FDR - Jean Edward Smith [140]
FDR was in top form at the convention. As he and Elliott made their way to the platform, without the crutches that had been so evident in 1924, the 15,000 delegates and spectators roared their approval. Franklin’s healthy appearance and evident high spirits belied any impression that he was an invalid. At the podium he seemed perfectly relaxed, perfectly natural, nodding left and right, looking up at the galleries, waving with his right hand to acknowledge the applause.
The speech was one of Roosevelt’s finest. Again and again he described the qualities Smith brought to the race, culminating with what in retrospect seems an almost autobiographical refrain. To be a great president, said FDR, required “the quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals, that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to those in sorrow or trouble, that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow man.”
The Roosevelt who delivered those lines was a far different man from the callow young assistant secretary of the Navy who had run for vice president in 1920. His concluding remarks invoking the image of the Happy Warrior brought the delegates to their feet in a remarkable display of party unity.35 Smith was nominated on the first ballot with 849 votes.† Senate Minority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas accepted the nomination for vice president, and the convention adjourned ready to take on Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis in November.
The convention bluster faded quickly. Except for the nation’s farmers, the United States basked in unprecedented prosperity. The GOP hold on the House and Senate seemed secure, and Herbert Hoover, dour though he might be, appeared positively scintillating compared to Calvin Coolidge, who had chosen not to run. Even worse for the Democrats, Smith’s candidacy found little resonance outside the cities of the East Coast. Catholic and wet, he alienated much of rural, fundamentalist America while his ties to big business did little to energize the party’s working-class base. On the stump, Smith proved even more parochial than his city slicker image suggested. As the acerbic Baltimore Sun columnist H. L. Mencken noted, “Al Smith’s world begins at Coney Island and ends at Buffalo.”36
FDR declined Smith’s offer to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee and continued to resist efforts to nominate him for governor.37 Both he and Howe recognized that 1928 would not be a good year for Democrats, and Franklin wished to concentrate on regaining the use of his legs so that he might seek the governorship in 1932 and perhaps run for president in 1936. (Roosevelt and Howe assumed that Hoover would be reelected in 1932).38 When the New York State Democratic convention met in Rochester at the end of September, FDR was ensconced at Warm Springs determined not to be drawn into the fray.
By this time, party leaders recognized that Smith’s campaign was in trouble. Unless he could carry New York, with its forty-five electoral votes, he could not hope to win the presidency. And if Smith lost New York, he would likely take the entire ticket down with him. The Republicans had just nominated the state’s crusading attorney general, Albert Ottinger, for governor. Ottinger not only had amassed a superb record fighting price racketeers and stock manipulators but was also of working-class Jewish origin, up from the sidewalks of New York. A formidable campaigner, he would cut deeply into the traditional Democratic vote in the five boroughs. The unanimous consensus of the county chairmen who gathered at Rochester was that the only Democrat who stood a chance of beating Ottinger was Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, they believed, would add another 200,000 upstate votes to the ticket.
FDR was unmoved. On the eve of the gubernatorial nomination he sent a public telegram to Smith restating his decision not to run: AS I AM ONLY FORTY-SIX I OWE IT