• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1920 0

occupied in TR’s cabinet. But old party hands like Daniels, McAdoo, and Colonel House insisted that Daniel Roper of South Carolina be given a cabinet post, and Commerce seemed the best fit. As a consolation prize, Straus drew the embassy in Paris. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., sought to be appointed secretary of agriculture, but when farm organizations objected he was posted to the Farm Board, soon to become the centerpiece of the New Deal’s Farm Credit Administration. For Agriculture, Roosevelt settled on Iowa publisher and crop experimenter Henry A. Wallace. Like Ickes, Wallace was a nominal Republican; also like Ickes, he was unknown to the president-elect before his appointment. For the final cabinet post, secretary of labor, there was no question. From the beginning FDR wanted to appoint a woman, and Frances Perkins was a shoo-in. Organized labor filed a ritual reclama, but Miss Perkins had demonstrated her ability as a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet in New York, and she was as much a part of FDR’s political family as Farley or Flynn.

As Roosevelt described it, the cabinet was “slightly to the left of center.” Three members (Hull, Swanson, and Roper) were old Wilsonians. Three were Republicans: either Republican-progressive (Ickes and Wallace) or Republican-conservative (Woodin). Two had served in the Senate (three, counting Walsh), and one (Dern) was a governor. There were two Catholics (Farley and Walsh), and for the first time a woman joined the ranks. All regions of the country were represented, and all the appointees had been FRBC—For Roosevelt Before Chicago. FDR had a fingertip feel for political nuance. He was also the most calculating and hard-nosed politician of his generation. His preconvention rivals, Al Smith and Newton D. Baker, were not consulted about, let alone appointed to, any position in the administration, nor were their supporters. The same was true of Maryland’s governor, Albert C. Ritchie. FDR’s former antagonists on the National Committee, John Raskob and Jouett Shouse, were consigned to outer darkness. Roosevelt reached out to Republican progressives and independents, but he snuffed out rivals in his own party.

FDR’s hostility was political, not personal. Baker, Raskob, Ritchie, and Smith represented the probusiness wing of the party: a conservative, hard-money tradition dating at least to the era of Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt, standing far to the left, had put together a remarkable coalition of western populists, white southerners, ethnic minorities, and big-city machines. He was not about to share the victory with his rivals nor to divert the Democratic party from the progressive path he had staked out. In 1874 Ulysses S. Grant, with his veto of the inflation bill, had weaned the Republican party from its agrarian, antislavery roots and converted it into the political vehicle of American business. In 1932 FDR broke the conservatives’ hold on the Democratic party and made it the instrument of liberal reform.

Eleanor remained at loose ends and speculated what role she might play in the new administration. “I tentatively suggested to my husband that perhaps merely being hostess at the necessary formal functions would not take all my time and he might like me to do a real job and take over some of his mail. He looked at me quizzically and said he did not think that would do; that Missy, who had been handling his mail for a long time, would feel I was interfering. I knew he was right and that it would not work,” Eleanor wrote, but FDR’s rebuff did little to improve her spirits as the inauguration approached.68

On February 4 FDR departed for an eleven-day Caribbean cruise aboard his friend Vincent Astor’s sleek 263-foot yacht, Nourmahal.69 It would be Roosevelt’s final relaxation before assuming his responsibilities as president—an escape back to the world of Groton and Harvard, of Fly Club and the Crimson. Astor, the founder and owner of Newsweek, was a Hyde Park neighbor and the nephew of FDR’s late half-brother, Rosy.* Joining them were four familiar faces from New York society pages: Kermit Roosevelt,