by Marc Peyser
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Yet despite their substantial family feeling, Alice and Eleanor continued to drift apart, like ill-fated siblings who found themselves fighting on opposites sides in the Civil War. Though Alice never spoke about her father’s death, she became devoted to protecting his legacy. She blamed Wilson for her father’s unexpected demise—a pulmonary embolism isn’t exactly a broken heart, but Alice maintained that Wilson’s refusal to allow Theodore to fight in France irreparably broke his spirit. She even kept a voodoo doll that resembled the president and often jabbed it with pins. Alice made a point to be at Union Station around midnight on July 8, 1919, when the president triumphantly returned to Washington after signing the Treaty of Versailles. “I wanted to see for myself what sort of reception he was given,” she said. “It was a sparse crowd…There was very little cheering—such as there was had a treble quality, as women predominated.”23 (This was hardly a compliment. Alice was no suffragette, and she put little stock in opinions of the female persuasion.) The New York Times apparently watched the president’s arrival from a different location: “Never in recent years has any other President received such a warm welcome at such a late hour. Not only were the crowds larger, but they were more demonstrative in their greeting and there was no mistaking their sincerity.”24 At least one person wasn’t offering a warm welcome. When the president’s motorcade drove past her, Alice jumped out of her car and stood on the curb to watch. Then she crossed her fingers, made the sign of an evil eye, and delivered a medieval curse: “A murrain on him! A murrain on him!”25
The fact that Franklin worked in the Wilson administration earned him and Eleanor a large black mark in Alice’s book. It didn’t help that Eleanor and Franklin had sailed home from Europe with Wilson in February 1919 as he carried the outline for the Treaty of Versailles, the blueprint for the League of Nations. Even though a wary U.S. Senate still needed to be persuaded to ratify the treaty, the Wilsonians were giddy at the prospect of forging what they believed was a landmark vehicle for world peace. “We heard nothing but the League of Nations and the great advantages of the League of Nations,” said Sheffield Cowles, Aunt Bye’s son who worked with FDR in Europe and also sailed home with him and Wilson. Once Sheffield arrived in Washington, he went to stay with his cousin Alice. When he told her all the rosy predictions he’d heard from Franklin, Eleanor, and the rest aboard the ship, Alice nearly blew his ears off. “I was surprised, from being in one milieu, in which the League of Nations was the ultimate and desirable thing to attain, to land in Alice’s house where I found it was the absolute worst thing, in her opinion, that we could do for this country,” Cowles said. “She immediately broke down my arguments in favor of the League. In fact, she completely changed me on it in no time at all.”26
Alice might have chopped up young Sheffield’s convictions like so much hamburger meat, but she wasn’t really motivated by any grand geopolitical worldview. Although Theodore died before the final provisions for the league had been hammered out, she knew that he had planned to make defeating it a cornerstone of a potential 1920 presidential platform. After his unexpected death, Alice and the president’s admirers clutched to the Gospel of Roosevelt as if it were some sort of political scripture. As with all scripture, Theodore Roosevelt’s enormously complicated legacy was subject to interpretation. Over the years, his sharp, curious, and sometimes mercurial mind had explored and occasionally embraced contradictory stands on key issues. He might have rejected an international peacekeeping organization at the end of his life, but as early as 1910, when he traveled to Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, he seemed to be arguing in favor of just such a body. “It would be a masterstroke,” he said in Oslo, “if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.”27
When the outlines of Wilson’s vision of peace came into focus with the league at its core, Theodore turned skeptic. In part, he had qualms about who would be allowed to join and when, as well as some concerns about the potential for U.S. membership to infringe on national sovereignty. Most threatening, though, he worried that the league could ultimately entangle the United States in a foreign war. This was a somewhat ironic concern coming from one of the loudest cheerleaders for American involvement in World War I, not to mention the man whose own proposal had called for the use of force where necessary to keep the peace. In short, while TR was very much an internationalist who embraced the concept of a league, nothing could convince him that the hated Wilson—the man who personally barred his way to battlefields of Europe—could be trusted with the job of establishing it.
That distrust, even loathing, of Wilson was one of the legacies Theodore bequeathed to Alice. Well after her father’s death, she was still doubting that anyone could abide the man. In 1920, Ethel Barrymore was in Washington performing in a play called The Twelve-Pound Look, and Wilson was in the audience one night. Traffic was tied up for blocks after the curtain, delaying Barrymore’s dinner date with Alice. “I couldn’t get out of the theater any sooner because there was such a terrific crowd around it waiting to see Mr. Wilson leave,” Barrymore explained. “Who?” Alice asked. “When I told her, she wouldn’t believe me. She hated Wilson so bitterly that she simply couldn’t believe that a great crowd had waited just to see him pass.”28
Even before Wilson returned from Paris with the draft of the Treaty of Versailles, a group of senators and representatives from both parties had focused their collective firepower. They called themselves the Irreconcilables because they wanted to make clear that they would never accept the league under any conditions (as compared with another faction, the Reservationists, named after Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s Twelve Reservations, which, had they been adopted by President Wilson, might have allowed this Senate faction to support the treaty). Alice spent hours and hours each day listening to the Irreconcilables’ broadsides in various committee rooms and on the House and Senate floors. Some nights she stayed glued to her chair in the Capitol galleries until well past midnight. Other times she would pile in a car with a handful of Irreconcilables and drive around town plotting the next move. Her influence was soft—it would be another year before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote—but real. She frequently entertained the men at her house for a strategy-planning dinner, where her strong and strident voice was heard just as loudly as the men’s. Sometimes she was enlisted to lobby a Reservationist personally. When President Wilson began a nationwide speaking tour to drum up popular support for the league, one of his arguments was that Theodore Roosevelt himself had been a supporter.29 To kick that claim to the curb, Senator Lodge asked Alice to write an open letter denouncing that as a “gross misrepresentation.”30 (Five decades later, she shamelessly contradicted herself. “We were always for a League of Nations, because my father had started it in this country in his Nobel Peace Prize speech,” she told one interviewer.31 Just not Wilson’s league.) Soon enough, the Irreconcilables gave Alice her own nickname: the Colonel of the Battalion of Death.
If Wilson was the common enemy, the league battle also supplied Alice with a rather close friend. Though she would sometimes pull up a chair in the House to hear what her husband had to say, she gravitated to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Idaho’s fiery orator William Borah. Borah was an unlikely man for Alice to support. They had been adversaries since 1912, when she picked a fight with him in the dining car of a train out of Chicago because he had refused to abandon the GOP in favor of her father’s Progressive Party. By the same token, Borah had frequently backed Wilson in the run-up to the war, and support for Wilson was her political third rail. But Borah prided himself on being someone who didn’t let party or politics interfere with ideals. His reputation for being contrary was downright infamous. When Calvin Coolidge heard one day that the senator was horseback riding, he quipped that “I doubt it, because I have always understood that a horseback rider has to go i
n the same direction as his horse.”32
Yet Alice always respected freethinkers—especially when they agreed with her. As soon as Wilson revealed his vision for the League of Nations in his famous Fourteen Points in January 1918, Borah joined the Irreconcilable opposition. Borah himself was nicknamed the Lion of Idaho, a nod to both the mane of unruly hair on his overlarge head and his deep growl of a voice. He was the matinee idol of the Capitol. His grand and literate speeches, rehearsed down to the syllable (often while riding his favorite horse, Jester, through Rock Creek Park), drew overflow crowds to the staid halls of the Senate. Clarence Darrow, who faced off against Borah in the sensational 1907 trial of a man accused of blowing up the former governor of Idaho on his own front porch, called Borah “the ablest man” he ever faced (though Darrow still won the case).33 Alice was smitten every time he opened his mouth. “Occasionally I did not entirely agree with what Borah said, or rather with the slant he gave some question,” she said, “but he had a quality of earnest eloquence combined with a sort of smoldering benevolence, and knew so exactly how to manage his voice that before he finished I was always enthusiastic.”34
Somewhere along the way, her enthusiasm spread to the other parts of his body. It wasn’t surprising that they became lovers. Borah was very much Alice’s type. Older (by almost two decades), intellectual, and with a love of literature, the Lion of Idaho once again satisfied her daddy issues: “Lion” was also one of Theodore’s nicknames. Like all the men in her life, Borah was as masculine as a ram. When he was offered a cup of tea by a hostess once, he answered, “Do I look like a man who drinks tea?”35 He chased women like an animal, too, though his wife, Mary, was either oblivious or resigned. It was Mary Borah with whom Alice had gone calling the day she refused to get out of the car, which raises the question: Was Alice trying to deflect attention from her affair with Borah by flaunting her friendship with his wife, or was she just being her usual devilish self?
In small-townish Washington, the gossiping class aired its suspicions about Borah and Alice with relish, both in whispers and in print. It didn’t help that the ascetic Borah—he would later become a leading defender of Prohibition—almost never went to parties except for those thrown by one of two women: Alice or her old friend, rival, and panty depositor, Cissy Patterson, who was now known as Countess Gizycka by virtue of her foundering marriage to a wealthy Polish count. Like two fancy poodles sniffing around a Great Dane, the princess and the countess again found themselves fighting for the same powerful man. At the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, Cissy put Borah up in the house she’d rented, then salivated all over him in a story she wrote for the Chicago Herald and Examiner. “He picked up and held that audience in his hands as expertly and delicately as a woman might hold a peevish child,” Cissy said about a nominating speech he made on the floor. (It’s worth noting that while the Pattersons owned the Chicago Tribune, Cissy, ever the troublemaker, had gone to work for the rival Herald and Examiner, where along with her byline she was trumpeted as “Sister of the Editor of the Chicago Tribune.”)36 The stories linking Cissy and Borah were numerous, hilarious, and often apocryphal. One of the most widely circulated had Borah arriving at a Longworth party, only to disappear upstairs with Cissy. If that sounds familiar, so was the postmortem: Alice allegedly found several of Cissy’s hairpins in the library and returned them to her with a note. Only this time, instead of wondering if Alice had found her silk stockings in the couch, Cissy replied by asking if she’d discovered her underwear—in the chandelier.
Just as with their last love triangle, Alice got her man in the end. Her most triumphant moment might have come on November 19, 1919, when the Senate convened to vote on the Treaty of Versailles after four months of debate. Alice and her closest friend, Ruth Hanna McCormick*1 (whose husband, Medill, was a first-term senator from Illinois), sat in the family gallery from the opening gavel until 11:00 p.m. “It was the greatest crowd I have ever seen there,” Alice said.37 As an acknowledgment of his moral and oracular authority, Borah was given the penultimate speech. He lectured for two hours, invoking Monroe, Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Frederick the Great, all the while addressing himself directly to President Wilson. “Sir, since the debate opened months ago, those of us who have stood against this proposition have been taunted many times with being little Americans. Leave us the word American, keep that in your presumptuous impeachment, and no taunt can disturb us, nor decompose our purposes.”38 When Borah finished, that old salt Senator Lodge was reduced to tears. The Senate voted down Wilson’s plan 53 to 38, the first time it had ever rejected a peace treaty. To celebrate, the Irreconcilables repaired to their unofficial headquarters: Alice’s dining room. “Mrs. Harding cooked the eggs,” Alice said. “We were jubilant.”39 Alice and Borah drove there together.
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The Democrats weren’t ready to give up on their dream for the league just yet—far from it. Although Wilson had suffered a debilitating stroke in October that left the presidency largely in the clutches of his manipulative wife, Edith, his followers carried on in Washington and beyond. At the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in the summer of 1920, support for the league was as thick as the field of candidates. Twenty-four men lined up to run for president, including the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Ohio. FDR was a delegate for New York’s Al Smith, but when he dropped out, Roosevelt switched his support to the former secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo. McAdoo also happened to be Wilson’s son-in-law, and Franklin had been almost ostentatiously loyal to Wilson. Upon entering the Civic Auditorium on the first day of the convention, the delegates were greeted by an enormous American flag—at the time reported to be the largest flag ever created—hanging from the ceiling like a billboard. As a small marine bugle band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the flag began to rise as if Houdini himself were pulling the strings. Slowly, the real star of the show appeared behind: a large oil painting of Wilson, glowering in a spotlight. “It was not a very good picture, rather red faced and staring and frightened, but it served as a symbol of the man in the White House, and the cheering burst out,” wrote Heywood Broun in the New-York Tribune. “Or if it didn’t burst, at any rate it began.”40 Like Broun, Franklin thought the crowd’s tribute to their semi-fallen hero seemed tepid, especially among the New Yorkers. “Somebody must make a move,” Franklin told Smith. And with that, FDR leaped up from his seat in the hall, grabbed the “New York” placard from the surprised delegate who was carrying it, and led a merry, mini-band of six New Yorkers on a march around the auditorium.41
FDR turned up in many surprising places in San Francisco. Before leaving Washington for the convention, he had told a navy admiral that he was having trouble finding a hotel room in San Francisco, a dubious claim given that the states almost always reserved blocks of rooms for their delegates. Still, he managed to get himself berthed on the battleship New York, which provided a none-too-subtle salute to his wartime pedigree. (As did the grand reception he threw for his fellow Empire State delegates on the ship’s quarterdeck.) Not that the Democrats needed any reminders. The Roosevelt name had long popped up in the paper more than any assistant secretary had a right to expect, whether it was coverage of his countless naval base visits or of his breathless, on-the-scene reporting at the Palmer bombing. The convention boosted his standing even further. Two days after his placard-grabbing stunt, FDR hurdled over several rows of chairs on his way to the podium to second Smith’s ill-fated nomination—a dynamic contrast to the disabled president who was about to be replaced. The Democrats ultimately picked Governor James Cox of Ohio, though it took forty-four ballots and six long days and nights to settle on a nominee. Cox, a newspaper publisher from Dayton, hadn’t attended the convention, and when he was reached by phone, the big question was obviously about his choice of running mate. “Naturally, I’ve been thinking about this a good deal,” Cox said, “and my choice is young Roosevelt.”42
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Franklin had
many traits to recommend him: he was from the country’s most populous state, his pro-league stand would offset Cox’s relative indifference, and he was strongly anti-machine. But perhaps the biggest reason was the first one Cox mentioned in that phone call: “His name is good.” As the decided underdog, Cox could do worse than attach himself to a political dynasty, not to mention one rooted in the other party. The press naturally made much of Franklin’s similarity to Uncle Ted. “Roosevelt Career like That of Cousin; Both Served in State Legislature and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy,” was the headline on one New York Times story.43 Another, two weeks later, noted that “The name Roosevelt is an inspiration, and the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt suggests to the popular imagination many of the things for which in public, social, and civic life Theodore Roosevelt stood, and with which he was identified.”44 The weekly newsmagazine the Outlook, for which Theodore Roosevelt had frequently written, joined the bandwagon, calling Franklin “a gentleman of liberal culture, of high character, an able and upright public servant who possesses not a few of the political and personal qualities of his distinguished cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.”45 He was like Uncle Ted in one other way, too: as a leading contender for governor of New York, Franklin was a potential thorn for the state’s political bosses. They permitted his VP nomination largely to get him out of their hair.
