FDR - Jean Edward Smith [300]
On Tuesday evening FDR settled in with friends and staff at Hyde Park to take the returns. The early reports from New York and New Jersey were glum. As Ed Flynn had warned, Italian precincts were going heavily for Willkie and the Irish less so. Upstate, Democrats were running behind. In the city, only the Jewish vote was holding firm. Roosevelt asked to be left alone. With Mike Reilly of the Secret Service manning the dining room door, FDR tabulated the returns for the next hour by himself. The voter turnout (62.5 percent) was the greatest in more than three decades, and gradually the tide turned.112 By nine it was clear that the great industrial states in the East and Middle West would fall in behind the president.
The dining room doors were flung open, and the celebration began. By midnight the magnitude of the victory was clear. Roosevelt received 27,263,448 votes to Willkie’s 22,336,260. In the electoral college, FDR took 449 votes and Willkie won 82. Except for Maine, Vermont, and six farm states in the great plains, Willkie carried only Michigan and his native Indiana. Roosevelt won every large city in the country except Cincinnati. Labor and blacks remained in the Democratic column. A strong showing among Polish Americans helped offset the losses in the Italian community. German Americans for the most part voted Republican.113 The Democrats picked up six seats in the House, giving them a 268–162 majority, and lost three in the Senate, which they still controlled by well over 2 to 1.
The hostility between Roosevelt and Willkie faded quickly. Willkie conceded gracefully and called upon the nation to cast bitterness aside and give the president the support and respect he deserved. FDR invited Willkie to the White House and took an immediate liking to him. “You know, he’s a very good fellow,” Roosevelt told Frances Perkins. “He has lots of talent. I want to use him somehow. I want him to do something where the effort is nonpolitical but important. But I’d like to use him, and I think it would be a good thing for the country, it would help us to a feeling of unity.”114
* Hopkins found himself ensconced in the Blackstone’s suite 308/309, the same suite with “the smoke-filled room” in which Warren G. Harding had been selected to be the Republican nominee in 1920. Hopkins was connected to the White House with a direct line—the phone mounted in the bathroom to ensure privacy. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 136 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
† Hopkins was not a delegate to the convention and got onto the floor only by courtesy of a badge from Mayor Kelly designating him a deputy sergeant at arms. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 179 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* “Don’t any of you realize that there is only one life between this madman and the presidency?” thundered party chairman Mark Hanna—an observation that would not have been out of place in 1940. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 763 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
* Roosevelt wrote in his draft that the Democratic Party could not continue to be divided between liberals and conservatives. “It would be best not to straddle ideals. It would be best for America to have the fight out. Therefore, I give the Democratic party the opportunity to make that historic decision by declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency.” For the full text, see Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 216–218 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
* Clark, a senior partner in the firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine, was a 1906 Harvard Law School classmate of Felix Frankfurter, and had clerked with FDR at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn from 1907 to 1910. It was he who suggested to Frankfurter, who conveyed the suggestion to FDR, that Stimson be appointed secretary of war. In May 1940, at a series of small meetings of elite lawyers and businessmen in New York City’s Harvard Club, he organized the 2nd Corps of the Military Training Camp Association, a nostalgic reminder of the Plattsburg Movement organized at