Eleanor and Franklin Page 31

  Eleanor tried a number of ways to teach her children to concentrate. She spent time with them on their lessons and reading to them. She also had a French governess to help them learn French. Elliott “goes to Mlle. now for French every morning & I think has learnt a good deal though if you ask him to say anything he promptly refuses.” She had borrowed one of her methods of teaching concentration from Mlle. Souvestre. After lunch she had the children lie flat on the floor.5 “Relax your muscles completely,” she softly commanded. When they were physically relaxed and, she hoped, mentally focused, she read to them. It is difficult to say whether these efforts were effective. The Roosevelt children did show an unusual ability, when interested, to concentrate on what was being said and to pick up ideas and information aurally, but their father and mother had the same faculty and it may have been an inherited rather than a learned trait.

  The children did not suffer from lack of motherly care and attention. John was “three months old [and] weighs 14 lbs 13 oz.,” Eleanor noted, “which is 15 oz. more than F. jr. weighed.” She worried if she had to be away from the children. Before Eleanor left with Franklin on his inspection tour of southern naval facilities, Anna had asked anxiously what would happen if they had to buy anything “or got lost or put into prison.” Eleanor was also apprehensive about how the household would manage if a crisis developed while she was away, and the longer she was gone, the stronger her fears became. But after she returned she was able to report to Sara, “All was well here.”

  Sometimes there were mishaps while Eleanor was away. One summer when they were at Campobello she went to St. Andrews to do some shopping, and when she returned she discovered Elliott had fallen into the smoldering ashes of a fire the children had made on the beach while the nurse had wandered off and burned his arms and legs. In the four-page letter that went to Franklin describing what had happened, Eleanor was careful not to alarm him unduly—“he only cried a little & Nurse says they are only skin burns” and they applied Unguentine.

  She was as composed and cool-headed in dealing with Elliott as she was in writing Franklin, and later concluded that the spirit with which one faced life’s little calamities was the important thing, since children cannot be totally shielded from misadventures. But then when Franklin, perhaps because her letter was so reassuring, made only passing reference to Elliott’s injuries, she was indignant. “You are casual about Elliott’s burns . . . he is a very brave young man!”

  Because she had been full of fears when she was a child, Eleanor wanted her children to be venturesome and to meet adversity with fortitude. She was pleased when Anna and James entered the swimming pool. “One thing their lessons did for them is that they’ll put their heads under & go in to their necks & James seems less timid than Anna,” she reported. Since Anna was ten and James nine, it might not appear to be much of an achievement, but the point is that she was determined to have them face up to their fears. She admired spunkiness and detested sniveling. Once when Elliott bit James hard she spanked him with a slipper and explained that no matter whose fault it was, boys didn’t bite. Elliott’s feelings were hurt and “he made such a long upper lip he looked like a rabbit,” but she was pleased with his insistence that “it didn’t hurt so very much, Mother!” Another show of defiance was also reported half approvingly: “Elliott went for me with both fists.” There were times, however, when she was not so enamored of Elliott’s temper. She took him to the Spring-Rice dancing class to look on, “but he is so shy with people and you never are sure that he’ll do as you tell him without a scene so it isn’t an unmixed joy.” Then she added firmly, “The new baby is not going to be allowed to grow up like this!”

  Sara often deplored and frequently hindered Eleanor’s efforts at shaping the children’s character. “Anna and James thrive and have a good time,” Eleanor wrote Franklin, “though Mama thinks them much abused.” When they all went sailing, she reported on another occasion, “the chicks became obstreperous and I most severe and Mama unhappy!” When James fell off his pony while they were visiting Hyde Park he was scratched but Eleanor did not think he was really hurt; “but of course he cried hard and Mama brought him in and had him lying down before I knew anything was wrong or I would have made him get on again if only for a minute.”

  Sara should not have interfered with her daughter-in-law’s decisions, but Eleanor, as she later realized, was too stern a disciplinarian. She had disliked her mother, but it was her mother’s and grandmother’s tendency to say “no” rather than her father’s life-affirming “yes” that took charge when she was confronted by unruliness in her children. She thought the discipline she had undergone as a child had been beneficial, “and so when I found myself responsible for the bringing up of children, I enforced a discipline which in many ways was unwise.”6 Having seen what self-indulgence had done to her father and uncles, she was puritanical and repressive toward herself and overly severe in curbing what she considered the “wildness” of her children. “They have been the wildest things you ever saw,” she complained to Franklin, “and about ready to jump out of their skins.” “Let the chicks run wild at Hyde Park,” he advised her. “It won’t hurt them.” His reaction was the same when she appealed to him to end some roughhousing between James and Elliott: “Oh, let them scrap. It’s good exercise for them.”

  Franklin did not like to administer discipline. As public responsibilities more and more cut down the time he was able to spend with his “chicks,” he wanted the hours he was with them to be full of fun, excitement, and affection. His mother had always tried to run him, and he shied away from doing the same to his children. He was loath to hurt anyone’s feelings, and preferred to be the agent of good tidings. When one of the children had to be punished, the task usually fell to Eleanor, and if she insisted that it was Franklin’s responsibility, wrote James Roosevelt in his engaging memoir, Affectionately, F.D.R., “the punishment simply was not administered.”7

  Sara, however, was the real culprit in undermining the children’s discipline. Even the Hyde Park servants thought so. Sara overhead talk in the servants’ part of the house that she spoiled the children, that she was “chicken-hearted,” and the criticism made her cross, she wrote to Eleanor. Then she added:

  But one shd keep as clear of the opinion of that class as possible I am sure, for they blow hot & cold, the best of them, & if any of them speak to me of how nice the children are, I shall not even answer. One thing that makes for good behaviour at table is that we all know everything goes upstairs & outside.

  “We ‘chicks’ quickly learned,” wrote James, “that the best way to circumvent ‘Pa and Mummy’ when we wanted something they wouldn’t give us was to appeal to Granny.”8 But Franklin was away so often that it was Eleanor who bore the brunt of Sara’s interference. The older woman was motivated by darker, more complicated forces than an overindulgent love of her grandchildren: she was Eleanor’s rival for the affections both of the children and of Franklin. James wrote that his grandmother was “in constant competition with Mother” over how the children should be raised. In the article that McCall’s published posthumously, “I Remember Hyde Park,” Eleanor at the end of her life spoke more plainly that ever about this arrangement à trois.9 The Big House at Hyde Park was her mother-in-law’s and Franklin’s home, but not hers: “For over forty years, I was only a visitor there.” In the dining room Franklin sat at one end of the table, Sara at the other, and Eleanor on the side. It was the same in the large library-living room, in the new wing that Sara added to the house in 1915 after consulting Franklin but not her—the two large armchairs on either side of the fireplace were occupied by Franklin and his mother, while Eleanor “sat anywhere.”

  When Sara had realized that the marriage between Franklin and herself could not be prevented, Eleanor went on, explaining why the Big House had been such an unhappy place for her, “she determined to bend the marriage to the way she wanted it to be. What she wanted was to hold onto Franklin and his children; she wanted the
m to grow up as she wished. As it turned out, Franklin’s children were more my mother-in-law’s children than they were mine.” This was partly her own fault, she admitted, for having permitted Sara to keep her “under her thumb.”

  Hall understood his sister’s problems with “Cousin Sally,” as he called Sara, and with the nurses and governesses that Sara selected for Eleanor. “Are the legions of law and order too strong for you or have you managed this summer without too assiduous attentions?” he sympathetically inquired.

  Eleanor tried to lead the children in games and sports. She went fishing with them—“James and Anna and I fished off the float yesterday morning and got about 11 flounders in about an hour and a half.” She taught them croquet and found it “a good exercise for her temper” to take their disregard of the rules calmly. She accompanied Anna and James to their dancing class at Lady Spring-Rice’s. She took James on a tour of Annapolis and could “hardly drag him past the football practice field.” All the children had an assortment of dogs and rabbits—“We had a great tragedy yesterday, one of the bunnies died. . . . The chicks were very sad but they buried it with great ceremony and are going to put a mound of stones above him today and that seems to be a great consolation.” When she played with her children she tried to forget herself, to enter into the spirit of the occasion and to be like a child herself, but she was not easy-going in such matters. The moralist in her was always in command, standing between herself and her children, whose irrepressible spirits cried out for acceptance, not judgment. “She felt a tremendous sense of duty to us,” Anna later said. “It was part of that duty to read to us and to hear our prayers before we went to bed, but she did not understand or satisfy the need of a child for primary closeness to a parent.” “I was certainly not an ideal mother,” Eleanor wrote later. “It did not come naturally to me to understand little children or to enjoy them. Playing with children was difficult for me because play had not been an important part of my own childhood.”10

  Even without Sara, Eleanor’s overly active conscience would have been both a burden and a blessing to her children, but Sara made escape from the demands of that conscience more difficult. Sara spoiled the children, but she was also very conventional and she imposed her essentially Victorian standards of good behavior on the children by “a procession of ‘proper’ English ‘nannies,’” wrote James, that she “foisted on our household.”11 Their really intimate lives, said Anna, “were run by nurses and governesses.”12 One of these nurses, whom James called “Old Battleaxe,” tyrannized the children, cuffing them about, locking them in closets, subjecting them to humiliations, all in the name of discipline. Eleanor discovered that she was also “a secret drinker,” and that was her end. “From the time I got rid of that person,” she said many years later, reminiscing with her children, “and took over the selection of the type of nurses I wanted, I began to have more confidence in my ability to handle the children.”

  There was a severe polio epidemic in 1916, which frightened Franklin and Eleanor, and Franklin was glad his family was at Campobello. “The infantile paralysis in N.Y. and vicinity is appalling,” he wrote back after leaving them on the island. “Please kill all the flies I left. I think it really important.” Eleanor tried to do as he wished: “The flies are fairly well exterminated,” she reported.

  Franklin spent little time at Campobello that summer, and Eleanor was restless and when Franklin intimated he might have to cut short his holiday at Campobello, she proposed to bring the family down earlier: she and the children could “easily go down from here by train alone.” But Franklin did not like that idea. “No one is thinking of moving children by rail,” he told her. And he wanted his family to stay there until he could get the Dolphin to bring them back directly to Washington rather than have them go to Hyde Park as they usually did in September, but that would not be until mid-September. Eleanor did not share Franklin’s anxieties about having the children stay at Hyde Park.

  I think the chicks will be safest at Hyde Park and even Mama does not seem to worry. They are exposed possibly anywhere and all we can do is to keep them as well as we can and I think the long season in Washington would be worse for them than the risks at Hyde Park.

  But having made clear how she felt, she would not press the point: “of course if you decide it best to go to Washington or to stay later here I will do as you think best.”

  She yielded to him even though she found it “annoying to have to stay here just the one year I really want to get back!” The Dolphin finally picked them up at Eastport at the beginning of October. It was commanded by William D. Leahy, who recalled later that the forty-two-hour journey to New York City was considerably enlivened by the children, who took over the ship. They went to Hyde Park after all, Franklin finally agreeing with Eleanor “that H.P. is really no more risk than a long autumn in Washington.”

  It was Eleanor’s “complete unselfishness,” William Phillips wrote, that kept the household on an even keel, although Sara’s “jealousy made life difficult in many ways” for her.

  Caroline was always impressed by Eleanor’s willingness to efface herself so that there would be no trouble between mother and son. It was her thoughtfulness of other people rather than of herself which made it possible to preserve a calm and tranquil attitude in such domestic difficulties.

  No wonder we all admired her.13

  But was her attitude so admirable? She did not think so in later years. Neither did her children.

  19.THE APPROACH OF WAR

  ACCORDING TO BILL PHILLIPS, WHO KNEW HIM AS WELL AS anyone in World War I Washington, Franklin did not seem fully mature. “He was likable and attractive, but not a heavyweight, brilliant but not particularly steady in his views,” Phillips later wrote. “He could charm anybody but lacked greatness.”1 What was more, he was inclined to cockiness in his relation with his superiors, especially Daniels; if audacity did not more often lapse into presumption, he probably had Eleanor to thank for it.

  She tried to discipline his brashness, because although she appreciated her husband’s abilities and loyally supported his ambitions, she also knew that he could be egocentric and impulsive and give the impression that no one could refuse him anything. She took pleasure in passing on any praise of him that came her way, but usually coupled it with a chastening qualification. Harry Hooker “talked of you last night in a wonderful way and so did Maude and David the other day”—that was the garland; then came the bramble: “It is a great responsibility to feel such trust in one’s character and brains and I’m glad it doesn’t lie on my shoulders. I’d be bowed down!” Adulation bothered Eleanor. It intoxicated her husband.

  His exuberant self-esteem usually amused her, but occasionally she dressed him down sharply. She read in the papers that Franklin had launched his campaign for senator with a statement “congratulating” his old political ally William Church Osborn on his resignation as New York Democratic state chairman by using such snide phrases as “had Mr. Osborn been in the thick of every political contest” and “had Mr. Osborn’s political experience been deeper. . . . ” “Isn’t it just a bit patronizing?” Eleanor rebuked her husband. “If I were ‘he’ I would rise up and smite you for an impertinent youth.”

  Bill Phillips recorded an exchange between Franklin and Eleanor that he thought characterized Eleanor’s steadying influence on her husband in those years. It took place in a hotel suite in San Francisco which the Phillipses shared with the Roosevelts in March, 1915, when they accompanied Vice President Marshall to the opening of the Panama Pacific Exposition. One morning while the four of them were breakfasting together, Eleanor asked Franklin whether he had received a letter from a certain person. “‘Yes,’ said F.D.R. and drank his coffee. ‘Have you answered it, Dear?’ she asked. ‘No,’ said he and swallowed some more coffee. ‘Don’t you think you should answer it?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. ‘Don’t you think you should answer it now?’ ‘Yes.’” Phillips added, “He answered it then and there. I gathered that t
he letter might never have received a reply without the watchful eye of his wife.”2

  When Josephus Daniels had cleared Roosevelt’s appointment as assistant secretary with Elihu Root, then senator from New York, Root had cautioned him that “whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front,” and it was not long after his confirmation that Franklin was confiding to Eleanor how much better he could run the department than his chief. He and the secretary had slaved all day

  on all the things he should have decided before and as I expected most of them were turned over to me! The trouble is that the Secretary has expressed half-baked opinions on these matters and I don’t agree. I know that he would decide right if he’d only give the time to learn. However, he has given me carte blanche and says he will abide by my decision.

  Eleanor thought this showed Mr. Daniels to be a man of magnanimity and strength. “I think it is quite big of him to be willing to let you decide,” she cautioned Franklin. “Most people want to put their opinions through at all costs whether they are half-baked or not! It shows great confidence in you.”3

  At an early meeting of his cabinet President Wilson had referred to the Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the Navy, which had prompted Eleanor to read it and to point up its moral to her husband. She was struck by the “pettiness” of the men around Lincoln. “It was very wonderful we ever came through the Civil War. There seems to have been poor management at the War Department and so much jealousy and littleness among Cabinet members.”