NINE

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1920

It was a darned fine sail.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

ON JANUARY 2, 1919, Franklin and Eleanor boarded the USS George Washington in New York, heading for Paris.¹ The armistice had been signed in November, and FDR was to initiate the dismantling of the Navy’s vast European establishment. This included fifty-four shore installations stretching from the Azores to the Shetlands, twenty-five port authorities, and mountains of supplies, plus a vast array of claims, contracts, and government agreements arising from operations abroad. His party included Thomas J. Spellacy, a genial Irishman who was United States attorney for Connecticut, as legal adviser; and Commander John M. Hancock, chief of Navy purchasing.^*

For Franklin and Eleanor it was a reconciliation of sorts—Eleanor’s first visit to Europe since their wedding trip in 1905—and an opportunity to heal the hurt of the past autumn. After Eleanor discovered Franklin’s romance with Lucy Mercer, she grew morose, suffered headaches, and had days when she doubted her will to live. “This past year has rather got the better of me,” she wrote her friend Isabella Ferguson. “I still have a breathless, hunted feeling.”²

Several times each week Eleanor drove herself to Rock Creek Cemetery on the outskirts of Washington to sit alone and contemplate the remarkable statue Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt in his wife’s memory. Eleanor found solace communing with that shrouded figure of grief and in later years would usually visit the cemetery whenever in Washington.^3* Henry’s wife, Clover Adams, a pioneer woman photographer, had committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, deeply distressed at her husband’s infatuation with their friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Cameron, the beautiful young wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania.⁴ To learn more about the Adamses, Eleanor gave Franklin a copy of The Education of Henry Adams, which had been privately printed in 1906 and had just been reissued for general purchase. They took it aboard the George Washington, and Eleanor read it during the crossing. “Very interesting,” she noted of Henry Adams, “but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”⁵

Four days out of New York, Franklin and Eleanor were informed by radio that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. Both were stunned. TR had just turned sixty-one and, though he had recently been hospitalized, seemed to be regaining strength for another run at the White House in 1920. The Republicans had retaken control of both houses of Congress in November, Wilson was vulnerable, there was no apparent Democratic successor, and once again the GOP appeared united. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, a bitter critic of TR in past years, believed he would be nominated by acclamation on the first ballot.⁶ The former president died of a pulmonary embolism while asleep at Sagamore Hill. “Death had to take him in his sleep,” commented Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. “If Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”⁷ TR was not old, said Franklin, “but I cannot help think that he himself would have had it this way and that he has been spared a lingering illness.”⁸ Eleanor wrote Sara that she was concerned about Aunt Edith, “for it will leave her very much alone. Another big figure gone from our nation and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”⁹

Paris in January 1919 was a city of contrasts. Reminders of the war were everywhere: captured German artillery pieces lined the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde; limbless men and demobilized soldiers begged for change on fashionable street corners; and almost every other woman was dressed in black, mourning a departed loved one. Along the grand boulevards the glorious chestnut trees were gone, cut for firewood during the last desperate winter. Paris itself had been spared, but there were severe shortages of coal, milk, and bread.

Nevertheless, a festive air gripped the city. Those with money could still find wonderful clothes and jewels. The restaurants, when they could get supplies, were marvelous, and the nightclubs sparkled with gaiety. “I never saw anything like Paris,” wrote Eleanor. “The scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy. It is no place for the boys [i.e., American soldiers], especially the younger ones.… All the women in the restaurant look to me exaggerated, some pretty, all chic, but you wonder if any are ladies.”¹⁰

The Roosevelts were billeted by the Navy in a suite at the Ritz, where the lobby swarmed with foreign dignitaries sent to attend the peace conference that was about to begin. Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city the first week of January, after a triumphal tour of Great Britain and Western Europe. David Lloyd George arrived on January 11. The following day the Supreme Council of peacemakers—Wilson, Lloyd George, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clemenceau—convened for the first time.¹¹ They met in the ornate chambers of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, where, as host, Clemenceau presided. For the most part their discussions were conducted in English. Clemenceau, who had lived many years in the United States, spoke English fluently, and Orlando was minimally conversant.¹²

As the only head of state, Wilson was accorded a chair a few inches higher than the others, but of the four, Wilson was in the most precarious political position.¹³ Lloyd George was fresh from parliamentary elections in which his coalition had won a huge majority; Clemenceau had just received an unprecedented 398–93 vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies; and Orlando headed a left-center government that was virtually unassailable. Only Wilson was fresh from defeat, having unwisely declared the congressional midterm elections in November a referendum on his leadership.¹⁴ The electorate had responded by giving the GOP control of Congress for the first time since 1910.¹⁵

To compound his problem, Wilson had excluded the Senate from the negotiations. The American delegation, in addition to Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House, included more than twenty academic specialists but not one member of the U.S. Senate, which ultimately would have to pass judgment on the peace treaty.^* Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would soon become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and was on record as supporting a league of nations.¹⁶ The personal animosity between Wilson and Lodge was notorious, but to have included him would have been an act of statesmanship from which the president would have benefited substantially. Equally damaging, Wilson had thumbed his nose at the nation’s Republican leadership, almost all of whom had supported the war vigorously. William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, and Elihu Root had all endorsed the idea of a league, and their inclusion would have given the delegation a bipartisan cast.¹⁷ Instead, Wilson chose to go it alone, convinced, as always, that his mission was divinely ordained.

The meetings of the Supreme Council were held in camera, and the participants’ discussions remained secret. So much for “open covenants, openly arrived at,” the first of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But it was just as well the sessions were closed because relations among the Big Four were tepid at best.¹⁸ Orlando correctly perceived that he was being patronized; Lloyd George, the quintessential opportunist, had difficulty adhering to a fixed course; Clemenceau was all too fixed, obsessed with the need to provide for French security; while Wilson spoke with the dogmatic assurance of a Presbyterian elder. “What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him,” said Clemenceau. “He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us … the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory.”¹⁹

FDR played no role at the peace conference. He and Eleanor remained in Europe five weeks, during which time Franklin devoted himself to disposing of the Navy’s foreign assets. Roosevelt spoke French fluently and lubricated the discussions while Hancock and Spellacy hammered out the details.²⁰ “The most successful thing I pulled off in Paris,” FDR remembered, was the sale of the Navy’s Lafayette Radio Station near Bordeaux, the most powerful transmitter in the world at the time. The French had been dragging their feet, hoping the United States would simply abandon the installation. According to Roosevelt, André Tardieu, the French minister responsible (and later premier, 1929–30), “offered a ridiculous sum counting on the fact that the cost of dismantling and removing it would be prohibitive.” Just when the meeting reached an impasse, a messenger handed a telegram to FDR that read, “Dismantle and ship station to America. [Signed] Daniels.” Tardieu immediately gave in and agreed to buy the facility at FDR’s asking price of 22 million francs. Roosevelt later boasted to friends that he had written the telegram himself and arranged to have it delivered to him at the meeting.²¹ “This is a big success,” Eleanor wrote Sara, “but don’t mention it.”²²

On February 15, 1919, the Roosevelts left Paris for Brest and the return home on the George Washington. Among their fellow passengers were President and Mrs. Wilson, who were taking a quick break from negotiations so that the president might return to Washington to sign the final flurry of legislation passed by the outgoing Sixty-fifth Congress.²³ Wilson proudly carried with him the draft covenant of the League of Nations, which had just been completed. The president had insisted that the peace conference establish the League as its first order of business, and, with British acquiescence and French ambivalence, he had prevailed. “I like the League,” Clemenceau was quoted as saying, “but I do not believe in it.”²⁴

Aboard the George Washington Wilson remained aloof and kept more or less to his cabin. “He seemed to have very little interest in making himself popular with groups of people whom he touched,” Eleanor remembered.²⁵ One day, to FDR’s surprise, the president summoned him for a discussion about the League and what it meant for the future. The invitation came out of the blue, and FDR recalled Wilson’s intensity. A day or so later, Franklin and Eleanor were included in a small luncheon party given by the Wilsons. For the most part the conversation was unremarkable, though Eleanor remembered two things: Wilson said that since the war began he had read no newspapers; his secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, clipped them for him, giving him only what was important.^* The second was that Wilson had spoken with great emotion about the League. “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”²⁶

The George Washington’s original destination had been New York, but after she was under way Wilson advised the captain that he wished to land at Boston, where he was scheduled to speak at Mechanics Hall and introduce the League. The captain adjusted course but to his horror discovered he had no charts on board for a Boston landfall. He would have to feel his way. To complicate the task, a heavy North Atlantic fog descended as the ship slanted southward along the Massachusetts coast. “I was awakened in my berth by a shuddering noise,” FDR recalled. “Thinking the George Washington must be aground, I rushed to the bridge in my pajamas and bathrobe to discover that the ship’s engines had been reversed and cut off—that was the noise—and that she lay between two jagged rocks, with little way between, facing a shoreline with a row of summer cottages. I recognized the settlement as Nahant, where I had frequently made port, and in a general way I was able to tell [the captain] where he would find Boston harbor. He then gave the order for backing the ship out of its perilous location, and proceeded safely to Boston. President Wilson, who had not been awakened, was never told what happened.”²⁷

Back in the United States, the Roosevelts grappled with the future. “We’ve had an interesting trip,” Eleanor wrote her Aunt Bamie, “and F. thinks he succeeded very well with his demobilization of all possible stations in Europe.… He says he now expects to go into business this summer for a time so we may be in New York next year and there may be a little more time which we can call our own.”²⁸

But first Washington beckoned. Secretary Daniels left for Europe in mid-March to attend an Allied naval conference and was gone for two months, again leaving FDR in charge. The Navy’s demobilization was almost complete, and aside from adjusting to Republican control of Congress there was little other than routine housekeeping to occupy the acting secretary. Nevertheless, Daniels left detailed instructions to cover every contingency. The secretary was especially concerned that the admirals running the various bureaus not take advantage of his absence to push their pet projects through Congress. “They will probably present you with letters to sign and send to the new chairmen of the Naval Affairs Committees,” he told FDR. This, Daniels said, you must not do. “It would be very well … for you to have a drawer and put them all in it so that we can make a study of them, and we will discuss them when I get back.”²⁹

Franklin was careful to stay on sides. “Ever since you left,” he wrote Daniels, “things have been so quiet here as to be almost terrifying. Literally nothing has happened outside of routine work, which, however, has been positively voluminous.”³⁰ The workload was indeed heavy. The Navy remained the only cabinet department with just one assistant secretary. Whenever Daniels or Roosevelt was absent, the entire administrative workload fell to the other. By FDR’s account he worked fourteen hours a day and thrived on it. When Daniels returned in late May, Franklin wrote his old golfing partner John McIlhenny, “I have had a perfectly delightful two months, running things with a high hand and getting things done that were never done before. Last Saturday the Secretary got back and now I shall have a little leisure.”³¹

If the Navy Department had returned to normal by late spring, the city of Washington was anything but. Labor unrest gripped the nation. Prices were high, jobs were scarce, and thousands of returning servicemen clamored for work. Four million Americans went out on strike in 1919, one out of every five industrial workers. Organized labor strove to expand union membership, management resisted fiercely, and both sides carried their cases to Washington. John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers demanded that the government nationalize the coal mines immediately; mine and mill owners responded with court injunctions ordering strikers back to work. As agitation increased, violence became widespread, and Washington was not spared.

On the evening of June 2, 1919, a powerful bomb ripped the façade of the R Street home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, directly across the street from the Roosevelts’. The bomb was the work of a committed anarchist, who was blown up by his own device. Franklin and Eleanor were down the block when the bomb went off, returning from a late party. The blast shattered windows within a hundred-yard radius. Eleven-year-old James was the only Roosevelt child home at the time. Franklin raced upstairs and found him standing in his pajamas, barefoot amid the splintered glass, watching the scene below. “I’ll never forget how unnerved Father was when he found me standing at the window,” James recalled. “He grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs.”³²

With James safe, Franklin went across the street to assist the Palmers, who had escaped injury. He drove Mrs. Palmer and her daughter to the home of friends and then helped police gather up pages and pages of anarchist literature scattered by the blast. “Now we are roped off,” Eleanor reported to Sara the next morning. “The police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every bone found! I only hope the victim was not a poor passerby instead of the anarchist.”³³

The following month the city was torn by a bloody four-day race riot that left fifteen dead and hundreds injured. The Washington police proved powerless, and eventually the military was deployed to restore order. “The riots seem about over today,” Franklin wrote Eleanor on July 23. “Only one man killed last night. Luckily the trouble hasn’t spread to R Street and though I have troubled to keep out of harm’s way I have heard occasional shots during the evening and night. It has been a nasty episode and I only wish quicker action had been taken to stop it.”³⁴

The attack on Attorney General Palmer precipitated a widespread crackdown on suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks, known historically as the Red Scare of 1919–20. Primed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, government authorities under the attorney general’s direction launched an attack on civil liberties unequaled in peacetime since passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century.³⁵ Law enforcement officials illegally raided homes and union offices, aliens suspected of radicalism were deported, and thousands of innocent citizens were hounded for their beliefs. On a single night in January 1920 more than four thousand suspected Communists were arrested in thirty-three different cities.³⁶ The Palmer raids yielded almost nothing in the way of arms or revolutionaries but triggered a climate of fear that engulfed the nation. The New York state legislature, its better judgment swept away by a tidal wave of reaction, refused to seat five elected Socialists from New York City. In Washington, the House of Representatives twice refused to tender the oath of office to Socialist Victor L. Berger, elected overwhelmingly by the voters of Milwaukee.³⁷

FDR showed no interest in Palmer’s Red-baiting crusade. Indeed, at the same time that Congress and the New York legislature were expelling Socialists from their ranks, he upbraided Rear Admiral S. S. Robinson, commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, for discharging three machinists because they were Socialists. “Now, my dear Admiral,” Roosevelt wrote, “neither you nor I can fire a man because he happens to be a Socialist. It so happens that the Socialist party has a place on the official ballot in almost every state in the union.”³⁸

When an old grad sought to enlist Franklin’s help to cleanse the Harvard faculty of dangerous radicals (FDR was now a member of the university’s board of overseers), he ignored the request. The radical in question was Harold Laski, a young instructor in the Government Department who had recently advocated nationalizing the country’s railroads. “If Mr. Laski were teaching mathematics,” wrote Paul Tuckerman, ’78, “the argument for academic freedom would have some force … but he teaches our sons, not mathematics but government, and what reverence for our government and institutions can a professional Bolshevik teach? Why not clean house and get rid of this foreign propagandist?”³⁹ President A. Lawrence Lowell stood by Laski, and the Harvard board stood by Lowell. Laski returned to England shortly afterward to accept a position at the London School of Economics and went on to become an internationally renowned scholar and chairman of the British Labour party.

While Franklin was busy at the Navy Department, Eleanor took the first steps to make a life for herself outside the home. “Everyone is concerned about strikes and labor questions,” she wrote Isabella Ferguson in September 1919. “I realize more and more that we are entering on a new era where ideas and habits and customs are to be revolutionized if we are not to have another kind of revolution.”⁴⁰

On behalf of the Red Cross, Eleanor undertook to inspect St. Elizabeth’s, the nation’s mental hospital in Washington, where hundreds of battle-shocked servicemen were confined. “I cannot do this,” she remembered thinking to herself, but she went anyway. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” she wrote later, supplying her own emphasis.⁴¹

Once a week for the remainder of their time in Washington, Eleanor visited the hospital, distributing flowers and cigarettes, stopping to talk with the troubled men. When she discovered there were not enough attendants to provide proper care, she lobbied her friend Franklin K. Lane, secretary of the interior, in whose bailiwick St. Elizabeth’s fell. Lane declined ER’s invitation to visit the hospital—“the last thing he wanted to see was a hospital for the insane”—but he ensured that appropriations for St. Elizabeth’s were increased.⁴² Eleanor arranged for the Red Cross to build a recreation facility for the men, cajoled money from the Colonial Dames of America for occupational therapy, and organized a retail shop where patients could sell their handmade wares.

At the height of the Red Scare, Eleanor made her first contact with feminist organizations interested in improving working conditions for women. In late October 1919 representatives of nineteen nations convened in Washington for the First International Congress of Working Women. Because many of the delegates could not speak English, Mrs. Roosevelt and other multilingual Washington wives volunteered as translators. “It was of course, a very advanced and radical gathering,” Eleanor wrote Sara, “but I found it interesting and amusing.”⁴³

Eleanor invited a number of the women home for lunch. The U.S. delegation included many early activists in the American labor movement: Margaret Dreier Robins, Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swartz, Julia O’Connor, Fannia Cohn, and Leonora O’Reilly. “I liked all of the women very much indeed,” said Eleanor, “but I had no idea how much I was going to see of them in the future.”⁴⁴

After four months of additional negotiation, President Wilson returned to Washington on July 8 with the freshly minted Treaty of Versailles. Two days later, he presented it to the Senate. The treaty, he said, had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.”⁴⁵

The Senate was divided. A dozen or so irreconcilables, primarily populists from the South and West, favored rejection. Most Democrats supported the president and wished to accept the treaty outright. In the middle was a large group of Republicans led by Lodge who favored approval provided reservations to protect American sovereignty were registered. Unlike amendments, reservations do not change the text of a treaty but clarify how it will be interpreted. It is a well-established diplomatic practice for countries to add such qualifications, and if Wilson agreed, the chances were that the Senate would approve the treaty overwhelmingly. Secretary of State Lansing and the Senate’s Democratic leadership urged the president to accept the reservations, but Wilson refused.⁴⁶

Convinced that God and the people were with him, the president chose to make a direct appeal to the electorate. On September 2, 1919, Wilson set out by special train to canvass the West. His health was failing. He had already suffered a mild stroke in Paris in April and was haggard and drawn. His face twitched, his hands trembled. During the next twenty-two days the president would travel 8,200 miles through fourteen states, delivering more than forty speeches. On September 25 Wilson spoke at Pueblo, Colorado. That evening he suffered a total physical collapse. The tour was canceled, and the president returned to the White House. The following week Wilson had a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side. For two months he hovered between life and death, barely able to scrawl a shaky signature on documents his wife presented to him. After that his mind became clear enough to follow what was happening and he was able to dictate letters. But he never fully recovered.

On November 6 Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, the Democratic floor leader in the fight for the League, was admitted to the president’s bedside. Without the Lodge reservations, he told Wilson, he could not muster even a bare majority for the treaty, much less the two thirds required for approval. Wilson refused to accept the inevitable. “Let Lodge compromise,” he told Hitchcock. Two weeks later the Senate voted on the Treaty of Versailles and the opponents won. Brought up for reconsideration at the next session, it once more failed to achieve a two-thirds majority. On March 19, 1920, the Senate formally returned the treaty to the president, noting its inability to give its advice and consent.^*

Like most Democrats, FDR supported the League but did not see it as the be-all and end-all of public life. “Last spring I thought the League of Nations merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia,” he told the New York Bar Association in March 1919. “But in June I went abroad [and] found in Europe not only a desire to beat the Hun but a growing demand that out of it all must come something else.”⁴⁷ Three months later he warned the graduating class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute that “the United States would commit a grievous wrong to itself and to all mankind if it were even to attempt to go backwards toward an old Chinese wall policy of isolation.”⁴⁸ But unlike Wilson he did not object to Lodge’s reservations and believed the president should compromise to get the League accepted. The details were less important than the final product. “I have read the draft of the League three times,” he declared, “and always find something to object to in it, and that is the way with everybody.”⁴⁹

The British, the French, and most cabinet officers shared that view. In September 1919, the British government dispatched former foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Fallodon) to Washington to plead with Wilson to accept the Lodge reservations. Wilson refused to receive him. When the Roosevelts entertained Lord Grey and his staff at Christmastime, they became non gratae in the eyes of the White House.⁵⁰ The consequence for FDR was negligible because by January 1920 the Wilson administration had come unglued and it was every man for himself. Colonel House was no longer consulted; Secretary of State Lansing had been dismissed; Franklin Lane resigned at Interior, as did Carter Glass at the Treasury, frustrated at their inability to communicate with Wilson. Daniels wished to resign as well but remained out of personal loyalty to the invalid president.

It was in the context of the derelict Wilson administration that FDR began to look to his political future. But he did so discreetly. “I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not the bad luck of the early worm,” he wrote an impetuous supporter in late 1919.⁵¹

Already FDR had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate or the governorship should Al Smith choose not to run for reelection. But the possibility of the latter was slight, and the chance of defeating a popular Republican incumbent in the Senate, his good friend James Wadsworth of Geneseo, appeared equally remote. “I am not running for Senator or Governor or dog catcher,” Franklin told a friend shortly after Christmas. “I do not personally intend to make an early Christian martyr of myself this fall if it is going to be a strongly Republican year.”⁵²

The idea of seeking the vice presidency, just as the possibility of running for the New York State Senate in 1910, came to Roosevelt largely by chance. On January 10, 1920, FDR received a visit from an old friend, Louis B. Wehle, a Kentucky attorney and member of the War Industries Board who had admired Franklin since their days together on The Harvard Crimson. The Democrats’ presidential prospects looked bleak, said Wehle, but after talking to a number of party leaders he had hit upon a ticket that might win: Herbert Hoover for president, Roosevelt for vice president. Hoover was from California, FDR from New York: two states the Democrats must carry if they were to succeed. Hoover enjoyed a sterling reputation as wartime food administrator, he supported the Treaty of Versailles with minor reservations, and he was especially popular among American women, who in 1920 would be voting for the first time.⁵³ Like Hoover’s, Franklin’s wartime service as assistant secretary of the Navy had been exemplary, and he would add the luster of the Roosevelt name to the ticket. “Whether you win or lose,” said Wehle, “you would make a number of key acquaintances in every state … that would probably lead you eventually to the presidency.”⁵⁴

Roosevelt needed no convincing. “Hoover is certainly a wonder,” he allowed. “I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.”⁵⁵ Franklin, who thus far had patterned his career on TR’s, was well aware that the vice presidency had been Cousin Theodore’s stepping-stone to the White House. “You can go to it as far as I’m concerned,” he told Wehle. “Good luck.”⁵⁶

The following day Wehle called on Democratic kingmaker Colonel Edward House at his New York apartment. House was on the outs with Wilson but still wielded considerable influence in the party. “It’s a wonderful idea,” he told Wehle. “A Hoover-Roosevelt ticket is probably the only chance the Democrats have in November.”⁵⁷

Was Hoover a Democrat? Wehle called on the food administrator at his office on lower Broadway and found him noncommittal. So too did House. Like Dwight Eisenhower after World War II, Hoover was being courted by both parties and kept his own counsel. On March 6 Franklin and Eleanor dined with the would-be nominee but could not smoke him out. “Mr. Hoover talked a great deal,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “He has an extraordinary knowledge and grasp of present-day problems.” Evidently he did not reveal his allegiance.⁵⁸ At the end of March 1920, Hoover broke his long silence and proclaimed himself a progressive Republican: he had been registered as a Republican in California since 1898, and he had supported TR in 1912.⁵⁹ There would be no Hoover-Roosevelt ticket.

But FDR had been bitten by the vice presidential bug. Alben Barkley, Harry Truman’s vice president in 1949, was fond of telling of the woman who had two sons: one became a sailor and went to sea; the other became vice president of the United States. “Neither has been heard from since.”⁶⁰ “Cactus Jack” Garner of Uvalde, Texas, FDR’s crusty vice president, later told newsmen the job “wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.”^*61 For Roosevelt, it was a ticket to be punched, a way station on the road to the White House, and Wehle was correct: the nomination would bring Franklin into contact with Democrats across the country.

A successful vice presidential aspirant plays his cards close to his chest, waiting for lightning to strike. The choice of a running mate is traditionally the prerogative of the presidential nominee, and one scarcely runs for the post. But Hoover or no Hoover, FDR’s credentials would have placed him on any nominee’s short list: young, attractive, high-profile wartime service in Washington, liberal but not populist, probably wet but acceptable to the drys on Prohibition,^† and above all a Roosevelt from New York, by far the most populous state in the Union, with forty-five electoral votes, roughly one fifth of the number required for election.

When the Democratic convention met in San Francisco on June 28, FDR had positioned himself for the nomination. The support of the New York delegation was critical, and Franklin had taken every precaution. He traveled cross-country on the Knickerbocker Express with his fellow delegates, entertained them lavishly on the battleship New York, anchored off Treasure Island, and volunteered to second the nomination of Al Smith, a favorite-son candidate whom Charles Murphy was using as a stalking horse until the decisive moment to shift the Empire State’s ninety votes behind the winner. Franklin’s entourage included his Dutchess County allies John Mack and Tom Lynch; his old Harvard roommate, former congressman Lathrop Brown; his law partner Grenville Emmett; and his personal secretary from the Navy Department—all of whom began to work the hotel corridors and lobbies on FDR’s behalf.

Franklin took advantage of every opportunity. When a huge floodlit portrait of Wilson was unveiled during opening ceremonies, the convention erupted with a sentimental display of affection. Delegation after delegation flooded the aisles, parading around the hall, state standards held aloft. All, that is, except New York, whose delegates conspicuously kept their seats to illustrate the organization’s distaste for the president. When the demonstration reached its height, FDR seized the New York standard—Murphy nodded his approval—and joined the parade, to the cheers of hundreds of delegates.^*62

Al Smith was nominated by Tammany’s Bourke Cockran, one of the most gifted orators of the day. FDR’s seconding speech was brief and well received. Poised, confident, standing at a convention podium for the first time in his career, he was effusive in his praise of Smith: “I love him as a friend; I look up to him as a man; I am with him as a Democrat; and we all know his record throughout the nation as a great servant of the public.”⁶³

Grenville Emmett thought FDR’s speech “could not have been better.” Frances Perkins said Franklin was “one of the stars of the show. I recall how he displayed his athletic ability by vaulting over a row of chairs to get to the platform in a hurry. Al [Smith] always thought of this as the beginning of his friendship with Roosevelt and often referred to it as Roosevelt’s real start in important public life. And so it was.”⁶⁴

Smith remained in contention for seven ballots. On the eighth, Murphy switched the bulk of New York’s vote to three-term Ohio governor James Cox, a competent but colorless public servant, moderate, wet, untainted by any link to the Wilson administration, and uncommitted on the League. FDR and some nineteen upstate delegates voted for William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law and onetime secretary of the Treasury. For the next four days the convention wavered among McAdoo, Cox, and the nation’s Red-chasing attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Cox gained the lead on the thirty-ninth ballot and went over the top on the forty-fourth shortly after midnight on Monday, July 6. The convention then adjourned until noon the next day, when it would meet to choose the party’s vice presidential nominee.

Early Tuesday morning Cox’s campaign manager, Edmund H. Moore, called the governor at his home in Dayton. Whom did he wish as a running mate? “I’ve been thinking about this a good deal,” Cox replied, “and my choice is young Roosevelt. His name is good, he’s right geographically, and he’s anti-Tammany. But since we need a united front, go to see Charlie Murphy and say we won’t nominate Roosevelt if he objects.”⁶⁵

Moore followed instructions. “I don’t like Roosevelt,” said Murphy. “He is not well known in the country, but, Ed, this is the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency has shown me courtesy. That’s why I’d vote for the devil himself if Cox wanted me to. Tell him we will nominate Roosevelt on the first ballot as soon as we assemble.”⁶⁶

When the Democrats reconvened at noon, the early roll call of the states placed several favorite sons in nomination. As the roll call continued, Florida yielded to Ohio, at which point Judge Timothy T. Ansberry, leader of the Buckeye delegation, made his way to the platform. “The young man whose name I am going to suggest,” said Ansberry, “is but three years over the age of thirty-five prescribed by the Constitution … but he has crowded into that short period a very large experience as a public official. His name is a name to conjure with in American politics: Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Indiana and Kansas seconded the nomination, the favorite sons withdrew, the rules were suspended, and FDR was nominated by acclamation.⁶⁷

Josephus Daniels, by now the grand old man of the party, beloved by populists, Wilsonians, and big-city bosses alike, concluded the proceedings:

I wish to say that to me, and to five hundred thousand men in the American Navy, and to five million men in the Army, it is a matter of particular gratification that this Convention unanimously has chosen as a candidate for Vice President that clear-headed and able executive and patriotic citizen of New York, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.⁶⁸

Pleased with the ticket of Cox and Roosevelt, and a trifle more optimistic than the circumstances warranted, the convention adjourned sine die at 1:42 P.M. FDR’s friends were overjoyed. Walter Lippmann of The New Republic wired his congratulations: “Your nomination is the best news in many a long day.” Herbert Hoover wrote, “the fact that I do not belong to your political tribe does not deter me from offering my personal congratulations to an old friend. I am glad to see you in the game in such a prominent place, and, although I will not be charged with traitorship by wishing you success, I nevertheless consider it a contribution to the good of the country that you have been nominated and it will bring the merit of a great public servant to the front.” Franklin K. Lane offered his advice: “Get plenty of sleep. Do not give yourself to the handshakers. Be wise! Don’t be brilliant.”⁶⁹

On August 6, 1920, FDR resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy and headed west.⁷⁰ In the next three months he would crisscross the country twice, delivering nearly one thousand speeches and countless impromptu addresses—the most extensive campaign ever conducted by a candidate for national office.⁷¹ Franklin wrapped himself in TR’s mantle, peppering his speeches with “bully,” “strenuous,” and all manner of verbal tics associated with the former president. “I do not profess to know what Theodore Roosevelt would say if he were alive today, but I cannot help think that the man who invented the word ‘pussy-footer’ could not have resisted the temptation to apply it to Mr. Harding.”⁷²

Colonel Robert R. McCormick, a sometime Bull Moose and Franklin’s classmate at Groton, immediately protested. On August 13 the Chicago Tribune called FDR “the one-half of one percent Roosevelt. Franklin is as much like Theodore as a clam is like a bear-cat.… If he is Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root is [Socialist leader] Gene Debs, and Bryan is a brewer.”⁷³ Edith Roosevelt, TR’s widow, said, “Franklin is nine-tenths mush and one-tenth Eleanor.” Nicholas Longworth, Alice’s husband and a man who knew something about alcohol, called FDR “a denatured Roosevelt.”⁷⁴

Franklin’s advance man during the campaign was Steve Early, a blunt-spoken southern journalist who would remain at FDR’s side throughout his career. His press aide was Marvin McIntyre, who had handled that job at the Navy Department and who would become another permanent fixture. Louis Howe was there, of course, as were Tom Lynch from Hyde Park and FDR’s faithful personal secretary, Renah Camalier. When the campaign ran short of money, Franklin wrote a check for $5,000; Sara wrote another for $3,000. (In today’s currency, that would be $50,000 and $30,000, respectively.) Roosevelt was not yet the polished campaigner he would become. But he was tireless and confident, and Louis Howe thought he was becoming increasingly eloquent. Unfortunately, he was often unfocused and prone to exaggerate his personal achievements. Early complained, “he couldn’t be made to prepare speeches in advance, preferring to play cards instead.”⁷⁵

Franklin’s casual approach caused a passel of trouble. On August 18, in Deer Lodge, Montana, he became carried away by his own rhetoric and claimed to have written the Haitian constitution, much as Al Gore once claimed to have invented the Internet. A week later in San Francisco, he boasted of “running Haiti and Santo Domingo for the past seven years.”⁷⁶ The Associated Press picked up the stories, and Republicans had a field day. Harding said that when he became president, “I will not empower the Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets carried by United States Marines.”⁷⁷ John Barrett, director of the Pan-American Union, declared that Roosevelt had made a dreadful mistake. The New York Telegraph called him “a spoiled child to be spanked.”⁷⁸ FDR denied having made the statements, but there were too many witnesses to make the denial credible.

For the most part, Cox and Roosevelt tied themselves to Wilson and the League. But the electorate was tired of both. Harding pledged “a return to normalcy,” and that pledge struck a responsive chord. The November results were devastating. Harding polled 61 percent of the popular vote and trounced Cox in the electoral college 404–127. The Democrats failed to carry a single state outside the Solid South—the party’s worst showing since the Civil War. The Republicans won a record 301 seats in the House of Representatives and picked up 10 additional seats in the Senate. Nowhere were the results worse than in New York, where Cox and FDR polled just 27 percent of the vote, taking Smith and the rest of the ticket down with them. Outside New York City, the Democrats did not carry a single county or elect anyone to statewide office.⁷⁹

FDR took the defeat in stride. He telegraphed congratulations to Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s running mate, and headed off to the marshes of Louisiana for two weeks of hunting and loafing. Looking back on the campaign years later, FDR told Supreme Court associate justice Robert H. Jackson that if he had not run for vice president in 1920, he would not have been nominated for president in 1932. “He created a sense of indebtedness on the part of the Democrats and made personal friends who remembered him later when his campaign manager, James Farley, went out looking for delegates,” said Jackson. “Roosevelt’s sense of security was such that he did not fear defeat.”⁸⁰

The 1920 campaign saw Eleanor emerge into public life. She joined the campaign train in September and for the next four weeks accompanied Franklin as he barnstormed the country—the only woman in the entourage. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats initially made little effort to appeal to women voters.^* Eleanor was relegated to playing the dutiful wife, appearing at whistle-stops to look gracious and smile adoringly while Franklin delivered the same speech over and over.⁸¹ It was Louis Howe, not Franklin, who recognized Eleanor’s potential. And it was Howe who worked her into the campaign. Repeatedly Howe would knock on her compartment door and ask her to review speeches and help plan press conferences. “I was flattered,” Eleanor recalled, “and before long I found myself discussing a wide range of topics.”⁸²

Howe taught Eleanor about national politics, just as he had taught Franklin, and he helped her understand the importance of the press. “The newspaper fraternity was not so familiar to me at that time, and I was a little afraid of it. Largely because of Louis Howe’s early interpretations of the standards and ethics of the newspaper business, I came to look with interest and confidence on the writing fraternity and gained a liking for it which I have never lost.”⁸³

Even more important, Eleanor and Howe developed a deep and lasting friendship. Before, she had resented his intimacy with FDR and was jealous of the role he played in her husband’s life. Now she understood Howe’s position and felt treated as an equal partner. Howe encouraged her political talents and helped her express them. He understood her moods and dedicated himself to bridging the distance between her and Franklin. Eleanor, for her part, discovered that Howe had many talents. Aside from an encyclopedic knowledge of the nation’s politics, he had the temperament of an artist. He painted landscapes and portraits, sang in the choir at St. Thomas’ Church, wrote poetry, and was an avid theater buff, directing and acting for the Drama League Players in Washington. Howe loved the seashore, and, most endearingly, he knew when to be silent and when to speak up. As Blanche Wiesen Cook observed, “Louis Howe was the first of many intimate friends that ER grew to trust and love, with a warmth and generosity both spontaneous and unlimited.”⁸⁴

At Christmas Franklin sent each of the men who had campaigned with him a pair of gold cuff links engraved with his initials on one link and his own on the other. This was the beginning of the famous Cuff Links Club, which would meet annually on FDR’s birthday to eat, drink, and reminisce about their first campaign together. The men in turn presented Eleanor with a suitably engraved gold pin as a souvenir of the campaign, a gift she treasured.⁸⁵

FDR had no illusions about the political future. The Democrats, he told Cox, were unlikely to return to the White House until economic catastrophe drove the Republicans out. “Every war brings after it a period of materialism and conservatism. People tire quickly of ideals.” To Steve Early he joked, “Thank the Lord we are both comparatively youthful.”⁸⁶

To prepare for the political wilderness, FDR set about to restore his finances. After ten years of public service his coffers were bare. And with five children attending fashionable boarding schools, plus extensive social commitments, membership in a half-dozen elite clubs, first-class travel, and a household of ten servants, the need to make a substantial living could no longer be ignored. The answer was Wall Street. And the opportunity came when Van Lear Black, a wealthy Democratic contributor who owned the Baltimore Sun, asked FDR to become vice president of his Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland, the fourth largest surety bonding company in the United States. Roosevelt’s responsibilities would be to oversee the firm’s operations in New York and New England and to serve as rainmaker, bringing in new clients through his connections in government, labor, and industry.

FDR would be the firm’s front man on Wall Street, for which Black agreed to pay him $25,000 a year, five times his salary at the Navy Department. It was an arrangement from which both stood to profit. The hemorrhaging of Roosevelt’s finances would be stanched, and Black would benefit from Franklin’s name on the masthead. Even more important—which both men understood implicitly—the position was a holding pattern for FDR, much as the presidency of Columbia University would be for Dwight D. Eisenhower thirty years later. It was agreed that Franklin would spend only half a day at the office, leaving him free to develop his law practice and remain active in party politics.

On January 7, 1921, Black announced FDR’s appointment with a lavish black-tie dinner at Delmonico’s, the favorite watering hole of the Wall Street establishment. Among the dignitaries who welcomed Roosevelt to the business world were Owen D. Young of General Electric, Edward R. Stettinius of United States Steel, Daniel Willard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Adolph S. Ochs of The New York Times, all valued clients of F & D. Within little more than a month Roosevelt mastered the business routine. He glad-handed old friends like the boxing promoter Tex Rickard and called in his chits from the days in Washington. Unions that had been recognized by the Navy Department were invited to consider having their officers bonded by Fidelity & Deposit, as were the industries contracting with the service. When Harding took office in March, FDR added Louis Howe to his staff. Like Franklin, Howe worked at both Fidelity’s business and Democratic politics. As his personal secretary, FDR engaged Marguerite LeHand, a pert twenty-three-year-old who had worked during the campaign in Roosevelt’s New York headquarters. Known as “Missy” because the younger Roosevelt children had difficulty saying “Miss LeHand,” she too would become a permanent fixture in FDR’s entourage.

As Franklin jumped into New York social life, Eleanor enrolled in business school to learn typing and shorthand. She found a housewife to teach her to cook and became active in the League of Women Voters. Her task was to keep tabs on the League’s legislative agenda in both Washington and Albany, a job that brought her into contact with many of the nation’s leading feminists: Carrie Chapman Catt, Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Narcissa Vanderlip, Elizabeth F. Read, and Esther Lape. Eleanor took her responsibilities with the League seriously and began to address women’s groups on her own, bringing them up to date on legislative matters. She enjoyed the work, but, as she wrote Franklin from the League’s national convention in Cleveland in April, “I prefer doing my politics with you.”⁸⁷

With Louis Howe’s help, FDR began to stitch together an upstate organization to contest the 1922 election. This time he was careful to stress party unity. Already mentioned as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt recognized the importance of a full-blown organization effort under Charles Murphy rather than another divisive split. William Calder, the Republican incumbent, was vulnerable, but to beat him the Democrats needed a united front.^*

Speaking engagements carried Roosevelt throughout the state. He also undertook a wide range of charitable and philanthropic activities. In addition to the Harvard Board of Overseers, he became a member of the executive committee of the National Civic Federation, the Near East Relief Committee, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Seamen’s Church Institute. He headed a $2 million fund drive for Lighthouses for the Blind and accepted the chairmanship of the Greater New York Committee of the Boy Scouts of America. It was as chairman of the Scouts that on Thursday, July 28, 1921, FDR set sail up the Hudson for Bear Mountain and the annual Boy Scout Jamboree.

It was the type of occasion Franklin liked best. There were parades and speeches and solemn demonstrations of scouting activities. FDR posed for the newspapers surrounded by cheering boys and their scoutmasters. He served as master of ceremonies at a campfire before sailing back to the city that evening. Little did he realize that at some point during the day he had ingested a mysterious virus, incubated among the Boy Scouts, that would change his life forever.

^* Hancock proved so adept at contract liquidation that soon after resigning from the Navy he joined the New York investment house of Lehman Brothers, rising to become one of its managing partners. In 1933, FDR called him to Washington to help organize the National Recovery Administration (NRA). During World War II Hancock returned to Washington to head an interdepartmental board to handle contract settlement, and he drafted the 1943 legislation on contract renegotiation.

^* On the day before FDR’s inauguration in 1933, Eleanor asked her friend Lorena Hickok to pick her up at the Mayflower Hotel, where she and the president-elect were staying. Mrs. Roosevelt instructed the cab driver to take them to Rock Creek Cemetery so that she might gaze upon the statue once again. “In the old days when we lived here,” said Eleanor, “I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage, I’d come here alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.” Lorena A. Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady 92 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980).

^* Wilson’s exclusion of the Senate placed him at odds with American practice. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley sent a five-man delegation to Paris to negotiate the peace treaty and among the five included three senators from the Foreign Relations Committee: William Pierce Frye (R., Maine), Cushman Kellogg Davis (R., Wisconsin), and George Gray (D., Delaware). McKinley’s foresight was rewarded when the Senate narrowly consented to the treaty 57–27, just three votes more than the required two thirds.

^* Eleanor was startled by Wilson’s revelation. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she noted of Tumulty’s task in her diary. A president has a responsibility to keep himself informed. Later she wrote, “It was … a problem of allotting time. Franklin reserved certain periods for his study of the press, particularly the opposition press, and, at least while Louis Howe was with him, he was always closely informed on all shades of opinion in the country. This firsthand awareness of what people are doing and thinking and saying is essential to a president. When this information is filtered through other people, or selected with a view to what a few individuals think the president should know, the inevitable result is that this source of information is dangerously curtailed or misleadingly slanted. This is fatal in the formulation of far-reaching decisions.” Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 101–102 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

^* The Senate’s constitutional responsibility is to give its “advice and consent” to treaties by two-thirds vote. It does not “ratify” treaties. Ratification is a technical diplomatic term that applies when the president formally signs the treaty bringing it into effect, subsequent to the Senate’s advice and consent.

^* Newspapers sanitized Garner’s comment, and “warm piss” has come down through generations as “warm spit”: admittedly a four-letter word but scarcely as pungent as Cactus Jack’s characterization. Garner’s political insight is treated perceptively in a series of interviews with Bascom N. Timmons published in four installments by Collier’s, February 21, March 6, 16, and 20, 1948.

^† Next to the League of Nations, Prohibition was the burning political issue of 1920. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, went into effect on January 15, 1920, a date widely celebrated by the drys and perhaps even more widely deplored by the nation’s wets. As a young legislator in Albany, FDR had backed the prohibitionist cause, reflecting the sentiments of his upstate district. Thus he had a record the drys could embrace. In his personal life, Roosevelt enjoyed a drink as much as anyone. He paid no attention to Prohibition and never believed in it for an instant.

^* In his frequent retelling of the episode, FDR invariably escalated the event: “I grabbed the standard. About half a dozen men grabbed me and we had a jolly good fight, but I got the standard and it was paraded.” But Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, the Tammany stalwart who held the standard, reported that “FDR couldn’t budge it until Mr. Murphy sort of bowed to let it go and we let it go. The whole thing probably took less than four seconds. There wasn’t even an angry gesture.” Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 63 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954); Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

^* The GOP had always taken a more forceful stand on women’s suffrage than the Democrats, who were still captive to their southern, traditionalist base. On October 1, 1920, Harding held a special day for suffragists and then a Social Justice Day in which he called for equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, a minimum wage, national health care, and a department of social justice—virtually the entire program of the League of Women Voters. Cox and Roosevelt let the opportunity slip by. Stanley J. Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s 87–101 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

^* In 1922, the Democrats roared back under Murphy’s leadership. Al Smith was overwhelmingly returned to the governor’s office, and Dr. Royal S. Copeland, president of the New York Board of Health, easily defeated Calder for the Senate: 1,276,667 to 995,421. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1975).