Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  ELEANOR

  AND

  FRANKLIN

  The Story of Their Relationship,

  Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers

  JOSEPH P. LASH

  FOREWORD BY

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  INTRODUCTION BY

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To my wife Trude

  Contents

  Foreword ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

  Introduction FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JR.

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

  1.ELEANOR’S FATHER

  2.HER MOTHER

  3.THE WORLD INTO WHICH ELEANOR WAS BORN

  4.THE CRACK-UP

  5.HER MOTHER’S DEATH

  6.“HE LIVED IN MY DREAMS”

  7.THE OUTSIDER

  8.THE SPARK IS STRUCK

  9.YOUNG IN A YOUNG COUNTRY IN A YOUNG TIME

  10.“FOR LIFE, FOR DEATH”

  11.MOTHER AND SON

  12.JOURNEY’S END

  13.EPITHALAMION

  II. WIFE AND MOTHER

  14.HONEYMOON

  15.SETTLING DOWN

  16.THE WIFE OF A PUBLIC OFFICIAL

  17.THE ROOSEVELTS GO TO WASHINGTON

  18.BRINGING UP HER CHILDREN

  19.THE APPROACH OF WAR

  20.PRIVATE INTO PUBLIC PERSON

  21.TRIAL BY FIRE

  22.RECONCILIATION AND A TRIP ABROAD

  23.THE REBELLION BEGINS

  III. THE EMERGENCE OF ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  24.A CAMPAIGN AND FRIENDSHIP WITH LOUIS HOWE

  25.BAPTISM IN POLITICS

  26.THE TEMPERING—POLIO

  27.HER HUSBAND’S STAND-IN

  28.THE 1924 CAMPAIGN

  29.LIFE WITHOUT FATHER

  30.A LIFE OF HER OWN

  31.SMITH’S DEFEAT, ROOSEVELT’S VICTORY

  32.RETURN TO ALBANY

  33.ROOSEVELT BIDS FOR THE PRESIDENCY

  34.“I NEVER WANTED TO BE A PRESIDENT’S WIFE”

  35.MRS. ROOSEVELT CONQUERS WASHINGTON

  IV. THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS

  36.THE POLITICS OF CONSCIENCE

  37.MRS. ROOSEVELT’S “BABY”—ARTHURDALE

  38.PUBLICIST FOR THE NEW DEAL—COLUMNIST AND LECTURER

  39.WITHOUT LOUIS HOWE—THE 1936 CAMPAIGN

  40.WISE AS A SERPENT, GUILELESS AS A DOVE

  41.CHANGES AT HYDE PARK

  42.LIFE WITH MOTHER AND FATHER

  43.THE DIVIDED WHITE HOUSE

  44.A GATHERING STORM

  45.THE YOUTH MOVEMENT

  46.FROM PACIFIST TO ANTI-FASCIST

  47.A SPIRITUAL SHOCK

  48.MRS. ROOSEVELT AND THE COMMUNISTS

  49.FDR ADMINISTERS A SPANKING

  50.THE THIRD TERM

  51.A JOB TO DO

  52.GI’S FRIEND, I: JOURNEY TO BRITAIN

  53.A CONSCIOUSNESS OF COLOR

  54.GI’S FRIEND, II: THE FIRST LADY AND THE ADMIRAL

  55.THE 1944 CAMPAIGN

  56.DEATH OF THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

  Illustrations

  Bibliographical Note

  References

  Index

  Foreword

  ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

  I BEGAN TO READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK WITH A CERTAIN apprehension. I knew that no one was better qualified by close and sympathetic acquaintance to write the biography of Eleanor Roosevelt than Joseph P. Lash. But one also knew of Joe Lash’s profound, almost filial, devotion to Mrs. Roosevelt and feared that affection might conflict with the austere obligations of the biographer. Moreover, his friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt covered only the last twenty-two years of a long and varied life, and one wondered how someone coming along at the verge, so to speak, of the last act could do justice to the earlier years—above all, to an intense and crucial girlhood lived so many years before in what was not only another century but another world. Nor could one be certain that Mr. Lash, for all his experience as a newspaperman, would not be lost in the staggering mass of Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal papers; even a professional historian might well have been daunted by this form of total immersion.

  My apprehension was unjustified. Mr. Lash has written, I believe, a beautiful book—beautiful in its scholarship, insight, objectivity, and candor. He portrays Eleanor Roosevelt’s anguished childhood with marvelous delicacy and understanding, and he skillfully evokes the social milieu in which she grew up—the old New York of Edith Wharton, where rigid etiquette concealed private hells and neurosis lurked under the crinoline. He perceives and reconstructs the complex reciprocity of the partnership between Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt with immense subtlety, sensitivity, and honesty. He faithfully records the moving, often painful, process by which a tense and humorless girl overcame personal insecurity and private adversity and emerged as a powerful woman in her own right, spreading her influence not only across her own country but around much of the planet. As he does all this, he gives a story long familiar in its broad outline a fresh and compelling quality.

  A word about the author. Mr. Lash, born in New York City in 1909, graduated from the City College of the City University of New York in 1931 in the depth of the Depression. In the next year he became an officer of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a Socialist youth organization; and in 1935, when the Comintern Congress in Moscow gave the international Communist movement a more moderate party line, he overcame his earlier distrust of the American Communists and led the SLID into one of the first American experiments in a “united front” against fascism—the American Student Union. American students were politically concerned as they would not be for another thirty years, and Joe Lash was one of their more conspicuous leaders. In the Popular Front enthusiasm after 1935, he moved closer to the Communists and was discussing a job with the Daily Worker in August, 1939, when the news came through of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

  For the idealistic fellow-travelers of the period, the pact was a stunning blow. It separated the democrats from the Stalinists; and Lash found himself in growing conflict with his Communist associates in the ASU. Then in November, 1939, three months after the pact, Lash, with other youth leaders, received a summons from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, already well embarked on its long career of saving the republic by hit-and-run investigations of the radical left. It was in this connection that he had his first serious encounter with Mrs. Roosevelt.

  The president’s wife had a conviction, hard to oppose but not widely shared, that the youth constituted the future of a nation; and, in this time before the young had quite become a distinct and impassioned constituency, she sought to find out on behalf of her husband what they believed and needed. She not only advised the student leaders of 1939 how they should conduct themselves before Congressman Dies’s committee but attended the hearings herself and took half a dozen of the young firebrands back to the White House for dinner. Joe Lash, after Stalin’s deal with Hitler, was both in inner turmoil and somewhat isolated within the ASU; his personal dilemma appealed to Mrs. Roosevelt. Moreover, she soon found she could rely a good deal more on his word and judgment than on that of his pro-Soviet colleagues.

  Soon she invited him to Hyde Park. In spite of considerable disparities in age and background, a warm friendship developed. This continued when as a soldier he went to the South Pacific and in the years after the war when he wrote for the New York Post. Clearly he filled some need in her own life—in particular, perhaps the compelling emotional need, so perceptively analyzed in the pages that follow, to offer help, attention, tenderness, and to receive unquestioning love in return. Mrs. Roosevelt may hav
e made occasional mistakes in her desire to provide succor, but her trust in Joe Lash was not misplaced. He has now repaid this trust by writing a book which, because it sees Eleanor Roosevelt with love but without illusion or sentimentalism, makes her, in her fortitude and in her triumph, an even more remarkable figure than we had supposed before.

  Americans over thirty, whether they admired or detested her, will not forget Mrs. Roosevelt. But for those under thirty—and this was the group she cared about most—she can only in the 1970s, I imagine, strike faint chords of third-hand recollection, probably arousing faint memories of maternal benevolence. As the young read this book, they will discover that while the do-good thing was there all right, while an indestructible faith in human decency and possibility was the center of her life, all this was accompanied by an impressive capacity for salty realism and, on occasion, even for a kind of quasi-gentle mercilessness. She was, in fact, a tough old bird who saw earth as well as stars. People mixed with her at their peril, as even such tough citizens as Harry S. Truman, Cardinal Spellman, Carmine de Sapio, and Andre Vishinsky learned. Her air of artlessness was one of her most deadly weapons; no one could slice off a head with more benign innocence. But her toughness was tempered by tolerance and tied to a belief in humanity.

  The young will discover, too, how contemporary the past may, after all, be. They will find students in revolt, marching, picketing, fighting cops, heckling presidents. They will see the first American war against poverty and the greatest American effort to humanize industrial society. And they will see in Eleanor Roosevelt herself, though she would doubtless have smiled over the overwrought ideology and dramatics of Women’s Lib, the most liberated American woman of this century.

  But what Mr. Lash understands so well and sets forth so lucidly is that her liberation was not an uncovenanted gift. She attained it only through a terrifying exertion of self-discipline. It was terrifying because the conviction of her own inadequacy was so effectively instilled in Eleanor Roosevelt as a child, and because her adult life had so much disappointment and shock, that it required incomparable and incessant self-control to win maturity and serenity. If her mastery of herself was never complete, if to the end of her life she could still succumb to private melancholy while calmly meeting public obligation, this makes her achievement and character all the more formidable. Her life was both ordeal and fulfillment. It combined vulnerability and stoicism, pathos and pride, frustration and accomplishment, sadness and happiness. Mr. Lash catches all this and, in a remarkable American biography, recreates for a new generation a great and gallant—and, above all, a profoundly good—lady.

  Introduction

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JR.

  MY MOTHER’S WILL NAMED ME HER LITERARY EXECUTOR, responsible for her private papers which she deposited with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York. After consulting with my sister Anna and my brothers, I asked Joseph P. Lash to undertake the very extensive research and the writing of this biography based on these papers. Joe Lash has been a close friend of mine and of my entire family for over thirty years, and during this period I have developed great respect for his integrity and objectivity. In inviting Joe to go through my mother’s papers, I was also mindful of the fact that in 1947 she had selected him to assist my brother, Elliott, in editing volumes III and IV of my father’s letters. She further attested to her confidence in Joe in the authorization she gave him to go through her papers while she was still alive in connection with the book he was writing on the youth movement of the thirties.

  The library at Hyde Park houses the papers of both my father and my mother and of many who were associated with them during their public careers. Those careers cover the period in American history during which time the United States grew from a nation isolated not only by geography but often by national policy into the most powerful country in the world, the most advanced industrial society, as well as a nation of great social conscience. That transformation is reflected in the papers in the Roosevelt Library, which make it a fascinating and unique collection of source materials.

  Each of us sees a person differently. My brothers and sister in our family conclaves have often argued vehemently, though lovingly, about our parents. It was natural that Joe Lash would see some matters differently from us. I read this book carefully while it was in preparation. I had many sessions with the author, and we discussed his assessments and reconstructions and occasionally disagreed. But I felt from the beginning that this had to be the writer’s book.

  My parents are figures in history. They were also human beings with foibles and frailties as well as great strength and vitality. Their marriage lasted forty years. To us, as children, they were wonderful parents. Inevitably, there were times of tension and unhappiness as well as years of joy and companionship. For this book to be of value to the present generation the whole picture, insofar as it could be ascertained, had to be drawn.

  Many people have written about my mother’s contribution to my father’s work. This book documents her part in that work. They were a team, and the Roosevelt years, I believe, were more fruitful and creative as a consequence of that partnership.

  It was my hope that Joe Lash would present a portrait of my mother that would be objective yet sympathetic and recapture something of her reality as she moved through eight of the most significant decades in our country’s history. This book fulfills my hope.

  Author’s Note

  WHEN I FINISHED MY LITTLE BOOK, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: A Friend’s Memoir, I did not think that I would again be involved in writing about Eleanor Roosevelt, but then Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., invited me to do a biography based on his mother’s papers and I accepted happily. Not the least part of my pleasure was the prospect of again working closely with my old friend Franklin.

  Many people have aided in the writing of this book, but I particularly want to acknowledge my indebtedness to Eleanor Roosevelt’s children for talking with me freely and at length. Anna Roosevelt Halsted’s vivid recollections were invaluable, and our many three-hour luncheons were among the most pleasant parts of my research. The footnotes list the names of the many relatives, friends, and co-workers of Mrs. Roosevelt who were kind enough to share their memories with me. My sessions with Eleanor Roosevelt’s two remarkable cousins, Alice Longworth and Corinne Cole, and with Mrs. Roosevelt’s ninety-six-year-old uncle by marriage, the late David Gray, were especially memorable, as were my many talks with such long-time friends and collaborators of Mrs. Roosevelt’s as Esther Everett Lape, Marion Dickerman, Earl R. Miller, Dr. David Gurewitsch, and Maureen Corr.

  Dr. Viola W. Bernard read the first half of the manuscript and devoted several evenings to giving me a psychiatrist’s view of Eleanor Roosevelt’s psychosocial development. She was very helpful; however, she is not responsible for the way I have made use of her observations, nor, for that matter, are the others who talked with me.

  The distinguished New Dealer and wise counselor, Benjamin V. Cohen, read the entire manuscript and made helpful comments, as did Nancy and James A. Wechsler, who provided a constant support through their friendship. Mrs. Suzanne P. Roosevelt, who was trained by her father to look at a writer’s copy with a grammarian’s eye, reviewed part of the manuscript. A promising young writer, Noemi Emery, helped me with some of the research and made many useful observations.

  Living in a lovely old house, Wildercliffe, overlooking the Hudson, I spent three winters going through Mrs. Roosevelt’s papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, and immersing myself in the Dutchess County countryside and traditions. Research is a lonely task, but the loneliness in this case was offset by the companionship of the Richard Roveres and of the staff of the Roosevelt Library: Dr. Elizabeth B. Drewry, its former director; her successor, Dr. James O’Neill; William J. Stewart, the assistant director; James Whitehead, the curator; Jerry Deyo, the archivist; and Joseph Marshall, in charge of the Search Room.

  The typing was done by my sister, A. Elsie Lash, a formid
able task to which she gave all of her free time because of her devotion to the memory of Mrs. Roosevelt.

  It was my good fortune when I turned the manuscript in to W. W. Norton & Company to have it reviewed by Evan W. Thomas, an exacting but sensitive critic.

  The spare words with which I have dedicated this book to my wife do not convey the help she has given me in its writing. There is scarcely a page which does not bear her imprint.

  JOSEPH P. LASH

  Preface

  THE FIRST ROOSEVELT, CLAES MARTENSZEN VAN ROSENVELT, arrived from Holland in the 1640s when New Amsterdam was a tiny settlement of 800 huddled in some eighty houses at the foot of Manhattan. Who Claes Martenszen was, whether solid Dutch burgher in search of larger opportunities or solemn rogue “two leaps ahead of the bailiff,” as his witty descendant Alice Roosevelt Longworth has suggested, is not known. In either case, by the eve of the American Revolution when New York had become a bustling port of 25,000, there were fifty Roosevelt families, and Claes’s descendants were already showing an “uncanny knack” of associating themselves with the forces of boom and expansion in American economic life.

  In the Roosevelt third generation two of the brothers, Johannes and Jacobus, took the family into real estate with the purchase of the Beekman Swamp, a venture that was to have “a lasting effect on the city and their own family fortunes.” It was these two brothers, also, who started the branches that led ultimately to Oyster Bay (Johannes) and to Hyde Park (Jacobus). The pre-Revolutionary Roosevelts were prosperous burghers but not of the highest gentry, and in civic affairs they were aligned with the popular faction against the aristocrats.

  The first Roosevelt to achieve gentility and distinction was Isaac, the great-great-great-grandfather of Franklin, who for his services to the American cause was called “Isaac the Patriot.” Isaac was a trader in sugar and rum but ended his business career as president of New York’s first bank. At his death Philip Hone, the diarist, spoke of him as “proud and aristocratical,” part of the “only nobility” the country had ever had.