The Making of FDR: The Story of Stephen T. Early, America's First Modern Press Secretary - Hardcover

Levin, Linda Lotridge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159102577X ISBN 13: 9781591025771

Publisher: Prometheus Books, 2007

Synopsis

Though practically unknown to the public today, Stephen T. Early was one of the most influential men in mid-twentieth-century America. As the press secretary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was chiefly responsible for getting the president's message out to the press and he helped to shape Roosevelt's image in the eyes of Americans through the dramatic years of the Great Depression and World War II. It is no exaggeration to say that, had there been no Stephen Early, the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest-serving president in U.S. history, would probably have been limited to one term. In an engrossing narrative that brings to life key people and events during a calamitous time in American history, journalist Linda Lotridge Levin documents how Early remade what had been just a routine White House briefing function into the modern high-visibility role of today's presidential press secretary. A highly respected Associated Press reporter, Early launched a breathtaking reorganization of the way government informed the public. For the first time, the president held two news conferences a week. Under Early's guidance, the press evolved from just print journalism into the use of radio and newsreels, so he was the first press secretary to have the luxury and the frustrations of dealing with both broadcast and print media on a daily basis. Among his most important contributions, Early helped the president create the famous "Fireside Chats," which were a hallmark of Depression era and wartime America. Levin chronicles Early's life-long loyalty to Roosevelt and their close but sometimes-tumultuous personal and professional relationship, from Roosevelt's appearance on the political stage as a New York delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1912 through his four terms as President of the United States. She offers many intriguing glimpses into the personalities within Roosevelt's inner circle, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Harry Truman, and others. Levin concludes this engaging story of Early's influential life with an account of his state funeral, which was attended by President Truman, the vice president, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the secretaries of defense, army, and navy, and many other dignitaries. The Making of FDR is a long-overdue account of one of the last century's most important government officials.

About this title

About the Author

Linda Lotridge Levin (Kingston, RI), professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Rhode Island, is the author of Mass Communication Law in Rhode Island; To Understand: The History of a 10-Year Dialogue Between New England and Soviet Editors; and Rhode Island: The Independent State; as well as numerous articles in The Providence Journal and other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE MAKING OF FDR

The Story of Stephen T. Early, America's First Modern Press SecretaryBy Linda Lotridge Levin

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2008 Linda Lotridge Levin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-577-1

Contents

Preface.........................................................91. The Journalist Meets the Politician..........................172. Mr. Early Goes to War........................................303. The 1920 Campaign............................................444. Back to the Associated Press.................................625. Preparing for the White House................................866. Launching the Juggernaut.....................................917. The Honeymoon................................................1078. Hobgoblins...................................................1199. On Behalf of the President...................................13110. The 1936 Campaign: To Stay or Leave.........................14111. Court Packing and Other Problems............................15912. Good Friends and Job Offers.................................17213. Moving Toward World Chaos...................................18314. Fatal Days in Europe, Decisions at Home.....................20215. The Sloan Affair............................................22116. "Just Between Us 'Girls'"...................................23417. Pearl Harbor................................................25118. "Serve in Silence"..........................................27219. "The Travelingest President"................................30120. Morningside Drive...........................................31721. Extracting News from Oysters................................33422. "The Great White Jail"......................................36323. To Yalta and Back Again.....................................39624. Then There Was One..........................................41725. The Last Ride...............................................432Acknowledgments.................................................449Endnotes........................................................453

Chapter One

The Journalist Meets the Politician

Soon after he went to the White House with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Steve Early wrote to a woman who had inquired about his Early family origins: "As far as I know, my ancestors landed in Virginia and remained there." Indeed the family had settled on the eastern shore of Virginia in the early 1660s, probably arriving directly from England. Over the next 130 years, descendants of those first Earlys slowly made their way west across the state until they reached the Rivanna River, near Charlottesville, not far from the site where Thomas Jefferson chose to create his exquisite Monticello. The area became home to two more presidents. James Monroe lived nearby at his estate, Ash Lawn. Up the road from Ash Lawn was Montpelier, the home of James and Dolley Madison.

Thomas Joseph Early and Ida Virginia Wood Early, parents of Stephen Tyree Early, lived far less sumptuously. The young couple married in 1888 and settled in Crozet, a village ten miles west of Charlottesville in the rolling foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. Crozet was a stop of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Thomas Joseph worked for the railroad as a postal clerk. Stephen was their first child, born on August 27, 1889. His birth was followed three years later by a brother, Felix, who later studied law at Georgetown University and spent his life with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their next sibling, Mary Catherine, who was born in 1894, eventually married George Holmes, head of the International News Service (INS) bureau in Washington, DC. In 1897 Virginia, who later married Magnien McArdle, a well-known Washington lawyer, was born.

When Steve Early was born, Benjamin Harrison was president. George Eastman had just perfected the Kodak hand camera, allowing amateur photographers to snap away, and the modern bicycle, with two equal-sized tires and a saddle seat in between, was being mass produced, making it a popular mode of transportation. On November 14, Nellie Bly, the fearless reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the World in New York, began her around-the-world trip, which ended successfully seventy-two days later.

None of this probably had much effect on a lad growing up in the middle of one of the most fiercely proud of the old Confederate states, where tales recounted by old men must have left him dreaming of the adventures of a war that had affected his own family. The records show that at least one of his great-uncles, on his mother's side, was killed in the Civil War, and his grandfather was a captain in the Confederate cavalry. After Steve Early went to the White House, the Washington Post said that he was brought up in an atmosphere "of confidence in the old American tradition and respect for constituted authority," an apt description of Thomas and Ida's first child.

The ancestor whose war exploits so fascinated Steve-as a youth and as an adult-was Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early, who marched his Confederate troops to within five miles of Washington in 1864. During Steve Early's years in the White House as Roosevelt's press secretary, his ancestry was often recounted, especially in Washington and Southern newspapers, and he was asked by reporters and interested citizens-some of them with the surname Early-about his relationship to the crusty and eccentric old general. His explanations varied depending on his state of mind. If relaxed and playful, he would refer to himself as the "grandson of that famous bachelor general, Jubal Early, confederacy's shining star." In serious moments, he would painstakingly write back to anyone who inquired that he was indeed a kin of Jubal Early and then explain as best he knew the details of that relationship.

Just what was Steve Early's relationship to the Confederate general? He definitely was a collateral descendant-a lineage that went back, he once told someone, to 1728 and an ancestor named Jeremiah Early Sr., whose great-great-great-grandson was Thomas Joseph, Early's father. In 1937 Steve asked a friend in the Department of State who dabbled in genealogy to look into the relationship. The friend turned to the Library of Congress, whose genealogists informed him that the general and the presidential press secretary probably were third cousins twice removed.

The Early family moved to Washington in 1899 when Thomas was transferred by the railroad. Steve was only ten years old, but he remained rooted psychologically and emotionally in Virginia throughout his adult life. His two sons attended military school there, and his older son was a student at the University of Virginia. Steve and Helen often vacationed in the state. He corresponded with cousins and other relatives who remained in Virginia, and when he enlisted in World War I, it was with a Virginia regiment.

Washington must have been quite a change for the young lad who had roamed the rolling countryside around Crozet. With the move to Washington, the Early family had traded the relative tranquility of rural life for an urban setting a few blocks north of the United States Capitol, a building that in its awesome splendor must have captivated the imagination of young Steve. The family lived in a large, boxy house at 1228 North Carolina Avenue, a working-class neighborhood where Steve Early grew to manhood.

After the family arrived on North Carolina Avenue, Ida Early gave birth to five more children over the next eleven years. Julia Lee was born in 1899; she later married a lawyer. Rachel, born two years later, died when she was three. Oma, who married Barry Faris, the general manager of the International News Service, came along in 1903. Elisha, who as a child contracted polio and remained crippled, was born in 1906; and Thomas Joseph Jr. was born in 1910. This youngest son and namesake of his father was injured in a childhood fall from a tree and spent most of his adult life at home until he was placed in a nursing home in 1947. As the oldest child and son, Steve remained close to his brothers and sisters all his life, coming to their emotional and financial aid during all the years he served in the White House, despite his and Helen's own-often severe-budget constraints.

North Carolina Avenue is a broad, undistinguished street; the houses are close enough for next-door neighbors to converse out their windows. It was far from a glamorous neighborhood, but in those unendurably humid summers, the Early children could play in the park a few blocks away at Lincoln Square, where a bronze figure of President Abraham Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand, his left hand resting on the shoulder of a crouching black man whose shackles had been broken. Unveiled in 1876, it was a gift from emancipated slaves. It is unlikely, though, that the Earlys ever attended a social function at the White House or had any reason to interact with those with surnames of Riggs, Mays, Beale, or Blair-the city's social elite, with whom Steve Early would be at ease at the dinner table or on the golf course thirty years later.

It must have been a cash-strapped family in which the eight surviving Earlys grew up, especially since two of them had infirmities. As soon as he was old enough, young Steve delivered the Washington Post in the neighborhood, adding his own small earnings to the family's budget. There probably was little left over for a scrappy boy moving into his teenage years to spend on himself, but if he did, he may have attended a baseball game, where he would see the great Walter Johnson pitch for the Nationals (or the Senators, as Washington's hometown team also was called). It would have been difficult for a railway mail clerk to take a family of ten very far on his salary, since the six-day workweek was the norm, and the two-week summer holiday was just becoming popular.

The Early family probably read the Post and maybe the Washington Star, the two largest newspapers in town. Like so many journalists, Steve could trace his fascination with the profession to a childhood where reading newspapers was part of the family's daily routine. What Steve read while he was growing up may have planted the seeds of his choice of career: Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his time, was at the height of his career, having covered the brief but sensational Spanish-American War. In September 1901 President William McKinley was felled by an assassin's bullet, and Teddy Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency.

Steve Early attended the Peabody and Edmonds schools, both public, and moved on to Business High School, since stenography and typing were considered necessary for young men or women who did not plan to attend college. It is likely that the Early family budget would not have allowed him that luxury; his brother Felix later worked his way through Georgetown University as a law student. Steve liked to point out that he did not attend college, but the truth was that he did take a few college-level courses at George Washington University while he was in high school.

In August 1907, just out of high school and a week shy of his eighteenth birthday, Steve Early took a job as a messenger boy with the Government Printing Office. His salary was $360 a year, and since he was still living at home-and would continue to do so until his marriage, years later-the extra money helped pay some of the family's bills. In December 1908 he wrote to the head of the office, pointing out that he had been performing the same duties as a $900 a year man and requesting a similar salary. He was now nineteen, he wrote, "and therefore within the age required by the Civil Service Commission." The reply came back: "I recommend that Mr. Early be promoted from messenger boy at 15 cents per hour to messenger at 25 cents per hour. Civil Service bars him from going higher on account of his age." On October 9, 1909, less than a year after he received the requested raise, he resigned. The reason on his official resignation form: "Has a better position."

When young Steve Early went to work right out of high school for the Government Printing Office, Washington was emerging as the news capital of the country, "one of the notable journalistic phenomena in the first decade of the 20th century." The city had become a symbol of united democracy following the Spanish-American War, and, perhaps more important, with Theodore Roosevelt as a vigorous president the city had become the center of issues, reforms, and legislation that were significantly changing the social and economic fabric of the country, not unlike the changes that were to come during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.

It was not unusual for a young man to go directly from high school into a newsroom. If the job was at a metropolitan daily newspaper or a wire service, he would be a copy clerk or typist. If the young man wanted to, he could learn the basics of news reporting by tagging along with a veteran on news assignments. Eventually the apprentice might draw an assignment of his own. Years later, Early told an interviewer, "There was no college for me, unless you regard the Fourth Estate [journalism] as an educational institution."

When he left the Government Printing Office, Early was hired by the fledgling United Press wire service office in Washington to take dictation over the telephone from reporters in the field, one of the lowliest-but most important-jobs in the newsroom. Working for a wire service was faster paced and far more hectic than working for a newspaper, which might have several deadlines during a twenty-four-hour period. Deadlines for wire service employees were around the clock. Early was energetic and ambitious, and the work gave him the opportunity to discover how a journalist crafted a news story. He was a neophyte lacking any journalism skills when he joined United Press, so it is unlikely he was sent out on any stories during the first year he was there. After a while, he probably was allowed to cover the occasional police or fire story before he was finally promoted to reporter and assigned to cover the State, War, and Navy beat. Years later, he was remembered as having "something ingratiating about him that always opened doors for him."

United Press was founded in 1907 by E.W. Scripps, owner of a chain of newspapers in the Midwest. Instead of joining the Associated Press, which was a cooperative supported by its member newspapers, Scripps established his own press association. By 1908, when Early was hired, United Press had a dozen bureaus, but except in a few key cities, these "offices" consisted of one newsman, a young assistant, and as many telegraph operators as needed operating out of the corner of the newsroom of a client newspaper. News stories in smaller bureaus came from the bureau's single reporter and were supplemented with stories brought in by low-paid stringers or reporters at the client newspaper. In larger cities like Washington, the bureau was independent of any local newspaper and thus had its own staff of reporters, clerks, dictationists, and telegraphers, all overseen by a bureau chief. In contrast, the much older Associated Press had bureaus in all major cities and many smaller ones, as well as access to stories produced by European news agencies.

The United Press bureau in Washington at the time Early went to work there was run by a crusty newsman named Ed J. Keen, who had covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba for the Scripps-McRae Press Association, one of the forerunners of United Press.

Keen was responsible for establishing the reputation of the Washington bureau of United Press. He came up with a clever time-saving method of transmitting stories over the wire to client newspapers. The Phillips Code, a system for abbreviating words going out over the wires, saved both time and money. Phrases such as "Supreme Court of the United States" were shortened to "scotus"; "of the" became "f"; and "that" became "tt." Keen decided that if everyone on the staff learned the code, reporters could use it as a form of shorthand and when they telephoned a story to the office man on the desk, he could take it down in longhand using the code and give it to the telegrapher for instant transmission. This resulted in saving as much as five minutes on short stories and much more time on longer ones. It meant that the understaffed bureau could get stories out to client newspapers more quickly than other wire services in a business where time was of the essence. Today many journalists use their own version of Keen's code.

As members of an underdog organization, United Press reporters were eager to best the Associated Press. When Early joined up, the Washington bureau was operating on a budget of $1,000 a month, including staff salaries. (The Boston bureau, in contrast, was given $300 a month.) Salaries at United Press were probably in line with, or slightly lower than, those at daily newspapers. Early's pay was $50.

For an aspiring young journalist like Early, the Washington office of the United Press must have been an exciting place to hang his hat every day. Fires and police stories were the routine fodder of all journalists in cities big or small, but in a place like Washington, if you worked hard and kept on the good side of the bureau chief, you could land some better-than-average assignments. His tenacity must have paid off, because within a year after he arrived he was sent out to cover the State, War, and Navy beats. During his four years with United Press, Early covered Atlantic fleet battle maneuvers, where he forged a friendship with Herbert Bayard Swope, an influential reporter and editor for Pulitzer's New York World, among other journalists in Washington.

Washington was a swamp in those hot, steamy summers, but for Early lodging was cheap, since he lived at home. And he was a single man working at one of the more exciting jobs in the city. Not that it was all glamour: Early recalled years later that when Theodore Roosevelt was in office, newsmen used to wait outside the White House gates "whether it rained or shined, waiting for Teddy Roosevelt to call in a favorite reporter and give him a story. There wasn't a comfortable press and radio room [inside the White House]."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159102577X
• ISBN 13: 9781591025771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 538