstate vote still to come in. Shortly after midnight the morning papers appeared, trumpeting a GOP sweep. Franklin browsed through them, took the loss philosophically, and said he was going home to East Sixty-fifth Street to get some sleep. Newsmen and campaign workers drifted away, and the big ballroom in which the Democrats had planned a victory celebration went dark.

One room stayed open. The pros continued to keep watch. Louis Howe, Jim Farley, and Ed Flynn, together with a team of tally clerks and telephone operators, kept a vigil over the late returns. Sitting quietly on a couch in the corner was Frances Perkins, determined to stay until the last vote was counted, hoping her presence might change the result. Beside her sat an elderly woman who was equally determined. “I’ll stay with you,” said Sara. “It’s not over by a long shot.”⁵⁴

The two women sat quietly, watching the professionals tabulate the results. At 1 A.M. Ed Flynn detected a stronger than expected showing from the returns trickling in from upstate. He telephoned Roosevelt to say there was a glimmer of hope. FDR was running far ahead of Smith and might squeak through. Franklin didn’t believe it. Flynn was “crazy to wake him up,” he said.⁵⁵

At two o’clock the mood in the room lightened. Flynn could recognize a trend as well as any politician in the country. But he worried about the slow count. It was an article of faith among Democratic politicians that the GOP bosses upstate delayed reporting their results until they knew how many votes they needed. Flynn issued a statement to the press threatening to dispatch a thousand lawyers upstate to prevent the Republicans from stealing the election. The threat evidently had the desired effect, and the laggard upstate counties began to report more rapidly. Sara and Miss Perkins listened as the men kept count. “Forty votes here, one hundred votes there, seventy-five votes somewhere else. They mounted up.”⁵⁶

By 4 A.M. FDR had pulled ahead. The Democrats would hold the governor’s mansion. The final results gave Roosevelt 2,130,238 votes to Ottinger’s 2,104,630—a majority of 25,608 out of more than 4 million votes cast. Sara and Frances Perkins joined the men in a toast. Then, as Miss Perkins recalled, she shared a taxi with Sara to East Sixty-fifth Street. The seventy-four-year-old matriarch bounded up the steps, eager to get inside and inform her son of his triumph.⁵⁷

^* The waters at Warm Springs have been traced to rain that falls on Pine Mountain, several miles away, runs down 3,800 feet into a vast pocket of rock, where it is warmed by the inner earth, and returns to the surface at a temperature of 88° at a rate of 800 gallons per minute. Editor’s note, 2 The Roosevelt Letters, 448 Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).

^* William H. Woodin, the president of American Car and Foundry and a registered Republican, became FDR’s first secretary of the Treasury in 1933 but resigned because of ill health a year later. He was succeeded by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served for the remainder of the Roosevelt administration.

^* The “March of Dimes” (the name suggested by the comedian Eddie Cantor) was the principal fund-raising arm of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which FDR organized in 1938 and which the historian David Oshinsky called “the gold standard for private charities, the largest voluntary health organization of all time.” The pioneering research of Dr. Jonas Salk was supported in large measure by the foundation. His discovery of a vaccine against polio was announced by Basil O’Connor, chairman of the foundation, on April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of FDR’s death. David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story 53–55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also see Richard Carter, Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk 268 ff. (New York: Trident Press, 1966).

^* Eleanor remained active at Todhunter until 1938, although she did not teach after FDR was elected president. In 1939 the school was absorbed by the Dalton School.

^* On the eve of the convention, FDR laid out the Democrats’ foreign policy in an article in Foreign Affairs. Scathingly critical of the GOP’s go-it-alone isolationism, Roosevelt urged greater cooperation with the League of Nations and membership in the World Court: “We Democrats do not believe in the possibility or the desirability of an isolated national experience or a national development heedless of the welfare, prosperity and peace of the other peoples of the world. The American people would never be willing consciously to handicap the League in its efforts to maintain peace. Yet since the war, our attitude is that we do not need friends, and that the public opinion of the world is of no importance.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View,” 4 Foreign Affairs 573, 582 (July 1928).

^* The New York Times called FDR’s speech “a model of its kind. It is seldom that a political speech attains this kind of eloquence. It was not fitted to provoke frenzied applause, but could not be heard or read without prompting to serious thought and sincere emotion.” The New York Times, June 28, 1928.

^† The remaining 251 votes were divided among twelve candidates, Congressman Cordell Hull of Tennessee leading the pack with 71. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections 157 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

^* Raskob immediately sent FDR a check for $250,000, which Roosevelt returned with his thanks. It was sufficient to know that Raskob was willing to underwrite him, he said. From 1928 to 1932, Raskob was one of the principal benefactors of Warm Springs, donating more than $100,000. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 255 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).

^* After observing Rosenman for three days, FDR asked him to prepare a draft for a speech he was to give the next evening. It was a speechwriting relationship that would endure for the next seventeen years. “I get to know people quickly,” said Roosevelt. “Sometimes that is better than a long and careful investigation.”

Rosenman remembers that the campaign

was a difficult one. After the first two days by train, Roosevelt decided that he would continue the rest of the trip by automobile. This would enable him to make speeches at scores of crossroads and villages all through the state.… Two large buses accompanied the automobiles. One was used by the newsmen who were covering Roosevelt. In the other bus were the stenographers, mimeograph machine operators and their equipment. The speeches had to be typed and mimeographed as the bus was speeding along.

After a speech had been delivered in one city, I sat up and prepared a draft of the speech for the next night. It had to be ready for the candidate to look at the next morning during his breakfast when we would go over it together.

After breakfast the cavalcade of cars and buses would start the journey to the next city. I would get into the bus where the typewriters were, and, with Roosevelt’s corrections and suggestions, would work on the draft. Every once in a while the procession stopped at the center of some small village, where Roosevelt would make a short talk to the crowd. I would get into his car at one of these stops, and, after we started up again, we would discuss some of the changes to the draft. Sometimes he stopped his car at roadside and did some writing on the draft, or sent for one of the stenographers and dictated some new material.…

It was not easy for a crippled man to carry on this kind of campaign. He could not climb stairs, and often we had to carry him up some backstairs to a hall and down again. He always went through this harrowing experience smiling. He never got ruffled. Having been set down, he would adjust his coat, smile, and proceed calmly to the platform for his speech.

Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 21–22, 31 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).

^* It is easy to overestimate the magnitude of Smith’s defeat. Though he did dismally in rural America, his candidacy solidified the urban, immigrant vote for the Democratic party. For the first time since the Civil War the Democrats carried Massachusetts and Rhode Island and won a plurality in the nation’s twelve largest cities. All told, Smith polled more than 15 million votes, virtually as many as Calvin Coolidge’s winning total in 1924 and almost twice as many as any previous Democratic candidate. In that sense, it can be argued that Smith’s candidacy established the basis of the Roosevelt coalition and paved the way for FDR’s victory in 1932. Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics28–41 (New York: Harper & Brothers., 1952); Kristi Anderson, The Creation of a Democratic Majority: 1928–1936 2–11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and especially V. O. Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” 17 Journal of Politics 4 (1955); Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 265–288 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).