Louis Howe

Who was Louis Howe?

Louis McHenry Howe was an American reporter for the New York Herald best known for acting as an early political advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Born to a wealthy family in Indianapolis, Indiana, Howe was a small, sickly, and asthmatic child. The family moved to Saratoga, New York, after serious financial losses, and Howe became a journalist with a small paper that his father purchased. Howe married Grace Hartley and spent the next decade freelancing for the New York Herald and working various jobs. He was 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 would work 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.