Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  If Elliott and Ruth were associated with the anti-New Deal crowd in Texas, Anna and John were as staunch New Dealers as Eleanor herself, and this was an added bond between them. “Our voters reelected a complete New Deal delegation to Congress,” John reported to his father-in-law in November, 1938. “So far as we are concerned in Washington [state], you can write your own ticket in 1940.” The president did not comment on this last point when he replied to John; he was more concerned with his son-in-law’s success as a publisher: “I am keen to hear all about the progress of the paper. Somebody told me that either you are in the black or about to get there. It goes to prove that a Hearst paper, minus Hearst’s management, can be made to pay if it is run by a fellow like you.” A few Seattle citizens were unhappy that, as a Hearst paper, the Boettigers published syndicated material critical of the president and First Lady; “they are not treating you and the President as they should as far as I can determine by the paper,” one of them wrote Eleanor. “I assure you,” she replied, “that they treat the President and myself with the highest respect and affection and the fact that they have one of Mr. Hearst’s papers has nothing whatever to do with their attitude towards us personally.”8

  No sooner were Anna and John in their house in Seattle than Eleanor flew out, a “slow trip” because of low ceilings, to see them and to report to Franklin that their house was “lovely,” that they were “making a real place for themselves,” and that “Sis & Buzz are very well & happy. . . . Their teeth are being straightened so bars are rather in evidence.”9

  There were innumerable jokes, inside the family and out, about Eleanor’s travels. “Dearest Babs,” Franklin wrote her from the U.S.S. Houston, “The Lord only knows when this will catch up with my will o’ the wisp wife, but at least I am proceeding according to schedule.” Admiral Byrd set two places for supper at his South Pole hut just in case Mrs. Roosevelt should drop in; a child who heard the Robinson Crusoe story knew that the footprints in the sand were those of Mrs. Roosevelt; and the newswomen, in their 1936 stunt party, had Mrs. Roosevelt shooting to Mars in a rocket ship. The most famous story became a part of American presidential lore: the New Yorker cartoon in which two startled coal miners are looking up and saying, “Good gosh, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt.” And when life did imitate art and Mrs. Roosevelt went down a coal mine in a miner’s coveralls, Sara sent a barbed comment to her son, “I hope Eleanor is with you this morning. . . . I see she has emerged from the mine. . . . That is something to be thankful for.” Sara never gave up trying. “So glad Eleanor is there with you dear,” she wrote her son in Warm Springs, and sometimes she was even blunter: “I see Eleanor is back in Chicago, so perhaps you will have her at home tomorrow—I hope so.”10

  Yet much of Eleanor’s traveling was done in order to keep in touch with the children. They were getting married (and divorced), settling down, having children, and setting up in business, and she was there to nurse them, to celebrate a birthday, to inspect a new grandchild, to counsel them, and to give them news of the rest of the family. She spent Christmas week, 1936, in Boston where Franklin Jr. was hospitalized for an operation on his sinuses, and stayed through New Year’s Eve, sometimes in the company of, sometimes spelling, Ethel duPont, whom Franklin Jr. was to marry in June, 1937. Ten months later she was back in Boston to be with Johnny while he had four wisdom teeth removed, spending much of her time in the company of his fiancée, Anne Clark, a North Shore debutante. A few weeks later during Christmas of 1937 she canceled all engagements to fly out to be with Anna’s family while Anna went into the hospital for an operation. And she made a special plane journey to Seattle to be with her daughter for the birth of her third child and to keep a promise to Buzz to be there for his ninth birthday, but she had to cancel the latter when the telephone rang at supper and she learned that Hall’s son Danny had been killed in an airplane accident in Mexico. Dan Roosevelt had been a brilliant youngster, adventurous, with every promise of using the talents Hall had so tragically thrown away. “I am so deeply sorry for the boy’s mother and my brother,” Eleanor wrote an old friend, who had been one of the Morgan sisters of Staatsburgh. “Hall was so proud of Danny and was really very deeply affected. We can’t put old heads on young shoulders and they seem always to confuse recklessness with courage.” She left Seattle immediately to be with Hall and wrote him that “we must believe that there is a reason for all things in the universe, and turn to helping those, if we may, who are left behind, and will carry through life the scar of a great sorrow.” She accompanied Hall to Dedham for the burial. “It meant a lot to us,” Margaret Cutter, Hall’s former wife, wrote her, “and I feel that you were the one person that kept Hall going. I was so terribly sad for him. Dan had been such a belated discovery and had proved such a perfect companion and was something for him to cling to.”11

  Eleanor was still the one the family turned to in moments of stress and tragedy. One wintry morning the telephone rang between 4:00 and 5:00 and she heard Franklin Jr.’s voice saying that he and Ethel had run into a car without lights parked on an icy road and were in the hospital. Would she come? When she reached the hospital, she discovered that Franklin Jr. had a concussion and did not remember having called her and could not imagine how she came to be there; “his action was probably subconscious,” she recalled in This I Remember, “a reassertion of the childhood habit of turning to one’s mother automatically when one is in trouble.”12

  She was “well conditioned to coping with family crises,” she wrote. She could not afford to go to pieces because the president could not be worried more than was absolutely necessary.

  The wedding of a Roosevelt to a duPont, the family which had heavily subsidized the American Liberty League, was one of the story-book romances of the thirties. The day before the wedding Eleanor walked into her husband’s oval study, but seeing a group of gentlemen engaged in what seemed to be a very serious conversation, began to back away, when Franklin motioned to her. “The question under discussion is, what do I do tomorrow afternoon? I don’t think I had better stand in the line.” She was not very helpful, she said, but remembering the way the guests had abandoned her and Franklin at their wedding to cluster around their Uncle Theodore, she murmured, “It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you don’t steal the show.” The wedding was beautiful—that is, “the church part of it,” Eleanor reported to a newspaperman to whom she wrote frequently to encourage him in his effort to cure himself of alcoholism; “Ethel was a most beautiful bride. There were so many people at the house for the reception, the bridal party never sat down for five hours and they were utterly exhausted.” Eleanor herself had to abandon the receiving line at the duPont home in Greenville, Delaware, to make a broadcast in Washington. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sad,” she told reporters as she left, “but simply say prayers that fundamentally their lives may so develop that they may be useful lives and therefore happy ones.” That was her attitude, too, a year later when John married. “So our last child is leaving us,” she wrote Caroline Phillips in Italy. “He seems so very young, but he is determined to get married and I do love Anne Clark very much.” To Anne she gave the last string of pearls from the five-string choke collar that Sara had given her on her wedding day. Had she also given any “motherly advice” to Anne and Johnny, a relentless press wanted to know. “I am not good at giving advice,” she replied. “I believe in letting them work out their own plans.”13

  She was not inclined either to give advice or to make predictions as to how a marriage might turn out. The younger the couple was, the greater the hopes and dreams that were vested in the marriage relationship, yet when the fires of infatuation cooled who could be sure that the partnership would not fall apart, especially if because of immaturity neither husband nor wife understood that any human relationship to prosper must be carefully tended? “It would be better if people did not marry too young,” she felt, “and if they waited until they had more experience. Unfortunately, most people in this world
have to learn by experience.” She partly blamed herself for the early marriages of James, Elliott, and Anna. The Governor’s Mansion had not been a home, and they did not feel that the Sixty-fifth Street house was theirs, nor even Hyde Park. That made them anxious to establish homes of their own and had added to their need to make money quickly.14

  Elliott was the first to get a divorce. Anna was very close to him at the time, and at his bidding went to Chicago to talk things over with him. The family had heard rumors that he intended to get a divorce and marry Ruth Googins of Texas. “See if you can’t keep him from rushing into it,” Franklin asked his daughter. “He did not say he and Mother were opposed. He did not say ‘don’t do it’ and when I called him from Chicago and told him Elliott was going to remarry right away, he was very annoyed, but his annoyance was at Elliott’s doing it so quickly.” Eleanor was more outspoken. She found it impossible to believe, she wrote her husband, that Elliott was considering remarriage, especially since he had no job. She flew to the West Coast to talk with him, but he was a restless young man, determined on his own course, and when he went ahead, despite his parents’ pleas that he delay, they, of course, like most parents, loyally supported their headstrong child. Children should feel, Eleanor said, that they could always return to the home of their parents “with their joys or with their sorrows. We cannot live other people’s lives and we cannot make their decisions for them.” She had learned to accept “any change in her children’s lives without making them feel guilty about it.”15

  She and Franklin had suffered so greatly from Sara’s efforts to run their lives that they leaned over backward not to do the same with their children. They were unhappy when their children married too young and divorced too easily, but beyond being available to them for counsel and understanding when their private lives ran into difficulties, they resisted the impulse to interfere. Eleanor was more accessible than Franklin, for he, in addition to being tied down by his presidential duties, found it difficult to talk about intimate matters. Never once did either parent, although the children’s divorces were a source of political embarrassment, advance political considerations as a reason for their not doing what they felt they had to do. The president said that “he thought a man in politics stood or fell by the results of his policies,” Eleanor wrote; “that what their children did or did not do affected their lives, and that he did not consider that their lives should be tied to his political interests.”16

  Unlike Sara, Eleanor could not tell others what was right and what was wrong, since so often she was not sure herself. “Even if there were what the World calls sin,” she replied to a woman who had written to criticize the Roosevelt children’s divorces.

  I think we should remember that the Christian religion is patterned on the life of Christ, and that Christ showed in many of his actions that he believed one should judge not so much by what people had done but by the motives and a complete knowledge of the situation. Few people ever have that about other human beings. That knowledge is given only to the Lord.17

  She found it difficult to condemn divorce if behind the decision to do so there had been careful consideration and a genuine effort to make the marriage work. She thought the real culprit in most divorces was incompatibility: “Incompatibility of temper sounds like a trivial cause for divorce and yet I am not sure that it is not the most frequent cause. It is responsible for quarrels over money, and it drives husbands and wives away from each other to other interests and other people and brings about the most serious acts for which divorce is usually granted.” For that reason she thought people should be able to separate legally without moral stigma:

  Naturally, the people who, like the Catholics, believe that marriage is consummated in Heaven, are not going to agree on this point, but I think people can be made far more unhappy if they find they have developed different standards and different likes and dislikes, than they sometimes are by really very serious things. It does not seem to me necessary to brand everyone who gets a divorce with something as serious as adultery or desertion, when frequently it is a case of different development and different opportunities for development.18

  Eleanor rejoiced in the marriage of Anna and John because she felt they had not gone into their second marriage in any lightness of spirit. Both had profited by the sufferings and mistakes of their first marriages and now were drawn together by shared values and interests and by temperaments that were attuned to each other.

  She no longer felt that a marriage should be preserved for the sake of the children. She deplored divorce, she wrote, “but never for a minute would I advocate that people who no longer love each other should live together because it does not bring the right atmosphere into a home.” It was very sad when a couple was unable to make a success of marriage, “but I feel it is equally unwise for people to bring up children in homes where love no longer exists.” Such views did not sit well with the church.

  I am afraid I cannot claim to be a very good churchwoman. In fact, when I was tendered the Churchman’s Award this year for promoting goodwill among certain groups, I carefully explained that while my husband was a good churchman, I was not particularly orthodox. I have a religion but it does not depend especially upon any creed or church.19

  There was another reason why she hesitated to judge her children critically: being the children of public figures, especially of a president, they were at all times in the pitiless spotlight of publicity, so that every misstep or case of bad judgment became the subject of headlines, the slightest scrape was blown out of all proportions, the most improbable tale given the widest currency. “It seems so futile,” she wrote a woman in Jamesport, Missouri, “to answer such foolish statements. . . . However, I assure you that I have never seen any of my boys dance with a nude woman.”20

  “Incidentally, both our younger boys in college are having a very bad time as the sons of a man in public life,” she wrote her Allenswood schoolmate, “Bennett.” “It is not so easy . . . unless you never do anything or unless you have a Secret Service man with them all the time. Neither of these seems to go with the temperament of these two young things.”21

  The children resented the publicity. Franklin Jr. wanted to know why he should make headlines for actions which passed unnoticed when the Joneses or Smiths did them. His mother’s reply that being the son of a president carried advantages as well as drawbacks, privileges as well as responsibilities never quite satisfied him. Franklin Jr., or “Brud” as he was called in the family, was a speed demon who held the unofficial Harvard-to-New-York record and was often stopped for speeding. “Will you speak seriously & firmly to F. Jr. & John about drinking & fast driving?” Eleanor begged her husband. “I really think it’s important.” Neither of the boys had any memory of their father having done so.22

  “Father had great difficulty in talking about anything purely personal or private,” Franklin Jr. recalled, “especially if it involved anything unpleasant. He left that to Mother.” On one occasion, at Eleanor’s insistence, Franklin finally agreed to speak sternly to “Brud” about his fast driving, but, Franklin Jr. recalled, his father “couldn’t even bring himself to summon me to his little office on the porch of the Big House. It was Mother who had to say ‘Your father wants to see you.’” When Franklin Jr. went in, his father hemmed and hawed and finally said, “‘Your Mother tells me I must ask you to give me your license until you have learned your lesson.’ He put it all on Mother. That was a basic trait with him. He couldn’t fire anyone. I’m the same way. I hate an unpleasant showdown with anyone.”23

  Bad as the publicity was, it was equally injurious when officials excused offenses for which a Smith or a Jones would have been penalized. On one occasion when Franklin Jr. was picked up for speeding, instead of fining him the judge took him home for dinner.* “Father was simply furious,” Eleanor recalled. Her children, wrote Eleanor, were “five individualists who were given too many privileges on the one hand and too much criticism on the other.”24

 
; While Johnny was in Cannes in 1937 for the annual festival which ended in a “battle of flowers,” he made international headlines when he was accused of having emptied a bottle of champagne in the mayor’s plug hat. He denied the story, and William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, backed up his account. His parents believed the denial, and Eleanor was at the boat to meet him on his return:

  If it had been one of my other boys I would have felt the incident was more than probable, for they have great exuberance of spirit. It just happens that John is extremely quiet, and, even if he had been under the influence of champagne, I doubt if he would have reacted in this manner.25

  But these episodes of publicity were minor compared to the steady attack on the older children on the grounds that they were trading on their father’s position in order to make money and win favors for their associates. The children felt that the reverse was true—that government officials bent over backward when Roosevelts were involved in order to avoid the suspicion of favoritism. This was Elliott’s complaint to his mother when she visited him in Texas. “He is dreadfully upset,” Eleanor wrote her husband,

  that no decision is given on Ruth’s station & says that it is hurting him in getting the management of stations he sells for everyone thinks the Com. [Federal Communications Commission] will give no decisions on stations if his name is connected with them. It does seem as tho’ they had had ample time to make up their minds. Couldn’t you or James say a word which w1d hurry them? You know Elliott’s disposition, he is beginning to think you are both agin’ him.26

  Despite this plea, according to James, who was at this time one of his father’s principal secretaries, he and his father stayed out of it, and in time the FCC licensed the stations that Elliott sought in the name of his wife. Elliott was an able executive, but whether the FCC would have granted the licenses if his name had not been Roosevelt is a question to which no determinate answer is possible. But even if the commission had been influenced by the Roosevelt connection, was that so different from the advantages that all children reap who bear illustrious names?