Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  By the time she and Franklin left Washington her estrangement from Sara’s and Cousin Susie’s outlook was very deep. In early December, 1920, she spent an evening in New York talking with Sara and her two sisters, Dora and Kassie, and wrote Franklin afterward: “They all in their serene assurance and absolute judgments on people and affairs going on in the world, make me want to squirm and turn bolshevik.” She was beginning to follow the “remorseless logic” of her love for others. Her desire to serve, which deference to her mother-in-law and Franklin had confined to the family circle, was breaking free. Humiliation and despair did not quench her ardent nature. Tenderness flowed into new channels. She clipped a poem, “Psyche,” by Virginia Moore, out of the newspaper and wrote on it “1918,” meaning that it conveyed her own slow climb out of the depths. It, too, like the Spring-Rice sonnet about the Saint-Gaudens statue, was filed among her bedside papers.

  The soul that has believed

  And is deceived

  Thinks nothing for a while.

  All thoughts are vile.

  And then because the sun

  Is mute persuasion,

  And hope in Spring and Fall

  Most natural,

  The soul grows calm and mild,

  A little child,

  Finding the pull of breath

  Better than death, . . .

  The soul that had believed

  And was deceived

  Ends by believing more

  Than ever before.

  But her soul, which ended by “believing more,” was moving toward wider, more general sympathies. Speaking of her wartime experience, Eleanor later wrote that from then on she saw herself and others more realistically. “No one is entirely bad or entirely good,” and she no longer was sure of what was right and what was wrong; out of it all she emerged “a more tolerant person, far less sure of my own beliefs and methods of action, but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.”47

  III

  THE

  EMERGENCE

  OF

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  24.A CAMPAIGN AND FRIENDSHIP WITH LOUIS HOWE

  “SHALL WE HAVE TO FIGHT EACH OTHER THIS FALL?” ALICE Wadsworth, the wife of the incumbent Republican senator, asked Eleanor. “I’d hate to have either of our good men beaten—so let’s go after different jobs!”1

  It was 1920, a presidential election year and the end of the Wilson years. The “club” dispersed. Lane resigned to take a job with Edward L. Doheny’s oil company at $50,000 a year; it was strange employment for a man who had been one of the most progressive members of Wilson’s cabinet, but he was already suffering with the illness that in a few months would kill him. Phillips was posted as U.S. minister to The Hague. Franklin spent much of his time out of Washington touring New York State to prepare the way to run either for governor or senator in the 1920 elections.

  When Franklin left for San Francisco to attend the Democratic national convention, Eleanor did not know which office he would finally seek, but in either case he would need, if not the sponsorship, at least the neutrality of Tammany at the state convention. She was, therefore, surprised to read in the papers that he had helped wrest the state standard from a Tammany stalwart when the New York delegation refused to join in the demonstration in Wilson’s honor. “You and Tammany don’t seem to agree very well. Mama is very proud of your removing the State standard from them! I have a feeling you enjoyed it but won’t they be very much against you in the State Convention?”2

  Her letters to him sounded as if she, too, wanted to be in San Francisco. Two of his old Poughkeepsie supporters, John Mack and Thomas Lynch, were with him. “I can’t help thinking what fun you will all have together.” Politics interested her more than she sometimes acknowledged. She would like to have heard William Jennings Bryan’s speech about the Democratic platform, she said, and then added a terse comment on the platform itself that might well apply to most such documents—“too much self praise and recrimination, too long but better than the Republican on the whole.”3

  She wished she could meet Franklin in Washington after the convention was over and hear all about it, she wrote, but on July 4 she transported her brood to Campobello. She did not dream that her husband might end up being the vice-presidential candidate, and since McAdoo, Cox, Palmer, and Smith seemed to be in a stalemate over who the candidate would be, Eleanor’s major anxiety was that Franklin’s arrival at Campobello would be delayed. “Please, please don’t let your staying an extra day make any difference in coming up to us!”4 She still did not know what had happened when she wrote him, “I suppose you started tonight for the East. I heard tonight in Eastport Cox was nominated but am in the dark as to the rest. I wonder if you are really satisfied.”5 Then the telegrams began to arrive. “It would have done your heart good to have seen the spontaneous and enthusiastic tribute paid when Franklin was nominated for Vice President today,” Daniels wired her; “Franklin was nominated by acclamation,” Lynch informed her. “This certainly is a world of surprises,” she wrote Sara that evening. “I really think F. had a better chance of winning for the Senatorship but the Democrats may win, one cannot tell and at least it should be a good fight.”6

  So little was known about Eleanor that a long profile of Franklin Roosevelt in the Democratic New York World stated in the last sentence of the last paragraph, “Mrs. Roosevelt ‘goes in’ but little for society, finding her occupation in the management of her home and the welfare of her one daughter and her three sons.” A Washington society reporter gave a somewhat different picture in the New York Times: “Mrs. Roosevelt is one of those women who, while she is absolutely at ease in the frilliest of social frills—she was born to them—yet finds them unimportant in her scheme of life.”7 After describing the Roosevelt family, the reporter continued, “She has her own circle of warm friends. She is—well, as one of her friends put it, she is too much of a Roosevelt to be anybody’s prize beauty, but she’s pure gold. . . . Few women are so generally esteemed by their acquaintance as Mrs. Roosevelt. . . . She was up to her eyes in war work . . . [but] she is essentially a home woman. She seems to particularly dislike the official limelight. . . . Just how she would endure the Vice-Presidential status . . . remains to be seen.” “Papers are demanding your picture,” Howe wired her from Washington. “Is there one at the house here that I can have copied?” “Are no pictures of me,” she replied. As a result, the Daily News that Sunday published a picture of some other woman that it had cropped from a photograph of the Roosevelts at a baseball game, thinking it was the candidate’s wife.

  The World sent a correspondent from Eastport to Campobello to interview Eleanor. He came away with a brief, rather stilted statement that could hardly have satisfied his editor. “I am very much pleased and happy to know of Mr. Roosevelt’s nomination,” she said, “but I realize that it will take up much of his time during the coming campaign, and he may not have much time to enjoy a rest here. While he may not have looked for the honor, I am proud of his nomination and hope he will be elected.”8 An Evening Post reporter who went to Hyde Park, on the other hand, found a great dowager, quite at ease, overawed neither by press nor by the honors accorded to her son. “There is a stark and undeniable atmosphere of noncompromise about this house and its lady,” the reporter commented, and found everywhere and in everything about Springwood—in the commodious and sturdily built mansion, the stone walls, the spreading trees—“a stamp of ancient solid things, of good beginnings which have persisted well.”9 Sara declined to talk about Franklin except for his connection with Hyde Park, the one place on earth, she said, that he loved best. In such surroundings, the perceptive reporter remarked, “there is no necessity ever to speak of what is one’s belief; it is so certain and so sure.”

  Hyde Park did not want to be left out of the homecoming ceremonies that were being planned in Poughkeepsie, Sara advised her son. A rousing village welcome was being prepared, with their neighbor, Mr. Newbold, as chairman. “If
and when you are elected, you will belong to the nation, now you are ‘our boy’ of Hyde Park and Dutchess.” Motherly hopes were soaring: “My regards and best wishes to our future President.”10

  But Democratic national prospects were not good, as Eleanor had indicated in her letter to Sara. The country sensed that since Wilson’s illness the government had been rudderless, and this was held against the Democrats. The people were tired of the heroic mode. There was a revolt against high taxes. The country was ready, as the Republican nominee Senator Harding phrased it, for a “return to normalcy.” But for Roosevelt no political campaign was a lost cause. When Cox’s representative in San Francisco had awakened Charles Murphy to tell him that Roosevelt was Cox’s choice for vice president, the Tammany leader said, “He is not well known in the country.” To campaign was an opportunity for Franklin to project himself onto the national stage and to conduct himself in such a way that no matter what happened in 1920, the party would turn to him in 1924.

  Eleanor’s hopes for Franklin’s early arrival at Campobello dimmed as he conferred with local leaders on his way East and stopped off at Columbus to meet with Cox, a meeting at which the two men announced they wanted the election to be a plebiscite on the League of Nations. Eleanor finally went to Hyde Park instead. “In order to share the day with her husband, Mrs. Roosevelt traveled all night and all day from Eastport, Maine,” the New York Times reported. She arrived too late for the “homecoming” at Springwood, where village neighbors with a band at their head met Franklin at the gate and escorted him to the house, but she did catch up with him for the ceremonies in Poughkeepsie.11

  Sara wrote her son after the homecoming ceremony, “I will say nothing of my feelings on Tuesday last and in fact always for you know. I know you and I will never forget Tuesday the 13th of July, 1920! I kept wishing for your Father but I believe he knew and was with us. . . . ” Happy mother, unhappy wife. Eleanor could not identify with Franklin’s triumphs in that instinctive and impulsive way. “Whatever Franklin achieves must be largely due to you,” she had written Sara.12 That was conviction, not courtesy.

  Their closest friends saw it differently. Eleanor is “your real ‘running mate,’” Aunt Kassie wrote. Isabella was thrilled because if Franklin was elected, Eleanor would also be in a position to do much to benefit the country, and she marveled at the steady progress Eleanor had made. The thought of Eleanor as the wife of the vice president caused Pauline Emmet to glow: “How splendid you will be dearest Eleanor (we must win!) graceful and gracious and charming!”

  Eleanor was happy for Franklin, happy that he had attained something he wanted, but her feeling was also one of detachment and objectivity, as if she were looking at someone else’s life from the outside. There were married couples who could say, as Beatrice Webb did of her marriage, “apart we each of us live only half a life, together we each of us have a double life.” Eleanor had wanted that sort of relationship with Franklin, but the Lucy Mercer affair had killed her feeling that she really shared in his life or that she had abilities of her own. This was his career, not hers, his potentialities that were being realized, while hers continued to be circumscribed by family and friends.

  She was ready for something more—how much so is suggested in an interview she gave at Hyde Park during the homecoming ceremonies. Mrs. Roosevelt, the reporter wrote, “is first of all a domestic woman, but she has one outside interest, she admitted on Wednesday to a reporter of the (Poughkeepsie) Eagle News, in the only interview she granted. That is politics.”

  “Yes, I am interested in politics, intensely so, but in that I think I am no different from the majority of women, only that, of course, I have followed my husband’s career with an interest that is intense because it is personal. But I have never,” and she emphasized her words, “campaigned for him. I haven’t been active in politics in any way, and so you see there isn’t much of a story to be found in me.

  “My politics? Oh yes, I am a Democrat, but,” and here she paused, “I was brought up a staunch Republican,—and turned Democrat. I believe that the best interests of the country are in the hands of the Democratic Party, for I believe they are the most progressive. The Republicans are,—well, they are more conservative, you know, and we can’t be too conservative and accomplish things.

  “I am particularly interested in the League of Nations issue and I am firmly in favor of it, though I think we should adopt it with the reservation that Congress shall vote on whether or not we shall enter a war. But the League of Nations is, I believe, the only way that we can prevent war. We fought for it, and we should adopt it. If we don’t adopt, it will be useless. The U.S. must be part of the alliance.”13

  These were the careful comments of a woman who was thinking for herself. The reporter was charmed by this “womanly” woman, as he described her. “Her hair is blond and fluffy, and her eyes of a deep shade of blue, make her look far younger than one would have imagined the mother of half-grown children to be. She is constantly smiling,—not the set, vapid smile of one who assents pleasantly rather than discuss a problem, but rather the smile that portrays a personality intensely interested in the questions under discussion and with a personal viewpoint on each of them.” The reporter was interested that “as Mrs. Roosevelt sat and chatted . . . the Democratic nominee for Vice President frequently entered the library to ask her advice on questions that had come up. . . . ”

  Back in Campobello Eleanor followed Franklin’s progress through the papers. He and Cox were going to see the president, he wrote her, but he still planned to get to Campobello: “I can hardly wait, I miss you so much. It is very strange not to have you with me in all these doings.”14 “I like all your interviews,” she replied, “and am dying to hear about your talk with the President. Oh! how I wish I could be in two places at once!”15

  Franklin made the journey to Campobello on the destroyer Hatfield, piloting the vessel through the treacherous Lubec Narrows himself. While he was on the Island, he told the press, he intended to do some shooting, take cliff walks, begin work on another toy sailboat for the children, and teach James how to handle the Vireo, the boat that he had brought up, lashed to the deck of the Hatfield, to replace the Half Moon.16 At the end of the week he, Eleanor, and Anna left for Washington, after which they would go to Dayton to attend the ceremony at which Governor Cox would be officially notified of his nomination. In Washington Eleanor arranged to give up their house—another indication of how little they expected to win—and Franklin said his good-by to the Navy by means of a formal letter of resignation to the president and an affectionate longhand note to Daniels. “You have taught me so wisely and kept my feet on the ground when I was about to skyrocket—and in all there has never been a real dispute or antagonism or distrust.” In his diary, Daniels wrote, “He left in afternoon, but before leaving wrote me a letter most friendly and almost loving which makes me glad I had never acted upon my impulse when he seemed to take sides with my critics.”17

  While Eleanor and Anna went to Dayton to Franklin, Sara returned to Hyde Park with James and Elliott to prepare for Franklin’s notification. Young Henry Morgenthau, Jr., managed the ceremonies at Springwood. Sara later grumbled to her children about what the crowds of politicians had done to her immaculate lawns,18 but in her diary she wrote, “Very fine and impressive. About 500 came in the house. About 8,000 in all outside.” Party notables, including Daniels, McAdoo, and Governor Smith were on Sara’s porch, which one reporter called a “wonderful front porch—a long, broad stone veranda” that, he implied, put into the shadow the front porch from which Harding had said arrogantly he would conduct his campaign. The reporters wrote approvingly of the vine-covered stucco house and the old, wide-spreading trees, and described James and Elliott and their cousin Cyril Martineau as youngsters whose yellow hair stood on end like bristles, while Anna’s tow hair fell down her back nearly to her waist. Eleanor Roosevelt wore a plain blue and white dress without ornaments, the press reported, and listened to her husband i
ntently, perched on the balustrade that ran around the veranda with her feet resting on the edge of a camp stool.

  When Franklin went West for his first campaign trip, Sara, Eleanor, and the three children returned to Campobello. “Keep some kind of diary please,” he wrote her from St. Paul, “as I know I will miss some of the things that happen!”19 That was his last letter. From then on if the family heard from him at all it was by telegram. “Splendid receptions Minnesota, South and North Dakota,” he telegraphed on August 16. “So sorry miss Franklin’s birthday give him my special love. All well. Telegraph Wednesday noon care Station Master Northern Pacific Railroad, Spokane, Washington.”

  Franklin’s campaign office was still after her for photographs. “Bachrach in Washington has a good one with F. Jr. when a baby,” she replied to Charles McCarthy on August 25, but those taken of her alone were rather poor. “I take such bad photographs.” She went on to talk about the campaign:

  I am glad you feel Franklin’s chances are good for I would be sorry to have him beaten after so much work & I really think & hope “Cox & Roosevelt” can do better for the country the next four, very hard years than “Harding & Coolidge.” Personally, I had wanted Franklin out of government service for a few years at least, so in spite of the honor I really feel rather unselfish when I wish for his success!

  Would it be possible for you to send me some copies of Franklin’s acceptance & some campaign buttons both Cox & Roosevelt? Several people are asking & writing for them & I would be most grateful if you can let me have them.