FDR - Jean Edward Smith [45]
In mid-November Franklin went to Albany to find a suitable house. “I suppose I must have gone [with Franklin] and looked at the house which we took, though I have no recollection of doing so,” Eleanor said many years later.67 What the Roosevelts found was a massive three-story brownstone in the Flemish Renaissance style favored by wealthy moguls living upstate. The house was situated on a one-acre lot at 248 State Street, virtually in the shadow of the capitol. “It is quite a big house with a piazza and a big yard … and built more like a country house,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Isabella Ferguson in Tucson.68 Franklin called it “palatial.” Sara said it was “a fine house that could be made comfortable.”69 The large downstairs rooms provided ample space for entertaining, and there was an enormous paneled library at the rear and more than enough room on the second and third floors for their three children, the children’s nurses, and a household staff of six. The rent was $400 a month—$4,800 annually, or more than three times FDR’s senatorial salary. Later the Roosevelts moved into even larger quarters at 4 Elk Street, known as “Quality Row” for the affluent Albany families that lived along it. That mansion had been built by Martin Van Buren when he was governor—the first New York governor to reach the White House—and reflected Little Van’s penchant for lavish living.
The legislature convened on January 4, with the Democrats in control of both houses. The Assembly was led by the thirty-seven-year-old Alfred E. Smith, a seven-term veteran from the Lower East Side, son of an Irish mother and an Italian-German father, a vital cog in the Tammany organization who despite an eighth-grade education had demonstrated a political savvy that catapulted him ahead of a legion of better-educated, more seasoned legislators. In the Senate, the organization turned to thirty-three-year-old Robert F. Wagner, son of a Wiesbaden printer, who had landed in New York at the age of nine, not speaking a word of English. Smith and Wagner exemplified the spirit of urban reform that characterized Tammany in 1911, though FDR had yet to recognize it.
The first order of business was the election of a United States senator. The term of Chauncey Depew, the Republican incumbent, expired March 4, 1911. Under the Constitution, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, and in New York it was done in joint session: 150 assemblymen and 50 state senators, a total of 200 votes, of which a majority (101) was required to elect. Since there were 114 Democrats in the legislature, it was a foregone conclusion that Depew’s successor would be named by the Democratic caucus.
Tammany’s candidate was William F. Sheehan, known throughout the state as “Blue-eyed Billy,” the former political boss of Erie County, lieutenant governor, and assembly speaker who was now practicing law in New York City as the partner of Judge Alton B. Parker, the 1904 Democratic presidential nominee. Sheehan had amassed a considerable fortune in and out of politics, and his current legal practice reflected the ultimate in white-shoe respectability. He was director of a dozen or so public utility companies and, with the conservative Judge Parker, embodied the alliance between big business and machine politics. Sheehan raised money from his clients for the Democrats; Tammany spent the money and remembered from whence it came.
But the caucus was far from unanimous. Sheehan was anathema to old Cleveland Democrats—men like Franklin’s father, upstate WASPs who abhorred political bosses in principle yet as a practical matter were far more hidebound and conservative. Their candidate was Brooklyn attorney Edward M. Shepard, counsel for the Pennsylvania Railroad, an intimate of J. P. Morgan who had long been active in the cause of good government but could scarcely be called a liberal crusader. The fact that Sheehan was Irish Catholic and Shepard a Yankee Episcopalian was of more significance than many would openly admit.
Franklin sided with the Cleveland crowd. “Sheehan