Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  “I went,” Eleanor wrote, “and listened breathlessly and returned home still half-dazed by the sense of impending change.”16

  The period of privacy, of exclusive devotion to her family and preoccupation with purely social duties, was at an end.

  20.PRIVATE INTO PUBLIC PERSON

  A YEAR AFTER AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO THE WAR ELEANOR WROTE her mother-in-law that she was taking on still another assignment: “I’m going to have charge of the knitting at the Navy Department work rooms,” in addition to the hours spent at the Red Cross canteen. “It is going to mean part of every day now except Sundays taken up at one place or another but that doesn’t seem much to do, considering what the soldiers must do.”1 Eleanor had never shunned work, but the war harnessed her considerable executive abilities to her always active sense of responsibility. The war gave her a reason acceptable to her conscience to free herself of the social duties that she hated, to concentrate less on her household, and plunge into work that fitted her aptitudes. Duty now commanded what she could take pleasure in doing.

  During the first few weeks Eleanor was so busy helping entertain the high-ranking allied missions that came hurrying to Washington that she didn’t have time to think about what the war demanded of her as a person. The young couple’s friendship with British Ambassador Spring-Rice and French Ambassador Jusserand, Franklin’s duties with the Navy Department, and the social circles in which they moved meant a great deal of partying with members of the British Mission, headed by Arthur Balfour, whom Eleanor found “charming in the way that a good many Englishmen are and very few of our own men,” and with the French Mission, with “Papa” Joffre as the center of attraction.

  Marshal Joffre brought sobering news that dispelled the lingering illusion in New York and Washington that all that would be required of the United States would be money, foodstuffs, war materials, and the fleet to see to it that they got safely to Europe. At a luncheon at the Phillipses that included the Lanes, the Eustises, the Roosevelts, the Longworths, and Mrs. Borden Harriman, the Marshal made it clear that France wanted American troops, and as quickly as possible: “You should send 25,000 troops at once, and then again 25,000 and again and again, just as fast as possible.”2 Eleanor later accompanied Franklin to a Navy League reception for the head of the British Naval Mission. Franklin in his remarks sought to awaken the public to the true state of affairs. The British and the French Missions had been given “fair words, and again fair words,” he said, but they had a right to ask about “the number of men that have left America for the other side. . . . It is time that they [Congress and the people] insist on action at once. Action that will give something definite—definite ships, definite men—on a definite day.”

  Eleanor applauded; “Franklin listened to all the polite platitudes and false hopes and was called on to speak last,” she wrote Sara, at which time he “said all he has pent up for weeks. It was solemn and splendid and I was glad he did it and I think a good many people were but I shouldn’t wonder if the Secretary was annoyed. Mr. Belmont was furious and said he took much too dark a view!”3

  Franklin espoused a plan to lay a mine barrage across the North Sea to bottle up the submarines in their nests as part of an aggressive antisubmarine strategy. And it was originally Franklin’s idea, Eleanor claimed. There has been dispute about that claim, but none that he became its chief advocate at a time when Daniels questioned its practicality and the British admiralty dragged its heels. “Franklin has asked to see the President to present his plan for closing the North Sea,” Eleanor wrote Sara on May 10, 1917, “but 3 days have passed and he hasn’t been granted an interview.” She thought Franklin “very brave,” Sara wrote back, “and long to hear that he could show his plan to the President.” Franklin did not get to see Wilson until June 4, when he obtained the president’s support for the establishment of an interdepartmental commission to inquire into the project’s advisability. “If it hadn’t been for him, there would have been no Scotch mine barrage,” Admiral Harris later said,4 and if the barrage came too late to be a decisive factor in winning the war, the delay was not Franklin’s fault.

  Theodore Roosevelt visited Washington during the hectic first weeks of the war. Blind in one eye, bothered by the fever he had picked up in the Brazilian jungles, the former president nevertheless came charging into the Capital with characteristic bravura to press his proposal that he be sent to France at the head of a division that he personally would raise. He stayed with Alice, and Franklin and Eleanor saw a good deal of him. When Uncle Ted visited them, the two youngest children, Franklin and John, were soon made aware of his presence. Full of electric vitality, Theodore burst into their room at the top of the house. “Oh, ho, ho,” the old lion roared; “these two little piggies are going to market,” and he hooked a happily protesting child under each arm and charged down the stairs.5

  But apart from such family interludes there was little to cheer Theodore. “Though he was kind to us, as he always was,” Eleanor said, “he was completely preoccupied with the war.”

  Franklin thought it was good policy to permit Uncle Ted to go to Europe and arranged for him to see the secretary of war. Sara also approved. “I hope he will be allowed to go,” she wrote. More substantial support came from France. “Our poilus ask, ‘Where is Roosevelt?’” Clemenceau wrote Wilson. “Send them Roosevelt—it will gladden their hearts.” But the War Department was afraid a Teddy Roosevelt division would drain off the best officer talent. The war would be won by professionalism, discipline, and organization, it felt, not by gallant charges up the French equivalent of San Juan Hill. “The business now in hand,” Wilson coldly announced on May 18, “is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”

  “I hated to have him disappointed,” Eleanor wrote, “and yet I was loyal to President Wilson.”6

  All four of Theodore’s sons went into the service, and he repeatedly urged Franklin to resign and put on a uniform. But General Leonard Wood, the most prestigious soldier in the Army and a Republican, said in July, 1917, that it would be “a public calamity if Franklin, an advocate of fighting the war aggressively, left at this time.” Daniels was equally firm. A year later Eleanor became quite angry with her distinguished uncle when he brought up the subject again at Douglas Robinson’s funeral, urging her to use her influence to get him to don a uniform. It was her husband’s own business, she felt, and she knew, moreover, how anxious he was to get into the Navy. She was quite prepared to have him serve, but there were decisions a man had to make alone.

  When her brother Hall, who was just getting established professionally, teamed up with Theodore’s youngest son, Quentin, to go into the fledgling air force, she backed him up, even though he had to cheat a little on the eye test to qualify. But Grandma Hall asked why he didn’t buy a substitute, as gentlemen had done in the Civil War, which outraged Eleanor. “Gentlemen” owed the same duty to their country as other citizens, and it would be unthinkable, she flung out at her grandmother, to pay someone to risk his life for you.7

  The episode stood out in Eleanor’s mind as another step on her road to independence. Under the impact of the war, her viewpoint was changing. A letter from Cousin Susie full of complaints about minor inconveniences caused by the war evoked an impatient exclamation: “How can one be like that in these days?”8

  On all sides noncombatants were being urged to do their bit. “It is not an army we must shape and train for war,” said Wilson, “it is the nation.” Women, on the point of achieving suffrage—to which Eleanor was now a convert—broke loose from the Good Samaritan services to which tradition had assigned them and rallied to the war effort in every capacity except actual fighting in the field. “Is there any law that says a yeoman must be a man?” asked Daniels when the Navy faced a shortage of office workers. “Then enroll women!” Eleanor yearned to serve, but how? Her first ventures were awkward. Food administrator Herbert Hoover appealed to the country to conserve food; society responded by reducin
g the eight-course dinner to three, decreeing one meatless day a week, and pledging “simplicity in dress and entertainments.” There was an end to calls.

  Eleanor introduced her own austerity rules in her household, and her food-saving program was selected by the Food Administration “as a model for other large households,” the New York Times reported. “Mrs. Roosevelt does the shopping, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, each servant has a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of others; and all are encouraged to make helpful suggestions in the use of ‘left overs.’” And Mrs. Roosevelt added, according to the reporter, “Making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.”9

  The story produced guffaws all over Washington. Franklin wrote:

  All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table and the hand book. I will have it published in the Sunday Times. . . . Uncle Fred says, “It’s fine, but Gee how mad Eleanor will be!”

  Uncle Fred was right about Eleanor’s reaction. “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way and I feel dreadfully about it because so much is not true and yet some of it I did say. I never will be caught again that’s sure and I’d like to crawl away for shame.”10

  Although chagrined, she did not give up. She went to a meeting called by Daisy Harriman to muster support for the Red Cross. Mrs. Harriman proposed the formation of a motor corps auxiliary, but since Eleanor did not drive, she joined the Red Cross canteen, helped Mrs. Daniels to organize the Navy Red Cross, and joined the Comforts Committee of the Navy League, which distributed free wool to volunteer knitters and on Saturdays collected the finished articles.

  The war kept Franklin in Washington, and Eleanor had to move the household to Campobello alone. She managed very well, as usual, and as soon as the family was settled went to Eastport to talk about the Red Cross. She wrote that she also brought “6 pyjamas to make and am going to learn to use the machine to make them myself!” She had begun on the machine, she reported the next day, “and hope to work more rapidly as I go on!” A week later she rejoiced that the last pyjama top would be finished that night, “and then I take 6 pair back tomorrow!”

  During the summer Franklin was hospitalized with a throat infection, and Eleanor hurried to Washington to be with him. She returned the middle of August, bringing word to Sara that Franklin had petitioned the secretary to be allowed to go overseas in order to urge the British admiralty to use more aggressive antisubmarine tactics.

  At the end of the summer, for the first time, Eleanor varied the routine of moving her family off Campobello. She shepherded her whole flock as far as Boston, saw the four younger ones, their nurses, and maids settled on the train to New York, and then Huckins, the Roosevelt chauffeur, drove her and eleven-year-old Anna west along the Mohawk Trail to visit Hall and Margaret and their children in Schenectady. “The views are wonderful and Anna is a most enthusiastic companion,” she wrote her husband in Washington. She preferred to do such things with Franklin, but if he wasn’t available she would do them nonetheless, and she was determined also to learn to drive. It was another small declaration of independence.

  There was also the remarkable letter dated October 14, 1917, that Sara sent Franklin and Eleanor. In 1959 Eleanor told her son James that it had followed an argument about the future of Hyde Park, with Sara on one side and herself and Franklin on the other. Sara wanted the estate to stay in the family, the way Algonac and Fairhaven were kept by the Delanos and her English friends held on to their ancestral acres. Franklin dissented vigorously, Eleanor mildly, but dissent she did. He refused to make any such promise, Franklin declared and then, according to Eleanor’s later recollection, forcefully voiced his own social and political credo, an exposition that caused Sara to write the following letter a few hours after her children had left for Washington.

  Dearest Franklin

  & Dearest Eleanor,

  . . . I think of you almost in New York and I am sorry to feel that Franklin is tired and that my views are not his, but perhaps dear Franklin you may on second thoughts or third thoughts see that I am not so far wrong. The foolish old saying “noblesse oblige” is good and “honneur oblige” possibly expresses it better for most of us. One can be democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor we owe a great example, and my constant feeling is that through neglect and laziness I am not doing my part toward those around me. After I got home, I sat in the library for nearly an hour reading and as I put down my book and left the delightful room and the two fine portraits, I thought: after all, would it not be better just to spend all one has at once in this time of suffering and need, and not to think of the future; for with the trend to “shirtsleeves,” and the ideas of what men should do in always being all things to all men and striving to give up the old-fashioned traditions of family life, simple home pleasures and refinements, and the traditions some of us love best, of what use is it to keep up things, to hold on to dignity and all I stood up for this evening. Do not say that I misunderstand, I understand perfectly, but I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself. Well, I hope that while I live I may keep my “old fashioned” theories and that at least in my own family I may continue to feel that home is the best and happiest place and that my son and daughter and their children will live in peace and happiness and keep from the tarnish which seems to affect so many. Mrs. Newbold’s theory that children are “always just like their parents,” is pretty true, as example is what really counts.

  When I talk I find I usually arouse opposition, which seems odd, but is perhaps my own fault, and tends to lower my opinion of myself, which is doubtless salutary. I doubt if you will have time dear Franklin to read this, and if you do, it may not please you. My love to our fine little James, and to you two dear ones.

  Devotedly

  Mama

  At the time this was written Eleanor was deeply involved in war work, an experience that was propelling her toward a more radical assertion of independence. “Today I go canteening” had become Eleanor’s password. Washington was a major railroad junction, with as many as ten troop trains a day sitting on the sidings in the Washington yards. The Red Cross set up canteens manned by volunteers to provide the waiting soldiers with soup, coffee, and sandwiches. When a train came in the Red Cross ladies were there, lugging baskets of sandwiches and buckets of steaming coffee that had been prepared in the tin shacks where the volunteers worked. His mother was “up at five this morning to go to the canteen,” James complained to his grandmother; “do not you think that Mother should not go so early?”

  Edith Benham Helm described Eleanor at the canteen:

  We also had a small room where we sold, at cost, cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, picture postcards and candy bars. Here Mrs. Roosevelt shone. We had to make change at quick order when the men were lined up buying the supplies and we were supposed to turn over our finances in perfect order to the incoming shift. In all my experience there were only two women whose financial affairs were in perfect condition. One was Miss Mary Patten and the other, Mrs. Roosevelt.11

  Eleanor, who once had not known how to keep her own household books, worked out the canteen’s accounting system, and Mrs. Helm considered her “the dynamo” behind the canteen service.

  Before the troop trains pulled out, the canteen workers picked up the postcards they had furnished for the men, censored them, and saw that they were posted. But handling the mail on top of her other canteen duties was too much even for her, as it ran to about five hundred pieces of mail a day, “This post office game isn’t going to work,” she informed her husband. “It needs two or three people a day.” She persuaded the Red Cross to set up a special unit
under Mrs. Vanderbilt.

  When she was not at the canteen she gave out wool to knitters and collected the finished products. Then she was placed in charge of the knitting at the Navy Department, which meant supervising more than forty units whose captains reported to her. At the same time she learned that if Mrs. Daniels, who was ill, was not well enough to preside at a Navy Department rally the next day to organize for war work, she would have to preside. She did it—“I hated it but it was not as terrifying as I expected.” Then she was asked to report to an assemblage of Red Cross workers on how the Red Cross knitting operation was organized. She was “petrified” when it was her turn to speak in the huge DAR auditorium, but she managed to get through her report, she wrote Sara, “and I hope I was heard.”

  She did everything that was asked of her. “I pour tea this p.m. at the Navy Yard for a Navy Relief party”; “I am collecting for the Red Cross at the Shoreham Hotel Lobby from 9–12 tomorrow a.m. and then canteen from 1–6.” “Sometimes,” she wrote Franklin, “I’d rather like to have a little while with you when neither of us had anything we ought to do, but I suppose that isn’t to be hoped for till after the war!” Once when Franklin came to pick her up at the canteen they “were so busy he just turned in and worked too for an hour and enjoyed it! We had about 3,700 men during the day.” The only concession to family life she made was always to be at home at tea time with the children and to keep them with her until they went to bed.

  The winter and spring of 1918 were an anxious time. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the Germans will put everything they can muster into a spring offensive,” Eleanor wrote Sara.12

  Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador, was acutely conscious of the dangers of the interval before the weight of the fresh American divisions began to be felt on the western front. Wilson did not like the ambassador, whom he called “that highly excitable invalid,” and in January, 1918, Spring-Rice was recalled. “I feel very badly about the Spring-Rices,” Eleanor wrote. “I shall be very sorry to have them go, it will really make a big difference here.” The Spring-Rice children, Betty and Anthony, brought Anna pictures of themselves as parting gifts, and the ambassador gave Franklin and Eleanor a pen-and-ink drawing of the Washington monument which he had done himself; there was a poem on the back addressed to “sons of honour, richly fathered, scions of a sturdy brood. . . . Tell again your father’s story” and ending with a warning: “Woe to them who lounge and linger when the foe is at the gate.” Within a month Sir Cecil was dead. Eleanor framed the poem and drawing and hung them on the wall.