Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  Still, no one was more surprised by Franklin’s sudden rise than the Roosevelts themselves. Eleanor, who had taken the children to Campobello for the summer as usual, heard the news not from her husband but in a telegram from Josephus Daniels. She didn’t know what to think. “I am sure that I was glad for my husband, but it never occurred to me to be much excited,” she said.46 Joy had never been one of her primary colors, and the Lucy affair was still darkening her mood. “This past year has rather got the better of me it has been so full of all kinds of things that I still have a breathless, hunted feeling about it though for the moment I am leading an idle if at times a somewhat trying life!” she told Isabella Greenway.47 A month after that letter, Eleanor’s grandmother Hall passed away. Six months later, the converted Manhattan stable house where her mother’s sister Pussie lived caught fire. Pussie and her two young daughters died. All told, Eleanor was hardly prepared for the rigors of a national campaign on any level. At one point, Louis Howe sent her an urgent request from Washington. “Papers are demanding your picture. Is there one at the house here that I can have copied?” Eleanor’s reply: “Are no pictures of me.”48 Of course, that was not even remotely true. She’d been photographed plenty of times, including the previous year by United Press International, which circulated the shot nationwide. But Eleanor’s default mode was still to play the shrinking violet, and in this case at least she got her wish to fade away. A few days after Howe’s plea, the New York Daily News ran a full page of photographs featuring “glimpses” of the new vice presidential nominee in various locations. It included a large picture of a woman in a black hat and white fur collar over a caption that read, “Roosevelt’s wife is one of the leaders in Washington society.” The problem was, the woman in the picture was not Eleanor.49

  She didn’t stay anonymous for long. Franklin embarked on the kind of whistle-stop campaign that would have made Uncle Ted proud: thirty-two states and more than a thousand speeches in three months. For the last four weeks of the tour, Eleanor went along for the ride, from Colorado to New York. The Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, had just been ratified on August 18, 1920, and suddenly politicians realized that the polling booth was no longer a boys’ club. Eleanor’s presence would help Franklin appeal to women voters (though in point of fact, Eleanor never worked for the suffrage movement and only supported the Amendment after Franklin did). But traveling around on Franklin’s private railroad car—which doubled as a rolling campaign office, dormitory for staffers, and speaker’s platform—made her feel even more awkward than usual. By day, Franklin shook hands and delivered speeches while she sat nearby gazing and smiling and as lifeless as a mannequin. Wives had rarely traveled with their candidate-husbands before. Eleanor became the prototypical adoring spouse, the kind who became a fixture on every politician’s campaign. The evenings weren’t much better. The men stayed up late on the train, writing speeches, smoking, and playing cards. ER went to sleep in her stateroom, seething at FDR. “I was still a Puritan,” she said. “Little did I realize in those days how much he received through these contacts and how impossible it would have been for him, after the kind of days he was putting in, to go to sleep placidly.”50

  After only a few days on the trail, she was planning to quit and head home because twelve-year-old Jimmy had become sick and ended up in the Groton infirmary. But Franklin said the three magic words that Eleanor could never resist: “I need you.”51 The job of actually using her, however, fell to Louis Howe. Howe had stayed as loyal as a puppy throughout FDR’s stint at Navy, working as both a publicity guru and all-around problem fixer. Eleanor had learned to tolerate his filthy appearance and influence with her husband, but she’d never really accepted him. During those four weeks on the campaign train, that changed. When Howe saw that Eleanor felt marginalized, he made a point of drawing her into the action. He would knock on her stateroom door and ask her opinion on the draft of a speech or chat about current events. At campaign stops, he began to introduce her to the political reporters. They were charmed by her frankness. Perhaps because she was so obviously out of her element—a woman among men, a city girl in the heartland, a blue blood blending with the working stiffs—she let her guard down in ways she almost never had before. She enjoyed when the reporters stood in the back of the room and made faces, trying to make her laugh “when Franklin was making the same speech for the umpty-umpth time.”52 Sometimes they even made fun of the way certain women on the stump flirted with her tall, charming husband. “One of the standing jokes of that campaign has always been a reference to the day in Jamestown and certain photographs which were taken of lovely ladies who served luncheon for my husband and how they worshiped at his shrine,” Eleanor remembered. “He has had to stand much teasing from the rest of the party about this particular day.”53 In the not-too-distant past, humorless Eleanor would never have found humor in a topic like women on the prowl—especially in a topic like women on the prowl. Now she had joined the party.

  Franklin and Eleanor weren’t the only Roosevelts on the campaign trail in 1920. The Oyster Bay side of the family had never taken “Feather Duster” seriously and were at least as shocked as Eleanor when Franklin landed on the national ticket. It was around this time that mild-mannered Edith began to carp that “Franklin is nine-tenths mush, and one-tenth Eleanor.”54 She and the rest of the Oyster Bay family insisted that Franklin was shamelessly trading on their name, just as he’d lifted so much else from Uncle Ted’s résumé. Many voters assumed that FDR was TR’s son, and the Democrats did little to set the record straight. In fact, they tried to muddy the issue as much as they could. “At the recent Democratic rally on Boston Common not one of the various speakers mentioned the name of Woodrow Wilson,” the Boston Herald wrote in an editorial. “But the memory of Theodore Roosevelt was consigned to no such oblivion. Somebody with a keen ear counted no fewer than 63 allusions to his wise and humane statesmanship, his progressive ideals, and his staunch Americanism.”55

  The fact that FDR and Cox were campaigning as proud supporters of the League of Nations—Theodore’s late-in-life whipping boy—made the Roosevelt name game all the more infuriating in Oyster Bay. “Mama is wild over Nick L having called you in a speech a ‘denatured Roosevelt,’ ” Eleanor wrote to Franklin.56 Alice found an even more novel way to go after Franklin. She had never campaigned for anyone but her father and her husband, and Warren Harding, who was running against the Cox-Roosevelt ticket, was hardly her type. “To call him second-rate,” she said, “would be to pay him a compliment.”57 But she offered the Republican nominee a deal. She and the rest of the family would publicly support him if Harding agreed to appoint her brother Ted assistant secretary of the navy—take that, Franklin—and later support Ted for governor of New York.

  Alice knew that Harding loved a good horse trade. Back in 1912, just as Nick was agonizing over how to navigate the Taft-Roosevelt presidential face-off, Harding had the nerve to offer Nick help in becoming governor of Ohio, with the tacit understanding that Nick would back Taft over Theodore Roosevelt, his own father-in-law. Alice, standing right next to her husband, chewed out Harding before Nick could even reply. “One could not accept favors from crooks,” she told him. “I must say it was a little obtuse and raw of Harding to make that offer to Nick in my presence. Insight and taste, however, were not his strong points.”58

  They apparently got over their spat, because Alice made front-page news in early September when she said she’d begin campaigning for Harding in Maine. She forgot one thing—to show up. The same thing happened in October in southern Ohio. Alice blamed the no-shows on her abject fear of public speaking. Fortunately, other members of the family were less easily rattled. Aunt Corinne, who had just seconded the failed Republican presidential nomination of Leonard Wood (becoming one of the few women to address a major party’s national convention), took to the stump on a swing through the Midwest. “I am behind Senator Harding and Governor Coolidge,” she said, “because I believe them
to be 100 percent American, of true patriotism, who have not failed to show marked efficiency and ability in public office.”59 Corinne’s praise for the VP candidate Coolidge was clearly a slap at the VP candidate Roosevelt. It hurt even more seeing how Franklin’s half-niece, Helen, was married to Corinne’s son, Douglas. FDR had been an usher at their wedding fourteen years earlier.

  But the main attraction in the FDR hit parade was Alice’s brother Ted. Theodore had always envisioned his oldest son becoming his political heir, even though living up to his father’s expectations had terrified Ted junior since he was a kid. The president himself admitted that he’d probably given his eleven-year-old son a sort of “nervous breakdown” by pushing him too hard; one of his extended stays with Auntie Bye was meant as a way for him to be “treated”—the treatment apparently being a respite from his father.60 “The disadvantages of being a great man’s son far outweigh the advantages,” said Ted’s wife, Eleanor. “At twenty-five he was compared with his father at fifty and found wanting. He was always accused of imitating his father in speech, walk, and smile. If he had taken this seriously and tried to alter himself he would have been unbearably self-conscious.”61

  What Ted really wanted was to be a soldier. He had spent a few months after the war in Paris helping to establish the American Legion, then returned to the United States in March 1919 and published a memoir profiling his fellow men in uniform, Average Americans. Within days, the newspapers were suggesting a career change. “Many Republicans believe that young Mr. Roosevelt has a political future as promising as was his father’s when the latter first started political life…If he should be elected President of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, there is no reason why Mr. Roosevelt should not go higher, Republican leaders assert…[T]hey already see him the Mayoralty candidate of the party in 1922.”62 Good soldier that he was, Ted couldn’t ignore the calls to political duty, especially in the shadow of his father’s death. Instead of running for office in heavily Democratic New York City, Ted followed his father’s path to the New York State Assembly, running from his parents’ home in Oyster Bay. He won by the largest margin ever recorded in that district. He made his mark with his very first floor speech, in which he fiercely defended five assemblymen who had been expelled from the legislature because they were avowed socialists. “We abhor the doctrines of the Socialist Party,” Ted said. “[But] we must not let justifiable dislike force us to commit a crime against representative government.”63 It was just the kind of in-your-face defense of the underdog that his father would have relished. And his cousin Franklin, too.

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  Ted was running for his second term in the assembly when Franklin hitched a ride on the 1920 Cox ticket and threatened to establish himself as the new Roosevelt commander in chief. Ted scurried to the barricades, quitting his own reelection campaign and forcing his wife, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, to stump for votes in his place. “I was appalled,” Eleanor Butler said. “ ‘Ted! I can’t possibly do that. I never heard of such a thing!’ ” To which he replied, “Why, of course you can. You’ve got to! Constituents don’t like to feel neglected.”64 By mid-August, the Republicans had sent Ted junior out to tail FDR across the country like a policeman on the trail of a fugitive, following him from stop to stop. “The Republican managers are afraid that voters out West will get the impression that the Democratic Roosevelt is really the son of the late Colonel and that the progressively inclined will rally to his support,” the New York Times explained.65 Ted’s attack plan was simple: to take a hatchet to the Roosevelt family tree. “He is maverick,” Ted told a crowd filled with former Rough Riders in Sheridan, Wyoming. “He does not have the brand of our family.”66 This might well have been the first time in national politics that anyone campaigned almost exclusively against a party’s vice presidential nominee.

  Of course, the election of 1920 was less about the four men running for office now than it was a referendum on eight years of Wilson and his professorial hectoring on war and peace. In that respect, the Democrats were doomed. Harding and Coolidge pummeled Cox and Roosevelt, taking 60 percent of the popular vote (the biggest popular-vote landslide since the 1820s) and 404 electoral votes to 127 for the Democrats. With those kinds of numbers at the top of the Republican ticket, Ted junior triumphed easily in his assembly race, despite going AWOL from his own campaign. If Franklin and Eleanor harbored any ill will against their victorious Oyster Bay cousins, they didn’t seem to show it. By July 1921, they had mended their differences enough to join in a pre-wedding dinner for Sheffield Cowles, Auntie Bye’s only son, at Oldgate in Connecticut. Franklin did have a bit too much to drink, but hearty partying was a Roosevelt family tradition. So was Eleanor’s reaction: she was appalled. It was just like old times.

  At least for Eleanor. For Alice, the election of 1920 was her first without the strong hand of her father. Her success in helping topple the League of Nations earned her a place in Washington’s power elite, as much as a woman could claim such a thing. She was among a handful of Republicans invited to consult with Harding on his possible cabinet choices, and the only one who had the nerve to warn him against selecting his unscrupulous campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, as White House chief of staff. (Harding ignored her.) She’d become a confidante to countless other Republican politicians eager for her keen insights and unparalleled access. She had also earned herself a designated seat in the senators’ family gallery, even though she had never had a relative in the Senate. “One morning [the Kansas senator] Charlie Curtis telephoned that the rules had been changed to give ‘immediate members of ex-Presidents’ families’ the privilege of that gallery,” Alice wrote. “When I got to the Senate, he took me up. In a few minutes, [the New Hampshire senator] George Moses joined us to say that as the Senate rules had been changed for me, would I perhaps like the Constitution changed too?”67 Washington, the New York Times said, had become “a world where Alice Roosevelt Longworth would spend all of her days leaning over the railing of the Senate gallery—and then by night proceed to invite to dinner the senator whose argument she wanted to answer back—and under the glamour of her tingling personality and 100% French evening dress and under the soft allurement of candle light tell him how she’d vote on that measure.”68

  Not all of Alice’s powerful friends needed to win an election to claim their seat at the table. She had long been close to Evalyn Walsh McLean, who owned the two most precious gems in town: the Washington Post and the Hope Diamond. (The McLeans also owned Nick’s hometown Cincinnati Enquirer.) Nick and Alice had spent the first few days of their honeymoon at the McLeans’ house, a seventy-five-acre estate in northwest Washington called Friendship. Evalyn claimed that Alice’s own friendship with Borah became something more serious at her place as well. They were there for Easter brunch in 1921 when Alice pushed back from the table, stood up with the imposing senator from Idaho, and brazenly disappeared with him on the grounds (which wasn’t hard to do, given that Friendship enjoyed its own eighteen-hole golf course, stables, cast-iron swimming pool, and Italian gardens). McLean was as eccentric as she was rich. At a birthday party once, she let the guest of honor parade around wearing the Hope Diamond—the guest in question was her dog Mike, who had the 45.52-carat blue gem attached to his doggy collar. But even McLean thought Alice had gone too far by romping with Borah right under the noses of the ne plus ultra of Washington society. “Alice, you are a fool. You are hurting your reputation,” McLean told her once she and Borah had emerged from Friendship’s garden of Eden. To which Alice replied, “I am a Longworth. I can do as I please.” At the White House Easter egg roll the next day, Alice made clear that she’d informed Nick about everything and had no intention of turning back. “I am absolutely independent now,” she told Evalyn, “and I am going my own way.”69

  Alice was hardly in any danger of becoming a pariah, as McLean must have known. In addition to all her other iron-clad Capitol connections, she had long been friendly with the new First Lady (and fellow Ohioan),
Florence Harding. Two strong women eager for influence and the spotlight, Alice and Florence had an up-and-down relationship. Alice mocked Mrs. Harding’s broad midwestern accent and lack of style. “She was a nervous, rather excitable woman whose voice easily became a little high-pitched, strident,” Alice said. “She usually spoke of Mr. Harding as ‘Warren Harding.’ It is impossible to convey her pronunciation of the letter R in print. Something like Wur-r-ren Ha-ar-r-ding.”70 Florence thought Alice acted as if she thought she had a lifetime lease on the White House, which was probably true. “The Hardings never liked me, and I can hardly blame them. One of their intimate friends once asked me if I realized that when I spoke to the President my manner was condescending, if not actually contemptuous.”71 But Alice knew enough to play nicely with the current lady of the White House, and the three of them (along with McLean) bonded over their fascination with mysticism. (Evalyn and Florence were especially fond of a fortune-teller named Madame Marcia, who made regular visits to the White House with her crystal ball.) When the Hardings held a grand public reopening of the White House on March 8, 1921—a flamboyant retort to the Wilsons, who had kept visitors away on account of the war and the president’s declining health—Alice was among the first to arrive. The man on her arm wasn’t her semi-estranged husband or even Borah. It was her brother Ted, the incoming assistant secretary of the navy and the vessel into which she was now pouring her accumulated clout.