It was a Democratic sweep in which the governorship as well as both houses of the legislature were captured by the party, but Franklin ran far ahead of the state ticket. His unparalleled 1,140 majority in a rock-ribbed Republican district was noted by politicians throughout the state. “Telegrams coming all day for Franklin,” Sara recorded. Eleanor returned to New York to be with her baby, but a new period was beginning in her life, for Franklin had said that if elected he wanted his family with him in Albany. “We’re thinking of your move to Albany,” Isabella Ferguson wrote Eleanor from Cat Cañon in New Mexico. The Fergusons and their two children had cut loose from fashionable New York and were literally tenting down in the southwest desert because the dry air and hot sun had been recommended for Bob’s lungs. Eleanor’s impending move represented almost as drastic a break with her previous style of life as the Fergusons’ had.
The change began in November when she and Franklin, without Sara, went to Albany to look for a house. They picked a large brownstone with an enormous library and a small garden. Although it seemed quite palatial compared to their narrow New York house, “it is a comfort to have only three stories instead of six,” Franklin commented. Three weeks later they returned with Sara, who approved. “A fine house can be made comfortable.”
Albany in 1911 was a cluster of low roofs dominated by a few church spires and the architectural pile on a hill that constituted the center of the state government. For most of the legislators the city was little more than a dormitory and their brief stays were confined to the stretch of pavement between the Hotel Ten Eyck, the capitol, and the railroad station. It was also a pleasant city for those who wanted to live there, with broad avenues, narrow tree-shaded streets, and a spacious park full of lovely walks and drives where Eleanor and the nurses could take the children. Among the brownstones and red brick homes were a few gabled roofs to remind newcomers of the city’s Dutch antecedents. The small, compact Albany society was dominated by a few old families of Dutch lineage, and it bid the Roosevelts welcome.
Eleanor was the wife of Albany’s most talked-about young politician, and her initiation into official life was swift, sudden, and thorough. On the Sunday before Governor Dix’s inauguration, with the children, their three nurses, and a household staff barely settled, she and Sara were arranging furniture and hanging photographs when politicians who had come to Albany for the inauguration began to drop by to take a look at Franklin.
The next day, wife, mother, and brother-in-law accompanied the new senator to the assembly chamber, where they listened to the governor’s speech and then hurried home because Franklin had announced “open house” for his constituents. A block away, they saw a dense, cheering crowd in the front of their house—the delegation from Franklin’s senatorial district, “four hundred strong!” as Franklin told the story. There was a band and the Hyde Park Fife and Drum Corps, both “working overtime,” and “all finally managed to get into the house, shaking hands as they passed into the Dining Room.” To Eleanor the catered luncheon seemed endless, but Sara thought she “managed splendidly,” and Franklin recorded proudly that both “E.R. and S.D.R. . . . made a hit with the whole delegation.”
Eleanor’s initiation was not yet over. She and Franklin drove to the executive mansion to pay their formal respects to Governor and Mrs. Dix, and when they returned half the Dutchess County delegation was back at the house to await the departure of their train. It was late afternoon before Franklin coaxed them out and led them down to the station. Scarcely had Eleanor and Sara gone back to moving furniture when the governor called and invited Franklin and Eleanor to come up to the mansion for a “family party” and a little informal dancing; so they quickly dressed and hurried over.10 The next night they were again with the governor, this time as guests of Colonel and Mrs. William Gorham Rice, old friends of the James Roosevelts. Colonel Rice had been President Cleveland’s secretary, and he and Governor Dix were Cleveland Democrats, as Franklin’s father had been and as his half brother Rosy still was. Mrs. Rice welcomed Eleanor to Albany with a list of places to shop and a ceremonial offering of “ole Keuken,” a cake that was still eaten by the families descended from the original Dutch colonists. Another guest at the Rices’ was Thomas Mott Osborne, the former mayor of Auburn. A man of wealth, he was the leader of the anti-Tammany liberal wing of the Democratic party, which he had nurtured along with the help of an upstate newspaperman named Louis Howe.
On Wednesday Sara returned to Hyde Park. “It seems like a very strange dream,” she wrote Franklin and Eleanor, “to be here and to think of you dear things all settled in that big Albany house and my boy sitting in the State Senate, a really fine and dignified position, if only lived up to as it should be and I know it will be by my dear one. . . . I was so interested today and were I to be with you I should be very often in that gallery.”
For the first time since her marriage, Eleanor was out of immediate reach of Sara and Cousin Susie and had to depend upon herself. Although she was shy and uncertain, necessity was a good teacher. In the few days she had been in Albany, she had met hundreds of new people, had had to cope with all kinds of new situations, and had discovered not only that she could manage, but that she liked it.
She had a lively intellectual curiosity, was as interested in people as her husband was, and found the political atmosphere invigorating. When Franklin turned their State Street house into the headquarters of the insurgents a few days after the session began, Eleanor took it in her stride. At that time U.S. senators were still chosen by the state legislature, and Tammany leader Charles F. Murphy wanted Chauncey M. Depew’s successor to be “Blue-eyed Billy” Sheehan. Edmund R. Terry, an independent assemblyman from Brooklyn who had been a classmate of President Taft’s at Yale, began the rebellion against Boss Murphy’s designation of Sheehan. Franklin was the first senator to join the assembly insurgents and was made the spokesman for the group. He quickly became “the shepherd of the flock,” Terry wrote, “and his house was during the early days of the insurgency a harbor of refuge nearly every evening.”
Eleanor spent many of these evenings with the men, and later estimated that she got to know at least thirty of them “very well.” For her it was a seminar in the more practical side of politics. She made the men feel at home in the library; sometimes she sat with them, but more often they slipped into the living room to talk with her. Terry was one of the most faithful. A prolific writer of verse, he read it to her by the hour while she knitted. At the end of the evening, with Terry’s help she brought in crackers, cheese, and beer, which became the signal that it was time, gentlemen, to adjourn.
The press came to the house, another new experience for Eleanor. Louis Howe, a poky little man in disheveled clothes, was often there as reporter and adviser, and Eleanor invited his wife and daughter to lunch. Another day Mr. and Mrs. Sheehan were her luncheon guests. The former Buffalo boss hoped he could soften Franklin’s opposition in a direct confrontation, and the men withdrew, leaving the ladies to make polite, uncomfortable small talk. It was sticky going. Finally the parley ended and the Sheehans left. “Did you come to any agreement?” Eleanor anxiously asked. “Certainly not,” her huband replied. The struggle went on.
Sara came to Albany. “He is working bravely,” she wrote. Uncle Ted also approved: “Just a line to say that we are all really proud of the way you have handled yourself.” Franklin felt the same way about his distinguished relative. “Are you an admirer of your uncle-in-law?” a reporter asked him. “Why, who can help but admire him? . . . My uncle-in-law will come back all right, no matter what some people believe.” Sheehan spread the word that Franklin was really Theodore’s agent and was trying to split the Democratic party. “Why I haven’t seen my distinguished cousin since the first of the year,” Franklin said laughingly, and then added, a little inaccurately, “We’ve had absolutely no communication on this subject.” As Franklin’s fight made him known throughout the state, the mail began to pour in, and Eleanor received her first fan
letter: “I know very well he never could do so well, and be so brave, if he were not upheld and strengthened in every way by his wife.” It was one of the few nonfamily letters she saved from that period.
The meetings continued night after night, and when the children, whose nursery was directly above the library, began to complain about the cigar smoke, Eleanor moved the nursery to the third floor. She presided over frequent dinners and larger entertainments that mixed politicians and local society. She met thirty-three-year-old Robert Wagner, whose nomination as president pro tem of the state senate Franklin had seconded on behalf of the upstate senators. Alfred E. Smith, assembly majority leader and another of Murphy’s protégés, came to dinner. When British Ambassador James Bryce addressed a joint session of the legislature, Franklin and Eleanor gave a party for about one hundred people at which Ruth Draper did her monologues and Tammanyites, insurgents, and Albany cliff dwellers rubbed shoulders. “Mr. Grady gratefully acknowledges the honor and accepts the gracious compliment of the invitation of Mrs. Roosevelt to her at home,” one reply read, from Senator Tom Grady, the courtly, eloquent, but somewhat bibulous Tammanyite. Although Franklin had helped to depose Grady as senate leader, he liked the young man’s wife. “Be with the insurgents,” he wrote Eleanor on St. Patrick’s Day, “and if needs be with your husband every day in the year but this—to-day he ‘wid us.’”
When Sheehan finally withdrew from the race, Murphy put forward the candidacy of Justice O’Gorman, a man of integrity though a former Tammany sachem. The insurgents went along, and newspapermen wrote that Roosevelt had been scalped by Tammany. They failed to note that Franklin Roosevelt’s name had become nationally known in connection with the movement for direct, popular election of senators and that he had become identified as part of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. As for Eleanor, she asserted that the rights and wrongs of the Sheehan fight meant very little to her, although she was appalled at the reprisals against some of the more vulnerable insurgents. Franklin, however, later said that the struggle was the beginning of his wife’s “political sagacity.”
When, at a banquet given by the Columbia County Society, a reporter asked Franklin how country women compared with those in the cities, he replied, “I’m afraid I’m a little prejudiced in that direction,” and flashed his broad smile. “I haven’t been married long enough to compare any woman favorably with my wife—and she came from the country, from Columbia County which is one of the reasons I am at this banquet. If all country girls are like her, then there can be no comparison—and you must pardon me if I make none.”
Their close friends knew how helpful she was to him. “She did everything quietly but calmly and most efficiently,” Langdon P. Marvin, one of Franklin’s law partners, later recalled. “She was a great manager in the family and in the household and everybody loved her.” She was also, he added, “the ardent backer” of her husband, even though he was not able to budge her when he began to shift his position on women’s suffrage.11 His conversion was less than wholehearted at first. With an eye on his rural constituents—and perhaps also on his mother and his wife—he hedged his stand, saying that the voters should express their views through a referendum before the legislature acted. That, said the beautiful and relentless suffragette, Inex Milholland, who lobbied Senator Roosevelt on the issue, was “a very stupid and expensive way” of going about it.
Miss Milholland had come to Poughkeepsie in May, 1911, to fire up the feminist troops, of which the Vassar faculty was a powerful contingent. She marshaled the members of the Dutchess County chapter of the Equal Suffrage League in a series of street-corner meetings and house-to-house canvasses.12 Senator Roosevelt finally took the correct stand, but without help from his wife, who still considered men superior beings. Nor is there any evidence that Eleanor intervened on behalf of another crusader for women’s rights, Frances Perkins, just out of college, who had joined the staff of the Consumers League and, as a lobbyist in Albany for the fifty-four-hour bill for working women, was having difficulty with Franklin.
Eleanor was not yet “the evident force” that she subsequently became, observed Marvin. Within the privacy of the family, however, she was a sympathetic and interested listener who through her questions and comments helped Franklin clarify his opinions by talking them out, as she had seen her Auntie Bye do with Uncle Ted.
She went to the senate gallery regularly to listen to the debates and occasionally visited the assembly side to follow the progress of a bill. She read political materials, including such recondite documents as the proceedings of the 1884 Democratic national convention, which Colonel Rice had sent to her. By the beginning of July, when she transported her large household to Campobello, she had the knowledge of a political insider to whom Franklin could write in the crisp shorthand that political professionals use about such varied items as the race-track-gambling bill, the ups and downs of his fight for a direct primary, or his intricate political maneuvers to defeat a Republican reapportionment bill.
It was a disturbed summer. No sooner had Eleanor arrived in Campobello than Franklin reported he was having trouble with his sinuses and that he felt “like a rag and have lost nearly ten pounds. . . . I can’t tell you how I miss you and Mama does not in the least make up.” Eleanor promptly returned to Albany to nurse him. “Eleanor came in all the heat,” Sara noted, adding five days later, “Poor Eleanor returns alone to Campobello.” Franklin stayed to push his direct-primary bill. When the legislature recessed without action, he hastened to Campobello, but he had to leave again early in September. “I feel lonely and depressed and wish you were here,” she wrote him. “Take care of yourself and write often and tell me everything.”
She realized that she would often have to manage without him in the summer. She was a conscientious manager. Henry Parish, the banker who was married to Cousin Susie, taught her to keep her household accounts, and his lessons were supplemented by those Franklin gave her. She budgeted carefully. “I enclose Edgar’s bill which is a dreadful surprise to me,” she wrote her husband from Campobello. “I had no idea that you had told him to spend so much on the pool or that he had to work so many days in the winter. This year we must make it plain that we want no work done!” Sometimes her efforts at frugality and careful planning ran athwart Sara. Eleanor and Franklin had decided that instead of opening their townhouse in New York for the few autumn months before they were back in Albany, they would stay with Sara and board out the servants they wanted to keep. Sara was upset over the proposed arrangements, Franklin warned; she wanted the servants to stay. “Do just as you think best dearest,” he wrote Eleanor, “and you know I’ll back you up!” his letter ended.
“Really, Honey, it becomes ludicrous!” Eleanor protested in a spurt of independence:
She made an offer then withdrew it and now wants to renew it! I think she had better decide another time before speaking and as I wrote you it would be foolish to get new servants and put them in her house as Lydia is going. I expect to let Emily go also as I overheard a conversation which made me decide that she talked too much even though she might seem nice to me! . . . After Cousin Susie is in town I’m sure she will love having us stay there if we want to anytime and I would rather do it than go to Mama’s now! I simply wrote Mama all my plans were already made and no one would be in her house and I did not expect to go there!
Eleanor’s view prevailed. It usually did when she considered it worthwhile to make a stand.
When they returned to Albany for the winter 1911–12 they moved into a new house. Their friends were glad to see them both. They were “exceedingly popular . . . their home . . . the scene of good fellowship and real family life.”13 People were as interested in Eleanor as they were in Franklin, and she was now an old Albany hand. She called on the wives of the new legislators and helped make them feel at home, and she dropped in on the wives of newspapermen. Her thoughtfulness and kindness made friends for Franklin everywhere. Teddy Robinson had been elected to the assembly
from Herkimer in November’s Republican comeback, and the two families saw each other often. For Franklin’s birthday Eleanor had the Robinsons, Hall and his fiancée, Margaret Richardson, William Church Osborn, the Rices, and some senatorial colleagues with whom Franklin worked closely. Sara was not there. “I planned to go up and surprise you today,” she wrote, “and spend one night but as Hall and Margaret get there today I think it would be foolish and also I should have to sleep with you and Eleanor!” As a birthday gift, she “enclose[d] a little motor car for the winter.”
Eleanor found marriage to a man at the center of public activity stimulating. Everyone had something interesting to contribute to her education and, in turn, she gave everyone the feeling that she was interested in them. Eleanor’s “dinner record” was crowded with the names of Cleveland Democrats, progressives, and regulars. She and Franklin went to play bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Howe, although Eleanor felt that neither bridge nor Mr. Howe contributed to an attractive evening. Franklin wanted her to go, so she went.
Franklin was a key man in the 1912 legislature. “We are safely organized,” he informed Eleanor, who was in New York City, at the beginning of the year. “The Committee appointments were handed down. I drew Chairman of Agriculture, ranking member of Conservation (the old Forest, Fish and Game) and also members of Codes, Railroads and Military Affairs! This isn’t bad and I am particularly glad that the other members of Agriculture give me control of the Committee as against our New York City friends.” Franklin was even being talked about as a possible candidate for governor. On their wedding anniversary Eleanor gave a political luncheon attended by the governor, the lieutenant governor, Senator O’Gorman, and a gentleman whom she described in her dinner book as the “Secretary of Tammany Hall.”
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