“Dearest, dear Honey,” she wrote him on August 27, “I am positively hungry for news of you and it seems a long time since your last telegram and they are meagre enough.” Her letter was full of family and political news. “So far the Republican papers having nothing very bad against you have simply been trying to treat you like an amiable, young boy, belittlement is the worst they can do.” The Republican side of the family was lining up for Harding, a later letter reported. “Did you see that Alice is to go on the stump for Harding and that Auntie Corinne is to speak for him in Portland, Maine, on September 8th, starting his campaign there. Ted also speaks in Maine.” Mrs. Selmes, Isabella’s mother, had been at Henderson House when Franklin was nominated and reported that everyone there was “so nice” about Franklin. But Franklin’s success in the West worried the Republican high command. “Do you know,” said the engineer on the Roosevelt train, “that lad’s got a ‘million vote smile’—and mine’s going to be one of them.” Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was dispatched by the Republicans to trail Franklin. “He is a maverick,” young Theodore said in Sheridan, Wyoming. “He does not have the brand of our family.” This personal attack galled Franklin, and it was the beginning of bad feeling between the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park clans. Franklin thrust back shrewdly, although not personally, by recalling that “in 1912 Senator Harding called Theodore Roosevelt, first a Benedict Arnold and then an Aaron Burr. This is one thing, at least some members of the Roosevelt family will not forget.”
Eleanor was restless at Campobello. When Franklin agreed to go to Brooklyn on Labor Day, she wrote to Sara a little irascibly, “Of course it is hard to refuse but I do think he should have cut Monday out and come here directly, however, there is no use in saying anything.”20 A reminder to Franklin to write to Aunt Dora revealed her own feelings: “I hate to add these personal things when you are under such a strain and wish I could do them but I can’t and they are the kind of things which do mean so much to other people who don’t happen to have all the interesting things you have to fill their minds.”21 He was in the privileged position; he had interesting things to do, and she was no longer content to sit on an island off the northeast coast of Maine while he had all the fun.
On September 20 Louis Howe wrote her that the staff was struggling with the Roosevelt pictures and packing as well as they could, and then he added, “I do not think Franklin has told you, but I am resigning for a month in order to avoid the civil service rules and going off with Franklin on the next western trip.” And Franklin had not told Louis that he had also asked Eleanor to join the campaign train.
How this came about is not clear. She had written her husband at the beginning of September, “I would love to go down but as I know you must go on campaigning I would just be in the way.” If she thought of herself as a burden, her friends saw her as a political asset. When Grace C. Root sent congratulations on Franklin’s nomination, she added, “and not at all the least to you whose comprehension of things political might well be envied by the suffrage sisters!” Alice Wadsworth, relieved that “so far as our men are concerned the victory of one does not necessitate the defeat of the other,” took it for granted that “both of us will probably be busy with politics—thanks to this dratted Suffrage!”
The 1920 election was the first national election in which women voted. “The woman’s hour was striking,” Mrs. Catt proclaimed at the victory convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A candidate’s wife could have an important effect upon his fortunes, and Franklin wanted Eleanor at his side. Before joining him, however, she took James to Groton, the first of four trips to deliver a son to the rector’s Spartan disciplines. James was only twelve and it was difficult to leave him at boarding school, but it was family tradition, so she unpacked his trunk, arranged his cubicle, and finally said good-by to the Peabodys and to James. She would go through the same melancholy experience with each of the boys, increasingly dubious that separating youngsters from parents at so early an age was good for either; but it was Franklin’s wish and she yielded, just as she did a few days later when James came down with a digestive upset and Franklin, on the basis of a reassuring message from the rector, urged her to stay with the train and let Sara go to Groton instead. It was the first time she had not been with an ill child and it was hard not to hasten back to her son’s bedside, but as she wrote Sara, “I am going gaily on.”
“This is the most killing thing for the candidate I ever knew,” was her first report to Sara from the Westboro, as their campaign car was called.22 There were good crowds, she wrote from Charleston, and she was particularly pleased to find that “Franklin has certainly made strides in public speaking and gets enough praise everywhere to turn anyone’s head.”23 Days aboard a campaign train were more hectic than any she had ever experienced. “F. made 2 speeches & drove 26 miles over awful roads before we ever got any breakfast!” she reported from Kentucky. “There have been two town speeches since then and at least one platform speech every 15 minutes all day! We had coffee & sandwiches for lunch & a very hurried supper & now he still has to get off at Bowling Green at 10:10 for a speech in a hall! I never will be able to do without at least four large cups of black coffee again every day!”24 She was relieved to learn from Sara that James’ ailment had been diagnosed as colitis. “I don’t know when I’ll be back though I really don’t see that I’m of the least use on this trip.”
This was not Franklin’s view, according to a few lines he added to the same letter. “I am still alive, tho’ it has been about the most strenuous week of the campaign. It has been a great comfort to have Eleanor. Some day when this is all over I will regain my normal mode of life—& then I won’t be horrid to you as I was last Sunday—& I will really try to do the many little things that do count! It is too bad about James.”
Eleanor was able to leave the train in Terre Haute, Indiana, have a bath at the hotel, and write Sara.
We had a splendid meeting at Bowling Green last night, in the open at 10:30 p.m. must have been over a 1,000 people there. Franklin’s voice is all right again & I should say he came through yesterday finely & it certainly was a big day, he must have talked to and tried to shake hands with at least 30,000 people, the newspapermen think. We arrived in this town about 12, a big crowd waiting came to shake hands & when Governor Cox’s train came in we all went to speak to him & he had to say a few words & shake all the hands he could. He looks well but his voice is much worse than F’s. F. went with him to Indianapolis, also Mr. Howe, Mr. McIntyre (whom I like very much) & Mr. Prenosil (the A.P. man). They return at 8:48 & we get on the train & go on to St. Louis.
Of course Franklin’s looks bring all sorts of admiring comments & then we get asked if he’s “Teddy” frequently. I almost hope he does not get elected for so many people are coming to see us in Washington & I shan’t remember their names or faces.25
In St. Louis the station crowds appeared to her to be “rather apathetic,” but she thought that was due to the “German descent” of so many of the city’s inhabitants. In any case, Franklin had an “appreciative audience” in the armory, and afterward he had his hair cut “at 11 p.m. the only chance he had & then it was done on the car surrounded by an admiring audience of newspapermen!” She wanted Sara to send her “1 clean nightgown & shirt & 3 chemises & 3 drawers & any black stockings & handkerchiefs I may have. F. says he has enough.” In a postscript about Franklin’s impact on the crowds, she said his “head should be turned if it is ever going to be for there is much praise and enthusiasm for him personally almost everywhere.”26
They went westward as far as Colorado and then returned East by another route. In Cincinnati mail and laundry caught up with them. Eleanor was still amazed at the pace and unhappy over her own uselessness. “I tell Franklin he will never settle down & give up the inevitable large cup of black coffee & cream with every meal again but I really think he will be so glad to rest he won’t want to move for days. We enter N.Y. State the a.m. of the 21st & I shall go
on to N.Y. as my only use has been so far that people are curious to see his wife but that won’t be so in the East. . . . ”27 That Sunday in Cincinnati she was taken to church, “as they thought it wise to announce in the paper where we would go but only I went.” Franklin’s voice was again showing strain, she reported, and little wonder: “It is becoming almost impossible to stop F. now when he begins to speak, 10 minutes is always 20, 30 is always 45 & the evening speeches are now about 2 hours! The men all get out & wave at him in front & when nothing succeeds I yank his coat tails! Everyone is getting tired but on the whole the car is still pretty good natured! They tell us Gov. Cox’s is all on edge.”28
When the train reached Buffalo, Franklin went to speak in Jamestown, while Eleanor, with Louis Howe, decided to visit Niagara Falls, which she had never seen. This was a sign of their budding friendship. It had taken Eleanor a long time to appreciate Louis. At times she had resented his influence with her husband and had been swift to find fault with him. When Franklin went to Europe in 1918, she had complained that “the only item every paper gives is that Mr. Howe is running your office during your absence so he saw that was widespread news and how the naval officers must hate it!” But Howe was a sensitive, perceptive man who refused to be deterred by her coolness; he knew the blow she had been dealt by the Lucy Mercer business. She was the only woman on the Westboro, and he saw that many things bewildered or irritated her. At the end of the day Franklin would be tense and high-strung, and the men would gather at the end of the car to review the day’s events, play a little poker, and hoist a few bourbons. Roosevelt “did not take life seriously enough,” Steve Early, who was Roosevelt’s advance man, later recalled. “He was just a playboy preferring poker to speech conferences.”29 Eleanor disliked the playboy in her husband; she felt he should save his strength and go to bed, and that a candidate for vice president should set an example.
She expressed her discontent obliquely; for example, she worried because she thought the car’s porter was not able to get enough sleep because his berth was close to where the men played cards. She was timid with the newspapermen and wanted to be of more use than simply sitting with a rapt look listening to her husband make the same speech over and over again.
Louis sensed all this: her loneliness, her great sadness, her lack of self-confidence, her need of appreciation. He was aware also of her abilities—her good judgment, remarkable vitality, and organizational gifts. He saw the way people responded to her warmth and courtesy. He began to tell her, and she desperately needed to hear such words, that she had a real contribution to make to her husband’s campaign. He brought drafts of speeches to discuss with her. He explained the ways of newspapermen and encouraged her to meet them as friends. By the end of the trip she was on good enough terms with the press to be amused rather than upset when, from the rear of a hall, some of the reporters made funny faces at her to try to break the look of total absorption she adopted for her husband’s speeches. They teased her when the ladies crowded around the candidate, and she took it good-naturedly. She was grateful to Louis for that. Together they discussed the issues of the campaign and the politics of the towns through which they traveled. Eleanor discovered that Louis had a wide range of knowledge, a nice sense of humor, a feeling for poetry and the countryside. Louis knew when to be silent and when to speak up. By the end of the trip they had become fast friends. His daughter Mary was at Vassar. “Will you ask Mary Howe to come up on Sunday?” Eleanor wrote ahead to Sara.
On the Monday before the election Franklin wound up his campaign with the traditional appearance in Poughkeepsie. The central issue, he said at the end of the campaign as he had at the beginning, is “whether the U.S. is to finish the war or to quit cold, whether we are to join the other forty odd nations in the great working League of Nations that will serve to end war for all time or whether we will turn our back on them. . . . ” But he was a realist. Harding was a 10 to 1 favorite in the Wall Street betting. At 10:45 on Election Day morning, he and Eleanor and Sara arrived at the polling place in Hyde Park. It was raining but the village people were there and gave him a cheer. He was vote number 207 and Eleanor’s was number 208, her first vote. Sara also voted, as did Rosy’s wife Betty. But the hope that the millions of newly enfranchised women voters would cast a peace vote by voting for Cox, as Mrs. Catt had appealed to them to do, was quickly dashed. The special wire that brought the results into Springwood, where Franklin held open house for friends and neighbors, showed early in the evening that a Republican avalanche was in the making. “We all feel very badly over the result of the elections,” Eleanor wrote Franklin a few days later.
Franklin took it philosophically, as did the inner group around him. They all were sure another chance would come. He hoped, wrote Renah Camalier, his secretary on the Westboro, “that when the clan meets again four years hence, it will have sense enough to see that there is but one man to put at the head of the ticket, that man, of course, being none other than my ‘old boss.’” The Roosevelt organization dispersed except for Miss Marguerite LeHand. Young, pretty, highly competent, with a dry sense of humor, she had worked for Charles McCarthy in the Roosevelt offices at Democratic headquarters, and Franklin asked her to work for him permanently. She told him she would let him know “as soon as I have talked with my people. You were very nice to ask me.” A month later she wrote him, “If you would still like to have me, I will be in New York on January third.”
Louis was uncertain what he should do when a Republican secretary of the Navy took over—whether to go on Franklin’s payroll or accept an outside business connection. Eleanor now became his staunch advocate, as he was hers. All the Howes spent Thanksgiving at Hyde Park with the Roosevelts, and afterward, Franklin left with Louis for Washington to join Hall for a hunting trip in Louisiana. “I have enjoyed Mrs. Howe,” Eleanor wrote him. “I don’t think she would bore you and she’s a plucky little thing. They left at 9.03 cat and all, to take the midnight [train] and Mary went back to Vassar.” The next day she added to the same letter, “I had a line from Louis also this morning telling me of your trip and safe departure from Washington.”30
On Christmas Franklin sent the men who had been with him on the Westboro cuff links engraved with his initials and theirs, the beginning of the famous Cuff Links Club. The men in turn remembered Mrs. Roosevelt. “I wish you would send me a dollar and your visiting card,” Louis Howe wrote Tom Lynch. “The boys have decided to send Mrs. Roosevelt a little pin for Christmas as a souvenir of the campaign and this is your assessment.” “The very pretty pin you sent Mrs. Roosevelt,” Lynch wrote Howe after the holidays, “was shown to me last week and will say you have very good taste, the gift was appreciated very much.”
Eleanor had frequently suffered from her husband’s uncommunicativeness, and she now had an ally in Louis, who gave her the feeling she craved of a closer identification with her husband’s work. And Louis, who was never sure he knew all that was going on with the boss and even less sure of his influence, now had reinforcement in “holding Franklin down.”
Long ago he had set his hand to making a king; now he began to make a queen.31
25.BAPTISM IN POLITICS
BY THE TIME THE FAMILY MOVED BACK TO NEW YORK ELEANOR had a plan: she intended to help Franklin in whatever way he asked and permitted, but she would also have work of her own to do.
“All men who make successes of their work,” she counseled a lonely woman years later,
go through exactly the same kind of thing which you describe and their wives, in one way or another have to adjust themselves. If it is possible to enter into his work in some way, that is the ideal solution. If not, they must develop something of their own and if possible make it such a success, that they will have something to interest their husbands.1
Franklin charted a strenuous schedule for himself. He joined a law firm which became Emmett, Marvin and Roosevelt. He became vice president at $25,000 a year in charge of the New York offices of Van Lear Black’s Fid
elity and Deposit Company of Maryland, the third largest surety bonding house in the country. He was a Harvard overseer. He agreed to head the Navy Club and the Greater New York Boy Scout Council. He also had ideas for some books he wanted to write. It was too much of a program, Eleanor protested. “Of course I know your remarkable faculty for getting through work when you get right down to it,” but if he was to carry through on his commitments, he would have to cut out most formal parties, she said hopefully.2
Her own program was more modest. She enrolled in a business school to learn typing and shorthand. She found a housewife to teach her to cook. She began active work in the League of Women Voters. Unable to move back into 49 East Sixty-fifth Street because the Lamont lease still had six months to run, she and her family camped in Sara’s house, but Eleanor quickly made it clear she did not intend to return to the old pattern of always being available for a meal, a drive, or pouring tea for Sara’s friends and charities—in short, of subordinating her own interests to Sara’s. She no longer felt the old obligation to write Sara about everything, nor did she share confidences with her or come to her with problems. She brushed aside Sara’s view that a woman in her social position should confine her activity to serving on philanthropic boards. She did not want to be a name on a letterhead, an ornamental woman, without a job of her own to do. She wanted to be fully involved—with work, with people.3
A comment on Franklin K. Lane’s death illuminated her frame of mind as well as the respect in which her wartime friends held her. Lane had checked into the Mayo Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, and one of his last letters before undergoing the operation from which he did not recover was to Eleanor.
Just because I like you very much, and being a very old man dare to say so, I am sending this line—which has no excuse in its news, philosophy or advice;—has no excuse in fact except what might be called affection, but of course this being way past the Victorian era no one admits to affections. I will not belittle my own feeling by saying that I have a wife who thinks you the best Eastern product—and probably she’d move to strike out the word Eastern. At any rate I think I should tell you that I am to be operated on tomorrow by Dr. Will Mayo and am glad of it. We shall see what we shall see. . . . I’d love to see you and the gay cavalier—but let us hope it won’t be long till we meet! Au revoir.
Eleanor and Franklin Page 40