FDR - Jean Edward Smith [180]
Roosevelt approached the campaign with his usual optimism, and his enthusiasm was contagious. “We had one tremendous advantage, even at the very beginning of the 1932 campaign,” wrote Farley. “This was the genuine conviction shared by Governor Roosevelt himself and those connected with him that his election to the Presidency was a foregone conclusion.”30 Farley said FDR had an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important. “He was one of the most alive men I have ever met. He never gave me the impression he was tired or bored. His ability to discuss political issues in short, simple sentences made a powerful impression. There was a touch of destiny about the man. He would have been a great actor.”31
By contrast, Hoover was pessimistic and bitter. He exuded defeat. Not hangdog, whipped-puppy defeat but the vanquishment of the proud, done in by hubris and conceit. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson deplored Hoover’s preference “for seeing the dark side first.” To be in the same room with the president, said Stimson, “was like sitting in a bath of ink.”32 Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, observed that “if you put a rose in Hoover’s hand it would wilt.”33
When Hoover asked Stimson to take to the hustings and attack FDR, the secretary of state declined. Stimson admired Hoover and believed his great intellectual gifts were not sufficiently appreciated. But he thought even more strongly that foreign affairs should be above partisan politics. “To use the great office of Secretary of State to launch a purely personal attack on Roosevelt is quite inconsistent with my dignity and that of the office,” wrote Stimson. “Two years ago I was dragged into an attack on Roosevelt in the [New York gubernatorial] campaign, and I have regretted it ever since.”34
Colonel Stimson (as he liked to be called35) went not to Groton and Harvard but to Andover and Yale. Yet Endicott Peabody would have given him high marks for character. It is not surprising that he was venerated by a younger generation looking for heroes: men as varied as McGeorge Bundy, Lucius D. Clay, and George Herbert Walker Bush. Hoover never forgave Stimson for not participating in the campaign.36 Roosevelt never forgot. When war clouds gathered in 1940 and bipartisanship became essential, FDR reached out to Stimson and asked him to become secretary of war for a second time.*
As the campaign progressed, Roosevelt demonstrated an uncanny ability to say the right thing at the right time to the right audience. Hoover, in a rare turn of phrase, called him “a chameleon on Scotch plaid.”37 Roosevelt traveled more than thirteen thousand miles, speaking to ever-increasing crowds. The rhetorical high point occurred in Baltimore on October 25, when Roosevelt castigated the Four Horsemen of the Republican apocalypse: Destruction, Delay, Deceit, and Despair.38
Hoover’s voice found little resonance. He was so unpopular that it was unsafe for him to appear in public without heavy police escort.39 Isolated and out of touch, he came across as a master of malapropism. “Nobody is actually starving,” he told the Washington journalist Raymond Clapper. “The hobos, for example, are better fed than they have ever been.”40 It was difficult to credit a candidate who attributed the high unemployment rate to the fact that “many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”41 Or who asserted, as Hoover did on October 31 at Madison Square Garden, that if the sky-high rates of the Smoot-Hawley tariff were reduced, “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of a million farms. Their churches and school houses will decay.”42
The message of fear was all that remained. As Hoover would have it, Roosevelt was the precursor of revolution. Speaking in Saint Paul three days before the election, an exhausted Hoover equated the Democratic party with “the same philosophy of government which has poisoned all of Europe … the fumes of the witch’s cauldron