If she was strained and jittery in matters involving Franklin, when it came to a crisis involving the children Eleanor was remarkably poised, as she had demonstrated a few weeks earlier at the time of the A. Mitchell Palmer assassination attempt. “Mother’s” self-control on that occasion became a legend in the family. Shortly before midnight on June 2, 1919, a bomb went off in front of the house of Attorney General Palmer, shattering its front, killing a man, and blowing out the front windows of the Roosevelt house across the street. Franklin and Eleanor, who arrived shortly after the blast, raced into their house to see what had happened to James, who was the only child at home.
“James did not hear the explosion but heard the ensuing confusion,” she wrote Sara.
However, I stated nothing was the matter “just an explosion” in the most matter-of-fact tone as though it was a daily occurence and he returned to bed and sleep at once. We went over at once and offered to take the Palmers in but they preferred to get out of the street.
Now we are roped off and the police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every new bone found! I only hope the victim was not a poor passer by instead of the anarchist!18
She was now asserting a more direct supervision over her children’s upbringing. She was discontented with Anna’s school—she thought it “stuffy,” an expression that indicated her changing standards. Frequent conferences with the Misses Eastman on ways to improve Anna’s grades produced middling results. She took Anna to the theater to encourage an interest in the drama, and sent her to music and dancing classes, and when the young men from the British Embassy came to luncheon Anna was sometimes invited to join them in the hope that the combination of handsome young men and good conversation would widen her interests. She was tall, with yellow hair that tumbled over her shoulders, and looked older than her thirteen years. Her parents took her with them to Annapolis, and she was invited to next year’s plebe hop. “I declined,” her mother wrote Sara.19
James also failed to make good grades at the Cathedral School, which he and Elliott now attended. That distressed Eleanor because he needed good grades to qualify for Groton, and it was taken for granted that when they reached their twelfth birthdays all the boys would be handed over to Dr. Peabody. Eleanor tried a winter of getting up early to hear James’ lessons before he went off to school, and there were tutors and stern lectures, but all with indifferent results. James continued to do better as left end on the football team than on his exam papers. Elliott’s marks were “very good,” she informed Sara, but “James is worse than last month, 12th in a class of 26, average way below the class, the only decent mark is 93 in History. I just told him I did not care to discuss it as unfortunately no one else could study for him and he evidently did not care to make use of any of his advantages. He wept as usual and it will have as much effect as usual. I think this summer I shall have him work an hour longer than Anna daily.”20
Of all her children the two youngest, Franklin Jr. and John, were the ones Eleanor seemed to enjoy most. She was overprotective of Elliott, perhaps because he carried her beloved father’s name and seemed to have his proneness for physical mishaps, but with “the babies” she was more relaxed than she had been with the older children, could take their outbursts of wildness more calmly, and on the whole seemed to have more fun with them. Franklin Jr. was the “sunshine” boy, as James later dubbed him. “I went out for a walk with little Franklin this morning,” he wrote his grandmother, “and everytime he saw a child he would say hallow as if he knew them.” Franklin at five was a flatterer. “I love you very much. I want to kiss you,” he wrote his grandmother, adding, “Please give me a light like Anna’s and a firecracker.” He amused his mother. “I asked Franklin Jr. last night what I was to ask Santa Claus to bring him and without prompting he reeled off more things than you ever heard of. I gasped and he added, ‘and John just the same!’”21 John was already showing the instincts of a businessman; “I feel sure he owns everything by now,” Eleanor wrote Sara after the children had been with their grandmother for a week in 1918.22 She read them a children’s life of their Uncle Ted. “Granny, I intend to run for the Presidency, and am beginning my campaign at your tea,” Franklin Jr. announced to Sara while he was still in short pants. John had no such interest. Aunt Tissie at Fairhaven was so taken with John’s pleasing ways that she told him he would be president some day. “I am not going to be President,” he replied firmly.23
Franklin Jr. and John made a team. Together they went to a party at the Bill Phillipses and had a “fine time,” according to their mother, “except for the fact that they did not get enough cereal to eat.” On John’s fourth birthday she arranged a “Mother Goose” party for “the babies.” This was Franklin Jr.’s time to be little Jack Horner as the others had been before him, and she had a large pie filled with little toys which he handed out after supper with much excitement. As the youngest were a pair, so were Anna and James. Elliott was left out, the others sometimes allying themselves against him, spurred on by the feeling that their mother spoiled him. “The other boys ate up his dessert at dinner, because he ate so slowly he wasn’t ready for it, and they wouldn’t tell him where the w.c. was so just before leaving he had an accident in his pants which upset him a good deal but I think all will go well from now on!”24
Gladys Saltonstall, who spent a Sunday evening with the Roosevelts in 1919, found Eleanor’s warm, maternal relationship to her children especially attractive. “I secretly envied her.”25 But others who knew the household better doubted that Eleanor gave her children what they needed. Margaret Cutter, who then was her sister-in-law, felt that while Eleanor loved the children she “did not make them her friends.”26 “She did her duty,” cousin Corinne remarked. “Nobody in the world did her duty more than Eleanor Roosevelt. But with the children I don’t think you can have an understanding of them unless you enjoy them.”27 It was their father who taught them to ride, to love sailing, who during the winter was “the moving spirit in coasting and tobogganing,” and who filled their Washington week ends with joy. He was “my childhood hero,” said Anna, while “it was Mother’s duty to counteract my tomboy tendencies and to teach me to sew and knit.”28 “I don’t think Mother shared in the day-to-day fun in life at all,” James agreed, “in things like skating, sledding, etc. She was very good about making arrangements, but she did not participate. We had more real fun with Mother when we were all much older when we went to the play with her, met people at her house, a few Sunday evenings.”29
The burdens and perplexities of bringing up her own children made Eleanor appreciate more fully the heavy charge that had been placed on Grandma Hall when in 1892 she had taken in Eleanor and her two brothers. “My grandmother died,” she wrote in her diary on August 14, 1919. “A gentle good woman with a great and simple faith. It is only of late years that I have realized what it meant for her to take Hall, Ellie and me into her home as she did. Pussie and Maude were wonderful about it too.”
Not since the early days of their marriage when Franklin was a law clerk had Eleanor spent so much time with him, but time spent together can be abrasive as well as healing. He now often came home for lunch and tea, but good as his intentions were, he was still his old unpunctual self. He dallied at the office until an outraged telephone call from the “Missus” caused him to stuff papers in his briefcase, grab his hat and cane, and bolt for home. Even when she called for him at the office, she could not get him to leave on time. “Waited 35 minutes and returned to find Paul Hammond playing with the children waiting for us,” she noted on one such occasion. Outwardly she smiled, inwardly she seethed.
They picnicked together in the country. They walked in the woods. Together with the Phillipses and the Millers they canoed up the old B & O Canal, lunched, and came back by way of the Potomac. The river ran fairly fast in spots. Pleasant but “not real excitement,” Eleanor commented afterward.30 Danger and roughness gave spice to life, and she did not like a sla
ck and tepid existence. She tried to show Franklin that, but for him there were sanctuaries that belonged to men alone, into which he would not admit her.
If she did not hear from him she worried and when he was away she missed him, but when they were together he easily upset her, as was the case at the end of that 1919 summer. “I’m glad you enjoyed your holiday dear, & I wish we did not lead such a hectic life, a little prolonged quiet might bring us altogether & yet it might do just the opposite! I really don’t know what I want or think about anything anymore!”31 Yet when in October he went off to the Canadian woods with Livy and Lieutenant Commander Richard E. Byrd to hunt moose, she wrote him like a newlywed. “I hated to have you go off alone and shan’t feel quite happy till you are safely home again,” she wrote within hours after he left. When the postman brought his first letter she wrote in her diary, “No moose yet but sounds well, thank goodness. It was a joy to hear.”32
She tried to be the kind of person he wished her to be. When he went off to a poker game, she used the time to make up the household-accounts book as he liked to have it done. “Now that I’ve done it, it doesn’t take so long,” she wrote Sara. “I hope Franklin will be pleased.”33 She took more time selecting her clothes. While they were in Paris she had ordered two dresses at Worth, and Franklin and Sara approved. The cape that Sara did not like she gave away to the “darling housemaid.” She bought three hats (“$91—isn’t it too awful . . . but I really took a long time to choose”) from Miss Gandy, the mountain-climbing lady of whom she had been so jealous on her honeymoon.34 In February, 1920, she splurged again, buying an evening dress and a gray satin afternoon dress at Miss Converse’s. Franklin liked her in the evening dress, she noted a few weeks later with relief and pleasure.
The winter of 1920, a tonsillectomy was added to Franklin’s usual ailments of sinuses and colds. “He looks rather poorly for him,” Bertie Hamlin noted in her journal. Franklin asked Eleanor not to cancel their social engagements; Eleanor was getting out 2,000 invitations for Navy teas, he told Bertie. She got through the luncheons and the one big dinner they had scheduled, although it was “horrid” to do so without Franklin. Even with Franklin, dinner parties had again become ordeals. During one dinner that winter she went upstairs to tuck the children in and hear their prayers, and stayed away so long that Franklin became anxious. “I just can’t stand to greet all those people,” she said in tears. “I know they all think I am dull and unattractive. I just want to hide up here.”35
Franklin was thirty-eight on January 30, and she had a party to celebrate the occasion: “all are coming as a character in a book, so it ought to be amusing.”36 The Lanes, Millers, Polks, Hallowells, McCauleys, Rodgers, and Alice and Nick Longworth were the guests. Their costumes were nowhere recorded, nor whether Eleanor found the evening bearable. On her own birthday the previous October she had noted, “I am 36. Margaret and Hall sent me a book, Mama and Tissie and Franklin wired” (Franklin was away making a speech in Rochester). It gave her pleasure to plan and organize gay birthday parties for others, but she always found reasons why hers should not be celebrated, especially when her feelings had been deeply hurt. Why should anyone wish to celebrate her birthday? She was not averse to making Franklin feel a little guilty.
Some of the gayest parties the winter of 1919–20 were given by Mrs. Marshall Field, whose liveliness, despite her age, evoked Washington’s admiration. “We stayed at Mrs. Field’s last night till 12:30 p.m. ending with a Virginia reel! On Sunday night too!” Eleanor reported.37
But other evenings turned out less happily. There was one disastrous revel at the Chevy Chase Club, of which there are two accounts. One is Eleanor’s told years later when she could bear to speak of it; the other told by Alice Longworth with her usual “detached malevolence.”38 The women had, as usual, swarmed about Franklin, and he had been very gay while Eleanor felt more and more miserable. Finally she decided she would not be missed if she departed. He should stay and enjoy himself, she whispered to Franklin, but she was going home. She didn’t, “as a rule,” let him stay behind at a dance, said Mrs. Longworth. “She was rather firm about that; but this time she let him stay at the country club, and he came in with the Warren Robbinses. And it was they, of course, who hastened to tell me the next morning all about what had happened.”
Eleanor had forgotten her latchkey and, unable to get in, had settled down on the doormat, propping herself against the wall, feeling sorry for herself and cross with Franklin. When he finally did turn up, close to dawn, Eleanor rose in the vestibule “like a wraith,” said Alice, to confront him. The rest of the story we have from Alice.
“But darling, what’s happened? What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I forgot my key.”
“But couldn’t you have gone to the Adolph Millers’? You could have spent the night there, or you could have gone to Mitchell Palmer’s house, where there’s a guard.”
“Oh, no, I’ve always been told never to bother people if you can possibly avoid it.” Here, Alice, in telling the story, interpolated, “So noble, so noble.”
“You must have been hideously uncomfortable,” Franklin went on.
“Well, it wasn’t very uncomfortable.”
She was quite sure, Eleanor commented later, that she had made Franklin “feel guilty by the mere fact of having waited” in the vestibule. They were not, she said in a massive understatement, the best years of her life.
Her immense physical vitality seemed to drain away, one of the few times in all her years that she registered such a complaint. “I was dead,” she wrote on April 19, attributing her exhaustion to dinner guests who stayed “till 11.30.”39 The next day she noted again “I was a dead dog,” having dined with Aunt Kassie at eight. And the evening after that she went to the Army and Navy League Ball. “I stood and received till 11 p.m. and went home 11:30 dead again.” This would have been a normal reaction for most women, but Eleanor was always able to tap hidden springs of energy and her exhaustion was not normal. In May when she was at Hyde Park, she and Sara had a quiet dinner “but I might as well not have eaten it for I promptly parted with it all!”40 She insisted it was “just weariness,” but the weariness was only another manifestation of the conflict within her between a nature seeking to find its true vocation and the life of conformity that the effort to please her husband and mother-in-law had shaped.
While she sought to rebuild her relationship with Franklin, she began to turn against Sara. In July, 1919, when she had left Hyde Park and taken her younger children to Fairhaven, she confessed to her husband, “I feel as though someone had taken a ton of bricks off me and I suppose she feels just the same.”41 But Sara evidently was not aware of Eleanor’s inner stress. “A letter from Mama this morning,” Franklin wrote her. “It will amuse you as she says everything is going very smoothly.”42 At the end of September they all returned to Hyde Park. “Mama and I have had a bad time,” she noted on October 3, “I should be ashamed of myself and I’m not. She is too good and generous and her judgment is better than mine but I can learn more easily.”43 (The italicized word is almost undecipherable, but “learn” seems to fit the context best.)
On a Sunday two days after this rebellious entry, Eleanor wrote, “Went to Church but could not go to Communion.”44 The words were austere and their implication stark, for she was the most faithful of churchgoers, the most sincere of communicants, for whom prayer was not a matter of rote but a daily influence in her life. Religion was of the utmost seriousness to her and prayer a kind of continuing exchange with God, a way of cleansing the heart and steadying the will. To say that she could not take Communion meant that she could not say that she “truly and earnestly” repented of her sins and that she was in a state of “love and charity” with those around her, as the Episcopalian Communion service required. She was temporarily cut off from divine grace, a condition that she must have found insupportable.
That week end she lost her temper with her mother-in-law one of the rare times
in her life she did so. Her letter of October 6 begging Sara’s forgiveness disclosed how deeply alienation and despair had taken command of her feelings. “I know, Mummy dear, I made you feel most unhappy the other day and I am so sorry I lost my temper and said such fool things for of course as you know I love Franklin and the children very dearly and I am deeply devoted to you. I have however, allowed myself to be annoyed by little things which of course one should never do and I had no right to hurt you as I know I did and am truly sorry and hope you will forgive me.”
Although she was remorseful, her rebellion against Sara and the way of life Sara represented was only beginning, and it spread to Cousin Susie. When Eleanor went to New York to have dinner with the Parishes, “we had in some ways a very stormy evening.”45 She was finding Cousin Susie’s self-indulgence and her unfriendly attitude toward people outside of her little circle difficult to bear. Eleanor “fairly jumped with joy,” she wrote, when she and Franklin did not have to spend a summer week end with Cousin Susie, “though I’m sorry of course she isn’t well.”46
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