Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  The county leaders went into session again, but the discussion always came back to Roosevelt. Franklin was refusing to take Smith’s calls and Eleanor agreed to get her husband on the phone; the rest would be up to Smith. As soon as Franklin answered, Eleanor turned the receiver over to Smith and raced for the train in order to be back in New York in time for the opening of Todhunter. “All day long,” the New York Evening Post commented on the day’s activities, “Mrs. Roosevelt had been in conference with the leaders, quiet, unruffled, probably the calmest person in all the crowded hotel.”40

  When she heard that he had yielded to the party’s entreaties she wired Franklin: “Regret that you had to accept but know that you felt it obligatory.” The pressure on Roosevelt was described in a Lippmann editorial in the World: “The demand for Mr. Roosevelt came from every part of the State. It could not be quelled. It could not be denied. The office has sought the man.”

  Sara was surprised but accepted the decision in good spirit, considering her earlier opposition to her son’s remaining in public life. “Eleanor telephoned me before I got my papers that you have to ‘run’ for the governorship,” she wrote Franklin.

  Well, I am sorry, if you do not feel that you can do it without too much self-sacrifice, and yet if you run I do not want you to be defeated! . . . Now what follows is really private. In case of your election, I know your salary is smaller than the one you get now. I am prepared to make the difference up to you.

  One member of the family had no doubts. Anna wired her father, “Go ahead and take it,” to which he replied, “You ought to be spanked.”

  But what did Eleanor really think about her husband’s candidacy? When the press caught up with her at Democratic headquarters, she said

  I am very happy and very proud, although I did not want him to do it, he felt that he had to. In the end you have to do what your friends want you to. There comes to every man, if he is wanted, the feeling that there is almost an obligation to return the confidence shown him.

  The reporters questioned her persistently about a story that had appeared in that morning’s World under the headline “Mrs. Roosevelt’s ‘Yes’ Final Factor.” Based on what “intimate friends” of Mrs. Roosevelt told its reporter, it asserted that she had been on the phone with her husband in the late afternoon, that he had told her he might not be able to refuse in the end, unless she was not satisfied to have him run. “Mrs. Roosevelt held the receiver in silence for several minutes,” the story stated. “The decision was left to her. Then she assured Mr. Roosevelt that she was of the opinion that he might enter the campaign, and, if elected, accept the office without harmful effects.”41

  She would not deny that she had talked to him, but insisted, “I was very surprised at the nomination. I never did a thing to ask him to run.” Had she had a hand in changing his mind, the reporters wanted to know. “My husband always makes his own decisions. We always discuss things together, and sometimes I take the opposite side for the fun of the thing, but he always makes his own decisions.”42

  She did not think it right, as she had told Smith and John J. Raskob, then chairman of the National Democratic Committee, to ask him to do anything he felt he should not do, but did she herself want him to run? Edward J. Flynn, the Bronx Democratic leader, at Smith’s request, had been sounding out Roosevelt during the summer on his real reasons for resisting the nomination. Flynn felt that among other things Roosevelt was concerned about what would happen to Warm Springs and the considerable money—all his fortune, in fact—that he had put into it if he could no longer give it his full attention. Eleanor, who was always practical and hard-headed in money matters, would no doubt have wanted to be assured on this score, as she would have had to be persuaded in her own mind that her husband had gone as far as possible to recover the use of his legs. But in the end it seemed to Flynn “that she was anxious that he should run, and that she would be happy if he would consent to it.”

  Thirty years later when she saw Sunrise at Campobello, she noted that the play depicting Franklin’s victory over polio could have been a play about almost any other victim of infantile paralysis. There was another drama, she went on, “which came later in my husband’s life” when “he made his decision as to whether he would devote himself to his efforts toward recovery or accept his disabilities in order to play a more active role in the life he was leading.” Perhaps that was a subject for another play, she added.43 “I think the most wonderful thing Eleanor did was to encourage him to run in 1928 when most people thought he was not up to it,” said Esther Lape.44

  If she did influence his decision, she kept it well hidden. Her account of what happened in Rochester in This I Remember ended with the ambiguous remark, “I sometimes wonder whether I really wanted Franklin to run.”45

  Her husband’s decision to run did not alter Eleanor’s primary political responsibility, which was to the Smith campaign organization. She kept an eye on the state through Elinor Morgenthau, Caroline, and Nancy and even helped them with the campaign caravans they were sending out all over the state, but she had her hands full with national problems. Her mail reflected the unprecedented bigotry and snobbery elicited by Smith’s candidacy. “Can you imagine Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the White House as the leading family of the nation?” one letter from a Republican woman “who had always admired you” asked. Eleanor defended Smith in the Junior League Bulletin, saying that his “human” sympathies were wider than Hoover’s; men worked “under” Hoover but “with” Smith; Hoover stressed “material prosperity,” Smith would be concerned with “the human side of government.” The many letters demanding to know how she, a supporter of the Volstead Act, could support a man who, if elected, would nullify Prohibition, were relatively easy to answer. But the southern propaganda was irrational. If Smith were elected, the pope would be coming to the United States on a battleship, “AL SMITH THE NEGRO LOVER” leaflets throughout the South proclaimed. “I want to assure you,” Eleanor wrote an Alabama Democrat,

  that Gov. Smith does not believe in intermarriage between white and colored people. He has a full understanding of conditions as they are in the South and would never try to do violence to the feelings of Southern people . . . the Democratic Party has always better understood and sympathized with Southern feelings and prejudices than has the Republican.

  As Election Day approached, Smith’s defeat seemed likely, but Eleanor was a good trooper and sought to counteract a mood of defeatism. “I bring you good tidings,” she told 2,500 women Democrats. “All the women of the country have been passing before me at my desk at headquarters. . . . The tide has turned and Gov. Smith’s most recent speech has made us all feel that we are going to roll up a better and better vote.”46 But the day before election the betting odds favored Hoover and also Roosevelt. She made the traditional end-of-the-campaign swing through the Hudson Valley with Franklin, who was wearing the battered felt hat in which he had campaigned in 1920. The campaign ended with “Mr. Ottinger and I coming through it with the most kindly of feelings,” he said. What were her husband’s chances of success, a reporter asked Eleanor. “I don’t know the State situation. I haven’t been active with the State. I feel sure the Governor is going to win, though.”47

  She spent Election Day working at the polls, and in the evening was hostess at a buffet supper for their friends at the Biltmore. At nine Smith came by. “Frank, let’s go down and hear the verdict.” For a brief moment it looked as if Smith were carrying New York and the South, but then the returns moved decisively the other way. At midnight Smith dictated a telegram of concession, buttoned up his topcoat, put on his brown derby, and walked out. With heavy heart, Eleanor went to the Biltmore. “I may be here all night,” Franklin said. It was “as exciting as a horse race.” By morning he appeared to have survived the Democratic debacle. Smith lost New York by 103,481 votes; Roosevelt carried it by 25,564.

  Smith’s defeat notwithstanding, Eleanor had made her mark. Elizabeth Marbury, Democratic national committeewo
man from New York and considered the dean of women politicians, conferred the accolade. “They won’t need people like me. They’ve got their Mrs. Roosevelt now.”48

  But Eleanor grieved for Smith. “If the rest of the ticket didn’t get in, what does it matter?” she said to a reporter who asked her how she felt about her husband’s victory. “No, I am not excited about my husband’s election. I don’t care. What difference can it make to me?”49

  But of course it would make a great deal of difference. Even before Election Day she had written the Democratic state chairman, resigning from the Democratic State Committee: “It seems to me now that my husband is actually back in active politics, it is wise for me not to be identified with any of the party committees.”50 She could not withdraw from a Consumers League dinner, she wrote Franklin, who had returned to Warm Springs after the election, “because I promised long ago but it is my last appearance as a speaker on any subject bordering on politics!”51

  32.RETURN TO ALBANY

  A TRIUMPHANT ROOSEVELT DEPARTED FROM WARM SPRINGS AND left it to his wife to arrange the move into the executive mansion. She was a far different person from the anxious young woman who had accompanied the ebullient new senator to Albany eighteen years earlier. She accepted an invitation from Mrs. Smith to come to Albany, and with great dispatch decided on the changes that would have to be made to fit the comfortable, loose-jointed mansion, with its turrets, cupolas, and broad red-papered halls, to the needs of the gregarious Roosevelt family.

  The first structural change she wanted represented an act of thoughtfulness: to join the ladies’ cloakroom to the back hall so that it could be used as a servants’ dining and sitting room because the pantry where the servants had been eating was “not really decent.”1 Governor Smith’s zoo was to be dismantled, and the three monkeys, one elk, one deer, one fawn, and six dogs dispersed. Republican approval was obtained to remove the three greenhouses and install a swimming tank—a real saving, Franklin carefully pointed out to the press, since the annual upkeep of the greenhouses was $6,000 for flowers which could be obtained from commercial florists for $750.

  For her husband’s bedroom Eleanor chose the “grandest sunny” room in the mansion, a corner room of the second floor with two exposures and a palatial dressing room and bathroom. The library downstairs would be his study and workroom, and the room upstairs that Smith had used as his office at the mansion would, with chintz curtains and Val-Kill furniture, make a cozy family sitting room and serve as her workroom. She suggested that the only single bedroom in the mansion be given to Missy; “We can talk that over,” she wrote Franklin.2

  How did she visualize her life in Albany, she was asked at a news conference. She would make the executive mansion into a home for her husband, she said, take the social side of things off his shoulders, and see that the house was run smoothly. She would carry on with the furniture factory at Val-Kill (“sold everything,” she reported to her husband after their exhibit that autumn)3 and with the weaving enterprise that she had recently started at Hyde Park village. These activities, she felt, were helpful to her neighbors and satisfied her craftsman’s instinct. She was even more determined to continue her three-day teaching schedule at Todhunter School—“I teach because I love it, I cannot give it up.” And she would arrange her life so that she could be immediately available to her children.4 John, her youngest, had just joined Franklin Jr. and Elliott at Groton, and James was at Harvard. She must be able, at a moment’s notice, to dash up to Groton or Cambridge, as she did soon after Franklin’s election when “F. Jr. checked into the infirmary with a belly-ache in the right side” and Johnny, “the poor lamb,” was on crutches after having banged his knee on a door “in a rush for crackers after calisthenics.” She also discovered on that trip that Elliott, in his eagerness to get on the football team, had never told the school about his old rupture, which was giving him trouble. James, whom she visited in Cambridge on the way home, disclosed that he had become secretly engaged to Betsy Cushing, “a nice child . . . but I regret that he wishes to tie himself down so young . . . in any case we can do nothing about it.”5 “A lot of things can happen to four boys away at school,” she told the press with motherly understatement.

  Mistress of the mansion, mother, teacher—thus she envisaged her role in the weeks after election. But the women with whom she had worked expected more of her; they rejoiced in Roosevelt’s victory as much because it brought Eleanor into the executive mansion as because it put him into the governor’s chair. They were sure she would transform the position of First Lady into one of unique usefulness. “What a First Lady you will make,” exulted Emily Newell Blair, the one-time suffrage leader and veteran Democratic politician. “How splendid it is to have one in that place with the political acumen and feeling for women that you have.”6

  Eleanor was eager to make a place for women in government, and under her tutelage her husband had come to a more genial and enlightened view of woman’s quest for equality; but she knew that basically he still considered politics a man’s business. Having freed himself from his mother’s domination, he would become impatient and evasive if she pressed her point of view in ways that did not fit his purposes and defer to his moods. She would need self-control as well as feminine intuition and guile not to irritate him. They dealt differently with both people and problems. Her responses were structured by the logic of love; his by the logic of power and governance. Her imagination was active on behalf of others and flowered in deeds of kindness; he was concerned with using others to further his political career and purposes. She disregarded convention and sometimes was impatient with legality when it stood in the way of benevolence; he often yielded to expediency and the more comfortable course. When she disapproved, tension would arise between them. But she had an inner conviction that he shared her concern to make life better for others; that, too, was part of his political purpose, and she believed that with tact, humility, and a service of anonymity she could be of help to him and to the causes to which she now was so actively committed.

  Even before the new governor assumed office, she was influential in shaping the character of his administration. Roosevelt was uncomfortably aware that Smith meant to remain the power in the state. Smith had always patronized Roosevelt, the Hudson River patrician, and treated him, Roosevelt later wrote, as a piece of “window dressing that had to be borne with because of a certain value in non–New York City areas.” Robert Moses, with his gift for wounding invective, had summed up the attitude of some of Smith’s circle toward Roosevelt with the gibe “He’ll make a good campaigner but a lousy Governor.” The governorship need not interfere with Roosevelt’s polio therapy, Smith had accommodatingly assured him in September. Once he was sworn in, he could decamp for the winter to Warm Springs, leave Lehman in charge, and return for a few days before the legislature adjourned. The suggestion that he govern by proxy had amused Franklin in September; it irked him when it was renewed with even more insistence after his victory and Smith’s defeat. Smith pressed him to retain the Smith cabinet intact, and particularly to keep Robert Moses as secretary of state and Belle Moskowitz as his speech writer and strategist. The situation worried Roosevelt and he discussed his anxieties with his wife and Louis. They supported him in his determination not to be a front man for Smith.

  They were particularly uneasy about keeping Mrs. Henry Moskowitz. She had been a Bull Moose progressive and was a brilliant publicist, but she was so arrogant that even Eleanor, the most tractable and cooperative of colleagues, found it difficult to work with her. She was politically astute and totally committed to Smith—as dedicated, persevering, and suspicious in his behalf as Louis was in Roosevelt’s. “By all signs I think Belle and Bob Moses mean to cling to you,” she warned her husband, “and you will wake up to find R.M. Secretary of State and B.M. running Democratic publicity at the old stand unless you take a firm stand.”7 Her next slightly anti-Semitic remark underscored how strongly she felt. “Gosh! the race has nerves of iron an
d tentacles of steel!” Roosevelt was perfectly clear in his own mind that he did not want Belle as part of his political household, but he could not bring himself to tell Smith. Eleanor was aware of how difficult it could be for him to be the messenger of bad news and how he hated situations where his charm and persuasiveness were impotent, but she kept after him. “Don’t let Mrs. M. get draped around you for she means to be,” she prodded in a letter to Warm Springs. “It will always be one for you and two for Al.”8

  “I hope you will consider making Frances Perkins Labor Commissioner,” she wrote him, starting another campaign. “She’d do well and you could fill her place as Chairman of the Industrial Commission by one of the men now on [the] Commission and put Nell Schwartz (now Bureau of Women in Industry) on the Commission so there would be one woman on it.” Then, as if she sensed male feathers being ruffled, she hastily added, “These are suggestions which I’m passing on, not my opinions for I don’t mean to butt in.”9 And knowing that men will often hear with pleasure from other women what they will not accept from their wives, she had made sure that she would not be the only woman to make this suggestion. She instigated an invitation to Warm Springs for Molly Dewson, a reformer who nevertheless understood the political game; men liked Molly’s down-East saltiness. She had come to Eleanor to ask how she could cash in on her services in the campaign and interest the governor-elect in the legislative program of the New York Consumers League, of which she was president.10 “Go to Warm Springs to see Franklin before others see him,” Eleanor advised, and promptly made it possible.