James, particularly, had trouble over the nepotism issue. In late 1930, while he was still in law school, he teamed up with an insurance broker who offered him fifty dollars a week for part-time work. Although Louis Howe reported favorably on James’ prospective employer and Eleanor wrote delightedly “James has got a job!,” James said his father “was fit to be tied.” Roosevelt cautioned James against allowing his name to be used to elicit political business and said that when he saw him he would explain “some of the reasons for the great willingness of some people to be awfully nice to you.” James tried to avoid soliciting political business, but in his disarming memoir, Affectionately, F.D.R., he acknowledged that the line sometimes was pretty close. “Possibly I should have been sufficiently mature and considerate enough of Father’s position to have withdrawn from the insurance business entirely. But I was young, ambitious, spoiled—in the sense of having been conditioned to require a good deal of spending money—so I went right ahead in pursuit of what seemed to me the easiest solution.”27
The issue arose in acute form when the president asked James to become one of his secretaries after Louis’ death. Eleanor objected strongly and told Franklin he was being selfish. She also tried to talk to her son, telling him that she felt the appointment would draw down an unceasing political drumfire. “Why should I be deprived of my eldest son’s help and of the pleasure of having him with me just because I am the President?” was Franklin’s reply. Eleanor proved to be right and James was cartooned as “Crown Prince” and chivvied as “Assistant President.” The attacks culminated in a Saturday Evening Post story by Alva Johnston entitled “Jimmy’s Got It” in which it was insinuated that James’ income from his insurance business and government connections ranged from $250,000 to $2 million a year. Eleanor was so angered by the Johnston piece that she wanted to answer it herself, but her husband dissuaded her. Instead, James submitted to questioning by Walter Davenport of Colliers, to whom he turned over his income-tax returns from 1933 to 1937. These showed that his income ranged from $21,714.31 in 1933 to $23,834.38 in 1937, reaching its highest point in 1941 with an income of $49,167.37.
“One of the worst things in the world,” exclaimed the president to James’ assistant, James H. Rowe, Jr., in a rare display of personal feeling, “is being the child of a President! It’s a terrible life they lead!”28
Deeply devoted to his children yet preoccupied with public business, Franklin was less available to them than most fathers are to their offspring. He tried to make up for it by having at least one of them with him if it did not interfere with other things they ought to be doing, and one or two were always along when he traveled around the country on the presidential special or went for a cruise on a Navy vessel. “It was grand to have a couple of days wtih Anna and her family,” Eleanor wrote Josephus Daniels in Mexico City, and then added poignantly, “and the President had one whole day in which he could be just a father and grandfather with no official duties.”29
But she nevertheless felt that he should have devoted more attention to his children’s problems. “Mother was very hard on Father for not doing so,” Anna said.
Mother could go tearing off to be with the boys in their crises. Father had to wait until the boys came to him and he was a very busy guy. He settled these things in his own way and it may not have been the perfect way. When I was sick Mother dashed out to spend Christmas with us in Seattle. I felt embarrassed. I felt Mother should have been at the White House. I had a husband and Mother should not have been with me.30
The attacks on James helped to break down his health, and by the middle of 1938 his stomach ulcers became so painful that, accompanied by Eleanor, he went out to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
A decision was made to operate in September, and after six weeks of following the regimen prescribed by the doctors, James returned to Rochester, again accompanied by Eleanor. “The family as a whole seemed to feel that while he would probably be here only for a day still it would be a good idea for someone to go with him to make sure that he told us all the truth about what the doctors had to say!” Instead of allowing him to go home, the doctors reported that his illness was critical and recommended immediate major surgery. On September 11 Eleanor reported, “The President has arrived and shortly the operation for which the doctors have been preparing James will take place. I dislike operations!” She described the day of the operation in her next day’s column:
As I said before, I dislike operations! Like many other disagreeable things, however, they bring out the best that is in people. . . . Jimmy’s operation seemed to take a long time yesterday and when the young doctor who operated finally came to report to my husband, he looked as though he had been through quite an ordeal. . . .
I have discovered that there are a few advantages to being the President! Never before when I sat and waited for operations to be over, has anybody come and reported to me what was going on or what was the patient’s condition. This time every now and then some one came to tell the President how far the work had progressed in that marvelous white operating room upstairs and I decided that this was on the whole one real advantage for which a President could be grateful!31
The operation was successful, and no malignancy was found. Ten days later the doctors pronounced James out of danger and the president left—to face the Munich crisis. “I want to thank all of you,” he said to the citizens of Rochester, “for what I can best describe as an understanding heart. . . . You have understood that I have come here not as President but as a father; and you have treated me accordingly.” After a period of convalescence James resigned as secretary to the president, despite his father’s protests, because he did not feel physically up to the White House job and because his marriage was breaking up. He took a job in Hollywood as assistant to Samuel Goldwyn at $25,000 a year, which created another storm: What did James Roosevelt have to offer Hollywood that made him worth $25,000 except his name? And Eleanor came under fire because she became a director of the insurance firm of Roosevelt & Sargent in order to protect Jimmy’s interests.
This incident gave her a chance to say some of the things which Franklin had dissuaded her from writing a year earlier. Did the American people expect the children of their president to live lives of enforced idleness or to go out and earn their own livings, she asked. While the president’s term in office is limited, she pointed out, it was long enough to ruin the lives of the younger members of his family if they were compelled to lead a completely restricted existence. As for her appointment to the board of Roosevelt & Sargent, she planned to attend meetings to cast her son’s vote, not to sell insurance. Then she broadened the issue to defend her right to engage in private business. Did they expect the president’s wife to sacrifice all her personal accomplishments and all the interests she had built up? If that were the case, some day a wife might refuse to go with her husband to the White House at such a sacrifice. When a man was elected to the presidency the voters did not give the rest of his family jobs, she emphasized. The only concession she made to critics was an acknowledgment that there was an ethical obligation upon members of a White House family not to profit from special governmental favors in their business undertakings.†32
By and large, the public approved her statement. To Dr. Gallup’s question, “Do you think the President’s wife should engage in any business activity which interests her if she doesn’t do it for profit?” 73 per cent of those polled replied “yes.”33 Whether the answer would have been the same about the children’s business activities is more debatable. “They may be worth the high salaries they have been offered and accepted since their father became president of the United States,” wrote the Springfield News and Leader,
But we do not believe that William Randolph Hearst, whose place in national affairs is too well known to need recital, would have engaged Elliott Roosevelt, who knew nothing of radio, to become the head of the Hearst radio chain at a princely stipend had his father not been president, we do no
t believe Mr. Hearst would have engaged his son-in-law at a salary well in the five figures as a publisher almost the moment he married the president’s daughter if it were not for his admittance into the Roosevelt family, we do not believe that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would have snatched up Jimmie Roosevelt at a Hollywood retainer if papa hadn’t been sitting on the throne.34
So what? was the reply of the Daily News.
That the President’s power and influence don’t do his children any harm is of course true. But how about, for instance, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, Junius Spencer Morgan, E. R. Stettinius Jr., Edsel Ford? Those men are all energetic, able and highly respected. But one potent reason why they are as far along in the world as they are today is that their fathers were or are wealthy men.
It is taken for granted that a man who has made or inherited a wad of money in private business of some kind will help his children to get well started in the world. Nobody except a Red here or there objects to that.
But when a President of the United States merely LETS his children work at any trade at all, his political enemies caterwaul about nepotism and unfair advantages and undue influence. This, though the above-mentioned private fortunes are usually long-lived, while the Presidency up to now is only an eight-year job at the outside.35
“Dear Colonel Patterson,” Eleanor wrote, “I deeply appreciate your writing as you did and am greatly heartened to have your support of my point of view.”36
The attacks on the president and his wife for “exploiting” their connection with the White House were generally discounted as politics. “The long and the short of these attacks on the President’s family is that they constitute dirty politics,” the Daily News said, and added for itself that there were “far more substantial reasons for disagreeing with President Roosevelt, and far more decent sportsmanlike ways to fight him.”
Years later James wrote that Father “should have been a lot tougher with all of us . . . he should have counselled us more instead of leaving us free to steer our own courses.”37 No doubt Eleanor thought so too, and her communications to Franklin were filled with such pleas as “tell him he has to live on his income . . . until he earns his own money.” Yet she, too, leaned over backward not to interfere in her children’s lives and rallied to their defense when they got into trouble.
Children who are raised in liberal, enlightened households often look back at their lives and the wasted opportunities and wish their parents had been tougher. They do not remember the many occasions when their parents were firm and their only reaction was defiance and obstinacy. Once when she returned to the White House Eleanor found Franklin Jr. there, home from Charlottesville, where he was enrolled in the University of Virginia law school. He had not decided whether to return that night or early in the morning. “In my most organizing spirit, I started to make his plans for him and he looked at me with the funniest expression and said: ‘I don’t like being organized. I’m going to flip a coin!’” Eleanor was contrite. “It is good to be reminded every now and then of the bad habits which come with age. Grown persons do not like to have their minds made up for them. They like to arrive at a decision on their own volition. We mothers have a dreadful tendency to behave as though no one in the world could manage except ourselves.”38
“No one ever lives up to the best in themselves all the time,” Eleanor once wrote a friend, “and nearly all of us love people because of their weaknesses rather than because of their strengths.” That was true of her attitude toward her friends. It was even truer of her feelings toward her children.:
I don’t know how other parents are, but I know that for myself, I can stand back and look at my children and what they do and think, once they are grown up, with a certain amount of objectiveness. On the other hand, I know quite well that there is a bond between us, and that right or wrong, that bond could never be broken. I am proud of them when I think they have acquitted themselves well, regardless of what the rest of the world may think, and even when I disagree and feel impelled to tell them so, I know that I understand them better than anyone else, perhaps. They are always my children, with the right to call upon me in case of need. The greatest contribution the older generation can give, I think, to the younger generation, is the feeling that there is someone to fall back upon, more especially when the hard times of life come upon them, and that is so even when we know that we have brought those hard times on ourselves.
“We could not ask that they give us peace and quiet,” she wrote at the end of the White House years.39
* Franklin Jr. said his mother had sharpened the story to make her point. The judge fined him thirty dollars and then took him home for dinner.
† Her own income in 1938 totaled $61,128 of which $54,072 constituted remuneration for professional services—$1,000 from the Junior Literary Guild, approximately $17,000 from the United Feature Syndicate for her column, $23,000 from royalties and other writings, and $13,000 from lectures.
43.THE DIVIDED WHITE HOUSE
THE DOMESTIC SIDE OF RUNNING THE WHITE HOUSE WAS LEFT to Eleanor. She issued the social invitations, planned the family reunions and parties, saw to it that none of their friends were overlooked. She was responsible for the housekeeping. The government paid for official entertainment, but the food the family and its personal guests consumed came out of the Roosevelt personal budget, so she kept two sets of accounts and five checkbooks. “The first of each month I am always rather breathless until I have balanced all my check books.” Her biggest complication was the people who preferred to keep her checks as souvenirs rather than deposit them.1
The White House during the years of her mistress-ship was a place of warm hospitality, fun, and good-fellowship.
Although Eleanor was not witty, she liked fun and parties and had a sense of humor, especially about herself. She was too kind to take advantage of someone else’s vulnerabilities for the purpose of a sally or a satire, but her laughter led the rest when her own foibles were lampooned.
The highlight of the Gridiron Widows parties were the skits in which she and Elinor Morgenthau acted and for which Elinor’s versatile secretary provided the verses. In 1938 to the tune of “Gallagher and Shean” she and Elinor sang and danced:
MRS. R.: Your welcome cheers me much—
You know I still exist!
After my recent trip out west,
I found I’d not been missed!
One night I slipped away
Next morn, I’d gone halfway—
First stop, Seattle, to buy a rattle,
Then to Jimmie for a day.
MRS. M.: YourOh, Mrs. Roosevelt! Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt!
Seems to me you have slighted Elliott and Ruth!
MRS. R.: No, we stood and talked like mad,
Twenty minutes all we had—
Then I rushed to vote for Herbert, that’s the truth!
MRS. M.: Oh, Mrs. R.! Oh, Mrs. R.!
People really think that you’re a shooting star!
MRS. R.: Though Hyde Park was so remote,
Still the ticket got my vote!
MRS. M.: Positively, Mrs. Roosevelt—
MRS. R.: Absolutely, Mrs. M.!
The skits at the White House skirted controversy, but those put on by the newspaperwomen at the Women’s National Press Club were highly political and often centered around the First Lady. In 1937 Eleanor was portrayed on a sit-down strike at the White House to obtain union hours for presidents’ wives. The curtain rose, wrote Emma Bugbee, showing the White House portico draped with a huge sign on which was lettered,
THIS SHOP CLOSED. SIT DOWN STRIKE.
Eleanor’s robust laugh rang through the room as a procession of pickets demanded “Union hours for First Ladies,” “No more inaugural teas,” “No more than 300 handshakes a day.” Figures with banners representing the organizations accustomed to being sponsored by First Ladies—charities, battleships, peace movements, balls, musicales, thrift shops and hospital benefits, horse shows and amateur dra
matics, high-school debates and baby contests—marched past the footlights expressing their dismay.
“Mrs. Roosevelt! Mrs. Roosevelt! We can’t get our names in the papers any more,” protested a delegation from the societies. There was no response from the sit-down striker. In marched a distressed group from the Society of Critics of Mrs. Roosevelt to implore her cooperation. Frances Perkins arrived to try to settle the strike, but retired moaning and defeated. Newsboys rushed across the stage, shouting, “Mrs. Roosevelt won’t negotiate.” But the show had to go on, so other skits were presented, with Mrs. Roosevelt still sitting down. The skit ended with the appearance of two strikebreakers at the White House, figures easily recognizable as representing Mrs. Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Alfred M. Landon. Eleanor ended the program with an off-the-record speech in which she “got even” with her friends of the Press Club, a speech that unfortunately was not recorded.2
If the laughter was at her expense, she was prepared to join in, and somehow it never seemed to detract from her graciousness and dignity. Yet to be the butt of ridicule was difficult for her. She had been a clumsy child whom her mother had made fun of as “Granny” and an awkward teen-ager who had been too tall and unfashionably dressed, so that her first impulse was to shrink from the limelight, especially from occasions where she might be burlesqued, but she presented a brave face to the world and encouraged others to do the same. She should not let her height worry her too much, she wrote a Philadelphia girl: “I have moments when I hate being tall. At other times I find it convenient, as, for instance in crowds. . . . After all, what we look like doesn’t matter much to anyone except ourselves!” Life published a photograph of her asleep in an airplane with her mouth open. “She is fair game when caught by an enterprising photographer,” a Life editor rationalized. “The picture gave me no concern, though some of my friends were rather appalled by it,” Eleanor reassured the embarrassed photographer. “Nobody looks very nice when he goes to sleep with his mouth open, and this has served to remind me to carry a large heavy veil and swathe myself in it before I go to sleep on a plane again!”3
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