In private she was less amenable about accepting whatever came along. When the Ickeses visited the Boettigers in Seattle the talk inevitably turned to a third term. Anna knew as little as they about her father’s intentions, but she did know how her mother felt. Someone had suggested the possibility that the Roosevelt family might still be residing in the White House after 1940, Anna said. “Well, I don’t intend to,” her mother shot back. What was the use of being president, she wrote an old friend who asked about the possibility of Eleanor running for the presidency, “even if you wanted to be, if you cannot do the thing you ought to do?” Mrs. Meloney, whom Eleanor helped to secure administration speakers for the Herald Tribune Forum, always wanted the president. “FDR she wants you for a 3rd term and I thought this most unwise. You know I do not believe in it.”9
Although at this time (1938) Roosevelt agreed with his wife and was encouraging the candidacy of Harry Hopkins by bringing Hopkins into the cabinet as secretary of commerce, he was not averse to getting some fun out of terrifying the conservatives with the possibility that he might be the candidate himself.
Helen Robinson, a Republican committeewoman from Herkimer and daughter of Franklin’s half brother Rosy, dined at the White House a few days after the Munich crisis. “Franklin held forth as usual, and seemed in very good form,” Helen reported in her diary.
The talk ran into a discussion of “third term” possibilities in the early history of this country, all pointing most definitely in my mind, from all that FDR said on the subject, to the fact that he has it very much in his mind to run again. This terrifies me beyond words. But I could only look pleasant and eat my dinner and keep a poker face.10
Helen may have misunderstood Roosevelt’s historical references. His concern at the time was the selection of a successor who would carry on the New Deal. Andrew Jackson, he was telling Democratic leaders, including Garner and Farley, should have picked someone more in sympathy with his policies than Martin Van Buren if he wanted his policies continued. Franklin’s foray into history was meant to be a warning to the party’s conservatives.11 Eleanor asked Franklin how she should reply to letters from friendly Democratic politicians who wanted to do the president’s bidding, and his advice was reflected in her reply: “The thing for you to do is to work for delegates to the Convention who will only choose a liberal, New Deal candidate. Then, whoever is nominated, the ideas and policies will go on.”12
But who was that candidate? It was evident by 1939 that the Hopkins’ candidacy was stillborn. Perhaps if he had not been ill he might have been able to change that, but much of the time during the crucial pre-convention months he was either sick in bed or convalescing. There was no other New Dealer in sight to pick up the banner. The liberal cause looked desperate. Not only had the 1938 purge of conservative Democrats failed, but the Republicans had scored heavy gains. Congress was in a fractious mood, ready to vote down anything Roosevelt wanted just because he wanted it. In early 1939 a gloomy Ickes spoke of “the last-stand fight that the liberals are making under President Roosevelt’s leadership,” and Ickes and other New Dealers concluded that the president was the only liberal who could be nominated and elected.13
Eleanor disagreed, and had a long talk about it with Harry Hopkins during a luncheon with Hopkins and his daughter Diana in May. He described her attitude in a memorandum, dated May 28, 1939:
Mrs. Roosevelt was greatly disturbed about 1940. She is personally anxious not to have the President run again, but I gathered the distinct impression that she has no more information on that point than the rest of us. She feels the President has done his part entirely. That he has not the same zest for administrative detail that he had and is probably quite frankly bored. She thinks that the causes for which he fought are far greater than any individual person, but that if the New Deal is entirely dependent upon him, it indicates that it hasn’t as strong a foundation as she believes it has with the great masses of people. Mrs. Roosevelt is convinced that a great majority of the voters are not only with the President, but with the things he stands for, and that every effort should be made to control the Democratic Convention in 1940, nominate a liberal candidate and elect him. She has great confidence in his ability to do this, if, and it seems to be a pretty big “if” in her mind, he is willing to take his coat off and go to work at it.14
It was a period in which Roosevelt kept his own counsel, his mind veiled from everyone. No one knew what he intended, neither his wife nor his children. In Texas Elliott campaigned for Garner. John Boettiger, to the delight of the New Dealers, lambasted Garner in an open letter and belabored Elliott, insisting that Roosevelt was the only Democrat who could carry the West. But Anna and John were as much in the dark as everyone else as to what the president wanted. Did he know what the president’s reaction had been? John Boettiger wrote Ickes. The secretary was able to enlighten him: “Yesterday Pa Watson told me confidentially that the President had said to him and Steve Early, ‘John put it over on Elliott, didn’t he?’” But that reflected Roosevelt’s attitude toward Garner, not toward a third term.15
Although Eleanor believed there was still time to build up a liberal successor to the president, she went along with the strategy of the advocates of a third term to enter Franklin’s name in the primaries in order to head off Garner: “The Oregon primaries come early and Garner’s name will most likely be put up. They will put your name up, but this does not require your consent.”
She did not feel Franklin should run, and the outbreak of war did not change her view. The president had served his purpose in history, she told a young friend early in 1940, and youth should not cling to him for leadership. New leadership was needed for the next step ahead. Unless, she added, the international crisis made him indispensable.16
In Los Angeles for a lecture, her qualms about a third term came to the surface: “My own personal opinion—and not as the wife of a President—is that except in extraordinary circumstances we should stick to our traditions.” The conditions were becoming extraordinary, a friend suggested, as Hitler had just invaded Denmark and Norway. Eleanor acknowledged that. “It is all horrible,” she had written her husband from Denver,
and goes deep in our theories of civilization, for if this is done then only force counts, our concepts that right and wrong had to be considered all go by the board and we return to the Middle Ages with inventions that make such concepts more dangerous to the human race.17
Despite the cataclysmic events in Europe, she had the impression after talking with the president on her return that he was considering a Hull-Farley ticket. She had asked him about Hull’s social views, since she had always found the secretary “tight-lipped” on the subject. The president believed he was a liberal, yet she doubted that he was “strong enough to wage the fight that must be fought.” As for Farley, while most of the New Dealers were in full cry against him, Eleanor liked him. He was straight, and when he made a promise he kept it. But he did not know half of what the New Deal was about. Many of the problems of government were too much for him, especially in the field of foreign policy. He often said to her, “Well, I don’t understand it, but if you say it’s o.k. Eleanor, that’s enough for me.” She drew the line at Garner; she could not stand him. If he were nominated, she would campaign against him, even though to go against the party would be heartbreaking. With Europe in flames, how could she resign herself to a ticket that was second best, she was asked. Wasn’t it essential to have the strongest leader at the head of the ticket? For a moment she was silent. She did not like to contemplate the idea of the president’s running again, she finally answered. It might result in the same stalemate between Congress and the executive that had rendered the president powerless in his second term.18
A few weeks later Hitler’s mechanized armies and powerful air force struck westward, overrunning the Low Countries, knifing through the French at Sedan, and outflanking the Maginot Line:
The last week has been pretty grim. FDR has expected it & so have
I but the people are just waking up to the possibilities & everyone is worried. . . . FDR is getting more & more engrossed in the European problem but that is inevitable & one does feel a great futility in all human plans.19
The issue before the United States no longer seemed to be that of aiding the Allies but of American defense—perhaps even survival. If the Nazis came over she would give them a fight, Tommy impetuously exclaimed to her boss at the World’s Fair; she would “kick, scream, pull their hair!” She and the president had spoken of the terrible world it would be if Hitler should achieve world conquest, Eleanor commented, and the president had said to her—one thing, anyway, they both would be dead. That was the mood in the White House early in June.20
During a trip East James asked his mother whether, as a Marine Corps reserve officer, he should get his business affairs in shape so that he could leave, and she reluctantly told him he had better. He was ready to go, James went on, but his heart was not in it; he did not see how anything would come out of America’s entry into the war that would make it different from the last time. She had the same feeling, and, stirred by James’s fatalism, mirroring as it did the mood of so many young people, she asked Franklin how people could avoid the sense of futility that came from fearing that the same old cycle would repeat itself—wars interrupted by short eras of peace. Why should young people feel that such a future was worth fighting for? “Don’t you think that is a rather cowardly way to look at the future?” Franklin admonished her. He should give her one practical way to insure permanent peace, she pressed him. “Perhaps next time we shall have the sense to say there shall be no more armaments,” he replied. The conversation ended, but he, too, was not sure. The next day he confessed to her that he had worried over the points she had raised until all hours of the morning. She felt terribly guilty.21
“The news is bad & F.D.R. edgy & not able to get away enough,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray in Dublin, where Maude’s husband David had been posted as the U.S. minister.22 The German army was on the outskirts of Paris. Mussolini about to enter the war. A desperate French premier was deluging Roosevelt with entreaties that the United States should declare war. Such men as Ickes, Archibald MacLeish, and Walter Millis, who had long preached the futility of war, were reluctantly admitting to themselves that they now favored a declaration of war. Roosevelt knew it was politically impossible, even though he had realized long before the others how inextricably involved U.S. interests were with those of the democracies. Eleanor, returning to the White House, found everyone “in the same tense mood they had been in when I left,” she wrote the day Italy entered the war.23 Roosevelt longed to strike a blow for freedom, yet he could not.
The third-term pressure on him became stronger. To the liberal plea that he had to run in order to preserve the gains of the New Deal was now added the much more powerful and irresistible argument that he could not walk away when the nation was in its most critical situation since it had gained its independence. Yet another part of him hesitated. At Hyde Park over the July 4 holiday, Franklin’s cousin, Laura Delano, put the question to him while Eleanor sat nearby knitting. He cast his eyes despairingly toward the ceiling and exclaimed, “I am a tired and weary man.” Part of him longed to return to the Hudson. He knew he would wield great influence from the sidelines. Perhaps the strongest check to his saying yes was his conservatism, his respect for established custom, his feeling for American history. As Eleanor later explained to Isabella, who had been one of her bridesmaids and whose support of Willkie after the Democratic convention grieved her, “Franklin felt more strongly about the traditional part of it than I did.” Severely limited in what he could do to help Britain and France, uncertain as to what he should do about the third term, he became uncommunicative, even bad-tempered. “Those closest to him, including Missy,” wrote Ickes after an exchange of confidences with Pa Watson and Doc McIntire, “do not know what is running in his mind as to important matters. Apparently he is taking absolutely nobody into his confidence.”24
Although Eleanor did not learn from Franklin but from watching and listening to the others around him,* she concluded by the middle of June that he had been persuaded by the third-term advocates that with America in danger he could not refuse the nomination if it was offered to him. She could see, moreover, that if Franklin were to refuse now, it would be impossible to nominate anyone else acceptable to them and to the country.†25
She was still unhappy about his running again, but if he did she wanted him to make his campaign a crusade for the fuller freedom that alone would give hope of an end to the old grim cycle. “Even though we arm,” she wrote in her column, “still we must have more housing, better health services and jobs that insure a decent livelihood to every family.”26 Roosevelt agreed, but the draft that he sent out to Chicago said these things only weakly. When he told her firmly that he did not intend to go to the convention himself, nor should she go, she replied that in that case she would go to Hyde Park to her cottage. He did not ask her to stay. When a politician must move pragmatically and make compromises with city machines and southern senators that are difficult to square with his liberal principles, it is inconvenient to have a moralist around.
Val-Kill was at its most beautiful. At sunset, as the soft light filtered through the trees, the woods seemed to Eleanor to be filled with magic and mystery. Fat woodchucks and little white-tailed rabbits scuttled across the paths as she walked. The flowers beside the pool and house gleamed. On her sleeping porch she was lulled to sleep by the sound of frogs, and was awakened to the chirpings of a nest of baby robins. “This morning one of them is almost trying his wings. He almost flies out, but seems not to have the courage at the crucial moment. It reminds me of myself going off the diving board. I long to be able to communicate in some bird language that, if he just has self-confidence it will be all right.” With the news from Europe unrelievedly grim, the simplicities of Val-Kill gave her some relief.27
She was at Val-Kill the week of the Democratic convention, working with Tommy, swimming, riding, playing ring tennis, talking, and reading. Earl was in and out with a new girl whom he soon would marry. A young friend was present. She took her mother-in-law and Mrs. Betty Roosevelt to Norrie Point for dinner, had guests for luncheon, and in the evening listened to the convention proceedings over the radio, Tommy knitting a sweater, she monogramming linen. There were telephone calls from the White House and from Chicago, where Lorena Hickok, an employee of the Democratic National Committee and aware, therefore, of Farley’s strong sense of alienation, kept her informed. Harry Hopkins, Eleanor remarked the day the convention opened, seemed to be making all the usual mistakes at Chicago; he did not seem to know how to make people happy. Frances Perkins called from Chicago to say that the situation there was “deadly”—couldn’t something be done to lift the convention out of its squalid atmosphere of partisanship and factionalism? Frances wanted Eleanor to get the president to come out and speak, but Eleanor told her the president felt he had to stay close to Washington.
On Tuesday, the second day of the convention, Franklin called to tell her to listen to Senator Alben Barkley’s keynote address, which contained a statement from him; he wanted to know what she thought of it. She had not known that Franklin was going to send a statement to the convention, although he had insisted upon it at a meeting with Flynn, Hopkins, Frank Walker, and James Byrnes the week before the convention opened. They had opposed his saying anything, but he wanted somehow to make it clear—to his conscience as much as to the delegates—that he was not seeking the nomination and that they were free to vote for any candidate. Perhaps that also accounted for his insistence to Eleanor that he had not told Harry Hopkins to set up a headquarters in Chicago, that Harry had just gone ahead and done so. “It was as if he did not want to make the choice,” wrote Francis Biddle, “and preferred to have someone else make it for him.” The statement read by Barkley said neither yes nor no, Eleanor pointed out to her friends. However, in failing to say no, it was in e
ffect saying yes. She felt the statement should not have been made.28
By Wednesday the temper of the convention, which Frances Perkins had described as “deadly” on Monday, had turned ugly and rebellious as it became known that Roosevelt’s choice of a running mate was Henry Wallace. Miss Perkins called again to tell Eleanor that she had to come to Chicago; the delegates needed the reassurance of her presence, and they would be comforted if she thought what they were doing was right. Eleanor demurred. She thought Frances was speaking nonsense, but if Franklin, with whom Frances had spoken, felt she ought to go, and Jim Farley invited her, she would fly out.
The president urged her to go, she told the little group at Val-Kill. But in This I Remember the president’s quoted response sounded less enthusiastic: “It might be very nice for you to go, but I do not think it is in the least necessary.” Chivalry? Or was it male unwillingness to acknowledge that he needed the help of a wife whom he had kept at a distance because she posed uncomfortable questions about how much control he might have even if he was re-elected, questions that the fractious mood of the delegates were proving to be quite pertinent. However, he did agree that she could be helpful to Jim and say things to him that he could not. So, ever the good soldier, she said she would call Jim, and if he wanted her to come out she would. She called Farley, who had felt so frozen out by Hopkins and Dave Niles, Hopkins’s chief political adviser, that he was overcome with emotion by Eleanor’s call and was unable to speak.
Why was she so reluctant to go to Chicago, she was asked by one of the small group at Val-Kill when she had settled down after dinner in her study to listen to the nominating speeches. She did not like the idea of speaking because the president could say things so much more effectively, she replied. If she said things he later said, she would be attacked for butting in. They would say that she made up the president’s mind and he, understandably, would be annoyed.29
Eleanor and Franklin Page 99
