Eleanor had an easier time with James. He had resented his mother’s new friends, especially Louis, but by the end of 1926 he was playing bridge with Louis and being tutored by Marion Dickerman. Eleanor did not want him to go to Harvard. Franklin talked vaguely about sending him to Wisconsin University, but it was clear he hoped James would choose Harvard. James did, as did all the boys except Elliott.
James’ first reports from college were full of the papers he had to write, the books he had to read, and the freshman elections, in which he was chosen class secretary-treasurer. Some of the undergraduate rites did not appeal to Eleanor; election to the Hasty Pudding and Fly Clubs involved substantial initiation fees and heavy drinking. “Too bad James needs the money,” she wrote her husband. “You never can get away from your gold diggers, can you? I can’t say three nights drunk fills me with anything but disgust!”18 She and Franklin were worried that James would be too interested in social life and having a good time, and their fears were borne out when he was placed on probation. He had to give up running for the student council and his work with the Phillips Brooks House, and wrote a contrite letter to his mother: “I have learned what we talked about and it is better to learn it now when I can make the changes.” The letter impressed Eleanor. “He’s taking it very well and tho’ I’m sorry about it still I think it was the best thing [that] could have happened.”19
At the end of his freshman year James went abroad to bicycle around England, he told his parents. Eleanor suspected the real reason was to see Lucy Archer-Shee, whom James thought he wanted to marry, “but of course she or he may have changed a number of times before he is earning $5,000 a year which is the minimum I told him he could marry on much to his dismay!”20 The next year James wanted to go abroad again, this time with Sara, who would finance the trip. His parents thought he should work that summer, but were not arbitrary. Eleanor had long ago concluded that discipline and scolding were ineffectual if the inner motivation to act differently was lacking. “I’ve had long talks with James and Elliott and the net result is that I think perhaps we’ve been making a mistake,” she wrote Franklin.
It all comes down to the old question of necessity. If they saw the need it would be logical but as it is it is tyranny. Mr. Rawle has told James that the work of the college years is in college and the holidays should be used to see things they may not for many years have another chance to see or do, and work in a job should be left to be undertaken at the close of college and then pursued unrelentingly. His inclination, and Elliott’s also, runs along with this and so it seems an unreasonable request. James looked very badly and was plainly troubled about money when he arrived and I think we can push too far and therefore hope you will let him go abroad with Mama and return in August stipulating that on his return he stay at H.P. You could tell him that he must get rooted there if he ever hopes to go into politics. Mama will pay his way over and back and the $500 you would have paid to take him to Houston will cover his time over there. Mama says she will give him a Ford in the autumn and I think now he’s proved steady you’d better let him have it. She’ll help on his allowance too I know. . . . I will stay with the little boys this summer and economize in every way on the house and tutor and travelling so you ought to be able to make your political contributions and still get by.21
Eleanor’s greatest problems were with Anna, who was having a most difficult time. Eleanor was experiencing the usual anxieties mothers have about pretty daughters who have become conscious of the world of young men. “I was so guarded that even at 18 I was not allowed to go to a movie without a chaperone,” Anna later said. “And on that Mother went along 100 per cent with Granny.” Anna did not wish to come out. “Granny said I had to—and Mother went along.” Her grandmother picked out her clothes and Cousin Susie invited her to tennis week at Newport “along with a couple of suitable young men to squire me. And Mother went along.”22
When Anna finished Miss Chapin’s, Sara again took her abroad in the winter and spring of 1925, and Anna gave her some hard times on the trip. To Sara’s horror, a distant cousin took the girl on a tour of the Rome slums. Then an English lord became interested in her, and in desperation Sara telegraphed London to have a former governess come down and take charge. When they returned, Anna confided to her mother that she would never again travel on the continent alone with Sara. “We’ve had lots of talks and she’s a dear and I’m glad you’ll have a chance to give her some good advice.”23 The advice was needed about what Anna should do now that she was finished at Miss Chapin’s. Sara did not want her to go to college, and cautioned her on the dangers of becoming a grind because young men would be intimidated by her and she would end up an old maid. This fear was not high on Eleanor’s list. Her letters to Franklin spoke of “the inevitable young man” that was always somewhere in the vicinity. Anna had a feeling for outdoor life and a talent with animals, and felt that the summer she had spent with the Greenways on their Arizona ranch camping out on the desert was the best of her life. Her parents talked her into taking what she called “a short-horn agricultural course” at Cornell. Eleanor consulted with Henry Morgenthau, who suggested she first attend the Geneva (New York) State Experimental Station for six weeks as “it would provide the practical background for her Cornell course.” Anna did not want to go, and when Eleanor drove her to Geneva they didn’t say a word to each other the entire time. “Just now I am more worried about Anna than anyone,” she wrote Franklin afterward.24
Though Anna no longer sided with her grandmother against Eleanor, she did not take her mother’s admonitions kindly. “She doesn’t care to write me, I evidently was too severe and we have not had a line since,” Eleanor noted. Anna accepted her father’s good-humored advice with better grace. “I am so pleased at her letter to you,” Eleanor commented. “She has evidently not resented what you wrote in the way she did my letter and I’d rather have it that way for then you can be sure she’ll take your advice on anything important.”25 She should not worry so much, Franklin advised her; it was just a matter of being nineteen.
Anna and James were both at the age when going out meant making a night of it, and Eleanor caught catnaps waiting for them to come in. “Wednesday night it was 4 a.m. and today 6 a.m.,” she noted wearily, adding, “I will say, however, that even my suspicious nature could not imagine that he’d had too much to drink!” She napped on the sofa in Anna’s room until Anna came in, and it was after one particularly trying vigil that she told Anna about the Lucy Mercer affair. It was the “first really adult conversation I had with my mother,” Anna later said.26
Sara needn’t have feared that Anna would become an old maid. The Cornell course, short as it was, was abandoned abruptly when Anna became engaged to Curtis Dall, a stockbroker about ten years her senior, and she was married at twenty. “I got married when I did because I wanted to get out,” she said, to escape the tension and conflict between her mother and grandmother.27 Typical of the friction between the two older women was the row precipitated by Sara’s wedding gift to Anna and Curtis.
On Thursday Anna told me Mama had offered to give them an apartment . . . as a wedding present but she was not to tell me as she thought I would dissuade them from taking it. . . . While it is a lovely thing for her to do I am so angry at her offering anything to a child of mine without speaking to me if she thought I would object and for telling her not to tell me that it is all I can do to be decent and I’ve really tried to be thoughtful since Aunt Annie died. Sometimes I think constant irritation is worse for one than real tragedy now and then. I’ve reached a state of such constant self-control that sometimes I’m afraid of what will happen if it ever breaks!28
It was not only Sara’s deviousness that angered Eleanor. She felt that the luxurious apartment, which Anna did not want, would commit the couple to an expensive style of life that was Sara’s, not theirs, and that they would be able to maintain it only by continual subventions from Sara.
Sara wrote a bland letter of explanation to
her son. “I am sorry I could not consult with you and Eleanor, but as it is my wedding present, I feel I should do it alone, also two other people had options on it.”29 Eleanor had first decided not to say anything to Sara, but she finally did. “Eleanor dear,” an upset Sara wrote her afterward:
I am very sorry that I hurt you twice, first by not letting Anna tell you before it was decided and then by saying I would not give it to them. I certainly am old enough not to make mistakes and I can only say how much I regret it. I did not think I could be nasty or mean, and I fear I had too good an opinion of myself. Also I love you dear too much to ever want to hurt you. I was hasty and of course I shall give them the apartment. I only wanted them to decide for themselves and surprise you and Franklin. No doubt he will also be angry with me. Well, I must just bear it.
Devotedly
Mama
Eleanor sent this letter on to Franklin, saying, “I answered quite politely and apologized for answering her questions frankly and commenting on her subsequent remarks and told her you never demeaned yourself by getting angry over little things so you see I’ve been thoroughly nasty but I’ll try to behave again now for a time.”30
Anna and Curtis moved into the apartment in the autumn of 1926. “I want to help her,” Eleanor wrote her husband,
but not be about and do the superintending for I’m too executive not to do it all and then she’d never feel it was her own. Then next week I’ll go and do some arranging with her when she knows what she wants. Mamma says I’m cruel to “leave the poor child alone”!31
Eleanor sent Franklin a column by Angelo Patri, an educator, on the relationship that should exist between parents and children. “The enclosed meets my views and I think you’ll like it too,” she commented. “You are entitled to one life—your own,” Patri urged. “Live it, start the children on their way and then plunge back into your own again.” Eleanor elaborated her own views on the subject in an article, “Ethics of Parents,” that she submitted to Collier’s in 1927.32 “Why not try letting our children go for a change?” she asked. The fact that parents and children lived in the same house does not mean “inner understanding” of the younger by the older generation. It was important to help young people “in the way they wished to be helped and not in the way we think they should be helped.” With too many parents their attitude “comes down to this very often. ‘Do as I wish and I will help you in every possible way, but otherwise, oh, no!’” That statement reflected her bitter experience with Sara, but when she went on to say, “How about abstaining from criticism or advice when it is not asked?” she was voicing a lesson that she herself had had to learn. “I have yet to see the time when the unpleasant truths we ‘feel it our duty’ to tell our children really helped a difficult situation, but of course it relieved our own minds.”
Collier’s did not publish the article. “I have made three or four attempts to rewrite the story,” associate editor Walter Davenport wrote her. “Each effort injured rather than helped. . . . At any rate, none seemed to arouse the enthusiasm of Mr. Chenery [the editor].” Eleanor filed the manuscript and started work on a piece for the North American Review on “Why Democrats Favor Smith,” which was published.
Her first grandchild was born in March, 1927. “Such a 36 hours as we have had!” Eleanor reported to Franklin. Anna had her child at her mother’s house.
everything was prepared but we waited all day. It wasn’t hard and the new way is marvelous but it was long and tedious for the child. However, after an active second night the young lady appeared at 5 A.M. The boys will tell you about her. She weighs 7½ pounds, her eyes are blue, so far her hair is black, her mouth large, her ears very flat. Anna is tired but sleeping a lot. . . . Mama is thrilled.33
Sara wrote her son she was
sorry the young grandfather could not be here for the great event. Eleanor sat all last night with Anna and came to my room this morning perfectly dressed and her hair perfect as if she had just left the dinner table! I think she is a wonder!
Sara never reconciled herself to the new order of things—Eleanor’s living her own life, Franklin’s mixing the search for recovery with continued activity in business and politics, Franklin and Eleanor’s unwillingness to interfere in the lives of the children as she had in theirs. “I wish you could read Mama’s last letter to me,” Eleanor wrote Franklin in exasperation.
She is afraid of everything in it! Afraid of your going over bad and unfrequented roads, afraid I’ll let the children dive in shallow water and break their necks, afraid they’ll get more cuts! She must suffer more than we dream is possible!34
Franklin had less patience with his mother than Eleanor. “I have seen a strong man struggle half his life for emancipation from the gentle but narrowing control of his mother,” Eleanor wrote in the “Ethics of Parents” article, “and achieve it in the end only through what seemed heartlessness and entire lack of consideration.” After a surge of annoyance and anger, Franklin’s good nature and jollity reasserted themselves. He had his problems with Sara, but there was not the tension between Franklin and his mother that there was between Eleanor and Sara. Perhaps he sensed that the struggle was over him, but in any case he tried to stay out of it. He would sympathize with Eleanor, and then would add, “I have always told you that if you give Mama an inch she will take an ell.”35 Eleanor’s letters were full of her difficulties with Sara: “Mama has done nothing but get in little side slaps today.” “Mama was awful last Sunday and made us feel each in turn that we’d like to chew her up.” Sara, like her son, would be horrid one moment and surprised that all was not forgiven and forgotten the next. She considered the two houses on Sixty-fifth Street “absolutely comfortable and well planned and nice in every way” while Eleanor was looking at cooperative apartments so that they might move after John went to Groton.36 Sara criticized Eleanor’s clothes, posture, taste, and activities one day, and the next praised her extravagantly. “Eleanor is a wonder, so busy, and so sweet and so amiable all the time.”
That is what she really thought—but jealousy often warped her judgment and reactions. “Your library will have no chintz covers,” Eleanor indignantly wrote Franklin,
because Mama told me she could make it attractive in half an hour and everyone liked her house better than mine and we had all the things to make a nice room only it needed taste, so I told her to go ahead and do it. Later she said she never liked to interfere so she didn’t think she would and I said nothing would be done so I think you’ll probably return to have to do it yourself! If it weren’t funny I would probably blow up but I shan’t.37
A week later she was still stubborn. “It wouldn’t cost much to put slip covers in the Library, but I’m just obstinate after Mama’s remarks and it is either done by her or not at all!”38
Eleanor could be stubborn with Louis, too, and not only over the issue of Prohibition. “It has been so hot that the furnaces have been let out in the house and in consequence a cold wave has swept in from the West and taken unfair advantage of us,” he wrote his chief in Warm Springs.
I expect to spend the balance of the springtime sitting around 49 East 65th Street in my overcoat with a quilt over my shoulders, for I rashly suggested to your Missus that one hot day did not make a summer and in consequence, as you can easily guess, 20 below zero would not let her admit that she was wrong by having the furnaces started up again.39
30.A LIFE OF HER OWN
ELEANOR’S BEST DEFENSE AGAINST SARA WAS TO GET AWAY FROM her, and by June, 1927, when she was writing Franklin that she “simply couldn’t stand” staying at Hyde Park with Sara, she had a place of escape when Franklin and the children were not there, a place that she could share with her friends without having to negotiate with Sara whether it was all right for them to come. Sara was perfectly polite, always cordial, but she resented Eleanor’s new friends. Rosy, whose reactions were much like Sara’s, wrote Franklin, “Hope your Parlour Socialists are not living too much on the fat of the land with you, again
st their principles!!”1
Eleanor knew how the family felt about her friends, and when Franklin began to talk about a swimming pool near the Big House at Hyde Park, she persuaded him to combine it with a cottage that she, Nan, and Marion wanted to build beside the Val-Kill brook. “My Missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods and want, instead of a beautiful marble bath, to have the stream dug out so as to form an old-fashioned swimming hole,” Franklin wrote Elliot Brown,2 a friend from his Navy days whom he asked to supervise the project.
“We used to go up to Hyde Park for weekends and take the boys,” Marion recalled.
We were having a picnic and Eleanor said, “This is our last weekend because Granny is closing the house for the winter.” Franklin said “You girls are very foolish. Why don’t you build a cottage for yourselves?” So we got to playing with the idea. Franklin then said, “if you mark out the land you want, I will give you a life interest with the understanding that it reverts to my estate with your death.” So we drew up a paper that Louis, Franklin, Nan, Eleanor and I signed.3
Franklin, who had forceful views on the architectural style that was appropriate to the Hudson, decided the cottage should be made of fieldstone and he worked with Henry Toombs, the architect, on the plans. The bids the women received seemed exorbitant. Finally Franklin told them, “If you three women will go away, Henry and I will build the cottage.” On New Year’s Day, 1926, the three women had their first meal there sitting on nail kegs, a crate being used as a table. The following spring Sara was writing her son that while she, Curt, and Anna were at the Big House, Eleanor and the little boys were at the cottage,
but they came over here for some hours today and tomorrow they lunch here. We three are invited for supper tomorrow at the cottage and they all lunch here on Sunday. Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don’t tell her so, it is very becoming, and I hope she will not grow thin.4
Eleanor and Franklin Page 47
