Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands Page B

that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might perhaps have done. It seemed proper and sincere; and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”
    It was a stretch even so. Simply entering politics was unusual for one of Roosevelt’s class. Theodore Roosevelt had shocked his family and friends by taking the plunge a quarter century earlier; a godfatherly type told him that politics was grubby, low, and rough, and its practitioners were not those with whom gentlemen associated. “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class,” Theodore Roosevelt recalled. “I intended to be one of the governing class.” Franklin did, too, following Theodore’s example.
    Yet Franklin’s course was, if anything, harder than Theodore’s had been. Theodore’s people were Republicans, the relatively respectable party in New York. Franklin’s folks were Democrats, the party of Tammany Hall. Defection appears never to have occurred to Franklin; consequently any political career he commenced would have to struggle against, surrender to, or otherwise take account of the most storied and arguably the most corrupt political machine in America.
    To be sure, Tammany Hall had mellowed somewhat since the days of Boss William Marcy Tweed, who bilked the city of millions in the aftermath of the Civil War. Tweed eventually died in jail, an object lesson in the wages of corruption. But the source of the corruption—the wellsprings of the cesspool, so to speak—remained. In fact they flowed more strongly than ever as America continued to industrialize and to attract immigrants by the several hundred thousand per year. The immigrants arrived in need of homes, jobs, education, and the myriad other goods and services required to make a new life in a strange land. Relatives and friends from the old countries supplied some of the needs, but being mostly poor themselves, they could do only so much. Government, as government, had yet to conceive its role as providing social services. Consequently the machines—headed by the bosses, staffed by precinct captains, and manned by regiments of ward heelers—found their niche acting as the immigrants’ sponsors and protectors. They helped the newcomers locate housing and employment; they furnished food and clothing if these ran short; they interceded with police and judges when youthful enthusiasm got out of hand or want drove men to desperate deeds. In return they asked only for loyalty at election time. And they usually got it.
    The more thoughtful, or merely more sophistic, of the bosses formulated a philosophy of the machines as agents of democracy. “Consider the problem which every democratic system has to solve,” Richard Croker, Tammany’s chief at the turn of the century, told journalist William Stead. “Government, we say, of the people, by the people, and for the people. The aim is to interest as many of the citizens as possible in the work—which is not an easy work, and has many difficulties and disappointments—of governing the state or the city.” Government officials had to appeal to the needs and desires of citizens. In New York, citizens were often immigrants. “We have thousands upon thousands of men who are alien born, who have no ties connecting them with the city or the state,” Croker said. “They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws. They are the raw material with which we have to build up the state.” Tammany took upon its shoulders the building. It welcomed the newcomers and made them Americans. “Who else would do it if we did not?” Croker conceded that certain of Tammany’s tactics couldn’t stand close scrutiny. But he refused to apologize for them. “If we go down into the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter.”
    Croker’s logic wouldn’t be lost on Franklin Roosevelt, once Roosevelt turned to politics. But it largely eluded