by Marc Peyser
Eleanor and Franklin visited him there regularly, too. Sometimes Franklin would bring a guest to amuse him. “Felix and I were discussing your case on the way down here,” FDR said after arriving one day with the future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. “We’ve decided that it’s unconstitutional.”24 More often than not, the president would go alone to consult with the man who had been his most stalwart adviser and confidant for more than twenty years. The rise of Hitler, the upcoming State of the Union speech, strategy for the 1936 campaign—Louis might have left the building, but he was still very much at the center of the White House. As the end grew nearer, Eleanor stopped by every day to check on him. On April 18, 1936, they were both out: Franklin telling jokes at the annual Gridiron Club dinner (an all-male affair in those days) and Eleanor hosting the club members’ wives. They got the news when they returned home just after midnight that Louis had died in his sleep. The president immediately canceled all his appointments for the upcoming week and had the flag of the White House lowered to half-staff. Eleanor planned the funeral service in the East Room and all the details for the burial in Massachusetts. In a family that made a point of affecting indifference to death, she realized immediately that she couldn’t shrug off the loss of Howe. “I think I felt Louis would always be an invalid but still always there,” she wrote to Hickok on the day after he died. “He was like a pitiful, querulous child but even when I complained I loved him and no one will ever be more loyal and devoted than he was.”25 She, too, was devoted to the end. Her penultimate My Day column was largely devoted to Louis. It was published on September 24, 1962, less than two months before Eleanor died.
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The Time cover story had been published to coincide with the release of Eleanor’s book of essays called It’s Up to the Women, an odd mix of platitudes (“For every normal human being, fresh air is essential”) and impassioned arguments about the role of women in the country and the world. She wasn’t the only Roosevelt moonlighting as an author. The same week that Eleanor’s book was released, Alice published her long-awaited autobiography, Crowded Hours (a favorite phrase of her father’s). Derived in large part from a series of articles Alice had written for the Ladies’ Home Journal, Crowded Hours was a fairly bloodless political memoir. To her credit, she insisted on writing it all herself—no ghostwriter—though she did have the services of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Still, she devoted the majority of the book to the events leading up to the torching of the League of Nations, her personal house of horrors. She never mentioned the death of her father, her husband, or her brother Quentin, or anything at all about her daughter, Paulina. For the rare personal anecdote, she reached all the way back to her childhood at Sagamore Hill and her whirlwind 1905 trip to Asia. To explain her decision to omit almost everything after 1921, Alice provided one of the strangest rationalizations ever conjured by a memoirist. “The past twelve years, it seems to me, are too much in the middle distance, not far enough away, or not near enough to write about with much detail,” she explained.26 She didn’t even cough up many of her legendarily wicked bons mots. The best she could do was excuse Harding for the Teapot Dome scandal—“Harding was not a bad man,” she wrote. “He was just a slob”27—and poke her cousin Franklin, albeit mildly. “The President has the name of Roosevelt, marked facial resemblance to Wilson, and no perceptible aversion to the policies of Bryan. [In Alice’s world, there was still no greater insult than to be likened to Wilson.] The New Deal, which at times seems more like a pack of cards thrown helter skelter, some faceup, some face-down, and then snatched in a free-for-all by the players, is going on before our interested, if puzzled eyes.”28 Still, the book sold well, in large part because Alice had said so little for the record over her thirty-plus years of celebrity.*8 Crowded Hours was at the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists for every city east of the Mississippi on November 13, 1933. That was the week Eleanor’s book hit the stands. It’s Up to the Women only made the list in Washington, where it beat out Crowded Hours for the top spot.29
As it turned out, the cousins’ books were only an introduction to what became a long-running media sparring match. The next round, ironically, was touched off by Will Rogers, world-famous actor, writer, vaudevillian, and wit. Rogers was one of a handful of prominent people who was a friend equally to Alice and to Eleanor. In August 1935, the fifty-five-year-old Rogers was touring Alaska with the famed aviator Wiley Post when their plane crashed on takeoff, killing them both. His column, Will Rogers Says, had been a fixture in American newspapers for thirteen years, read daily by forty million people. Suddenly the McNaught Syndicate needed another pithy, informed, well-known writer to fill Rogers’s space.*9 McNaught’s founder, V. V. McNitt, thought Princess Alice was just the woman for the job. He was a fan of Crowded Hours, and it had done well enough to suggest that the country wanted to hear more from her. The trouble was, as much as Alice admired writers, she didn’t enjoy writing. The drudgery didn’t appeal to her, though she’d never say that in so many words. “I shall never write another book,” she’d later joke. “My vocabulary is too limited.”30 But McNitt pursued her for months, and he finally prevailed on her to write a few sample columns, to see how she would respond to working on a deadline. “They have been frankly partisan, loudly anti–New Deal,” Newsweek reported in a piece detailing the genesis of her column. “But since two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers are normally Republican and three-fourths of them are against the New Deal, McNaught should not find this a drawback.”31 In fact, Alice’s appeal was strong enough that more than seventy-five newspapers bought her column sight unseen.
What Alice Thinks*10 debuted in January 1936, and just as McNitt had hoped, she zeroed in on all aspects of the New Deal. Her topics ranged from the latest farm bill to praise for a speech by the former New York governor Al Smith (who by this time had angrily broken with FDR, his former protégé). She bemoaned, with undisguised envy, FDR’s mesmerizing speaking voice and speculated about which Republican would step into the ring against her cousin in the next presidential election.
But while Will Rogers had been the quintessential everyman, a master at bringing the high-and-mighty down to the level of the average Joe, Alice was such a deep Capitol Hill insider that she was practically entombed. In What Alice Thinks, she would launch into an attack on boondoggles at Passamaquoddy, the recent speech by one Ernst Hanf-staengl, or the persecution of General Hagood, all with the assumption that her readers were as in the know as guests at her legendary dinners. If you had to ask “who?” you simply didn’t belong around her table. Less than two months into her run, folks in the Washington–New York media axis were wondering just what was Alice thinking? “Frankly, I can’t understand how so colorful an individual as I have always thought Mrs. Longworth to be, can produce such conventional and uninteresting copy,” M. V. Atwood, an editor at the Gannett Newspapers, wrote to McNitt. “It seems to me it has no value except the value of her name.”32 She would occasionally draw blood, as McNitt had hoped, but her cuts tended to be superficial and ham-handed. It was hard to miss her dig at FDR’s paralysis when she described Al Smith’s feud with the administration like this: “The Governor’s threat to ‘take a walk’ gives a violent palsy to administration forces.”33
What Alice Thinks looked all the more ponderous next to the debut of a column by another celebrated Washington woman: Eleanor. The First Lady had considerably more editorial experience than Alice. She had published three books, written columns for the Women’s Democratic News and Good Housekeeping, earned bylines in numerous magazines, including Redbook, the North American Review, Modern Screen, and Women’s Journal, and edited a magazine called Babies, Just Babies. When word spread that a column from Alice was in the offing, the editors at the United Feature Syndicate were eager for a column by Eleanor that could compete. But they weren’t sure that the multitasking and peripatetic First Lady could pull it off. They asked her to write a series of test c
olumns so they could shop them to newspapers, and several editors critiqued her submissions. Monte Bourjaily, the general manager of the United Feature Syndicate, went so far as to ask Eleanor’s assistant, Tommy Thompson, to “jot down” anything interesting that Mrs. R. might say over the course of her day and send it along in case they needed extra material. At the time of its launch, only twenty-five papers bought the column, which was called My Day.
The early entries of My Day were exactly as advertised: chatty slices of the First Lady’s daily life, both in her official capacity as a White House hostess and as a mother and grandmother. She offered a mix of news, advice, observations, and occasional preaching, any of which could veer dangerously close to inane: “What is it about going to a play or a concert, if you have a cough, which always brings on a tickling in your throat and makes you cough five times as badly as you have at anytime during the preceding hours?” she asked after reporting on a concert she’d attended the day before.34 But what made My Day palatable, even enjoyable, was the context. Reading about her heroic battle to silence a ticklish throat was considerably more interesting once she mentioned that the wife of the Mexican ambassador started the whole coughing jag and the wife of the secretary of state was the one who quieted them both with a handy box of lozenges. Those kinds of mundane stories might sound unexceptional in the social-media era, but no one had ever pulled the curtain back like that before on a world so close to the president. Discovering that the First Lady of the United States had a lot in common with the average housewife was a revelation.
Eleanor didn’t ignore politics, but she avoided obvious partisanship. When she noted that the Republicans had nominated Governor Alf Landon of Kansas to oppose her husband in 1936, she sounded like a small-town newsletter welcoming a new neighbor. “News has come of Governor Landon’s nomination—not a great surprise to us…The platform which will be drafted by the Convention is of paramount interest. For once the Republican Party seems to be made up of as many varying elements as the Democratic has often been!”35 She would salute her husband from time to time, but the results could sound calculating enough to validate Alice’s cynicism. A column Eleanor wrote a week before the 1936 general election opened with this story: “ ‘Please “Dod,” let the President be fat,’ so prayed a little three-year-old the other night. The next morning the friend who was taking care of her and her sister while mother and father had gone away for the night, inquired why she wanted the President to be fat. ‘Because,’ said she, ‘then he won’t never be hungry the way we were before he helped Daddy get a job.’ Rather sweet and pathetic isn’t it? She must be one of many thousands of children who had known real want in the course of the past few years.”36
And so the ink-stained versions of Mrs. Democrat and Mrs. Republican were a lot like the cousins in life: polar opposites despite their common core. In one respect, their divergent outlooks were ideal. Their columns were supposed to compete with each other; My Day was actually rushed into print so it could debut a week before What Alice Thinks. That said, they never did speak the same language. Alice’s lens was tightly focused on Washington, politics, and the dance of legislation; Eleanor’s was a broader and softer report on the people and events that whirled through her active life. If Alice spent one day squawking about cabinet secretaries fighting for their share of WPA funds (as she did on May 8, 1936), on that same day Eleanor might recount her trip to the District of Columbia Training School for Delinquent Girls: “Never have I seen an institution called a ‘school’ which had so little claim to that name. Buildings are unfit for habitation—badly heated, rat infested, with inadequate sanitary facilities, without an educational program or a teacher, children walled in like prisoners in spite of ample grounds and beautiful views, no psychiatrist to examine and advise on the treatment of these unfortunate children who at such an early age have found the social conditions of the world too much to cope with—practically nothing but incarceration for a juvenile delinquent!”37 Eight days after her column appeared, Eleanor invited sixty girls from the D.C. training school (fifty-two of them black) to the White House for a picnic. The First Lady roamed among them, chatting and smiling as they swallowed their ice cream and lemonade. Naturally, the girls’ visit only brought more attention to the condition of their school, which soon received $100,000 from Congress to upgrade its facilities. Alice might have been the one dropping big names, but little by little Eleanor’s column was establishing her own brand of squeaky-wheeled political power.
The columns did occasionally provide a clear contrast of the two cousins’ worldviews, as events in the 1930s caused them to revisit their isolationism-versus-interventionism sparring of the early 1920s. The brutal Spanish Civil War, which began in earnest in the summer of 1936,*11 was one news story that both cousins wrote about frequently. Eleanor was careful not to openly contradict the U.S. government’s studied neutrality,*12 but she did bemoan the loss of life and the world’s apparent indifference to the ongoing suffering. “It came over me again what a fearful waste it is that we have to go on killing each other before even a difference of opinion can be settled amongst people of the same nation,” she said in the late summer of 1936.38 Although she never called directly for intervention, her message was clear: it was morally indefensible to stand on the sidelines and watch innocents get slaughtered, especially when that slaughter was being abetted by outside forces. She returned to a similar message frequently in the next few years as the United States sat on the sidelines at the beginning of World War II.
On the other hand, Alice found herself in the unusual position of praising Franklin’s foreign policy. She, too, lamented the suffering caused by the war, but she applauded the administration’s refusal to get involved in what she believed would become a quagmire. “The neighbor who steps into a domestic brawl traditionally comes out through the window, much the worse for wear. This country cannot afford to take sides in the internal upheaval in Spain where issues are involved that Americans do not pretend to understand.”39 Alice was the cynic to Eleanor’s idealist, the same roles they had played since they were teenagers.
But Alice’s dogmatic aversion to foreign entanglements also led her to overlook fascist aggression—another foreshadowing of her World War II stands. In April 1937, when the Nazis assisted Franco’s airborne assault on the Basque town of Guernica, Alice actually gave credence to dubious suggestions that the Reds were to blame:
News coming out of Spain is so contradictory and apparently unreliable that American readers who wish to be impartial are learning to control their indignation against one side or the other in the civil conflict, or let it apply equally to both. After we are all ready to condemn the Fascists for destroying Guernica by airplane raids, a special dispatch from the New York “Times” tells us that the correspondent, who has visited the town, saw no evidence of its destruction by air. The [Fascist] Rebels claim that anarchists within the town destroyed it by fire…Now we hear that anarchists are rising in Barcelona, and that a destructive war within the red ranks is threatening that city. Doubtless there will be a contradiction tomorrow.
Although she redeemed herself somewhat at the end of the column when she wrote that “the one emotion that we are definitely justified in having is sympathy with the civil population of the strife-ridden land,” the overwhelming evidence of fascist atrocities made Alice look to some observers like an apologist for Franco and his brutal cohorts.40
While What Alice Thinks was often a broadside fired at her cousins, there were notable exceptions. When Louis Howe died, Alice used her column to tip her hat to him. “He was not the sort of man to take any disagreement with his Chief to the public, or supply the gossip writers with hints of what went on behind the scenes,” she said. “There is no doubt that his death is a great loss to the President, whose career owes so much to Mr. Howe’s single-hearted devotion and political sense.”41 She made a similar gesture after FDR’s longtime bodyguard Gus Gennerich died suddenly of a heart attack during an official visi
t to Latin America. She knew that Gennerich was in actuality much more than a bodyguard; he was the man who regularly lifted the handicapped president out of his wheelchair and into a car or a bathtub, and she knew that his loss would be felt keenly by Franklin. Likewise, in the twenty-seven years of My Day, Eleanor only mentioned Alice by name in the most amiable way, such as when they spent a day together in Cincinnati.
That didn’t stop Washington insiders from looking for dirt. The closest the cousins seemed to come to hurling mud at each other was just before the election of 1936. In her column dated October 5, Eleanor did something almost unprecedented: she lost her temper (albeit in a thoroughly ladylike manner). Her fuse was lit by a newspaper op-ed piece with the headline “His ‘Mollycoddle Philosophy’ Is Called Typical of Roosevelt.” A “mollycoddle” was a pampered, overprotected boy or man, a distant relative of the “Feather Duster” dig. It was also one of Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite epithets for his political opponents, few of whom ever met his manly standards. Applied to the paralyzed president, of course, “mollycoddle” took on a new layer of meaning, and Eleanor wasn’t going to let it pass quietly.
