FDR - Jean Edward Smith [142]
Despite his misgivings, Louis Howe set the campaign in motion, establishing headquarters at the Biltmore and organizing a statewide Independent Committee for Roosevelt and Lehman. Working hand in glove with Howe was Edward J. Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx, who had detached himself from the national campaign to work exclusively on the gubernatorial race. An enlightened protégé of Charles Murphy, Flynn hailed from a prosperous Irish background, had graduated from Fordham Law School, and detested the backslapping and glad-handing endemic to the political fraternity. Courteous and cultivated in social relations, Flynn sought to keep his own machine honest and responsive. He hit it off instantly with both FDR and Howe. “Politics has never been my vocation,” Flynn once said, “but it’s been an avocation. I’ve had a lot of fun with politics but I’ve always been in the position where, if anything happened, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference to me.”48
FDR was joined on the campaign trail by Frances Perkins and Sam Rosenman, a young member of the New York legislature assigned to bring Roosevelt up to date on state issues. Like Howe and Missy LeHand, Rosenman would become a permanent fixture of Roosevelt’s entourage, a walking file cabinet of legislative detail.* For his part, Rosenman, who had been initially skeptical of FDR’s patrician origins, was immediately impressed by his uncanny ability to go to the heart of an issue. Rosenman reported that he “had never seen anybody who could grasp the facts of a complicated problem as quickly and as thoroughly as Roosevelt.”49 Frances Perkins, who had not been thrilled by Franklin as a state senator, was also impressed by what she saw now. She was awed by FDR’s stamina and pleasantly surprised by his good humor. “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice,” Franklin told her, “You learn to say ‘that’s all right’ and drink it.”50
For four weeks FDR barnstormed the state, sometimes speaking as often as fourteen times a day. Rosenman marveled at his strength and courage, noting that merely to stand up and sit down was, for Roosevelt, “more exercise than the ordinary man takes during an entire day.”51 In Troy on October 26 Franklin delighted a cheering audience with a reference to the effort he was putting forth. He reminded his listeners of the “sob stuff” Republican editorial writers had published about his physical condition: “Too bad about that unfortunate sick man, isn’t it.”52 When he spoke in many upstate cities, the turnout was twice as large as the number of registered Democrats. Initially, bookmakers favored Ottinger 2 to 1. By the end of October the odds had reversed. “I am horribly afraid you are going to be elected,” Howe told Franklin a week before the election.53 FDR ended the campaign in Poughkeepsie, where some 20,000 people paraded down Main Street in his honor.
On the morning of November 6, Roosevelt voted at Hyde Park and then went to campaign headquarters at the Biltmore to listen to the returns. By nine o’clock it was clear that the Democrats were going down, and as the evening wore on the avalanche accelerated. Even the Solid South, which Cox and Roosevelt had managed to hang on to in 1920, had split, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas going Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.* In New York, Smith trailed Hoover by 100,000 votes. FDR was running ahead of the ticket but was still 25,000 votes behind Ottinger, with much of the normally Republican upstate vote still to come in. Shortly after midnight the morning papers appeared, trumpeting a GOP sweep. Franklin browsed through them, took the loss philosophically, and said he was going home to East Sixty-fifth Street to get some sleep. Newsmen and campaign workers drifted away, and the big ballroom in which the Democrats had planned a victory celebration went dark.
One room stayed open. The pros continued