FDR - Jean Edward Smith [52]
* ER’s feelings never completely changed. “Franklin was always surrounded by Catholics,” she told her friend Irine Sandifer in 1960. “They were determined to see that he was always surrounded.” Irine Reiterman Sandifer, Mrs. Roosevelt as We Knew Her 86 (Silver Spring, Md.: privately printed, 1975). Also see James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts 143, 196–197 (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
* FDR’s view of Tammany eventually caught up with the times. When Charles Murphy died in 1924, Roosevelt said feelingly, “In Mr. Murphy’s death, the New York City Democratic organization has lost probably the strongest and wisest leader it has had in generations.… He was a genius who kept harmony, and at the same time recognized that the world moves on. It is well to remember that he had helped to accomplish much in the way of progressive and social welfare legislation in our state.” Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy 21; LaCerra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall 61.
FIVE
AWAKENING
I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
FRANKLIN WAS LITTLE LIKED in Albany. Most of his colleagues found him insufferable. Al Smith wrote him off as a dilettante—“a damn fool” who thought more about political appearances than substantive legislation. Robert Wagner saw him as a stage dandy interested only in publicity: “Senator Roosevelt has gained his point. What he wants is a headline in the newspapers. Let us proceed to our business.” The elderly Tom Grady, who had served in the legislature with TR, thought Franklin the more obnoxious of the two. Even the genial Tim Sullivan, a man of exceptional warmth and kindness, believed him to be “an awful arrogant fellow.”1
Frances Perkins, fresh out of Mount Holyoke and Columbia Graduate School, was often in Albany lobbying on behalf of labor. She knew the Roosevelts socially in New York City and traveled in the same circles. No one who saw FDR in those years, she wrote, would have been likely to think of him as a potential president.
I have a vivid picture of him operating on the floor of the Senate: tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit—so natural that he was unaware of it—of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.
I think he started that way not because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had a good education at Harvard, but because he really didn’t like people very much and because he had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot.2
The fight against Sheehan provided national publicity for Roosevelt. But it exposed his social indifference. On March 25, 1911, while the legislature was still deadlocked, fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which occupied the three top floors of a New York City loft building just off Washington Square. The flames spread quickly. The doors to the only stairwell were chained shut, ostensibly to prevent theft, and there was no fire escape. Forty-six employees fell or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below; one hundred perished in the inferno. All but fifteen were girls and young women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. In the trial that followed, the company was absolved of responsibility and collected $64,925 in insurance damages. Twenty-three families of the dead sued and received an overall total of $1,725. That amounted to $75 for each life lost.
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the worst factory fire in New York history, exposed the evils of unregulated