It was no secret in New York that Franklin Roosevelt was ill. Newspapers reported that the one-time state senator and failed vice presidential candidate had fallen ill on Campobello Island and was taken by stretcher to a hospital in the city. Soon the diagnosis became public: Polio.
For New York’s ruthlessly pragmatic politicians there was no longer any reason to speculate about Franklin Roosevelt’s future. He had none. True, he tried to pretend otherwise, telling friends that it was just a matter of time before he regained control of his legs. He told an old friend from the Wilson Administration, former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, that he was getting better every week. McAdoo was glad to hear it — he had hoped to run for president in 1920 to succeed his father-in-law, Wilson, but was denied at the convention. Things would be different in 1924, McAdoo thought, and he was counting on allies like Roosevelt to help him.
Roosevelt and his friend Louis Howe kept a lively correspondence with prominent Democrats in the months following his polio diagnosis. He was hidden from public view, but hardly out of mind — or at least that was the point. And he saw an opportunity to play the role of power broker in the summer of 1922, when New York Democrats were looking for a candidate for governor.
The Republican incumbent, Nathan Miller, had defeated Al Smith in 1920 but was not especially popular. But Democrats appeared to have nobody to challenge him — nobody, that is, save for the wildly controversial newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, a former congressman. Hearst had made many enemies in New York politics, none greater than Al Smith, who had retired to private life but who remained the state’s most-popular politician.
FDR saw his opportunity: He wrote a letter to Smith urging him to return to public life, adding a nudge by saying that if Smith stayed on the sidelines, his old enemy Hearst might be the party’s candidate. Roosevelt then published an open letter to Smith, pleading with him to run again.
Smith agreed, and Franklin Roosevelt was given credit for persuading the former governor to return to the campaign trail. FDR was unable to walk and was invisible to the public, but when Al Smith declared his candidacy and then won election in a landslide, he was seen as a power broker in his home state. Mission accomplished.
There was more to come.
Even as he sought valiantly to rebuild his strength, even as he assured others — and perhaps even himself — that he would indeed walk again, Franklin Roosevelt tried to prove himself to Al Smith. FDR ignored the contempt he saw in the eyes of some of Smith’s advisers, especially Robert Moses and Belle Moskowitz, both of whom saw Roosevelt as an amateur who lacked Smith’s deep knowledge of state politics. Smith himself tended to treat Roosevelt as a child or a student: somebody who could be trusted with minor tasks, but who still had some growing up to do.
Smith decided to make history in 1924. He would be a candidate for president of the United States. No Catholic had ever won a major party’s presidential nomination. His campaign manager, Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy, asked Roosevelt for help in soliciting support for Smith among the elite progressives who tended to look down at politicians like Smith. Roosevelt agreed, and in doing so spurned the candidate who seemed more like him – his old friend William Gibbs McAdoo, who was Treasury secretary during the Wilson years. Roosevelt did his job well enough that Smith asked him to deliver his nominating speech at the party’s convention in Madison Square Garden. It would be his first public appearance since contracting polio.
Then, a few months before the convention, Charles Murphy, Smith’s campaign manager, died. Smith again turned to Franklin Roosevelt, naming him as Murphy’s replacement to run his campaign. Only two years earlier, Roosevelt’s mother was urging him to retire to a quiet life as a country squire in Hyde Park. Now, from his wheelchair, he was the campaign manager for a major presidential candidate and was about to speak not only to thousands of delegates but to the entire country through the new miracle of the age: radio.
But the convention had produced two stars, two very different men from New York who represented two very different traditions.
Not everybody was pleased with the idea of a Roosevelt, one of the nation’s most-distinguished families, working to put a Catholic in the White House. Roosevelt received scores of letters condemning him as a traitor to his people. “What is the matter with you,” one letter writer asked “Keep the Pope out of the U.S.” The letter was signed, simply, KKK.
The Klan was a major faction in the Democratic Party, and not just in the South. As Democrats gathered in Madison Square Garden for the convention, there were Klan delegates from more than a dozen states, including several from the Midwest and far West. They were determined to stop Al Smith, and their candidate of choice was Roosevelt’s old friend, William Gibbs McAdoo.
Franklin Roosevelt appeared on stage during the convention’s second day, after propelling himself to the podium on crutches and smiling the whole time. He delivered a rip-roaring endorsement of Smith, calling him the “Happy Warrior.” Roosevelt’s speech set off a demonstration of more than an hour, to the chagrin of McAdoo and his Klan supporters. But the speech did more than simply place a Catholic’s name in nomination for the nation’s highest office. It placed Franklin Roosevelt on the side of the New America emerging in the immigrant wards of the cities, on the side of people who frightened rural America, Protestant America — the America that Roosevelt might have been expected to defend.
Instead, he was the spokesman for the candidate of New America, Al Smith.
And now the battle was joined, and at stake was more than a presidential nomination. During more than two weeks, and through 103 ballots – the longest convention ever – the Democratic Party argued over the very idea of who was an American, and what Americanism meant, in the third decade of the 20th century. It was played out in the contest between Smith, the New York Catholic, and McAdoo, the progressive Protestant who had the overt support of the Ku Klux Klan. When Franklin Roosevelt chose sides, he foreshadowed how this battle would end – with the triumph of New America and a winning coalition that would dominate American politics for a half-century.
But as the exhausted Democrats finally chose a compromise candidate after neither Smith nor McAdoo could win the necessary two-third majority, the party’s prospects seemed bleak as ever. And sure enough, the party was pummeled in the 1924 general election.
But the convention had produced two stars, two very different men from New York who represented two very different traditions.
And after 1924, Franklin Roosevelt and Al Smith would begin building a bridge across the party’s vast divide.
Photo from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Caption: Franklin Roosevelt, second from left, on crutches, welcomes Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis and Al Smith to Springwood in 1924.
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