FOUR

ALBANY

Frank, the men that are looking out of that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.

—ED PERKINS (DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN OF

DUTCHESS COUNTY) TO FDR, 1910

FDR LED A PERILOUS LIFE as a first-year law student. His classmate General William Donovan, who headed the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, later said that Roosevelt’s most prominent characteristic at Columbia was his “daring”—a remarkable observation from a man who won the Medal of Honor leading New York’s “Fighting Sixty-Ninth” in the Meuse-Argonne.¹ What Donovan meant was that after Groton and Harvard, Franklin had enormous confidence in himself—perhaps overconfidence—and he never let law school interfere with his personal life.

Following his wedding on Saint Patrick’s Day, he and Eleanor departed for Springwood and a week’s honeymoon. That contributed to the seventy-three absences FDR recorded his first year and helps explain why he initially failed two of his seven courses (contracts and civil procedure). “It certainly shows the uncertainty of marks,” he wrote Sara. “I expected much lower marks in some of the others and failures in one, and thought I had done as well on the two I failed as in those I passed with B.”² A Columbia professor saw it differently. Franklin, he said, had little aptitude for the law and “made no effort to overcome that handicap by hard work.”³ After studying haphazardly over the summer, FDR took makeup exams in contracts and civil procedure and easily passed both. His final grades were three Bs, three Cs, and a D, which placed him roughly in the middle of his class.⁴

FDR’s attitude toward law school was similar to Ulysses S. Grant’s view of West Point: it was a hurdle but should not be taken too seriously. At West Point, Grant—who also had enormous confidence in himself—read novels instead of field manuals and spent his free time painting in the studio of his art professor. At Columbia, FDR led an exhausting social life and wrote doggerel about his instructors:

REDFIELD ON BLEATING^*

BAH! BAH! BAH!

We are little bored sheep

That have lost their way

     Bah! Bah! Bah!

Gentlemen lawyers off on a spree

Wrong from here to eternity

God ha’ mercy on such as Redfield

     Bah! Bah! Bah!

During the summer between first and second year, Franklin and Eleanor undertook a second honeymoon in Europe, much as James and Sara had done twenty-five years earlier. In England they dined with Whitelaw Reid, a longtime Hudson River neighbor and publisher of the New York Tribune, who had just taken up his duties as ambassador to the Court of St. James. In Scotland, visiting friends of Eleanor’s parents, they had dinner with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “They write books on sociology,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Franklin discussed the methods of learning at Harvard with the husband while I discussed the servant problem with the wife.”⁵ While in Scotland the honeymooners were asked to open a village flower show. Franklin did the honors. He was fortunate, he said, “in having had a Highland nurse, so that I passed my early years with kilts on the outside and oatmeal and scones on the interior.” With a perfectly straight face FDR went on to tout the advantages of American vegetables: “Instead of water, we cook them nearly always in milk, and this, of course, makes them more nutritious, besides bringing out the flavor.”⁶

From Scotland the couple went briefly to Paris, and from there to Milan, Verona, and Venice. Then the Dolomites, Switzerland, and the Black Forest. Their continental excursion lasted more than three months: Eleanor, Baedeker in hand, resolutely examining the monuments and masterpieces of Europe; Franklin, enjoying himself at the expense of one and all. In Venice, Eleanor pronounced the Titians on display “not among his best.” Franklin loped ahead through the galleries of what he called the “Academica de Belly Arty” (Accademia dei Belle Arti) briefly perusing the paintings—“chiefly indecent infants sitting or falling off clouds—or sacred apostles trying to keep the sun out of their eyes.”⁷ In Cortina, Eleanor went to bed early and FDR attended the hotel dance alone. To Sara he wrote, “The hotel maids, cooks, and some of the villagers did a Schuhplattler—the native dance. It beats a cake walk and a court quadrille all to pieces.… I danced with Mme. Menardi [the proprietress], and talked to the cook and smoked with a porter and had the time of my life.”⁸

In St. Moritz they stayed with Aunt Tissie and her husband, Stanley Mortimer, who summered there regularly. Then back to Paris for an extended stay with Aunt Dora (Sara’s sister) and Uncle Paul Forbes, who had made the City of Light their permanent home.⁹ They were entertained by Cousin Hortense Howland, a sparkling Parisian who was the sister-in-law of FDR’s father, James, by his first marriage, and whose salon was described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. “You would have laughed if you could have heard Mrs. Howland flatter Franklin,” wrote Eleanor.¹⁰ While in Paris, Franklin and Eleanor had their fortunes told by a French clairvoyant. “E. is to inherit a fortune,” FDR wrote Sara, “and I am to be President of the U.S. or the Equitable, I couldn’t make out which.”¹¹ Harvard friends seemed to be everywhere. One evening Franklin and his classmates took Eleanor and Aunt Dora to a naughty French farce. Eleanor was shocked. “I confess my Anglo-Saxon sense of humor was somewhat strained,” she remembered.¹²

Throughout the trip Franklin teased Sara about his and Eleanor’s purchases and the money they were spending. From London he wrote that they stayed in the Royal Suite at Brown’s Hotel for £1,000 a night (actual cost £36). In Paris he reported buying “thousands of dollars worth of linen.… Eleanor got a dozen dresses.… I am getting Eleanor a long sable coat and a silver fox coat for myself.” From Venice, “3 or 4 old tapestries and a Tintoretto—the latter in his best style.… Also an old library—about 3000 books—and had them shipped to London.” Back in Paris, “I got some Rembrandt engravings and a cunning little sketch by Claude Lorraine.” At one point he suggested they were planning to expand the trip into a tour around the world—“It is only a step or two.” At another he suggested buying the woodwork and mosaic floor tiles from an old Venetian palace: “It can be got for about $60,000. If you care to have it cable me.”¹³

From Europe the newlyweds pressed Sara to find a house for them, preferably the rental property of their Dutchess County friends the Drapers, at 125 East Thirty-sixth Street—just three blocks from Sara’s Madison Avenue address. “It is just the right situation and size for us,” wrote Franklin. “Our one hope is to hear very soon that you have got it for us. It would be so nice to feel that all is settled before we return.”¹⁴ Eleanor wrote Sara, “you are an angel to take so much trouble about the house, but I am glad you are going to see it and I do hope you will take it if it is possible.”¹⁵ When Sara replied that she had taken the house for two years, Eleanor was delighted. “We are so glad and think you have done wonders for us. It is very nice that the work can be begun before we get home … and we will get settled so much sooner than if we waited to choose a house on our return.”¹⁶

The Draper house was temporary. At Christmas 1905, Sara informed Franklin and Eleanor that she was building a town house for them. “A Christmas present from Mama—number and street not yet quite decided.” The following year Sara bought an expensive plot on East Sixty-fifth Street just off Park Avenue and hired a well-known architect, Charles A. Platt, to draw plans for two adjoining houses—one for herself and one for Franklin and Eleanor—similar to the Ludlow-Parish houses on East Seventy-sixth Street. The drawing rooms and dining rooms of the two houses opened into each other, there were connecting doors on the upper floors, and a common vestibule. Construction began in the spring of 1907 and was completed the following year. Sara retained title to both houses, and upon her death in 1941 FDR sold them to the Hillel Foundation of Hunter College for a modest price.¹⁷

Franklin, who loved to design things, immersed himself in the construction of the houses and worked constantly with the architect, the builder, and the decorators. Eleanor was consulted but chose not to become involved. “Instead of taking an interest in these houses, one of which I was to live in, I left everything to my mother-in-law and my husband.”¹⁸ One evening shortly after they moved in, Franklin found his wife in tears. This was not her home, she sobbed. She had not helped plan it, and it was not the way she wanted to live. FDR was bewildered. Why hadn’t she said something before? he asked. They had gone over the plans together—why hadn’t she spoken up?¹⁹

As Eleanor recalled the incident, “he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.”²⁰ FDR avoided further friction simply by refusing to recognize that a problem existed. That was a trait he would hone to an art form in public life. “If something was unpleasant and he didn’t want to know about it, he just ignored it and never talked about it,” said Eleanor. “I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would settle itself.”²¹

In the summer of 1909 Sara gave Eleanor and Franklin a second house—a thirty-four-room, three-story, seaside “cottage” nestled on ten acres of prime Campobello shoreline. The expansive house, constructed along the lines of the Arts and Crafts Movement, had been built in 1898 by the Hartman Kuhn family of Boston and stood next to the Roosevelt house, separated by a tall hemlock hedge. This time Sara transferred full title to Franklin: “a belated wedding gift,” as she expressed it. For Eleanor the house was a godsend, the first dwelling she felt she owned. Mrs. Kuhn had left all the furnishings, linen, crystal, and silver, and ER spent weeks rearranging things. “I have moved every room in the house around,” she wrote Franklin, “and I hope you will like the change.” Eleanor never tired of the place. “There was no telephone … no electricity,” she remembered. “There was a little coal stove on which you did all your cooking, and the lamps sometimes smoked, and you went to bed by candlelight. But it had great charm.”^22*

Financially, Franklin and Eleanor were well provided for. Between them, they had trust-fund income of a little over $12,000—the rough equivalent of $240,000 after-tax dollars one hundred years later.^* Yet their combined incomes were insufficient to support their lifestyle. Eleanor and Franklin were not members of the fastest, richest set in New York, but they lived in three different houses at various seasons of the year, always employed at least five servants, maintained a large yacht and numerous smaller boats, automobiles, and carriages, dressed in fashion, belonged to expensive clubs, traveled extensively, and gave generously to political and charitable causes. Sara subsidized the shortfall. As her grandson Elliott recalled, “Granny was generous to a fault. Whenever Father needed help, he had only to ask for it, and he usually had no need to ask, because Granny anticipated what he or Mother wanted and was ready with a check, cash or a gift in kind.”²³

Midway through his third year at Columbia, Franklin took the grueling eight-hour New York bar examination and passed handily. He was immediately admitted to practice and at that point dropped his courses at Columbia and never took a degree. Twenty-two years later, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was invited to address the Columbia Law School Alumni Dinner. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, sat next to him, chatting affably. At some point Butler was overheard joking with FDR on his failure to obtain an LL.B. “You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams.” Franklin flashed his famous grin: “That just shows how unimportant the law really is.”²⁴

The young Roosevelts spent the summer of 1907 relaxing at Campobello and Hyde Park. Anna, their firstborn, was a one-year-old toddler. Eleanor was pregnant once more, and their second child, James, named for FDR’s father, would be born in December. In their first ten years of marriage, Franklin and Eleanor would have six children, one of whom would die in infancy.^† Later, Eleanor would write, “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted.”²⁵

Unlike Sara, who handled every detail of FDR’s childhood, Eleanor delegated the raising of her children to a succession of nurses and caregivers. “I had never any interest in dolls or little children,” she wrote, “and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” Having heard that fresh air was good for babies, Eleanor ordered a small chicken wire cage constructed and, placing Anna in it, hung the contraption out a rear window at the town house in New York. It was on the north side of the building, cold and shady, and the baby often cried, but Eleanor paid no attention. Finally, an irate neighbor threatened to report the Roosevelts to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “This was rather a shock for me,” Eleanor recalled, “for I thought I was being a very modern mother.”²⁶

Years later Eleanor acknowledged that she had been completely unprepared to be a practical housekeeper, wife, or mother. “If I had it to do over again, I know now that what we should have done was to have no servants in those first few years.… However, my bringing-up had been such that this never occurred to me, and neither did it occur to any of the older people who were closest to me. Had I done this, my subsequent troubles would have been avoided and my children would have had far happier childhoods.”²⁷

For his part, Franklin, like his father, left the child rearing to his wife. “Father’s attitude on nurses and other household affairs was strictly hands off,” said his son James.²⁸ When the children were older, FDR enjoyed roughhousing with his “chicks,” taking them riding at Hyde Park, and sailing at Campobello. “Father was fun,” said Anna. “He would sometimes romp with me on the floor or carry me around on his shoulders.”²⁹ The children adored “Pa,” who seemed much warmer than their straitlaced mother. He was like a favorite uncle who entertained them, while Eleanor was the disciplinarian.^*

In September 1907 Franklin joined the distinguished Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn as one of five unsalaried apprentices. “I know you will be glad to start,” wrote Sara. “Try to arrange for systematic air and exercise and keep away from brokers’ offices, this advice free gratis for nothing.”³⁰

Carter, Ledyard and Milburn was one of the most prestigious law firms in the nation. It had a large general practice and was executor of the Astor estate, but its major source of income was corporate law, at which it had few equals. James Carter, the firm’s founder, was so highly respected at the appellate bar that the attorney general of the United States engaged him to argue the government’s case before the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust in 1894, the great income tax case.³¹ Louis Cass Ledyard, an intimate of J. P. Morgan, played a vital role in arresting the Wall Street Panic of 1907, served as counsel for both the Morgan Bank and United States Steel, and later represented the American Tobacco Company in antitrust litigation before the Supreme Court.³² John G. Milburn, the third senior partner, was counsel for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil cartel in an equally well publicized antitrust suit in 1911.³³ Milburn himself had clerked for Grover Cleveland in his Buffalo law office, and it was at Milburn’s home in Buffalo that William McKinley died after being shot by an anarchist in 1901.³⁴

FDR had little passion for the law, but he was a fast learner blessed with an avuncular, ingratiating personality. “He had a sanguine temperament, almost adolescent in its buoyancy,” a fellow clerk recalled.³⁵ Franklin wrote Sara that he was a “full-fledged office boy.” Like his fellow apprentices, he kept dockets for the partners, looked up cases for them, answered calendar calls, recorded deeds, and ran all manner of errands. After a while he took on minor cases in the municipal courts, and during his second year he was made managing clerk in charge of municipal cases.^*The following year he moved on to the firm’s admiralty division, one of the nation’s most lustrous. As numerous observers have noted, there was always a whiff of the sea at Carter, Ledyard. Cass Ledyard succeeded J. P. Morgan as commodore of the exclusive New York Yacht Club, and Edmund L. Baylies, head of the admiralty section, was president of and principal fund-raiser for the Seamen’s Church Institute. Franklin became a director of the institute and a member of the Yacht Club. But even the laws of the sea had little appeal for FDR. He was perpetually good-humored and energetic but made little secret of his desire to move on.

Grenville Clark, a Harvard classmate who was a fellow clerk at the firm, recalled FDR in those early years. “We were a small group,” said Clark, “and in our leisure hours sometimes fell into discussions of our hopes and ambitions. I remember him saying with engaging frankness that he wasn’t going to practice law forever, that he intended to run for office at the first opportunity, and that he wanted to be and thought he had a real chance to be President. I remember that he described very accurately the steps which he thought could lead to this goal. They were: first, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy … and finally the governorship of New York. ‘Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be president,’ he said.^* I do not recall that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might have done. It seemed proper and sincere and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”

Clark went on to say that FDR not only had made politics his profession for thirty-five years “but had adopted that profession deliberately and constantly enjoyed it, just as one enjoys a game that one has always liked and learned to play well.”³⁶ FDR’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., made the same point somewhat differently. Had Franklin not gone into politics, said Vanderbilt, he would have been “just another corporate lawyer, summering in Newport and hibernating on Wall Street.”³⁷

Political lightning struck in the summer of 1910. As FDR remembered it, he was kidnapped off the streets of Poughkeepsie—“one of the first cases of deliberate kidnapping on record”—and taken to the Dutchess County policemen’s picnic. “On that joyous occasion of clams and sauerkraut and real beer I made my first speech, and I have been apologizing for it ever since.”³⁸

Hyperbole aside, the Democratic leadership of Dutchess County did indeed make the initial overture to FDR. But never was a victim more eager to accompany his abductors. Because of the large working-class vote in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County was one of the few Democratic strongholds in upstate New York.^* And for a political novice seeking entry to the state legislature, there were few opportunities so golden.

The first feelers were extended by Judge John E. Mack, the district attorney of Dutchess County and one of three members of the Democratic party’s executive committee. Mack had been a friend of FDR’s father, James, and owned a 100-acre farm in Clove Valley where he raised prizewinning peonies. In the folksy manner of upstate New York he called himself “a Dutchess County farmer who does a little lawyering on the side.” Beneath the folksiness lay cunning political instinct. Mack was virtually unbeatable at the polls. He endeared himself to his Irish and Italian constituents in Poughkeepsie by not prosecuting public drunks provided they sign a release asking him to lock them up for six months should they be arrested again. Mack’s rationale was based on the theory “All dogs get one bite.” And it was a surefire winner in the immigrant community. He courted the rural vote equally assiduously by prosecuting chicken thieves for the more serious crime of burglary rather than petty larceny. Mack prided himself on being able to hear the political grass grow beneath the soil, and in the early summer of 1910 he engineered an excuse to call on FDR at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Some documents, it seems, needed Sara’s signature. Rather than mail them, he thought he’d drop them by personally.

FDR received Mack warmly. When their business was completed, the talk turned to politics. The Democrats were in trouble in Dutchess County, Mack told Franklin. The incumbent Democratic assemblyman, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler of Barrytown, wanted to retire. A descendent of John Jacob Astor on his maternal side, Chanler had been elected lieutenant governor in 1906. In 1908 he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination, only to lose the election to Charles Evans Hughes. After exposure to statewide politics, Chanler was bored with being a mere assemblyman and was thinking of stepping down. If he did, would Franklin consider running? FDR could scarcely believe his good fortune. The Second Assembly District was as safe a Democratic seat as any outside the Solid South. Nothing would please him more, he told the judge. Mack casually suggested that FDR spend some time on weekends in Poughkeepsie getting to know local Democrats and let it go at that. There was no offer, merely an inquiry.^*

Two weeks later, Edward E. Perkins, president of the First National Bank of Poughkeepsie, who was also the Democratic state committeeman for Dutchess County, invited Franklin to a dispersal sale of high-grade Guernseys on the Reece farm in Wappinger Falls. They could run down and pick up some good ones, said Perkins. On the way home, after inspecting the cattle, Perkins confirmed to FDR that Lewis Chanler did not wish to run again. Would Franklin be interested? “I’d like to talk to my mother first,” Roosevelt replied.

They drove on to Poughkeepsie and pulled into a parking spot in front of Perkins’s bank. “Frank,” he said, “the men that are looking out that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.”

“I’ll take it,” said Franklin.³⁹

If the New York legislative seat was certain for the Democrats, why was the party leadership so eager to bestow it on a neophyte like FDR? The decision was not as bizarre as it might appear. For the men who ran the county, a seat in the New York Assembly was small potatoes. The important offices were sheriff, tax assessor, county clerk, the various town supervisors, the judges and prosecuting attorneys—positions that levied taxes, spent money, and enforced the law. The assembly seat was a low-paying, part-time job in Albany. Second, while Poughkeepsie was safely Democratic, the rural areas of the county tilted Republican. It was useful to have someone on the ticket who could appeal to conservative voters in the countryside. In 1910, all New York counties employed the party-column ballot. Straight-ticket voting was the rule, and successful party leaders always sought a balanced ticket: a name or two on the ballot that would reassure the district’s farmers and small-town residents. At the national level, that traditionally dictated the choice of presidential running mates (FDR’s 1932 selection of John Nance Garner, for example), and the same calculus applied at county level. The Roosevelt name was a tremendous drawing card, and a Democratic Roosevelt on the ticket might galvanize the rural voters of Dutchess County. Finally, electoral campaigns were expensive—even in 1910. And FDR (or at least Sara) had deep pockets. “I guess several people thought that I would be a gold mine,” Franklin said later, “but unfortunately the gold was not there.” Not quite true. When party fund-raisers came calling, the Roosevelts eventually coughed up $2,500—about $50,000 in current value, a substantial sum for a seat in the state legislature.⁴⁰

Sara had little difficulty with Franklin’s decision. Her father had gone to China twice with nothing in his pocket, and twice he had returned with a fortune. The risks of political life, the winner-take-all aspect of a campaign, and the high-stakes rewards appealed to her Delano instincts. TR had started small and made it to the White House. Sara had no doubt that her son was as gifted as his Oyster Bay cousin, and she understood the advantage her personal fortune gave to FDR. She would have preferred that he make a brilliant career at the law; she would have been even more pleased if he had chosen to be a country squire like James; but if Franklin wanted politics, she resolved to make the best of it. As her friend Rita Halle Kleeman put it, “All her life Sara had been accustomed to accepting the decisions of the men in the family whom she loved and respected. From the moment she heard Franklin make his simple, sincere declaration of principles, she accepted his decision and knew that it was wise.”⁴¹ And when Sara embraced a decision, she did so without reservation. Within days she was referring to the surrounding countryside as “Franklin’s district.”⁴²

Many years later, sitting at Springwood on election night awaiting the presidential returns, Sara reflected on that first campaign. “I shall never forget it,” she said. “I was one of the few sympathizers Franklin had among his own people. Many of our friends said it was a shame for so fine a young man to associate with ‘dirty’ politicians. Some of them hoped he would be defeated for his own sake and learn a lesson. I knew only that I would always be proud of him [and] I was indeed happy when he won.”^43*

Franklin discussed the matter with Eleanor, and she too was delighted.⁴⁴ But he did not ask her approval. “I listened to all his plans with interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play. I felt I must acquiesce in whatever he might decide and be willing to go to Albany if he should be elected.”⁴⁵

A greater question mark for FDR was cousin Theodore. TR had just returned from a twelve-month safari in East Africa (“I hope every lion will do his duty,” J. P. Morgan quipped on the eve of TR’s departure) and was beginning to thrash around in the politics of the Empire State. If he should campaign in Dutchess County and say anything remotely disparaging about his Democratic kinsman, it would end Franklin’s political career before it began. FDR hesitated to approach the former president directly but with Sara’s encouragement laid the problem before Bamie, who visited Campobello that summer. As FDR hoped, Bamie wrote to her brother immediately. “Franklin ought to go into politics without the least regard as to where I speak or don’t speak,” TR replied on August 10. “Franklin is a fine fellow,” he told Bamie, although he wished he were a Republican.⁴⁶ FDR correctly interpreted the former president’s reply as a green light. When TR spoke before a throng of 40,000 well-wishers at the Dutchess County Fair later that autumn, he refrained from mentioning either Franklin or his Republican opponent.

FDR’s fledgling campaign ended before it began. In mid-September, three weeks before the Democrats held their nominating caucus, Lewis Chanler announced for reelection. He was not stepping down. The Assembly might be dull, but it was far livelier than no office at all. Franklin felt snakebitten. He went to Mack and Perkins and threatened to run as an independent. Mack knew Roosevelt was serious. “Why not run for the Senate?” he asked. For a second time, FDR could scarcely believe his good fortune. The State Senate seemed far more attractive than the Assembly, although the odds of winning were slight: Mack put them at one chance in five. The Senate seat comprised Dutchess, Putnam, and Columbia counties, the three counties stacked one above the other along the east bank of the Hudson. The district was thirty miles wide and ninety miles long, and, with one exception, no Democrat had won the seat since 1856.⁴⁷ The Republican incumbent, Senator John F. Schlosser of Fishkill Landing, was a well-known lawyer, seasoned campaigner, and president of the State Volunteer Firemen’s Association. His 2-to-1 margin of victory in 1908 made him appear invincible. Roosevelt was undeterred. Youth and inexperience melded with the patrician confidence instilled at Springwood, Groton, and Harvard. Franklin exuded confidence in victory from the first day of the campaign.

“I accept this nomination with absolute independence,” FDR told the Democratic caucus in Poughkeepsie on October 6. “I am pledged to no man; I am influenced by no special interests.… In the coming campaign, I need not tell you that I do not intend to stand still. We are going to have a very strenuous month [and] we have little to fear from the result on November eighth.”⁴⁸

Roosevelt opened the campaign with a rally on Bank Square in the center of Fishkill Landing, the home of Senator Schlosser, the idea being to cause as much consternation as possible. The Democratic organization could be counted upon to deliver the votes in Poughkeepsie and the other towns in the district, so Roosevelt carried his fight to the countryside. Election day was only a month away, and to cover the three counties he rented a fire-engine red, open-top Maxwell touring car. To drive the car, which had two cylinders and no windshield, FDR engaged Harry Hawkey, an itinerant Poughkeepsie piano tuner with an encyclopedic knowledge of backcountry roads gleaned from years of calling on customers. The cost for car and driver was $20 a day, a fee few legislative candidates could afford.

The idea of campaigning by automobile was risky. Cars were still luxury items in rural New York, and to use one might remind voters unnecessarily of Franklin’s silk-stocking pedigree. Far more serious was the possibility of an accident. Farmers didn’t like automobiles because they frightened their horses. In fact, New York law gave the right-of-way to horse-drawn vehicles. “When we met a horse or a team—and that was about every half mile or so,” said FDR, “we had to stop, not only the car but the engine as well.”⁴⁹ But the experiment proved a whopping success. Wheezing along at the dazzling speed of twenty miles an hour, Roosevelt crisscrossed the district as no candidate had done before. The flag-draped little car soon caught people’s attention.^* Even the mandatory horse stops worked to FDR’s advantage. Farmers were duly impressed with the candidate’s deference, and Franklin used the halts to chat up the teamsters and anyone else in the vicinity.

For companionship, and to learn the tricks of the campaign trail, Franklin invited Richard E. Connell, the editor of the Poughkeepsie News-Press and perennial Democratic nominee for Congress, to accompany him. Connell was a gifted stump speaker in the florid style of William Jennings Bryan and began each of his orations by referring to his audience as “My Friends”—a phrase Roosevelt quickly adopted as his own. It was also Connell who advised FDR to discard the pince-nez he had worn since Groton. Made him look snooty, said Connell.

For four exhausting weeks, Franklin, Connell, and Hawkey spent day after day on the dusty back roads of Dutchess, Putnam, and Columbia counties, giving the same speeches as often as ten times a day. They spoke from the porches of general stores, atop hay wagons, in dairy barns, at village crossroads, sometimes standing on the backseat of the old Maxwell itself—any place where a group of farmers could be brought together. “I think I worked harder with Franklin than I ever have in my life,” said Hawkey afterward.⁵⁰

FDR was having the time of his life. Nothing seemed to lessen his enthusiasm for jumping into a crowd, pumping hands, and making friends. He was “a top-notch salesman,” a Hyde Park housepainter, Tom Leonard, remembered. “He wouldn’t immediately enter into the topic of politics when he met a group. He would approach them as a friend and would lead up to that … with that smile of his.”⁵¹

No roadside gathering was too small for Franklin. He startled a gang of Italian railroad workers repairing track near Brewster by leaping from his car into their midst, chattering away in what they slowly realized was his own version of Italian—a cross between textbook French and the Latin he had learned at Groton.⁵²

Occasionally Roosevelt’s enthusiasm got the best of him. Campaigning in the Harlem Valley on the eastern edge of the district late one afternoon, he stopped in front of a small-town saloon, rushed inside, and invited everyone to have a drink. “What town is this?” he asked the bartender. “Sharon, Connecticut,” said the man pouring drinks. FDR paid up, passed out campaign buttons, and told the story on himself for years.⁵³

As the campaign wore on, Judge Mack recognized that FDR was a natural. His speech making was still awkward, but he had an uncanny ability to persuade his audience. Women’s suffrage did not come to New York until 1917, but an increasing number of ladies began to attend Franklin’s rallies, especially those in the evening. “They came to see as well as hear the handsomest candidate that ever asked for votes in their district,” said Mack. “Franklin was so good looking he might have stepped out of a magazine cover.”⁵⁴

Roosevelt was his own campaign manager. He ordered up 2,500 campaign buttons, designed 500 posters for storefront windows throughout the district, and personally wrote checks to pay for advertisements he placed in each of the twenty-four county newspapers, ranging from the Amenia Times to the Wappinger Chronicle. His platform was entirely personal and avoided substantive issues that might trigger opposition. “I want to represent you, the people of these counties, and no one else,” he told an October rally in Hudson. “I am pledged to no man, to no special interest, to no boss. I want to stay on the job representing you twelve months of the year.”⁵⁵ Later, he would write with disarming candor, “During the campaign … I made no promises in regard to particular legislation.”⁵⁶ Instead, he identified himself with good government and blasted away at the “rotten corruption of the New York legislature and the extravagant mismanagement of the State administration.”⁵⁷

Nineteen-ten proved to be a banner year for the Democrats. Riding a wave of protest against the complacency of the Taft administration in Washington, the party picked up ten seats in the United States Senate and more than half the governorships (including Princeton president Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey) and won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1892. The GOP debacle was greatest in New York, where the party lost the governorship, both houses of the legislature, and two thirds of the seats in Congress.

FDR was a direct beneficiary of the Democratic landslide, which, in New York at least, was partially attributable to Cousin Theodore’s reentry into political life. In a preview of the 1912 presidential election, TR took up the cudgels for reform, lambasted the party’s old guard, and split the GOP down the middle. The issues were tailor-made for TR. Governor Charles Evans Hughes had been locked in a bitter struggle with Republican regulars and old-line Democrats over electoral reform. Hughes sought to introduce direct primaries for party nominations to state office—an innovation that threatened the power of both the GOP bosses in Albany and the Tammany leadership in New York City. But Hughes was elevated to the Supreme Court before the battle was won. When the bosses combined to defeat the measure, Teddy jumped into the fight. At the Republican state convention in Saratoga on September 27, TR wrested control of the party apparatus from the old guard, forced the nomination of his friend Henry L. Stimson for governor, and dictated a reformist platform. Party regulars responded by sitting on their hands during the election.

Franklin capitalized on the Republican split. He lashed out at political bosses in both parties, fighting alongside his illustrious cousin against graft, privilege, and corruption. Asked at a farm rally whether he supported Governor Hughes’s policies, FDR replied, “You bet I do. I think he is one of the best governors the State has ever had.”⁵⁸ Since his opponent, Schlosser, had voted against the election reform bill, the lines were drawn. The cadences of political rhetoric came naturally to Roosevelt: “I don’t know who Senator Schlosser represents,” he told a gathering at the Quaker meetinghouse in Clinton Corners. “But I do know that he hasn’t represented me and I do know that he hasn’t represented you.”⁵⁹

The Republicans initially paid no attention to FDR. But as the campaign drew to a close, panic set in. In the final week, Hamilton Fish, who represented Dutchess County in Congress,^* attacked Franklin as a carpetbagger who lived in Manhattan, not Hyde Park. His automobile campaign, said Fish, was nothing more than a cheap “vaudeville tour for the benefit of the farmers.”⁶⁰ The Poughkeepsie Eagle, which had otherwise ignored FDR, now railed against his ties to big business: “Franklin D. Roosevelt represents just the opposite of what Theodore Roosevelt stands for. The News-Press reports him as managing clerk of the firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn of 54 Wall Street. It is well for the electors of this Senatorial District to bear in mind that this firm are the lawyers for some of the great trusts which are being prosecuted by President Taft’s administration, such as the Standard Oil Co., and the Sugar Trust.”⁶¹ Schlosser, who had conducted what amounted to a front-porch campaign, joined the fray with a vituperative attack on FDR’s patrician origins and dandified appearance. Roosevelt responded by renewing his attack on Schlosser’s subservience to the GOP bosses in Albany. “I had a particularly disagreeable opponent,” FDR remembered years later. “He called me names … and I answered in kind. And the names I called him were worse than the names he called me. So we had a joyous campaign.”⁶²

FDR closed out the race with an election-eve rally in Hyde Park. With Eleanor and Sara at his side, he told his fellow townsmen, “You have known what my father stood for before me, you have known how close he was to the life of this town, and I do not need to tell you that it is my desire always to follow in his footsteps.”⁶³

November 8, election day, dawned gray and rainy—a good omen for Democrats, who always prayed for bad weather upstate to keep the Republican faithful indoors. FDR voted early and returned to Springwood to await the results. As the returns trickled in that evening, it quickly became apparent that the state and the nation were undergoing one of those defining moments when political power passes from one party to the other. The Democrats swept everything in sight. Republican Henry Stimson suffered a crushing defeat for governor, Richard Connell upset Hamilton Fish in the race for Congress, and Roosevelt carried more than two thirds of the precincts in the Twenty-sixth Senatorial District, defeating Schlosser 15,708 to 14,568—an unprecedented Democratic majority.

But it was not just the Democratic avalanche that propelled FDR into office. He outspent Schlosser five to one; he outcampaigned and outorganized him by an even greater margin; and he led the entire Democratic ticket.⁶⁴ He ran almost as well in the countryside as he did in Poughkeepsie, carried Hyde Park 406–258, and defeated Schlosser on his home turf in Fishkill.

Sara watched the returns as avidly as Franklin, proudly noting the results in her firm Delano hand on a sheet of personal stationery: “Franklin carried Poughkeepsie by 927 … carried Hudson by 499 … Fishkill 128 … Second Assembly district of Dutchess 900.” Sara was not surprised. “I have always thought Franklin perfectly extraordinary,” she once said, “and, as I look back, I don’t think he has ever disappointed me.”⁶⁵

At the age of twenty-eight, Roosevelt had found his calling. He passed out two dozen expensive cigars to friends and relatives and settled in to savor his victory. It was a singular personal triumph. He had run strongly in the rural reaches of the district, where party professionals had thought he had little chance. And the pros took notice. When “Big Tim” Sullivan, the Tammany wheelhorse who represented the Bowery in the Senate, heard that TR’s cousin was going to be a colleague, he told friends, “If we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the dock. The Roosevelts run true to form, and this kid is likely to do for us what the Colonel is going to do for the Republican party, split it wide open.”⁶⁶

New York legislators earned $1,500 a year. The session rarely lasted more than ten weeks, and most members either commuted or stayed in one of the half-dozen tourist-class hotels and boardinghouses that catered to transient lawmakers. Hyde Park was sixty-five miles from Albany on the main Delaware & Hudson rail line and FDR might have easily commuted, yet he chose to convert his election victory into a full-time career as a state senator. Skeptics might argue it was a rich man’s hobby: Franklin could not have established himself in the capital without his trust-fund income and Sara’s largesse. But FDR was committed. As he told the voters in Hudson, he intended to stay on the job in Albany “twelve months of the year.”

In mid-November Franklin went to Albany to find a suitable house. “I suppose I must have gone [with Franklin] and looked at the house which we took, though I have no recollection of doing so,” Eleanor said many years later.⁶⁷ What the Roosevelts found was a massive three-story brownstone in the Flemish Renaissance style favored by wealthy moguls living upstate. The house was situated on a one-acre lot at 248 State Street, virtually in the shadow of the capitol. “It is quite a big house with a piazza and a big yard … and built more like a country house,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Isabella Ferguson in Tucson.⁶⁸ Franklin called it “palatial.” Sara said it was “a fine house that could be made comfortable.”⁶⁹ The large downstairs rooms provided ample space for entertaining, and there was an enormous paneled library at the rear and more than enough room on the second and third floors for their three children, the children’s nurses, and a household staff of six. The rent was $400 a month—$4,800 annually, or more than three times FDR’s senatorial salary. Later the Roosevelts moved into even larger quarters at 4 Elk Street, known as “Quality Row” for the affluent Albany families that lived along it. That mansion had been built by Martin Van Buren when he was governor—the first New York governor to reach the White House—and reflected Little Van’s penchant for lavish living.

The legislature convened on January 4, with the Democrats in control of both houses. The Assembly was led by the thirty-seven-year-old Alfred E. Smith, a seven-term veteran from the Lower East Side, son of an Irish mother and an Italian-German father, a vital cog in the Tammany organization who despite an eighth-grade education had demonstrated a political savvy that catapulted him ahead of a legion of better-educated, more seasoned legislators. In the Senate, the organization turned to thirty-three-year-old Robert F. Wagner, son of a Wiesbaden printer, who had landed in New York at the age of nine, not speaking a word of English. Smith and Wagner exemplified the spirit of urban reform that characterized Tammany in 1911, though FDR had yet to recognize it.

The first order of business was the election of a United States senator. The term of Chauncey Depew, the Republican incumbent, expired March 4, 1911. Under the Constitution, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, and in New York it was done in joint session: 150 assemblymen and 50 state senators, a total of 200 votes, of which a majority (101) was required to elect. Since there were 114 Democrats in the legislature, it was a foregone conclusion that Depew’s successor would be named by the Democratic caucus.

Tammany’s candidate was William F. Sheehan, known throughout the state as “Blue-eyed Billy,” the former political boss of Erie County, lieutenant governor, and assembly speaker who was now practicing law in New York City as the partner of Judge Alton B. Parker, the 1904 Democratic presidential nominee. Sheehan had amassed a considerable fortune in and out of politics, and his current legal practice reflected the ultimate in white-shoe respectability. He was director of a dozen or so public utility companies and, with the conservative Judge Parker, embodied the alliance between big business and machine politics. Sheehan raised money from his clients for the Democrats; Tammany spent the money and remembered from whence it came.

But the caucus was far from unanimous. Sheehan was anathema to old Cleveland Democrats—men like Franklin’s father, upstate WASPs who abhorred political bosses in principle yet as a practical matter were far more hidebound and conservative. Their candidate was Brooklyn attorney Edward M. Shepard, counsel for the Pennsylvania Railroad, an intimate of J. P. Morgan who had long been active in the cause of good government but could scarcely be called a liberal crusader. The fact that Sheehan was Irish Catholic and Shepard a Yankee Episcopalian was of more significance than many would openly admit.

Franklin sided with the Cleveland crowd. “Sheehan looks like [Tammany’s] choice,” he noted in his diary in early January. “May the result prove that I am wrong! There is no question in my mind that the Democratic Party is on trial, and having been given control of the government chiefly through up-state votes, cannot afford to surrender its control to the organization in New York City.”⁷⁰ Like Theodore when he first entered the legislature, FDR was itching for a fight. It was a matter of publicity and power, not policy or substance. The issue for Franklin was “bossism,” and the contest for U.S. senator was the first target of opportunity that came into view. Whether Sheehan was more progressive than Shepard was immaterial.

Under party rules the decision of the caucus was binding. A majority of the caucus was fifty-eight votes, and if party discipline prevailed—and it invariably did—those fifty-eight determined how all 114 Democrats would vote on the floor. That gave Tammany the whip hand. The New York City organization controlled far more than the fifty-eight votes required, and Charles F. Murphy, the astute Tammany chieftain, confidently expected to put Sheehan in the Senate come March.^* Yet there was a loophole. When asked by FDR, Al Smith confirmed that only those Democrats who attended the caucus were bound. If a member was absent, he was not bound by the caucus’s decision.⁷¹

Both parties scheduled their caucuses for nine o’clock on the evening of January 16. The Republicans met briefly and unanimously named Depew. But when the Democrats called their meeting to order, twenty-three members were absent. Those present voted sixty-two for Sheehan, twenty-two for Shepard, and seven for D. Cady Herrick, a former candidate for governor. The caucus formally nominated Sheehan, but only ninety-one Democrats had attended—ten fewer than the 101 votes required to elect.

While the Democrats caucused, twenty-one of the absentees convened nearby in the Ten Eyck Hotel. Some favored Shepard, some favored other candidates, but all were agreed that they would not support Sheehan. A brief press release explained they did not wish their individual votes smothered by the caucus. “The people should know just how their representatives voted … and any majority should be credited to the representatives in the Legislature and not someone outside that body”—a blast at Tammany in general and Charles F. Murphy in particular.⁷²

The legislature met in joint session the next morning. When the ballots for U.S. senator were tabulated, Sheehan had ninety-one votes from the Democratic caucus, all eighty-six Republicans voted for Depew, and the remaining Democratic votes were split among a number of sentimental favorites.^* No candidate had received the 101 votes required for election. For the next ten weeks battle lines hardened and the legislature ground to a halt. “Never in the history of Albany have 21 men threatened such total ruin of machine plans,” the veteran newsman Louis Howe reported in The New York Herald.⁷³ The rebels “are the talk of the capital,” said The New York Times. “They are not radicals. They speak with moderation, and have made clear that while they will resist to the last any attempt at coercion, they are keenly alive to the necessary processes of government by party.”⁷⁴

FDR was not the instigator of the insurgency or even its prime organizer. Yet he quickly emerged as its spokesman and informal chairman. He was always available to the press, he had no political baggage from past campaigns, and he was articulate and self-confident. “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight,” he told The New York Times on January 22. “I never had as much fun in my life as I am having right now.”

The name Roosevelt fascinated reporters bored with statehouse routine. Comparisons with TR were inevitable. The New York Post told its readers that Franklin had “the strong insurgent tendencies of the family.”⁷⁵ The American reported, “His face is boyish, but those who remember Theodore Roosevelt when he was an Assemblyman say the Senator bears a striking likeness to the Colonel.”⁷⁶ According to the New York World, FDR was “of spare figure and lean intellectual face, suggesting a student of divinity rather than a practical politician.”⁷⁷ The New York Globedepicted a matinee idol: “Tall, with a well set up figure, he is physically fit to command. His face is a bit long but the features are well modeled, the nose is Grecian, and there is a glow of country health in his cheeks.… It is the chin, though, aggressive and somewhat prominent, that shows what a task the leaders in Albany have if they have thoughts of making this young man change his mind. His lips are firm and part often in a smile over even white teeth—the Roosevelt teeth.”⁷⁸

FDR’s house, just one block from the capitol, became insurgent headquarters. It was our “harbor of refuge,” said Kings County assemblyman Edmund R. Terry.⁷⁹ Every morning the insurgents gathered in the Roosevelts’ library, walked together to the legislature, cast their votes against Sheehan, returned after the session, went out again for supper, and came back for a long evening of drinks and cigars. The sessions were as much social as political. “There is very little business done at our councils of war,” FDR confided to a Times reporter. “We just sit around and swap stories like soldiers at a bivouac fire.”⁸⁰ There were shouts and laughter and a blue haze of cigar smoke that engulfed everyone and everything. The smoke became so pervasive that Eleanor eventually moved the children to the third floor so they might breathe more easily.

The fight against Sheehan gave Eleanor her initial taste of political life. “It was a wife’s duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books or a particular dish for dinner. That was the attitude with which I approached that first winter in Albany,” she said later.⁸¹ Eleanor watched proceedings from the Senate gallery, entertained the insurgents at home, prepared their drinks and snacks, and forged some unlikely friendships. Veteran Tammany pols like Tom Grady and Tim Sullivan—who had little use for Franklin—found Eleanor delightful. “Be with the insurgents, and if needs be with your husband every day in the year but this,” wrote Grady to ER on Saint Patrick’s Day. “But this day be with us.”⁸² Eleanor’s understanding of the personal aspects of politics seemed instinctive. She softened Franklin’s self-righteousness and made him appear less arrogant. When Lord Bryce, Great Britain’s ambassador to the United States, addressed a joint session of the legislature, ER stepped forward and hosted a massive reception where Tammanyites, insurgents, and Old Albany society mingled freely. That first year in the state capital was a seminar in practical politics, and Eleanor enjoyed every minute. As one of her most sympathetic biographers has written, “Franklin’s entrance into politics saved them both from the kind of ordinary upper-class life, vapid and fatuous, that ER associated with society—at least that part of society where she had never felt welcome, comfortable, or understood.”⁸³

Tammany exerted maximum pressure on the insurgents. Pet projects were shelved, patronage dried up, hometown constituents were mobilized, local newspapers counseled against delay, county chairmen, bankers, and prominent businessmen threatened to withdraw support. More than once, FDR had to raise funds for his colleagues to pay off mortgages called suddenly by their banks.⁸⁴ When intimidation failed, the Sheehan forces turned to favors and inducements. Al Smith did not say “to get along, you have to go along,” but the capital was rife with rumors of judicial posts and other perks offered to the rebels. Charles Murphy journeyed to Albany to meet with FDR; Sheehan and his wife had lunch with Franklin and Eleanor—all to no avail. At the end of March the rebels still held out. The legislature had been in session ten weeks, and not one measure of substance had been enacted.

Both sides were becoming restive. Governor John Dix, in despair for the state budget, called for Sheehan to withdraw. A number of compromise candidates emerged, and finally Charles Murphy settled on State Supreme Court justice James Aloysius O’Gorman, a former Tammany sachem (underboss) and longtime president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. O’Gorman had been on the bench for ten years and his reputation for integrity was unassailable. Unlike Sheehan and Shepard, he had no ties to the corporate world or big business. Yet he was far more a creature of Tammany than Sheehan had ever been. He would be hard for the rebels to accept, but even harder for them to reject.

When Smith and Wagner promised there would be no reprisals, the insurgents broke ranks. A majority voted to accept O’Gorman. FDR sought to hold out, but with his troops thinning, further resistance was futile. He embraced the inevitable: “We would have taken Justice O’Gorman at the very beginning and been perfectly satisfied,” he later told the Times.⁸⁵

On the afternoon of March 31, 1911, when the rebels filed into the chamber for the final vote, jubilant regulars let out a raucous cheer. There were cheers and more cheers, and then an Irish voice burst into song: the rhythmic anthem of the New York City organization: “Tam-ma-nee … Tam-ma-nee.” The regulars joined in, chorus after chorus, including the improvised

Tam-ma-nee, Tam-ma-nee

Franklin D., like Uncle “The,”

Is no match for Tam-ma-nee;

Tam-ma-nee, Tam-ma-nee

Eventually order was restored and the clerk called the roll—the sixty-fourth ballot for U.S. senator. When his name was called, Roosevelt stood to explain his vote, struggling to make himself heard above an undercurrent of hisses. “We have followed the dictates of our consciences and have done our duty as we saw it. [Hisses.] I believe that as a result the Democratic Party has taken an upward step. [Groans and hisses.] We are Democrats—not irregulars, but regulars. [Silence]. I take pleasure in casting my vote for the Honorable James A. Gorman. [Tepid applause.]”⁸⁶ The results were predictable. One hundred twelve Democrats voted for O’Gorman; eighty Republicans for Depew. The insurgency was broken. All but three of the twenty-one members who had rebelled with FDR would be defeated in upcoming elections.

The fight against Sheehan became another myth Roosevelt could not resist embellishing. Two days after the vote in Albany, Franklin addressed the YMCA of Greater New York and claimed victory. “I have just returned from a big fight,” he announced. “A fight that went sixty-four rounds. This fight was a free-for-all … and many of the other side got good and battered.… The battle ended in harmony, and we have chosen a man for the people who will be dictated to by no one.”⁸⁷

Over the years the public forgot how ignominiously the insurgents had been beaten and remembered only that Sheehan had not been elected. This became gospel for FDR, who never tired of retelling the tale of his first political victory.^* “Do you remember the old Sheehan fight of 1911?” he asked a longtime friend in 1928 when he was running for governor. “When the final Murphy surrender came, the flag of truce was brought to me by Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and State Senator Bob Wagner. What a change has taken place all along the line.”⁸⁸

FDR harvested a bumper crop of national publicity from the Sheehan fight, and for some he became a youthful symbol of political reform. The Cleveland Plain Dealer tabbed Franklin as TR’s successor: “May it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty? Franklin D. Roosevelt is, to be sure, a Democrat, but this is a difference of small import. In other respects, he seems to be thoroughly Rooseveltian.”⁸⁹ In North Carolina, Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, wrote an editorial praising FDR’s stand against Tammany entitled “A Coming Democratic Leader.”⁹⁰ In Trenton, New Jersey’s reformist governor Woodrow Wilson took notice, and TR wrote his congratulations: “Just a line to say that we are really proud of the way you have handled yourself.”⁹¹

The downside of the Sheehan struggle was that FDR was tagged as anti-Catholic and anti-Irish—a label that proved hard to shake. The Reverend Patrick Ludden, the Roman Catholic bishop of Syracuse, claimed that Franklin and his colleagues reflected a resurgence of “the old spirit of Knownothingism” that prevented Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, from getting ahead.⁹² Daniel O’Connell, political boss of Albany for several generations, put it more pungently. Franklin, he said, “was a bigot. He didn’t like Tammany. He didn’t like poor people. He was a patronizing son of a bitch.”⁹³ FDR’s denials were more fervent than convincing. Both he and Eleanor shared the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic prejudices of their time and class.^* Franklin would learn tolerance, and over the years he and the nation’s Irish pols would use each other for their mutual benefit. But their affection never ran deep. James A. Farley, who served FDR for a dozen years as campaign manager and party chairman, had as one of his tasks to persuade his fellow Irish leaders that they could work with Roosevelt in spite of what they might have heard about his youthful anti-Catholicism. Farley did a superb job, but he was never personally convinced. Later he lamented that his relationship with FDR had been purely professional. “Strange as it may seem, the President never took me into the bosom of his family, although everyone agreed I was more responsible than any other single man for his being in the White House.”⁹⁴

A lasting legacy of the Sheehan fight was the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct election of U.S. senators by the voters in each state, not the legislatures. In April 1911, the New York legislature took up a bill previously introduced by Roosevelt instructing the state’s congressional delegation to support such an amendment. The direct election of senators was popular with the progressive movement throughout the country and had been one of the planks in the Democratic platform. FDR led the debate in the State Senate, which on April 20 passed the measure 28–15. Four days later the Assembly adopted it 105–30. The Democrats in both houses voted solidly in favor, most Republicans against. The Sheehan battle, taken together with similar struggles in New Jersey and Illinois, launched a groundswell of popular sentiment behind the amendment. Congress adopted it by the required two-thirds vote on May 13, 1912, and upon ratification by three quarters of the states, it became part of the Constitution on May 31, 1913. (New York was the fourth state to ratify, acting January 15, 1913.)

Fighting “bossism” came naturally to FDR. He challenged Tammany over a bill to reorganize the State Highway Commission, pressed for adoption of a direct-primary bill, and struck a puritanical pose against such Tammany-endorsed measures as Sunday baseball, legalized prizefighting, and betting at the racetrack. “Murphy and his kind must, like the noxious weed, be plucked out root and branch,”⁹⁵ he told an audience in Buffalo. These stands were popular with Roosevelt’s churchgoing constituency of upriver farmers and small-town businessmen. But they ignored the economic issues of the day, failed to address the growing problems of industrialization, and tagged Tammany with an out-of-date label more appropriate to the days of the Tweed Ring than the progressive leadership of Murphy, Wagner, and Smith.^* As one legislative veteran put it, FDR’s ideas in 1911 were “the silly conceits of a political prig [devoid] of human sympathy, human interests, human ties,” a characterization with which most members would have agreed.⁹⁶

^* Written in pencil by Roosevelt on the flyleaf of his copy of Professor Henry S. Redfield’s Selected Cases on Code Pleading and Practice in New York. Redfield was one of two professors who failed FDR.

^* Except for the wicker furniture, there was little rustic about the Kuhn-Roosevelt “cottage.” In addition to the extensive manicured lawns extending to the water’s edge, there were four full baths, two butler’s pantries, seven fireplaces, and a full-size laundry. It required a staff of eight to operate. After FDR contracted polio, the cottage was used sparingly. In 1952 the house and all of its furnishings were sold to the financier Armand Hammer. Hammer carefully restored it, installed electricity, and offered Eleanor full use whenever she wished. After ER’s death in 1962 Hammer donated the property to the U.S. and Canadian governments, which jointly established the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. See Jonas Klein, Beloved Island: Franklin and Eleanor and the Legacy of Campobello (Forest Dale, Vt.: Paul S. Eriksson, 2000).

^* FDR received approximately $5,000 annually from the trust fund his father established. ER’s inheritance produced a little over $7,000, the principal invested primarily in New York Central Railroad stocks and bonds, administered by Cousin Henry Parish, vice president of the Chemical Bank.

^† Anna Eleanor (May 3, 1906); James (December 23, 1907); Franklin Delano, Jr. (March 18, 1909–November 8, 1909); Elliott (September 23, 1910); Franklin Delano, Jr. (August 7, 1914); and John Aspinwall (March 13, 1916).

^* Even within the family, FDR kept his feelings largely to himself. After the death of their infant son Franklin, Jr., in 1910, Roosevelt quietly joined the board of the New York Milk Committee, to help combat infant mortality. Franklin, Jr., had been bottle-fed, and the death rate for bottle-fed infants in the city was extremely high—over a thousand babies died in Manhattan alone the summer Franklin, Jr., fell ill. The trouble was traced to unpasteurized or adulterated milk drunk from unsterilized bottles. The Milk Committee ran a chain of storefront milk stations in the poorest sections of the city, which provided pure milk and free medical advice to mothers unable to afford either. See Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt 102–103 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

^* FDR proved adept at the law when he chose to apply himself. Legend at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn holds that when Franklin was managing clerk he was one day sent by John Milburn to municipal court to settle eight or nine minor suits against the American Express Company, one of the firm’s principal clients. Milburn instructed FDR to take $1,000 from the cashier and pay what was necessary. Later that afternoon the firm’s cashier reported to Milburn that Roosevelt had just come back and returned the $1,000. Milburn immediately called Franklin into his office and demanded an explanation. “Oh,” said Roosevelt. “When they called the cases, I tried them all and won.” Francis M. Ellis and Edward F. Clark, Jr., A Brief History of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn 115–116 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter E. Randall, 1988).

^* At first blush, FDR’s statement appears somewhat grandiose. Until his election in 1932, only three New York governors had been elected president: Martin Van Buren (1836), Grover Cleveland (1884 and 1892), and TR (1904). But from the perspective of 1907, when FDR was speaking, his assertion warrants greater credence. New York cast almost 10 percent of the total electoral vote, and three of the last six presidential victors had indeed been New York governors.

^* In the 1909 election, the Democrats won all countywide offices and twenty of the twenty-seven town supervisors. See Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 18 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).

^* On election eve in November 1932, Roosevelt received a letter from Edwin De Turck Bechtel, a leading partner at Carter, Ledyard, who had been a fellow clerk with FDR at the firm and had been in the bullpen with him when Judge Mack discussed Dutchess County politics. “It thrills me,” Bechtel wrote, “to realize that your decision in 1910 as you sat at your old roll-top desk at 54 Wall Street and the political principles which you chose then and have always followed should have led to such a marvelous goal.” Enclosed with the letter were photostats of two pages from the ledger FDR kept as managing clerk “as a reminder of old times.” Legal Papers, Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.

^* Sara, understandably, was never happy with the rough-edged politicians and less-than-couth newsmen FDR brought to Springwood, nor with the mannish social workers Eleanor escorted in the 1920s, but she was always gracious to them. “I have always believed that a mother should be friends with her children’s friends,” she gamely put it. The one exception was Louisiana senator Huey Long, whom she could not abide. In the autumn of 1932, Senator Long visited Hyde Park to discuss campaign strategy with FDR. (The Kingfish had personally intimidated the wavering Arkansas and Mississippi delegations to keep them in line on the crucial third ballot at the Democratic convention, and Roosevelt owed him.) Always a flamboyant dresser, Long was attired in a loud checkered suit, orchid shirt, and a watermelon pink necktie, which was garish even for him. FDR received Long affably and invited him to lunch, where they continued their conversation, leaving the other guests to talk among themselves. During a momentary lull in the conversation, Sara could be heard sotto voce from her end of the table: “Who is that awful man sitting on my son’s right?” When asked later by newsmen about his opinion of FDR, Long said, “I like him. But by God, I feel sorry for him. He’s got even more sonsofbitches in his family than I got in mine.” T. Harry Williams, Huey Long 601–602 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).

^* Twenty-two years later, FDR would capture the nation’s attention by flying from Albany to Chicago to accept the Democratic nomination for president—the first presidential candidate to use an airplane during a campaign.

^* Hamilton Fish [II] was the son of the Hamilton Fish, who served successively as governor of New York, U.S. senator, and Grant’s secretary of state for eight years. Fish II served in Congress for only one term (1909–1911) and is the father of Hamilton Fish, Jr., who subsequently held the seat from 1920 to 1945 and delighted in tweaking FDR.

^* Charles Murphy, who headed Tammany Hall from 1902 until his death in 1924, was the antithesis of his ham-handed predecessors. Known variously as “The Quiet Chief,” “Silent Charlie,” or simply “Mr. Murphy,” he had a cleansing effect on both the organization and New York politics.

The son of an Irish tenant farmer, Murphy saved enough money driving a Blue Line horse trolley to open a saloon (the first of four) known as Charlie’s Place on Second Avenue, where he learned politics doling out favors to the neighborhood. He rose quickly through the Tammany ranks, attributable in part to his gentlemanly discretion and in part to his innate political instinct, to become the most powerful Democratic leader in the state.

Reform was in the air when Murphy took control of Tammany, and he put the organization at the head of the parade. As he saw it, reform had too many ramifications to be left to the reformers. Under Murphy, Tammany became the most potent force for effecting economic and social change in New York. It supported Republican governor Charles Evans Hughes in the creation of a Public Utilities Commission, as well as laws regulating banking, insurance, and tenement housing. It pioneered legislation for old-age pensions, workman’s compensation, and five-cent transit fares. Robert Wagner would later refer to Murphy’s Tammany as “the cradle of modern liberalism.” Nancy J. Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858–1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics 27–38 (Northampton, Mass: Smith College, 1968); Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tiger of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); Charles LaCerra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall of New York43–46 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997).

^* Edward M. Shepard 14, Judge Alton B. Parker 6, former governor Herrick 2, State Supreme Court justice James W. Gerard 2, and Martin W. Littleton 2.

^* Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, one of Al Smith’s closest advisers, said party professionals in New York always laughed a little at FDR for the Sheehan affair. “According to the gospel, FDR won a great victory. But the victory was that instead of getting Sheehan, who was a pretty good upstate lawyer, [Tammany] withdrew him and nominated O’Gorman, whom they would much rather have nominated in the first place.” Interview, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

^* ER’s feelings never completely changed. “Franklin was always surrounded by Catholics,” she told her friend Irine Sandifer in 1960. “They were determined to see that he was always surrounded.” Irine Reiterman Sandifer, Mrs. Roosevelt as We Knew Her 86 (Silver Spring, Md.: privately printed, 1975). Also see James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts 143, 196–197 (New York: Grove Press, 2001).

^* FDR’s view of Tammany eventually caught up with the times. When Charles Murphy died in 1924, Roosevelt said feelingly, “In Mr. Murphy’s death, the New York City Democratic organization has lost probably the strongest and wisest leader it has had in generations.… He was a genius who kept harmony, and at the same time recognized that the world moves on. It is well to remember that he had helped to accomplish much in the way of progressive and social welfare legislation in our state.” Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy 21; LaCerra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall 61.