Louis Howe

Born to a wealthy family in Indianapolis, Indiana, Howe was a small, sickly, and asthmatic child. The family moved to Saratoga Springs, New York, after serious financial losses. Howe married Grace Hartley and became a journalist with a small paper that his father purchased. He spent the next decade freelancing for the New York Herald and working various jobs. Howe was then assigned to cover the New York state legislature in 1906, and soon became a political operative for Thomas Mott Osborne, a Democratic opponent of the Tammany Hall political machine.


After Osborne fired Howe in 1909, Howe attached himself to rising Democratic star Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he worked for the rest of his life. Howe oversaw Roosevelt's campaign for the New York State Senate, worked with him in the Navy Department, and acted as an advisor and campaign manager during Roosevelt's 1920 vice presidential run. After Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921, resulting in partial paralysis, Howe became Roosevelt's public representative, keeping his political career alive during his recovery. He arranged Roosevelt's 1924 "Happy Warrior" convention speech that returned him to the public eye, and helped to run Roosevelt's narrowly successful 1928 campaign to become Governor of New York. Howe then spent the next four years laying the groundwork for Roosevelt's landslide 1932 presidential victory. Named Roosevelt's secretary, Howe helped the president to shape the early programs of the New Deal, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps. Howe grew ill shortly after Roosevelt's election, and died before the end of his first term.


Howe also acted as a political advisor to Franklin's wife, Eleanor, and he encouraged her to take an active role in politics, introducing her to women's groups and coaching her in public speaking. Eleanor later called Howe one of the most influential people in her life. Franklin Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith called Howe "a backroom man without equal in Democratic politics",^[2] and Roosevelt publicly credited Howe and James Farley for his first election to the presidency in 1932.

Early life[edit]

Howe was born in 1871 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to wealthy parents, Eliza and Edward P. Howe, who owned a store and part of a wholesale business.^[3] Edward P. Howe, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, had been a captain with the Union Army in the Civil War and made an unsuccessful run for the Indiana State Senate as a Democrat before Louis' birth. Louis had two stepsisters, Maria and Cora, from his mother's previous marriage.^[4] Howe was sickly and fragile as a child, suffered from asthma, and was generally kept home by his parents;^[5] he never grew to more than five feet tall.^[6] Fearing to expose Howe to public school, his parents instead enrolled him in an all-girls seminary.^[1]


Edward speculated heavily in real estate, and gradually lost the family's wealth in the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. When Louis was seven, the family lost their home, moving to Saratoga Springs, New York, with help from Eliza's family.^[7] Edward's health collapsed, but he nonetheless took a job as a reporter for a Saratoga newspaper, later purchasing a small Democratic paper of his own, The Saratoga Sun.^[8][9] Louis's health, in contrast, improved during his teenage years, allowing him to leave the house more often and consider attending Yale University.^[10] On his way to a cousin's wedding rehearsal, he suffered a bicycle accident in which he fell into gravel, permanently scarring his face.^[11] Ultimately, the dual obstacles of his still-questionable health and finances caused him to abandon his university ambitions and instead take a job with his father's paper.^[12]


In 1896, he met Grace Hartley, a well-off 20-year-old who was on vacation with her mother at one of Saratoga's sanitariums. Although she initially was unimpressed with him, Howe courted her assiduously for two years, and the couple became engaged in 1898, marrying the following year.^[13] The pair had three children, one of whom died in infancy.^[14]