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

He was the nominee of his party. But he was beginning the national campaign in the shadow of a doubt.

Powerful Democrats were beginning to hope for a landslide victory. Why should Roosevelt take a chance on a full-tilt campaign that might leave him exhausted? He could stay in New York, give a few national speeches on the radio, and win walking away. Many in the party’s upper tiers thought he should cancel the plans for a big western campaign trip, and they sent Jim Farley to Albany to deliver that message to the governor.

“Big Jim” and Roosevelt were both well aware the whispering campaign was still thriving out in the country. They knew that when FDR had visited Warm Springs a few weeks earlier, rumormongers had spread tales that he had been carried to his quarters on a stretcher and that he had stayed there in seclusion to be treated for a mysterious illness. They knew all about what one reporter called “the cleverly managed propaganda which depicted Mr. Roosevelt as a weak man.” They may well have heard that Herbert Hoover and his aides were saying, behind closed doors in the White House, that Roosevelt would be the best possible Democratic nominee if only the public could see his “helplessness.”

When New York Republicans had talked like that in 1928, FDR had taken a fierce pride in showing voters how much physical stamina he really had. The whispers about his health had gone on ever since. Even many of his true friends and allies couldn’t quite believe he had the strength for a national campaign. He had stood and stood on aching legs while President Hoover made him wait. He had listened to friends urge him to take it easy, save his energy, and coast to the finish line.

FDR asked Farley, “Jim, what do you think yourself?”

“I think you ought to go,” Farley said, breaking into a grin. “And I know you are going anyway.”

“That’s right,” Roosevelt said. “My Dutch is up.”

In mid-September a six-car train called the Roosevelt Special crossed the Mississippi River at St. Louis just as news was coming in that Maine, a rock-solid Republican state, had elected a Democrat as governor—a good omen for FDR’s national campaign.

In the crowds that came out to see the Democratic nominee for president, many people were in the grip of a quiet desperation.

Since 1930, month by month, things had gone steadily from bad to worse to disastrous. The value of companies had been rising all through the prosperous 1920s. People had thought the American economy might never stop growing. Now solid companies large and small were going under. In the great industrial cities, factories closed one assembly line, then another, leaving millions of workers unable to buy food or pay rent. Mines closed. Stores closed. The tonnage of goods hauled over the nation’s railroads dropped and dropped and dropped. As the wages of people in the cities fell, farmers in the countryside had to cut the prices they charged for their grain, milk, meat, and eggs—down and down and down—and by 1932, many farmers were so desperate there was talk of revolution. People hanging on to their jobs lived in fear of the next round of closings. Dozens of banks shut their doors, then hundreds. The entire banking system teetered on the edge of a general collapse.

President Hoover’s halting half measures had failed. When destitute veterans of World War I gathered in Washington to ask for early payment of the bonuses they’d earned for their war service, Hoover sent armed soldiers to drive them away. The Roosevelts were appalled when they read about it. FDR wondered how he had ever thought Hoover could be a good president. He’d concluded “there is nothing inside the man but jelly.” He thought of the veterans pushed out of the capital, bringing nothing home to their families. “They’re probably camping on the roads leading out of Washington,” he said. “They must be in terrible shape.” In and around cities and towns, families who had lost their homes hammered up shacks with scrap lumber and sheet metal. They called these makeshift settlements Hoovervilles.

In big cities FDR delivered speeches to convention-sized crowds. He spoke about the farm crisis to twelve thousand in Topeka, Kansas. He spoke about the railroad crisis to ten thousand at the great Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. He spoke about the crisis in international trade to sixteen thousand at the Civic Auditorium in Seattle. He spoke on harnessing rivers for electrical power in a packed arena in Portland.

These were huge audiences. But he could have stayed home and given the same speeches by radio to audiences numbering in the millions. The point of the trip had more to do with the stops he made in small towns along his route. As he said to a thousand people who came to see him at the railroad station in Goodland, Kansas (population: 3,626), “We are going through the country doing a very simple thing: We are showing ourselves to you.”

What did that mean? Simply what it said—he was showing people that, contrary to what they might have heard, he had all the strength and stamina needed for a demanding cross-country journey with speeches and meetings all along the way. If he could do that, could anyone say he wasn’t strong enough to be president?

During his first campaign for governor, in 1928, he had spoken often about his comeback from polio. Not in 1932. He never mentioned it. He let his performance make the case. He expected the reporters on the campaign train to make the point to their readers, and they did.

“The governor appears in the best of trim,” remarked a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, “in high spirits and having lost none of the vigorous delivery which marks all his speeches.”

He was showing “that he is not a