Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (29 page)

A
S
R
OOSEVELT 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.

S
OME 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.

R
OOSEVELT’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.”