Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Her friendship with Earl was cemented by the assistance he gave her with her alcoholic Uncle Vallie and with Franklin’s old Groton tutor and crony of Navy days, George Marvin, who had similar problems. Marvin, full of self-pity, turned up in Albany lamenting his wasted literary talents and asking for help. Franklin had no time for him, so Eleanor undertook the task of rehabilitation, getting him a job with Henry Morgenthau’s Conservation Department. But the process was painful and marked by frequent backslidings. When word reached her that George was on a tear, Earl was sent into action.

  And when Vallie’s drinking sprees resulted in his hiring a taxi and roaring up to the executive mansion, she and Miller took him back to Tivoli. At one point Vallie began associating with a young neighbor who had been arrested for raping a ten-year-old girl and who managed to smuggle in liquor. When the young man induced Vallie to buy a car and to permit other members of his family to stay at Tivoli, Eleanor decided the time had come to step in. She took Vallie to his room while Miller proceeded to read the riot act to the young man. He told him to leave and followed him to the county line, where he warned him that if he returned he ran the risk of arrest. Vallie was more difficult: Earl had to subdue him by force. “As I wrestled him down, the cords stood out in his head. ‘Hey! you’re quite a strong fellow.’” Vallie finally conceded.20

  Earl became part of the mansion household. He had been eating out in the kitchen with the other troopers, but was asked to eat with the family. He gave Eleanor the appreciation that her husband and her four sons so often neglected to show her. He took her side rather than Franklin’s. And to be squired around by this handsome state trooper who paid her small masculine attentions and treated her as a woman appealed to long dormant feminine qualities in her. She even liked his lapses into a roughness that Nancy and Marion considered rudeness.21 She became as devoted to Earl as she was to Louis; she loved everyone who gave her strength to meet and surmount difficult trials and fears.

  Those she loved she mothered, as she did almost everyone who served her and Franklin. Gus Gennerich, a New York policeman who was Roosevelt’s personal bodyguard, was another member of the family entourage. He had little education and always remained the New York “cop,” but he was engaging and affectionate and loyal. The Roosevelts considered him a friend, and Franklin always insisted that he be considered part of his personal party. Eleanor often visited Gus’s old and ailing mother, and she stayed with Gus after his mother died until the funeral.22

  No matter what she may have felt about Missy’s closeness to Franklin, Eleanor’s maternal tenderness enveloped her as well. Inevitably, a romance developed between Earl and Missy which ended when Earl and Ruth Bellinger, a second cousin of his first wife, decided to get married. “Glad Earl told Missy,” Eleanor wrote Franklin. “I was sure she would rather know from him.”23 Earl and Ruth were married at Hyde Park, with Anna Dall as bridesmaid and Elliott the best man.

  The marriage ended gossip, at least temporarily, concerning Eleanor’s relationship to Earl. It was not surprising that the habits and friendships of both Franklin and Eleanor caused raised eyebrows and provided food for “inside stories” at many dinner tables. Eleanor’s frequent trips with Earl as her only companion, Missy’s presence in the mansion and her role as the governor’s hostess in Eleanor’s absence, the affectionate familiarity among all of them, the obvious delight they took in each other’s company left even good friends puzzled and confused as to the true character of their relationships.

  When Bill and Caroline Phillips visited the Roosevelts in Albany, the observant Caroline noted that Earl Miller came to tea, but she could not quite figure out what his function was; she gave him the title of “Major” and decided he was probably an aide. She also noted that there was “a secretary whom everyone called Missie [sic],” who was, she commented, “a very nice young woman.”24 Missy’s status also intrigued the Henry Goddard Leaches, who were among the guests that week end. Franklin proposed that they all motor down to Hyde Park for luncheon, and Eleanor said to Agnes Leach, “You’ll understand that Franklin will not drive with us. He has this new car and he wants to show it off to Missy.” Agnes concluded that he was very fond of Missy, and mentioned it later to Elinor Morgenthau. “Oh no,” Elinor protested. “He loves Missy. She’s quite essential to him. He loves Missy but as to an affair—no.”25 At Hyde Park they were met by Nancy Cook, “Eleanor’s great friend,” Caroline wrote in her diary, “short, stocky Miss Cooke [sic], with her poppy-out blue eyes and short wiry grey hair . . . was as always warmly embraced by Eleanor. She is a most determined person who began by being a paid worker at some Democratic organization and then a sort of political secretary to Franklin and she now runs the Val-Kill furniture factory at Hyde Park, as well as the Roosevelt family!”

  The Phillipses came away from the week end with their two old friends feeling that they were both “living on top of their arduous job in a magnificent way. . . . The only flaw I could find in Eleanor is her disdain for any interest in food! . . . our meals were very unattractive, I must say. She was laughing at her mother-in-law who wanted to discuss with her what dishes would be most delicious for a dinner party, ‘as though,’ said Eleanor, ‘anyone now-a-days had time to spend twenty minutes planning what to eat!’”

  Eleanor’s determination not to waste time on food made her insensitive to her husband’s wishes, and she insisted that he was as indifferent to food as she was. “I am sorry to tell you that my husband and I are very bad about food. I do not know of any particular dish which he likes unless it is wild duck and the only recipe for that from his point of view is that it should fly through the kitchen.”26 It was no secret to others, however, that Roosevelt did not like the “plain foods, plainly prepared” that were served at the mansion, but evidently there was little he could do about it except when Eleanor was away. “Goodness, the Governor has no preferences,” she told S. J. Woolf of the New York Times. “If I should give him bacon and eggs three times a day he would be perfectly satisfied.”27 She could be stubborn and she was always on guard against the pleasure-loving side in her husband.

  Eleanor wanted her husband to talk to her about everything—friendships, managing the children, homemaking, and of course, politics and public affairs. She wanted to be his confidante and counselor, to be privy to his hopes and to be turned to when he met disappointment. But the nearer they came to the nominating convention and the decisive battle, the more ambiguous he became about his basic convictions and the less time he had for anything except the political game. When she feared that his pursuit of the presidency was engulfing her hopes of a true partnership, when it seemed to her that politics instead of being an instrument for the ennoblement of humanity was turning into a naked pursuit of an office, which, if achieved, would transform her into a ceremonial marionette, when it became evident that the more insistently she pressed these matters with him, the less he took her into his confidence, she fell into black despair.

  She was worried about her children and the fact that her husband rarely saw them. Anna was having problems with her marriage. Elliott, not yet twenty-one, was restlessly moving from one job to another and rushing into marriage; he seemed “terribly young to prefer monogamy,” commented David Gray,28 and David’s reservations were mild compared to Eleanor’s. The youngest boys were driving too fast and too recklessly. Her husband did not take the drastic measures she urged, either because of the pressure of public duties or disinclination to face disagreeable situations. The fact that Franklin was governor meant a sacrifice for the children, she said; they could not be “first” with their father. At times she understood and accepted this as the inevitable consequence of his career as a public man but at the other times she was resentful that they should be robbed of his time, his companionship, his guidance. The reflected limelight was particularly injurious—favors were done for them; they were offered jobs and opportunities. There were always strings attached but they were too young to see that. “It may be so small a t
hing as being invited to park their cars where others are not permitted to,” Eleanor said, unburdening herself to a friendly reporter. “It is bad for children to be allowed to infringe the rules.”29 She found herself in the role of “perennial deflator . . . sometimes it seems to me that I am everlastingly saying ‘no.’” Her sigh as she said this reflected the burden that was thrown upon her by her husband’s unavailability as disciplinarian. And if she did try to get Franklin to accept the responsibility for disciplining one of the children, “the punishment simply was not administered.”30

  In December, 1931, she wrote an article entitled “Ten Rules for Success in Marriage.”31 Though most readers probably assumed it described her relationship to her husband, actually it depicted what she wished marriage to be and what it was not. The article even discussed the circumstances under which divorce was justifiable, a hazardous topic for a public figure and a radical departure from the traditions of her grandmother and mother-in-law, who belonged to the generation described by Edith Wharton as dreading scandal more than disease. When in 1922 Hall had taken her to a little New York restaurant to tell her that he intended to divorce Margaret, she had been concerned with what it would mean “to the family, all of whom believed that when you made your bed you had to lie in it.” But now she observed succinctly, “It is far better for two people who cannot get along to separate than to lead a quarrelsome life. If there are no children, I would say that divorce is justifiable when either husband or wife, or both find that life together has ceased to have any spiritual value.”

  Her formula for married happiness emphasized “unselfishness—thoughtfulness—consideration of others. In marriage selfishness shows itself in one way that is particularly common, through the desire of either husband or wife to be the dominating person in the household.” Expect to disagree, she said, but “do not dominate. In this respect victory for one is failure for the partnership.”

  But Franklin always had to be in command. He was a showman, and his charm and magnetism were so overpowering that the household naturally gravitated around him; everyone’s interests were subordinated to his. A woman in love with a man could accept this, but that kind of love had died with the Lucy Mercer affair, Eleanor told herself. She was not in love with him. Yet she was prepared to render him a labor of love by serving his work (a distinction that she drew in an article for King Features, the Hearst Syndicate, published in February, 1933, on the role of a public man’s wife) if he would be thoughtful, considerate, and treat her as a partner and confidante. Perhaps these longings for a full partnership were inherently unfillable given her emotional needs and insecurities, and Franklin, on his side, could not be tenderly confiding and open in the way she craved. As she explained to her son James years later, “His was an innate kind of reticence that may have been developed by the fact that he had an older father and a very strong-willed mother, who constantly tried to exercise control over him in the early years. Consequently, he may have fallen into the habit of keeping his own counsel, and it became part of his nature not to talk to anyone of intimate matters.”32

  Many years later she wrote to a young friend in the service:

  There is one thing I’ve always wanted to say to you, when you do come home and get engulfed in work, will you stop long enough now and then even if T. is working with you to make her feel she is first in your life even more important than saving the world? Every woman wants to be first to someone sometimes in her life and the desire is the explanation for many strange things women do, if only men understood it!

  Stubbornly she fought for a more tender, intimate relationship with her husband. Life away from him was difficult; life with him could be equally so. In the spring of 1931 Sara, who was in Paris, became ill with pneumonia. Franklin wanted Eleanor to go to France, but she felt that it would do his mother much more good if he went without her, so he took Elliott instead. A touching letter from Eleanor followed. “I think I looked so tired chiefly because I hated to see you go, though I knew it was the best thing for you to do & the sensible thing for me not to go. We are really very dependent on each other though we do see so little of each other. I feel as lost as I did when I went abroad & I will never do that again. . . . Goodnight, dear. . . . Dear love to you. . . . I miss you & hate to feel you so far away.” Franklin’s visit, she wrote eighteen years later in This I Remember, “gave his mother just what was needed to accelerate her recovery.”33

  There were acute differences over issues and the compromises he felt obliged to accept in order to win the nomination. During the twenties she had developed a set of strongly held views and she used every channel in advancing them with her husband. “What did he think? . . . What was his reaction?” she would anxiously ask Louis, if he was in Albany, before she went in to sit on Franklin’s bed and say good night. Or if she were leaving Albany, she would say to Missy, “You work on him.”

  As the Depression deepened and joblessness spread, she pressed more urgently for action. She was “not excited about the Communists,” she told the Southern Women’s Democratic Organization, but she was concerned about “the great number of people in New York who cannot get work.”34 Before the Brooklyn Emergency Unemployment Committee, she spoke of the right to work “as fundamental and inherent in our civilization. Suddenly to find that no work is to be had turns people bitter.” She understood that bitterness and pleaded for the “alleviation of distress . . . now.”35 She was unhappy that Franklin was as elusive on the issue of child-labor legislation as Al Smith had been. Molly, on behalf of the advocates of unemployment compensation, asked Eleanor to urge the governor to make it a major objective. Eleanor regarded her thoughtfully as they drove through the congested garment district, Molly recalled, and then said, “I will speak to Franklin about it. I do not know whether he will consider it wise to take on another measure.”36 It was she who brought to her husband’s attention a hard-driving, militant social worker named Harry L. Hopkins, whom Roosevelt selected to head up the state’s program of unemployment relief.37

  Some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers—Sam Rosenman, his counsel and speech writer, and Doc O’Connor, his law partner and a political counselor, thought Eleanor was dangerously idealistic. Not long after Rexford G. Tugwell was drafted as a member of the Brains Trust in the spring of 1932, he was stunned to hear O’Connor say to him and Ray Moley, Columbia University professor and the first to be recruited into the Brains Trust, that he hoped they knew one of their first jobs was “to get the pants off Eleanor and onto Frank.” Sam agreed.38 Eleanor’s “well-meant probings” annoyed them, so much so that they tended to avoid the dinners at the mansion that preceded a work-out with the Brains Trust. Conversation at dinner, Tugwell noticed, tended to be controlled by Eleanor, who always had “some good cause to further” and who “was apt to chide her husband when he claimed more than he should have for his efforts during the past four years.”39 Although Eleanor’s “pronouncements infuriated Doc and Sam,” Tugwell took them less seriously. He felt that even if her views were not profound, “they went cautiously in the right direction.”40

  The sharpest disagreements between Eleanor and her husband were occasioned by his shifts on Prohibition and the League of Nations. She remained a teetotaler, an ardent advocate of Prohibition, and a supporter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She would not have liquor or wine at her table and it offended her to learn that cocktails were served at the mansion in her absence. It had been difficult for her to go along with Franklin when at the 1930 Governors’ Conference he suggested a states’ rights solution of the enforcement problem. She had had great hopes for the Volstead Act, yet “when I see the terrible things that have grown out of it, such as graft and bootlegging, one begins to wonder about it,” and she was realistic enough to see that enforcement was not working. But when Franklin went beyond states’ rights and called for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, Eleanor disagreed sharply. “She was,” commented Sam Rosenman, “a rather inflexible person, rather high-minded a
nd averse to compromise. She had very set ideas.”41

  Although Louis was disdainful of Sam and Doc and was usually allied with Eleanor, on the Prohibition issue he, too, considered her unrealistic.42 Eleanor’s ally in this case was Sara, who was also a Prohibitionist by conviction. “I don’t want my son to be elected if he has to be elected on a ‘wet’ ticket,” she told a group of Roosevelt’s political associates. But Roosevelt and Howe approached the issue politically, and were quite reconciled to see the “great experiment” torpedoed.

  The other source of tension between Eleanor and her husband in the spring of 1932 was his retreat from supporting the League of Nations and the World Court. After he became governor, Roosevelt, one of the country’s most prominent Wilsonians, fell silent on the issue of adherence to the Court on the grounds that as a governor he should stick to state affairs and not get involved in foreign-policy issues. Eleanor, on the other hand, continued to work with Esther Lape for ratification of the World Court. Pleas for action over her signature were sent to all Democratic senators, and she asked the Democratic national committeewomen from their states to get after any senators who did not respond.43 “You do stick to the Court through thick and thin,” Mrs. Catt wrote her admiringly in March, 1930.

  Until 1932 Roosevelt had managed to escape attack on the issue through a policy of public silence and private assurances to World Court partisans that he was still with them. Now William Randolph Hearst, launching a boom for Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas, began to fulminate against internationalism and the Wilsonians, urging instead an “America First” policy. His first blast named Roosevelt, Newton Baker, Owen D. Young, even Al Smith, but the attack was soon limited to Roosevelt. In front-page editorials with big black type the Hearst papers quoted his pro–League of Nations statements in 1920. By the end of January Howe was advising Franklin that “You may have to make a public statement before we get through, if this gets any more violent.” The struggle over whether to appease Hearst raged among Roosevelt’s advisers. Rosenman thought Eleanor was rigid on this issue, too, even more so than on Prohibition: “She had an awful lot of faith in the World Court as the only thing to rally around once the League of Nations was out of the question.”44 Roosevelt tried to avoid public repudiation of the League and the Court by sending Jim Farley to the editors of Hearst’s New York American to reassure them about Roosevelt’s views on internationalism. The assurances should be given “to the public, publicly, not to me privately,” Hearst stated on the front page next day. Finally, Roosevelt capitulated, and in a speech to the New York State Grange said he did not favor American participation in the League of Nations. He was even ready to turn his back on the Court, but Hearst seemed satisfied and the Wilsonians were up in arms. Cordell Hull, who had been drawn to Roosevelt by his internationalism and was one of the most influential supporters of his candidacy, was deeply upset by Roosevelt’s speech. Colonel House warned Howe, “What you said about the League has already strained their loyalty, and many of them have told me that if you take the same position on the World Court they cannot support you.”