the psychological factor in his management is paramount. He has such courage, such ambition, and yet at the same time such an extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism that it will take all the skill which we can muster to lead him successfully to a recognition of what he really faces without crushing him.21
Eleanor understood the psychological factor better than anyone. Franklin came back to New York believing he would soon be well enough to leave the hospital on crutches and resume work. At Campobello, all of them—Franklin, Louis, herself—had taken it for granted that he would soon be able to work again. They were returning to New York rather than Hyde Park, she had written Rosy, not only because that was where he could best be treated, but so that he could carry on his “various business activities.” His determination to remain active was supported by his wife and by Louis, who underwrote his loyalty and faith in his friend’s recovery by giving up his personal and family life and moving into the Roosevelt home in order to handle Franklin’s affairs.
But the charade of a busy man of affairs which all three played at Campobello was based on the assumption of a relatively speedy and complete recovery. What would happen when Franklin realized that it might take years to regain the use of his legs or the even more somber possibility of permanent disablement? Any suggestion of retirement would diminish his recuperative powers, Dr. Draper felt. Eleanor was sure that if her husband was to hold onto the will to recover, he had to cling to his faith that he would return to politics and business.
Franklin was discharged from Presbyterian Hospital on October 28, but his record read “not improving” and some of the most painful days were ahead. At home he set about his exercises, but he was still running a temperature and his muscles were still tender.
Now the most excruciating pain began. The tendons behind his right knee began to jackknife and lock, and his legs had to be placed in plaster casts into which wedges were driven deeper and deeper, to stretch the muscles. It was as if his legs were on the rack. Not since Eleanor had seen her father go to have his leg rebroken had she witnessed such pain. But Franklin had a toughness and resilience her father had lacked, and he bore it stoically. He and Eleanor had taught the children to face illness and injury without tears or complaint; pain was to be borne silently. He followed his own Spartan precepts. Those who called him “feather duster,” the political opponents who derided him as “Mama’s boy,” simply failed to see the iron fortitude behind the smiles and cheer. And if there were moments, as there must have been, when he was tempted to cry out against his fate, to surrender to his infirmities, Eleanor was there to brace him against them.
Their biggest problem was Sara. In her view, public service was an affair of noblesse oblige, not civic duty, and the life of a public man, especially of a politician, was less attractive than the quiet, secluded existence of a country gentleman. She now adamantly preached its virtues to Franklin and Eleanor. She was, moreover, genuinely afraid for her son. She was fearful that the callers whom Eleanor encouraged to come to the house sapped his vitality, that keeping up with his interests tired him. And she was sure that her mother’s heart knew better than Franklin or Eleanor or Louis or the doctors what would speed his recovery. (She was not the only Hudson River matriarch with such views. Her good friend Mrs. Robert Livingston had prevailed upon her son to abandon the law and withdraw to the vacuous life of a country squire when his eyesight began to bother him. In later years his contemporaries, viewing his squandered talents, would say that Franklin had had Eleanor and Louis to save him from his mother while Robert Livingston had been unprotected.)22 All through the winter a struggle between the two women went on, usually with politeness and courtesy but sometimes with acrimony.
As Franklin and Eleanor stood firm in the contest of wills, Louis became the target of Sara’s resentment, but it was Eleanor who bore the brunt of the struggle. Sara could be ruthless. With her, family was all that counted, and she resented outsiders with whom her children had close relationships. When Louis moved into the house, rather than being grateful to him for thus “marrying himself irrevocably to his crippled friend’s future,” Sara doggedly fought the influence with Franklin and Eleanor of “that ugly, dirty little man,” as she called him.23 She found it difficult to be civil to him and, in disapproval, withdrew to Hyde Park.
Sara was not content simply to argue with Eleanor over Franklin’s care; she also used the children, too young to understand what was going on, shaken by the sight of their splendid, spirited father prostrate, their house astir with strangers. Since they were also resentful of Louis, Sara played on their resentment, especially Anna’s. She was fifteen years old and having a difficult time fitting in at Miss Chapin’s, where she felt she was treated by students and teachers as an “outsider.” “I hated it but Mother decided I had to like it because she hoped I would develop the same feeling for Miss Chapin that she had for Mlle. Souvestre. So it was a year of complete withdrawal on my part from Mother, and Granny was feeling very excluded too.”24
Anna was supposed to have the large room with bath on the third floor, but Eleanor had turned it over to Louis, relegating Anna to a cubicle on the fourth floor. Eleanor was sharing a room with the youngest boys, sleeping on a cot, but Anna did not think of that: “I agreed completely with Granny that I was being discriminated against.” Moreover, Anna was confused by her mother’s switch in attitude toward Louis; Eleanor and Sara had always agreed about that “dirty little man,” and now only Sara was being consistent.
Granny, with a good insight into my adolescent nature, started telling me that it was inexcusable that I, the only daughter of the family, should have a tiny bedroom in the back of the house, while Louis enjoyed a large, sunny front bedroom with his own private bath.
Granny’s needling finally took root; at her instigation, I went to Mother one evening and demanded a switch in rooms. A sorely tired and harassed mother was naturally anything but sympathetic; in fact, she was very stern with her recalcitrant daughter.25
Eleanor carried a tremendous load. Since she was relieving the trained nurse, household arrangements could be complex. If she wanted to go out, as she did to take Anna to Tosca (she could not “resist seeing Anna at her first opera”), she had to make special arrangements with the nurse. Franklin wanted visitors and she saw to it that they came, but she also had to make sure they did not stay too long and would see them herself if necessary. Franklin had his ups and downs, and the one person with whom he did not have to dissemble was his wife.
“I am sorrier for you than Franklin,” Caroline Phillips wrote from The Hague, “and I know what an ideal wife you are.” It was, Eleanor said, the “most trying winter” in her life. Once Anna came upon her mother unexpectedly and found her slumped down in a chair, the picture of total dejection. Only Louis knew how to cope with Eleanor’s moods. She must not give up in despair, he counseled; she had a great future, and so did Franklin. He could usually make her come out of her shell, but Anna only came to appreciate this later. At the time she was angry and resentful and it upset her to see Louis sitting in a comfortable armchair with her mother at his feet: “I would be violently jealous.”26
Sara encouraged Anna to believe that her mother cared more for Louis than for her and this brought Eleanor close to the breaking point. Once that winter her self-discipline failed and the outward serenity and composure with which she usually guided the household shattered. She was reading to Franklin Jr. and John when she was suddenly swept by uncontrollable sobbing. The boys quickly left the room and so did Elliott, who happened to come in, saw his mother in tears, and fled. Louis tried to calm her but could do nothing. Finally she locked herself in a bathroom in her mother-in-law’s house, until she was able to regain control. It was the only time that she went to pieces in that way, she said.
Sara’s interference, on top of the burdens, was almost too much for Eleanor. “That old lady [Sara] with all her charm and distinction and kindliness hides a primitive jealousy of her daughter-in-law wh
ich is sometimes startling in its crudity,” Caroline Phillips wrote in 1936 after a long talk with Helen Robinson in which she learned of the way Sara had used Anna against Eleanor.27
In the late spring of 1922 Anna came down with the measles and on top of that the mumps.28 She was sent to Hyde Park and when Franklin went to Boston to be fitted for braces Eleanor went to Hyde Park too. One day Anna was writing a letter to her cousin, Helen Robinson, and “had just finished a few lines to the effect ‘that the thing I like most about being up here is that Louis Howe is not up here,’ when Mother walked in.” Anna tried to hide the letter, but Eleanor sternly insisted that she wanted to read it. “I burst into tears,” said Anna, “and gave it to her. She read it sitting at the end of the sofa and then said very coldly to me she would have to see to it I had no further contact with Louis the next winter when school started.”
Sara was to take Anna and Jimmy to Europe later that month and the conversation turned to that.
Suddenly to my horror Mother burst into tears and out poured her unhappiness. She had always looked forward to taking Jimmy and me to Europe, but she did not have the money to do so. So Granny was.
Eleanor softened when she saw how upset Anna was and said “she would really try to make things easier for me with regard to Louis,” Anna noted.
After this incident, mother and daughter began to open up to each other. Their rapprochement was strengthened as a result of a run-in between Anna and her father. One day Anna was on a ladder shifting some books in the library at Hyde Park while Franklin directed her from his wheelchair when an armful of books slipped and crashed to the floor. “I saw Father start, and an expression of pain passed swiftly over his face. My apologies were interrupted by his voice very sternly accusing me of being too careless for words and no help at all.” Anna fled in tears and
ran into Mother. To her I sobbed out my story and my grief. . . . Mother told me of the battle Father was waging against great odds; of the naturalness of his nervous reaction; how lucky we were to have him alive and to be able to help him get well; how much more patience and grit he had to have than we; until I felt very sheepish and even more ashamed—but in a different way, a more adult, understanding way. Back I went to the library where, of course, I not only found forgiveness but also a sincere and smilingly given invitation to resume my place on the library ladder.29
Whatever the strain, Eleanor did not yield to Sara. After it was all over, Dr. Draper told his sister, Alice Carter, that if it had not been for Eleanor and Mr. Howe, Franklin would have really become an invalid.30 Eleanor refused to treat Franklin as an invalid and did not allow others to do so. The struggle with her mother-in-law was finally over. “She dominated me for years,” Eleanor later said. Franklin’s illness completed her emancipation “and made me stand on my own two feet in regard to my husband’s life, my own life, and my children’s training.”31 She and Franklin both emerged from the ordeal tempered, tested, and strengthened. If she had yielded to Sara, Eleanor later said, she would have become “a completely colorless echo of my husband and mother-in-law and torn between them. I might have stayed a weak character forever if I had not found that out.”
27.HER HUSBAND’S STAND-IN
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT NOW BEGAN A PERIOD OF INTENSIVE PUBLIC activity. Chroniclers of the Roosevelt era have studied her emergence in the years after her husband was stricken from the point of view primarily of the help it was to him. She became his stand-in with the Democrats. She kept his name before the public. She brought people to see him—key party officials and public personalities and the less well known whose points of view she felt should interest him.
All this was true. Equally true, although rarely noted either by herself because of modesty or by others because they were more concerned with Franklin Roosevelt, was her effectiveness in the organizations in which she worked. Interested in neither titles nor honors, she moved swiftly into positions of leadership. She became known for the honesty and vigor of her opinions. She accepted responsibility because there was a job to be done, and with the same ardent good will took on both “donkey work” and assignments that produced headlines. Her lack of pride and vanity and her sincere dedication to the public good inspired confidence in her fairness and judgment. By the time Franklin returned to political office some of the foremost women of the time, who had long been leaders in the struggle for women’s rights, saw in Eleanor a new leader to whom they could pass on the torch.
Even before polio disabled Franklin, Louis had been encouraging her to take up interests of her own and to go into politics. As it became clear that Franklin would not return to public activity for a long time, Louis added an irresistible argument: Eleanor had to become actively involved in Democratic politics in order to keep alive Franklin’s interest in the party and the party’s interest in him. Doubtful as she was of her ability, once Louis put it to her as a matter of duty, his suggestions became easier for her to accept. And beneath the implacable promptings of conscience, there now were also the stirrings of ambition—the desire to show that she could succeed in this man’s world of politics—and, even deeper, a repressed but sweetly satisfactory awareness that the fate of the man who had hurt her so deeply now depended upon the success she made of her work for him.
So when Nancy Cook, assistant to Harriet May Mills, chairman of the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee, called to ask her to preside at a money-raising luncheon, she suppressed an impulse to say “no.” Sara was among the hundred women gathered at the luncheon tables, and although she had undoubtedly come to give her daughter-in-law moral support, the presence of this increasingly critical lady could only have added to Eleanor’s terror of the occasion. “I trembled so,” she later wrote, “that I did not know whether I could stand up, and I am quite sure my voice could not be heard.”1 Since a few thousand dollars were raised as a result of her plea for funds, somebody must have heard her, and her performance was strong enough that she was subsequently asked to serve as chairman of the Finance Committee for the women’s division. She invited Miss Cook, whose brisk enterprise she liked, to spend a week end at Hyde Park. Nancy was a striking, crisp-haired, crisp-voiced young woman with eager eyes, whose resourcefulness as an organizer and talents as a designer and craftsman (she was skilled at jewelry, pottery, copper, and brass work as well as cabinet making) made it easy for the members of the women’s division to accept her managerial propensities. Through Nancy, Eleanor soon met Marion Dickerman, a soft-spoken, tall (“as a Gothic church window,” someone said) woman of high principles and mournful countenance. They hailed from upstate New York, where they had been active in the suffrage movement, and had gone overseas to serve as volunteers in a British hospital. They returned home as the New York suffrage leaders were casting about for someone to run against Thad Sweet, the upstate Republican Speaker of the Assembly, who had blocked the progressive measures sponsored by the women. Finding that Marion lived in his district and was a Republican, they persuaded her to run against him. Nancy became her campaign manager. Backed by the Democrats, Socialists, Prohibitionists, and the women’s groups, Marion’s candidacy frightened Sweet sufficiently, though the district was traditionally Republican, that his backers slashed the tires of the women’s cars, denied them halls to meet in, pressured the local printers to refuse their work. Marion lost but doubled the vote against Sweet. Harriet Mills was impressed with Nancy’s work and asked her to come to New York City to work with her. Marion came down too, to teach and to work for the Foreign Policy Association. They found an apartment in Greenwich Village. Marion came with Nancy to Hyde Park.2 That was the way the friendship began. During the next few years Nancy, Marion, and Eleanor were almost inseparable.
On Franklin’s urging, Eleanor put in as much time in Dutchess County politics as she did at the offices of the State Committee. An upstate Democrat had to have a firm local footing, Franklin felt, if he was not to be at the mercy of the New York bosses. He also believed that Democratic weakness upstate
was a result of the neglect and apathy of those same bosses toward upstate issues and that systematic hard work could diminish, if not overcome, Republican upstate majorities. Franklin was the strategist and Eleanor the chief of the troops at his command. She and John Mack’s daughter set out to organize the women in the county. That meant more speaking, and Louis took her in hand and coached her. He came to her meetings, sat at the back of the hall, and afterward gave her his critique. He was hard on her nervous giggle: “Have something to say, say it, and then sit down,” was his terse advice.
The 1922 State Democratic convention was to take place at the end of September. William Randolph Hearst had gubernatorial aspirations. Franklin backed Al Smith and undertook to mobilize upstate support for him and especially to ensure a Dutchess County delegation committed to the former governor. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., helped, as did Mack, Tom Lynch, and Eleanor, who was his most tireless worker. She presided over a Dutchess County luncheon at which Elinor Morgenthau offered an anti-Hearst resolution that was unanimously adopted. She met the press and fired away at the Republicans: “It is impossible to be both a Republican and a progressive under the leadership of Governor Miller in this State.”3 She gave a picnic at Hyde Park for the wives of forty upstate mayors. She and Franklin received the Odd Fellows and Rebeccas at Hyde Park. One evening that summer as dessert was being served, Eleanor rose and said she had to go to speak in the Village. “It’s only beginning,” Rosy laughingly warned his younger half brother. “Once they mount the soapbox, mark my words, they never get off.”4
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