Leadership Read online

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  “My first days in the Legislature were much like those of a boy in a strange school,” Roosevelt recalled. “My fellow-legislators and I eyed one another with mutual distrust.” Not only was Roosevelt the youngest member, but the Democrats held a commanding majority, and he was a Republican from “the wealthiest district in New York.” While Lincoln kept quietly in the background throughout his first session, watching and figuring, Roosevelt charged into action, often irritating his colleagues, violating the rules of parliamentary procedure.

  With abrasive and manic energy, he interrogated his fellow assemblymen, aggressively soaking up everything they knew about how the Assembly operated. “How do you do this in your district and county,” he would ask. “What is this thing and that thing?” Within a short period of time, “he knew more about State politics” than “ninety percent” of the veteran members did. In short order, he had divided the members into three groups: a small circle of fellow reformers, those he labeled “very good men;” another circle of “very bad men” beholden to Tammany Hall, New York’s political machine, and susceptible to bribery; and a majority, “neither very good nor very bad,” who could be swayed in either direction, depending on the strength of public opinion.

  After scarcely two months in office, he seized the spotlight, displaying what would become a characteristic penchant for brash maneuvering. Newspaper reports had accused state judge Theodore Westbrook of using court proceedings to help the Wall Street financier Jay Gould gain control of New York’s elevated railway system. After investigating the matter further, Roosevelt was convinced that Westbrook had forged a corrupt alliance with the notorious robber baron. Rising from his seat, the rookie assemblyman delivered a fiery indictment of the judge that produced banner headlines, making Theodore Roosevelt “the most talked about man in the State.” In an era of “subserviency to the robber barons of the Street,” the New York Times editorialized, “it needs some little courage in any public man to characterize them and their acts in fitting terms.”

  At this introductory stage of his career, Roosevelt viewed politics in a puritanical light, as an arena where good battled evil. He had seen his father’s dreams of high office undone by corruption; he had absorbed his father’s warning that the country could not much longer stand “so corrupt a government.” He was a knight embarked on a crusade to uncover corruption at the highest levels, jousting against the “black horse cavalry” of machine politicians. “There is nothing brilliant or outstanding about my record, except perhaps for one thing,” he told a reporter, “when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act.”

  Even as his political star was beginning to rise, Roosevelt insisted that politics was not a proper occupation. As a citizen, one might intermittently engage in political activity, but it would be “a dreadful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office. Such a feeling prevents him from being of real service to the people while in office, and always puts him under the heaviest strain to barter his convictions for the sake of holding office.”

  Yet, it was already clear after this first year in the Assembly that Theodore Roosevelt had found his calling. Politics encompassed the activities he found most enjoyable and fulfilling: speaking, writing, connecting with people, assuming center stage. A fuse had been lit that would keep him in politics and public life for the rest of his days.

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  “I rose like a rocket,” Theodore Roosevelt recalled of his ascent. Notwithstanding a statewide Democratic sweep, he had gained a second term, and despite his youth, he had been chosen by his Republican colleagues as their minority leader. But as his friend Jacob Riis shrewdly warned, “if they do shoot up like a rocket they are apt to come down like sticks.” In the wake of these triumphs, Roosevelt lost perspective. His head “was swelled”; he became indulgent and self-absorbed. He began to think that he alone had cornered the market on honesty and integrity. “There is an increasing suspicion,” one observer noted, “that Mr. Roosevelt keeps a pulpit concealed on his person.” The small circle of reformers who had idolized him at the start watched with growing concern as he became “a perfect nuisance,” constantly interrupting Assembly business, yelling and pounding his desk with his fist. “He was just like a jack coming out of a box,” one member recalled. When criticized by Democrats, he fired back venomously, castigating the entire party as “rotten.” His friends pleaded with him “to sit on his coat-tails,” warning that he was ruining himself and “everybody else” with his “explosive” and “indiscreet” attacks, but he “would listen to no argument, no advice,” self-infatuated as he reveled in the headlines his colorful language generated.

  After failing to mobilize support for several projects, however, he realized that he “was absolutely deserted,” even by his friends. “My isolated peak had become a valley; every bit of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish.” The “bitter experience” was a blow to his ego, to the dogmatic and self-righteous aspect of his nature that prevented him from working with others and learning to compromise. He began to see, he conceded, that he “was not all-important,” and “that cooperation from other people” was essential, “even if they were not so pure as gold.” And he learned that “if he could not get all he wanted, he would take all he could.” He turned to help others, and they, in turn, gave him a hand. The world was far more complicated and nuanced than his categorical moral vision had led him to believe. The ability to learn from the excesses of his egocentric behavior, to alter course, to profit from error, was essential to his growth.

  Roosevelt further revealed that capacity for growth when a union-sponsored bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses was referred to one of the committees on which he sat. When the bill was first introduced, he presumed he would vote against it, as he had voted against minimum wage legislation and bills to limit the hours of the working day. Both his membership in the privileged class and the laissez-faire economics he had learned in college had “biased” him, he later said, “against all governmental schemes for the betterment of the social and economic condition of laborers.” In the case of the cigar bill, he believed that tenement owners, who were also the manufacturers, had a right to do as they wished with their own property.

  After meeting with labor leader Samuel Gompers and hearing his description of the dreadful conditions in the tenement apartments where thousands of families lived and worked stripping, drying, and wrapping cigars, he agreed to make a personal inspection. Roosevelt was so stunned by what he found that he made a turnabout and agreed to become the bill’s champion. Thirty years later, he would still remember one noxious tenement in which five adults and several children, all Bohemian immigrants who could barely speak English, were enclosed in a single room, compelled to work sixteen hours a day, with tobacco crammed in every corner, next to the bedding, mixed in with food. The investigation persuaded him “beyond a shadow of a doubt that to permit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses” was “an evil thing from every standpoint, social, industrial, and hygienic.”

  The incident suggests Roosevelt’s developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln’s seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people’s points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended. “The real things of life were getting a grip on him more and more,” Jacob Riis observed. In an essay on “fellow-feeling,” written a decade and a half later, Roosevelt maintained that empathy, like courage, could be acquired over time. “A man who conscientiously endeavors to throw in his lot with those about him, to make his interest theirs, to put himself in a position where he and they have a common object, will at first feel a little self-conscious, will realize too plainly his aims. But with exercise this will pass off. He will speedily find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to stimulate was really existent, though latent, a
nd is capable of a very healthy growth.” Indeed, he argued that a “very large part of the rancor of political and social strife” springs from the fact that different classes or sections “are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.”

  By his third term in the Assembly, Roosevelt had begun to soften his abrasive self-righteousness. Working with Democrats, whom he had previously labeled as “rotten,” he brought the two parties together to pass civil service reform and a host of bills to benefit the city of New York. He had taken his weaknesses, his physical liabilities, his fears, and the brash and self-centered aspects of his leadership style, and had carefully worked to overcome them.

  At twenty-five years old, happily married and awaiting the birth of his first child, he now felt, he told his wife, that he “had the reins” in his own hands.

  THREE

  FRANKLIN

  “No, call me Franklin”

  No fixed timetable governs the development of leaders. While Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt all possessed inherent leadership capacities, the period of time when they first perceived themselves as leaders and were considered leaders by others occurred at different stages of their growth.

  Hardship quickened Abraham Lincoln’s self-reliance. Early on, he revealed a number of traits associated with leadership—ambition, motivation, resoluteness, language skills, storytelling gifts, sociability. The people who knew him from boyhood to young manhood saw the makings of a leader, just as he was beginning to feel that same potential within himself.

  Theodore Roosevelt came later to the sense of himself as a leader, though others had clearly seen flashes of a unique nature—a remarkable willpower, intellectual vitality, irrepressible liveliness, wide-ranging interests, and a growing gratification connecting with people from different backgrounds and stations in life.

  Franklin Roosevelt, reared without siblings at Springwood, a country estate on the banks of the Hudson, was the latest bloomer of the three. The fierce ambition to succeed, so apparent in young Abraham and Theodore, was largely concealed, just as he concealed so much else in his life. There was little evidence of exceptional motivation or focus. Though he was the most conventionally handsome of the three, he lacked the physical strength and competitive athletic skill that lent young Abraham standing among his male companions; nor did he seem to possess the torrential energy that amused and overwhelmed everyone who met young Theodore. An indifferent student at Groton, Harvard College, and Columbia Law, Franklin ostensibly was following an expected path for a member of the privileged class by joining an old, conservative Wall Street law firm.

  At the age of twenty-eight, when both Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt had already evidenced striking leadership attributes, Franklin had not impressed the partners of his law firm with either his native intelligence, his work ethic, or his sense of purpose. Yet, when fortune shone on him in the form of a wholly unexpected offer from the top Dutchess County Democratic bosses, John Mack and Edward Perkins, to run for a safe Democratic seat in the State Assembly with the full backing of the party, Franklin hastened to accept, revealing a great eagerness to jump into politics. He knew something about himself that others did not—that beneath his complacent demeanor, he craved adventure, a desire for freedom from the confines of his insulated world. In all likelihood, he felt the promptings of ambition within himself long before others detected it. Some impulse told him that the political world might provide the best fit for his gregarious temperament, natural abilities, and undeveloped talents.

  It is not clear whether John Mack had even met Franklin before the late spring day in 1910 when he called upon the young law clerk at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. As a pretext for the visit, Mack carried some documents that required the signature of Franklin’s mother, Sara. After concluding the business part of the meeting, Mack turned to the real reason for dropping by—to sound out Franklin on the possibility of running for an Assembly seat from the district that included Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, the village where Roosevelt had grown up and where his mother still lived. Mack explained that the incumbent Democratic assemblyman, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, had decided to retire. For generations, Democrats had held the seat, based largely on the Irish and Italian vote in Poughkeepsie. But the party hoped to reach out as well to the traditionally rural Republican areas within the district, and Mack thought Franklin might be “the right person for the job.”

  That Mack and Perkins considered Franklin the best choice had little to do with their perception that the young law clerk had within him the makings of a leader. The key to their interest lay in the resonance of the Roosevelt name in Republican circles. In 1910, after serving nearly two terms in the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin’s fifth cousin, remained the most dominant figure on the national scene. Mack also understood that Sara Roosevelt’s wealth would allow her son not only to pay his own campaign expenses but to contribute to the general Democratic coffers. So, while Abraham Lincoln took the initiative on his own to run for his first elective office and Theodore put himself in a position to gain the nomination by mingling with politicians at Morton Hall, Franklin Roosevelt was simply chosen to run.

  What proved more compelling than why Franklin was chosen was the manner in which he responded to the proffered opportunity. “Nothing would please me more,” he enthusiastically replied, “just tell me what to do, where to go, whom to seek out.” What to do? Mack told him to spend time in the district, make the acquaintance of local Democratic activists. Franklin said he would start at once. He would spend as many summer weekends as he could in Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie, leaving his Wall Street firm on Friday afternoons, returning on Monday mornings. Whom to seek out? He should start with the Democratic committeeman from his home village—Tom Leonard.

  Consequently, at three o’clock one August afternoon, he searched out Leonard, a house painter currently at work inside one of the houses on the Roosevelts’ country estate. The estate resembled an English country manor, “with class lines separating the close little family of three at the top from the nurses and governesses, and these in turn from the maids and cooks indoors, and these in turn from the stable boys and farm hands outside.” As a child, Franklin, seated on his pony, had ridden with his father every morning to survey the plantings and the various construction projects under way on the estate. As they rode by, employees “tipped their hats.”

  Never having been formally introduced to the house painter, Roosevelt rang the bell. “There’s a Mr. Franklin wants to see you,” the housekeeper told Leonard. “I thought for a moment,” Leonard said, but after searching his memory, he concluded, “I don’t know any Mr. Franklin.” Nonetheless, he stepped out to meet the gentleman, surprised to find none other than Mr. Franklin Roosevelt. “Hello, Tom,” said the young patrician, smiling warmly and extending his hand in greeting. “How do you do, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked the puzzled painter. “No, call me Franklin. I’m going to call you Tom,” he declared, telling him that he had come to ask his advice about getting into politics. That Roosevelt was able to extend his hand and seek counsel with such good-natured spirits and without a trace of affectation or pomposity won over Tom Leonard as it would soon win over thousands in Dutchess County. His manner, his affability, and his sincerity conveyed something authentic. With this first foray into politics, he had bridged, emblematically at least, a lifetime of social distance.

  Everywhere he went, people were immediately struck by young Franklin’s warmth and charm. He made arrangements for a driver with a horse and two-wheeled wagon to meet him at the Hyde Park train station on Friday evenings. On Saturdays and Sundays he traversed the district, attending political meetings, talking with people in general stores, stopping in village squares, standing outside manufacturing plants, shaking hands. He made a good impression, Tom Leonard recalled, “because he wouldn’t immediately enter into the topic of politics”; instead, he encouraged people to talk about their w
ork, their families, their lives. He had always loved to talk, but now he learned to listen, and to listen intently, his head nodding in a welcoming way, with an air of sympathetic identification, an attentive posture and manner that would become a lifelong characteristic.

  With the assurance from the bosses that he would be nominated for the Assembly seat at the convention scheduled for early October, Franklin delivered his maiden political speech at the annual policemen’s clambake on September 10. “On that joyous occasion of clams and sauerkraut and real beer,” Roosevelt later recalled, “I made my first political speech and I have been apologizing for it ever since.” Introduced by John Mack, Franklin began with a favorite phrase of Theodore Roosevelt’s. “I’m dee-lighted,” to be here, he said, summoning with phrases, gestures, and pince-nez glasses an identification with his famous relative, “and next year promise to be here again with all my relatives.” No further record of the speech exists, though people who heard him speak in the weeks ahead remarked on his relaxed, conversational style. He mingled easily with crowds, pumped hands with enthusiasm, made friends everywhere he went. To the surprise of John Mack and other veteran officeholders, it was beginning to seem, unaccountably, that this twenty-eight-year-old son of privilege, upon diving into the water for the first time, could swim like a seal!