by Marc Peyser
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Eleanor was also declaring her independence—from Mama. Distancing and occasionally defying her mother-in-law had been a gradual process throughout her time in Washington. Not long after she’d arrived, Eleanor fired her entire domestic staff, all of whom had been hired by Mama—and all of whom were white, as they were in most proper northern households. Eleanor replaced them entirely with African-Americans. It wasn’t exactly the kind of socially progressive statement she’d make in later decades. “Well, all my servants are gone and all the darkies are here and heaven knows how it will all turn out!” she wrote to Mama.72 (Though very much a product of her time and class, Eleanor would grow more aware of the insensitive use of such racially charged terms.) The truth was, black servants were paid less than white ones, and Eleanor was always looking to be frugal despite the family’s relative comfort. But she also clearly sought to swerve from the path that her mother-in-law had chosen for her. ER wasn’t afraid of Sara anymore. In fact, she sometimes seemed to relish the fight. “Mama and I have had a bad time,” she wrote to Franklin after the two had crossed swords over the children. “I should be ashamed of myself but I’m not.”73
As it happened, Franklin, Eleanor, and the kids had to move into Mama’s half of the Sixty-Fifth Street house when they returned to New York after the failed 1920 campaign because their side had been rented out for six more months. But Eleanor spent relatively little time there. She couldn’t sit at home anymore, not after all she’d accomplished, and endured, in the last five years. “I did not look forward to a winter of four days a week in New York with nothing to do but teas and luncheons and dinners to take up my time,” she said. “The war had made that seem an impossible mode of living.”74 So she turned herself into a one-woman self-help course. She took classes in cooking, shorthand, and typing. “My mother-in-law was distressed and felt that I was not always available, as I had been when I lived in New York before,” said Eleanor. So she agreed to attend weekly knitting classes with Sara, too.75
Not long after she’d returned to New York, an acquaintance from Washington named Narcissa Vanderlip stopped by. Vanderlip was the president of the New York chapter of the League of Women Voters, which had been formed only a few months earlier. She had worked with Eleanor on a few war-relief projects, and she was impressed by ER’s tirelessness and managerial ability. Would Eleanor like to join the board of the league? Her experience in Washington and on the recent presidential campaign would make Eleanor an excellent person to monitor any national legislation that would be of interest to women, Vanderlip said. Eleanor, being Eleanor, begged off, explaining that “I would be interested but doubted my ability to do this work.”76
Vanderlip, whose husband, Frank, was president of the National City Bank (later to become Citibank), didn’t fall for that. To help Eleanor get up to speed and over her nerves, Vanderlip assigned a young lawyer named Elizabeth Read to study the Congressional Record with her, teaching Eleanor how to track bills for the league. In January 1922, Eleanor traveled to Albany as a Dutchess County delegate to the state’s League of Women Voters convention. In April, she went to Cleveland for a national League of Women Voters convention. Despite a large number of Republicans, the League of Women Voters was also strongly behind the League of Nations, which made ER’s connection to the new organization that much stronger. When she wrote to Franklin from the league convention in Cleveland, she almost seemed to feel guilty for enjoying herself. “Much, much love dear,” she said, “and I prefer doing my politics with you.”77
But Franklin wasn’t doing much politics anymore. After losing the 1920 election, he took a job as vice president of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland. Like so many of the Roosevelt men, including Uncle Ted, he was a lousy businessman. He was clearly frustrated to be out of politics, which is why he kept Louis Howe on the payroll, poking around for ways to get FDR back in the game. In the meantime, that party for Sheffield Cowles wasn’t the only time in recent months that he’d spent an evening drinking as if he were still a Harvard student. Eleanor had hoped to save Franklin from himself by ensconcing the family at Campobello for most of the summer of 1921, and she’d invited a rotating slate of houseguests, including the Howes, a Romanian diplomat, and Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco, the daughter of the British Liberal Party leader. But in July, the Senate Subcommittee on Naval Affairs accused FDR and Secretary Daniels, in a shockingly detailed six-hundred-page report, of covering up a program where sailors at a naval facility in Newport, Rhode Island, were encouraged—and perhaps forced—to seduce other men in order to expose suspected homosexuals in their ranks. The New York Times said that the details were of an “unprintable nature.” Daniels and Roosevelt were forced to head to Capitol Hill for a long, stressful day testifying in front of the committee to clear their names.*2
Franklin seemed tired when he returned to Canada from Washington, but the sea always lifted his spirits, even on the cold and foggy morning of August 10, when he took the children and Louis sailing on the Bay of Fundy. This being a Roosevelt family outing, it was hardly relaxing. The family went fishing for cod, then for a swim in the frigid bay. They even helped tamp down a forest fire with the help of some pine branches. By the time they returned to the house that afternoon, Franklin was feeling chilled and tired. The next morning he felt worse. His limbs dragged and he had a fever. By the next day, he couldn’t move his legs at all. An eminent doctor from Philadelphia came to examine him on August 12 and diagnosed a blood clot. “The doctor feels sure he will get well but it may take some months,” Eleanor wrote to Franklin’s half brother, Rosy. Franklin was eager to return to New York, and the doctor thought he could go some time after September 15, when the heat in the city subsided. And the doctor advised Eleanor to take one more precaution for the trip home. “It may have to be in a wheelchair,” he said.
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*1 Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms (1880–1944) was the daughter of Republican powerhouse and McKinley-backer Senator Mark Hanna. Alice’s lifelong friend and close confidante, Ruth married wealthy journalist and politician Joseph Medill McCormick in1903; he committed suicide shortly after Paulina Longworth’s birth in 1925. Ruth then married Representative Albert Gallatin Simms. She served one term representing Illinois in the House of Representatives from 1929–1931, then left the House for an unsuccessful bid to represent Illinois in the Senate.
*2 They only partially succeeded. Though Daniels and Roosevelt denied any knowledge of the plan’s details, many people didn’t believe them. The Senate committee, in a report issued in July 1921, called the men’s role “reprehensible.” New York Times, July 20, 1921.
Chapter 6
THE SINGING TEAPOT
Louis Howe desperately wanted to keep news of Franklin’s condition away from the press—and the voters. A second doctor, this one an orthopedist, had examined Franklin and diagnosed him with polio. The doctor wasn’t sure yet how severe the case was; there was a chance that FDR might walk again. But Howe worried that the slightest hint of a debilitating illness would end FDR’s political career. So once the doctors gave permission for Franklin to return to New York, Howe devised a plan to sneak him home as if he were contraband. To get Franklin off tiny Campobello without hiring an ambulance or alerting the authorities, six men strapped him on a stretcher and carried him across a stony beach and up a gangway to a motorboat for the two-mile trip across the bay to Eastport, Maine. From there, Howe had arranged for a private railcar—compliments of Franklin’s uncle Lyman Delano, a railroad magnate—to take him back to Manhattan, but the men had to slip his limp, prone body through the train window, rather than maneuver him around the narrow train corridors. Howe had already stocked Franklin’s room with enough pillows to prop him up so he looked as if he were sitting, in case anyone could see through the window. Just to be sure, he also put a festive fedora on FDR’s head, one of his signature cigarette holders in his mouth, and the Roosevelts’ Scottish terrier, Duffy, in his arms. He looked as if he were out for a le
isurely journey home.1
Even a media wizard like Louis couldn’t make this kind of story disappear, however, and sure enough reporters had staked out Grand Central Terminal on September 15 to wait for FDR’s train. In that morning’s paper they had reported (via Howe’s misleading tips) that Franklin was feeling “better” after having been “seriously ill.”2 Now Howe adjusted the narrative, which in the next day’s paper became “F. D. Roosevelt Ill of Poliomyelitis,” but of a mild strain causing “the loss of the use of both legs below the knees.”3 Strictly speaking, that was true; his lower legs had stopped working. But so had his upper legs and the rest of his body up to his chest, including, for a time, the muscles controlling his bladder and bowels. The spinning continued: “You can say definitely that he will not be crippled,” his doctor, George Draper, was quoted as saying. “No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this attack.”4 Even more shamelessly, that very day Howe had Franklin write a letter—actually, Howe ghostwrote it himself, over Franklin’s signature—to Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, that referred to the paper’s unwittingly misleading story about his illness. “While the doctors were unanimous in telling me that the attack was very mild and that I was not going to suffer any permanent effect from it, I had, of course, the usual dark suspicion that they were just saying nice things to make me feel good,” the letter said, “but now that I have seen the same statement officially made in the New York Times I feel immensely relieved because I know of course it must be so.”5
The public bought the whole thing. Even folks who seemed unlikely to sympathize with Franklin expressed their encouragement. “Dearest Eleanor,” wrote Ted junior, who only a few months before was telling anyone who would listen that Franklin was a “maverick” who didn’t belong in his family. “I have just heard of Franklin’s illness. I am so sorry. I hope it will turn out to be but of a short duration and that he may be soon well again. Meanwhile, I know just how very hard it is for you. It is after all those who love us that suffer more when we are sick than we do ourselves. I think of you constantly. Will you give my best to Franklin and tell him ‘good luck’ from me. Affectionately, Theodore Roosevelt.”6 It was a remarkably gracious note from across the family divide. Then again, it was easy for the Oyster Bay clan to be gracious now. They had just won the war of the Roosevelts. For all their fear of Franklin usurping the family name and its claim to power, their rival was now effectively finished. He might not have meant to gloat, but it’s telling that Ted junior wrote his note to Eleanor on stationery embossed across the top with “The Assistant Secretary of the Navy.” The Oyster Bay Roosevelts had wrestled that precious perch back from the upstate upstart.
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Despite his steady climb up the political ladder, Ted junior was still not much of a politician. The job of guiding his career belonged to Alice. “Although her brothers are striving mightily to do credit to their name, and carry the titular honors, nevertheless it is Alice Longworth who is the true bearer of the Roosevelt tradition,” said one paper. “Her friends say she possesses more than her share of the family personality, ability, intellect and courage.”7 After Ted and his wife, Eleanor, moved the family to Washington, he and Alice lunched together almost daily, played poker weekly (often with the Hardings), and plotted his future constantly. He relied on her completely. After Alice went on an extended European trip in 1923, Ted could hardly wait for her to return. “I have missed her more than I can say,” he wrote in his diary. “It will be like rain falling on parched ground to have her back here again with me.”8
Ted was actually one of three potential tickets back to the White House for Alice, along with her husband and her lover. Rather than dissipating her potency like so much watered-down gin, Alice’s ubiquity—she had a man in the House, a man in the Senate, and a man in the administration—only magnified her claim to influence. Some of her clout was obviously trivial. “The saying is in Washington that the Senators have formed the habit, upon coming into the United States Senate chamber at noon, of looking up to the family gallery, to the left from the Vice-President’s chair, to estimate the temper of business for the day,” wrote one reporter. “If Alice Roosevelt Longworth is in the gallery—her usual place is in the front row—they take off their coats, figuratively speaking, of course, and prepare for a ‘hot day.’ ”9 Others claimed her power was more substantial. She got credit for the defeat of a treaty that would have required the U.S. to pay Colombia $25 million as restitution for having finagled Panama’s independence in order to build her father’s cherished canal. Not long before his death, Theodore had called the restitution plan “blackmail,” which explains Alice’s involvement: her causes were almost invariably his. That said, while she might have helped the Senate sink the plan during the Wilson administration, it sailed through under Harding.
Alice’s true authority was difficult to gauge because it wasn’t the type that left a paper trail or even fingerprints. She never cast a vote on legislation, rarely made a speech. Instead, she merely whispered into the ears of the country’s most influential men. But in Washington, proximity to power was almost as good as the real thing. In February 1922, the Massachusetts representative Charles Underhill was complaining to an audience at a local chamber of commerce meeting about how ignorant some of his colleagues back on Capitol Hill could be. Exhibit A was a conversation Underhill overheard between two congressmen discussing an upcoming celebration of Massachusetts’s favorite son, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The whole idea of a tribute, one of the politicians complained, was ridiculous. “Why, nobody ever heard of Longfellow,” the congressman said, “until he married Alice Roosevelt.”10
Her stock rose again in 1923, when Nick became House majority leader, though some people thought she merited a more vaunted position. “When folks wonder why Nicholas Longworth does not run for the Senate, it is whispered that his wife will not let him,” said one paper. “She wishes to be senator herself. And certainly few people know more about the job of being a senator than she.”11 She had also developed an unusual talent for capitalizing when a president died in office. It happened again on August 2, 1923, when Harding, who was enduring the first drips of the Teapot Dome scandal, died of a heart attack in San Francisco. While Alice had long dismissed Harding as “just a slob,” she had cultivated a nice relationship with Vice President Coolidge. They were both boxing fans; she joined his group on a private train to see Jack Dempsey defeat the Frenchman Georges Carpentier in New Jersey in July 1921, then played cards with him on the trip back home. “Coolidge whipped us with pinch paste playing poker,” she remembered.12 Coolidge was close to Borah too, or at least close enough to ask the Idaho senator to be his running mate in 1924. Borah’s reply: “For which position?”13
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Alice was so busy laying track for the future she never realized she was about to be run over by a man in a wheelchair. It was natural to assume that Franklin’s days as pretender to her father’s throne were over. Most everyone else did, and because she kept her distance during his long rehabilitation—Edith, Aunt Corinne, Aunt Bye, and Ted junior all wrote notes when they got word of Franklin’s illness, but not Alice—she had no reason to look over her shoulder. But Eleanor and Louis Howe thought otherwise. Howe had believed, since their first meeting at the 1912 Democratic convention, that Franklin would one day become president, and he wasn’t about to let a little paralysis change that. Back in New York, Howe moved into the Roosevelts’ Sixty-Fifth Street house—or, more precisely, he moved into their daughter Anna’s bedroom on the third floor, while she decamped to a smaller room on the fourth. Anna was furious, as only a dispossessed teenager can be. “For years, all of us thought that Louis Howe was just kind of a nuisance,” said Anna, who got into enormous shouting matches with her mother, followed by extended periods where they wouldn’t speak, while Howe lived with the family. “I was very jealous of him.”14
Eleanor was never the most intuitive of mothers; now she became almost oblivio
us. She was simply too busy, too harried, to be bothered by how miserable her children had become. Sara was adding fuel to the children’s animosity, but the newly emboldened Eleanor cared less and less about her overbearing mother-in-law’s opinion about Howe, or anything else. “Various members of the family thought it was their duty to criticize the arrangements which I had made, but that never troubled me greatly, for I realized that no one else could plan our very complicated daily lives,” Eleanor said.15 She herself was sleeping in one of the boys’ rooms, having given up her own bedroom for Franklin’s nurse. After all, sacrifice and duty were her specialties. “It is impossible to assess…the emotions of Mother as she compelled herself to perform the necessary physical tasks on the body of the man whose intimate touch was only a memory,” said their son Elliott. “He had to be bathed and rubbed to guard against bedsores. With Louis panting from the effort of helping her, he needed to be lifted and turned. All his bodily functions were paralyzed now. Catheters and enemas had to be used to do the work of powerless muscles.”16
