FIVE

AWAKENING

I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

FRANKLIN WAS LITTLE LIKED in Albany. Most of his colleagues found him insufferable. Al Smith wrote him off as a dilettante—“a damn fool” who thought more about political appearances than substantive legislation. Robert Wagner saw him as a stage dandy interested only in publicity: “Senator Roosevelt has gained his point. What he wants is a headline in the newspapers. Let us proceed to our business.” The elderly Tom Grady, who had served in the legislature with TR, thought Franklin the more obnoxious of the two. Even the genial Tim Sullivan, a man of exceptional warmth and kindness, believed him to be “an awful arrogant fellow.”¹

Frances Perkins, fresh out of Mount Holyoke and Columbia Graduate School, was often in Albany lobbying on behalf of labor. She knew the Roosevelts socially in New York City and traveled in the same circles. No one who saw FDR in those years, she wrote, would have been likely to think of him as a potential president.

I have a vivid picture of him operating on the floor of the Senate: tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.

I think he started that way not because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had a good education at Harvard, but because he really didn’t like people very much and because he had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot.²

The fight against Sheehan provided national publicity for Roosevelt. But it exposed his social indifference. On March 25, 1911, while the legislature was still deadlocked, fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which occupied the three top floors of a New York City loft building just off Washington Square. The flames spread quickly. The doors to the only stairwell were chained shut, ostensibly to prevent theft, and there was no fire escape. Forty-six employees fell or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below; one hundred perished in the inferno. All but fifteen were girls and young women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. In the trial that followed, the company was absolved of responsibility and collected $64,925 in insurance damages. Twenty-three families of the dead sued and received an overall total of $1,725. That amounted to $75 for each life lost.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the worst factory fire in New York history, exposed the evils of unregulated working conditions. “This calamity is just what I have been predicting,” said the city’s fire chief.³ Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League put it more pejoratively: “The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred, it matters little if one hundred and forty-six of us are burned to death,” she told a protest rally at the Metropolitan Opera House.⁴ Political leaders in Albany took up the cry for reform. The legislature immediately established a Factory Investigating Commission with Robert Wagner as chairman, Al Smith as vice chairman, and Frances Perkins as chief investigator. Over the next three years the commission would produce a flood of thirty-two bills that came to serve as models of industrial reform throughout the nation. Franklin Roosevelt stood on the sidelines. He said nothing about the Triangle fire and took no part in the legislative effort the tragedy produced.

One of the principal pieces of social legislation to come forward at the 1911 session was a bill to limit the workweek of women and children to fifty-four hours. The measure was being held up in committee, and Democrats were divided. Every vote was important. Miss Perkins approached Roosevelt to ask his support and was dismissed abruptly: “No, no. More important things. More important things. Can’t do it now. Can’t do it now. Much more important things.”⁵

Thanks to help from Tammany stalwarts like Big Tim Sullivan and The MacManus (“the Devil’s Deputy from Hell’s Kitchen”), Miss Perkins got the measure to the Senate floor a year later on the final day of the session. Under the rules, an absolute majority—twenty-six votes—was required for passage, and the supporters were two votes shy. At the last moment, Tim Sullivan and his cousin Christy, whom Miss Perkins managed to call back from the night boat that was about to take them down the Hudson to New York, crashed through the chamber door to cast the two decisive votes. “It’s all right, me gal,” Big Tim thundered. “The bosses thought they were going to kill your bill, but they forgot about Tim Sullivan.”⁶ Pandemonium erupted on the floor. The Senate was swept by a tidal wave of emotion. Callous old politicians found themselves weeping. And at the back of the chamber, Frances Perkins was weeping too.⁷

Franklin was absent when the bill passed. “I remember being considerably disappointed because Roosevelt wouldn’t do anything about the 54-hour bill,” said Perkins. “I took it hard that a young man who had so much spirit did not do so well in this, which I thought a test, as did Tim Sullivan and The MacManus, undoubtedly corrupt politicians.”^8*

Whether he could not remember, or whether he simply wanted to cover his tracks, FDR’s version of that night varies substantially—another example of excluding unpleasant facts from the record. Campaigning for governor in 1928, Roosevelt told a labor rally in Manhattan, “One of the first measures that we started in 1911 was the fifty-four-hour law for women and children in industry. In those days a fifty-four-hour law was considered the most radical thing that had ever been talked about.”⁹ Several years later, Roosevelt ratcheted up his involvement, telling reporters how he and Robert Wagner had been called Communists because they had worked for a fifty-four-hour-a-week law. “It is an old story,” said FDR, “but like an elephant, I have a long memory.”¹⁰

The most blatant reinterpretation was provided by Roosevelt’s principal aide and general factotum, Louis Howe, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1933. In Howe’s version, FDR not only supported the bill but played the central role in its passage. It was “young Senator Roosevelt,” wrote Howe, who held the Senate floor with a filibuster while Sullivan was summoned from the night boat. When told by runners that Big Tim refused to return, Roosevelt is supposed to have said, “Tell him he has to and I said so.”^11*

FDR’s early record on women’s suffrage was little better. Although his district included Vassar College, a hotbed of feminism, Roosevelt initially hewed to the negative attitude of his farming constituency. Under relentless pressure from campus militants, he took cover in public opinion. “I am trying to get the sentiment of Dutchess County,” he wrote Anna Dayley, a Poughkeepsie attorney, in February 1911, “and I shall be guided very largely by the result.”¹² At the end of May, he was still equivocal. “I am not opposed to female suffrage,” he allowed, “but I think it is a very great question whether the people of the state as a whole want it or not.”¹³

The following year, when the issue of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage was before the legislature, FDR came out in favor. Always fond of a good story, Roosevelt enjoyed telling how he had been convinced by the glamorous suffrage lobbyist Inez Milholland, who perched on his desk in the Senate chamber and dazzled him with Vassar wiles and lawyerly arguments. Milholland was often described as the high priestess of the suffragist cause, and, as FDR would have it, she persuaded him that suffrage was “the only chivalric position for a decent man to hold.”¹⁴

Eleanor supported women’s suffrage reluctantly. Throughout her life she refused to concede Milholland’s role. Nevertheless, Franklin’s conversion left her stunned. “I had never given the question serious thought,” she wrote, “for I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did. I realized that if my husband was a suffragist I probably must be too [but] I cannot claim to have been a feminist in those early years.”¹⁵

FDR’s attitude toward Prohibition was equally equivocal. Never averse to bending an elbow himself, he nevertheless accumulated a perfect voting record in the Senate, according to the Anti-Saloon League. In January 1913, he actually introduced a local option bill for the League and became the subject of a laudatory editorial (“An Advocate of Christian Patriotism”) in its national magazine.¹⁶ In this instance, Franklin appears to have been too clever by half. Prohibition was anathema in New York City, and his opponents never tired of tying him to it. Down through 1932 the story persisted that whatever Roosevelt might say, there was a voting record to prove he was “dry” at heart.¹⁷

Following the path blazed by TR, conservation of the state’s natural resources turned Roosevelt progressive. It was as chairman of the traditionally somnolent Forest, Fish, and Game Committee in the Senate that FDR found his voice as a progressive spokesman. He spearheaded the successful fight to update and codify New York’s fish and game laws but lost a bitter battle with the timber industry to enact a similar code to protect the state’s forests. Franklin’s bill for the “Protection of Lands, Forests, and Public Parks” imposed drastic restrictions on harvesting timber—including a clause to restrict cutting trees below a minimum size on private property.

The state’s timber producers descended on Albany in droves, charging that to tamper with private ownership was unconstitutional. For Roosevelt, it was baptism in a battle he would often revisit. “The same old fight is going on up here,” he wrote to a friend in February 1912, “between the people who see that the Adirondacks are being denuded … and those [timber interests] who succeeded in getting for nothing what they would have to pay well for today. Nobody here has any desire to confiscate property and the bill before my Committee is a conservation measure only.”¹⁸But few believed that. Any attempt to regulate what private landowners could do with their property galvanized the gods of free enterprise. Roosevelt failed to get his bill out of committee. A related bill that FDR introduced to permit the state to flood its own forest lands to provide reservoirs for public power died in the Assembly.

When the fight over the timber bill was at its height, Roosevelt was invited to give the keynote address to the progressive People’s Forum, meeting in nearby Troy. By this time his concern for conservation had morphed into an awareness of the perils of excessive individualism. The speech comes as close as FDR ever came during his early years in politics to providing a philosophical explanation for his actions. Impatient with abstract ideas, he adroitly translated contentious concepts into phrases his audience could relate to—a preview of the mature Franklin D. Roosevelt. No one was better than FDR at simplifying a complex issue and translating it into words the average American could understand.

The course of modern history, he suggested, had been a struggle for individual liberty. “Today, in Europe and America, the liberty of the individual has been accomplished.” What was now required was a process by which that liberty could be harnessed for the betterment of the community. “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further. Co-operation, which is the thing that we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” FDR avoided the term “community interest” as too socialistic. He eschewed “brotherhood of man” as too sentimental. Instead, he defined cooperation as “the struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the individual” and said it was “what the founders of the republic were groping for.”

The answer was regulation. But don’t call it regulation, said Roosevelt. “If we call the method regulation, people will hold up their hands in horror and say ‘unAmerican’ or ‘dangerous.’ But if we call the same process co-operation these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done.’ ”¹⁹

FDR’s embrace of a regulative role for government led him to Trenton and Woodrow Wilson, the fast-rising leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. In 1910, the year Franklin was elected to the Senate in Albany, Wilson was rescued by New Jersey Democrats from a difficult situation at Princeton and elected governor.^* Wilson proved more adept at state politics than academic infighting (“The reason academic politics are so vicious is because the stakes are so small” is often attributed to Wilson) and in his first four months as governor cajoled the legislature into enacting a spectacular series of reform measures including a direct primary law, a corrupt-practices act, a bill establishing a strong public utilities commission with rate-setting authority, and an employer’s liability law. The speed with which Wilson pushed the measures through the statehouse provided a lesson in leadership that made him the odds-on favorite among progressive Democrats for the party’s 1912 presidential nomination.

Roosevelt was but one of many Democrats who journeyed to Trenton to meet Wilson. The get-together served a common purpose: Wilson was interested in the delegate vote count in New York; FDR was eager to join the Wilson campaign at its inception. They met in Wilson’s office in the autumn of 1911. How many votes could he count upon from New York? the governor asked. The prospects looked bleak, FDR replied. New York had ninety votes at the convention and perhaps a third might support Wilson. But like the Democratic legislative caucus in Albany, the state operated under the unit rule. Charles Murphy would control the delegation, and Murphy’s candidate, who was likely to be anyone other than Wilson, would get all of New York’s ninety votes.²⁰

Late that afternoon FDR and Wilson resumed their conversation on the train back to Princeton, where Wilson lived. As they sat opposite each other in a Pennsylvania Railroad day coach, the short ride to Princeton Junction gave the man who would become the twenty-eighth president of the United States and the man who would follow twelve years later as the thirty-second an opportunity to appraise each other. At fifty-five years of age, Wilson was the beneficiary of a sudden wave of popularity. But he remained cold, stern, and professorial—a dour Presbyterian academic born to southern privilege who believed God was guiding his every step. Crisply articulate, inflexible, and dedicated to principle, his firm belief in right and wrong evoked in Franklin memories both of his father, James, and, more poignantly, the Reverend Endicott Peabody. Peabody lacked Wilson’s brilliance but shared his righteous certitude. Wilson’s academic writings suggested a highly theoretical approach to the daily cut and thrust of politics, yet this was belied by his stunning pragmatism as governor.²¹ He was not a man approached easily; he was concerned more with issues than personalities; yet his grasp of political reality was indisputable. Years later, writing from the oval office, FDR drew on his own political experience to contrast Wilson with his early role model, Cousin Theodore. As Franklin saw it, TR lacked Wilson’s depth “and failed to stir, as Wilson did, the truly profound moral and social convictions.” Wilson, on the other hand, failed where TR succeeded in arousing popular enthusiasm over specific events, “even though these events may have been superficial.”²²

In FDR, Wilson saw a tall, young (Roosevelt was twenty-nine), ebullient Harvardian, somewhat full of himself, a shade too eager, not unlike many young men he had met at Princeton. He was smooth, bordering on glib, yet he spoke truthfully and reported the New York situation accurately. He would be of little help at the convention, assuming he was a delegate, but he was a Roosevelt and a Democrat, and obviously shared a commitment to reform. If Wilson got the nomination—a very big “if” in the autumn of 1911—the young man sitting opposite would be most useful building an organization in New York that could help carry the state in November. If TR became the Republican candidate, a Democratic Roosevelt would be even more valuable.

In the ensuing months, Wilson’s political fortunes eroded. His honeymoon with New Jersey legislators ended abruptly—the governor had shed none of his sanctimonious rectitude—and early backers lost interest. Supporters on Wall Street, who saw Wilson as a conservative counter to the populism of William Jennings Bryan, became disenchanted with his increasingly progressive agenda and were now working actively against him.²³ Campaign funds dried up, and other candidates, led by House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri, entered the field.²⁴

The political tide was running strongly against Wilson when New York Democrats convened for their nominating convention in New York City on April 12, 1912. FDR organized a dinner for Wilson supporters at the Belmont Hotel the evening before. He invited close to a hundred upstate delegates, but fewer than twenty replied and of those only three accepted. Murphy dominated the convention from start to finish. A slate of ninety uninstructed delegates was chosen, Tammany held a decisive majority, and Roosevelt was pointedly passed over, as either delegate or alternate.²⁵

If Franklin was discouraged he did not show it. Following a month’s vacation in the Caribbean with his brother-in-law Hall Roosevelt (at TR’s request, Colonel George Goethals gave them a VIP tour of the Panama Canal), FDR accepted the chairmanship of the New York State Wilson Conference, a splinter group of disaffected Democrats, including William Gibbs McAdoo, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and, to everyone’s surprise, Senator James Aloysius O’Gorman. The organization was paper thin but provided cover for Roosevelt to organize a rump of 150 Wilson supporters to attend the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore—an offset to the official New York delegation under Murphy. FDR’s team set up headquarters in the Munsey Building across from the convention and bombarded delegates with manifestoes urging Wilson’s nomination. No Democrat—save Madison and Buchanan—had ever won the White House without the electoral vote of New York, and winning New York, they asserted, required a progressive candidate. Senator O’Gorman interceded with the Democratic National Committee to obtain seats for the Wilson Conference in the gallery, where they chanted incessantly for Wilson.²⁶ Franklin obtained credentials from the sergeant at arms who admitted him to the convention floor. These were countersigned by Joseph E. Davies, the pro-Wilson national committeeman from Wisconsin who many years later would serve as FDR’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.

The 1912 Baltimore convention was Roosevelt’s first exposure to national politics and he reveled in the excitement. He spent hours working hotel lobbies and dining rooms, shaking hands and touting Wilson’s virtues. Reporters and delegates alike flocked to meet the Democratic Roosevelt. One was Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, who had been a fan of FDR since “Blue-eyed Billy” Sheehan had been denied a seat in the U.S. Senate. Daniels was also the Democratic national committeeman from North Carolina and a prominent fixture in the Wilson campaign. “Franklin and I became friends at that convention,” Daniels wrote later. “It was a case of love at first sight.”²⁷ Another new friend who would play an important role in FDR’s political life was the taciturn Tennessee congressman Cordell Hull, an old-school Appalachian liberal who drove the Wilson bandwagon in the South.

The Democratic convention operated under the two-thirds rule, a tradition that not only gave the South veto power over the nominee but also ensured that voting would continue for at least several days. In 1912, there were 1,088 delegates; 545 constituted a majority, but two-thirds (726) were required to nominate. Most states voted under another historic relic, the unit rule: all votes from a state must be cast for a single candidate. This smothered individual delegates’ preferences and gave each state organization effective control of the vote count. Balloting began June 28. After the roll of the states was called, Champ Clark led with 440 votes; Wilson was second with 324; Judson Harmon, the conservative governor of Ohio, had 148; and Congressman Oscar Underwood of Alabama trailed with 117.^* The New York delegation, in a holding pattern, cast its ninety votes for Harmon. Murphy preferred Clark but was waiting for the opportune moment to swing the Empire State’s vote and start a stampede that would put his candidate across.

The summer of 1912 was one of the hottest on record in Baltimore, and the delegates sweltered through roll call after roll call. On the tenth ballot Murphy decided the time had come and threw New York’s support to Clark. That gave the Speaker a majority, but he was still well short of the 726 votes required. Nevertheless, his momentum appeared unstoppable. At that moment William Jennings Bryan rose from his seat in the Nebraska delegation to address the convention. The “Great Commoner” had three times led the party to defeat, but he retained the affection of many southern and western delegates, and his voice had lost none of the resonance that electrified convention after convention. “So long as the ninety wax figures of the New York delegation vote for Clark,” said Bryan, he was withdrawing his support and casting his vote for Wilson. Bryan’s intercession derailed the victory train. For the next dozen ballots Clark’s strength hovered around 550; then it began to erode. On the thirtieth ballot Indiana’s favorite son, Governor Thomas R. Marshall, withdrew and shifted the Hoosier State’s 31 votes to Wilson, who pulled ahead 460–455. With each succeeding ballot Wilson gained strength. On the forty-third ballot, four days after the voting started, Illinois switched its 58 votes from Clark to Wilson, and the landslide began. Three ballots later, Wilson was nominated with 990 votes. Tammany voted for Clark to the bitter end. Governor Marshall was later rewarded for his switch with the vice presidential nomination.²⁸ Bryan would become Wilson’s secretary of state. FDR, who did little but lead cheers and organize demonstrations, made ready to work for Wilson in the coming election. WILSON NOMINATED THIS AFTERNOON,he wired Eleanor at Campobello. ALL MY PLANS VAGUE. SPLENDID TRIUMPH.^29*

The day after Wilson was nominated, FDR called on the governor at his summer residence in Sea Girt, New Jersey. With Murphy temporarily persona non grata, Franklin sought and obtained the candidate’s permission to organize pro-Wilson New York Democrats to fight the November election. Two weeks later, at a much-ballyhooed press conference in New York City, Roosevelt proclaimed the Empire State Democracy, a grassroots progressive movement with a national agenda. Backed by Ralph Pulitzer’s New York World, the Sun, and a sprinkling of upstate papers, the movement quickly picked up speed. “We are not a small minority,” Franklin told a second organizational meeting of two hundred Democrats at the Hotel Astor on July 29. “We are a big majority.” If state party leaders cannot release themselves from their bondage to Tammany, he said, then “true party loyalty demands that bondage be broken by the rank and file. If this be party treason, let those who are responsible for such conditions make the most of it.”³⁰

The Republicans meanwhile were self-destructing. TR and President Taft traded barbs throughout 1911 and then broke irrevocably in February 1912. The issues were initially political. TR pressed a reform agenda; Taft preferred the status quo. But the dispute soon became personal. Taft denounced Teddy and his supporters as “neurotics” who sought to “pull down the pillars of the temple of freedom.” TR dismissed Taft as a “blackguard,” a “fathead,” and a “puzzlewit” with an intellect slightly less developed than a guinea pig’s. “My hat is in the ring and the fight is on,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters on February 21, 1912.³¹

The GOP convened in Chicago in mid-June. Taft forces controlled the convention machinery; TR commanded the party’s rank and file. “It is a marvelous thing” wrote Franklin, “that [Cousin Theodore], acting with the support of untrained militia, has succeeded in overcoming the well-organized opposition of the trained soldiers of the Republican Party.”³² Almost, but not quite. The credentials of some two hundred delegates were contested, and the Taft forces prevailed in virtually every case. That ensured the president’s renomination. TR charged that the deck had been stacked and dramatically instructed his delegates to walk out of the convention. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord,” said Theodore, with his penchant for understatement. Seven weeks later TR accepted the nomination of the newly formed National Progressive party and, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, took the social conscience of the Republican party with him. Claiming to be “as fit as a bull moose,” he posed a threat of unknown dimensions to both parties.³³

Woodrow Wilson believed his election was preordained.³⁴ His campaign staff was less convinced. And with TR added to the race and threatening to siphon off a sizable portion of the progressive vote, all bets were off. The rupture of the Democratic party in New York now took on alarming proportions. If Taft had been the only opposition, FDR’s Empire State Democracy and half a dozen other splinter groups could have been tolerated. Wilson could oppose bossism and let the devil take the hindmost. But now every vote counted, and the Wilson campaign could not afford to alienate Tammany and the regular party organization. For his part, Charles F. Murphy was a constant Democrat. Candidates come and go, but the party continues. He had no difficulty supporting the ticket, even though he had opposed Wilson at the convention.

Wilson and Murphy made no explicit deal. But FDR soon found himself outmaneuvered. The issue came to a head in early October, when the state Democratic party met in Syracuse to nominate its candidate for governor. Murphy supported another term for the complacent John Dix and had the votes to win, though it would likely split the party. Wilson opposed Dix and demanded an open convention. The delegates, he told The New York Times, “must be left free from personal control of any sort.”³⁵

With barely a month before the election, neither Wilson nor Murphy could afford a total break. So while Wilson continued to attack the New York machine publicly, Colonel Edward M. House, his principal adviser and alter ego, negotiated with Murphy to find a compromise candidate: “some unobjectionable Tammany man … who could not bring discredit upon the party,” as House expressed it.³⁶ The charade that followed was carefully choreographed. For the first three ballots Tammany dutifully supported Dix. On the fourth, Murphy shifted his support to Congressman William “Plain Bill” Sulzer of New York City, a public champion of progressivism who had been a Tammany insider for years. Sulzer was exactly the type of common denominator behind whom the party could unite. As with Sheehan two years before, Murphy lost the battle over Dix but won the war.³⁷

Sulzer’s nomination appeared open and above board. House’s role was not revealed. Wilson claimed victory and hailed the “freedom of action which the convention exercised.”³⁸ The party split was healed, the Empire State Democracy dissolved, and FDR said he was proud to be a Democratic regular. “I believe in unity,” he told the Times.³⁹ The only discordant note was sounded by Thomas Mott Osborne, the financial angel of the Empire State Democracy. Wilson, he said afterward, was “perfectly willing to put the ten commandments to a vote and reject them if the vote were adverse.”⁴⁰ Senator Robert Wagner called Osborne a poor loser.⁴¹

FDR’s practical education continued. He began to appreciate that life in the political arena involved more than bossism and good government. He saw House negotiate with Murphy and recognized how expendable he himself had been. He also recognized that he had to get through the eye of the Democratic needle and be renominated for his Senate seat. After that he faced a general election against not just a single Republican opponent but a Bull Moose acolyte of Cousin Theodore as well. Franklin saw the handwriting on the wall and made peace with Tammany. As one scholar expressed it, FDR became a Democratic regular and a Tammany irregular.⁴² There were even rumors that if a Democratic victory in the gubernatorial race had been in doubt, Murphy would have held his nose and backed Roosevelt—just as the Republicans had nominated Theodore in 1898 to avoid defeat.^*

After FDR pulled in his horns he was nominated unanimously by the Democratic caucus in Poughkeepsie. Past differences were brushed aside, and Franklin once again hired Harry Hawkey’s red Maxwell convertible to barnstorm the district. But before the campaign commenced, Roosevelt was struck down with a particularly virulent attack of typhoid. Eleanor, who was also hit, but not as seriously, blamed the drinking water aboard the steamer returning from Campobello.⁴³ Franklin’s political career appeared to have come to an abrupt end. He could not possibly win a three-way race without mounting a strenuous backcountry campaign similar to the one he had waged two years before. But he was feverish and bedridden. To make matters worse, he had been stricken in New York City, not Hyde Park, and the old carpetbagger accusation was certain to resurface. In desperation, Franklin asked Eleanor to send for Louis Howe.⁴⁴

Eleven years older than FDR, Louis Howe was the Albany reporter for the New York Herald. A veteran newsman with a hopeless addiction to politics, Howe gloried in an atmosphere of racetracks, gambling casinos, and the ornate watering holes of East Coast society. He was barely five feet tall, emaciated, his face scarred by a childhood bicycle accident. A malodorous Sweet Caporal cigarette dangled perpetually from his lips, the ashes falling randomly on his rumpled three-piece suits. Even when freshly scrubbed, which was not often, he looked dirty and unkempt. Howe took perverse pride in his appearance, claiming to be one of the four ugliest men in New York. “Children take one look at me on the street and run.”⁴⁵ A fellow reporter once called him a “medieval gnome,” and Howe accepted the designation with delight. For most people, Louis Howe was an acquired taste. But he was blessed with superabundant energy, uncanny political insight, and a penchant for intrigue. His cynical view of human nature rarely left him disappointed. And he was always broke. His job with the Herald was seasonal and provided a precarious living at best. As a result, he hired himself out as a ghostwriter whenever possible, but the pickings in Albany were slim. “I’m in a hole,” he wrote FDR after Wilson’s nomination. “If you can connect me with a job during the campaign, for heaven’s sake help me out.”⁴⁶

Howe leaped for joy when Eleanor’s message arrived. He had admired Franklin’s fight against Sheehan, provided valuable advice to the insurgents on legislative strategy, and interviewed Roosevelt at length for the Herald—FDR’s first exposure to the national media. “Almost at that very first meeting,” Howe said later, “I made up my mind that nothing but an accident could keep him from becoming President.”⁴⁷ Howe needed a hero, and Roosevelt—who in personal appearance and patrician background was everything Howe was not—fit the bill. FDR, for his part, needed practical political guidance, and Louis Howe provided it. Except for a basic attachment to the Democratic party, Howe was indifferent to ideology. Yet he was an astute tactician with a litmus ability to distinguish a sound political move from one that was likely to cause trouble. Roosevelt became virtually unbeatable once Howe joined his entourage. It was a symbiotic relationship in which each supplied what the other could not.

Franklin turned his Senate campaign over to Howe. For the next six weeks Howe became FDR’s surrogate. He moved to Poughkeepsie, decorated Harry Hawkey’s Maxwell with Roosevelt banners, and hustled the countryside for votes. He was as energetic as Franklin had been two years earlier, but he focused more sharply on specific constituencies. To win the farm vote, Howe devised a scheme to protect farmers from New York City commission merchants, the middlemen who pocketed the difference between what the farmer got for his crop and what the consumer paid. Howe pointed out that if reelected, Roosevelt would become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There he would ensure passage of an agricultural marketing act with real teeth in it. Howe mailed hundreds of personal letters over FDR’s signature informing farmers of the proposal. Each letter contained a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the farmer’s reply. Similar letters promised apple growers that Franklin would introduce a bill to standardize the size of barrels, another sore spot for farmers whose apples were often measured in oversized barrels. Shad fishermen were assured that license fees on the Hudson would be lowered. Altogether, Howe dispatched more than eleven thousand letters on FDR’s behalf.⁴⁸

No voter was left uncourted. Howe took out full-page newspaper advertisements, unprecedented in upstate races, in which Roosevelt pledged his support for women’s suffrage, identified with the concerns of the workingman, and bashed the Republicans for standing pat. Howe worked at the end of a long leash. FDR was consulted, but often after Howe had already acted. “Here is your first ad,” he wrote the bedridden Roosevelt in late October. “As I have pledged you in it I thought you might like to know casually what kind of a mess I was getting you into.… Your slave and servant, Howe.”⁴⁹

FDR turned his checkbook over to Howe and soon found himself overdrawn. Expenses were heavy, and Howe, evidently unfamiliar with check writing, always added the amount of the check to the balance rather than subtracting it.⁵⁰ FDR met most of the expenses from his personal funds, including Howe’s salary of $50 a week. Overall the race cost about $3,000, roughly twice the salary of a state senator.⁵¹ A few friends loaned Franklin money for the campaign. “I pray your mother is as wealthy as reported so I can get some of the money back,” wrote FDR’s Hyde Park neighbor Jefferson Newbold.⁵²

Howe scoured the district, promising in Franklin’s name whatever would win votes. “I’m having more fun than a goat,” he wrote FDR in early November.⁵³ Everyone was pleased except Eleanor and Sara, who were put off by Howe’s habits, particularly his addiction to high-powered Sweet Caporals. “Remember, I was still a Puritan,” Eleanor said many years later.⁵⁴ Howe ran the campaign so effectively that FDR’s absence was rarely noted and never commented upon by his opponents.^* Voters for the most part remained unaware that Roosevelt was ill—a forerunner of the campaigns Howe would conduct when FDR ran for governor and president, in which many voters never realized the candidate could not walk.

In the final week of the campaign, Jacob Southard, Franklin’s Republican opponent, attacked FDR as anti-Catholic—an unfortunate legacy of the 1911 fight against Sheehan. Howe enlisted a number of Catholic friends to put out the fire. He told Franklin not to worry. “Everyone is happy and singing the doxology.”⁵⁵ Howe was as good as his word. Without ever setting foot in his district, Franklin won by a larger margin than he had two years before.⁵⁶

FDR’s victory was part of a Democratic sweep. Wilson defeated TR by 2 million votes and Taft by almost 3 million.^* In the electoral college, Wilson carried forty of the forty-eight states with 435 votes, Roosevelt carried six states with 88 votes, while Taft carried only Utah and Vermont for a total of 8 votes. The Democrats added 61 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a lopsided 291–127 majority, and regained control of the Senate for the first time since 1895.⁵⁷ In New York, Tammany’s “Plain Bill” Sulzer easily won a three-cornered race for governor and the Democrats regained control of both houses of the legislature. FDR led the ticket in the Twenty-sixth Senatorial District, running 700 votes ahead of both Wilson and Sulzer. “Congratulations on your deserved and notable victory,” wrote FDR’s Dutchess County friend John Walker. “When a bull moose and an elephant are both outrun by a man sick-a-bed it would seem ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ”⁵⁸

Franklin returned to Albany in January 1913, still so frail and pallid that Eleanor worried about his ability to carry on. “I’m very well and taking care of myself,” he wrote reassuringly. “Wearing rubbers, brushing my teeth, etc., etc.” As Howe had predicted, FDR became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the ranking member of Forest, Fish, and Game. “This isn’t bad,” he wrote Eleanor. “I am particularly glad that the other members of Agriculture gave me control of the committee as against our N.Y. City friends.”⁵⁹

Roosevelt evidently assumed he would be joining the Wilson administration when it took office on March 4. Instead of the opulent houses they had rented in previous sessions, he and Eleanor took a two-room suite at the Ten Eyck Hotel. They commuted to Albany Tuesday through Thursday while the children remained at the town house on East Sixty-fifth Street.

The first hint that FDR might go to Washington came on January 13, 1913, when he received a telegram from Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s private secretary, summoning him to Trenton for a conference with the president-elect.⁶⁰ Patronage matters were discussed, and Tumulty pressed Roosevelt on his willingness to join the administration. Tangential evidence suggests that FDR expressed his preference for the number two post in the Navy Department.^* No formal offer was extended, yet Eleanor recalled that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration Franklin was confident he would be going to Washington. Whether he would become the assistant secretary of the Navy was less clear.⁶¹

Wilson chose his cabinet primarily to reward the faithful, repay obligations, and punish his opponents. Little attention was paid to professional expertise or even a modest awareness of the subject matter of each portfolio. William Jennings Bryan had never been outside the United States when he became secretary of state. Lindley M. Garrison of New Jersey, the secretary of war, knew precious little about the military but had a distinguished record as a conservative jurist and was given as hostage to the strict-constructionist wing of the party.⁶² When Garrison departed the cabinet in 1916, he was succeeded by Newton D. Baker, the mayor of Cleveland. Baker too knew little about the Army but had played a key role in swinging Ohio behind Wilson at a crucial moment in Baltimore.⁶³

As secretary of the Navy, Wilson chose North Carolina newspaper editor Josephus Daniels. Daniels, from landlocked Raleigh, knew even less about the Navy than Garrison did about the Army, but he had been a vital Wilson supporter in the South and was on friendly terms with the president-elect.^† William Gibbs McAdoo of New York, whom Wilson tapped to be secretary of the Treasury, was a distinguished New York lawyer and railroad executive and would later become Wilson’s son-in-law. But he had no background in finance. He was selected primarily because he was a prominent anti-Tammany Democrat who had worked vigorously for Wilson’s election. His appointment sent an important message to the New York Democratic organization.

As attorney general, the logical choice was Louis Brandeis, widely regarded as the nation’s leading advocate of judicial reform. Instead, Wilson repaid his debt to Tennessee’s Cordell Hull and appointed James C. McReynolds from the Volunteer State. A decent lawyer who had served in TR’s Justice Department, the ultraconservative McReynolds was scarcely a crusader for reform and had little in the way of national reputation. He proved the least congenial of Wilson’s original appointees and was soon elevated to the Supreme Court, where he would later prove an implacable foe of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.⁶⁴

FDR made certain he was not overlooked. He and Eleanor took rooms at Washington’s Willard Hotel on March 1, three days before the inauguration. Located at Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue—less than two short blocks from the White House—the Willard had been a favorite with visiting politicians for decades. Lincoln had stayed at the old Willard before his inaugural, Grant had stayed there when he went to Washington to assume command, and virtually every subsequent chief executive had stayed at the Willard at one time or another. In 1913, most members of the incoming administration were among its guests, and Wilson attended a gala banquet there on the eve of his inaugural.⁶⁵

On his first day at the hotel, FDR met the incoming Treasury secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, with whom he had worked closely during the campaign. McAdoo was busy assembling his team at Treasury and asked Franklin if he would like to be either assistant secretary or collector of customs of the Port of New York. Both were prime appointments, particularly the collector’s post, which would have provided FDR with a vast patronage base were he interested in running for statewide office in New York. Roosevelt was appreciative but noncommittal. McAdoo’s offer was too good to turn down, but he still hoped for the post at Navy. Two days later, on the morning of the inauguration, Roosevelt ran into Josephus Daniels in the cavernous lobby of the Willard.

As Daniels recalled, FDR was bubbling with enthusiasm: “as keen as a boy to take in the inauguration ceremonies.” Franklin congratulated Daniels on his appointment. Daniels responded by offering Roosevelt the appointment he sought: “How would you like to come to Washington as assistant secretary of the Navy?” Franklin beamed. “It would please me better than anything in the world,” he told Daniels. “All my life I have loved ships and have been a student of the Navy, and the assistant secretaryship is the one place, above all others, that I would like to hold.” Roosevelt said McAdoo had asked him to join Treasury, “but nothing would please me so much as to be with you in the Navy.”⁶⁶

The symbolism of the appointment was apparent. Daniels noted in his diary that Franklin’s “distinguished cousin TR went from that place to the Presidency. May history repeat itself.”⁶⁷ The Raleigh News & Observer, announcing FDR’s posting, proclaimed, “He’s Following in Teddy’s Footsteps.” Cousin Theodore, who at this point despised Wilson even more than Taft, penned a short note: “It is interesting that you are in another place which I myself once held. I am sure you will enjoy yourself to the full as Ass’t Secty of the Navy and that you will do capital work.”⁶⁸

Before sending FDR’s nomination to the Senate, Daniels, as custom required, consulted New York’s Democratic senator, James Aloysius O’Gorman. O’Gorman owed his place in the Senate to FDR, and he assented readily. The Senate, he said, would confirm the appointment promptly.⁶⁹Out of courtesy Daniels also touched base with the Empire State’s distinguished senior senator, Republican Elihu Root. Root, who had served as secretary of war under McKinley and secretary of state under TR, had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As Daniels recalled, a queer look came over Root’s face when he mentioned FDR. “You know the Roosevelts, don’t you?” Root asked. “Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front.” Root told Daniels he knew Franklin slightly and the appointment would be fine, “though, of course, being a Republican, I have no right to make any suggestion.” Daniels replied that he wasn’t worried about FDR and that he wanted a strong man as assistant secretary. “A chief who fears that an assistant will outrank him is not fit to be chief.”⁷⁰

After the inauguration FDR returned briefly to Albany to wind up his affairs. He paid a courtesy call on Senate leader Robert Wagner and asked whether he thought it was wise to go to Washington. “Go, Franklin, go,” Wagner said, delighted to have Roosevelt in the nation’s capital rather than Albany. “I’m sure you’ll be a big success down there.”⁷¹

^* Sullivan ran the gambling and prostitution rings south of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and he thrived on the intensely personal side of politics. Every year on his mother’s birthday, he distributed tickets entitling each of the two thousand children in his Bowery constituency to a free pair of shoes, and he could always be counted upon in the legislature to support measures that would benefit the poor.

Sullivan served one term in Congress but left in disgust because it was too far removed from the voters and too anonymous. “There’s nothing in this Congress business,” he told a reporter. “They know ’em in Washington. The people down there use them as hitching posts. Every time they see a Congressman on the street they tie their horse to them.”

When Sullivan died in 1913, twenty-five thousand people, including three United States senators and twenty members of the House of Representatives, followed his casket to the grave. Charles F. Murphy and the mayor of New York headed the pallbearers. The high requiem mass was celebrated by Monsignor Kearney, rector of the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Sullivan’s estate, estimated at $2 million to $3 million dollars, was placed in trust for charitable purposes. M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall 508–510 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).

^* Howe, who covered Albany for years for the New York Herald, knew his account could not be disproved because the Senate Journal recorded votes only and not speeches. But four New York City newspapers, three Albany papers, and one from Poughkeepsie covered the debate. Five mentioned the Sullivans being called back, but not one mentioned Roosevelt taking part. New York Herald, The New York Times, New York World, New York Tribune, Albany Knickerbocker Press, Albany Daily Argus, Albany Evening Journal, Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, March 30, 1912.

^* Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Princeton class of 1879, received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1885, was appointed to the Princeton faculty in 1890, and became president in 1902. His first few years as president were punctuated by a flurry of educational reforms, but by 1906 his welcome had worn thin. He alienated alumni by attempting to abolish the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, and his academic certitude turned faculty against him. In 1909–10 he lost a showdown battle with Dean Andrew West ’74 over the location and role of the graduate school (Wilson wanted it in the midst of the campus; West preferred a bucolic location). Trustees, faculty, and important donors sided with West, and Wilson recognized that his authority as president was fatally compromised. New Jersey Democrats had been urging him to run for governor, and after West’s triumph Wilson had little choice. He accepted the party’s nomination in September 1910. Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson,” in A Princeton Companion 512–515, Alexander Leitch, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

^* The remaining 59 votes were split among a variety of favorite-son candidates, including Governor Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana (31). William Jennings Bryan, who was not a candidate but who hovered over the convention like Banquo’s ghost, received one vote. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 148 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

^* Wilson attributed his nomination to divine intervention. “I am a Presbyterian and believe in predestination. It was Providence that did the work in Baltimore,” he told his campaign manager, William F. McCombs. McCombs, who had worked round the clock to secure Wilson’s victory, was understandably taken aback. “I must confess I felt a chill … because I thought that if he attempted to apply that Predestination doctrine to the extreme, the Democratic campaign might find itself very much in the ruck.” William F. McCombs, Making Woodrow Wilson President 180–181 (New York: Fairview Publishing Co., 1921).

^* An unsigned Tammany memorandum from a member of the State Senate, perhaps Tim Sullivan, to Charles Murphy, makes the case for an alliance with FDR: “I would rather an organization man were elected, but we can’t win with an organization man.… My reasons for favoring Mr. Roosevelt are as follows: First—He is a young man, who would go up and down the state capturing a great army of young men.… Second—The name Roosevelt would mean at least 10,000 votes to the Democratic ticket. Third—He is worth several million dollars, and could finance his own campaign, if necessary. Fourth—He is independent and is known throughout the state as a man who will fight for what he believes to be right.” Manuscript, Senate files, FDRL.

^* In what surely ranks as one of the greatest examples of chutzpah of modern politics, Howe, over FDR’s signature, wrote the voters of Columbia County on November 1 to attack Franklin’s Republican opponent for not having visited the county during the campaign. FDR, meanwhile, was still flat on his back on East Sixty-fifth Street. FDR to [Voter’s name], November 1, 1912, FDRL.

^* The final returns showed Wilson with 6,293,152 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 4,119,207 and Taft’s 3,486,333. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, received 900,369, mostly in the West, where agrarian unrest was rampant (he received 16.5 percent of the vote in Nevada and 16.4 percent in Oklahoma). Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections284 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1975).

^* Michael Francis Doyle, a young Philadelphia lawyer active in both the Wilson and Bryan presidential campaigns, was informed by Bryan shortly after the election that Wilson planned to appoint him assistant secretary of the Navy. After FDR’s visit to Trenton, Bryan advised Doyle that Roosevelt had his eye on the position and urged Doyle to withdraw, which Doyle did. Frank Freidel, interview with Michael Francis Doyle, October 17, 1947, cited in Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 155 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).

^† Daniels was initially concerned about his lack of nautical knowledge but rationalized his acceptance by recalling that he had been a successful newspaper editor without understanding linotype machines or rotary presses. Horatio Nelson, after all, had been a poor sailor, and, as Daniels would have it, Napoleon had had “no practical experience handling troops.”

Daniels remained at the Navy Department for the entire eight years of the Wilson administration. Afterward he relished retelling the query put by a newsman to longtime Republican congressman Martin B. Madden of Illinois: “Can a civilian direct the Navy if he had no experience in Naval affairs?” Madden answered, “Daniels did.” Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace—1910–1917 122–123 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).