Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Corinne also remembered the party. Eleanor had left with Sara after dinner; Franklin had stayed on, at Eleanor’s urging, and had had “a lovely time,” Corinne recalled. “It was an all-night affair and he could not have left before three or four in the morning.” The next day when Corinne finally arose, she went in to see Eleanor and afterward ran into Franklin in the foyer. “He was pale as a sheet and furious. His mother had upbraided him for staying out so late, especially with his wife unwell, and had forced him to come down for breakfast at 8 A.M.” Corinne and Franklin went for a walk and stopped in a greenhouse. “Suddenly there was a clatter of pipes and Franklin literally jumped. ‘Are you afraid Mama is after you again?’ I teased.”5

  If Eleanor was hurt by Franklin’s easy acquiescence in her pulling back from most of the gay life of the young-married set she never said so, but much later she confessed that she had sometimes been jealous. She well remembered a young bride, Eleanor wrote in 1931 in a draft of an article, “The Tests of a Successful Wife” (and the reference, although in the third person, appears to be autobiographical), “who wept many tears because after an absence of some weeks, her husband on his return talked to her more about his business than about his love for her with the result that she thought the romance and glamor of marriage were gone forever.”

  Franklin, self-centered and flirtatious, would gladly have joined in every game or mischievous escapade of the moment. Banter came easily to him, and he was an incorrigible tease. Although Eleanor could laugh robustly, she was usually over-serious, sensitive, and felt insecure in casual relationships. Thus, not wishing to spoil her husband’s fun, nor expose herself to embarrassment and humiliation, she increasingly withdrew.

  Their different temperaments, values, and upbringing created problems of adjustment for both. She had high and precise standards of how her young husband should behave. If he disappointed her—if he, like her father, was as invariably late as she was prompt; if he forgot an anniversary by which she set much store; if he was sometimes less than frank; if, without suspecting the inner distress it caused her, he agreed to domestic arrangements she did not like—she did not speak to him about it. Instead, she withdrew into heavy silence. The depressions were a form of passive reproach: she did not dare to be defiant, for that meant risking the approval of those whom she wanted to love her. She called them her “Griselda moods,” and she was, like Patient Griselda in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale,” the medieval archetype of “wifely obedience . . . all meekness, all yielding, all resignation.” Eleanor not only nursed her hurts and disappointments in silence, but performed her wifely duties so excellently, was so helpful, self-effacing, competent, and understanding that, also like Griselda, “Ech her lovede that looked in her face.”† Franklin loved and admired his wife but was often puzzled by her “Griselda moods” and wished she would speak up. He wanted to live up to her expectations and was aware of his shortcomings, even if he was not unduly weighed down by them. It made him unhappy to see his wife sad or depressed, and at those times he left her alone, hoping it would blow over.

  There were other differences between the two. Franklin executed his vestryman’s duties at St. James Church faithfully, but often skipped Sunday services to play golf. Eleanor went to church regularly; it took time for her to become reconciled to his casual churchgoing habits. Franklin was dilatory about writing, while she was the most dependable of correspondents. “I was horribly disappointed with your hasty little scrap of a note yesterday after not getting anything for two days,” she wrote from Campobello. It was a recurrent reproach.

  In the excitement of the moment he often neglected his duties and forgot his promises, assuming that eventually, if others were involved, Sara or Eleanor would square things for him. And they did.

  Eleanor took care of the amenities. When babies were born she sent notes of congratulations and ordered the gifts. When someone was ill, she called; when friends or relatives died, it was she who wrote. When Sara was not with them, it was Eleanor who said to Franklin, “I think Mama would love a letter from you” or “Don’t forget Mama’s birthday is the 21st.” When Sara returned from Europe it was Eleanor who advised Franklin to have a man at customs “to see Mama through quickly . . . she expects us to ‘smooth’ things.” She had an obsession about paying bills promptly; Franklin could be quite casual about this and tended to overlook them. She did not want to bother him in the midst of his Cambridge festivities, Eleanor wrote him in June, 1907, but “this has just come and I thought you said you wrote the man a note. . . . ”

  Whether gladly or not, she accepted the role of prodder and manager in family affairs in her marriage, just as she had for her brother. On the whole, life seemed good. When two of her bridesmaids, Ellen Delano and Muriel Robbins, wrote her in the spring of 1907 about their young men, she commented to Franklin, “God bless them both and may their husbands be as good to them as you have been to me.”

  Her preparations at the end of 1907 for the birth of her second child were a model of serene efficiency. “It is a very active infant or infants (!),” she wrote her mother-in-law, “and I have never felt so well but it will stick out in front and I have great difficulty keeping my clothes from rising up to my chin! Miss Spring says if it is twins she will run away!!” On December 16, Miss Spring again came to stay.

  Eleanor wrote out a list of things for Franklin to do.

  F.D.R. List

  Tell Sara she can have Mrs. Keenan for the afternoon & evening on her Sunday out & on Thursday evenings. Speak to Mrs. K. yourself. Tell Nurse to put Anna to sleep in her crib until I am well enough for her to go in her cage & to bring her down to you in the mornings as soon as you call & then you get the nursemaid when you leave to bring her sewing & stay with her till Nurse can come for her. Telephone G’ma—47 Germantown, Cousin Susie, Isabella 331 Plaza. A. Corinne 6605 - 38th St. Helen 1008 79th St. Telegraph A. Bye 1733 N. St.

  Milk tags for cans to be given Sara about Jan. 3d are in left hand drawer of my desk. Address envelopes for bills next to tags.

  She bought and wrapped the Christmas gifts and filled the stockings, “even [for] Baby Anna and Miss Spring,” Sara reported in some astonishment. On December 22, 1907, Eleanor, Franklin, and Hall dined with Sara and at 10:30 walked home. An hour later Hall was sent back to Sara’s to spend the night there, as Eleanor’s pains had begun. Franklin called his mother at 2:45 in the morning.

  “I flew over and found Franklin to greet me with ‘a son all right Mummy.’” Sara wrote in her diary. “I hope it will be James.”

  Franklin, elated, could not wait to inform the world. He called Helen and Teddy before breakfast, and Helen arrived almost immediately. Franklin showed her the “cunning baby,” she reported. “He is lovely & looked like a 3-weeks-old child instead of only 7 hours! Weighs 10 lbs. 5 oz.”

  On the day that James was christened, Sara noted in royal phrases, “I gave presents on the place and house in honor of the named.” As for Eleanor, her “heart sang,” and she greeted the birth of a son with “relief and joy.”

  Despite James’ size he was a sickly baby. He came down with pneumonia, and even after he recovered he was not completely well. The winter was difficult, for both baby and mother—“one of the times” in her life, Eleanor wrote, which she “would rather not live over again.” To be near their doctor, the Roosevelts rented a cottage at Seabright, New Jersey, for the summer of 1908. Sara preferred not to be in Campobello without her children, and commuted between Hyde Park and Seabright during the hot summer months as did Franklin.

  That summer Franklin had one of the first Fords around—it had no windshield, was cranked by hand, and was prone to frequent blowouts. “Has Franklin done anything rash yet—such as driving across the lawn and through the hedge?” Hall inquired. But it was Eleanor, not Franklin, who banged into the gate post when she was learning to drive. She gave up the attempt after the mishap, appalled at having damaged something that was Franklin’s. She preferred the victoria, in which sh
e and the children took drives along the beach.

  Franklin and Eleanor enjoyed their children, whose first lispings were chronicled in detail. “She kept her eyes fixed on the door and said ‘pa pa pa’ all the time,” Eleanor reported of Anna, aged eight months. There wasn’t a funnier sight, she told her mother-in-law, than Franklin coming up the hill with Anna on his back, her “two short legs sticking straight out of either side of his head.” Anna’s first steps were duly noted. “She began on Sunday going from him [Franklin] to Cousin Susie and does better all the time but she loves it so that she really runs instead of walking which is the cause of many tumbles and subsequent tears.”

  In later years Eleanor described herself as having been a model of innocence and ignorance in her methods of child training. A believer in fresh air, she cradled Anna in a wire contraption rigged up outside a window until outraged neighbors, who allegedly threatened to report Eleanor to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, compelled her to give up the experiment. But the other young wives thought her a pioneer. “How well I remember the Tuckermans, etc. on 37th Street agitating over the baby outside the window,” Lily Polk later recalled, “and how wise the younger ones thought it and when we copied you how daring we felt!”

  Though Eleanor knew what habits she wanted to encourage in her children, she was not sufficiently sure of herself to overrule the formidable array of mother-in-law, nurses, and English governess. In these early years she yielded to their authority against her own better judgment. “Anna is upset today so I am told though I haven’t seen her long enough to judge for myself. Mama and Nelly think so, however, so she has gone to bed and had a dose of castor oil.” On another occasion she thought that Anna wasn’t well, but Sara disagreed. The doctor came and said Anna “should have calomel and I expect all would have been well before had I given it but Mama is so against it I didn’t dare!” But if Sara and a nurse disagreed, the headstrong Sara laid down the law: “I told Nurse Watson she must get up and turn her [Anna] over and soothe her,” Sara once noted in her diary.

  When Anna was sixteen months old, Nurse Nelly had to be away. “I am to take charge of her and put her to bed tonight,” Eleanor wrote, and noted the next day, “I never knew before how easy it was to take care of Anna.” When Nurse Nelly returned, the baby was pleased, but, wrote Eleanor, “I am glad to say I think she missed me a little last night!”

  In the autumn of 1908 Franklin and Eleanor moved into a house Sara had had built for them at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street. She had announced her intentions at Christmas in 1905, and the following year had acquired the land and hired Charles A. Platt, the designer of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to draw up plans for adjoining houses—one for herself and one for the young couple—like the Ludlow-Parish houses on Seventy-sixth Street. The two houses’ drawing and dining rooms opened onto each other, there was a connecting door on the fourth floor, and they had a common vestibule.

  When Franklin came home on their first evening in the new house, he found his wife in tears. This was not her house, she sobbed. She had not helped plan it, and this wasn’t the way she wanted to live. Why hadn’t she told him this before, her bewildered husband asked. They had gone over the plans together—why hadn’t she spoken up? He told her gently that she was not seeing things as they really were, and quickly left the room.6

  If Sara knew of Eleanor’s unhappiness, she did not admit it, even to herself. “Some of [my] friends were surprised,” she told her biographer twenty-five years later, that Franklin and Eleanor had not lived with her after their marriage. That had never occurred to her, she blandly averred; she valued her independence too highly.7 “You were never quite sure when she would appear, day or night,” Eleanor later said of the connecting doors.8

  With all her benevolence and breeding, Sara was an autocrat and rather enjoyed being regarded as the “redoubted madam” by her staff. She would have been surprised and hurt, however, if she had been told she was trying to rule her children’s lives. She was a matriarch who belonged completely to a past generation; she sought to dominate her children’s lives as she had dominated her husband’s—from behind a façade of total generosity, submission, and love.

  “Last night we had such a funny time,” Eleanor wrote from Seabright to Nova Scotia, where Franklin was on a hunting expedition with Hall.

  You would have enjoyed it for Anna gave Mama a little exhibition of her will power! She wished to sit on a certain chair and Grandma thought by talking to her and diverting her mind she could be made to sit on another and the result was shrieks and G’ma rapidly took to the desired chair.

  When she ceased to weep I said “Oh! Anna where did you get all your determination from?” and she looked up at Mama and said “Gaga!”

  Of course I almost expired for it did hit the nail so beautifully on the head.

  Sara’s husband had advised her never to be materially dependent upon her children, but it was all right, she told Eleanor, to have her children be dependent on her. “I think she always reverted that my husband had money of his own from his father and that I had a small incomes of my own,” Eleanor said many years later. Their son James stated it more bluntly: “Granny’s ace in the hole . . . was the fact that she held the purse strings in the family. For years she squeezed all of us—Father included—in this golden loop.”

  Few in the family were aware that Eleanor found total subordination to her mother-in-law increasingly oppressive. She did confide, often tearfully, Laura Delano said, in Laura’s mother, Mrs. Warren Delano, who lived around the corner. But if she could tell Aunt Jennie, Laura wondered, why couldn’t she have had it out with her husband and her mother-in-law?9

  A few of her closest friends eventually became aware of the situation and concluded that she kept silent because she did not wish to do anything that might disturb the relationship between mother and son. Moreover, she could not bear being scolded or rebuked herself. She had developed a sixth sense for Sara’s velvety “yes” that really meant “no” and was so sensitive even to these indirect reproaches that she preferred to swallow her discontent. That was the period, a friend recalled, when she was saying “Yes, Mama” or “No, Mama” three or four times in a row.10 She was “very dependent” on her mother-in-law, Eleanor said forty years later; she had needed Sara’s help “on almost every subject and never thought of asking for anything which I felt would not meet with her approval.”11 But this self-subordination exacted its toll in self-doubt, bottled-up anger, and withdrawal into those “Griselda moods” that her husband found so puzzling.

  Whatever Eleanor’s private frustrations, Sara was oblivious of them in her diaries, which were a serene chronicle of the things she did with Franklin and Eleanor and their children: “A little dinner for F. & E.” “To town early. Arranged flowers for F. & E.’s lunch of 22 for the T.R. family.” “Today E. & I walked to church.” In 1908 Eleanor was pregnant for the third time, and a diary she kept briefly before the baby was born revealed only that, like other young wives, she moved in a world that was still limited to family and old friends, to familiar surroundings and activities. She was very precise in noting the time Franklin came in and when he went out alone. She dined alone with Sara, she recorded in January, 1909, while Franklin went to a dinner pary with Teddy Robinson, played poker at the Knickerbocker Club, and “returned home 4 A.M.” Two weeks later there was a similar entry: “F. went to Harvard Club dinner & got home 3:30 A.M. Dined with Mama.”

  On Wednesday, March 17, she wrote, “St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s birthday. Our fourth wedding anniversary!” The next day Franklin Jr. was born.

  Again Sara recorded the event.

  March 18th Eleanor had her beautiful hair washed, etc. and nails done. At 2 she went to drive with me. We got home at 4. At 5.30 Dr. Ely came. At 8.10 her second son was born. Franklin got home at 4.45 so he was there very soon after Eleanor got home from her drive. The baby is really lovely and very big, 11 lbs.

  Franklin Jr. was ind
eed the biggest and most beautiful of all Eleanor and Franklin’s babies. Eleanor had regretted letting Miss Spring go too quickly after the birth of James, and this time she insisted on keeping Miss Spring for several months.

  In the summer of 1909 they returned to Campobello but stayed in a house of their own. Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, who had owned the cottage next door to Sara’s, had become as fond of Eleanor, who frequently read to her, as she had always been of Franklin. She had died in 1908, and her will stipulated that Sara could have her house for $5,000, if she purchased it for Franklin and Eleanor. Sara did so.

  This was the first house that Eleanor felt was her own. “I have moved every room in the house around,” she gaily reported to her husband, “and I hope you will like the change,” and he should bring up his caribou and wolf skins to spread in front of the fireplace. Now Franklin and Eleanor could have whomever they wished as guests. Although Sara had encouraged them to invite friends when they stayed with her, her opinions of suitable guests had not always coincided with Eleanor’s. Furthermore, Sara did not want her children to form close attachments outside the family circle. Eleanor liked Miss Spring, from whom she had learned a great deal, but when she lunched with Miss Spring she did not dare mention it to Sara and cautioned Franklin not to do so, “for Mama always seems to dislike my doing things with her!” Even after her first summer in her own house in Campobello Eleanor was fearful of Sara’s reaction to the announcement that she was inviting Miss Spring to come up for part of the next summer.