Many folks locally and around the country have been dedicating evenings lately to “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” the new Ken Burns documentary series on PBS.
No question that Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor among them shook the world. But before they were President, Franklin and Theodore were each governors of the Empire State. Before she was first lady of the world (in Harry Truman’s phrase), Eleanor Roosevelt was first lady of New York.
So some of their effect on us locally was direct and personal. There are persistent stories about Franklin stopping at one of the resorts on Keuka Lake, though I’ve never been able to verify them. We were also on the campaign hustings, a route which ran along the railroads in Theodore’s day. In 1898 he spoke to a large crowd at the Erie Depot in Corning, where T.G. Hawkes employees attended on company time. Two years later he was back in Corning, running for the vice-presidency.
When Theodore’s campaign train stopped at Cameron Mills, he spotted the milk station manager with his nine children on the loading dock. “This is the most prosperous place I have been to yet,” TR quipped (he only had six himself). I believe he also spoke at least once in Bath.
By the time Franklin ran for governor in 1928, auto was the way to go. Since his calamitous bout with polio seven years earlier, worries about his strength and health were pervasive. So he barnstormed every county in the state by car, starting in Middletown and running across the Southern Tier, then up along the lakeshore and down the Hudson to New York City. In one day he woke up at Elmira and raced to Olean (largely over dirt roads), speaking at both places – not to mention at Corning, Bath, and Hornell along the way. Besides blasting Republican leaders as “stupid,” and promising continued Progressivism and reform, Roosevelt jauntily asked every crowd, “Do I look sick to you?” and beamed as they shouted back their answer.
He won, of course, the grueling three-week campaign proving that he could do what even a fully healthy man would quail at, and smile the whole way.
While finding plenty of support in a union town like Hornell, out here in the west he was hampered by the hereditary Republicanism of many voters. Hammondsporters gave him their ballots for President in 1932, when he promised to repeal Prohibition. That accomplished, they went back to Alf Landon four years later.
Through the thirties many communities, including Corning, held balls on Franklin’s birthday to raise money for the fight against polio. On August 23, 1933, empowered by the new National Industrial Recovery Act, Corning Glass Workers finally got a union. This was apparently an idea whose time had come, since they voted 1650 to 113 in favor, with 180 abstentions.
A student once asked me if New Deal construction projects had been necessary. I replied that if you thought a dirt road was fine, with a bridge that could carry a horse and wagon, then they hadn’t been needed. But if you though that our bridges and highways should carry tractor-trailer trucks, that was a different story.
For some mystifying reason tradition describes New Deal jobs as do-nothing projects, and the workers as lazy bums who got paid for leaning on shovels. Some of the useless boondoggles accomplished by these bums include Hoover Dam; the Golden Gate Bridge; and LaGuardia Airport.
Locally we can thank the New Deal for Stony Brook Park; Dansville High School (now Genesee Community College); Glenn Curtiss Memorial School; the Painted Post post office – most of them still in use.
In the early 1930s a supervisor of the poor in Steuben County, while admitting that hundreds, if not thousands of desperate people were being helped by state and federal programs, grumped that these programs were making people lazy and dependent. These are the same people, of course, who fought through the Depression, won the Second World War, and built the biggest economic boom our country has ever enjoyed.
And they couldn’t have built that boom without the highways, harbors, bridges, airports, schools, post offices, and power systems of the New Deal. They couldn’t have bought their homes, or gotten their college educations, without Franklin’s G.I. Bill of Rights.
In 1996 Bob Dole campaigned for president, with the awkward task of running against peace and prosperity. One of his most memorable proposals was less meat inspection – an idea that stunningly failed to enthuse the public, who preferred living in Theodore Roosevelt’s world. On another question, after stumbling briefly, Dole finally told his questioners, look, this is America – we’re not going to let children go hungry… showing that he himself was living in Franklin’s world.
Every person who picks up a prescription, or buys a cold remedy, with confidence that they’ll be safe, is living in Theodore’s world. Every patient with pre-existing conditions who can now buy health insurance is living in Theodore’s world, for he campaigned on universal health care 110 years ago.
Every American who deposits money in a bank without worrying, or who gets a Social Security payment, or belongs to a union – or who buys a bottle of wine — is living in Franklin’s world. Every woman who thinks she should be able to think for herself, and plan her life without others confining her, is living in Eleanor’s world. Every African American who thinks he should have the same chances every other American has, is living in the world of the Roosevelts. Without their dreams, their ideals, their convictions, and their accomplishments, or lives would be very different.