Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “Mrs. Roosevelt is a magnificent trouper and a real newspaper person to carry on under such circumstances,” George Carlin, the manager of the United Feature Syndicate, said to Tommy.32

  Eleanor’s fellow-columnists enjoyed giving her advice, usually in their columns. “Of course Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt is new at the column-and-diary profession or racket and one should not be too harsh,” wrote Franklin P. Adams, whose “Conning Tower” in the Herald Tribune was devoted to a diary in the style of Samuel Pepys once a week. “In . . . yesterday’s ‘My Day,’ . . . she tells of having tried to get, though not where, a Chuddar shawl for Colonel Howe, probably Louis McHenry Howe. She tried in three places, unnamed, and at the fourth, also unnamed, found that an effort would be made to get the shawl. . . . We are not her editor, but if we were we would say, ‘Get names.’” The manager of the syndicate sent the column to her, saying “I agree with his comment heartily.” She had not wanted to advertise the shops, she replied, or to use names without asking people’s permission, but she would try to do better in the future. “I fear I have been trained to be too careful.”33

  Similar advice was offered by Damon Runyon a year and a half later. He wanted to know what she had for lunch, who were the interesting people to whom she referred, and what was interesting about them. She took the criticism in good spirit and tried to bear it in mind, but when she was hurried, which was often the case, her sentences were sometimes wordy, her verbs weak, her nouns abstract—so much so that the syndicate occasionally felt obliged to delete. Of one such paragraph, William Laas, the managing editor, complained that “the guests are not named, nor are the organizations they represent, and the question under discussion is not stated in so many words. These essential details are left rather mysterious.”34

  “I realize you are right,” was her contrite reply.

  She was not the only Roosevelt to begin a column in 1936. Alice Longworth had been recruited by a rival syndicate and was enlivening the Republican press with her political asperities. “I think Alice is having a grand time,” Eleanor wrote their mutual friend Nan Wood Honeyman. “She certainly writes well. I wish I were as free as she, though I do not wish ever to be as bitter.”35

  The difference between the two was the basis of a skit, “Alice and Eleanor, or These Little Girls Make Big Money,” which was put on at the stunt party of the Women’s National Press Club in March, 1936. It showed a tall lady in riding clothes with a knitting bag at her side sitting at a desk next to a tea table. She poured tea, knitted, and picked away at her typewriter. The sign at her desk read, “Roosevelt, E.” At another desk, labeled “Roosevelt, A.,” sat a woman with a large handbag, a lot of cigarettes, and newspapers. She smoked, glanced at a paper, wrote fitfully, strode up and down. They finished their columns simultaneously and, crying “copy,” left the stage. Then two distraught editors appeared. One, tearing his hair, read a tender, domestic little piece about a lovely tea hour around a roaring fire with Harry Hopkins reading fairy tales and Rex Tugwell piling logs on the Red Flames. That, screamed the hysterical editor, appeared in hundreds of newspapers under the name of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The other editor, equally upset, found that under Eleanor Roosevelt’s name there had appeared a column about the New Deal perishing of a potato diet and on the verge of being borsched to death.

  The copy boy, the skit ended, was to blame, for “he had put Eleanor’s syrup on Alice’s desk and Alice’s vinegar on Eleanor’s desk.”36

  Whatever Eleanor’s stylistic shortcomings, the column was popular. When editors left it out for a day readers protested. “I have a feeling,” Bruce Bliven wrote in the New Republic, “that the New York sophisticates are all wrong and that the country as a whole likes the sort of person Mrs. Roosevelt has in her column demonstrated herself to be—friendly, unpretentious, possessed of inexhaustible vitality, a broad interest in all sorts of people and a human wish for their welfare.” Her column was then appearing in 59 papers; a week later, right after the 1936 election, the Pottsville (Pennsylvania) Republican was added, a subscription that her syndicate considered “next only in importance to the President’s carrying Pennsylvania.” Though her circulation was smaller than some other columnists’, it was respectable. In February, she appeared in 62 papers with a circulation of 4,034,552; Westbrook Pegler was in 110 papers with 5,907,389; Dorothy Thompson was in 140 papers with 7,500,000; Heywood Broun was in 42 papers with 2,829,487; and Raymond Clapper was in 49 papers with 3,653,000.37

  When Eleanor first became a fellow-columnist, Westbrook Pegler approved of her; “about the only two things in the world that Pegler seems to like are ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and Eleanor Roosevelt,” wrote Carlin.38 Pegler’s enthusiasm bubbled over in a column datelined San Francisco, March 17, 1938, in which he described her day there:

  It had been another routine day in the life of one who is stingily described as the “most remarkable” and “most energetic” woman of her time in this country, but who deserves more than that. I think we can take the wraps off and call her the greatest American woman, because there is no other who works as hard or knows the low-down truth about the people and the troubles in their hearts as well as she does.

  Pegler went on to describe Eleanor’s lecture on peace, a performance that he considered the more creditable “because she works in the straitjacket of diplomatic and political restraints. . . . Mrs. Roosevelt has been before us for five years now. We know her better than any other woman, and she knows the country better than any other individual, including her husband, and the profit is all on our side.”

  But not long after this column appeared Pegler soured on the New Deal, the Roosevelts, and the American Newspaper Guild, and he began to challenge Eleanor’s credentials as a columnist. She was no more eligible for membership in the American Newspaper Guild, which she had promptly joined, he insisted, than he for membership in the DAR; she was “gainfully employed” as a journalist, as the guild constitution required of members, only because she was the wife of the president. The first step toward rehabilitating the guild would be to get rid of those who did not belong, starting with her. The president, with whom Mrs. Roosevelt discussed the column, advised her to ignore it. “Why get into a bad-smells contest?” he said.

  She was not going to get into an argument with her “kindly fellow columnist,” she wrote a few days later. She acknowledged that as the wife of the president she was in a different position than other columnists: “That has not always been the case and will not always be so in the future. In the meantime, I must worry along as best I can, facing situations that I find myself in, and doing the best I can with them as they are.”39

  In a private letter George Carlin, a good friend of Pegler’s whom he also syndicated, protested Pegler’s challenge to Mrs. Roosevelt’s eligibility: “Big names come and big names go, but a big name goes nowhere unless, through the quality of the daily delivery, the author can hold a following.” Recalling that in 1936, the year “My Day” had first appeared, Alice Longworth had also begun a column along the same lines, Carlin continued:

  If you will remember back, as long as I can remember, it had been the aim of newspapermen to get interviews with Princess Alice for twenty years without result. It had been thought that if she ever wrote, her stuff would make a great feature. The only trouble with the idea was that when it came to writing, she just couldn’t write. Her stuff fell by its own weight and disappeared from the column field.

  My Day goes on and on, not because it is written by the wife of the President of the United States, but because it is an honest projection of one of the great personalities of our own time; a woman great in her own right, and, as a newspaper columnist, possibly the best trouper of them all, never known to miss a deadline.40

  Much as she enjoyed doing her column, Eleanor’s secret aspiration was to write a novel or a play—she had always been a fervent admirer of creative writers. “I have always been sorry that I did not have the courage to go to see you when you
were living in Poughkeepsie,” she wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who, since she considered Eleanor Roosevelt the greatest woman in the country, was somewhat overwhelmed by this unaffected, almost hero-worshipful tribute.41

  Eleanor did not think she had the technical knowledge to write a novel but she had long toyed with the thought of doing an autobiography. The preface and footnote material that she supplied for the volume of her father’s letters she had edited had brought pleas from family and friends for more stories about her early years. Her conversation was filled with anecdotal material from those years, and on the Florida Special on the way back from Puerto Rico in 1934 she had held a group of correspondents spellbound with reminiscences of her wedding day twenty-nine years earlier and how Uncle Ted had stolen the show from her and Franklin. She discussed the project of an autobiography with her literary agent, George Bye,* in the summer of 1936. He immediately saw its possibilities and begged her to begin, and by autumn, as she traveled with the president on the campaign train, sections were being dictated to Tommy.

  Most authors would have considered writing an autobiography a full-time assignment in itself, but Eleanor did not slacken any of her other activities. She performed the election chores her husband assigned her, filed her column, did her lecture stint, discharged her official duties as White House hostess, and, of course, dealt with her voluminous mail. Some literary advice that she offered a farm woman from the Ozarks at that time shed light upon how she approached her own autobiography. Mrs. Alma W. Johnson of Rogers, Arkansas, had not sought literary guidance; like thousands of others she just wanted to pour out her troubles to the sympathetic soul in the White House. But Eleanor found in Mrs. Johnson’s chatty twenty-page account of rural vicissitudes a sweetness of spirit so moving and readable that she sent it to Henry Goddard Leach, who published the “poignant document” in the Forum. The publishing world became interested, and Simon & Schuster thought there might be a book in her life story. But Mrs. Johnson did not quite know how to begin, so Eleanor dispatched a long letter of encouragement and advice:

  Block out your early youth, start with your very first memory, putting in as many incidents as possible which will show up your relationship to your parents, the effect of circumstances upon you, the things you learned and the way your character was formed by the circumstances of your life and the influence, conscious or unconscious, of your parents.

  If you do that and will send those chapters to me, I will correct grammatical errors and spelling and send them to Simon and Schuster.42

  Although the lady in the Ozarks, even with Mrs. Roosevelt’s help, was unable to produce a satisfactory draft chapter, Eleanor, adhering to the plan of work that she had outlined, and with her incredible ability to shut off the outside world and concentrate upon the task at hand, made steady progress with her own story. By late autumn an exhilarated George Bye was showing the first part of the book to Bruce and Beatrice Gould, who had recently taken over the Ladies’ Home Journal and were on the lookout for features with which to reverse the magazine’s declining fortunes. They promptly purchased the serial rights for $75,000 and urged Eleanor to push on. “An evening buried amongst old letters,” she wrote. “Why does one keep old letters?” Some, unfortunately for future biographers, went into the fireplace that winter. The people at the Ladies’ Home Journal were “all aglow” with what they had seen, Fannie Hurst reported; they were delighted with her “fine clean prose” and the “simplicity and forthrightness of the narrative.”43

  Although she was little more than halfway through, Eleanor was sufficiently satisfied with what she had written to attend a party that the Goulds gave to celebrate the appearance of the first installment. She was so excited at the prospect of being the guest of honor at a literary party that she first went to the wrong address. She finally arrived at the right place, breathless, wearing a large black hat whose sweeping lines reflected her exultation. Radiant and happy, she took her place in the receiving line along with the Goulds and other Journal authors, including Dorothy Thompson. “I have written as simple and as truthful a story as I could write,” she told reporters at the party. “It was quite a job, but most exciting, all of it.” She had such a good time at the party that she stayed “an unconscionable time.” As she said her good-bys to the Goulds, she astonished them with the remark: “I can’t tell you what it means to me to have this wonderful recognition for something I have done myself not on account of Franklin’s position.”44

  The Goulds were not happy with the later chapters. While the early ones had been vividly evocative of a New York society that had vanished and of a childhood that had been unexpectedly painful and insecure, and were, the couple felt, “moving and veracious” and written with “startling honesty and courage,” some of the chapters she was now bringing in were “superficial and thin.” Suddenly her story had stopped being “the story of a human being and become almost a mere chronicle of events,” Gould wrote her. “Now I don’t think your life has become suddenly less interesting. But you have ceased suddenly to write about the most interesting aspects of it.” He wanted her to tell “the inner story . . . because it is all women’s story made more important because you are the person you are and occupy the position you occupy.”45

  She came to his office to work on revisions. They wanted the revealing phrase and telling detail. Could she give an exact description of her mother-in-law? Could she remember her husband’s first words when he realized he had polio? Bruce Gould, a brusque man, burst out at one point, “But this chapter is simply a listing of places you went and people you met. It has nothing to say—in fact—it’s terrible!” Mrs. Gould cast a reproving glance at her husband, but Eleanor took his criticism quietly. Insecure as a writer, she welcomed tough editing. She was herself a disciplined worker willing to do the best she could and would not waste time bewailing her failures and frustrations, but she offered a sympathetic shoulder to other writers on which to weep. “You do get yourself into a state of jitters,” she consoled novelist-friend Martha Gellhorn, who was in the throes of a new book. “It is better to write it all down and then go back. Mr. Hemingway is right. I think you lose the flow of thought by too much rewriting. It will not be a lifeless story if you feel it, although it may need polishing.”46

  The Goulds rightly perceived that the later chapters dealing with her years in Washington and her own entry into politics after her husband was stricken with polio were not as well written as the early ones. But it was not, as they thought, that the chapters were “hastily written,” but because there was so much she could not say. She could not let herself go as she had in speaking of her childhood. “Freedom is necessary for the development of the creative spirit,” she had once said in explaining why women were not as creative in some of the arts as men. Women were obliged to defer to conventions to a far greater extent than men, and that blunted their creativity.

  Franklin went over the manuscript carefully. He was a good editor, and in the earlier chapters his comments were chiefly stylistic, such as “the contrasts must be emphasized.” In the final chapters, however, he was concerned with substance. He was displeased with her account of his efforts to get into a uniform during the war, which she had written from her own point of view, to explain why she had been unwilling to try to influence his decision either way. He made a large X through this section, commenting, “This is at least unfair to me.” He wrote out his version of what had happened and she included it as he wrote it. He did not like some of the phrases she used describing the onset of his polio, such as “one night he was out of his head,” and she deleted them. When she said that Elliott had never really liked Groton as James did, his comment was “too rough,” even though it was an understatement, and when in writing about her brother Hall’s divorce she quoted Mrs. Selmes as having said, “If you love a person, you can forgive the big things. Infidelity under certain circumstances need not ruin a relationship,” he struck out the phrase about infidelity.47

  Anna and John were al
so unhappy about the last chapters when she left the manuscript with them during a visit to Seattle. There was an undercurrent of “bitterness” in the later part of the work, and although it dealt with a most difficult time in her life, it did not show how she had mastered her bitterness and developed her present philosophy of life. They felt that her quarrel with Anna over the room that she had given to Louis Howe should be left out and hoped that she would modify expressions that made it appear “that you had little part in, and little interest in, your husband’s career.” She softened offending passages, rewrote others.48

  As she reworked the last chapters, the Goulds began to purr. She had picked up the “dramatic thread” again, Bruce wrote encouragingly, but he pressed her to deepen her account of her husband’s illness with additional material on how she felt upon seeing that her whole life would have to be revised. “What you have given of your philosophy of learning to adjust yourself to the difficult business of life is so sound, so illuminating, that you cannot blame us for wanting more.”49

  Nothing in This Is My Story as it finally was published was false but much was said circumspectly. The Lucy Mercer affair went unmentioned, and her struggle with her mother-in-law was muted; her “night-of-the-soul” could be glimpsed but dimly. And yet, in retrospect, considering that she was First Lady when the book was written, it was astonishingly frank, and this was the public’s appraisal of the volume when it appeared.

  There had been some criticism of the Goulds within the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Curtis publishing organization because they had accepted a Roosevelt book, but their editorial judgment was swiftly vindicated when the “smash success” of This Is My Story became a major factor in helping the Ladies’ Home Journal overtake McCall’s and the Woman’s Home Companion. “Even more pleasing than this liking expressed in numbers was the exciting discovery that Eleanor Roosevelt’s biography was read, in effect, by everyone—in government, parlors and slums.”50