FDR - Jean Edward Smith [54]
The following year, when the issue of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage was before the legislature, FDR came out in favor. Always fond of a good story, Roosevelt enjoyed telling how he had been convinced by the glamorous suffrage lobbyist Inez Milholland, who perched on his desk in the Senate chamber and dazzled him with Vassar wiles and lawyerly arguments. Milholland was often described as the high priestess of the suffragist cause, and, as FDR would have it, she persuaded him that suffrage was “the only chivalric position for a decent man to hold.”14
Eleanor supported women’s suffrage reluctantly. Throughout her life she refused to concede Milholland’s role. Nevertheless, Franklin’s conversion left her stunned. “I had never given the question serious thought,” she wrote, “for I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did. I realized that if my husband was a suffragist I probably must be too [but] I cannot claim to have been a feminist in those early years.”15
FDR’s attitude toward Prohibition was equally equivocal. Never averse to bending an elbow himself, he nevertheless accumulated a perfect voting record in the Senate, according to the Anti-Saloon League. In January 1913, he actually introduced a local option bill for the League and became the subject of a laudatory editorial (“An Advocate of Christian Patriotism”) in its national magazine.16 In this instance, Franklin appears to have been too clever by half. Prohibition was anathema in New York City, and his opponents never tired of tying him to it. Down through 1932 the story persisted that whatever Roosevelt might say, there was a voting record to prove he was “dry” at heart.17
Following the path blazed by TR, conservation of the state’s natural resources turned Roosevelt progressive. It was as chairman of the traditionally somnolent Forest, Fish, and Game Committee in the Senate that FDR found his voice as a progressive spokesman. He spearheaded the successful fight to update and codify New York’s fish and game laws but lost a bitter battle with the timber industry to enact a similar code to protect the state’s forests. Franklin’s bill for the “Protection of Lands, Forests, and Public Parks” imposed drastic restrictions on harvesting timber—including a clause to restrict cutting trees below a minimum size on private property.
The state’s timber producers descended on Albany in droves, charging that to tamper with private ownership was unconstitutional. For Roosevelt, it was baptism in a battle he would often revisit. “The same old fight is going on up here,” he wrote to a friend in February 1912, “between the people who see that the Adirondacks are being denuded … and those [timber interests] who succeeded in getting for nothing what they would have to pay well for today. Nobody here has any desire to confiscate property and the bill before my Committee is a conservation measure only.”18 But few believed that. Any attempt to regulate what private landowners could do with their property galvanized the gods of free enterprise. Roosevelt failed to get his bill out of committee. A related bill that FDR introduced to permit the state to flood its own forest lands to provide reservoirs for public power died in the Assembly.
When the fight over the timber bill was at its height, Roosevelt was invited to give the keynote address to the progressive People’s Forum, meeting in nearby Troy. By this time his concern for conservation had morphed into an awareness of the perils of excessive individualism. The speech comes as close as