FDR - Jean Edward Smith [176]
So it seemed in retrospect. FDR captured the initiative with his dramatic flight to Chicago and his rousing acceptance speech, and never looked back. Before Roosevelt left the platform that evening he had received the endorsement of Nebraska’s senior senator, George W. Norris, the grand old man of American progressivism, followed quickly by Norris’s fellow Republicans Hiram Johnson of California, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico. The wheels were coming off the Republican wagon.
With his progressive flank secure, FDR turned right to repair the breach in his own party. Following his acceptance speech, Roosevelt dined with the ninety-six members of the Democratic National Committee at the Congress Hotel. Raskob presided for the last time, and FDR devoted the bulk of his remarks to soothing old wounds, going far out of his way to praise “my very good and old friend, John Raskob” and “my old friend Jouett Shouse.” He thanked his former adversaries for their service to the party and invited their help in the coming campaign.3
Al Smith posed another problem. He had left Chicago in a huff, and the campaign worried that he would blast FDR when he arrived in New York. His train was intercepted at Harmon-on-Hudson by mutual friends, and the Happy Warrior was persuaded to hold his peace. When the dust settled, Smith rallied to the ticket. He and Roosevelt forced the gubernatorial nomination of Herbert Lehman over Tammany’s objections and, to the delight of onlookers, made up publicly on the floor of the state Democratic convention in Albany. “Hello, you old potato,” shouted Smith as he pumped FDR’s hand. “Hello, Al, I’m glad to see you too—and that’s from the heart.” Farley remembers the pair grinning like schoolboys, “with hands clasped together, while the excited photographers took picture after picture.”4
Perhaps only Roosevelt could have launched his campaign by sailing with three of his sons—James, Franklin, Jr., and John—in a battered thirty-seven-foot yawl three hundred miles from Port Jefferson, Long Island, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “My son Jimmy has rented a yawl for $150,” FDR told his first postconvention press conference. “It was cheap and that’s why we could afford it. We are going to do our own navigating, cooking, and washing. I’m going to do the navigating.”5*
On July 11, 1932, nine days after accepting the Democratic nomination, FDR set sail across Long Island Sound into the New England waters he knew so well. Because the yawl had no engine, a wharf boat towed it from the dock into the harbor and the stiff breeze whipping across the water. “Get out of my wind,” Roosevelt jokingly called out to reporters aboard the press boat following behind.6 The drama of Roosevelt and his sons sailing a choppy sea captured the public’s imagination. Daily press and newsreel accounts showed a robust blue-water sailor, muscular and self-confident, beaming and laughing with a remarkable zest for life—a stark contrast to the starchy, buttoned-up demeanor of Herbert Hoover in the White House. “I think [grandfather] instinctively knew there would be a general sense of admiration for someone who could sail a boat with his sons that distance,” said FDR’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt.7
Aside from putting to rest questions about FDR’s health, the sail allowed him to mend fences with Smith’s supporters in New England. When his boat anchored in Stonington, Connecticut, and again in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Roosevelt played host to visiting state