FDR - Jean Edward Smith [39]
Grenville Clark, a Harvard classmate who was a fellow clerk at the firm, recalled FDR in those early years. “We were a small group,” said Clark, “and in our leisure hours sometimes fell into discussions of our hopes and ambitions. I remember him saying with engaging frankness that he wasn’t going to practice law forever, that he intended to run for office at the first opportunity, and that he wanted to be and thought he had a real chance to be President. I remember that he described very accurately the steps which he thought could lead to this goal. They were: first, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy … and finally the governorship of New York. ‘Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be president,’ he said.* I do not recall that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might have done. It seemed proper and sincere and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”
Clark went on to say that FDR not only had made politics his profession for thirty-five years “but had adopted that profession deliberately and constantly enjoyed it, just as one enjoys a game that one has always liked and learned to play well.”36 FDR’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., made the same point somewhat differently. Had Franklin not gone into politics, said Vanderbilt, he would have been “just another corporate lawyer, summering in Newport and hibernating on Wall Street.”37
Political lightning struck in the summer of 1910. As FDR remembered it, he was kidnapped off the streets of Poughkeepsie—“one of the first cases of deliberate kidnapping on record”—and taken to the Dutchess County policemen’s picnic. “On that joyous occasion of clams and sauerkraut and real beer I made my first speech, and I have been apologizing for it ever since.”38
Hyperbole aside, the Democratic leadership of Dutchess County did indeed make the initial overture to FDR. But never was a victim more eager to accompany his abductors. Because of the large working-class vote in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County was one of the few Democratic strongholds in upstate New York.* And for a political novice seeking entry to the state legislature, there were few opportunities so golden.
The first feelers were extended by Judge John E. Mack, the district attorney of Dutchess County and one of three members of the Democratic party’s executive committee. Mack had been a friend of FDR’s father, James, and owned a 100-acre farm in Clove Valley where he raised prizewinning peonies. In the folksy manner of upstate New York he called himself “a Dutchess County farmer who does a little lawyering on the side.” Beneath the folksiness lay cunning political instinct. Mack was virtually unbeatable at the polls. He endeared himself to his Irish and Italian constituents in Poughkeepsie by not prosecuting public drunks provided they sign a release asking him to lock them up for six months should they be arrested again. Mack’s rationale was based on the theory “All dogs get one bite.” And it was a surefire winner in the immigrant community. He courted the rural vote equally assiduously by prosecuting chicken thieves for the more serious crime of burglary rather than petty larceny. Mack prided himself on being able to hear the political grass grow beneath the soil, and in the early summer of 1910 he engineered an excuse to call on FDR at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Some documents, it seems, needed Sara’s signature. Rather than mail them, he thought he’d drop them by personally.
FDR received Mack warmly. When their business was completed, the talk turned to politics. The Democrats were in trouble in Dutchess County, Mack told Franklin. The incumbent Democratic assemblyman, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler of Barrytown, wanted to retire. A descendent of John Jacob Astor on his maternal side, Chanler had been elected lieutenant governor in 1906. In 1908 he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination, only to lose the election to Charles Evans Hughes. After exposure to statewide politics,