A Treasury of Great American Scandals (12 page)

The third-party candidate knew he was in for a tough battle. “In strict confidence, my feeling is that the Democrats will probably win if they nominate a progressive candidate,” he told a friend. His worst fears were realized when the Democrats nominated New Jersey gov-ernorWoodrow Wilson. The race was on, but it was between Roosevelt and Wilson. Poor Taft never had a prayer. In an era of reform, he and his conservative agenda were simply irrelevant. “Sometimes I think I might as well give up so far as being a candidate is concerned,” Taft wrote plaintively. “There are so many people in the country who don't like me. Without knowing much about me, they don't like me.”

With the Republican party split, Wilson won the election handily with 42 percent of the vote. Roosevelt pulled off the best third-party performance in history, finishing second with 27 percent of the popular vote. Taft carried only two states, Utah and Vermont. The ousted president, of whom Roosevelt later said, “He meant well, but he meant well feebly,” achieved his ultimate dream nine years later when President Warren G. Harding appointed him chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. “I don't remember that I was ever President,” Taft joyfully remarked on the occasion.

“I'd Rather Vote for Hitler”

 

 

 

As far as Theodore Roosevelt's children were concerned, the wrong Roosevelt eventually succeeded their late father to the White House in 1933. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a lightweight in their eyes—a distantly related upstart, and a Democrat to boot. It didn't matter that he had married their first cousin Eleanor,
¹³
strengthening his ties to their branch of the clan. He was still an outsider, an unfit one at that, whose rise to power was a gross usurpation of the political mantle they believed should have rested with them.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore's acid-tongued daughter, often gave voice to the decades of ill will generated by the conflicting ambitions within the extended family. “There we were,” she once said of her branch of the family, “
the
Roosevelts—hubris up to the eyebrows,
beyond
the eyebrows—and who should show up but
Nemesis
in the person of Franklin.”

FDR grew up worshiping his distant kinsman Theodore, eagerly absorbing tales of his adventures in the American West and his military exploits with the Rough Riders. He also followed the great man's path when it came to charting his own future—attending Harvard, starting in politics in the New York state legislature, and becoming assistant secretary of the navy while the country was at war. But his close identification with the late president became a bit too much for Theodore Roosevelt's children when FDR was nominated as Ohio governor James Cox's running mate in the 1920 presidential race against Warren G. Harding. Franklin was quick to latch onto TR's legacy during the campaign, whistle-stopping through the West, which was proven Roosevelt territory, and slamming the Republican nominee by saying he couldn't help believing that Theodore Roosevelt, who had “invented the word ‘pussy-footer,' would not have resisted the temptation to apply it to Mr. Harding.” The tactic worked almost too well, with many people believing FDR was TR's son. “You're just like the old man!” people would shout at various stops. “I voted for your father!”

Theodore Roosevelt's brood believed the public's confusion was being cultivated deliberately by FDR and quickly mobilized against him. Ted, TR's eldest son and namesake—and his only legitimate heir, from the family's point of view—joined Harding's campaign and started trailing FDR to counter any impression that this obscure Roosevelt relative had any real connection to the late, great president. “He is a maverick,” Ted said of Franklin. “He does not have the breed of our family.” That included courage, Ted implied, noting that FDR had only gone to Europe as an observer for the Wilson administration during World War I, while all four of TR's sons had fought.

Ted's gadfly campaign seemed to be effective; at one point the
Chicago Tribune
echoed him by calling FDR “the one half of one percent Roosevelt.” It was enough to prompt presidential candidate James Cox to confront Ted publicly: “It is a pitiable spectacle to see this son of a great sire shamelessly paraded before the public. Out of respect for the memory of his illustrious father someone ought to take this juvenile spokesman aside and in primer fashion make plain what really ought to be obvious.” Ted and his siblings were vindicated by Harding's crushing victory against Cox and his running mate, Franklin.

None of the clan could be described as overly concerned about FDR's subsequent paralysis from polio, either. (Alice's husband, Nick Longworth, an Ohio congressman and future speaker of the House, cruelly called him the “denatured Roosevelt.”) With Franklin apparently out of the way, it was now Ted's turn to claim his rightful place in the political arena. He started by moving to Washington in 1921 and taking over the post of assistant secretary of the navy that FDR had held during the previous Wilson administration. From there Ted decided to run for governor of New York in 1923. It was just about this time, however, that he was tarred by Teapot Dome, one of the worst scandals in the nation's history.
¹⁴
Although Ted was not personally involved, the scandal consumed him nonetheless.

FDR, adjusting to his paralysis and aiming for a return to politics, could not have been more delighted with his distant cousin's misfortune. Frances Perkins, his future secretary of labor, said that one of his leading characteristics during this time was the overwhelming desire “to outshine his cousin Ted.” As there could be only one Roosevelt in the arena, Ted's troubles came almost as a gift. Franklin loved getting newspaper articles from his advisor, Louis Howe, chronicling the Teapot Dome mess, and Ted's perceived role in it as assistant secretary of the navy. “I'm sending you clippings from which you will see that little Ted appears to be down and out as a candidate for governor,” Howe wrote, adding as a postscript: “The general position of the newspaper boys is [that] politically he is as dead as King Tut, for the moment at least.”

Ted wasn't dead, but he was seriously wounded. Franklin, on the other hand, gloriously reclaimed the spotlight at the Democratic National Convention of 1924 when, despite his disability, he bravely walked up to the podium—with the help of his son James, and after hours of practice at home—and nominated New York governor Al Smith for president. It was a rapturous moment for FDR. And though Smith failed to get the nomination, he did run for reelection as New York's governor, dramatically decreasing Ted Roosevelt's chances of winning that race. “They have certainly handed you a fight,” Alice telegraphed her brother.

Despite his newly claimed political stature, and Louis Howe's urgings, FDR refused to campaign against Ted. His wife, Eleanor, had no such qualms. Though she was Ted's first cousin, she had long been treated by his family as a pathetic relation whom they occasionally allowed to bask in their collective glory. Growing up shy and awkward, she was tormented by Alice, who was later complicit in FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer, and who delighted audiences with her wicked imitations of Eleanor's protruding teeth and receding chin. So, the family ties Eleanor Roosevelt might have been severing by campaigning against Ted were already seriously frayed to begin with. Besides, Franklin was her husband, and her emerging political fortunes were entwined with his. Armed with the knowledge that a victory for Ted could compromise their own ambitions, Eleanor launched a ferocious attack on her cousin.

It began at the state Democratic convention when she seconded Al Smith's nomination for governor, caustically observing that by nominating Ted the Republicans “had done everything they could to help [Smith].” As Ted had done to FDR years earlier, Eleanor badgered her cousin at his campaign stops, trailing him in a car outfitted with a giant teapot spouting steam—a glaring reminder of the scandal that haunted Ted's campaign. She denounced him as “a personally nice young man,” but a political weakling “whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.”

To the family who had once dismissed Eleanor as a meek and insignificant orphan in their midst, her activism came as a stunning, and most unwelcome, surprise. “I just hate to see Eleanor let herself look as she does,” her aunt Anna wrote after a visit by Eleanor and a couple of her feminist friends—“female impersonators,” as Alice called them. “Though never handsome,” Anna continued, “she always had to me a charming effect, but alas and lackaday! since politics have become her choicest interest, all her charm has disappeared, and the fact is emphasized by the companions she chooses to bring with her.” Ted's wife wasn't happy about Eleanor's behavior either, particularly since they shared the same first and last names. People were bound to think Ted's own wife was campaigning against him. Yet no matter how much she upset her relatives, Eleanor plowed on, tasting power and savoring her cousin's eventual defeat in the New York governor's race.

In 1928, Franklin Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, the same office Ted had been denied four years earlier. Theodore Roosevelt's family was being eclipsed again, as Ted had to settle for an appointment by President Herbert Hoover as governor-general of Puerto Rico. One of Ted's nieces recalled a visit by FDR's family during his gubernatorial campaign, when the resentment was palpable: “We were
awful
to those Franklin children. And after the family left, we took the Franklin Delano Roosevelt buttons they left with us and stomped on them with glee!” It was about all they could do, as FDR was becoming an unstoppable force.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the economic chaos that followed spelled disaster for the Republican party, which was buried in the midterm elections of 1930, and for the Republican Roosevelts. For Franklin Roosevelt, though, it was a boom period. He was reelected governor by a huge margin, greatly increasing the likelihood that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1932. “Well, as far as I can see, the ship went down with all on board,” Ted wrote his mother from Puerto Rico about the Republican reversals. “Franklin now, I suppose, will run for the Presidency, and I am beginning to think of nasty things to say concerning him.”

Anything Ted had to say would be an insignificant squeak amid the chorus calling for FDR. Although he was appointed to the more prestigious and visible post of governor-general of the Philippines, and still harbored hope for even greater things, Ted seemed to know that his time was passing. “I believe that the Governor Generalship of the Philippine Islands may well mark the end of my active career as a public servant,” he wrote his mother from Manila. “Should it do so . . . I would like to feel that I had done the best that lay in me. I do not feel now that I have anything to be ashamed of [for] having gone into public life or that Father would feel other than that I have done well.”

Ted submitted his resignation shortly after Franklin became president in 1933. A new party was in power, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. did not belong. Asked by a newsman in Manila precisely what his relationship with the new president was, he responded wryly, “Fifth cousin about to be removed.” The reversal of Ted's place in the world, and that of his family, was made all the more bitter when he discovered that his brother Kermit had defected to FDR. In an ingratiating letter to the president-elect, Kermit wrote, “I can say with absolute truth that, although I have been a Republican all my life, I am tremendously relieved and pleased that you were elected.” Then, to seal the new alliance, Kermit joined FDR on a two-week Caribbean cruise aboard Vincent Astor's yacht.

The rest of the Theodore Roosevelt family maintained ranks and did what they could to make life miserable for their distant cousin in the White House. Alice often led the charge, offering a steady stream of cruel commentary for the benefit of Washington's conservative cave dwellers while perfecting her Eleanor imitation. Her visits to the White House were often unsettling, such as when she showed up dripping in gold jewelry right after FDR had taken the country off the gold standard. But the fact that she visited the White House at all, even if it was to torment its occupants, irked Ted. “I could not help feeling it was like behaving in like fashion to an enemy during war,” he wrote his mother. “More so, for enemies generally only fight for territory, trade or some material possessions. These are fighting us for our form of government, our liberties, the future of our children. I did not expect Kermit to see—for that's his blind side. But I did expect [Alice] to see this, for she's acute and her life has been politics.”

Ted's own assault on the Roosevelt administration was relentless. He charged FDR's New Deal programs with “making false promises to the needy,” administering relief in such a way as “to leave a stench in the nostrils of decent people,” and destroying the country “morally and spiritually and ruining it materially.” In one 1935 speech he addressed the president directly: “You have been faithless. You have usurped the functions of Congress, hampered the freedom of the press. . . . You have urged Congress to pass laws you knew were unconstitutional. . . . You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible.” It was harsh stuff, which Ted only intensified as he tried to subvert FDR's efforts to engage the United States in World War II (by the end of which both cousins would be dead). “Like you I am bitterly fearful of Franklin,” Ted wrote his sister Alice. “I am confident he is itching to get in the situation, partly as a means of bolstering himself and partly merely because of megalomania.”

Alice herself had not mellowed much over the course of FDR's first two terms. When asked her views on a third term, she snorted, “I'd rather vote for Hitler.” After years of tolerating her ferocious wit, FDR was fed up. “I don't want anything to do with that damned woman again!” he roared. As invitations to the White House dried up, Alice seemed bemused by Franklin and Eleanor's reactions to her: “They might have said, ‘Look here, you miserable woman, of course you feel upset because you hoped your brother Ted would finally achieve [the presidency] and now he hasn't. But, after all, here we are. Come if it amuses you!' But they took it all seriously. They took the meanness in the spirit in which it was meant.”