Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (12 page)

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.

I
T WAS
C
HARLES
M
URPHY
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.

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT 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.