Jean Edward Smith Read online

  Financially, Franklin and Eleanor were well provided for. Between them, they had trust-fund income of a little over $12,000—the rough equivalent of $240,000 after-tax dollars one hundred years later.* Yet their combined incomes were insufficient to support their lifestyle. Eleanor and Franklin were not members of the fastest, richest set in New York, but they lived in three different houses at various seasons of the year, always employed at least five servants, maintained a large yacht and numerous smaller boats, automobiles, and carriages, dressed in fashion, belonged to expensive clubs, traveled extensively, and gave generously to political and charitable causes. Sara subsidized the shortfall. As her grandson Elliott recalled, “Granny was generous to a fault. Whenever Father needed help, he had only to ask for it, and he usually had no need to ask, because Granny anticipated what he or Mother wanted and was ready with a check, cash or a gift in kind.”23

  Midway through his third year at Columbia, Franklin took the grueling eight-hour New York bar examination and passed handily. He was immediately admitted to practice and at that point dropped his courses at Columbia and never took a degree. Twenty-two years later, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was invited to address the Columbia Law School Alumni Dinner. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, sat next to him, chatting affably. At some point Butler was overheard joking with FDR on his failure to obtain an LL.B. “You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams.” Franklin flashed his famous grin: “That just shows how unimportant the law really is.”24

  The young Roosevelts spent the summer of 1907 relaxing at Campobello and Hyde Park. Anna, their firstborn, was a one-year-old toddler. Eleanor was pregnant once more, and their second child, James, named for FDR’s father, would be born in December. In their first ten years of marriage, Franklin and Eleanor would have six children, one of whom would die in infancy.† Later, Eleanor would write, “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted.”25

  Unlike Sara, who handled every detail of FDR’s childhood, Eleanor delegated the raising of her children to a succession of nurses and caregivers. “I had never any interest in dolls or little children,” she wrote, “and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” Having heard that fresh air was good for babies, Eleanor ordered a small chicken wire cage constructed and, placing Anna in it, hung the contraption out a rear window at the town house in New York. It was on the north side of the building, cold and shady, and the baby often cried, but Eleanor paid no attention. Finally, an irate neighbor threatened to report the Roosevelts to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “This was rather a shock for me,” Eleanor recalled, “for I thought I was being a very modern mother.”26

  Years later Eleanor acknowledged that she had been completely unprepared to be a practical housekeeper, wife, or mother. “If I had it to do over again, I know now that what we should have done was to have no servants in those first few years.… However, my bringing-up had been such that this never occurred to me, and neither did it occur to any of the older people who were closest to me. Had I done this, my subsequent troubles would have been avoided and my children would have had far happier childhoods.”27

  For his part, Franklin, like his father, left the child rearing to his wife. “Father’s attitude on nurses and other household affairs was strictly hands off,” said his son James.28 When the children were older, FDR enjoyed roughhousing with his “chicks,” taking them riding at Hyde Park, and sailing at Campobello. “Father was fun,” said Anna. “He would sometimes romp with me on the floor or carry me around on his shoulders.”29 The children adored “Pa,” who seemed much warmer than their straitlaced mother. He was like a favorite uncle who entertained them, while Eleanor was the disciplinarian.*

  In September 1907 Franklin joined the distinguished Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn as one of five unsalaried apprentices. “I know you will be glad to start,” wrote Sara. “Try to arrange for systematic air and exercise and keep away from brokers’ offices, this advice free gratis for nothing.”30

  Carter, Ledyard and Milburn was one of the most prestigious law firms in the nation. It had a large general practice and was executor of the Astor estate, but its major source of income was corporate law, at which it had few equals. James Carter, the firm’s founder, was so highly respected at the appellate bar that the attorney general of the United States engaged him to argue the government’s case before the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust in 1894, the great income tax case.31 Louis Cass Ledyard, an intimate of J. P. Morgan, played a vital role in arresting the Wall Street Panic of 1907, served as counsel for both the Morgan Bank and United States Steel, and later represented the American Tobacco Company in antitrust litigation before the Supreme Court.32 John G. Milburn, the third senior partner, was counsel for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil cartel in an equally well publicized antitrust suit in 1911.33 Milburn himself had clerked for Grover Cleveland in his Buffalo law office, and it was at Milburn’s home in Buffalo that William McKinley died after being shot by an anarchist in 1901.34

  FDR had little passion for the law, but he was a fast learner blessed with an avuncular, ingratiating personality. “He had a sanguine temperament, almost adolescent in its buoyancy,” a fellow clerk recalled.35 Franklin wrote Sara that he was a “full-fledged office boy.” Like his fellow apprentices, he kept dockets for the partners, looked up cases for them, answered calendar calls, recorded deeds, and ran all manner of errands. After a while he took on minor cases in the municipal courts, and during his second year he was made managing clerk in charge of municipal cases.* The following year he moved on to the firm’s admiralty division, one of the nation’s most lustrous. As numerous observers have noted, there was always a whiff of the sea at Carter, Ledyard. Cass Ledyard succeeded J. P. Morgan as commodore of the exclusive New York Yacht Club, and Edmund L. Baylies, head of the admiralty section, was president of and principal fund-raiser for the Seamen’s Church Institute. Franklin became a director of the institute and a member of the Yacht Club. But even the laws of the sea had little appeal for FDR. He was perpetually good-humored and energetic but made little secret of his desire to move on.

  Grenville Clark, a Harvard classmate who was a fellow clerk at the firm, recalled FDR in those early years. “We were a small group,” said Clark, “and in our leisure hours sometimes fell into discussions of our hopes and ambitions. I remember him saying with engaging frankness that he wasn’t going to practice law forever, that he intended to run for office at the first opportunity, and that he wanted to be and thought he had a real chance to be President. I remember that he described very accurately the steps which he thought could lead to this goal. They were: first, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy … and finally the governorship of New York. ‘Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be president,’ he said.* I do not recall that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might have done. It seemed proper and sincere and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”

  Clark went on to say that FDR not only had made politics his profession for thirty-five years “but had adopted that profession deliberately and constantly enjoyed it, just as one enjoys a game that one has always liked and learned to play well.”36 FDR’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., made the same point somewhat differently. Had Franklin not gone into politics, said Vanderbilt, he would have been “just another corporate lawyer, summering in Newport and hibernating on Wall Street.”37

  Political lightning struck in the summer of 1910. As FDR remembered it, he was kidnapped off the streets of Poughkeepsie—“one of the first cases of deliberate kidnapping on record”—and taken to the Dutchess County policemen’s picnic. “On that joyous occasion of clams and sauerkraut and real beer I made my first speech, and I hav
e been apologizing for it ever since.”38

  Hyperbole aside, the Democratic leadership of Dutchess County did indeed make the initial overture to FDR. But never was a victim more eager to accompany his abductors. Because of the large working-class vote in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County was one of the few Democratic strongholds in upstate New York.* And for a political novice seeking entry to the state legislature, there were few opportunities so golden.

  The first feelers were extended by Judge John E. Mack, the district attorney of Dutchess County and one of three members of the Democratic party’s executive committee. Mack had been a friend of FDR’s father, James, and owned a 100-acre farm in Clove Valley where he raised prizewinning peonies. In the folksy manner of upstate New York he called himself “a Dutchess County farmer who does a little lawyering on the side.” Beneath the folksiness lay cunning political instinct. Mack was virtually unbeatable at the polls. He endeared himself to his Irish and Italian constituents in Poughkeepsie by not prosecuting public drunks provided they sign a release asking him to lock them up for six months should they be arrested again. Mack’s rationale was based on the theory “All dogs get one bite.” And it was a surefire winner in the immigrant community. He courted the rural vote equally assiduously by prosecuting chicken thieves for the more serious crime of burglary rather than petty larceny. Mack prided himself on being able to hear the political grass grow beneath the soil, and in the early summer of 1910 he engineered an excuse to call on FDR at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Some documents, it seems, needed Sara’s signature. Rather than mail them, he thought he’d drop them by personally.

  FDR received Mack warmly. When their business was completed, the talk turned to politics. The Democrats were in trouble in Dutchess County, Mack told Franklin. The incumbent Democratic assemblyman, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler of Barrytown, wanted to retire. A descendent of John Jacob Astor on his maternal side, Chanler had been elected lieutenant governor in 1906. In 1908 he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination, only to lose the election to Charles Evans Hughes. After exposure to statewide politics, Chanler was bored with being a mere assemblyman and was thinking of stepping down. If he did, would Franklin consider running? FDR could scarcely believe his good fortune. The Second Assembly District was as safe a Democratic seat as any outside the Solid South. Nothing would please him more, he told the judge. Mack casually suggested that FDR spend some time on weekends in Poughkeepsie getting to know local Democrats and let it go at that. There was no offer, merely an inquiry.*

  Two weeks later, Edward E. Perkins, president of the First National Bank of Poughkeepsie, who was also the Democratic state committeeman for Dutchess County, invited Franklin to a dispersal sale of high-grade Guernseys on the Reece farm in Wappinger Falls. They could run down and pick up some good ones, said Perkins. On the way home, after inspecting the cattle, Perkins confirmed to FDR that Lewis Chanler did not wish to run again. Would Franklin be interested? “I’d like to talk to my mother first,” Roosevelt replied.

  They drove on to Poughkeepsie and pulled into a parking spot in front of Perkins’s bank. “Frank,” he said, “the men that are looking out that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Franklin.39

  If the New York legislative seat was certain for the Democrats, why was the party leadership so eager to bestow it on a neophyte like FDR? The decision was not as bizarre as it might appear. For the men who ran the county, a seat in the New York Assembly was small potatoes. The important offices were sheriff, tax assessor, county clerk, the various town supervisors, the judges and prosecuting attorneys—positions that levied taxes, spent money, and enforced the law. The assembly seat was a low-paying, part-time job in Albany. Second, while Poughkeepsie was safely Democratic, the rural areas of the county tilted Republican. It was useful to have someone on the ticket who could appeal to conservative voters in the countryside. In 1910, all New York counties employed the party-column ballot. Straight-ticket voting was the rule, and successful party leaders always sought a balanced ticket: a name or two on the ballot that would reassure the district’s farmers and small-town residents. At the national level, that traditionally dictated the choice of presidential running mates (FDR’s 1932 selection of John Nance Garner, for example), and the same calculus applied at county level. The Roosevelt name was a tremendous drawing card, and a Democratic Roosevelt on the ticket might galvanize the rural voters of Dutchess County. Finally, electoral campaigns were expensive—even in 1910. And FDR (or at least Sara) had deep pockets. “I guess several people thought that I would be a gold mine,” Franklin said later, “but unfortunately the gold was not there.” Not quite true. When party fund-raisers came calling, the Roosevelts eventually coughed up $2,500—about $50,000 in current value, a substantial sum for a seat in the state legislature.40

  Sara had little difficulty with Franklin’s decision. Her father had gone to China twice with nothing in his pocket, and twice he had returned with a fortune. The risks of political life, the winner-take-all aspect of a campaign, and the high-stakes rewards appealed to her Delano instincts. TR had started small and made it to the White House. Sara had no doubt that her son was as gifted as his Oyster Bay cousin, and she understood the advantage her personal fortune gave to FDR. She would have preferred that he make a brilliant career at the law; she would have been even more pleased if he had chosen to be a country squire like James; but if Franklin wanted politics, she resolved to make the best of it. As her friend Rita Halle Kleeman put it, “All her life Sara had been accustomed to accepting the decisions of the men in the family whom she loved and respected. From the moment she heard Franklin make his simple, sincere declaration of principles, she accepted his decision and knew that it was wise.”41 And when Sara embraced a decision, she did so without reservation. Within days she was referring to the surrounding countryside as “Franklin’s district.”42

  Many years later, sitting at Springwood on election night awaiting the presidential returns, Sara reflected on that first campaign. “I shall never forget it,” she said. “I was one of the few sympathizers Franklin had among his own people. Many of our friends said it was a shame for so fine a young man to associate with ‘dirty’ politicians. Some of them hoped he would be defeated for his own sake and learn a lesson. I knew only that I would always be proud of him [and] I was indeed happy when he won.”43*

  Franklin discussed the matter with Eleanor, and she too was delighted.44 But he did not ask her approval. “I listened to all his plans with interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play. I felt I must acquiesce in whatever he might decide and be willing to go to Albany if he should be elected.”45

  A greater question mark for FDR was cousin Theodore. TR had just returned from a twelve-month safari in East Africa (“I hope every lion will do his duty,” J. P. Morgan quipped on the eve of TR’s departure) and was beginning to thrash around in the politics of the Empire State. If he should campaign in Dutchess County and say anything remotely disparaging about his Democratic kinsman, it would end Franklin’s political career before it began. FDR hesitated to approach the former president directly but with Sara’s encouragement laid the problem before Bamie, who visited Campobello that summer. As FDR hoped, Bamie wrote to her brother immediately. “Franklin ought to go into politics without the least regard as to where I speak or don’t speak,” TR replied on August 10. “Franklin is a fine fellow,” he told Bamie, although he wished he were a Republican.46 FDR correctly interpreted the former president’s reply as a green light. When TR spoke before a throng of 40,000 well-wishers at the Dutchess County Fair later that autumn, he refrained from mentioning either Franklin or his Republican opponent.

  FDR’s fledgling campaign ended before it began. In mid-September, three weeks before the Democrats held their nominating caucus, Lewis Chanler announced for reelection. He was not stepping down. The Assembly might be dull, but it was far liv
elier than no office at all. Franklin felt snakebitten. He went to Mack and Perkins and threatened to run as an independent. Mack knew Roosevelt was serious. “Why not run for the Senate?” he asked. For a second time, FDR could scarcely believe his good fortune. The State Senate seemed far more attractive than the Assembly, although the odds of winning were slight: Mack put them at one chance in five. The Senate seat comprised Dutchess, Putnam, and Columbia counties, the three counties stacked one above the other along the east bank of the Hudson. The district was thirty miles wide and ninety miles long, and, with one exception, no Democrat had won the seat since 1856.47 The Republican incumbent, Senator John F. Schlosser of Fishkill Landing, was a well-known lawyer, seasoned campaigner, and president of the State Volunteer Firemen’s Association. His 2-to-1 margin of victory in 1908 made him appear invincible. Roosevelt was undeterred. Youth and inexperience melded with the patrician confidence instilled at Springwood, Groton, and Harvard. Franklin exuded confidence in victory from the first day of the campaign.