Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Here there was a pause for breath and her grandmother managed to say something.

  G’ma. “But Mary Ann if we have a great deal of company can you make ice cream and do all the other work?”

  Mary Ann. “Why to be sure, Ma’am an’ I can do anything, anything you want, of course ye’ll give me some help and don’t you worry about me I kin do things just perfect. You just send word to Mrs. K. I can’t come back. I’d do it meself but I can’t write you know.”

  “So G’ma retired,” Eleanor finished, “to do as she was bid and Mary Ann is still our cook.”

  The entry (and the diary) ended with a pathetic declaration: “I won’t write again until I’ve been to the Poor’s. Wish me good luck please. I’m usually so hopeless on a house party!”

  Despite this self-depreciation, she had begun to develop a circle of friends. Her eyes, Laura Delano later asserted, softened the hearts of all the men, young as well as old, and her face did things that were suddenly lovely.11 Her male friends came from the group that worked for the Astor Trust—Duncan Harris, Nicholas Biddle, and especially Robert Munro Ferguson, who was the center of a “Ferguson cult” among New York society women. He was a member of an ancient Scotch Highland clan, and his brothers were pillars of the British Liberal establishment and members, along with Asquith, Haldane, and Grey, of the closely knit group called the “Limps.” Bob Ferguson had come to the United States in the late 1880s and had been a Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War; Teddy Roosevelt considered him one of the bravest men he had ever known. He had been a frequent visitor at Eleanor’s house while her mother was alive and was a favorite of Auntie Bye’s. A tall man, rather sad looking except when his face broke up in twinkles, he invited confidences. He was not all surface and Eleanor was strongly drawn to the silent, sensitive, attractive Bob.

  Bob Ferguson introduced Eleanor to Bay Emmett, the painter, and escorted her to parties at Miss Emmett’s studio in Washington Square. “Not a Four Hundred thing, although it was the Four Hundred,”12 the Emmett parties were extremely informal and supposedly very Bohemian, although some young men did not stay long because no hard liquor was served. That made the parties even nicer, as far as Eleanor was concerned, and thus she was not, as was customary for her, among the first to leave.

  By the autumn of 1903 her Tivoli family was beginning to depend on her a great deal, looking upon her as the strong one. She could cope with Pussie’s emotional crises, and when a drunken Vallie, eluding Mrs. Hall in Tivoli, would turn up in New York, it was Eleanor who took command. She gladly assumed responsibility for Hall. Anna Roosevelt had entered Hall’s name on the Groton list for his year, and after her death, the headmaster, Reverend Endicott Peabody, wrote Eleanor’s father that although Hall was twenty-third on the list, he was sure that Groton would be able to take him. It was Eleanor who accompanied Hall to the school, saw him installed, and chatted with Dr. Peabody and the masters, especially William Amory Gardner (WAG), on whose yacht the America her father had sailed. It was the first of what would be many trips, for she thought of Hall as being as much her son as her brother.

  She went through her second winter in New York calmly. Just as at Allenswood she had taken the younger girls under her wing, she now eased the ordeal for those in the new crop of debutantes who were close friends. Though society had lost its terrors for her, she did not look forward to another round of parties, she was ready for something more. She joined a German and a Bible class.

  Mlle. Souvestre had cautioned her against a preoccupation with social success, and the good example that Auntie Bye set proved Mlle. Souvestre’s point to Eleanor. At home in the world of society, Mrs. Cowles did not let herself be limited by its conventions. People said of her, as they did of Eleanor, that she was no beauty but that her quick intelligence and cordiality made them forget that fact. In New York she had turned her drawing room “into a rendezvous for civic reformers, artists, writers, journalists, politicians”13 at a time when society “fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman.”14 Her at-homes in Washington, Eleanor observed, brought “every kind of person into that house.” She enjoyed people, drew them out, and made them feel at their best; later she would discuss them with Eleanor, commenting with sympathy, sometimes with spice. When Eleanor stayed with her, Bye was delighted to take her “soft-eyed” niece—so alert, so shyly curious—everywhere and to encourage her interest in public affairs.

  The most important visitor to Bye’s little house on N Street was Theodore Roosevelt, who came so frequently to talk with his sister that her home was called “the little White House.” Eleanor would talk to her about them afterward, enough so that she could say later,

  There was never a serious subject that came up while he was President that he didn’t go to her at her home on N. Street and discuss with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decisions, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.15

  Uncle Ted’s disdain for society no doubt fed Eleanor’s maturing determination to free herself from its demands. “It was one of Roosevelt’s definite contributions to his time,” wrote Mark Sullivan, “that he, being a Harvard man, and of inherited wealth, showed to others of his class ways to spend their lives with satisfaction to themselves and advantage to their country.”16 It was a doctrine that he particularly preached to the young.

  He did not have much success with Alice, who, he wrote his sister Corinne in 1903, was “spending most of her time in Newport and elsewhere, associating with the Four Hundred—individuals with whom other members of her family have exceedingly few affiliations.” Eleanor, however, found his attitude congenial.

  One day Eleanor was on the Hudson River train with an elderly relative who never hesitated to state his views. Referring to the newspaper he was reading, he demanded, “What is this Junior League?” Not waiting for her answer, he rasped out his disapproval of girls who gave plays and made themselves conspicuous. He did not like it even if it was in the name of charity. “Young girls are getting altogether too bold nowadays!” Eleanor kept quiet. That was a time, she said, when young people did not disagree with their elders.17 But her interest had been stirred, and later when she was asked why she didn’t join the Junior League, she was the readier to do so because it had been criticized. She was acquainted with Mary Harriman and Nathalie Henderson, who were rallying the debutantes to give entertainments to help finance the “college settlements.” While all debutantes were automatically inscribed as associate members on the lists of the Junior League, only a few were volunteering for active work in the settlement houses.

  Eleanor soon joined this group. Along with Jean Reid, the daughter of Whitelaw Reid, she was assigned to work with the settlement house on Rivington Street. After a brief introductory lecture in “practical sociology,” they plunged into teaching calisthenics and dancing to a group of young East Side girls, although they had had no previous training in how to manage children in groups. Jean played the piano, Eleanor was the teacher. “I had been in calisthenics classes and in dancing classes,” wrote Eleanor, “and all I could do was put to use methods I had seen used and which I thought were good.” The results were sometimes ludicrous. “The contribution of the college settlements to the education of the middle class,” observed the historians Mary and Charles Beard, “was perhaps greater than its services to the poor.”18

  Until then Eleanor’s contact with poor children had been slight: she had helped her father serve Thanksgiving dinner to the Newsboys; she had assisted Uncle Vallie in decorating the Christmas tree for children in Hell’s Kitchen; and she had trailed along with her aunts to sing at the Bowery Mission. But these activities had been charity, a continuation of the kind of work that had been started by her grandfather. Now she saw misery and exploitation on a scale she had not dreamed possible, and the pleas for legislative reform were more compelling to her because she saw the conditions to which they were addressed.

  The Rivington Street Settlem
ent, two blocks south of Houston Street in one of the most densely populated parts of the city, was a harsh introduction to social realities. When the settlement was founded in 1889 the neighborhood had been German. Then it had become predominantly Jewish; and now it was changing again as Italian emigrants flooded into the country. Settlement workers urged the residents to welcome the Italians and not to use the derogatory term “dago.” The settlement activities were practical—kindergartens for the young children, a gymnasium, classes in cooking, carpentry, art, and dancing, picnics in the woods and at the beach, and a summer camp in the country—and the settlement was also the center of neighborhood effort for civic improvement. The headworker, in her report for the year Eleanor was there, hailed the advances that had been made—cleaner streets, tenements with more light and air, new schools—and then she added: “That further improvements will follow is assured by the fact that the neighborhood is beginning to demand them and to speak for itself, a most encouraging sign.”19

  The settlement’s policy of encouraging slum dwellers to stand together and claim their rights was one phase of Eleanor’s education in the realities of social change. Another was in the relationship of law and politics to social conditions. The girls and young women in the clubs and classes often failed to appear, and when the settlement workers investigated they found the explanation in the excessively long hours the poor were obliged to work. The College Settlement Association enlisted the help of Miss Mary Van Kleeck of Smith College to make a study of working hours of women in factories. Such a report, it was hoped, would prod state authorities into enforcing the law that limited the hours that women and children could work to sixty per week.

  The Van Kleeck report startled the city. Ten hours, it noted quietly, “make a long day spent watching and feeding a needle which sets 4,000 stitches a minute; or treading in standing position the pedals of an ironing machine.” Yet Miss Van Kleeck found that it was “not uncommon” for young girls in factories to work twelve, thirteen, and even fourteen hours a day, six days a week, at a weekly wage of $6.

  Eleanor took her duties at Rivington Street very seriously—too much so, in the view of her cousin Susie, in whose home on East Seventy-sixth Street Eleanor was staying. When her afternoon at Rivington Street conflicted with a party, Cousin Susie insisted that Eleanor give up the class; Eleanor gave up the party. “She says I am the most obstinate person she knows as she would have preferred my giving out this afternoon and going to-night!” Cousin Susie pitied the man Eleanor might marry. For her part, Eleanor pitied Cousin Susie’s husband, Henry Parish, whom the family described as “a dear sweet man” except that he never dared stand up to his wife and at Newport kept his bottle of Scotch hidden in his hatbox. Cousin Susie was a very tall, very proper woman, who in motion reminded the younger people of “a full-rigged ship.”20 She was strait-laced and opinionated and refused to have anything to do with people who were outside Society. Nevertheless, she was very kind to Eleanor, and although Eleanor refused to be frightened by Susie’s apprehensions about her safety on Rivington Street, she was devoted to her and her husband.

  Eleanor liked the settlement-house children and they liked her.

  Poor Jean [Reid] has grippe and couldn’t go to Rivington Street with me today, so I took my first class alone and I’ve not had such real fun for weeks. The children were dears, a little obstreperous at times but I hope they enjoyed it in the end as much as I did. Two of them walked back to the cars [?] with me and we had such a nice talk, I cannot see how Caroline and Gwendolyn after going once could miss as they do. I don’t believe either of them really cares for children or they would love going down there and not treat it as a burden. I stayed very late and only got home at a quarter to six and it was such a relief to know that I didn’t have to start out for the Barker’s at once.21

  Jean recovered and returned to the class, and Eleanor was relieved that she too enjoyed the assignment: “I thought she might hate it and refuse to go again!”22

  When Gwendolyn Burden needed help in Ludlow Street in her sewing class, Eleanor volunteered, “but the children were not as nice as mine and I am glad I do not have to go regularly.” Occasionally she had disciplinary problems at Rivington Street and had to send children home, which she “hated” doing, but on the whole the experience, after the agonies of trying to shine in society, was a reassuring one. Her class at Rivington Street, she summed up, was “the nicest part of the day.”23

  She quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the Junior League. Of a meeting at Nathalie Henderson’s, she reported that it had been “a little trying . . . I made myself disagreeable to Mary Harriman by telling her I could not call meetings at a moment’s notice and by opposing several of her suggestions successfully!”

  The settlement house was part of a network of reform organizations that included the Public Education Association, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Consumers League. Eleanor became a member of the Consumers League, a militant group devoted to combating the abuses disclosed in the Van Kleeck report. The league was headed by the redoubtable Maud Nathan; Eleanor’s aunt, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, was a vice president, as was Mrs. Fulton Cutting, Helen’s mother. It operated by means of a “white list” that named the retail establishments which dealt “justly” with their employees and which the league’s members and friends were urged to patronize. To get on the “white list” a retail firm, among other requirements, had to give equal pay for equal work, observe a ten-hour working day, and pay a minimum wage of $6 per week. Another of the league’s major goals was to obtain legislation that would prohibit child labor, and, in particular, the cruel “sweating system” where children of kindergarten age toiled away in their slum homes at such jobs as making artificial flowers.

  The league’s key committee was the one that determined whether a merchant had complied with the league’s standards. The Rivington Street headworker was on that committee, and Eleanor became involved in its activities.

  Her first trip to check on conditions in department stores proved to be valueless. Did the women have stools to sit on behind the counters when they were not waiting on customers, she was asked afterward. She had not looked, she confessed; it had not occurred to her that perhaps they could never sit down and rest. “And if I had looked I would not have understood what it meant until someone else pointed out its meaning.” But she was a willing pupil, and the league asked her to investigate the sweatshops in which artificial feathers and flowers were being made.

  I was appalled. In those days, these people often worked at home, and I felt I had no right to invade their private dwellings, to ask questions, to investigate conditions. I was frightened to death.

  But this was what had been required of me and I wanted to be useful. I entered my first sweatshop and walked up the steps of my first tenement. . . . I saw little children of four or five sitting at tables until they dropped with fatigue. . . . 24

  She was finding a vocation and a role, and she applied herself with scrupulous diligence to the settlement tasks. Already her debutante friends were classing her with Mary Harriman and Nathalie Henderson, whom they regarded as “superior beings,” and even among her more frivolous debutante associates she was not an object of fun. Would-be scoffers were deterred by Eleanor’s dignity and universal helpfulness. She did not have “social lightheartedness,” but girls liked to tell her their most intimate secrets because she gave everyone the feeling that she was interested in them, as indeed she was.

  Among the young men, too, she had many admirers, including some whose interest was serious. But they had missed their chance. A young man who knew his mind had asked her for her hand, and she had become secretly engaged.

  10.“FOR LIFE, FOR DEATH”

  FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S MOST FATEFUL ACTION AS A GAY, CHARMING, princely young man of twenty-one was to pick shy, somewhat plain Eleanor Roosevelt to be his wife. It showed remarkable perspicacity. We can only guess at his reasons; his courtship letters were burned—by Elean
or Roosevelt, probably in 1937 when she was writing the first volume of her autobiography and his youthful avowals of constancy unto death were perhaps too painful to reread. She said she burned them because they were too private. He preserved hers.

  Franklin was a junior at Harvard when he encountered Eleanor after her return from Allenswood and began to see in her an appealing woman rather than interesting cousin. They had run into each other occasionally before she went abroad. At a Christmas party in 1898 at the West Orange country house of Eleanor’s aunt, Corinne Robinson, a sixteen-year-old Franklin, then a Groton student, had asked an unhappy, pathetically dressed fourteen-year-old Eleanor to dance, for which she had been deeply grateful. But it had not been just cousinly chivalry. A few weeks before the Robinson party Franklin had written his parents, “How about Teddy Robinson and Eleanor Roosevelt? They would go well and help to fill out the chinks at a Hyde Park Christmas party.” It was about this time, too, that he was said to have remarked to his mother, “Cousin Eleanor has a very good mind.”1

  Still, his interest in Eleanor was scarcely distinguishable from his lively awareness of a number of other teen-age girls, including Alice Roosevelt, with whom he exchanged a few teasing letters. And they did not correspond while Eleanor was at Allenswood, although both were already conscientious letter writers. But one day during the summer of Eleanor’s return from finishing school, Franklin saw her on the train to Tivoli, hastened over, and took her to the car in which his mother was sitting. Eleanor remembered the occasion all her life. Sara, although her husband had died two years before, was still entirely in black, with a heavy veil that fell from her hat to the ground, as was the custom for widows. Eleanor was held spellbound by her beauty, and the son was as handsome as the mother—tall, slender, with sloping shoulders. His nose, pinched at the bridge, gave him a patrician aspect; his eyes were a cool grayish-blue, arch and gay and jauntily self-confident. And Eleanor, however insecure she may have felt, was outwardly self-assured, clothed with the authority of three years abroad. Eleanor at seventeen, said Caroline Drayton, one of her contemporaries, was “dear [and] affectionate . . . simple [and] spontaneous.” She had a Gibson-girl figure, a pensive dignity, the charm of tenderness, and the sweetness of youth.