FDR - Jean Edward Smith [143]
The two women sat quietly, watching the professionals tabulate the results. At 1 A.M. Ed Flynn detected a stronger than expected showing from the returns trickling in from upstate. He telephoned Roosevelt to say there was a glimmer of hope. FDR was running far ahead of Smith and might squeak through. Franklin didn’t believe it. Flynn was “crazy to wake him up,” he said.55
At two o’clock the mood in the room lightened. Flynn could recognize a trend as well as any politician in the country. But he worried about the slow count. It was an article of faith among Democratic politicians that the GOP bosses upstate delayed reporting their results until they knew how many votes they needed. Flynn issued a statement to the press threatening to dispatch a thousand lawyers upstate to prevent the Republicans from stealing the election. The threat evidently had the desired effect, and the laggard upstate counties began to report more rapidly. Sara and Miss Perkins listened as the men kept count. “Forty votes here, one hundred votes there, seventy-five votes somewhere else. They mounted up.”56
By 4 A.M. FDR had pulled ahead. The Democrats would hold the governor’s mansion. The final results gave Roosevelt 2,130,238 votes to Ottinger’s 2,104,630—a majority of 25,608 out of more than 4 million votes cast. Sara and Frances Perkins joined the men in a toast. Then, as Miss Perkins recalled, she shared a taxi with Sara to East Sixty-fifth Street. The seventy-four-year-old matriarch bounded up the steps, eager to get inside and inform her son of his triumph.57
* The waters at Warm Springs have been traced to rain that falls on Pine Mountain, several miles away, runs down 3,800 feet into a vast pocket of rock, where it is warmed by the inner earth, and returns to the surface at a temperature of 88° at a rate of 800 gallons per minute. Editor’s note, 2 The Roosevelt Letters, 448 Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
* William H. Woodin, the president of American Car and Foundry and a registered Republican, became FDR’s first secretary of the Treasury in 1933 but resigned because of ill health a year later. He was succeeded by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served for the remainder of the Roosevelt administration.
* The “March of Dimes” (the name suggested by the comedian Eddie Cantor) was the principal fund-raising arm of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which FDR organized in 1938 and which the historian David Oshinsky called “the gold standard for private charities, the largest voluntary health organization of all time.” The pioneering research of Dr. Jonas Salk was supported in large measure by the foundation. His discovery of a vaccine against polio was announced by Basil O’Connor, chairman of the foundation, on April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of FDR’s death. David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story 53–55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also see Richard Carter, Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk 268 ff. (New York: Trident Press, 1966).
* Eleanor remained active at Todhunter until 1938, although she did not teach after FDR was elected president. In 1939 the school was absorbed by the Dalton School.
* On the eve of the convention, FDR laid out the Democrats’ foreign policy in an article in Foreign Affairs. Scathingly critical of the GOP’s go-it-alone isolationism, Roosevelt urged greater cooperation with the League of Nations and membership in the World Court: “We Democrats do not believe in the possibility or the desirability of an isolated national experience or a national development heedless of the welfare, prosperity and peace of the other peoples