Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  It is true that Franklin was as strong a traditionalist as his mother, and later became a founder and pillar of the Dutchess County Historical Society, but he recognized what his mother did not, and the recognition was implicit in his Harvard essay, that in order to survive America’s aristocracy had to justify itself by its works and a willingness to accommodate to change. This was Eleanor’s feeling, too, although genealogy never had the fascination for her that it did for Franklin.

  Franklin knew his own mind, and was determined to shape his own destiny. Although he was a devoted and loving son, if his views differed from his mother’s in matters that he considered important to himself, he held his own course. He preferred to achieve his objectives by diplomacy, patience, and charm, but if it came to a direct collision, he, too, could be stubborn. That was the case with his decision to marry Eleanor.

  Eleanor signed the letter she wrote Franklin after their week end together in New York “Little Nell,” her father’s favorite name for her. It was a sign of how completely she had surrendered her heart to her young lover by admitting him into her most precious secrets and endowing him with all the virtues she had ascribed to her father. “For many years,” she later wrote, her father “embodied all the qualities I looked for in a man.” But although he was her father’s godson, Franklin was not like her father, nor was her father the “parfit, gentil knight” that in her dream world Eleanor imagined him to be. In this inability to see the man she loved as he really was, she set the stage for much disappointment for herself.

  Franklin, like Eleanor, was caught up in the tide of young love. He copied and sent to her his favorite poem from the Sonnets from the Portuguese. We can only guess which one it was. It “is an old friend of mine,” Eleanor wrote back, “and queerly enough I read it over the other evening also and thought how beautiful and expressive it was.” Why did he reread her old letters? she went on. “They really are not worth it. However, I don’t suppose I ought to talk as I have kept all yours and probably read them far oftener than you read mine, but you write nice letters and I love them and mine are very often dull I fear.”

  She was wrapping Christmas presents and he was in the midst of class elections. He had been nominated for class marshal, but, as he had warned his family, he was not elected. The biggest prizes seemed to elude him, at Harvard as well as at Groton. He had entered Groton two years after the other boys in his form, was not a success at athletics, was not elected prefect, and was not one of the really popular boys. “He knew things they didn’t; they knew things he didn’t,” Eleanor later said, commenting on the consequences of his entering his form two years late. “He felt left out. It gave him sympathy for people who are left out.” At Harvard he not only missed election as class marshal but was not taken into Porcellian, Harvard’s most exclusive club, which was by far “the greatest disappointment” in his life, he later confided to Bye’s son, Sheffield Cowles.15 After he became president, his Republican relatives ascribed his attacks on Wall Street and his hostility to bankers like Morgan and Whitney to his resentment about not making Porcellian. “He was getting back at them,” they maintained. He had been disappointed, Eleanor agreed, and even developed something of an inferiority complex as a result; but the blow to his self-esteem at Harvard, like his loneliness at Groton, had widened his sympathies. His childhood had been secure and happy, and his cheerfulness contrasted with Eleanor’s gravity. But there was a sense in which he, like Eleanor, was an outsider, and this, too, drew them together, especially since she supported and encouraged him in his large dreams.

  She was overjoyed, she wrote him when he was chosen permanent chairman of the Class Committee, “for I know how much it meant to you and I always want you to succeed. Dearest, if you only knew how happy it makes me to think that your love for me is making you try all the harder to do well and oh! I hope so much that some day I will be more of a help to you.”

  12.JOURNEY’S END

  FOR FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR JANUARY, 1904, WAS SHADOWED by Franklin’s impending departure for the Caribbean. If Sara had hoped that a five-week winter cruise would dampen the romance, the urgency of their meetings in January should have told her otherwise.

  “I am sorry to part with the old year,” Eleanor wrote Franklin on New Year’s Eve; “it has been so good to me but the new is going to bring us both I hope still more perfect joy and love, if that is possible. Twelve is striking so goodnight darling ‘a Happy New Year to you—.’”

  They spent the next two days together in New York, and while Franklin jovially reported to his mother, who had returned to Hyde Park, how they had gone to a play and to church and been to Aunt Corinne’s for an “uproarious lunch” and all had tea later at Cousin Susie’s, there were things he did not tell her, such as how they had slipped away from Aunt Corinne’s early and that he was planning on returning to New York the following week end.

  Even with the prospect of seeing him again on Saturday, for Eleanor the hours seemed to drag. “What will you do when you have to stand five weeks?” Cousin Susie admonished her. Eleanor was mortified that anyone else should see how out of humor she was; it spoke badly for her self-control, she felt. She told Franklin that he should not laugh at her work in the Rivington Street Settlement. If he were in New York to take up all her time “I would not be going I’m afraid, but one must do something or not having the person who is all the world to me would be unbearable.”

  Despite all their stratagems for concealing their relationship, some began to suspect. When challenged or teased, Eleanor found the slightest deviation from a truthful, candid reply excruciatingly difficult. Was she ever going to marry Franklin, her Aunt Pussie asked her flatly one day. She had no right to ask that, replied Eleanor, who was easily exasperated with Pussie; when she intended to marry, she would let Pussie know. But since she was secretly engaged, this was an evasion and it embarrassed her. “I suppose I could have got out of it without telling such a story if I had thought and I am really quite remorseful.”

  At a luncheon one day Eleanor’s friends began to discuss the approaching marriage of one of their friends, Edith Poor, to a British officer. “Can you imagine loving a man well enough to go to South Africa with him?” the girl next to Eleanor asked her. “Luckily,” said Eleanor, someone else chimed in and answered for her. To dissemble made her dreadfully uncomfortable.

  For the sake of appearances, Eleanor agreed to accept Lyman Delano, Franklin’s cousin and also a student at Harvard, as a supper partner at a theater party and dance to be given by his Aunt Kassie. Lyman was interested enough in Eleanor to get angry when she seemed to elude him. He wrote her from Harvard that he was expecting to come to New York for Aunt Kassie’s party—would Eleanor go to supper with him? To avoid difficult explanations, Eleanor accepted. But, she consoled Franklin, “I’ll dance with you,” and besides, they would be together at Groton before the party and would come to New York on the train together. At the party Lyman wanted to know how she had come down from Boston and by what train, “and when I said the twelve,” Eleanor reported to Franklin later, “he said ‘why had I not let him know, as he would have met me and been delighted to come down with me!’ I did not say that I was escorted by someone else.”

  In Franklin a relaxed attitude toward the truth produced neither guilt nor embarrassment. Although his trip to New York the second week end in January had been planned the week before, after he was back in Cambridge he wrote to his mother:

  Now I must confess—on Saturday I found I had no engagement and went to N.Y. on the 10 o’clock—E. and I had a quiet evening and went to Church together on Sunday—I lunched at the Parishes’ & came on here again on the 3 o’clock getting here at 10, just in time to write my editorial. You know I positively couldn’t help it—There was nothing to keep me here and I knew I should be in a much better humor for a short trip to N.Y.!

  Countless young men in love have resorted to similar omissions and excuses in communications with their parents, and Franklin’s dissemblings
were not unusual. Eleanor’s scrupulousness was. She had, she said, “painfully high ideals and a tremendous sense of duty at that time, entirely unrelieved by any sense of humor or any appreciation of the weaknesses of human nature.”1

  There was a deep strain of puritanism in her. Grandfather Hall had preached a stern gospel of duty and self-control, and both Grandfather Roosevelt and Uncle Theodore, for all their joy of life, had been accused of priggishness in their youth. Grandma Hall and Cousin Susie both dinned it into her that passions should be mastered, not yielded to. “I don’t think I seem a great success at conquering ‘my natural inclinations’ which seems to be our aim in life,” she confessed to Franklin in the course of bewailing her inability to get along with Pussie. Her conscience spoke to her with a strong voice, and it was powerfully reinforced by the repressed knowledge of what self-indulgence had done to her father. Paradoxically, her earnest correctness and the tight control she kept over herself were not, on the conscious level at least, her defense against being like her father but were her way of complying with her father’s wishes. He had wanted her to be good, loyal, well educated, truthful; he had wanted her to be the virtuous person he wished he could be and which perhaps she could help him to be; he had wanted her to work against the pleasure-seeking side in him. He, too, had lovingly called her “Granny.” Perhaps she appealed to Franklin because he needed someone to temper his fun-loving, easy-going, frivolous side.

  She could be quite censorious and prim. Alice was in New York, she informed Franklin, “looking well but crazier than ever. I saw her this morning in Bobbie Goelet’s auto quite alone with three other men! I wonder how you would like my tearing around like that. I’m seriously thinking of taking it up, it seems to be the fashion nowadays.” Bobbie Goelet was one of the gayest and wealthiest young men about town—“None of us had very much money compared to Bertie and Bobby Goelet,” said Duncan Harris, who then worked at the Astor Trust; “they were the big party boys.” Bobbie Goelet was also one of the reasons Eleanor disapproved of Pussie, who was to marry Forbes Morgan on February 14. Eleanor was to be her maid of honor and the day before the wedding was busy arranging the house for the ceremony. Pussie, on the other hand, spent a good part of the day with Bobbie Goelet, and Eleanor could not understand “spending the last afternoon like that.” But then there was little that Pussie did of which Eleanor approved. She could not forget what Pussie had said about her father. After one of Eleanor’s flare-ups with Pussie, Cousin Susie told Eleanor that her face looked as if it were made of stone. Eleanor should read the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians, Cousin Susie had suggested, “and though she said it laughingly I am quite discouraged with myself for I don’t think I shall ever learn how to take Pussie charitably.” A few days later Cousin Susie lectured her again, this time on the subject of forgiveness. “She says I do not know the higher meaning of the word because I never forget. Of course, it’s true and that makes it all the more disagreeable I suppose. . . . ” Eleanor vowed to try to be a better person, “and according to Cousin Susie the first step is peace with Pussie so peace it is to be until we fight again!”

  Eleanor’s mood softened the day of the wedding: “Pussie was married this afternoon at half past four and really looked so lovely.” The ceremony affected Eleanor strongly. “It is a pretty solemn thing when it comes to the point of this getting married and I do not see how anyone who has not a great love in their heart can go through with it. Have you ever read the service through Honey? I wish you would sometime for each time I hear it, I think it more beautiful and it means so much, one’s whole life in fact.”

  She was very firm about not yielding to what she considered her baser instincts. She came very near “gambling” at bridge, she confessed to Franklin, at a dinner party at General and Mrs. Bryce’s on Washington Square. Afterward their daughter Leila organized the young people for bridge and suggested that Eleanor and Beatrice Mills play at the same table, which terrified Eleanor, who seldom played bridge. It was a favorite diversion at the Mills’ house parties,* and Beatrice was a skilled player. “You can imagine my feelings when I had to say that I never played for money and objected distinctly to having my partner carry me!”

  Harnessed to a narrow moralism, Eleanor’s ability to say “no” might have landed her in the ranks of the battle-ax feminist crusaders had she not married Franklin, Alice Longworth asserted.2 She was, moreover, by temperament a “yea-sayer.” Overflowing with vital energy, she was eager to experience the world in all its aspects and, like her preceptor Mlle. Souvestre, believed it to be woman’s particular function to add a grace note to life. However, she was not as forbidding as she depicted herself in the episode at the Bryces’. Although she was not good at games, she was an easy conversationalist, quick to appreciate merit in others; she took pains to draw shy people out and would not spoil other people’s pleasure if she could help it. Outwardly, little ruffled her. One time a group of young men—Bob Ferguson, Nick Biddle, and Otway Byrd of Westover, Virginia—descended upon one of her tea parties and in high spirits proceeded to telephone her friends, talk Indian language to them, and beat on tom toms. “Finally they left to my great relief,” Eleanor recalled, “and I’m glad to say Cousin Susie was out during the whole performance or I’m afraid she wouldn’t have approved!” At a dinner party given by Charles Barney, she was seated between Mr. Barney and Bronson Winthrop, the bachelor descendant of Governor Winthrop. “Luckily, I can, with some effort, succeed in making Mr. Winthrop talk but I cannot imagine why I was put next to the host when there were a good many older girls there! I suppose I must resign myself to being considered twenty-five however!” It was part of her code that one tried to put other people at ease, and she was critical of Laura and Ellen Delano, Franklin’s cousins, because they would not make the effort to talk with people who were newly introduced to them.

  At the Whitelaw Reids’ annual ball Edmund Rogers took her into supper, and she had such “nice partners” that she stayed until 4:00 A.M. “for the first and last time this winter.” She was “burning the candle at both ends,” she confessed to Franklin, and she could never do that for very long.

  It was an equally strenuous month for Franklin. He would arrive back in Cambridge from a week end in New York and then doze through his morning classes. “It is dreadfully hard,” he wrote his mother, “to be a student, a society whirler, a ‘prominent and democratic fellow’ and a fiance all at the same time—but it [is] worth while, especially the last and next year, tho’ hard will be easier.”

  Two plays greatly impressed Eleanor that winter, one negatively, the other positively. She went with Maude Waterbury to R. C. Carton’s Lord and Lady Algy, a popular stock comedy that everyone enjoyed—except Eleanor. The intoxication scene in the second act was the most vivid in the play, and it spoiled the entire work for her. But she saw Candida by George Bernard Shaw several times, and was fascinated by Candida, whose love for and care of her husband, James Morell, a popular clergyman and Christian Socialist, made him strong and master of the house. The play’s most eloquent speech is made by Candida to the wastrel poet Marchbanks, and its account of what she does for Morell foreshadows the role that for many years Eleanor would have in Franklin’s life.

  Now I want you to look at this other boy here—my boy—spoiled from his cradle. We go once a fortnight to see his parents. You should come with us, Eugene, and see the pictures of the hero of that household. James as a baby! the most wonderful of all babies. James holding his first school prize, won at the ripe age of eight! James as the captain of his eleven! James in his first frock coat! James under all sorts of glorious circumstances! You know how strong he is . . . —how clever he is—how happy! [With deepening gravity] Ask James’ mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask me what it costs to be James’ mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. . . . Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful serm
ons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it; when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep vulgar little cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it. . . .

  This outpouring is a revelation to Marchbanks, who gives up his suit; he says despairingly of Candida, upon whose hurt feelings he had hopefully played, “it is she who wants somebody to protect, to help, to work for. . . . Some grown-up man who has become as a little child again.” Eleanor must have identified with the character of Candida, since she, also, wanted somebody to protect and to work for. She had already begun to take care of Franklin. She worried about keeping his relationship with his mother on an even keel: “Boy dear, do you realize you’ve not written your Mother for over a week,” she admonished him. Just as Candida had the will and self-discipline to make a happy marriage, so did she.

  January sped past, and the week of Franklin’s departure for the Caribbean arrived. Then—dreadful disappointment—Henry Parish had to go to Lakewood for his health, and “of course Cousin Susie goes too so I shall be here alone and no one not even you dear can come to the house till they get back.” She hated to upset their plans for being together before Franklin left, “but I cannot help it as long as it is not proper for me to have you come to see me when I’m not chaperoned. . . . I don’t know what to do but perhaps you can think of something and you know that I will do anything which I possibly can rather than miss seeing you for a whole day before you leave.”

  Franklin was equal to the emergency. He wrote his mother:

  I have just heard from E. that Mr. and Mrs. Parish have gone away and I couldn’t see her [i.e., no chaperone] if I went to N.Y. on Wednesday. I find I can get off from here Tuesday night and I feel that I must see all I can of E. these last few days—so I am telegraphing you tonight to see if you won’t have her up at Hyde Park—coming Wednesday a.m. and staying till Thursday. Nobody need know a thing about it and she wouldn’t be any trouble as far as getting off is concerned—for I can pack all my things in half an hour. If you decide not to telegraph her I think I must go down Thursday so as to have all day Friday with her. . . .