FDR - Jean Edward Smith [132]
Proskauer reflected a moment and said, “Frank Roosevelt.”
“For God’s sake why?” Smith asked.
“Because you’re a Bowery mick and he’s a Protestant patrician and he’d take some of the curse off you.”85
Smith nodded his head, and the two men walked over to see FDR at campaign headquarters. “Joe and I have been talking this over, and I’ve come here to ask you to make the nominating speech,” Smith said.
“Oh, Al, I’d love to do it, but I’m so busy here working with delegates I have no time to write a speech.” Could Joe write it? Roosevelt asked. The fact was, Proskauer had already prepared a draft, concluding with a paraphrase of William Wordsworth’s encomium to the “Happy Warrior.” FDR thought the reference too poetic for the ordinary delegate on the floor but under the pressure of time agreed to deliver it. “It will probably be a flop,” he told Proskauer.86
The Democratic convention convened in Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden on June 24, 1924, for what would prove the longest convention on record. With 1,098 delegates, and 732 votes required to nominate under the party’s two-thirds rule, the Democrats met for an unprecedented seventeen days and required 103 ballots before settling on West Virginia’s John W. Davis, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, as the most viable compromise between Smith and McAdoo. The 1924 convention was also the first covered by national radio and broadcast live across the country.87
FDR was in his seat as chairman of the New York delegation when the opening gavel fell on June 24, and he attended every session thereafter. His arrival each day was carefully planned. He was driven to a side entrance of the Garden and wheeled inside by his sixteen-year-old son, James. When they reached the door to the hall closest to the New York delegation, James would lock his father’s braces and pull him to a standing position so he could enter the convention floor on his feet. FDR would then grasp his son’s upper arm with his left hand, place most of his weight on the crutch under his right arm, and ratchet himself forward one halting step at a time.
To make the passage up the aisle as easy as possible, the Roosevelts arrived early and left late. “So as not to scare everyone to death,” as FDR put it, he and James joked and bantered as they made their way along. “The process of getting into his seat was an ordeal for Father,” James recalled. “We practiced the awkward business standing together by a chair, with me supporting him and taking his crutch as he lowered himself into his chair. Once he was seated, it was my task to stand by, run errands, deliver messages, and help Father off the floor when he wanted to leave.”88
The galleries, stuffed with Tammany supporters, recognized FDR and regularly broke into applause as he made his perilous way down the aisle each day. Over the radio, a national audience could hear the applause as the announcer intoned, “I don’t know what it is, but I rather imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt is coming in. He always gets a hand for the gallant fight he is making.… Yes, it is. There he comes slowly down the aisle on his crutches.”89
Roosevelt was scheduled to speak at twelve noon on Thursday, June 26. Waiting expectantly in the gallery were Sara, Eleanor, and the four other children, plus Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, who joined the family for the occasion. Dickerman recalled how carefully Franklin had prepared himself: “Nobody knows how that man worked. They measured off in the library of the Sixty-fifth Street house the distance to the podium, and he practiced getting across that distance. Oh, he struggled.”90
Shortly before noon Franklin and James left their seats on the floor and made their slow, awkward way up the aisle. “Outwardly, [Father] was beaming, seemingly confident and unconcerned, but I could sense his inner tenseness,”