FDR - Jean Edward Smith [181]
On election day FDR and Eleanor voted at Hyde Park and then went into the city, where Eleanor hosted a buffet supper for family and friends at East Sixty-fifth Street. Early in the evening Sam Rosenman noticed two unidentified men in dark suits enter the house unobtrusively and take up positions near Roosevelt. When Rosenman inquired, he was told they were from the Secret Service.45
The outcome was never in doubt. The turnout, almost 40 million, was the greatest in American history. The GOP suffered a crushing defeat. Roosevelt received 22,825,016 votes to Hoover’s 15,758,397 and carried forty-two states with 472 electors.46 The result was as much a repudiation of Hoover as it was a triumph for FDR. The president received 6 million fewer votes than he had in 1928 and carried only six states, all in the Northeast. The Democrats gained an unprecedented ninety seats in the House to give them a virtual 3-to-1 majority (310–117) and won control of the Senate, 60–36.
At campaign headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel the celebration began early. Hoover, at his home in Palo Alto, conceded shortly after midnight. After receiving Hoover’s message Roosevelt made his way to the Biltmore’s grand ballroom, where he spoke briefly to hundreds of jubilant campaign workers. He singled out Louis Howe and James Farley as the “two people in the United States, more than anybody else, who are responsible for this great victory.”47
Howe did not hear FDR’s tribute. Unwilling to be seen in public on election night, he tabulated the results at his hideaway office on Madison Avenue. Eleanor and Farley joined him shortly after eleven, only to find him, in Farley’s words, poring over the returns “like a miser inspecting his gold.” They tried to persuade him to come back to the main celebration at the Biltmore, but he declined. He extracted an ancient bottle of Madeira from his desk that he had put away after the fight against Blue-eyed Billy Sheehan in 1911. It was not to be opened until FDR was elected president. Carefully Howe filled the glasses and raised his own: “To the next President of the United States.”48 At the age of fifty, Franklin Roosevelt had become president. He would remain president for the remainder of his life.
Eleanor, who did not work directly in the presidential campaign, continued to have mixed feelings about FDR’s election:
I was happy for my husband, of course, because I knew that in many ways it would make up for the blow that fate had dealt him when he was stricken with infantile paralysis; and I had implicit confidence in his ability to help the country in crisis.… But for myself, I was probably more deeply troubled than even [Chicago Tribune reporter] John Boettiger realized.* As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own. I knew what traditionally should lie before me; I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect. By earning my own money, I had recently enjoyed a certain amount of financial independence, and had been able to do things in which I was personally interested. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night, and the next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.49
Roosevelt was elected on November 8. Inauguration was not until March 4.* That four-month hiatus, coinciding with the fourth winter of the Depression, proved the most harrowing in American memory. Three years of hard times had cut national income in half. Five thousand bank failures had wiped out 9 million savings accounts. By the end of 1932, 15