Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  It was also Sara who a month later almost undid the European trip during a family dinner at the Big House. Eleanor was reviewing their plans for the trip—they were taking over the Buick and Chevvy and she, Nan, and Marion would do the driving; perhaps they might even do some camping. Suddenly Sara reared up, disapprovingly—it would be undignified for the wife of the governor and two of his sons to motor in an old touring car and even worse for the governor’s wife to drive herself. Here young Franklin, unaware of the gathering storm clouds, chimed in, “Mom will probably land us in the first ditch,” and described how the day before she had driven them into a gatepost, ending, cheerfully if illogically, “But we’ll be all right.” Eleanor then turned to the head of the table where Sara always sat opposite Franklin, and said in a cold voice, “Very well. I will take your grandsons in a manner consistent with what you think their positions ought to be.” With that she hurried out of the dining room and took refuge on the screened porch. Here Franklin intervened, and in a voice more stern than Franklin Jr. had ever heard him use before—“or after”—told him to go after his mother, apologize, and not to return without her. Young Franklin was appalled to find his mother in tears and horrified that he should have hurt her so—“and there was the Old Man chained to his chair by his legs or otherwise he would have gone himself after Mother,” he commented in recalling the incident.36

  But Franklin did not contradict Sara. She again had her way, and the incident cast a shadow over the entire trip. The Chevvy was left behind. Nan and Marion took the Buick but Eleanor rented handsome chauffeur-driven limousines everywhere they went, beginning with a Daimler in England, and made the boys sit in the back with her although they longed to be up front with the driver. Not until Belgium, where they had a driver who charmed them all and who placed a little bouquet of flowers in the car for Eleanor every morning, did she relent. “Brother paid for that remark very dearly,” commented Marion Dickerman. “Eleanor could be very hard.”37

  Before going abroad, Eleanor and the boys accompanied Franklin on an early-summer trip through New York State that was to become an annual event. During his first bout with the legislature, the governor had suffered several rebuffs from the Republican-controlled body, a fate he knew would be repeated unless he could build greater support for his objectives in the upstate areas. The city-oriented Democrats had long given up the farm areas as irretrievably Republican, but Roosevelt’s formula was to cultivate the rural areas, and six years of crisscrossing the state on behalf of the women’s division had convinced Eleanor that Democratic policies and organization could find a foothold upstate if the leadership worked at it. Roosevelt planned a summer cruise along the state’s inland waterways that would enable him to inspect hospitals, mental institutions, and prisons as well as carry his programs to the people, especially the farmers. To Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who had sampled rural opinion on the issues of the 1929 legislature, he wrote, “What hits me most is the very high percentage of ignorance.”

  Eleanor joined enthusiastically in the preparations for the trip. A farm woman had written her a bitter letter against the Department of Education and school consolidation, she informed Dr. Frank Graves, the commissioner of education, and she wanted someone in his office to line up the facts for her “as concisely as possible.” She intended to talk to the woman when she was in the western part of the state. “I think it would be a very good thing to put in the Women’s Democratic News,” she added, “besides being a very necessary thing for my own education.”38 The tour had another purpose. In May when Franklin had gone to Warm Springs there had been a flood of stories that he was an exceedingly tired man, which disturbed Eleanor and Louis. “It looks like a deliberate campaign to show how much will now have to be done when you are away,” she wrote Franklin. “Lehman would not do it & I think others are responsible”;39 she detected “Belle’s hand” in the operation. The most effective antidote to innuendos about the governor’s physical capability was to go out and meet the citizenry face to face. So on July 7 Franklin, accompanied by his wife and sons, took command of the “good ship Inspector which has a glass roof” and headed westward along the Barge Canal to Buffalo.

  There were frequent debarkations to meet local officials and inspect state institutions. The protocol of these inspections called for a tour of the grounds by automobile with the superintendent as guide and Roosevelt as commentator, pointing out for the benefit of the press what he wanted the legislature to do. Debarred by his crippled legs from going through the buildings, the governor would excuse himself and say Mrs. Roosevelt would be happy to do so. This was a new responsibility for Eleanor. She had at times looked at state hospitals for crippled children and similar institutions, but it was one thing to visit as a guest and quite another to inspect on behalf of the governor, who carried the ultimate responsibility for the management of these institutions. Franklin was not easily satisfied; the usefulness of the information—on which he had to act—depended on the ability of his deputies to spot the telling detail, fix it in their minds, and report it back coherently. He had made hundreds of inspections when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, and he knew what to look for; he now proceeded to instruct his wife.

  Her first reports produced explosions of dissatisfaction. Was there overcrowding? It had not seemed so to her. How had she reached that conclusion? Had she estimated the distance between beds? Had she looked behind doors and into closets to see whether cots had been folded up and stacked away out of sight?

  He was equally severe in regard to the food that was being served. The first time, she simply reported what she had read on the menus. He advised her to look into the pots in the kitchen and to make sure that what she saw there corresponded with what was listed on the menus. She began to look for the telltale signs, the grimace, the slightly cynical smile that might suggest morale problems between patients and staff or between staff and superiors. And then there was the problem of remembering it all. Franklin had a “really prodigious memory,” and Eleanor had to discipline herself to hold the things she saw in her mind until she had passed them on to him.40

  Her education in the techniques of inspection was further advanced by Corporal Earl Miller, a state trooper assigned to the governor’s detail who often accompanied Eleanor when she went out alone. They became friends and he was soon giving her hints on the techniques officials used to take in unwary visitors. The surest way to get a true picture, he suggested, was to arrive unannounced, which she began to do; unhappy officials often could not conceal their consternation.41

  It was a hard school. Once Franklin asked her to look at some upstate tree plantings that were to serve as a shelter belt, and he was clearly disappointed by her inability afterward to answer his questions. “I put my best efforts after that into missing nothing and remembering everything.”42 Before the Albany years were finished, she “had become a fairly expert reporter on state institutions.”43

  Eleanor continued to have mixed feelings about dropping everything to take the boys to Europe while her husband stayed behind to do the world’s battles; it was too reminiscent of her lonely summers at Campobello. “Like most things in life,” she confessed, “I want to go and yet I don’t want to leave.”44 But they sailed from Montreal on July 26 after Franklin gave them a farewell dinner at the Mount Royal Hotel. “Well we are off & I am going to try to give the boys a good time and while I don’t expect you to write please send me frequent cables,” she wrote Franklin. “One for instance on Monday after you have been to Dannemora!”45 Her mind was on the state’s business, not Baedeker. There had been an outbreak of riots at Dannemora and Auburn prisons caused by overcrowding, poor food, and the enactment of the Baumes Laws, which made life sentence mandatory for fourth offenders. “I think the Baumes law makes reward for good behavior impossible and takes incentive away,” her second shipboard letter stated. “Do write me what you find and your conclusions. The surplus will vanish in prison repairs if this goes on.”46 But he did not write, preferrin
g to cable and telephone. “Hope you have a good trip. What shall I do with your casket?” his first communication read. “No one could imagine what it meant,” Eleanor informed him, “but then I remembered the lunch basket which we discovered we left behind our first day out. . . . ”

  The boys disembarked at Belfast, where they joined James, who was staying with his fiancée at a country house overlooking the River Boyne that the Cushing family had taken outside Dublin. After a trip through the Lake district—in two cars—Nan and Marion went on to visit friends in Scotland, while Eleanor took the boat back to Dublin, where she found her boys very much involved with horses. James had even spent all his money on a colt that a fast-talking Irishman said could be trained to win all the races. When James later wired his father for his return passage, saying he would repay him out of his winnings, Franklin replied, “So happy about horse, suggest both of you swim home.”47 From the boys’ talk Eleanor picked up the news that Elliott had gambled on the canal trip and lost twenty-five dollars to Corporal Miller and forty-five dollars to another member of the governor’s staff. “I had a talk with him about gambling but I did not realize it was for sums like that he had played.”48 She was quite worried about Elliott. It was the summer he was refusing to go on to college. Franklin should talk to him about the right use of money, she advised, but without telling him they knew about his gambling losses.

  In Dublin she went to the horse show and the races with her children. At a lunch at the legation, she met the “very nice Governor General” of Ireland, and the children of the founder and president of Czechoslovakia, the young Masaryks, were there—“very nice as usual”—and also “a most unpleasant Maharaja who strangled his wife (one of them) & threw her body down a well & looks it.” Gossip had it that it had been the wife’s punishment “for having disagreed with her lord and master.” For the rest of the tour, they kept away from the world of officials. A Labor government had just come to power in London, but Eleanor made no effort to get in touch with political people, even though Franklin had suggested she go and see Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. This was to be a sightseeing trip for her boys, she insisted, and though she saw some old school friends in London and Aunt Dora in Paris, nothing was allowed to interfere with an exhaustive inspection of historical and cultural sites. She tried to keep the boys so busy during the day that they would be too weary for roughhousing, but almost every night she had to separate “two very angry brothers.” They loved shopping at Harrod’s and Burberry’s: “I assure you I am ruined but they are swank and happy,” she wrote Franklin. But they were bored with cricket and seeing the sites, and Eleanor was weary “of my incubus of a motor car,” and so all were glad to cross the Channel for a tour of the Low Countries and the Rhine down to Bingen. In Luxembourg Nan, Marion, and the two boys toasted Franklin in the local champagnes; Eleanor “joined in, in Evian water!” Outside of Reims they inspected the Poméry wine cellars, where Eleanor observed that “very young boys were working under very unhealthy conditions” and Brother happily did some tasting. “F Jr. has had a taste of everything and likes it but I won’t let him have it as a rule!” she reported.

  At her husband’s specific request they toured the battlefields, the underground forts at Verdun, Château-Thierry, Belleau Woods, and placed flowers near Quentin Roosevelt’s grave. The rows and rows of crosses made a profound impression on the boys. “The thing that surprised me most was how France or Germany could go on and continue to be a world power when it had lost so many men,” John wrote to his father.

  Eleanor was disappointed not to find a letter from Franklin in Paris. “I hate not knowing what you have done about Elliott, and a thousand other things,” she wrote. Had young Nesbitt, the son of a Hyde Park woman with whom she had become friendly, gotten into Cornell, she wanted to know, and would Franklin advance him money if he needed it.

  As they were leaving Paris for Cherbourg, Franklin’s only letter finally arrived, with the information that he intended to leave for Warm Springs soon after she returned. “I am very glad to be going with you as it will give us a little while to catch up & talk things over,” she replied contentedly. She was glad she had made the trip, she finally concluded, “& will enjoy it in retrospect when the anxiety & necessary difficulties with two healthy youngsters is past. They have been good but a certain amount of trouble is inevitable. I think next summer we will separate them for a while.” But her trials with the boys were not over. On their way to Cherbourg they visited Chartres and spent a night at Madame Poulard’s at Mont-Saint-Michel, but the boys were in such a quarrelsome mood that she left them behind when she went to climb the ramparts and look at the old abbey and church. On her return, there was a commotion in the streets, and as she approached Madame Poulard’s she heard screams. Franklin Jr. had pushed Johnny out of the window and was holding him head down dangling by the heels.49

  They returned September 15, Todhunter classes resumed on October 1 and as vice principal she was soon involved in the preparations for the reopening of the school. Being mother, mistress of the executive mansion, and the governor’s stand-in were all parts of her job, but the activities that she considered her own were teaching, writing, lecturing, helping run the Val-Kill Furniture Factory. She had agreed to serve as a member of the committee selecting books for the Junior Literary Guild. “She tells you with pride that this is a paid job; not her only one, for her school pays her a salary, too,” Ida Tarbell wrote.50 Vogue asked Eleanor to do an article, and she was pleased that the editor thought it “splendid,” she noted in her reply to him, but he had said nothing about payment. “The only reason that I feel I must do this on a business basis is that other magazines pay me and I do not feel that unless it is for a purely educational or charitable publication, that it is quite fair not to ask the usual compensation.”51 She could use the money, but more important to her was the professional recognition that payment signified.

  Though the activities that gave her the greatest satisfaction were those that she did in her own right, the public’s growing interest in her was a result of the way she used the executive mansion as a springboard for good works, revealing the First Lady had a heart awake to the problems of other people. There was a person at the center of government, the individual citizen discovered, who answered any plea for help and took up every complaint against a bureaucrat. Neither by design nor appointment, and with her husband’s concurrence, she began to perform an office that later generations would call “ombudsman.”

  She entered into the lives of her petitioners and thought of them as human beings, not cases. There were heart-rending appeals from the families of patients in the mental hospitals, which she sent on for investigation to Dr. Parsons, the commissioner of mental hygiene. “I enclose his report,” she wrote to the family of a Miss P., “which indicates that the patient has a mild mental disturbance to which, generally speaking, she makes a satisfactory adjustment, but from time to time she overboils in the manner indicated in the letter.” And thanking Dr. Parsons, she wrote, “I hope she eventually may be settled, . . . poor thing, she does not sound very happy.” She was swamped with letters from old people begging her help with pension problems. She had every one of these “pathetic letters” reviewed in the hope that somehow they might be entitled to some kind of help. She looked into all requests for pardons, and if clemency was impossible, as was usually the case, “I can sometimes relieve their sorrow a little.”

  One of her most touching and insistent correspondents was a mother with a son in jail. “When she found I could not help her free him she begged that I go see him which I did. Now she begs that I go weekly and read the Bible to him!” A woman of eighty, so poor she could not pay for a dog license, had applied for an exemption. She sent Eleanor the “unfeeling letter” the state supervisor of dog licenses had written her; could Mrs. Roosevelt use her influence with the governor to have the tax remitted? It was Mrs. Roosevelt who paid the tax. She was overwhelmed by the trust people had in her. “I am the farme
r’s wife, that wrote you two years ago,” one letter began. “You remember, I laid out my case then. Will you now see that I get my pension.” “The farmer’s wife,” commented Eleanor wonderingly, “when there are dozens of them daily!”

  But no letter went unanswered. Sometimes she sent a petitioner to his local district leader for help, but she did not leave it there. “Will you be good enough to let me know just what help your District Leader gave you,” she added. If she could do nothing in Albany, she would appeal to one of the many friends she had made throughout the state to look into a case for her, to see whether help might not be available locally.

  Sometimes she showed these letters to Louis and, after she got to know him, to Corporal Miller, but as often as not she disregarded their warning that she was being taken in. “You’re nothing but a cop,” she said to Corporal Miller.52 The appeals for help became a flood after the stock-market crash, and the rise in joblessness taxed even her resourcefulness in finding something affirmative to say to her correspondents. She strongly advised people not to come to New York to look for work: “At the present time there are countless numbers of people out of employment here and I am not able to get positions for any one.” But still she did not give up. Did he have a job for Mr. K., statistician and Yale graduate, she asked Tom Lynch, who was now president of the State Tax Commission. “He has cried in my office like a whipped child.”