Following serialization, the autobiography was to be published in book form by Harper & Brothers. In advance of the book’s appearance Eleanor had several sets of the Ladies’ Home Journal containing the complete autobiography bound in limp leather and marked in gold letters for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, Malvina Thompson Scheider, and Earl R. Miller.† The copy she gave Franklin was accompanied by a jingle:
This may not look it but it is,
A book which will some day appear
It promises to be a whiz,
So little less you’ll get my dear!
On her way through New York City in early November she went to Harper’s to receive her copy of the book. “It looks much more important than I had ever imagined it would be, but I am still inexperienced enough to feel a real thrill and to be very proud when Mr. [Cass] Canfield said that they considered it a good piece of work and were glad to be the publishers.”51
The book was widely acclaimed because the experiences she described in it were, she discovered, widely shared. The “harmless childish weaknesses of character” that she had written about in language that was “classic” in its “plain simplicity,” said Dorothy Canfield Fisher, are universal. The painfully honest account of her struggle to overcome shyness and insecurity, wrote educator Alice V. Keliher, “will help young people in their adjustments to life more than anything else written.” Women embraced the story as their own. “I saw so much in the story so far that every woman experiences,” wrote one.
Old Bishop Atwood touched on another aspect of the book’s appeal. Eleanor had been too harsh in judging her own character, the bishop thought, but had “succeeded in making a living picture of a social life now in the past.” Karl Bickel, the former president of the United Press, thought it was one of “the greatest human documents he had read in modern times,” and Captain Joseph Patterson, the president of the Daily News, in a bold black scrawl let her know that “I think your book is splendid; and that it may become a classic.” There was praise, sweet to her ears, from Alice Longworth, who at a party was heard to say “Have you read it? Did you realize Eleanor could write like that? It’s perfect; it’s marvellous; she can write . . . all at the highest pitch.”52
As Alice Longworth acknowledged, Eleanor could write, but the basic appeal of This Is My Story, like the basic appeal she had as a lecturer and columnist, flowed from her personality. “You see I think you are a kind of genius,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “Out of your personality and position you have certainly created something of first-rate and unique value—not a book or statue or painting—an example.”
* Her first literary agent was Nannine Joseph. But since Nannine was also Franklin’s agent Louis Howe placed Eleanor with George Bye, telling Nannine it was not right for her to be the agent for both the president and First Lady. Nannine became Eleanor’s agent again in the late forties.
† Franklin, for Christmas, 1936, had distributed bound copies of the speech he had delivered at Chatauqua, New York, in August, 1936, “I Have Seen War, . . . I Hate War.” Copy number 1 went to his wife; number 2 to his mother; the next five to children; number 8 to Missy; number 9 to Daisy Suckley, a Hudson River neighbor; number 10 to Grace Tully; number 11 to Marvin McIntyre; number 12 to Steve Early; number 13 to Doc McIntire; number 14 to Bill Bullitt; numbers 15 to 24 to the members of the cabinet beginning with Secretary of State Hull.
39.WITHOUT LOUIS HOWE—THE 1936 CAMPAIGN
THE 1936 CAMPAIGN WAS THE FIRST WITHOUT LOUIS HOWE. FOR Eleanor, whose life had been molded by this misshapen eccentric genius almost as much as by Mlle. Souvestre, his death left a void as impossible to fill as it was for Franklin, with whose rise to the presidency Louis’ name would be forever linked.
Louis’ final decline began in the autumn of 1934 when his breathing became more labored, his eyes more sunken, his thin frame more wasted. He found it an ordeal to walk to the office and began to stay in his paper-littered bedroom off the Lincoln room. It was directly across the hall from Eleanor’s sitting room, and his pajama-clad figure, wracked with coughing, was often seen shuffling from one room to the other. In January, 1935, he took a turn for the worse, and the annual Cuff Links party of those who had been associated with Roosevelt’s 1920 campaign was canceled. Franklin and Eleanor had no heart for a party without Louis, who had always been the impresario on such occasions, dreaming up stunts and writing scripts with Eleanor as a willing accomplice. In March, Eleanor warned his children, Mrs. Mary Baker and Hartley, that while there was no immediate danger, their father needed cheering up and letters would help. Ten days later, after a bronchial collapse, he drifted into unconsciousness. “He seems to cling to life in the most astonishing manner,” Eleanor reported to Molly Dewson, “but I am afraid it is the end.”1
But he rallied, opening his eyes two days later to ask for one of his Sweet Caporals. For another year, much of it spent under an oxygen tent, he battled for breath and life. When Louis’ wife Grace could not be at the White House, Eleanor watched over him faithfully. She kept track of what he ate, insisted that he follow the doctor’s orders, kept him informed on the comings and goings in the White House, and encouraged him in his hopes that he would manage the 1936 campaign as he had the others.
When the doctors recommended that he be moved to the Naval Hospital it was Eleanor who took him there in the White House limousine and did not leave until she saw him settled. He went “peacefully,” she reported to Grace, and only got into a “tizzy-whiz” because no telephone had been arranged.2
From his hospital bed he continued to plot strategy for the coming campaign by way of memos dictated to his secretary, Margaret Durand (“Rabbit”), and the telephone. When the inspiration seized him he insisted that “Hacky,” the White House switchboard operator, put him through to Franklin immediately whether the president was at Hyde Park, Warm Springs, or in bed. The president finally requested that Louis’ direct line to the White House be available only from 10:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., but he also asked his chief aides to treat Louis with respect and courtesy no matter what orders he issued by phone.3
The president visited Louis at the hospital and those were moments of cheer, for Roosevelt was a great jollier, but there were not as many visits as Louis wished. Not only were the pressures of the presidential office remorseless, but Roosevelt had a faculty for blotting from consciousness the people who were unable to keep up with him. It was Eleanor, who had taken so long to appreciate Louis, who was steadfast to the end. She came to see him every day she was in Washington, “but yesterday he was too busy,” she wrote Grace Howe, for sometimes he played the same game with her he did with Farley—that “he was still a busy man of consequence.” She brought friends like Baruch, who promised to be helpful to his son Hartley and also to underwrite the Good Neighbor League, an organization that Howe felt would be needed in the campaign to appeal to Republicans and Independents.
He was saving his strength for the campaign, Louis informed Rabbit, and when the time came he would leave the hospital and move his operations to the Biltmore Hotel in New York. All of his friends joined in the sad charade that Louis would be with them in the campaign.* On the day Louis died Eleanor wrote Farley, “The President tells me that everything is to clear through both you and Louis and anything you are not entirely sure about is to come to him.” That night, April 18, he slipped quietly away while asleep. Franklin was informed while he was at the Gridiron Dinner and Eleanor as she was giving her annual party for the Gridiron widows. The president ordered the White House flags to be half-masted, and the funeral services were held in the East Room. The choir of St. Thomas’ Church, which Louis had joined when he first came to Washington with Franklin, sang the music he had always liked. The president and the First Lady accompanied the body to Fall River for the burial. “There is nothing to regret,” Eleanor wrote in her column, “either for those who go, or for those who stay behind—only an inheritance of good accomplishment to be lived up to by those who car
ry a loving memory in their hearts.”
There was one comforting thought, General Hugh Johnson wrote her: “In his impaired health he would have been very miserable as the campaign advances—and he not able to get into it vigorously.” Eleanor agreed: “It was the happiest solution for Louis.” She was grateful to Baruch: “You were wiser than the rest of us. You knew that it was medicine, food and drink to Louis to know that he was still in there fighting, doing something for Franklin.”5
Even before Louis’ death, she had felt that as a consequence of Louis’ illness, Franklin was seeing a narrower range of people and his mail was being analyzed with insufficient sensitivity. “F.D.R.,” she penciled on an aggrieved letter, “I think this letter answering is really vital. That was how L. H. built your popularity. I don’t like R.C. but he’s right about the way they feel. Couldn’t one person take over this mail? E.R.” He was “entirely right,” she informed the writer, Russell Carney: “Louis Howe’s not being on hand has meant that many people were not appreciated and had been forgotten.” Molly Dewson complained that she was not able to get to see the president although the 1936 campaign was coming up and she had to get the women’s division in readiness. Eleanor arranged for her and other women’s division leaders to spend an evening with him. Afterward Molly commented, “I miss Louis Howe awfully.”6
One of the jobs Louis had performed for Franklin was to keep track of the Roosevelt coalition, to evaluate by the statistical methods that were then available the inroads that were being made into the president’s support from both left and right. The large followings attracted by the radical demagogues Huey Long, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, and Dr. Francis E. Townsend demonstrated that more rather than less action by government was necessary. Yet, on the other side, big business was outspokenly hostile to the New Deal, and men like the duPonts, Alfred Sloan, and John J. Raskob in alliance with conservative Democrats like Alfred E. Smith, Albert Ritchie, and John Davis had established the American League to oppose Roosevelt and his New Deal reforms.
The progress of the demagogues frightened the New Dealers, who raised an anguished cry for more vigorous leadership by Roosevelt. In early 1935, they were asking what had happened to FDR. What should she say in reply? Eleanor asked Franklin, sending him several letters that reflected the liberals’ complaint. Perhaps she also shared their restlessness, but in selecting these letters for his attention her primary purpose was to make sure that with Louis no longer analyzing the White House mail, Franklin was aware of the questions among significant groups of his supporters. She felt, more strongly than her husband perhaps, that the New Deal could not be considered complete, but she also believed that significant changes in national direction could not simply be declared. They had to be worked at long and patiently.
A young man who described himself as still in difficult circumstances said he was prepared “to starve a little . . . if I knew that the man in Washington who captured my imagination and admiration in 1933 was unchanged.” “Would you like to answer or shall I?” Eleanor queried her husband, adding, “It is rather nice.” Franklin asked her to write and presumably indicated the reply she might give. “Nothing has happened to F.D.R., but reforms don’t come in two years.”7 An Iowa Republican who had voted Democratic in 1932 confessed that she was beginning to lose hope because the old order seemed unchanged. “I would write her,” Roosevelt suggested, “that there is one thing to learn and that is not to believe everything she reads in the newspapers. Also tell her that the position of the Administration has not varied one iota and that it still has the same objectives.”8
Molly Dewson was another who communicated to Eleanor her alarm over the president’s failure to exert more vigorous leadership. Eleanor replied to Molly along lines suggested by Franklin:
These things go in cycles. We have been through it in Albany and we are going through it here. . . . He says to tell you that Congress is accomplishing a great deal in spite of the fact that there is very little publicity on what they have done. . . . The relief bill and the [social] security bill are bound to go slowly because they are a new type of legislation. If he tried to force them down the committee’s throat and did not give them time to argue them out, he would have an even more difficult Congress to work with. . . .
Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership that he is seeing the men constantly, and that he is working with them, but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship and I hardly think the country would like that any better than they do the delay.
The ups and downs in peoples’ feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately. Considering the time we have had to work in the past for almost every slight improvement, I should think they might get over with it, but they never do.
Franklin says for Heaven’s sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.9
Sometimes even Roosevelt became impatient and was tempted to twist arms and apply the whip to Congress, and it was Eleanor who urged patience and perseverance. She lunched with some friends of World War I days—Caroline Phillips, Mary Miller, Anne Lane. “She was as dear, as affectionate, as simple and spontaneous as she was at 17 when I first knew her 35 years ago,” Caroline recorded in her diary. But she also looked “very tired” and was “worried about the harm Huey Long is doing.” The president was ready “to take the whip to Congress and abandon his conciliatory attitude. Eleanor tries to prevent this, but has only a limited influence,” Caroline noted.10
In mood and objective she was allied with the New Dealers, but she felt that education, not the “whip,” was the way to move ahead. Congress must have time, she counseled an Iowa progressive who wondered whether the president had deserted the progressive group in Congress for big business: “If he went on the air and forced legislation through, there would be the cry of ‘Dictator,’ and no willing cooperation.”11 In Warm Springs at Thanksgiving time she urged her husband to adopt “the same method he had used in Albany of holding a school of his own members in Congress so that they can get a chance to talk out their own ideas and he can get his across to them.”12 But Roosevelt felt he did not have the time, he told Sam Rosenman, who agreed with Eleanor about a school for legislators, “and besides, there are so many of them that we could never get around to all.”13
Eleanor had strong convictions, but she respected her opponents and believed, moreover, that in a democracy reforms had to be both gradual and subject to revision. The objectives set forth by people like Huey Long, she wrote a correspondent, were fine; the problem was to obtain them “without too much dislocation and too much hardship to everyone concerned.”14
Nor did her strong disagreement with the American Liberty League alter her warm feeling for Al Smith, one of its chief architects. Louis had been “a hater” in politics, “the most intense hater I have ever known,” she said; he never forgot and rarely forgave a politician who had crossed the president. But Eleanor, as columnist Arthur Krock noted, did not seem to take “her husband’s political wars personally. She has seen a lot of feuds and reconciliations in politics.” Krock’s comment was prompted by the one-day sensation caused when it was disclosed that Eleanor had invited Al Smith to stay at the White House when he came to Washington to address the American Liberty League on January 25, 1936. Smith declined the invitation. Had not Mrs. Roosevelt understood, Krock wondered, that the invitation to Smith, when he was coming to Washington with the avowed purpose of blasting the president, would be considered suspect? People had to understand Eleanor Roosevelt’s “simple and candid” nature, he was told by White House aides. She considered the White House her home. She was an extraordinarily direct person with a feeling of warmth for Smith, and had invited him without consid
ering the political implications. The president had had nothing to do with it.15
One of the most bitterly fought measures in the 1935 Congress was the social security bill. There were differences among its advocates over a national versus a state approach, over the size and method of contribution, over whether it should be a new agency or lodged within the Labor Department. And there was the more basic opposition of the Republican party to the principle of social security, which conservative businessmen felt would lead to the “ultimate socialistic control of life and industry.”
Eleanor’s “old crowd” reflected the virulence of the conservative opposition. She invited the ladies of the exclusive Fortnightly Club to hold their March meeting at the White House and proposed that “social welfare” be the topic of discussion. Her cousin Helen Robinson, since the Club’s Board of Governors did not dare write directly, was asked to convey to Eleanor their fears that they would not feel free while receiving her hospitality to criticize the administration and to disagree with pending legislation. It had not occurred to her that the social security bill was political, but if the board could think up another subject, she would have no objection: “Of course, I would have expected them to criticize administration measures where they touch on politics. I cannot see why everyone should be expected to think the same way about anything.”16
Faced with strong opposition to the very principle of social security, Molly Dewson, although she had strong views on the specific features of the bill that were in contest, said she would take a bill “anyhow it’s drafted.” Eleanor felt similarly. She did not expect to get a complete “security program” in the next two years, she told her news conference, but hoped to see the program launched. Asked about the differences among the proponents of social security, she replied: “I have always been amused to note that those who want a great deal more, and those who want a great deal less done, find themselves, unconsciously to be sure, working together and preventing the accomplishment of a moderate middle-of-the-road program.”17
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