PART I

Swimming to Health

1882  1928

1.

WARREN DELANO SPOILED ALL HIS CHILDREN BUT SARA ESPECIALLY. Delano was a New Bedforder who, like some others of that intrepid seaport, became a China merchant, which in the mid-nineteenth century meant he dealt in opium. He amassed a fortune in the East and retired to a handsome estate on the Hudson River where Sara was born in 1854. Yet the Panic of 1857 caught Delano out, and he found himself on the verge of ruin. He returned to China, redoubled his energies, and sold more opium than ever. He fetched his family from America and settled them in Hong Kong, where they lived in Oriental opulence. Seven-year-old Sara found the experience at once overwhelming and mundane: overwhelming in its initial foreignness, mundane in the way everything attached to family eventually becomes for children.

Her worldly education continued when the family returned home. Though legal, the opium trade wasn’t respectable, and after Delano decided he’d accumulated enough to weather future downturns, he worked himself away from the business. The family took various routes home. Sara sailed with a brother and sister to Singapore and then Egypt, where the Suez Canal was under construction. They visited France and England before crossing the Atlantic to America. Along the way—if not earlier—she discovered that travel agreed with her, and during the next decade she returned to China and France, lived in Germany, and transited the completed Suez Canal.

By the time she finally resettled into life along the Hudson, she felt herself a person apart. Few of her neighbors had seen so much of the world; almost none of her contemporaries had partaken of such exotic experiences. She might not have said she was too good for the neighborhood—but her father said it on her behalf. Warren Delano took special pains to protect his daughter from the young men of the Hudson Valley. The military academy at West Point comprised the closest collection of bachelor males; the cadets found Sara, who had grown into a tall, slender, self-composed beauty, most enchanting. They came courting, only to be rebuffed by Sara’s father, who understood that West Point, which provided a free education to young men clever and pushy enough to win the approval of their states’ elected officials, appealed to the ambitious but impecunious among the nation’s emerging manhood—precisely the sort from whom Sara should be protected.

Warren Delano had other suspicions of his daughter’s suitors. As a staunch Republican he distrusted individuals of the opposite persuasion. “I will not say that all Democrats are horse thieves,” he declared in a moment of magnanimity. “But it would seem that all horse thieves are Democrats.” One young man was vetoed on account of his red hair.

Sara seemed not to resent or resist her father’s intrusion into her love life. On the contrary, because she idolized him she accepted the high standards he set for her suitors. Years slipped past and she remained unattached to any save him. By the time she reached twenty-five she was well on the way to spinsterhood, a fate she viewed with outward equanimity.

But one day she accepted a dinner invitation from an old friend. During her peripatetic childhood Sara had lived in New York City for a time and become close to Anna Roosevelt, called Bamie (pronounced “Bammie” also called Bye), the older sister of Theodore Roosevelt, the future president. Brilliant but afflicted by a spinal ailment, Bamie was, like Sara, a spinster-in-progress, and her widowed mother hosted a party for her and her sister, Corinne.

Mrs. Roosevelt was playing matchmaker that evening and had also invited James Roosevelt, a fifth cousin of Bamie, once removed. The Roosevelts had nothing against distant cousins marrying, as events would reveal, and Mrs. Roosevelt may have been thinking of pairing Bamie with James. But James saw only Sara. “He never took his eyes off of her and kept talking to her the whole time,” Mrs. Roosevelt recalled.

A Delano-Roosevelt match wasn’t an obvious one. James was fifty-one and Sara twenty-five. James had a son—James Jr., called Rosy—just six months younger than Sara. And James was a Democrat.

Yet if James was old enough to be Sara’s father, that stood him well in the eyes of Sara’s actual father. Warren Delano had done business with James Roosevelt’s partners and knew James from clubs they had in common. James’s years promised stability in a relationship; James’s wealth allayed concerns about fortune seeking. As for his politics, a series of visits by James to the Delano home opened Warren’s eyes. “James Roosevelt is the first person who has made me realize that a Democrat can be a gentleman,” he said later, still marveling at the thought.

For Sara’s part, she saw in James Roosevelt things she hadn’t seen in her youthful suitors. Her father was her model of what a man ought to be; James approached the model as closely as any man could and be plausibly marriageable. In 1880 Sigmund Freud was still a student at the University of Vienna and had yet to loose his theories of psychosexual development on the world; but Sara’s friends didn’t require Freud to tell them that much of what attracted her to James Roosevelt was his resemblance to the only man she had ever loved and admired. Perhaps Sara herself saw this, too.

In any case, when James Roosevelt requested of Warren Delano permission to marry his daughter, and Delano assented, Sara accepted the proposal with pleasure. A huge wedding would have been planned had James not been a widower; as it was, the prospect of the Roosevelt-Delano nuptials set dollar signs gleaming in the eyes of dressmakers, florists, coachmen, and caterers up and down the Hudson Valley. James’s son, Rosy, had recently married Helen Astor, the daughter of high-society czarina Mrs. William Astor. (The dimensions of the Astor ballroom established the numerical limit of Ward McAllister’s celebrated “four hundred.”) Meanwhile on the Delano side, Sara’s uncle Franklin Delano had married William Astor’s sister. A merger of the Roosevelt and Delano clans, under the kindly gaze of the Astors, promised to be a memorable event indeed. But Sara’s aunt Sarah Delano, for whom she was named, minus a letter, died amid the planning, and out of respect the ceremony was greatly simplified. A mere hundred guests witnessed the exchange of vows at the Delano home in October 1880. The couple departed that afternoon for the short carriage ride to Springwood, James Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park. A month later the honeymoon began in earnest when the newlyweds left for Europe on a grand tour that lasted most of a year.

SARA DOTED ON her husband but even more on the son she gave him. Fittingly for one who would end his life as the arbiter of Europe’s fate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was conceived on the Continent, perhaps in Paris, where James’s father and dozens of Delanos met the honeymooners and occupied an entire floor of the Hôtel du Rhin. The couple returned home in plenty of time to ready themselves and the Hyde Park house for its new occupant. “At a quarter to nine my Sallie had a splendid large baby boy,” James Roosevelt wrote in the family diary for January 30, 1882. “He weighs 10 lbs. without clothes.”

From the beginning Sara asserted herself regarding her son. James Roosevelt wished to name the boy Isaac, after his paternal grandfather. Sara vetoed the idea. She doubtless didn’t say as much to her husband, but her actions revealed that she considered the boy more a Delano than a Roosevelt, and the names she chose reflected her view. She initially thought to name her son Warren Delano, after her father. But her brother had just buried a young son named Warren and, upon Sara’s inquiry, informed her that he couldn’t endure the idea of another child of the family, so close in age to his lost boy, carrying the same name. Consequently Sara turned to her favorite uncle, Franklin Delano, who was childless and now delighted to have a namesake.

The christening of Franklin Delano Roosevelt took place at the St. James Episcopal Chapel in Hyde Park. The godmother was Eleanor Blodgett, a long-time friend of Sara’s. There were two godfathers: Sara’s brother-in-law Will Forbes and Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore’s younger brother. Theodore might have seemed the more obvious choice between the two Roosevelt brothers, being the older and by most measures the more responsible. But Sara liked the charmingly troubled Elliott better than the earnest Theodore, and in any case she didn’t expect her son’s second godfather to play much role beyond the christening.

Franklin’s infancy was unremarkable in certain respects. Weaned at twelve months, walking at sixteen, he was neither precocious nor slow. His first words were “Mama” and “Papa,” apparently in that order; he added “Mamie” for the nurse who tended to the less appealing aspects of child rearing. Nurses and nannies weren’t unusual among families of even modest means in New York in the Gilded Age; the millions of immigrants who poured into America during the latter half of the nineteenth century included hundreds of thousands of girls and young women willing to work for little money and remain till they found husbands. Helen McRorie, Franklin’s nurse, had more experience than most in her occupation; Sara insisted on the best. And Helen had more help than most nurses. James and Sara Roosevelt employed several servants: a housekeeper named Elspeth McEachern (called Tiddle by young Franklin and thereafter by the rest of the family), a cook, a butler, a gardener, a horseman, multiple maids, and casual laborers as the work required. James Roosevelt was a gentleman farmer, which meant that the actual farming at Springwood was done by the hired men.

Sara bore James no other children, almost certainly, considering the ease with which she conceived Franklin, by her choice. Consequently Franklin grew up without live-in siblings, half brother Rosy, Sara’s contemporary, having long since left home. But he never lacked for people about the house. In fact, in keeping with upper-class custom in America at the time, he saw more of the help than he did of his parents. Sara and James refused to let the responsibilities of parenthood impinge on their active social lives. They entertained their Hudson Valley neighbors and were entertained in turn. They dropped down to New York City, sometimes taking Franklin—and his nurse—and sometimes leaving them home. Franklin naturally was included on the regular summer visits to Sara’s ancestral home near New Bedford; she insisted that he learn to cherish his Delano roots.

In his adulthood, hearers would sometimes wonder where Franklin Roosevelt got his accent. He didn’t sound like a New Yorker, not even a Hudson Valley Knickerbocker. He didn’t sound like a New Englander, despite the summers spent among the Delanos. He did sound rich, but this was as much a matter of tone and timbre—the self-confidence of one who expected the world to treat him well—as of pronunciation. And most other rich Americans sounded little like Roosevelt.

He sounded vaguely British, which made sense in terms of his upbringing. As a child and youth, Franklin Roosevelt spent almost as much time in Britain and continental Europe as in America. Before his fifteenth birthday he traveled eight times to Europe; each visit lasted months, and the eight together accounted for years of the period of his life when he was mastering language. His closest companions during much of this time were the Ulster natives Mamie and Tiddle, which perhaps intensified the British influence on his patterns of speech.

The trips started early. Franklin wasn’t yet three, in the fall of 1884, when James, Sara, Franklin, Mamie, and Tiddle crossed the Atlantic to England, where Franklin, Mamie, and Tiddle remained—at Tunbridge Wells—while James and Sara proceeded to France and Germany. After several weeks at various spas, Franklin’s parents came back to England and the family spent the winter there. They didn’t return to America until the spring, more than half a year after embarking.

Subsequent journeys followed a similar pattern. James, already suffering from the heart ailment that would kill him, found particular relief at the spa at Bad Nauheim, north of Frankfurt. His and Sara’s visits to Nauheim became annual affairs, and until Franklin went off to school, at the advanced age of fourteen, he often accompanied his father and mother. He spent enough time in Germany to acquire moderate proficiency in the language—a facility he put to good use decades later. Like his mother and her generation of Delanos, he became as comfortable at sea as on land and as familiar with the countries of Europe as with his own.

FASHION IS OFTEN cruel, but few fashions ever blighted so many lives as the one precipitated in America by the 1886 publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy, a novel for children and especially their mothers by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The English-born Burnett spun a story of an American boy who discovers that he is really an English earl and has to learn to play the part. The story prompted American mothers to imagine similar strokes of fortune touching their offspring and to dress their lads in readiness. Velvet suits with lace collars became the uniform of the scions of the aspiring classes; barbers despaired as the boys’ locks were allowed to grow past the ears to the nape and shoulders. The fact that real earls-in-waiting and barons-to-be didn’t dress this way had scant effect on the phenomenon in America, which like most fashions assumed a life of its own. Compounding the trauma for the victims was the simultaneous emergence of comparatively convenient photographic technology, which meant that their moments of mortification were frozen in silver gel for posterity.

Photographs from Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth year show him in full Fauntleroy regalia. In one a wool cap perches atop his auburn locks, and patent boots keep the wind from his shins. In another his hair falls uncovered across his shoulders and down his back, and a silk sash wraps his waist. He appears happy, with a blooming cheek, a steady gaze, and a nose remarkably well defined for a child so young.

Nor did he have any reason not to be happy. He was the center of the universe, as far as he knew. No siblings intruded upon his consciousness—Rosy visited but might as well have been of another generation. Several adults, starting with his parents but including the hired staff, apparently had nothing better to do than to meet his needs and indulge his whims. The world afforded ceaseless entertainment: pony and buggy and sleigh rides, tobogganing on the slopes above the Hudson, journeys by train and steamship to exciting cities and countries, stays in fine hotels and fancy houses.

Neither did his Eden tarnish with age. He avoided the typical childhood trial of starting school by the simple expedient of not attending school till he was a teenager. His parents engaged tutors to teach him his letters and numbers and the other prerequisites for a genteel existence. He rarely clashed with other children, for he spent most of his time among adults.

In one respect he may have been cared for too well. Most children in the nineteenth century, like most children for millennia past, were exposed to all manner of microbes at an early age. Many died of infant and childhood illnesses, but those who survived developed robust immune systems, able to cope with the mundane infections they subsequently encountered. Franklin Roosevelt, by virtue of his comparative isolation, missed out on some of this tempering. Not for years would the consequences become apparent, but when they did, they would be devastating.

Among his childhood toys were boats: model boats at first but eventually the genuine article. His mother and uncle told tales of the China trade and their round-the-world voyages on clipper ships; during the summer visits to New Bedford he haunted the wharves, clambered about the old whalers, and heard the wizened harpooners talk of their personal Ahabs and Moby Dicks. When he was nine his father purchased a sailing yacht (with auxiliary engine), the fifty-foot Half Moon, which Franklin immediately adopted as his own.

The vessel sailed out of New York harbor but coasted up to New Bedford and on around Cape Cod to the Gulf of Maine. At the north end of the gulf, where the estuary of the St. Croix River meets the Bay of Fundy, in Canadian waters but barely a mile from Maine, it dropped anchor at Campobello Island. In the 1880s a group of land developers began promoting the island as a summer getaway for wealthy Americans. The attraction was the weather—pleasantly cool even in the hottest August—but also the isolation. Summer was the unhealthy season in America’s burgeoning cities. Cholera and yellow fever weren’t quite the scourges they had been, chiefly due to improved sanitation, but these and other maladies still struck with frightening frequency. And even outside the cities, malaria laid thousands low in the steamy months of the year.

The James Roosevelts discovered Campobello Island the year after Franklin was born. Friends recommended it, James and Sara and Franklin visited it, and James and Sara decided to build a cottage there. Upon its completion, months at Campobello became a summer ritual for the family.

A central part of that ritual was sailing. Franklin crewed for his father until he was tall enough to see over the tiller, at which point he often took the helm. The winds in the Bay of Fundy could be daunting, even in summer, and the tides, among the highest in the world, challenged the sharpest sailor. Franklin thrived on the tests.

Sailing and the sea absorbed him. He consumed books about boats and the feats of great mariners. He doodled sloops and ketches in the margins of the work he did for his tutors; his earliest surviving letter to his mother—doubtless the first he wrote, as Sara saved everything—included a remarkably evocative rendering of three vessels under sail. He could scarcely contain his excitement while waiting for the Half Moon to be delivered. “Papa is going to buy a cutter that will go by naphtha”—for the auxiliary engine—“and we are going to sail in it at Campobello,” he wrote his aunt in the spring of 1891. When the family traveled to Germany that summer, he apprised his cousins of his favorite activities: “On this paper is a picture of the big lake on which we row, and Papa got me a great big boat and I sail it every day.”

ENDICOTT PEABODY WAS an American-born, English-schooled Episcopalian priest and the walking, breathing embodiment of the manly Christian virtues as they were understood in America of the Victorian age. He excelled at sports, especially boxing, and had faced down rowdies from his first pulpit, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. (He arrived not long after the infamous 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral, in which the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday exchanged lethal fire with Ike and Billy Clanton and their friends.) Besides improving his boxing skills, Peabody’s Arizona experience revealed a knack for fundraising; he frequented the saloons of the town in a successful effort to persuade the patrons to contribute to the construction of a proper church for the frontier diocese.

Upon his return to the East, he devoted this talent to the fulfillment of a long-standing dream to establish an American school for young men that would reproduce the best of English private education. It helped Peabody’s cause that his family was rich and well connected. His father was a partner of J. P. Morgan’s father, and his brother had married into the Lawrence family of Massachusetts. The Lawrences summered at Campobello with the James Roosevelts, to whom they described Peabody’s plan for a boys’ school. James Roosevelt was impressed by the board of trustees Peabody had put together, starting with Morgan. Sara Roosevelt took note that the most distinguished families of New York and Boston were enrolling their sons for admission, years before the boys would be old enough to enter the school. Lest Franklin lose out, she put his name on the list.

By the time Franklin arrived, in September 1896, Peabody’s vision had taken fair shape. The school was located thirty-five miles north of Boston, above the Nashua River and two miles from Groton village, which was just visible from the higher parts of the hundred-acre campus. The school’s handful of structures included a classroom building, a chapel, a gymnasium, a boathouse, and the most recent addition, the Hundred House, opened in 1891 as a dormitory for the hundred boys of the school. Students typically entered at age twelve and remained for six years, but because Sara couldn’t part with Franklin so young, he didn’t enter till fourteen, when he joined the students of the third “form,” or year.

His early months at Groton marked the first time he’d been away from his family circle for long, and he was predictably homesick. “Thanks very much for your letters,” he wrote his parents in late September. “The more the better.” He discovered that the other boys received edible delicacies from home. “Could you send me some grapes or other small fruit? It would be very nice.” He described his daily routine, focusing on athletics, which constituted an obsession at Groton. Every boy played every sport, or tried to. The masters—the teachers—were likewise expected to play, following Peabody’s continuing vigorous example. Autumn being football season, Franklin leaped onto the gridiron. “I played football today on the 4th twenty-two (7th eleven),” he explained in his initial letter home. “I play right halfback or fullback.” He was no standout, being light and not especially fast. But he was as determined as any of the boys, and he took pride in his battlefield wounds. “I managed to dislocate my fourth finger in a small football game,” he recounted. “I have not been able to play since, in consequence, but I shall begin again tomorrow.”

James and Sara naturally wished to know how their son’s studies proceeded. “I am all right in Latin, Greek, Science, and French; a little rusty in Algebra but not more so than the others,” he wrote. This was reassuring to his parents, but even more to Franklin. Much as in sports, the boy who hadn’t been around other boys didn’t know how he compared intellectually with his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, given his age and the Groton ethos, his status on the field mattered more to him than his standing in the classroom. But parents who paid Groton’s tuition expected academic progress reports, which Endicott Peabody religiously provided. Franklin’s first-month report showed an average of 7.79 (out of 10), with the highest marks for algebra (9.75) and English literature (8.5) and the lowest for Greek (6.75) and history (7.33). The grade report also covered personal habits; Franklin rated a perfect 10 for punctuality and 9.68 for decorum. His class rank was fourth (of nineteen). This satisfied Endicott Peabody, who summarized Franklin’s performance: “Very good. He strikes me as an intelligent and faithful scholar and a good boy.”

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT SPENT four years at Peabody’s school, during which time his adult personality gradually emerged. Of course, it was the premise of Endicott Peabody’s pedagogy that the adult personality didn’t merely emerge during the Groton years but was significantly shaped by the Groton experience. This belief informed every aspect of Groton life, from the rigorous living conditions to the regimented daily routine. Like the other boys, Franklin was assigned a Hundred House cubicle, a space of sixty square feet containing a bed, a dresser, and a chair. The walls of the cubicle were taller than the tallest boy but stopped well short of the ceiling, thereby affording each inmate some privacy but not too much. A few hooks on the walls held what clothes didn’t fit in the dresser, but the total storage capacity was meager, requiring the boys to choose between winter clothes and lighter gear for their kit on hand. An early cold snap could leave them shivering in linen; an unseasonable warm spell had them sweating in wool.

A communal lavatory adjoined the dormitory. Most American homes at this time didn’t have piped hot water, and neither did Groton. Cold water—plenty of it—was an essential part of the routine, with each boy being required to take a cold shower every morning, for purposes of hygiene and to calm youthful spirits. In early fall and late spring, the temperature of the water could be almost comfortable, but when snow covered the hill and ice sheeted the rivers and ponds, the morning shower was decidedly bracing.

After showers and dressing, the boys filed to the dining hall for 7:30 breakfast. Chapel followed at 8:15, and then classes from 8:30 till noon. A substantial meal fueled the young scholars for two more classes, which were followed by a vigorous afternoon of organized athletics. Supper revived them sufficiently for another chapel service and for study hall, at the end of which the Reverend and Mrs. Peabody bade each boy good night, and all retired.

The regimen of the school was designed to instill self-discipline and build character. In the case of Franklin Roosevelt it definitely introduced him to a more spartan lifestyle than he had encountered before. The buildings were barely heated; during cold weather the boys wore heavy coats even indoors. On one occasion a winter gale blew open a transom in the dormitory during the night; Franklin and the other boys awoke beneath snowdrifts on their bedclothes. In spring the discomfort came from the opposite end of the thermometer. “Today is broiling, and five boys fainted in church this a.m.,” Franklin wrote his parents during a particularly warm stretch.

Groton introduced Franklin to something else he hadn’t encountered: regular outbreaks of disease. A hundred boys living close together provided a festering ground for all manner of contagions. Most were fairly innocuous: colds, influenza (“grippe”), mumps, pink eye, earaches, assorted intestinal disturbances. But other afflictions occasioned greater concern. Symptoms of scarlet fever triggered the immediate quarantine of the patients; on the occasions when this failed to stem the spread, classes were canceled and the students sent home. (A standard precaution against the import of illness from outside the school was the requirement that students bring a certificate of good health upon return from vacations.) Whooping cough could be severe or mild, but it was so common that the school sometimes ignored outbreaks and let the sufferers—including Franklin Roosevelt during the spring of his junior year—walk around whooping.

Franklin was neither sicker nor healthier than most of his classmates. The school doctor examined the boys regularly, recording their growth, muscular development, and vital signs. For reasons he didn’t explain, the physician concluded that Roosevelt had a “weak heart” and consequently should refrain from exerting himself excessively. The patient rejected the diagnosis. “I told him that he was a liar (not quite in those words),” he wrote his parents. And he blithely ignored the advice, engaging in every athletic activity imaginable—and a few, including a handball derivative called “fives,” unimagined by any save Endicott Peabody and his fellow Grotonians. Roosevelt received his share of whatever infections were going around. Sara sent him regular supplies of cod liver oil—a good source of vitamin D, although this particular aspect of its prophylactic powers wasn’t known at the time—and insisted that he take it. But he still succumbed to scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, flu, colds, and sundry other maladies.

SARA’S SOLICITUDE reflected not merely the concern any mother feels for her child but also Sara’s understanding that the Roosevelts weren’t the most robust of physical specimens. Franklin’s father, James, continued to decline during Franklin’s teenage years; during the autumn of 1900 James’s condition grew alarming. Sara arranged for the two of them to winter in South Carolina, but he became too sick to travel. She regularly informed Franklin of his father’s condition; Franklin responded with worried remonstrance. “Make Papa rest,” he wrote in mid-November. When James rallied, Franklin took excessive encouragement. “I am so glad Papa is really better,” he remarked the day after Thanksgiving. “I only hope he will be absolutely well again in a few days.”

Probably Sara wasn’t telling Franklin the whole story; she must have known a full recovery was impossible. And in fact this rally gave way to a relapse. “I am too distressed about Papa and cannot understand why he does not improve more quickly,” Roosevelt wrote in early December. Only days later he received word to hurry to New York City, where James was staying at a hotel between visits to his doctors. On December 8, 1900, Franklin’s father died.

Franklin remained with his mother throughout the holidays. And during the following year he observed a sort of mourning by using stationery bordered in black. But otherwise his father’s passing appeared to affect him fairly little. He had never known his father except as an old man, and one who was often sick. In many respects James was more a grandfather than a father to his younger son. An eagerly athletic boy like Franklin had difficulty seeing himself in James.

The chief emotional effect of James’s death was to reinforce the bond between Franklin and Sara. Always her only son, Franklin now became the only man in her life. She doted on him as never before; without James to care for at Hyde Park, she rented a house in Boston during winters to be closer to him. James left Franklin a modest inheritance, but the bulk of the estate went to Sara. Sara supported Franklin and did so in what she judged his best interests. But it was her judgment, not his, that counted. And she no longer had to heed James’s opinion in the matter.

Even as his father’s death made Franklin more dependent on Sara financially, it also made him feel more responsible for Sara emotionally. Until now James had provided an outlet for Sara’s emotions; with James gone that function fell entirely to Franklin. He grew solicitous of her in ways he hadn’t been before; when she became upset he was the one who soothed her. The bond between mother and son, already strong, grew stronger.

2.

FRANKLIN GRADUATED FROM GROTON IN THE SPRING OF 1900 AND enrolled that fall at Harvard, down the road in Cambridge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Harvard aspired to intellectual eminence, but social standing still counted for more among the undergraduates than academic achievement. Boys from wealthy families inhabited the “Gold Coast” along Mt. Auburn Street, living in large apartments, dining in expensive eating houses, and gathering in exclusive clubs. Boys from poorer families lived across Massachusetts Avenue in the drab, crowded dormitories of the Yard. The two castes mingled in the lecture halls, but outside the classrooms they rarely encountered each other.

Roosevelt, naturally, was a Gold Coaster. He lived at Westmorly Court, a prime property, in a four-room apartment he shared with Lathrop Brown, another Grotonian. “The sitting room is large enough for two desks, and the bedrooms and bath light and airy,” he wrote home. “The ceilings are very high.” The suite was bare when Roosevelt arrived. “The rooms look as if struck by sheet lightning, the sitting room having the chairs and tables but no curtains or carpets…. The bed is in place in my room, and it looks inhabitable, but one trunk is the sole piece of furniture of Lathrop’s room.” The apartment perked up when Sara sent carpet and curtains, and Roosevelt and Brown put pictures on the walls. A rented piano completed the décor and provided a focus for entertaining.

Roosevelt’s circle widened at Harvard. “On Monday I went to a ‘Beer Night’ in a Senior’s room,” he noted. “It is a regular institution by which a senior has a few of his classmen and about 20 Freshmen in to his room in order to get them acquainted with each other.” Sports played a socializing role at Harvard as they had at Groton, and Roosevelt threw himself into the games. He was realistic about his prospects for football. “There are still over 100 candidates”—or about a quarter of the freshman class—“for the ’04 team, and I shan’t make it, but possibly a scrub team.” The scrubs were where he wound up, yet he enjoyed the distinction of being elected captain of one of the eight scrub squads. “It is the only one composed wholly of Freshmen, and I am the only Freshman captain.”

He joined the school newspaper. Like the football team, the Crimson required tryouts; cub reporters who made the grade could hope to rise to editorial ranks. Roosevelt discovered in himself a certain flair for reporting. He wrote easily, and he could talk his way into information that eluded his rivals. His first weeks at Harvard were the last weeks of the 1900 presidential campaign; the campaign evoked great interest on the Harvard campus, with most of the students, doubtless following the lead of their fathers, supporting Republicans William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt against Democrats William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson. “Last night there was a grand torch-light Republican parade of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Franklin wrote home. Franklin joined the Republicans for the festivities. “We wore red caps and gowns and marched by classes into Boston and through all the principal streets, about eight miles in all. The crowds to see it were huge all along the route, and we were dead tired at the end.”

Amid the excitement of the marching, Roosevelt didn’t neglect his reportorial duties. Harvard’s own president, Charles Eliot, spoke loudly and often for good government, but in the current contest he had declined to endorse either McKinley or Bryan. Crimsonrules forbade first-year reporters from interviewing Eliot, but Roosevelt, feigning ignorance, buttonholed the Harvard president anyway. Caught by surprise, Eliot blurted out his preference, and the Crimson carried Roosevelt’s scoop under the headline “President Eliot Declares for McKinley.” The story won Roosevelt a coveted spot on the regular staff.

The position brought greater responsibility. “I am working about six hours a day on it alone, and it is quite a strain,” he told Sara. His hard work was rewarded during the autumn of his sophomore year when he was elected to the editorial board. The choice reflected his peers’ assessment of his talents as a journalist, and perhaps the persuasive skills that would make him an effective campaigner when he turned politician. It also revealed the appreciation of his classmates that he could afford the job. One responsibility of the editors was to treat the staff to dinner and related diversion. To celebrate their election, Franklin and four other new men threw a lavish dinner, followed by an evening at the theater. “Great fun, speeches, songs, etc.,” he reported to Sara.

ROOSEVELT’S FAMILY CONNECTIONS grew even more valuable when Theodore Roosevelt became president upon McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. Having a cousin as governor had been a mark of distinction for Franklin; having a vice president perhaps more so (yet not necessarily, given the low esteem in which vice presidents were held in those days). But having a president in the family was truly impressive. Whether Cousin Theodore’s ascent to the apex of American politics contributed to Franklin’s election as a Crimson editor is impossible to know. It certainly lent luster to the family name. Yet Franklin’s diligence and flair had marked him for months, and Theodore’s inauguration probably only made a logical choice easier.

Franklin didn’t wait long to capitalize on Theodore’s new office. Alice Roosevelt, Theodore’s daughter by his deceased first wife, turned eighteen in February 1902; the occasion required that she be formally presented to society. Edith Roosevelt, the First Lady, hosted a White House debut, the first of its kind at the executive mansion and the most lavish ball there since the days of Dolley Madison almost a century before. Alice was queen of the night, with a very large court. “Three hundred beautiful and beautifully gowned young women and a body of smart young men almost as numerous practically made up the party,” the New York Times reported. A handful of adults were present; these conspicuously did not include the president, who at Edith’s urging or Alice’s insistence left the stage to his daughter. “The White House was filled with young people,” the Timesreporter wrote, “and they enjoyed themselves after the manner of young people. The state apartments had been turned over to them, with no other injunction put upon them than that they would incur the great displeasure of the President if they did not make a jolly night of it. They appeared to heed this injunction.”

The guests included several Roosevelts. Franklin rode the train down from Boston on the Friday morning of the ball, took tea with one set of family friends and dinner with another. “Then to the dance, which was most glorious fun,” he told his mother. “From start to finish it was glorious…. We left at 2 a.m. and I slept till 12 on Saturday.” That afternoon he visited the new—as of 1897—home of the Library of Congress. A White House tea followed, again hosted by Edith, with Alice once more the center of attention and her father still absent. “All most interesting,” Franklin recorded. On Saturday night he attended a reception given by the Austrian ambassador, and he mingled with numerous members of the diplomatic corps. Sunday brought more of the same. “On the whole it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” Franklin wrote Sara.

THIS WAS SAYING a lot, for Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed nearly all his college days. “On Saturday I went to Beverly to the Beals, played golf that day, and on Sunday went to the Sohier’s camp on a neighboring lake for the day, returning here Monday a.m.,” he wrote from Cambridge on a Wednesday in October of his junior year. “Now (11 p.m.) I am just back from a dinner of the Massachusetts Republican Club, of 1,000 people, at which Secretary Shaw of the Treasury and Senator Lodge made most interesting addresses. Mr. Beal gave me the ticket, and it was the chance of a lifetime.” Perhaps Mr. Beal, the father of one of Roosevelt’s Harvard classmates, wished to make a Republican out of his son’s friend; perhaps he simply wanted to do a favor for the budding journalist.

Roosevelt joined several of the clubs that ruled Harvard’s extracurricular universe. The Porcellian Club, the most exclusive, snubbed him, for reasons he never learned. A black ball—literally—from any of the sixteen members sufficed to bar a prospective new member; Roosevelt received at least one in the critical vote. The rejection stung, the more so since Cousin Ted had been a Porcellian member. Later—during the First World War—Franklin remarked that his rejection was the “greatest disappointment of my life.” This may have revealed a lingering hurt; it also reflected the minor character of his failures till then. While he was at Harvard he certainly didn’t appear to dwell on his exclusion from the single stuffiest of the clubs but rather made do quite well with others. He was chosen for Alpha Delta Phi, known as the “Fly Club,” of which he became librarian; the Institute of 1770; the Signet Literary Society; the Memorial Society, which served as keeper of Harvard history and traditions; and Hasty Pudding, the student theatrical group.

He didn’t exactly ignore his studies. His courses included a full round of English, history, and government, as well as the odd philosophy and fine arts class. He passed them all, without distinction. And because he had taken several college-level courses at Groton, he completed the requirements for his bachelor’s degree by the end of his third year.

But he didn’t dream for a minute of skipping his fourth year, which he expected to be his time of social glory. In the autumn of his third year he was elected assistant managing editor of the Crimson, and in the spring managing editor. He could reasonably anticipate, given the paper’s traditions, making president, or editor in chief, in his fourth year, if he stayed in school. When he took his summer vacation in 1903 in Europe, on a tour of the Swiss Alps, he carried along the previous year’s editorials and read them with an eye to doing better. His preparation paid off on his return, when he was indeed elevated to the top post.

The editor of the Crimson wasn’t, by virtue of his office, as prominent on campus as the football captain or the stroke oar of the crew team, but he was a big man nonetheless. He certainly had a voice no other student possessed. In that era the editor wrote all the editorials (later he would share the job with an editorial board). Roosevelt took advantage of his forum to pass judgment on Harvard football, chiding the student body for insufficient support and the team for uninspired play. His latter comments provoked an angry reaction from team members. “I am glad to say the effect has been just what was wanted; it has stirred up the team by making them angry, and they are playing all the harder for it,” he congratulated himself. He weighed in on politics, urging his fellow students to join the Political Club, and the Political Club to get practical. “With such a large city as Boston close at hand, it would be easy to send in parties, under the guidance of some experienced man, which in one day could learn more than through the means of lectures.” He publicized a series of political talks, explaining that “the committee in New York which has selected the speakers hope that by arousing sufficient interest men may be induced to enter New York politics upon leaving college.”

The paper almost monopolized his time, but not quite. He played golf during the week and on Saturday afternoons shouted for the football team. “I was one of three cheer leaders in the Brown game, and felt like a d——f——, waving my arms and legs before several thousand amused spectators,” he told his mother, with poorly disguised delight. “It is a dirty job; one gets chiefly ridicule. But some poor devil has to suffer, and one can’t refuse.” He attended the Bachelors’ Ball in Boston—“which was very exclusive, very animated, and rather tipsy,” he remarked. “I got back at 6.” He went to the wedding of a fraternity brother and took upon himself the task of introducing his classmates to the mother of the bride. “Mrs. Kay was much impressed by his savoir faire,” the grateful groom recalled. “His charm and ease of manner were apparent in those early days.”

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS a Roosevelt before she married Franklin Roosevelt. Her father was Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore’s brother. Alice Roosevelt was a cousin. Her mother was Anna Hall Roosevelt—“one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen,” Eleanor wrote, many years after her mother died. Coming from another child of another mother, such a comment might have required discount for the bias of the excessively close. In Eleanor’s case, any discount must have been in the opposite direction, for she was not close to her mother and never identified with her in any way. Her mother was beautiful; she herself was not—certainly not by her own reckoning. And her mother inhabited a world that never warmed to Eleanor, nor Eleanor to it. “My mother belonged to that New York City society which thought itself all-important,” Eleanor said. “In that society you were kind to the poor; you did not neglect your philanthropic duties in whatever community you lived; you assisted the hospitals and did something for the needy. You accepted invitations to dine and to dance with the right people only; you lived where you would be in their midst. You thought seriously about your children’s education; you read the books that everybody read; you were familiar with good literature. In short, you conformed to the conventional pattern.”

Eleanor’s father inhabited Anna’s society but was not really of it, which may have been why Eleanor identified much more strongly with him. Or it may have been the flaws in Elliott Roosevelt’s character. Elliott was the more attractive and engaging of the two Roosevelt boys, with blond hair, handsome features, and a winning personality. But there was a crack in his character, and in the repeated poundings of sibling competition with the older and more ambitious Theodore, it opened wider and wider. Their parents sent Elliott off to Texas in his teens to recuperate from a nervous breakdown; when the boys’ father died soon after, Elliott employed his inheritance to fund a round-the-world tour. He hunted tigers in India and other beasts elsewhere, finally gaining an edge on his brother, who had yet to bag anything larger than a bear. He brought home heads, hides, and an exotic reputation, which helped sweep Anna Hall, in full bloom at nineteen, off her feet and to the altar. He loved her madly but badly, being already addicted to alcohol and becoming addicted to the opiates he ingested for pain following a riding accident that shattered his leg. He squandered what remained of his fortune and got a servant girl pregnant; she threatened a public scandal and had to be bought off by Theodore and the family.

The sordid details were kept from Eleanor, who knew only that her father loved her with a strange desperation. He needed Eleanor, for Eleanor loved him as Anna never could. Eleanor made no demands, held him to no standards. Eleanor forgave his absences—in sanatoriums and hospitals, often, drying out—and greeted him more ardently the longer he was gone. “Though he was so little with us, my father dominated all this period of my life,” she remembered. “Subconsciously I must have been waiting always for his visits. They were irregular, and he rarely sent word before he arrived, but never was I in the house, even in my room two long flights of stairs above the entrance door, that I did not hear his voice the minute he entered the front door. Walking down stairs was far too slow. I slid down the banisters and usually catapulted into his arms before his hat was hung up.” There was no other man for Eleanor—not when she was a girl, and not when she was a young woman. “He dominated my life as long as he lived, and was the love of my life for many years after he died.”

His importance to her grew even as his presence diminished. When Eleanor was eight, Anna died of diphtheria. Elliott came home for his wife’s final days, and he broke the news to Eleanor. “He was dressed all in black, looking very sad,” she remembered. “He held out his arms and gathered me to him. In a little while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was gone, that she had been all the world to him, and now he had only my brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young, and that he and I must keep close together.” He said that he had to leave and that the children would stay with their mother’s parents. But he would return. “Some day I would make a home for him again. We would travel together and do many things which he painted as interesting and pleasant…. Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or whether he felt that they would be at school…. There started a feeling that day which never left me—that he and I were very close together, and some day would have a life of our own together.”

The promised day never came. Elliott spiraled downward after Anna’s death. He drank more heavily than ever and consorted with women of ill repute. Even Theodore, who had hardened his heart against his brother’s sins, pitied him, more or less. “Poor fellow!” he declared after learning that Elliott had crashed a carriage into a lamp post and injured his head. “If only he could have died instead of Anna!”

Elliott’s end came soon enough. Seized by a fit of delirium tremens, he thrashed about uncontrollably, tried to leap out a window, sweated and foamed, and finally collapsed in a fatal heart attack.

Eleanor refused to credit the news when she heard it. Since moving in with her grandparents, who had exhausted their tenderness on their own children and had none left for Eleanor or her brothers, she had perfected a habit of retreating into a world of fantasy when things went wrong. This defense made her seem strange and sullen to adults and other children, but it shielded her from disappointment when her father didn’t come as promised, when her grandmother scolded her for behavior she didn’t realize was wrong, or when the servants took out their own frustrations on her, knowing she was too timid to report them. The word of her father’s death arrived just before her tenth birthday. “I simply refused to believe it,” she remembered. “And while I wept long and went to bed still weeping, I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dream world as usual.” Her grandmother decreed that the children not attend the funeral. “So I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on, I knew that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”

Her early teens were deeply troubled. She was lonely, physically fearful, and yet stubborn. By her later admission, she lied as a matter of course, which simply elicited harsher responses from her grandmother. For reasons best known to herself, Mrs. Hall refused to let Eleanor visit her Roosevelt relatives more than once or twice a year. Perhaps she thought the demons that had hounded Elliott to his death lived in the Roosevelt closets; perhaps she thought Eleanor’s cousin Alice, who was just eight months older than Eleanor but already displayed a wild streak, was an evil influence. Yet the distance didn’t prevent Eleanor from idolizing Alice, who seemed “so much more sophisticated and grown-up that I was in great awe of her.”

The other Roosevelts were mostly nice. Aunt Corinne, Elliott’s and Theodore’s sister, threw Christmas parties for the youngsters of the clan. Eleanor attended, with a mixture of anticipation and dread. She liked seeing people her own age, but she was awkward and shy. She couldn’t dance, and her clothes were horribly out of fashion. Yet a certain boy seemed not to notice. “I still remember my gratitude at one of these parties to my cousin Franklin Roosevelt when he came and asked me to dance with him.”

Thoughts of Franklin helped tide her through difficult days. The Halls grew harder and harder to live with. Besides her stern and narrow-minded grandmother, Eleanor had to endure some uncles who were undeniably alcoholic and potentially abusive. For protection—presumably before the fact but possibly after—her grandmother or an aunt installed three heavy locks on Eleanor’s bedroom door. A girlfriend who spent the night asked Eleanor what the locks were for. “To keep my uncles out,” she replied.

Life took a turn for the better when, at fifteen, she became old enough to attend boarding school. Her Hall aunts transported her to England and deposited her at Allenswood, a school for girls just south of London. Where none of the students had parents at hand, the orphaned Eleanor no longer felt uniquely alone. In fact she had one distinct advantage over most of the other girls. Her first nurse had been French, and with her mother constantly socializing and her father frequently gone, she had learned French before she learned English. The Allenswood headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, insisted that the girls speak French. “It was quite easy for me,” Eleanor wrote. “But for many of the English girls who had had very little French beforehand, it was a terrible effort.”

In her seventy years Marie Souvestre had developed decided notions of propriety and pedagogy. The girls got three baths a week; any more would have elicited queries as to how one became so dirty. Their beds and dressers were inspected daily; a drawer out of order could result in the contents being cast across the floor. The morning constitutional, a brisk walk about the town common, took place in rain, sleet, or snow. The school had nominal central heating but none of the girls could feel it. Field hockey was required; bruises to arms, legs, and heads were expected.

Yet Eleanor grew to love Marie Souvestre. In the first place, as a French-woman among the English, the headmistress favored her few American students. In the second place, she flouted orthodoxy. She was an atheist who couldn’t imagine a God being bothered with the pettiness of human affairs. Religion, she said, was a crutch for the weak. Eleanor had never heard anything so radical. “Mlle. Souvestre shocked me into thinking,” she said.

Marie Souvestre made Eleanor sit opposite her at meals, and gave her portions of the special dishes she sometimes ordered prepared for herself. When guests came to the school—including Beatrice Chamberlain, the sister of future prime minister Neville Chamberlain—Eleanor was introduced, and she participated in the conversations they had with the headmistress.

Marie Souvestre sometimes took Eleanor with her for holidays. On one trip they traveled by train from Marseilles, ticketed to Pisa. But when the conductor announced the station at Alassio, their plans suddenly changed. “I am going to get off,” she told Eleanor. Eleanor grabbed their bags and they tumbled out. Souvestre explained, as they stood alone on the platform with night falling, that she had a friend in Alassio. “Besides,” she said, “the Mediterranean is a very lovely blue at night, and the sky with the stars coming out is nice to watch from the beach.” As it happened, her friend was away, and they spent the night in a damp room that caused Souvestre to catch cold. But they saw the stars rise over the sea, and she deemed the discomfort well worth it. “I had learned a valuable lesson,” Eleanor recalled. “Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been heretofore.”

At eighteen Eleanor’s idyll ended and she returned to America. Her debut into New York society was “utter agony.” She felt too tall and ungainly. She knew few of the girls and fewer of the boys. She still couldn’t dance. The mirror condemned her as visibly inferior to the other Hall women. “I knew I was the first girl in my mother’s family who was not a belle, and though I never acknowledged it to any of them at that time, I was deeply ashamed.”

FOR THIS REASON she responded to Franklin’s overtures with skepticism, albeit grateful skepticism. She had encountered Franklin a few times since the dance where he plucked her from among the wallflowers. On a visit home from Allenswood she had been traveling by train up the Hudson toward her grandmother’s house when he walked past her in the coach car. He stopped and they chatted, and he invited her to say hello to Sara in the Pullman car. Sara was pleasant but proper. Nothing came of this encounter.

After Eleanor returned from England for good, she saw more of Franklin. They moved in the same circle and went to the same parties and receptions. In January 1903 Eleanor attended Franklin’s twenty-first birthday party. During the subsequent months they saw each other several times, sporadically at first, then more often. One day he dropped by a settlement house on Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she did volunteer work with immigrant children. “All the little girls were tremendously interested,” she remembered, “and the next time they gathered around me demanding to know if he was my ‘feller.’”

He wasn’t yet. Franklin moved cautiously in courting Eleanor. He required time to discover his heart; he also worried what his mother would think. He had dated other girls, including a seventeen-year-old named Alice Sohier with whom he grew sufficiently serious that her parents sent her to Europe to chill the romance. The strategy worked, and the relationship faded. Franklin never told Sara about it. Sara made no secret of her belief that young people lost their minds when they heeded their hearts. Franklin must finish college and get well started on a career before even thinking about a serious relationship.

Such was her reasoning on the subject; her emotions were no less strong. He was the man in her life, and she wasn’t one to share. Eventually, of course, he’d have to marry. She wanted grandchildren. But there was plenty of time for that.

She didn’t tell Franklin all this; she didn’t have to. Her tone of voice when he discussed girlfriends said more than enough. As a result he simply stopped speaking of girls with her. For many months he disguised his growing attachment to Eleanor. The fact that they were kin made the deception easier, as their appearance at many of the same events was taken as a matter of course.

Consequently Sara was astonished when Franklin informed her at Thanksgiving 1903 that he and Eleanor intended to marry. He had proposed to Eleanor the previous weekend, and she had accepted at once. He wanted to delay telling Sara, but Eleanor urged him to speak out. “I never want her to feel she has been deceived,” Eleanor wrote him. “Don’t be angry with me, Franklin, for saying this, and of course you must do as you think best.” He accepted the advice and told Sara at the Delano Thanksgiving dinner. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” Sara remarked in her diary that night.

But she kept her composure, determined to attack this unwelcome development obliquely. Franklin was planning to visit Eleanor in New York; Sara insisted on joining him. The three would have a good conversation, she said. Sara allayed Eleanor’s fears that she would reject the engagement outright, instead simply counseling patience. They mustn’t rush into anything. Eleanor was relieved. “Dearest Cousin Sally,” she explained to Sara, “I must write you and thank you for being so good to me yesterday. I know just how you feel and how hard it must be, but I do so want you to learn to love me a little. You must know that I will always try to do what you wish.” Franklin sent his mother similar thoughts from Harvard. “Dearest Mama,” he said, “I know what pain I must have caused you, and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it.” But he could not help it; he loved Eleanor. “I know my mind, have known it for a long time…. Result: I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest.” He added reassurance that Eleanor would never come between them. “Dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have been and always will be to each other.”

Without apparent difficulty Sara persuaded the couple to postpone any public announcement of their engagement. This left her free to try to undo what young love had done, without the world being any wiser. She scheduled a six-week Caribbean cruise and, despite the demands of Franklin’s newspaper work during his final semester at college, insisted that he join her. If distance alone didn’t diminish his ardor for Eleanor, she calculated, he might meet another girl. He did meet other girls, and some older women too. But he didn’t forget Eleanor, and he returned to New York more devoted than ever. Sara then applied to Joseph Choate, a longtime friend and the current American ambassador to Britain, to take Franklin to London as his private secretary. Choate said he’d like to help but already had a secretary.

Eleanor found Sara’s sabotage attempts irksome, yet she held her tongue and pen. She wished Franklin would assert himself more forcefully on her behalf, but when he didn’t she declined to be provoked. Precisely what she communicated to him is impossible to reconstruct; she later burned their courtship correspondence. But clearly she didn’t deliver any ultimatums or throw any tantrums. She was too much in love.

Why she loved Franklin so, she probably couldn’t have said. Obviously there was chemistry between the twenty-one-year-old man and the nineteen-year-old woman. But beyond the physical attraction, Franklin doubtless signified to Eleanor things she had lost or never experienced. The Delanos were daunting as individuals, yet they stuck together in a way that Eleanor’s own family never had. “They were a clan,” Eleanor wrote. “And if misfortune befell one of them, the others rallied at once…. The Delanos might disapprove of one another, and if so, they were not slow to express their disapproval, but let someone outside as much as hint at criticism, and the clan was ready to tear him limb from limb.” The thought of having the clan at her back doubtless appealed to Eleanor.

At one level or another, Franklin must have seemed a replacement for her lost father. A certain physical resemblance existed, and it was complemented by Franklin’s charm and easy social grace, which matched Eleanor’s memories of her father. But whatever the likeness, Eleanor had been searching for a strong male figure since her father died—in fact, since before that, if she was being honest with herself. Just how strong Franklin truly was, she couldn’t say. But she was willing to take a chance on him.

Franklin had his own reasons for loving Eleanor. In the first place, she was better-looking than she let on. Alice Roosevelt, who rarely had a kind word for anyone, remarked of Eleanor, “She was always making herself out to be an ugly duckling, but she was really rather attractive. Tall, rather coltish-looking, with masses of pale, gold hair rippling to below her waist, and really lovely blue eyes.” Of course Alice, being Alice, couldn’t stop there. She felt compelled to add, “It’s true that her chin went in a bit, which wouldn’t have been so noticeable if only her hateful grandmother had fixed her teeth.”

Beyond her appearance, Eleanor was intelligent and more thoughtful than most of the girls Franklin encountered at parties and mixers. She spoke French better than he did, she had lived abroad, and she had experienced aspects of life that made his own sheltered existence seem mundane. That her uncle was the president of the United States didn’t diminish her appeal. Franklin remained far from knowing what his future held, but it was difficult to imagine that having in-laws in the White House would hurt his prospects, no matter what he attempted.

YET THOSE WHITE HOUSE in-laws—in particular Theodore Roosevelt—made the wedding itself problematic. In the autumn of 1904 Sara acknowledged defeat in her effort to prevent the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, and she permitted the engagement to be announced. A date was set for the wedding, then reset and reset again. The problem now wasn’t Sara but Theodore, who would stand in for Eleanor’s deceased father. The president, after winning election in November 1904, had to be reinaugurated, and he had to accommodate all the other demands on the time of the nation’s head of state and head of government. Finally an opening came into view: March 17, when Theodore could stroke the pride of New York’s Irish Americans in the morning by reviewing the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade and tend to the family matters in the afternoon.

The ceremony was held at the brownstone of Eleanor’s cousin Susie Parish on East Seventy-sixth Street. From the bride’s perspective it was a fiasco. After McKinley’s assassination the Secret Service took no chances on losing another president, and it threw a cordon around the entire neighborhood. Wedding guests were stopped and interrogated; all were delayed by the tangles the president’s presence created in the traffic of the Upper East Side. Many fumingly reached their destination only after the ceremony ended.

Endicott Peabody, officiating at the request of Franklin and Sara, asked who gave the bride away. Theodore answered loudly, “I do.” Eleanor and Franklin exchanged vows, rings, and kisses. Theodore congratulated the groom with a joke that soon made the rounds: “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family!”

At this point a door that connected Susie Parish’s house to the matching house of her mother next door was thrown open, and the wedding party was introduced to the larger crowd at the reception. Theodore, who could never resist an audience, strode forward and hypnotized the guests in his usual fashion. Years later, Eleanor recalled the moment distinctly: “Those closest to us did take time to wish us well, but the great majority of the guests were far more interested in the thought of being able to see and listen to the President; and in a very short time this young married couple were standing alone.” Eleanor of course said nothing, although she surely hoped that her new husband would speak up. But he was as smitten as the rest. “I cannot remember that even Franklin seemed to mind.”

How she felt beyond that, she didn’t say. But the experience couldn’t have eased her lifelong insecurities, and if she thought she saw her future in the sight of her husband drawn irresistibly toward politics, in preference to her, she could have been forgiven.

3.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT PROBABLY COULDN’T HAVE IDENTIFIED PRECISELY when he began to model himself on Cousin Ted—or Uncle Ted, as the president became upon Franklin’s marriage to Eleanor. Perhaps it was during one of Franklin’s visits to the Roosevelt White House, as the younger man looked around and imagined himself living there. Perhaps it was at the wedding, when Franklin experienced the magnetic attraction of political power. Doubtless Sara suggested, likely often, that if one Roosevelt could reach the pinnacle of American politics, another Roosevelt could, too.

Whatever its origin, Franklin’s emulation of Theodore shaped his personal and professional life for decades, and it manifested itself soon after his wedding. Theodore had gone from Harvard to Columbia Law School. Franklin did the same. Theodore had found law school dull and dropped out before finishing. So did Franklin—although in his case he took and passed the New York bar exam, something Theodore never accomplished. Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler later chided Franklin Roosevelt for not completing his degree. “You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams,” Butler said. Roosevelt answered with a laugh: “That just shows how unimportant the law really is.”

His job search began in the obvious places: the clubs, dining rooms, and salons of those he knew socially. Lewis Ledyard was commodore of the New York Yacht Club, besides being a leading partner in one of the most powerful law firms on Wall Street. Edmund Baylies was a partner in the same firm, in addition to being a member of the Yacht Club and the Knickerbocker Club and president of the Seamen’s Church Institute, a charitable organization. Franklin knew both men from the Yacht Club, of which he was a member, and he knew Baylies from the Knickerbocker, to which he also belonged, and the Seamen’s Institute, on whose board of directors he served. Baylies and Ledyard thought Roosevelt promising, and they offered him the equivalent of an apprenticeship. For a year he would work without pay. If he did well he would be placed on a small salary and on the track that led to partnership.

Roosevelt commenced his legal career with a conspicuous lack of gravity. He printed cards for the occasion:

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

COUNSELOR AT LAW

54 WALL STREET

NEW YORK

I beg to call your attention to my unexcelled facilities for carrying on every description of legal business. Unpaid bills a specialty. Briefs on the liquor question furnished free to ladies. Race suicides cheerfully prosecuted. Small dogs chloroformed without charge. Babies raised under advice of expert grandmother etc., etc.

The principals of the firm, by contrast, took their calling quite seriously. When Roosevelt arrived, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn was up to its cufflinks and cravats in the signature antitrust suit of the era, with John Milburn personally serving as counsel to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, then under indictment by Theodore Roosevelt’s Justice Department. Lewis Ledyard represented J. P. Morgan and the United States Steel Corporation, the giant trust Morgan had created in 1901, which continued to swallow its competitors under Ledyard’s legal guidance. Three decades later Franklin Roosevelt would consider big business, and the lawyers who defended the great firms, to be his mortal enemies, but at the outset of his career he entertained no such prejudices. On the contrary, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn seemed everything a young man in his position could ask for.

An apprenticeship was appropriate, for academic legal education in those days strongly favored theory over practice. Roosevelt discovered that Columbia had prepared him hardly at all for the day-to-day work of a lawyer. He had never been inside a courtroom and didn’t know the first thing about trying a case. “I went to a big law office in New York,” he explained afterward, regarding his hiring by Carter Ledyard. “And somebody the day after I got there said, ‘Go up and answer the calendar call in the supreme court”—the New York supreme court—“tomorrow morning. We have such and such a case on.’” Roosevelt had to confess that he had no idea how to do what was being asked. “Then the next day somebody gave me a deed of transfer of some land. He said, ‘Take it up to the county clerk’s office.’ I had never been in a county clerk’s office. And there I was, theoretically a full-fledged lawyer.”

Those just ahead of Roosevelt in the firm’s hierarchy gradually filled him in on what Columbia had failed to teach him. They introduced him to the procedures and personnel of the New York courts. He caught on sufficiently that the firm appointed him managing clerk in charge of municipal litigation. He mainly pushed paper but in the process gained an appreciation for how the law affected the lives of those caught in its coils. He was assigned some minor cases of his own and learned to bargain with opposing counsel in order to settle cases before they reached trial. His heart wasn’t always on the side of his clients, typically big corporations being sued by plaintiffs and lawyers with far inferior resources. One story remembered of Roosevelt had him haggling with a plaintiff’s lawyer over a claim for damages. The lawyer asked for $300; Roosevelt refused. The lawyer asked for $150; Roosevelt again refused. Roosevelt finally visited the lawyer’s apartment. The lawyer was not at home, but his mother was, and she explained that the family was in dire straits. The condition of the apartment confirmed her remarks. Roosevelt wrote a note to the lawyer: “I would be glad to settle this case for thirty-five dollars. I cannot get myself to honestly believe that it is worth a cent more, probably less. Enclosed is a small personal check which I am sure you will not return until you are well out of these temporary difficulties.” The check was for $150. “I wept,” the lawyer said. “Six months later I paid him back.”

Away from work Roosevelt mingled with the people an up-and-coming member of the New York elite should know. He sailed at the Yacht Club and lunched at the Knickerbocker. He golfed in Westchester County when staying in the city, and on Dutchess County courses when at Hyde Park. By all appearances he was making a successful start on a life of respectable ease and moderate good service to the institutions upholding the status quo of capitalist America.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WORKED hard at her marriage, trying to be a loving wife to Franklin and a devoted daughter to Sara. Neither task came easily. Sara’s presence had hovered over the newlyweds’ ship as they steamed to Britain on their honeymoon, and it tracked them across the Continent. Franklin still felt the responsibility for his mother’s happiness he had inherited upon his father’s death—a responsibility Sara did nothing to diminish. Now Eleanor, partly from a desire to become one of the Delano clan, and partly, no doubt, from considerations of self-defense, committed herself to being the daughter her mother-in-law had never had. “Dearest Mama…,” she wrote Sara, who had arranged the details of the journey, “Thank you so much, dear, for everything you did for us. You are always just the sweetest, dearest Mama to your children, and I shall look forward to our next long evening together, when I shall want to be kissed all the time.”

Not a week passed that Sara didn’t receive multiple letters from the newlyweds—long letters relating all but the most intimate details of the honeymoon. From London to Paris to Venice to St. Moritz and down the Rhine the travelers proceeded, informing Sara of their progress—and being informed, in turn, of Sara’s progress preparing the house they would live in upon their return. It was on East Thirty-sixth Street, just three blocks from Sara’s own house. Franklin gave not the slightest hint of wanting to provide for Eleanor himself; on the contrary he wrote his mother, “We are so glad that it is really through you that we get the house…. It is so good that you take all the trouble for us.” He closed this letter with words that may have revealed more than he intended: “Ever your loving infants.”

Besides tending to Sara back home, Franklin and Eleanor visited many cousins, uncles, aunts, and family friends and acquaintances scattered about Britain and France. They saw the Whitelaw Reids in London, where Reid was now the American ambassador. They had lunch with Sidney and Beatrice Webb (“They write books on sociology,” Franklin said of the Fabian couple) and tea with Beatrice Chamberlain. They stayed with some Delanos in Paris and traveled for a time with Bob Ferguson, a British Rough Rider comrade of Theodore Roosevelt’s. Eleanor caught up with old teachers at Allenswood, unfortunately not including Marie Souvestre, who had recently died.

Especially in England they were treated like aristocracy on account of their last name. “We were ushered into the royal suite, one flight up, front, price $1,000 a day—a sitting room 40 ft. by 30 ft., a double bedroom, another ditto and a bath,” Franklin wrote from London. “Our breath was so taken away that we couldn’t even protest and are now saying, ‘Damn the expense, wot’s the odds’!”

The final weeks of the honeymoon coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Everyone is talking about Cousin Theodore, saying that he is the most prominent figure of present-day history,” Franklin wrote, with vicarious pride. He told Sara they would be home soon. “You know how we long to see our Mummy again.”

Eleanor found the voyage home difficult. She wasn’t the sailor her husband was, and she sorely feared disappointing him. The outbound journey had been suspiciously easy, with fair weather and calm seas the entire way. But the return was a trial, despite conditions hardly more severe. On landing she learned the reason: she was pregnant. “It was quite a relief,” she wrote. She had worried not simply about being unable to keep up with Franklin as a traveler. “Little idiot that I was, I had been seriously troubled for fear that I would never have any children and my husband would therefore be much disappointed.”

Aside from the morning sickness, the pregnancy went smoothly. She suffered the ordinary first-baby jitters, magnified in her case by not previously having spent time with infants. “I had never had any interest in dolls or little children, and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” The nurse she hired to assist her turned out to be no help. The woman was young and scarcely more experienced than Eleanor. “She knew a considerable amount about babies’ diseases, but her inexperience made this knowledge almost a menace, for she was constantly looking for obscure illnesses and never expected that a well fed and well cared for baby would move along in a normal manner.” Yet Eleanor was too timid to complain. “For years I was afraid of my nurses,…who ordered me around quite as much as they ordered the children.”

Sara offered assistance but on her own terms. She set up Eleanor and Franklin’s first house, and when their family outgrew that she built them another, on East Sixty-fifth Street—adjacent to her own new house, with rooms that opened into the matching rooms of her house. Eleanor had no say in the design or decorating of her house. She might have asserted herself but didn’t. As a result she felt the independence she had learned from Marie Souvestre slipping away. “I was growing very dependent on my mother-in-law, requiring her help on almost every subject, and never thought of asking for anything which I felt would not meet with her approval.” In later years she reflected on Sara: “She is a very strong character, but because of her marriage to an older man she disciplined herself into gladly living his life and enjoying his belongings, and as a result I think she felt that young people should cater to older people. She gave great devotion to her own family and longed for their love and affection in return. She was somewhat jealous, because of her love, of anything which she felt might mean a really deep attachment outside of the family circle.”

Eleanor was usually charitable in her assessment of others’ motives, and she may have given her mother-in-law more benefit of the doubt than Sara deserved. But whatever the wellsprings of Sara’s omnipresence in the lives of Eleanor and Franklin, it ultimately provoked a breakdown. “I did not know what was the matter with me,” Eleanor wrote, “but I remember that a few weeks after we moved into the new house in East 65th Street I sat in front of my dressing table and wept, and when my bewildered young husband asked me what on earth was the matter with me, I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.”

If Franklin ever felt Sara’s presence to be a burden, he didn’t say so. And doubtless her demands weighed less on him, who had outlets beyond the household for his energies and emotions, than they did on Eleanor, who could never escape her mother-in-law. Yet whatever his own perception of Sara, he offered little sympathy to Eleanor. “He thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while,” Eleanor recalled. Then he left her to cry alone.

THERE WERE OTHER occasions for tears. The first baby, Anna Eleanor, born in 1906, was followed by a son, James, in 1907, and a second son, Franklin Jr., in 1909. Franklin Jr. was the biggest of Eleanor’s babies and appeared the most robust. His parents and grandmother fussed over all three and took the standard precaution among the well-to-do of clearing out of the city during the unhealthy summer season. They typically sojourned at Hyde Park before heading to Campobello. Eleanor would take the children by train; Franklin would gather a group of male friends and sail up the coast in the Half Moon II, the successor to his father’s boat, which had been destroyed when the naphtha tank exploded. Eleanor never quite understood the appeal of these boys’ weeks out. “They always told me what delicious things they had had to eat on the boat. Apparently their idea of perfection was a combination of sausages, syrup and pancakes for every meal, varied occasionally by lobster or scrambled eggs. My husband was the cook as well as the captain, and was very proud of his prowess.”

Franklin was an accomplished sailor, but even the best boatmen meet trouble now and then. Some of Eleanor’s cousins, the Parishes, were coming to Campobello to visit, and Franklin and Eleanor sailed the mile to Easton to greet the evening train. On the return the compass light failed, and Franklin replaced it with a lantern. Meanwhile a thick fog set in, requiring Franklin to navigate by compass alone. The crossing took longer than usual, but at first he attributed the delay to the slow speed he was keeping on account of the fog. Suddenly a passenger in the bow shouted “Hard aport!” and Franklin veered over just in time to miss crashing into a dock at the village of Lubec, far off course. Mystified and chagrined, he recharted the course. A few minutes later another warning call came from the bow, and Franklin had to maneuver frantically to keep the boat from grounding on a small island he hadn’t expected. More confused than ever, he checked the compass, then rechecked it, before finally realizing that the lantern was made of steel that was deranging the compass. He removed the lantern and thereafter read the compass by match light, and eventually brought all to safety. “Never again were we able to induce Mrs. Parish to attempt a trip to Campobello,” Eleanor recalled.

The summer of 1908 proved an exception to the Hyde Park–Campobello routine. One-year-old James had contracted pneumonia that spring, and Eleanor was leery of subjecting him to the chill and damp of the Bay of Fundy. Besides, she wanted to stay close to regular medical care. So the family rented a house at Seabright, on the New Jersey coast. The quarters were cramped by comparison with what they were used to, but James recovered in the sun and salt air.

The following year Franklin Jr. was the one who caused the greatest concern. The family stopped at Hyde Park en route back from Campobello to New York City. Eleanor and Franklin went ahead to the city, only to learn that the three children had caught the flu. Little Franklin, just six months old, was the worst off. Eleanor fetched a doctor from New York and returned to Hyde Park; the doctor declared that the baby’s heart had been affected and insisted that he be taken to a hospital in New York. Hospital care in such a case consisted of little more than watchful waiting, and though cause for hope appeared now and again, the baby died in early November.

Franklin was saddened, but Eleanor was consumed with self-reproach. “I felt he had been left too much to the nurse and I knew too little about him, and that in some way I must be to blame. I even felt that I had not cared enough about him…. I made myself and all those around me most unhappy during that winter. I was even a little bitter at my poor young husband who occasionally tried to make me see how idiotically I was behaving.”

4.

THOSE WHO KNEW FRANKLIN PROFESSIONALLY DURING THIS PERIOD—in particular his fellow law clerks, with whom he spent hours every day, sharing confidences and dreams—realized he wasn’t long for the law. “I remember him saying with engaging frankness that he wasn’t going to practice law forever,” Grenville Clark recollected years later. “He intended to run for office at the first opportunity…. He wanted to be and thought he had a very real chance to be president.” Roosevelt sketched the route, which drew liberally on the experience of his kinsman in the White House. “I remember that he described very accurately the steps which he thought could lead to this goal,” Clark continued. “They were: first, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy…and finally the governorship of New York. ‘Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be President with any luck’ are about his words that stick in my memory.” Roosevelt said all this most matter-of-factly, in a way that compelled respect if not outright admiration for his audacity. “I do not recall that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might perhaps have done. It seemed proper and sincere; and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”

It was a stretch even so. Simply entering politics was unusual for one of Roosevelt’s class. Theodore Roosevelt had shocked his family and friends by taking the plunge a quarter century earlier; a godfatherly type told him that politics was grubby, low, and rough, and its practitioners were not those with whom gentlemen associated. “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class,” Theodore Roosevelt recalled. “I intended to be one of the governing class.” Franklin did, too, following Theodore’s example.

Yet Franklin’s course was, if anything, harder than Theodore’s had been. Theodore’s people were Republicans, the relatively respectable party in New York. Franklin’s folks were Democrats, the party of Tammany Hall. Defection appears never to have occurred to Franklin; consequently any political career he commenced would have to struggle against, surrender to, or otherwise take account of the most storied and arguably the most corrupt political machine in America.

To be sure, Tammany Hall had mellowed somewhat since the days of Boss William Marcy Tweed, who bilked the city of millions in the aftermath of the Civil War. Tweed eventually died in jail, an object lesson in the wages of corruption. But the source of the corruption—the wellsprings of the cesspool, so to speak—remained. In fact they flowed more strongly than ever as America continued to industrialize and to attract immigrants by the several hundred thousand per year. The immigrants arrived in need of homes, jobs, education, and the myriad other goods and services required to make a new life in a strange land. Relatives and friends from the old countries supplied some of the needs, but being mostly poor themselves, they could do only so much. Government, as government, had yet to conceive its role as providing social services. Consequently the machines—headed by the bosses, staffed by precinct captains, and manned by regiments of ward heelers—found their niche acting as the immigrants’ sponsors and protectors. They helped the newcomers locate housing and employment; they furnished food and clothing if these ran short; they interceded with police and judges when youthful enthusiasm got out of hand or want drove men to desperate deeds. In return they asked only for loyalty at election time. And they usually got it.

The more thoughtful, or merely more sophistic, of the bosses formulated a philosophy of the machines as agents of democracy. “Consider the problem which every democratic system has to solve,” Richard Croker, Tammany’s chief at the turn of the century, told journalist William Stead. “Government, we say, of the people, by the people, and for the people. The aim is to interest as many of the citizens as possible in the work—which is not an easy work, and has many difficulties and disappointments—of governing the state or the city.” Government officials had to appeal to the needs and desires of citizens. In New York, citizens were often immigrants. “We have thousands upon thousands of men who are alien born, who have no ties connecting them with the city or the state,” Croker said. “They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws. They are the raw material with which we have to build up the state.” Tammany took upon its shoulders the building. It welcomed the newcomers and made them Americans. “Who else would do it if we did not?” Croker conceded that certain of Tammany’s tactics couldn’t stand close scrutiny. But he refused to apologize for them. “If we go down into the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter.”

Croker’s logic wouldn’t be lost on Franklin Roosevelt, once Roosevelt turned to politics. But it largely eluded New York voters in 1901, when Croker and Tammany were ousted in favor of a reformist slate led by Columbia University president Seth Low. Tammany beat a tactical retreat and reconstituted itself under the leadership of Charles Murphy, who by 1910 dominated the Democrats not only of New York City but of New York state.

IT WAS CHARLES MURPHY whom Roosevelt confronted when he decided to run for the state senate that year. Roosevelt had intended to aim lower, for the state assembly. When the Democrats of Dutchess County heard that he was interested in politics—and that even while living in New York City he had maintained his voting residence in Hyde Park—they approached him eagerly. The Roosevelt name was the most famous in American political life; in fact, with Theodore Roosevelt just then completing a post-presidential grand tour of Europe, it might have been the most famous political name in the world. Beyond the candidate’s family celebrity, a Franklin Roosevelt campaign would be self-financed—or at least financed by the candidate’s mother—which was no small consideration for a county organization strapped for funds. Finally, Dutchess County, like most of the rest of upstate New York, was historically Republican. Any candidate would be a long shot, and if Franklin Roosevelt flubbed his chance little would be lost.

Yet there was reason for hope. The national Republicans had taken to feuding since Theodore Roosevelt left office, with the party’s conservatives striving to reclaim control of the GOP and the party’s progressives struggling to maintain the momentum they had achieved under the Rough Rider. The split in the Republicans afforded hope to Democrats all across the country, including upstate New York. In Dutchess County, assemblyman and former lieutenant governor Lewis Chanler, who had hinted at retirement, became sufficiently encouraged by his prospects to announce at the last minute for reelection. This prompted the county’s Democratic committee, meeting in early October, to nominate Roosevelt for the state senate rather than the assembly.

The switch was a stroke of luck, but whether good luck or bad wasn’t immediately apparent. A senate seat was a bigger prize than a spot in the assembly, but for precisely this reason the Republicans would contest the senate election more vigorously. Yet Roosevelt was rarely inclined to second-guess fate, and he didn’t do so now. “I thank you heartily for the honor you have done me,” he told the nominating convention, in what amounted to his maiden speech as a candidate. “But even more do I thank you for giving me an opportunity to advance the cause of good government under the banner of the Democratic party.”

The voters of Roosevelt’s senate district knew his name, but they didn’t know him. And with only a month between the nomination and the election, he had to work hard and travel fast to introduce himself to them. New York’s rural voters still expected candidates to visit them by train or horse and buggy, if the candidates visited them at all. Roosevelt laid out a map of the three counties his district comprised and determined that he’d never cover them all the old way. And so he hired a big, gaudy red, open-topped Maxwell automobile. He hoisted flags from the rear of the car and enlisted the company of Congressman Richard Connell, a rare successful Democrat in upstate New York, and they roared from town to town and village to village. They met farmers on the road who were as intrigued by the car as by its passengers. But whatever the reason they stopped, Roosevelt leaped out to shake their hands, ask them what they wanted from their state government, and promise to represent them to the best of his ability.

His prepared speeches stressed honest government and fair treatment of farmers. Yet mostly they revealed an attractive young man. “Humboldt, the great traveler, once said: ‘You can tell the character of the people in a house by looking at the outside,’” he informed a small crowd at the public library in Pleasant Valley, not far from Poughkeepsie. “This is even more true of a community. And I think I can truthfully say that of all the villages of Dutchess County—and I have been in pretty nearly every one—there are very few that appear as favorably as Pleasant Valley.” Before this race Roosevelt had no particular reason to think he’d like, or be good at, campaigning. But he discovered he loved it and had a gift. He told jokes on himself. “I’m not Teddy,” he reminded one audience—by way of reminding them that he was a Roosevelt. While the crowd laughed, he continued, “A little shaver said to me the other day that he knew I wasn’t Teddy. I asked him why, and he replied, ‘Because you don’t show your teeth.’” But Franklin did say “Bully,” just like Teddy, and, in conscious echo of Theodore’s Square Deal, which called for government efficiency and an even hand between business and labor, he declared, “I am running squarely on the issue of honesty and economy and efficiency in our state senate.” That his opponent was a protégé of a longtime Republican foe of Uncle Ted reinforced the family connection.

Roosevelt’s listeners responded with surprising enthusiasm. The twenty-eight-year-old candidate had no special qualifications for office; he brought no compelling new ideas to the campaign; he had little in common with most of the voters of his district; he utterly lacked elective experience. But he had that something—that sincerity, that charisma—that caused people to respond. And when voters went to the polls on November 8, they elected Franklin Roosevelt to the New York senate by a margin of 1,440 votes out of 30,000 cast.

The victory wasn’t wholly personal; it was a good day for Democrats as a party. They captured both houses of the New York legislature, and the federal House of Representatives. In neighboring New Jersey, another Democratic first-timer, Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, won the Garden State governorship.

All the same, it was a fine start for Roosevelt’s political career. Not even Uncle Ted, whose first victory had been in a race for a state assembly seat, had done better.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT ARRIVED in Albany as the majority Democrats were deciding who should replace Republican senator Chauncey Depew in Washington. Depew had served two terms in the Senate and hadn’t done poorly for New York. If his fate had been up to the voters of New York, he probably would have continued in office. But in those days before the Seventeenth Amendment he answered to the legislature, not the voters, and the Democrats weren’t about to waste their upset victory on returning a Republican to Washington.

Among the New York Democrats, the strongest element was the Tammany delegation, which took its orders from Charles Murphy. The Tammany boss decreed that William Sheehan—“Blue-Eyed Billy”—should become New York’s next senator. Sheehan, a former lieutenant governor who had subsequently made a fortune in transport and utilities, with Tammany’s help and to Tammany’s benefit, wasn’t markedly less qualified than many of those who held seats in the Senate, but his candidacy caught the force of the rising progressive headwind. Near the top of the list of progressive must-fixes was the method of electing senators. Reliance on the legislatures seemed anachronistic eighty years after the nation’s embrace of democracy; it allowed machines like Tammany to frustrate the will of the people. For a decade progressives had demanded the popular election of senators. But till the Constitution could be amended to that effect, they waged their antiboss battles within the statehouses.

The current round of the contest in New York began on January 1, 1911, when Franklin Roosevelt and the rest of the lawmakers swore their oath of office. Among the freshmen, Roosevelt attracted the greatest attention. “His patronymic had gone before him,” a feature writer the New York Times sent to Albany to profile the Democratic Roosevelt explained. “Those who looked closely at the lawmaker behind Desk 26 saw a young man with the finely chiseled face of a Roman patrician, only with a ruddier glow of health upon it. He is tall and lithe. With his handsome face and his form of supple strength he could make a fortune on the stage.” During the campaign some New Yorkers had imagined a closer family relation between Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt than actually existed; the Times writer set the matter straight. He also suggested a difference in style between the former president and the novice state senator. “It is safe to predict that the African jungle never will resound with the crack of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rifle. The thought of the hartebeest and the wildebeest, the mobile springbok and the deceitful dig-dig does not set the blood tingling in his veins. As far as he is concerned, the roaring lion may pursue unmolested its prey until such time as it shall lie down with the lamb.”

Yet one beast drew the fire of the new senator. “Only if you should happen to say ‘Tiger!’ you will find that Franklin D. Roosevelt believes there is good hunting nearer home,” the Times asserted. The tiger was the mascot of Tammany Hall, and Roosevelt, as a bearer of that famously combative and progressive name, had a symbolic rifle thrust into his hand whether he wished it or not.

In fact he relished the fight. Roosevelt’s political philosophy was largely inchoate at the beginning of his career. He couldn’t have convincingly explained where he stood on half the issues that confronted legislators at that time. But his upbringing had caused him to value honesty in government; the example of Uncle Ted pushed him toward progressivism; and his emerging political instincts told him he’d be noticed if he bearded the Tammany tiger. Besides, he didn’t like being told what to do. This only child of an indulgent mother had never experienced the weight of discipline, and he didn’t propose to shoulder it now.

Yet discipline was precisely what was expected of Democrats in Albany. In the matter of selecting a senator, the party traditionally operated as a bloc. The candidate of the party caucus was, ipso facto, the candidate of all the Democrats in the legislature. Because Tammany controlled a majority of the Democrats in the legislature, Charles Murphy’s choice for senator would carry the caucus, and because the Democrats constituted a majority in the legislature, Murphy’s candidate would win the election.

There was one loophole. Innocently or otherwise, Roosevelt asked Alfred E. Smith, a Tammany man more approachable than some of Murphy’s followers, just how tightly party rules bound the members. Smith replied that if Roosevelt attended the party caucus, his vote for the caucus candidate would be required. But if he didn’t attend, he could vote his conscience. Roosevelt noted Smith’s forthrightness and thanked him for it—and proceeded to boycott the caucus.

If that had been the extent of his rebellion, Murphy would have shrugged. Yet Roosevelt, on account of being a Roosevelt, was in the spotlight, and his independence prompted concern among the Tammany leadership. “Big Tim” Sullivan, a Murphy crony, inquired whether this new Roosevelt was really kin to the Rough Rider; informed that he was, Sullivan remarked, “Well, if we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the dock. The Roosevelts run true to form, and this kid is likely to do for us what the Colonel is going to do for the Republican party: split it wide open.”

Tammany’s worries intensified when Roosevelt’s boycott of the caucus spread. Roosevelt wasn’t the only progressive in Albany, and twenty other Democrats joined him in pledging to resist Murphy’s dictation. They proposed, as an alternative to Sheehan, Edward M. Shepard, a reformer from Brooklyn. Partly on account of his famous name, but equally by virtue of his wealth, Roosevelt emerged as the leader of the rebels. Few of the legislators could afford to rent houses in Albany; most took rooms in hotels. Roosevelt was one of the rare renters, and the large house he and Eleanor leased on State Street near the Capitol became a third home for the insurgents. “The men arrived sometime during the morning,” Eleanor recalled. “They went up to the Senate, cast their votes, ate their lunch, and during the afternoon were back at our house for smoking and talk in the library. They went out again for supper, and returned and spent the entire evening.” Their presence ultimately created problems for Eleanor and the children. “One morning the nurse came to me and announced that the children were slowly choking to death in their room because the fumes of the cigars which had been smoked downstairs for months had permeated the bedroom above.” Yet rather than evict the smokers, Eleanor moved the children.

Roosevelt initially ducked the label of leader of the insurgency. “Leader?” he responded to a question. “I should not claim that title. There really is no leader.” He similarly denied any attempt to split or otherwise weaken the Democratic party. “This is not a split in the party, or even a fight in the party. We are merely a group of men who are taking a rational view of a situation that is not very difficult to size up, and acting in accordance with that view…. I am a Democrat first, last, and all the time.”

But he didn’t deny opposing bossism and fighting for honest democracy. “The control by Tammany Hall of the state Democracy will stand under present conditions as an insurmountable obstacle in the way of party success,” he said. “This fight involves a much bigger question than whether Shepard or Sheehan shall go to the United States Senate.” Taking a deep breath, till he became quite full of himself, Roosevelt asserted, “The election of Mr. Sheehan would mean disaster to the Democratic party not only in the state but in the nation.”

Whether or not it affected the nation, the Roosevelt insurgency did draw the attention of the national press. Since the Tweed scandals of the 1870s, everyone in America knew of Tammany Hall; to those many outsiders who looked on Gotham as Gomorrah, Tammany equaled bossism at its most corrupt. The efforts of a new Roosevelt—and one rather more photogenic than Theodore—to tame the Tammany tiger made the best copy since the colonel had assaulted San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. Paper after paper across the country carried pictures of Roosevelt and reports of his rebellion against Boss Murphy; editor after editor endorsed his struggle. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reminded readers of Theodore Roosevelt’s valiant campaigns against corruption and declared, “Franklin D. Roosevelt is beginning his public career fully as auspiciously…. If none of the colonel’s sons turn out to befit objects for popular admiration, may it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty?”

YET TAMMANY WAS wily and determined. New York legislators, like nearly all state legislators then and after, required incomes beyond what they received for their lawmaking service. A handful, like Roosevelt, were financially independent; the others operated farms or businesses or pursued professions. Several of the insurgents had contracts with the state or with businesses dependent to a greater or lesser degree on the goodwill of Tammany Hall. As the boycott of Sheehan proceeded, these vulnerable ones found themselves pinched where it hurt. Contracts were canceled, loans called, mortgages foreclosed. Roosevelt bravely promised to make the victims whole. “Some of us have means, and we intend to stand by the men who are voting for principle,” he declared. “We shall see to it that they are protected in the discharge of their public duty. They shall not suffer because they are faithful to the people.” Just how he proposed to do this, he didn’t say. His own means—and Sara’s—rendered him impervious to Tammany’s economic counterattack, but they didn’t stretch far enough to cover all his allies.

Tammany unveiled other weapons. Sheehan was Irish, as were Murphy and many of Tammany’s most loyal supporters. Old-stock Americans of such pedigrees as Roosevelt’s often looked down on the Irish, especially the destitute refugees of the Great Famine of the 1840s and their heirs. Though in his case inaccurate, imputations of anti-Irish feeling in Roosevelt’s opposition to Sheehan and Tammany weren’t implausible. From allegations of anti-Irishism to charges of anti-Catholicism was a short step, which Tammany’s rumor-mongers readily made.

Roosevelt denied the rumors vigorously. “This is absolutely untrue!” he shouted. “We do not ask and do not care from what stock a man may have sprung or what his religious beliefs may be. All we ask is that he be a fit man for United States Senator.” He pointed out that the insurgents included a number of Irishmen and Catholics. Yet his denials simply gave the accusations a larger audience, as Tammany reckoned they would.

Roosevelt fumblingly counterattacked. He alleged that Sheehan was in bed with Thomas Fortune Ryan, an infamous speculator who, with Tammany’s help, had managed to monopolize rail transport in much of New York City. Or if Sheehan wasn’t in bed with Ryan, at least he was in church with Ryan: Roosevelt asserted that the two attended the same ten o’clock mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was a silly charge—hundreds of worshipers attended the same service—and Roosevelt soon let it drop.

But he held his ground otherwise. The insurgency wasn’t going away, he declared. “The Sheehan men can keep up the struggle as long as they choose. They will find that we can stand it as long as they can. They must be aware, however, that the longer they keep up the battle the worse it is for the Democratic Party.”

Murphy eventually agreed. He invited Roosevelt to his hotel suite. The day happened to be Roosevelt’s twenty-ninth birthday, and the Tammany boss exuded good cheer. He met Roosevelt with what Roosevelt afterward characterized to reporters as a “delightful smile,” and he conducted the interview with respect and friendliness. “I know I can’t make you change your mind unless you want to change it,” he told Roosevelt (again by Roosevelt’s account). “Is there any chance of you and the other twenty men coming around to vote for Sheehan?” Roosevelt responded, “No, Mr. Murphy…. In the first place, we believe a great many of our Democratic constituents don’t want him to be the United States senator, and in the second place, he is altogether too closely connected with the traction trust in New York City.” In Roosevelt’s version, Murphy said he accepted this reasoning. He intimated that he had chosen Sheehan more from a sense of personal obligation than from conviction that he was the best man for the job. He told Roosevelt that if the insurgents were dead set against Sheehan and could never vote for him, then he—Roosevelt—should tell Sheehan this to his face, and explain why. Presumably, once Sheehan realized he couldn’t be elected, he would withdraw and save the party further embarrassment.

Roosevelt inferred from the session that Murphy was weakening. He proceeded to his house on State Street to enlist Eleanor’s further support. “My husband came home and announced that the gentleman he was fighting against would be with us for luncheon the next day,” she recalled. “After luncheon I was to entertain ‘Blue Eyed Billy’ Sheehan’s wife while my husband talked to him in his study. Lunch was not so bad, for I had my husband to carry the burden of the conversation, but after lunch we two women sat and talked about the weather and anything else inconsequential that we could think of, while both of us knew quite well that behind the door of my husband’s study a really important fight was going on.”

The issue wasn’t settled that day. Sheehan left as determined as ever; Roosevelt stood equally firm. “Mr. Sheehan is delightful personally,” he told reporters. “But that is one thing; the senatorship fight is another.”

Yet as the impasse continued, it obstructed the work of the legislature, and Tammany and the Democratic regulars feared that after years of Republican control of the state, they were frittering away an opportunity that might not recur soon. Murphy quietly decided to cut his losses. His support of Sheehan grew less and less conspicuous, until the candidate got the message and decided at the end of February to withdraw. Albany watchers anticipated a quick compromise, that the real work of the legislature might begin.

But Roosevelt wasn’t through. He and his fellow insurgents rejected the substitutes Murphy suggested, one after another until more than a dozen had been vetoed. Roosevelt, publicly reconsidering his earlier promise of loyalty to the Democrats, hinted that if he couldn’t work with Tammany and Murphy he might strike a bargain with Republican boss William Barnes. Murphy responded with his own overtures to Barnes.

Meanwhile Tammany’s sapping operations against the insurgency began to tell. One by one Roosevelt’s allies weakened and sought an end to the battle. A stroke of misfortune improved the chances for compromise when the Capitol caught fire in late March and burned badly. Already weary and now displaced, the legislators as a body grew anxious for a solution. Murphy proposed a new candidate, Judge James Aloysius O’Gorman. Before ascending the bench O’Gorman had been a Tammany leader, or sachem, but since then he had earned a reputation for independence of mind and integrity of decision. The choice saved face for both sides in the long struggle: Murphy could point to O’Gorman’s early political career, Roosevelt to his recent judicial service.

All that remained was to negotiate the details of the settlement. Roosevelt insisted on amnesty for himself and the insurgents: no reprisals from the Democratic leadership for their display of conscience. Al Smith and another Tammanyite, Robert Wagner, conveyed Murphy’s assurances on this issue. While Roosevelt and a hard core of the insurgents made a final point by refusing to attend the caucus that nominated O’Gorman, they sent word that they would vote for the judge in the legislature.

Roosevelt proclaimed a victory for principle. “We have followed the dictates of our consciences and have done our duty as we saw it,” he declared. But he was also happy to claim a personal triumph, one suggesting that the pressmen’s parallels to combative Uncle Ted weren’t without basis. “I have just come from Albany and the close of a long fight which lasted sixty-four rounds,” he told an audience at the annual dinner of the Young Men’s Christian Association in New York City the next day. “At the end of it was a free-for-all. Some got battered, but you can see by me that there were few scratches on the insurgents.”

5.

ROOSEVELT’S RIVALS OFTEN LAMENTED THE LUCK THAT BLESSED HIS career at crucial moments. He wouldn’t have denied that fortune smiled on him, and he knew from no less an authority than Uncle Ted that luck could make all the difference between success and failure at the apex of public life. “As regards the extraordinary prizes, the element of luck is the determining factor,” Theodore wrote his eldest son, Ted, who was Franklin’s near contemporary. Franklin didn’t read this letter, but he certainly heard the sentiment from Theodore, who often acknowledged that his brilliant success owed to two remarkable strokes of luck: his own good luck in surviving his heroics at San Juan Hill and McKinley’s bad luck in being assassinated. Had the dice been weighted ever so slightly differently, the world would scarcely have heard of Theodore Roosevelt.

Franklin’s initial good fortune had been to run his first race for office as the New York Republican party was fracturing between the progressives and the standpatters. The window for Dutchess County Democrats opened just long enough for him to step through, and it began closing almost at once. The 1911 elections for the New York assembly restored the Republican majority to the lower chamber, and the 1912 elections threatened to do the same to the senate. Roosevelt had reason to anticipate retirement from office.

But smiling fate intervened once more—assisted by none other than Uncle Ted. Republican progressives warned the Rough Rider that everything he had accomplished in the White House would be imperiled by another four years of his protégé, William Howard Taft. Rested after his safari and world tour, and restless after three years out of power, TR declared himself a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1912. This Roosevelt insurgency garnered incomparably more attention than Franklin’s fight with Boss Murphy, but it recapitulated the same themes. TR denounced the Taft machine as corrupt and unconcerned with ordinary Americans; the welfare of the people required a fresh blast of democracy. Several states by this time held preference primaries; Roosevelt trounced Taft in most of these, including one held in Taft’s home state of Ohio. But Republican party rules left the majority of the votes at the national convention in Chicago in the hands of the regulars, who rebuffed Roosevelt to renominate Taft. Roosevelt thereupon bolted the convention, trailing a large portion of the party behind him. This insurgent column reorganized under the banner of the Progressive party (nicknamed Bull Moose for TR’s characterization of his rude good health) and girded for combat. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed.

Indirectly they battled for the Democrats, as anyone not blinded by emotion could see. Since the 1850s the Democrats had elected precisely one president (Grover Cleveland, albeit twice). Sixty years after the industrial revolution began transforming American life, the party of Jefferson and Jackson had yet to come to terms with the political meaning of that revolution. The South dominated Democratic congressional politics; southern senators and congressmen sat on important committees and protected the interests of their states and districts. But the South sorely handicapped the party in presidential politics. The blatantly racist politics of the South alienated voters elsewhere, putting southern presidential hopefuls in an impossible bind. To win a name in the South required repeatedly playing the race card, but doing so effectively disqualified one for president.

The Democrats might have mitigated their southern burden by embracing the Democratic machines of the urban North. Yet the notorious corruption of Tammany Hall and its counterparts in other cities caused their favorites credibility problems of their own when seeking higher office. Even had the machines been exemplars of integrity, the cities, with their large and growing immigrant populations, seemed so foreign to rural voters that the graduates of city politics had scant appeal beyond the boroughs. It merely compounded the problem that rural districts were constitutionally overrepresented in most state legislatures, and the rural states in the federal electoral college.

If some charismatic figure could build a bridge between the two pillars of the party—between the South and the cities—the Democrats might again elect presidents as they had before the Civil War. Till then their only hope lay in a civil war among the Republicans.

This was precisely what Theodore Roosevelt’s defection in the summer of 1912 touched off and what enabled the Democrats to envision reoccupying the White House. Since the turn of the century, Democratic conventions had been pro forma affairs, with candidates vying for the dubious privilege of losing, often badly, to the Republican nominee. This time the contest was genuinely bitter because the prize was real.

IN THE EARLY summer of 1912 Franklin and Eleanor embarked on what amounted to a second honeymoon. They left the children with the nurse, nanny, and servants, and headed for the Southwest. They crossed the Mississippi on a Louisiana train ferry that handled several cars at a time. No bridge yet spanned the lower Mississippi, partly because the river was so wide but also because the floods that periodically inundated the land on either side of the river would have played havoc with any but the sturdiest approaches and abutments. In fact, a flood that surged downstream in 1912 nearly prevented Franklin and Eleanor from getting across; theirs was the last train ferried over for several days.

They traversed western Louisiana and the entire width of Texas, exiting the train at Deming in southern New Mexico. Bob Ferguson, the British Rough Rider, and his wife, Isabella, had moved from Scotland to New Mexico on account of the tuberculosis that was slowly taking Bob’s life. As with other diseases incurable by contemporary medicine—a large category in the second decade of the twentieth century—treatment consisted of transporting the patient to an environment as supportive as possible of the patient’s immune system. For tuberculosis patients this meant somewhere high and dry. Davos, Switzerland, was famous for its tuberculosis sanatoriums; Bob Ferguson, the cavalryman, preferred the American West. He and Isabella were building a home in the mountains of New Mexico; meanwhile they and their children kept house in a tent.

Eleanor had never been camping, and the visit to the Fergusons opened her eyes to its possibilities. She was amazed at how well the Ferguson children adapted to their new surroundings and regimen. “My city ideas had to be rapidly adjusted when I saw them eating pork and beans and all kinds of canned food which would have been considered absolute death to children of their age in eastern surroundings,” she remembered. She had read about cowboys and heard Uncle Ted tell of his experiences among the cattlemen of Dakota. Now she encountered the hardy breed herself. All were polite, but Isabella informed her that courtesy sometimes concealed darker currents. “Last week I thought I had a really good boy to do the work,” Isabella told Eleanor. “But I found he was wanted for the murder of his brother, so I had to let him go to jail.”

FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR timed their return east to allow Franklin to attend the Democratic national convention in Baltimore. Two candidates had distanced the field during the primary season: Champ (shortened from James Beauchamp) Clark of Missouri and Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. Clark, a nine-term congressman and the current speaker of the House, appealed to party conservatives; Wilson, the Princeton president who had become New Jersey’s governor, wore the progressive mantle. Some of the same issues that were splitting the Republicans threatened to divide the Democrats, but two factors seemed certain to prevent a full-blown schism. First, because the Democrats lacked an incumbent, the progressive challenge couldn’t well be construed as lese majesty, as it was among the Republicans. Second, because the Democrats had been exiled so long from the White House and appeared doomed, under normal circumstances, to wander the wilderness for decades longer, they were desperate to take advantage of the opportunity of Theodore Roosevelt’s rebellion.

Franklin Roosevelt had liked Woodrow Wilson’s style from the moment the professor had first taken on the New Jersey establishment. After accepting the endorsement of Democratic boss James Smith in the 1910 campaign, Wilson proceeded as governor to topple Smith from power. Smith and his lieutenants cried foul, but other members of the machine sued for peace, on Wilson’s terms. Roosevelt was impressed that a liberal could be so cunning.

He first met Wilson personally in late 1911, traveling to Trenton to pay his respects and indulge his curiosity. Wilson asked what support a progressive presidential candidate might expect in New York. Roosevelt offered his own backing and said other progressives would join him. Wilson inquired what, precisely, this meant; Roosevelt conceded that it might not mean much. New York Democrats operated under a unit rule at national conventions; they all voted with the majority. And because Boss Murphy, who despised New Jersey progressives almost as much as he detested the New York variety, controlled the majority, the prospects for Wilson weren’t good.

Yet Wilson took the long view. Murphy might win the early rounds, but if the progressives went to the people, they couldn’t help triumphing. Perhaps 1912 was their year; perhaps they’d have to wait. But their cause would prevail. Wilson, a devout Calvinist and predestinarian, was certain of that.

His confidence was catching, and Roosevelt enlisted with a group of New York Democrats for Wilson. His anti-Tammany reputation preceded him, and he soon was named chairman of the group’s executive committee. He solicited donations for Wilson—money that funded speakers, articles, and advertisements on behalf of the New Jersey governor. And when the Democrats convened at Baltimore, following the crack-up of the Republicans at Chicago, he headed an unofficial New York delegation committed to Wilson.

Inside the convention hall, Champ Clark led the early balloting, to no one’s surprise. But the Democrats’ two-thirds rule for nominations—adopted in the early days of national conventions, to enforce party discipline—prevented Clark from claiming victory. And with each ballot that failed to put him over the top, his candidacy lost momentum.

The break occurred on the fourteenth ballot. William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ three-time nominee and, despite his three defeats, still the hero of the southern and western wings of the party, rose to announce that he was switching his vote from Clark to Wilson. He explained his decision as a rebuke to Charles Murphy and boss rule; he said that he’d support Wilson only so long as Murphy did not.

But the explanation was lost in the pandemonium that followed the announcement of the switch. A brawl broke out between Clark delegates and Wilson men. One Clark delegate was heard to mutter, in Bryan’s direction, “By God, somebody ought to assassinate him.”

Roosevelt’s role at the convention consisted chiefly of offering moral support to Wilson. He disappointed some onlookers who, hearing that “Roosevelt is coming,” expected Theodore and found only Franklin. But he let out to reporters that he had spoken with Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore’s son, who related that his father, in Franklin’s words, was “praying for Clark.” The story appeared in the papers, as Franklin intended, and bolstered Wilson’s prospects. At a crucial early moment, when a faction of Clark men tried to stampede the convention by staging a noisy demonstration for the Missourian, Franklin Roosevelt led an even louder counter-cheering squad for Wilson. Throughout the convention he took every opportunity to introduce himself around, making a widely, if not deeply, favorable impression.

And he applauded the convention’s outcome, when it finally occurred. “Wilson nominated this afternoon,” he wired to Eleanor, who had taken the children to Campobello. “All my plans vague. Splendid triumph.”

THOUGH VAGUE, Roosevelt’s plans weren’t unconsidered. He traveled from Baltimore to Sea Girt, New Jersey, where Wilson, in line with tradition, had kept his distance from the convention and where, while taking the salt air, he was simultaneously measuring the temperature of various elements of the party. With Taft and Theodore Roosevelt dividing the Republican vote, Wilson could count on New York’s bloc of electors, the largest in the country. But he couldn’t count on the post-inaugural cooperation of New York’s congressional delegation unless Charles Murphy fell from power. By one line of reasoning, in fact, Murphy was more dangerous than ever, for the Republican rift at the top of the ballot would make almost any down-ballot Democratic slate of candidates easy victors. Murphy wouldn’t have to appease the progressives but could pack his people onto the Wilson bandwagon, whether they agreed with Wilson or not. Wilson doubtless realized it already, but Roosevelt reminded him that the true battle for New York would be fought not at the polls in November but at the Democrats’ nominating convention in October.

Wilson accordingly blessed Roosevelt’s strategy of building up a pro-Wilson, anti-Tammany organization of Democrats. This group, calling itself the Empire State Democracy, gathered at the Hotel Astor in Manhattan in late July to indict Murphy politically on multiple charges of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance. “In imbecility, in greed, and in suspected partnership in violence,” the new group’s manifesto asserted, “the small clique claiming control of the party organization has been bound to abhorrent criminal forces, to predatory special interests, to favored corrupt contractors, and to unscrupulous patronage-mongers…. The patriotism of self-respecting men requires, and true party loyalty demands, that at whatever cost that bondage shall be broken by the rank and file.”

Roosevelt endorsed the Empire State manifesto but supplied his own interpretation. “They refer to us as ‘irregular,’” he said of Murphy and his henchmen. They were wrong. “We are the regulars. The system, Tammany, has prevented the Democrats from having control in New York for sixteen years.” The time had come to restore the Democrats—the real Democrats, which was to say the ordinary, honest people of New York—to their rightful place in charge of their own destiny. “This is the year to go ahead and strike, and we’ve got the club.”

To the surprise of many progressives, their declaration of war against Tammany prompted Murphy to seek a truce. He offered to let the Tammany delegates at the state convention vote their consciences, and he accepted the nomination of a moderately progressive candidate for governor in place of the incumbent regular. Finally, he acquiesced in the renomination, by a unanimous vote of the nominating committee, of Franklin Roosevelt for state senator.

As things transpired, Murphy’s retreat was tactical rather than strategic, and Tammany survived the 1912 campaign season as it had survived every other season for more than a century. All the same, Roosevelt could plausibly claim credit for another victory over the forces of bossism and corruption.

HAD THE 1912 presidential campaign been designed expressly for the purpose of educating Franklin Roosevelt in competing theories of government power, it could hardly have unfolded more enlighteningly. William Howard Taft, the conservative among the three presidential candidates, believed that government ought generally to defer to the wisdom of the marketplace. Taft’s Justice Department prosecuted certain industrial monopolies, including Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which was dismantled by order of the Supreme Court. But by and large Taft trusted Adam Smith’s invisible hand to promote the interests of the nation and produce the greatest good for the greatest number of the American people.

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were far less enamored of the capitalist status quo. Each believed that capitalism was running away with democracy, that the invisible hand was strangling economic opportunity and holding millions of Americans in thrall to corporate greed. Each endorsed the progressive idea that government must intervene in the marketplace on behalf of the private sector’s victims.

But they differed sharply on the nature of the intervention. Theodore Roosevelt contended that the optimal riposte to the power of corporations was the power of the people, as exercised through government. In a widely reprinted speech he outlined what he called the “New Nationalism,” a philosophy premised on the belief that combination—the establishment of ever-bigger corporate entities—was an ineluctable fact of modern economic life. “Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation,” Roosevelt asserted. This being so, political wisdom consisted in controlling rather than dismantling the combinations. “The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.” The federal government, with powers enhanced for the purpose, was the single body competent to bring the great corporations to heel.

Woodrow Wilson took less comfort in big government. As a professor Wilson had studied government historically, and he became convinced that government operated better as a policeman of the economy than as its overseer. He concurred with Theodore Roosevelt that the fundamental problem of American life was the excessive power of corporate capital. “The inventive genius and initiative of the American people,” he said, “is being held back by the fact that our industrial field is so controlled that new entries, newcomers, new adventurers, independent men, are feared, and if they will not go partners in the game with those already in control of it, they will be excluded.” The function of government ought to be to level the field among the industrial and commercial contestants. But where Theodore Roosevelt proposed to accomplish this by expanding the power of government, Wilson advocated reducing the power of business. “What I am interested in is laws that will give the little man a start, that will give him a chance to show these fellows that he has brains enough to compete with them and can presently make his local market a national market and his national market a world market.” Wilson’s “New Freedom” would break up the trusts, restore the conditions of competition that had prevailed in the nineteenth century, and then let the little man have his day.

Franklin Roosevelt had special reason to follow the arguments of Colonel Roosevelt and Professor Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt was a progressive, but his progressivism remained amorphous on most subjects not directly related to the politics of New York state. He could learn directly from the contest between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom as theories of governance; he could also learn indirectly, by observing how American voters responded to the competing versions of progressivism. Moreover, he had a personal stake in the fight. He had committed publicly to Wilson, and his career stood to advance if Wilson won. At the same time, having modeled himself on Theodore Roosevelt, he couldn’t help wondering whether this part of Uncle Ted’s career would be worth emulating, too.

Unfortunately for Franklin Roosevelt’s political education, the meaning of the 1912 campaign was confused by the three-way nature of the race, and never more than on election day. Wilson received 6.3 million votes, to 4.1 million for Roosevelt and 3.5 million for Taft. Translated into electors, the result gave Wilson 435 against 88 for Roosevelt and 8 for Taft. Obviously progressivism had won, but how much of Wilson’s popular vote reflected simple Democratic loyalty, as opposed to endorsement of his small-government progressivism over TR’s big-government version and Taft’s comfort with the status quo, was impossible to determine. Equally puzzling was how long the distinction would persist in practice, once the campaign faded into memory.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S IMMEDIATE memories of the campaign were clouded by an illness that afflicted him during its final weeks. Following his convention-shortened vacation at Campobello, he and Eleanor cruised down the coast to New York, where they planned to meet friends for an evening on the city. But he felt weak and feverish and had to beg off. The next day he was worse. Eleanor called a doctor, who was mystified at the patient’s symptoms. “No one could understand what was the matter with him,” Eleanor recalled. She nursed Franklin for several days, till she started feeling poorly herself. She summoned the doctor back, and he diagnosed her illness as typhoid fever. Franklin had had typhoid as a child, which was why no one thought to test him for it. But in fact he had contracted it again, and though Eleanor’s infection burned itself out fairly quickly, his reinfection kept him bedridden for weeks.

While Eleanor and the doctor reasoned backward to figure out how she and Franklin had contracted the water-borne disease—she eventually identified a pitcher of water on the boat from Campobello; they had taken care not to drink the water but had rinsed their toothbrushes in it—Franklin wrestled with the problem of conducting his reelection campaign from his sickbed. Heretofore his style had been intensely personal and physical. He had insisted on meeting as many constituents as possible, pumping their hands, patting the heads of their children, and doing whatever else he could to diminish the patina of inherited wealth that still clung to him. Now that he was an invalid, if only temporarily, he had to adopt an alternative plan.

Luckily he had help. Louis McHenry Howe was a Hoosier by birth, the son of one of Indianapolis’s most prominent families. But the Panic of 1873 bankrupted his father and forced the family to seek refuge with relatives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Louis grew up. He became a reporter and then, for a time, editor and owner of the Saratoga Sun. He developed a passion for politics and might have entered the arena himself if not for an off-putting appearance—Howe described his own face as “one of the four ugliest” in New York state, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, who learned to love him dearly, called him a “gnome-like looking little man”—and an impatience with posers and fools. Instead he sought a candidate he could devote himself to, a man who could serve as the vehicle for his intelligence and ambition. Likely figures were few in Albany, but when Franklin Roosevelt arrived in 1911, Howe decided he qualified.

Roosevelt’s acuity in judging character would prove to be one of his greatest gifts; his first important verdict—in the case of Louis Howe—was perhaps the most insightful of all. Many people couldn’t stand Howe. Beyond his unprepossessing physiognomy were personal habits that repelled the fastidious. He rarely changed his suit, which was chronically covered with ash from the cigarettes he never stopped smoking. His wicked sense of humor impaled friends nearly as often as it skewered enemies. But Roosevelt managed to see past Howe’s idiosyncrasies to his distinctive gifts. Howe understood New York state politics as almost no one else did. He knew where Tammany buried the bodies (metaphorically, for the most part). In an age before scientific polling, he had an uncanny feel for public opinion. And Roosevelt liked him—liked his irreverence, liked his passion for politics, liked his capacity for intrigue.

Howe recognized this, and during the summer of 1912, when the newspaper business was slow, he appealed to Roosevelt for work. “If you can connect me with a job during this campaign,” he wrote, “for heaven’s sake help me out.” Roosevelt threw him some small assignments, and then, after being hit by typhoid, hired him to manage his reelection campaign.

Howe delivered a virtuoso performance. He drafted letters from Roosevelt to all the important constituencies in his district. In Roosevelt’s name he asked farmers for advice on strengthening agriculture. He consulted commercial fishermen on how to conserve the shad run. He assured apple growers that their crops would be fairly measured and marketed. He declared Roosevelt’s support for woman suffrage. On one occasion he drafted a full-page newspaper advertisement specifying the Roosevelt platform; upon its completion he sent Roosevelt a proof, with a note: “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.” Howe traveled the district in Roosevelt’s stead, reminding audiences that Roosevelt had faced down Tammany and contending that such integrity ought to earn him the support of all honorable Hudson Valley voters, Republicans as well as Democrats.

In late October the strategy seemed to be working. One of Roosevelt’s Hyde Park neighbors told him, “I have talked quietly with a number of Republicans and think I can safely promise you 35 or 40 who did not vote for you before are willing to do so now on the good showing you made in Albany against the Murphy ring.”

The strategy was still working on election day. Roosevelt received 15,590 votes to 13,889 for his Republican opponent. “My husband was reelected thanks to Louis Howe,” Eleanor explained simply.

6.

ROOSEVELT HAD FELT COMPELLED TO DEFEND HIS STATE SENATE SEAT in order to maintain his political credibility, but he was hoping less for a return to Albany than for an assignment to Washington. He may or may not have appreciated that genuinely reforming New York politics—definitively defeating Tammany Hall—would require a much larger reorganization of the national political economy than could be accomplished from the New York senate. Yet he certainly understood that a stint in Washington, as part of a Wilson administration, would do far more for his career than another two years in Albany.

He had reason to think he might be in line for a federal appointment. The sixteen years since Grover Cleveland had left office constituted almost a lifetime in politics, with the result that the new administration would have to look to Democrats as green as Roosevelt to fill the scores of appointive positions in the various cabinet offices. The Democrats were especially weak on naval affairs, having surrendered that issue to the Republicans about the time sail gave way to steam. Franklin Roosevelt had never served in the navy, but his practical knowledge of the sea outstripped that of nearly every other Democrat of comparable political promise and ambition.

Josephus Daniels, Wilson’s choice for secretary of the navy, thought so. “As I entered the Willard Hotel on the morning of Wilson’s inauguration, I ran into Franklin Roosevelt,” Daniels remembered. “He was bubbling over with enthusiasm at the incoming of a Democratic administration and keen as a boy to take in the inauguration ceremonies.” Roosevelt knew that Daniels had been nominated for secretary, and he offered congratulations. Daniels thanked him and then asked if Roosevelt would like to come to the Navy Department as assistant secretary. “His face beamed his pleasure. ‘How would I like it? I’d like it bully well. It would please me better than anything in the world. I’d be glad to be connected with the new administration. 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, I would love to hold.’” Daniels explained that he hadn’t asked Wilson about the appointment and would have to make some inquiries. But he wanted to check with Roosevelt first, to see if he wanted the job.

Daniels became Roosevelt’s first political sponsor. A North Carolinian by birth, a lawyer by education, a newspaperman by profession, a Grover Cleveland Democrat by inheritance, a Bryan Democrat by conviction, and a progressive Democrat by political necessity, Daniels had boosted Wilson early in the pages of the Raleigh News & Observer and later as a member of the Democratic national executive committee. Upon Wilson’s victory he fell in line for a cabinet post. In part because Daniels’s father had been a shipbuilder, for the Confederacy among other clients, but mostly because the more senior positions had gone to supporters with greater claims—William Jennings Bryan, for example, became secretary of state—Wilson assigned him the Navy Department.

Daniels knew nothing about naval administration per se and little enough about administration on any large scale. He visited the departing navy secretary, George Meyer, who offered advice. “In the Navy Department there is no chief of staff, and nothing important is done which does not go over the desk of the secretary,” Meyer said. He urged Daniels to maintain this system, and he warned against those who wanted to change it. “You will find that in the navy there are officers who wish to have an organization like that in the army or of some foreign navy.” To accede would be a grave mistake and must be resisted.

Daniels was just the person to stand up to the admirals and their allies, in particular the corporations that did business with the navy. “Daniels was one of the few living men who had the exact combination of qualities needed to grapple with the navy as it was in 1913,” an observer remarked. “He had no personal friends in the navy, and he had the Puritan’s conscience and stubbornness. He entered the department with a profound suspicion that whatever an admiral told him was wrong, and that every corporation with a capitalization of more than $100,000 was inherently evil. In nine cases out of ten, his formula was correct: the navy was packed at the top with dead wood, and with politics all the way through, and the steel, coal and other big industries were accustomed to dealing with it on their own terms. With all that, he had sound judgment of men coupled with an innate affection for a rebel.”

Daniels hadn’t known Franklin Roosevelt long, but what he’d seen convinced him that Roosevelt would make a fine deputy. They met at the Baltimore convention, where Daniels controlled the passes for newspaper correspondents. Roosevelt arrived with several upstate New York editors in tow. “He was in a gay mood, and I thought he was as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen,” Daniels remembered. Daniels handed over the passes and struck up a conversation. “At that convention Franklin and I became friends—a case of love at first sight—for when men are attracted to each other there is born a feeling that Mexicans call ‘simpática,’ a word that has no counterpart in English. A lasting friendship was born.”

After the election and their inauguration day encounter at the Willard, Daniels went to Wilson for permission to make Roosevelt his assistant. Daniels knew that Wilson sought geographic balance in his administration, and he pointed out that a New Yorker would nicely complement a North Carolinian at the Navy Department. He mentioned Roosevelt’s sailing background and added that he was “our kind of liberal.” Wilson agreed at once. “Send the nomination over,” the president said.

Even as he did so, Daniels interviewed New York’s senators regarding Roosevelt. Democrat James O’Gorman, by custom of the upper house, could block a Democratic appointment from his home state. But O’Gorman had only praise for the man whose insurgency had resulted in his election. New York’s senior senator, Republican Elihu Root, lacked a veto, being from the opposition party, yet he appreciated Daniels’s courtesy in consulting him. Root knew Theodore Roosevelt well, having sponsored him for New York governor in 1898 and served as his secretary of war, and he had strong opinions about the Roosevelts. As Daniels recalled: “When I told him that the President had in mind naming Franklin Roosevelt as assistant secretary, a queer look came on his face. ‘You know the Roosevelts, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front…. They like to have their own way.’” Daniels assured Root he could handle Franklin Roosevelt. “I told the Senator that I would hate to have an assistant who did not have a mind of his own. I told him I wanted an assistant who would help pull the load and I had no fear of a strong man as assistant secretary. I would wish no other kind.”

Roosevelt’s nomination sailed through the Senate, and he moved into his office—the same one Uncle Ted had occupied—in the State, War, and Navy Building just west of the White House. One day not long after his installation, he and Daniels posed for photographers on an upper-floor porch looking down on the executive mansion. The prints came back, and Daniels showed the best one to Roosevelt.

“Franklin,” he asked, “why are you grinning from ear to ear, looking as pleased as if the world were yours, while I, satisfied and happy, have no such smile on my face?”

Roosevelt seemed surprised at the question and offered no answer except that he always tried to look good in pictures.

“I will tell you,” Daniels continued. “We are both looking down on the White House and you are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, ‘Some day I will be living in that house’—while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.”

PARTLY BECAUSE HE had his eye on the White House, Roosevelt cultivated the navy brass more carefully than Daniels did. The admirals appreciated that he plumped for more and better ships whenever possible. Since its establishment in 1900, the general board of the navy had contended that America’s enlarged world role required a bigger fleet. The board was chaired in 1913 by George Dewey, the hero of the Manila Bay battle that opened the Spanish-American War, and America’s most distinguished naval officer, and it proposed an aggressive building program of four battleships, sixteen destroyers, and two submarines each year for the next several years. Josephus Daniels respected Dewey, but he didn’t hesitate to cut the board’s request by half when he presented his budget recommendations to Congress.

Roosevelt took care not to contradict his boss directly, but he made plain that he thought Dewey rather than Daniels had the better sense of what American security required. Skeptics in Congress and around the country suggested that smaller ships, designed for coastal defense, would meet the nation’s needs; Roosevelt rejected this argument as woefully short-sighted. “Invasion is not what this country has to fear,” he said. “In time of war, would we be content like the turtle to withdraw into our own shell and see an enemy supersede us in every outlying part, usurp our commerce, and destroy our influence as a nation throughout the world?” Of course not. “Yet this will happen just as surely as we can be sure of anything human if an enemy of the United States obtains control of the seas.” America’s vital interests spanned the globe, and America’s power had to span it too. “Our national defense must extend all over the western hemisphere, must go out a thousand miles into the sea, must embrace the Philippines and over the seas wherever our commerce may be.” American vessels must be state of the art. “Dreadnoughts are what we need,” Roosevelt declared. Dreadnoughts were the most powerful battleships of the day. “The policy of our Congress ought to be to buy and build dreadnoughts until our Navy is comparable to any other in the world.”

To a later generation, one accustomed to American military preeminence, Roosevelt’s proposed standard—“comparable to any other in the world”—would appear unexceptionable. But in the second decade of the twentieth century it was radical to the point of revolutionary. For a century Britannia had ruled the waves, insisting on a navy the equal of her principal competitors’ combined. Not even Dewey’s general board advocated challenging Britain’s supremacy. But partly because Roosevelt saw farther than the seventy-six-year-old Dewey, whose strategic vision was dimming, and partly because he wanted to make a name for himself, the assistant secretary staked out an extreme position on naval construction.

He strove to claim credit for each step taken toward his goal. In March 1914 he hammered the first bolt, a ceremonial silver fastener, into the keel of a new dreadnought being constructed at the Brooklyn navy yard. The ship was designated Number 39 during construction; it would be christened as the U.S.S. Arizona. The keel laying had been scheduled to start earlier, but Roosevelt ordered its postponement till he could arrive. “It was an impressive moment,” a reporter explained. “And there was none in the throng who did not realize that the banging of the hammer meant the actual beginning of construction of the biggest ship ever built in New York.”

Besides displaying his concern for American security, Roosevelt’s hammering signified his appreciation of the importance of the Navy Department as an employer. For the crowd at the Brooklyn yard, the new battleship represented thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in wages. These meant a great deal to those who received them and scarcely less to those who dispensed them. Of such were political loyalties fashioned. Roosevelt hadn’t been a year in his post, and already he was showing a gift for the art of government spending. He suffered no pangs of conscience that the navy provided jobs; dreadnoughts weren’t pork barrels. All the same, when the jobs were being handed out, he insisted on reminding the recipients, and their voting friends and kin, that they had him to thank.

But delivering jobs made him, in effect, an employer, with all the potential for upsetting labor that being an employer entailed. Many of the shipyards were unionized, requiring Roosevelt to deal with the union leaders, who were hardly the kind of people he had grown up with or met at Groton and Harvard. Most of them saw him as a college boy who could be cowed or a bureaucrat who might be ignored, but hardly as an ally in their struggle for higher wages and better working conditions for their members and more power for themselves.

Yet Roosevelt surprised them, as he surprised many others in his career. He afterward explained his Navy Department initiation into labor relations:

I had not been there more than about a week when a delegation from the Brooklyn navy yard came down and said, “Mr. Roosevelt”—they had not started to call me Frank; they did in about another week—“there is one thing that we want you to do. You know, you, as assistant secretary of the navy, have charge of all labor matters.” I said, “That is fine; I did not know it.” “Will you do something to change the present method of working out the wage scale paid in the navy yard?” I said, “Fine. How is it done?” “Well,” they said, “do it yourself.” I said, “Why, hasn’t it been done by the assistant secretary in the past?” “No, it has been done by the officers.” And they went on to tell me how unjustly the wage scales in all of the navy yards on both coasts and on the Gulf of Mexico had been arranged each year by a special board of naval officers. After I had been there about three days longer, I think, I got Joe Daniels to sign an order making it the duty of the assistant secretary to fix the wage scale each year.

But the assistant secretary didn’t fix the wage scale by himself. The naval board continued to meet and make its recommendations; these reflected the view of the admirals and embodied, to a more or less obvious degree, the disdain the braided classes felt for the toilers who strained with wrench and riveter. The workers felt particular resentment at the refusal of the board to take sufficient account of local costs of living in determining the wage scales.

Roosevelt couldn’t work magic with the wages. Congress set the department’s overall budget, and more money for workers meant less for ships and naval operations. Besides, the admirals had powerful friends on Capitol Hill and were astute at protecting what they had come to consider theirs. Yet Roosevelt made clear to the labor leaders—the ones who soon called him Frank—that his door was always open. And with a shamelessness that would have been infuriating had he not been so personally charming, he took credit when wages went up and dodged blame when they didn’t. He attended hearings where workers aired their grievances, and though he couched any encouragement in reminders that regardless of what he proposed, Congress would ultimately dispose, his warm handshake and reassuring smile let the workers know he was on their side. Daniels, who didn’t mind delivering bad news, acquiesced in Roosevelt’s arrangement and let his assistant be gone when that bad news reached the workers. “Take what is offered,” one labor leader counseled his negotiators, regarding a parley with Daniels. “And go after the rest when Mr. Roosevelt returns.”

It helped matters that Roosevelt’s years at the Navy Department were a flush time for American shipyards. His relentless calls for a bigger navy contributed to the building boom, but the great events of world affairs—in particular the First World War—contributed much more. All the same, it was with substantial and not entirely unwarranted pride that Roosevelt was able to boast, after the fact, that during his seven and a half years at the Navy Department labor relations had been productive and smooth. “We did not have one single major dispute—no strike, walk-out, or serious trouble in all of the navy yards all over the United States.”

7.

HENRY ADAMS HAD BEEN YOUNG ONCE, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT ASSUMED. It was hard to know for sure. Adams lived across Lafayette Square from the White House, in the home he had built two generations earlier beside that of John Hay, his longtime friend and fellow ironist. Though Hay died a decade before Eleanor and Franklin arrived in Washington, Adams remained at his post, guarding the republic against the shenanigans of the transients at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The old-timers in the capital, the ones who stayed from Congress to Congress and administration to administration, called themselves “cave dwellers” Henry Adams in 1913 was the senior troglodyte. “He was pointed out to us as a leaf-frail old man in a Victoria, drawn by one horse which looked as if it had made the whole trip with him from his boyhood,” Jonathan Daniels, Josephus’s son, remarked. For fifty years since the 1860s, when it had become clear that the nation had nothing to offer Adams by way of office or authority comparable to that which it had bestowed on his great-grandfather and grandfather, presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, he had muttered into his tea against the trend of public affairs. “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin,” Adams wrote. He hadn’t approved of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he dismissed as “pure act.” Woodrow Wilson appeared somewhat more thoughtful, but Adams could never bring himself to trust a Democrat or a native southerner. On an afternoon when Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt came for lunch, Franklin was discussing a matter of pressing importance for the administration. “Mr. Adams looked at him rather fiercely,” Eleanor recalled, “and said: ‘Young man, I have lived in this house many years and seen the occupants of that White House come and go, and nothing that you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long!’”

Adams tolerated dogs better than humans, and after Eleanor one day caught him playing with a Scottish terrier she thought she detected a soft heart behind his cynical façade. But other aspects of life in Washington remained mysterious to her. Not that she lacked counsel. On learning that Franklin would be joining the Navy Department, Theodore Roosevelt sent a special message to Eleanor via Franklin. “I do hope she will be particularly nice to the naval officers’ wives,” Theodore wrote. “They have a pretty hard time, with very little money to get along on, and yet a position to keep up, and everything that can properly be done to make things pleasant for them should be done.” Aunt Anna, who had astonished the whole family by finally marrying at the age of forty, offered similar advice. Her husband was a retired rear admiral, William Cowles, who educated her to the challenges of navy life, especially for the officers’ spouses. “You can do a great deal to make life pleasant for them when they are in Washington,” Anna told Eleanor. “And that is what you should do.”

Eleanor certainly tried. During the early weeks in the capital she religiously traced the circuit of official Washington. On Mondays she called on the wives of the justices of the Supreme Court. On Tuesdays she saw the spouses of members of the House of Representatives, starting with the New York delegation but gradually including the other states. On Wednesdays she covered the cabinet, on Thursdays the Senate, on Fridays the diplomatic corps. When she was lucky the wives in question were not at home; many were making their own rounds. Eleanor left her card. To those who were in she recited what soon sounded like a jingle in her own ears: “I am Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. My husband has just come as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”

That first spring flew by, till she made her escape to Campobello with the children. She wasn’t surprised to discover that the Navy Department claimed more of Franklin’s time than the legislature at Albany had, or that he was delighted that it did. He shared his enthusiasm for his work in his letters. After a strategy session aboard the presidential yacht Sylph—which landsman Wilson regularly lent to his subordinates—Franklin could hardly contain himself. “I have never had such an interesting conversation on that kind of a trip,” he wrote Eleanor. “We covered every country on the globe!” But offsetting her happiness that his responsibilities engaged his passion was the disappointment she felt each time he postponed his own journey north.

When he did come she wasn’t entirely pleased he had. He celebrated the Fourth of July by ordering the battleship North Dakota to join the festivities at nearby Eastport, Maine. The townsfolk were thrilled, but Eleanor was aghast to learn that she was expected to entertain the officers. She survived the weekend’s picnics and parties yet could manage no more than a grim smile when Franklin jokingly promised that in the future he’d never dispatch anything larger than a destroyer to the vicinity of Campobello.

His joke was serious, as Eleanor discovered when Franklin subsequently arrived aboard the destroyer Flusser, following an inspection voyage in adjacent waters. The skipper was William Halsey, a young navy lieutenant. “Unlike most Assistant Secretaries of the Navy (and Secretaries, for that matter), he was almost a professional sailorman,” Halsey wrote of Roosevelt years later. “I did not know this then. All I had been told was that he had had some experience in small boats. So when he asked me to transit the strait between Campobello and the mainland, and offered to pilot us himself, I gave him the conn (steering control) but stood close by. The fact that a white-flanneled yachtsman can sail a catboat out to a buoy and back is no guarantee that he can handle a high-speed destroyer in narrow waters. A destroyer’s bow may point directly down the channel, yet she is not necessarily on a safe course. She pivots around a point near her bridge structure, which means that two-thirds of her length is aft of the pivot, and that her stern will swing in twice the arc of her bow.” Yet the amateur pilot proved his mettle. “As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over; he knew his business.”

In the autumn of 1913 Eleanor and Franklin settled into a house they rented from Anna and William Cowles at 1733 N Street. The residence had been called the Little White House during Theodore’s presidency, in recognition of the amount of time TR spent there consulting his sister, who was widely considered one of the sharpest political analysts in Washington. The name lingered, and more than a few observers supposed that Franklin Roosevelt was planning to move from the Little White House to the real thing. He brushed off such suggestions by pointing out that the location, just six blocks from the Navy Department, was most convenient for a busy public servant. The small backyard with roses climbing an arbor provided the children a place to play and Franklin and Eleanor to sit in the moments they found together.

Eleanor discovered that domestic issues were more complicated in Washington than in New York. She unthinkingly imported her favorite servants, who happened to be white, only to be informed by the keepers of the capital culture that in Washington, as elsewhere in the South, servants were black. To confuse the issue by employing white servants risked blurring the color line essential to southern life. Eleanor eventually swapped her white servants for black ones, even as she wondered that so much depended—in the minds of her new neighbors, at any rate—on so little.

THE CULTURAL CONSERVATISM of the capital extended beyond the race question. Despite the progressivism of the era and of the Wilson administration, women in Washington were essentially confined to traditional roles. “Nearly all the women at that time were the slaves of the Washington social system,” Eleanor wrote. They supported their husbands and raised their children, and counted themselves lucky to do so. Two women alone, of Eleanor’s acquaintance, challenged the status quo. One was Martha Peters, the wife of a Massachusetts congressman and the sister of William Phillips, the assistant secretary of state. Her rebellion was primarily negative; she opted out of the calling-card circuit.

The other was Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Alice’s White House wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth had been a brilliant occasion, either because of or despite the presence of her father, who stole the show even more thoroughly than he had at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor. But the Longworth-Roosevelt marriage hadn’t gone well. Nick drank copiously and philandered notoriously, humiliating and outraging Alice. She contemplated divorce but learned that her father and stepmother wouldn’t stand for it. “Although they didn’t quite lock me up,” she recalled, “they exercised considerable pressure to get me to reconsider.” So she took her pleasures elsewhere. She made her home a salon where the mildly disreputable might gather and gossip. She herself was a marvelous mimic and spared no one. Her imitation of Helen Taft amused even friends of the Republican First Lady, although it prompted Edith Roosevelt to urge her to watch her step. “Remember for Nick’s sake to be really careful what you say,” Edith warned. “People are only too ready to take up and repeat the most trivial remarks.”

Careful was the last thing Alice chose to be. If her actions reflected poorly on Nick, she judged, it was no more than he deserved. Eleanor Roosevelt, observing her cousin, was at once appalled and attracted by such independence, which was far beyond anything she could muster at this stage. “I was perfectly certain,” Eleanor remembered, “that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the majority of women were doing, perhaps to be a little more meticulous about it than some of the others were.”

As a public wife Eleanor began to entertain. She couldn’t enter the all-male clubs—the Chevy Chase and Metropolitan—where Franklin golfed and drank with his friends and those he hoped would become his friends. James Roosevelt recalled caddying for his father on Sunday mornings; the attraction was the twenty-five-cent pay and the excuse to skip church. One regular Roosevelt links partner was Republican senator—and future president—Warren G. Harding. “All I remember about Harding was that he seemed amiable and that Father enjoyed golfing with him,” James said.

Eleanor wouldn’t have joined Franklin’s clubs even if she could have; she remained shy and retiring. It was an effort for her merely to open her house to the friends and acquaintances he brought home from work. But Sunday gatherings became semiregular. Eleanor served scrambled eggs and cold cuts to William Phillips of the State Department; Franklin Lane, the secretary of the interior; Adolph Miller, a Lane aide who transferred to the staff of the new Federal Reserve Board; and their wives. They all found Franklin delightful in a middleweight way. “I knew him then as a brilliant, lovable, and somewhat happy-go-lucky friend,” Phillips remembered of Roosevelt. “The qualities that made him great matured later.” As for Eleanor, she was appealing in an unassuming manner. “She seemed to be a little remote, or it may have been that Franklin claimed the attention, leaving her somewhat in the background,” Phillips explained. “She was essentially domestic, and her interest in public affairs was centered in her husband’s career rather than in any thought of a career of her own.”

Yet Eleanor had her moments and her methods. Phillips recalled sharing breakfast with Franklin and Eleanor one morning. She asked Franklin if he had received a letter from a particular person.

“Yes,” he answered, continuing to drink his coffee.

“Have you answered it, dear?” she inquired.

“No,” he said, still drinking.

“Don’t you think you should answer it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think you should answer it now?”

“Yes.”

Phillips concluded the story: “And he answered it then and there. I gathered that the letter might never have received a reply without the watchful eye of his wife.”

AS MUCH AS Roosevelt relished life in the nation’s capital, he realized that Washington was a wasteland of elective politics. No one was ever elected senator or governor or president from the federal district; every viable candidate had a base in his home state. With this in mind, Roosevelt spent as much energy worrying about the affairs of New York as about those of the Navy Department, and he took few steps in his capacity as assistant secretary without weighing their effects on politics back home.

His first avenue of influence was patronage. As a large employer, the Navy Department could function much like one of the urban machines, bestowing jobs on supporters in the same way that Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall did. The process was complicated by civil service rules, which limited firings and complicated hirings. But Roosevelt managed to install allies and their friends in navy yards and other places of employment about New York. He simultaneously expanded his reach beyond the navy. He ingratiated himself with Daniel Roper, his counterpart in the Post Office Department, who allowed Roosevelt to identify worthy recipients of postmasterships. With his knack for self-promotion, Roosevelt soon claimed—discreetly, since much of what he was doing violated the spirit if not the letter of the civil service laws—that anyone who wanted a federal job or contract in New York needed to talk to Franklin Roosevelt.

He might have been even more assertive had Wilson not refused to alienate Tammany Hall. As a progressive, Wilson regarded Tammany with distaste, but as a practical politician—far more practical than most people knew—he appreciated that he couldn’t carry New York without Tammany. In this regard, Wilson’s interests differed from those of Roosevelt, who had won his reputation attacking Murphy and who had to remain on the offensive if he wished to return to elective politics.

The difference became apparent during the summer and early autumn of 1914. Roosevelt hadn’t held the assistant secretaryship for even eighteen months, but he itched to proceed on his path to the White House. Uncle Ted had moved on after fourteen months; time was passing. Besides, the career benefits of a bureaucratic job diminished dramatically over time; eventually the refusals and rejections that formed an inevitable part of the bureaucrat’s life piled up till they were all anyone remembered. Roosevelt’s charm might postpone the day of reckoning but couldn’t forestall it forever.

Consequently Roosevelt decided to make a run for the Senate. The 1914 elections would be the first under the provisions of the Seventeenth Amendment, which finally let voters themselves, rather than the state legislatures, choose senators. That same year New York joined the ranks of progressive-minded states in selecting its Senate nominees by primary election. Between them, primaries and the direct election of senators dealt a double blow to bosses, pushing Charles Murphy and his ilk to the edge of extinction.

Or so the progressives hoped. In fact the bosses proved more resourceful than their opponents expected. After Roosevelt had Louis Howe launch a trial balloon in early 1914, he tried to persuade Wilson to take a public anti-Tam-many stand. The president demurred and indicated that other officials of the executive branch should follow his lead. “My judgment is that it would be best if members of the administration should use as much influence as possible but say as little as possible in the politics of their several states,” Wilson wrote Roosevelt.

Wilson’s directive might have determined the issue for an assistant secretary of lesser ambition. And indeed for a time Roosevelt kept quiet. He had been mentioned, by Howe among others, for governor as well as for senator, and he kept denying interest in the former office long enough to convince those who might have pushed his candidacy that he really didn’t want it. When a final attempt by some supporters to win an endorsement from Wilson fell short, Roosevelt issued a definitive denial. “To repeat what I have now said more than half a dozen times, I am not a candidate for nomination for Governor of New York,” he told reporters.

But only three weeks later, to the surprise of many who knew him, including Howe, he declared his candidacy for the Senate. “My senses have not yet left me,” he assured Howe, who was fairly certain they had.

Somehow Roosevelt had gotten the impression Wilson wanted him to run. William G. McAdoo said so, Roosevelt told Josephus Daniels, and McAdoo, Wilson’s Treasury secretary and son-in-law, should have known. Daniels cautioned Roosevelt, predicting he’d have a hard time against the Tammany candidate in the primary and perhaps a harder time against the Republican nominee in the general election. Daniels urged Roosevelt to check with Wilson before making a decision.

Roosevelt declined the advice and ignored the discouragement. Perhaps he exaggerated what McAdoo had actually said; perhaps he feared that if he asked Wilson directly, the president would tell him to stay out of the race. Perhaps he hoped to force Wilson’s hand in the contest. But Wilson kept aloof, and when Tammany tapped James Gerard, a machine man yet one respectable enough to have won Wilson’s nomination to be ambassador to Germany, Roosevelt realized he’d been outflanked. Roosevelt initially hoped Gerard would decline the endorsement, as the war in Europe had just begun and the ambassador presumably wouldn’t want to vacate his post. Gerard accepted the Tammany endorsement but remained in Berlin during the primary campaign, leaving Roosevelt to flail against an absent opponent.

He did so energetically. He visited navy yards, courting the union vote. He motored across the rural districts, reaching out to farmers. He wrapped himself in the mantle of the administration, although the mantle slipped whenever Gerard’s supporters rejoined that the president had refused to choose between these two members of his administration. He denied disrupting the party, even as he criticized Boss Murphy. A reporter asked what kind of Democrat he considered himself to be. “I am a regular organization Democrat of Dutchess County, a New York State Democrat, and a National Democrat,” he answered. “I am not an anti-Tammany Democrat, but, in this campaign, as in many others, I have taken a consistent position against the control of the Democracy of this state by Charles Francis Murphy, believing that he is a handicap to our Democracy.”

The primary contest resulted in the worst defeat Roosevelt would ever suffer. Gerard received 210,000 votes to his 77,000. As Murphy and Tammany gloated, Roosevelt put on his bravest smile and congratulated the winner. “Will make an active campaign for you,” he added, “if you declare unalterable opposition to Murphy’s leadership and all he stands for.” Gerard saw no reason to make such a declaration, logically deeming Murphy’s support more valuable than Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt affirmed Democratic regularity but sat on the sidelines as Republican James Wadsworth buried Gerard in the general election.

8.

ELEANOR REMEMBERED HER FATHER BY NAMING HER THIRD SON FOR him, and of all the Roosevelt children Elliott took the greatest interest in family history. It was Elliott who, inquiring after the cause of his grandfather’s premature death, was told by his mother that her father had suffered from a brain tumor for which alcohol offered the only pain relief. Whether or not he believed this version—which almost certainly wasn’t true, given the etiology of alcoholism and brain tumors—he reported it without comment in the memoir he wrote as an old man.

He reported much else, with extended comment. His first memories were of life in Washington while his father was the assistant secretary of the navy. He remembered what a dashing figure his father cut as he came down to breakfast each morning dressed in a starched high collar, an expensive English-tailored suit that hung impeccably on his lanky frame, and polished leather shoes purchased straight from London. His father was always a bit behind schedule but was never the least concerned on account of it. “Good morning, Babs,” he would say to Elliott’s mother, who had been up for hours. He would kiss her on the cheek and then turn to the children. “Good morning, chicks—how are we all today?” He would kiss them too. As he sat down, Eleanor would ring a silver bell, which signaled the servants that the master of the house required his morning meal.

Elliott recalled his father as the model of cheerfulness, despite the demands his office placed on him. “He invariably woke in a high good humor, ready and eager to tackle anything the day might bring,” Elliott wrote. “I do not remember a breakfast time when there wasn’t a smile on his lips and in his eyes.” As he inquired of Eleanor and the children what their day might hold or mentioned something on his own calendar, he appeared oblivious to the passage of time. Not so Eleanor, who constantly checked the clock to ensure the punctual departure of her husband and the school-bound children.

Typically the doorbell would ring before Franklin finished his coffee. A servant would answer, and Louis Howe, who had become Franklin’s chief aide at the Navy Department, would be shown in. “Good morning, Boss. Good morning, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Howe would say. Franklin and Eleanor would smile in response—he with true warmth, she out of politeness. “Mother made no pretense that she liked him,” Elliott said of Howe. “She felt somehow excluded from the intimacy he and Father shared, the affectionate bantering that went on between them, the secrets they kept exclusively to themselves.” She also found Howe’s manner crude and his hygiene deficient. But she smiled nonetheless. “Would you care for some breakfast, Mr. Howe?” she would say. “No, thank you,” he would answer, “but I would like some coffee, please.”

Howe survived on caffeine and nicotine, and on the adrenaline stimulated by proximity to power. The combination kept his weight a bit above one hundred pounds and his lungs in a chronic state of rebellion. “Don’t you think you should see a doctor about your cough?” Eleanor would inquire as he hacked across her breakfast table. He would respond, “It’s an old friend. I once saw a doctor in Albany who gave me two months to live. That was nearly ten years ago.”

Franklin would finish his breakfast and Howe his coffee. Franklin would kiss Eleanor and the children again, grab his hat—a felt bowler in winter, a straw boater in summer—and head out the door. Elliott, summoning testimony, memory, and imagination, recalled the fifteen-minute journey to the Navy Department:

He must have loved striding down Connecticut Avenue every weekday morning with Louis hurrying along at his side, the two of them looking uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho setting out to battle with giants. Government girls on their way to their typewriters turned their heads to watch. Society gossips rated Father to be among the handsomest men in town, long-muscled, superbly fit from weekend exercise. His good friend Nigel Law, Third Secretary at the British Embassy, who had arrived aboard the Lusitania in November, 1914, thought that he was “the most attractive man whom it was my good fortune to meet during my four years in America.”

HAD ROOSEVELT WON election to the Senate, he would have had to alter his daily route to the office. As it was, he stuck to Connecticut Avenue, turning the heads of the office girls on that street. He also turned the head of a young woman he passed on the stair of his own house. Lucy Mercer’s father was descended from the Carrolls of Maryland, the most distinguished Catholic family in America, with roots in Lord Baltimore’s colony and a signature—Charles Carroll’s—on the Declaration of Independence. Carroll Mercer, Lucy’s father, characterized his occupation as “gentleman” on her birth certificate. Lucy’s mother, Minnie Tunis, was generally considered the most beautiful woman in Washington and was, by virtue of a large inheritance, one of the richest. Her virtues ended about there, in the thinking of the straitlaced, for after a first marriage turned sour she divorced her husband to marry Carroll Mercer. They celebrated by living in grand style, having two daughters, and squandering most of their money. Carroll Mercer fought beside Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and came home to relocate his family to one of the comparatively modest row houses on N Street, just off Connecticut Avenue. Not long thereafter he himself moved out, leaving Minnie to rear Lucy and her sister. She accomplished the task by various means, including the kindness of other gentlemen entranced by her charms. The gossips raised a racket but couldn’t negate the effect of the beauty of Minnie and the girls, who grew up to be as attractive as their mother. The net result for Lucy, who turned twenty-two the month after the Franklin Roosevelts arrived in Washington, was that she required a job yet considered herself above most ordinary labor. Eleanor Roosevelt, for her part, felt the need for a guide through the social intricacies of the capital. Anna Cowles had known the Mercers in better days; most likely Anna was the one who suggested Lucy to Eleanor.

At first Lucy seemed a godsend. “She and Mother worked together in the living room,” Elliott recalled. “There was no other space available. Lucy would curl herself gracefully on the carpet, spreading out for sorting the letters, cards, bills and invitations that flowed in, prompted by Mother’s calls. Lucy was gay, smiling, and relaxed. We children welcomed the days she came to work.” With confident efficiency, Lucy answered the letters, acknowledged the cards, and paid the bills. Even Sara Roosevelt, to whom criticism came more naturally than praise, was smitten. “She is so sweet and attractive, and adores you, Eleanor,” Sara wrote her daughter-in-law.

Eleanor appreciated the help but had difficulty warming to Lucy. Eleanor had always been insecure about her looks, and bearing six children—Elliott, a second Franklin Jr., and John, after Anna, James, and the deceased first Franklin Jr.—in ten years hadn’t added to her confidence. Franklin grew more handsome with each passing year; she felt old and ugly. Lucy’s presence made her feel worse. And Lucy possessed a sparkle, a joie de vivre, that matched Franklin’s ebullience but contrasted sharply to Eleanor’s somberness. Before long Eleanor couldn’t help detecting an enthusiasm in Franklin’s hellos to Lucy she hadn’t heard for years in his greetings to her.

She couldn’t complain to Franklin without feeling petty. But she begrudged more than ever the weeks he stayed in Washington while she tended the children at Campobello. And when he postponed his departure from the capital, and then postponed it again, she found herself doubting his excuses. “I will wire you tomorrow or Tuesday whether I can go up next Sunday or the following,” he wrote on a Sunday in July 1914. He added, as if to assuage her unspoken doubts, “I have dined at home almost every evening.” Three days later he apologized that “it may be impossible to get off this Sunday as J. D. may go to Raleigh.” Roosevelt went on to say that work was consuming him. “I have been as usual going every second, at the office till 7:30 last night…. Dinedhere alone.” Eleanor didn’t object to Franklin’s devotion to his duties, but she couldn’t help wondering: Was it his work he found so compelling, or Lucy?

She felt that she was losing him, and she didn’t know how to respond. Every close relationship she had ever experienced had ended disastrously—in abandonment or premature death. She didn’t know that love could weather crisis, didn’t know how to fight for what she valued. As he drifted away, she gradually closed herself off, seeking to recapture the emotional self-sufficiency she had found to be her only refuge as a child.

THE MORE SHE WITHDREW, the easier it was for him to rationalize his behavior. Eleanor seems never to have enjoyed the physical aspects of marital love; her daughter, Anna, later recalled her saying, just before Anna married, that sex was “an ordeal to be borne.” Franklin had long set his heart on six children, following the lead of Uncle Ted; after her sixth child, Eleanor may have decided enough was enough. Had she enjoyed sex she and Franklin might have employed one of the methods of contraception then available; since she didn’t enjoy it, she may have employed the most basic method of all. Perhaps she articulated an embargo against intimacy; perhaps she simply let Franklin know, by her lack of interest, that she wanted nothing more of it.

Her coolness might have come as a disappointment to Franklin; it might, alternatively, have provided an excuse for him to do what he was tempted to do anyway. Washington had always been hard on family life, from the earliest days of the republic when travel was difficult and most members of Congress left their wives at home. Women plying the oldest profession had spotted an opportunity and found enough patrons among the members to maintain a lively trade. The growth of the executive branch during and after the Civil War increased the permanent population of government officials, but Congress still came and went, as, at greater intervals, did those executive branch employees not protected by the civil service reforms. The result, even during the second decade of the twentieth century, was that life in Washington reflected a peculiar transience among the governing classes. In the swirl of receptions and dinners, existing attachments frayed and new ones readily formed.

A man on the make like Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have to look far to find models of infidelity—not far at all. Nick Longworth’s extramarital adventures grew more notorious with each passing month. Alice knew of the affairs but ignored them till one evening she discovered Nick and her close friend Cissy Patterson coupled on the floor of her bathroom. Alice was surprised, though less about Nick than about Cissy, who was supposed to be having an affair with Senator William Borah. After a memorable tryst between Cissy and Borah at one of Alice’s parties, Alice’s maid recovered some distinctive hairpins from the floor of the library. Alice sent them to Cissy with a note: “I believe they are yours.” Cissy answered, “And if you look up in the chandelier, you might find my panties.”

Alice decided that two (or more) could play that game, and she pursued Borah. The “stallion from Idaho,” as he was known around Washington, reciprocated her interest, and their affair soon stoked the gossip engines of the capital. “Everybody called her ‘Aurora Borah Alice,’” Hope Miller, a member of Alice’s set matter-of-factly recalled many years later. Eventually Alice became pregnant. Most of her acquaintances assumed Borah was the father—including Nick, who vetoed Alice’s initial choice of a name for the baby girl. Alice, in perhaps her most brilliantly malicious stroke of humor, wanted to name the child Deborah. Nick drew the line. He would raise the baby, he said, and in the event doted on her far more than Alice did. But he wouldn’t have a child under his roof named “de Borah.” Alice settled for Paulina.

What Franklin Roosevelt made of all this is impossible to say. By the time the most scandalous parts became known, he was in no position to comment on other people’s affairs. But he doubtless told himself that flirtations were the norm among Washington’s summer bachelors, and if women found him attractive, who was he to push them away? Hostesses were happy for Lucy Mercer to fill Eleanor’s empty place at dinner; Lucy’s social antecedents, not to mention her manners and looks, were such as to elevate the tone at almost any table. When the flirtation began to turn more serious is equally hard to say. Perhaps it did so gradually, perhaps with a swiftness that took the lovers’ breath away. But whether sudden or slow, Franklin’s attachment to Lucy eventually overtook his love for Eleanor.

The affair was a secret chiefly from those who weren’t supposed to know. Alice Roosevelt caught on early. “Lucy was beautiful, charming, and an absolutely delightful creature,” she recalled. “I would see her out driving with Franklin, and I would say things like, ‘I saw you out driving with someone very attractive indeed, Franklin. Your hands were on the wheel, but your eyes were on her.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?’” Alice encouraged the affair, for her own complicated reasons. “He deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor,” she said later. Alice probably felt that Franklin’s affair in some way excused her own. On at least one occasion she appears to have taunted Eleanor by saying she had a secret that ought to interest her. But Eleanor, wishing neither to give Alice the satisfaction she obviously coveted nor to have her own fears confirmed, declined to be enticed into asking what Alice’s secret was.

Yet the secret—or half secret—took a toll on Franklin and Eleanor’s immediate family. Elliott afterward wrote of a “vague hostility” that suffused the household. He was a young child then; perhaps he recalled things accurately, or perhaps he imputed later feelings to the earlier time. Quoting his mother’s published recollection regarding the same period, that “there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us,” Elliott remarked that readers naturally assumed she was talking about the troubled state of world affairs. “But by ‘all of us’ she meant not the country at large but her family. She was talking about trouble much closer to home.” Speaking for himself, Elliott adopted language of a later era in describing a “cold war” between his parents.

Franklin and Eleanor fought—not directly over Franklin’s affair, which remained unspoken, but over other matters. She blamed him when he didn’t arrive at Campobello on schedule. She accused him of ignoring her letters. “You never answer a question, and nothing I ask for appears!” She insulted Lucy gratuitously by trying to pay her for volunteer work. She gloated in the knowledge that her insult had hit the mark. “She is evidently quite cross with me!” she wrote Franklin. Finally, after another period of procrastination in his departure from Washington for Campobello, she delivered what appears to have been an ultimatum. “I count on seeing you the 26th,” she wrote. “My threat was no idle one!” Elliott, reading this letter later, had little difficulty discerning its meaning. “There was no mystery,” he said. “She threatened to leave him.”

Meanwhile Eleanor did something she hadn’t done since the early years of the marriage: she consciously cultivated Sara. Perhaps Eleanor understood that an explosion was imminent and wanted to protect herself—and her children—against it. Perhaps she guessed that Sara would take her side, at least this once. “I miss you and so do the children,” Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law in a typical letter from the period. “As the years go on, I realize how lucky we are to have you, and I wish we could always be together. Very few mothers I know mean as much to their daughters as you do to me.” A few weeks later she declared, “I wish you were always here! There are always so many things I want to talk over and ask you about, and letters are not very satisfactory, are they?”

9.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WASN’T ALONE IN NOT SEEING A EUROPEAN war coming. Americans made Woodrow Wilson their president with only the vaguest notion of where he stood on world affairs. “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs,” Wilson remarked confidentially just before his inauguration. As a professor of government and history, Wilson had studied European affairs for decades and, with most experts, had come to the conclusion that a major war in Europe was nearly impossible. Border scrapes—the international equivalent of barroom scuffles—would occur, but none of the great powers had any incentive to burn the bar down. Even if a big war somehow got started, it couldn’t last long, for the powers would run out of the money required to keep modern armies in the field.

This reassuring logic began to unravel in the summer of 1914, when Serbian terrorists calling themselves the “Black Hand” killed the next in line to the throne of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The terrorists were almost ludicrously inept; the bomb they tossed at the car of Franz Ferdinand bounced off without igniting, and most of the plotters were arrested. Only by the dumbest luck did one of those not arrested find himself face-to-face with the archduke later that day, and this time he couldn’t miss. Gavrilo Princip’s bullets killed Franz and his wife, Sophie, and triggered a slow-motion cascade of diplomatic protests as Austria demanded of Serbia the right to investigate the murder, Russia warned Austria not to pressure Serbia, Germany told Russia to leave Austria alone, and France and Britain threatened Germany over Russia. Each protest prompted the armies of the countries involved to prepare for war. At first the preparations were chiefly demonstrative: to lend weight to what the ambassadors were telling the foreign ministers. But the reciprocal mobilizations developed a dynamic of their own. Any reasonably efficient army can mobilize to go to war on a given day, but no army can maintain war readiness for long. As the Russians, Germans, French, and British approached peak readiness, each feared the consequences of standing down first. The Germans, loathing the Russians and disdaining the French, decided to strike rather than step back. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914, and on France on August 3. The first general European conflict since Napoleon began.

Americans watched in hypnotized horror as Europe went over the brink. They thanked God for having dug the Atlantic Ocean so wide and deep and congratulated their ancestors for having evinced the foresight to leave that lunatic continent. Hardly an American man or woman registered disapproval when Wilson, following the precedent of George Washington at the outbreak of the previous round of Europe’s attempted self-destruction, declared American neutrality. Again following General Washington, who in his farewell address had warned his compatriots against excessive emotional attachment to foreign countries, Wilson urged Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.”

UNTIL 1914 Theodore Roosevelt had been a good loser regarding his defeat at Wilson’s hands two years before. The people had spoken, and anyway the prize he lost to Wilson was no more than he had held before. The outbreak of war in Europe, however, changed things entirely. TR knew enough history to realize that the European conflict afforded the statesmen of the world, including the American president, the opportunity to transform international affairs—and to win reputations of truly historic proportions. Roosevelt was proud of the record he had compiled in the White House from 1901 to 1909, but he knew it would never vault him into the pantheon of American politics—into the company of such towering figures as Washington and Lincoln, who had led the country through war. Though he had received much criticism for his assertion that “no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war,” he still stood by every word. And now it galled him to think that Wilson, who had never served under arms, who didn’t know a mortar from a howitzer or a destroyer from a dreadnought, and who had defeated him in 1912 only because the Republican regulars immorally denied him the nomination, was the president to enjoy this rare chance at historical greatness. Roosevelt gnashed his teeth and cursed the unfairness of it all.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t communicate directly with Theodore these days. As one of the most visible members of the Wilson administration, Franklin had to exercise care not to consort conspicuously with the enemy. Theodore understood. “Now, Sara,” he wrote Franklin’s mother in response to an invitation to him and Edith to stay at Hyde Park while visiting the Hudson Valley, “I am very doubtful, from Franklin’s standpoint, whether it is wise that we do so…. I shall be in the middle of a tour in which I am attacking the Administration, and I think it might well be an error, from Franklin’s standpoint, if we stayed with you…. I hope you understand, dear Sally, that it is the exact truth to say that I am only thinking of Franklin’s interest.”

The outbreak of the European war diminished what little discouragement Franklin felt at the failure of his halfhearted bid for the Democratic nomination for the Senate that year. A post with a peacetime navy could be enjoyable, especially for a sailor like Roosevelt, but it didn’t do much for a man’s reputation after the initial benefits of the appointment wore off. A job with a wartime navy was another matter. Roosevelt didn’t know whether the United States would enter the European war, but he had to prepare for that possibility. The opponents of American intervention, currently led by President Wilson, were invoking George Washington; Franklin Roosevelt could cite the father of his country, too, about preparation for war being the best preventive.

Doing so meant drawing farther from Josephus Daniels and the pacifist wing of the administration. Daniels and Secretary of State Bryan believed, General Washington notwithstanding, that preparing for war made war more likely. Bryan resisted efforts to upgrade the army, while Daniels denied that the European war demanded any acceleration of the Navy Department’s construction program. The navy’s general board was still recommending four new battleships a year; Daniels again told the House naval affairs committee that two were plenty.

Members of the House committee, who generally found the arguments of the career admirals more persuasive than those of the North Carolina newspaperman, summoned Franklin Roosevelt for a third opinion. They had reason to believe he would bolster the admirals’ case, for he had just produced a detailed estimate of navy readiness that declared the service singularly unready. Scores of American ships were in reserve rather than on active duty. “That is to say, they have on board only from 25 percent to 50 percent of the crews necessary to man them in case of war,” Roosevelt explained. Dozens more were even less ready—“manned by from 10 percent to 20 percent of their regular complements, just enough to prevent them from rusting to pieces.” Still more were “hopelessly out of date.” To remedy the shortfall in readiness required a major infusion of personnel. Roosevelt said the navy needed eighteen thousand enlisted men to bring all existing vessels into war-fighting trim. The additional ships currently under construction would demand still more—a thousand men each, for example, for the new battleships Oklahoma and Nevada.

Roosevelt’s report was a work of political art as much as a statement of policy. It didn’t exactly contradict Daniels, who had focused on the construction of ships rather than the enlistment of sailors. But its essential thrust was in the opposite direction, for whether the navy lacked metal or men, it was, in Roosevelt’s view, far less ready for use than Daniels let on.

Roosevelt recognized the danger his borderline insubordination involved. Sending Eleanor a copy of the report, he declared, “The enclosed is the truth, and even if it gets me into trouble I am perfectly prepared to stand by it. The country needs the truth about the Army and the Navy instead of the soft mush about everlasting peace which so many statesmen are handing out to a gullible public.”

In his appearance before the House committee, Roosevelt did stand by his report. A correspondent covering the hearings explained, “Mr. Roosevelt impressed the committee by his promptness in answering questions and by his candor.” Afterward Roosevelt himself thought he had done well. Describing the hearings as “really great fun and not so much of a strain,” he told Sara: “I was able to get in my own views without particular embarrassment to the Secretary.”

The House committee invited him to return. Members wanted to know where the United States ranked among the naval powers of the world. Roosevelt responded with what must have seemed an obscure formula, named for the German naval strategist Otto Kretschmer, that involved tonnage, armor, gun size, and speed. After a certainly intentional eye-glazing exposition of the Kretschmer formula, Roosevelt revealed that the United States ranked third, far behind Britain, a bit behind Germany, and comfortably ahead of France.

Committeemen pressed him on the readiness of the fleet. He noted a difference between theory and practice. The Navy Department’s theory was that a ship in reserve could leave port within twenty-four hours and start fighting at once; the practice was rather different. “A battleship in reserve could go to sea tomorrow,” Roosevelt said. “But it would take three months to shake her down. Two-thirds of her crew would be new to the ship and would have to fit themselves to her.” When a committee member asked why more ships weren’t kept in commission, ready to fight, Roosevelt answered, “It is a necessity as a matter of economy that all our ships should not be in commission all the time. No navy does that—except that of one country.” Roosevelt’s listeners perhaps expected him to identify Britain as the perpetually ready power; he got a laugh when he explained that it was Haiti. “She has two gunboats, and they are in commission all the year around.”

The hearing went smoothly for Roosevelt until members delved into his apparent difference with Secretary Daniels regarding manpower. Again Roosevelt carefully avoided prescribing policy, but he didn’t retreat from his earlier description. If anything, the situation seemed to have gotten worse. “We are from 30,000 to 50,000 men short of the needs of the navy as laid down in the confidential war plans of the War College,” he informed the committee.

UNTIL THE SPRING of 1915 the debate over the size and strength of the navy was, if not quite academic, less than immediately consequential. The fighting among the major belligerents had stagnated in the mud of northern France, with neither the Germans, on one hand, nor the French and British, on the other, able to break the murderous deadlock imposed by the momentary advantage in armaments defenders held over attackers. Trench warfare claimed lives in numbers no one had imagined just months before, but the front lines barely moved.

So the belligerents turned to naval warfare to secure the mastery both sides were denied on land. The British blockaded Germany with surface ships; the Germans reciprocated with submarines. The latter were slow and unarmored; they attacked effectively only without warning. And when their torpedoes struck their targets, the U-boats lacked the capacity to rescue survivors.

Americans understood the situation but appreciated its import only after a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania. The British had exploited the Germans’ reluctance to target passenger ships, by transporting munitions aboard the liners. Notices from the German government warning Americans to stay off British vessels traversing the war zone were published in American papers; one such notice appeared in New York papers on the day the Lusitania left New York, bound for Liverpool. But the passengers ignored the warning as disinformation, assuming, in any event, that the swift liner could outrun the U-boats. This assumption proved tragically mistaken when, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo boat blasted a hole in the Lusitania’s hull, triggering a secondary, internal explosion that sent the vessel to the bottom just off the southern coast of Ireland, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, 128 of them American.

This first direct blow against the American people sorely tested the Wilson administration’s neutrality policy. The policy was already under strain from a different direction. Just weeks into the war the French government, aware that its cash reserves couldn’t sustain a protracted conflict, had asked J. P. Morgan & Company to float French bonds in the United States. Secretary of State Bryan vehemently opposed the bond sale, on the ground that it would erode American neutrality more surely than any other action. Wilson initially accepted Bryan’s argument and vetoed the loan. But when the French modified the request, asking simply for credits toward the purchase of American goods, Wilson gave his approval. He added that he would approve credits requested by the other warring powers as well.

Though neutral in form, Wilson’s credit policy favored France and Britain in practice. Those countries were better connected to American markets than Germany; combined with Britain’s naval superiority, which allowed a more effective blockade of Germany than Germany could impose against Britain, the New York–London–Paris financial connections funneled American money far more freely to France and Britain than any analogous connections did to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Yet even the American credits couldn’t keep the French and British armies provisioned, and in the spring of 1915 French and British officials applied for unrestricted loans. Without the loans, they said, their war effort would collapse, with disastrous consequences for democracy in Europe—and for the economic health of the United States. They persuaded Robert Lansing, Bryan’s second at the State Department. “The result would be restriction of outputs, industrial depression, idle capital and idle labor, numerous failures, financial demoralization, and general unrest and suffering among the laboring classes,” Lansing wrote Wilson regarding a refusal to approve the loans. The president, not wishing to hazard such a result, let the loans proceed.

The Lusitania sinking made Wilson’s decision easier, although not at first. American papers reacted with understandable outrage at the mass killing of Americans; editors thundered that Germany must be chastised. Wilson initially resisted the tide of opinion. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” the president declared. But when this evoked an even louder outcry—how could America be “too proud” to avenge its dead citizens?—he adopted a stronger position. He filed a protest with the German government demanding that Berlin alter its submarine policy and provide guarantees against another such attack. After Germany responded unsatisfactorily, Wilson sharpened his warning. He declared that persistence in Germany’s submarine policy would constitute an “unpardonable offense” against American sovereignty and that he would be forced to interpret any future incident similar to the Lusitania sinking as “deliberately unfriendly” to the United States.

This was too much for William Jennings Bryan, and almost too much for Josephus Daniels. The secretary of state complained that Wilson’s policy put America on the path toward war; a single torpedo fired by a hot-headed or fog-blinded German U-boat captain could drag the United States into the maelstrom that was consuming Europe. To underscore his objection, Bryan resigned. Daniels supported Bryan, although not to the extent of surrendering his job.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT OBSERVED the fight within the administration at first hand, taking mental notes on the subject of wartime leadership. He interjected where he could. The Anglophilia he and most members of America’s upper class exhibited to one degree or another influenced his attitude toward the European war, and he felt himself drawn toward Britain’s side even before the Lusitania sinking. “Today Sir C. Spring Rice lunched with me,” he wrote Eleanor in early 1915, referring to the British ambassador, who had been the best man at Uncle Ted’s wedding to Edith and was now cultivating the younger Roosevelt. “Von Bernstorff”—the German ambassador—“was at the next table, trying to hear what we were talking about! Springy and Von B. would kill each other if they had a chance!” The tension of the high-stakes diplomacy delighted Roosevelt, who added mischievously, “I just know I shall do some awful unneutral thing before I get through!”

His neutrality diminished further amid the Lusitania crisis. If he wished to keep his job—and, with war looming, he definitely did—he couldn’t be as vocal as Uncle Ted, who was taxing Wilson and Bryan loudly for not breaking relations with Germany. But Franklin railed in private against Bryan and Daniels. “These are the hectic days, all right!” he wrote Eleanor. “What d’ y’ think of W. Jay B.? It’s all too long to write about, but I can only say I’m disgusted clear through!” To Bryan’s credit, in Roosevelt’s eyes, the secretary of state finally had the dignity to get out of the way when he could no longer support policies the president deemed essential to American security. Not so Daniels, who continued to obstruct from within. “J. D. will not resign!” Roosevelt declared indignantly.

To the president, Roosevelt offered encouragement. Bryan’s departure was a heavy political blow, as Bryan intended it to be. The now-former secretary of state knew his constituency, and he recognized that all those farmers were leery of getting dragged into Europe’s war. Wilson’s personal attraction for this crucial part of the Democratic coalition was essentially nil; without Bryan he’d have great difficulty keeping the Democrats together. Roosevelt realized that other voices counted more with Wilson than his, but he tendered support all the same. “I wanted to tell you simply that you have been in my thoughts during these days and that I realize to the full all that you have had to go through,” he wrote the president. “I need not repeat to you my own entire loyalty and devotion—that I hope you know. But I feel most strongly that the Nation approves and sustains your course and that it is American in the highest sense.”

Wilson appreciated the gesture. Roosevelt’s letter “touched me very much,” the president replied. “I thank you for it with all my heart. Such messages make the performance of duty worth while, because, after all, the people who are nearest are those whose judgment we most value and most need to be supported by.”

WILSON REQUIRED THE support especially as the 1916 election approached. Nearly all the Republicans who had followed Theodore Roosevelt out of the party in 1912 were following him back in, and the arithmetic of American national politics increasingly re-summed toward the Republican majority that had characterized the country since McKinley beat Bryan in 1896. In his favor with voters, Wilson could count certain domestic accomplishments: the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, a downward revision of the tariff. He could also hope that voters worried by the war in Europe would want to stick with the leader they knew. Whether these would outweigh the institutional Republican edge in the electoral college was the central question.

Wilson trod carefully, particularly on matters relating to the war. Ever more he believed that a German victory would endanger the United States in a way a British and French victory wouldn’t. Germany had started the war; Germany’s autocratic government both reflected and amplified what Wilson and many others perceived to be an inherent aggressiveness in the German people. In early 1916 Wilson quietly sent Edward House, his informal intimate, to Britain to test the waters of cooperation. House and British foreign secretary Edward Grey initialed a memorandum of understanding to the effect that the United States would propose a peace conference and that if Germany refused to participate, America would probably enter the war on the side of Britain and France. The House-Grey memo didn’t bind the United States to anything, but it made clear that Wilson himself had abandoned the moral neutrality he had urged on his compatriots not two years before.

Yet he didn’t trumpet the abandonment. In fact he stressed just the opposite: that he had kept the United States out of war. This became the theme of his reelection campaign, to which Franklin Roosevelt contributed his expected share. Roosevelt ignored for the moment his differences with Daniels and Wilson and berated the Republicans for hindering the president’s efforts to prepare the country for whatever might befall it. “Every minute of time taken up in perfectly futile and useless argument about mistakes in the past slows up construction that much,” he told the Navy League. “Worse than that, it blinds and befogs the public as to the real situation and the imperative necessity for prompt action.” Employing an image he would use in similar circumstances more than two decades later, Roosevelt demanded, “How would you expect the public to be convinced that a dangerous fire was in progress, requiring every citizen’s aid for its extinguishment, if they saw the members of the volunteer fire department stop in their headlong rush towards the conflagration and indulge in a slanging match as to who was responsible for the rotten hose or the lack of water at the fire a week ago?”

Roosevelt’s efforts and those of other Democrats almost weren’t enough. The early returns on election night told heavily for Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson went to bed thinking the race was lost; Roosevelt stayed up to tell friends he might have to return to the practice of law. Things looked grim the next morning; newspapers reported Hughes the victor. But as the ballots in the West were tallied, Wilson’s prospects improved. “The most extraordinary day of my life,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor at noon. “Wilson may be elected after all.” The counting proceeded with nerve-rending slowness. “Another day of the most wild uncertainty,” Roosevelt recorded on the Thursday after the Tuesday election. “Returns, after conflicting, have been coming in every hour from Cal., N.M., N.D., Minn., and N.H.” If Wilson won enough of these, he might barely squeak past Hughes.

This was just what happened. Wilson wound up with 9.1 million votes to Hughes’s 8.5 million, and 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. Less than 4,000 votes ultimately separated the two candidates in California, whose thirteen electors gave Wilson his margin of victory.

WILSON’S TRIUMPH SPARED Roosevelt a return to the private sector; it also freed the president to deal more forthrightly with the German threat. At the end of 1916 the United States was the great imponderable in the European equation. The front in France had scarcely moved for two years, despite casualties on both sides that numbered in the millions. American money and provisions kept the British and French fighting, but not fighting so well as to defeat the Germans. Yet Germany was weakening under the strain of the British blockade, and Berlin realized it couldn’t hold out forever. To break the deadlock, the German government decided to rescind all restrictions on its submarine commanders. The Germans understood that the new policy would bring the United States into the war, but they were willing to gamble that a cutoff of American resupply to the British and French, combined with a major German offensive in France, would compel the Western allies to sue for peace before American troops could reach the battlefield in meaningful numbers. Accordingly, in January 1917 Berlin announced that it would begin sinking all ships—passenger liners and freighters, neutral vessels and enemy—in the waters around Britain.

Wilson might have responded to the German announcement with a request of Congress for a war declaration. Instead he simply handed Bernstorff his passport and severed diplomatic ties with Germany. Perhaps the president still hoped that war might be averted; perhaps he wished to move slowly enough toward war that even the most reluctant Americans could keep pace. When Albert Burleson, the postmaster general, suggested at a cabinet meeting that public opinion could force his hand, Wilson replied, “I want to do right, whether popular or not.” Whatever his reasons, Wilson waited until American ships actually started going down—in late March—before approaching Congress.

His hesitance paid off in a manner he couldn’t have anticipated. While the world waited on Wilson, revolutionaries in Russia toppled the czar. Nicholas II had always been the odd man out in the anti-German alliance; his auto cratic regime, more reactionary even than those of Germany and Austria-Hungary, prevented the British and French from proclaiming theirs a war for liberal values. The unrepresentative character of the Russian government gave Wilson pause in weighing intervention; the American president insisted on fighting for principle, and he couldn’t discern any principles he and Nicholas shared. Consequently, the overthrow of the czar in March 1918 (February by the unreformed Russian Orthodox calendar) and the proclamation of a provisional government committed to republican rule came as a tremendous relief to Wilson, removing the last impediment to a clear-conscienced embrace of American belligerence.

The Zimmermann telegram was a bonus. In hopes of distracting the Americans, Berlin tried to lure Mexico to its side, promising the Mexican government a restoration of territories Mexico had lost to the United States in the 1840s, in exchange for Mexican support against the Americans. The German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, made this astonishing offer in a January 1917 telegram that also called on Mexico to help persuade Japan to jump from Britain’s side in the war to Germany’s. British agents intercepted the telegram, deciphered and translated it, and in February delivered it to the U.S. government, fully aware of the impact it would have on American public opinion. The inevitable anti-German reaction, combined with Berlin’s submarine campaign, eliminated what little remained of sympathy for the German cause.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress. The president retraced Germany’s increasingly egregious violations of American neutrality, contending that these more than justified a declaration of war. Yet he made plain that in his judgment war was not simply a response to injuries past and present but an instrument for ensuring a better future. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Wilson said. “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

Congress might have granted Wilson’s request for a war declaration at once, but the sweep of his idealism took some of the lawmakers aback. They debated the matter, and though the ultimate vote was overwhelmingly in favor, it required two days to achieve. All the same, when Wilson signed the war declaration on April 6, he knew he had the backing of the great majority of the American people.

AS A STUDENT of executive leadership, Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t help admiring Wilson’s mastery in allowing support for war to build. Americans in August 1914 had recoiled in horror from the very thought of intervention; now, in April 1917, their representatives voted 455 to 56 in favor of war. Roosevelt had never stopped thinking that he himself might be president one day, and despite the impatience he had vented over American unpreparedness, he had to admit that Wilson had accomplished a remarkable feat, one any future president could hardly improve upon.

When he thought of himself as a future president, Roosevelt returned to the script he had mapped out a decade earlier. The stage directions now called for him to resign from the Navy Department to enlist in the active military. That was what Uncle Ted had done at the comparable moment in 1898, and Franklin knew enough of history and politics to realize that it was the Rough Rider, not the former assistant secretary, who went on to become governor, vice president, and president.

Roosevelt considered following the script. He made noises about seeking active duty. But he soon decided against it. In the first place, men whose opinions he valued told him he would be crazy, even derelict, to leave Washington, where his actions in the Navy Department might materially influence the outcome of the war, to serve in the trenches or on some ship, where his actions couldn’t matter beyond the reach of his rifle or the view from his bridge. “Franklin Roosevelt should, under no circumstances, think of leaving the Navy Department,” Leonard Wood, TR’s commanding officer in Cuba, told a mutual friend, for Franklin’s benefit. “It would be a public calamity to have him leave at the present time.”

In the second place, the present war was a different beast than Uncle Ted’s war. A day’s fighting by a few thousand troops in front of Santiago largely determined the result of the contest with Spain; after nearly three years of bloodletting by several million troops, the outcome of the European war remained in the balance. Even if Franklin hadn’t already appreciated how drastically war had changed between 1898 and 1917, he would have learned the lesson very quickly from Theodore’s experience when he tried to reprise his Rough Rider role. TR began raising a division of volunteers, only to have his actions vetoed by Wilson, who explained that this war required regular, disciplined troops, not the volunteer, freelancing units of the Spanish-American War. Wilson was playing politics, ensuring that his Republican rival not become a hero again. But he was also being sincere. Any war directed by progressives must be orderly, impersonal, and scientific.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Franklin’s decision to depart from the Roosevelt script showed that despite sharing a name and some superficial traits, he was a different kind of man than Uncle Ted. Theodore, too, had been told that abandoning the Navy Department for the cavalry would be irresponsible, but he refused to listen. He couldn’t help himself. Since childhood he had been obsessed with strength, with manliness, with the military. He had tested himself in every way imaginable—on the athletic field, in the pursuit of dangerous animals, on the political stump—except for the one way that mattered most to him: on the field of battle. He was too much the patriot and the politician to have admitted it, but he almost certainly would have preferred performing heroically in a losing national cause to doing nothing distinguished in a victory.

Franklin Roosevelt labored under no such obsession. He was ambitious, but he lacked his cousin’s insatiable need to be moving, doing, testing, confronting. Theodore understood the demons that had driven his brother Elliott to drink and dissolution, because he sometimes felt them closing in on him. What a later generation would call depression ran in Theodore’s branch of the Roosevelt family, as the self-destructive behavior of Elliott and various other kinsfolk demonstrated. Theodore refused to let the demons catch him. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he wrote, revising Horace. His whole exhausting life was, among other things, a race against that black care.

Franklin Roosevelt knew nothing of that sort of inner struggle—at least not in 1917. His thirty-five years on earth had been as blessed as any man could wish. His family wealth and connections, the love and devotion of his parents, his good looks and natural charm made life easy. He waltzed from triumph to triumph, scarcely breaking a sweat. The principal complaint against him was precisely that success came so easily. No one disliked him; this was nearly impossible. But it wasn’t difficult to envy him, and enviously call him shallow for never having supped at disappointment or drunk of despair.

And so, in his shallowness—or innocence or simple well-adjustment—he decided not to risk becoming cannon fodder to scratch a psychic itch that wasn’t even his own. He stayed at the Navy Department, determined to ensure that the American fleet did its part to secure the victory he, with Wilson now and so many others, considered essential to the survival of democracy.

10.

BUT IF HE WASN’T GOING TO CHARGE UP THE FRENCH EQUIVALENT of San Juan Hill, he could still apply his considerable energy—his share of the Roosevelt zest—to assaulting the hills at hand. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun for the United States even before the American war declaration, when German U-boats started sinking American merchant vessels. Roosevelt snatched up the gage and determined to punish the German fleet.

This was no small task. For strategic and political reasons, the British had declined to share with a neutral American government the extent of the damage German submarines were doing to British and French shipping. Once the United States entered the war, Roosevelt and other administration officials were shocked to be told that the Germans were sinking nearly a million tons per month. At this rate, the German gamble—on strangling Britain and France before American power came to bear—might well succeed. The first priority, the one on which the war currently hung, was to counter the U-boats.

Opinions differed on the best defense against the submarines. The admirals of the British and American navies preferred a steady-as-she-goes policy of fighting the U-boats with the ships and tactics at hand. Destroyers were the antisubmarine vessels of choice; they could escort convoys of troop transports and freighters, keeping the prowlers away and killing them when they got too close. This approach risked little; it also promised relatively little beyond what it was already accomplishing. The entry of the United States into the war increased the number of available destroyers but didn’t offer any radical solution to the submarine problem. Britain’s admirals were especially conservative; skeptics accused them of putting the safety of the British navy before the security of the British empire.

Those skeptics included Franklin Roosevelt. In time the world would discover that Roosevelt’s reflexive response to emergency was action. Many other men, many other leaders, liked to ponder their options carefully before acting; Roosevelt typically acted first and pondered later. In part this approach revealed an activist temperament; he was a doer rather than a thinker. In part it followed from a belief that in a crisis almost any action was better than none and that errors, which were inevitable in any case, could be corrected as easily on the run as standing still.

To the status quo thinking of the admirals, Roosevelt riposted two novelties. The first involved small patrol boats that could increase the number of eyeballs searching for enemy submarines. Only a few shipyards produced the big steel ships that formed the backbone of the American navy, but scores of builders could turn out lesser wooden craft. Roosevelt envisioned hundreds of the patrol vessels, in two models: 110-footers with three engines, and 50-footers with single engines. The admirals looked askance at even the larger of the boats, fearing they’d steal resources and attention from the real ships; they dismissed the smaller ones as flotsam beneath the dignity of any blue-water man.

Josephus Daniels for once allied with the admirals, primarily because he distrusted the profit motive of the boat-builders more than he doubted the bureaucratic self-seeking of the gold braids. He didn’t prevent Roosevelt from fighting for the patrol boats, but he frowned on the whole business. “How much of that sort of junk shall we buy?” he wrote in his diary after a typically vigorous Roosevelt appeal. The answer to Daniels’s question was several hundred of the patrol boats, which Congress—sensitive to the needs of those many small boat-builders—seconded Roosevelt in declaring essential to the war effort.

Roosevelt’s other novelty was even more controversial. To his sailor’s eye, the German success with submarines was almost inexplicable. Germany is hardly landlocked, but its seafront affords it access only to the Baltic and North seas, which are geographically constrained. The British and French navies seemed to have fairly well blocked up the Strait of Dover with mines, nets, and patrols, preventing the U-boats from skirting Britain’s southern shore en route to the open Atlantic. Roosevelt reasoned that if the British and the Americans could do the same to the broader channel between Scotland and southern Norway, the submarines would be stymied. Those caught within the North Sea blockade would be unable to get out; those stuck outside would starve for want of fuel and ammunition.

The idea wasn’t original with Roosevelt. The British had considered it before the Americans entered the war, only to reject it as infeasible. Too many mines were required, the water was too deep for successful mooring, and no mining project so ambitious had ever been attempted, let alone accomplished. Yet Roosevelt pushed forward on what he called his “pet hobby,” convinced that answers would turn up if sufficient intelligence and money were applied. He argued that a few hundred million dollars would purchase sufficient mines and nets to close the northern outlet of the North Sea to all but the boldest and luckiest of U-boat captains. The British and Americans didn’t have to stop every sub; merely by lengthening the odds against safe passage they could tip the balance in the war of the sea.

Roosevelt’s initial efforts went nowhere. London continued to resist the mine blockade—or mine barrage, as it was formally called—as a waste of limited resources. The technical difficulties remained overwhelming. “Project has previously been considered and abandoned,” the British admiralty curtly declared.

The situation changed during the summer of 1917. As Roosevelt had anticipated, the war brought out the best in American ingenuity. An inventor named Ralph Browne visited Roosevelt’s office with blueprints for an antisubmarine weapon he called the “Browne Submerged Gun.” Roosevelt doubted the efficacy of the weapon as a whole, but the trigger mechanism looked promising. Long wires dangled from surface floats; when anything metal—the hull of a submarine, for instance—touched the wires, it closed an electrical circuit and detonated the gun. Substitute a mine for the gun, Roosevelt reasoned, and suddenly closing the North Sea became much more feasible.

Roosevelt repitched the barrage, first to Daniels, who liked the idea, and then to Wilson. “I am very sorry to bother you,” Roosevelt wrote the president disingenuously, before telling him what he ought to do to get the project moving. “Some one person in whom you have confidence should be given the order and the necessary authority to execute the plan without delay…. He, working with an Englishman clothed with the same orders and authority, will succeed if success is possible.” The project ought to receive the highest priority. “This is a bigger matter than sending destroyers abroad or a division of battleships, or building a bunch of new destroyers—it is vital to the winning of the war.”

Wilson was intrigued. The president had long believed that “shutting up the hornets in their nest,” as he put it, made more sense than chasing them one by one across the open ocean. He gave Daniels the floor at a cabinet meeting the next day and let the navy secretary present the case for the barrage. “I told W. W. it was very difficult but was the only plan possible to shut off the submarines,” Daniels wrote in his diary. “It might cut off 1/2 and that would be important. Very costly and difficult, but all things are possible.” Wilson weighed the matter and gave his approval. With the American president aboard, the British dropped their opposition.

Roosevelt hurled himself into the project. He had anticipated Wilson’s approval and arranged to purchase a hundred thousand of the new firing mechanisms; these had to be fitted to the same number of mines, which themselves had to be manufactured. Orders went out to several hundred contractors for steel, high explosives, wire and cable, electrical circuitry, railcars to move the raw materials to assembly plants and from the plants to seaports, ships to carry the equipment across the Atlantic, and other ships to position the mines. New procedures for mine laying, in waters up to six hundred feet deep, in weather as foul as anywhere on the seven seas, had to be devised on the spot. Gradually the entire chain of fabrication, delivery, and placement took shape, and during the summer and autumn of 1918 the intrepid mine layers slipped seventy thousand mines beneath the surface of the North Sea. (The mine layers had to be intrepid, as the underwater bombs had a habit of detonating spontaneously while being laid.) They would have deployed that many again had the war’s end not terminated the project.

The effect of the barrage on the outcome of the conflict was hard to determine. Though it was never completed, it killed four U-boats for certain, and possibly four more. This was a small fraction of the total number of German submarines sunk. Yet Admiral William Sims, for one, called the mine barrage “exceedingly important” in ending the war. “That submarines frequently crossed it is true,” he said. “There was no expectation, when the enterprise was started, that it would absolutely shut the U-boats in the North Sea. But its influence in breaking down the German morale must have been great.” Sims considered what the submarine crews experienced in approaching the minefield. “The width of this barrage ranged from fifteen to thirty-five miles; it took from one to three hours for a submarine to cross this area on the surface and from two to six hours under the surface. Not every square foot, it is true, had been mined…but nobody knew where these openings were, or where a single mine was located. The officers and crews knew only that at any moment an explosion might send them to eternity. A strain of this sort is serious enough if it lasts only a few minutes; imagine being kept in this state of mind anywhere from one to six hours!”

Roosevelt, applying similar logic, later claimed for the North Sea barrage a large part of the credit for the discontent that culminated in the mutiny of the German navy at the end of the war. As a prime mover of the barrage, Roosevelt had cause to exaggerate its influence. And he probably did exaggerate. But whether the effect was large or small, it was clearly positive. And Roosevelt could definitely take credit for that. “If Roosevelt had not been there, the North Sea barrage would never have been laid down,” Admiral Frederic Harris explained.

FOR ALL HIS efforts on behalf of the mine barrage, Roosevelt spent less time fighting the Battle of the Atlantic than various skirmishes of the Potomac. The struggle against Germany drew Americans together, but it hardly eliminated differences of opinion among them. Some initially supposed that since maritime troubles had drawn the United States into the war, American participation might be confined to the high seas. When the Wilson administration made clear that this was not to be so, that American soldiers would join the French and British in the trenches of the western front, and that many of these soldiers would be conscripts, even members of Wilson’s own party complained. “In the estimation of Missourians,” Champ Clark declared, “there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” But Congress went along with the administration, authorizing a draft and otherwise mobilizing the country for war.

Many of the progressives, judging themselves lovers of peace, had assumed they would be the wrong sorts of people to run a war. Wilson told Josephus Daniels in 1914, “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war.” But to their surprise, and in some cases to their dismay, the progressives discovered that they were the ideal war administrators. The reformist temperament in American life has always hidden a coercive streak: if people won’t shape up voluntarily, they should be encouraged, even compelled, to do so. American abolitionists didn’t rely on persuasion to free the slaves; they fought a civil war. American prohibitionists didn’t merely denounce demon rum; they outlawed it—in several states by 1917, and very shortly in the country as a whole.

Upon American entry into the war, Wilsonian progressivism turned coercive overnight. The draft was the first triumph of coercion over voluntarism—although the president, unwilling to acknowledge what he and Congress were doing, denied that conscription was coercive. He called it simply “selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.” As additional coercions followed, neither the president nor other members of the administration bothered to disguise them. The War Industries Board mobilized American industry behind the war effort, replacing Adam Smith’s invisible hand with the plainly visible hands of federal officials who directed the operation of major parts of the nation’s economy. Before the war ended, the government essentially seized the American railroad industry and ran the rails from Washington. The Committee on Public Information marshaled American opinion, enlisting hundreds of professional writers and tens of thousands of “four-minute men”: fast-talking speakers whose job was to keep support for the war at what one CPI directive called “white heat.” The Espionage and Sedition Acts directly forbade any obstruction of the war effort, even by mere words. Eugene Debs, the socialist leader, was arrested for denouncing the draft, convicted, and sent to prison—where he remained in November 1920, when he received nearly a million votes for president.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t write any of the laws or larger regulations of the period, but he observed their effects, approved of most of them, and participated in the implementation of some. He enlisted his own publicist, the American novelist Winston Churchill, to spur the sluggards in the Navy Department, including Josephus Daniels at times, to swifter action. (In later years, after the British Winston Churchill came to figure in Roosevelt’s life, a certain retrospective confusion of the two Churchills inevitably occurred.) Roosevelt fed Churchill information that Churchill used in magazine articles, to frequently good—in Roosevelt’s opinion—effect.

As part of his effort to increase the number of patrol boats, Roosevelt encouraged his yachting friends to sell or donate their vessels to the navy. Many did so willingly, but others refused or demanded exorbitant payment. Roosevelt denounced such ingrates as impediments to the war effort. Congress agreed, concluding that if the bodies of ordinary Americans could be drafted, so could the yachts of the wealthy. The legislature gave Roosevelt authority to seize the vessels, which he did with obvious pleasure. His personal contribution to the program was the Half Moon II, which joined the navy during the summer of 1917.

ANOTHER ROOSEVELT CONTRIBUTION was more frivolous. The New York Times ran an article about efforts to conserve food, according to guidelines issued by the federal Food Administration. The story featured Eleanor Roosevelt, who explained what she, her family, and their servants were doing to cut back. “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable,” she said. “Since I have started following the home-card instructions, prices have risen but my bills are no larger.”

Franklin winced on reading the piece and twitted Eleanor. “I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer, and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!” he wrote. “Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table, and the hand book. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.”

Eleanor didn’t think the incident funny at all. “I’d like to crawl away for shame,” she wrote Franklin.

IN THE SUMMER of 1918 Roosevelt traveled to the front. The German gamble of the previous year had failed as the Americans and British improved their convoy techniques on the Atlantic and the German ground offensive stalled in the mud of northern France. The Germans tried again the following spring and drove to within artillery range of Paris. But they could get no closer, and with each passing month more American troops arrived—green troops, but well equipped and backed by America’s unequaled economic power.

Roosevelt’s presence was incidental to the combat, but it was essential to his political future. He had chosen not to fight, but he couldn’t miss the fighting. Already he imagined how he would present himself after the war: as one who had seen the carnage, who understood what war did to a country and a people. It wouldn’t be the same as having fought, but it was something.

His excuse for making the trip was that the navy had dozens of installations in France and Britain, and the marines—that proudest branch of navy warriors—were playing a pivotal role at the front. Roosevelt argued to Josephus Daniels that the Navy Department needed to dispatch a representative to the battle zone to inspect the men and facilities. The secretary was too essential in Washington to be gone the several weeks a proper tour would require; the assistant secretary must go. Daniels assented.

Roosevelt left Brooklyn on July 9 aboard the Dyer, a new destroyer. In calmer times the navy gave new vessels thorough shakedown cruises before putting them into service; amid the press of the war the Dyer’s crew shook her down on the crossing to Europe. “It is pretty rough,” Roosevelt wrote on the third day, in a journal he kept of the trip. “Even the troop ships roll and pitch…. One has to hang on all the time, never moving without taking hold with one hand before letting go with the other. Much of the crockery smashed; we cannot eat at the table even with racks, have to sit braced on the transom and hold the plate with one hand.”

To avoid attracting German submarines, the ships of the convoy darkened their lamps at night. From the Dyer’s position at the starboard quarter of the convoy, Roosevelt could just discern the “great black lightless masses” of the vessels; he pronounced the effect “very weird.” The fourth day began with a call to battle stations. Roosevelt raced to the bridge. “The lookout in the foretop had reported a vessel ahead, quickly reporting another and another and another until we began to wonder if we had run into the whole German fleet,” he recorded, catching his breath. Closer inspection revealed something less threatening but by no means reassuring. A twenty-eight-ship convoy of American merchantmen out of Norfolk was crossing the path of Roosevelt’s convoy from south to north. Had the encounter occurred many minutes earlier there likely would have been blood on the water. “We would have run through them in the dark at eighteen knots and some bad smash-up would almost surely have followed.” Convoy schedules and routes were carefully arranged to prevent such collisions, but mishaps occurred. Roosevelt made a note to improve the scheduling procedure.

Northeast of the Azores the convoy entered the active submarine zone. A predawn alert sent Roosevelt hurtling out of bed. “This is the second time I have sprinted for the bridge in pajamas and bare feet. I realized my costume today and apologized to Poteet”—the Dyer’s captain—“before descending, but he said it made an excellent and distinctive uniform for a flag officer as long as the Secretary of the Navy does not try to change it to the old-fashioned night-gown and carpet slippers.” Roosevelt’s regular attire was distinctive enough. “I wish I could travel all the way in my destroyer costume—my own invention—khaki riding trousers, golf stockings, flannel shirt, and leather coat. It does not soil or catch in things!”

The Dyer landed at Portsmouth and Roosevelt proceeded to London, where the British admiralty put him up at the Ritz. The next morning he met with Sir Eric Geddes, the First Lord of the Admiralty. They talked of the joint Anglo-American antisubmarine efforts, and Geddes informed him of a new British program to fit certain warships with flat decks for launching and catching airplanes. The concept was experimental but promising, Geddes said.

Roosevelt spent two fascinating hours with British naval intelligence officers. “Their intelligence department is far more developed than ours,” he concluded. “This is because it is a much more integral part of their Office of Operations.” He determined to remedy the problem once back in Washington.

He conversed at length with George V. “The King has a nice smile and a very open, quick and cordial way of greeting one. He is not as short as I had expected, and I think his face is stronger than photographs make it appear.” The interview ran half an hour over the scheduled fifteen minutes. “He was a delightfully easy person to talk to, and we got going so well that part of the time we were both talking at the same time.”

Roosevelt met with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who impressed him with his “tremendous vitality.” Lloyd George in peacetime had polarized British politics; in wartime he taught Roosevelt—and others—a valuable political lesson. “The Conservatives who used to despise him as a demagogue, the Liberals who used to fear him as a radical, and most of the Labor people who now look on him as a reactionary, may hate him just as much as ever and be unwilling after the war to trust reconstruction to his hands. But they will stand by him just as long as his administration keeps the winning of the war as its only political aim.”

Roosevelt addressed the Anglo-American Luncheon Club, and attended a dinner gathering of the British imperial war ministers, where he was introduced to Britain’s Lord Curzon, Canada’s Sir Robert Borden, and South Africa’s General Jan Smuts, each of whom greatly impressed him. “A really historic occasion,” Roosevelt called it. He also met Winston Spencer Churchill, who did not impress him—at least not enough for him to mention Churchill in his journal of the trip. Churchill reciprocated the neglect, forgetting the meeting until he was reminded of it by Roosevelt decades later.

ON JULY 31 Roosevelt left London for France. He crossed the Channel and landed at Dunkirk, which anchored the British presence in France. “I had no idea that the British were sending in so many supplies through this place,” he wrote. The Germans were fully aware of Dunkirk’s importance and had been blasting it with artillery for three years, and more recently with airplane-delivered bombs. “There is not a whole house left in this place…. I did not see one pane of glass in the town, and almost every house-front is pock-marked by fragments of shell.”

Roosevelt’s party drove to Calais, where German planes had been trying out new, very large bombs, weighing more than a thousand pounds. “These have smashed things up over a large radius,” he wrote. “I saw a spot where one had landed in the middle of a street—about six houses on each side of the street were completely wrecked by it and many people killed.”

In Paris, Roosevelt met French prime minister Georges Clemenceau. “I knew at once I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France,” Roosevelt recorded. “He did not wait for me to advance to meet him at his desk, and there was no formality such as one generally meets. He almost ran forward to meet me and shook hands as if he meant it, grabbed me by the arm and walked me over to his desk and sat me down about two inches away. He is only 77 years old, and people say he is getting younger every day. He started off with no polite remarks because they were unnecessary, asked me three or four definite questions about our naval production and what I thought of the effect of the submarine campaign on the troop transportation.” Roosevelt’s answers satisfied Clemenceau, who turned to the current state of the fighting. “He jumped up, took me over to a big map with all the latest troop movements and showed me the latest report from General Degoutte, covering progress north of Château-Thierry up to one hour before.”

Roosevelt had never been so close to wartime command, and he was mesmerized. “He launched into a hair-raising description of the horrors left by the Boche in his retreat—civilian population carried off, smashing of furniture, slashing of paintings, burning of houses—and he said, ‘These things I have seen myself,’ for the wonderful old man leaves his office almost every Saturday in a high-powered car, dashes to some part of the front, cheered by troops everywhere he passes, visits a Corps Commander, travels all night, goes up a good deal closer to the actual battle line than the officers like, keeps it up all day Sunday, and motors back in time to be at his desk on Monday morning.”

Clemenceau paused, as if to let Roosevelt catch up. “Then, still standing, he said: ‘Do not think that the Germans have stopped fighting or that they are not fighting well. We are driving them back and will keep them going back because we are fighting better, and every Frenchman and every American is fighting better because he knows he is fighting for the right and that it can prevail only by breaking the German Army by force of arms.’ He spoke of an episode he had seen while following just behind the advance—a Poilu and a Boche still standing partly buried in a shell hole, clinched in each other’s arms, their rifles abandoned, and the Poilu and the Boche were in the act of trying to bite each other to death when a shell had killed both. And as he told me this he grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me with a grip of steel to illustrate his words, thrusting his teeth toward my neck.”

IN MID-JULY the German army had tested the troops of the American Expeditionary Forces in the Second Battle of the Marne. For three days the Germans pressed forward, but on July 18 the Americans retaliated furiously at Château-Thierry with a coordinated artillery and infantry counterattack. They forced the Germans to yield the ground just taken and, more significantly, demonstrated that the Americans could fight effectively. With ten thousand Americans pouring into France every week, Château-Thierry signaled the beginning of the end for Germany.

Roosevelt approached the Marne in early August. Soldiers clogged the road: French reinforcements heading into battle, German prisoners being led away. This was Roosevelt’s first sight of the enemy. “They did not impress me as being physically unfit, but there is an awful contrast between the amount of intelligence in their faces compared with the French Poilus.” From Meaux to Château-Thierry, civilian French refugees brought traffic nearly to a standstill. They had fled the German onslaught; now they were returning to their homes, or what they hoped would still be their homes. “They went with big carts drawn by a cow or an ox and a calf trotting behind, bedding, chickens, household goods, and children, and sometimes a grandmother, piled on top, all of them taking it perfectly calmly, remembering always their good fortune in having got away before the arrival of the Boche, ready to start in again even from the ground up, but constantly impressing upon their children what the Boche has done to northern France in these four years.”

On reaching Château-Thierry, Roosevelt was struck by the failure of the French, who had retaken the town ten days earlier, to rebuild any of the bridges over the Marne. Soldiers, animals, and vehicles had to cross on rickety floating bridges. The problem appeared to be a shortage of steel. Roosevelt jotted another note to himself: “Forethought in providing bridge steel would have made a better record.”

Roosevelt toured the battlefield. He was no military expert, but as he surveyed the ground he began to grasp what the fighting there had been like. “We walked to the edge of the woods and looked east. No wonder this was the key to the salient. In front the ground, while rolling, was in general lower and more open, and even a civilian’s eye could see that the few wooded higher points could be turned without offering half the defensive strength of the jungle we were about to enter.” Immediately beyond lay the makeshift graves of German soldiers, whose unclaimed bodies had been interred beneath humble wooden crosses. Farther on were graves with slightly different crosses marking fallen Frenchmen and Americans. The ground itself was frozen into angry billows tossed up by the exploding artillery shells. Merely walking across the battlefield was a physical and emotional ordeal. “We had to thread our way past water-filled shell holes and thence up the steep slope over outcropping rocks, overturned boulders, downed trees, hastily improvised shelter pits, rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters, crawling lines of ants, and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too, with a whittled cross or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”

Though the sensory impact of the battlefield was overwhelming—“the smell of dead horses is not only evident but very horrid,” Roosevelt wrote—he insisted on pushing closer to the active fighting. “We drove into Fère-en-Tardenois and met here the artery of communications for this sector: camions, artillery, and moving troops filled the road in both directions, but the stream never stopped. We turned sharply north just as a series of exploding shells followed by little white puffs indicated a Hun plane, probably doing photographic work.” They passed large piles of live shells dumped by the Germans in their haste to retreat; in one place a circle of felled trees, their broken crowns pointing away from a crater at their center, showed where another such dump had been before it exploded. Roosevelt’s party crossed a small stream and entered the shattered village of Mareuil. “Just as we were descending from the motors, a loud explosion went off very close by. Some of the party jumped perceptibly, realizing that we were within easy range of the Hun artillery. It was, however, only one of our own 155s so cleverly camouflaged in a tree just off the road that we had not noticed its presence.” Roosevelt insisted on examining this gun and some others, and he fired one of the 155s against German positions far over the horizon.

The next day Roosevelt drove to Verdun, the site of the tremendous 1916 siege and battle. Shell holes still pocked the road, which construction crews worked to repair. Villages along the way had been blasted beyond restoration. “All this was nothing, however, to the sight that met our eyes when we looked down over the town. Great gaps showed where buildings had once stood. Detached and jagged walls were everywhere, and of the houses still standing not one roof remained intact. It was a scene of colossal destruction.” The town remained within reach of German artillery, and so its garrison of four thousand troops huddled in tunnels sixty feet beneath the ancient citadel at the town’s highest point.

Roosevelt toured the tunnels and shared lunch with the commandant and his staff, who showed him about the town afterward. “The first thing that met our eyes on one of the walls was the memorable original signboard which was posted near the entrance to the citadel during the siege, and on which the thousands of troops going forward to hold the line read the words which, for the French people, will sum up for all time their great watchword of four years: ‘Ils ne passeront pas.’”

Roosevelt’s party crossed the Meuse River to the battlefield itself. They were given helmets and gas masks, just in case. Nowhere had the fighting been more violent than here, but at first it didn’t show. “There were no gashes on these hills, no trenches, no tree trunks, no heaps of ruins—nothing but brown earth for miles upon miles.” Closer inspection, however, revealed that the monotony was the result of shelling so intense that it obliterated all preexisting features of the terrain. “When you look at the ground immediately about you, you realize that this earth has been churned by shells, and churned again. You see no complete shell holes, for one runs into another, and trench systems and forts and roads have been swallowed up in brown chaos.”

ROOSEVELT’S EXPERIENCE in France shaped his perceptions of war and added to his mental album of lessons for an aspiring president. It also made him decide to resign from the Navy Department and seek active service. The war was winding down, but he might get in a few licks before it ended. Neither the president nor anyone else could criticize him for leaving his post; he had done his duty in Washington, and with distinction. He had a right to fight.

His plan was to return to France as part of a naval artillery unit—a battleship battery mounted on railcars. Such an assignment might not be the stuff of heroism, but it would allow him to see action. With luck he might be decorated, even lightly wounded. A president-in-the-making couldn’t ask for more.

Roosevelt’s excitement at this prospective turn in his career caused him to ignore the first twinges of illness as he raced around tying up the loose ends from his inspection tour. He told himself he could catch up on his rest on the ship home. He climbed the gangway under his own power but collapsed in his cabin, more debilitated than he had realized. The pandemic of influenza that was starting its sweep around the world—it would kill more than fifty million before it burned out—had infected many of the soldiers Roosevelt had mingled with, and it followed him aboard the Leviathan. Quite possibly he suffered a touch of the flu himself; if so, his case was one of the mild ones. Of greater concern was a bad case of pneumonia. Both his lungs began to fill with fluid, and though he coughed incessantly, he couldn’t clear them. Doctors in those days had no medication for pneumonia; rest, liquids, and ample nourishment were the standard prescription. Roosevelt received all of these, but his immune system had been compromised, and he struggled simply to hold his ground.

He was confined to bed the whole voyage to America. A wireless message from the ship alerted the Navy Department that the assistant secretary was ill; the Leviathan should be met by orderlies with a stretcher. The department relayed the news to Eleanor, who shared it with Sara, and both women came to the dock in New York. Sara directed the orderlies to her house on Sixty-fifth Street. Roosevelt’s condition stabilized there, but his recovery proceeded slowly. He relocated to Hyde Park; not for a month was he on his feet and ready to return to work.

He delivered the report of his inspection tour to Daniels and prepared to offer his resignation to the president. He visited the White House armed with arguments he thought Wilson wouldn’t be able to resist. The one thing he hadn’t counted on was the first objection the president raised: that the war was about to end. Wilson revealed in confidence that the Germans were suing for peace. Long before Roosevelt could reach the front, the fighting would be over.

This news elated the world as soon as it was made public, but it left Roosevelt ambivalent. Though he shared the relief that the bloodletting was over, by now he really wanted to see action. With decent luck, there would never be such a war again. Yet this meant that there would be no comparable chance for the peculiar distinction that comes with military service. Other men—other politicians—would be able to tell their war stories and display their ribbons and medals. At such moments Roosevelt would have to remain silent.

HE HAD ANOTHER, more personal reason for regretting not being able to return to the front. Roosevelt’s inspection tour in France and Britain gave Lucy Mercer reason to write him regularly for the first time. The Delanos tended to be collectors, and Roosevelt, like his mother, never threw a letter away. On his return to America, his luggage contained Lucy’s letters. He had intended to unpack his bags himself, but the pneumonia that prostrated him left his kit in other hands. While he drifted in and out of consciousness, Eleanor unpacked her husband’s suitcases and found the letters.

“The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she told her friend Joseph Lash years later. “And I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.” Her comment was revealing, especially the part about honesty, which indicated that Lucy’s letters, while a shock, weren’t a surprise. They simply compelled her to acknowledge what she had implicitly denied till now: that her husband loved another woman.

What to do? That was the question for Eleanor—as for so many other wounded spouses throughout history. Should she leave or stay? To leave would free her from a situation that had grown emotionally intolerable. In an era that gravely disapproved of divorce, it would be humiliating, but perhaps no more humiliating than what she had been through, facing the snickers and suggestive glances of those who knew what she now had to acknowledge. Leaving would also expose the children to the opprobrium of the broken home. They wouldn’t starve—her own inheritance, Sara’s concern for her grandchildren, and the courts of New York would see to that. But they would grow up marked by disgrace, which to Eleanor’s way of thinking would be almost as bad as starving. Leaving might well ruin Franklin too. What divorced man had succeeded in politics? None that Eleanor had heard of. Nor had any made a respectable reputation in law or business. Franklin’s fate wasn’t her first consideration at this point, but, if only for the sake of the children, she couldn’t ignore it. Anyway, she didn’t stop loving him just because he had wounded her.

Yet to stay was scarcely more appealing. Could she ever trust him again? Could she ever trust herself? She had been rescued from her childhood insecurities by his love, but now, after she had painstakingly come to believe in herself, she discovered she hadn’t been rescued at all. The knowledge was devastating.

She couldn’t decide alone. She had to consult Sara, whose meddling had been a cause for resentment but whose intense concern suddenly seemed a source of strength. She and Sara and Franklin met in the only suitable place for such an interview: the great library in the house at Hyde Park. What was said there was never recorded. But Alice Roosevelt Longworth later told of a comment by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, her and Eleanor’s aunt. “Always remember, Alice,” Corinne said, “that Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom.”

If Eleanor did, Franklin must have pondered accepting it. Some months earlier, when the strain on the marriage had become intense, the possibility of divorce apparently arose in another conversation with Eleanor and Sara. He said something that prompted Sara, in a follow-up letter to him and Eleanor, to lecture him on his duties to family and tradition. “One can be as democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor, we owe a great example,” Sara wrote. “Do not say that I misunderstood. I understood perfectly. But I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself.”

Now, at the moment of crisis, Sara summoned arguments more powerful than appeals to family honor. “If divorce were the answer, she would cut off Father’s money as punishment for his offense,” Elliott Roosevelt wrote, relating the version accepted by the children. Franklin’s own inheritance might support him, but it wouldn’t sustain two households. As a working lawyer or business executive he might manage to provide for Eleanor and the children, as well as for himself, but he would have to abandon his political hopes—which in any case would be shattered by the divorce.

Additional reasons were adduced against divorce, including the fact that Lucy was a Catholic. This presumably precluded marriage to a divorced man. But the Catholicism in Lucy’s family didn’t run deep, as her parents’ breakup demonstrated. She might well have chosen Franklin over orthodoxy, had matters come to that.

They didn’t. If Franklin had indeed been tempted to follow his heart out of his marriage to Eleanor, he decided upon Sara’s ultimatum to follow his ambition back in. Eleanor insisted that he promise never to see Lucy again. He couldn’t possibly object, and he gave the required pledge. The children, who were better placed than anyone else to know, inferred an additional condition: that she and Franklin would never resume conjugal relations. Not for years would the younger children appreciate the significance of their parents’ separate bedrooms. But none of the five ever detected a breach in the emotional wall the separation raised in the middle of their family.

11.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1918, ON THE EVE OF THE ALLIED VICTORY IN THE war, Woodrow Wilson committed the greatest blunder of his presidency. He should have known better, if any president should have, for he had studied politics his whole adult life. Had he been advising a president other than himself, he would have warned against making congressional elections a referendum on the administration’s war policies. He would have predicted a sixth-year slippage in party support, for it was the norm among second-term presidents as the inevitable accumulation of bent and broken promises took its toll. And he most definitely would have argued against urging voters to put foreign affairs first as they selected their congressmen. Voters had never done so in the past; it tempted fate to ask them to alter historic habits.

But hubris had set in. As the end of the war hove into sight, Wilson looked to the peace conference that would follow. For Wilson the war had always been about the peace; an unsatisfactory settlement, he believed, would render all the carnage, all the expense, all the compromises with principle wasted. He had decided to attend the peace conference himself, and to bolster his position he called on the American people to rally behind him. “If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad,” he said, “I earnestly beg that you will express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”

He knew he was taking a chance. His closest advisers, including his wife, told him so. But he couldn’t help himself. He needed the vote of confidence, the better to speak at the peace conference for humanity, as he intended to do. Predestinarian that he was, he may have believed that God wouldn’t let him down.

But the American people did. They handed not one but both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Wilson wasn’t simply repudiated; he was delivered over to his enemies. Any treaty he brought home from Paris would have to win the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, a formidable standard under the best of circumstances but one made suddenly more daunting by the presence of Henry Cabot Lodge at the Senate door. Lodge would chair the foreign relations committee, which would examine the treaty, conduct hearings, and report its findings to the full Senate. Lodge opposed Wilson politically and despised him personally; he dismissed Wilson’s literary productions with the comment that while they might suit Princeton they would never have passed muster at Harvard, Lodge’s school. Lodge’s dark eyes and Van Dyke beard had always given him a slightly sinister aspect; now, in the malevolent satisfaction of his and the Republicans’ victory, he seemed likely to be downright Mephistophelean toward anything the president returned with from Paris.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT SAW the disaster approaching but was helpless to prevent it. If the president wouldn’t listen to his intimates, he certainly wouldn’t heed an assistant secretary. Fortunately for Roosevelt, no one could blame the debacle on him. The lingering effects of the pneumonia—perhaps compounded by the emotional stress of his confrontation with Eleanor over Lucy—allowed him to beg off from campaigning for the Democrats that season. When the roof fell in on the president, none of the debris hit Roosevelt.

At least not at once. The wounded Wilson set off for Paris in January, and when he arrived, Roosevelt was there to greet him. Roosevelt had hoped to return to France to fight; instead he oversaw the denouement of the fighting. The U.S. navy’s large wartime presence in Britain and France required liquidating; Roosevelt got the assignment.

Eleanor accompanied him. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have, as he was on government business, and spouses typically stayed behind. But after his pneumonia he still needed a nurse or the equivalent, and Eleanor filled the part. In light of what had transpired between them the last few months, she may have considered herself equally his chaperone. This, obviously, wasn’t for public consumption.

The voyage was uneventful. Walter Camp, the Yale coach who essentially invented American football, had taken his philosophy of physical training to Washington during the war, leading government officials in calisthenics each morning to clear their heads and ready them for a hard day at their desks. Franklin Roosevelt was one of Camp’s prize specimens—“a beautifully built young man, with the long muscles of the athlete,” Camp observed. Having contributed his part toward winning the war, Camp now determined to help secure the peace by similar attention to the mind-body connection. He joined Roosevelt’s France-bound American contingent and drilled the travelers on the deck of the George Washington. Roosevelt again bent and stretched in the front row, doubtless happy for the physical release the exercise afforded. When the others headed for their staterooms and showers, Roosevelt hit the shuffle-board and quoits courts. Occasionally he reviewed his papers, sitting beside Eleanor, who slogged her way through Henry Adams’s dismal autobiography. “Very interesting, but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little,” she remarked.

The most important development of the eight days of the voyage occurred not on the ship but on the shore of Long Island Sound. Theodore Roosevelt had been in and out of the hospital, but in the year of the flu pandemic so had tens of thousands of other Americans. His various maladies made him uncomfortable, yet none seemed likely to kill him. And so, when he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, the loss took America by surprise. “The old lion is dead,” his son Archie cabled the other sons. Franklin and Eleanor got the word by wireless aboard the George Washington.“We were shocked by the news of Uncle Ted’s death,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Another big figure gone from our nation, and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t comment directly on his cousin’s passing. Perhaps he reflected on ambition’s—and life’s—ultimate end; perhaps he wondered whether he would be remembered and mourned as widely at his own death as Theodore was being remembered now. He may have felt a certain relief at the prospect of no longer being the “other Roosevelt,” the one in the Rough Rider president’s shadow.

Whatever musings Theodore’s death evoked, they dissipated soon after Franklin and Eleanor reached France. January 1919 was a glorious time to be an American in Paris, and especially to be associated with Woodrow Wilson. The people of France knew nothing of Wilson’s political setback at home, or if they knew they ignored it in their ecstatic welcome to the American president. Banners awaited his docking at Brest, bearing the message “Hail the Champion of the Rights of Man.” Two million Parisians lined the Champs Elysée to pay Wilson homage; three divisions of French troops struggled to keep the crowds from lifting him bodily from his carriage and hoisting him on their shoulders. “I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops,” an American newsman remarked. “But Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman.”

Franklin and Eleanor absorbed the excitement. “I never saw anything like Paris,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “It is full beyond belief, and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends! People wander the streets unable to find a bed, and the prices are worse than New York for everything.”

The thrill of being at the center of the world while the statesmen of the great powers negotiated humanity’s future doubtless eased, or perhaps simply disguised, the personal tension between Franklin and Eleanor. The relaxation, or distraction, continued as Franklin took Eleanor to visit some of the battlefields. Because the fighting had halted under an armistice rather than a surrender, the front technically remained a war zone, and most women, including wives of assistant secretaries, weren’t allowed. But Roosevelt ignored the ban, and before anyone acted to enforce it, Eleanor’s observation of the battle sites was, as Franklin told Sara, “a fait accompli.”

Franklin’s official business focused on selling American assets to the French government. The navy’s ships, of course, could be sailed home, but bases and other immovable infrastructure would have to be left in place. Or so the French supposed, and they offered the American government a pittance in payment for the facilities. Roosevelt, in one noteworthy instance, informed them that they were wrong. The wireless station at Bordeaux appeared quite permanent to most observers, but when the French made what Roosevelt deemed an insulting offer, he ordered the American personnel to prepare to dismantle it. The navy would ship it home, he told his French counterparts. The French government quickly recalculated and the next day improved its offer substantially. Roosevelt was delighted and shared his pleasure with Eleanor. She passed the good news to Sara: “This is a big success but don’t mention it!”

Other successes were smaller. Roosevelt visited a fort held by U.S. marines at Ehrenbreitstein in the occupied German Rhineland; seeing no American flag above the battlements, he demanded of the commandant to know why. The officer said he didn’t want to offend the Germans. Roosevelt indignantly returned to Paris and informed General Pershing that this would never do. “The German people ought to know for all time that Ehrenbreitstein flew the American flag during the occupation,” he declared. Pershing agreed, and soon Old Glory was snapping in the German breeze.

Within a month Roosevelt completed most of what needed doing. He might have stayed longer, but Eleanor wanted to get back to the children, and he wished to share a sea voyage with Wilson, who was returning to America to sign legislation and tend to other pressing executive business before resuming his seat at the peace conference. The president had been far too busy with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando to have time for his assistant navy secretary at Paris, but Roosevelt hoped that aboard the George Washington they might speak.

And so they did, albeit not as confidentially as Roosevelt would have preferred. Wilson invited Franklin and Eleanor to lunch with him, Mrs. Wilson, and a few other distinguished passengers. Never one for small talk, Wilson launched into an impassioned defense of the League of Nations, the centerpiece of his plans for the postwar settlement. “The United States must go in, or it will break the heart of the world,” he told the group, “for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.” Eleanor thought this statement sufficiently noteworthy that she recorded it verbatim. Something else Wilson said also caught her attention, and doubtless Franklin’s too. “He said he had read no papers since the beginning of the war, that Mr. Tumulty”—Joseph P. Tumulty, Wilson’s private secretary—“clipped them all for him, giving him only important news and editorials.” Eleanor wondered at handing a secretary such implicit power. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she remarked in her diary.

THE FIGHT FOR the League of Nations dominated American politics from the spring of 1919 through the autumn of 1920, and it commenced upon the George Washington’s landing in Boston. The destination had originally been New York, the vessel’s home port, but Wilson decided to take the fight to Henry Cabot Lodge’s turf. Boston held a parade for Wilson, which suggested that not all of New England, or even of the Bay State, stood behind Lodge. Roosevelt rode in the parade, and he joined Wilson for lunch with Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge. He sat on the platform at Mechanics Hall while Wilson summoned America to enlist with him in a mission devoted to the highest ideals of democracy. A peace not based on ideals would be unworthy of the American people, Wilson said, and would not last. The president declined to mention his principal antagonist by name, but everyone knew he was speaking of Lodge in warning of the fate that would befall those who opposed the League. “Any man who resists the present tides that run in the world,” Wilson declared, shaking a long, accusing finger, “will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever.”

Roosevelt’s opinion of the League of Nations at this point is unclear. Nothing in his past—and not much in his future—suggested an affinity for the kind of impassioned idealism that informed Wilson’s vision of the League. Roosevelt was more the pragmatist than the idealist, more the tinkerer than the true believer. He also realized that the League had become a monomania with Wilson. The president could justify any compromise at Paris, any political tactic at home, that would deliver the League and secure American membership therein. Roosevelt would never get so passionate about anything. Monomania wasn’t in his nature. He was a politician, not an ideologue; he served people, not causes.

WILSON, AFTER RETURNING to Paris, got his League incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles, signed in that suburb of the French capital in June 1919. The compromises the president made to win the support of Britain, France, and Italy for the League disconcerted some Americans, who wondered what had happened to self-determination and other principles Wilson had championed before and during the war. The charter of the League, in particular the war-triggering clauses of article 10, which pledged the United States to defend the sovereignty and security of fellow League members, by military force if necessary, disturbed many others, who feared that America’s independence would thereby be infringed. But Wilson was proud of his handiwork, and he brought the treaty home and personally delivered it to the Senate in July. Lodge met him at the door of the upper chamber and asked if he could carry the document inside. Wilson clutched it tightly, glared at Lodge, and said, “Not on your life.”

The treaty might have provoked a searching debate over the role of the United States in world affairs. For brief moments it did elicit serious discussion. But it became so entangled in the partisan wrangling of Republicans and Democrats, and so enmeshed in the private animosity of Wilson and Lodge, that the larger issues often faded from view. Lodge insisted on reading all eighty thousand words of the treaty aloud, with stentorian slowness, reckoning that American interest in Europe would diminish the farther the war slipped into the past. The greater part of a year already separated the armistice from the present; Lodge could reasonably expect to delay a final vote on the treaty till the peace had lasted longer than the war itself—at least the part of the war Americans participated in. It wasn’t inconceivable that the elections of 1920 would be fought over Wilson’s precious League. Lodge certainly hoped so. The foreign relations chairman scheduled hearings; everyone, it seemed, with an interest or an opinion was invited to testify.

Wilson endured Lodge’s siege for two months before mounting a counteroffensive. The Republicans controlled Congress, but the president might appeal to the American people. In 1919 radio remained a wireless substitute for telegraphy; it had yet to become a broadcast medium. Consequently, for Wilson to reach the American people required that he travel to where they lived. He left Washington in September, intending to circle the country by train. He started preaching the League gospel in Ohio, then continued across Indiana to Missouri. He warned of the day of judgment should the Senate reject the treaty and the League. “There will come some time,” he said in St. Louis, “in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the world.” He spoke in Montana and Idaho and Washington and drew crowds at every stop. A reporter traveling with Wilson thought the tour was going quite well for the president. “It seems a safe assertion that the ten states through which he has passed believe with him that the Treaty of Peace should be ratified without delay,” the newsman wrote, “and that they are willing to have the United States enter a League of Nations.”

Wilson swung south into Oregon and California, and then east to Colorado. At Pueblo, he gave the speech of his life. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace,” he said. “We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”

He might have won the country to his cause. But on the threshold of victory, Wilson fell silent. The Pueblo speech, after weeks on the road, wore him out. He suffered from chronic hypertension, and the stress of the tour triggered what seems to have been a minor stroke. His doctor, traveling with him, had feared such an attack, and he immediately canceled the rest of the tour. The president’s train sped east to Washington, where Wilson summoned the strength to walk through Union Station and smile at the supporters who greeted him there. But a major stroke felled him at the White House. “He looked as if he were dead,” the White House usher recalled. “There was not a sign of life.”

For weeks he lay in a sickroom, shielded from the outside world by his wife, his doctor, and his secretary, who together conspired to conceal the extent of his disability. The administration drifted rudderless; not even Wilson’s cabinet secretaries knew his true condition.

THE ASSISTANT SECRETARIES knew even less. Having decided, before Wilson told him of the impending armistice, to leave the Navy Department, Roosevelt had difficulty summoning enthusiasm for his old job, which grew dreary in the aftermath of the war. “Things have been so quiet here as to be almost terrifying,” he wrote Josephus Daniels in April 1919. “Literally nothing has happened outside of the routine work.” The routine was painful when it wasn’t boring. Roosevelt battled with bureau chiefs over the disposition of a shrinking budget, chose which thousands of workers to lay off from navy yards, determined which hundreds of ships to mothball or scrap, and explained to a hostile Congress how the navy had spent its wartime millions. A controversy developed over the award of contracts to supply the navy with oil; political allies of those who did not receive contracts alleged favoritism toward those who did. Another row resulted from the refusal of Secretary Daniels to approve all the ribbons and medals Admiral Sims thought his men deserved; Sims responded by blasting the Navy Department for criminal negligence in the prosecution of the war. The Republican Senate happily probed the charges, conducting three months of hearings in the spring of 1920. The indictment didn’t stick, but the investigation exhausted the civilian personnel of the Navy Department, including Roosevelt, who in the process found more reason to admire Daniels and less to respect Sims and the admirals.

He pondered how to get out of office gracefully. The Wilson administration was hemorrhaging talent as its end approached, with cabinet secretaries and their underlings leaving for law firms, investment banks, corporate boards, and the other posts in the private sector where public servants recouped—or simply couped—their fortunes following stints in Washington. Some of the incorrigibly political plotted campaigns for elective office in 1920, but sober Democrats estimated their party’s chances that year as slim to minuscule. Prudence counseled letting the Republicans have their day.

Wilson’s stroke and the consequent paralysis of the administration accelerated the rush to the door. In November 1919 the Versailles treaty came up for a vote in the Senate. Lodge had attached several reservations to the treaty. These were either honest attempts to fix what Lodge and other critics considered wrong with the treaty or cynical efforts to sabotage it; Lodge let senators draw their own conclusions. When Wilson, communicating uncertainly through his wife, ordered the Senate Democrats to reject the treaty-plus-reservations, it fell short of even a simple majority, with Democrats supplying most of the negative votes. Lodge then allowed a vote on the unencumbered treaty. It failed by a similar margin, although now the Republicans were mostly responsible. Lodge might thereupon have declared the treaty rejected. But he liked the issue enough to let it linger over the winter. In March 1920 the treaty came to a final vote. Reservations had been reattached, and Wilson, more feeble than ever, again attempted a veto. This time several Democrats disobeyed the president and voted in favor. Yet it still fell seven votes shy of the necessary margin, with 49 in favor, 35 against.

The failure of the treaty left the administration dead in the water, and more of Roosevelt’s colleagues clambered off. For months he himself had been plotting his escape. “I wish it were possible for me, now that the war is over, to return to something a little more lucrative than this position,” he told an acquaintance. He sounded out two attorney friends, Grenville Emmet and Langdon Marvin, about opening a New York law practice. The three agreed on terms of a partnership, to be called Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt. Emmet and Marvin laid the groundwork; Roosevelt would join them at his first opportunity to leave the administration without embarrassing either himself or the president.

12.

BY THE SUMMER OF THEIR EIGHTH YEAR IN OCCUPANCY OF THE White House, the Democrats held no hope of extending their lease beyond March 1921. A whole litany of issues, besides the Treaty of Versailles, split the country in the wake of the war. The economic readjustment was wrenching, as strikes idled hundreds of factories and hundreds of thousands of workers, price rises pinched tens of millions of households, and markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities alternately sizzled and fizzled as the global economy reintegrated the recently warring national economies. The war had commenced a transformation of American race relations, with African Americans migrating from the farms of the South to the cities and factories of the North. The migrants encountered suspicion and hostility, which turned bloody during and after the war in Chicago, New York, Omaha, and East St. Louis, Illinois. But the migrants kept coming, intent on sharing some of the prosperity and personal freedom that had long eluded them in the segregated South. Though the Wilson administration didn’t overtly encourage the violence, it implicitly legitimated the hostility by extending the Jim Crow system to the federal workforce. Since the end of Reconstruction, the federal government had stood by while the states gutted the Constitution’s ostensible guarantees of equal rights for African Americans; now Washington joined the evisceration.

Other issues bled the country metaphorically. Decades of preaching, praying, keg smashing, and still wrecking culminated in the 1919 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the production and distribution of intoxicating beverages. The drys hadn’t won over the wets, and it wasn’t even clear they outnumbered them. But because the wets were concentrated in the cities, which were underrepresented in the politics of ratification (as in state and national politics generally), the drys dictated policy. The Eighteenth Amendment split the country not merely in terms of taste in beverages but also along lines of class and wealth. The amendment said nothing about possession of alcohol or its personal consumption; those persons rich enough to stock wine cellars and liquor closets ahead of January 16, 1920, the day on which the Volstead Act, the enforcing statute, took effect, could tipple to their gullets’ content.

Another amendment promised, or threatened, to be no less revolutionary. For three-quarters of a century—or about as long as Susan B. Anthony lived—feminists had agitated for the vote for women. Their efforts finally paid off during the Progressive era, in part because the progressives assumed that old-stock middle-class—and presumptively progressive-minded—women would vote in larger numbers than their ethnic working-class sisters. But until the experiment actually took place—that is, before the federal elections of 1920, the first to which the Nineteenth Amendment applied—no one could say for sure. The only certain thing was that for every statistical person (not always a woman) convinced that female voting was a boon to democracy, there was some substantial fraction of another person (not always a man) who remained skeptical, if not flatly opposed. The professional pols, those who prided themselves on heeding experience rather than theory, were at a particular loss, as their experience encompassed nothing quite like this radical expansion of the electorate.

Beyond the realm of constitutionalism were persons and groups who defined radicalism rather differently. The Russian revolution, which had proceeded from its moderate first stage of early 1917 to the Bolshevik triumph of the following autumn, had invigorated socialists, communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and nihilists around the world. Not many of any of these groups but the socialists inhabited the United States, yet the specter of communism frightened American officials and voters—the former anticipating a favorable response from the latter—into undertaking a campaign of suppression of radical thought and practice. The wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts remained in force after the armistice, and Wilson’s Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a series of raids on leftist organizations during the winter of 1919–20. The Palmer raids and the ensuing “red scare” turned up a modest number of actual communists, a larger number of sympathizers, and an undetermined collection of hapless drop-ins who suffered from bad timing in being present when the G-men swooped through. Thousands were jailed; hundreds of immigrants were deported. The Palmer raids encouraged private vigilante action against labor organizers, particularly the “Wobblies” of the Industrial Workers of the World, some of whom suffered gruesome treatment at the hands of self-appointed defenders of American security and respectability.

The threat of domestic revolution was largely a figment of fevered imaginations or, in some cases, cynical political calculation. But it wasn’t woven of utterly whole cloth. Police intercepted dozens of mail bombs addressed to prominent capitalists and public officials; explosive devices they didn’t detect blew the front off Attorney General Palmer’s Washington home and killed dozens and wounded hundreds in the heart of Wall Street.

The Palmer house bombing might have injured, or even killed, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had their luck been a little worse. After outgrowing Anna Cowles’s N Street house, the Roosevelt family had moved to R Street, across from the attorney general’s residence. On the night of the bombing Franklin and Eleanor had just walked past the Palmer house, returning from a dinner engagement, when the bomb detonated. “I went over to the Attorney General’s immediately after the explosion,” Roosevelt explained to the police, “and was very much gratified to find that no one had been injured despite the terrific wreckage of the front of the house.” Rubble was strewn all along the street; among the debris that landed on the Roosevelt doorstep was a body fragment, evidently from the bomber.

WHEN THE POLITICAL parties gathered in the summer of 1920 to choose their nominees for president, the angry, fearful mood of the country permeated both conventions. The Republicans, deprived of Theodore Roosevelt, deadlocked between General Leonard Wood and Illinois governor Frank Lowden before settling—in what became the proverbial smoke-filled room of Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel—on a handsome nonentity, first-term senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. Shrewd minds among the Republicans questioned the Harding nomination, pointing out that no sitting senator had ever won the White House. Shrewder minds said not to worry. No one in America knew who Harding was, let alone that he sat in the Senate. If a controversial record of legislation was the issue, Harding posed little problem, as he had missed two-thirds of the roll call votes during his five years in office.

The Democrats, meeting in San Francisco, had a more difficult time choosing a candidate. To begin with, they were Democrats, which meant they—still—awkwardly straddled the gap between the multiethnic (and increasingly multiracial) cities of the North and the fiercely segregationist white South. And they—still—labored under the two-thirds rule, which dictated marathon conventions and nominees notable chiefly for being the last men standing. Finally, their titular leader, Woodrow Wilson, who might have provided direction to the delegates, was confined to his sickroom, shrouded in silence. The president was said to nurse delusions of a third term; besides demonstrating how far gone he truly was, this report prevented prospective successors from mounting vigorous campaigns. Former Treasury secretary William McAdoo cast himself as the heir to Wilson, but his failure to win Wilson’s endorsement—despite being the president’s kin—undercut his claim. Attorney General Palmer hoped his stern treatment of subversives would work in his favor; it did among rural conservatives but left liberals cold and labor hostile.

As the front-runners failed to reach the two-thirds elevation of the nomination mountain, party leaders looked for a compromise candidate. James M. Cox had the merits of being a governor, which showed off executive ability better than holding a cabinet post or a Senate seat; of being from Ohio, which grew presidents the way Iowa grew corn; of being a wet, which attracted city dwellers; and of not being associated with Wilson, which appealed to an increasing portion of the party as time passed.

Franklin Roosevelt had little to do with Cox’s emergence as the convention favorite. Roosevelt attended the convention as a New York delegate but one whose reputation by now largely transcended New York state politics. This was a mixed blessing. Since his failed attempt to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in 1914, Roosevelt had considered making other races: for New York governor in 1918 and for governor or senator in 1920. But one thing and then another kept him out, not least the lack of a groundswell beneath him. His single significant accomplishment of the period in New York politics was a truce with Tammany Hall. In the spirit of wartime unity, Roosevelt addressed the Society of Tammany’s annual Independence Day celebration in July 1917. The appearance raised eyebrows, as the New York Times observed in reminding readers that Roosevelt, “although a Democrat, has been unsparing in his denunciation of Tammany.” Who proposed the truce is unclear. Roosevelt intimated that Tammany came to him, although he hardly gloated. The Times reported that Roosevelt got a laugh “by remarking that the member of Tammany who invited him declared that if Tammany could stand it to have him, he could stand it to come.” He proceeded to give an innocuously patriotic speech, lauding the war effort and summoning all Democrats to pull together.

The good feeling persisted during the following years. Roosevelt endorsed Tammany’s Al Smith for governor in 1918 and supported Smith after he carried the election. At San Francisco in 1920 he associated conspicuously with Boss Murphy, and after Tammany’s Bourke Cochran proposed Smith for president as New York’s favorite son, Roosevelt leaped up and gave a rousing seconding speech.

The purpose of the New Yorkers’ San Francisco performance—as all interested parties appreciated—was less to promote Smith than to boost Roosevelt. Smith’s national prospects in 1920 were nil, but Roosevelt’s were realistic. Some loose talkers had pushed Roosevelt for president; he dismissed the suggestion as absurd—even as he milked it for publicity. But he didn’t dismiss pre-convention rumors that he might be considered for vice president. A Roosevelt nomination for number two made real sense. The kind of gray personage the party might well settle on for president would definitely benefit from the sparkle and dash the comparatively young, undeniably attractive Roosevelt would bring to a national campaign. And the further the presidential nominee stood from Wilson, the more the ticket would need a Wilsonian in the second slot for balance. Democratic progressivism, like the Democratic president, might be ailing, but it wasn’t dead. If the party didn’t wish for its progressives to sulk on the sidelines, it needed to give them reason to turn out. Roosevelt might be just that reason.

Things transpired in San Francisco according to the New York script. Roosevelt’s speech for Smith explicitly asserted the unity of New York Democrats behind the governor but implicitly promised that a New Yorker anywhere on the ticket would produce a New York majority for the Democrats in November. As Cox crept past McAdoo in the balloting for president, the availability of Roosevelt as a balancer quelled the complaints of the party’s progressives. Cox finally prevailed at the forty-fourth ballot and promptly let out that Roosevelt would be quite acceptable as a running mate. In those days the parties had more autonomy in choosing vice presidential candidates than they would later, but a good word from the presidential nominee never hurt. The party approved Roosevelt by acclamation.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD been forty-one upon receiving the Republican nomination for vice president in 1900. Franklin Roosevelt was thirty-eight when the Democrats did him the comparable honor in 1920. Yet if Franklin was ahead of Uncle Ted’s pace in one respect, he was behind him in others. He hadn’t become a military hero. Nor had he been elected governor of New York. Perhaps most significantly, where the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket of 1900 had a very good chance of winning—and in fact won quite easily—the Cox-Roosevelt ticket of 1920 had no chance at all.

Roosevelt wasn’t the one to admit it. On the contrary, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the campaign. His apparent enthusiasm benefited from the absence of scientific polling of voters, which wouldn’t arrive until the mid-1930s. Candidates and their managers sounded out editors around the country, sampled incoming correspondence, and consulted tea leaves and entrails to divine how their tickets were faring. Wishful thinking often filled the large gaps in the intelligence, so that candidates could convince themselves right up to the moment of an electoral deluge that their prospects were sunny.

Roosevelt probably didn’t believe that he and Cox could win, but he behaved as though he did. His acceptance speech—delivered, according to custom, not at the convention but weeks later, at his home—identified him as a root-and-branch Wilsonian. Some question initially surrounded the stance of the Cox ticket regarding the League of Nations, given the controversy the League had elicited and the defeat it had suffered. Cox and Roosevelt met with Wilson, to receive the president’s blessing and affirm their Democratic solidarity. “As we came in sight of the portico, we saw the President in a wheel chair, his left shoulder covered with a shawl which concealed his left arm, which was paralyzed,” Roosevelt recounted later. “The Governor”—Cox—“said to me, ‘He is a very sick man.’” Cox approached Wilson and offered his hand. Wilson wearily raised his eyes and spoke in a low, weak voice. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I am very glad you came.” Roosevelt was startled by Wilson’s feebleness; Cox was moved to tears. After some small talk, Cox told Wilson, “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.” Wilson, whose gaze had fallen, looked up again. “I am very grateful,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I am very grateful.” Cox and Roosevelt passed through the president’s office on the way out. Cox called for a piece of paper and sat down at a writing table. “There he wrote the statement that committed us to making the League the paramount issue of the campaign,” Roosevelt remembered. “It was one of the most impressive scenes I have ever witnessed.”

Roosevelt perhaps embellished the interview with Wilson in the recounting, but the upshot of the session—that he and Cox would fight their campaign on the League of Nations—was true enough. In his speech accepting the vice presidential nomination, Roosevelt embraced a Wilsonian, internationalist view of America’s global role. “Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it,” he declared. The war had stirred noble emotions in Americans; these must not be allowed to expire without issue. “To the cry of the French at Verdun: ‘They shall not pass’ to the cheer of our men in the Argonne: ‘We shall go through’ we must add this: ‘It shall not occur again.’” Critics alleged that the League was airy and impractical. Roosevelt didn’t deny that the League was inspired by idealism, but he rejected most vehemently that it was impractical. “The League of Nations is a practical solution of a practical situation.” It was not perfect, but neither had the Constitution of 1787 been perfect. The League had been assailed as anti-national, which was taken to mean that it was anti-American. “It is not anti-national. It is anti-war.” For Americans to reject the League would be to turn their backs on their own values. They must not do so. “This is our hour of test…. We must go forward or flounder.”

AS ROOSEVELT SPOKE from the Hyde Park porch, Eleanor and Sara sat close by, listening. Sara had silently suffered all morning as the throngs of news reporters, party functionaries, well-wishers, and curious passersby trampled her lawn, bruised her flowers, and generally did violence to the decorum that, at her insistence, had always characterized her home. If not for her pride in Franklin and her appreciation that the country was finally recognizing his remarkable talents, she would have called the sheriff and had them all removed.

Eleanor’s concerns were less for propriety and the property and more for the privacy of herself and her family. Franklin had been a public figure for a decade, but the attention he received as state senator and then assistant navy secretary was nothing like this. He was suddenly a national figure—which meant that she was, too, whether she liked it or not. He hadn’t asked her whether he ought to accept the nomination; her first news on the subject was a telegram to Campobello from Josephus Daniels in San Francisco: “It would have done your heart good to have seen the spontaneous and enthusiastic tribute paid when Franklin was nominated unanimously for vice president today. Accept my congratulations.”

Eleanor wasn’t sure congratulations were in order. “I was glad for my husband,” she wrote later. “But it never occurred to me to be much excited.” She understood that Franklin’s career came first and that her job was to adjust to it. She accepted this arrangement, almost fatalistically. “I carried on the children’s lives and my own as calmly as could be, and while I was always a part of the public aspect of our lives, still I felt detached and objective, as though I were looking at someone else’s life.”

The campaign required more of Eleanor than any of Franklin’s public endeavors thus far. He embarked in mid-August on a monthlong train tour across the country, during which he spoke several times a day to audiences large and small, pre-organized and spontaneous. He reiterated the necessity of American membership in the League of Nations; on the domestic side he promised to extend the progressive reforms of the Wilson administration.

Candidates’ wives didn’t always accompany their husbands on political tours. Some simply refused; others pleaded responsibilities at home. But Eleanor’s sense of duty—and perhaps her lingering suspicions of her husband’s fidelity—prompted her to join him. It was hard service and largely thankless. She was the sole woman in the entourage, and the men didn’t know what to make of her. Politics had been and essentially remained a male sport; the candidates, their assistants, and the reporters who covered them made rolling smokers and running card games out of the whistle-stop tours. Franklin acted much more like one of the boys than like her husband. “He had speeches to write, letters to answer, and policies to discuss,” she said. “In the evenings, after they got back to the train, all the men sat together in the end of the car and discussed the experiences of the day from their various points of view.” The smoking and drinking and especially the gambling offended Eleanor. “I was still a Puritan…and was at times very much annoyed with my husband.”

Franklin was too busy to notice her annoyance, or perhaps he simply didn’t care enough to address it. But Louis Howe noticed and cared. The vice presidential nomination had given Roosevelt the excuse he needed to quit his Navy Department post; Howe, who required a regular income, stayed on. Yet he took a leave of absence for the campaign, and he assigned himself the task of educating Eleanor in the nuances of national politics. She was dubious and distant at first, not least because she realized that Howe and Franklin shared a bond she and Franklin didn’t. “I resented this intimacy,” she conceded later. She continued to think Howe slovenly and uncouth. “He not only neglected his clothes, but gave the impression at times that cleanliness was not of particular interest to him.”

But neither her resentment nor her distaste put Howe off. He artfully drew her into the campaign by showing her drafts of speeches and soliciting her reactions. “I was flattered, and before long I found myself discussing a wide range of subjects. I began to be able to understand some of our newspaper brethren and to look upon them as friends instead of enemies.” She came to realize that they were as bored by the repetitiveness of the campaign as she was. The ice melted, and they started making faces at her from the back of the crowds, hoping to get her to giggle during some especially solemn part of one of her husband’s speeches. When she would accompany Franklin through crowds and women would exclaim over his good looks, the boys from the campaign car—not realizing how close to the bone they were cutting—would teasingly ask if she was jealous.

She never became an enthusiast campaigner for her husband. “I still think campaign trips by anyone except the presidential candidates themselves are of little value,” she wrote years later. But she began to view politics itself as more interesting than she had thought, and in that regard came to view her husband in a different light than before.

SOME VOTERS REASSESSED Roosevelt, too, but they weren’t nearly numerous enough to overcome the Democrats’ deficiencies that season. The ticket of Cox and Roosevelt started the campaign far behind that of Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and if the Democrats closed the gap the improvement wasn’t noticeable. The election results told the grimmest tale in the history of the Democratic party. Harding and Coolidge trounced Cox and Roosevelt by 16 million to 9 million in the popular balloting and 404 to 127 in the electoral vote. The congressional elections completed the massacre, with the Republicans establishing a dominance in both houses they hadn’t enjoyed since Reconstruction.

James Cox never recovered from the debacle; his campaign with Roosevelt was his last. But the crack-up scarcely touched Roosevelt. American voters don’t hold vice presidential candidates accountable for the failure of their tickets; blame rises to the top. Positively, the campaign gave Roosevelt a national platform and allowed him to find his national voice. It furnished voters the opportunity to size him up and imagine him as president. On this scale he compared favorably with the man who won. If voters could envision Warren Harding as president, they could certainly envision Franklin Roosevelt.

Besides, had Cox won, Roosevelt would have receded into the nether world still occupied by vice presidents in the days before they became their party’s presumptive next nominees. (A second lightning strike on behalf of a Vice President Roosevelt appeared improbable. Cox was hale—he lived to be eighty-seven—and he wasn’t the type to attract assassins.) With Cox’s defeat, Roosevelt emerged as one of his party’s leading men.

All that was required was patience. Of this Roosevelt possessed enough. A few weeks after the election he wrote to Stephen Early, a reporter who had joined the campaign team as Roosevelt’s advance publicist. “I want to have a talk with you about the situation in general,” Roosevelt said. The immediate future was dark, but things would turn around. “Thank the Lord we are both comparatively youthful.”

13.

ROOSEVELT’S REMANDING TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR WAS A PERSONAL shock, even though by the time it occurred it was no surprise. Having forsaken the law for politics a decade earlier, on account of the tedium of the counselor’s craft, he hardly thrilled to return to the world of wills, contracts, and lawsuits. He softened the blow by finagling a second job, beyond his law partnership with Grenville Emmet and Langdon Marvin, as the New York representative of the Fidelity & Deposit Company, a Baltimore-based seller of surety bonds. Roosevelt knew little about surety bonds except that they guaranteed contracts, but he knew something about sailing, which appealed to the Fidelity & Deposit chairman, Van Lear Black, who hired him, and he knew much about government, which was the principal reason Black and the Fidelity board made him a vice president and agreed to pay him $25,000 a year for part-time work. Roosevelt’s responsibilities were vague, but Black and the board reckoned that Roosevelt’s Washington connections would serve the company well, one way or another.

In January 1921 Black and Fidelity threw a dinner for their new colleague at Delmonico’s; among the guests were some of the most powerful men of American industry, finance, and government: Edward Stettinius of United States Steel, Owen D. Young of General Electric, Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, William P. G. Harding of the Federal Reserve, Judge Augustus N. Hand of the U.S. District Court for New York, Van Lear Black himself. Fed chairman Harding gave the keynote address of the evening, touring the horizon of international finance and urging his listeners to be optimistic but responsible in pursuing their opportunities as America and the world completed the conversion from war to peace. Roosevelt spoke briefly, thanking Black and Fidelity for hosting the dinner, expressing gratitude to the guests for coming, and relating anecdotes of government in Washington. By evening’s end, Roosevelt appeared positioned to become a full-fledged member of the postwar capitalist class in America, a post-progressive generation that recognized that business and government need not be adversaries, as often in the past, but could be partners, to the benefit of all concerned. “Never have I imagined a more delightful or a more delicious dinner,” he wrote Black afterward.

But residual obligations—leftovers from the Navy Department—delayed Roosevelt’s transition to his new career. The Republican sweep in the 1920 elections had disposed and empowered the GOP to dredge up muck to throw against the Democrats, and during the spring and summer of 1921 a special subcommittee of the Senate naval affairs committee probed allegations of misbehavior among enlisted men and navy investigators at a Newport training facility. The charges were stale—two years old—but sordidly spectacular. Their essence was that the navy had sent agents among the Newport trainees to investigate immoral and illegal behavior, which in that time and place included homosexual activity. The agents were said to have entrapped young men by soliciting sodomy. The charges may or may not have been true; the line between legitimate investigation and illegitimate entrapment, especially in consensual activities, has always been difficult to draw and enforce. But needless to say, suggestions that innocent boys might have been lured into acts that most of American society considered unspeakable, by agents of the government no less, was profoundly disturbing—and politically explosive.

For Roosevelt, the more personally germane issue was whether, assuming the entrapment had occurred, he had authorized it. The majority report of the Senate subcommittee asserted that he did. The report, a massive work of fifteen volumes and six thousand pages, blindsided Roosevelt, who thought he had received a promise from the subcommittee to let him review its findings before they were made public. But he learned, only just before the fact, that the report was about to be released. He interrupted the family’s summer vacation at Campobello to race to Washington to try to forestall the release. Although the Republicans on the subcommittee insisted on going ahead, they allowed him a few hours to examine the report before the press got copies, so that while he wasn’t able to influence either the conclusions of the report or the language in which they were couched, he did manage to release his own independent rebuttal, which appeared in the same news stories as the report itself.

The report condemned Roosevelt in the strongest language possible—language, in fact, that was too strong for the newspaper accounts. “Lay Navy Scandal to F. D. Roosevelt,” the main headline of the New York Times said of the subcommittee’s conclusions. “Details Are Unprintable.” Yet the essence of the allegations was clear enough. Roosevelt must have known of the entrapment and authorized it, the report said; or if he didn’t know, he was “most derelict in the performance of his duty.” The whole affair was “deplorable, disgraceful, and unnatural,” not to mention “absolutely indefensible and to be most severely condemned.”

Roosevelt rejected the report in language equally categorical. He alleged a “clear breach of faith” on the part of the Republican majority in not letting him answer the charges before they were made public. He accused the Republicans of a “premeditated and unfair purpose of seeking what they mistakenly believe to be a partisan political advantage.” He denied knowing anything about the details of the Newport investigation, ridiculing the very notion that while overseeing the affairs of a navy of hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of men, he had the time to supervise a small office of a dozen employees. The Republicans were the ones who had engaged in shameful behavior. “I accuse them of deliberate falsification of evidence, of perversion of facts, of misstatements of the record, and of a deliberate attempt to deceive.” The American people knew better than to fall for such partisan slander. “This business of using the Navy as a football of politics is going to stop. People everywhere are tired of partisan discussion of dead history.”

MAYBE THEY WERE. Roosevelt’s reputation didn’t appear to have been damaged by the report, which must have seemed to most honest observers as a late, low blow. But the events surrounding its release—his rush to Washington in the heat of midsummer, his frantic reading of the report and his drafting of the rebuttal, the worry the whole affair caused him—taxed Roosevelt’s constitution more than he realized. “I thought he looked quite tired when he left,” his Washington secretary, Marguerite LeHand—called Missy—wrote Eleanor following her boss’s departure back north. Yet Roosevelt was reluctant to acknowledge fatigue, at least when politics or public duty called, and en route to Campobello he stopped at a Boy Scout camp on the Hudson. The Boy Scout Foundation of Greater New York was one of his many worthy causes, and he was currently president. Reporters covered the camp outing, which involved much waving of flags, marching, and reaffirming of the mission of the scouts. Photographers made a visual record for the papers and for posterity. One picture showed Roosevelt leading a procession; his eyes drooped a bit but his posture, as always, was athletically straight and tall.

Roosevelt generally reasoned, often rightly, that the fatigue he most often suffered was of the mental and psychological kind. His favored cure was fatigue of the physical kind, in particular the weariness of body that comes from sustained exertion of muscle and bone and that pushes aside the cares of office. He administered the cure to himself on his return to Campobello in early August 1921. Arriving aboard the yacht of Van Lear Black, which he piloted through the final tricky passage of the Bay of Fundy, he took Black fishing the next day; for hours he baited hooks, rigged tackle, identified the gathering grounds of the wily cod, and played the tireless host to his new employer. At one point he unusually lost his footing and slipped from the boat into the bay. “I’d never felt anything so cold as that water,” he recalled later. “I hardly went under, hardly wet my head, because I still had hold of the side…. But the water was so cold it seemed paralyzing.” This sensation was odd, given that Roosevelt had been in that same water innumerable times before. He chalked it up to the heat of the August sun and of the boat’s engine, which had caused him to sweat profusely. He gave it little more thought.

A few days later he took Eleanor and the children sailing aboard the Vireo, the craft he had purchased to succeed his war donation, the Half Moon II. Just as his father had taught him to sail, so now he showed his own sons the ropes. They seemed apt pupils, and the outing went well. On the home leg someone spotted smoke over an uninhabited island in the bay. Forest fires were common enough in the area that neighborhood protocol demanded that whoever noticed one should try to put it out. The Roosevelts landed on the island and attacked the blaze with fir boughs Roosevelt cut for the purpose. The work was hot and strenuous and lasted hours; by the time the flames had been beaten into submission, father and family were soaked with sweat, begrimed with dust and soot, and exhausted from head to toe. They reembarked from the island and reached home around four. Roosevelt thought a swim would be a cleansing, bracing end to the day. The children liked a pond on the other side of Campobello Island, not least because its water was several degrees warmer than that of the bay. Eleanor excused herself, but Franklin led the young ones at a jog across the island. The lake washed them and refreshed the kids, but it didn’t give Roosevelt the lift he’d been expecting. And so he plunged into the bay, hoping its fifty-degree water would have its usual tonic effect. This did help, and though he still felt a little sluggish on emerging, he headed the troops on a quick march back to the house.

By the time they arrived a more profound weariness was setting in. Too spent to change out of his swimming suit, Roosevelt sat down to read the mail. He eventually felt a chill and, with considerable effort, made his way upstairs to bed. He assumed he was catching cold and crawled under the covers to warm up and rest. He told Eleanor to serve the children dinner without him.

His symptoms the next day suggested something besides a cold. He had a fever and found it difficult to move his left leg. He initially attributed the leg problem to a strain or slight tear of a muscle, and he managed to hobble about well enough to shave. But then his right leg began balking, too, and he had to return to bed.

Eleanor sent for Dr. E. H. Bennett of nearby Lubec. Bennett had known the family for years and had ministered to their minor bumps, bruises, and infections with the calming touch of the small-town general practitioner. He crossed over to Campobello, examined Roosevelt, and pronounced the illness a cold. The patient should stay in bed and let time work its healing.

Eleanor accepted the advice with ambivalence. She had seen Franklin with colds, and they weren’t anything like this. Yet Bennett was the doctor, and he had treated many more colds than she had observed. All the same, she remained by Franklin’s side while the children went off on a camping trip previously planned for the whole family.

She grew more worried almost at once. Franklin’s symptoms steadily worsened. His back ached badly; his legs became numb and then completely immobile; the paralysis began to creep up his torso. Even his arms and hands started to go limp. He discovered he couldn’t hold a pen to write.

Bennett belatedly recognized his misdiagnosis and the need to consult an expert. Fortunately August was a good month to fall sick on the Maine coast, as much of the northeastern medical establishment vacationed there. Louis Howe had brought his family to Campobello to join the Roosevelt holiday; now he escorted Bennett back to the doctor’s mainland office, and the two began calling around for a specialist. They turned up William W. Keen, an elderly Philadelphia surgeon vacationing at Bar Harbor, who agreed to come over and examine Roosevelt. Howe knew that Keen had been part of a team of surgeons that secretly removed a tumor from the mouth of Grover Cleveland during the summer of 1893. The secrecy had been important, in that Congress was locked in a fight over the nation’s money supply, with advocates of a gold standard battling proponents of silver. Cleveland preferred gold, but his vice president, Adlai Stevenson, liked silver, and the merest hint of weakness on the gold side—such as cancer in the president—might precipitate a financial panic. A Philadelphia paper got wind of the story within weeks, yet the White House denied it, and the doctors, including Keen, maintained their silence for decades. Howe was already worrying about the career ramifications for Roosevelt of a serious illness, and he took comfort in Keen’s ability to keep a secret.

Keen concluded that the patient’s most serious symptoms—the back pain and paralysis—resulted from a blood clot pressing upon the spinal cord. The fever was the consequence of an unrelated infection that would diminish on its own. Meanwhile Howe, Eleanor, and anyone else who could be mustered into service ought to massage Roosevelt’s legs, to enhance the blood circulation there and maintain muscle tone until the clot dissolved.

Accordingly Roosevelt’s wife and his political man Friday took turns kneading his legs. The procedure was painful, for although the legs had lost their ability to move, they had regained their sense of touch, which in fact had grown more acute. But Roosevelt gritted his teeth and told Eleanor and Howe to continue.

The therapy yielded no positive result. The paralysis grew worse. Roosevelt lost control of his bladder and bowels, requiring Eleanor and Howe to treat him like an invalid. His fever intensified, and so did the pain. By the end of the fifth day since the onset of the symptoms, he was almost delirious.

But this was the worst. The next day his fever diminished and the pain began to dull, from a knifelike stabbing to a chronic ache. Roosevelt’s mind gradually cleared, and he and the others focused on what seemed a slight improvement in his muscle control. “We thought yesterday he moved his toes on one foot a little better,” Eleanor wrote Franklin’s half brother, Rosy.

Louis Howe knew from his own childhood illness the emotional dangers of false encouragement, and while Eleanor and Franklin seized on signs of recovery, he looked for evidence of continuing affliction. He wrote to Franklin’s uncle Fred Delano for help enlisting medical opinion more expert and current than that of the bucolic Bennett and the octogenarian Keen. Delano consulted specialists in New York and Boston, who, on the basis of Roosevelt’s reported symptoms, suspected infantile paralysis, as poliomyelitis was commonly called. They recommended Robert W. Lovett of Boston, the country’s leading authority on polio. Lovett had an office in Newport, Rhode Island, and he agreed to travel north.

Lovett required only a brief examination of Roosevelt to determine that his illness was indeed polio. Lovett had seen far worse cases, and he knew that patients tended to improve as the inflammation that accompanied the first infection abated. A complete recovery for Roosevelt was not out of the question, he said. But the massages must stop, as they risked damage to the muscles and caused the patient needless pain. Warm baths would be helpful, not merely to soothe the pain but to facilitate muscle movement that would forestall atrophy. “He can do so much more under water with his legs,” Lovett said. Yet Lovett had seen enough of polio to realize that pain and atrophy were only part of the problem. “There is likely to be mental depression,” he warned.

THE MEMBERS OF the Roosevelt household responded variously to Lovett’s diagnosis. Eleanor thought first of the children. Not for nothing was the disease called infantile paralysis; it typically struck the young. This largely explained why Bennett and Keen missed the diagnosis; adult-onset polio was very rare. The rareness exacerbated Eleanor’s alarm, for if the present strain was virulent enough to fell Franklin, she reasoned, the children must be even more vulnerable. Lovett reassured her. Though considerable uncertainty still surrounded polio’s mode of transmission, he assumed that if the children were going to be exposed, they already had been and would by now have manifested symptoms.

Lovett’s words reassured Eleanor, though for weeks she watched the children covertly for any sign of fever, any indication of muscle weakness. By the end of that time she had discovered a new role for herself with respect to her husband. From the start of their relationship, she had often felt herself the needier of the two. She was much less self-confident than Franklin; she was much more dependent on his love and esteem than he was on hers. Over several years she had slowly convinced herself of the reality of his love and had come to accept herself as worthy of it—only to have her conviction and self-perception shattered by the discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer. She and Franklin stayed together for the children and for Franklin’s future, but she had never regained the feeling that she meant anything essential to him. She had expected that she never would.

But now, suddenly, he needed her, in a very fundamental way. He needed her to thread the catheter into his urethra and to do so with care and skill, to avoid pain and prevent an infection of the kind that often shortened the lives of bedridden patients. He needed her to sponge-bathe him, to dress him, to lift him from his bed to his wheelchair, to manage his finances, to do the hundred things he realized, day by day, that he could no longer do. She discovered within herself resources she hadn’t known she possessed. She became an able nurse, adept with catheters, thermometers, and several forms of physical therapy. She sharpened her management skills, taking over direction of the family economy. She shouldered much of his part of the parenting burden, becoming half a father in addition to remaining a full mother.

In all of her new responsibilities she found a purpose she hadn’t known before. Her husband needed her, really needed her. Did he love her? That was a harder question. Did she love him? Equally difficult. But he needed her, and she liked the feeling. It was a beginning—or, more precisely, a new beginning.

LOUIS HOWE’S RESPONSE to Roosevelt’s illness was similar, in certain respects, to Eleanor’s. Howe hadn’t known quite what to do with himself as Roosevelt segued from public office to the private sector. Almost a decade earlier Howe had hitched his wagon to Roosevelt’s star, and then proceeded to promote that star in every way possible. He still intended that Roosevelt should be president someday, and he be Roosevelt’s chief adviser. But the 1920 election delayed the unfolding of Howe’s design, forcing Roosevelt into the private sector and Howe himself to find new work. The Navy Department let him remain through the transition to the Harding administration, then thanked him for his eight years’ service and sent him on his way. Roosevelt offered to bring him to Fidelity & Deposit, as his assistant. Howe accepted the offer with reservations, being unfamiliar with the bonding business and uncertain where his relationship with Roosevelt was headed.

Roosevelt’s illness changed everything. From the moment Howe heard the diagnosis of polio, he recognized his new calling, as the agent of Roosevelt’s recovery. Physical recovery would be welcome, of course, but Howe was most concerned with Roosevelt’s political recovery. A politician didn’t need to walk; he needed to think—and plan and coax and cajole and threaten. He didn’t need legs; he needed only a sound head. Perhaps, in retrospect, Howe now let himself imagine that Roosevelt’s very athleticism had served him poorly as a politician, making him appear a lightweight beside those men who devoted themselves entirely to the governing arts. Perhaps Howe perceived the polio as leveling the ground between himself and Roosevelt. Howe’s small stature and compromised health had always left him at a physical disadvantage to Roosevelt; Howe now stood taller than Roosevelt and enjoyed the edge in mobility. Moreover, Howe could command Roosevelt’s attention as never previously; henceforth when they sat down to plot out Roosevelt’s future, Howe could be sure the boss wouldn’t bounce away for a sail or a round of golf.

And at some level Howe must have appreciated that Roosevelt’s disability guaranteed his—Howe’s—indispensability. Roosevelt had first leaned heavily on Howe during his reelection campaign of 1912, when typhoid fever had prostrated him and he had no one else to turn to. Howe had proved his mettle sufficiently for Roosevelt to take him to Washington and the Navy Department. But as Roosevelt’s career advanced, he attracted other men prepared to devote themselves to his future, and by the time he joined the national ticket in 1920 he had his pick of political suitors. It certainly occurred to Howe that he might be jilted—if gently, as Roosevelt was a gentleman. The polio fairly precluded such a separation. The summer suitors would find other prospects; Roosevelt would have to rely on Howe, just as in 1912. Only this time the reliance would be long-term, perhaps permanent.

Howe never articulated this thinking, at least not in any form that survived. Perhaps he never laid it out completely in his own mind. He certainly didn’t explain to Eleanor or Franklin what he was up to. He simply made himself useful—finding and transporting doctors, keeping reporters and other nosy people at bay, reassuring Eleanor and Roosevelt himself. “Thank heavens,” Eleanor wrote of Howe amid the worst of Franklin’s physical crisis. “He has been the greatest help.”

SARA ROOSEVELT WAS nearing the end of her annual European vacation when Franklin became ill. Eleanor didn’t inform her of her son’s condition. “I have decided to say nothing,” she told Rosy. “No letter can reach her now, and it would simply mean worry all the way home.” Eleanor sincerely wished to spare Sara helpless fretting, but she probably had an additional motive. Eleanor knew her mother-in-law well enough to realize that she would attempt to assume charge of Franklin’s recuperation. Eleanor wouldn’t be able to resist Sara’s influence entirely, if only from financial considerations. Franklin would be unable to work for some extended period, and already it was apparent that his medical care would be costly. Not long after William Keen left Campobello, the eminent doctor sent his bill “for $600!,” as Eleanor wrote in amazement. But Eleanor, who had been fighting Sara over Franklin ever since the young lovers first told her of their relationship, had no intention of surrendering her husband at this late date. Maybe she had learned it from Louis Howe, perhaps she intuited it on her own, but Eleanor understood that knowledge is the prerequisite to power, and she determined to maintain control of knowledge of Franklin’s condition as long as she could.

Of course Sara had to be informed eventually. Her ship was scheduled to arrive in New York at the end of August; a few days before it docked Eleanor wrote: “Dearest Mama,…Franklin has been quite ill and so can’t go down to meet you on Tuesday.” She offered nothing more in explanation and sent the note to Rosy, who greeted his stepmother’s boat in Franklin’s stead and delivered Eleanor’s message.

The very lack of details in Eleanor’s message must have tipped Sara to the seriousness of her son’s condition; her sensitivity on anything touching Franklin was exquisite. Whatever she guessed, Rosy and Fred Delano, who also met the boat, supplied the facts as soon as it docked. Sara naturally felt terribly for Franklin—for his present and future pain, for his loss of mobility, for the blow to self-esteem of one whose identity had been closely connected to his physicality. But much as for Eleanor and Louis Howe, the polio gave Sara cause to lay a new claim on Franklin. She had never shared her son gracefully—not with Eleanor, not with the world at large. Her fondest hope had been for him to ease into the role his father had vacated, as the seigneur of Springwood. He had chosen politics instead. Now Sara assumed that politics was out of the question—or at least she hoped it would be. Franklin would retire to Hyde Park; what else could he do? “He is a cripple,” one family friend wrote to another. “Will he ever be anything else?” Sara didn’t have to hear such sentiments to know how common they were; she felt them herself. Perhaps she congratulated herself on maintaining control of the family money. Since he couldn’t work, he would have no choice but to honor her wishes and come home.

THE OBJECT OF the unspoken competition had little thought at first for the plans or feelings of Eleanor, Sara, and Howe. Dr. Lovett had been right; depression was a real threat. Franklin Roosevelt had experienced occasional disappointment, as at his snub by the Porcellians at Harvard, and sadness, upon the death of his father and the first Franklin Jr. But he had never been really unhappy, a fact that reflected both his innate temperament and his life circumstances. Roosevelt’s temperament tilted toward the sunny side of any street, and his circumstances had been such as to shield him from most of what other people typically became unhappy about. Life had been very good to Franklin Roosevelt, and he knew it.

But suddenly life wasn’t so good. As his fever diminished and his head cleared, and as he learned the cause of his symptoms, he came to realize that paraplegia would be his lot for some considerable time, perhaps forever. His days of effortless physical grace had been cut short by an unlikely twist of evil luck. For the children’s sake he tried to put up a brave front, but his anger, fear, and frustration sometimes burst through. He exploded without warning during one visit by Bennett, startling Eleanor and taking even the doctor aback. For days and weeks he wondered what to make of himself, wondered whether life was worth living, whether all he had worked toward was suddenly and forever beyond his reach. The doctor’s prescription simply made things worse. Almost never had Roosevelt felt himself the victim of inexorable fate; on those comparatively rare occasions when things went wrong in his life, his natural reaction was to fight back, to launch a counteroffensive. But Dr. Lovett, the polio expert, told him not to do anything. Aside from the warm baths, he must simply rest: no massage, no attempts to move about, nothing that fatigued him at all. A harsher sentence for an activist personality was difficult to imagine; no wonder he was frustrated and depressed.

Photo Insert One

As Fauntleroy

At the helm on the Bay of Fundy

With James Roosevelt

Harvard man

Newlyweds

Looking to the White House with Josephus Daniels

At the Brooklyn navy yard to lay the keel of the Arizona

With Uncle Ted

For vice president, with James Cox

The family in 1920: Roosevelt, Sara, Eleanor; Elliott, Franklin Jr., John, Anna, James

Hydrotherapy

With Elliott and the giant fish in Florida

With Missy LeHand at Warm Springs

Madison Square Garden, 1924

When Al Smith was an ally

With Howe and Farley at the Chicago convention, 1932

Yet his moment of self-pity passed—at least as far as Roosevelt let others see. The mindset of the Victorian era in which Roosevelt grew up had its quirks and foibles, but one of its virtues was its employment of outward denial as a coping strategy. Males of Roosevelt’s generation—and to some extent the females too—were expected to meet misfortune with a stiff upper lip and a sturdy smile, to deny that anything serious was wrong and to soldier forward. Doubtless for certain persons in particular circumstances this approach was counterproductive, but in many other cases it was a perfectly reasonable response to conditions beyond the ability of the sufferer to control. Fate was more capricious then, or so it seemed. Disease struck unexpectedly, often inexplicably, in that era of relative medical ignorance. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards ravaged unprepared populations in the days before scientific forecasting. Financial panics plunged nations into chaos at a time when neither economists nor policy makers understood how industrial economies really worked. When everyone was a victim at one point or another, no one won sympathy by wearing victimhood as a badge. Get over it, get on with life, might have been the motto of the era.

It became Roosevelt’s modus operandi. It didn’t keep him from thinking about what he had lost; it didn’t prevent his cursing his luck when the pain in his legs left him lying awake at night. Never had his future been so darkly unknowable. Would he be a cripple for life? What would people think of him? Could he ever be intimate with a woman again? How could he run for office if he couldn’t even walk?

But when morning came he pushed back the demons of despair. The Roosevelts refused to be weak in public. The Delanos refused even more adamantly. By the time Sara reached his bedside, her son had mastered his emotions sufficiently to treat his illness almost as a lark. Dr. Bennett and Eleanor were in the room when Sara entered. “I am glad you are back, Mummy,” he said with a smile. “I got up this party for you!” Sara afterward wrote to her sister of the “happy, cheerful attitude” Franklin maintained. During one examination by Bennett, Sara noted from outside the door of Franklin’s room: “I can hear them all laughing.”

ROOSEVELT’S ILLNESS extended his stay at Campobello much longer than he had expected, and by mid-September he was eager to get off the island and back to civilization. This was no easy matter. The isolation of Campobello had enabled Louis Howe to hold the press at a distance, but it also complicated Roosevelt’s returning to New York without alerting the world to his condition. Walking or riding from the dock at Easton to the train station was typically a public act, conducted in full view of whoever happened to be around. Because Roosevelt—still considered one of the most eligible Democrats in the country—had been out of sight for more than a month, the local stringers for the major papers mounted a stakeout as the summer season drew to a close.

Howe weighed various tricks for distracting the newsmen, before resorting to simple prevarication. He announced that Roosevelt’s boat would be arriving at a certain hour and invited reporters to be present. Then he whisked Roosevelt—carried to and from the boat on a stretcher by several islanders well paid to keep their mouths shut—into the dock ahead of schedule and onto a private railcar before the reporters realized they had been fooled.

The ruse bought Howe time, but only a little. The reporters immediately realized that Roosevelt had something to hide, and the stakeout shifted down the line to New York. On September 16 the city’s papers had the story. “F. D. Roosevelt Ill of Poliomyelitis,” the front page of the New York Times declared. Yet Howe still managed to control the story and put it in the most favorable light. The regular Roosevelt family physician, George Draper, declared, on the basis of Howe’s testimony and his own cursory examination of Roosevelt at the Presbyterian Hospital, that the patient was much improved. “I cannot say how long Mr. Roosevelt will be kept in the hospital,” Draper told reporters. “But you can say definitely that he will not be crippled. No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.” Roosevelt himself—which was to say, Howe—declared through the hospital’s superintendent that he had had a “comfortable trip” and was feeling “very well.”

The news that one of the most prominent men in the country had contracted polio triggered an outbreak of concern in New York and elsewhere regarding the disease. Authorities immediately sought to put the Roosevelt case in perspective. The director of New York City’s infectious disease bureau, Dr. Louis Harris, reported that the city had experienced 269 cases in the previous year, of which slightly less than one-fifth had been fatal. The cases were more numerous than in recent years, but not so much more, Harris hastened to explain, as to constitute an epidemic. Additionally, although the late summer and early fall—the current period—was the time when the incidence of polio peaked, it always declined with the onset of cool weather. Folk wisdom asserted that the countryside was safer than the city; Harris said this was not true. In fact, in a substantial fraction of the reported cases, the infection seemed to have occurred outside the city. Residents were advised to remain calm, conduct themselves sensibly, and avoid crowds. How this last bit of advice was to be followed in the nation’s largest city, Harris declined to say.

OTHER REACTIONS TO the news of Roosevelt’s illness were more personal. Within days Roosevelt began receiving letters from polio victims relating their own stories, offering encouragement, and generally expressing solidarity with a famous man who shared, at least in this one respect, their fate. “Fellow Sufferer,” wrote a Minneapolis woman. “Through the enclosed clipping”—a piece about Roosevelt—“I have just learned the pretty and truthful name of that which I have suffered for eleven years.” (The news accounts popularized, in many locales for the first time, the label poliomyelitis in place of infantile paralysis.) This woman explained that she walked with a cane, although she allowed this was common enough for one of her age: “only 87¹/2 years old.”

Roosevelt was touched by the woman’s sympathy and good humor. He thanked her for her kind thoughts and added that he hoped to be as lucky as she. “If I could feel assured that time could treat me so lightly as to leave me at eighty-seven and half years with all my vigor, powers, and only a cane required,” he wrote, “I would consider that my future was very bright indeed.”

Additional letters arrived from old friends and associates. Walter Camp picked up on the positive tone of the press coverage. “This is just a line to assure you how glad all your old friends were to get reports that you are coming along all right,” Camp wrote Roosevelt. He recalled the exercise sessions during the war and said he hoped “to repeat the old days when Delano, McAdoo, Davis, and you formed my ‘Flying Squadron’ and we ‘double-quicked’ in Potomac Park!”

Answering Camp required all the appearance of optimism Roosevelt could summon. The mere mention of those days when he had been Camp’s prize physical specimen drove home yet again how much he had lost. And though Roosevelt encouraged Howe and his doctors to portray his condition in the most positive light, he knew they were stretching the truth shamelessly. Yet he set his jaw, clamped the smile on his face, and dictated a reply—since his hands remained too weak to manipulate a pen. He told Camp how well he remembered the sessions in Potomac Park. He added, “I can assure you that if I could get up this afternoon and join with Messrs. McAdoo, Davis, and Delano in a sprint for the record, I would consider it the greatest joy in the world. However, the doctors are most encouraging, and I have been given every reason to expect that my somewhat rebellious legs will permit me to join in another course of training sometime in the future.”

DID HE BELIEVE IT? This was a critical question as his recovery began. To display optimism to the world was one thing; to actually expect improvement was something else. Patient histories showed that polio victims benefited from physical therapy: from moving their legs under their own remaining power, often in water; from having their legs moved by nurses, therapists, and anyone else willing to lend a hand; and from walking as best they could on crutches, braces, and supporting arms. The cause of their paraplegia was neurological—damage to the nerves that initiated and controlled muscle movement—but the consequences were muscular, as the leg muscles atrophied from lack of use; circulatory, from the lack of assistance those muscles had supplied to the heart in pumping blood about the body; and skeletal, when the large bones of the legs and hips lost calcium from lack of weight-bearing stress. Sometimes, or so experience suggested, the damaged nerves recovered to a certain degree, and the physical therapy contributed to the recovery, with the patients regaining partial or in rare cases nearly full use of their legs. But even where the nerves were permanently affected, the physical therapy helped forestall the secondary symptoms, which complicated the paralysis, leading to general decline and sometimes premature death.

The secret to consistent physical therapy was hope. To every person who contracted the disease—very young infants perhaps excluded—the disability came as a severe psychological blow. Dr. Lovett had encountered this often enough to consider the depression he had predicted for Roosevelt part of the disease itself. Most patients regained their emotional equilibrium sooner or later, but those who managed to view their altered circumstances with hope were more likely to stick to the regimen of therapy required to make any substantial degree of physical recovery possible.

Roosevelt gave every outward impression of hope. He spoke consistently of believing that he would get better, and he frequently pointed to improvements in this or that measure of muscular control. Yet the improvements were often less than he claimed, which suggests some degree of deception—perhaps deception of himself as much as of others.

Whatever his true feelings, he certainly acted as though he expected to improve. Rarely had a patient exhibited greater diligence toward recovery than Roosevelt. He undertook his therapy, after Lovett gave his approval, with a zeal that shortly worried the doctor. Lovett had discovered that certain patients overdid their therapy, from denial of the extent of their injuries or impatience at the slowness of their recovery. Roosevelt’s overwork probably reflected a bit of both, and Lovett and George Draper, the New York doctor, felt obliged to slow him down. Yet caution entailed hazards of its own, for it might convey discouragement. Finding the balance was extremely difficult—and tremendously important. “The psychological factor in his management is paramount,” Draper wrote. “He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism, that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.”

Draper, who directed the day-to-day treatment, and Lovett, who consulted from Boston, handled Roosevelt gently, indulging his optimism to a greater degree than they might have with patients less determined or less famous. They knew that Roosevelt’s chances of walking again were very small. But little was to be gained by sharing this knowledge with the patient, as long as his ignorance didn’t cause him to injure himself further. So they quietly kept watch and let him dream about getting back on his feet.

14.

THE AUTUMN OF 1921 AND THE FOLLOWING WINTER PASSED SLOWLY but swiftly, in the paradoxical manner that clocks creep but calendar pages fall away for the under-occupied ill. Roosevelt remained in Manhattan to be close to Dr. Draper and his therapists and to the children, who attended school in the city, except for James, who had graduated to Groton. Friends and former associates dropped by to visit; Roosevelt greeted them with a hearty good cheer that often took them aback. Josephus Daniels wasn’t sure what to expect of his old assistant, who had once skipped across the decks of rolling ships with a nonchalance that worried even the tars. Daniels’s uncertainty showed as he approached Roosevelt’s bed, and it prompted a characteristic reaction. “He hauled off and gave me a blow that caused me nearly to lose my balance,” Daniels remembered. “He said, ‘You thought you were coming to see an invalid, but I can knock you out in any bout.’” Roosevelt wasn’t always so physical with guests, but with those who had known him in public life and whose opinion mattered to his future in politics, he took pains—sometimes literally—to prove that he was no less forceful, no less able to stand up for friends and against enemies, than he had ever been.

He kept touch with the outside world to the extent he could. By personal conferences at his home and by telephone, telegraph, and letter, he conducted various business of the New York office of Fidelity & Deposit. By similar means he communicated with leaders of the state and national Democratic party, consulting on policies, on personnel, on past and future campaigns. In every case his object was to reclaim as much of his old life as possible.

In February 1922 he was fitted for leg braces. These heavy steel traps clamped about his shins and thighs and connected to leather belts that encased his hips and torso; when the hinges at his knees were locked into place, the devices could support his weight in an upright posture—once he learned how to balance himself. This task, for one who hadn’t stood at all for six months and who lacked the stabilizing forces supplied to most people by the muscles of their feet and legs was tricky and arduous. Yet Roosevelt, with the help of his therapists and the encouragement of Eleanor, Louis Howe, the children, and Sara, eventually mastered it.

Far more daunting was learning to walk in the braces, or rather to lurch forward, step by ungainly step. Because his hip and thigh muscles didn’t have the strength and coordination to swing the braces, he had to employ the muscles of his abdomen and lower back. He would prop himself on two crutches and one leg while, with a lean and a twisting heave of his pelvis, he threw the other leg forward. After months of strenuous practice he managed to develop a kind of rhythm, which made his gait resemble a walk in tempo if in little else. Yet he never became really stable, and he kept to his wheelchair except when something extraordinary dictated that he stand.

SARA WAS RIGHT in one thing about her son’s affliction: he would be more comfortable physically at Hyde Park than he was in the house on East Sixty-fifth Street. The Manhattan residence had easily accommodated the Roosevelt family when the children were younger and smaller, but as they grew they needed more space. And now the house had to accommodate Franklin’s live-in nurse, in addition to the regular staff of servants.

Louis Howe also required a room, having decided to move in with his boss. Two years earlier Eleanor wouldn’t have tolerated Howe’s permanent presence under her roof. But the bond that had developed between them during the 1920 campaign grew stronger under the strain of Franklin’s illness. Eleanor, moreover, understood the importance of a positive outlook in her husband’s recuperation, and she appreciated that the hours he spent with Howe, re-fighting old political battles and plotting new ones, did him more good than any medication or physical therapy.

Unfortunately, neither Howe’s hygiene nor his manners had improved. He smoked constantly and ubiquitously—at breakfast, in the parlor, on the stairs—till every room reeked of smoke and ashes covered the carpets and the furniture. Franklin smoked, too, but at least he was housebroken. Howe wore the same suit day after day till Eleanor insisted that he change it. He puzzled and irritated the children, who wondered how this interloper had horned his way into the family and what kind of person abandoned his own wife and children—who lived in Poughkeepsie, where Howe visited them on weekends—to take up residence with another family.

Anna Roosevelt, now fifteen, felt Howe’s presence most acutely. He displaced her from the large bedroom on the third floor she thought should be hers. She carried her complaints to Sara, whose negative opinion of Howe—that “dirty, ugly little man,” she called him—was no secret to anyone in the family. Sara naturally sided with Anna. “Granny, with a good insight into my adolescent nature, started telling me that it was inexcusable that I, the only daughter of the family, should have a tiny bedroom in the back of the house while Louis enjoyed a large, sunny front bedroom with his own private bath,” Anna recalled. “Granny’s needling finally took root. At her instigation, I went to Mother one evening and demanded a switch in rooms.”

Eleanor later remembered this period as the “most trying winter of my life.” She told Anna that the whole family had to make sacrifices. She herself didn’t have a bedroom at all but slept in one of the younger boy’s rooms and dressed in Franklin’s bathroom. Yet she understood that more was involved than living arrangements—and that Sara was using Anna for her own purposes. “Because of constant outside influences,” Eleanor recalled, “the situation grew in her”—Anna’s—“mind to a point where she felt that I did not care for her and was not giving her any consideration.” Franklin’s patience on the subject was understandably limited, which didn’t help matters. “There were times at the dinner table when she would annoy her father so much that he would be severe with her and a scene would ensue. Then she would burst into tears and retire sobbing to her room.”

Eleanor held things together as long as she could. But one day, not especially more trying than most others of that period, she suddenly found herself weeping uncontrollably. “I could not think why I was sobbing, nor could I stop,” she wrote. Elliott arrived home from school, saw his mother in a state in which he had never observed her, and fled in alarm. Franklin Jr. and John, to whom she had been reading, wandered away mystified. Louis Howe heard her sobs and gallantly tried to console her; failing, he too abandoned the field. “I sat on the sofa in the sitting room and sobbed and sobbed.” After a long while she crossed through one of the passageways connecting the house to Sara’s, which was empty following Sara’s move to Hyde Park for the season. She splashed herself with cold water and eventually calmed down. “That is the one and only time I ever remember in my entire life having gone to pieces,” she recollected decades later.

THE STRESSES CHANGED but didn’t noticeably diminish during the spring of 1922, when the family followed Sara to Hyde Park. Sara had readied the house for Franklin’s arrival, adding ramps where a step or two would have stymied him, retuning the elevator added during her husband’s final illness, and instructing the servants on the care of an invalid—which was how she viewed her son. Beyond the concern of any mother for her child, she hoped to show Franklin how much more pleasant life could be at Hyde Park, away from the noise and dirt of the city, in a house large enough to accommodate his shrunken world, among people who respected him for what he was rather than what he did.

At Hyde Park, Sara reclaimed some of the primacy in Franklin’s life she had lost to Eleanor. Springwood was her home; she would have a hand in all that happened there. Eleanor might be Franklin’s wife, but at Springwood she would be Sara’s guest. And guests had certain duties, among them deference to their hosts.

For the most part Eleanor didn’t challenge Sara’s claims. She appreciated that Sara—and Sara’s servants—shouldered much of the burden of Franklin’s physical care. She had never liked to manage a house; at Springwood she didn’t have to. The children, besides, were making ever greater demands of her, especially now that Franklin could no longer do much of what he had done before. “I became conscious of the fact that I had two young boys who had to learn to do the things that boys must do—swim and ride and camp,” she wrote. Because her own experience out of doors was quite limited, she had to teach herself as she taught them. It wasn’t easy. “I had no confidence in my ability to do physical things at this time. I could go into the water with the boys, but I could not swim. It began to dawn upon me that if these two youngest boys were going to have a normal existence without a father to do these things with them, I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-around person than I had ever been before.”

Her renaissance began behind the wheel of one of Sara’s cars. After a minor mishap some years earlier, Eleanor had left the driving to others. But camping trips and kindred adventures required the personal mobility cars increasingly provided, and she determined to master the motor arts. Early outings went poorly. She smacked a stone gatepost, and later, en route to a picnic, rolled the car, with children aboard, backward off the road, down a sharp decline, and into a tree. “It was pure luck I did not overturn the car and seriously injure someone,” she confessed. But gradually she tamed the unruly vehicle, and the family drives grew less exciting, to general relief.

SOMETHING ELSE discouraged Eleanor from competing with Sara. Since discovering Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor had self-consciously cultivated interests of her own. The needs of the children initially limited the time she could devote to her interests, but as they grew older she found herself freer. The campaign of 1920 had attuned her to politics in a way that came naturally to most Roosevelts but heretofore not to her. She joined the League of Women Voters and the Women’s City Club of New York, and met women who provided role models for the person she increasingly wanted to be: confident, independent, useful. She learned to type and write shorthand. She studied cooking—not actually to put food on her family’s table but for the satisfaction of knowing she could do so if the supply of servants ever failed.

At first her name meant more than her talents to the organizations she joined. In the early 1920s, following Theodore’s death and Franklin’s national race, the Roosevelt name was the most valuable political property in America. And with the enfranchisement of women, a woman bearing the Roosevelt name was doubly useful to political and other organizations that hoped to catch the public eye. In the spring of 1922, the executive secretary of the women’s division of the New York Democratic party, Nancy Cook, called to ask Eleanor to speak at a party fund-raiser. Eleanor initially demurred, disliking to speak before audiences and in any event wondering what she would say. But Franklin urged her to reconsider, doubtless thinking the experience would both broaden her horizons and defend the trademark on the family name. Louis Howe seconded the urging, from similar mixed motives, and he offered to help with the speechwriting and with tips on delivery. Eleanor let herself be persuaded, for Franklin’s sake and her own.

She spoke briefly at first, and poorly. “I had a very bad habit, because I was nervous, of laughing when there was nothing to laugh at,” she remembered. Howe, who sat in the back of her audiences, recorded her titters and pointed them out to her afterward. He gave her a rule for speaking she never forgot: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down.” She followed his advice and gradually got better.

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the onset of Franklin’s illness found him at Hyde Park, stubbornly optimistic regarding his long-term prognosis but increasingly impatient with his lack of short-term progress. The paralysis had settled into his legs, leaving his hands, arms, and shoulders free and mobile. His arms and shoulders were growing stronger than they had been before his attack, as they now carried much of the weight his legs had borne. On his crutches they provided both support and locomotion; in his bed they pulled him up and about via bars and straps above his mattress; around the house they propelled him by wheelchair and, on occasion, across the floor on his rear end. His arms and shoulders grew stronger still from an exercise designed for his legs. On the Springwood lawn, at the suggestion of another polio sufferer, he had a set of parallel bars constructed waist-high, just far enough off the ground that his feet could touch while his arms held most of his weight. He would move along the bars, willing his unbraced legs to walk, while his arms and shoulders did the actual work against gravity.

He took up swimming as therapy. At first he merely sat in the pond by the spring house, for the hydraulic massage its waters provided. But the water was cold, and to ward off its chill he would paddle around. In time a neighbor, one of the Astors, offered use of his heated indoor pool, which allowed Roosevelt to linger in the water. “The legs work wonderfully in the water, and I need nothing to keep myself afloat,” he informed Dr. Draper.

Yet all the therapy and all his determination failed to produce what he really wanted: stronger legs. His legs weren’t getting worse, but after a year they weren’t getting better. His mobility was improving, but that was compensation—stronger arms, greater skill with his braces and crutches—rather than recovery. And even his mobility improved in distressingly small increments. He set for himself the goal of walking, on braces and crutches, from the house down the two-hundred-yard driveway to the road. Each day he struggled a bit farther before his arms gave out and he sank, exhausted, to the ground.

FOR A MAN of affairs, a world traveler since birth, Springwood soon seemed a prison. Another reason Eleanor didn’t bother fighting Sara’s plan to reclaim her son was that she knew Franklin would never consent to the confined life his mother intended for him. After a long summer in Hyde Park, he returned to Manhattan. He remained a vice president of Fidelity & Deposit, although he hadn’t been to the office in more than a year. He decided to pay his employer a call.

In that era, paraplegics weren’t expected to venture into the world, and the world made little accommodation for them or anyone else who couldn’t walk, climb stairs, step up and down curbs, mount train platforms, and get in and out of automobiles. The mere sight of a cripple—the common term and conception—who wasn’t begging for coins could often draw crowds. Roosevelt attracted a curious audience upon his return to the Fidelity & Deposit office on lower Broadway. The ride downtown was no problem; a chauffeur guided the family Buick. This driver had been chosen, as well, for his strength of limb, for after the car pulled up to the door of the building, he had to manhandle Roosevelt from the back seat to a standing position and lock his braces straight. They had rehearsed the routine at home, but any opening performance is always fraught with uncertainty, and in this case a gust of autumn wind flipped Roosevelt’s hat to the street. The driver couldn’t retrieve it without dropping Roosevelt; while they debated what to do, a helpful passerby picked it up and put it back on Roosevelt’s head. Roosevelt laughed his thanks to the stranger, even as the sweat that soaked his shirt and coat betrayed his anxiety.

Inside the building, the marble floor, polished to a gleaming smoothness that made transit easy for everyone else, challenged Roosevelt’s advance. He had never practiced with crutches on such a surface, and their rubber tips struggled for a grip. With a grim smile and the driver’s help he got almost to the elevator before the crutches slipped and he tumbled heavily to the stone floor.

Again he put on a brave face. He laughed as though he were romping with his children on the floor of his bedroom, and he nonchalantly accepted the offer of two sturdy young fellows who, together with the driver, stood him up again and deposited him bodily in the elevator. The rest of the outing passed unremarkably. “A grand and glorious occasion,” was how he described the luncheon his boss, Van Lear Black, hosted for him that day. But not for months did he return to the office, and rarely during the rest of his life would he allow himself to be placed in a position to suffer such an embarrassing pratfall.

HEALTH RESORTS IN America had never developed the following their European counterparts enjoyed, which was why James Roosevelt, Franklin’s father, had traveled to Germany every year. Part of their failure to catch on was the underdeveloped state of American medicine, compared with that of Europe. It was the doctors as much as the waters that drew the infirm to Bad Nauheim in Germany, Baden in Switzerland, and Spa in Belgium (which gave its name to the species). Another part of the failure resulted from the underdeveloped state of the American economy. Medical tourism was expensive, and the number of Americans who could afford to travel and spend weeks or months to regain or improve their health was comparatively small.

Yet a few places earned names for themselves and profits for their proprietors. Saratoga Springs had attracted the infirm for decades before Louis Howe’s parents took him there in the 1870s. Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and Berkeley Springs, Virginia, boasted longer histories; Blue Licks, Kentucky, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, made do with shorter résumés.

A warm springs near Pine Mountain, Georgia, had enticed human visitors for centuries, perhaps millennia. The indigenous peoples and later the first white settlers ascribed healing powers to the soothing, mineral-laden waters. As early as the 1830s the springs were being touted as a destination for cure seekers; by the late nineteenth century the traffic to the area had grown large enough to cause one Charles Davis to build a three-hundred-room hotel, the Meriwether Inn. The resort included tennis and bowling facilities, a dance hall, and a shooting range, in addition to the swimming pool that captured the healing waters for the convenience of the guests. But it was Davis’s misfortune to open the resort in time for the depression of the 1890s, which cut deeply into discretionary spending on such items as health vacations. Davis lacked the money to maintain the place through the hard times, and as the nineteenth century ended it was falling into disrepair.

Franklin Roosevelt paid no attention to Warm Springs until he contracted polio, but as his rehabilitation stalled he became intrigued by reports of the Georgia spa. He and Eleanor traveled south to investigate. “The old hotel with its piazzas called to mind the southern belles of Civil War days,” Eleanor related. “The outdoor swimming pool was the one really fine thing about the place.” The pool was all Franklin saw, and at the first opportunity he shed his clothes and lowered himself in. “I spent over an hour in the pool this a.m.,” he wrote Sara. “It is really wonderful and will I think do great good.”

The water’s secret was its warmth and unusual density. Like most warm springs, this one drew its heat from deep below the surface. The rains that fell on Pine Mountain, above the resort, filtered through crevices in the granite down to depths where the crust retained some of the heat of its magmatic origin. Reaching an impervious layer, the warm water ran along this layer till the layer breached the surface several miles from Pine Mountain and water gushed forth at the rate of several hundreds of gallons a minute—more after unusually rainy seasons, less following drought. Besides transferring heat from the depths to the surface, the water transported large quantities of dissolved minerals. Water laced with minerals is denser than fresh water and supports with unusual force whatever is immersed in it. Swimmers discover they can’t sink even if they try; persons who walk and otherwise exercise in the water can do so almost effortlessly.

Between the warmth and the buoyancy of the Warm Springs waters, Roosevelt found he could pad and paddle about the pool there for hours. Most of the initial positive effect was psychological; not surprisingly for one eager to be cured, he attributed his new stamina to improvement in his leg muscles rather than to the lighter load they were carrying. But even after he discounted for the water’s effect, he could hope that the extended exercise it allowed would, in time, rebuild his withered muscles. “The doctor says it takes three weeks to show effects,” Roosevelt told Sara. Even if it took three months, or three years, he felt, it would be time and effort well spent.

Almost immediately Roosevelt adopted Warm Springs as his second home. “The cottage is delightful and very comfortable, and with Roy and Mary”—staff on loan from the proprietors—“we shall be most comfortable,” he informed Sara. Roosevelt made friends with the neighbors at once. Thomas Loyless had edited the Atlanta Constitution till the Ku Klux Klan, experiencing a revival in the 1920s, forced him and his liberal voice from the paper; he retreated to the mountains near Warm Springs, where Roosevelt got to know him and his wife. “We have gone motoring with Mr. and Mrs. Loyless and have seen the country pretty thoroughly,” Roosevelt informed Eleanor after she had returned to New York. “I like him ever so much, and she is nice but not broad in her interests. But she chatters away to Missy”—Missy LeHand, who had come south with Franklin and Eleanor to handle Franklin’s correspondence—“on the back seat, and I hear an occasional yes or no from Missy to prove she is not sleeping.”

Eleanor was less entranced by Warm Springs, which was one reason she had excused herself after helping her husband settle in. “I remember the first house we lived in, and my surprise that I could look through the cracks and see daylight,” she said of the cottage Franklin found delightful. The mode of living in backwoods Georgia was more rustic than she was used to. She described her “perfect horror” at learning that chickens for dinner had to be purchased live. “At Hyde Park there were chickens in the farm yard, but that was a mile away from the house and I didn’t hear them being killed. In Warm Springs they ran around in our yard, until the cooks wrung their necks amid much squawking and put them in the pot. Somehow I didn’t enjoy eating them.”

Yet Eleanor learned to like the neighbors. Her side of the Roosevelt family had a connection to the Warm Springs area. Eleanor’s Aunt Mittie—Theodore Roosevelt’s mother—was Martha Bulloch by birth; besides possessing uncles and cousins who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, Mittie had relatives for whom the town of Bullochville, adjacent to Warm Springs, was named. Eleanor never knew Mittie, who died the year Eleanor was born, but she and Theodore’s children spent many hours with Mittie’s sister, Anna Bulloch Gracie, who regaled them with stories of the antebellum South. “She had made me feel that life in the South must be gracious and easy and charming,” Eleanor remembered. The reality of southern life around Warm Springs in the 1920s was rather different. “For many, many people life in the South was hard and poor and ugly,” Eleanor noted of her initial visit. The experience affected her deeply; like her husband she had a habit of filing observations away for future reference. The trials of the South made her appreciate the kindness the neighbors showed her and Franklin. “Hardly a day passed that something was not brought to our door—wood for the fireplace, or a chicken, or flowers. Frequently the flowers came arranged in an old silver bowl or china vase that was a priceless family possession, and I would worry until the flowers faded and the container was returned to its owner.”

As Eleanor realized, it was Franklin, the celebrity visitor, the neighbors were most interested in. If one important, wealthy northerner had come to Warm Springs, others might follow, to the economic benefit of the town and county. “On Wednesday the people of Warm Springs are giving me a supper and reception in the Town Hall,” Franklin wrote Sara. “And on Friday evening, our last day, I am to go to Manchester, five miles away, for another supper and speech. I think every organization and town in Georgia has asked me to some kind of a party…. Missy spends most of her time keeping up a huge and constant local correspondence.”

DURING THE MID-1920s Roosevelt divided his time among Warm Springs, Hyde Park, and the Florida coast, where he cruised aboard a houseboat he purchased with a friend. The Larooco became a vacation home and office combined. Missy LeHand lived on board, managing Roosevelt’s paperwork and serving as his all-purpose assistant. Louis Howe traveled down from New York to apprise the boss of political developments and spike the Florida punch with his mordant wit. Howe dictated the bylaws of the logbook to Missy, who typed them for the record:

This Logbook must be entirely accurate and truthful. In putting down weights and numbers of fish, however, the following tables may be used:

2 oz. make 1 logbook pound.

5 logbook pounds make “a large fish.”

2 “large fish” make “a record day’s catch.”

2 inches make 1 logbook foot.

2 logbook feet make “big as a whale.”

Anything above “whale” size may be described as an “icthyosaurus.”

(Note: In describing fish that got away, all these measures may be doubled.

It is also permitted, when over 30 seconds are required to pull in a fish, to say, “After half an hour’s hard fighting…”)

When the spirits of the guests required fortifying—generally just as the sun was passing over the figurative yardarm—Roosevelt brought out the grog. In public Roosevelt was a proper dry, keeping well within the bounds of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. In private he was a merry wet, drawing on his private stash to serve drinks to guests at Hyde Park and, in southern Florida, capitalizing on that region’s proximity to Cuba and the rumrunners who plied the Florida Strait.

Roosevelt’s guests included college classmates, professional acquaintances, and friends of friends. Wives occasionally joined their husbands, affording Missy female company. “Resourcefulness and good humor weighed heavily with him in a man,” Elliott Roosevelt noted regarding his father’s choice of houseboat guests. “In a woman, he looked for warmth of spirit and physical attractiveness.” Frances de Rham, a spark from Franklin’s pre-Eleanor days, qualified on both counts, as did Cynthia Mosley, whose husband, Oswald Mosley, had yet to make himself notorious as Hitler’s principal British apologist.

ELEANOR RARELY came aboard. She didn’t fish or play cards, and she much preferred the company of her own friends. Two in particular satisfied her need for stimulation and affection. Nancy Cook, of the women’s division of the New York Democratic committee, had first been attracted to Eleanor by her family name, but before long a friendship blossomed and Eleanor was inviting Cook for weekends at Hyde Park. Cook was as irreverent and stubborn as Eleanor, at this stage, was proper and uncertain; Eleanor soon adopted Cook as her role model. To underscore the identification, Eleanor ordered matching tweed knickerbocker suits for the two of them.

The third vertex of Eleanor’s triangle was Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook’s longtime domestic partner. Younger and quieter than Cook, Dickerman provided a steadiness Eleanor found appealing. Together Cook and Dickerman drew Eleanor deeper into politics of a progressive, even radical nature. Eleanor began consorting with feminists, trade unionists, and socialists. Dickerman had run for the New York state assembly against the conservative Republican speaker, who branded her a man-hating Bolshevik; she lost, but narrowly. She subsequently accepted a position as dean of New Jersey State College, yet her reputation for radicalism followed her. To Eleanor it added to her appeal.

The three women worked together and often played together. In the summer of 1925 they embarked on a road trip from Manhattan to Maine by a circuitous route. Eleanor brought Franklin Jr. and John, one of their cousins, and a friend of John’s. The plan was to camp along the way. Automobile campers often paid farmers for the right to pitch tents in a fallow field, but when Eleanor inquired of one farmer whether they might stay on his place, he eyed the three women suspiciously. “Where are your husbands?” he demanded. “Mine is not with me,” Eleanor answered, “and the others don’t have husbands.” The farmer snorted, “I don’t want women of that kind.” He told them to move along.

The trip tested everyone’s patience. Cook and Dickerman weren’t used to small boys and found their antics unpleasant. The young Roosevelts didn’t like their mother’s friends and let her know it. Franklin Jr. tried to cut down a tree with an ax and nearly lopped off his foot. Johnny and his friend wandered away in Quebec City and turned up only after thoroughly frightening Eleanor and annoying her companions further. The car crashed into a ditch and later a lumber wagon. By the time they reached Campobello the travelers couldn’t bear the thought of another mile in the big Buick; they summoned Dickerman’s sister and had her drive it away.

Yet the friendship among Eleanor, Nancy, and Marion survived and in fact grew stronger. Spurred toward personal independence by Nancy and Marion, Eleanor determined to build a house for the three of them on the property at Hyde Park. Franklin endorsed the idea, knowing how Sara cramped Eleanor’s style in the main house and how Eleanor’s friends irritated Sara. Franklin pointed out that he owned part of the property, having purchased a tract along the Val Kill, a creek two miles from the main house, on which the group often picnicked. As Dickerman told the story, Eleanor was lamenting, late in the summer of 1924, that the season would end, Sara would close up Springwood, and the good times on the Val Kill would cease. Franklin responded, “But aren’t you girls silly? This isn’t Mother’s land. I bought this acreage myself. And why shouldn’t you three have a cottage here of your own, so you could come and go as you please?” The Val Kill idea took shape that autumn, and the cottage was built the following summer. For Nancy and Marion it provided a permanent home; the couple lived there till 1947. Eleanor came and went, according primarily to the needs of her children. By now her marriage to Franklin placed almost no demands on her; he scarcely figured in her considerations of where to spend her time.

Franklin called the Val Kill house the “Honeymoon Cottage.” How fully he intended the analogy is unclear, but the place certainly provided an idyllic escape of the kind associated with honeymoons. Eleanor embroidered the trio’s initials—“E.M.N.”—on the linen; friends provided monogrammed gifts of the sort newlyweds typically receive. Franklin himself furnished various items, including a book entitled Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, which he presented on the occasion, as he put it, “of the opening of the Love Nest on the Val-Kill.”

Val Kill became a world unto itself. The group pooled resources to build a furniture factory for Nancy, the artisan of the three. The factory produced replicas of traditional American designs, preserving a part of the nation’s heritage, as the three conceived it, while providing employment for craftsmen whose livelihoods were threatened by industrialization. “She wanted to use methods employed by our ancestors,” Eleanor said of Nancy’s plan, “and see whether she could find a market for furniture which, though the first processes were done by machinery, would be largely handmade and therefore expensive.”

The Val Kill partnership expanded into other areas. Eleanor edited a newspaper, the Women’s Democratic News, while Marion implemented her theories of education as principal of the Todhunter School for girls, which the trio eventually purchased from the British woman who had founded it. Eleanor joined Marion in attempting to bring the real world to the classroom, and vice versa. She taught courses in literature, history, and current events and led field trips to New York, where the students visited City Hall and sat in on trials in the courts. “This made the government of the city something real and alive, rather than just so many words in a text book,” she afterward explained.

15.

WITH FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR FASHIONING THEIR SEPARATE LIVES, the children struggled to find their own niches. Anna experienced the greatest difficulty. Sara still employed Anna against Eleanor, constantly reminding her that her mother was neglecting her in favor of Louis Howe and now her new women friends. Sara insisted that Anna come out as a debutante at eighteen, despite Franklin’s apathy and Eleanor’s ambivalence. Eleanor might have sided with Anna, who detested the debutante crowd and all it entailed, but she declined to pick another fight with Sara, and the old, insecure part of her secretly wondered whether Sara wasn’t right to introduce Anna to high society. “I was informed that I had to come out in society,” Anna remembered. “And I died…. I wasn’t going to come out. And Granny said, ‘You are.’ And I went to Mother, and she said, ‘You must.’” Anna knew better than to appeal to Franklin. “Father you couldn’t draw into this. He’d just say, ‘That’s up to Granny and Mother. You settle all this with them.’ I couldn’t go to Father on this. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

Not that Anna wasn’t complicit in certain of Sara’s schemes. After an unsuccessful attempt at college—as Harvard didn’t admit women, she chose Cornell—Anna found love, or something approximating it. Her brother Elliott detected a secondary agenda. “Sis was in a hurry to marry, to escape the cold war which promised no armistice between Granny and Mother, Mother and Father,” Elliott wrote (amid the real Cold War of the 1970s). Anna brought her beau to Hyde Park for Christmas. Curtis Dall was a stockbroker and a Princeton grad, twenty-nine years old and excessively proud, in the estimation of Elliott and James. The Roosevelt boys invited him to a pickup game of hockey—“to knock some of the starch out,” Elliott said. “We tripped him. Blood was streaming from a cut made by a skate slicing into his chin, when Sis took him into the house, raging at us for damaging her beloved.” The blood had dried but Anna’s anger toward the whole family still burned when she and Dall were married in 1926. Sara insinuated herself into the affair by buying a lavish apartment for the newlyweds—behind Eleanor and Franklin’s back. When her gift was discovered, Sara pleaded the best intentions. “Eleanor dear, I am very sorry that I hurt you,” she wrote. “I did not think I could be nasty or mean, and I fear I had too good an opinion of myself.” She had simply wanted to surprise Eleanor and Franklin, who of course couldn’t afford to give the newlyweds such a useful present. “I love you, dear, too much to ever want to hurt you,” Sara said. If she had made them angry—“well, I must just bear it.”

THE ROOSEVELT BOYS had less to do with Eleanor and more with Franklin, albeit not much more. “In the summer of 1926 Father, for the first and only time in his life, took a major, positive, forceful action to guide and prepare me for the sort of rude world in which I eventually would have to live,” James recalled. As the eldest son, James had been the first to leave home for boarding school—Groton, of course. He had lived away during the whole period since his father contracted polio. He joined the family for summers at Hyde Park, but as his final year at Groton concluded, Franklin decreed that he should take a job outside the family circle. Franklin inquired among his associates and found James a job at a paper mill in a frontier region of Quebec, near the town of Desbiens. He sent instructions ahead that the son of Franklin Roosevelt was not to be shown any special consideration. These proved unnecessary, as James discovered on arrival. “None of the lumberjacks in Desbiens…had the faintest idea who Franklin Roosevelt was,” James recalled. “And if they had, they could not have cared less.”

James learned to appreciate that summer’s experience but only after the fact. The long days of muscle-straining work—sorting logs, shoveling chips, heaving pulp, stacking paper—wore him down and toughened him up, and convinced him that his father was a heartless brute. “I remember staying mad at Father almost every moment of the summer.” He nursed his anger in silence. “I wrote no letters at all to either of my parents.” The one merit he detected in his exile was that it was so far out of the way that there was nothing on which to spend his minimal wages—eighteen cents per hour and keep. By the time he returned to civilization he’d amassed enough to purchase a car. And when he did return, he went to see not his father at Hyde Park but his grandmother at Campobello. “Granny made much over me, as she never had approved of sending me up to that awful place.” Eventually, just before heading to Harvard, James visited Franklin at Hyde Park. Like his siblings, James craved his father’s approval, and he kept his dissatisfaction over his summer experience to himself. “I was too proud to tell him how much I had disliked it.” But Franklin figured it out, and he never sent the younger boys to such a rigorous finishing school.

Elliott, the second (surviving) son, rebelled more openly, as second sons often do. He couldn’t stand Groton, after he got there, and at every opportunity told his parents so. As graduation approached he vowed he would never go to Harvard, no matter what anyone said or did. Franklin decided that a western trip would do the boy good, and he arranged for him to spend the summer on a ranch in Wyoming. But Elliott disappeared en route, and for two months no one in the family heard a word of his whereabouts. Franklin appeared unconcerned, but Eleanor grew more and more worried. For weeks she suffered in silence, until her maternal fears got the better of her stoicism. “Franklin, we must do something about finding this boy,” she said. Roosevelt called the New York state police, who wired their counterparts in Wyoming, who located Elliott on a different ranch than the one Franklin had made the arrangements with. The foreman who had agreed to hire Elliott had taken a new job on a neighboring ranch, and Elliott required some time to find him. With the calculating thoughtlessness of the teenage rebel, he neglected to inform his parents of the switch. Their letters to him gathered dust for months at the old ranch; when Elliott finally wrote back, his chief concern was that Franklin and Eleanor might have made him look bad to his friends. “I suppose you told everybody how terrible I was…. I suppose there is no use in asking you to keep my defects and faults quiet.”

Yet there were moments of filial satisfaction. James and Elliott took turns keeping their father company in Florida. James enjoyed the visits, in part because his father treated him as one of the gang. James fished with Franklin and his friends, talked politics with Franklin and friends, and probably drank with Franklin and friends. (Both were subsequently silent on this point. James did say he sat out the poker games Franklin and friends played daily.) On one occasion James joined Franklin for lunch with William Jennings Bryan, who currently devoted his persuasive powers to promoting Florida real estate to northern tourists.

Elliott, being younger and more resentful, fit less readily into Franklin’s crowd. But Elliott liked to fish, and one day’s exploit furnished the stuff of family legend. “Last night we caught the record fish of all time!” Franklin recorded in the ship’s log.

Elliott had put out a shark hook baited with half a ladyfish, and about 8 o’clock we noticed the line was out in the middle of the creek. It seemed caught on a rock and we got the rowboat and cleared it. It then ran under Larooco, and with E. and Roy and John and the Capt. pulling on it, we finally brought a perfectly enormous Jewfish along side. We could just get his mouth out of the water and put in two other hooks and a gaff. Then Roy shot him about eight times through the head with my revolver. As he seemed fairly dead we hoisted him on the davit, which threatened to snap off at any moment. He was over seven feet long, over five feet around, and his jaw opened eighteen inches. We put him on the hand scale this morning, which registers up to 400 pounds. He weighed more than this, as he was only two-thirds out of water, so we figure his weight at between 450 and 500 lbs.

DURING ROOSEVELT’S first visit to Warm Springs, two reporters from Atlanta caught wind of his presence there and wrote an article entitled “Swimming Back to Health,” which was picked up by papers around the country. The article piqued interest in the curative powers of the Warm Springs waters, and in April 1925, during Roosevelt’s second visit, a steady trickle of polio patients began arriving. The owners of the Meriwether Inn eyed the visitors skeptically. It wasn’t obvious they could pay their way, and they had an unsettling effect on the other guests. As the cause and mode of transmission of polio remained a mystery, fathers and mothers didn’t have to be paranoid or callous to fear that their children might be harmed by swimming with persons who obviously had contracted the disease. When these guests began cutting their vacations short, the management understandably grew concerned.

Roosevelt unexpectedly found himself the advocate for his fellow sufferers. The owners might contemplate putting the other polio victims back on the train and sending them away, but they couldn’t do so to one of Roosevelt’s stature—and with him on the premises they couldn’t do it to the others either. Roosevelt resolved the problem, for the time being, by persuading the management to dig a separate pool, some distance below the main pool. Here he took his own exercise, and he encouraged the others to join him. And lest the regular guests have to meet the polio victims in the halls of the hotel, Roosevelt arranged for them to stay in some of the abandoned cottages about the resort.

They quickly came to appreciate him, and then to love him, for his efforts on their behalf. He reciprocated the fond feeling. He was delighted to hear them call him “Dr. Roosevelt” and flattered by the attention they paid as he showed them exercises that had worked for him. Some of these he had learned from Dr. Lovett; others he invented himself. One man didn’t know how to swim when he arrived; Roosevelt taught him the basic arm strokes, and soon the fellow was bobbing about with the rest of the group. Two ladies were quite rotund and consequently buoyant; Roosevelt had to struggle to get their feet to the bottom of the pool, so that they could practice walking in the water. He would push one knee down till the foot hit bottom, then reach for the other knee—only to watch the first knee shoot back to the surface. Great effort on his part and intense concentration on theirs were required to succeed in planting both feet on the pool bottom at once.

The resort had no resident physician, and certainly no polio specialist. None of the new guests had Roosevelt’s advantage of advanced—for that era—polio care, and they were eager to hear what he could tell them of the disease they shared. He had Missy LeHand help him prepare a series of charts showing the human musculature and indicating which muscles were affected by polio and therefore needed special exercise. He answered their questions, assisted them in locating specialists near their homes, and charmed them with his natural optimism.

The experience boosted Roosevelt’s spirits as much as theirs, and as much as anything he had done since contracting the disease. To some degree his positive attitude reflected his comparative physical advantage over several of the others; self-pity appeared particularly out of place when others were much worse off. To some degree it reflected the actual improvement he felt in his condition. His half brother, Rosy, now in his late sixties, had suffered a knee injury; Franklin wrote him a letter of concern and appended a status report: “My own knees are really gaining a lot of strength. This exercising in warm water seems to be far and away the best thing, and I think you will be delighted with the progress I have made.”

AS ROOSEVELT LED the exercises in the pool, as he answered the questions at the water’s edge, as he felt the spirits of the group rise on the mutual encouragement each offered to all, an unexpected vision took shape in his mind’s eye. His conversations with the resort’s management and his observations of the other guests convinced him that Warm Springs would never become a satisfactory facility for polio victims unless it was owned and operated by someone sympathetic to their plight. Roosevelts and especially Delanos had invested in less worthy ventures; Franklin now determined to put his money where his heart lay, and purchase the resort. As owner he would have the freedom to implement what he had learned in his own rehabilitation and to assist others—doctors and patients, working together—in devising new treatments.

By early 1926 he was talking openly of his plan. “I had a nice visit from Charles Peabody”—the brother of the principal owner—“and it looks as if I have bought Warm Springs,” he wrote Sara. He was deliberately trying to shock his mother; he hadn’t yet bought the place, but he was letting her know he intended to, regardless of the opposition he was sure she would raise. “I want you to take a great interest in it,” he continued, “for I feel you can help me with many suggestions, and the place properly run will not only do a great deal of good but will prove financially successful.”

Sara was indeed leery; so was Eleanor. Though Franklin and Eleanor’s activities and circles of friends continued to diverge, their finances remained intertwined. They had enough for daily expenses, but James was in college and the younger boys, if perhaps not the rebellious Elliott, would follow. Eleanor wasn’t sure where the money would come from. “I know how you love creative work,” she wrote Franklin. “My only feeling is that Georgia is somewhat distant for you to keep in touch with what is really a big undertaking. One cannot, it seems to me, have vital interests in widely divided places.” Yet she conceded that her caution might be excessive. “I’m old and rather overwhelmed by what there is to do in one place…. Don’t be discouraged by me; I have great confidence in your extraordinary interest and enthusiasm.”

She had reason to worry. Franklin was talking of sinking $200,000, or two-thirds of his net worth, into the property. Renovations would run through additional tens of thousands before the place began to attract the kind of clientele that might actually make it pay.

He went forward all the same. In April 1926 he announced his purchase of the resort; shortly thereafter he spelled out the improvements he planned and the results he anticipated. “The first thing to be done concerning the curative powers of the spring waters will be to conduct some experiments under able physicians,” he told reporters. “This summer we expect to bring a limited number of patients to Warm Springs who will receive treatment under the direction of a staff of physicians. The physicians then can tell definitely the value of the warm waters.” Roosevelt said he expected the experiments to be an “unqualified success,” which would justify the construction of a sanitarium.

Though polio rehabilitation would be the focus of the first phase of the resort’s redevelopment, Roosevelt’s broader plan was much more ambitious. He described for the reporters a year-round facility catering to persons with plenty of money to spend on rest and outdoor recreation. He said that he had already engaged Donald Ross, the St. Andrews–bred Scotsman who built the finest golf courses of his generation, to carve a championship facility out of the forest on Pine Mountain. A three-thousand-acre shooting preserve would entice visitors partial to the thrill of the hunt. Riding trails—safely distant from the shooting preserve—would allow guests to gallop, trot, or walk their steeds over hill and dale. A stocked lake would bring out the Izaak Walton in visitors.

Roosevelt discreetly but clearly explained that the polio sanitarium would be separate from the larger resort facilities. He didn’t say so explicitly, but it was also clear that he hoped the revenues from the larger facility would underwrite the polio portion. Roosevelt’s model for the larger facility was premised on the sale of memberships to the golf club and of home sites in what he called the “cottage colony” that would grow up around the golf course. Roosevelt expected the members and guests to be of two kinds: northerners who came south for the winter and returned home in the spring, and southerners who headed for the hills during the summer. Borrowing a page from experienced promoters, Roosevelt assured reporters that enthusiasm was high, without revealing details. The list of prospective members included “some of the best people in the South and some of the best people in the North,” he said. “When this list grows a little larger we will be ready to announce the names of the first members.”

As Roosevelt expected, the mere fact of his purchase of Warm Springs assured the resort much positive publicity. From Atlanta to New York articles and editorials recounted the sale, his plans, and the positive impact the new ownership would have on a region bedeviled by poverty and lack of opportunity. “The waters of Warm Springs have been pronounced equal in some respects to the most famous health waters of Germany and Austria,” the Atlanta Constitution declared. “There is good reason to believe, therefore, that this resort, under the direction of one so able financially to develop it, and whose heart is so closely wedded to it, will become one of the great attractions of Georgia, and of marked economic value to the state.”

In conjunction with the unveiling of his plans for the resort, Roosevelt organized the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, which was chartered in New York in January 1927. The foundation’s purpose was to institutionalize Roosevelt’s dream while capturing the tax advantages available to nonprofit organizations. In time the foundation would buy out Roosevelt’s ownership, repaying his investment—and thereby enabling Eleanor to breathe easier regarding the children’s education. In the shorter term it enabled Roosevelt to dun his friends on behalf of his cause, but in the foundation’s name rather than his own. Edsel Ford, the son of the automaker, on visiting Warm Springs became an early donor. “Mrs. Ford and I are deeply impressed with the wonderful work which is being carried out here at Warm Springs and we would like to do something towards the development,” Ford wrote. “I am sending herewith a check for twenty-five thousand dollars which I hope you will accept for the Foundation with our best wishes for its complete success.”

The evolution of Roosevelt from politician to entrepreneur and healer impressed observers all the more. Following the announcement of a program to bring cash-short polio victims, at foundation expense, to Warm Springs, the Atlanta Constitution hailed the moving spirit of the enterprise as “Roosevelt the Reliever.” Applauding his “sympathetic and splendid philanthropy,” the paper went on to predict, “It will be one of the superb blessings to humanity if Mr. Roosevelt and his associates shall succeed in demonstrating that our Georgia Warm Springs is the ‘pool of Siloam’ to many thousands of the sufferers from the dread affliction that so deadens the limbs, spines, and even the brains of human creatures.”

ROOSEVELT GREW AT Warm Springs in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. Besides being Dr. Roosevelt to the patients, whose numbers expanded with each passing month, he was “the Boss” to the hundreds of men and women who worked on the grounds, built the golf course and the cottages, dug the pools, and tended the cows and chickens and corn and soybeans on the farm he purchased adjoining the resort. (But not cotton. “We’ll grow no cotton,” he declared, convinced that cotton contributed to the exhaustion of soil and the cycle of debt that trapped so many southern farmers). He was the dynamo of the Warm Springs Foundation, the phone caller and letter writer who hit up everyone he could think of for contributions to the worthiest cause he knew. He was the irresistible embodiment of polio, who hurried to Atlanta when he learned the American Orthopedic Association was meeting there and, against the scientifically skeptical inclinations of the distinguished doctors, persuaded them to send a team to Warm Springs to examine the facility and the therapeutic powers of the water.

He was also the face of the outside world to many of his Georgia neighbors. Tom Bradshaw, the Warm Springs village blacksmith, explained that he could rig a Model T with pulleys and levers to let a person drive with his hands and arms alone. Roosevelt laughed with pleasure at the thought, and laughed even louder each time he got in the car and tooled along the roads of Meriwether County. He shouted and waved at the men, women, and children he passed; he stopped to chat, to commiserate regarding the woeful price of crops, and to share a jar of moonshine when the revenuers weren’t looking. Some of those he encountered had never seen a Northerner; almost none had ever met a wealthy Yankee who treated them with such honest good cheer.

He charmed them all. He put the “polios”—as he and they called themselves—at ease with his matter-of-factness toward his disability. He led them in jokes, sometimes at the expense of the able-bodied guests. The young male assistants who propelled the wheelchairs about the grounds he dubbed “push boys” he struggled to suppress his mirth when some of the push boys, pretending paralysis, lowered themselves into the waters of a fountain that graced the front lawn of the resort and leaped out, proclaiming a miraculous cure, to the astonishment of gullible visitors. He played poker with all comers, taking the money of polios and able-bodies alike.

He held court in a cottage built to his specifications. Shortly after unveiling his master plan for the resort, he contracted for the construction of one of the first new cottages, for himself. Ground was broken in the autumn of 1926; the house was ready for occupation by the following February. Eleanor and Missy traveled to Atlanta to purchase a stove and refrigerator for the place; they collaborated on other touches to lend the feel of home. (Rarely did the two spend much time together, especially without Roosevelt. One wonders what they talked about on their Atlanta trip; neither ever said.)

Missy, who served as Roosevelt’s hostess, became more indispensable with each passing year. Her cottage was one of the next ones built. The full nature of Roosevelt’s relationship to Missy inspired quiet conjecture then and somewhat less-guarded guesses since. Elliott Roosevelt assumed they were lovers and had been at least since their days in Florida. Elliott contended that their intimacy “was treated as a simple fact of life aboard the Larooco.” He continued: “Everyone in the closely knit inner circle of Father’s friends accepted it as a matter of course.” As for his own reaction: “I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in a brown wicker chair in the main stateroom, holding her in his sun-browned arms, whose clasp we children knew so well. When Sis and Jimmy on occasion witnessed much the same scene, they had a similar reaction, as I learned when we spoke afterward. It was not in Father to be secretive or devious in his dealings with us. He made no attempt to conceal his feelings about Missy.”

Elliott explained that during this period his father regained feeling in his legs, with positive consequences for his overall mental and physical state. “Except for the braces,” Roosevelt declared, in a letter Elliott quoted, “I have never been in better health in my life.” Elliott elaborated: “There was an additional reason, besides the return of sensation in his legs, for his mood of exhilaration. One of the innumerable medical reports on his general well-being stated explicitly: ‘No symptoms of impotentia coeundi.’” The obvious implication, to Elliott at least, was that Missy made Roosevelt feel like a man again.

THE WARM SPRINGS experience broadened Roosevelt as nothing else could have. For years afterward he credited his experience in Georgia with providing insight into this aspect or that of politics, economics, or the American dream. “It was way back in 1924 that I began to learn economics at Warm Springs,” he recalled on a visit to Georgia as president, to dedicate a schoolhouse.

Here is how it happened. One day while I was sitting on the porch of the little cottage in which I lived, a very young man came up to the porch and said, “May I speak with you, Mr. Roosevelt?” And I said, “Yes.”

He came up to the porch, and he asked if I would come over to such and such a town not very far away from here and deliver the diplomas at the commencement exercises of the school.

I said, “Yes,” and then I asked, “Are you the president of the graduating class?” He said, “No, I am principal of the school.”

I said, “How old are you?” He said, “Nineteen years.”

I said, “Have you been to college?” He answered, “I had my freshman year at the University of Georgia.”

I said, “Do you figure on going through and getting a degree?” He said, “Yes, sir, I will be teaching school every other year and going to college every other year on the proceeds.”

I said, “How much are they paying you?” And the principal of that school said, “They are very generous. They are paying me three hundred dollars a year.”

Well, that started me thinking. Three hundred dollars a year for the principal of the school. That meant that the three ladies who were teaching under him were getting less than three hundred dollars a year. I said to myself, “Why do they have to pay that low scale of wages?”

At that particular time one of the banks in Warm Springs closed its doors. At the same time one of the stores in Warm Springs folded up. I began realizing that the community didn’t have any purchasing power. There were a good many reasons for that. One reason was five cent cotton. You know what five cent cotton, six cent cotton, seven cent cotton meant to the South. Here was a very large part of the nation that was completely at the mercy of people outside of the South, who were dependent on national conditions and on world conditions over which they had absolutely no control. The South was starving on five and six and seven cent cotton. It could not build schools and it could not pay teachers.

Roosevelt concluded this story by saying that he then began to see the economy of the country as a whole. He had read about low crop prices, but he had never witnessed in firsthand, personal terms what they meant for those honest, struggling farmers who were compelled to accept them. The cost to the present was the poverty, illness, and despair that seemed endemic to much of the South; the cost to the future was the failure of the underfunded schools to educate the children and end the cycle of poverty.

Roosevelt told another story that elaborated his point. On his first visit to Warm Springs he had been jolted to consciousness in the middle of the night by the sound of a train rumbling through the village and blasting its whistle across the slope of Pine Mountain. He lay awake for some time afterward, pondering various subjects but mostly muttering about his interrupted sleep. “So I went down to the station and said to the stationmaster, ‘What is that train that makes so much noise, and why does it have to whistle at half past one in the morning?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the fireman has a girl in town.’” Roosevelt asked what the train carried and where it was bound. “That is the milk train for Florida,” the stationmaster said. Roosevelt assumed the milk came from Georgia or perhaps Alabama. He was surprised to be told that, no, it came from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later he went to the village store to purchase a sack of apples. He had seen apples growing in the southern Appalachians and assumed he’d get some of those. But the local store carried no such local produce; the only apples the storekeeper stocked came from Oregon and Washington. He encountered a similar situation with beef. He couldn’t find any local meat, only cuts sliced and dressed in Chicago and Omaha. The lesson he drew was the same one as in his school tale: southern troubles weren’t the South’s alone but manifestations of national difficulties. Solutions must be similarly national.

Doubtless Roosevelt’s Warm Springs stories improved in the telling. Like many another moralist—and Roosevelt’s stories invariably had a moral—Roosevelt dealt in truths deeper than surface detail. And the moral of his own Warm Springs story was that it connected him emotionally to the plain people of the South and, through them, to the ordinary people of America. Southern poverty wasn’t news to Roosevelt; as an intelligent and well-read person, he had long known that the lot of southern farmers was a hard one. Nor had he been unaware, theoretically, that the problems of the South—and of other regions, for that matter—were tied to the condition of the national economy. But for the first time he felt what poverty meant to those who lived it daily.

Beyond improving his grasp of economics, Roosevelt’s time at Warm Springs—and his overall experience of polio—made him better able to empathize with victims of misfortune generally. No one could suffer such an arbitrary blow of fate without becoming better attuned to others who suffered similarly. Capricious calamity isn’t part of the American dream, which promises success to those who strive diligently toward reasonable goals. Other cultures have allowed greater scope for accident or the whims of the gods, but fatalism never caught on in America. Yet sometimes bad things do happen to people through no fault of their own. Roosevelt now understood this in a way he hadn’t before.

Polio certainly helped people sympathize with him as they hadn’t previously. Roosevelt’s first four decades gave ordinary Americans little to identify with in him. His patrician background, mannerisms, and accent would have made him an ideal candidate for president in the age of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, when ordinary Americans expected their leaders to stand above them. But the age of deference had ended with the election of Andrew Jackson; after that candidates for president needed to display a common touch if they hoped to win the people’s confidence. Though some candidates faked it, the most successful were those whose bond with the people was genuine. Comparatively few Americans had suffered the specific disabilities associated with polio, but all had suffered in one way or another. And in their suffering they now could identify with Franklin Roosevelt.

16.

NOT EVEN ROOSEVELT’S WORST RIVALS WOULD HAVE SAID THAT HIS contracting polio was anything but a misfortune. Yet some could have complained that if a Democrat with presidential ambitions had to come down with the disease, he couldn’t have chosen a better time than the early 1920s. The decade after the World War was a wilderness period for the Democrats. The Republicans remained the nation’s majority party, chiefly by virtue of their success in delivering on the promises of the economic revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Republican coalition combined nearly all the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and midwestern farmers to lock up the White House and Congress. Against this coalition the Democrats arrayed nothing nearly so unified but rather the tired dualism of city bosses and southern gentry, with western mavericks shouting from the sideline. Pulled three ways at once, the Democrats went nowhere.

Roosevelt reentered the political lists gingerly. Following the shellacking he and James Cox suffered in 1920, he had no choice but to return to New York state politics, if he intended a political future. His eight years in Washington had weakened his position with the state party, and to maintain his electability he needed to restore his base. If he still wanted to be president—which he did, though the polio complicated the timing and logistics—he had to be able to count on New York’s support. Aside from Wilson, whose capture of the White House owed chiefly to the Republicans’ split in 1912, the only president the Democrats had elected since the Civil War was a New Yorker, Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt might have a chance of repeating Cleveland’s accomplishment but only if he had the strong support of his home state.

With Louis Howe’s help he communicated with the Democratic leaders in New York. He wrote letters to party officials around the state, urging them to keep the faith in the present dark hour for Democrats. The letters let Roosevelt preserve his political visibility even as they obscured his physical visibility, for in his letters he consistently minimized the severity of his illness and maximized the extent of his recovery. The strategy succeeded well enough that Tammany Hall spoke of nominating him for governor in 1922, on a ticket that included Al Smith for senator. Roosevelt let the talk continue for several months before acknowledging that he wasn’t ready for a race just yet.

But he could help determine who did run. Smith had been elected governor in 1918, defying that year’s Republican trend, and he had nearly been reelected in 1920, despite the Republican landslide in the rest of the country. Yet Smith didn’t want to be governor again. He had taken a job with the United States Trucking Company and was, in the words of one of his Tammany Hall associates, “making big money for the first time in his life.” Smith was happy to consider a Senate nomination, since the part-time work of Congress would have allowed him to keep his private-sector job. But the governorship was full-time, as he knew from experience. For this reason he had been one of the strongest supporters of the Roosevelt-Smith ticket for governor and senator.

When Roosevelt begged off, the pressure on Smith to make another run for governor intensified. If Smith declined, the nomination might well go to William Randolph Hearst, which was the last thing Tammany wanted. Hearst’s ambitions were as large as Roosevelt’s, and his family fortune—accumulated by his late father, George Hearst, the most successful miner in American history—was many times greater. After helping to provoke the Spanish-American War in 1898, the populist press lord advanced far enough in politics to win election to the House of Representatives in 1902 and 1904. His bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1904 failed, and he subsequently wandered off to splinter parties. But he returned to the Democrats in time to criticize Al Smith’s governorship and threaten a takeover of the party in 1922. Most of Tammany despised Hearst and would quickly have squelched his ambitions had he been an ordinary politician. But his fortune and his newspapers made him a formidable antagonist. Fear of Hearst, as much as love of Roosevelt, inspired the Tammany groundswell for the latter; when Roosevelt withdrew from consideration, Tammany turned in desperation to Smith.

The Tammany chieftains looked to Roosevelt to persuade Smith of his duty to state and party. Roosevelt responded with an open letter to Smith. “In every county the chief topic of political conversation is, ‘Will Al Smith accept if he is nominated?’” Roosevelt declared. “Already unauthorized agents are saying that you will not accept, and many are being deceived and beginning to lose interest as a result.” This would be a shame, in fact a tragedy. Roosevelt reminded Smith—that is, the readers of this open letter—that he had compiled a distinguished record as governor and that he had run a million votes ahead of the national Democratic ticket in 1920. “Many candidates for office are strong by virtue of promises of what they will some day do. You are strong by virtue of what you have done.” Without citing specifics—of which he had none—Roosevelt asserted confidently that voters were tiring of the Republicans and were eager to return good Democrats to office. “You represent the hope of what might be called the ‘average citizen.’” Roosevelt acknowledged that family considerations inclined Smith to seek financial security. “I am in the same boat myself,” he said. “Yet this call to further service must come first. Some day your children will be even prouder of you for making this sacrifice than they are now.”

Roosevelt’s letter flushed Smith into the open, where he had no choice but to agree to accept an offered nomination. And it stymied Hearst, who lacked any comparable endorsement. “It appears to have rather punctured the Hearst boom,” Roosevelt remarked happily. Roosevelt wasn’t ready to declare victory, though. Hearst had money and could generate headlines at will. “Eternal vigilance is necessary in politics,” Roosevelt said, “Al will not be nominated until the votes are actually cast in the convention.”

Roosevelt labored to see that the votes were cast for Smith. He hosted a Hyde Park reception for Smith, who, after two years as governor, didn’t have to be introduced to Roosevelt’s Dutchess County neighbors but who nonetheless benefited from being seen with a local boy. Roosevelt passed up the state Democratic convention, on grounds of health, but sent Louis Howe and Eleanor—this being the first time the state party allowed women to serve as voting delegates. Smith easily won the nomination for governor, leaving Hearst to hope to land the party’s nod for senator. Yet Smith blocked that avenue by vowing to withdraw from the governor’s race if the convention nominated Hearst for senator. Smith tried to talk Roosevelt into accepting the Senate nomination, both to drive the nails into Hearst’s coffin and to turn out a large Democratic vote in the general election. Roosevelt declined, citing the same reasons of health as before.

But on the whole he felt pleased with the results of the convention. The fact that his name kept popping up for office revealed that the Democrats still admired him, disability or no. And they still listened to him, which was no less gratifying. “I had quite a tussle in New York to keep our friend Hearst off the ticket and to get Al Smith to run,” he wrote a friend, “but the thing went through in fine shape.”

ROOSEVELT COULDN’T CLAIM credit when Smith won the general election six weeks later. America’s transition from war to peace occurred less smoothly than the Republicans in 1920 had intimated it would under their wise guidance. As the demand for agricultural and industrial products fell off after the armistice, farmers and manufacturers found themselves overplanted, overinvested, and overstaffed. Meanwhile the removal of wartime controls allowed wages and prices to seek their own level for the first time in years. The result was a roller-coaster ride for the economy, which plunged in 1919, rose in 1920 (in time for the elections), and plunged again in 1921 and 1922. The latter drop made the Republicans vulnerable, especially in states like New York, where Prohibition added to voters’ dissatisfaction. The Eighteenth Amendment was as unpopular in New York City as in most other urban areas, and New Yorkers didn’t hesitate to vent their displeasure at those they considered responsible, namely the Republicans. The result was a thumping victory for the wet Democrat Smith and renewed hope among Democrats generally that as New York went in 1922, so the nation might go before long.

Roosevelt imagined, on his best days in the months that followed, that he would be the one leading the party to victory. Not long after the election he wrote to James Cox of the “very successful summer” he had spent at Hyde Park. “The combination of warm weather, fresh air, and swimming has done me a world of good…. The legs are really coming along finely, and when I am in swimming work perfectly. This shows that the muscles are all there, only require further strengthening. I am still on crutches but get about quite spryly.”

Yet when his physical progress failed to keep pace with his hopes, he recognized that his political comeback would have to wait a while longer, and he rededicated himself to the advancement of the Democratic party as a whole. The party needed his help, badly. During the 1920s the Democrats’ paralysis grew worse than ever. The current source of the trouble, or at least its most obvious manifestation, was the Ku Klux Klan. The twentieth-century Klan was an ecumenical update of its Reconstruction-era predecessor; it targeted not only African Americans but Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, communists, and anyone else who challenged its members’ narrow notions of conservative values. The modern Klan spread far beyond the Old South, planting active chapters in such previously unlikely locales as Indiana and Oregon. The Klan tipped political races in several states and was influential in getting Congress to pass the first comprehensive immigration control measure, in 1924. A Klan parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in 1925 featured thousands of hooded, white-sheeted members.

The rise of the Klan complicated the politics of the Democratic party, aggravating the divisions among the party’s eastern, southern, and western wings. The eastern Democrats, who embodied the machine politics of the big cities, were conservative economically, being generally supportive of banks and other big business; friendly to immigrants, on whom they had depended politically for decades; and wet, urging repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. The southern Democrats were the heirs of the post-Reconstruction “Redeemers” and were the current strongest column in the Klan. They looked on New York as the source of most evil in America, with Wall Street and the Lower East Side haunting their dreams about equally, the former on account of its control of the nation’s commerce, the latter for furnishing refuge to Catholic and Jewish immigrants. New York was also the home of the speakeasies, which the southern Democrats—dry to the last Baptist—considered dens of iniquity. The West was the wild card in the Democratic deck. The western Democrats numbered many fewer than the Easterners or the Southerners, but they potentially held the balance between those two groups. The Westerners were the party radicals on economic issues, having absorbed the message of Populism during the 1890s and never forgotten it. Western farmers felt the pain of the continuing postwar agricultural slump and demanded relief, relatively undistracted by such other issues as race and immigration. On Prohibition the Westerners were predominantly dry.

Each segment of the party had its champion in 1924. Al Smith was the darling of the Easterners, having lived down his Tammany past to become, in his second term as New York governor, a persuasive spokesman for clean, efficient government. Catholic and wet, Smith symbolized the cosmopolitan tolerance on which the eastern Democrats prided themselves. Oscar Underwood appealed to Southerners by virtue of his Alabama roots and residence. His name on the tariff reduction act of 1913 still reminded southern farmers of his devotion to their cause, as against that of Wall Street—and against many of the eastern Democrats. Yet Underwood hoped to reach the rest of the party, and presumably the rest of the country, by roundly denouncing the Klan. He went so far as to declare the Klan a mortal threat to democracy and the most important issue facing the party, and he demanded that other candidates join him in condemning the organization. William McAdoo, the former Treasury secretary, who had relocated from Washington and New York to California—for personal reasons, he said, but really to distance himself from Tammany Hall—was the favorite of the West.

Smith, as a Catholic target of Klan vituperation, had no difficulty accepting Underwood’s challenge and denouncing the Klan. But McAdoo demurred. Having grown up in Georgia during the era of the first Klan, McAdoo considered the second edition comparatively harmless. Moreover, with Underwood on record as opposing the Klan, parts of the South were suddenly in play. If McAdoo could finesse the Klan issue—neither endorsing the Klan, which could ruin his chances in the nation as a whole, nor repudiating it, which would cost him southern support—he might carry the 1924 convention. On a visit to Georgia he issued a statement regarding the Klan: “I stand four square with respect to this and I stand four square with respect to every other organization on the immutable question of liberty contained in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, namely freedom of religious worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of peaceful assembly.” A leading Klan official, apparently after communicating privately with McAdoo, applauded this statement as perfectly acceptable to the organization. The Klansman might have gone farther had he not feared that an open endorsement would be used against McAdoo. But the message to the Klan rank and file was clear: McAdoo is with us in spirit.

This was what worried Roosevelt, who would have supported fellow New Yorker Smith anyway but now considered McAdoo’s Klan connection a formula for electing Republicans for another six decades. Until the 1920s Roosevelt had never thought deeply or systematically about the future of the Democratic party or its place in American national politics. His first few years in government had been consumed with New York state politics, and during most of his time in the Wilson administration the Democrats had been the ruling party, a condition unconducive to serious reflection about the future. But after the defeat of 1920 Roosevelt turned his mind to long-term strategy. He recognized that Wilson’s success had been a fluke, the beneficiary of a Republican rift that probably wouldn’t be repeated in Roosevelt’s lifetime. The Republicans had been the normal majority party since the Civil War, and if the Democrats hoped to break the GOP’s hold on power, they would have to reconfigure and reposition themselves.

As a first step, they needed to decide what to keep and what to reject of their Wilsonian inheritance. Wilson’s had been an unusual administration, in that it had begun with an overwhelmingly domestic orientation and ended obsessed with foreign policy—indeed, obsessed with a single item of foreign policy: the League of Nations. Roosevelt understood that any obsession was unhealthy, but he remained committed to the internationalist principles of the League, and he believed that a judicious educational effort by the Democrats could win them support at the expense of isolationist Republicans. “I am not wholly convinced that the country is yet quite ready for a definite stand on our part in favor of immediate entry into the League of Nations,” he wrote James Cox in 1922. “That will come in time, but I am convinced we should stand firmly against the isolation policy of Harding’s administration.”

As a modest first step toward this goal, Roosevelt headed a committee to create an endowment honoring Wilson and the principles of the League. Ill health—first Wilson’s and then Roosevelt’s—complicated the fund-raising, but by the time Wilson died, in 1924, the Wilson Foundation had collected more than $700,000 and was beginning to sponsor activities relating Wilson’s beliefs to current affairs.

More directly, Roosevelt addressed the crux of American skepticism on international affairs: article 10 of the covenant of the League of Nations, which committed signatories to the defense of one another against external aggression. The skeptics contended that this article unconstitutionally stole war-declaring power from Congress and war-making power from the president. Wilson’s explanations in 1919 hadn’t seriously dented this conception, and subsequent efforts by lesser League advocates hadn’t either. Roosevelt knew better than to try; instead he advocated rewriting the offending article. In response to a contest organized by Edward Bok, the longtime editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, to generate proposals for means of fostering world peace, Roosevelt drafted a plan for an updated and improved version of the League of Nations. Roosevelt’s version would be called the “Society of Nations,” in recognition, he explained, “that public opinion in the United States is, and will be for some time to come, sufficiently hostile to the present formula of the League of Nations to preclude any use of the old name.” The Society’s membership would be similar to the League’s, except that it would include the United States. Its structure would differ in giving more power to a permanent executive committee, consisting of the five great powers (the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan) and six rotating members. Decisions would be by a two-thirds majority rather than by the unanimity required of the League. “Common sense cannot defend a procedure by which one or two recalcitrant nations could block the will of the great majority,” Roosevelt explained. Most significantly for Americans, article 10 of the League covenant would be diluted dramatically. In place of the guarantee that the League would “preserve as against external aggression” the independence and territory of member states, Roosevelt’s draft specified that members would “undertake to respect” one another’s sovereignty and borders. And in the event of violation, the Society would merely “make recommendations” as to appropriate responses.

In the end Roosevelt declined to enter his League revision plan in Bok’s contest. Eleanor had become a member of the committee evaluating the entries, and rather than ask her to recuse herself he simply shelved his plan. Perhaps he had second thoughts about going public with his proposal at a time when any mention of the League risked triggering an isolationist backlash. Yet he mentally filed away his thoughts, as he had been filing away political reflections for years, to await a more propitious time. And when that time arrived he would sponsor a successor to the League that looked very much like his Society of Nations.

Meanwhile he concentrated on issues where he thought progress was possible. Though the Harding administration eschewed involvement in European affairs, in matters pertaining to Asia and the Pacific it was less diffident. Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson’s adversary in 1916 and now Harding’s secretary of state, brought representatives of the leading naval powers to Washington, with an eye toward curtailing an escalating arms race and establishing a framework for security in the Pacific. The Washington Conference opened on Armistice Day 1921; it generated the ordinary effusions of goodwill and, over the next three months, an extraordinary series of treaties pledging the great powers to unprecedentedly self-denying behavior. The United States, Britain, and Japan consented to reduce their navies and to refrain from fortifying their Pacific possessions. They agreed to arbitrate disputes, to respect the status quo in the Pacific, and specifically to honor the territorial integrity of China.

Roosevelt attempted to build on Hughes’s accomplishment. In the summer of 1923 he published an article in Asia magazine asking, “Shall We Trust Japan?” He answered that Americans should do so and that the Washington Conference gave them reason to believe they could. The Washington system engaged Japan’s honor, which Japan’s leaders were loath to besmirch. More to the point, the naval limitations largely eliminated Japan’s ability to threaten China or shake the status quo. America itself was still more secure. “Even if Japan in 1914 had any false notion that she could threaten us either through Mexico or by direct invasion of the Pacific Coast,” Roosevelt said, “it is safe to say that her strategists have now tacitly abandoned such ideas.” He added, as one who knew something about positioning ships and other naval assets: “As long as ten years ago naval experts said that a fleet crossing a wide ocean from its home base must of necessity lose from a quarter to a third of its fighting force. If that judgment was true ten years ago, then the principle is even more true today; for the addition of two new dimensions, under water and in the air, to the fighting area has made the protection of the capital ship—super-dreadnought or battle cruiser, the fundamental fighting unit—a much harder task than it was then.”

ON THE ISSUE of greatest interest to voters—the health of the economy—the Republicans appeared unbeatable. Farmers continued to suffer from low prices, high debt, and unrealistic hopes of a return to the flush years of the war, but city dwellers—who, according to the 1920 census, for the first time outnumbered their rural compatriots—were doing very well. The hiccups of the postwar transition had given way to a period of robust growth. Consumers spent the piles of money they had saved during the war, when military production had crowded out consumer goods. Topping the lists of must-have items were new cars. “The paramount ambition of the average man a few years ago was to own a home and have a bank account,” a small-town banker observed. “The ambition of the same man today is to own a car.” Henry Ford’s Model T remained the most popular model; in 1920 the Tin Lizzies came off the assembly line at Ford Motor’s monster River Rouge plant in Detroit at the rate of one per minute. Half the cars in the world were Fords. A growing part of the other half consisted of the many models gathered under the General Motors umbrella and marketed with uncanny adeptness by GM chief Alfred P. Sloan.

The auto boom echoed in other industries. The steel industry rolled square miles of sheet metal for fenders; the rubber industry tapped whole rain forests to make tires; the glass industry floated and cooled acres of windscreens and side panes. Big Oil was an even bigger winner: the millions of cars required billions of gallons of gasoline. (As a bonus to the petro-men, railroads and ships converted from coal to diesel during this same era.) The road-building industry benefited as the various levels of government discovered that averting mayhem on the highways required constructing wider, smoother, straighter roads than horses and buggies had needed.

The auto boom reshaped American housing. The lifting of the wartime caps on construction would have triggered a modest surge in home building, but the advent of the auto age allowed builders to venture much farther from the centers of cities. New neighborhoods—suburbs—sprang up where truck gardens and orchards had grown. Cheap land translated into lower costs to builders and lower prices to purchasers, who secured mortgages and signed contracts while the carpenters and plumbers were still pounding and fitting away.

The new houses demanded new furniture and new appliances. Electricity for the first time entered the average home, lighting rooms, washing clothes, refrigerating food. Telephones kept families in touch with friends and one another; radios gradually connected households to the wider world of public affairs, music, and sports.

Americans looked out upon the material world that surrounded them and, with the exception of those farmers, accounted it good. No one knew how long the bounty would last; no one ever knew such things. But while it did last, Americans were likely to stick with the party that presided over the prosperity.

FOR THIS REASON the Democratic convention of 1924 was something of a charade, having as much to do with auditioning future candidates as with selecting a leader to send against the Republicans. When the delegates gathered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the contest came down to Al Smith and William McAdoo. Oscar Underwood had faded after his rejection of the Klan, and the handful of minor candidates weren’t generating appreciable support. McAdoo led, but Smith was closing, partly on account of the Klan controversy but also because of a scandal involving Republicans. In 1922 the Wall Street Journal had broken a story relating that Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, had allowed a private petroleum company to lease the navy’s oil reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, without the customary competitive bidding. As the tale unfolded during the next two years, it revealed a web of corruption that reached from Washington to California. Harding appeared honestly surprised and was undeniably distraught. “I have no trouble with my enemies,” he told journalist William Allen White. “I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my God-damn friends, White, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!” Albert Fall was tried and convicted of taking bribes. Several others joined him in the dock and a few behind bars; a couple escaped justice, or at least prison, by killing themselves. Teapot Dome entered the vocabulary of American political corruption alongside the Tweed Ring and Crédit Mobilier.

All this delighted the Democrats, with William McAdoo being the signal exception. One of Fall’s tempters was Edward Doheny, a Californian who had hired McAdoo as legal counsel, on an annual retainer of $25,000. No one alleged malfeasance in McAdoo, but clearly it was his access to official Washington—rather than his competence as a lawyer, for example—that made him attractive to Doheny. Although McAdoo’s Teapot Dome connection didn’t prevent his accumulating enough support to roll into the 1924 convention with a lead in committed delegates, it tainted him in the eyes of the uncommitted, who fretted that a McAdoo nomination would deprive the Democrats of the biggest stick they hoped to swing against the Republicans that autumn.

The Smith forces rallied behind their leader and his first lieutenant, Franklin Roosevelt. The death of Charles Murphy had deprived Smith of an obvious campaign manager, and the candidate’s eye naturally fell on Roosevelt, who could bring to the Smith campaign a polish and national presence it conspicuously lacked. Roosevelt could write and call influential people Smith didn’t know; Roosevelt, the old-stock Protestant, could reassure delegates that a Smith nomination wouldn’t hand the party to immigrant Catholics.

For Roosevelt, heading the Smith campaign suited his comeback plans perfectly. He could tell that this wasn’t the year to be the Democratic nominee. The Teapot Dome scandals had damaged the Republicans as a group but were sparing the top of the ticket, chiefly because Harding’s sudden death in August 1923 had eliminated the man in charge at the time of the influence peddling. Calvin Coolidge, the current occupant of the White House, could believably claim that he had had nothing to do with the whole affair. Roosevelt thought the Democrats should try to keep the scandal before the voters, but he doubted the effort would do much good.

So he focused on the convention. He contrived to break custom and deliver the speech putting Smith’s name before the convention. Candidates had typically enlisted the party’s most celebrated orators for this function, but times were changing, and with them standards of political speech. Although no one knew it then, the 1924 convention marked William Jennings Bryan’s final appearance before the full party; yet even that summer it was clear that the days when successful rhetoric required Bryanic lung power to fill a hall were passing. Electric amplification allowed speakers to lower their voices, to draw listeners into a realm of intimacy denied their pre-Edison forebears. Radio would shortly reveal the full effect of this change, and no one would employ radio more effectively than Franklin Roosevelt. But aspects of the change were already in evidence when Roosevelt addressed the Democratic convention of 1924.

He carefully plotted his path to the dais. Several times he rehearsed his steps, his left arm holding the right arm of his son James, his right arm and shoulder supported by a crutch, his legs cocooned in their steel braces. He taught James the art of the clenched-teeth smile, the seemingly effortless nod of the head accomplished amid great muscular and psychological strain. On the night of his address, when he and James reached the platform, he took his second crutch from his son and turned to a delegate nearby. Motioning with his head toward the speaker’s stand, he said, “Go up and shake it, will you?” The delegate hesitated, puzzled. “Shake it!” Roosevelt insisted. “I must know if the speaker’s stand will bear my weight.”

As the delegate tested the stand’s sturdiness, Roosevelt began his solitary final steps forward. Every eye in Madison Square Garden followed his progress; every breath hesitated, awaiting his fall. When he reached the stand the delegates and the visitors in the galleries erupted in sustained applause. Roosevelt smiled and nodded the more, but where another speaker, or Roosevelt himself a few years earlier, would have waved to the thousands clapping and shouting his name, he now didn’t dare release his grip on the speaker’s stand, either to acknowledge the applause or to wipe the sweat that poured from his face.

Gradually the hall fell quiet. “To meet again so many friends whom I have not seen since the last Democratic national gathering gives me a thrill of pleasure,” Roosevelt began. The audience cheered again. He continued to smile, and to grip the stand. The cheering gradually died.

He reintroduced the delegates to Al Smith with a self-deprecating reminder of the Democrats’ woes in 1920. “When our national ticket in the state of New York went down to defeat under a plurality of 1,100,000, he lost this state by only 74,000,” Roosevelt said. “He got one million more votes than I did—and I take my hat off to him!” McAdoo’s supporters were claiming for their candidate the title progressive reformer; Roosevelt countered the claim by citing Smith’s record on behalf of the less fortunate:

He obtained laws prohibiting night work for women and the employment of small children. He secured state pensions for widowed mothers and state aid for the promotion of the health of rural communities. That is progressive!

He has sponsored a practical workmen’s compensation law, and has established labor boards to mediate disputes between employer and employee; he was responsible for the best factory laws ever passed in any state. That is progressive!

Under his leadership, cooperative marketing, the extension of state highways built for miles, not votes; diversification of crops and the reforestation of denuded lands have marched hand in hand. That is progressive!

Roosevelt summoned the spirit of the Democrats’ progressive former president, only recently deceased, on behalf of Smith’s vision. “It was the illustrious Woodrow Wilson, my revered chief and yours, who said, ‘The great voice of America does not come from the university. It comes in a murmur from the hills and the woods, from the farms, the factories, and the mills—rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us from the homes of the common people.’” The common people were the core constituency of the Democrats, and among the common people the dreams of America never flagged. “Four years ago, lying opponents said that the country was tired of ideals—they waged a campaign based on an appeal to prejudice, based on the dragging out of bogies and hobgoblins, the subtle encouragement of false fears.” But America had not lost her faith, Roosevelt insisted. “Idealism is of her very heart’s blood. Tricked once we have been. Millions of voters are waiting today for the opportunity next November to wreak their vengeance on those deceivers.”

Al Smith was the man who would lead them. “He has a power to strike at error and wrongdoing that makes his adversaries quail before him. He has a personality that carries to every hearer not only the sincerity but the righteousness of what he says. He is the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.”

AS ROOSEVELT FINISHED, the crowd erupted once again. Some were cheering for Smith; all were rooting for Roosevelt. “A noble utterance,” conservative journalist Mark Sullivan called the speech. “It will rank as the high point of the present convention and it belongs with the small list of really great convention speeches.” The New York Herald Tribune described Roosevelt as “the one man whose name would have stampeded the convention were he put in nomination.” The Herald Tribune added, “He is the only man to whom the contending factions could turn and at the same time save their faces and keep square with the folks at home…. From the time Roosevelt made his speech in nomination of Smith, which was the one great speech of the convention, he has been easily the foremost figure on floor or platform.” The New York Evening World asserted, “No matter whether Governor Smith wins or loses, Franklin D. Roosevelt stands out as the real hero of the Democratic Convention of 1924. Adversity has lifted him above the bickering, the religious bigotry, conflicting personal ambitions and petty sectional prejudices. It has made him the one leader commanding the respect and admiration of delegations from all sections of the land…. Roosevelt might be a pathetic, tragic figure but for the fine courage that flashes in his smile. It holds observers enchained.”

Roosevelt’s reputation for lighthearted courage—many delegates decided he was the Happy Warrior, the one the more literate recalled Wordsworth characterizing in the poem that began “Who is the happy warrior? Who is he / That every man in arms should wish to be?”—only increased when the convention got down to the bruising business of choosing a nominee. As most expected, McAdoo led early but lacked the votes to put Smith away. A dozen ballots produced little movement; a dozen more, then another dozen, and another and another left the delegates gasping for air but no closer to a decision. Roosevelt returned to the rostrum after sixty-six ballots to move that Governor Smith be allowed to address the convention in person. This was a breach of tradition so egregious as to require the assent of two-thirds of the delegates; the Smith delegates naturally supported the motion, as did some quaverers on the McAdoo side. But the defections weren’t numerous enough to open the convention-hall door to the governor, and the balloting continued with the candidates kept off the premises.

The contest became a battle of attrition, with each side battering and bleeding the other. Smith pulled ahead of McAdoo but couldn’t achieve the necessary two-thirds majority. Victory for either side increasingly appeared impossible.

Roosevelt huddled with Smith and, following the ninety-third ballot, again addressed the convention. “I am here to make a brief and very simple statement on behalf of Governor Smith,” he told the delegates. “After nearly one hundred ballots it is quite apparent to him and to me that the forces behind him, the leader in the race, and behind Mr. McAdoo, who is second, cannot be amalgamated. For the good of the party Governor Smith authorizes me to say that immediately after Mr. McAdoo withdraws, Governor Smith will withdraw his name.”

McAdoo declined the offer, but after six more ballots he released his delegates to vote their judgment of the party’s good. A few did so at once, then more and more. The critical break occurred when the women of the California delegation, the most determined of the McAdoo diehards, lowered the flags they had been waving incessantly for their favorite.

The beneficiary of McAdoo’s tacit withdrawal, and of Smith’s more formal version, was John W. Davis of West Virginia. Davis was known to oppose the Ku Klux Klan and excessively powerful corporate trusts, but otherwise he had left few marks on the public record that anyone could object to. The exhausted delegates fell in line behind his candidacy, and on the 103rd ballot he received the nomination.

YET THE REAL beneficiary of that exhausting week was Roosevelt. “The most popular man in the convention was Franklin D. Roosevelt,” the New York Times asserted. “Whenever word passed around the floor that Mr. Roosevelt was about to take his seat in the New York delegation, a hush fell over the Garden. On his appearance each time there was a spontaneous burst of applause.”

The political insiders agreed. Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s counterpart to the late Charles Murphy, told Ike Dunlap, a Pendergast man who knew Roosevelt, “I met your friend Franklin Roosevelt in New York and had just a few words with him. I want to say this, Dunlap—you know I am seldom carried away or become overly enthusiastic in meeting men of all stations of life, but I want to tell you that had Mr. Roosevelt…been physically able to have withstood the campaign, he would have been named by acclamation the first few days of the convention. He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met, and I predict he will be the candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1928.”

17.

ROOSEVELT HEARD THE PRAISE AND PONDERED HOW TO MAKE THE most of it. From the state of the economy and the country he assumed that Americans weren’t done with the Republicans yet; a comeback by the Democrats almost certainly would require a stumble by the GOP. But the Democrats would reward their loyalists when that stumble occurred, and Roosevelt positioned himself to be seen as the most loyal son of America’s oldest party. He polled Democratic leaders around the country regarding the most promising steps for the party, and he summarized the replies in a published letter to Thomas J. Walsh, the Montana senator who had been permanent chairman of the Democratic national convention in 1920. A consensus had emerged, Roosevelt said, that what the Democrats needed to do was reiterate the essential difference between themselves and the Republicans. “The Democracy must make it clear that it seeks primarily the good of the average citizen through the free rule of the whole electorate, as opposed to the Republican Party, which seeks a mere moneyed prosperity of the nation through the control of government by a self-appointed aristocracy of wealth and of social and economic power.” To this end the party needed to put national issues above local concerns. The Democrats had divided themselves by region, with the Easterners advocating one thing, the Southerners another, and the Westerners something else. Roosevelt refrained from specifying the divisive issues, lest he reinforce the division by doing so, but Prohibition and the Klan came quickly to attentive minds. The consequence was that voters had no idea what the party, as a national party, believed or advocated. The remedy, Roosevelt said, was to emphasize what the various elements of the party had in common. To facilitate this he recommended a national meeting of state Democratic leaders, to be held in the spring of 1925 and charged with defining what made Democrats Democrats.

Senator Walsh and other party officials responded positively to Roosevelt’s recommendation. But resistance developed precisely where Roosevelt feared it would: among the populists long associated with William Jennings Bryan. The three-time Democratic nominee and former secretary of state had never stopped distrusting the party’s eastern business element, and with the emergence of Prohibition as a polarizing issue, he learned to distrust the party’s eastern ethnic—that is, wet—element too. Bryan countered Roosevelt’s unity plan with suggestions that the Democrats’ southern and western wings join forces against the East.

Bryan’s opposition conjured fears—and hopes, among Republicans—of a confrontation between Roosevelt and Bryan at the annual Jefferson Day dinner in Washington in April 1925. The event had produced some of the most memorable scenes in American history, including Andrew Jackson’s defiant rejection of the secessionism of his own vice president, John C. Calhoun, amid the nullification crisis of Jackson’s first term. “Our Federal Union,” Jackson had thundered, “it must be preserved!” The rift among the Democrats wasn’t quite so deep almost a century later, but Washington quivered with excitement at the thought of a showdown between the crippled champion of liberal unity and the aging lion of agrarian dissent.

It didn’t come to that. A showdown was the last thing Roosevelt wanted, and he wrote the organizers of the Jefferson dinner explaining that his physical recovery required a longer stay at Warm Springs that season than he had anticipated. He couched his regrets in typically upbeat fashion, asserting that after another several weeks of therapy he might be able to “throw away” his crutches. Bryan had no such compelling excuse, but he too begged off, simply saying that his calendar was full.

Yet Roosevelt met Bryan nonetheless. He traveled from Warm Springs to Miami, where Bryan was still selling land, to pitch party unity in person. “He was, at first, fearful that a conference, especially a large one, would result in more trouble than good,” Roosevelt remarked a short while later. But Roosevelt persisted, and Bryan gradually softened. “After we had talked for over an hour he agreed that if the conference were kept small, as I outlined, it would accomplish very great things.” Bryan’s stated concern was that Easterners and city dwellers would dominate the party, as they had during the evil days of Grover Cleveland. “But, as I pointed out to him, there are millions of really progressive Democratic voters in these localities who cannot be read out of the Party by making the Democracy a mere combination of the South and the West, and he agreed that the Party policies and Party effort must be made national instead of sectional.”

BRYAN’S AGREEMENT came too late. Other elements of the party had been happy to let Bryan take the blame for frustrating Democratic unity, but as Bryan’s resistance began to melt under the warmth of the Roosevelt sun, they raised objections of their own. Some simply didn’t believe that Bryan’s conversion to party unity was sincere, suspecting the old man—although he was a mere sixty-five, he seemed to have been around forever—of hoping to lead one last revolt. Others questioned Roosevelt’s motives. Was the proposed conference an honest effort to mend the party or a vehicle Roosevelt hoped would carry him to the 1928 nomination?

The objections had the desired effect of delaying Roosevelt’s conference, pushing it back into summer of 1925, when the whole idea of a conference exploded amid events neither Roosevelt nor Bryan anticipated. The Tennessee legislature, at the behest of conservative Christians, had recently approved a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union enlisted a young teacher named John Scopes to challenge the law, and the ensuing trial, in the small town of Dayton, attracted the attention of much of the country. Bryan, one of America’s best-known Christian fundamentalists, took the witness stand as an authority on the Bible. Scopes’s lawyer, celebrated atheist and defense attorney Clarence Darrow, grilled Bryan unmercifully and tied him in logical knots but failed to shake his conviction that the author of Genesis, not Charles Darwin, had got the story of creation right. The Bryan-Darrow confrontation, which was broadcast by radio to a national audience, deepened the rift between traditionalists and progressives in American life, with the former concluding that Bryan had held his ground while the latter thought he was made to look a fool. Scopes was convicted—the verdict was later overturned on a technicality—but the more dramatic, and poignant, conclusion occurred when Bryan suddenly died less than a week later. H. L. Mencken, the acid-penned journalist and social commentator, remarked: “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.”

Roosevelt’s hopes for a party conference died with Bryan, but his desire to discover common ground on which a national ticket might stand persisted. Al Smith remained the favorite of Democrats’ city wing, which grew in numbers and influence with each passing year. Westerners and some Southerners still liked William McAdoo, but after Smith won reelection as New York governor in 1926, by the largest margin in the history of the Empire State, he appeared the odds-on favorite to capture the Democratic nomination for president in 1928.

The only person who potentially blocked his way was Franklin Roosevelt. The longer Smith’s lead over McAdoo stretched, the more desperately party strategists asked themselves whether American voters would embrace a wet Catholic and the more attractive Roosevelt looked as an alternative. Roosevelt had most of what made Smith attractive: a strong eastern presence and credibility with the party’s urban wing. And he traveled without Smith’s heavy baggage, being Protestant and tactfully silent on Prohibition. His physical disability netted out neutrally: what he lost in lack of mobility on the campaign trail he recouped in voter sympathy. The big question was whether he could lead a ticket. Nearly everyone thought he had done well as number two in 1920, but number two wasn’t number one.

There was another question: whether Roosevelt wanted the nomination. As often as his friends and supporters urged him to run, he deflected their appeals in favor of Smith. He would have registered greater interest in the 1928 nomination had he thought there was anything in it, but the Republican prosperity continued, causing most political analysts to doubt that voters would be inclined to dump the GOP for the Democracy. Farmers were hurting, but farmers had been hurting for decades without their injury redounding to the Democrats’ benefit. The nation’s center of gravity now rested in the cities; till something shook the confidence of city dwellers, the Republicans would remain America’s party.

Roosevelt said as much in a confidential letter to Josephus Daniels in the summer of 1927. “Strictly between ourselves,” Roosevelt wrote, “I am very doubtful whether any Democrat can win in 1928. It will depend somewhat on whether the present undoubted general prosperity of the country continues. You and I may recognize the serious hardships which the farmers in the South and West are laboring under, but the farmers in the South will vote the Democratic ticket anyway, and I do not believe that the farmers of the West will vote the Democratic ticket in sufficient numbers even if they are starving.”

So he put his shoulder to the Smith wheel. If Smith by a miracle won, the country would benefit, as Smith, in Roosevelt’s view, was far preferable to any Republican. And Roosevelt would get credit for party loyalty, which could only help a Roosevelt run eight years later. (Neither Roosevelt nor Smith even considered a ticket with both men on it, as the Twelfth Amendment effectively bars a single-state ticket.) If Smith lost, Roosevelt would still get the loyalty credit, which he could redeem in four years.

Smith needed help in the area of foreign policy especially. The only foreign policy Tammany pursued was friendly relations with the countries that supplied the immigrants that kept the bosses in power. Such relations were harder to ensure in the age of immigration restriction than they had been during the open-door era prior to 1924, but Tammany men still marched in St. Patrick’s Day parades, waved the Italian flag on Columbus Day, and honored as many mother countries as there were ethnic neighborhoods in New York. Smith learned little more about foreign policy in Albany. In a later period governors would venture overseas to drum up foreign business and otherwise represent their states to the world, but in the 1920s such modest drumming as was done remained the province of the federal government.

Roosevelt’s extensive personal experience of the world and his long attention to foreign affairs contrasted sharply with Smith’s inexperience and inattention, and consequently he was the natural choice both to tutor Smith and to define a Democratic foreign policy for the country. In the summer of 1928 he answered an invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York association of internationalists, to present what amounted to the Democrats’ foreign policy platform.

He made his case cautiously. The popular isolationism that had seized American policy since Wilson’s battle with the Senate Republicans over the Treaty of Versailles continued unabated. If anything, the booming economy convinced most Americans that they didn’t need the rest of the world, and various unsettling developments abroad made them think they didn’t want the rest of the world. Mussolini had seized control of Italy, and though a certain fascination with Fascist efficiency emerged among America’s business classes, many more Americans wished to have nothing to do with the Duce. The Soviet Union, as Russia’s empire was now called, had dropped off the world map, partly because Stalin wanted things that way while he consolidated his grip on the Kremlin and partly because the capitalist democracies, including the United States, were doing all they could to quarantine the Bolshevik infection. China was a mess, having descended into civil war after the long-expected collapse of the Manchu dynasty. Japan was making more ominous noises than ever about establishing an empire in East Asia.

Germany was a looming question mark. The hyperinflation of the immediate postwar period had been brought under control, but the former autocracy’s attempt at democracy was failing to inspire confidence in anyone, including Germany’s tentative democrats. The gang of thugs and unemployed war veterans who had gathered under the banner of National Socialism had already tried once, in 1923, to topple the German government, and though the leaders had been tossed into jail, they were now back on the streets and in the beer halls, nursing their grievances against democracy, against foreigners, against communists, against Jews, and against the Versailles system. In spirit they weren’t much different from the Ku Klux Klan in America, and their revolt against modernity reflected fears not unlike those that inspired Prohibition and the anti-evolution movement. But the Nazis, and especially their leader, Adolf Hitler, were far more ruthless than anyone in the United States—and far more ruthless than anyone outside their movement knew.

Republican officials in Washington kept America’s distance from the world. They publicly decried the League of Nations as the antithesis of everything George Washington and the other founders had fought for. On certain low-visibility issues like public health and education, they cooperated quietly with the Geneva-based body, but on anything approaching high politics or diplomacy they continued to shun it. They denied the jurisdiction of the World Court over Americans or American actions, preferring that their country and their countrymen remain, in a technical and sometimes practical sense, outlaws to the rest of the world. They raised America’s tariff wall, effectively closing American markets to many foreign goods. And when they finally agreed to reschedule war loans due the United States from foreign debtors, they did so with a conspicuous lack of grace. Calvin Coolidge at first rejected calls for relief of the Europeans’ financial distress with a typically terse retort: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” The Republican president relented only far enough to put Germany in America’s debt, along with Britain and France. The Germans needed money to pay what the Versailles treaty said they owed the British and the French in reparations; the British and French needed the reparations to repay their loans from the United States. Coolidge approved a plan whereby Germany would borrow American money to pay the British and French, who would close the circle by using Germany’s payments to service their American loans. The beauty of the plan, from the standpoint of American bankers, was that they would receive interest all the way around.

Beauty of this sort was mostly in the eyes of the participating bankers. To please the much larger group not in the lending trade, the Coolidge administration endorsed the Pact of Paris of 1928, also called the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, after American secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. On its face, the Paris treaty would revolutionize diplomacy, by the simple expedient of forbidding war. The signatories, eventually including almost every government in the world, solemnly promised not to resort to war to resolve international disputes. The treaty was gloriously innocuous, containing no provisions for enforcement. Its toothless quality was reflected in the 85 to 1 vote in its favor in the U.S. Senate.

This was the record Roosevelt assailed in July 1928. He had help in drafting his Democratic manifesto from Sumner Welles, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker with roots even deeper in America’s upper crust than Roosevelt’s, with similar experiences of school and college at Groton and Harvard, and with an equally international outlook on American policy. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, which had been founded six years earlier by the Council on Foreign Relations to keep the Wilsonian dream alive, helped whip the argument into final shape.

Roosevelt rejected the go-it-alone attitude of the Republicans, and he denied that it represented America’s historic traditions. He walked his readers through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along a path of constructive internationalism. The Monroe Doctrine was a formula for hemispheric peace, he said. Disputes with Britain over Canada’s borders and over Civil War damages were settled by arbitration. The Spanish-American War, for all the provocation of the Maine’s destruction, was “not a war of revenge, but the offer of a helping hand” to the suffering Cuban people. Annexation of the Philippines, with an eye toward preparing the Filipinos for self-government, was a “precursor of the ‘Mandate’ theory of the League of Nations.” The United States had helped organize the Hague tribunal, the forerunner of the World Court. Theodore Roosevelt had mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

The World War exemplified America’s attachment to internationalist ideals. Woodrow Wilson led the country into the war not for selfish gain but to uphold the principle of neutral rights. During the war he guided the belligerents toward a just and equitable peace. “Slowly, through 1917 and 1918,” Roosevelt said, “the American President brought home to the hearts of mankind the great hope that through an association of nations the world could in the days to come avoid armed conflict and substitute reason and collective action for the age-old appeal to the sword.” At the Paris conference after the war, Wilson resisted attempts by Britain and France to base the peace settlement on the same narrow nationalist designs that had produced the war in the first place.

But then things had gone wrong. The Republican Senate rejected the League of Nations and the internationalist vision it embodied. The Harding administration, Roosevelt asserted, had made a fetish of “caution and small-mindedness” in foreign affairs. The Washington Conference’s limits on naval construction should have been the start toward broader arms control, but the Republicans refused to take the next steps, missing an opportunity that might not recur in a lifetime. Their boycott of the World Court flew in the face of common sense and national interest. No less an authority—and card-carrying Republican—than Elihu Root had endorsed the World Court as “the latest institution wrought out by the civilized world’s general public opinion against war.” But the Coolidge administration, frightened to death that the court might sometime rule in some way against some American, refused to have anything to do with it. The Republicans’ handling of debt reorganization was clumsy and off-putting. The Republicans tried to explain away the hostility their policies provoked by asserting that nobody loved a creditor. “True,” Roosevelt rejoined, “but every creditor is not a hated creditor. In time of general poverty and retrenchment our Government has seemed greedy…. While exacting payment we have by our discriminatory and exorbitant tariff policy made it doubly hard for them to pay.”

The fundamental problem was that the Republicans didn’t take foreign policy seriously. Republican leaders had failed the American people in a matter of the most critical importance. The situation was grave—but not yet irreversible. “If the leadership is right,” Roosevelt said, “or, more truly, if the spirit behind it is great, the United States can regain the world’s trust and friendship and become again of service. We can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; we can cooperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind…. It is the spirit, sir, which matters.”

AS THE 1928 Democratic convention approached, the groundswell for Smith rose higher and higher. The party went south for the first time since the Civil War, to Houston, where the delegates gathered in Sam Houston Hall. Smith’s longtime partner from their Tammany days, Robert Wagner, headed the platform committee; Roosevelt served as Smith’s floor manager. To the casual observer Roosevelt looked much recovered from his appearance before the national party in 1924. He dispensed with the crutches and relied on his leg braces, a cane, and son Elliott’s arm.

As on that earlier occasion, he gave the speech placing Smith’s name before the convention. He lauded Smith’s leadership, as revealed by the progressive reforms New York had enacted during Smith’s tenure as governor. He noted the overwhelming margin by which Smith had been reelected, and he recounted the confidence Smith continued to inspire among the ordinary people of New York. He spoke of Al Smith the man, asking what was so special about him and supplying the answer:

It is that quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals; that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to all those in sorrow or in trouble; that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow men. Instinctively he senses the popular need because he himself has lived through the hardship, the labor, and the sacrifice which must be endured by every man of heroic mold who struggles up to eminence from obscurity and low estate. Between him and the people is that subtle bond which makes him their champion and makes them enthusiastically trust him with their loyalty and their love.

Roosevelt’s speech was broadcast by radio around the country. The overwhelming majority of those who heard him that evening had never met Smith and never would. They couldn’t tell whether Roosevelt described him accurately or not. But they all felt they learned something about Roosevelt—about what he valued in a man, about the kind of person he was.

THE GENERAL CAMPAIGN of 1928 started mean and grew meaner. After the Democrats chose Smith, the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, an Iowa orphan who became a millionaire mining gold and baser minerals, and then an international hero organizing refugee relief during the World War. President Harding had drafted him to be commerce secretary in the early 1920s, and after the administration covered itself in scandal, Hoover was one of the few to emerge untainted. He strongly seconded Coolidge’s view that the business of America was business, and when Coolidge announced, with customary succinctness, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928,” Republicans looked to the administration’s businessman-in-chief to succeed him. Hoover garnered the GOP nomination without difficulty, pledging to extend the prosperity of the current decade into the next.

Hoover was as reassuring to American traditionalists as Al Smith was disconcerting. His Quaker background might have appeared exotic in another year, but compared with Smith’s Catholicism it landed Hoover squarely in the Protestant mainstream—especially after Hoover abjured the most distinctive of the Friends’ tenets, pacifism. His endorsement of Prohibition was sincere and strong and contrasted sharply with Smith’s opposition. Hoover’s midwestern roots gave him a grip on the heartland Smith couldn’t come close to matching. Hoover stood for the country against the city, and especially against the immigrants and corrupt political machines that characterized the city in the mind of middle America.

Hoover likely would have won even had the Republicans campaigned solely on the prosperity their party had delivered, or at least presided over. But public-opinion polling in the 1920s was immature and inaccurate, and Hoover’s advisers had little way of knowing how their candidate stood. The Republicans took no chances, employing every device of speech, print, broadcast, rumor, and innuendo to damage Smith in voters’ eyes. They traced his Tammany origins to Boss Tweed of Gilded Age infamy, and they refused to allow that the machine might have mellowed in sixty years. “Tammany is Tammany,” declared William Allen White, the Kansas editor who grew famous lambasting the Populists in the 1890s. “And Smith is its prophet.” Some Republicans whispered, others shouted, that Smith’s support for the repeal of Prohibition reflected a lushness in his personal behavior. The Prohibitionist temperament typically conflated any use of alcohol, or any desire for any use of alcohol, with full-blown alcoholism; when some Republicans reported, credibly, that Smith had sipped from time to time, other Republicans magnified the reports into falling-down drunkenness.

The most virulent assaults centered on Smith’s religion. In an era when racism was institutionalized across the South and indulged informally in much of the North, when anti-Semitism went unremarked in clubs, colleges, and corporate boardrooms, and when the Ku Klux Klan paraded boldly down the main street of the nation’s capital, anti-Catholicism barely bothered to hide its face. “Shall we have a man in the White House who acknowledges allegiance to the Autocrat on the Tiber, who hates democracy, public schools, Protestant parsonages, individual right, and everything that is essential to independence?” demanded Dr. Charles Luther Fry, a prominent Lutheran divine, addressing a large group of his co-denominationalists in New York. The anonymous attacks on Smith’s religion were still more scurrilous. “To Murder Protestants! And Destroy American Government! Is the Oath Binding Roman Catholics,” screamed one handbill. Anti-Catholic lecturers toured the country, some claiming spuriously to have been priests or nuns before seeing the Protestant light and describing in lascivious detail what carnal sinning occurred behind closed doors in the rectories and convents of America, starting with satanic orgies and culminating in the murder of the ill-gotten offspring.

Hoover did little to restrain the Republican low-roaders. “I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit,” he said. Doubtless he was sincere. But intolerance was the organizing principle of his party that year. The critical gains occurred not among Republicans, who would have voted for Hoover anyway, but among rural Democrats. “The Republican headquarters was the parlor affair,” an Oklahoma Democrat explained of the GOP operations in his state. “The real place of activity was across the street in the so-called Hoover-Democrat Headquarters, a combination of Ku Klux and ultra-protestants with four times the clerical force and activity of the Republican headquarters, and every item of expense paid by the Republican headquarters, numerous paid speakers, big and little, constantly speaking all over the state with the most horrid stories of what the Pope would do to the people of this country.”

ROOSEVELT HADN’T intended to enter the fight. He left the Houston convention convinced he had done for the Democratic party about all he could or ought to that season. He wasn’t one to get carried away by the inspirational rhetoric of a convention, even his own, and in any case Louis Howe regularly reminded him that 1928 was not the Democrats’ year. The still-rising economy made the Republicans irresistible. Roosevelt should give a few speeches on Smith’s behalf, Howe said, but otherwise retreat to Warm Springs, continue his exercises, and prepare for 1932. The boom couldn’t last forever.

Roosevelt listened and nodded agreement. And he did retreat to Warm Springs. But he neglected to sever all communications with the North, and when the New York Democrats gathered in state convention at Rochester at the end of September he heard their appeals for him to come to the party’s rescue in the governor’s race. He was the only one with the political stature to follow Smith in Albany, they asserted. Besides, the presidential race was going badly in New York, especially upstate where the Klan had grown alarmingly strong. Smith wouldn’t stand a chance if he couldn’t carry his home state and its nation-leading forty-five electoral votes. Roosevelt was the only person who could bring New York voters to their favorite-son senses.

Roosevelt refused to take telephone calls from the Rochester convention or the top officials of the Democratic party. Smith and John Raskob, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, pleaded with Eleanor, a delegate to the state convention, to intercede with her husband. “They told me how much they wanted him to run, and asked me if I thought it would really injure his health,” she remembered. “I said I did not know; that I had been told the doctors felt that if he continued with his exercises and swimming at Warm Springs he might improve.” Eleanor’s equivocation was all the encouragement Smith and Raskob needed. They assured her they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize Roosevelt’s recovery. It would be an easy race, and a relaxed governorship. They then inquired whether there might be other reasons behind Roosevelt’s reluctance. She mentioned the $200,000 he had invested in Warm Springs, and by her words or the worried tone in her voice she made Raskob—the party’s money man—understand that this wasn’t something her husband could treat lightly. Raskob asked whether it would have any effect on Roosevelt’s decision in the governor’s race if he was relieved of his financial worries. “I told him I was sure it would not,” Eleanor wrote. She was less than convincing, as events at once proved.

Smith and Raskob worked Eleanor by turns. She said she never interfered in her husband’s politics, and she certainly wouldn’t attempt to persuade him to do something he didn’t want to do. They said they wouldn’t dream of asking her anything of the sort. But would she agree to let them make their own case to him? She allowed she might. Would she get him on the telephone? She said she would try.

Perhaps Roosevelt hadn’t decided about the governor’s race; perhaps he simply liked being wooed. But as time ran out for the Rochester convention, he made himself deliberately scarce. He motored ten miles to Manchester, Georgia, to give an address. The third-floor auditorium was packed when he got word that Eleanor had been calling the phone at the corner drug store down the street; he kept talking a half hour longer than expected—ironically, lauding Smith to the local Democrats. When he finally finished, he visited the drug store. Eleanor was about to leave Rochester on the late train to New York City, but she managed to get him with a final call. “He told me with evident glee that he had been keeping out of reach all day and would not have answered the telephone if I had not been calling,” she wrote afterward. She explained that she had to go and passed the handset to Smith.

Smith spoke, then shouted, into the phone, but the connection was poor and the operator had to interrupt to ask Roosevelt to try using the telephone in the Warm Springs hotel when he got back to the resort. This additional delay made Smith and Raskob even more anxious, not least since the telephone link to Warm Springs was notoriously undependable. Yet when Roosevelt arrived at the hotel and the phone rang, Raskob’s voice came through quite well. The Democratic chairman urged Roosevelt to accept the nomination, for the good of the party. Roosevelt balked, citing his commitment to Warm Springs and the Warm Springs Foundation. Raskob responded impatiently: “Damn the Foundation! We’ll take care of it.”

He passed the phone to Smith. “Take the nomination, Frank,” Smith said. He explained that Roosevelt wouldn’t have to campaign very hard—just make a few speeches and he’d be sure to be elected. And he could run the governor’s office at his convenience. He would have to open the legislature in January, but then he could go back to Warm Springs for a couple of months while the lawmakers moved as slowly as they always did. He could return to Albany toward the end of the session, sign the bills, send the boys home, and be in Georgia again eighteen hours later.

Roosevelt scoffed at this projected schedule. He knew he couldn’t govern that way, and he knew Smith wouldn’t have been able to, either. “Don’t hand me that boloney,” he said.

At this point Herbert Lehman came on the line. Lehman was being touted for lieutenant governor, and he said he’d relieve Roosevelt whenever he required a break.

Smith grabbed the phone back. “Frank,” he said, “I wasn’t going to put this on a personal basis, but I’ve got to.” He said he needed Roosevelt at the top of the state ticket if he—Smith—were to have any chance of winning the national race.

Roosevelt still resisted. He said things weren’t as grim as Smith made out. Hoover might still be beaten.

Smith snorted, and stated the question to Roosevelt directly: “If those fellows nominate you tomorrow and adjourn, will you refuse to run?”

This was Roosevelt’s final chance to close the door. If he told Smith he would refuse, the governor would have to find someone else. But if he didn’t say that—if he simply said nothing—Smith would take his response as a yes and the convention would nominate Roosevelt, leaving him no alternative but to accept.

Maybe Roosevelt was still ambivalent. Maybe he just wanted to squeeze all the advantage out of playing hard to get. He repeated that he wasn’t ready to resume public life. He said he couldn’t authorize putting his name before the convention. But he didn’t declare explicitly that he would repudiate the nomination.

This was what Smith wanted to hear—or not hear. “All right,” he said. “I won’t ask you any more questions.”

The deal was concluded the following day. Roosevelt’s name was put into nomination at Rochester. The weary delegates hardly bothered to applaud, and they didn’t bother to call the roll. They approved the nomination on a voice vote and departed.

“MESS IS NO name for it,” Louis Howe telegraphed Roosevelt. “For once I have no advice to give.”

Roosevelt’s chief political strategist couldn’t imagine what had come over his man. They had agreed months before that 1928 was a Republican year. And the reaction to Smith’s candidacy simply reinforced the conclusion that this was a good season to be out of politics. Smith would break his sword on the Republican boom and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant bigotry, leaving Roosevelt as the most credible Democrat standing. But now Roosevelt had spoiled everything by volunteering for a lost cause. With luck a man might have one chance at the presidency; Howe had been working for nearly two decades to get Roosevelt that chance. And Roosevelt had thrown it away.

For what? For party unity? The Democrats, who daily gave new meaning to the concept of self-destruction, couldn’t expect that of anyone. For Al Smith? What had Smith ever done for Roosevelt? For the sake of ambition? Foolish ambition was worse than no ambition at all.

If Howe couldn’t understand Roosevelt’s motives, Roosevelt himself might have been no wiser. He couldn’t have gainsaid Howe’s objections, which made perfect political sense. No doubt the smartest thing would have been to do just what Howe advised: lie low for another few years, write the occasional article, deliver thoughtful speeches, do favors for fellow Democrats, and make ready for 1932.

But logic didn’t get the last word, not this time. Roosevelt’s appearances at the Democratic conventions in 1924 and 1928, and especially the receptions he received there, reminded him how much he loved the game of politics. With those two brief exceptions, he had been out of the game for eight years, and Louis Howe wanted him to stay out another four. He had devoted as much time to his physical recovery as anyone could have, and though he still professed optimism about further improvement, he doubtless realized in his heart that he had gotten back all the leg strength he was going to get. The Warm Springs project was a worthy cause, but other people could manage it.

He was forty-six years old. He knew himself well enough to appreciate his talents. He had a gift for politics—for inspiring people to work with him toward a common civic goal. Polio aside, he was in the prime of life; his gifts wouldn’t increase with the passing years. If anything, they would tend to deteriorate. And in a polio survivor they might deteriorate faster than in other persons.

Roosevelt wasn’t a gambler. But neither was he a slave to calculation. And in 1928 he cast aside calculation and threw himself into a race smart money said he would lose.

AT FIRST HE campaigned for Smith, despite the odds against the national ticket. “Smith has burned his bridges behind him,” Roosevelt confided to a friend. He did what he could to repair the damage. In a speech at Rochester he praised Smith’s policies on education and public health. In Syracuse he cited Smith’s contributions to water-power development. In Jamestown he lauded the governor for paving rural roads.

As he warmed to his task, he lashed out at the Republicans—not the ordinary party members, whose votes he courted, but the party leadership, whose record he disdained. “Somewhere in a pigeon-hole of a desk of the Republican leaders of New York State is a large envelope, soiled, worn, bearing a date that goes back twenty-five or thirty years,” he told a crowd in Buffalo. “Printed in large letters on this old envelope are the words, ‘Promises to labor.’ Inside this envelope are a series of sheets dated two years apart and representing the best thought of the best minds of the Republican leaders over a succession of years. Each sheet of promises is practically the duplicate of every other sheet in the envelope. But nowhere in that envelope is a single page bearing the title ‘Promises Kept.’”

As he hit his stride he hammered at what had become the central, if unacknowledged, theme of the Republican presidential campaign. “I have just come from the South,” he told an audience at Binghamton, which had experienced a rash of Klan activity. “I have seen circulars down there in the Southern states that any man or woman in this audience would be ashamed to have in his home. I have seen circulars that were so unfit for publication that the people who wrote and printed and paid for them ought not to be put in jail, but ought to be put on the first boat and sent away from the United States.” Roosevelt tried to shame New York’s bigots into better behavior by associating them with their more virulent southern cousins. He told a tale from Dixie:

Just after I got down to Georgia, an old friend of mine in a small country town, a farmer, came in to see me, and said, “Mr. Roosevelt, I am worried. A lot of my neighbors, all Democrats—we are all Democrats down here—say that they cannot vote for Governor Smith, and I don’t know what the reason is. But there must be some good answer. Will you tell me so I can go back and talk to them? They tell me, these neighbors of mine, and they show me printed handbills saying that if Governor Smith becomes president of the United States, the Methodist and Baptist marriages over here among our neighbors will all be void and that their children will be illegitimate.

Roosevelt’s audience laughed at the improbability of this assertion. “You may laugh,” he continued.

But they were not laughing. They thought it was true, and they were honest, law-abiding citizens. They did not have the education, the contact, to know better. Oh, I could go on and tell you a thousand stories along that line.

Roosevelt expressed relief—or hope—that New Yorkers weren’t so gullible or mean-spirited as to hold a man’s religion against him. “I believe that this year we in the state of New York have got beyond those days of prejudice and bigotry.”

The campaign lasted barely three weeks, but by its midpoint something curious became apparent, at least to certain observers. Perhaps Roosevelt had intended this all along; perhaps it occurred to him in the act; perhaps he never consciously realized it. But the more he spoke of Al Smith’s qualifications for president, the more it sounded as though he were running for the White House. In every speech he would start by pointing to Smith’s accomplishments as New York governor, but as he portrayed what a progressive federal government might achieve in the future, his passion for the subject grew intensely personal. He sketched what government could do to develop the hydropower resources of the nation, bringing electricity to rural areas and lowering rates in the cities. He explained how the Republicans had persistently blocked such development, diverting resources and profits into the pockets of their friends. He spoke of the need for government to guarantee pensions for the elderly, who too often ended their lives in the poorhouse. “One of the most oppressing things that I have to do on occasion in this state is to visit the county poorhouse,” he told a crowd at Rochester. “It just tears my heart to see those old men and women there, more than almost anything that I know.” He spoke of the need for stronger labor legislation, to protect workers from excessive hours and to rectify the imbalance between management and workers in strikes and other disputes. The Republicans claimed to be the friends of labor. “How dare they say that!” Roosevelt demanded. “How do grown up and ostensibly sane political leaders perjure themselves that way?” He called for government aid to farmers, who had been suffering for years and been neglected by those same Republicans. “I want to see the farmer and his family receive at the end of each year as much for their labor as if they had been working not on a farm, but as skilled workers under the best conditions in any one of our great industries.”

As a candidate for governor, Roosevelt couldn’t well debate the Republicans on foreign policy. But he came close. He returned to the issue of religion in politics as a way of reminding voters of his experience abroad in the World War—and of what Americans had fought and died for in that war. “I go back in my memory ten years ago, ten years ago this autumn,” he said in Buffalo.

I go back to a day in particular when several miles behind the actual line of contact between the two armies I passed through wheat fields, wheat fields with the ripened grain uncut; wheat fields in which there were patches, little patches of color, something in the wheat, and some of those patches wore a dark gray uniform and others of those patches wore an olive drab uniform. As we went through these fields there were American boys carrying stretchers, and on those stretchers were German boys and Austrian boys and American boys being carried to the rear, and somehow in those days people were not asking to what church those German boys or those American boys belonged. Somehow we got into our heads over there and we got into our heads back here that never again would there be any question of a man’s religion in the United States of America….

If any man or woman, after thinking of that, can bear in his heart any motive in this year which will lead him to cast his ballot in the interest of intolerance and of a violation of the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, then I say solemnly to that man or woman, “May God have mercy on your miserable soul.”

VOTERS CROWDED Roosevelt’s appearances, responding to his vision and urging him on. Smith’s advisers were less appreciative. “Tell the candidate that he is not running for President but for Governor,” Smith’s manager wired Samuel Rosenman, whom Smith had loaned to Roosevelt for assistance with speeches. “And tell him to stick to state issues.”

It was too late. On election day the contest for president proved to be a Republican rout. Smith held his own in the cities, but he got trounced in the country, losing by six million votes total. He dropped five states of the old Confederacy and, most embarrassingly, New York, where Hoover’s upstate vote outweighed Smith’s large majority in New York City. Whether the country voters rejected Smith for being a Catholic, a wet, an advocate of immigrants, a progressive, or simply a Democrat in a time of Republican prosperity was impossible to tell.

But what was possible, indeed inescapable, was that leadership in the Democratic party passed from Al Smith to Franklin Roosevelt that day. As the looming disaster for the Democrats had grown apparent in the weeks before the election, Roosevelt’s chances of carrying New York appeared slim. The early returns on voting day provided little reason for encouragement. Yet Roosevelt refused to concede to Albert Ottinger, his Republican rival, and as the tallies from certain Republican counties were slow in being reported, he sensed he might have a chance. “I have an idea that some of the boys upstate are up to their old tricks of delaying the vote and stealing as many as they can from us,” he told Sam Rosenman. He decided to intervene. He called sheriffs in the tardy counties. “This is Franklin Roosevelt,” he said. “I am watching the returns here at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City. The returns from your county are coming in mighty slowly, and I don’t like it. I shall look to you, if they are unduly delayed, and I want you personally to see that the ballots are not tampered with. If you need assistance to keep order or to see that the vote is counted right, call me here at this hotel and I shall ask Governor Smith to authorize the state troopers to assist you.”

Roosevelt was bluffing. The state troopers lacked the capacity to deal with vote tampering. But the sheriffs probably didn’t know that. Whether or not Roosevelt’s calls were the cause, the returns started arriving more swiftly. When they were totaled they revealed a Roosevelt victory. The margin was narrow: twenty-five thousand votes out of more than four million cast. Yet it was enough.