If she could not speak to the president directly, she had her column. People should not profit from the war financially while the nation’s young men were being drafted, she wrote.38 Each side in this debate had its own analysis of why France fell. While liberals spoke of the sit-down strike by French business against Léon Blum, conservatives like Eleanor’s long-time friend and lawyer Harry Hooker were equally sure that the collapse of France had been due to the Blum reforms. Wendell Willkie had sounded this theme in his acceptance speech. The New Deal, like the Blum government, Willkie contended, was incapable of mobilizing industry’s capacity to produce, and fomented division instead of unity. Eleanor gave a wholly opposite analysis of what had happened in France. Too many Frenchmen had cared more for their money than for France.
Unhappy as Eleanor was over Franklin’s inability to give a stronger lead on those issues, Willkie offered no alternative, and the Republican party refused to follow his leadership on the Burke-Wadsworth bill, narrowly conceived as it was. Further, as if to underscore the unwillingness of the privileged to make any sacrifices, Willkie attacked the Russell-Overton amendment to the conscription bill, which would authorize the government to seize plants that refused to cooperate in the defense program. It would “sovietize” industry, Willkie charged: “It is said that if men are to be conscripted, wealth must be conscripted. If this statement is taken literally . . . I cannot understand what we are undertaking to defend.” “Oh, yeah,” Uncle David Gray wrote Eleanor from Dublin, Willkie “will send our boys to be massacred, but money is too sacred.”39
But it was a losing battle. It took Congress all summer to complete action on conscription and taxes. Liberals predicted a “new crop” of war millionaires. “It was abandoning advanced New Deal ground with a vengeance,” Ickes commented in his diary.40
It was worse than that. Earlier in the year, before France had fallen and he had consented to run again, Roosevelt had spoken of a revived NRA through which corporate enterprise would be subordinated to the public interest, and had talked to Ickes about regulatory and planning mechanisms modeled on the TVA. Now big business was setting the terms of its cooperation with the government, and the influence of the military had begun to grow. These were the dangers that Eleanor had foreseen for her husband if he ran for a third term, but as the campaign progressed and she saw the forces that lined up behind Wendell Willkie, she became increasingly reconciled to her husband’s candidacy.41
“I think I’ll have to do a little work at headquarters but no campaigning,” she wrote shortly after the Chicago convention. “It is going to be a disagreeable fight! The convention was bad & Jim Farley’s feelings & F.D.R.’s feelings made things no easier. They seem quiet now, however.” Quiet they were, but the breach between the president and Farley was unbridgeable. Neither the president nor Eleanor was able to sway Farley from his determination to give up the national chairmanship. Roosevelt turned to Ed Flynn, who took on the job, reluctantly. “If I do anything political,” Eleanor wrote Ruby Black, “I will surely let you know as I feel that the press would be entitled to know. However, I do not expect to do anything out in the open. Eddie Flynn is a very old friend of mine and I think, in some ways, we are even closer than I have ever been with Jim.”
Flynn, she felt, understood the New Deal much better than Farley, and, indeed, the Bronx leader was keenly aware of Eleanor’s strength and popularity with the New Deal segments of the Roosevelt coalition. He accepted her views on the organization of the women’s work. She immediately implored Molly Dewson, who had written in July saying that she was “nearly reconciled to his running again,” to leave her Maine refuge “to do some of the work with the men.” Flynn asked Eleanor to serve as his link with Norris and LaGuardia, who were to head up an Independent Committee for Roosevelt and Wallace. But primarily Flynn wanted her nearby as an additional channel to the president. He knew how stubborn and remote Roosevelt could become, inaccessible even to his closest advisers.42
What was the strategy of the campaign, she was asked early in August. Before she could reply a friend observed, “The strategy eludes me except that the President is to continue being President and Mrs. Roosevelt First Lady.” Flynn’s advice to the president had been to confine himself to running the country and, as commander-in-chief, preparing for the dangers that beset it, and to leave partisan attacks to Flynn. There would be no campaign trips, Franklin informed Eleanor, but with the president silent, the pressure on her to campaign was stronger than in 1932 and 1936. She was sorry, she wrote a Roosevelt supporter,
but I have never campaigned for my husband, and could not. The Democratic National Committee does not wish it either. The President must stand on his own record.
If he is defeated we must believe it is for the best interest of the country.43
By the end of September she was no longer sure that the president’s above-the-battle posture was right. She sent him a letter from a woman deploring the president’s aloofness in the face of the GOP barrage of charges and claims. “FDR—I rather think she expresses the feelings of many,” she wrote on the margin.
Flynn dispatched Franklin Jr., who was heading up youth work in the campaign, to plead with his father to make some political speeches. “What brings you to Washington?” Roosevelt teased his son as they dined alone in the oval study. “What is this ‘urgent’ business you had to see me about?” he went on as if he did not know.
“Everybody’s worried at headquarters.”
The president was amused. “Are they out ringing the doorbells?”
“Yeah, they’re working their pants off.”
“Good, good,” the president beamed, “then they’re not relying upon me.”
Young Franklin protested: it was not enough; he had to get into it; Flynn had to know when he intended to start campaigning. “I’ll let him know,” the president said amiably.44
On October 11, Roosevelt went to Dayton, Ohio, but only to make a nonpolitical speech on hemispheric defense, and the short talks he made along the way were equally nonpolitical. Eleanor now felt that the president owed it to the public to discuss the issues that were being raised by Willkie: “I hope you will make a few more speeches. It seems to me pretty essential that you make them now as political speeches & the people have a right to hear your say in opposition to Willkie between now & election day.”45
The anti-Roosevelt underground campaign in 1940 was venomous, and Flynn accused the Republicans of conducting “the most vicious, most shameful campaign since the time of Lincoln.” Much of the abuse centered on Eleanor and the Roosevelt family. Publicly she brushed it off as routine “mudslinging” but privately, as she confided in a long letter to Maude Gray reporting on her children, it caused offense and anguish:
The campaign is as bad in personal bitterness as any I have ever been in. Scurrilous letters & publications pour in about Elliott, about the money we have all made & the way we have made it with innuendoes of all kinds so I’ll be glad when it is all over. Of course from a personal standpoint I’d give anything to leave Washington & if Franklin is elected I sometimes wonder if the amount he can do will be worth the sacrifice that all of us have to make, but the choice is not ours to make.46
She feared what another four years of the presidential spotlight might do to her children. Franklin Jr., handsome, full of life, quick at jovial repartee with hecklers, was proving to be a great success as a campaigner; from all over the country politicians reported on how he captivated his audiences. His success pleased his mother, but his other traits worried her. In a stern letter reminiscent of the one Sara had written her son in 1906, Eleanor wrote her husband:
Something has to be done to make F. jr. realize it is dishonest not to pay bills. I suggest you ask him to list all he owes. Pay it yourself & then take out of his allowance $100 a quarter. Tell him he has to live on his income, no going to “21” etc. until he earns his own money in toto & has no bills. Forbid Granny to give him anything except his Xmas & birthday presents be
yond his allowance & that to be cut in proportion as his earnings make it possible. . . . Thank God for Anna & Johnnie who don’t want to get rich quick & are willing to work & pay their way as they go.47
On October 23 the president went to Philadelphia for his first “political” speech. He was in fine form. The huge crowd loved it as he pulled out all the rhetorical stops in speaking of “the tears, the crocodile tears” that the Republican leaders were now shedding for labor, youth, the unemployed, and the elderly after having opposed all the New Deal measures that he had introduced to help these groups: “In 1940, eight years later, what a different tune is played by them! It is a tune played against a sounding board of election day. It is a tune with overtones which whisper: ‘Votes, votes, votes.’”
It was devastating, and the crowd roared in approval. Eleanor heard it in Barrytown, where she was visiting a Hudson neighbor, Alice Huntington. She listened to Willkie afterward. The contrast was terrific, she thought, and all to the president’s advantage. She called Franklin and could sense that he, too, felt it had been a success. “Darling,” she interrupted his expressions of pleasure, “it’s my call and it’s costing me money and I have things to tell you.”
Early in June, Esther Lape had expressed concern over a Republican whispering campaign that Roosevelt wanted to get the United States into the war, which she felt ought not to go unanswered. But the president refused to make statements that he feared would give aid and comfort to the dictators. In October LaGuardia warned the White House that “the anti-third term propaganda would cease about the middle of October and a concerted drive [would] be made on anti-war.”48 LaGuardia was sufficiently worried to want Roosevelt to postpone the first call for draftees until after the election. The mayor’s information was correct. In the closing days of the campaign the GOP began to emphasize, to the exclusion of all else, the isolationist charge that Roosevelt was going to lead the country into war. Were there secret agreements to do so, Willkie demanded, and answered his own question with the prediction that on the basis of the president’s past performance with pledges, the United States would be in the war by April. As Republican orators pounded away on this theme, there was something close to panic at Democratic headquarters. Although Roosevelt refused to postpone the drawing of the numbers under the Selective Service Act, in Boston he yielded to his political advisers and inserted an assurance to the “mothers and fathers [that] your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. . . . The purpose of our defense is defense.”
Quietly, the next day, in her column, Eleanor added her own footnote to this pledge: “No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.”49
Upon Flynn’s urging, she consented in the final days of the campaign to appear at some Democratic rallies. The Republicans had sought to make her a campaign issue, distributing WE DON’T WANT ELEANOR EITHER buttons. These sometimes backfired. Gertrude Ely reported that she had gone to a Willkie Club meeting to present the Democratic position and started out by saying that she was one of the many women “who did want Eleanor, too,” and to her utter amazement “this Administration-baiting group broke into sudden, spontaneous, enthusiastic applause.”50
Throughout the campaign Eleanor had kept her column nonpolitical. George Carlin, the manager of the United Feature Syndicate, had advised her to do so because she had “become more and more loved by the Republicans as well as Democrats.” Although nonpolitical, the column’s spirit of grace and kindliness, its chatty reports on the doings of the president and his family, were more effective campaigning than any direct political utterance. That was the case, too, with her appearances at the huge receptions and rallies in and around New York City in the closing days of the campaign. A campaign worker wrote a friend:
She came in smiling, very straight, giving the feeling of great strength and confidence, waving at old friends. She had that quality of noticing people in a crowd and letting them know it. All of us were made to feel our contribution had been of great importance. All of us felt enhanced. And when she spoke, every mother knew that she understood and shared their great anxiety about tomorrow—and so, they felt reassured that the President too would know and remember and protect them in every way.51
The Monday before election there was the traditional tour with the president through Dutchess County and his final appearance before his neighbors outside of the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie. Afterward Eleanor wrote:
I remember what it was like the first time my husband ran for the State Senate. . . . I think my feelings have always been much as they were the first time. I think I can say with honesty: “May what is best for the country happen today and may we all remember that whatever happens, this is just the beginning of some years of useful work!”52
To her Aunt Maude she wrote (and it was a measure of how her thinking had changed about her husband’s candidacy): “Frankly I hate the next four years in Washington and dread what it may do to us all but there seemed nothing else for F. to do and once nominated for a number of reasons his defeat would have been undesirable.”53
After luncheon at the Big House on Election Day, the president, Harry Hopkins, Pa Watson, and Doc McIntire settled down to a poker game to speed the afternoon along. Eleanor went to Val-Kill for a long walk with a friend, which took them through wooded paths drifted over with autumn leaves up to the hilltop house where in calmer days she and the president had entertained the British king and queen. She talked about the next four years. She hoped the president would now do all the things that he had wanted to do all along, that he knew had to be done but had not done because of political considerations. She was confident of victory, and she hoped that it would be clear-cut, a decisive mandate for liberal government. Repeatedly she spoke of the magnitude of the responsibility the president would assume with victory. The rapt expressions of trust and devotion on the faces of the people lining the streets as the president passed through had heightened her sense of the awfulness of the responsibility carried by the president in such perilous times. For herself, she had a real horror of four more years in the White House, with its lack of privacy, the ceremonial occasions, the things that had to be done in which she was not interested, and the people who would have to be entertained who meant little to her. She preferred to retire to Hyde Park, live with her friends, and be a useful citizen doing productive and helpful work, with a job of her own.54
As dusk descended everyone at the Big House except the president and his mother went to Val-Kill for a buffet supper of creamed chicken and rice, cake, ice cream, and coffee. Early returns from Connecticut were good, but talk was subdued as the forty-odd guests grouped themselves in different corners of Eleanor’s dining and sitting rooms. Toward nine o’clock everyone returned to the Big House, where the president was already set up for business in the dining room. He was seated at the table with his jacket off and his necktie loosened. The tools of the evening were spread out before him—tally sheets, a large supply of sharpened pencils, and telephones that linked him with the White House and with Flynn at the Biltmore. In a little cubicle off the dining room, called the smoking room, AP, UP, and INS teletype machines clattered away. The group with the president changed from time to time except for Missy, Franklin Jr., and John. Harry Hopkins, to whom Roosevelt referred as “my house guest without portfolio,” was often in and out, as were Judge John Mack, who had placed Roosevelt in nomination in 1932 and 1936, Uncle Fred Delano, and the members of a small group who gathered in a little study off the foyer: Pa Watson and Doc McIntire, Captain Daniel Callaghan (the president’s naval aide), Judge Samuel Rosenman, Secretary Morgenthau, and Postmaster General Frank Walker.
The remainder of the party clustered around radios in the library. From time to time Missy or one of the boys came in from the dining room with “takes” from the tickers for Eleanor or written notes based on telephone talks with Ed Flynn and other politi
cal leaders around the country. Eleanor transmitted these tidbits calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place. All evening, in an easy, effortless way, she made everyone feel at home and included, but she was detached about the returns, an observer rather than a participant in the mounting excitement. By eleven Flynn claimed victory, and scrambled eggs—an old Roosevelt custom—were being served. Some of the newspaperwomen came inside the house, and asked the president’s mother how she felt. Beamingly she replied, “Am I proud of being a historic mother? Indeed I am.” But there was no elation in Eleanor’s reply to such questions: “This is too serious a time for the President to feel anything but a great sense of responsibility,” she said.55
At midnight the traditional parade from the village arrived with red flares and a band playing “The Old Gray Mare.” The floodlights of the movie cameramen went on and there was a great cheer as the president and his family went out and arranged themselves on the portico, with the president on the right, steadying himself on the arm of Franklin Jr., and Eleanor, in a flame-colored chiffon dress, tall and commanding, on the left. There was a sense of history having been made. Harry Hopkins was standing by himself at the rear of the portico. Suddenly he did a little pirouette of triumph and in a long, swinging arc brought his right fist down into the palm of his left hand. The words “we made it” could not have been spelled out more graphically or exultantly. After some banter with his neighbors, Roosevelt made a little speech, ending with the assurance that “you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.”
As the flares burned down and he called “Good night,” there were shouts of “We want Eleanor,” but smilingly she waved her hand and went into the house. A little later a delayed contingent of the Home Club arrived, and Franklin Jr., came in saying, “Mother, they want you. There are 700 people still standing out there in the dark, asking for you. You’ll have to go to them.”
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