FDR - Jean Edward Smith [44]
FDR closed out the race with an election-eve rally in Hyde Park. With Eleanor and Sara at his side, he told his fellow townsmen, “You have known what my father stood for before me, you have known how close he was to the life of this town, and I do not need to tell you that it is my desire always to follow in his footsteps.”63
November 8, election day, dawned gray and rainy—a good omen for Democrats, who always prayed for bad weather upstate to keep the Republican faithful indoors. FDR voted early and returned to Springwood to await the results. As the returns trickled in that evening, it quickly became apparent that the state and the nation were undergoing one of those defining moments when political power passes from one party to the other. The Democrats swept everything in sight. Republican Henry Stimson suffered a crushing defeat for governor, Richard Connell upset Hamilton Fish in the race for Congress, and Roosevelt carried more than two thirds of the precincts in the Twenty-sixth Senatorial District, defeating Schlosser 15,708 to 14,568—an unprecedented Democratic majority.
But it was not just the Democratic avalanche that propelled FDR into office. He outspent Schlosser five to one; he outcampaigned and outorganized him by an even greater margin; and he led the entire Democratic ticket.64 He ran almost as well in the countryside as he did in Poughkeepsie, carried Hyde Park 406–258, and defeated Schlosser on his home turf in Fishkill.
Sara watched the returns as avidly as Franklin, proudly noting the results in her firm Delano hand on a sheet of personal stationery: “Franklin carried Poughkeepsie by 927 … carried Hudson by 499 … Fishkill 128 … Second Assembly district of Dutchess 900.” Sara was not surprised. “I have always thought Franklin perfectly extraordinary,” she once said, “and, as I look back, I don’t think he has ever disappointed me.”65
At the age of twenty-eight, Roosevelt had found his calling. He passed out two dozen expensive cigars to friends and relatives and settled in to savor his victory. It was a singular personal triumph. He had run strongly in the rural reaches of the district, where party professionals had thought he had little chance. And the pros took notice. When “Big Tim” Sullivan, the Tammany wheelhorse who represented the Bowery in the Senate, heard that TR’s cousin was going to be a colleague, he told friends, “If we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the dock. The Roosevelts run true to form, and this kid is likely to do for us what the Colonel is going to do for the Republican party, split it wide open.”66
New York legislators earned $1,500 a year. The session rarely lasted more than ten weeks, and most members either commuted or stayed in one of the half-dozen tourist-class hotels and boardinghouses that catered to transient lawmakers. Hyde Park was sixty-five miles from Albany on the main Delaware & Hudson rail line and FDR might have easily commuted, yet he chose to convert his election victory into a full-time career as a state senator. Skeptics might argue it was a rich man’s hobby: Franklin could not have established himself in the capital without his trust-fund income and Sara’s largesse. But FDR was committed. As he told the voters in Hudson, he intended to stay on the job in Albany