FDR - Jean Edward Smith [119]
* The Senate’s constitutional responsibility is to give its “advice and consent” to treaties by two-thirds vote. It does not “ratify” treaties. Ratification is a technical diplomatic term that applies when the president formally signs the treaty bringing it into effect, subsequent to the Senate’s advice and consent.
* Newspapers sanitized Garner’s comment, and “warm piss” has come down through generations as “warm spit”: admittedly a four-letter word but scarcely as pungent as Cactus Jack’s characterization. Garner’s political insight is treated perceptively in a series of interviews with Bascom N. Timmons published in four installments by Collier’s, February 21, March 6, 16, and 20, 1948.
† Next to the League of Nations, Prohibition was the burning political issue of 1920. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, went into effect on January 15, 1920, a date widely celebrated by the drys and perhaps even more widely deplored by the nation’s wets. As a young legislator in Albany, FDR had backed the prohibitionist cause, reflecting the sentiments of his upstate district. Thus he had a record the drys could embrace. In his personal life, Roosevelt enjoyed a drink as much as anyone. He paid no attention to Prohibition and never believed in it for an instant.
* In his frequent retelling of the episode, FDR invariably escalated the event: “I grabbed the standard. About half a dozen men grabbed me and we had a jolly good fight, but I got the standard and it was paraded.” But Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, the Tammany stalwart who held the standard, reported that “FDR couldn’t budge it until Mr. Murphy sort of bowed to let it go and we let it go. The whole thing probably took less than four seconds. There wasn’t even an angry gesture.” Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 63 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954); Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
* The GOP had always taken a more forceful stand on women’s suffrage than the Democrats, who were still captive to their southern, traditionalist base. On October 1, 1920, Harding held a special day for suffragists and then a Social Justice Day in which he called for equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, a minimum wage, national health care, and a department of social justice—virtually the entire program of the League of Women Voters. Cox and Roosevelt let the opportunity slip by. Stanley J. Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s 87–101 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
* In 1922, the Democrats roared back under Murphy’s leadership. Al Smith was overwhelmingly returned to the governor’s office, and Dr. Royal S. Copeland, president of the New York Board of Health, easily defeated Calder for the Senate: 1,276,667 to 995,421. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1975).
TEN
POLIO
This is the happy Warrior;
this is he,
That every man in arms
should wish to be.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
AFTER EIGHT YEARS in Washington, FDR looked forward to spending the summer of 1921 at Campobello. Eleanor and the children left New York for the island as soon as school was over in June.* Franklin, who was detained by business, embarked on Friday, August 5, traveling the distance aboard Van Lear Black’s oceangoing yacht Sabalo. “I thought he looked tired when he left,” Missy LeHand wrote Eleanor. Both women hoped the brief sea voyage would revive him.1
FDR arrived at Campobello Sunday evening and found their eighteen-bedroom “cottage” overflowing with guests. In addition to five children and the normal complement of servants, tutors, and governesses, Louis Howe and his family were visiting, as were several friends from Washington, including Romanian diplomat Prince