No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  There was a moment of uncomprehending silence. In the end, the statement said neither yes nor no. Yet it was what the statement did not say that counted: nowhere did the president say that he would refuse to serve if nominated, nor did he officially recognize the power of the two-term tradition. Clearly, Roosevelt was in the hunt. Or was he? The delegates sat for a moment in their seats, uncertain what they were supposed to do. Then, from some loudspeaker not in view, a single booming voice shouted, “We want Roosevelt!” This was all that was needed to ignite the crowd, which picked up the chant and made it their own. “We want Roosevelt.” “New York wants Roosevelt.” “California wants Roosevelt.”

  The mysterious voice was later traced to the basement, where Edward Kelly, Chicago’s mayor, had planted his “leather-lunged, pot-bellied” superintendent of sewers with a powerful microphone and detailed instructions to begin the stampede as soon as Barkley finished reading the president’s statement. However contrived its beginning, the demonstration took on a life of its own. With state banners held aloft, the delegates formed a long parade which wound its way through the aisles, knocking down chairs, surging, singing, screaming. After a short struggle with the Farley contingent, the Massachusetts banner was seized from its holder and carried into the parade. Watching the wild scene from the stage, Farley’s eyes were dimmed with tears. A similar struggle with Vice-President John Garner’s supporters in the Texas contingent resulted in scores of men rolling on the floor in quest of the banner. And still the demonstration raged.

  In the president’s moment of triumph, Eleanor shook her head resignedly, knowing now that his nomination was a certainty. She did not see why the presidential statement had had to be made. Naïvely, she had never considered that the delegates to the convention did not feel entirely free to make their own choices regardless of what the president said. But, she admitted when she talked with her husband after the convention finally adjourned, there are times when “even obvious things may have to be said.”

  • • •

  Despite the tumultuous demonstration, the delegates awoke on Wednesday morning feeling rightly that they had been used to serve the president’s political purposes. If they were willing to shatter a tradition as old as the country and go down the line for Roosevelt, then, they felt, they deserved at the very least a personal appearance from the president.

  “The President has got to come,” Frances Perkins was told. “This thing is going to blow up.” No matter if the president won the nomination, “he won’t have the party back of him.” With no prospect of the president’s coming to Chicago, the leaderless crowd resembled a restless audience at the performance of a play without its leading man. The mood was definitely sour, Perkins agreed, as she picked up the phone to call the president and urge him to come, “to make a speech, receive a number of delegates and go away—that is, spread light and sweetness over it.”

  “Absolutely no,” the president replied. “I wouldn’t think of doing such a thing. I’ve said I won’t go and I won’t go . . . . Too many promises will be extracted from me if I go. They’ll begin to trade with me. I can’t do it.”

  When Perkins persisted, the president shifted the conversation. “How would it be if Eleanor [came]?” he asked Perkins. “You know Eleanor always makes people feel right. She has a fine way with her.” Perkins thought that was an excellent idea. “Call her up and ask her,” the president told Perkins. “She’s pretty good about this kind of thing . . . . If she says no, tell her what I say, talk with me about it, but I don’t want you to tell her that you’ve talked with me. Don’t let Eleanor know that I’m putting any pressure on her.”

  Perkins reached Eleanor at dinnertime. “Things look black here,” she told Eleanor; “the temper of the convention is very ugly . . . . I think you should come.” When Eleanor demurred, Perkins insisted, telling her that things were getting worse by the moment, that the delegates would be reassured by her presence and “comforted if she thought what they were doing was right.” Still Eleanor balked, although she agreed that she would call the president to talk it over with him.

  Listening only to Eleanor’s side of the conversation, Tommy thought it would be a terrible move for Eleanor to go. Never before had a first lady addressed a convention; at a time when the sacred two-term tradition was about to be broken, it made little sense, Tommy thought, to break another tradition as well. “I thought it was extremely dangerous,” Tommy admitted later to Lorena Hickok. “I did not want to see Mrs. Roosevelt sacrificed on the altar of hysteria.”

  For his part, Joe Lash could not understand Eleanor’s reluctance to go, just as he found it impossible to fathom her hesitancy about another four years in the White House. “For someone like me who loves politics so much,” he admitted in his diary, “it is incomprehensible that she wouldn’t want to be in Washington much less the White House.” Patiently Eleanor explained her reluctance. Suppose she went and gave a speech and said some things the president later said. Immediately “the cry of ‘petticoat government’ would go up. She would be accused of making up the President’s mind and it could get under the President’s skin. It would get under anyone’s skin.”

  “Well, would you like to go?” Roosevelt cheerfully inquired, when Eleanor called him, not wanting to ask for help directly if he didn’t have to. “No,” Eleanor replied, “I wouldn’t like to go! I’m very busy and I wouldn’t like to go at all.”

  “Well,” Roosevelt responded, quickly shifting gears, “they seem to think it might be well if you came out.” Then Eleanor asked, “Do you really want me to go?” And so, finally acknowledging that he needed her, he said, yes, “perhaps it would be a good idea.”

  So, like a good soldier, Eleanor agreed, on the condition that she could call Farley first and see how he felt about it. Knowing there was bad feeling, she later wrote in her memoirs, because “Harry Hopkins has been more or less running things and perhaps has not been very tactful,” she was “not going to add to the hard feelings.” When Farley heard Eleanor was calling, he was so “overcome with emotion” he was unable at first to speak. At last, he told her it was perfectly all right with him if she came and, from the president’s point of view, it was essential. They would delay the vice-presidential nomination until after she had spoken. “Thanks, Jim, I appreciate this. I’ll come,” she said.

  That night, Roosevelt’s name was placed in nomination, along with the token candidacies of Farley, Vice-President Garner, Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, and Cordell Hull. The vote was a foregone conclusion: the president received an overwhelming majority of 946 votes on the first ballot. Only 150 votes were cast for all the other candidates. Yet, though the victory was Roosevelt’s, the delegates reserved their emotions for the defeated Farley, who mounted the rostrum to speak. “Never had the delegates cheered more heartily,” the Washington Post observed. “My name has been placed in nomination for the Presidency by a great and noble American,” Farley began, referring to the frail but widely respected Virginia Senator Carter Glass, who had risen from his sickbed to deliver the nominating speech. “As long as I live I shall be grateful to [him].” But the time has come, Farley went on, to suspend the rules and declare Roosevelt the candidate by acclamation. The audience cheered and cried as the band struck up “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in tribute to the party chief. In her sitting room at Val-Kill, Eleanor sang along in a low voice.

  In a revealing statement, Eleanor said that when she heard her husband nominated by acclamation she “felt as though it were somebody else’s excitement and that it had very little to do with me.” Eleanor was not alone in her sense of alienation. Because of the way the convention had been structured, because Hopkins had pressured the delegates to vote for the president without the presence of the president’s assuaging charm, many of the delegates saw their vote as a command rather than a choice. They saw nothing else they could do. And they were right. But they didn’t feel good about it.

  Though the nomination had not come in the e
xact form Roosevelt wanted—the “draft” would never be able to shake off the quotation marks surrounding it, since votes had been cast for other candidates—it had been achieved nonetheless, and without the kind of party split that might have hurt the chances for victory in November. All in all, Rosenman recalled, the mood in the president’s study that night was one of “general satisfaction and relief.”

  His nomination secured, Roosevelt turned at once to the vice-presidency. Though it was nearly 3 a.m., he told Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly that his choice was Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace. Wallace, Roosevelt believed, was a dependable liberal, a good administrator, a deep thinker, and a fervent supporter of aid to the Allies. The response from Boss Kelly was not enthusiastic. To the party leaders in Chicago, Wallace was a babe in the political woods. He had started life as a Republican and only recently switched to the Democratic Party. “The party longs to promote its own,” Frances Perkins observed, “and Henry Wallace was not its own. He wasn’t born a Democrat . . . . They would have liked to have had somebody that came right up through the Democratic machine, who owed his whole life to them.” But Roosevelt was adamant. Wallace was the man he wanted, he told Kelly, and then he went to bed.

  Thursday morning, while the president was having breakfast, Harry Hopkins called to report that things looked bad for Wallace. The opposition was growing by the minute—already there were ten candidates with more votes than Wallace. It would be a cat-and-dog fight, Hopkins warned. “Well, damn it to hell,” the president angrily replied, “they will go for Wallace or I won’t run and you can jolly well tell them so.” Then, turning to Rosenman, he said, “I suppose all the conservatives in America are going to bring pressure on the convention to beat Henry.” Well—“I won’t deliver that acceptance speech until we see whom they nominate.”

  By Thursday afternoon, July 18, as Eleanor was in the plane heading for Chicago, the convention had spun out of control. The galleries were packed with placards for a dozen different candidates, including Federal Loan Administrator Jesse Jones, Federal Security Agency head Paul McNutt, Jimmy Byrnes, and Speaker of the House William Bankhead. Everywhere one went, the name of Henry Wallace was met by jeers and catcalls. As Perkins interpreted the unruly situation, the ugliness was the result of Roosevelt’s months of silence and the seeming hauteur involved in his failure to appear. “He not only wants to be nominated himself,” the delegates seemed to be saying, “he wants to pick his own man. He doesn’t want to leave that to the convention. He doesn’t want to let us have a runoff here between our political racehorses.” But since nobody could afford to show their resentment to the President, it was deflected onto Wallace.

  By early evening, as Eleanor’s plane was coming in for a landing in Chicago, the president was beginning to get “quite concerned,” as Sam Rosenman put it, “about what might happen that night at the Convention.” Jim Farley was the first to greet Mrs. Roosevelt as she stepped from the plane in a soft crepe dress and a navy cloth coat. The first lady paused to take some questions from reporters, and then followed Farley into a large sedan, complete with a motorcycle escort and a Chicago police guard of about fifty men.

  On the way to the Stevens Hotel, Eleanor told Farley that she would miss him terribly in the upcoming campaign. She said she felt as though she had known him all her life and that she could always turn to him for advice. Thus reassured, Farley confided in her the slights he had experienced at Hopkins’ impolitic maneuvers. Having been wounded by Hopkins herself in recent months, Eleanor understood Farley’s pain.

  Eleanor was brought into the convention hall on Farley’s arm, “which was just the way it ought to be,” Frances Perkins noted. “They were smiling at each other like obviously close friends.” At the sight of the first lady, the entire convention rose to its feet in a rousing cheer. Acknowledging her warm welcome with a smile and a wave of her hand, Eleanor took a seat beside Mrs. Wallace on the platform just as the evening session was about to get under way.

  Trouble began immediately. The first lady was scheduled to speak as soon as the nominating speeches for vice-president were finished. From the opening address for Speaker Bankhead, which evoked a demonstration far exceeding the expectations of a “symbolic candidacy,” it was clear that the president’s nomination of Henry Wallace faced an uphill climb. The situation worsened as names of other candidates were placed in nomination, each to loud, sustained applause. “The rebel yells grew in intensity,” The New York Times reported, “and there seemed to be a determination, coming out of nowhere, to demonstrate for anybody not picked by the White House.”

  When the name of Henry Wallace was presented to the convention, the shouts and boos outnumbered the cheers as the delegates rose in rebellion against their president’s choice. “It was agony,” Frances Perkins recalled. “I shall never forget Henry Wallace’s face as he sat there . . . . It was a dreadful thing to go through, terrible. There were catcalls, hisses, all the more vulgar and outward manifestations of dislike and disappointment. I never lived through anything worse . . . . He was listening . . . but his eyes were way off . . . . I remember thinking that his face and posture depicted the kind of suffering that a man in the Middle Ages being tried for some heresy which he couldn’t understand might show. The storm was rolling over him and he had to take it. This was certainly nothing he had anticipated.”

  For Mrs. Wallace, attending her first national convention, the situation was incomprehensible. “Poor Mrs. Wallace was almost out of her mind,” Perkins observed. “Her brain was reeling around inside her head. The antagonism and the ill will was a crushing thing, a very hard thing to bear. I remember seeing Mrs. Roosevelt take her hand.”

  “The noise in the room was deafening,” Eleanor recalled. “You could hardly hear yourself or speak to your next door neighbor.” At one point, Mrs. Wallace turned to Eleanor and said in understated fashion, “I don’t know why they don’t seem to like Henry.”

  How well Eleanor remembered her own discomfort at the first national convention she had ever attended, in Baltimore in 1912! Conventions, Eleanor thought at the time, should be seminars to debate ideas and policies, a “meeting ground of the nation’s best minds.” Instead, she found a raucous brawl, a fight between Woodrow Wilson and House Speaker Champ Clark that belonged in the gutter. When Clark’s daughter was carried aloft through the aisles, arms and legs akimbo, in a procession of support for her father, Eleanor was “frankly appalled.” Frustrated and uncomfortable, she left after only one day.

  To be sure, Eleanor had traveled a long political road since 1912; the world of politics had become her world as well as her husband’s. But the pandemonium at the 1940 convention was unlike any she had seen before. At this stage—as rumors spread that unless Wallace was nominated Roosevelt himself would not accept first place on the ticket—anything seemed possible.

  • • •

  The scene in the president’s study was not a cheerful one. In silence, a large group of staffers listened to the disturbing reports on the radio. A card table had been set up in the middle of the room so the president could relax with a game of solitaire while awaiting his wife’s speech and the vice-presidential balloting.

  The president’s figure, the expression on his face, and the tone of his voice all revealed fierce irascibility. The rebellion had captured the emotions of both the crowd and the commentators, who made it clear that the real target of the anger was not Wallace but the president’s arrogance in forcing his man upon the delegates. “As the fight got more and more acrimonious,” Sam Rosenman recalled, “the President asked Missy to give him a note pad and a pencil. Putting aside his cards he started to write. The rest of us sat around wondering what he was writing. We all felt a great desire to sneak around and read over his shoulders, but none of us succumbed to that temptation.”

  Finally, after writing in silence for five full pages, the president turned to Sam: “Put that in shape Sam,” he said, a strained expression on his face. “Go on Sam, and do as I’
ve told you . . . . I did not want to run and now some of the very people who urged me the most are putting me in the position of an office-hungry politician, scheming and plotting to keep his job. I’m through.” He then returned to his game of solitaire.

  As Sam walked out of the room into the corridor with the handwritten sheets in his hand, Missy, Steve Early, Pa Watson, and Dr. McIntire followed behind him, demanding to know what it said. At one point, Watson reached out his “hamlike paw and snatched the sheet of paper away from Sam,” but Sam got it back and brought it over to a small lamp in the hallway. With Missy and Watson bent over his shoulder, he began to read.

  It was a stunning document—a statement to the convention declining the presidential nomination—which he intended to deliver if Wallace lost. Interpreting the battle over Wallace as the conservatives’ struggle for the direction of the Democratic Party, Roosevelt’s statement argued that “until the Democratic party makes clear its overwhelming stand in favor of liberalism, and shakes off all the shackles of control by conservatism and reaction, it will not continue its march of victory.” From the beginning of the convention, it claimed, the forces of reaction had been busily engaged in the promotion of discord. Now it was no longer possible to straddle the issue. The time for a fight to the finish had come. Therefore, “I give the Democratic Party the opportunity to make that historic decision by declining the honor of the nomination.”

  Pa Watson was apoplectic. “Sam, give that damned piece of paper to me—let’s tear it up . . . . He’s all excited in there now—and he’ll be sorry about it in the morning. Besides, the country needs him. I don’t give a damn who’s Vice-President and neither does the country. The only thing that’s important to the country is that fellow in there.”