Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Never dreamed, though right were worsted

  Wrong would triumph,

  Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.

  The peace-award group evolved into the American Foundation, whose main purpose was to work with those who shaped national opinion to promote U.S. entry into the World Court. Esther was the member-in-charge, Elizabeth the foundation’s legal scholar, Eleanor the activist. A succinct statement on the “next step” in international cooperation that Eleanor wrote in 1925, when the House of Representatives approved U.S. participation in the World Court’s activities and for a brief moment it looked as if U.S. acceptance was certain, revealed that although she would not compromise on goals, she advocated being flexible on tactics; a strong sense of practicality tempered her utopianism. Her speech was prepared for a meeting of women’s clubs, and Louis went over it and made a few changes, chiefly shortening some of her sentences. Entry into the World Court was a first step in America’s acceptance of its international responsibilities, she stated. She was concerned with the “attitude of mind” with which a next step should be approached:

  Many of us have fixed ideas of what we think our own country and the various other countries of the world should do, but if we rigidly adhere, each to our own point of view, we will progress not at all. We should talk together with open minds and grasp anything which is a step forward; not hold out for our particular, ultimate panacea. Keep it in our minds, of course, but remember that all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.

  The speech also showed how strongly her approach to politics was grounded in religious conviction:

  The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations. When we center on our own home, our own family, our own business, we are neglecting this fundamental obligation of every human being and until it is acknowledged and fulfilled we cannot have world peace.

  Peace was “the question of the hour,” and for the women “this should be a crusade”:

  The abolition of war touches them more nearly than any other question. Now when many of the nations of the world are at peace and we still remember vividly the horrors of 1914–1918 and know fairly generally what the next war will mean, now is the time to act. Usually only the experts, technical people, busy with war plans know, but at the moment we all know that the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?28

  * It is Esther Lape’s recollection that Franklin did submit his plan and that “his objection to the winning plan was simply that it was not his.”

  28.THE 1924 CAMPAIGN

  SHORTLY AFTER THE BOK PEACE AWARD CONTROVERSY QUIETED down and Eleanor was again concentrating on politics, Josephus Daniels wrote Franklin that he was relieved to learn that

  I am not the only “squaw” man in the country. . . . I think the World showed good taste when it announced that you were taking the helm of the Smith campaign they published the picture of your wife. I have had that experience on similar occasions and have always wondered how the newspapermen knew so well who was at the head of the family.

  Franklin replied in the same tone:

  You are right about the squaws! Like you I have fought for years to keep my name on the front page and to relegate the wife’s to the advertising section. My new plan, however, seems admirable—hereafter for three years my name will not appear at all, but each fourth year (Presidential ones) I am to have all the limelight. Why don’t you adopt this too? It will make it much easier to put that Democratic national ticket of Daniels and Roosevelt across in 1928 or 1932.1

  Was Franklin wholly jesting? In less than two years Eleanor had moved into a position of state leadership. Newspapers called her for statements and she was beginning to speak over the radio as well as on the stump. Her voice was still high, sometimes shrill, but her speaking style had improved and she gamely stuck by the rules Louis had laid down. The traits of helpfulness, modesty, and energy that made her universally admired within the family now inspired equal admiration in the public arena.

  Franklin esteemed his wife’s abilities highly, but he never happily surrendered the limelight to anyone. “Eleanor has been leading an even more hectic life than usual,” he wrote Rosy. “Bok Peace Award, investigation by the Senate, Democratic females, in Philadelphia, etc. etc.—I think when I go away she will be more quiet as she will have to stay home more!”2

  Eleanor understood how difficult it was for Franklin not to be front and center, especially in politics. “You need not be proud of me, dear,” she wrote him on February 6, 1924:

  I’m only being active till you can be again—it isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world and I’ll fall back into habit of sloth quite easily! Hurry up for as you know my ever present sense of the uselessness of all things will overwhelm me sooner or later!

  She had a stoic, almost fatalist, sense of resignation, yet like Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations she admired, she was strongly motivated by a sense of the efficacy of moral effort. If the two attitudes were contradictory, it is a contradiction philosophers have never been able to resolve.

  Directed by Franklin, coached by Louis, with a group of highly able women as co-workers—Esther, Elizabeth, Nancy, Marion, Caroline O’Day (widow of a Standard Oil heir) Elinor Morgenthau, Rose and Maud, a group to which in 1924 was added Mary W. Dewson, the new civic secretary of the Women’s City Club—she was becoming a major force in public life. Whenever Eleanor was mentioned, wrote Isabella, who was now Mrs. John Greenway, “I say ‘there is probably the greatest woman of this generation!’” A great many people were beginning to feel that way about her.

  She made her office in the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee. Caroline O’Day, socially prominent and strongly antiwar, had succeeded Harriet May Mills as chairman and Eleanor was chairman of the Finance Committee. Their efforts to organize the women, especially in the rural counties where there was no men’s organization, and obtain recognition from the men, involved hard, often tedious work. Eleanor’s journeyings with Nancy Cook or Marion Dickerman were fragmentarily recorded in her engagement book: “Left Massena in the rain. . . . The man Nan wanted to see was away.” “Ran out of gas” in Ithaca and “searched for Mrs. T. unsuccessfully.” “A good supper at St. James, proprietor a Democrat.” “Gloversville—lovely country—meeting about 20 women and stayed till 3.” Although they had requested modest lodgings, in one hotel they were ushered into “palatial suite. . . . Think F.D.R. may have to send us money to get home on.”

  By the spring of 1924 all but five counties of the state we organized, and the men were impressed. “Organization is something to which they are always ready to take off their hats,” Eleanor said, but she realized how much women still had to learn before they would belong to the game as completely as did the men. In an interview with Rose Feld of the Times she related what she told women as she went around the state. “They have the vote, they have the power, but they don’t seem to know what to do with it.” Their lack of progress stemmed from the hostility of the men, and Eleanor summed up the real masculine attitude toward women in politics:

  You are wonderful. I love and honor you. . . . Lead your own life, attend to your charities, cultivate yourself, travel when you wish, bring up the children, run your house, I’ll give you all the freedom you wish and all the money I can but—leave me my business and politics.

  Her message to
women was: “Get into the game and stay in it. Throwing mud from the outside won’t help. Building up from the inside will.”

  A woman needed to learn the machinery of politics; then she would know how “to checkmate as well as her masculine opponent. Or it may be that with time she will learn to make an ally of her opponent, which is even better politics.”3

  At the Democratic state convention in April, 1924, called to launch the Smith boom for the presidential nomination, Eleanor led the women in rebellion against male monopolization of power. The issue was the selection of the delegates-at-large; the prime antagonist was Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany boss. “I have wanted you home the last few days,” she wrote Franklin on the eve of the Albany meeting,

  to advise me on the fight I’m putting up on two delegates and two alternates at large. Mr. Murphy and I disagree as to whether the men leaders shall name them or whether we shall, backed by the written endorsement of 49 Associate County Chairmen. I imagine it is just a question of which he dislikes most, giving me my way or having me give the papers a grand chance for a story by telling the whole story at the women’s dinner Monday night and by insisting on recognition on the floor of the convention and putting the names in nomination. There’s one thing I’m thankful for I haven’t a thing to lose and for the moment you haven’t either.4

  Murphy held firm and Eleanor raised the flag of rebellion at the women’s dinner at the Hotel Ten Eyck.

  “We have now had the vote for four years and some very ardent suffragists seem to feel that instead of gaining in power the women have lost,” she challenged her audience. If women wanted to achieve the objectives for which they had fought in winning the right to vote, they must not limit themselves to casting a ballot. “They must gain for themselves a place of real equality and the respect of the men,”5 and that meant working “with” the men, not “for” them.

  Then she went on with great deliberation,

  It is always disagreeable to take stands. It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes. We cannot even be of real service in the coming campaign and speak as a united body of women unless we have the respect of the men and show that when we express a wish, we are willing to stand by it.

  The next day she headed a committee that called on Governor Smith, and when he supported the women’s demands, Murphy capitulated. “Upstate women at the Democratic convention won the principal points in their contention that the selection of women delegates and alternates-at-large should be made by them rather than by Charles F. Murphy and other men leaders,” the New York Times reported. “We go into the campaign feeling that our party has recognized us as an independent part of the organization and are encouraged accordingly,” Eleanor told the press. “No better evidence could be shown that it is to the Democratic Party that the women voters of this State must turn if they desire to take a real part in political affairs.” Governor Smith, she added, had been “a powerful factor” in bringing about this “very satisfactory conclusion.”

  That afternoon she presented the resolution to the convention that the New York State delegates to the Democratic national convention should be pledged to the governor. The resolution was adopted with a shout, and the chairman appointed Eleanor and Miss Martha Byrne to go to the governor’s office to escort him to the platform. “It was Mrs. Roosevelt,” noted the New York Times editorial, “a highly intelligent and capable politician,” who introduced the Smith resolution at the convention.6 The Times considered that a mark in Smith’s favor.

  The fight at the state convention she won, but the next she lost. Cordell Hull, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appointed her chairman of a subcommittee of Democratic women to canvass the women’s organizations and formulate planks on social-welfare legislation to submit to the Platform Committee at the national convention. The subcommittee she assembled was a strong one—the veteran Texas reformer, Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Mrs. Dorothy Kirchwey Brown of Massachusetts, who headed the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Women Voters, Mrs. Norrie, Elinor Morgenthau, Maud Swartz, Gertrude Ely, liberal Democrat from Bryn Mawr, Charl Williams of Tennessee, who was credited with lobbying through that state’s legislature the final vote needed for ratification of the suffrage amendment, and Mrs. Solon R. Jacobs, former Alabama member of the Democratic National Committee and influential in the League of Women Voters. The subcommittee held hearings and drafted strong pro-league and Prohibition enforcement planks, equal pay for women workers, and a federal department of education, but its major objective was to commit the party to a resolution calling on the states to ratify the child-labor amendment. When the male-dominated Resolutions Committee rejected this proposal, Eleanor’s committee sat outside its doors until the early hours of the morning demanding that it reconsider. The Resolutions Committee refused, by a vote of 22 to 18.

  The resolute fight Eleanor and her friends made for progressive planks distinguished her group from two other claimants to leadership among women. One was Miss Elizabeth Marbury, who had been Democratic national committeewoman from New York since the passage of the suffrage amendment, for which she had fought. Though a remarkable woman, Miss Marbury gave the men no trouble; her chief interest in politics in the twenties, except for her opposition to Prohibition, was social, and her salon was famous for its mingling of high figures from the world of politics, fashion, and art. Eleanor and her colleagues were on good terms with her, but simply bypassed her. On the other side there were the embattled females of the Woman’s party, who were too masculine for Eleanor’s taste. Moreover, she thought the Woman’s party opposition to protective legislation for women on the basis of equal rights was downright reactionary.

  Although Eleanor’s group was defeated in the Resolutions Committee, forces were gathering that in time would give them what they sought in the field of social-welfare legislation, including the abolition of child labor. Franklin Roosevelt returned to the political wars to nominate Alfred E. Smith with a speech that Walter Lippmann said was “perfect in temper and manner and most eloquent in its effect” and lifted the convention for a moment above “faction and hatred.”

  The national convention over, Roosevelt returned to his exercises, happy to have a legitimate reason to stand aside from the doomed national campaign, but Eleanor was deeply involved, more in support of the re-election of Smith as governor than in the campaign of John W. Davis. Because the national party had evaded the issue of ratification of the child-labor amendment, she was the more determined that the state convention should not. She appeared before the Platform Committee carrying a mandate from thirty women’s organizations to urge a child-labor plank, and it was approved. She also represented the Women’s Trade Union League in a plea for planks on the eight-hour day and minimum-wage legislation and these, too, were included in the platform.

  Her speech seconding the renomination of Smith was one of the state convention’s high points. A day earlier the Republicans had nominated her cousin Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., to oppose Smith, the same cousin who had called Franklin “a maverick” Roosevelt in 1920. Salt had recently been rubbed into that wound by Nicholas Longworth. “Mama is wild over Nick L. having called you in a speech a ‘denatured Roosevelt,’” Eleanor wrote Franklin. Nick “was just trying to be funny,” she told Sara, but she, too, was angry.7

  “Of course he [Smith] can win,” Eleanor said in her seconding speech. “How can he help it when the Republican convention yesterday did everything to help him?” The delegates did not miss the thrust, and applauded appreciatively. In the spring she had feigned concern because Louis Howe had rejoiced that some of the oil from the Teapot Dome scandal had spattered Teddy.8 “I told him I was ashamed of such vindictiveness but he’s been waiting to get even he says
a long time!” In the campaign Louis’ “vindictiveness” went further, and now he was actively abetted by Eleanor. Louis persuaded Eleanor and her lady Democrats to follow Teddy around the state in a motorcade that featured a huge teakettle spouting steam, and in her speeches Eleanor referred to her cousin as “a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.” Eleanor later said the teakettle affair was a “rough stunt.”9 The Oyster Bay clan sizzled, Louis beamed, and we may assume that Franklin shed few tears.

  There is a glimpse of Eleanor on the stump in the upstate rural areas, in her own words.

  “I guess you’re campaigning,” the speaker, a bedraggled woman who looked fifty but probably was thirty, stood beside our car. . . . We were on a narrow back road in a hilly country and we were campaigning so we acknowledged it and asked her politics, meanwhile taking a look at the farm and buildings. Everything bespoke a helpless struggle, the poor land, run down buildings, the general look of dirt and untidiness so we were not surprised to hear “Oh, I ain’t got much time for politics but Mr. Williams the R.F.D. man says I must vote for Coolidge because he ain’t had a chance yet and I’ve always been a Republican anyways.”

  “No,” she went on, “he ain’t done much as I can see for farmers, leastways I never had a worse time. . . . ”10

  Eleanor was one of the few New York Democrats who stumped in the rural districts, and her talks with farmers’ wives shaped her approach to agricultural distress. Her theme was rural-urban interdependence, which placed her in disagreement with those who felt that a conflict between city and countryside was inevitable. “I live in both city and country and so realize that the best interests of both are to be promoted by better understanding of each other’s situation and cooperation rather than conflict.” Because city problems had been so obvious “all of the best brains in the land have concentrated on solving them” and things had improved, and rural backwardness could also be overcome “if city and country people will consider the rural problem as a joint problem vital to both and give their best thought to solving one of the greatest problems confronting our nation today.”11