FDR - Jean Edward Smith [149]
For Franklin and Eleanor this was the beginning of a remarkable partnership. FDR did not insist his wife drop anything she cared about to become first lady, and Eleanor undertook to support her husband’s public career in every way possible. They would have different priorities and different interests. They would often disagree. Their personal lives would be separate. But they shared a mutual respect that eventually resolved most differences.
From his first day in office FDR operated as though he had been governor for many years. He said there had been so few changes in Albany since he had left the State Senate in 1913 that it was like renewing an acquaintance with an old friend.27 Roosevelt knew instinctively how to handle the controls of government, an intuitive “feel” that could not be explained rationally. Like all true artists he made what he did look easy. Sam Rosenman was amazed that FDR never seemed to worry. “He would think a problem through very carefully. Having come to a decision, he would dismiss it from his mind as finished business. He never went back to it to worry about whether his decision was right.”28 Frances Perkins said, “Roosevelt was a walking American history book.” There were no isolated events for FDR. Everything that happened in politics, every crisis, every decision taken, was part of a larger American tapestry, part of an experiment in government still being worked out.29
The state machinery Roosevelt inherited from Al Smith was in good working order. Rather than fix what was not broken, Franklin moved forward in new directions of his own, first in public power, agriculture, and conservation, and then, after the Depression started, in relief and social security.
FDR’s concern for electric power dated from his service in the state senate and had continued without interruption. He often spoke of harnessing the high tides of Passamaquoddy Bay, near Campobello, for hydroelectric purposes, and he was an early advocate of dual-purpose flood control dams on the tributaries of major rivers: dams that could be used both to store water and to generate electricity. As Roosevelt saw it, cheaper electric power required greater generating capacity as well as more effective regulation of public utility companies. In March 1929 he asked the legislature for authority to construct a series of hydroelectric plants on the Saint Lawrence and to sell the power to private companies at cost. Roosevelt also sought tighter regulation of existing utilities and suggested that publicly generated power serve “as a yardstick with which to measure the cost of producing and transmitting electricity.”30 The “yardstick” metaphor would later become a staple of New Deal rhetoric.
Roosevelt’s interest in agriculture was also of long standing, a natural product of his avocation of gentleman farmer at Hyde Park and Warm Springs. Whereas Al Smith had written off New York’s farmers as inherently Republican (“I never made any impression on any considerable number of them”31), FDR made farm relief the centerpiece of his legislative program. “If the farming population does not have sufficient purchasing power to buy new shoes, new clothes, new automobiles, the manufacturing centers must suffer.”32 Not only did Roosevelt’s interest revitalize the Democratic party upstate, it also helped him balance between the urban and rural wings of the party at the national level.33
FDR’s agriculture program was scarcely radical. But because the plight of the farmer was so dismal in the late twenties, anything that offered