FDR - Jean Edward Smith [60]
Howe leaped for joy when Eleanor’s message arrived. He had admired Franklin’s fight against Sheehan, provided valuable advice to the insurgents on legislative strategy, and interviewed Roosevelt at length for the Herald—FDR’s first exposure to the national media. “Almost at that very first meeting,” Howe said later, “I made up my mind that nothing but an accident could keep him from becoming President.”47 Howe needed a hero, and Roosevelt—who in personal appearance and patrician background was everything Howe was not—fit the bill. FDR, for his part, needed practical political guidance, and Louis Howe provided it. Except for a basic attachment to the Democratic party, Howe was indifferent to ideology. Yet he was an astute tactician with a litmus ability to distinguish a sound political move from one that was likely to cause trouble. Roosevelt became virtually unbeatable once Howe joined his entourage. It was a symbiotic relationship in which each supplied what the other could not.
Franklin turned his Senate campaign over to Howe. For the next six weeks Howe became FDR’s surrogate. He moved to Poughkeepsie, decorated Harry Hawkey’s Maxwell with Roosevelt banners, and hustled the countryside for votes. He was as energetic as Franklin had been two years earlier, but he focused more sharply on specific constituencies. To win the farm vote, Howe devised a scheme to protect farmers from New York City commission merchants, the middlemen who pocketed the difference between what the farmer got for his crop and what the consumer paid. Howe pointed out that if reelected, Roosevelt would become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There he would ensure passage of an agricultural marketing act with real teeth in it. Howe mailed hundreds of personal letters over FDR’s signature informing farmers of the proposal. Each letter contained a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the farmer’s reply. Similar letters promised apple growers that Franklin would introduce a bill to standardize the size of barrels, another sore spot for farmers whose apples were often measured in oversized barrels. Shad fishermen were assured that license fees on the Hudson would be lowered. Altogether, Howe dispatched more than eleven thousand letters on FDR’s behalf.48
No voter was left uncourted. Howe took out full-page newspaper advertisements, unprecedented in upstate races, in which Roosevelt pledged his support for women’s suffrage, identified with the concerns of the workingman, and bashed the Republicans for standing pat. Howe worked at the end of a long leash. FDR was consulted, but often after Howe had already acted. “Here is your first ad,” he wrote the bedridden Roosevelt in late October. “As I have pledged you in it I thought you might like to know casually what kind of a mess I was getting you into.… Your slave and servant, Howe.”49
FDR turned his checkbook over to Howe and soon found himself overdrawn. Expenses were heavy, and Howe, evidently unfamiliar with check writing, always added the amount of the check to the balance rather than subtracting it.50 FDR met most of the expenses from his personal funds, including Howe’s salary of $50 a week. Overall the race cost about $3,000, roughly twice the salary of a state senator.51 A few friends loaned Franklin money for the campaign. “I pray your mother is as wealthy as reported so I can get some of the money back,” wrote FDR’s Hyde Park neighbor Jefferson Newbold.52
Howe scoured the district, promising in Franklin’s name whatever would win votes. “I’m having more fun than a goat,” he wrote FDR in early November.53 Everyone was pleased except Eleanor and Sara, who were put off by Howe’s habits, particularly his addiction to high-powered Sweet Caporals. “Remember, I was still a Puritan,” Eleanor said many years later.54 Howe ran the campaign so effectively that FDR’s absence was rarely noted and never commented upon by his opponents.* Voters for