FDR - Jean Edward Smith [128]
FDR kept close watch on the Democratic political scene. In December 1922 he counseled against the search for a charismatic figure to lead the party out of the wilderness. “Personal candidacies so rarely develop into anything tangible,” he wrote Byron R. Newton of the New York Herald. “In our own Party for the last 50 or 60 years the nomination for the Presidency has been nearly every time a matter of luck, or some eleventh hour opportunity boldly seized upon.” What was important, said Roosevelt, was “to make the nation understand again that Republican rule means government by selfish interests and powerfully entrenched individuals.”61
Friends and acquaintances bombarded FDR with home remedies. In February 1923 an old friend in England sent a new elixir that she was certain would effect a cure. “It may be monkey glands or perhaps it is made out of the dried eyes of the extinct three-toed rhinoceros,” Franklin wrote Dr. Draper. “You doctors have sure got imaginations. Have any of you thought of distilling the remains of King Tut-Ankh-Amen? The serum might put new life into some of our mutual friends. In the meantime, I am going to Florida to let nature take its course—nothing like Old Mother Nature anyway.”62
Roosevelt rented a sixty-foot houseboat, the Weona II, for $1,500 and planned to spend several months cruising off the Florida Keys. Eleanor accompanied him for the first few days but did not enjoy herself and returned to New York. “I had never considered holidays in winter or escape from cold weather an essential part of living,” she remembered. “I tried fishing but had no skill and no luck. When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me.”63
Franklin, on the other hand, had a rollicking good time. Old friends came down to visit—Livingston Davis; Lewis Cass Ledyard, Jr., and his wife, Ruth; Henry and Frances De Rahm; and John Lawrence and his wife, Lucy. Ledyard had been an intimate friend of FDR since their clerkship days at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn; De Rahm was a Harvard classmate, and Frances, née Dana, had been one of Franklin’s early heartthrobs; Lawrence, another classmate, was now a prosperous New England wool manufacturer.
Except for Franklin, the men began each day with a swim au naturel. Frances De Rahm evidently went skinny-dipping too on occasion. As she jauntily wrote in the ship’s log:
A female went swimming—she was far from a peach.
She was as the Lord made her, so what could she do
But call herself, gaily, a true 32.
Louis Howe brought down some paperwork that needed FDR’s attention and spent a few days on board. Like Eleanor, he had little luck fishing; unlike ER, he gladly took refuge in the illicit rum that flowed freely. As Howe put it:
Colder, colder grew the night, we really suffered pain.
We’d sat and sat with rod and reel and fished and fished in vain.
And that we thought was reason fair to take to rum again.
In Miami, former presidential candidate James Cox came aboard for a visit. “Jim’s eyes filled with tears when he saw me,” FDR recalled years later. “I gathered from his conversation that he was dead certain that I had had a stroke and that another one would completely remove me. From that day on Jim always shook his head when my name was mentioned and said in sorrow that I was a hopeless invalid.”64
Cox to the contrary, the voyage worked wonders for Franklin’s morale. “I am sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good,” he wrote his mother on March 15. “I am sunburned and in fine shape. My friends have been dear and look after me all the time. They are great fun to have on board in this