Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Often she showed letters to her husband. “How shall I answer or will you?” she would pencil on the plea.

  She functioned in a highly unorthodox way that defied all proper administrative charts. If she had been less tactful, less sensitive, if she had not always been careful to stay within the limits set by Franklin and to check with him to be sure that her activities were consistent with what he wanted done, her acts of compassion and her desire to be helpful could have degenerated into a scandal of meddlesomeness.

  Roosevelt encouraged his state officials in the belief that he and “the Missus” were a team. She understood, and she was loyal. When she disagreed with him she told him, but it was kept within the family. He was the captain of the ship. “I sat next to you in the Senate chamber when the twenty million dollar relief bill was passed,” an irate upstate judge wrote her. “Officials in Albany told me you were the boss. . . . ” She had not been in the senate chamber when the relief bill was passed, she replied, “so you were wrong in thinking you sat next to me. Also any officials who told you I was boss of anything, were equally wrong.”53 Some members of Roosevelt’s administration undoubtedly grumbled to their wives when she made requests they considered inconvenient, but more often they were glad to oblige. Not only was she the governor’s wife and a political power in her own right, but, most important of all, she was a useful champion when their own programs were in trouble—or when they wanted the governor’s support for new ideas.

  It was to Eleanor that Frances Perkins came with a plan to overhaul and modernize the moribund Public Employment Service and its neglected network of state employment offices. Eleanor immediately saw its political implications as well as economic uses. “It looks good to me for it would take in employment of middle-aged and physically handicapped, etc. and you’d get the jump on Hoover, but they won’t move till you let me know what you think,” Eleanor wrote Franklin; the letter reached him a few days before the collapse of the stock market.54 Roosevelt, according to Perkins, “at once saw the point of developing a good modern well-supported State Public Employment Service.”

  Eleanor had gotten to know a vast number of women in the small towns and rural areas and was now systematically getting to know more of them. Together with Elinor Morgenthau and Nancy Cook she was a faithful participant in the Home Economics Weeks that were organized by Cornell’s Bureau of Home Economics and which annually brought thousands of rural women to Ithaca. Eleanor admired Martha van Rensselaer, the moving spirit behind the bureau, for the way she had made the bureau into a down-to-earth, sensible service to upstate women.

  The women’s division was ready for the 1930 gubernatorial campaign. Eleanor brought Molly Dewson into the division, and with Nancy Cook and Caroline O’Day they mapped strategy, organized meetings, issued literature—all behind the scenes. Her editorials in the Democratic News rallied the workers in the precincts to speak for the whole ticket. Her final editorial criticized the one-issue campaign of Republican candidate Charles H. Tuttle, who had concentrated on Tammany and corruption: what about the other big state-wide questions—taxation, farm relief, labor legislation, control of utilities, unemployment and public works, power?

  What does it mean to be a candidate’s wife, an interviewer wanted to know as the campaign drew to a close. “It doesn’t mean a thing!” Eleanor replied. “In this particular case, at any event, the candidate’s wife will go on pursuing the even tenor of her ways. Politics does not excite me. It never did. I take things as they come. If my husband is reelected, I shall be pleased. And if he isn’t—well the world is full of interesting things to do.”55 In the meantime, however, she made sure that not the smallest thing was left undone that might help get her husband elected.

  Roosevelt’s landslide victory exceeded all expectations. He was swept in with a margin of 725,000, and was the first Democrat ever to carry upstate New York—by 167,000, which included Hyde Park, to Eleanor a “greater satisfaction than anything else.” “Mrs. Roosevelt was a very great factor in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection,” noted Molly Dewson, who was not given to flattery.56

  The victory celebrations at Hyde Park on election night were prolonged, and Eleanor, who had to get ready for class next day, penciled a good-night note to her husband. “Much love & a world of congratulations. It is a triumph in so many ways, dear & so well earned. Bless you & good luck these next two years.—E.R.”

  33.ROOSEVELT BIDS FOR THE PRESIDENCY

  IN A YEAR OF DEMOCRATIC SUCCESSES, ROOSEVELT’S WAS THE handsomest. Overnight he became front runner among the Democratic aspirants for the presidency. It gave Eleanor pleasure to see him move toward the prize that he wanted above all others. She better than anyone appreciated how much determination and self-mastery his victory represented. She was happy, too, in the joy that the triumph brought her gnarled little friend Louis Howe, who behind the scenes had masterminded the comeback. Both men were now within sight of the goal they had been pursuing almost from the time of their first encounter. But she herself was a “fatalist,” and the larger the ambition, the greater her feeling of its insubstantiality. She obtained her sense of fulfillment in service to others; to search out some hidden or defeated aspiration in the heart of a human being and then, in ways of her own, “to help this aspiration assume reality” gave her the greatest, perhaps the only, real joy in life. She had helped Franklin surmount the apparent devastation of his hopes by poliomyelitis. Now that he was the leading candidate for president, “that prospect did not interest me particularly.”1

  Her hopes were centered on a wholly different concern—making their marriage once again a covenant of spirit and feeling and not an arrangement to benefit the children and Franklin’s career. A wife’s job, Eleanor told an interviewer who had been advised by a group of distinguished women that she was “the ideal type of modern wife,” was to be partner, mother, homemaker—and in that order, she emphasized. At one time she had placed the mother’s role first, “but today we understand that everything else depends upon the success of the wife and husband in their personal relationship.”2

  She wanted to be close to her husband, to share, to be treated as equal not as instrument. But he had been brought up in a society where the ideal marriage was one that joined masculine egotism to feminine self-devotion. He was, moreover, self-centered in the way men become when they learn that few can refuse them anything. She could say “no” to him, and that was a part of her problem—how to press her point of view without making him feel guilty. For when that happened he became elusive, and as he was a consummate actor if he wished to be, he could keep even Eleanor guessing as to his true feelings and purposes. This made her feel shut out and destroyed the sense of companionship that she craved. She never gave up the hope that he would change. Perhaps now, in a common effort to make life better for other people, they could find their way to a new kind of partnership and at last efface the hurt he had done her in the Lucy Mercer affair.

  The day after Roosevelt’s victory, Jim Farley, the breezy politician whom Louis had groomed and nudged into the Democratic state chairmanship, told the press, “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party, even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.” Roosevelt had not told Farley he had made up his mind to run, but the statement had been carefully drafted with Louis, who, Jim assumed, knew the Boss’s mind. A few days later Ed Flynn, whose rather nominal duties as secretary of state sheltered his role as one of Roosevelt’s closest political advisers, was let in on the decision. They decided that the friendly, outgoing Farley was the man to send out to the regular organizations to round up delegates as the representative of the Friends of Roosevelt, an organization that Louis would direct. It was not Franklin who told Eleanor that he had decided to make his bid for president in 1932, although, of course, she had long known that the presidency was his goal. It was from Louis that she learned of his decision and that Louis was already at work planning the final strategy.3

>   Even though Franklin had not asked her how she felt about his running for the presidency, she was prepared to put her full strength—which was considerable—into the battle for the nomination, and he knew he could count on her. New York politicians, Farley said, recognized that she was “a strong and influential public figure in her own right.”4 Women figured importantly in the campaign plans and Farley, a new convert to women’s role in politics, stood a little in awe of the work of the women under Eleanor’s leadership. He was also grateful to her. “It wouldn’t matter what Mrs. Roosevelt asked me to do, I would do it,” he later told Emma Guffey Miller, Democratic national committeewoman from Pennsylvania. “If it hadn’t been for her I would never have gotten where I am for she gave me my first big chance.”5 But it was political realism about the effectiveness of the women’s organization more than gratitude to Eleanor Roosevelt which swayed the men. Farley credited the women’s division with Roosevelt’s margin of victory in 1928, and the 1930 campaign became known as the “waffle-iron” campaign because of the effective appeal the women had addressed to the housewives.6 According to Farley’s calculation, in counties where Eleanor’s women were at work the total party vote picked up 10 to 20 per cent. “We felt the same kind of a job could be done on a national scale,” he said.7 As the recognized leader of the Democratic women of the state, Eleanor was the logical person for this job, but as the wife of the man who was both governor and candidate, she could not work openly, so Molly Dewson agreed to serve as her deputy. Molly hit it off well with Howe and Farley, and the team was complete.

  By the spring of 1931 Louis had opened up the Friends of Roosevelt offices, and his “letter writing mill” was going full tilt.8 So was Molly’s, for whose signature Eleanor prepared the letters, and who, said Howe, managed a campaign correspondence “quite as large” as Farley’s, though she did not use the green ink that became his trademark. In July Farley, in his role as Exalted Ruler of the Elks, made a highly productive western tour. At Eleanor’s suggestion, Molly followed in his tracks a few months later. Her voluminous reports to Eleanor were also read by the men and perhaps were written with that in mind, for they reflected her and Eleanor’s concern that Franklin should discuss the issues and that the women should not be ignored. At the end of her trip Molly reported from Salt Lake City: “I certainly got into pleasant relations with the ladies. . . . They undoubtedly were glad to see me. After all they are on the political coach, only by the eyelids—yet Hoover won by the women’s vote.” The women she had talked with considered Roosevelt “O.K.” and a “vote getter” but Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war and a leading internationalist, also was “well liked.” They were eager to hear Roosevelt “discuss national and international issues.”9

  Eleanor’s campaign tasks for her husband were not limited to the women’s division; she also helped the writers who wanted to do biographies of Franklin. Earle Looker, who had Republican inclinations and was a friend of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, wanted to write a book about the Democratic Roosevelt. Eleanor furnished him opportunities to observe Roosevelt at first hand, and provided him with information. Looker did a great service for Roosevelt when the inevitable whispering campaign began about the candidate’s physical incapacity to handle the presidency: he proposed publicly to challenge Roosevelt to submit to an examination by a panel of eminent physicians to be selected by the head of the New York Academy of Medicine. Roosevelt agreed and had the examination. The reprints of the panel’s wholly affirmative findings, published by Looker in Liberty, were mailed out broadcast by Louis. “If polio did not kill him, the Presidency won’t” was Eleanor’s unsentimental reply when she was asked whether Franklin was physically up to the presidency.10

  She was equally helpful to Ernest K. Lindley, who had covered Roosevelt, first for the World and then for the New York Herald Tribune. An outstanding reporter, he made his Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Politics a sympathetic but objective biography that is still a source book for Roosevelt’s Albany years. Roosevelt, who feigned dismay at the “whole library” of life stories that were being written about him, was not very cooperative with Lindley, but Eleanor and Louis were.11

  Eleanor also took on such delicate, time-consuming tasks as the cultivation of Elizabeth Marbury, the still powerful Democrat, who wrote suggesting that Roosevelt come to Maine. “The best I can do is to send Eleanor to see you about the 20th of July,” he replied. An ailing Missy accompanied Eleanor on a week’s trip that included a stay in Newport with Cousin Susie and a stopover in Portland with Maude and David Gray. Eleanor was more concerned with Missy’s health than with Miss Marbury’s loyalties; Missy “smoked less today,” she reported to her husband, “and I thought seemed more ready to sleep tonight. She is eating fairly well.” They arrived at Miss Marbury’s in time for lunch “& Miss Marbury has talked politics ever since except for a brief time when Missy & I went in swimming! Molly Dewson is here too for the night & tomorrow there is a grand jamboree!”12

  Although she declined either in speeches or interviews to discuss politics or her husband’s chances for the nomination, she was nevertheless an effective representative of his candidacy in the course of her extensive travels. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she spoke to the Altrusa Club, a nationwide organization of professional women, at a time when new Tammany scandals were breaking almost daily in New York City. Roosevelt’s association with Tammany was seized upon by his rivals in order to embarrass him, and the nation watched developments as an index of his political independence. Eleanor did not deal with the issue directly in Winston-Salem; her subject was general and high-minded—“The Individual’s Responsibility to the Community.” In the course of her speech, however, she talked naturally about Tammany and how she had been raised to think that Tammany men had “horns and a tail,” but “when one’s party is not what one feels it should be, it is better to get into the organization and purify it from within instead of standing without and criticizing.” Critics were disarmed. The Times correspondent observed that “Mrs. Roosevelt made many friends for herself and Governor Roosevelt. It was remarked by many political-minded folk at the dinner that she was a splendid advance agent, if such she could be termed, for her husband.”13 In Atlanta she spoke before the League of Women Voters. She sounded the theme that it was up to the women to end war, the reporter for the Atlanta Constitution wrote admiringly, “alternately bringing laughter with stories of her own education in politics and holding her listeners tense with her eloquence, Mrs. Roosevelt exhibited a versatility and political background worthy of the traditions of the Roosevelt family.” She herself admitted to Molly that the time spent in North Carolina had been “rather profitable,” although “nine speeches in three days was a bit strenuous!”14

  Within New York State she continued to serve as Franklin’s proxy. “I do not often go to the big places,” she told Ida Tarbell with her usual modesty, “but often to the little places where they have difficulty in securing speakers. I don’t do it as well as I wish I did, but after all what they want is to see the Governor’s wife.”15 The New Yorker saw it differently: “No woman has a better grasp of the intricacies of state business and she has a decided flair for putting things aptly.”16

  She did not like to travel in the big state car, preferring to use her own and drive herself. This made Franklin uneasy, and he insisted that Earl Miller, now promoted to sergeant, accompany her.17 Miller, one of the handsomest troopers in the state, a former amateur welterweight champion, an excellent horseman who did trick riding at the state fair, and an instructor in judo and boxing at the State Police School, was something of a self-styled Lothario. He had been Al Smith’s bodyguard for four years and when the Roosevelts came to Albany was kept on the mansion detail. The boys in the barracks did not envy him his assignment with “that old crab,” but Eleanor, with her kindliness and insatiable curiosity about people, quickly made a conquest of him. Soon he was telling her the story of his life—his beginnings in Schenectady, hi
s years as circus acrobat, his war years in the Navy, his unhappy first marriage. Solicitude for his troubles made it easier for her to accept his helpfulness and brusque gallantries, and his barracks-room language, his cynicism, and his roughneck qualities were a new and interesting experience. She got to know his family and invited his niece to stay at the mansion. Earl, who had had no home since he was twelve, transferred the affection he would have felt for his parents to “the Boss” and “the Lady.” Eleanor encouraged his friendship, and he helped her overcome fears that still remained from her years of self-subordination. He urged her to take up riding again and took care of her horse. He helped her gain enough confidence in her driving that she told Louis—who often insisted on doing the driving and sometimes “scared her pink”—that she would “never take him again unless I’m doing all the driving.”18

  While she could deal with the press, she hated to be photographed because she was convinced she was ugly. She and Louis had a game—who could find the ugliest photograph of himself. “Please don’t let them take my picture,” she would plead with Miller. “Try to smile,” he encouraged her; “smile for just one picture.” He even stood behind the photographers and made funny faces at her.19 Miller was not the only one who, from her photographs, had expected to encounter a woman of formidable plainness. The New Yorker correspondent was surprised at how “unjustly” the camera dealt with Mrs. Roosevelt because it could not capture “her immaculate freshness of appearance, her graciousness, and the charm of a highly intelligent, forceful and directed personality.” In time, coached by Miller and pushed by necessity, she became as relaxed with photographers as with newspapermen.