Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

Eleanor and Louis—in only a few years their relationship had evolved from wariness to friendliness to something that looked a lot like devotion. With Franklin’s political future now resting in their hands, Eleanor put herself entirely in Louis’s, sometimes literally. Anna once walked into a room in their house and found her mother curled up at Louis’s feet while he lovingly brushed her hair, almost as if she were his daughter. “He probably cared for me as a person as much as he ever cared for anyone and more than anyone else has,” Eleanor once said.17

  That might well have been true, but it was also a by-product of his larger goal: saving Franklin. Howe thought the way to do that was with a steady stream of news, visitors, and contact with the outside world, all of which would stop him from sinking into despair while keeping his name in play. Eleanor could help with all of that, especially if she lent a hand in the Roosevelt family business—politics. Howe encouraged her work with the League of Women Voters and pushed her to get involved with Democratic Party initiatives. When a woman named Nancy Cook, the executive secretary of the newly formed Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, called out of the blue to ask if Eleanor would speak at a fund-raiser, Louis went into full Pygmalion mode. By now he had seen that inside ER’s mousy exterior was a lion ready to roar, even if she needed elocution lessons. She made the speech, all the while gripping the podium as if she were enduring an earthquake. “I trembled so that I did not know if I could stand up, and I am quite sure my voice could not be heard,” said Eleanor.18 In fact, the speech was a success, and she was soon asked to do more. Her mentor rarely left her side. “Louis Howe went with me and sat at the back of the audience and gave me pointers on what I should say and how I should say it,” Eleanor said. “I had a bad habit, because I was nervous, of laughing when there was nothing to laugh at. He broke me of that by showing me how inane it sounded. His advice was: ‘Have something to say, say it, and sit down.’ ”19

  She didn’t sit for long. Eleanor’s fledgling friendships with women activists led to an ever-expanding web of commitments; suddenly everyone wanted Eleanor to play on her team. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League and attended the International Conference of Working Women in Washington. She co-founded a monthly newsletter (which Howe edited, naturally) called the Women’s Democratic News that reported on projects involving the party’s female members. She even learned to drive, albeit with middling results. “I might as well own up at once that I had two accidents,” she wrote. “I drove into the stone gatepost of the Hyde Park Avenue [entrance] because I tried to turn while going too fast. [And] I backed the entire family downhill, off the road and down a steep bank and came to a stop because I struck a tree.”20 She neglected to note that, like Alice, she had a lead foot that earned her a $10 speeding ticket on her way home from speaking to the Democratic women of upstate Chenango County. She was becoming less fearful by the day, in every aspect of her life. “The more she got involved in helping father,” said Anna Roosevelt, “the more she gained her own self-confidence.”

  Her personal relationships took on a new intensity as well. The young woman who had been terrified of dances and parties suddenly found her card filled with friends and admirers. She spent many evenings discussing politics and reading poetry in the Greenwich Village apartment of Elizabeth Read, the young lawyer she met working with the League of Women Voters, and her lover, Esther Lape. Nancy Cook’s female lover, Marion Dickerman, was a teacher involved in advocating for various social causes, and Eleanor invited the couple to Hyde Park for weekends. Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the Women’s Trade Union League, schooled Eleanor and Franklin on workplace issues over dinners and visits in New York and Hyde Park, sometimes joined by her girlfriend. Eleanor made friends with plenty of straight women too, including Elinor Morgenthau, a Dutchess County neighbor (and wife of FDR’s future Treasury secretary, Henry), and Caroline O’Day, who later became the first female Democrat elected to Congress from New York. But the number of lesbians in her sphere could hardly escape notice. Whether Eleanor initially knew of their sexual orientation is an open question, but if so it wasn’t a mystery for long. FDR and Howe referred to Eleanor’s lesbian friends as “she-males.” Alice called them “female impersonators” and mocked her cousin’s friendships, though she didn’t seem to be passing judgment on homosexuality per se. “My cousin Helen had a horrible story—a delightful story—of being once in an adjoining room to one in which Eleanor and a couple of her female impersonators were having a pillow fight (apparently they used to leapfrog a lot as well),” Alice wrote. “She had not had a very happy childhood, so of course it was nice for her to have some vigorous companions who adored her. Couldn’t be better. More strength to all of them. Pillow fights were obviously as jolly a form of communication as any.”21

  Fun and games weren’t the stock-in-trade of the “impersonators,” however. The League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee—this constellation of rising women gave Eleanor the sense of purpose and camaraderie she hadn’t enjoyed since her days at Mlle Souvestre’s boarding school. The lesbianism, at least the sexual component, was beside the point. Eleanor was developing an affinity for strong, passionate women who didn’t need a man in their lives to find meaning. Howe might have opened Eleanor’s eyes to her own potential, but her female friends encouraged her to work on her own behalf, for the causes that mattered to her, regardless of their utility to her husband. “She thought through her position on such issues as women’s rights, labor, welfare, so that when Father went back into public life, she had such definite opinions of her own, she could pester the hell out of him,” said their daughter, Anna.22

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  If Alice made light of Eleanor and her female friends, perhaps that’s because she had a front-row seat when they first stepped onto the national stage—and tried to revive a prime piece of Alice’s roadkill. By 1923, Alice’s Irreconcilables thought they had buried the League of Nations, but a Dutch-born man named Edward Bok wasn’t ready to let it go so easily. Bok had been the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal and the author of an autobiography called The Americanization of Edward Bok, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. The book is filled with the kinds of up-by-his-bootstraps life lessons often told by humbly successful immigrants, from the fateful boat ride to America and impoverished youth in New York to his baby steps in publishing and transformation of the Ladies’ Home Journal into the first magazine with a circulation of more than one million. He prided himself on being a sort of spur to the flank of his adopted country. He also credited his devotion to philanthropy and public service to a Dutch-American friend: Theodore Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt drops into The Americanization of Edward Bok so often he is practically its co-star. “Bok felt somehow that he had been given a new draft of Americanism: the word took on a new meaning for him; it stood for something different, something deeper and finer than before,” Bok wrote about his first meeting with Theodore. (Bok wrote the book in the third person, which makes it feel both faux humble and pretentious at the same time.) “And every subsequent talk with Roosevelt deepened the feeling and stirred Bok’s deepest ambitions. ‘Go to it, you Dutchman,’ Roosevelt would say, and Bok would go to it. A talk with Roosevelt always left him feeling as if mountains were the easiest things in the world to move.”23

  But Bok was no Roosevelt, and he perhaps underestimated the size of the mountain he chose to climb on July 1, 1923. That was the day he announced what he called the American Peace Award, which he thought would pick up where the defeated League of Nations fell short. The award was an elaborate contest that asked people to submit a master plan for how to “achieve and preserve the peace of the world.”24 A big job—with an even bigger payoff. Bok put up a whopping $100,000 ($1.3 million in 2015 dollars) as prize money, half awarded to the winner upon selection of his or her proposal by a panel of seven expert judges, half paid when the Senate or the American people voted to make
it law. Overall, 22,165 plans were submitted. Keeping with Bok’s quaint belief that “peace is primarily a woman’s problem; she takes it as her own more than a man does,” he appointed Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read’s lover, to oversee the entire process. The first woman Lape asked to be her deputy was Read’s industrious friend from the League of Women Voters: Eleanor Roosevelt.

  It was a perilous assignment, kindling for firestorms in Congress and the papers. Bok was a foreign-born private citizen who seemed to be attempting to influence American foreign policy with a come-on that was equal parts patriotic and mercenary. “The audacity of the propagandists who are financing and directing this attempt to misrepresent public opinion is astounding,” wrote the Washington Post. “There is something in this propaganda which resembles the amazing expertness of European propaganda systems during the war.”25 Even before the winner was named, the Senate Special Committee on Propaganda moved to investigate whether Bok had attempted to “control public opinion and the action of Congress upon legislative matters through propaganda or by the use of money, by advertising, or by the control of publicity.” It just so happened that the Propaganda Committee included a few of Alice’s closest Irreconcilable friends: Senator James Reed and Senator George Moses. Their distrust of the peace award wasn’t surprising, given how Bok’s idea seemed to be built with spare parts from the League of Nations. He even seemed to be correcting his hero Roosevelt’s insistence on “a peace obtained by machine guns and not typewriters” when he explained his motivation: “Wars are not voted upon, but peace can be, and perhaps the next war will go to a vote.”26

  But if the battle lines were familiar, this particular skirmish featured a new duel: Alice versus Eleanor. On January 21, 1924, they faced each other in the middle of a packed Senate hearing room as the Propaganda Committee convened three days of hearings on Bok’s peace award. Alice would have been staring down from her post up in the family gallery if the hearing had been in the main Senate chamber. In the smaller committee room, she had an even better seat: a large leather couch placed “in a privileged corner” of the senators’ own section—right behind Senator Reed.27 That not only kept the princess away from the riffraff; it gave her a direct view of Eleanor.

  Eleanor seemed far less comfortable in her surroundings. She knit constantly and said nothing. Other than her white gloves, she arrived wearing all black. Even the large black ostrich feather that stuck out the back of her bowler-type hat made her look as if she were heading to a funeral. But she sat with Lape and Narcissa Vanderlip, Lape’s other deputy, front and center at the witness table. “Maybe that’s why [Alice] was so well-behaved,” Lape told Lash years later, noting that Alice kept remarkably quiet on her couch. “I remarked,” Lash said, “that I did not think that ER’s presence would have restrained her.”28

  The hearings featured enough fireworks without Alice’s usual dramatic tendencies. The anti-League forces, led by Reed and Moses, were determined to prove that Bok had stacked his judging committee with proleague activists (though it’s hard to see the crime in that). At one point, Reed—chomping on a black cigar and clenching his fists as if he were just itching to throw a punch—questioned Lape with such ferocity that two Democrats on the committee warned him to back off. Not that Lape needed any help. The people in the courtroom gave her an ovation when she finished sparring with the men. “Miss Lape proves match for hecklers at Bok Prize hearing,” reported the New York Tribune. “Emerges victor in contest of wits.”29 By the time that Charles Levermore, a retired college president and a longtime peace activist, was named the award’s winner in early February, the Propaganda Committee had lost any hope of scoring political points and had quietly disbanded. Eleanor might never have said a word during the proceedings, but she had clearly arrived. The woman who only three years earlier could not produce a single photograph of herself had now turned up on the front page of the New York Times. She turned up someplace else, too: her appearance before the Senate committee earned the first entry in what would become a voluminous FBI file.

  Typically, Eleanor downplayed any credit to the point of obsequiousness. “You need not be proud of me dear,” she wrote to FDR after the hearings were over. She had already moved on to fund-raising for her various political organizations and preparing to make a presentation at the 1924 Democratic National Convention that June on the Women’s Division’s political concerns. “I’m only being active till you can be again. It isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world & I’ll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily! Hurry up for as you know my ever present sense of the uselessness of all things will overwhelm me sooner or later!”30 Of course, she was now about as likely to be overwhelmed as a herd of elephants.

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  One reason Alice didn’t put up a better fight at the Propaganda Committee hearings was that they weren’t the only match on her Capitol boxing card that week. She was also shuttling to hearings before the Senate Committee on Public Lands, an otherwise unglamorous setting except that in January 1924 the public land in question was a government oil field in Wyoming named Teapot Dome. Alice would have deposited herself at the Public Lands Committee hearings under any circumstances. Teapot Dome was already shaping up to be one of the biggest political scandals in American history, a tale of cabinet members accused of selling exclusive access to public property for their own gain. But Alice had an uncomfortably personal connection to Teapot Dome. Two of her little brothers—Ted and Archie—were being called as witnesses in the case, threatening their careers and the pristine Roosevelt family name.

  The Roosevelts’ deep and complicated connection to Teapot Dome began years earlier. Teapot (named for the shape of a boulder that dots that Wyoming landscape) was one of a handful of oil-rich tracts set aside by the government in the wake of World War I as vast reserve fields. In 1921, Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby, Ted junior’s boss, agreed to transfer jurisdiction of reserves in Wyoming and California to the Department of the Interior and its secretary, Albert Fall. Fall then secretly agreed to lease exclusive access to the Wyoming fields to the Mammoth Oil Company, which happened to be where Ted worked as a director prior to becoming assistant secretary of the navy—and where Archie Roosevelt was still employed as the vice president of international operations. In appreciation of Fall’s assistance, Harry Sinclair, Mammoth’s owner, delivered a gift of six heifers, a bull, two boars, four sows, and a Thoroughbred horse to the interior secretary’s New Mexico ranch. A California oil company owned by Edward Doheny got a similar sweetheart deal and “lent” Fall $100,000, which Doheny had wrapped in paper, stuffed into a little black bag, and delivered (by his own son, Edward junior) to Fall’s Washington apartment.

  At first, the folks most outraged by these shady arrangements were the competing oil companies that failed to get their greasy-palmed piece of the action. In July 1922, one of those companies, Mutual Oil, went ahead and set up a wildcat rig at Teapot Dome. Sinclair promptly appealed to his man Secretary Fall, who in turn appealed to the navy for help. As luck would have it, Secretary of the Navy Denby was traveling at the time; Assistant Secretary Roosevelt was in charge. Ted issued an order for all “squatters” to leave Teapot Dome, then sent a contingent of marines to dispatch them—all the while letting the press know, in advance, what was coming. When Fall sent a commendation to the marine commander who drove off the unauthorized drillers, Ted junior added in his own handwriting, “You did excellently and confirmed our pride in the ability of the Marine Corps to measure up to whatever it was put up against—T.R.”31

  It’s possible that at the time Roosevelt didn’t know the sordid nature of the deal he defended, but he would soon enough. As the Public Lands Committee continued its Teapot Dome hearings in January 1924, Archie called Ted from New York and said, “Of course I may be wrong, but I’m afraid there’s been dirty work at the crossroads on this oil business. I don’t want to talk on the telephone. When are you coming to New York?” Archie wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the Roo
sevelt drawer, perhaps as a result of his wartime experience that left him occasionally disoriented. “I thought that the Sinclair Company wanted me because I was such a brilliant young man,” he said once he realized the extent of the Teapot mess. “I didn’t know that they had hired me because my father’s name was Theodore Roosevelt and they believed they could use that name.”32 To his credit, Archie immediately resigned from Mammoth when his suspicions about “dirty work” grew too putrid to ignore. The other two men in Alice’s brain trust, Borah and Nick, then advised him to voluntarily testify before the Public Lands Committee.

  Archie arrived in Washington on January 23, and he brought his own cheering section. “Beside Archie and his wife, there was his bald but beautifully dressed brother-in-law, Nicholas Longworth, his unbeautiful brother, Theodore, and his wife,” said one paper. “It was as tense a scene as has been witnessed in Washington in a long time and the Roosevelts were the center of it.”33 Naturally, Alice was there too; as luck would have it, the Bok committee didn’t meet that day. If Eleanor had arrived at the Capitol dressed in unobtrusively basic black, Alice, as was her wont, took the opposite tack. She wore crimson from her hat to her gown. The only exception was a heavy, gold-chain necklace. “It and her dead-white face and hands were the only things not red about her,” the Baltimore Sun said.34 Now that her side of the family was in the hot seat, Princess Alice transformed herself into Washington’s own Mary, Queen of Scots, preparing to be martyred.

  For all that, it didn’t take long for Archie to exonerate himself. He explained to the committee that what compelled him to quit the oil company was a conversation with G. D. Wahlberg, Sinclair’s personal secretary, who admitted that his boss had bribed Secretary Fall with $68,000. Ted, however, wouldn’t escape so easily. In March 1924, Congressman William Stevenson of South Carolina learned that Ted’s wife, Eleanor, owned a thousand shares of Sinclair stock, which had shot up ten points thanks to its Teapot Dome lease. Stevenson, on the floor of the House, called for Roosevelt’s resignation from the navy while sideswiping Eleanor Butler’s integrity in the process. Ted immediately vowed to take matters with Stevenson into his own fists, which prompted a quick phone call from his older and wiser sister. “Ted? I hear you’re going to beat up Stevenson,” Alice said. “Yes, of course he deserves it…I know he’s a rat. By the way, he’s a little elderly man and wears glasses. Remember to have him take them off before you hit him.”35