Rain, Mud

When rain drove Nominee and Notification indoors at Albany, the crowd pressed up to the Assembly Chamber doors to try for seats. Nine out of ten had to stay outside and hear the speeches through, the amplifiers. Among those who stayed outside was a tall, familiar figure with the crutches it has had to use for the past several years, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the friend and believer who placed Candidate Smith in nomination in 1920, 1924, 1928. With Mrs. Roosevelt, he sat on the outdoor platform, huddled from the rain under a canopy of State Troopers' waterproof coats.

A reporter for the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune spied the Roosevelts and, in his copy that night, he wrote: "His [Mr. Roosevelt's] infirmity made it impossible for him to battle the crowd for a place in the Assembly Chamber." The Herald Tribune headlined: "Nominator, Crippled, Is Unable to Fight Crowds to Get Inside."

The implications were: 1) that the crowd was disorderly; 2) that, through neglect or ingratitude, Nominator Roosevelt had been omitted from the reserved-seat Iist at this, the Brown Derby's crowning moment.

Nominator Roosevelt wiped up this bit of political mud with a public statement: "Full accommodation was provided for me and my family in the Assembly Chamber, but as I reached Albany late and walking up many steps in a slow process, it was easier and cooler to listen to the speeches outdoors."