“Here comes the boss now,” said one of the newspapermen indifferently. It was dark on the station platform, with only a few lights shining through the rain. Reporters and photographers who were going along on the campaign tour stood around in slickers, talking in small groups. The President climbed on board in silence. There were no greetings; no one said anything. Only a Secret Service man standing on the rear platform, every muscle alert, his head turning this way and that, his eyes darting over the groups of men below as if to ward off any hostility, gave one a sense of excitement.
Our first stop the next morning was Thomas, a little mining town in West Virginia. Because of the rain none of us knew whether the President would take the drive through the hills that had been planned. Dr. Ross McIntire, his physician, came out on the platform, looked worriedly at the sky, shook his head as he held out his hand to the rain, and went in again. “Old Doc Mac doesn’t like it,” said one of the reporters. “He gets worried sick if the President gets his feet wet.” But Roosevelt came out anyway, and as he climbed into the open car shrill cheers broke from the hillside, where people from miles around had been waiting patiently in the rain to see the President. Their faces as we drove by were all slightly agape with a look of delighted wonder at being visited by the nation’s number-one celebrity.
We made five stops at mining towns, each one bigger and grimier than the last. The crowds, too, grew in size and enthusiasm till we reached Fairmont, where there were over fifteen thousand massed in the station, the streets, on the bridge and housetops. At one stop I shoved in among the crowd, hoping to hear revealing comments, but all I heard was, “There he is! No, that ain’t him. Sure that’s him,” which was no help in predicting how West Virginia’s eight electoral votes would go. No distinguished guests were in our party, but just before each station we would make a short stop and several cigar-smoking, well-fed gentlemen in thick overcoats would climb on. These, in the words of the irreverent press, were the “local boll weevils”; they would then appear on the rear platform, smiling and graciously waving to the crowd, which was so proud to see its home-state leaders traveling with the President.
At these stops the newspapermen would rush back to hear the President express his joy at seeing smoke coming out of the chimneys again and tell about that telegram he had “just received” announcing the first year in fifty-five with no national-bank failures. As he finished, everyone would clamber back on board, disappear into separate compartments, and immediately fill the train with the sound of clicking typewriters. Nearing Pittsburgh, we wondered why no release of the speech was forthcoming, the delay, some said, being to safeguard against a possible Landon spy wiring its contents on to Al Smith in New York. As a matter of fact, although there were many pro-Landon papers represented, there were very few pro-Landon journalists. One reporter told me that while eighty percent of the newspaper owners are Republican, eighty percent of the individual journalists are pro-Roosevelt. And there is the story of the still unpublished poll taken by the Herald Tribune of fifty editorial employees, which showed forty-four for the President. When one of the correspondents said he was going to stay on the train and listen to the Pittsburgh speech over the radio in order that the enthusiasm of the crowd might not color his story, I asked why he wanted to be so objective. “When you’re a New Dealer writing for a Republican paper,” he said, “you have to be as objective as hell.”
Judging from the reception Pittsburgh gave to Roosevelt, Pennsylvania, which has been steadfastly Republican in every election since Lincoln, stands a good chance to go Democratic for the first time this November. Hardly listening to what the President said, the crowd cheered their heads off, blew whistles, and jangled cowbells whenever he paused for breath. Once when he said, “And during the late war we piled up a national debt of twenty-five billions,” the crowd answered, “Hooray!” And when Governor Earle gave his list of Pennsylvania bad men—the Mellons, Pew, Ware—the crowd delightedly roared back “Boo!” to each name, ending with the richest, fruitiest boo of all when the Governor, drawing out the final s into a long hiss, cried, “the du Ponts!” As the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the end, and the President stood erect, his profile immobile and stern, he looked (consciously perhaps?) not unlike one of those heads of Washington carved out of a mountain. Just then an aide nudged him, and without looking down the President reached for his hat and folded it across his bosom in the proper gesture of patriotic reverence. An almost imperceptible move, but it made him once more a mortal. Everywhere we went, with his sumptuous voice and dominating presence, he was invariably the best speaker on the program.
In Jersey City the next morning the reporters’ theme song, “Hey, Bill, what do you estimate the crowd?” was brought into full play as we drove through the incredible demonstration staged by Mayor Hague, who was making show of his loyalty to the man he called a “weakling” when he led the “Stop Roosevelt” movement in Chicago in 1932. As we crawled through the three miles of shrieking, flag-waving schoolchildren (half of Hague’s turnout was below voting age), we were heckled with such remarks as “Aw, it’s oney de press … say, ya got it pretty soft … gimme a lift, mister? … hey, mister, take my pitcha … ooh, lookit, a woman repawter, hiya, toots.”
Back in New York no machine organization turned out the crowds which sprang up impromptu to cheer the President. Except on Park Avenue. There the sidewalks were no more crowded than usual, and the only heads peering out the windows were the servants’. It called to mind the story, which no one would swear was not apocryphal, of Knox in San Francisco. As he was driving through the streets, someone in the crowd yelled, “Hurrah for Roosevelt!” The cry was taken up and Knox began to get red in the face until a Republican committeewoman driving with him leaned over and said, “Never mind, Colonel, they’re only working people.”
The Nation, October 10, 1936.