Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  “I broke it to Mama Miss Spring was coming up and put it all on you,” she advised her husband. Unable to stand up for herself and say “this is what I want,” she made use of others. It was a conscious tactic that she would employ in the White House years with great subtlety and sophistication in order to get Franklin to do the things which he might otherwise refuse to do if the suggestions came directly from her.

  Eleanor was content at Campobello. The pace there was more sedate than at Bar Harbor or Newport. The summer families had a club of sorts and were satisfied with an occasional dance for which a Victor talking machine provided the music. Eleanor even liked the Bay of Fundy’s fogs and its prolonged periods of foul weather, for she was an avid reader and enjoyed reading aloud to family and guests in front of the fireplace in the large living room.

  She always arrived at Campobello determined on self-improvement. One summer she and Sara read all of Ferrero’s volumes on Rome. She began to study Spanish with the help of recordings. “All my Spanish things are here,” she wrote Franklin, “but I am waiting for you to put my phonograph together!” Franklin did, but at the end of the summer she confessed she might never learn the language because she still had not mastered the art of making the phonograph work.

  Until his marriage, Hall spent part of his summers at Campobello. Franklin enjoyed and admired his brilliant young brother-in-law, who had been chosen senior prefect at Groton. Whenever Hall arrived, a covey of girls would immediately gather around him, and Franklin and Eleanor spoke teasingly about “Hall and his harem.” Hall looked up to his sister, whose selflessness and devotion he appreciated. “I despair of hearing from Eleanor about herself,” he wrote Franklin from Groton. “I hope you will drop me a postal some time just to let me know how she is getting on.”

  When Franklin had to be in New York, Eleanor tried to pinch-hit for him with the children in outdoor activities, and during the summer of 1909, when James was a year and a half and Anna a little over three, she took them sailing on the Half Moon. “I think they will sail rather seldom together as James goes round and round the cockpit and won’t sit still and Anna kicks him whenever she can.” James had his defenses against Anna, however: “He is very naughty and poor Anna’s arm is all blue where he bit her yesterday.”

  There were fond letters from Eleanor and the children.

  Dearest Honey—

  The enclosure was dictated jointly by Anna & James on the Half Moon this afternoon. We got off at three but the wind was light & we didn’t get up to G. South Bay but the chicks had supper on board & loved it.

  This morning I took Anna & James to the beach & as there was no wind & the sun was hot I put on Anna’s bathing suit & she waded until just before we came up when she sat down & kicked & splashed & then ran home & slept 2 hours! She is mad about it & James weeps because he can’t sit down & when I say he must stop wading he kicks & howls with rage! . . .

  Ever so much love.

  (Enclosure)

  E.R.

  Dear Fadder,

  I had my bathing suit on & go in the water & walked & sat down & splashed. (James) took off his shoes & stockings & was angry as he couldn’t walk to the boat. In the morning I say “Good morning Half Moon, Captain, Mother, Old Mother Hubbard.

  (Anna) I wouldn’t like to go away from Campobello.

  (James) Poor Fadder go to New York.

  (A. & J.) Like Fadder to come back soon.

  Anna’s kiss . . . made by herself.

  James’ kiss

  Your loving

  Anne & James

  And there were the detailed orders from an efficient wife in cool Campobello to a husband in the sweltering city. “I enclose my list of things to be done,” she wrote Franklin, “and I am sorry for you.”

  Ask Mary if she knows of two good, honest cleaners to come on Monday, Sept. 13th & start at the roof & clean down & be through on Sept. 21st. To take great care with the white paint & get it clean also sun the children’s mattresses on the roof & beat them well the last day. I think it would be well for you to ask Harriet to do the library & tell her to take all the books out, wipe them & put them back. She ought to do it in three days & as she can’t work steadily I would tell her that we will only pay her $1. a day. The other cleaners get $1.50.

  Telephone R. H. Morisson 73rd St. & 3d Avenue to clean all the chimneys between the 9th & 11th as it must be over before the cleaning begins. Also find out from Max if the [word indistinct] cap is on the chimney as we don’t want more work than necessary done after the house is clean.

  Bring me Aug. & Sept. Harper’s when you come. Go to Putnam’s & order some nice book not more than $5. sent to Miss Ellen Shipman, Windsor, Vermont, with enclosed card.

  If Mary knows no cleaners ask Harriet.

  I am anxiously waiting for the wash trunk. Was Mary at the house when you got home? Will you ask her when the trunk left? Don’t forget to look in both houses for [words indistinct]. Tell me what Dr. Dailey’s bill was. Send Hall his check book.

  Subsequent letters supplemented these instructions.

  Their return to New York that autumn was shadowed by the illness of Franklin Jr. Although he weighed eleven pounds at birth, he seemed delicate, like James, and Miss Spring was with the family at Campobello most of the summer to care for him. They were worried about his rapid breathing, but they were not prepared for the worsening in his condition that set in late in October. Sara reported the course of the crisis in her journal and the reaction of the three of them to the tragedy.

  Oct. 29. Baby cried often in the morning, but was sleeping sweetly in the pram at 12.30 when I went in a motor to the Olins for lunch. Mrs. Howard with me. At 2, Annie the housemaid telephoned me to come as Baby was ill. I flew home. . . . Dr. Gribbon was here, holding precious Baby. He just got there in time as the little heart had almost stopped. . . . I telephoned E. she and F. came at 8.30 bringing Miss Spring. Dr. Gribbon stayed till 11.

  Oct. 30th. . . . they all leave on the 9.30 train. . . . Dr. Winters in N.Y. confirms Dr. Gribbon that it is serious heart trouble. Some hope is held out. Darling Eleanor is brave and Franklin helps and supports her hopeful spirit.

  Oct. 31st. Eleanor says Baby had a fair night and is quiet. They are hopeful. At 2.30 Franklin telephoned me not so well. I went to town, though just as I left, F. said “don’t come down.” I simply had to go. When I got there, E. said, “Oh I am so glad you came.” . . .

  Nov. 1st. At a little before 5 I went in. Dr. Carr said “He is holding his own.” At a little before 7 A.M. F. telephoned me to my room. “Better come, Mama, Baby is sinking.” I went in. The little angel ceased breathing at 7:45. Miss Spring was asleep in her room but Dr. Carr and Miss Battin did what they could. F. and E. are most wonderful, but poor E.’s mother heart is well nigh broken. She so hoped and cannot believe her baby is gone from her. He was 7 months and 9 days old, a beautiful flower he always seemed and yet the delicacy certainly was there and he could not overcome it.

  Nov. 2nd. I sat often besides my little grandson. It is hard to give him up and my heart aches for Eleanor.

  Nov. 5. F. and E came home (i.e., H.P.) and it is such a sad homecoming. E. is perfectly marvelous the way she bears it.

  Nov. 7th. All to church. E. brave and lovely.

  For many months Eleanor’s life was darkened by the baby’s death. She felt she was in some way to blame and reproached herself for not caring for him enough. The baby’s death reinforced her sense of inadequacy as a woman and as a mother. When Elliott, born ten months later, turned out to be a more agitated and excitable baby than Anna and James had been, she blamed that, too, on her moodiness while carrying him. Only gradually did she conquer her grief for her dead baby, and she often laid flowers on the quiet little grave in the St. James churchyard and recalled the sad burial scene.

  Such tragedies, as she well knew from childhood, were part of the human condition. Religion comforted her, as did her love for Franklin. “I miss you dreadfully and feel very lonely,” she w
rote him from Campobello the next summer, “but please don’t think it is because I am alone, having other people wouldn’t do any good for I just want you!”

  “Success in marriage,” she told an interviewer many years later, “depends on being able when you get over being in love, to really love . . . you never know anyone until you marry them.”12 Five years after her marriage, just before Franklin entered politics, their friends considered them an exemplary couple and thought Eleanor remarkable for the way she fulfilled her role as wife, mother, mistress of her household, and daughter-in-law.

  * But secretly she resented her exclusion from the active handling of the boats on which her menfolk sailed. In 1935 Emma Bugbee of the New York Herald Tribune was with her in Campobello, and they went sailing. “I shall never forget the satisfaction with which she took the helm from Captain Calder, who had handled Roosevelt family boats for years,” Emma later wrote. “‘I never get a chance to sail the boat myself,’ she beamed. ‘There are always so many men around. . . . One always has to let the men do the sailing’” (New York Herald Tribune, July 7, 1963).

  † The parallels between Chaucer’s Griselda and Eleanor go much beyond this point. The prince’s subjects at first could not understand why, with all the beautiful girls in the realm to choose from, he settled on Griselda. But then as she took charge of his household, they recognized her “rype and sad corage,” and before long all were her liege supporters, for

  So wyse and wordes hadde she

  And jugements of so greet equitee,

  That she from heaven sent was, as men wende,

  Peple to save and every wrong t’amende.

  16.THE WIFE OF A PUBLIC OFFICIAL

  AFTER TAFT’S ELECTION IN 1908 THEODORE ROOSEVELT INVITED various younger members of the family to the White House for a final visit before inauguration day. Eleanor and Franklin went down early in January, and a week later it was the Teddy Robinsons’ turn. “It is rather horrid to feel that is the last time that we will be at the White House in that way,” Helen wrote.1 Franklin had other thoughts. Imbued with Theodore’s ideals of public service, he already contemplated a career modeled on Uncle Ted’s that would bring him to the White House on his own. To his fellow law clerks he outlined a political timetable like his uncle’s—the state legislature, assistant secretary of the Navy, the governorship, and then, with “any luck,” the presidency. The law office was only a way station on the road to the livelier world of politics, and “he intended to run for office at the first opportunity.”2

  Franklin’s mother did not welcome the idea that her son might become involved in the “messy business” of politics, as she later told her biographer. She did not see why she should receive all these people whom she had never called on and whose families she did not know. Eleanor, however, was neither surprised nor upset by his plans.3 While Franklin was still in law school she had written Auntie Bye, “he will not find himself altogether happy with the law he is studying at Columbia unless he is able to get a broad human contact through it.”4 A career in politics would assure him of a life full of excitement and variety in which his ability to get along with people would be important.

  Franklin had always voted from Hyde Park. Like his father, he was active in village and county affairs, but with Eleanor at his side to encourage him he brushed aside his mother’s pleas that he follow his father and lead a “peaceful life among the family, the friends and neighbors at Hyde Park.” When John Mack, Democratic district attorney in Dutchess County, dropped into the Carter, Ledyard and Milburn offices early in 1910 to talk Dutchess politics and discuss the possibility of Franklin running for the state legislature, he found an attentive listener.

  Eleanor had known enough men in public life to realize that if her husband embarked on a political career it would mean that the family would have to move about a lot, be very adaptable, and make many sacrifices. But she wanted her husband to have large plans, and if realizing those dreams meant she would have to make adjustments, she was prepared to do so—to live in Albany if that was required and to see that his household ran smoothly. Politics was neither new nor threatening to her. She followed public affairs, read the New York Times regularly, and, like her husband, had been stirred by Uncle Ted’s appeals to the younger generation to devote themselves to the public good. And deep within she must have realized that Franklin’s entry into politics would mean an expansion of her horizons as well as his.

  In June she and Franklin lunched with Uncle Ted on his return from Europe and Africa, and no doubt they discussed Franklin’s decision to go into politics. Theodore was planning to return to the political wars himself, to fight the conservative drift in the Republican party under Taft. Would Uncle Ted be campaigning in Dutchess County, Franklin asked Auntie Bye a few weeks later. “Franklin ought to go into politics without the least regard as to where I speak or don’t speak,” Theodore advised Bye. Franklin was “a fine fellow,” he went on, but he wished he had Joe Alsop’s views. Joe Alsop, whom Auntie Corinne described as “a very strong man,” had married young Corinne and was involved in Republican politics in Connecticut. And in Herkimer, New York, Teddy Robinson was preparing to run for the state assembly as a Republican.

  She had heard an amusing account, Aunt Ella wrote Eleanor from Liverpool, of how Franklin, Teddy, and Joe Alsop were “all in the limelight and Uncle Ted in the extraordinary position of being the arbiter of the Republican destinies. He has certainly infected you all with large ambitions as citizens and I am sure will be proud of you all.”5

  It was a measure of Franklin’s independence that, admiring Theodore as greatly as he did, he stuck with the Democrats. Eleanor, although she worshiped her uncle and had been raised in a household and milieu where “Republicanism and respectability went hand in hand,”6 followed her husband’s political allegiance. Any suggestion that she should not would have shocked her, and she certainly did not envisage a political role for herself. She was an anti-suffragette, and vigorously so. Pussie was the only advocate of the women’s vote in the family. “The most surprising part to me,” Hall commented to Eleanor in 1908, “is that she is trying to convert you of all people.” Two years later Eleanor was still disagreeing with Pussie over the suffragette issue, and evidently with some violence, to judge by Hall’s reproving remark: “I thought you had more self control.”

  While Eleanor insisted that politics was a man’s domain, she wanted to share her husband’s interests and accomplishments, a somewhat contradictory position that was also held by other strong-minded women of that transitional era. Beatrice Webb did not recant her public opposition to women’s suffrage until 1909, even though she had renounced her romance with Joe Chamberlain rather than yield to his insistence that he should have the final word in their marriage.7 Eleanor made no such demand, but she did want to be part of her husband’s life away from home as well as in it.

  She was at Campobello most of the summer of 1910 when Franklin was meeting with the Dutchess County leaders and party workers. Her letters begged him to keep her informed about his political prospects; it was difficult enough being at Campobello without him, she wrote, but if he did not write she would feel quite lost. And if he was unable to come up as he had planned, “I shall weep.” Franklin hoped to run for the assembly, but the incumbent, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, finally told him he had no intention of bowing out. This left the state senate seat, which had only once been won from the Republicans, in the 1880s by Roosevelt’s neighbor, Thomas Jefferson Newbold. Franklin’s chances of winning, Mack cautioned him, were one in five. Undaunted, Franklin decided to make the bid.

  On September 23, 1910, Eleanor gave birth to Elliott, an eleven-pound fourteen-ounce baby. Two weeks later, on October 6, the Democratic leaders meeting in convention in Poughkeepsie formally nominated Franklin Roosevelt for state senator. Sara now discovered that pride in her son was stronger than anxiety over the hordes of strangers she might have to receive. She sat proudly through the meeting as he made his acceptance sp
eech, she recalled two decades later, her head held high, sure as she heard his statement of principles that noblesse oblige would shape his career in politics as it had that of her old friend Theodore and the sons of her highborn friends in England.8 In her diary at the time, however, she limited herself to the more pragmatic comment, “Franklin will be here now a great deal.”

  Eleanor did not hear the speech. Immobilized in New York City with her newly born baby, she had to be satisfied with the lilies, at that time her favorite flower, that Franklin had sent her. “Much love and good luck to you in your campaigning,” she wrote him as he set out to reverse the 5 to 1 odds by the unorthodoxy of his campaign tactics. “In the coming campaign,” he had pledged in his acceptance speech, “I need not tell you that I do not intend to sit still. We are going to have a very strenuous month.” He hired a red Maxwell touring car and decked it out with flags, and “at the dangerous pace of about 22 miles an hour” he and the congressional candidate, Richard Connell, a spread-eagle orator, toured the district, stopping at every country store, talking to every farmer, speaking in every village.* Not even a fall from a moving street car slowed him down. Eleanor spent twenty-four hours soaking his elbows and knees in disinfectant and he was off again. The Saturday before the election Eleanor heard him make his final speech outside the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie, later known as his “lucky corner”—the first time she had heard him make a political speech. She agonized over his slow delivery and frequent pauses,9 but he managed, nonetheless, to convey warmth, friendliness, and self-confidence. The voters responded. On Election Day, Sara recorded, in the proper order of their importance to her, “Anna weighs 42.8; James 35.13. Franklin elected State Senator with about 1,500 majority.”