The story of Franklin Roosevelt’s coming of age as a politician — the years he spent in Washington serving as President Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy — is relatively well known. He left his position as a state senator in New York in 1913 to accept the job his cousin and uncle-in-law Theodore Roosevelt held at the outbreak of the Spanish American War. During the ensuing eight years, FDR had access to the new Democratic progressives who dominated the Wilson administration. He made friends and allies who would prove valuable when the time came for Roosevelt to make a move on the White House himself. He transformed himself from a local Albany lawmaker to a national figure schooled in national and international politics.
All of that is true. But history has forgotten how much time and effort Roosevelt devoted to his political ambitions in New York during his time in Washington. Roosevelt methodically used the contacts he made and the patronage power he wielded to build a power base of his own in the Empire State as he looked to the future and a return to electoral politics. Ironically, some of these maneuvers resembled the sort of tactics he regularly condemned when they were used by the state’s most powerful political machine, Tammany Hall.
Roosevelt spent slightly more than two years in Albany, from early 1911 to March of 1913, before moving on to Washington. His time in New York’s state Senate coincided with the passage of historic legislation designed to better protect workers and families from exploitation, unsafe working conditions, tragedy and misfortune. And in later years, Roosevelt and his loyal aide, Louis Howe, would put FDR in the middle of the push for these reforms.
In fact, Roosevelt had little interest in issues like a bill limiting the number of hours women and children could work in a single week. A good deal of his time in Albany was spent trying to obtain funding for a road project sought by a wealthy New Yorker who hired Roosevelt’s law firm to lobby for the project.
Meanwhile, the push for milestone social welfare and workplace safety reforms was being led by two men who had been sent to Albany by the Tammany Hall machine. Their names were Al Smith and Robert Wagner.
They were from the city. They were from Tammany. One, Wagner, was an immigrant. The other, Smith, was the grandson of an immigrant. Smith was a leader of the state assembly, and Wagner was president of the state Senate. Together, they led a special legislative commission that investigated working conditions in New York after the catastrophic fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in March 1911, when more than 140 workers died. Some were burned alive at their sewing machines. Others hurled themselves to their deaths from ninth-floor windows.
Smith, advised and accompanied by the renowned social reformer Frances Perkins, personally investigated working conditions throughout the state, and no doubt saw in the bedraggled faces of those workers his own parents and their friends who trudged through life in the factories of New York City in the late 19th century. The laws he wrote and helped pass, including the beginning of a minimum wage, limits on child labor, mandatory fire safety measures in factories, a college scholarship program for poor children, and, some years later, pensions for widows with young children, foreshadowed the New Deal and had the support of Boss Murphy and his cronies at Tammany Hall.
If you couldn’t beat Tammany politicians, perhaps it was time to at least make peace with them.
Roosevelt mobilized his army of federal jobholders in 1914, seizing an opportunity to run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. He knew he would not have the support of Murphy’s Tammany Hall and so was prepared to run a primary — the first one ever in New York — against Murphy’s eventual pick. He said he was running to free the party from Murphy’s bossism.
But Murphy, a shrewd operator, announced that he would support Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Germany, a man named James Gerard, as his candidate for Senate. Roosevelt was stunned – he was counting on support from the Wilson administration for his campaign. But Murphy had outfoxed him by choosing another Wilson man as his candidate.
Roosevelt wound up losing in a landslide. Primary elections had been designed to take power away from people like Murphy, but Roosevelt learned first-hand that the absolute opposite was true — in a primary election, the best-organized candidate had a huge advantage, and nobody was better organized than a Tammany candidate.
Roosevelt retreated to Washington but continued to monitor New York politics, looking for his next opportunity. To the surprise of everyone, perhaps including himself, he accepted an invitation to speak to Tammany Hall — to a room filled with people he once considered little more than crooks and grafters—on July 4, 1917. He posed for pictures with Boss Charlie Murphy and glad-handed his way around the room. Something was up — soon Tammany politicians like Jimmy Walker were encouraging Roosevelt to run for something else. Perhaps governor in 1918.
If you couldn’t beat Tammany politicians, perhaps it was time to at least make peace with them.
Franklin Roosevelt gave some thought to running for governor in 1918 but decided he wished to remain in Washington, with the nation now at war in Europe. In fact, he had hopes of following in his cousin Teddy’s footsteps — again — by leaving his desk and perhaps getting a Navy commission for active duty. That didn’t happen.
But with Roosevelt out of the race, Tammany turned to its favorite son – Al Smith.
Smith was a popular choice, in every sense of the word. Unlike Roosevelt, he was a man of the people, a candidate like none other in the colorful history of New York politics. He was a grade school dropout. He spoke in a workingman’s bellow. He knew what it was like to struggle, as his family did when his father died when he was 12.
And he was a gifted politician who knew how to connect with an audience, keeping them entertained and charmed – once upon a time, when he was a younger man, he dreamed of being an actor. One thing was certain: He remained a consummate performer.
Smith defeated the incumbent governor by a slender margin and then set about building a government that would embrace the kinds of social reforms he championed as a legislator. Roosevelt noticed, and soon the letters started arriving, with advice, job recommendations, and invitations to Navy events. The Wilson administration would come to an end after the 1920 elections, and FDR was looking for his next opportunity. Having a friend as governor of New York might come in handy.
But together they could help reorganize New York’s Democrats.
At the 1920 Democratic National Convention, Al Smith had his name placed in nomination for president simply as a symbolic gesture — he was just a placeholder candidate. But Smith asked his new friend Roosevelt to give the seconding speech for his nomination. And when Roosevelt was unexpectedly nominated for vice president, he asked Smith to second his nomination.
The burgeoning relationship between these unlikely allies became deeper in the fall of 1920 because of mutual disappointment. Smith was defeated for re-election – the first loss of his career — and the Democratic national ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt was trounced by Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. It was Roosevelt’s second straight defeat, and both were electoral disasters.
In the days afterwards, the two men commiserated via letter. Smith suggested perhaps it was all for the better. But Roosevelt sought to buck him up. The two of them would probably never run for office again, Roosevelt said. But together they could help reorganize New York’s Democrats.
Roosevelt told Smith he wanted to work with him to help build a new party, but soon politics was the least of Roosevelt’s concerns. After a swim off the island of Campobello in the summer of 1921, he lost the use of his legs.
Picture from the Museum of the City of New York. Caption: From Albany, Smith followed the 1928 presidential convention in Houston viaradio. The new medium did not serve him well, but his successor as governor, Franklin Roosevelt, mastered it.
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