Category Archives: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Robert Caro’s Al Smith

10 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Historiography, Libraries, Robert Moses

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Alfred Emanuel Smith in May 1920 during his first term as governor of New York

I was on vacation last week when I received a text message from someone who was himself away, sitting on a beach in Mexico no less, telling me that the New-York Historical Society had just acquired the extensive—200 linear feet—papers of Robert Caro. I told my friend that I remembered seeing Caro interviewed on C-SPAN 12-15 years ago and Brian Lamb asking the biographer where his papers might eventually go. Caro said at the time that he was not sure, but that he would not be giving them to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. He had had several problems with officials there over the years, especially in the early years of his multi-volume LBJ project when at least some officials then at the archive had been personal associates of Johnson himself and thus less than forthcoming. As it happened I was reading Terry Golway’s Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance that Created the Modern Democratic Party when my friend texted.

Caro’s papers include a great deal on Al Smith himself, one of the great and sadly forgotten figures in American history. Smith happened to enter the New York State Assembly 116 years ago this week in January 1904. Tammany boss Tom Foley, the man responsible for giving Smith his start in politics, gave Smith one piece of advice before his protégé headed to Albany that January nearly a century ago: “Don’t speak until you have something to say.” And so for that first term Smith sat as a back-bencher high above the legislative floor, taking in the proceedings and figuring out who was who and what was what. Roosevelt entered Albany politics seven years later. The word “alliance” in Golway’s title is fitting, for while Smith and FDR’s relationship was more than transactional the two very different men and never shared a friendship in any true sense. For reasons too complicated to go in to here and now, I would aver that it is not a stretch to say that without Al Smith there would be no FDR, at least no FDR as we know the man and his legacy.

I have some projects I’m hoping to accomplish involving Al Smith over the next few years and am hoping Caro’s research on the four-term New York governor and 1928 Democratic Party nominee will be available fairly soon.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt and Prince Edward Albert

24 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.

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Franklin Roosevelt had a soft spot for European royals and did not miss the opportunity to escort Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, to the U.S. Naval Academy with other dignitaries on November 14, 1919.

President and First Lady Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt famously hosted King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park in June 1939. Twenty years previously in November 1919 Assistant Naval Secretary Roosevelt and others hosted George’s brother, Edward Albert, on the Prince of Wales’s visit to Washington D.C. This was the same trip I mentioned a few days ago in which the heir apparent to the British Crown had come to North America in that year just after the Great War’s end for an extended period. The future King Edward VIII spent most of that period, almost four months starting in early August, in British Canada, entering the United States via train on November 10 in the border town of Rouses Point, NY on Lake Champlain to a warm welcome on a cold autumn evening from U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, various British & American military brass, and most of the Rouses Point population of around 2000. The following day he arrived in Washington’s Union Station while Armistice Day ceremonies were going on nearby. He spent some moments that afternoon with the incapacitated President Wilson at the White House.

The image we see above was taken at the Naval Academy of November 14. Here we see Roosevelt on the far left. It is always striking to see how strong and virile he was before contracting polio, less than two years after this photograph was taken. The Prince of Wales is second from the right, wearing the uniform of Captain of the Royal Navy. The announcement stating that Edward Albert would visit Annapolis had gone out ten days prior; in that announcement the Prince of Wales made clear he was representing not just England and Britain, but Canada and the Empire itself during his American tour. Still, his time in the American capital was brief. After the visit to the Naval Academy he took a three-day respite in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia before coming to New York for five days. While here, among many other things, he visited West Point two hours up the Hudson to visit the cadets at the Military Academy. He was in the United States for a mere two weeks, but had done and seen much in that brief span.

(image/Library of Congress)

Isaac Roosevelt, colonial New Yorker

02 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Founding Fathers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book project), Isaac Roosevelt

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Isaac Roosevelt, 1726-1794

The Journal of the American Revolution has uploaded my article about Isaac Roosevelt. I spent much of late summer and early fall working on this project and am happy with how it came out. It had been my loss goal for several years to write about Isaac and the specific “ah ha” moment came one August Saturday at Federal Hall when I was talking to one of rangers about prominent New Yorkers of the colonial, Revolutionary, and Early American periods. When we think of these eras we tend not to think of the Roosevelts, though they were very much prominent in local, national, and international affairs in these decades. That is what I tried to convey in this piece. Isaac Roosevelt was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s great, great grandfather.

I don’t want to give away too many details at the moment but I am preparing a submission to speak at a conference next year about interlocking familial aspects of the Early American and Civil War generations, focusing on one father, son, and grandson, the last of whom features prominently in my book manuscript Incorporating New York. If it comes to pass the Roosevelts, though not front and center, will feature as well. So often we hear that both sides in the Civil War, Union and Confederate, saw themselves as the inheritors of the Founders’ legacy. That is certainly true, but how and why is something we do not always hear about. We’ll see how the pitch to conference selectors goes. In the meantime, here is my biographical narrative of the life and times of Isaac Roosevelt, a founder of the State of New York, ratifier of the U.S. Constitution, and good friend of Hamilton, Jay, and others.

(image/FDR Presidential Library and Museum)

The photographers’ Great Depression

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, New Deal

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Okies in Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency migratory labor camp, Calipatria, Imperial Valley, February 1939. This image was taken by Dorothea Lange, a colleague of Arthur Rothstein whose images are included in the current exhibit at Roosevelt House.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently. I have spent much of the past several weeks finishing the draft of a project that proved more difficult and time-involved that I had imagined. I submitted the draft the other day. We’ll see if comes to pass toward the end of the year. People were asking me at work yesterday what I intended to do over the three-day weekend; when they did I answered with a negative: “not writing and editing.”

Last night I went to Roosevelt House on East 65th Street for the opening of the exhibit “A Lens on FDR’s New Deal: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein, 1935-1945.” Rothstein was one of the great visual chroniclers of Depression Era America. It is not going too far to say that he, his friend and colleague Dorothea Lange, and others shaped our awareness and memory and of what the country was enduring in the 1930s and early 1940s. Part of the reason the Roosevelt Administration created the initiative to photograph the severity of the economic crisis to begin with was to press the need for its New Deal programs.

Rothstein was the son of refugees from Eastern Europe. Like so many immigrants and first-generation Americans, he was eager to make his contribution. Born in 1915, Rothstein attended Columbia University at fifteen and in the mid-1930s, just a young man in his early 20s, found himself driving across the country on dirt roads, sleeping in his car, eating off a hot plate, and shooting 80,000 images in migrant camps, farming communities, and elsewhere.

Rothstein’s daughter, Dr. Annie Segan, put the exhibition together in with her husband and the Roosevelt House historian. With over 125 photographs it is the biggest exhibit of Rothstein images to go on display in more than a quarter century. Other photographers are included as well. Many of the images were taken from tiny negatives. Rothstein’s daughter in her talk called them “picture stories.” Incredibly the trove of 175,000 images taken by Rothstein and the nearly twenty other photographers working for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) were nearly discarded by indifferent bureaucrats in the years after the Second World War. Thankfully they were saved and are available to the public at the Library of Congress and online.

The exhibit runs into January 2020.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

 

Constitution Day

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Alexander Hamilton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, James Madison, Rufus King

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Audience at FDR’s Constitution Day speech, September 17, 1937

Today, September 17, is Constitution Day. It was on this date in 1787 that the Framers met for the final time to sign the document they had written over that contentious summer. It was never a sure thing and was still not a done deal; after that the Constitution went to the states for ratification, a process that took several years as state delegates argued for and against. It was in this period that Hamilton, Jay, and Madison authored The Federalist.

Constitution Day is one of those holidays, like Flag Day and Evacuation Day, that used to be a significant part of American culture but that are hardly remembered today. We would do wise to keep in mind what we stand to lose; if we have learned anything over the past few years it is that our world is more fragile than we would like to think. Many thousands used to turn out in places like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Borough Hall for speeches and parades. There is still some of that. The Rufus King Manor in Queens, for instance, is having its annual observation and fundraiser today. King himself was one of the drafters of the Constitution and was there in Philadelphia for most of the convention. Other events are undoubtedly taking place elsewhere.

President Roosevelt gave his 1937 Constitution Day speech during his Supreme Court packing initiative, largely seen today as one of the major blunders of his administration.

Here are two images from the 1937 Constitution.Day. President Roosevelt spoke that evening at the base of the Washington Monument. One can see the seriousness on his face. That is because this event came during his notorious Courting Packing controversy and he was trying to rally support. The thing never went his way and it is justifiably seen as a low mark in his twelve year presidency.

(images/Library of Congress)

 

The summer of 1919’s terrible climax

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Headquarters of the National Guard during the September 1919 police strike. Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the guard in response to lotting and violence.

Summer technically has another week and a half to go, and these waning days mark the anniversary of one of the worst events of that terrible Red Summer of 1919: the Boston Police Strike raged for nearly a week that September. It was anarchy when more than 1000 police officers walked off the job. Hobbes was right. The same thing happened in Montreal half a century later in 1969. The Boston strike was just one of the many violent outbreaks that year, many of which were essentially pogroms against African-Americans. In a broader context in can also be seen as another in one of the thousands of strikes that had taken place across the country dating back decades to the Gilded Age.

Guardsmen rounding up gamblers in Boston Common during the municipal police strike of 1919

The big winner in the 1919 Boston Police Strike was Governor Calvin Coolidge, whose calling out of the National Guard helped staunch the violence and looting. The following year Coolidge was on the national ticket when he and Warren G. Harding defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt and James M. Cox in the 1920 presidential election. I wish my grandparents on both sides were still alive for me to ask if they remembered the incident; all four grew up in Boston and would have been between 5-10 at the time, old enough perhaps to remember something or to have heard older relatives discussing it in later years. Alas I will ever know because the opportunity is just no longer there.

(images/Boston Public Library)

Marguerite Alice LeHand, 1896-1944

31 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Federal Hall National Memorial, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, Those we remember

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I hope everyone’s summer is going well. I know I have gotten away from the blog a bit but I have been doing some summer things. I have also been trying to finish a book chapter about Eleanor Roosevelt. It is almost done and I’ll turn it in to the editor sometime later in the week. It proved a little difficult to manage because when I stated at Federal Hall n early June I pivoted heavily to the Early American Period. I have no regrets and have learned a great deal. It has given me a more holistic understanding of American History, especially as I try to make sense of our own historical moment. Still, it has been a bit difficult moving from one era back to the other.

Missy LeHand holds up a dime given in the fight to find a cure for infantile paralysis, January 28, 1938

I did want to make certain to pause and remember one of the most important figures of the Roosevelt Era: Marguerite Alice “Missy” LeHand, who died on this day seventy-five years ago in 1944. Ms. LeHand was born in Potsdam, New York and grew up in the working-class Boston suburb of Somerville. She entered the Roosevelts’ world in her mid-20s around the time Franklin ran unsuccessfully for the Vice Presidency in 1920. Marguerite stayed on and proved invaluable after Franklin contracted polio in August 1921; while Roosevelt was seeking in vain for a cure that would never come, Ms. LeHand worked on his behalf. She was part of the inner circle, hanging out on the houseboat in Florida and settling in to her own room at Warm Springs. Ms. LeHand was a charter member of Roosevelt’s Cuff Links Gang, the small circle of early advisors during that Vice Presidential run to whom he each gave a set of gold cufflinks with his initials engraved on one and the recipient’s engraved on the other. Technically she was his secretary but she was so much more than that; when Roosevelt assumed the presidency she was for all intents and purposes the White House chief-of-staff. Had she been a man more people would have appreciated the role she played in his administration.Throughout the long administration others came and went; Marguerite LeHand stayed.

She suffered a debilitatingly stroke in 1941 just as the United States was on the verge of entering the war. FDR had little time to attend to Ms. LeHand as much as he would have liked, but he and Eleanor did make sure her needs were taken care of. She convalesced n the White House but after starting a fire with a cigarette and burning herself significantly she was sent back to Massachusetts. Eleanor Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter, James A. Farley, and Joe Kennedy were just a few who attended her funeral.

(photograph by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress)

Happy 4th

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Happy 4th of July. I’m having my morning coffee before heading to Federal Hall in a bit. I thought I would share these images from ninety years ago today. This is Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt at the dedication of the Tammany Society wigwam at Union Square and 17th Street on July 4, 1929. The 4th was Tammany’s biggest day of the year. Al Smith, among others, was there too, but by now Smith’s time had passed. The Happy Warrior had been a fixture at these Tammany Independence Day events for years, and was being touted by his Tammany brethren for the presidency for much of the 1920s at these 4th of July observances. Now on this Independence Day in 1929 Tammany was touting FDR as the next president, and in Smith’s presence no less. Ouch.

Tammany built this structure in the late 1920s while at the height of its power and influence. That they were forced to sell it less than fifteen years later, in 1943, demonstrates how quickly Tammany declined.

Go get some of what should be a beautiful summer day.

(images/NYT)

FDR’s Tammany Society

02 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert Moses

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Franklin Roosevelt wrote this letter to the Tammany Society on July 2, 1936. It was read aloud two days later at the Tammany wigwam on 17th Street and 4th Avenue during the Tammany Society’s annual Independence Day celebration.

I came across this letter in my prep for a small talk I hope give on the 4th of July at Federal Hall about the history of Independence Day in New York City. It’s a missive from President Roosevelt to the Tammany Society in the lead-up to Tammany’s annual 4th of July event. When we think of Tammany we immediately think of Boss Tweed. In reality, Tweed was a very small part of Tammany’s long story. The Tammany Society dated back to the 1780s; it was a response to the Society of the Cincinnati, a Revolutionary War organization for officers who fought in the conflict. The organization continued for decades after Tweed’s death and would be at the height of its power in the 1920s and 1930s. Roosevelt himself had taken on, or tried to take on, Tammany in the early 1910s when he was a young state assemblyman, but soon realized the futility and so made his peace with the organization. Governor Roosevelt was there–as was Al Smith, Jimmy Walker, Herbert Lehman and others–when Tammany opened its new wigwam across from Union Square on July 4, 1929.

Now president, Roosevelt did not attend Tammany’s 1936 July 4th event. Instead he attended an Independence Day ceremony at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s a story for another time but it’s funny how the reputations of the Founding Fathers rise and fall in relation to one another, especially Jefferson and Hamilton, who was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Right now Hamilton is upland Jefferson is down. In the mid-1930s however the opposite was true. Before he was all done Roosevelt would put Jefferson on the nickel and dedicate the memorial to the philosopher, secretary of state, and third president on the National Mall. Tammany men were more inclined toward Jefferson as well. Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ironically the Age of Roosevelt accelerated Tammany’s decline.The Society’s influence waned when New Deal federal dollars began pouring in shortly after Roosevelt took office. Men like Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses found they could sidestep Tammany and get their funds directly from Roosevelt.

(source/150th Anniversary Celebration, 1786, July 4, 1936)

Versailles

28 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson

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Summer has come full on. I was off today and had the windows open and fan on as I worked on an article I’m doing about Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ve got about 400 in the books and hope to write another 400 or so this evening before declaring victory. I would be remiss if I did not pause and note that today, June 28, 2019, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors. I don’t intend to write too much about it right now because there is already so much good reading out there today. For now I though I would emphasize the quickness and degree to which resistance to the treaty, especially its covenant for a League of Nations, had manifested itself even before the ink had dried.

Henry A. Wise Wood, the son of Civil War Era New York City mayor Fernando Wood, led the campaign against the League of Nations the very day of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

One hundred years ago tonight the League for the Preservation of American Independence held a rally in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. One of the American Independence League’s leaders was Henry A. Wise Wood, an engineer and inventor who had been active in the Preparedness Movement with Theodore Roosevelt and others in the Great War’s early years before American entry into the conflict. Born in 1866, Wood was the son of three-time New York City mayor Fernando Wood. The League for the Preservation of American Independence enjoyed tremendous popularity and easily filled Carnegie Hall that night in protest against Wilson, the Versailles Treaty, and prospective League of Nations. A spinout crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk. Wood asked that the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt fill the hall.

TR had died almost six months previously but almost certainly would have opposed the League of Nations. One Roosevelt who did support it was Franklin, who when he ran for the vice-presidency in 1920 advocated for the League. FDR’s position may or may not have been opportunism based on loyalty to Wilson and the knowledge that, because he and running mate Jacob M. Cox would likely lose the election, he could take a position confident in never having to carry it out. Franklin D. Roosevelt did learn the lesson of the failures of Versailles however, and when he became commander-in-chief began pushing for what became the United Nations a quarter of a century later.

(image/Library of Congress)