by FDR
The fact is, Eleanor relished her role in Albany. She often served as FDR’s proxy, speaking on his behalf, inspecting state institutions, reporting back with a thoroughness that increased with time and experience. Roosevelt encouraged state officials to believe that he and “the Missus” were a team. “I do not often go to the big places,” Eleanor told the progressive historian and journalist Ida Tarbell, “but often to the little places where they have difficulty securing speakers. I don’t do it as well as I wish I did, but after all what they want is to see the Governor’s wife.”56
Throughout the Albany years, Eleanor was accompanied on her inspection tours by New York State Police sergeant Earl Miller. ER refused to be driven in an official limousine and insisted on driving herself. This made Franklin uneasy, and he assigned Miller as her bodyguard. Miller had been Al Smith’s personal bodyguard, and he and Franklin were acquainted from World War I, when Miller, the Navy’s middleweight boxing champion, had kept watch over FDR during his trip to France in 1918. Miller was a first-rate athlete and had been a member of the U.S. Olympic squad at the Antwerp games in 1920. He was an award-winning swimmer, expert marksman, and trick rider at state fairs, and had once worked as a circus acrobat. He was also a warm and affectionate man, and he and Eleanor hit it off from the beginning.
For Eleanor, Miller provided encouragement and support. He was unfailingly attentive and chivalrous. He protected and defended her and reintroduced her to sports and activities she had long forgotten. He taught her to shoot a pistol, coached her tennis game, and built her a deck tennis court at Val-Kill for daily practice. He gave her riding lessons and eventually bought a horse for her, a chestnut mare named Dot, which ER rode regularly at Hyde Park and later in Washington. He improved her swimming and taught her to dive, a goal that required years to accomplish but something Eleanor was keen to do.
For Miller, Eleanor provided stability and accomplishment and gave his life a purpose. She was forty-four when they met; he was thirty-two. He became her unofficial escort, companion, and manager. One biographer compared their relationship to that of the legendary Scotsman John Brown and Queen Victoria.57 Earl Miller and Eleanor laughed together, journeyed for weekends through the countryside, and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. In the evenings Miller sang and played piano, while Eleanor frequently read aloud and listened to his tales of a world she had never known. Their leisure time was filled with pranks and surprises, with home movies like “The Pirate and the Lady,” in which Miller, dressed as a pirate, kidnapped ER (by then the nation’s First Lady), bound her wrists, tied a blindfold around her eyes, and carried her off into the sunset.
Eleanor always kept a room for Earl at Val-Kill and later in her apartment in Greenwich Village. Whether they were more than good friends is open to conjecture. Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook were distressed at their public display of affection.58 Joseph Lash records their love (“He interested her physically”) but doubts if it were more than an emotional attachment.59 Blanche Wiesen Cook calls Miller ER’s “first romantic involvement” of her middle years but declines to speculate further. “Whatever rules they agreed upon, they were two mutually consenting adults who were engaged in a discreet relationship.… [T]hey did whatever they agreed to do.”60 James Roosevelt, who may have had the best opportunity to judge, believed that Lash was overly protective of ER’s reputation. “I believe this is a disservice to her, a suggestion that because of her hang-ups she was never able to be a complete woman.” According to James:
Mother was self-conscious about Miller’s youth, but he did not seem bothered by the difference in years. He encouraged her to take pride in herself, to be herself, to be unafraid of facing the world. He did a lot of good for her. She seemed to draw strength from him when he was by her side, and she came to rely on him. When she had problems, she sought his help.… He became part of the family, too, and gave her a great deal of what her husband and we, her sons, failed to give her. Above all, he made her feel that she was a woman.… From my observations, I personally believe they were more than friends.61
This remarkable relationship, which commenced in 1929, continued until Eleanor’s death in 1962. Yet the trail is largely unmarked.62 There are photographs and a few home movies, but no diaries or letters despite the fact that she and Earl are believed to have corresponded almost daily.63 Rumors persist that shortly after Eleanor’s death the letters were anonymously purchased and destroyed, or purchased and locked away. To date, not a single letter from ER to Earl Miller has surfaced.64*
Eleanor’s friendship with Miller paralleled Franklin’s relationship with Missy LeHand. Just as Missy provided FDR with the adoration and love his wife could not, so Miller made up for what Franklin could not give. Remarkably, both ER and Franklin recognized, accepted, and encouraged the arrangement. Missy and Earl became members of the family. Eleanor gave Missy the larger bedroom near FDR’s in Albany while she took a smaller one down the hall, and Franklin was equally attentive to Earl’s requirements. Eleanor and Franklin were strong-willed people who cared greatly for each other’s happiness but realized their own inability to provide for it.
* The Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour in 1868; Horace Greeley in 1872; Samuel Tilden in 1876; Grover Cleveland in 1884, 1888, and 1892; Alton B. Parker in 1904; and Al Smith in 1928.
* In 1934 Moses departed the party of his patron to run for governor as a Republican. He was trounced by Herbert Lehman, 2,201,727–1,393,744. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 423 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
* For her part, Eleanor Roosevelt distrusted both Belle Moskowitz and Robert Moses, whom she considered stalking horses for Smith. One week after the election she wrote FDR, “By all signs I think Belle and Bob Moses mean to cling to you and you will wake up and find R. M. Secretary of State and B.M. running Democratic Publicity at her old stand unless you take a firm stand. Gosh, the race has nerves of iron and tentacles of steel.”
Later, ER told Franklin, “You have to decide … whether you are going to be Governor of this state or whether Mrs. Moskowitz is … If Mrs. Moskowitz is your secretary, she will run you. It won’t hurt you. It won’t give you any pain. She will run you in such a way that you don’t know that you are being run.… That’s the way she works. That is the kind of person she is. She doesn’t do it in any spirit of ill will. It’s simply that her competence is so much greater than anyone else’s.”
ER to FDR, November 13, 1928, FDRL; Frances Perkins Interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
* Al Smith warned FDR against appointing Miss Perkins to a cabinet post. “Men will take advice from a woman,” said Smith, “but it is hard for them to take orders from a woman.” Miss Perkins remembered FDR’s chuckle as he related the conversation: “You see, Al’s a good progressive fellow but I’m willing to take more chances. I’ve got more nerve about women and their status in the world than Al has.” Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 55 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
* The Roosevelt children were unlucky in marriage. Anna was married three times, James four, Elliott five, Franklin, Jr., five, and John twice. Among them they had twenty-seven children. Samuel Rosenman, who lived in the executive mansion and had an opportunity to observe firsthand, attributed the children’s lack of marital success to an inadequate family life. FDR was pursuing his career, Eleanor had separate interests, and the children were left high and dry. Samuel I. Rosenman interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
* Dean Acheson, a fellow Grotonian who served on and off as a sub–cabinet officer in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the few who took umbrage at FDR’s first-name familiarity. Considered more than a bit pompous himself, Acheson felt Roosevelt was condescending, calling the president’s style the Hudson Valley equivalent of the royal prerogative. “His was the royalty of the Tudors and Stuarts and Bourbons and Hapsburgs.… So when he called me ‘Dean’ on the first meeting, I did not like it.” Acheson to
William D. Hassett, Hassett Papers, FDRL. Also see Acheson, Morning and Noon 165 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
* Eleanor’s income tax returns for the period indicate a professional income averaging slightly more than $25,000 annually—roughly the same as FDR’s salary as governor. FDRL.
* Miss Perkins, who was sometimes present in the executive mansion when FDR spoke, said his voice and facial expression were that of an intimate friend. “As he talked his head would nod and his hands would move in simple, natural, comfortable gestures. His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 72 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
* The ditty sung by the newsmen to greet FDR is the chapter epigraph.
† Born in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1879, Rogers delighted the nation with his homespun wisdom. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” he once quipped. “I’m a Democrat.” Quoted in David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 31 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
* To allay concern about Roosevelt’s health, Louis Howe arranged for FDR to be examined by a battery of insurance company physicians at his Sixty-fifth Street home shortly after he received the Democratic nomination. Their report was made public on October 18, 1930, and Roosevelt was issued a life insurance policy for $560,000 (roughly $6 million today) with the Warm Springs Foundation as the beneficiary. On behalf of the examining physicians, Dr. Edgar W. Beckwith, medical director of the Equitable Life Assurance Company, told newsmen that to issue a policy of that magnitude was highly unusual. It required that the insured be in perfect health, which he said Roosevelt was. Except for his withered legs, said Dr. Beckwith, FDR’s physical condition was comparable to that of a man of thirty. His chest expansion was 5½ inches, weight 182 pounds, height six feet, one and a half inches, blood pressure 128/80—“a little better than gilt-edged for a man of forty-eight.” Privately, Dr. Beckwith wrote FDR: “Frankly, I have never before observed such a complete recovery in organic function and such a remarkable degree of recovery of muscles and limbs in an individual who had passed through an attack of infantile paralysis such as yours.” Dr. Beckwith to FDR, October 21, 1930, Howe Papers, FDRL.
* FDR’s response to Stimson, Hurley, and Mills was much like his reply to Martin, Barton, and Fish in the 1940 presidential campaign, when he worked Democratic crowds into paroxysms of partisan enthusiasm by invoking the names of the isolationist congressmen Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, Bruce Barton of New York, and Hamilton Fish of New York. “Martin, Barton, and Fish” rolled off FDR’s tongue in rhythmic cadence and was zestfully picked up and chanted by Democratic audiences, to their mutual delight.
* Miller was married three times, briefly and unsuccessfully. In 1932 and again in 1941 he is said to have married to quell rumors about himself and ER. After 1929 he and Eleanor had become constant companions in Albany, and gossip abounded. “That’s why I got married in 1932 with plenty of publicity. I got married with someone I wasn’t in love with. Same with the second marriage. But I was never successful in killing the gossip.”
In 1947, during divorce proceedings initiated by his third wife, Simone, it was alleged that Miller was conducting an adulterous affair with ER and a packet of her letters to him was introduced into the proceedings. The trial judge awarded Mrs. Miller a considerable but undisclosed settlement and custody of their two children and ordered the letters sealed. (Eleanor was godmother to both children.) There was minimum publicity, although New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan wrote, “Navy Commander’s wife will rock the country if she names the co-respondent in her divorce action!!!” Eleanor’s FBI file also contains a reference to the proceedings in Miller v. Miller. On October 4, 1947, the New York field office informed Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, that Mrs. Miller “is planning to sue her husband for divorce and she will name Eleanor Roosevelt as correspondent.” (Microfilm, FDRL.) In 1984, Joseph Lash reported that Eleanor was devastated by the proceedings, “especially because of their possible impact on her children.” Joseph P. Lash, interview with Earl Miller, reprinted in Love, Eleanor 119 (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Lash, A World of Love 296–297 (New York: Doubleday, 1984); New York Daily News, January 13, 1947.
THIRTEEN
NOMINATION
I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JULY 2, 1932
THE DAY AFTER FDR’s reelection, James Farley, at Louis Howe’s instigation, threw the governor’s hat into the presidential ring. “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party,” Farley told a hastily assembled press conference, “even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about.”1 Neither Howe nor Farley had cleared the announcement with FDR. Both were convinced it was time to strike, taking the tide of victory at the flood. If Roosevelt disagreed, he could repudiate them.
“I was in doubt as to how he would take it,” Farley recalled. But the worry proved groundless. When he reached FDR by phone in Albany, the governor laughed. “Whatever you said, Jim, is all right with me.”2 Roosevelt immediately called reporters into his office and issued his own statement: “I am giving no consideration or thought or time to anything except the duties of Governorship. You can add that this applies to any candidacy, national or otherwise in 1932.”3 It was vintage Roosevelt. Publicly, Farley was disavowed; privately, he and Howe had been flashed a green light to proceed. Roosevelt was committed. “Eddie,” he confided to Bronx chieftain Edward J. Flynn, “I believe I can be nominated for the Presidency in 1932 on the Democratic ticket.”4
Roosevelt left day-to-day management of the campaign to Howe and Farley. Howe was FDR’s alter ego. He had little need to consult “the Boss” because after working with Franklin for twenty years he knew precisely what moves to make and when to make them. He was a backroom man without equal in Democratic politics, and his loyalty to Roosevelt was legendary. As Farley noted, “Louis Howe thought of nothing else during his waking hours other than how to secure the party’s nomination for the Governor.”5 For his part, Farley was the perfect complement, the outside man to Howe’s inside. A tall, jovial Irishman whose smooth skin and bald head made him resemble a peeled egg, Farley was a joiner, a mixer, and a glad-hander who never met a ward heeler he could not charm—and whose name he never forgot.6 Like Howe, he was unencumbered by ideology, other than partisan attachment to the Democratic party. Unlike Howe, he could work with anyone and was a master at grassroots political organization. They not only made a remarkable team, they liked each other. Farley, seventeen years younger, did not encroach on Howe’s role as FDR’s deputy, and Howe recognized the skill Farley brought to the effort.
While Howe and Farley busied themselves launching a letter-writing campaign on FDR’s behalf, Roosevelt focused on the economic crisis. By the winter of 1930–31, the nation and the State of New York had fallen into the trough of the Depression. Unemployment, which stood at 4 million in March 1930, zoomed to 8 million in March 1931. Desperate men selling apples appeared on urban street corners, breadlines stretched block after block, community soup kitchens ladled out thin porridge, and “Hoovervilles”—little settlements of tin shacks, abandoned autos, and discarded packing crates—were springing up in the dumps and railroad yards of big cities to house the dispossessed. Every week, every day, more workers joined the ranks of despair. Hoover responded in February 1931 by urging Americans to embrace the principles of local responsibility and mutual self-help. If we depart from those principles, said the president, we “have struck at the roots of self-government.”7
Confronted with the reluctance of federal authorities to take action, FDR summoned the New York legislature into special session. Breaking with the tradition of what economic historians call the “night watchman state,” Roosevelt asked the legislature to immediately appropriate $20 million to provide useful work where possible and, where such work cou
ld not be found, to provide the needy “with food against starvation and with clothing and shelter against suffering.”
In broad terms I assert that modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.… To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.8
Roosevelt’s speech to the legislature on August 28, 1931, marked the genesis of the New Deal. The term was not used: that would come in FDR’s acceptance speech the following year. But the idea that government had the definite responsibility—a “social duty”—to use the resources of the state to prevent distress and to promote the general welfare was first suggested at that time. The speech was written at Hyde Park by FDR and Sam Rosenman, and reflected how Roosevelt’s thinking had evolved.9 In addition to the $20 million relief package, the governor sought the establishment of a new state agency, the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), to distribute the funds. He also asked the legislature to raise personal income taxes by 50 percent to pay for the relief effort.* New York was the first state to establish a relief agency, and TERA immediately became a model for other states—New Jersey, Rhode Island, Illinois—as well as a prototype for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, created by FDR in 1933.
To head TERA, Roosevelt obtained the services of Jesse Straus, president of R. H. Macy department stores, a lifelong Democrat and one of the most respected businessmen in the state. (Straus would later serve as FDR’s ambassador to France.) Straus was given a free hand to organize the agency. He chose as his executive director a forty-two-year-old social worker originally from Iowa, Harry L. Hopkins, who at the time was unknown to Roosevelt or to any of Roosevelt’s advisers. Hopkins was an inspired choice. A gifted administrator who proved he could deliver aid swiftly with a minimum of overhead, Hopkins gave the relief effort an intensity that propelled him to Roosevelt’s attention. When Straus resigned in the spring of 1932, FDR named Hopkins to succeed him. In the next six years TERA assisted some 5 million people—40 percent of the population of New York State—at a cost of $1.155 billion. At the end of that period, 70 percent of those helped had returned to the workforce.10
