Delegates to the Democratic National Convention of 1944 traveled to Chicago in passenger cars crowded with GIs headed to the battlefields of World War II. Ahead of the convention, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with party officials in the 51st Street rail yard where his fortified sleeping car, the Ferdinand Magellan, was parked.
His legs, weakened by polio, were encased in heavy metal braces. Press photographers only had access to him sitting at his desk, looking like a man unencumbered by any handicap, leading his people to victory.
FDR’s nomination for a fourth term was unopposed and thus assured.
Yet those who saw him up close, or in the White House, had a nagging sense that by choosing FDR’s running mate, the convention might be naming the next president.
Roosevelt’s hands shook, and his mind wandered. Ill with the flu, he had delivered the 1944 State of the Union Address as a Fireside Chat instead of a speech before Congress. He rarely appeared in public. His political strategist wrote a memo about, “finding a practical alternative to a fourth term.”
FDR was clearly suffering from the wear-and-tear of years in the White House — dealing with the Great Depression and World War II, traveling to conferences with European allies. And there was no end in sight.
“You in this Convention are aware of what I have sought to gain for the Nation, and you have asked me to continue,” FDR said in accepting its nomination on July 20, 1944.
It was broadcast to the delegates in the Chicago Stadium from the San Diego Naval Base. Roosevelt was en route to Hawaii to join military brass debating strategies for the Pacific theater of war.
Even then, he had to keep an ear attuned to politicking at the Chicago convention. Four years earlier, Roosevelt replaced his conservative vice president, John Nance Garner, with Henry Wallace, who was far more liberal and had a greater commitment to Roosevelt’s social revolution than to Roosevelt. Both the party and Roosevelt knew Wallace had to go.
The Democratic Party chairman, Robert Hannegan, later joked that he hoped his tombstone would be inscribed “Here lies the man who stopped Henry Wallace from becoming the president of the United States.”
On the eve of the convention’s most ballyhooed slug fest, even as Roosevelt publicly offered support to Wallace, the selection of a running mate remained up in the air.
Voters formerly saw Wallace as a sober representative of Middle America’s values. His grandfather edited “Wallace’s Farmer,” which told farmers when to plant crops and how to market them. Wallace’s father, a farmer-scientist who developed mathematic models for breeding corn, and Wallace himself followed as editors of the publication.
But many of his beliefs were out of touch with everyday Americans. For example, he was fascinated by the ideas of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian mystic. He referred to him as the “Guru” and reported seeing visions of him during his morning meditations.
As James Farley, the onetime party chairman, observed: Wallace “would only make the country a mighty strange president.”
On the run-up to the convention, Roosevelt sent Wallace on a mission to the Soviet Union. That would keep the vice president out of the loop should FDR audition potential replacements.
The Soviets gave Wallace a sanitized tour of Stalin’s alleged workers’ paradise. He went for it hook, line and sinker. He described a gulag labor camp for political prisoners in Magadan as “a combination of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
But Wallace’s naivete abroad fueled a simmering queasiness at home. Would his name on the party’s ticket doom Democratic candidates for other offices?
Fearing the debate could boil over, Wallace sought Roosevelt’s blessing. Wallace’s assistant suggested to Roosevelt’s assistant that FDR say: “We have made a team which pulls together, thinks alike and plans ahead.”
Roosevelt initially thought the opposition to Wallace was limited to politicians. But he was being told it had metastasized to the electorate. So FDR’s assistant told Wallace’s assistant the most the vice president could get was this: “Wallace is his first choice and he would vote for Wallace if he was a delegate at the Convention, but that the Convention will have to decide.”
There were other candidates for the nomination, and FDR’s style was to encourage rivals. Each would assume he was at the top of Roosevelt’s list, and do FDR’s dirty work.
James Byrnes was one such candidate. A former South Carolina senator who was appointed by Roosevelt to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court — which he left after just 15 months for a post with the Roosevelt administration — Byrnes often was referred to as the “assistant President”.
Yet as a Southerner he endangered the party in northern cities where the Black vote was the key to success.
U.S. Rep. William Dawson of Illinois, the political boss of Chicago’s Black wards, assured his fellow delegates that Byrnes’ nomination wouldn’t trigger a Black flight from the Democratic Party. But Byrnes had another liability. He had left the Catholic Church upon marrying an Episcopalian. How would that sit with Irish Catholic voters in cities like Chicago?
Other party leaders thought a better bet was Sen. Harry Truman of Missouri. He had conducted hearings into wasteful spending in the defense industry. The issue would attract voters whose shopping lists had to match their paychecks.
The unions had to be factored into the candidate-selection algorithm. War workers were moved to where they were needed. It would take legions of union organizers to find them and get them registered to vote.
Roosevelt would often append an injunction to the consensus of his advisers: “Run it by Sidney.” Sidney Hillman was the powerful head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a founder of the Congress of Industrial Unions. It was pledged to Wallace.
The boisterous selection process virtually desiccated the Chicago Stadium. Vendors’ sold oceans of remedies for throats parched and aching from shouting praises of their candidate, booing and hissing his opponents. Delegates and others at the convention drank 80,000 bottles of beer and 125,000 soft drinks over two days of the convention. They munched 25,000 hot dogs a day. Three hundred quarters of bourbon, rye and scotch were consumed.
Candidates were eliminated by a roundabout process. Roosevelt’s thoughts were carried from the Ferdinand Magellan to a buddy of the recipient, or a party official, who’d deliver it to the losing candidate.
FDR’s friend Leo Crowley told Byrnes that the president found him to be a “political liability.”
Byrnes tried to maneuver out of that political death sentence by co-opting a rival. He called Truman and said: “The president has given me the go sign for the vice presidency and I am calling you up to ask if you will nominate me.”
Truman was about to drive to Chicago and take himself out of the race. He was a protege of Tom Pendergast, boss of Kansas City’s shady Machine. Reporters looking for skeletons in Truman’s political closet were pestering his neighbors. Truman knew his family would come under great scrutiny.
So he stopped at the house of his aged Aunt Ella. “Aunt Ella, I’m going to the convention to defeat myself,” he told her, she later recounted. “I don’t want to be vice president.”
When word of Truman’s jitters reached FDR, he snapped: “Well, tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, the responsibility is his.”
With that, Truman stepped up to the plate and the pieces fell into place, as in a well-played game of three-dimensional chess. Roosevelt and Truman won the 1944 election.
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, shortly before Germany surrendered. Truman became president and two weeks later was provided with details on the atomic bomb. The decision was his: Should we drop it, hoping Japan would surrender?
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