FDR - Jean Edward Smith [77]
When Franklin dispatched intermediaries to canvass Cousin Theodore’s support, the result was equally disappointing. TR said he admired his young Hyde Park relative but was too busy mending fences with liberal Republicans to offer a Progressive endorsement.4 The final blow to FDR’s gubernatorial aspirations was administered by Congressman John J. Fitzgerald of Brooklyn, the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the Tammany spokesman in the House. Unless Wilson disavowed self-appointed critics of Tammany within the administration, said Fitzgerald, he and twenty other New York Democrats would find it difficult to support the New Freedom legislative agenda.5 That finished FDR. Wilson issued a public statement saying he had the highest regard for Mr. Fitzgerald and certainly did not endorse the characterization of Tammany congressmen as “representatives of crooks, grafters, and buccaneers”—campaign rhetoric that had become a staple for FDR.6*
Roosevelt recognized the impossibility of his quest and put an upbeat spin on the outcome. “Thank God,” he wrote Eleanor, “the governorship is out of the question.”7 To the Times he denied that he had ever been a candidate: “When I said I was not a candidate and would not accept the nomination, I did not say it in diplomatic language, but in seafaring language, which means it.”8
The reason for FDR’s jauntiness soon became apparent: an even more desirable statewide office was available. In May 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators, was added to the Constitution. Senator Elihu Root’s term was expiring, and Root, who had opposed the amendment in Senate debate, announced that he would not seek reelection.9 That provided an opportunity FDR had not anticipated. The venerable Root was one of the most distinguished members of the Senate—secretary of war under McKinley, secretary of state under TR, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Had Root run, he would have been unbeatable. Now the race was wide open. Even better, there was no Democratic incumbent to contest the nomination. Franklin could barely contain his excitement as he broke the news to Eleanor that he planned to seek both the Democratic and Progressive nominations for the U.S. Senate. “I really would like to be in the Senate just so as to get a summer with my family once every three or four years.”10
FDR’s 1914 flirtation with elective office was interrupted by events in Sarajevo, far off in the Balkans. On the morning of June 28, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot and killed by a nineteen-year-old Bosnian terrorist while riding in an open car in downtown Sarajevo. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, one of seven young Bosnian co-conspirators, believed that by killing the archduke he would liberate Bosnia from Hapsburg captivity.11 The Serbian government was implicated in the assassination, and the Austrians demanded satisfaction. Germany backed Austria and gave Vienna a blank check to proceed as it wished. Diplomatic demands escalated, armies mobilized, governments miscalculated, and events took on a life of their own. The Concert of Europe, elaborately crafted by Viscount Castlereagh and Count Metternich one hundred years earlier and embellished by Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, came crashing down like a house of cards. The year before his death, Bismarck had predicted that “some damn foolish thing in the Balkans” would ignite a general war in Europe. Princip provided the spark that set things off.12*
On July 23, more than three weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian government, believing itself ready for war and confident of German support, presented Serbia with an ultimatum couched in language