Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 2
The following is perhaps the most intriguing—and certainly the most frustrating—of all the recorded conversations. It took place sometime between August 22 and 27, and in it, Roosevelt and his aide Lowell Mellett discuss the most sensitive sort of political maneuvering, the spreading of political rumors.
Late that summer, FDR had learned that the Republican National Committee had obtained a cache of potentially embarrassing letters written some years earlier by his running mate, Henry A. Wallace, to Nicholas Roerich, a White Russian painter, explorer, and mystic, and to one of Roerich’s female disciples. At least two of the letters were addressed “Dear Guru.” It was too late to drop Wallace from the ticket and, since GOP operatives were known to be showing copies of the letters to friendly publishers, the problem Roosevelt faced was how to counter or blunt their effect. The Democrats had a secret weapon of their own: they knew that Wendell Willkie had mostly lived apart from his wife for a number of years, while having an affair with a woman prominent in New York literary circles.
The whole subject of political scandal reminds Roosevelt of two stories from his own past. The first concerns the 1920 presidential campaign, when the James Cox-FDR ticket was soundly defeated by Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Rumors of Harding’s alleged Negro ancestry had indeed been widespread during the campaign—though FDR’s belief that they were orchestrated by Harding’s own campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, in an effort to win sympathy for his candidate seems to have been unique with Roosevelt.
The “trial” to which Roosevelt later refers was the 1932 hearing in which Governor Roosevelt, already his party’s nominee for President, was faced with the prickly problem of deciding whether or not New York’s flamboyant—but staunchly Democratic—mayor should be removed from office. (Walker finally solved the problem for him by resigning.)
Here is the conversation:
FDR : Uh, Lowell, on this … ah … thing. I don’t know if you remember, we were talking about the story… and so forth and so on. There was a fellow once upon a time who was named Daugherty, and he helped to run Harding’s campaign against the Democrats. He was slick as hell. He went down through an agent to a Methodist minister in Marion, the town where Harding’s mother and grandmother came from. This friend of Daugherty’s got hold of the Methodist minister and told him the story about Harding’s mother having a Negro mother. In other words, Daugherty planted it on the Methodist minister, who was a Democrat, and showed him certain papers … that proved the case. The Methodist minister, who was a Democrat, got all upset and he started the story all over the place. The press took it up, and it was the most terrific boomerang against us .
Now I agree with you that there is… so far as the Old Man [presumably F.D.R. himself]