FDR - Jean Edward Smith [160]
The battle lines were drawn. Having observed the amenities, Roosevelt opened fire. He instructed Farley to convene a special meeting of the New York State Democratic Committee in Albany on March 2. That morning, at a breakfast meeting in FDR’s bedroom, Louis Howe, Ed Flynn, and Farley drafted a resolution endorsing Roosevelt’s position that the National Committee had no authority to commit the party on any issue arising between conventions. The resolution was introduced by Flynn that afternoon and carried unanimously.18
With three days remaining before the National Committee would meet, Roosevelt, Farley, and Howe worked the phones, lining up proxies from committeemen who would not be present. When Farley took the train to Washington on March 4, he held enough proxies to defeat Raskob’s motions 2 to 1. Raskob recognized the inevitable, withdrew his proposals before a vote, and hunkered down before an onslaught of southern righteousness. Farley, seated next to Hull at the meeting to make a point, lay back and said nothing. “I think on the whole the meeting did no harm,” Roosevelt wrote Buffalo’s Norman Mack afterward. “The thing we must work for now is the avoidance of harsh words and no sulking in tents.”19
For Roosevelt, Raskob’s ill-fated maneuver proved a godsend. From that time on, Hull wrote in his Memoirs, the southern leaders took Roosevelt seriously and rallied round him as the one candidate who could deliver them from the Smith-Raskob alliance.20 FDR shared the antitariff sentiments of the South and West, and on Prohibition he was damp: neither wet nor dry but in favor of leaving the question to the states. That was satisfactory to most southerners.21
While Farley dealt with the National Committee in Washington, Louis Howe worked to raise money for the fledgling campaign. FDR had not yet announced, but already contributions were flowing in. Old friends were first off the mark. In March 1931, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., William H. Woodin, and Frank C. Walker, a New York attorney, got the ball rolling with gifts of $5,000 [$60,000 currently] each. Herbert Lehman, Basil O’Connor, Jesse Straus, Ed Flynn, and Joseph P. Kennedy quickly followed suit. Sara chipped in her share, as did publisher Robert W. Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal (later FDR’s ambassador to Great Britain).* The entertainment industry, represented by the moviemaker Harry M. Warner and Broadway impresario Eddie Dowling, did its share as well. James W. Gerard, who had defeated FDR for the Democratic senatorial nomination in 1914, was a particularly generous contributor, always ready to open his checkbook when a campaign payroll came due. Colonel Edward M. House, whose New York apartment was across the street from the Roosevelt home on East Sixty-fifth, was also an early contributor.22
At the end of March, Jesse Straus commissioned a presidential poll of delegates and alternates who had attended the 1928 Democratic convention. Purportedly, Straus conducted the poll without FDR’s knowledge.23 Opinion polling was in its infancy in 1931, and the results garnered front-page coverage throughout the country. Roosevelt was the undisputed front-runner. Of the forty-four states that responded, FDR led in thirty-nine.24 Smith led in three (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware); Governor Albert C. Ritchie was Maryland’s favorite son, as was Senator Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas. Among the 844 delegates who responded, Roosevelt was favored by 478; Smith by 125; the industrialist Owen D. Young of General Electric by 75; Ritchie by 39; Robinson by 38; and Newton D. Baker of Ohio, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war, by 35.25
Straus commissioned four more polls that spring among Democratic businessmen, bank presidents, and corporate directors. All showed Roosevelt well ahead—surprising, given FDR’s identification with the rural, progressive wing of the party and the conservative, probusiness stance of both Smith and Young. A nationwide survey by twenty-five Scripps-Howard newspapers that summer indicated that Roosevelt