FDR - Jean Edward Smith [43]
Roosevelt was his own campaign manager. He ordered up 2,500 campaign buttons, designed 500 posters for storefront windows throughout the district, and personally wrote checks to pay for advertisements he placed in each of the twenty-four county newspapers, ranging from the Amenia Times to the Wappinger Chronicle. His platform was entirely personal and avoided substantive issues that might trigger opposition. “I want to represent you, the people of these counties, and no one else,” he told an October rally in Hudson. “I am pledged to no man, to no special interest, to no boss. I want to stay on the job representing you twelve months of the year.”55 Later, he would write with disarming candor, “During the campaign … I made no promises in regard to particular legislation.”56 Instead, he identified himself with good government and blasted away at the “rotten corruption of the New York legislature and the extravagant mismanagement of the State administration.”57
Nineteen-ten proved to be a banner year for the Democrats. Riding a wave of protest against the complacency of the Taft administration in Washington, the party picked up ten seats in the United States Senate and more than half the governorships (including Princeton president Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey) and won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1892. The GOP debacle was greatest in New York, where the party lost the governorship, both houses of the legislature, and two thirds of the seats in Congress.
FDR was a direct beneficiary of the Democratic landslide, which, in New York at least, was partially attributable to Cousin Theodore’s reentry into political life. In a preview of the 1912 presidential election, TR took up the cudgels for reform, lambasted the party’s old guard, and split the GOP down the middle. The issues were tailor-made for TR. Governor Charles Evans Hughes had been locked in a bitter struggle with Republican regulars and old-line Democrats over electoral reform. Hughes sought to introduce direct primaries for party nominations to state office—an innovation that threatened the power of both the GOP bosses in Albany and the Tammany leadership in New York City. But Hughes was elevated to the Supreme Court before the battle was won. When the bosses combined to defeat the measure, Teddy jumped into the fight. At the Republican state convention in Saratoga on September 27, TR wrested control of the party apparatus from the old guard, forced the nomination of his friend Henry L. Stimson for governor, and dictated a reformist platform. Party regulars responded by sitting on their hands during the election.
Franklin capitalized on the Republican split. He lashed out at political bosses in both parties, fighting alongside his illustrious cousin against graft, privilege, and corruption. Asked at a farm rally whether he supported Governor Hughes’s policies, FDR replied, “You bet I do. I think he is one of the best governors the State has ever had.”58 Since his opponent, Schlosser, had voted against the election reform bill, the lines were drawn. The cadences of political rhetoric came naturally to Roosevelt: “I don’t know who Senator Schlosser represents,” he told a gathering at the Quaker meetinghouse in Clinton Corners. “But I do know that he hasn’t represented me and I do know that he hasn’t represented you.”59
The Republicans initially paid no attention to FDR. But as the campaign drew to a close, panic set in. In the final week, Hamilton Fish, who represented Dutchess County in Congress,* attacked Franklin as a carpetbagger who lived in Manhattan, not Hyde Park. His automobile campaign, said Fish, was nothing more than a cheap “vaudeville tour for the benefit of the farmers.”60 The Poughkeepsie Eagle, which had otherwise ignored FDR, now railed against his ties to big business: “Franklin D. Roosevelt represents just the opposite of what Theodore Roosevelt stands for. The News-Press reports him as managing clerk of the firm of Carter,