Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  While Marie Souvestre’s agnosticism produced no answering echo in Eleanor, the elder woman’s “uncompromising sense of truth”—Beatrice Webb called it her “veracity”—and her “intolerance of pettiness and sham” did. In later years Eleanor did not hesitate to disagree with church or bishop when their actions or words seemed to conflict with Christian spirit or when religious institutions lent support to cruelty, prejudice, and human degradation.

  Although Allenswood was notably emancipated if measured against other finishing schools, it was totally innocent in regard to preparing young ladies to deal with the world of men. Except for a few elderly gentlemen teachers, the girls were as cloistered as in a nunnery. On one occasion when Eleanor and Audrey Hartcup, then two of the oldest girls at the school, went into the library to say good night to Mlle. Souvestre, they found her in conversation with Mlle. Samaia and the older brother of one of their classmates. “Mlle. Samaia threw up her hands in horror and shooed us out!” The next day Eleanor and Audrey cornered her and tried to make her understand the absurdity of such squeamishness in view of “how freely we mixed with members of the opposite sex—when at home.” If Eleanor, one of the most proper of young ladies, felt that Mlle. Samaia was being overly protective, it must have indeed been a cloistered existence.

  Mlle. Souvestre was the most influential figure in Eleanor’s early years, second only to her father. Headmistress and pupil were strongly drawn to each other. Marie Souvestre, like Eleanor, had been very attached to her father, who had died when she was quite young, and there were other bonds between the two. Mlle. Souvestre admitted to having a special feeling for Americans, and then there was the family tie. “Believe me,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall, “as long as Eleanor will stay with me I shall bear her an almost maternal feeling, first because I am devoted to her aunt, Mrs. Cowles, and also because I have known both the parents she was unfortunate enough to lose.” But according to Corinne, Eleanor’s younger cousin whose first year at Allenswood overlapped Eleanor’s last and who also gained a preferred place in the affections of the school’s headmistress, the crux of the relationship was Mademoiselle’s realization that “she could give a great deal to that really remarkable, sad young girl.”

  The headmistress’ motherly solicitude for Eleanor extended to her clothes, her health, her grooming. She was outraged by Eleanor’s made-over dresses but hesitated to say so at first because she was afraid of hurting the sensitive girl. During Eleanor’s second year at Allenswood, however, when she and Burky were spending the between-year holiday with a French family in order to improve their French, Mlle. Souvestre, who was also in Paris, finally expressed herself on the subject of Eleanor’s clothes. Mlle. Samaia was directed to take Eleanor to a dressmaker, and the dark red gown that was made for her gave Eleanor as much pleasure as if it had come from the most fashionable house in Paris. “I can well remember this red dress,” a schoolmate recalled more than sixty-five years later.

  Mlle. Samaia also undertook to break Eleanor of the habit of biting her fingernails. She had little success until one day when Eleanor was rereading her father’s letters and came to the passage that admonished her to take care of her personal appearance. It hit home, and from that day forward, she said, she let her nails grow.

  Her grandmother had alerted the school to her delicate health. “You would enjoy seeing her so well, so rested, so ready for all out-of-door exercises,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall. “She does not any more suffer of the complaints you told me about. She has a good sleep, a good appetite, is very rarely troubled with headaches and is always ready to enjoy her life.” A year later Mlle. Souvestre again reported on Eleanor’s physical condition.

  She looks always very thin, delicate and often white and just the same I have rarely seen such a power of endurance. She is never unwell even when she seems so. Her appetite and sleep are excellent and she is never tired of walking and taking exercise.

  Photographs of Eleanor at this period show a tall, slim, narrow-waisted girl with soft, wavy hair arranged in a pompadour and braided in the back. Her most distinctive feature was her eyes; blue, serene, and soft, in their gaze one forgot the overly prominent teeth and the slightly receding chin. Her soul, said Mlle. Souvestre, was a radiant thing, and it could be glimpsed in her eyes. Like her father, she had the faculty of concentrating all her attention and sympathy on the person she was with. “She is conscientious and affectionate,” the headmistress wrote Mrs. Hall in one of many such reports, “full of regard for others, and of a fineness of feeling truly exquisite. She desires only the good.”

  Eleanor’s schoolmates agreed. Burky, who felt “tired” by comparison with Eleanor, later expressed her gratitude to her for her companionship during holidays, even though “my mind and my body could not keep up with all the things you absorbed so readily and so intelligently.” Eleanor was so consistently helpful that even the girls her age looked upon her “as one of the older ones.” Avice Horn’s sister Dorothy characterized Eleanor “as being entirely sophisticated, and full of self-confidence and savoir faire,” and Eleanor’s cousin Corinne gave this picture of the position that Eleanor held at the school:

  When I arrived she was “everything” at the school. She was beloved by everybody. Saturdays we were allowed a sortie into Putney which had stores where you could buy books, flowers. Young girls have crushes and you bought violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were idolizing. Eleanor’s room every Saturday would be full of flowers because she was so admired.

  Mlle. Souvestre’s aim was to make her girls “cultivated women of the world,” and because she knew so many men of arts and letters in all countries she was able to give a few fortunate older pupils special advantages when she took them abroad on vacation. Eleanor was one of those chosen for this privilege.

  “If you have no objection to this plan,” she wrote Mrs. Hall in February, 1901, “I am thinking of taking her with me to Florence during the Easter holiday. It will be short but I think she may nevertheless derive some benefit of a fortnight in Italy and she is very eager to come with me.”

  All the practical details of the journey were turned over to the sixteen-year-old girl. Eleanor packed for both of them, looked up train schedules, secured the tickets, arranged for the hansoms and porters. She loved every part of her assignment, and traveling with Mlle. Souvestre was a “revelation” to her: eating native dishes, drinking the vin du pays (diluted, of course, with water), being with the people of the country, not one’s countrymen. She learned the pleasures of a meal of wine, cheese, bread, and coffee, and the virtue of flexibility in travel; of revising plans in order to see a friend or a church or a painting. In France they were entertained by M. Ribot, a former prime minister. In Alassio they called on Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist. In Florence they stayed with a painter who was doing a gigantic church mural of the Last Supper. While in Florence Mlle. Souvestre told Eleanor to take her Baedeker and go through the sublime city street by street, church by church; “Florence is worth it,” said Mlle. Souvestre. And “so, 16 years old, keener than I have probably ever been since and more alive to beauty, I sallied forth to see Florence alone.”15 In addition to the excitement and joy of discovery, there was the pleasure of discussing everything she had seen with Mlle. Souvestre afterward. “It is impossible to wish for one self a more delightful companion in traveling,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall. “She is never tired, never out of sorts, never without a keen interest in all that she sees.”16

  On her way back to England Eleanor stopped in Paris, where she wanted to get gifts. Like her father, she took pleasure in giving, and also like him she tried to find “just the thing” which would make the recipient feel loved and valued. A list of those to receive presents started with her family:

  Maude’s baby [Maude was Mrs. Larry Waterbury]

  Joe’s baby [her Uncle Eddie Hall had married the beautiful Josie Zabriskie]

  Pussie

  Cherub [Hall]

 
Grandma

  Vallie

  Tissie [Mrs. Stanley Mortimer]

  Cousin Susie [Mrs. Henry Parish]

  It also included teachers and her closest school friends, and ended with the redoubtable Madeleine, who had caused her so much grief.

  In Paris she ran into the Newbold family, whose Hyde Park estate bordered on that of the Roosevelts’. Mlle. Souvestre did not think Eleanor needed to be chaperoned, and the Newbolds promptly reported to Grandma Hall that they had seen Eleanor in Paris alone. Eleanor worried about her grandmother’s reaction to this news; she was to go back to the United States in July and she wanted desperately to return to Allenswood in September. “I sincerely hope she may be able to do that,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote to Mrs. Hall. “I am sure another year of a regular and studious life will be in every respect mentally and physically beneficial. Her health though excellent is perhaps not yet settled enough to make it desirable for her to face all the irregularities of a society life. . . . She is very desirous of seeing you and is often anxious for you, now that so many of your daughters are married and away.” (Tissie spent a good part of the year abroad; Maude had married Larry Waterbury, the famous polo player; and Pussie, although still unmarried, was totally preoccupied with herself.)

  It was Pussie who came to London to accompany Eleanor on her return to America. The voyage was emotionally exhausting. Pussie, in the throes of a romantic crisis about a man she had met in London, was full of tears and avowals that she was going to jump overboard. It was a bad beginning of an unhappy summer, whose only bright note was a visit to Farmington, Connecticut, where Auntie Bye had recently moved. Eleanor helped her aunt get settled, and in the guest book next to her name she wrote “the laborer is worthy of his hire.” She was thrown together with Pussie again in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where Pussie was staying with Mrs. Ludlow and Eleanor with Mrs. Ludlow’s daughter, her cousin Susie.

  Something Eleanor said nettled Pussie. Because she had taken Pussie’s threats to jump overboard seriously, Eleanor may have expressed surprise at the speed with which Pussie became involved in a new romantic interest in Maine. Whatever the provocation, Pussie retaliated with gibes intended to hurt Eleanor where she was most vulnerable. She ridiculed Eleanor’s appearance, reviving her mother’s lament that she was the ugly duckling among all the beautiful Hall women; no men would ever be interested in her, Pussie taunted. But Eleanor, long reconciled to her plain looks, could not be provoked, so Pussie thrust more savagely. Who was she to talk self-righteously in view of her father’s behavior? She hysterically told Eleanor about her father’s last years and of the grief and shame his behavior had caused her mother and all the family. Distraught and shattered, Eleanor ran to her grandmother for consolation and denial, whereupon she was told that Elliott had ruined her mother’s life.

  Eleanor was thrown into despair, and wanted only to get back to Allenswood and Mlle. Souvestre. Her grandmother hesitated, but Eleanor’s determination and entreaties finally prevailed and Mrs. Hall agreed to let her return for a third year if she could find a chaperone for the voyage. Eleanor went to New York and on her own engaged a “deaconess” through an employment agency to accompany her. With the help of her aunts, she bought her first tailor-made suit with an oxford-gray skirt that fashionably trailed the ground. Accompanied by the respectable-looking deaconess and dressed modishly, she turned away from that unhappy summer and returned to the peace of Allenswood.

  It is a measure of how much she had grown in self-assurance that her encounter with Pussie did not cause her to withdraw into feeling unloved except by a father who was dead. Instead, her last year at Allenswood strengthened her leadership qualities.

  She was happy and contented, yet she also “knew the sadness of things,” a sadness that shadowed even her moments of greatest joy and achievement. She could not abandon herself to frivolity and merriment like other young people. Mlle. Souvestre later talked with Corinne about “Totty,” and after enumerating her virtues “would throw up her hands and add ‘mais elle n’est pas gaie.’” “She took a serious view of life,” Helen Gifford recalled, “and once confided to me that all she wished for was to do something useful: that was her main object.”17

  Because her mother had bred in her an ineradicable sense of inferiority and plainness, Eleanor felt that she could never count on beauty in gaining people’s affection—only helpfulness. “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced,” she later wrote. Happiness, she reasoned in an essay she wrote for Mlle. Souvestre, lay in what one did for others rather than in what one sought for oneself.

  There is no more fleeting notion than that of happiness. Certain people seem to find happiness in a thoroughly egoistic life. Can we believe however that those socialites who look as if they were enjoying happiness in the bustle of worldly pleasures are actually happy? We don’t believe so, for the pleasures of the world are precarious, and there must be moments, even in the gayest and most brilliant life, when one feels sad and lonely in the midst of a frivolous crowd where one cannot find a single friend.

  On the other hand, it often happens that those whose existence seems saddest and dullest are in fact the happiest. For instance you sometimes meet a woman who sacrifices her own life for the sake of other people’s happiness and is happy nevertheless because she finds in her devotion the best remedy against sadness and boredom. . . .

  If no life is without sadness, none is without happiness either, for in the saddest life there are moments of happiness, sometimes produced by comparing the present peace of mind with past sufferings.

  Most of all, those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it for those who are busy searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

  Eleanor wanted to return for a fourth year, but her grandmother insisted that she come home and be introduced into society since she would be eighteen in October.

  “The more I know her the more I see what a helpful and devoted grandchild she will be to you,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote to Mrs. Hall at the beginning of 1902, adding, “Ah! to me! What a blank her going away must leave in my life!” And in her final report in July she said, “Elinor [sic] has had the most admirable influence on the school and gained the affection of many, the respect of all. To me personally I feel I lose a dear friend indeed.”

  As for Eleanor, she wrote in an exercise that described Allenswood to an interested parent, “I have spent three years here which have certainly been the happiest years of my life.”

  * A fictional account of the crisis at Les Ruches and a vivid portrait of Mlle. Souvestre are to be found in Olivia by “Olivia” (1949). Olivia was the pseudonym of Dorothy Strachey-Bussy, the sister of Lytton Strachey who was a pupil at Les Ruches and a teacher at Allenswood when Eleanor was there.

  9.YOUNG IN A YOUNG COUNTRY IN A YOUNG TIME

  ELEANOR WAS ALMOST EIGHTEEN WHEN SHE RETURNED TO THE United States in the early summer of 1902. There was a lively perception in her eyes, her face was sensitive and intelligent, and although she was tall, her movements were quick and graceful—like those of a colt, someone said. Full of dreams and hopes, her sky-reaching mood matched that of the country. Reform was in the air. The century was young, and the United States, raucous and self-confident, was responsive to the prophecies of Eleanor’s uncle, its most youthful president, that this was destined to be an American and, therefore, a better century. The nation was ready to embark on “a new quest for social justice,” historian Harold U. Faulkner wrote, and Roosevelt “instinctively . . . responded to the widespread desires for a better civilization and, rushing to the head of the movement, he rose to unprecedented heights of popularity as the reform wave surged onward.”1

  Radiant, full of optimism, Theodore Roosevelt delighted in the presidency, and the nation was infected with his enjoyment of the office. For the first time not only was a president’s policy always on stage, but so was his personality—the warming smile, the outsize teeth, the
striking phrase sometimes uttered with a screech, the explosive laugh. Never before had the private lives of the president and his family been so fully and continuously reported. The country adored reading about his dash with children and friends down Cooper’s Bluff, his wandering off into the meadows to read an afternoon away, or such greetings to Alice’s friends as “Children, come with me—I’ll teach you how to walk on stilts.”2 Alice, now dubbed “Princess,” was on the front page almost as often as her father, and he, even in his Harvard days, had been, one professor complained, “a great lime-lighter.” He now used his showman instincts to promote his public purposes. “On the whole,” William James wrote in 1902, “I have rejoiced in Roosevelt so far.”3 His use of the word “rejoiced” caught precisely the national mood of sheer pleasure in its young president. The nation was enchanted, and so was Eleanor, who, soon after her return, made the rounds of her Oyster Bay kin—Auntie Bye and Auntie Corinne, Uncle Gracie and Uncle Ted.

  The advance of technology and the resultant new domestic comforts bolstered the sense that the new century would be a better one. “How wonderful the telephone is and how I should miss it at Hyde Park,” Mrs. James Roosevelt noted in her journal. Eleanor’s family was replacing coal stoves with gas, and kerosene lamps and gas jets with electricity. They were using automobiles as a means of transportation, not only as playthings. When Alice and another girl motored alone “all the way from Newport to Boston” that summer, the newspapers hailed the journey as representing progress in travel by motor, while their families lamented the shift in moral standards among the young implied by the absence of a chaperone.