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

When the stock market crashed and the economy plunged, he argued that state government should mount compassionate efforts to help the swelling crowds of New Yorkers who had been turned out of their jobs through no fault of their own.

So if Big Jim Farley had exaggerated when he said no one but FDR could possibly be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 1932, he was surely right that FDR was the man for other Democrats to beat.

But it was still too early to say out loud what Farley and others close to FDR were sensing—that there was some intangible spark in this man, a promise of something great. Only years later did Farley try to put the feeling into words.

“He was one of the most alive men I had ever met,” Big Jim would write. “He never gave me the impression that he was tired or bored … He was quick, alert, keen …

“I had an intuition that there was a touch of destiny about the man, that he was intended to play a big role in the affairs of his fellow countrymen.”

Chapter 16WHISPERS AND SHOUTS

For a while Americans figured the country was going through nothing much worse than the kind of economic slump that often followed boom times. In May 1930, President Hoover declared: “I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover.” There was no need for more federal action, he said, since “the Depression is over.”

But all that summer, the season for putting up new buildings, construction workers were losing their jobs. Steel mills and car factories cut production. In the fall, banks here and there began to fail. They could give out no more loans, the lifeblood that businesses needed to grow, and no more mortgages for people buying houses. People who had put their savings into those banks simply lost their money. And fears began to rise that the same might soon happen to many more banks.

The country looked to the White House for help. Hoover made a few cautious moves. He urged business to do better. He blamed Europeans. But he would not stand for the idea of using federal funds to help people in need. He hated speaking in public, and on the radio he sounded like a nervous old crab. The man who had once been a hero, rescuing war refugees and flood victims, now seemed timid, even frightened.

Shortly before FDR’s campaign for reelection as governor began in 1930, all delegates to the last Democratic National Convention received a printed newsletter, unsigned, in their mail. A copy landed on the desk of Jim Mahoney, an aide to FDR, who passed it along with a note to Louis Howe. The note read: “Honestly, I could murder for much less.”

The newsletter contained an outrageous lie. It said that FDR had been hiding the truth about his paralysis. It was not the result of poliomyelitis, the letter said. It was the result of syphilis, a dreaded bacterial disease usually spread by sexual intercourse. In FDR, as in some other people with syphilis, the bacteria had invaded the spinal cord, causing the person to walk with a jerky, spastic gait. But “the most disgusting, vicious and really dangerous thing about this matter,” the piece went on, “is the fact that Governor Roosevelt (with his loathsome and infectious venereal disease) bathes in the same pool with … poor innocent children at the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia, when he himself visits there for months at a time.”

As FDR’s aides began to talk with Democrats around the country about the likelihood that he would run for president in 1932, they picked up more rumors on the party’s grapevine. None was quite as bad as the syphilis story, but they were bad enough:

The truth, said the rumor spreaders, was that FDR had suffered from a heart attack.

Or cancer.

Or a syphilitic stroke.

Or his polio had been an act of God to punish him for terrible sins he had committed.

Then there was the old story, as a newspaper editor put it, that “a physical cripple is inclined to become an emotional and spiritual cripple.”

It didn’t take much of this kind of thing before FDR and his lieutenants—Howe, Ed Flynn, and Jim Farley—to realize they would have to defend against this new threat known as the “whispering campaign.” They had little doubt it was being fed by powerful Democrats who hoped to block FDR from winning the nomination for president.

“I find there is a deliberate attempt to create the impression that my health is such as would make it impossible for me to fulfill the duties of President,” FDR wrote a friend in 1931. “To those who know how strenuous have been the three years I have passed as Governor of this State, this is highly humorous, but it is taken with great seriousness in the southern states particularly. I shall appreciate whatever my friends may have to say in their personal correspondence to dispel this perfectly silly piece of propaganda.”

The Roosevelt team decided not to ignore the rumors or try to hush them up. They would acknowledge them, then assert they simply were not true—with proof. It was not enough to point to his governorship to show he was capable of running a big executive enterprise. They had to give more evidence.

So, first, they had three prominent doctors give him a thorough medical exam, then publicized the results. The doctors declared “his organs and functions are sound in all respects … The chest is exceptionally well developed, and the spinal column is perfectly normal … and free of disease.” His physical recovery from polio was likely to continue. “We believe that his powers of endurance are such as to allow him to meet all demands of private or public life.”

Then they arranged for a journalist, Earle Looker, to spend enough time with FDR to write a definitive article for Liberty, a popular weekly magazine. The story was titled: “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt