by Marc Peyser
The irony of Alice Longworth suddenly standing up for decorum certainly wasn’t lost on anyone: “Especially it is a relief to the recalcitrants to have Mrs. Longworth appearing in the role of leader in defense of the old-established social-official, or official-social, order. It is a fact all the more impressive because so novel. Always Mrs. Longworth has ignored, even defied, precedent, in the matter of paying and receiving calls, giving and accepting invitations, even keeping an open house on New Year’s Day, as every Speaker’s wife before her always did, and as she never has done.”25 It’s fair to say that while protocol might have been the tinder that ignited the whole affair, it was really Alice who fueled it. Being the most famous woman in Washington had its price: “The part which Mrs. Longworth plays on Capitol Hill, the prestige she commands throughout Washington, is, of course, resented by other Congressional wives, most of whom lead a dull and pompous existence in the red-plush drawing rooms of the second class hotels which cluster around the Hill, or attend excessively stodgy teas, the guest lists of which they phone at great lengths to society editors. It was natural, therefore, that a large number of these estimable ladies should have sided with Dolly Curtis Gann in the social-precedence war against her more charming and socially-powerful opponent, Alice Longworth.”26
Yet the silliest part of the feud wasn’t Washington’s juvenile reaction but Alice’s. She insisted, for years afterward, that she had about as much interest in snubbing Dolly Gann as she did in a quiet game of checkers. The whole thing had really been Nick’s crafty way to back out of a “dry” dinner party when he could. “There never was any row,” she wrote four years later, in Crowded Hours. “Anyone who knew me was aware that rank and conventionality were things I always fled from and shirked.”27 But she certainly acted as if she cared. If she didn’t, a single public comment to that effect would have dissolved the feud instantly. Instead, she let her actions do the talking. The week after the State Department ruled in Dolly’s favor, Alice made a point of pulling out of a White House dinner honoring the British prime minister, setting off yet another round of coverage. The truth is, she liked playing the game, especially because she was writing the rules. With her impeccable sense of publicity, she knew exactly how to stoke the press for her own amusement, right down to the end. In December 1930, when she had apparently had enough, Alice made a point of showing up at one of the biggest functions of the year, the annual White House Diplomatic Reception, knowing full well that Dolly would be there on the vice president’s arm. When they saw each other, the two women immediately smiled and held hands. Alice seemingly put the lid on the whole episode with her cheerful greeting: “Hello, Dolly!”28
There was ample reason for green-eyed Washington to go after Alice Blue Eyes. The press treated her with more deference than any woman in town. “Heavy politics are played at the Longworth house and Alice sits in. The Longworth place is the closest thing to a salon that Washington has. Alice Longworth never made a speech in her life and never gave an interview. She was not a suffrage advocate, never joined a women’s club, never is a sponsor for or a member of the ‘honorary committee’ of this or that great movement…Yet in her imperceptible way she is one of the most influential women in Washington. She knows men, measures, and motives; has an understanding grasp of their changes.”29 Sometimes she came across as a superhero, even if the stories sounded apocryphal. When the Republicans were missing a crucial member before a close vote in the Senate, Alice was said to have been the only person with the nerve to march into the unnamed senator’s house, rouse him from a drunken stupor, pack him into her car, and get him to his desk in time to raise a wobbly hand in favor of the bill. When asked by a portly matron during a fashionable party how she kept her figure, she was said to have pinned her skirt tightly around her legs and launched herself into a headstand. “Girth control!” she told the flabbergasted woman. It was also during this time that her character-defining quips started to become the stuff of legend. The one that launched her viper-tongued reputation came at the expense of her friend and confidant, Calvin Coolidge: “He looks like he was weaned on a pickle.”
The one person who didn’t buy the Longworth lore—or at least pretended not to—was Alice. “At intervals legends grow up that certain women have political power, that they influence votes on legislation,” she wrote. “Such a role is from time to time attributed to me, and a legend is what it amounts to—totally absurd and without foundation in fact.”30 The problem is that she protested too much. She denied credit for most everything, from the Gann feud right down to the pickle quip. “I heard that at my dentist’s office,” she insisted, sounding like someone who had been caught passing a nasty note behind the teacher’s back. “But didn’t it describe him exactly?” Alice’s modesty did have some basis in truth. Two close friends, Isabella Greenway and Ruth Hanna McCormick, became members of Congress themselves, something Alice never even considered. But there was a good bit of self-preservation in her humility. She had the unfortunate habit of overshadowing the powerful men in her life. It’s telling that when the Los Angeles Times blamed Alice for removing Nick from presidential consideration in 1927, it also noted that she had thrown her weight behind Borah. He, too, was often described as being “advised” by her, but then again so was half of Washington. “Mrs. Longworth, who is regarded in capital circles as having inherited more of the ‘T.R.’ flair for politics than any of her male line, is expected to breathe some life into the drawing-room caucuses which are indulging in President-making when she re-opens her Massachusetts-avenue house within a few days,” the Times said. “Those who know best the ways of the capital hesitate to challenge even for an instant the power Mrs. Longworth wields.”31
Her brother Ted got the worst of it, probably because she exerted so much of her influence on his behalf. She had bargained hard with Harding to get his support when Ted ran for governor of New York in 1924, only to have Harding die before he could lift a finger. In 1929, she asked Hoover to appoint Ted governor of the Philippines. When that fell through, she tried again for Puerto Rico, piling him and her friend (and now congresswoman) Ruth McCormick into her car and delivering them personally to the White House for a final vetting. The newspaper headline: “Sister Helps Clear the Way for Roosevelt.” Ted got the job and did well enough in Puerto Rico to capture that posting in the Philippines in 1932, but Alice stole his thunder yet again. “If some Roosevelt must be sent to Manila, why not the famous ‘Princess’ Alice?” whined the Philippines Free Press when news broke of Ted’s appointment. “Her executive ability is on a par with her brother’s, and she seems to have inherited some of the political acumen of her Presidential father. By all means, if we must have a Roosevelt, let it be Alice.”32
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In Alice’s defense, upstaging their men—intentionally or not—ran in the Roosevelt family. Unlike Alice, Eleanor wasn’t reluctant to leave her fingerprints on her pet projects. As much as she had dreaded abandoning her progressive causes when she moved to Albany, she discovered that she’d come too far to fade away now. In between her work at the Todhunter School and the endless ribbon cuttings, society teas, and various photo ops that fell to the wife of a politician (and especially of one eager to keep his paralysis out of the public eye), Eleanor slowly edged her way back onto her soapbox. She worked to raise money for underfunded schoolteachers, wrote newspaper opinions about the proper role of women in the home and workplace (including calling for a minimum wage for women), supported striking dressmakers, denounced lengthy prison sentences for minor crimes, and even waded into two of the most heated issues of the day: birth control and Prohibition.
If there was any question that her shrinking-violet days were history, it was answered at the small town of Lake Placid, New York. In February 1932, Lake Placid opened its frosty doors to the third Winter Olympics; Franklin, as governor of the host state, presided over the opening ceremony. With one eye already on the upcoming presidential election, he used his moment on the world stage to make a W
ilsonian plea for global peace and cooperation. Unfortunately, his big moment was almost eclipsed when Eleanor struck up a conversation at lunch with a member of the American bobsled team. Before anyone could stop her (and long before the issue of liability insurance would have scuttled the fun), she had agreed to strap herself onto a two-man bobsled and take the plunge. In the next day’s paper, her joyride got nearly as much space as Franklin’s speech: “The sled passed through the ‘zigzag,’ a double series of curves, and a few moments later was visible streaking down the mountain side and into the final curve. It shot up the wall of ice and down again and then raced under the finish bridge and up the slope to a standstill. Smiling, Mrs. Roosevelt removed the leather helmet which sledders use, and came back through the snow, chatting with her companions.”33 Somewhere, Uncle Ted was smiling right back at her.
When it came to making the actual decisions of government, however, Eleanor went out of her way to underplay her clout. As with Alice, nothing could have been further from the truth. Her role as Franklin’s unsung adviser began in earnest when they moved to the Governor’s mansion in Albany. It turned out that Alice and her Oyster Bay family weren’t the only ones who regarded Franklin as a lightweight. Having lost the presidential election but succeeded in getting his apprentice elected governor, Al Smith still expected to run New York State. He insisted that FDR reappoint most of his administration and imagined that Governor Roosevelt would spend most of his time floating in the healing waters of Warm Springs while Smith controlled the government by proxy. Franklin did keep much of the Smith team intact, with two notable exceptions: Robert Moses, the legendary urban planner and builder, and Belle Moskowitz, Smith’s closest adviser. Smith’s expectation regarding Moses was absurd, given that the power-hungry Moses had been openly contemptuous of Franklin when they worked under Smith, especially when the parks commissioner refused Roosevelt’s request to find a job for Louis Howe.
Belle Moskowitz, however, was the sort of gutsy, hardworking, and skilled woman that Franklin, and particularly Eleanor, would have been expected to welcome onto their team. Franklin was all for her. It was Eleanor, he said, who objected:
Eleanor said to me, “Franklin, Mrs. Moskowitz is a very fine woman. I have worked with her in every campaign. I never worked with anybody that I liked to work with better. She’s extremely competent…I think a great deal of her and I think we are friends. But I want to say this to you. You have to decide, and you have to decide it now, whether you are going to be governor of this state, or whether Mrs. Moskowitz is going to be governor of this state. If Mrs. Moskowitz is your secretary, she will run you. It won’t hurt you. It won’t give you any pain. She will run you in such a way that you don’t know you’re being run a good deal of the time. Everything will be arranged so subtly that when the matter comes to you it will be natural to decide to do the thing that Mrs. Moskowitz has already decided should be done.”34
This was clearly not the same Eleanor who had silently emptied the men’s ashtrays and refilled their drinks when the state senator Roosevelt was in Albany sixteen years earlier. She had become a keen political observer and cunning enough to separate her personal fondness for Moskowitz—and her natural inclination to support a woman—from the risk Moskowitz posed to her husband. Four years before they moved to the White House, the seed of the Roosevelts’ unprecedented political partnership had started to take root.
The Longworths had long ago mastered the art of the business-only marriage, despite such obstacles as the daughter that at least one of them knew did not belong to them both.*2 Ultimately their exile from power was caused by something far bigger than anything they could control. When the stock market crashed and took the rest of the economy with it in October 1929, much of the country, understandably, blamed the Republicans. They were the party in power and had been for the entire decade. Even as the economy swirled ever closer to the sewer, President Hoover stuck to his belief that the government shouldn’t interfere, while progressive politicians such as Roosevelt experimented with a host of aggressive policies that would later be expanded during FDR’s presidency, such as unemployment insurance and a form of social security. In the election of 1930, the Republicans lost forty-two House seats, putting them in a virtual tie with the Democrats. Even if the GOP somehow managed to hold on to its majority, its members seemed ready to ditch their leadership. “Perhaps this is the last time I will address you from this rostrum,” Nick told his members on the last day of the Seventy-First Congress. Then he played his own elegy on the House piano.
Alice and Nick did their best to keep up their spirits and appearances. As per tradition, they hosted the annual Speaker’s dinner for the president and the First Lady, during the week before Christmas. In February 1931, they threw themselves a twenty-fifth-anniversary party. Alice, perhaps pining for her glory days, asked the guests to come dressed in clothes from 1906. She herself wore a gold silk gown plucked straight from her trousseau, along with the same profusion of jewels she wore at her wedding (plus a new diamond tiara in the place of an orange-blossom wreath). Despite the usual, effusive coverage in newspapers across the country, Nick wasn’t feeling like himself. At sixty-one, he was in as bad shape physically as he was politically, a lifetime of drinking and partying finally taking a toll. He’d had a head cold that lasted several weeks, and in April he took a trip to Aiken, South Carolina, to shake it. He was sure to feel warmer there, given that he’d be staying in the winter home of his current mistress, Mrs. Laura Curtis.*3 (Mr. Curtis, in the style of the times, politely looked the other way.) Whatever her good qualities, Laura was apparently a lousy nurse. Nick’s cold morphed into pneumonia, and she called for Alice, who arrived on April 8. The next day, Nick was dead.
Alice arranged for a special train to take the body back to Cincinnati—special, in part, because among the passengers keeping vigil over Nick’s corpse were Mr. and Mrs. Curtis as well as a woman named Alice Dows, another of Nick’s great loves. “[Alice] asked me to go with her,” Dows said. “Oh, it was very moving. Particularly the way Alice treated me, as if I was the widow, which I suppose I was.”35 The president and the vice president also attended the Cincinnati funeral. Franklin and Eleanor did not but issued a formal statement of condolences, noting that they were “deeply grieved to learn of the death of Speaker Longworth, because both of us have known him since we were children.”36 The widow—the widow Longworth, that is—seemed to bear up just fine. “Nick’s death was very sad and will be a real blow to the Republican party,” Kermit wrote to his wife’s sister. “Sister has been extremely plucky about it and I think will go on with her life in the same way, dividing up her time between Cincinnati and Washington.”37 In an interview many years later, Alice was asked what she remembered most fondly about Nick. She said she couldn’t think of anything.
For Alice, the more wrenching funeral came four months later, when Aunt Bye, at age seventy-six, died in Connecticut. If she wasn’t a celebrated pillar of the Roosevelt family, she was certainly the cement that kept the foundation in place. She was brother Ted’s greatest confidante, orphaned Alice’s savior, and young Eleanor’s lone source of consistent support and affection. She’d introduced Sara Delano to James Roosevelt, raised Rosy Roosevelt’s motherless children, and in her later years—when she was deaf, confined to her wheelchair, and yet still the liveliest conversationalist in the room—gave Franklin companionship in his disability. When it came to the Roosevelt women’s ability to outshine their men, Bye created the template. “I used to think she might have governed an empire, either in her own right, or through her influence over a king or an emperor,” Eleanor wrote, ten years after Bye’s death.38 Other than Franklin, who couldn’t get away from Albany, all the surviving members of the family made the trip to Bye’s house for her funeral: Sara Roosevelt (age seventy-six), Edith (seventy), Aunt Corinne (sixty-nine), Joe and Stewart Alsop, and of course Alice and Eleanor. There was something fitting about Aunt Bye’s knitting the entire family together—and somethin
g sad. Within a year, the election of 1932 would drive a wedge between the family’s two branches from which they would never fully recover.
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War was declared even before Franklin’s candidacy. After Governor Roosevelt won reelection by a landslide in 1930, his name was on every pundit’s presidential short list, and his Oyster Bay relatives began planning their Armageddon. “Well, as far as I can see, the ship went down with all on board,” Ted junior wrote to Edith. “Your cousin Franklin now, I suppose, will run for the Presidency, and I am already beginning to think of many nasty things to say concerning him.”39 The issue wasn’t so much FDR’s big-government ideals, though the Republican Roosevelts didn’t cotton much to them. This was really about bragging rights, about retaining their claim to the hallowed Roosevelt name, much as it was when Franklin ran for vice president in 1920 and Ted junior rode around the country declaring that his cousin didn’t have the “brand” of their family. “We behaved terribly,” Alice admitted many years later. “There we were—the Roosevelts—hubris up to the eyebrows, beyond the eyebrows, and then who should come sailing down the river but Nemesis in the person of Franklin. We were out. Run over…It was complicated by the fact that my brother Ted had been brought up by my father to follow in his footsteps, which was very tough, and then to see Franklin follow in those same footsteps with large Democratic shoes on was just too terrible to contemplate!”40
On both sides of the family divide, the Roosevelt women eagerly hit the road in 1932. Edith hadn’t set foot in the White House since she left it in March 1909, but she showed up for a party celebrating President Hoover’s re-nomination, along with Ethel and Alice. She still didn’t say much. When a reporter asked the famously tight-lipped former First Lady for a statement, she replied, “I haven’t talked for the press, not in 71 years, and it’s too late to begin now.”41 But when she returned home to Long Island, she wrote to Ted in the Philippines and gave him a full report, at least as she saw it. “As far as I can tell there is no enthusiasm for Franklin,” she wrote optimistically, even sharing a sample of opinions from her still-voluminous mailbag: “One woman wrote, ‘He has made a poor governor so why should he make a good President?’ ”42
