Franklin D. Roosevelt: Typed Letter Signed with Holographic Notation as New York Governor....

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Franklin D. Roosevelt. Typed Letter Signed. One page 4to, State of New York, Executive Chamber letterhead, May 4, 1931, marked "Personal" by FDR in his own hand, to Milton A. Miller, of Portland, Oregon. FDR writes: "Personal [in his own hand]/ My dear Mr. Miller:/ My duties as Governor unfortunately make it almost impossible to get as far west as Oregon during the next two years, particularly as on account of my mother's illness I am stealing a few weeks to go abroad and visit her. If you happen to be coming east, however, I shall be only too glad to see you and talk with you./ The only things I happen to have covering anything I have done or said are those prepared for use in the last Gubernatorial campaign. I will have them looked up and sent to you./ I appreciate your interest in my career very much and hope you will keep in touch with me./ Very truly yours,/ Franklin D. Roosevelt." Very interesting content written by FDR, with uniquely bad phrasing such as "looked up." Milton A. Miller was a teacher and a pharmacist, Mayor of Lebanon, Oregon for ten years, and a member of the school board for twenty years. Miller was both a State Representative and State Senator from Linn County, Oregon, and one of the directors of the Lebanon canal. Miller later served as United States Collector of Customs, for more than eight years. A friend of William Jennings Bryan and both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was seriously considered as a candidate for Vice President in two Presidential campaigns. In this letter to Mr. Miller FDR mentions his mother's illness and his intent to visit her. As Kenneth S. Davis notes on pages 213-214 in his FDR: The New York Years: "An event in Roosevelt's personal life resulted in publicity that confirmed is position as an overwhelmingly probable presidential nominee. Roosevelt was about to leave New York for his annual Warm Springs vacation, at the end of April, when a cablegram informed him that his mother, who had been traveling in Europe, was ill with pneumonia in Paris. He at once canceled his vacation and the numerous political visits planned for Warm Springs, sailing instead for Europe on the Aquitania. He asked Eleanor to go with him. She refused. ‘I knew it was the best thing for you to do & the sensible thing for me not to,' she wrote him after he'd gone, in tacit recognition that his ties to his mother remained of the essence of his selfhood whereas her relationship with her mother-in-law was not a loving one; his presence at his mother's bedside would do more to benefit her if she, Eleanor, were not beside him. So he took Elliott with him as companion. A flock of reporters and photographers attended his departure, and another his arrival in Paris, where he found his mother, whose illness had been less serious than at first believed, well on the way to complete recovery. He praised to reporters the treatment given her in American Hospital. He toured with Elliott the battlefields ‘where I had followed the fighting in 1918' and found that the ‘farms which I had seen smashed and splintered around Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had been completely rebuilt.' He had talks with high French officials, notably with Andre Tardieu, then Minister of Agriculture. He sailed from Cherbourg on May 22 aboard the Bremen. Among his shipboard companions was the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Republican Charles G. Dawes of Dawes Plan fame and Vice President of the United States from 1925 to 1929, who recorded in his diary entry for May 24 that, accepting an invitation sent him by Roosevelt via Elliott, he had dined with Roosevelt in the latter's stateroom the night before. ‘I do not know when I have enjoyed an evening more,' wrote Dawes, ‘and we both were surprised, being still fresh and in full height of conversational activity, to find we had consumed 4 ½ hours when . . . I left his room. . . . Roosevelt is only 49 years of age. After this evening's visit I feel that if he is the next President of the United States, he will serve with honor to his country and credit to himself. He seems to have strength and equipoise, clarity of mind with soundness of judgment, and to steer his course by the compass of common sense.' Two days later, Dawes recorded that he had ‘[d]ined again with Governor Roosevelt at his stateroom' the night before ‘and we had a session until midnight, and a fine time.' The governor's landing in New York on May 27 received considerably greater publicity than did the arrival of Ambassador Dawes, who, returning to Washington for consultations with the State Department and the President, was Hoover's guest in The White House. Reported The New York Times: ‘Viewed as the outstanding probability for the Presidential nomination next year of the Democratic Party, which until recently has stood firmly against protection in any form, the Governor declared [in a shipboard interview upon his arrival] that France's agricultural tariff has been an important factor in maintaining fairly stable economic conditions there when a large share of the rest of the world was suffering from a business depression.' This was interpreted as tacit approval by the governor of tariff protection for American agriculture, a shift from the traditional Democratic position toward the continuing Republican position on protectionism." A very interesting letter written by FDR during a critical time in his positioning himself as the 1932 Democratic candidate for President of the United States, mentioning the illness of his mother Sara Delano Roosevelt in the spring of 1931 and his forthcoming travels abroad to Europe.