FDR - Jean Edward Smith [114]
Al Smith was nominated by Tammany’s Bourke Cockran, one of the most gifted orators of the day. FDR’s seconding speech was brief and well received. Poised, confident, standing at a convention podium for the first time in his career, he was effusive in his praise of Smith: “I love him as a friend; I look up to him as a man; I am with him as a Democrat; and we all know his record throughout the nation as a great servant of the public.”63
Grenville Emmett thought FDR’s speech “could not have been better.” Frances Perkins said Franklin was “one of the stars of the show. I recall how he displayed his athletic ability by vaulting over a row of chairs to get to the platform in a hurry. Al [Smith] always thought of this as the beginning of his friendship with Roosevelt and often referred to it as Roosevelt’s real start in important public life. And so it was.”64
Smith remained in contention for seven ballots. On the eighth, Murphy switched the bulk of New York’s vote to three-term Ohio governor James Cox, a competent but colorless public servant, moderate, wet, untainted by any link to the Wilson administration, and uncommitted on the League. FDR and some nineteen upstate delegates voted for William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law and onetime secretary of the Treasury. For the next four days the convention wavered among McAdoo, Cox, and the nation’s Red-chasing attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Cox gained the lead on the thirty-ninth ballot and went over the top on the forty-fourth shortly after midnight on Monday, July 6. The convention then adjourned until noon the next day, when it would meet to choose the party’s vice presidential nominee.
Early Tuesday morning Cox’s campaign manager, Edmund H. Moore, called the governor at his home in Dayton. Whom did he wish as a running mate? “I’ve been thinking about this a good deal,” Cox replied, “and my choice is young Roosevelt. His name is good, he’s right geographically, and he’s anti-Tammany. But since we need a united front, go to see Charlie Murphy and say we won’t nominate Roosevelt if he objects.”65
Moore followed instructions. “I don’t like Roosevelt,” said Murphy. “He is not well known in the country, but, Ed, this is the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency has shown me courtesy. That’s why I’d vote for the devil himself if Cox wanted me to. Tell him we will nominate Roosevelt on the first ballot as soon as we assemble.”66
When the Democrats reconvened at noon, the early roll call of the states placed several favorite sons in nomination. As the roll call continued, Florida yielded to Ohio, at which point Judge Timothy T. Ansberry, leader of the Buckeye delegation, made his way to the platform. “The young man whose name I am going to suggest,” said Ansberry, “is but three years over the age of thirty-five prescribed by the Constitution … but he has crowded into that short period a very large experience as a public official. His name is a name to conjure with in American politics: Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Indiana and Kansas seconded the nomination, the favorite sons withdrew, the rules were suspended, and FDR was nominated by acclamation.67
Josephus Daniels, by now the grand old man of the party, beloved by populists, Wilsonians, and big-city bosses alike, concluded the proceedings:
I wish to say that to me, and to five hundred thousand men in the American Navy, and to five million men in the Army, it is a matter of particular gratification that this Convention unanimously has chosen as a candidate for Vice President that clear-headed and able executive and patriotic citizen of New York, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.68