Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  Having long insisted she was too shy to speak in public, Alice managed to steel herself and tackle the role of Oyster Bay mouthpiece. She spent much of her time, ironically, in Nick’s backyard, despite having spent her married life escaping from Ohio whenever possible. Alongside First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, Alice appeared at numerous rallies and parades. At one point when they crossed over the Ohio border, Mrs. Hoover was able to coax Alice to the front of the train platform and greet the crowd, though it’s hard to imagine Alice convinced many of them when she announced, “I’m glad to see my fellow Buckeyes!”43 She did better three days later at a Republican women’s rally in Columbus. “I was so carried away with the enthusiasm and spirit of the meeting that I just had to talk,” she insisted.44 But unlike her father, whose written speeches were so hefty they could literally stop a speeding bullet, Alice kept her pitch to a mere thirty-one words: “The Democrats can’t get away with blaming the Depression on President Hoover. Because the people are realizing this and waking up to that fact, President Hoover will be re-elected November 8.”45

  Alice might have gathered enough courage to speak publicly, but she didn’t dare tell voters what really motivated her. “I wasn’t so much for Hoover,” she said years later, “but I was against Franklin, in that nasty way that an Oyster Bay Roosevelt felt about it.”46 The ill will didn’t only emerge in the political arena. Long before the 1932 campaign took shape, Eleanor had begun constructing a sort of valentine to her father, Elliott: a collection of his letters written while he was young, sober, and still the most promising of the Roosevelt boys. Aunt Corinne, Elliott Roosevelt’s last-surviving sibling, suggested that Scribner’s might publish the letters. “They looked them over very carefully and wrote me a nice note about them but said that they did not think they could publish them before Christmas,” Eleanor wrote to her aunt. “I asked Mr. [Louis] Howe to see Mr. Scribner and it then developed that he was very nervous on account of being great friends with Alice, Aunt Edith, and you, for fear if he published them at this time they would in some way be considered a political document and he would be accused of playing up the enemy camp.”47

  In fact, Aunt Corinne was one of the few Oyster Bay relatives who refused to go after Franklin. She had been active in Republican politics for years and actually campaigned for Hoover in 1928 against Al Smith. In early October 1932, the New York State Republican Party named her as a Hoover “elector,” a largely ceremonial position that involved formally registering a state’s vote in the Electoral College. The next day, she refused the party’s offer. “You must understand why I cannot comment on the national campaign,” she said at a Republican event. “My own beloved niece is the wife of the Democratic candidate. She is the daughter of the brother who was closer to me in age than Theodore. For her I have the deepest affection and respect. So much as I would like to pay the highest tribute to President Hoover, I cannot do so in this campaign.”48

  Eleanor certainly appreciated the support from at least one limb of her family, even as she insisted she didn’t hold anything against the others. “Many thanks for both your notes,” she wrote to Corinne Alsop, Aunt Corinne’s daughter and another relative who refused to enter the fray. “As you know, I haven’t the slightest feeling that anyone should work for any party they don’t believe in, but I do know that I can always count on your personal affection and it was very dear of you to write. Franklin appreciated it as much as I do.”49

  On the other hand, Eleanor was almost too busy to notice what Alice and the others were saying. In July 1932, she flew with Franklin to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was the first major-party candidate to break with the received wisdom that accepting the nomination in person was somehow unseemly; his dramatic appearance at the podium in front of the delegates was cleverly designed to show him as a man of emphatic action, and not one hobbled by polio. Eleanor was soon to become the most widely traveled and prominent wife of a nominee. It would be difficult to overstate her importance to her husband’s campaign as she trekked around the country with a particular focus on women’s groups, reaping the benefit of the ties she had cultivated as New York’s activist First Lady. As if that weren’t exhausting enough, Eleanor insisted on driving herself to many campaign stops, though Franklin demanded she travel with the New York state trooper Earl Miller in the passenger seat and a handgun in the glove compartment. Somewhere along the way, she developed an unusual technique for battling fatigue: she could fall asleep anywhere and almost instantly if the situation didn’t require her full attention. Sometimes that meant in the middle of a quiet conversation; sometimes she managed to ignore an enormous amount of noise. The family had been campaigning in Chicago on October 1, and because the New York Yankees happened to be in town facing the Chicago Cubs in game three of the World Series, Eleanor decided to treat the family to a game. This particular contest would go down in baseball history as the one where Babe Ruth, being heckled mercilessly by fruit-throwing Chicago fans, pointed to the center field bleachers and proceeded to deposit a home run in that very spot, 440 feet away. The New Yorkers in the crowd went wild. Well, all but one: “Mrs. Roosevelt sat between her husband and Jimmy, squeezed in so tightly that she could not have fallen over even if she had collapsed,” said Lorena Hickok, an Associated Press reporter assigned to cover the Roo sevelts. “I noticed that her head had dropped forward, and, on the way out of the ball park, Jimmy told me his mother had slept through the entire game.”50

  —

  With the election approaching and Hoover still sinking, the Oyster Bay family got desperate. On Halloween night 1932, Edith unglued her lips and showed up at New York’s Madison Square Garden to introduce Hoover to thousands of rallying Republicans. On November 3, just five days before the election, Alice broke down and made her first national radio address, which turned out to be as preposterous as it was momentous. She argued that the Democrats not only lied when they blamed Hoover for the Depression; they also insulted the voters, who obviously knew a specious argument when they heard one. “They belittle the intelligence of the average citizen,” Alice claimed, “and I, as an average citizen, resent it.” When Alice Roosevelt Longworth was willing to refer to herself as an “average citizen,” hope was clearly lost. On November 8, Franklin won forty-two states, Hoover only six.

  The battle might have been over, but the war was just beginning. Ted junior, who had been governor-general of the Philippines for less than a year, realized his days in Manila were numbered. When a reporter there asked how he was related to the president-elect, Ted replied, “Fifth cousin, about to be removed.” (And removed he was. In fact, the boat carrying the retiring governor and his wife back to the United States on March 22 hit the rocks and ran aground off the southern Philippines. It was an apt metaphor for his foundering political career.) In Washington, the Oyster Bay side began to panic about an eighty-five-acre island in the Potomac River that had recently been purchased by the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association. The plan had been to turn the land, which sat in the shadow of the ten-year-old Lincoln Memorial, into the home for some sort of tribute to TR. Now that the wrong Roosevelt was about to enter the White House, the Oyster Bay family quickly arranged a ceremony so that they could present the island to the lame-duck president, Hoover, rather than to President-elect Roosevelt. They sent Alice to the White House to do the honors.

  Of all the Oyster Bay relatives, Edith was the most incensed by the notion of a second president Roosevelt. In a letter to Ted’s wife, she complained bitterly after a stranger “asked if I was the mother of the President. I furiously said no, the widow of one whose mother had been dead for fifty years. I wish Franklin would drop Mr. Roosevelt and retain Mr. Delano.”51 She wasn’t all that happy with her son Kermit, either. Kermit had long been the closest to the Hyde Park family, having bonded a few years earlier when his daughter Clochette had a brush with polio. He had warmly congratulated Franklin and Eleanor after both of FDR’s gubernatorial elections and again after his presidenti
al win. In fact, he joined Franklin and some friends on the philanthropist-tycoon Vincent Astor’s yacht Nourmahal for a ten-day, preinaugural cruise around the Bahamas. The New York Times promptly ran the headline “Rift Between Roosevelt Families Bridged,” which wasn’t exactly true. When a reporter asked Edith why Kermit was yachting with the president-elect, she answered, “Because his mother wasn’t there.”52

  When the Nourmahal docked in Miami on the evening of February 15, a suntanned Franklin was greeted by cheering crowds on the dock. He stopped to deliver a few off-the-cuff remarks, but before he was finished, an unemployed Italian bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him. A woman standing in front of Zangara grabbed his arm at the last second. He missed Roosevelt, but he hit Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago in the stomach; Cermak would linger for three weeks before dying from his injuries. “Those things are to be expected,” Eleanor told the children when she got the news, an astonishingly calm reaction that would reverberate twelve years later when she was summoned to the White House to be told of Franklin’s sudden death.53

  Less than a week after the assassination attempt came the news that Aunt Corinne had died. Eleanor had just seen her at a party honoring the incoming First Lady at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Delighted by her favorite niece’s success, Corinne, seventy-one, had trekked from her home in upstate New York into the city despite having a minor respiratory infection. But her condition worsened quickly after that, and she died exactly one month later. The fractured family, thrown together sooner than anyone had expected, behaved admirably at the funeral service, with Alice, Eleanor, Franklin, and many Oyster Bay cousins attending. It might have helped that Edith, Ted junior, and his wife, Eleanor, were still away in Asia at the time. Or maybe the temporary truce was just a tribute to Corinne’s place in the family. “One wanted to tell her everything,” Alice wrote in her memoirs, “sure of her perfect comprehension and response, whether it was a serious problem or indulgence in family malice.”54 Without her aunt applying the brakes, Alice would now be free to indulge her taste for family malice at even greater speed.

  * * *

  *1 The Department of State had the unenviable task of resolving these semi-weighty matters because of the complexities involved in hosting the representatives of foreign governments. In a feat of exquisite timing, the Office of the Chief of Protocol was established on February 4, 1928, just before the Dolly Gann Affair exploded. Five and a half decades later, Selwa Roosevelt (daughter-in-law of Alice’s brother Archie) would hold that position during the Reagan administration.

  *2 That Borah was Paulina’s biological father was long suspected but not confirmed until 2007, when unprecedented access to Alice and Borah’s personal correspondence was granted to Alice’s biographer. In many of the letters between them they employed a simple code that, deciphered, makes clear that Borah was aware that he was a father and was genuinely concerned for and fond of his child. See Cordery, Alice, 287.

  *3 Ironically, Aiken was also home to another political mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. It was from Aiken that she would travel, unbeknownst to Eleanor, to join FDR at Warm Springs in 1945.

  Chapter 8

  IN THE ARENA

  The president might have insisted that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but he evidently forgot to check with his wife first. Eleanor was something of a nervous wreck on March 4, 1933, her first Inauguration Day as First Lady. In large part that was because she had to fly solo for much of it. She and Franklin drove in separate limousines to pick up the sullen and semi-mute Hoovers for the ride from the White House to the Capitol, the men in the first car, the wives following. Eleanor wore a velvet dress in a lovely shade of lavender (which the press immediately dubbed “Eleanor Blue”), a short overcoat, and an inconspicuous little bowler hat. They hardly kept out the chill on that raw and windy Saturday. Eleanor stood, shivering and apprehensive, as Franklin leaned on their son James’s shoulder and walked deliberately from the East Portico of the Capitol out to the center of the inauguration platform, 146 daunting feet away. While his landmark “fear itself” speech took only fifteen minutes, the ensuing parade stretched for six miles and several hours. “The crowds were so tremendous, and you felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do,” Eleanor recalled. “It was very, very solemn, and a little terrifying.”1 The president wouldn’t budge until the last of the forty marching bands had filed by, but she had to leave early to get back to the White House to greet the one thousand guests expected for afternoon tea and sandwiches (though three thousand actually showed up). Later that night, she would leave Franklin behind again to attend the inaugural ball. Eleanor had already tried to back out of the traditional gala, claiming she wanted to show respect for FDR’s attorney general designate, Senator Thomas Walsh, who had died suddenly two days before the inauguration, as well as Mayor Anton Cermak, who was still in a coma after the February 15 assassination attempt against FDR. (Cermak died two days later.) But Louis Howe reminded her she had a duty as First Lady not to disappoint her husband’s loyal supporters, so the woman who had dreaded dances and cotillions her entire life put on her silver lamé ball gown and headed off to do her social-minded duty.

  And that was the easy part of the day. In between the parade and the gala, she had endured the most fearsome event, when the extended Roosevelt family arrived to celebrate its latest White House triumph. There were seventy-five of them in all for a buffet dinner, and not a drop to drink. (Prohibition wasn’t repealed until the following December.) The invitation list was drawn up by Sara, who sat near her Franklin in the small drawing room, swollen with pride and expensive jewelry, waiting to welcome the guests. Eleanor discarded the usual First Lady protocol and greeted the visitors herself at the door, among them cousins Teddy and Helen Robinson and Archie Roosevelt from her side; cousin Laura Delano, Uncles Fred and Lyman Delano, and Aunt Kassie Collier from his. And then came Alice.

  At first, no one knew exactly how to react. After all, this was a party for a victory she’d tried to snuff out like a kitchen fire. The indomitable Sara chatted with her amiably; Alice had the good sense to limit her conversation to praising the current president Roosevelt, as opposed to the previous one. Then she walked over to Eleanor, who had been such a remarkably approachable presence at the day’s various events that the Associated Press wrote a gushing story with the headline “Mrs. Roosevelt Shatters Traditions in a Single Day.”2 Alice, however, thought her cousin could still use a few pointers. “You’ll be able to learn after a while how to handle affairs like this,” she told Eleanor, glancing around the roomful of their collective kin. “I’ll help you if you like.”3 Not everyone appreciated Alice’s condescending brand of goodwill. “Mother expressed her thanks, her nervousness mounting under her cousin’s patronage,” said Eleanor and Franklin’s son Elliott. “Almost two years of widowhood had done nothing to curb [Alice’s] style or her irresistible compulsion to lord it over Mother.”4

  Alice’s lifetime claim on the White House was as strong as ever in 1933. She didn’t only drop by on Franklin’s first day. She had also been there the day before to visit the previous residents—the Hoovers. Alice said she wanted to take eight-year-old Paulina over to say good-bye, but there was clearly a dose of morbid curiosity in her motivation. “They looked like figures from waxworks, they looked so unalive. Poor, stiff, bruised, wounded,” she said. “That was the third of March. The next night—dinner at Franklin’s! Dinner at the White House! Riots of pleasure! All of us there, all of us having a good time. It couldn’t have been a more incredible contrast. The overwhelming of the defeat and then the triumph of a very gay first family.”5

  Alice must have been in a very small circle of people in history who were invited to visit the outgoing president on his last day in office and the man who defeated him on his first. The fact that she showed up to celebrate with the extended family wasn’t entirely shocking, though given her rabid support for the Republican ticket it w
as a little like a player from the losing Super Bowl team dropping by the winners’ locker room to guzzle champagne. In the years that followed, what surprised and puzzled onlookers, and frequently annoyed Roosevelts on both sides, was that Alice kept coming back. Faced with the grim reality of now being an “out-of-season” Roosevelt (a phrase coined by Alexander Woollcott), she had two options for dealing with the rise of her Hyde Park relatives: make peace with them (as her brother Kermit did), or take a vow of ice-cold hostility (her brother Ted’s route). Alice never liked playing by other people’s rules, so naturally she chose both options. She cursed nearly every one of Franklin’s policies and mercilessly mocked Eleanor, all the while accepting virtually every invitation to the White House. That seeming vacillation—playing friend and foe—surprised some folks, given Alice’s habit of turning political differences into something very personal (as Presidents Taft and Wilson and her collection of voodoo dolls could attest). The more belligerent members of her immediate family were disgusted by her willingness to associate with the White House usurpers. “I could not help feeling that it was like behaving in like fashion to an enemy during a war,” said Alice’s devoted brother Ted, who rarely disagreed with her on anything. “More so, for enemies generally only fight for territory, trade, or some material possessions. These are fighting us for our form of government, our liberties, the future of our children. I did not expect Kermit to see—for that’s his blind side. But I did expect her to see this, for she’s acute and her life has been politics.”6