It was Louis Howe who had almost literally pitched her into the lecture circuit. “When I expressed some idea he thought was good he would snarl, ‘For goodness sake, why don’t you put it on paper?’ Or else in his gruff but sweet manner he would say, ‘Get out and talk.’”12 Magazines had begun to invite her to write for them, and paid her generous fees. One article—“What I Want Most Out of Life,” which appeared in Success Magazine in May, 1927—was highly personal yet representative of the new perplexities confronting women: what should they do with their vote and their growing leisure? “I suppose if I were asked what is the best thing one can expect in life, I would say—the privilege of being useful,” the article began. She was particularly concerned with the woman over forty, whose children were grown and away from home and who did not have to worry too much about contributing to the family budget. She regretted that more women were not interested in politics. “More than anything else, it [politics] may serve to guard against the emptiness and loneliness that enter some women’s lives after their children are grown.” Even while children are growing up mothers should become
accustomed gradually and while they are still comparatively youthful, to having lives, interests and personalities of their own apart from their households. . . . Home comes first. But—in second and third and last place there is room for countless other concerns. . . . And so if anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say—the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be obtained.
It was not, in essentials, too different from the analysis of how to achieve happiness that she had written for Mlle. Souvestre a quarter of a century earlier.
Redbook asked her to write on women and politics, and she did a piece entitled “Women Must Learn to Play the Game As Men Do.”13 She was elated when McCall’s offered her $500 “and only 2,500 words. . . . I suppose James will tell me he ‘wouldn’t write for such a magazine’ as he did about the Redbook but I am glad of the chance!”14
S. J. Woolf, who interviewed her for the New York Times Magazine, was thoroughly taken with her:
Seated at a small desk . . . she posed for a drawing, spoke about women in politics, answered innumerable telephone calls, arranged her son’s departure from the city and directed household affairs; and all before 10 o’clock in the morning for at that time she had to leave to give a talk at the girls’ school at which she teaches.15
“She is the strongest argument,” Woolf concluded, “that could be presented against those who hold that by entering politics a woman is bound to lose her womanliness and her charm.” Mlle. Souvestre would have liked that.
By 1927 Democratic women were strongly organized throughout the state. Whenever Governor Smith’s legislative program bogged down, he called Caroline and Eleanor to Albany to ask them to help get his bills through, and women by the hundreds came to the state capital at their call. They worked in a more disciplined way than the men, whom Eleanor ventured to criticize for their “inability to comprehend the value of sustained organization. Men think they can organize the vote six weeks before election, but women generally believe in all-year-round active political work.”16 In 1926 the women had achieved one of their goals—election to the Democratic State Committee on an equal footing with the men. To the six hundred women who gathered to celebrate the victory, Eleanor hailed it as the “breaking down of the last barrier.” But once inside the fortress, they found it empty. Eleanor bridled at the “cut and dried” way in which matters were handled at State Committee meetings.17 The power lay elsewhere, and the men still held it alone.
Alfred E. Smith, who was the governor of New York during the years of Eleanor’s emergence, considered her a valuable ally—partly as the representative of her husband and partly in her own right as a leader among women. Eleanor admired the governor. Reflecting her rebellion against Sara and Sara’s values, the fact that Smith had worked his way up from Oliver Street on the Lower East Side and still spoke its language of the streets added to his appeal. Franklin made the keynote speech at the 1926 convention that renominated the governor, and Eleanor was a member of the platform committee and spokesman for the women. Franklin could not campaign actively, but Eleanor could and did. “The Governor does get what he wants, doesn’t he?” she wrote after election day the following year when an amendment he had opposed was defeated.18
What Smith most wanted was the Democratic nomination for president in 1928, and Eleanor was prepared to support him, even though she did not admire him unqualifiedly. She brought Florence Kelley, the veteran social reformer, in the hope of converting him to the child-labor amendment. He stormed at the frail, elderly woman, paced angrily up and down his office, and finally Mrs. Kelley left in despair. Eleanor knew the governor well enough to understand that his show of anger masked his defensiveness; after Mrs. Kelley left she said to him, “You know that you are opposed to this amendment because the Church is opposed,” and Smith agreed.19 Some felt Smith’s Catholicism disqualified him, but Eleanor quoted her Uncle Ted as having said he hoped to see the day when a Catholic or a Jew would become president.20
In the North American Review she argued the case for Smith, saying that unlike Wilson, who was “the Idealist, with no knowledge of practical politics, and therefore without the ability to translate his dreams into facts,” Smith combined idealism with a “practical knowledge of how to achieve political results.”21 The issue in the 1928 elections, she wrote in Current History, was the age-old conflict between Jeffersonians and Federalists.
The Democrats today trust in the people, the plain, ordinary, everyday citizen, neither superlatively rich nor distressingly poor, not one of the “best minds” but the average mind. The Socialists believe in making the Government the people’s master; the Republicans believe that the moneyed “aristocracy,” the few great financial minds, should rule the Government; the Democrats believe that the whole people should govern.22
In promoting Smith’s candidacy with the Southern Women’s National Democratic Organization, she argued that Smith, “in greater degree than any other man in public life, [has] the faculty of taking a complex problem of government and simplifying it so that people can go to the polls and vote on the issue intelligently,” which she considered one of the most important functions of a leader in a democracy.23 The governor’s stand on Prohibition distressed her, but compared to his other qualities “his personal attitude on Prohibition is of minor importance.” Mrs. Jesse W. Nicholson of Texas, the head of the Women’s Democratic Law Enforcement League, bitterly opposed Smith’s candidacy because he was a wet. If the league, whose membership was largely southern, was so concerned with upholding the Constitution, Eleanor wrote Mrs. Nicholson, why was it not making as great an effort “to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments relating to the right of all citizens to vote?”24 Bravo, wrote George Marvin, writer, diplomat, and former Groton master, who addressed Franklin as “Francisco.” “Whenever she gets ready to run for anything, she can count on two humble but husky votes in this ‘Section.’”25
She had difficulties over Prohibition in her own household. When in 1924 she accompanied Mrs. Norrie to a convention of women in Washington to press for strict enforcement of the Volstead Act, she apologized to Franklin: “I know you will probably feel with Louis it is politically wrong to come but I do believe in it.” While she felt that the Eighteenth Amendment
works imperfectly I don’t want it repealed or modified, for with all its faults, its virtues make it good. . . . Prohibition makes it harder to get alcohol. . . . There is less drinking now among young people than there was among our fathers. It is the example of the parents that is so dangerous.26
Franklin, whose approach to Prohibition was firmly political and opportunist, teased her about her support of Smith despite his wetness. “Thanks for sending me that awful picture of my Missus,” he wrote Stanley W. Prenosil, the AP man who had covered his 1920 campaign. “She is apparently looking at a fly on the ceiling wit
h the hope of finding out how to be wet and dry at the same time.”27
Although Smith’s “Kitchen cabinet” included neither Franklin nor Eleanor, he counted on them to play a major part in his drive for nomination and election. “Mrs. Moskowitz practically told me yesterday that you were to nominate the Governor,” Eleanor informed Franklin.
You will have to work hard to keep up your standard of four years ago! Also I am to head up a Woman’s Committee for preconvention activities and we are to have an office in the Biltmore with Mrs. Moskowitz, etc. It won’t mean much work once it is started but there was an implication of future work which horrified me as I ought to let them know I have to be at home this summer and yet you can’t refuse what you haven’t been offered, can you?28
“Elinor and Henry Morgenthau are like children in their joy that she [Elinor] should be made a delegate-at-large,” Eleanor wrote wonderingly, a few weeks before the Democratic national convention in Houston. “I never realized any one could care so much and only hope nothing happens to change the minds of the mighty!”29
One of her purposes in going into politics had been to keep Franklin’s name before the public, especially the politicians. She succeeded. Mrs. Roosevelt’s activity with the Democratic women, the New York Herald Tribune wrote in 1927, “has caused a revival in Tammany circles of the talk that Governor Smith favors Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . as Democratic candidate for Senator next year.” Wherever she went in Democratic circles, people asked about Franklin. “I told everyone at the State Committee meeting yesterday you were going to Houston without crutches!”30
Franklin’s return to the political scene would mean her withdrawal—there never was any doubt in her mind about that. She was sure that was the way it should be and had to be. But was she wholly content with the prospect? She did not go with him to Houston, but Elliott and Louis did, and when Sara sailed for Europe with James she was left in charge of Hyde Park, a chore she hated. Her last letter to Franklin before he left Warm Springs for the convention reported that “it is horrid, rainy weather and I am quite unreasonably depressed, partly because I feel uncomfortable about servants. . . . ”31 She would go to the railroad station to say good-by to Marion, Elinor, and Henry when they boarded the train for Houston, she added, and if Franklin saw Mrs. Nicholson of Texas, “give her an extra polite dig for me!” She would listen on the radio “and expire if it doesn’t work!” It was not the letter of a woman who was satisfied to be removed from the scene of the action. When Smith was nominated on the first ballot she sent him her personal congratulations and to Franklin wrote that she was meeting Marion at the station and rather hoped the governor would be on the train as the papers had indicated he might be.
She had worried whether Franklin’s nominating speech in Houston would meet the high standard of the “Happy Warrior” one. It did, said the New York Times editorially: “It is seldom that a political speech attains this kind of eloquence . . . a model of its kind.” At state headquarters, Eleanor reported, “everyone was talking of your speech and feel you did untold good to the Governor’s cause.” But there was also dissatisfaction among the women, who were unhappy because they had not been consulted
by the men leaders as to what women from New York should be given this or that place. It would be so easy for the men to do. I can’t understand why they prefer to stir up this current of discontent! However it is none of my business. I’m doing just what Mrs. Moskowitz asks me to do and asking no questions, the most perfect little machine you ever saw and after the National Committee meets and they appoint permanent people I’m going to get out and retire.32
She was not allowed to do so. In July the Democratic National Committee drafted her and Mrs. Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, the first woman governor, to head up the women’s work in the campaign, with Mrs. Ross touring the country and Eleanor directing the work at headquarters. “She does a thorough job of it,” the New York Evening Post reported. She was at her desk at nine, except when she had a class at Todhunter, and stayed until the work was done, which was often after midnight.
Always courteous, never showing the slightest sign of impatience, she sees nearly every person who wants to talk to her and there are hundreds of them. It is said that she also dictates a personal answer to every letter she receives—about 150 a day.33
Malvina Thompson, young, tart, shy, a blend of New England and the Bronx, who had worked for the Red Cross and the Democratic State Committee, became Eleanor’s personal secretary, and the campaign sealed a relationship that lasted through “Tommy’s” life. She was also assisted by young Grace Tully, who had received her training as Cardinal Hayes’ secretary. Under Eleanor’s supervision, committees were organized to appeal to independent voters, business and professional women, college women, working women, social workers, new voters. Congresswoman Mary T. Norton ran the Women’s Speakers Bureau and witty Mrs. June Hamilton Rhodes, the publicity department.
“Every morning,” Eleanor wrote in a post-election account of the women’s organization in the campaign, she “called a meeting of the various executive secretaries and went over their work with them, each one listening to the problems and questions of the other, thus learning what was going on and thus avoiding duplication. All work done in the various bureaus was under [my] direct supervision.”34 She prodded the states in which the organization was unsatisfactory and ironed out the inevitable disputes. One trouble spot was the midwest region, whose headquarters were in St. Louis. She telephoned Molly Dewson at her summer house in Maine.
Harry Hawes says the women in the Midwestern Headquarters of the Democratic National Committee are fighting and I must come out, but I cannot possibly leave headquarters in New York. Will you go in my place? I know only two women whom it would be safe to send and you are one of them.35
Of this request Molly later wrote, “scattered all over this country are, I imagine, a great many persons who have never been able to say ‘no’ to the Roosevelts or even ‘I will think it over and telephone you.’ I am no exception.” The choice was a wise one, for Senator Hawes begged Molly “to stay through the campaign.” After that, no campaign would be run without Molly’s help.
Sara, still in Europe with James, wrote Eleanor that “I long to hear that my Franklin was not used up by Houston.”36 When she and James reached Vittels in the Vosges she informed Franklin that she had been given a first-hand account of the convention by Bernard Baruch.
Mr. B. Baruch is here and he came to our table last evening when he finished dinner and said he had been at the Convention and heard your fine speech. He seems to think Smith has a good chance, chiefly because many Republicans are anxious not to have prohibition. . . . Mr. Baruch says Elliott was perfect, helping you and taking the sheets as they fell from your hand. How lovely to have had James four years ago and Elliott now.37
Baruch also reported to Sara that the Smith forces were trying to draft her son for governor, but Roosevelt was firmly determined to avoid a draft for the governorship. Eleanor was less certain that he should turn down the nomination if it were offered to him. Agnes (Mrs. Henry Goddard) Leach, who was New York State chairman of the League of Women Voters, recalled being at Hyde Park around the time of the Houston convention. In the middle of luncheon Franklin was informed that Belle Moskowitz wanted to talk to him on the telephone. He refused to take the call, but then he was told Smith was on the phone and so he had himself wheeled out for what proved to be a long talk. “What did Smith want?” Eleanor asked on his return. “The same old thing,” he replied. “He wants me to be the candidate for Governor. It’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t think you should say it’s ridiculous so quickly,” Eleanor cautioned him.38
When the delegates began to arrive for the state convention in Rochester at the end of September, Franklin was ensconced in Warm Springs and evidently expected to stay there, for he had instructed Eleanor to have the Times and the World sent there for three months. Always buoyant and hopeful, he thought that with a fe
w more years of exercises at Warm Springs he would be able to walk without braces. Moreover, he and Louis did not believe that 1928 was a good year for the Democrats, and he deliberately put himself out of immediate reach of Smith and his friends. As a result, their pressure to have him run focused on Eleanor and to a lesser degree on Louis. “My conviction that you should not run is stronger than ever and Eleanor agrees with me in this,” Louis wired him on September 25. Tammany leader George Olvaney, Louis informed Franklin the next day, “has been trying to reach Eleanor who is speaking in New Hampshire apparently to persuade her to persuade you,” and Franklin should let them know whether his decision “not to run is still final.” If Franklin would head the ticket, Colonel Herbert Lehman told Eleanor, Lehman “would gladly run as Lt. Governor” so that Franklin could feel he “could go away each winter and leave [a] competent person in charge.”
“I have to go to Rochester but I wish I didn’t have to go for everyone makes me so uncomfortable,” she wrote her husband. “They feel so strongly about your running and even good explanations can be made to sound foolish. The Governor called me yesterday and I told him to call you.”39 Smith had telephoned her from Milwaukee, and she arrived at the Hotel Seneca in Rochester almost at the same time he did. Roosevelt had sent a telegram to the governor reaffirming his reasons for refusing to run—that Smith did not need him in order to win and that he needed two more years to get rid of his leg braces; he owed it to his family to follow through his curative program to the end. A haggard Smith closeted himself with Mrs. Roosevelt. He wanted to know Franklin’s real objections to accepting the nomination—health? Warm Springs finances? Would the governorship endanger his chances of walking again? At two she emerged from the governor’s suite. “Will Mr. Roosevelt run?” the reporters wanted to know. “I don’t think it is possible,” she answered. Was she willing for him to run? She told them what she had told the county leaders who were insisting that it had to be Roosevelt: “It is entirely up to him. I am not trying to influence him either way.” The reporters admired her poise.
Eleanor and Franklin Page 49
