Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

Many people, when they’re young, spin visions of a grand future. Most of them find out it’s a lot easier to dream about doing great things than it is to actually do them. So they put their dreams away and settle for less.

It was different with Franklin Roosevelt.

By 1921, he had taken two of the steps marked out by T.R.—serving in the New York legislature, then as assistant secretary of the navy. He had even been nominated for vice president, like T.R., though the older Roosevelt had won his election to that post, while FDR had lost his race in 1920.

At the start of his career he’d not been a natural politician, just as he’d not been a natural leader in school. Politics rewards people who can make friends with practically anybody, from street cleaners and farmers to judges and senators. As a rookie state senator at age twenty-eight, FDR felt at home on the upper rungs of society’s ladder, but not the lower. And he had to learn that in politics, even an idealist had to give a little to get things done.

In Albany he met a gifted young political activist named Frances Perkins, who was urging legislators to pass a law to limit the hours of working women. In time the two would become close friends and colleagues. But in their early meetings, Perkins thought FDR was stuck-up, and so did others. Perkins remembered a friendly old senator named Tim Sullivan saying: “Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt.”

She described the young FDR at work in the state senate, “tall and slender, very active and alert … rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of 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 [glasses] and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people.” She recalled him facing off with a couple of older senators who were “arguing with him to be ‘reasonable,’ as they called it, about something.” But he tossed that chin up and in “his cool, remote voice” said, “No, no, I won’t hear of it!”

Ten years in politics and government rubbed off the arrogance. In the state senate he had been trying too hard to be serious and “senatorial.” But even then, Frances Perkins said, he loved to laugh. Gradually he relaxed into a political style more in line with his natural warmth and humor. Meanwhile, Louis Howe helped him learn the tactics needed to get things done and advance his own prospects.

It wasn’t easy.

He made his name in the state senate by fighting the powerful men who ran the Democratic Party in giant New York City. The local Democratic organization was known by the name of its headquarters, Tammany Hall. The bosses of Tammany were mostly Irish Americans whose ancestors had been snubbed by New York’s elite for generations. Through politics they had grabbed a share of power, and often they used it for personal gain. The “Tammany machine,” it was called—a political factory where elections were rigged and corrupt deals were hatched.

When the current boss of Tammany Hall, “Silent Charlie” Murphy, tried to put one of his pals in the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt led the idealistic reformers who quashed the scheme. That earned him a big black mark in Tammany’s ledger. When he tried to make his own run for the U.S. Senate in 1914, the Tammany machine slapped him down. He had to face the fact that if he was ever to run for statewide office, he would have to make peace with Tammany. So by quiet signals he let the bosses know that while he would never play the game their way, neither would he make them his target.

He also learned that politics was not a simple matter of good and evil. With experience, he saw that Tammany politicians often did more practical good—giving food to poor families in trouble, helping the jobless find work—than high-minded reformers who talked about helping the oppressed people of the earth but didn’t actually know any.

One of those politicians was Tim Sullivan, the state senator who had found the young Roosevelt so arrogant. Born in the poor and violent Irish American neighborhood called Five Points, Sullivan had come up from shining shoes and selling newspapers to owning saloons, vaudeville theaters, and racetracks. Then he’d joined the Tammany machine, which sent him to the state assembly, the state senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. Sullivan took payoffs and traded political favors for votes. He also gave new shoes by the thousand to destitute people in his district. Knowing the everyday dangers of the city’s slums, he pushed through the state’s first law against carrying concealed weapons. When Frances Perkins was fighting for shorter hours for working women, Roosevelt opposed her. So did the Tammany legislators in Albany—except Tim Sullivan, whose sister had gone to work in a factory at fourteen to help her family.

FDR got to know Sullivan. Later on, when Franklin had become a firm supporter of women’s rights, he told Frances Perkins, “Tim Sullivan used to say that the America of the future would be made out of the people who had come over in steerage [emigrated from Europe to the United States in the worst quarters of passenger ships] and who knew in their own hearts and lives the difference between being despised and being accepted and liked.

“Poor old Tim Sullivan never understood about modern politics. But he was right about the human heart.”

FDR’s cousin Joseph Alsop later said that after the 1920 election, Roosevelt “looked remarkably like another specimen of a familiar American political type—the attractive young man who makes politics his profession, comes up fast at first, and then runs into a dead end and spends the rest of his life regretting former glories that everyone else soon forgets.”

FDR had no