Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  Ted backed down, but Alice let fly with her own one-two punch. First, she lobbied her poker buddy President Coolidge to intercede on Ted’s behalf with the Senate. When he refused, she got her husband and her lover to defend Ted on the floor of their respective houses. Ted was ultimately exonerated on the strength of one piece of unmanly evidence. It turned out that while he had been a member of the Mammoth Oil board as recently as 1921, Roosevelt didn’t personally make any money when the company’s stock rose. That was because he had put his wife in charge of all the family finances, and she had sold their thousand shares in Sinclair in December 1921—at a loss.

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  The Oyster Bay Roosevelts weren’t the only ones hanging on every Teapot Dome development. By 1924, FDR’s health and strength had improved enough for him to take an active part in politics again. He knew that Ted had been working hard to seal the deal his sister had made for him to become New York governor in 1924. It was, after all, an essential launching pad. The incumbent governor was almost always on the short list of consideration for the national ticket; it had been a stop on his father’s road to the White House, too. It was also the job Franklin thought could be his, before polio intervened. Instead, it was Ted who spent hour after hour awarding blue ribbons at countless county fairs, observing obscure Masonic Lodge anniversaries, and trekking to small towns from Long Island to Niagara Falls. Few events in New York didn’t merit a visit from the assistant secretary of the navy. Speculation about his future was soon rampant: Ted for governor…Ted in the VP slot with Coolidge. Teapot Dome could still put a stop to all that, if the Hyde Park side was lucky. “I am sending you clippings from which you will see that little Ted appears to be down and out as a candidate for governor,” Louis Howe said gleefully in a letter to FDR. “Politically he is as dead as King Tut, at least for the moment.”36

  While Howe was counting the minutes until Ted’s political demise, he was also plotting Franklin’s resurrection. Governor Al Smith of New York was attempting to become the first Catholic president, and he asked Franklin—a Protestant who was popular with labor voters—to deliver his nominating speech at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. Even though his legs were as useless as toothpicks, FDR spent weeks training to maneuver on his own—long enough, at least, to lock his legs in heavy metal braces, hoist himself up on a pair of crutches, and hobble across a convention stage, first on the shoulder of his son John and then, for the final fifteen agonizing feet, all alone. FDR’s Happy Warrior speech on behalf of Smith—“This is the Happy Warrior, this is he, whom every man in arms should wish to be”—sent the hall into a wild ovation. The applause wasn’t for the man being nominated; Smith ultimately lost to the congressman and diplomat John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot. It was for the speaker: FDR, the irrepressible fighter who had just willed his way back from the political dead.

  What most people had only started to notice, however, was that FDR wasn’t the only happy warrior in the family. A few months after his electrifying speech, Eleanor herself took to a stage in Syracuse to second the nomination of Al Smith—for governor again, Smith’s consolation prize. Her speech, too, was a highlight of the convention, and no less for the fact that Smith’s opponent was, as Alice had long planned, Ted junior. He had secured the state’s Republican nomination just the day before. “Of course Smith will win,” Eleanor told the Democratic faithful. “He could not do otherwise when the Republican convention just did all it could to help him” by nominating her cousin. One newspaper said her zinger “raised a howl of laughter.”37

  Ironically, Ted’s positions were often quite close to Eleanor’s, especially on social issues. His unpopular support, on free-speech grounds, of five socialist New York state assemblymen presaged Eleanor’s stance during the Red Scare of the 1950s. At a time when racial intolerance haunted the nation, Ted’s unambiguous positions stood in contrast to many leading Democrats’, including those of President Wilson, who actually resegregated the executive branch that had been integrated by Theodore Roosevelt. One reason the Democrats took 103 ballots to nominate the former West Virginia congressman John W. Davis for president in 1924 was the strong but divisive Klan support for his opponent William McAdoo. Ted took up the issue on the stump in New York City: “No race, no religion must ever be permitted to come up when American is meeting with American. The Ku Klux Klan or any other organization which endeavors to do otherwise is committing an un-American act.”38 Race would remain a constant theme in Eleanor’s life as well, helped in large part by the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, whom she met in 1927, and countless other activists over the years. As she said later in a famous essay she wrote for Ebony magazine, “Some of my best friends are Negro.”39

  But politics makes both strange and estranged bedfellows, and with the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park Roosevelts politics usually acted like a hot knife slicing through a stick of butter. There were less than six weeks between the New York state Republican and Democratic nominating conventions in late September and Election Day on November 4. If Eleanor was going to block “little Ted” and therefore keep Franklin’s path to the governor’s office open, she had to hurry. On September 30, the Republicans announced that Ted junior would travel to every corner of the state in a specially equipped campaign train. Over the next week, Eleanor gathered many of her allies from the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee (along with Howe) at Hyde Park. The first public hint of their emerging strategy came in a campaign booklet the group published on October 12 that included a Q&A section worthy of a late-night talk show monologue. “What is Teapot Dome?” it asked. “A large body of government oil completely surrounded by Republican cabinet officers.”40

  Oil, of course, spreads easily and soils everything, and Eleanor and her cronies were more than happy to help that process along. Their vehicle was, in fact, a car—a large blue Buick with the words “For Honesty and Efficiency Vote for John W. Davis and Alfred E. Smith” painted on the side. It came to be called the “singing teapot,” though it neither sang nor brewed tea. It was, however, fitted with a makeshift teapot constructed of white canvas and stretched over a six-foot wooden frame. It even belched steam. The allusion to Teapot Dome was clear enough, but in case anyone missed the point, a press release explicitly credited Eleanor as the architect of the entire enterprise—and pointed out that she was the first cousin of the Republican nominee.

  Eleanor also took a page right out of Ted’s own game plan. Much as he had shadowed Franklin in 1920 to denounce him as a “maverick,” the singing teapot was scheduled to nip at Ted’s campaign footsteps. It worked the state in a sort of triangle: beginning in New York City, then due north up the Hudson almost to the Canadian border (with an overnight stop at the Roosevelts’ Springwood estate in Hyde Park), then west along the southern edge of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, then finally back toward New York City for a celebratory dinner at Franklin and Eleanor’s town house. The punishing itinerary called for 218 stops, sometimes as many as 14 in a day. In the smallest towns, the teapot was allowed only five minutes to park, distribute literature, and move on with a few belches of steam for good effect. There was no time to waste. For the launch event on October 20 in Manhattan’s Pershing Square, the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen, Murray Hulbert, was asked to make a bon voyage speech. He was in the middle of his prepared remarks as the noontime departure arrived. Whistles and horns sounded, the crowd cheered and surrounded the teapot, and soon Hulbert was left alone on the speaker’s platform. The Republican press made much of the “disorganization of the Democrats” and the insult to the Democrat Hulbert, who promptly vowed to give no more speeches on Smith’s behalf. But the moveable beast was proving its PR value before its journey had even begun.

  It made news everywhere it went, including deep inside Republican territory. “The Singing Teapot Dome car of the Democrats visited Fulton on Friday evening and held an open air meeting,” wrote the Fulton Patriot. “It was a notable campaign venture in the i
nterests of the Democratic ticket, and the ladies in charge made a good presentation of their side of the arguments. However, Fulton and Oswego Counties will not follow the ideas presented to any large extent.”41 It even made news when it did not show up: on October 23, the Ogdensburg Republican-Journal ran the headline “Teapot to Sing Across North Land—Davis and Smith Women Campaigners Not Coming Here.”42 It’s hard to know if the paper was boasting or brooding.

  If the opposition press went easy on them, perhaps that’s because Team Teapot was exclusively female. Florence “Daisy” Harriman, a prominent socialite, suffragist, and social reformer, always spoke on behalf of the national ticket. Harriet May Mills, who had been the Democratic nominee for secretary of state for New York in 1920, spoke for Governor Smith. Taking turns driving and distributing campaign literature were the daughters of three prominent politicians: Elia O’Day, whose mother, Caroline, was the future congresswoman and a longtime ally of Eleanor’s; Governor Smith’s daughter Emily; and Eleanor and Franklin’s daughter, Anna. “I spent all of my time explaining how Emily Smith and Anna Roosevelt could be in the same party,” said Smith, “because Franklin Roosevelt was so unknown at the time. They only knew of Theodore. They didn’t realize there was a Democratic branch of the Roosevelt family.”43 The trip itself was paid for by Henry Morgenthau’s wife, Elinor. The one person who did not bear witness to the teapot’s triumphs was Eleanor herself. She campaigned with Governor Smith while the teapot steamed through other parts of the state, though she returned to Manhattan to host an end-of-tour dinner at the family’s Sixty-Fifth Street town house with Franklin. Beyond that, FDR decided not to involve himself in Eleanor’s shenanigans. To put a safe distance between himself and the mudslinging, he spent most of October convalescing in Warm Springs, Georgia.

  Besides, this was Eleanor’s battle. She was clearly proud of the whole endeavor. Her one documented ride in the singing teapot was a side trip she and the ladies took to show off their new toy to Auntie Bye in Connecticut. Apparently, Eleanor forgot that Bye was also Ted junior’s aunt, and she was none too pleased by her troublemaker niece, even if she didn’t say it in so many words. “I just hate to see Eleanor let herself look as she does,” she wrote to her sister, Corinne. “Though never handsome, she always had to me a charming effect, but alas and lackaday! since politics have become her choicest interest all her charm has disappeared, and the fact is emphasized by the companions she chooses to bring with her.”44 Two days before Election Day, Eleanor debated Frances Parsons, a Republican activist, at Town Hall in New York City. Parsons scolded her for using the teapot as a symbol against Ted when he had been “completely exonerated,” but Eleanor refused to back down. Her cousin, she insisted, was “a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.”45

  Years later, Eleanor would call the singing teapot, semi-apologetically, a “rough stunt,” which she chalked up to getting swept up in the political battle. But it was clearly more than that. It was a way for her to flash the steel she’d acquired in her velvet glove, to show the world that she was no longer willing to be just a mousy mother of five. There was a dash of vindictiveness about the teapot, too. ER wanted to settle scores: with Ted junior for going after her husband as a “maverick” in 1920 and with the rest of her Oyster Bay relatives, who thought she was too ugly or timid to ever amount to much. Blindsided by her cousin’s hidden cunning, Alice was struck virtually speechless. Her reaction was simply to say “it was a base thing to do,” along with a threat: “Like the Republican elephant I am, I never forget.”46

  Anyway, Eleanor wouldn’t have let her cousin forget. As the years went on, she eagerly, and uncharacteristically, boasted about the tour’s dirty tricks. In her autobiography, she wrote that the singing teapot “led the procession of cars touring the state, following the Republican candidate for governor wherever he went!”47 Alice went further, placing Eleanor in the car during the tour. In fact, while the teapot inevitably visited some of the same towns in which Ted junior had earlier campaigned, their teapot and his train never got to within seventy-five miles of each other. And though Eleanor was clearly the driving force behind this “rough stunt,” there is no contemporary evidence that she accompanied it on the tour, much less spoke from it.

  For a family that built its political identity on being straight shooters, they often lost track of the truth when it came to each other. Why the white lies? Maybe it was bragging rights, a by-product of growing up in a hypercompetitive family. The problem was that the Roosevelts were, for many years, America’s First Family. Their various tall tales got amplified in the national gossip mill, and those echoes didn’t help family unity, especially with two cousins as evenly matched in their histories and fame as Alice and Eleanor.

  But to a certain extent, the facts didn’t matter. The singing teapot made sure no one forgot Teapot Dome. In a year where President Coolidge, a Republican, carried New York by 870,000 votes, Ted lost to Smith by a margin of 100,000. His political career had evaporated like the steam belching from the singing teapot, and the Oyster Bay side of the family lost its best hope for a return to glory. They wouldn’t give up fighting, of course, especially Alice. She still clung to the dream of returning to the White House through what you might call the back door—on the arm of either her husband or her lover. But before she could even begin to plot her next move, she had to tend to a bit of personal business that would stun Washington and beyond.

  Chapter 7

  NEW ROLES

  In elected Washington, the only thing harder than keeping your job is keeping a secret. Franklin could testify to that, though he and Howe did better than most. Finding a picture of FDR in a wheelchair is still a rarity. Alice played her own cat-and-mouse games with the press corps—more of them, given her gossip-magazine level of fame. But she didn’t always prevail. In 1915, the papers reported on an illness that she’d clearly hoped to keep to herself: “It was learned today that Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, formerly Miss Alice Roosevelt, has been confined for the last days at the home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue, with a severe attack of the mumps.” One paper then delivered Alice’s version of a non-denial denial: “A servant of the Vanderbilt home brought back the following message to a reporter who called there today: ‘Mrs. Longworth does not want her mumps to get in the paper.’ ” Sorry about that, Mrs. Longworth.1

  However, there was one big secret she managed to keep from everyone—except the president of the United States. In July 1924, the Coolidges lost their sixteen-year-old son, Calvin junior, to a freak accident. He had developed a blister on one of his toes after playing a match on the White House tennis court. The toe became infected, and the infection spread, killing him within a week. The Longworths and the Coolidges had become friends over politics, poker, and boxing matches, so when Alice had some news she thought might cheer them up, she called the White House and asked to come over. Mrs. Coolidge had a busy official schedule that day, including a lunch, along with the president, for a large women’s organization, so she tried to beg off. Alice, being Alice, wouldn’t hear of it. She arrived shortly after 10:00 a.m., flitted up to the First Lady’s room, and announced she was going to have a baby. Then she flitted back downstairs, hugged Ike Hoover, the old White House head usher, and departed.

  If nothing else, Alice’s surprise made for lively table talk at the women’s luncheon later that November day. One guest asked Mrs. Coolidge when Alice’s baby was due. “Now, if that isn’t like me!” she replied. “In all the excitement, I just forgot to ask.”2 With that, President Coolidge picked up a nut off the table and muttered blandly, “Some time in February, I understand.” The ladies were shocked, and none more than Mrs. Coolidge. “Well, how would you like to live with a man like that?” she said. “He had known it for two weeks and never a word said he to me!”3 Which just goes to show: being pals with a man known as Silent Cal had its advantages.

  Mrs. Coolidge obviously wasn’t the on
ly one who had her hair blown back by Alice’s news. The reporter who called Alice later that day to confirm the story seemed scared half to death. “Excuse me, Mrs. Longworth,” he stammered. “I apologize for asking you this question, but are you pregnant?” “Hell yes!” Alice shot back. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” The reporter’s hesitation was understandable. After all, Alice was hardly the maternal type. What’s more, when news of her pregnancy broke, she was forty years old.

  As much as she might pretend otherwise, Alice worried quite a bit about what people would say regarding her “condition.” Her close relationship with Borah was one of the worst-kept secrets in the city, though she obviously wasn’t expecting to get pregnant (and probably assumed, at the age of forty and after twenty years of childless marriage spiced with a few affairs, it wasn’t going to happen). “Poor Alice. She feels humiliated about the baby and dreads what people will say,” her best friend, Ruth Hanna McCormick, wrote in her diary. “Nick will have a hard time of it for a while, and so will Alice. Everyone will gossip about it and then I hope it will be forgotten for a while.”4

  Everyone did gossip, starting with her own family. When Edith heard that she was going to be a grandmother again, she wrote in her diary the French word bouleversé (“stricken” or “shattered”). After all these years, prim and proper Edith could still be shocked by her brazen stepdaughter. “Alice’s news,” Edith wrote a few days later to Aunt Bye, “was rather a blow.”5 She apparently knew, or assumed, something Nick did not. When Nick talked to Alice’s brother Kermit about the baby, Kermit was surprised by the expectant father’s untempered joy. “[Nick] seems very much pleased about it,” Kermit wrote to his wife, Belle. “I imagine Sister is doing a great job of bluffing when she talks as she does.”6 When Congress went back into session in early December, all eyes were on Alice—and she knew it. Rather than take her normal seat overlooking Borah in the Senate chamber, she chose to station herself near Nick in the front row of the House family gallery. (Almost as remarkable, sitting with the House meant she couldn’t witness the Senate’s tribute to her great friend Henry Cabot Lodge, who had died less than a month earlier.) At a time when the press gave considerable deference to the privacy of the famous and powerful, most reporters winked at the truth. They would refer to Borah as Alice’s “good friend” or “great admirer”; the one reporter who referred to Alice as “his most intimate friend” didn’t have the nerve to include a byline.