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On His Way

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Greg Robinson
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Extract

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was all but absent from public life between November 1920, when he was defeated as the Democratic candidate for vice president, and his successful campaign for governor of New York in fall 1928. Throughout most of this period (which one might call FDR's “wilderness years,” borrowing Martin Gilbert's term for Winston Churchill's hiatus from power), Roosevelt struggled to overcome the physical paralysis that resulted from an attack of polio in August 1921, as well as the boredom and depression that accompanied his enforced inactivity. He spent much of his time pursuing treatments for his crippled legs (a process that culminated in his purchase and development of Warm Springs, Georgia, as a treatment center), kept up what he could of his law practice and business interests, and planned with his chief advisor Louis Howe for an eventual return to political life. Meanwhile, to help keep the Roosevelt name in the public eye, Howe encouraged Eleanor Roosevelt to begin her independent career of public speaking and political activism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 28 , October 2004 , pp. 341 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

NOTES

1. For Roosevelt in the 1920s, see Freidel, Frank, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954)Google Scholar; Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 (New York: Putnam, 1972)Google Scholar; and Ward, Geoffrey C., A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989)Google Scholar.

2. Theodore Roosevelt wrote some fifty books and served as first president of the American Historical Association, whereas Wilson had been a professional scholar who had written highly regarded works on George Washington, the Civil War, and American government before being named president of Princeton University. Many of FDR's later contemporaries among world leaders, including Hitler, Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, would also achieve or aspire to renown as the authors of works on politics or history.

3. For Roosevelt's foreign policy writings during the 1920s, see Dallek, Robert, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Robinson, Greg, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 36–41Google Scholar. Among Roosevelt's publications during this period are a privately printed volume on the Committees of Correspondence in the Revolutionary War, a collection of Hyde Park town records, an introduction to a work on naval history, and an interview entitled “Want to Be a Lawyer?” in the Boy Scout magazine Boy's Life. In addition, he designed a plan for an international peace organization for the Bok Peace Prize in 1924. Although it is possible that other people, such as Louis Howe, helped draft some or all these pieces, I include all works printed under Roosevelt's name as “his,” since they stand as evidence of his (presumed) views.

4. Freidel, , Franklin D. Roosevelt, 160–61Google Scholar. The introductory article FDR wrote on the “machinery of government” for his proposed volume during 1922–23 was rejected by the Saturday Evening Post.

5. Gunther, John, Roosevelt in Retrospect (New York: Harper's, 1950), 120Google Scholar. Roosevelt was conscious of his shortcomings as a writer, and spoke with envy of Winston Churchill's great skill (Tugwell, Rexford W., The Democratic Roosevelt [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958], 141Google Scholar).

6. Goldman, Eric F., Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of American Reform (New York: Vintage, 1956), 289Google Scholar. See, for example, Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R., America in Midpassage (New York: Macmillan, 1939)Google Scholar; Burns, James MacGregor, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882–1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 154–55Google Scholar; and Gerstle, Gary, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (10 1994): 1043–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. For Roosevelt's involvement with the ACC, see Tugwell, , The Democratic Roosevelt (142–44, 281–82)Google Scholar; Freidel, , Franklin D. Roosevelt (152–55)Google Scholar; and Davis, , FDR (700–704)Google Scholar.

8. Morgan, Ted, FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 266Google Scholar.

9. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “The Task Ahead For Building,” Nation's Business 11 (01 1923): 36Google Scholar.

10. Feld, Rose C., “To Lift the Labor Deficit in the Building Trades: An Interview with Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Trained Man 3, no. 11 (1923): 244Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 245.

12. Ibid.

13. For Hoover's leadership of business and encouragement of standardization during the 1920s, see Noble, Paul F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar.

14. Hoover, Herbert, American Individualism (New York: Doubleday 1922), 42–43Google Scholar. After receiving a copy of the book from a friend, Roosevelt wrote, “I had read of its publication but had not yet got a copy and I have taken great pleasure in reading it. I wish that everybody could have a chance to do so” (Franklin Roosevelt, letter to Lupton A. Wilkinson, January 18, 1923, in FDR Correspondence, 1920–1928, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park).

15. Feld, , “To Lift the Labor Deficit,” 245Google Scholar.

16. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Building Construction Costs Problematic,” Permanent Builder 8 (05 1924): 45Google Scholar.

17. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Smith — Public Servant,” Outlook 137 (06 25, 1924): 310Google Scholar. Until the 1930s, Roosevelt himself preferred to be called a “progressive” rather than a “liberal” (Lindley, Ernest K., Franklin Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931], 320Google Scholar).

18. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Problems and Policies in New York State,” American Review of Reviews 69 (06 1924): 604–7Google Scholar.

19. Ibid. The quote comes from an article published during the fall statewide campaign in the Women's Democratic News, a weekly edited by Eleanor Roosevelt (see Roosevelt, Franklin D., “What It Was All About,” Women's Democratic News 1 [11 1924]: 1Google Scholar).

20. Roosevelt, , “Problems and Policies,” 606Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 605. Ironically, it was this theory of government operation that led Smith to appoint Robert Moses New York's secretary of state and to the Taconic State Park Commission, and Moses used the independent commissions to build himself an impregnable power base in New York over the following decades. Roosevelt's dismissal of Moses following his election as governor of New York in 1929 helped occasion the final break between Roosevelt and Smith (see Caro, Robert A., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York [New York: Vintage, 1975]Google Scholar).

22. Roosevelt, “Smith: Public Servant,” 310. The importance to Roosevelt of this quality is reflected in his almost literal recycling of the passage in The Happy Warrior, an article-sized 1928 presidential campaign pamphlet on Smith, in which FDR praised Smith's “instinctive method of stripping the shell of verbiage and extraneous matter from any problem and then presenting it as a definite programme which anyone can understand” (Roosevelt, Franklin D., The Happy Warrior, Alfred E. Smith: A Study of a Public Servant [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928], 16Google Scholar).

23. Davis, , FDR, 478Google Scholar.

24. Ibid.

25. See Carmichael, Donald Scott, ed., F.D.R. Columnist (Chicago: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1947), 36–40Google Scholar, which includes the texts of all the columns. Roosevelt's writings on civil service reform include his last published piece before his polio attack (Roosevelt, Franklin D., “The Americanization of Government Affairs,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin 22 (03 4, 1920): 532–37Google Scholar.

26. Carmichael, F.D.R., Columnist.

27. Ibid., 32–34.

28. Ibid.

29. Letter of April 16, 1925, cited in Davis, , FDR (804)Google Scholar.

30. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Is There a Jefferson on the Horizon?” (review of Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America), American Mercury, 61 (09 1945): 278 (reprinted from New York Evening World, December 3, 1925)Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 279.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. The article is also prophetic about the threats to democracy from overseas. In fact, Roosevelt appointed Claude Bowers as U.S. Ambassador to the Spanish Republic at the time of the Spanish Civil War as a champion of democratic credentials.

35. Roosevelt's admiration for Jefferson led him to approve the building of the Jefferson Memorial in the Tidal Basin area in Washington, D.C. FDR's final speech, which he was in the midst of correcting when he suffered his fatal cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, and which he did not live to deliver, was a tribute to Jefferson meant for a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.

36. Burns, , Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 90Google Scholar.

37. Roosevelt, Franklin D., Whither Bound? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 15–16Google Scholar.

38. Franklin D. Roosevelt, address to New York State Democratic Convention, September 27, 1926, in FDR Speech File, PSF 1820, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

39. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “What Price Flood Relief?” National Business Review, 3 (10 1, 1927): 35–36Google Scholar. For the impact of the flood on American politics, see Barry, John M., Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997)Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 37.

41. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Why Bother With the Crippled Child?” Crippled Child 5 (04 1928): 140–44Google Scholar. This speech marks one of Roosevelt's first public statements about polio, although he did not mention his own condition in it.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Roosevelt, Happy Warrior. Roosevelt's Houston nomination speech makes up the second half of the text.

45. Carmichael, , F.D.R. Columnist, 125–40Google Scholar.

46. Roosevelt, Franklin, interview, New York Times, 12 30, 1928Google Scholar, cited in Freidel, Frank, F.D.R.: The Triumph (Boston, Little Brown, 1956), 12 nGoogle Scholar.

47. Roosevelt, , “Why Bother?” 143Google Scholar.