Master of His Fate by James Tobin (books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

wide enough for FDR and two other men. So if he absolutely had to, he could get up and down stairs by himself, as long as there was a strong railing. Anna saw him perform this feat at Flushing High School in Queens. He didn’t want to walk up the long center aisle of the auditorium, Anna recalled, “for fear people might think he was trying to develop sympathy for himself—a sympathy aimed at making people vote for a physically courageous man rather than for one with the political and statesmanlike qualities necessary for the office.” So here, too, he chose to come in by a fire escape at the rear of the building, one that was apparently too narrow for assistants to carry him. “By using his strong arms and shoulders,” Anna wrote, “he could, slowly but surely, swing first one leg and then the other up one step at a time. It was a tough, slow climb, and Father paused for breath a couple of times. Each time he made a wisecrack to break the tension for those of us who were watching. We weren’t worried that he might fall. But we knew how he hated to have people watch him doing something that was as much effort as this and that drew attention to his paralysis. When he reached the top, his face was streaming with perspiration, and his white shirt was soaked. He paused just long enough to mop his face and catch his breath. Then he walked out on to the stage…”

Watching FDR at one event after another that week, Perkins recalled, “I began to see what the great teachers of religion meant when they said that humility is the greatest of virtues, and that if you can’t learn it, God will teach it to you by humiliation. Only so can a man be really great.”

Every day, Roosevelt told the crowds that he and Al Smith were on the verge of historic upset victories. But by now it was clear to any realistic onlooker that Smith was about to be buried in a landslide.

If his campaign had accomplished nothing else, at least it had persuaded the press that his disability was no handicap. “It is a fact,” wrote a New York World reporter, “that Mr. Roosevelt appears in better health today than he did at the outset of his campaign three weeks ago.”

But toxic rumors continued to circulate. He would be dead within six months. Or if he won and survived, he would soon turn over the governor’s chair to Herbert Lehman.

“I thought that with Halloween over these ghost stories would be forgotten,” he told listeners at one stop. “All I can say is that if I could keep on in this campaign steadily for another twelve months I would throw away my cane.”

In the final days he rushed north for meetings and rallies on his home ground. He spent the day before the election in Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, slept in his own bed that night, voted in the morning, and then joined Smith in New York City to await the results.

At the Biltmore Hotel, he and Eleanor hosted a buffet supper for friends and allies. He went over to see the Democratic faithful at Tammany headquarters, looked in on the party’s national offices at the General Motors Building, then went back to the Biltmore for the long night of waiting.

Early reports from upstate voting precincts were crushing. Ottinger was racing out to a big lead. By midnight the totals showed that Smith had lost his race against Hoover in all but eight states. His beloved New York State had gone against him.

Sam Rosenman watched Roosevelt as he leafed through the county-by-county voting returns. He saw FDR’s jaw get set and stony.

“We’ll stay around until it is over,” he said.

He suspected Republican county sheriffs were delaying their vote reports and doctoring the totals. He had phone calls put through to several of them.

“This is Franklin Roosevelt,” he said. “The returns from your county are coming in mighty slowly, and I don’t like it … I want you personally to see that the ballots are not tampered with.”

Finally he concluded there was no point in staying any longer. Now only Frances Perkins and Sara Roosevelt were left to wait for the party workers to hand over the final tally. “I made up my mind to sit out the night on the ridiculous theory that if I didn’t give up somehow the result would be changed,” Perkins said.

Precinct by precinct, local totals continued to stream in by teletype. The first editions of the newspapers arrived with headlines announcing Hoover’s and Ottinger’s victories. Still more reports arrived.

At 4:00 A.M., the men tallying the returns came over to tell Sara and Frances Perkins that FDR had been elected governor by twenty-five thousand votes out of nearly 4.5 million cast.

The two women embraced. Then Frances Perkins escorted Sara home to East Sixty-Fifth Street just as the sun was coming up.

Chapter 15“HE MUST DO IT HIMSELF”

Two years later, on November 4, 1930, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a second term as governor of New York by the greatest margin of victory ever recorded in the state. This time, against the Republican Charles H. Tuttle, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he piled up mountains of votes throughout the city; he won in the upstate cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany; he won in rural counties where farmers had been voting the straight Republican ticket since the days of Abraham Lincoln; he won among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. He won by nearly three-quarters of a million votes out of roughly three million cast.

The day after the election, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, one of the governor’s lieutenants came out of Democratic Party headquarters to talk with reporters.

This was Big Jim Farley, a friendly Irish American political pro who had moved over from Al Smith’s camp to work for