FDR - Jean Edward Smith [118]
With Louis Howe’s help, FDR began to stitch together an upstate organization to contest the 1922 election. This time he was careful to stress party unity. Already mentioned as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt recognized the importance of a full-blown organization effort under Charles Murphy rather than another divisive split. William Calder, the Republican incumbent, was vulnerable, but to beat him the Democrats needed a united front.*
Speaking engagements carried Roosevelt throughout the state. He also undertook a wide range of charitable and philanthropic activities. In addition to the Harvard Board of Overseers, he became a member of the executive committee of the National Civic Federation, the Near East Relief Committee, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Seamen’s Church Institute. He headed a $2 million fund drive for Lighthouses for the Blind and accepted the chairmanship of the Greater New York Committee of the Boy Scouts of America. It was as chairman of the Scouts that on Thursday, July 28, 1921, FDR set sail up the Hudson for Bear Mountain and the annual Boy Scout Jamboree.
It was the type of occasion Franklin liked best. There were parades and speeches and solemn demonstrations of scouting activities. FDR posed for the newspapers surrounded by cheering boys and their scoutmasters. He served as master of ceremonies at a campfire before sailing back to the city that evening. Little did he realize that at some point during the day he had ingested a mysterious virus, incubated among the Boy Scouts, that would change his life forever.
* Hancock proved so adept at contract liquidation that soon after resigning from the Navy he joined the New York investment house of Lehman Brothers, rising to become one of its managing partners. In 1933, FDR called him to Washington to help organize the National Recovery Administration (NRA). During World War II Hancock returned to Washington to head an interdepartmental board to handle contract settlement, and he drafted the 1943 legislation on contract renegotiation.
* On the day before FDR’s inauguration in 1933, Eleanor asked her friend Lorena Hickok to pick her up at the Mayflower Hotel, where she and the president-elect were staying. Mrs. Roosevelt instructed the cab driver to take them to Rock Creek Cemetery so that she might gaze upon the statue once again. “In the old days when we lived here,” said Eleanor, “I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage, I’d come here alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.” Lorena A. Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady 92 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980).
* Wilson’s exclusion of the Senate placed him at odds with American practice. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley sent a five-man delegation to Paris to negotiate the peace treaty and among the five included three senators from the Foreign Relations Committee: William Pierce Frye (R., Maine), Cushman Kellogg Davis (R., Wisconsin), and George Gray (D., Delaware). McKinley’s foresight was rewarded when the Senate narrowly consented to the treaty 57–27, just three votes more than the required two thirds.
* Eleanor was startled by Wilson’s revelation. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she noted of Tumulty’s task in her diary. A president has a responsibility to keep himself informed. Later she wrote, “It was … a problem of allotting time. Franklin reserved certain periods for his study of the press, particularly the opposition press, and, at least while Louis Howe was with him, he was always closely informed on all shades of opinion in the country. This firsthand awareness of what people are doing and thinking and saying is essential to a president. When this information is filtered through other people, or selected with a view to what a few individuals think the president should