Sara, who was in Europe with Anna and James, seemed to be feeling more benevolent about Eleanor’s activities. “Eleanor’s work among the women, will, I trust, bear fruit,” she wrote Franklin.5 Despite her political chores Eleanor took a refresher course in driving, and three times a week chauffeured Franklin and the two youngest children to Vincent Astor’s place in Rhinebeck to use his “swimming tank.” There were mishaps. “Your running into our gate post was all right,” Sara comforted her, “so long as you were not hurt.”6
On August 13 Franklin addressed an open letter to Smith calling on him to run again, as the choice of “the average citizen.” Smith said he was available. A telegram from Louis in Syracuse to Franklin in Hyde Park described the outcome: “AL NOMINATED WITH GREAT ENTHUSIASM. MORGENTHAU AND YOUR MISSUS LED THE DUTCHESS COUNTY DELEGATION WITH THE BANNER THREE TIMES AROUND THE HALL . . . ” “Everything went along first rate,” Smith wrote Roosevelt after the convention. “I had quite a session with our lady politicians as Mrs. Roosevelt no doubt told you. I was delighted to see her taking an active part and I am really sorry that you could not be there but take care of yourself—there is another day coming.”7
The “lady politicians” had demanded two places on the ticket, but when Smith pledged to appoint women to high places in his administration, they gave way.
During the campaign Eleanor worked mainly in Dutchess County and learned how party politics worked on the village level. What she saw was not pleasant, especially the purchase of votes, but rather than withdraw in well-bred disgust, she was spurred on to work harder. On Election Day she chauffeured voters to the polls in the family Buick. The Republican margin in the county for Miller, which had been 6,200 in 1920, was reduced to little over 1,000. “I think what has been done in the county is amazing,” Mrs. Norrie wrote approvingly to Franklin, “and I believe, now the start is made, a great deal more can be done.”8 So did Franklin and Eleanor. He was having a “strenuous time” over Hudson River politics, Franklin wrote a few months later. “We are doing some fine organizing work—especially with the aid of the ladies.”9
“What job is Smith going to give you?” Hall wrote her from the West Coast after Smith’s landslide election,10 but a job on the public payroll was not what Eleanor had in mind. She was in politics primarily to serve her husband’s purposes and beyond that to advance a point of view that began to take shape in her mind as she took on increasing responsibilities in the party. It was crystallized in an article entitled “Why I Am a Democrat,” which the Junior League Bulletin asked her to write and which was to be run with one by Mrs. John Pratt on “Why I Am a Republican.”11
She first discussed political parties and why principles, not personalities, should govern one’s party allegiance. She felt that the Democratic party gave higher priority to human needs than did the Republican party. “On the whole the Democratic Party seems to have been more concerned with the welfare and interests of the people at large, and less with the growth of big business interests.” Her next point showed how far she had moved from the viewpoint of the group with whom she had been raised.
If you believe that a nation is really better off which achieves for a comparative few, those who are capable of attaining it, high culture, ease, opportunity, and that these few from their enlightenment should give what they consider best to those less favored, then you naturally belong to the Republican Party. But if you believe that people must struggle slowly to the light for themselves, then it seems to me that you are logically a Democrat.
This Jeffersonian trust in the people was even more strongly reflected in Eleanor’s growing involvement with the Women’s Trade Union League. Founded in 1903 by Jane Addams and others “to aid women workers in their efforts to organize . . . and to secure better conditions,” the Women’s Trade Union League was the most militant women’s group, and many of its leaders were aligned with the socialist movement. Eleanor joined the league in 1922 after attending a luncheon at the invitation of Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw. Rose Schneiderman, a redheaded packet of social dynamite who directed the New York League, said she first met Eleanor at a tea given by Mrs. Willard Straight to interest her friends in purchasing a home for the league. Rose was captivated by Eleanor’s “simplicity” and “her lovely eyes.” Eleanor was interested in Rose, too, and invited her to Sunday night supper at Sixty-fifth Street. While Eleanor scrambled eggs in a chafing dish and the silver coffee urn burbled, Rose recalled, “We talked about the work I was doing. Mrs. Roosevelt asked many questions but she was particularly interested in why I thought women should join unions.”12
Rose and her associate, Maud Swartz, who had received her trade-union training in the British labor movement and was full of amusing stories about the trials and tribulations of a labor organizer, represented a new kind of friendship for Eleanor. Esther and Elizabeth, Nan and Marion, came of old American stock and were cultivated, well-bred women. But Rose, who had emigrated from Russian Poland and whose accent was still marked by the Lower East Side, was a fiery soapboxer. Her speech after the Triangle fire in 1911, the New York Times reporter said, brought emotion “to a snapping point.” It took some time before Eleanor ventured to ask Sara to invite Rose and Maud to Hyde Park, as Sara was almost feudal in outlook. “She judged people almost solely by their social position,” Eleanor later wrote, but “only people who knew her well could tell when she was really being rude.”13 “Of course, I can understand the point of view to which Cousin Susie and Sally arrive (a la Ku Klux),” Hall commiserated with her,
but could never contemplate its use as they see it their duty to inflict same. If I lived in New York we should either never meet or else they would “lay off” of personalities. My feeling of the entire tribe is that they lack sympathy (original Greek meaning). I am only disturbed lest my children be brought up in the atmosphere of protection and utter uselessness to society.14
Eleanor went to work for the Trade Union League with the energy and thoroughness that characterized all her undertakings. While Dorothy Straight raised the $20,000 to make a down payment on a five-story brownstone at 247 Lexington Avenue, Eleanor, assisted by Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont, agreed to head up a committee to raise funds to pay off the mortgage, which in the end amounted to $35,000. Evening classes for women workers were organized at the new headquarters, and Eleanor came one night a week to read to the girls—to teach and to be taught. Marion Dickerman taught a class in literature. In 1925 Eleanor invited Rose and Maud to Campobello, and when she had to leave briefly while they were there she left the two women in charge of Franklin Jr. and Johnny and two of their friends. She had “more faith” in Maud Swartz handling the boys, she wrote Franklin, than she did in their tutor.15
Eleanor explained to her sons what the two women were doing and asked if they would like to give a Christmas party for the children of WTUL members. The boys agreed, but Sara was horrified. The diseases the two boys might pick up. . . . But this argument no longer carried weight with Eleanor. When she shyly approached Rose with the proposal, Rose was delighted. The invitations went out from Franklin Jr. and Johnny; Nancy Cook dressed the Christmas tree; Eleanor purchased the gifts—clothing, roller skates, dolls—and a cornucopia of candy for each child. At the last moment her boys balked; they could not understand “giving” presents: Christmas was a time for “getting” presents. They were more reconciled to their role the following year when it was explained to them that they were, in fact, deputies of Santa Claus.16 For the Roosevelt boys this was their first contact with children of the slums and with trade unions. For their mother, it was another manifestation of a radical equalitarianism.
A Christmas party for slum children might still be considered in the Lady Bountiful tradition, even if it was under trade-union auspices, if it had not been buttressed by Eleanor’s systematic work on behalf of league objectives—the forty-eight hour week, minimum wages, the abolition of child labor, the right to organize. She had become an influential figure in the League of Women Voters, the Wome
n’s City Club, and especially in the Democratic party, and wherever she carried weight, she rallied support for league programs. “Always generous and understanding, she never refused me anything I asked her,” Rose wrote; for her part, Rose taught Eleanor all that she knew about trade unionism.17
Through Eleanor, Rose and Maud also became Franklin’s teachers and spent many hours with him. Frances Perkins later said that Franklin’s whole attitude toward trade unions might have been different had he not seen the theory and history of the trade-union movement through the eyes of these women. A labor leader once said to Madam Perkins that “you’d almost think he had participated in some strike or organizing campaign the way he knew and felt about it,” and she credited his comprehension and grasp to the hours he had spent with Rose and her associates.18
In her article for the Junior League Bulletin on why she was a Democrat Eleanor had listed as a final reason the party’s approach to the prevention of another war. The Democrats, she felt, were “more conscious of our world responsibility and more anxious to see some steps taken toward international cooperation than were the Republicans.” It was a mild statement of the case. The times were not hospitable to militant advocacy of the League of Nations; the mood of the country was indifference, the policy of the Harding administration isolationist. Franklin, who had become head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, muted his support of the League and sought instead to keep an interest in Wilsonian principles alive. Wilson’s attitude toward Franklin softened, especially after polio made Franklin a fellow in suffering. They exchanged letters, and when Eleanor went to Washington she called on Mrs. Wilson.
When Wilson died in early February, 1924, Franklin was on his houseboat in Florida waters. “I wired Mrs. Wilson today for us both,” Eleanor wrote Franklin; “a people had never more surely contributed to a man’s breakdown.”19 The president “must have been glad to go.” She was aghast at Lodge’s fulsome tribute to the dead president in the Senate: “I must say if I had been Lodge I would not have made his speech in the Senate, would you?” She took Anna to the hastily organized memorial service in New York at Madison Square Garden, which “was really almost filled even in the top gallery. Mr. John Davis and several others made good speeches but Rabbi Wise made the most stirring one.”20 That gifted orator called on his listeners to “embalm in oblivion the names and deeds of those who, to punish your and my leader—the hope-bringer of mankind—struck him down and broke the heart of the world!”
Franklin thought Wilson’s death might help revive bipartisan faith in Wilson’s ideals, but to Eleanor it seemed that the country was “so seething in partisan politics just now, it would seem hard to lift any subject out of them.”21 She spoke from melancholy personal experience. A promising and substantial effort to move international cooperation back into the realm of practical politics was foundering in a flare-up of faction and cowardice.
The previous May, Edward W. Bok, the former editor and publisher of the Ladies’ Home Journal and a talented publicist, had proposed a nationwide competition for “the best practicable plan by which the U.S. may cooperate with other nations to achieve and preserve the peace of the world.” To stimulate interest in the contest he offered $100,000 as the prize, half to go to the winner on the selection of the plan and the other half to be given to him when the plan received serious consideration in the Senate. It was, as the New York Times said, one of the most “princely” prizes ever offered for a noncommercial idea. Bok asked Esther Lape to direct the project, and she agreed to do so if she could have Eleanor Roosevelt work with her as a member of the policy committee. Bok readily agreed, and to establish the nonpartisan character of the competition they also asked Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, a Republican, to join the initial group.
The competition was announced on July 2, 1923. It was the lead story in the New York Times and rated headlines in all the great metropolitan dailies. “Isn’t the American Peace Award going fine?” an exultant Bok wrote Franklin a month later, “and surely a great deal of the credit is due to that wonderful wife of yours. I am wondering whether she and Esther Lape ever sleep!”22 Eleanor and Esther had assembled an impressive policy committee and had persuaded the big national organizations to set up a cooperating council. “She has been very busy with the Bok Award,” Franklin wrote Hall. “I think it is a fine thing for Bok to start and will undoubtedly do much to hasten our eventual participation in world reconstruction, though I doubt if we see any immediate results. What do you think of it?”23 Hall was more skeptical of its producing results: “The voting public of this part of the world, at least,” he wrote, “has fallen into a state of lethargy as regards cooperation with the European Powers.” Esther asked Franklin for a statement on the award. He was cautious. “I handed out a serious protest against the title,” Roosevelt wrote Bok, “on the ground that it might make people think that we could get permanent peace by the mere establishment of a formula.”24
With a quarter of a million inquiries and plans pouring in by the thousands, Eleanor was more sanguine than her husband and brother. The purpose of the competition, she said in her speeches, was not only to focus public thinking upon the form of association Americans felt their country ought to have with the rest of the world, but to submit the winning plan to the supreme test of practicality—passage in the Senate. “Esther wants me to do rather a job at the Bok office the next few weeks,” she wrote Franklin at the end of October (the deadline for entries was November 15, 1923). “I told her after Election I’d devote my major activities to her and let up a bit on the Democrats!” On the closing day of the contest 700 plans were received, bringing the total to 22,165. “Amazing indeed, is the interest that has been called forth from every part of the country, and from every walk of life,” the Times commented. On January 7 the winning plan was released. Again it was the lead story in the Times, which also published the full text. Briefly stated, it called for U.S. entry into the World Court and conditional support for the League of Nations, in effect cooperation without membership.
Promptly the Senate isolationists raised the cry that it was “a pro-League proposal pure and simple.” An inquiry was launched headed by Senators Reed and Moses, two leading “irreconcilables,” designed to show that the competition was a sinister propaganda exercise, that it was a rigged contest, and that the committee of jurors had been packed. Women crowded the hearing room, with Alice Longworth in a privileged seat on a huge leather sofa in back of the committee. Bok was treated with kid gloves at the hearing but Reed’s examination of Esther Lape was so severe that other senators chivalrously came to her aid. How was the policy committee chosen, Reed demanded. Mrs. Roosevelt was the first one invited to join, Esther replied, and then Mrs. Vanderlip; Mr. Bok had left the selection of the remainder to the three women. “Do you mean that you three ladies then selected the rest of the members of the Policy Committee?” Reed asked incredulously. He was not alone in his outrage at such female presumption. “THREE WOMEN ENGINEERED BOK PEACE PRIZE CONTEST,” was the Republican New York Herald’s headline. “The great Bok peace prize contest,” the head of the Herald’s Washington bureau wrote, “was managed by two matrons of social distinction and a highly educated and most efficient young unmarried woman.” Front-page photographs of Eleanor, Esther, and Mrs. Vanderlip accompanied the story. Franklin’s unofficial press representative in Washington, Marvin McIntyre, came up to Esther, Elizabeth, and Eleanor after the committee excused Esther. “I think we’re a thousand percent!” he told them. Miss Lape was one of “the most marvellously acute witnesses” to appear on the Hill, the Boston Transcript correspondent wrote. “They never went on with the hearings,” Esther said. “They used Wilson’s illness as a pretext to adjourn them.”25 But the isolationist orators called the Bok Peace Award a “peace-at-any-price” enterprise and equated internationalism with treason.
When Eleanor and Esther went to Washington March 17 to try to persuade some senators merely to introduce the winning plan, they were treated with cordiality and
friendliness, but they were turned down. “It is discouraging to see people on an errand like this,” Eleanor wrote her husband. “They have so little courage! They agree that their private views are met but the party isn’t for it!”26
For Eleanor it was an intense education in the substantive issues as well as the politics of internationalism. Together with Esther and Elizabeth she read all of the entries, twenty of which Esther published in a book called Ways to Peace. The contest also helped Franklin crystallize his thinking on international cooperation. He had little sympathy for the isolationists (“You have doubtless seen the grand hullabaloo in the Senate over the Bok. Peace Award,” he wrote George Marvin. “What fools Reed, Moses, etc. are. Eleanor is just back from Washington, where she went to hold Esther Lape’s hand”), but he also had a healthy respect for political realities.
My objection to the accepted plan is that it is not practicable, i.e. politically practicable. The dear judges must have known that in choosing that plan they would revive the League of Nations very largely along existing lines. My plan avoided this by providing for an International Conference to establish a brand new permanent International organization.27
Because of his wife’s membership on the policy committee, Franklin had not submitted his plan, but he did show it to Esther and it shaped his own approach to international cooperation when he was president.* The fundamental commitment to internationalism was there, but as a politician he thought it prudent to avoid open battle. Perhaps he felt he was bearing sufficient witness to the internationalist cause through the activities of his wife; since the public identified her advocacy with his convictions, that added to his reputation as a statesman without increasing the risks to him as a politician. He lapsed into relative silence but Eleanor pressed on. Public opinion admittedly was apathetic, even hostile; all the more reason to go forward with the work of education and organization. In her engagement book she transcribed the lines
Eleanor and Franklin Page 44
