Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Agnes Leach was one of the angry Wilsonians who had occasion to see Roosevelt at the time. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she said to him. “That was a shabby statement. I just don’t feel like having lunch with you today.”

  Franklin was taken aback. “I am sorry you are in that mood. One reason I wanted you here today is that Eleanor is very fond of you and you can make peace between us. She hasn’t spoken to me for three days.”45

  When Eleanor heard about the incident she immediately phoned her friend: “Agnes, you are a sweet, darling girl. I hear you upset Franklin very much. I didn’t know you had it in you.” He was eager for Eleanor’s approval, Mrs. Leach felt, and cared “a terrific lot about her opinion” even if he disregarded it.

  Roosevelt’s reversal on the League, his ambiguities on Prohibition, and his efforts to avoid a showdown with Tammany produced widespread doubt about the strength of his convictions. Heywood Broun called him “a corkscrew,” Elmer Davis thought him the “weakest” of the candidates for the nomination, and Walter Lippmann described him as “an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses” who was “not the dangerous enemy of anything.” (Eleanor saved that column.) Many years later, Eleanor’s radio and television agent, Thomas L. Stix, who idolized her, confessed that he had voted for Norman Thomas in 1932. “So would I,” she reassured him, “if I had not been married to Franklin.”46

  Political discontent merged with personal unhappiness, as is revealed briefly in a letter she sent Molly after having lunch with her: “Of course there is no other candidate who will do more what we want. I simply had a fit of rebellion against the male attitude. I’ve had one before but sober sense does come to my rescue & I feel better when I realize that I’ve thought primarily about myself.”47

  “Can’t you see that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours,” one of Roosevelt’s letters to an irate Wilsonian began, and went on to explain that his ideals had not changed, only his methods of achieving them—“and for heaven’s sake have a little faith.” He might almost have been arguing with his wife.

  “It was all unnecessary,” wrote Mrs. Charles Hamlin to Josephus Daniels about Roosevelt’s repudiation of the League. But was it? A moment came in the Democratic convention three months later at the end of the third ballot when the stop Roosevelt movement still kept him short of the two-thirds vote needed for nomination. Several states—Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama—were being held in the Roosevelt ranks with difficulty. If Roosevelt did not gain decisively on the fourth ballot, his ranks might break and disintegrate. After consulting with Howe, Farley went to work on Texas, which along with California had been voting for Garner. Hearst was one of the keys to the California-Texas alliance, and Roosevelt leaders telephoned him at San Simeon to urge him to support a switch. He agreed. Would he have done so if Roosevelt had not satisfied him on the issue of the League? There is no absolute answer to the “ifs” of history, but it seems a reasonable conjecture that if Roosevelt had not compromised on this issue he might not have won the nomination. And if he had not been president when the Hitler menace broke out, would another man have promoted the Wilsonian cause as faithfully and effectively as he did?

  Franklin was the politician, she the agitator, Eleanor said in later years.48 “Mrs. Roosevelt’s hand is almost exactly complementary to the hand of her husband,” an authority in palmistry wrote. “By this I mean she has just the sort of character that will supplement and aid the character of the Governor.”49 They made a splendid team, but that was not the way it seemed to her at the time. She was a deeply divided woman as the convention neared. She was happy for Franklin—and Louis—as the states fell in line (“So Tennessee is in!” she wrote him on May 21, as things went according to schedule; “Jim Farley grins more broadly with each State!”), but she saw her husband’s entry into the White House as portending a kind of gilded captivity for her.

  Friends were baffled by her calmness, almost detachment, as the convention began. She took several hours off on the opening day to drive through a thunderstorm to visit Margaret Doane Fayerweather, an old friend who was recuperating from a very serious operation. For an hour she sat at Margaret’s bedside, her knitting needles busy. Not till she left was there a word of politics. Then Margaret, unable to contain herself asked, “What are your plans?”

  “Well, we shall either be flying to Chicago—or staying quietly at home.”

  “We shall be praying that you will be flying to Chicago.”

  “The time when we shall need your prayers will be if Franklin is nominated and elected.”50

  When the long night of the nominations began she was with Franklin, who was in his shirtsleeves, silent, waiting. Sara was at the governor’s mansion as were Elliott and John, Missy, Grace Tully, and Sam Rosenman. When the speechmaking ended and the balloting began it was 4:20 A.M., and Eleanor sent out pots of coffee to the newsmen, who had established a listening post in the garage. As roll call followed roll call, Franklin chain-smoked and Eleanor knitted a turtle-neck sweater for asthma-wracked Louis who was in Chicago. At 9:15 A.M., after the inconclusive third ballot, the convention recessed. Sara found the suspense too upsetting and left for Hyde Park, indignant that some of the “gentlemen” in the New York delegation had voted against her son. The others tried to get a little sleep. Eleanor was the first to come down and was preparing to have breakfast with Louis Howe’s grandson when she encountered two Associated Press reporters on their way out after the all-night vigil. Would Miss Hickok and Mr. Fay join her, she asked them. The breakfast went pleasantly, but to the two reporters Eleanor seemed withdrawn, not at all involved in the drama of the tense hours between the third and the final ballots. Fay thought she was worried that her husband would not get the nomination. More perceptively, Lorena Hickok, a woman in her late thirties, observed, “That woman’s unhappy about something.”51

  At dinner that night the telephone call came for which Roosevelt had been waiting. “F.D., you look just like the cat that swallowed the canary,” said Missy. Later the news was on the radio: McAdoo announced that California had not come to Chicago to deadlock a convention but to elect a president and was switching to Roosevelt. “Good old McAdoo,” said Roosevelt, smiling contentedly. “The rest of the study was a bedlam,” Grace Tully recalled. “Mrs. Roosevelt and Missy LeHand embraced each other. Both embraced me. John and Elliott tossed scratch paper in the air and shook hands as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Mrs. Roosevelt came down out of the clouds before the rest of us. ‘I’m going to make some bacon and eggs,’ she announced.”52

  Albany neighbors gathered on the front lawn to cheer. Roosevelt exchanged quips with the photographers and reporters who had come crowding in from the garage. The women reporters, including the owl-eyed Miss Hickok, found Mrs. Roosevelt scrambling eggs. “Mrs. Roosevelt, aren’t you thrilled at the idea of being in the White House?” one of them “gushed.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s only reply, Miss Hickok noted, was a look so unsmiling that it stopped all further questions along that line. Lorena Hickok’s intuition that here was a woman strangely unhappy as her husband moved toward the presidency became a bond between the two women, and before the campaign was over she was receiving Eleanor’s confidence. “I’m a middle-aged woman,” she said to Miss Hickok on her forty-eighth birthday. “It’s good to be middle-aged. Things don’t matter so much. You don’t take it so hard when things happen to you that you don’t like.”53

  34.“I NEVER WANTED TO BE A PRESIDENT’S WIFE”

  THE MORNING AFTER THE NOMINATION ROOSEVELT FLEW TO Chicago as a way of serving notice on the country that a new energetic leadership was prepared to take command. Eleanor accompanied him, as did Elliott and John, Sam, Missy, Grace, and two bodyguards, Gus and Earl. Eleanor was the first to emerge from the plane. “A fine job, Mr. Farley. Congratulations!” she said, extending her hand to the beaming chairman. Struck by her poise and composure, Emma Bugbee of the New York Herald Tribune commented that sh
e was “one of the calm people of the world.”1 Someone asked her whether her life would not “belong to the public after this,” and she quickly replied, “It never has and never could.”

  It was a discerning question. There was in her a craving for experience, a fear of pomp and ceremony. She did not wish to be shielded from the world but to take part in it and change it. She wanted to live a life without artifice, to do things herself, to live the truth. She had an ascetic strain—she called it the Puritan in her—and inner drives that in other times and other places had led women to renounce worldly pleasures and take vows of poverty and service. She carried about with her a prayer by Henry Van Dyke entitled “The Footpath to Peace,” to which she added the words “with oneself.” Among the prayer’s injunctions were “to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends and every day of Christ”; she had circled the phrase about Christ. “Christ was born in a manger,” she wrote a few months later, “and worked all his life and in that way we were taught that the highest and best things in life may be linked with material hardship and the simplest of living.” As completely as she could, she wanted to live according to Christ’s teachings.

  She feared that all these things would become impossible once she was First Lady, that she would become a prisoner of protocol and tradition. Louis, an inveterate scribbler of verse, had addressed himself to her anxieties in early 1932.

  We are the hooded brotherhood of fears.

  Barring the pleasant path that lay ahead.

  Who, grim and silent, all these futile years,

  Have filled your timid soul with numbing dread. . . .

  Fool! Had you dared to speed your pace

  Our masking cowls aside to tear

  And meet us bravely face to face

  We would have vanished into air.

  Louis’ assurances that there would be plenty for her to do in the White House did not end her worries; the closer Franklin came to the nomination, the more certain she became that she did not want to be First Lady. Nancy and Marion had accompanied Louis to Chicago, and Nancy received a letter from Eleanor saying these things. When she showed it to Louis, he ripped it to shreds and told her not to breathe a word of it to anyone.2 From her own personal standpoint, Eleanor later wrote, she did not want her husband to be president: “It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.”3

  Her dread of what she called “captivity” in the White House did not prevent her from pitching into the campaign with her usual vigor. While some of the party’s conservatives were opposed to a strong women’s division, especially a “militant” one, a major appeal was nevertheless going to be directed to the distaff side of the electorate. Molly moved over from Friends of Roosevelt to direct the drive, again as Eleanor’s deputy. There was an easy and understanding relationship between the two. “I hate people to be grateful to me,” Eleanor wrote Molly in Maine, where she had been sent to rest before the campaign, “just as much as you apparently hate them to be grateful to you so you need not worry. I love working with you for just the reasons I imagine you like working with me and you need not ever worry that I will not speak perfectly truthfully to you or that you should hesitate to say whatever you have on your mind to me.”4

  While Molly rested in Maine, Eleanor organized and staffed the women’s division. She presented the Democratic National Committee, which Farley had assembled in New York for a strategy session, with the plan developed by Molly for work in the states. There was to be a vice chairwoman in every state to head up the women’s work and a committeewoman in every county, especially in the rural areas, with whom Molly could correspond directly and to whom headquarters could send literature and gasoline money. The men agreed, although they were reluctant to have any money come into their states that was not channeled through them. They also agreed that the women in charge of their states would draft their work plans and send them to Eleanor. For the wife of the presidential candidate to hold such responsibility and to wield such authority was unprecedented in American politics, but in Eleanor’s case it seemed the natural thing to do.

  Eleanor and her colleagues had learned their lessons well in 1930 and knew exactly what they wanted. They did not want, a chagrined Howe discovered, the twelve-page brochures the men, including himself, had drafted. The women marched into his office, he later reported, “their noses visibly turned toward Heaven,” and announced loftily, “You surely don’t expect us to send that to our women do you?” “Why not?” Howe inquired. “Well, I don’t know about you men, but we women have no time to waste reading through stuff like that.” Women, Howe learned, had an “appalling desire for figures”; they preferred leaflets which presented a single argument. Finally they were given their own printing budget and told to produce their own literature. The ladies’ “Rainbow Fliers,” as they came to be called, were printed by the millions and were so successful that the men made extensive use of them. “They were written solely by women. No man had a hand in them,” Molly commented rather smugly.5

  Eleanor turned over to Molly a list of the “safe states” and the “fighting states,” where Louis figured the election would be won or lost. The women precinct leaders in the latter states were notified just how their districts had voted in 1928 and how many additional votes were needed for a Democratic victory in 1932. The most intensive campaigning was done by a corps of “grass trampers,” women who went from door to door and whose indefatigable work Louis later credited with bringing out the women’s vote; he “would rather have a half-dozen women field workers than a hundred men any day,” he concluded. Moreover, they made the same amount of money go twice as far; in fact, they were sometimes too frugal, and in a campaign it was necessary to use money speedily.6

  Farley’s and Molly’s offices were at the Biltmore Hotel, while Louis and Eleanor remained across the street at the old Friends of Roosevelt office. One of Eleanor’s jobs was to keep the channels of communication open between Farley and the ever-suspicious Howe, and she could occasionally be seen hurrying across Madison Avenue with Louis in tow to straighten out a misunderstanding, smooth over a hurt feeling. After the Walker hearings ended with Tammany Mayor Jimmy Walker’s sudden resignation, Franklin took off on his campaign train accompanied by James and his wife Betsy and Anna Dall. Roosevelt liked to have his children with him, and he was especially fond of Betsy, who was pert, vivacious, and enjoyed coquetting with her irresistible father-in-law. From time to time Eleanor flew out to join the campaign train, and she was in Chicago when the whole family attended a World Series game between the Cubs and the Yankees. She was not a model of attentiveness, Jimmy later claimed, having slept through most of the game, one in which Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each hit home runs.7 But during that same stay in Chicago when Bobby Fitzmaurice, who handled transportation schedules, fell ill, it was Eleanor who took the “Commissioner of the Ramps,” as Roosevelt had fondly dubbed him, to the hospital, just as, a few weeks later, when Missy’s mother died, it was Eleanor who accompanied Missy to Potsdam, New York, for the funeral.

  The Depression was reaching its nadir and the grim signs were everywhere—the lengthening bread lines, the Hoovervilles, the silent, sullen countryside in which smoldered the fires of rebellion, the horrifying use of troops and tear gas to rout the veterans from Washington. Eleanor shifted her emphasis from the alleviation of distress to the need for basic change. A financial system that was “man-made” was also “man-controlled,” she told the Chatauqua ladies. “We must reorganize our economic structure so it may be possible for those willing to work to receive adequate compensation.” Her ideas were not more advanced than her husband’s, Tugwell noted, but she was willing to talk about them “when he was not yet ready for commitment.”8 She counseled the girls of the Junior League to prepare themselves for the big changes that were coming by learning to earn their own living and to pull their weight by making a contribution to the world. When one of her Todhunter girls remarked that “you can get anything
you want in the world if you have enough money,” she asked the entire class to bring in “a list of things you think the Depression has taught people who have money and also a list of what you think it has done to people who are unemployed and have nothing.” She urged “a spirit of mutual helpfulness” in easing the hardships of the Depression but insisted that the country’s leaders probe deeply into its causes with a view to fundamental reform.

  It was considered unseemly for her to campaign for her husband, but it was decided she should take the stump for Herbert Lehman, who had been nominated for governor over Tammany’s objections and faced a hard fight. While Roosevelt, in Pittsburgh, to the delight of the conservatives among his advisers, condemned Hoover for his “reckless and extravagant” spending policies and promised a 25 per cent reduction in federal payrolls, Eleanor, in Syracuse a week later, was not so sure economy was such “a very wonderful thing . . . it can do a great deal of harm.” The Republicans had cut $21 million out of the state budget, but “practically all of that came out of the appropriation for the Department of Public Works . . . [which] means that thousands of young engineers, draftsmen and laborers were thrown out of work.” Since the Republicans subsequently were obliged to appropriate not only what they had cut out of the budget, but more for public relief, she wanted to know which would have been better—“to pay that money out in salaries for labor on public works, or to pay it in unemployment relief?”9