Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Roosevelt’s goal was to get elected, and his rhetoric was shaped by that; Eleanor—as she ladled out soup on the bread lines, gave lifts to tramps, and sent hungry men to her house with instructions that they should be fed—was increasingly preoccupied with the necessity not only for fundamental changes but for preparing the country to accept those changes. Otherwise, she felt, Franklin’s task might prove to be an impossible one.

  She poured out her anxieties to Lorena Hickok on a midnight drive from Poughkeepsie to New York. She had attended Franklin’s final rally but insisted on driving back to town afterward so that she could meet her nine o’clock class in the morning. “Of course Franklin will do his best if he is elected. He is strong and resourceful. And he really cares about people,” she said, according to Hickok. “The federal government will have to take steps. But will it be enough? Can it be enough? The responsibility he may have to take on is something I hate to think about.”10

  The next day she was back in Hyde Park to cast her ballot and then returned to New York to prepare the buffet supper that she and Franklin gave for family, friends, and newsmen before going to the Biltmore Hotel to await the returns. Whatever her misgivings about becoming First Lady, outwardly she was as gracious and composed as ever. At the Biltmore, Franklin withdrew to a small suite upstairs to receive the returns with Flynn, Farley, and a few intimates. Eleanor stayed downstairs in the ballroom to greet the hundreds of party workers who had gathered to celebrate the victory that appeared to be in the making.

  Smilingly she moved from ballroom to State Committee and National Committee quarters, but as the returns began to come in she slipped off to give Elliott’s wife a glimpse of the lights and crowds and excitement on Broadway on an election eve and to bring Sara down to headquarters. As the fateful hour arrived, Louis turned gloomy, and as if to emphasize his behind-the-scenes role, secluded himself with his wife and son in his deserted offices across the street, calling Roosevelt and Farley on the telephone but refusing to acknowledge that the early returns were as good as they seemed. When victory seemed certain, Eleanor and Farley went over to get him. The “two people in the United States,” Roosevelt saluted Howe and Farley, “more than anybody else, who are responsible for this great victory.”

  The reporters assigned to stay with Eleanor were, as one of them wrote, “incredulous” at her composure in the midst of the klieg lights and the mounting hysteria of victory. Nothing seemed to penetrate her “profound calm.” She consented to a press conference. Was she pleased at the outcome of the election?

  “Of course I’m pleased—if it really is true. You’re always pleased to have someone you’re very devoted to have what he wants.” Then she paused and went on gravely, “It’s an extremely serious thing to undertake, you know, the guidance of a nation at a time like this. It’s not something you just laugh off and say you’re pleased about.”

  The reporters had been reading Hickok’s stories with their hints of Mrs. Roosevelt’s reluctance to become First Lady. Did she anticipate returning to Washington and its social functions? one asked. “I love people. I love having people in my house. I don’t think I know what ‘functions’ are,” was her smiling response.

  Would she miss New York? would she find life in Washington too restricting? the reporters pressed on. “I’m very much a person of circumstance,” she said, again avoiding a direct reply. “I’ve found that I never miss anything after it’s gone. The present is enough to deal with. Life is always full, you know.”

  The next morning the invisible bands whose fetters she had feared began to tighten. The police guard outside the Sixty-fifth Street house had been doubled, there were Secret Service men about everywhere, and the crowd of reporters outside was prepared to dog her footsteps all day. She was up early, and only Louis and Anna’s daughter Sisty, who attended Todhunter and whom she would take to school, joined her at breakfast. A reporter for an afternoon paper sent in a message begging her to come out so that they might have a story for the early editions, and she interrupted her breakfast to oblige. She told the press what she intended to do that day. She “refuses to allow the new honor that has come to her husband to interfere with the varied interests of her own life,” the Sun reporter wrote.

  But at Todhunter the fiction she had insisted on maintaining—that she was just like any other teacher—was ignored. The girls could no longer be restrained. They stood as she entered, and one of them presented her with an Egyptian scarab to bring her good luck. “We think it’s grand to have the wife of the President for our teacher,” the girl shyly said.

  She was not the wife of the president yet, she laughingly insisted, “and anyway I don’t want you to think of me that way.” In what was meant to be a reassurance to herself and a plea to those who knew her, she added, “I’m just the same as I was yesterday.”

  To Lorena Hickok, whom she now called “Hick,” who accompanied her to Albany the next day, she unburdened herself more fully than she ever had before. “If I wanted to be selfish, I could wish Franklin had not been elected.” She gazed out of the window at the long-familiar and reassuring vistas of the Hudson and the Catskills and continued, according to Hick, “I never wanted it, even though some people have said that my ambition for myself drove him on. They’ve even said that I had some such idea in the back of my mind when I married him. I never wanted to be a President’s wife, and I don’t want it now.” She looked at Hick. “You don’t quite believe me, do you?” she asked.

  She was glad for Franklin, she went on, “sincerely. I couldn’t have wanted it to go the other way. After all, I’m a Democrat, too.”

  “Now I shall have to work out my own salvation.” Life in Washington was going to be difficult, but there was not going to be any First Lady—“there is just going to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt. And that’s all.” She would very likely be criticized, “but I can’t help it.”11

  The criticism was not long in coming. She continued to do what she had done for ten years—to live her own life as teacher, publicist, and business executive. She accepted a commercially sponsored radio contract, wrote articles for the Hearst syndicate and for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and edited a MacFadden magazine, Babies—Just Babies. Although most of the proceeds went to charity and good works, many people reproached her for “commercializing her position” as the wife of the president-elect. When she continued to speak her mind on controversial issues, part of the press said she was embarrassing her husband.

  She had contracted with MacFadden to edit Babies—Just Babies with Franklin’s approval and after much discussion in the family. It gave a job as her assistant to Anna who was estranged from her husband. There was widespread ridicule as well as disapproval of the venture; the Harvard Lampoon parodied the magazine with an issue entitled “Tutors, Just Tutors.” She had absolute control over the magazine’s contents, she said defensively. “The job with the magazine I shall keep,” she told the press. Versatility and enterprise, the Hartford Courant said, were admirable in a woman generally, “but the fact remains that being the first lady of the land is a full-time job in itself and that the dignity of the President and of the country cannot but suffer when his name is used for commercial purposes.” Other papers echoed the Courant and suggested that “as a matter of propriety and in keeping with the dignity of the exalted position her husband is about to hold she ought to abandon some of her present occupations.”12 The debate became more heated when during a nationwide broadcast sponsored by a cosmetics firm she remarked that the average girl today “faces the problem of learning, very young, how much she can drink of such things as whisky and gin and sticking to the proper quantity.” She was not urging girls to learn how to drink, but she was underscoring Prohibition’s failure to curb excessive drinking; the conditions brought about by Prohibition, she said, required more strength of character and discipline than had been required of girls in her own youth. But that point was ignored by the drys and the “shocked protests” poured in. She was c
riticized in verse as well as prose.

  Dear Madam: Pray take this tae mean

  A kindly counsel fra a freen.

  That ye hae reached the White House door

  Is just because the folk were sore.

  Noo, though ye talk an’ though ye write

  Fair words wi’ brilliant sapience dight,

  Tis better far for ye, I ken,

  To curb the tongue an’ eke the pen . . . M’Tavish

  She defied convention in other ways that offended society. She went to Washington to call on Mrs. Hoover and look over the White House. She had received a telegram from Mrs. Hoover’s secretary asking where she would like to have the White House car pick her up and whether she would like her military aide to be in uniform or civilian attire. No car and no military aide, she had replied; she would go down on the midnight train, have breakfast at the Mayflower, and walk to the White House. But that was not the end of the affair. Soon after breakfast Franklin’s cousin, Warren Delano Robbins, who was then chief of protocol in the State Department, turned up with his wife and an official limousine to take her to the White House. No, Eleanor told them; she intended to walk.

  “But Eleanor, darling, you can’t do that,” Warren protested. “People will recognize you! You’ll be mobbed!” They argued with her, but to no avail. She liked to walk, Miss Hickok would accompany her, and that was that.

  Whatever Ike Hoover, the chief usher, may have thought about her disregard of protocol in arriving at the White House, he could not but admire the dispatch with which she let him know what she wanted. She “rattled it off as if she had known it her whole life. She had already decided on every last detail of the social plans for Inauguration Day; told me who the house guests would be and what rooms they would occupy, though this was five weeks in the future; gave the menus for the meals, both regular and special; told me what household effects she would bring; what servants should be provided for; what the family liked for meals and when they liked to have them; in fact, everything the Chief Usher could wish to know except what the weather might be on March fourth.”13

  She had her defenders as well as critics. The Nashville Tennessean, recalling the way “Princess Alice” had been the joy of the newspaper world in the Theodore Roosevelt era, said approvingly, “It begins to look as if Anna Eleanor Roosevelt is going to make Alice Roosevelt Longworth look like Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire.”14 And Heywood Broun did not see why she should conform to the traditional idea of a president’s wife and limit her role to saying “Yes, dear, you’re entirely right” to her husband. “I would hold it against her rather than in her favor if she quit certain causes with which she has been associated simply on account of the fortuitous circumstance that he happens to have been chosen as President.”15 He was “delighted to know that we are going to have a woman in the White House who feels that like Ibsen’s Nora, she is before all else a human being and that she has a right to her own individual career regardless of the prominence of her husband.”

  Despite such defenders, Eleanor thought it best to retreat. She intended to do no more commercial radio work, she announced; her writings would be confined to subjects that did not touch politics or her husband’s interests, she would give up teaching, and she would refrain from linking her name to anything that might be used in advertising promotion.16 The press applauded. “The President’s wife, indeed, during the term of her husband is in the position of a queen, as far as the public is concerned,” wrote the Baltimore Evening Sun.17

  The episode confirmed her worst apprehensions that she was going to be a prisoner in the White House “with nothing to do except stand in line and receive visitors and preside over official dinners.”18

  While she was in Washington to call on Mrs. Hoover, Mrs. Garner had come to call on her. A plain woman, she had for years served as her husband’s secretary and cooked his lunch on an electric grill in his office. She, too, was worried over what she could properly continue to do now that her husband was vice president–elect. Anxiously, she asked, “Mrs. Roosevelt, do you think I can go on being Jack’s secretary?”

  “I most certainly do!” Eleanor replied with vehemence.

  Mrs. Garner’s question may have influenced her own thinking about what kind of useful role she could play in her husband’s administration that would not provoke public criticism and that would enable her to be the counselor and confidante of her husband. As she listened to the men surrounding the president-elect, she began to feel that the gravest danger facing him as president was that he would never hear the truth, that everyone would say yes to him. “From my life in Washington I know how difficult it is to keep in contact with public opinion once a man gets there.” She was getting an enormous amount of mail—pleas for help, cries of despair, threats of rebellion. Why couldn’t she serve as her husband’s “listening post” and see to it that he obtained a balanced picture of what the country was thinking and feeling?19

  She mentioned the “listening post” theme in remarks before a farewell dinner the Women’s Trade Union League gave her. Some critics, she said, had asked her what right she had to set herself up “as knowing what other people are going through, what they are suffering. I cannot understand fully, of course. Yet I think I understand more than the people who write me think I do. . . . Perhaps I have acquired more education than some of you [who] have educated me, realize. . . .

  “I truly believe that I understand what faces the great masses of people in the country today. I have no illusions that any one can change the world in a short time. Things cannot be completely changed in five minutes. Yet I do believe that even a few people, who want to understand, to help and to do the right thing for the great numbers of the people instead of for the few can help.”20

  That is what she hoped her husband would be able to do. That is what she hoped she would be able to help him to do.

  Finally she approached Franklin, but she did so hesitatingly, tentatively, afraid she already knew what his answer would be. Perhaps he would like her to do a real job and take over some of his mail, she suggested. He looked at her “quizzically” and softly turned her down; Missy would consider it interference, he said. “I knew he was right and that it would not work, but it was a last effort to keep in close touch and to feel that I had a real job to do.”21

  Eleanor could not have been her husband’s secretary. She was not a Mrs. Garner, content to subordinate herself totally to her husband. A forceful personality in her own right, every whit as strong-willed as her husband, and with a clearer sense of direction, she would have found it difficult to handle his mail and make it exclusively a reflection of his thinking and purposes.

  Though she knew this was true, her husband’s rebuff hurt. The day before the inauguration she asked Lorena Hickok to pick her up at the Mayflower, where the Roosevelt and Howe families were staying until they moved into the White House. She directed the cab driver to take them out to the cemetery in Rock Creek Park, where they left the cab and walked to the cluster of pines that enclosed the Saint-Gaudens memorial to the wife of Henry Adams. They sat down on the stone bench that faced “Grief,” as the statue had come to be called. After they had both gazed at the hooded figure in hushed silence, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke, quietly, almost as if she were speaking to herself, about what the statue meant to her.

  “In the old days when we lived here, I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage, I’d come here alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.”22

  The wound left by the Lucy Mercer affair was still open, still painful. She was a woman of sorrow who had surmounted her unhappiness and managed to carry on, stoical toward herself, understanding and tender toward others. She had turned her sorrow into a strengthening thing before, and would do so again. As First Lady she would not be able to live her own life, but she would be able to render a ser
vice of love to her stricken country.

  35.MRS. ROOSEVELT CONQUERS WASHINGTON

  INAUGURATION DAY DAWNED GRAY AND CHILL. WHEN ELEANOR slipped out before breakfast to walk her Scottish terrier, the streets around the Mayflower were almost deserted and, in the dull, windy morning, cheerless.

  They seemed to mirror the mood of the country. The greatest productive machine in the history of mankind had slowed almost to a halt. With at least thirteen million unemployed, no one felt his job was safe. Banks everywhere were closing, and almost everyone feared for his savings. Eviction and foreclosure had sent an icy finger through the middle class on the farm and in the city. For the first time there was not merely hunger but fear of starvation. “World literally rocking beneath our feet,” wrote Agnes Meyer, the wife of the head of the Federal Reserve Board, in her diary.1 In New York two young Socialists had been arrested by the police in the middle of the night for pasting on the closed banks stickers that said “Closed! Socialism Will Keep Them Open.” Their evangelistic message was proclaimed to unseeing eyes. While the secretary of war of the departing administration had concentrated troops around some of the nation’s cities because of what “Reds and possible Communists” might do, it was fear and apathy that endangered the republic, not revolt.