Read Online Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash - Free Book Online

stocks. Valentine Hall considered that stupid. “He should have held on until after Lincoln’s election,” he thought. Everything would go up. He scared another friend with the warning that if McClellan were elected, the Democrats would surely repudiate the debt. But Valentine Hall did not wholly approve of Lincoln, either. When the president sent in a general to take charge of riot-ridden New York, he thought the action “despotic.” As for Lincoln’s political associates, their pockets were “filled too.” He prayed, worried abouthis health, and though in his twenties, bought a substitute in order to escape military service, as many gentlemen did.
    The Oyster Bay Roosevelts stayed Republican, but the Dutchess County branch reverted to the Democratic party. One Roosevelt who voted for Cleveland was the gracious squire of Hyde Park.
    Cleveland was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since 1860, but his policies differed little from those of his Republican predecessors. Not until Theodore became president did either Republican or Democrat assert the national interest in any way that angered the rich and privileged.
    The Cleveland victory saw the final suppression of the Negro vote in the southern states. “Let the South alone,” William E. Dodge, New York capitalist, Grant Republican, and close friend of the elder Theodore, had urged in 1875, and that is what Republican administrations did, beginning with President Hayes, for whom the elder Theodore had worked hard. By 1884 the South had nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments insofar as they applied to Negroes, and white supremacy was effectively re-established.
    Because of the Bulloch connection in Georgia, the Roosevelts always had a large circle of southern friends. And because of these southern ties, Elliott and Theodore were undoubtedly sympathetic with the restoration of white rule in the South, although as president, Theodore would shatter precedent and rouse the South to a fury by having Booker T. Washington as a White House luncheon guest.
    He was to shatter precedent as well by his enlightened approach to the rights of the workingman, and it was in the year of Eleanor’s birth that he began to question the interpretation of the laissez-faire doctrine to which he and most of the members of his class had always subscribed. In 1884 Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers Union took Theodore on a tour of the slum sweatshops, and the young assemblyman agreed to sponsor a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenements even though it violated his laissez-faire principles. And when the courts, quoting Adam Smith, invalidated his bill saying that they could not see “how the cigar-maker is to be improved in his health or his morals by forcing him from his home and its hallowed associations,” Theodore began to be aware, as he wrote later, that complete freedom for the individual could turn out in practice “to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.” He would be the first president since Jackson to use the power of government against Big Business—in the 1902 coal strike.
    The trade-union movement in the eighties was in its infancy. Labor was cheap. The propertied wanted to keep it that way and rationalized their privileged position by arguing that any man worth his salt could improve his status. The day Eleanor was born, an Episcopal congress met in Detroit to answer the question Is Our Civilization Just to Workingmen? “Labor’s complaint is poverty,” said the keynote speaker, the Reverend Dr. R. H. Newton. “Poverty is the fault neither of the laborer nor of nature. The state crosses the path of the workingman and prevents him from making a fair fight. Labor fails to get favorable legislation; capital secures all it asks.”
    To the respectable and the upstanding, whether wealthy or not, this was “rot” and heresy. Their laissez-faire