Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (28 page)

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.

W
HEN 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.

T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT 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.”