FDR - Jean Edward Smith [191]
* “We underrated Long’s ability to grip the masses,” wrote Farley after the election. “He put on a great show and everywhere he went we got the most glowing reports of what he had accomplished for the Democratic cause.… If we had sent Huey into the thickly populated cities of the Pennsylvania mining districts, the electoral vote of the Keystone State would have gone to the Roosevelt-Garner ticket by a comfortable margin.” Farley, Behind the Ballots 171.
* Stimson served as secretary of war under Taft from 1911 to 1913 and as secretary of state under Hoover, 1929–1933. He was FDR’s secretary of war (and then President Truman’s) from 1940 to 1945.
* In January 1935 John Boettiger married Franklin and Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, following her divorce from Curtis Dall.
* The Twentieth (“Lame Duck”) Amendment, changing inauguration day from March 4 to January 20, was not added to the Constitution until January 23, 1933, and did not become effective until 1937.
* One of FDR’s first acts upon assuming office was to ask Congress for authorization to impose an embargo on the shipment of weapons to Bolivia and Paraguay, then engaged in a war for control of the headwaters of the Chaco River. Congress complied; Roosevelt proclaimed the embargo; and Curtiss-Wright Corporation violated it by attempting to ship sixteen machine guns to Bolivia, setting the stage for one of the landmark decisions of the Supreme Court pertaining to the nature of foreign affairs and the scope of executive authority, United States v. Curtiss-Wright, 299 U.S. 304 (1936). Justice George Sutherland, speaking for the Court, held that the authority to conduct foreign affairs was inherent in the national government and did not depend upon express grants in the Constitution. Sutherland’s dictum that the president is the “sole organ” of American foreign relations is often quoted, frequently out of context.
* FDR was the first president to use the telephone extensively. Wilson had a telephone installed at the White House, but it was not in his office. Hoover was the first to have one on his desk, but he rarely used it. Perhaps because of his immobility, Roosevelt had learned the advantages of telephoning and was a master at the instrument. He had the entire White House wired and by his own testimony spent about a third of each day on the phone. Roughly a hundred people had direct access to FDR, and Hackmeister put them through without reference to Missy or Howe. Charles Hurd, When the New Deal Was Young and Gay 117 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965); John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 125 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
* When five Democratic senators suggested to Raymond Moley that Hull was too idealistic and might not be up to the job of secretary of state, Roosevelt dismissed their concern out of hand. “You tell the senators I’ll be glad to have some fine idealism in the State Department.” Raymond Moley, After Seven Years 114 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
* James Roosevelt Roosevelt (“Rosy”), who died in 1927, had been married to Helen Astor, the daughter of the Mrs. Astor, the fabled arbiter of New York society.
* Cermak had stacked the galleries at Chicago Stadium with Smith supporters and needed forgiveness. Chicago’s schoolteachers were working without salary, and Cermak was desperately seeking federal assistance. Farley wrote later that Cermak would not have had to go to Miami “if he had jumped on our bandwagon” after the first ballot. James A. Farley, The Jim Farley Story 21–22 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
* Louis Howe’s draft introduction, which Roosevelt received on February 28, contained the sentence “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR added the sentence and embellished it. Some have noted the resemblance to Henry David Thoreau’s “nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” but Moley, who was with Roosevelt when the speech was put in final form, discounts the link. Raymond Moley, The First New Deal 96