FDR - Jean Edward Smith [112]
Like most Democrats, FDR supported the League but did not see it as the be-all and end-all of public life. “Last spring I thought the League of Nations merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia,” he told the New York Bar Association in March 1919. “But in June I went abroad [and] found in Europe not only a desire to beat the Hun but a growing demand that out of it all must come something else.”47 Three months later he warned the graduating class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute that “the United States would commit a grievous wrong to itself and to all mankind if it were even to attempt to go backwards toward an old Chinese wall policy of isolation.”48 But unlike Wilson he did not object to Lodge’s reservations and believed the president should compromise to get the League accepted. The details were less important than the final product. “I have read the draft of the League three times,” he declared, “and always find something to object to in it, and that is the way with everybody.”49
The British, the French, and most cabinet officers shared that view. In September 1919, the British government dispatched former foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Fallodon) to Washington to plead with Wilson to accept the Lodge reservations. Wilson refused to receive him. When the Roosevelts entertained Lord Grey and his staff at Christmastime, they became non gratae in the eyes of the White House.50 The consequence for FDR was negligible because by January 1920 the Wilson administration had come unglued and it was every man for himself. Colonel House was no longer consulted; Secretary of State Lansing had been dismissed; Franklin Lane resigned at Interior, as did Carter Glass at the Treasury, frustrated at their inability to communicate with Wilson. Daniels wished to resign as well but remained out of personal loyalty to the invalid president.
It was in the context of the derelict Wilson administration that FDR began to look to his political future. But he did so discreetly. “I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not the bad luck of the early worm,” he wrote an impetuous supporter in late 1919.51
Already FDR had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate or the governorship should Al Smith choose not to run for reelection. But the possibility of the latter was slight, and the chance of defeating a popular Republican incumbent in the Senate, his good friend James Wadsworth of Geneseo, appeared equally remote. “I am not running for Senator or Governor or dog catcher,” Franklin told a friend shortly after Christmas. “I do not personally intend to make an early Christian martyr of myself this fall if it is going to be a strongly Republican year.”52
The idea of seeking the vice presidency, just as the possibility of running for the New York State Senate in 1910, came to Roosevelt largely by chance. On January 10, 1920, FDR received a visit from an old friend, Louis B. Wehle, a Kentucky attorney and member of the War Industries Board who had admired Franklin since their days together on The Harvard Crimson. The Democrats’ presidential prospects looked bleak, said Wehle, but after talking to a number of party leaders he had hit upon a ticket that might win: Herbert Hoover for president, Roosevelt for vice president. Hoover was from California, FDR from New York: two states the Democrats must carry if they were to succeed. Hoover enjoyed a sterling reputation as wartime food administrator, he supported the Treaty of Versailles with minor reservations, and he was especially popular among American women, who in 1920 would be voting for the first time.53 Like Hoover’s, Franklin’s wartime service as assistant secretary of the