by Marc Peyser
By “the house,” Alice meant the family estate in Cincinnati, an ivy-covered brick manse called Rookwood (not to be confused with FDR’s family home, Springwood). At the time of their wedding, the Chicago Daily Tribune called it “one of the most interesting as well as one of the most beautiful houses in the country.”31 Alice begged to differ. “Rookwood,” she said. “was enchanting, it was so awful. It was Hudson River Bracketed. The sort of thing Franklin’s family had before they turned it into Long Island Georgian.”32 It didn’t help that she had to share the place with Mummy. Susan vacated Nick’s house in Washington when he got married, but she wasn’t going to cede Rookwood to an unwelcome daughter-in-law. “So there she and I were, in the absurd, yet none the less trying, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law situation of the comic papers,” Alice said. “I know how hard it was for her to have him marry at all, and I was not some one who ‘merged’ with the family she married into; not by a long shot.”33 Behind her back, she called Susan “bromide,” either because Alice found the straight-backed midwesterner a tad boring or because spending time with her was like being forced to take medicine. She felt that way about much of her time at the Longworth family home. “There were a good many musical evenings at Rookwood—as often as three times a week,” Alice grumbled. “Anyone caught starting a conversation during the music was shut up in the dining room. Once in a state of boredom bordering on stupefaction I said to the ardent music lover sitting next to me, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary to think that Mozart never composed anything exclusively for the viola?’ He looked at me perplexed for the rest of the evening.”34
Moving into Rookwood didn’t bother her nearly as much as moving out of her previous home. “Everyone knew that Alice wanted a 99-year lease on the White House,” said one Ohioan.35 She spent as much time as she could in Washington, even when Congress wasn’t in session and Nick was in Cincinnati. “With the perversity of human nature, having become removed from them by marriage, I became aware of how delightful families are,” Alice said. “I think I saw more of the family during the three winters after I married—the last three winters that they were in the White House—than I did during the entire five that went before.”36 Alice’s relationship with her stepmother magically improved; her favorite hideaway became Edith’s bedroom overlooking the Ellipse and the Washington Monument, where she would repair in the afternoons to gossip with her stepmother, her siblings, and her father, when he could break away. In 1907, Alice had to have her appendix removed. Rather than have the surgery back in Ohio, or even in a hospital, she opted for a makeshift operating room created in the Rose Bedroom at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where she also spent her recovery.37
The one magnet that could pull Alice back to Ohio was politics. Of course, she’d been in and around the political arena from the day she was born: her father missed getting home for her birth because he couldn’t tear himself away from his desk in the New York State Assembly. But she never filled her dance card with the grind of campaigning, legislation, and the like unless there was a big party or high-profile ribbon cutting in the offing. That changed when she got married. For one thing, she genuinely loved Nick. She also loved being useful—being needed—and as a rising politician Nick needed his famous young wife on the trail with him. She signed up for a full helping of campaign whistle-stops and small-town shindigs, smiling and shaking hands as if she really wanted to be there. In a way, she did. Alice also loved being the center of attention, and there was no question that the large crowds that came to greet Representative Longworth in Cincinnati and elsewhere were there primarily to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Longworth, “the Daughter of the Nation and the dearly beloved stepdaughter of the Queen City,” as one paper called her.38 So beloved, in fact, that when the Cincinnati Zoo acquired a baby elephant in the fall of 1906, it was promptly named Alice.
Fun as it was—and Alice always loved a good laugh—the adulation had its serious ramifications. One newspaper declared that if her name were on the ballot instead of Nick’s, “what a landslide there would be!”39 It was the kind of emasculating remark that would, over the years, take its toll on the Longworth marriage. On September 14, 1906, more than fifty thousand people turned out in Columbus to watch the Longworths unveil a statue of Ohio’s own dearly departed president McKinley. The event was supposed to start with an invocation by the Reverend Dr. Washington Gladden, but he only got out a few sentences before the audience shouted him off the stage, demanding to see Alice. With the crowd getting rowdier by the minute, she quickly stood up from her seat on the dais, walked to the podium, and tugged on a string that pulled back a curtain of flags, revealing the statue. That only made the crowd crazier. They surged toward the stage, grabbing at the flags and trampling at least two women. Alice and Nick were forced to climb through a window in the Ohio state capitol, which overlooked the plaza, only to be chased into the governor’s office, then out of the building entirely. They finally took refuge in another building across the street until a carriage arrived to rescue them. “It was the worst crush I ever witnessed,” Alice said. “I have seen nothing like it in my trip around the world.”40
But that didn’t dampen Alice’s enthusiasm for politics—far from it. She became increasingly fascinated by the battle, much to the surprise of her worldwide audience. “ ‘Princess Alice,’ social butterfly, whose erratic traveling flights kept society guessing over her movements has disappeared completely,” wrote one newspaper. “In her place the people of Ohio have discovered Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, woman politician.”41 As the 1908 election approached, she became positively obsessed with the campaign. Theodore, having impetuously announced during the 1904 race that he would not seek a third term,*3 took it upon himself to anoint his successor—such was his popularity and power within the Republican Party. When he picked Alice’s old Asia cruising buddy Taft, she became a quasi adviser to her father. The fact that the Tafts and the Longworths were longtime Ohio compatriots only made Alice’s involvement more valuable—and her stake in the outcome all the more personal.
The problem was that she didn’t like the idea of Taft, or anybody else, stepping into her father’s presidential shoes, even if he’d kicked them off himself. “No one will ever know how much I wished, in the black depths of my heart, that ‘something would happen’ and that Father would be renominated,” she said. “It was against human nature, against mine anyway, not to feel the prospect of all those great times coming to an end was something to be regretted, though most secretly.”42 Still, she did her part. When Taft returned from another trip to the Philippines in the summer of 1907, Theodore escorted him to Alice’s recovery room in the White House so the two Roosevelts could coach him on an important pre-campaign speech in Boston. What red-blooded issues did he plan to discuss? they asked him. The Philippines, Taft said. Theodore and Alice were apoplectic to the point of laughter. “Indeed, I was so emphatic that one of the stitches in my scar broke,” she said.43
The next year, she went to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, beginning an unbroken streak of convention attendance that would continue through the next six decades. “It was my first convention,” she said, “and it gave me a taste for that form of entertainment that I do not think I shall ever get over.”44 As usual, she attracted almost as much attention as the main event, with women giving up their seats—or sometimes just standing on them—to get a look at her.45 She created an especially big commotion when, ensconced in the front row, she refused to take off her towering Merry Widow hat despite requests from two election officials who explained she was blocking others’ view. “I shan’t and you shan’t make me,” she barked at Nick when he told her she was making a scene. “Alice, I want you to take off your hat,” he replied. She finally, reluctantly, relented, earning Nick a sarcastic little newspaper headline: “Longworth Boss of the Family.”46
With Roosevelt’s backing, Taft walked away with the nomination and the general election, handing the Democratic flamethrower William Jennings Bryan his thir
d straight loss. The family slowly made peace with its impending return to civilian life. Theodore, like Santa Claus without the red suit, proceeded to parcel out countless White House artifacts to the steady stream of friends and family who dropped by for a final White House visit. “Why mother, he has given away nearly everything in the study, and Aunty Corinne and nearly every other guest in the White House have their arms full of pictures, books, and souvenirs,” Ethel reported to Edith one evening.47 The Roosevelts invited the Tafts to dinner on the night before the inauguration. Alice was not pleased. “No one likes to leave the White House, whatever they say,” she said. “There is a photograph of the whole family about to leave and I must say, we look as if we are being expelled from the Garden of Eden.”48 Just for good measure, Alice left behind her own snake in the grass: she planted a voodoo doll in a White House garden as a sort of ill-will gesture to her father’s successor. “Perhaps someone will find it some day and say, ‘How strange!’ ” she said.49
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Despite being seven months pregnant with ill-fated Franklin junior, Eleanor accompanied Franklin on their own final visit to her uncle’s White House, on January 7, 1909, joining twelve hundred guests at the president’s farewell reception to the diplomatic corps. Alice left early that evening with a cold, but Eleanor noticed that her usual effervescence had gone a little flat. “She looks lovely & very well & so quiet!” she wrote to a friend.50 As they both approached twenty-five, the cousins didn’t see much of each other, except when Eleanor could steal away to Washington or Alice to New York. They mostly kept in touch via chipper cards and the occasional news of yet another of Eleanor’s pregnancies, followed by a new-baby gift.51
Yet their lives continued to mirror each other in remarkable ways—this time as political wives. FDR had idolized Theodore since his swashbuckling cousin dropped in for a visit to the Groton School when Franklin was a student there, and the regular stays at the White House only solidified the connection. As Theodore Roosevelt’s second term was winding down, Franklin boasted to his co-workers at the New York City law firm where he worked that he intended to follow his cousin Ted to the White House someday. He even planned to march the same route: state assembly, assistant secretary of the navy, governor, president.52 It was a somewhat surprising assertion, given that FDR had shown far more interest in journalism than in politics; he never even graduated from Columbia Law School (though he did pass the New York bar).
But about a year after their farewell visit to the Roosevelt White House, the acorn of FDR’s plan began to root. A group of Democrats in the district that included Hyde Park needed someone to run for an open seat in the New York State Assembly. They approached Franklin one spring day in 1910 at a local cattle auction. He dithered. It wasn’t because of his uncertain party affiliation (even if the first man he ever voted for was a Republican—his cousin Theodore) but because he needed to get Sara’s approval first. That wasn’t just the usual mama’s boy dynamic at work. FDR was expected to finance his own campaign, and Sara controlled the cash. “Frank, the men who are looking out that window are waiting for your answer,” said Ed Perkins, the Dutchess County Democratic Party chairman, who turned up the heat by driving FDR to meet a group of potential backers he’d assembled at a bank in Poughkeepsie. “They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.”53 FDR took the plunge, and he kept going even after the Democrats asked him to step up in class and run instead for the local seat in the state senate, which the Republicans had only lost once in history.
Eleanor strongly supported Franklin’s new zeal. She couldn’t campaign with him, on account of the children. But she wrote him encouraging letters while he barnstormed the district in a red convertible (like Alice’s) and fretted over him at the one speech she was able to attend. “He looked thin, then, tall, high-strung, and at times nervous,” she remembered. “He spoke slowly, and every now and then there would be a long pause, and I would be worried for fear he would never go on.” But he won, and in January 1911, the entire family (Franklin, Eleanor, three children, their respective nurses, and three servants) moved full-time to the state capital of Albany.
Eleanor was delighted. She and Franklin hosted a New Year’s reception for constituents at their rented house, the first of many political gatherings at the Roosevelts’. True to cousin Theodore’s form, Franklin quickly took over the insurgent wing of his party, a group of about thirty men opposed to the Tammany Hall political bosses who controlled the Democrats, especially a candidate for the U.S. Senate named William “Blue-Eyed Billy” Sheehan.54 FDR and his compatriots would sometimes spend the entire day plotting strategy in the family’s living room. Before long, their house became saturated with smoke, and Eleanor had to move the children’s bedroom up to the third floor so they could breathe fresh air at night. It was her first peek behind the political curtain, and while it took years for her to become active in her own right, she welcomed the chance to be involved, even if that meant mostly serving the snacks, charming the wives, and humoring the pols. “I still remember the poems which Assemblyman Ed Terry from Brooklyn used to bring and read me,” she said. “I was learning that the first requisite of a politician’s wife is always to be able to manage everything.”55 Like Alice, she longed to be useful, needed. It didn’t hurt that her mother-in-law was seventy miles away in Hyde Park. “For the first time in my life,” she said, “I was going to live on my own.”56
After only one term in Albany, twenty-nine-year-old Franklin had made enough of a name for himself—not to mention made the most of his family name—that the national party took notice. In the fall of 1911, he traveled to Trenton to meet with New Jersey’s governor, Woodrow Wilson, a progressive who was viewed as a likely Democratic candidate for president. Franklin warned Wilson that his chances in New York were slim, given how much power the Tammany troops still wielded. But Franklin was charming and eager and, despite his youth, an extraordinarily nimble politician. That was never more true than in his own 1912 reelection campaign for New York State Senate. One September night when he and Eleanor were in Manhattan for dinner, Franklin became violently ill with a high fever and severe stomach cramps. After feeling terrible for almost two weeks, he was finally diagnosed with typhoid and ordered by the doctor to stay in bed indefinitely. The election was less than two months away. Even more perilous, Franklin’s constituents lived at least seventy-five miles north of his New York City sickbed.
Desperate to keep his campaign alive, Eleanor suggested that he contact the “rather gnome-like looking little newspaper man from Albany” who had been so supportive of FDR’s early career and moonlighted as a political operative.57 Louis Howe did come across like someone who spent most of his time foraging underground. He was scrawny, pock-marked, and gruff, with wrinkled suits and the stench of cigarettes that followed him like industrial smog. He himself maintained he was “one of the four ugliest men in New York.”58 But he was also a veritable oracle of politics. He once began a letter to FDR with the salutation “Beloved and Revered Future President.”59 Howe wrote that letter in 1912—twenty years before FDR’s first White House victory.
When Eleanor reached Howe, an unemployed father of two at the time, he accepted the job on the spot, both for the money and for the unusual challenge. He took FDR’s blank checkbook and used it to fund his own brand of political black magic, a potion that was equal parts flooding the district with the Roosevelt name and drowning his opponents in the muck of dirty campaign tricks. On the positive side, he bought full-page newspaper ads announcing FDR’s support for the workingman and for women’s suffrage. He also mailed off thousands of “personal” letters (on which he forged FDR’s signature) to apple farmers and Hudson River fishermen promising industry-friendly legislation.60 Among his shadier ploys: planting an obviously false story in a local paper claiming that FDR (who was still sick in bed) had rescued a family in Pawling, New York, when their house caught on fire. He also chauffeured a monsignor from Fishkill around the district in FDR’s re
d touring car to undercut claims that Roosevelt was anti-Catholic.61 Toward the end of the campaign, Howe created the “Franklin D. Roosevelt Club,” whose chief task was handing out $5 checks on Election Day.62 It was money well spent. The final vote: Roosevelt 15,590 and the Republican Jacob Southard 13,889. The total number of days that FDR campaigned in person: zero.
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Franklin wasn’t the only member of the family balancing on a political tightrope in 1912. The Oyster Bay side spent the year fighting an unprecedented Republican civil war, between the party’s progressives and its conservatives. President Taft, Theodore Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, had pledged to continue his progressive policies, even tacitly agreeing to consult his former boss on cabinet selections—an impossible vow for any president to keep, not to mention any protégé looking to make his own mark in the master’s shadow. Roosevelt departed the White House in March 1909 and immediately left on an extended African safari, in part to keep out of his successor’s hair. Conservatives lost little time in manipulating the affable and malleable Taft. Before long Roosevelt became deeply disappointed. “It is hard, very hard,” said Taft, “to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.”63 The men never did agree on what transgression finally toppled their relationship. There were certainly plenty of body blows: Taft firing Roosevelt’s friend the U.S. Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot; his waffling stances on tariffs and antitrust issues; and many petty snipes. “For instance,” one Roosevelt insider said, “the Colonel*4 has had it reported to him that President Taft frequently refers to him as ‘my Democratic predecessor.’ He does not like this.”64 Whatever the reason, the feud broke into the open at the end of February 1912, when Roosevelt formally declared that he would challenge Taft for the Republican nomination, despite having vowed repeatedly that he would never run for a third term. “My hat is in the ring,” he said. And another Rooseveltism was coined.65
