This background regarding the tense relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, is useful; it needs to be absorbed, seen in the context of a long-past culture. The kind of pointed hostility that developed between them is not common, however. And my grandmother was largely responsible for it.
The critical question remains: What made Eleanor’s attitude so strikingly different from the usual expressions of family tensions? What was behind her taking against Sara, often so vindictively? It makes no sense, especially since the younger woman was known for her sincerity and warmth toward other people.
One piece of the puzzle may include the range of Eleanor’s activity. She reached out to the whole of America. As we have seen, “Mrs. Roosevelt” became a household name. On the other hand, Sara’s scope was more restrained. She sought nothing more than to do her duty, as she saw it.
As first lady, Eleanor focused intensely on the events, and the people, with whom she was brought into contact through her engagements, her speeches and interviews, her writing, and her visits around the country. Each activity was connected with the social issues of the day. She did not purposely gather information for her husband, disliking the press dubbing her the eyes and ears of the president. But she shared with him her observations and assessments of how people were coping with the Great Depression and how much they understood of what he was trying to do through the New Deal programs. He greatly valued her opinions and read the notes and letters she regularly sent him.
It would never have occurred to Sara to assume this role. Although she supported FDR’s New Deal, and said so when asked, she did have her own way of seeing at least one of his programs. When the new Social Security Act had become law, an embarrassed Treasury Department official had to advise the president that his mother had not paid her social security taxes, and refused to do so, saying, “I can take care of my own!” FDR quietly paid it, and ordered the official not to let his mother know of his intercession.
Sara regularly worked with a number of voluntary organizations, and not only those of traditional concern to WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). She consistently supported the Africa-America Institute and more than once hosted social events at her New York City house, including a fund raiser, in honor of Mary McLeod Bethune, the prominent African American leader. In 1938 the Jewish Forum awarded her the Albert Einstein Medal for Humanitarianism, noting Sara’s “broad sympathy and activities in alleviating the conditions of all people throughout the world who suffer from poverty, oppression and hatred.” In support of Eleanor, Sara invited to Hyde Park members of the Women’s Trade Union League, including Eleanor’s friend Rose Schneiderman.
I mention these engagements as representative of Sara’s attitude, one not actually like what is usually reported. Eleanor’s later comments about her mother-in-law would sometimes lead you to believe that Sara’s interests were limited to sewing circles and traditional (safe) charities. One of Sara’s regular activities did include teaching a new system of sewing at the school in Hyde Park village, and she sewed clothes for dolls to be given to hospitalized children. Additionally, there were the usual organizations such as the Red Cross, or other church-related charities. New York City’s Greenwich House, founded to help the local immigrant community, was one of Sara’s special interests.
Unlike many of her class, Sara was not anti-Semitic. She was a supporter of B’rith Abraham and Hadassah, once traveling to Toronto to address their group. When my great-grandmother died, a spokeswoman for the Young Women’s Zionist Organization of America said, “Her [Sara’s] understanding of the problems of minority groups and her sympathies with their aims endeared her to Americans of all faiths.”
At one Mother’s Day celebration, Sara spoke in the address she gave of her concern for “the great multitude—many millions—of homeless mothers, war orphans, impoverished refugees. . . . This we shall do without neglecting the needy of our own land.” Eleanor remarked in her column: “There is no one I know who sets a greater value on the duties and pleasures of motherhood.” Considering all Sara’s other activities, I hear this as a rather sly remark on Eleanor’s part, relegating her mother-in-law to “motherhood.”9
One basic difficulty in penetrating into why Eleanor Roosevelt took against her mother-in-law is that Eleanor so soon turned into an icon after becoming first lady in the White House. When I grew up, indeed throughout most of my life, anything my grandmother said was, I felt, undoubtedly true. She was one of those people whose integrity was not questioned. So when she spoke and wrote about Sara Delano Roosevelt, particularly after Franklin had died, in ways that created the now widely accepted image of Sara as an arrogant and out-of-touch woman with a controlling nature, this version became the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Although known across America as a model of tolerance and respect for the rights of all people, perhaps it is now possible to say out loud: Hold on. Eleanor did have a dark side, and she did engage in hostility toward a selected few. This perhaps means she was only human as well as humane.
Perhaps more than by anyone else, Eleanor’s disparaging public images of Sara Delano Roosevelt were nailed firmly in place by Joseph P. Lash, my grandmother’s authorized biographer. In his best-selling book entitled Eleanor and Franklin, he writes: “She [Sara] was a matriarch who belonged completely to a past generation; she sought to dominate . . . from behind a facade of total generosity, submission and love.” False characterizations such as the above occur throughout, and he regularly slips in the snide word or phrase to reinforce his own derogative views. Lash writes: “She [Eleanor] had to bear the brunt of Sara’s harassment and discontent.”10 He drags in my eighteen-year-old mother when he writes: “Alone with her grandmother [Anna] had to bear the brunt of Sara’s harassment and discontent.” In fact, I know from my mother that, being regularly at odds with her own mother, she often would seek out her grandmother, Sara, as her confidante.
In Eleanor and Franklin, Lash, too, describes how Sara stepped in with financial assistance when it was needed. He records at one point, my grandmother’s anxiety about unpaid bills piling up. “There were large doctors’ bills that spring, between Johnny’s knee and Brother’s broken nose and Elliott’s rupture and James digestive troubles.” He then notes: “Sara as usual came to the rescue,” at the same time noting the relief expressed by Eleanor at her mother-in-law’s help.11 None of this sounds at all as though Sara’s generosity was greatly resented.
Another example from Lash’s biography of Eleanor is the funny but sad story that follows.12 Lash notes that FDR was spending most of his time concentrating on trying to recover from polio. Hence my grandmother was planning a European trip with her two close friends, Marion and Nancy, taking along her two youngest children, Franklin Jr. and Johnnie: “It was also Sara who a month later almost undid the European trip during a family dinner at the Big House. Eleanor was reviewing their plans for the trip—they were taking the Buick and Chevy and she, Nan, and Marion would do the driving; perhaps they might even do some camping. Suddenly Sara reared up, disapprovingly—it would be undignified for the wife of the governor and two of his sons to motor in an old touring car and even worse for the governor’s wife to drive herself.”
Hearing this, “Eleanor then turned to the head of the table where Sara always sat opposite Franklin, and said in a cold voice, ‘Very well. I will take your grandsons in a manner consistent with what you think their positions ought to be.’” With that she hurried out of the dining room and took refuge on the screened porch.”
Lash concludes:
But Franklin did not contradict Sara. She again had her way, and the incident cast a shadow over the entire trip. . . . Eleanor rented handsome chauffeur-driven limousines everywhere they went, beginning with a Daimler in England, and made the boys sit in the back with her, although they longed to sit up front with the driver.
I heard this story several times from my grandmother, so I know from whence Lash obtained it
. But note the phrase he uses to describe Sara’s response to Eleanor’s plans: “Suddenly Sara reared up, disapprovingly.” That’s simply his interpretation. “Rearing up” was not something Sara would do; it would be poor form, bad manners, something quite unnecessary for someone with Sara’s self-confidence. She was not expressing anger, only an outdated sense of propriety.
For my part, I feel this characterization of my great-grandmother reflects the author’s lack of understanding of upper-class routines of the time—such as the normality of having a chauffeur drive your car. (In New York City, in 1936, I was regularly driven to school by one.) Granny’s somewhat outdated notion of the dignity that should be accorded to the governor’s wife and sons might well have been dismissed by one of FDR’s “amusing remarks,” and the whole scene would have been laughed off—if only my grandmother had not decided to make a scene. And about what? I have always wondered whom it was she was punishing.
What I don’t understand, considering his long friendship with Eleanor, and the fact that he was a professional writer, is how Lash could ignore the imprint on her of her very distinct background. In his biography he quite misses this basic element of her personality. She was reared in the same class as her mother-in-law, and it was evident all her life. Eleanor was well-known for her liberal views but her demeanor was always revealing.
Joe Lash was a professional writer, a prober of events, long before he became Eleanor’s biographer. But he refused to entertain the possibility that Eleanor was rationalizing her feelings of inadequacy, attempting to justify what she considered to be her failures as a mother. “I never played with dolls when I was a child” was an oft-repeated excuse of my grandmother’s, one that made me cringe. Lash writes that Eleanor felt that “if she had insisted on caring for her own children . . . she as well as they would have been happier.” Elsewhere in his book he acknowledges (as does Eleanor in her autobiography) that she was simply incapable of giving to her children the love they so much wanted. Lash quotes Eleanor: “I was certainly not an ideal mother. . . . 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 childhood.”13
Joe knew all my uncles and thought them loud and arrogant, indeed confirming Granny’s characterization of them as not being well brought up, but he makes no comment on my grandmother’s excuses. Like me he regularly heard her offering these same explanations for her feeling that she didn’t do well with children.
Perhaps Joe’s intense loyalty to Eleanor also blocks him from seeing that a sense of humor was not one of her strong points (nor of his, I should add). Additionally, it was known to all of us that Eleanor was likely to take immediate offence when she felt criticized. But Joe doesn’t mention this; he doesn’t relate it to the tensions between Eleanor and Sara.
In retrospect I can see that my great-grandmother was one of the last of a specific milieu, people who still had enough money to sustain themselves in their class position. Indeed Granny disdained those who did not know how to “handle money well” or those of her peers in society who did not practice the charitable responsibilities Granny felt were obligatory for a person graced with being “the well to do.”
Sara Delano Roosevelt died in 1941, a month before the Pearl Harbor attack plunged us into World War II. I doubt that she would have found it easy to cope with a postwar America in which her world, the old order, made orderly by the class system, was well on its way out, no longer having the same role or carrying the same influence in our society.
I should note here my own glaring omission as of this point. I have not noted my grandfather’s reaction to this open hostility that his wife expressed toward his mother. Of course he was aware of it. Eleanor would write to him about the exchanges she had had with Mama and how she had apologized the following day. FDR was sympathetic but careful not to take sides. He disliked an atmosphere of discord, especially when it was laced with his wife’s anger. One reason, I presume, that FDR went to Florida, where he had rented a houseboat, was to escape the disturbing vibrations at home. He knew there was nothing he could say that would reduce the tension. Any intervention on his part would only make things more difficult.
The practice of taking against another person, with its pointed hostility, is a very neurotic trait. Unfortunately it is a well-known phenomenon, a most destructive prejudice when directed against a group or institution—Jews, Roman Catholics, Muslims, fundamentalists, people of nations we consider a threat, etc. From there it can be picked up and used by demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and propagated throughout a nation, or, to be more up to date, through the mass media. Likewise, indirectly, prejudice may be exploited for raising immense amounts of lobbying money to be used for narrow political ends.
Eleanor Roosevelt would be dismayed to find herself in this company. And it would be a gross injustice to place her there. What I wish to write about here is a blip in her personality, albeit a serious one. When one considers how much of a struggle it was for her to emerge from her inner turmoil and begin to open up, it is all the more strange to see her slip into such pointed hostility. Her choice of focus for her hostility makes it doubly puzzling. Sara certainly did not deserve to be taken against with such intensity. I do wonder why my grandmother felt such a strong need to do so—flying in the face of the very values such as understanding and compassion she had come to champion.
My object in this chapter has certainly not been to denigrate this woman I knew so well. It is to show that a person recognized as having extraordinary character—one whom we look up to, whose image for courage and sincerity has rightfully made her an icon of integrity—is still a human being, just like you and me. It may push her a bit off her pedestal, but what I describe in no way diminishes her greatness, nor my reverence for my grandmother.
However, I do not excuse my grandmother’s biographer, whose judgment and lack of perspective I find glaring. He never probes the questions I raise above, rather obvious ones. Worse, few have challenged his unkind assertions about Sara Delano Roosevelt nor his unquestioned channeling of Eleanor’s complaints.
I have maintained that Eleanor was very disappointed in not finding in FDR’s mother the maternal figure she so desperately wanted. Was she also resentful at having been lumbered with child after child (six in all)—“always either pregnant or recovering from giving birth”—for so many years? Or—and this is highly speculative—was Eleanor’s hostility toward Sara really a substitute for resentments against her husband? Any disappointment in Franklin may have seemed an expression of hostility that “a good wife” could not make openly. It is anybody’s guess.
Eleanor’s own writing gives us few leads, though I have cited her difficult childhood and lack of confidence. We also know that when confronted by behavior she felt to be oppressive, she could, as she said, turn “cold.” Her close friend Nancy Cook has commented, “Eleanor can be very hard.”
Eleanor herself writes plainly about her foul moods, and how she took out it on the people surrounding her. Even on her honeymoon there was an incident in which she “had lapsed into an irritable and aggrieved silence—a pattern of behavior that would be repeated hundreds of times in the years to come.”14 Many people live with their hostility repressed inside them. My grandmother did so most of the time, but occasionally she let it out and, in my observation, she then produced an object of hostility that was not at all realistic. She created the hostile image to suit her needs, one such as her mother-in-law. Even Sara’s death did not alter my grandmother’s attitude. In fact my grandmother went right on telling the same stories of how difficult a person Franklin’s mother had been and what a burden.
In a letter reporting to my mother about Granny’s funeral, Eleanor wrote of Sara, “I kept being appalled at myself because I couldn’t feel any real grief or sense of loss & that seemed terrible after 36 years of fairly close association.”15
While I admire my grandmother’s candor,
her admission makes me very sad.
10
Others in the White House Entourage
My life in the White House and at Hyde Park was filled with interesting people. Books have been written about some of them—Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins, for example. Others, such as Marion Dickerman, have written their own memories.
I think one should have been written about my Cousin Polly, Miss Laura Delano. She was a character, both looking and acting the part well. Petite, rustling about in silk pajamas, (which she donned for the evening), she covered her hands and wrists with rings and bracelets that all tinkled and clattered when she gesticulated as she talked.
All this was topped by a rather haughty face, defined by a high forehead. Her hair was dyed either blue or mauve, perhaps a shade in between. The total effect was one of amazing grace and style.
Yet it seemed quite casual. Polly displayed such charm when entering a room that all were riveted. She liked to gossip and always had a juicy story for Cousin Franklin. (She chose to avoid the nasty cutting style of Alice Roosevelt, a cousin from the Teddy Roosevelt branch of the family.)
Cousin Polly (or Cousin Laura, as we called her when we were children) was a favorite of my grandfather, and was with him in Warm Springs when he died. As I have learned more about my great-grandmother’s family, the Delanos, Polly doesn’t seem to fit in with their style. Obviously she had cut away from their norm and established herself with a distinct personality.
During World War I, when my grandparents were living in Washington due to FDR’s post as assistant secretary of the navy, Laura Delano was also there. She created a real scandal—within a very limited circle, as it was so scandalous!—by falling head over heels in love with the first secretary of the Japanese embassy. For many Americans at the time, prejudice against Asian peoples was not far different from their prejudice against African Americans. It didn’t matter that Cousin Polly’s love was a prince in the Japanese royal family. But there was more. They wanted to get married! It was his family that put its foot down. The prince must marry someone more appropriate for his station, said his parents. I was told that Cousin Laura had been devastated and remained “Miss Delano” henceforth.
Upstairs at the Roosevelts' Page 12