Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “The cottage is beginning to look sweet,” Eleanor wrote her husband, on “Val-Kill Cottage” stationery.5 Nan and Marion lived there, but she used it often.

  I was delighted after I took all to the train at five to go back and say goodbye (to Mama) and come over here for a quiet evening with Nan. I’ve written two editorials and three letters and we have had supper and the peace of it is divine, but we have to take the 10:05 down tomorrow.6

  The children loved the Big House, as did their father, but Eleanor never felt at home there. Even when Sara was away her spirit and presence were everywhere. “This house seems too queer without you,” Eleanor wrote her, “and there is no doubt in my mind but houses reflect the central spirit and are just empty shells without them!”7

  Nan’s undertaking to build the furniture for the cottage evolved into a more ambitious plan to start a furniture factory nearby to produce authentic copies of early American pieces. Both Franklin and Eleanor shared a long-time concern with a better rural-urban balance, and with his encouragement Eleanor helped establish the shop “primarily . . . to carry out a theory . . . about establishing industries in agricultural counties to give men and boys a means of earning money in winter and something interesting to do.” Nan went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to the Chicago and Hartford museums, and later to Monticello, to copy designs. Skilled Norwegian and Italian cabinet makers were employed to train the local boys. But Nan was the moving spirit here, hanging over her bottles and jars in search of the stain she wanted with the “passion of a medieval alchemist,” and every piece, after the stain was applied, was rubbed and polished until the wood had the texture of velvet. Eleanor put up most of the capital—out of her growing earnings from radio and writing, as well as some of the little money she had inherited.8

  As a first project, the women built the furniture for Franklin’s new cottage in Warm Springs. “The furniture from the Val-Kill shop is a great success,” Franklin wrote. By the spring of 1927 they were ready for their first exhibition, which was held at the Roosevelt Sixty-fifth Street house. The price list ranged from $40 for “trestle-table, round” to $175 for a large maple chest of drawers. “The work is handwrought and beautifully finished in every detail and copied with exactness from genuine antiques,” said the New York Times.9 Eleanor and Nan persuaded Abraham & Straus to send up buyers,

  and though they say they only sell cheap furniture, they’ve ordered $610 worth and are making an exhibit of it. . . . I’m going to try Sloane’s . . . and perhaps ask Grover Whalen if the Wanamaker shop in Philadelphia might be interested.10

  Their early brochures spoke of “Roosevelt Industries,” and Eleanor tried to interest the local women in weaving and other handiwork. She recruited women for a weaving class from the Hyde Park League of Women Voters and joined the class herself, but she did not have Nan’s flair for design and craftsmanship. Her contributions to Val-Kill were those of executive, merchandiser, and inspirer.

  Val-Kill Industries did not fully satisfy her need to do things herself, to develop skills of her own, to be useful professionally. In touch now with many professional women, she was bitter over her own inadequacies. “If I had to go out and earn my own living, I doubt if I’d even make a very good cleaning woman,” she said. “I have no talents, no experience, no training for anything.”11 So when Marion, who was teaching at and vice principal of Todhunter, a private school for girls in New York City, was offered a chance to buy the school, Eleanor said, “I have no more children at home. Why don’t we buy it together?”12 With the shining example of Marie Souvestre in the back of her mind, she had always found teaching appealing. Franklin approved of the plan to buy the school and of Eleanor’s decision to teach in it.

  Her first efforts as a teacher evidently were disappointing. “I can’t say I am set up by the exams my children did,” she wrote Franklin. “I only flunked one but the others were none too good.”13 Yet when Marion asked her to take on a heavier schedule the following year she agreed.

  She taught courses in literature, drama, and American history. Her drama course began with Aeschylus and ended with Eugene O’Neill, and her class in nineteenth-century English and American literature was equally wide-ranging. Notes for this class included biographical data on the writers she dealt with as well as remarks on their style and characteristics. She found her Allenswood notebooks quite useful. She was the moralist in literature; at that time it constricted her taste. She, Esther, and Elizabeth gave one night a week to reading French literature. Esther, on a trip to Paris, sent her André Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs. The homosexual theme shocked her. “I read the book as the story of a sensitive relationship sensitively told,” Esther said. “She read it in terms of a forbidden subject. She couldn’t bring herself even to consider homosexuality. Generally her reaction was not so final, but in this case it was.”14

  In her history class, she emphasized “the connection between things of the past and things of today.” Her examinations were given in two parts, one designed to test a knowledge of dates and facts, the other to encourage the girls to think for themselves. “Give your reason for or against allowing women to actively participate in the control of government, politics and officials through the vote, as well as your reasons for or against women holding office in the government.” “How are Negroes excluded from voting in the South?” “What is the object today of inheritance, income and similar taxes?” (Most of her students came from families of wealth and high social standing.)

  She was educating herself as well as her pupils. There were such reminders and admonitions to herself in her classbook as “look up Vikings” or “trace the trade routes better,” and the general injunction, “be more exact.” She used the “project method” in her homework assignments. When the class reached the Declaration of Independence she asked the girls to

  read any life [of a signer] you like. Get any pictures you can. Visit the museum and see if you can find anything in the museum belonging to them. Write about any present day descendants. Look up furniture of the Colonial period in the museum. Make book with pictures.

  Later she gave a class in current events, called “Happenings,” for the older girls. “I would like them to see the worst type of old-time tenement,” she wrote Jane Hoey of the Welfare Council.15 She took them to courts, police line-ups, markets, and settlement houses so that they might have a firsthand picture of how the city was run.

  Her courses in modern history and current events made greater use of newspapers and magazines than they did of textbooks. A teacher should start from a young person’s own present interest, she felt, and lead them into a wider and deeper understanding of the world into which they were going. “It is the teacher’s function,” she told Eunice Fuller Barnard, the education editor of the New York Times, “to manage this relating process, to seize all opportunities, however unpromising, to make all history and literature and the seemingly barren study of the machinery of government somehow akin to the things pupils are doing in their daily life.”16 She modeled herself on Mlle. Souvestre. The Times observed that

  no slipshod phrases escaped her, and again and again a girl was asked to define her terms. Nor did sonorous phrases parroted from textbook or dictionary get by. “That’s what the book says,” Mrs. Roosevelt would smile serenely. “Now, how would you put it?”17

  Todhunter was progressive in its use of the project method in teaching, but it was also traditional.

  We still have frequent tests and mid-term and final examinations as well as reports and marks of the traditional school. For we believe that the girls will have to take certain hurdles in life, and that hurdles in school are an important preparation.18

  The way the school day began was also traditional. Promptly at ten minutes of nine, the hundred uniformed girls, ranging from five to eighteen, marched into the assembly room

  to a stirring march on the piano. . . . And Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Dickerman, stately figures in tailored dark red gowns and low-heeled oxf
ords, like those the girls are required to wear, stand behind a long table in front to receive them. There is a hymn, a prayer and announcements, and a friendly talk about school plans in which the girls take part. Then comes another song of the girls’ own choosing, which may be as popular as they please. The morning I was there they sang “Polly-wolly-doodle” with great relish. And they march out again to classes.19

  “Teaching gave her some of the happiest moments in her life,” said Marion. “She loved it. The girls worshipped her. She was a very inspiring person.” When Franklin was elected governor of New York in 1928, she determinedly retained her ties with Todhunter, leaving Albany on Sunday night, teaching two and a half days and returning to the capital Wednesday afternoon.

  Many, perhaps a majority, of Todhunter girls were drawn from Social Register families. Eleanor tried to broaden their horizons and widen their sympathies, but the very concept of a “private” school gave her difficulty. In Europe, she noted, obligatory military service brought together men from all social backgrounds thus for a time wiping out class distinctions. Public schools should do this in the United States, “but unfortunately many of our children are so closely confined amongst the little groups of people which form their immediate circle of family and friends, that they have very little opportunity to develop any knowledge or judgment of human beings as a whole.”20 To bring up young people in the belief

  that their own particular lives are typical of the whole world is to bring up extraordinarily narrow people and every parent should demand of the school in which they place their children that if possible, there be a wide range of types in order that the child may be given an opportunity to develop its knowledge of the world and its own powers of choosing desirable companions.21

  She was critical of mothers who did not inquire how well a school stood scholastically “but only whether the children that her daughter will meet will benefit her when she is ready to enter into that strange thing called ‘society,’” a word which, she indicated, had lost its magic and meaning.

  There was a time in New York City when the City was comparatively small and much was heard of “the four hundred.” Perhaps there were really only four hundred people who could afford the gaieties and elegant leisure of the society of the day, which was represented by an old lady in a magnificent house, who gave remarkable parties to a few people, many of whom, while they may have belonged to the society of the four hundred, scarcely can have been said to have either ornamented or elevated its standing in the greater social organization we call civilization.

  But today there was no such thing

  in the larger cities at least, as any one group which may be called “society.” . . . there is no such thing possible in this country as an aristocracy of society based on birth. We set up a material basis as the final criterion of social eligibility, certainly in our larger cities.22

  During her Washington days when she had come to New York she had told Sara that the people she wanted to see were Ruth Ledyard, Pauline Emmet, Nathalie Swan, Helen Wilmerding, Caroline Trevor, Mary Morgan, Helen Robinson, and Cousin Susie. She was still fond of these people, but she saw much less of them. “I’ve had a long sobbing letter from Cousin Susie who says I’ve only been there twice all winter so I must make an effort to see more of her!” She still paid her dues to the Monday Evening Sewing Class and the Colony and Cosmopolitan Clubs, but she no longer took “society” seriously. The most satisfactory friends, she had now discovered, were those with whom she worked.

  31.SMITH’S DEFEAT, ROOSEVELT’S VICTORY

  POLITICS IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER TOOK MORE AND MORE OF Eleanor’s time as the 1928 presidential campaign neared. “Women should not be afraid to soil their hands” by getting into politics, she urged everywhere. “Those who are not make the best politicians.”1 Together with Caroline O’Day, Elinor Morgenthau, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman, she infused energy and purpose into the work of the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee.

  There was a great deal of drudgery. She had raised $6,000 toward the women’s budget, she wrote her husband. “I have $24,000 to raise, do suggest some people to do it.”2 Each year it was a new struggle. “I hate the money-raising job and I wish I could resign,” she wrote Franklin.3 But she never did, and when, that same year, they began to publish a monthly magazine, the Democratic News, she took on the job of advertising manager as well as editor. “I’ve visited 12 or 15 men, can’t do more than four a day and only have four ads, so far,” she lamented.4 “I’m learning the advertising business,” her next letter exulted.

  I spent an hour with Mr. Franklin Simon, who gave me advice, an “ad,” and several names. This p.m. I’m getting my rate card done with H. M. Jr.’s “ad” man, so you see this bulletin is going to be a real business proposition before we get thro’ if hard work can do it.

  She wrote the editorials, solicited contributions from prominent Democrats—including her husband—and kept in touch with a network of correspondents in every county. Behind the scenes Louis was her chief collaborator. He taught her the tricks of layout, headline writing, and composing a terse lead, occasionally doing the job himself. Louis was pleased with Eleanor’s progress as a politician and advised Franklin that his “Missus” was “gaining in political wisdom every day.”5

  She often went to Albany to do battle with recalcitrant legislators on behalf of legislation for women and children. When the assembly held a hearing, the manufacturers’ lobby brought shop girls to Albany who asserted they were perfectly content with a 50- and 54-hour week, that a 48-hour bill would eliminate jobs. “What we want most of all is protection from the non-working and professional uplifters,” an employee of the BMT declared. Disregard the “sob stuff,” Eleanor urged the assemblymen when she rose to speak. The “great majority of the working women of this State are really in favor of this bill and would like to see it become law. I can’t understand how any woman would want to work 54 hours a week if she only has to work 48 and could receive the same rate of wages.”6 The battle for the 48-hour law went into the 1926 and 1927 legislatures where she again clashed with the lobbyists for industry.7

  Throughout the twenties the drive for progressive social and labor legislation in New York was directed by the Joint Legislative Conference, which had been initiated by the Women’s Trade Union League and included the Consumers League, the League of Women Voters, the Women’s City Club, the industrial board of the YWCA, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the WCTU, and the New York Child Labor Committee. One of its most stalwart members was Mary W. “Molly” Dewson, civic secretary of the Women’s City Club, a no-nonsense lady who combined tough-mindedness with vision. She had worked for twelve years as superintendent of parole for girls in Massachusetts, gone to France during the war with the American Red Cross, and after the war, as research secretary of the National Consumers League, had helped Felix Frankfurter prepare the economic briefs in the District of Columbia and California minimum-wage cases. She had first met Eleanor the autumn of 1924, when, according to Molly, the president of the Women’s City Club had introduced her to “a tall, slender woman who was hastening out of the room. “This is our new Vice President, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt,’ she said. . . . In that fleeting second, I felt her human warmth, sincerity and genuine interest in other persons.”8 Molly lived in the same cooperative house on West Twelfth Street as Nan and Marion, and she, too, became a co-worker of Eleanor’s.

  The program of the Joint Legislative Conference, Molly wrote in her memoirs, included such long-standing progressive objectives as unemployment compensation, minimum-wage legislation, old-age pensions.9 The work of the conference, she thought, had had a large educational effect upon Franklin Roosevelt through Eleanor, who had served as chairman of the conference one year and who, by 1926, was militantly walking the picket line with Rose Schneiderman and using her considerable political influence within the Democratic party on behalf of the advanced goals of the conference. She had developed in
to a hard-hitting campaigner whom the Democrats frequently asked to present the party’s viewpoint in debates, as she demonstrated in the 1926 senatorial campaign when Justice Robert F. Wagner was the Democratic candidate against incumbent James Wadsworth. Eleanor would have preferred Owen D. Young to Wagner, but Wagner was better than Wadsworth, whom she smilingly shrugged off in a debate as “a country squire of the 17th century in politics . . . in the 20th century.” Warming up to this theme, she added that he had a “Marie Antoinette type of mind.”

  In 1926 she was elected to the holy of holies of the suffrage movement—the Leslie Commission, the group of nine women who presided over the disbursement of the fund that Mrs. Frank Leslie, widow of the publisher of Leslie’s Weekly, had left Mrs. Catt in 1914 with which to advance the cause of women’s rights. “You have qualified,” Mrs. Catt wrote Eleanor on her election as a director. “I should add that you were nominated and seconded by two ‘black Republicans.’”10

  There were other signs of Eleanor’s growing effectiveness. Radio was coming into its own and she was often asked to present the woman’s viewpoint. She had become a practiced lecturer. Pearl Buck, a graduate student at Cornell in the mid-twenties, was on the committee to meet and escort her the day she came to Ithaca to lecture to the Home Economics Department. “It was her energy that struck me most that day.” Her clothes were nondescript—an ankle-length purple satin dress, a brown tweed coat, bright tan oxfords—but her disregard of style did not matter. She had “a disarming kind of shyness. She was full of self-confidence and was anxious to please.” Her speech was “good,” and then there was a luncheon “invented” by the Home Economics Department. “It seemed to be mostly raw cabbage. . . . It was an uneatable meal so far as I was concerned. Mrs. Roosevelt ate it with great gusto, however, and congratulated the head of the department on having achieved this meal. . . . I remember her gay, high-pitched voice commenting on everything.” Miss Buck was on the receiving line before dinner. “She shook each hand vigorously. She was the soul of good humor and not a whit Then they proceeded to dinner “and when we saw her off on the train I was completely exhausted.”11