Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “We laugh about it a great deal when I formally make an appointment for the children to see their father at given hours when something comes up which really must be discussed and decided but it is not as much a laughing matter as we make it out to be. . . . ”32 Usually Eleanor did not see Franklin until he returned from the executive offices to get ready for dinner. They rarely dined alone, and while conversation flowed freely at the dinner table, it was inevitably of an impersonal sort. After dinner, officials often came in to work with the president, leaving Eleanor to entertain their guests and bid them good night. Then she would go to her desk to work on her mail. Before she went to bed—“and sometimes that is very late”—she took her dogs for a walk around the White House circle and drank in the beauty and stateliness of the White House, with its portico “lighted only by the lights from the windows, and yet shining out in its whiteness against the darkness.” Sometimes during the first few months officials stayed until the early morning and Eleanor did not dare to go to bed for fear of missing something that might happen while she was asleep.33 In any event, she did not go to bed before going in to say good night to her husband, sit on his bed, and chat for a while. It was often the only chance she had to talk with him about the things she really had on her mind.

  However late she stayed up, her day usually began at 7:30 A.M. with exercise or a ride in Rock Creek Park. Her horse, Dot, which she had bought from Earl, was stabled at Fort Myers and brought over to the park in an army van. Missy was occasionally her companion on these rides, but more often it was Elinor Morgenthau, with whom she was closer than any other woman in official Washington. Eleanor, in her riding habit and with a velvet ribbon around her soft, light-brown hair, became a familiar figure along Washington’s bridle paths. Once her horse reared, frightened by a newspaper that blew across her path, and she was thrown. “I slid off very gracefully right into the mud,” she told the reporters, who inevitably heard of the mishap.34

  After breakfast she went to her desk and saw in turn the head usher, the social secretary, and the housekeeper. Ike Hoover, who had come to the White House during the administration of Benjamin Harrison and who died soon after the Roosevelts arrived, was succeeded as chief usher by Raymond Muir, a tall, dignified lawyer from the Veterans Bureau—always polite, always unruffled. The usher’s room, which was at the right of the entrance as guests came in, was the clearing house of the establishment. Muir kept track of everyone who came into the White House living quarters—family, guests, people who had appointments with anyone in the White House. He saw that guests were met by a White House car and escorted them to their rooms if Eleanor could not do so herself. Mrs. Edith Helm was Eleanor’s social secretary, as she had been Mrs. Wilson’s. Mrs. Helm was tall, distinguished, erect, and correct, and bore the unmistakable stamp of someone who had grown up in one of the services. The daughter of an admiral and the widow of an admiral, she knew Washington’s customs and conventions. Every morning she and Eleanor went over her lists and invitations and table orders. And finally Eleanor talked with Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, who did the buying, prepared the menus, and supervised the household staff. Ike Hoover had been concerned because Mrs. Nesbitt was not a professional housekeeper, but Eleanor preferred Mrs. Nesbitt to a professional manager because she was conscientious and something of a business woman, and she was grandmotherly and unpretentious. She would do Eleanor’s bidding, not vice versa.35

  By the time Eleanor was finished with Mrs. Nesbitt, Tommy (now Mrs. Frank J. Scheider) had gone through the mail and taken out all the personal letters, communications from government officials, and any other letters that looked as though they might require immediate attention—some fifty letters a day, only a small proportion of the mail that Eleanor received. “Letters and letters and letters,” she said of the first weeks in Washington. “Wire baskets on my desk, suit cases of mail going home even on Sundays” with Tommy, “a sense of being snowed under by mail.” That first year 300,000 pieces of mail came to the White House addressed to her, and she loved it.

  The letters that were not kept for Eleanor’s immediate attention were sent to the Correspondence Unit, where they were opened and classified. (It was unofficially called the social bureau, indicating the nature of the bulk of the First Lady’s correspondence in previous administrations.) There were two divisions: one, under Mrs. Helm, handled the social correspondence; the other, under Ralph Magee, worked with Tommy on the remainder of the mail. Magee’s unit used form letters dating back to the Cleveland administration, which did not seem adequate to Eleanor, so she rewrote some; but generally she tried as far as was humanly possible to see that a letter received personal attention either from Tommy or herself. Some letters Tommy answered directly, and to others she dictated replies for Eleanor’s signature, but for the fifty or so letters which were of special interest, Eleanor made a note of the kind of answer she wanted Tommy to compose or, in cases involving personal friends or controversy, she dictated a reply herself. In addition, there were letters she answered in longhand—to Hick, Earl, Nancy and Marion, her children, and old friends. So when she was not on the telephone, receiving callers, or otherwise engaged, there was always the basket of correspondence to get through, even if it meant working through the night after the last dinner guest had departed or slipping away from the movie that was being shown in the hall outside the president’s study. However she managed to do it, by morning there was always a basket of outgoing mail on Tommy’s desk.

  When she was not writing letters, she was writing articles. With Louis Howe acting as her agent, she contracted to do a monthly 750-word piece for the North American Newspaper Alliance at $500 an article. They asked her to write “as one woman to another, of your problems as the woman of the household.”36 She signed the contract after exercising her option to cancel her arrangement with MacFadden to edit Babies—Just Babies. Criticism did not faze her, but ridicule did. Even her friends spoofed her about Babies—Just Babies. At the annual party of the Women’s Press Club one of the songs began:

  We are new to the business of running the show,

  We’re babies, just babies, just babies.37

  When in addition to the ridicule there were editorial differences with publisher MacFadden, she decided to withdraw, and the magazine ceased publication. That same month, May, Louis Howe negotiated a contract for her with Woman’s Home Companion to do a monthly column, “I Want You to Write Me,” for which she received $1,000 each month. In addition, Anna was paid $325 a month for handling the correspondence that came flooding into the magazine as a result of the column. A friendly congressman alerted Marvin McIntyre that there was Republican criticism in the House Appropriations Committee of the number of letters that Eleanor referred to the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor to be answered for her. It was assumed that this mail was the result of the Woman’s Home Companion columns, and when it was pointed out that the mail that came in to the magazine was answered there, the criticism was dropped.38 But there were other complaints.

  He did not mean to be impertinent, a member of the staff of the Writer’s Digest wrote, but weren’t these writing offers made to her because her name would attract attention? She did not think him “the least impertinent” for asking such questions, Eleanor replied. “I do not like to think that my name is entirely responsible for my receiving these offers, although I realize it must be a part of it, as I cannot very well divorce myself from my name. I always honestly try to do every job to the best of my ability.”39

  But if there were many critics, most of the country approved. Here was the wife of the president, wrote historian Mary R. Beard, who through a massive correspondence, articles, press conferences, and speeches was giving “inspiration to the married, solace to the lovelorn, assistance to the homemaker, menus to the cook, help to the educator, direction to the employer, caution to the warrior, and deeper awareness of its primordial force to the ‘weaker sex.’” The country was accustomed to “the Great White Father
in the White House” instructing his people “in right conduct,” commented Mrs. Beard; now the “Great White Mother emerges as a personality in her own right and starts an independent course of instruction on her own account.” Mrs. Beard, a long-time feminist, clearly thought the country as well as the women had gained by this step forward in feminine evolution.40

  Were they having guests the next week end? Franklin asked Eleanor at the beginning of April. “Probably a house full,” she replied. Perhaps she had better put off some of them, he suggested. Why? Were they having some guests he had not mentioned? “I think, perhaps a few Prime Ministers.” In April Eleanor discovered that “there were certain social duties which were entirely mine and which must be performed even if the skies seemed about to fall.”41

  Formal entertainments such as that occasioned by the visits of Ramsay MacDonald, Edouard Herriot, and the host of other foreign dignitaries who arrived to discuss the preparations for the London Economic Conference had an obligatory, ceremonial character. If she was sad because children and friends had to be seated at remote ends of the table, she reminded herself that it was the “people’s hospitality” that she was dispensing, not her own, and that men and women had to be treated according to rank and precedence. Even with American public officials, the respect for their office and the pleasure their status conferred upon them were high among the inducements that had brought them to Washington, and this had to be recognized. “It is really the position which is invited and not the person!” And it was not Eleanor Roosevelt, the person, she realized, whom officials were anxious to meet, but the “wife of the President.”

  That was equally true of the thousands who came to her afternoon teas and receptions. Conventions came in great numbers to Washington in April, and they had to be received. One group would come in at four and another at five. Sometimes it was much worse, as in the case of the Daughters of the American Revolution, when Eleanor shook the hands of 3,100 women in an hour and a half: “If you don’t think that rather trying, you want to try it sometimes.”42 A visit to the White House was an exalted occasion to the women she received. They wanted it to be memorable, and the smartly turned-out junior military aides who attended the First Lady and the very dignified ushers who escorted the guests to the Red Room or the Green Room helped make it so. With the help of Mrs. Helm, who admonished Eleanor gently and insistently upon the importance of protocol, she finally came to realize that the handshaking and receiving were more important than she thought. “I was a symbol which tied the people who came by me in the long ever-recurring receiving lines to their government,” she noted later.43 Once she understood the significance of the receptions and teas, she no longer rebelled. “Four hundred will be quite easy to have for tea,” she assured Ruth Morgan, who was organizing the conference on the Cause and Cure of War.44

  Nor was she unappreciative of ceremony that was evocative of American history or symbolic of the responsibility and power of the presidential office. She quickly came to know the history of the White House—its rooms, its portraits, its china—and enjoyed telling guests about it. Her pulse quickened to the ceremony of piping the president aboard the yacht Sequoia for the trip down the Potomac with the MacDonalds, and when they came back it was she who told the press of the little ritual at Mount Vernon that was performed by all passing naval vessels: “the bell rings, the flag dips, the sailors man the rail; if there is a bugler aboard he sounds taps; everybody stands at attention in silence.”45

  Although entertainment, especially of foreign visitors, was rigidly prescribed by protocol, even here her personality quickly made itself felt. MacDonald was accompanied by his daughter Ishbel. “What a difference,” Bess Furman wrote, from their previous visit to the Hoovers in 1929, when Ishbel had been “shielded” from the press by Mrs. Hoover. Eleanor held two press conferences in the White House for the prime minister’s daughter, who was a political personality in her own right, and had her sit in on her own. With the press in tow they went everywhere together, including a visit, unprecedented for a First Lady, to a congressional hearing on the thirty-hour bill while Frances Perkins was testifying. A young Republican congressman named Everett Dirksen gallantly vacated his seat for the Democratic First Lady. MacDonald wrote from London that they had felt themselves “so much at home at the White House.”

  Most of the formal entertaining decreed by protocol and tradition was over by inauguration day, but in the autumn Eleanor would have to confront her first social season, and a “deep gloom” settled upon her as she went over the dates and lists for the state functions. “One thing is certain,” she told Mrs. Helm, “I can’t even have a headache between the middle of December and the beginning of Lent!” Tuesday and Thursday nights were set aside for the large formal parties that were dictated by custom. The dinner for the vice president was unusually the first, in December. She knew that the president’s dinner was “a command,” Mrs. Garner wrote from Uvalde, but they wanted to stay in Texas for Christmas and “you know how Mr. Garner feels about dinners—so why not forget that it is a custom to give a dinner for the Vice President?” She had talked it over with the president, Eleanor replied, “and he says there is no reason why the dinner for the Vice President could not be given just as well in January. . . . I do not think the order in which the dinners come matters at all.”46

  Her success as a hostess was due neither to stamina nor to adherence to protocol but to her constant thoughtfulness for her guests, the little human gestures that made them feel welcome and at home amid all the trappings of power and ceremony. When the Amyas Ameses, who lived next door to the James Roosevelts in Cambridge, arrived to spend Easter at the White House Eleanor was at a meeting. After saying good evening to the president the Ameses were taken to one of the guest rooms opposite his study, and as they were unpacking there was a knock on the door, and there was Eleanor bearing a bowl of fruit. Mrs. Ames was pregnant and occasionally nauseated; James had told his mother of this, so Eleanor asked if her guest would like to have a snack between meals, and if so, what? “Cocoa and rye twist,” Mrs. Ames said hesitantly. Eleanor saw to it that there was always a thermos and a plate of bread on the bedside table. On Easter Sunday when the whole household went to the cathedral for the service, Mrs. Ames went along doubtfully. “You won’t want to stay through the whole thing,” Eleanor told her; “I’ve arranged for the car to come back early and you can slip out before the sermon.” She inquired whether there was anyone the Ameses wanted to see in Washington, and when they mentioned the Francis Plimptons, she invited them for Easter dinner. “The White House had an aura of power and impressiveness about it, but they were themselves,” Mrs. Ames later recalled. “They acted as if they had always been there. It was like visiting friends in a very large country house. One was put instantly at one’s ease. She was the fantastically most thoughtful hostess I have ever met in my life.”47

  In 1913 when Eleanor, then twenty-eight years old, had arrived in the Nation’s Capital as the wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy, the social lists had dictated whom she received and entertained. The day was now long past when society as such had any interest for her; social standing did not foreclose an invitation to the White House, and neither did it insure one. Miss Mary Patten came, as full of gossip as ever, and so did the shy, almost speechless parents of a young hitchhiker to whom Eleanor had given a lift in upstate New York and had undertaken to get into a CCC camp, wiring Tommy that if he should turn up at the White House he should not be sent away. She reproached her cousin Muriel Martineau for thinking “we are not going to be able to see everyone just as we have always done,” and also Rose Schneiderman, who had been to Washington on union business and had not let her know: “Please always come to lunch or to see me. I always feel badly when I miss any of my friends.”

  To be a successful hostess she felt one really had to give oneself to one’s guests. This was easier to do when the people who were closest to her, who represented the private realm in her life, were somewhere n
ear. Their arrivals, departures, and birthdays were carefully recorded in the little diary she began to keep on March 4. “Said goodbye to Hick.” “Said goodbye to Earl & Ruth.” “Nan to stay.” “Rock Creek Cemetery with Hick.” “Marion and 10s come 7:30 Hick for night.” “E.R., Marion & Nan start upstate & Campo.” “Hall’s birthday.” “Anna & children arrive.” “Sisty’s Birthday Party.” “L.H. birthday. . . . Supper for L.H.” After the inaugural ceremonies, Elizabeth said to Esther, “Eleanor cares about having her friends go through things with her.” She did and invited them to one big dinner after another. She never let go of a friend.

  The two events she added to the list of formal entertainments were the White House Gridiron Widows party and a garden party for women executives in the government, many of whom had never been to the White House. The Roosevelt receptions and parties were “so carefully avoided by the ‘nice people,’” a Washington cave dweller was heard to say, that Eleanor “had to invite the people who worked for the government in order to have any attendance at all.” When these Washingtonians read the social news from the White House and found the names of those present unidentifiable, they sat back, disapproved, enjoyed Alice Longworth’s cruel take-off of her cousin, and thought nostalgically of the days when the Washington that counted agonized over whether Alice, as the wife of the Speaker, or Dolly Gann, as sister and hostess of Vice President Curtis, should have social precedence.