Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Though Farley was optimistic he was not yet ready to predict, as he did just before election, that Roosevelt would carry forty-six out of the forty-eight states. Far from it. In early August he forwarded to Eleanor a supporter’s dream that Roosevelt “would win the election by a large majority, carrying 37 states . . . [including] Mr. Landon’s home state,” and his accompanying comment was that “we must get a few laughs out of the campaign.” Uncertain about the outcome, Farley felt that the more militant New Dealers should be sidelined during the campaign, meaning especially Rex Tugwell and Harry Hopkins. Was it accidental that when the president’s schooner pulled into Welchpool, Harry Hopkins was there, he and his wife having come as guests of Eleanor Roosevelt?

  She herself was a controversial figure in the 1936 campaign, and some of the president’s more skittish advisers, although not Farley, “felt that she ought to stay in the background.”32 Her support of Negro rights (see Chapter 44), her insistence on pursuing her own career, her outspoken views, often slightly in advance of those of her husband, and the widespread complaint that she had commercialized the First Lady’s role caused some politicians to fear that the campaign might well turn into a referendum on whether the public preferred the old or new style of presidential wife. Alice Longworth hinted at this in an article she wrote on the ideal qualifications of a president’s wife. She by no means disapproved of Eleanor’s conduct as First Lady; in fact, as an activist herself with an insatiable interest in politics, she rather admired her cousin, but in her article she wondered whether people might not feel that “we didn’t elect her, what is she horning in for?”33

  The American Liberty League made Eleanor a primary target in its efforts to lure the Democratic South away from Roosevelt. Early in 1936 Raskob, duPont, and Sloan helped finance a gathering of southern Democrats in Macon, Georgia. Its purpose was to assault the New Deal root, branch, and leaf, and to launch a presidential boom for Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, idol of the wool-hat boys who referred to Roosevelt as “that cripple in the White House.” As the “grass roots” Democrats filed into the hall for the meeting every seat had on it a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World, featuring a two-column photograph which Vance Muse, the promoter of the meeting, described as “a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt going to some Nigger meeting, with two escorts, Niggers, on each arm.” Harry Hopkins accused Sam Jones, a Washington public-relations man who worked for the Republicans, of having hatched the plans “to smear Mrs. Roosevelt in Georgia.”34

  Among the hate items circulated anonymously in the campaign was a bit of rhymed scurrility directed at both the Roosevelts:

  You kiss the negroes

  I’ll kiss the Jews

  We’ll stay in the White House,

  As long as we choose. . . .

  Steve Early and Marvin McIntyre, both southerners and both among the president’s more conservative advisers, were unhappy about Eleanor’s racial views. Steve was furious, she knew, although he did not say anything to her, about her garden party for the girls from the reformatory in the District of Columbia. Eleanor had visited the District’s Training School for Delinquent Girls early in May, 1936, and, “horrified” by the conditions she found there, she determined to draw the attention of Congress and the District commissioners to them. Consequently, she invited the head of the school to bring her girls, three-quarters of them Negro, to the White House. “They were treated exactly as any other guests are treated and taken to see exactly what any other guests are taken to see.” She made one concession to local custom: the girls, Negro and white, remained in separate groups, segregated as they were at the school, and were served refreshments in separate tents. A few Negroes were offended that Eleanor, too, had deferred to the pattern of segregation, but the bulk of the Negro press realized that the important issue was not the segregation but that the First Lady had received as White House guests a group of girls most of whom were colored. The Afro-American noted that she did this in the wake of criticism “for appearing at colored gatherings and posing for photographs with colored people. . . . When she’s right, the President’s wife knows no such word as retreat.” She knew that Steve had blown up to others, including the president, about this garden party; “Franklin, however, never said anything to me about it.”35

  She so worried some of the president’s aides that there were reports she was considering curtailing some of her outside activities in view of the elections. To a friend who wrote expressing the hope that one such report was in error, she replied, “The piece in the paper had no basis—in fact I have neither talked to anyone or considered doing anything different from what I have always done.”36 Carrie Chapman Catt had been apprehensive that the campaign would increase the attacks on Mrs. Roosevelt. “The wife of a President or any other high official, suffered more from attacks upon him and his policies than did the man himself,” she cautioned her friend, adding that she was sure “these were not altogether comfortable times for you.” She was wasting her sympathy, Eleanor gently advised her: “I think I am more hardened to criticism than the President is, and it makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”37

  In March, the newspaperwomen had put on a skit at their annual party that underscored how drastically Eleanor Roosevelt had transformed the role of First Lady. A solemn-faced delegation appeared before a masked woman to inform her that her husband had been nominated for president and that she, as well as he, had to prove she was equal to the office. Then the delegation fired such questions at her as:

  “How many speeches can you make in twenty-four hours?”

  “Have you ever gone down in a coal mine?”

  “Can you write a newspaper column with one hand and shake 500 hands with the other?”

  “How’s your radio voice?”

  “How many places can you be at the same time?”

  “Can you remodel a White House kitchen?”

  “How many states of mind are bounded by Reedsville, West Va.?” At this point the prospective First Lady fainted away.38

  Ignoring the testimony of the newspaperwomen that the people liked their activist First Lady, the Republican strategists decided to make a campaign issue out of the proposition that Mrs. Landon would be different. Miss Nathalie Couch, a head of the Republican women’s division, flew out to Topeka, Kansas, and after conferring with the Landons said she knew of no plans for Mrs. Landon’s participation in the campaign. She expressed pointed admiration for the way Mrs. Landon was conducting herself, particularly her attempts to stay in the campaign background. “Mrs. Alf M. Landon does not intend to accompany her husband on any of his campaign trips and will devote the time from now until election to the care of her family,” the New York Times began its account of one of the rare press conferences Mrs. Landon held. As the wife of the governor she had never held a press conference, Mrs. Landon noted, and intimated she would hold few in the future. “If Governor Landon is elected, Mrs. Landon will spend her time in the White House,” Republican women orators proclaimed at their rallies.39

  The homebody image the Republicans tried to create of Mrs. Landon caused great amusement among the Democratic women working in the campaign. “She did not dare open her lips. She was kept under very close control.”

  It was not Republican strategists alone who completely misread how women felt about the President’s wife. A Democratic decision that although Eleanor could accompany the president on his campaign train she should stay out of sight did not survive the train’s first stop. “Then it was discovered that the crowds wanted Mrs. Roosevelt. If she failed to appear on the platform they shouted for her until she did appear, and they cheered her just as heartily as her husband, sometimes more heartily. She smiled and waved but made no speeches. She never does when her husband is about.”40 Scripps-Howard columnist Thomas Stokes was struck by the way the faces of women “would blossom in smiles and up went their hands in salute” when they spotted Eleanor on the train, and wondered
whether in the long run “the quiet pervasive influence of Mrs. Roosevelt” through women and the home “might not outweigh that of her husband.”41

  She celebrated her fifty-second birthday on the campaign train while it was crossing Nebraska and Wyoming. The Union Pacific Railroad provided a cake “large enough not only for our own party but for everyone on the train to share it.” There was a telegram from the White House staff: “This is to assure a gracious lady who fills her days with good deeds on behalf of others that the home folk appreciate all of her kindness to them. All the workers in the Executive offices join me in wishing you joy and happiness on your birthday.” It was signed by Steve Early.

  She continued to do her column all through the campaign but it was carefully nonpartisan. The only marked deviation from this posture was a ladylike thrust at Cousin Alice, who was campaigning for Landon.§ She did not name her cousin but referred to Alice’s attack on the president, headlined “His Mollycoddle Philosophy Is Called Typical of Roosevelt,” in which Alice had contrasted Franklin Roosevelt’s philosophy of security, dependency, and the so-called easy life with Theodore Roosevelt’s credo of the strenuous life. It was Alice’s view that her father had conquered his childhood disabilities and taught the nation the Spartan virtues of toughness and self-abnegation while Franklin Roosevelt, having learned to adapt to his illness, now was teaching the nation how to live with the Depression rather than to overcome it. “No man,” wrote Eleanor, “who has brought himself back from what might have been an entire life of invalidism to physical, mental and spiritual strength and activity can ever be accused of preaching or exemplifying a mollycoddle philosophy. Most of my mollycoddles have had too much ease, too much dependency, too much luxury of every kind.”43

  By the time they returned from the western tour, it was becoming clear that a Roosevelt victory, perhaps even a landslide, was in the making. “The western trip was almost too successful,” Roosevelt wrote Bill Bullitt. Eleanor had never seen crowds like those they were encountering in New England, she wrote as the campaign drew to an end. In Providence she was overcome by nostalgia for Louis Howe. She and Tommy went into the station restaurant for a cup of coffee and she thought of the many times she had been there with her friend and mentor: “I could see his little figure walking through that familiar station with the coat hanging from the sagging shoulders and the clothes looking much too big for him.”

  In the final days of the campaign the Republicans threw discretion to the winds. Landon, a man of moderate, often progressive, views and genial temperament, lost control of the campaign to the most reactionary and intransigent Republican politicians, and Molly Dewson deluged Eleanor with samples of Republican scare literature. The railroads were warning their men that if Roosevelt were re-elected the roads would be nationalized and thousands fired. Grocers were being advised their businesses would be destroyed by administration taxes and regulations. One national GOP bulletin directed all state headquarters in the final days of the campaign to stress that the administration was controlled by the Communists. Eleanor’s old friend and ally in the labor wars, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, had been nominated by the American Labor party as a Roosevelt elector; the Republican national chairman called Dubinsky—a Socialist and intransigent anti-Communist—a Communist, the American Labor party little better, and every day called upon Roosevelt to repudiate Dubinsky. Far from being daunted by these charges of Communism, Eleanor wrote Judge Dorothy Kenyon, who had explained that she was supporting the American Labor party as a party with “an enormous future,” that “I, too, must admit that the American Labor Party tempts me!”44

  The most reckless Republican tactic was the so-called pay-envelope campaign in which corporations inserted warnings in their employees’ pay envelopes that some future Congress would divert the insurance funds of Social Security to other uses. An indignant Roosevelt ordered his speech-writing team to take the gloves off for the wind-up at Madison Square Garden; they gave him what he wanted and he added a few punch-lines himself. It was a speech designed to stir the audience to fighting pitch. It succeeded. There was a ringing enumeration of Roosevelt’s commitments to the farmer, the consumer, the unemployed, the home owner, and the slum dweller, and after each pledge, almost like an incantation, “for all these things we have only just begun to fight.” But the section that brought the vast crowd to its feet, that carried overtones of hubris, and was seized upon by the Republicans as confirmation of their charges that Roosevelt aimed to make himself dictator, was his harsh, almost exultant defiance of his enemies and detractors:

  Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

  I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.45

  If Eleanor liked the speech, she did not say so in her column, which spoke only of the emotional quality of the audience’s reaction. She had her own test of what a campaign speech should be. On the campaign train she had written, “And then when you listen to all of the President’s speeches, you sharpen your critical faculties by asking yourself whether it is successfully informing the people of the nation.” The Garden speech was a call to battle whereas she wanted campaigns to be schools in citizenship. Moreover, having gone through many campaigns in which the voters on both sides warned that victory for the other meant the doom of the republic, she no longer took such rhetoric seriously. “I wish,” she wrote in mid-October, “I could convince myself that the defeat of either candidate would be so serious that it would make the victory for the side one believed in seem even more important. But the most I can feel is that we may have more difficult times if the opposition candidate is elected.” And in another column that week end she wrote that her letters showed that the people wanted her husband’s reelection “for very definite reasons, that they expect the next four years to bring some very definite achievements.” She thought this was a good omen, for it showed that people were “really thinking and beginning to realize that their help is needed in order to accomplish any real forward steps.”

  How could she be so serene, people asked on the eve of the election. There was no point in making a fuss over the inevitable, was her reply: “What happens tomorrow is entirely out of our hands, the record of the past four years, the campaign that has been waged, all are over and whatever the decision may be one accepts it and builds as useful and pleasant a life as one can under whatever circumstances one has to live.”46

  The Roosevelts listened to the returns at Hyde Park. There was a buffet supper for family, friends, and close political associates, and by 6:00 P.M. everyone settled down to the business of listening to the returns. The president was in the dining room with his sons, Missy, Sam, Tom Corcoran, leader of the new crop of bright young New Dealers, and McIntyre, with four telephones at hand. Corcoran improvised songs on his accordion; “Oh, Landon Is Dead,” was one of them. Harry Hopkins moved in and out, as did Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Most of the guests were in the library being entertained by Mrs. James Roosevelt and Eleanor, who was wearing a flowing white chiffon gown with a huge red rose in her belt. She worried about the food, about the guests who had not yet arrived, about the grandchildren who were not yet asleep. She did not have the president’s capacity for sitting back and savoring the moment, letting others worry about the details.

  The results were not long in making themselves evident. “Very quickly the people who can compute percentages seemed to be confident that the verdict of the people was in favor of the President.” Eleanor, as usual, was not so easily convinced, but when the leaders of the women’s division, who had been listening to the returns at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, telephoned that they were sure of the outcome and wanted to drive up to Hyde Park with Nancy Cook, she bade them come. “They were so much
elated by the results of their labors and the success of Governor Lehman and the State ticket and of Mrs. O’Day that they did not leave until about two a.m.!” She finally induced Franklin and the children to go to bed around 3:00 A.M. after talking on the telephone with Elliott and his wife in Texas.47 “You were right—so right,” Roosevelt wrote Farley, who the day before election had predicted that he was “still definitely of the opinion that you will carry every state but two—Maine and Vermont.”

  Eleanor found the feeling of the country toward her husband as revealed in the election returns and the messages that flooded in upon her afterward “a little awe-inspiring. . . . You cannot help saying over and over again to yourself: ‘What a responsibility for one man to carry!’ Of course, no man could carry it unless the people carried it with him.” Behind this last statement was a concept that later times would call “participatory democracy.” That is what she had wanted the campaign to be. She thought the mandate her husband had received, overwhelming though it was, needed to be continually revitalized and renewed by an involved citizenry. The “fundamental” task, “for the leader of a democracy, is to bring to the people the realization that true democracy is the effort of the people individually to carry their share of the burden of government.”48