FDR - Jean Edward Smith [158]
Roosevelt left day-to-day management of the campaign to Howe and Farley. Howe was FDR’s alter ego. He had little need to consult “the Boss” because after working with Franklin for twenty years he knew precisely what moves to make and when to make them. He was a backroom man without equal in Democratic politics, and his loyalty to Roosevelt was legendary. As Farley noted, “Louis Howe thought of nothing else during his waking hours other than how to secure the party’s nomination for the Governor.”5 For his part, Farley was the perfect complement, the outside man to Howe’s inside. A tall, jovial Irishman whose smooth skin and bald head made him resemble a peeled egg, Farley was a joiner, a mixer, and a glad-hander who never met a ward heeler he could not charm—and whose name he never forgot.6 Like Howe, he was unencumbered by ideology, other than partisan attachment to the Democratic party. Unlike Howe, he could work with anyone and was a master at grassroots political organization. They not only made a remarkable team, they liked each other. Farley, seventeen years younger, did not encroach on Howe’s role as FDR’s deputy, and Howe recognized the skill Farley brought to the effort.
While Howe and Farley busied themselves launching a letter-writing campaign on FDR’s behalf, Roosevelt focused on the economic crisis. By the winter of 1930–31, the nation and the State of New York had fallen into the trough of the Depression. Unemployment, which stood at 4 million in March 1930, zoomed to 8 million in March 1931. Desperate men selling apples appeared on urban street corners, breadlines stretched block after block, community soup kitchens ladled out thin porridge, and “Hoovervilles”—little settlements of tin shacks, abandoned autos, and discarded packing crates—were springing up in the dumps and railroad yards of big cities to house the dispossessed. Every week, every day, more workers joined the ranks of despair. Hoover responded in February 1931 by urging Americans to embrace the principles of local responsibility and mutual self-help. If we depart from those principles, said the president, we “have struck at the roots of self-government.”7
Confronted with the reluctance of federal authorities to take action, FDR summoned the New York legislature into special session. Breaking with the tradition of what economic historians call the “night watchman state,” Roosevelt asked the legislature to immediately appropriate $20 million to provide useful work where possible and, where such work could not be found, to provide the needy “with food against starvation and with clothing and shelter against suffering.”
In broad terms I assert that modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.… To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.8
Roosevelt’s speech to the legislature on August 28, 1931, marked the genesis of the New Deal. The term was not used: that would come in FDR’s acceptance speech the following year. But the idea that government had the definite responsibility—a “social duty”—to use the resources of the state to prevent distress and to promote the general welfare was first suggested at that time. The speech was written at Hyde Park by FDR and Sam Rosenman, and reflected how Roosevelt’s thinking had evolved.9 In addition to the $20 million relief package, the governor sought the establishment of a new state agency, the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), to distribute the funds. He also asked the legislature to raise personal income taxes by 50 percent to pay for the relief effort.* New York was the first state to establish a relief agency, and TERA immediately became a model for other states—New Jersey, Rhode Island, Illinois—as well as a prototype for the Federal Emergency Relief