Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Franklin Roosevelt is “one part mush and three parts Eleanor,” Doris Fleeson quoted Alice Longworth,‡ and the added quip that “Eleanor is a Trojan mare” did not sweeten the barb. A revealing exchange took place one evening in the president’s study. Harry Hopkins asked who America’s greatest women were. “Anne Hutchinson,” Eleanor began. Harriet Beecher Stowe, someone followed up. “Mrs. Catt,” Eleanor continued. “What was her husband’s name?” the president asked, his derisive tone making it clear that he did not think much of marriages in which wives overshadowed husbands.30

  She could never understand, Eleanor went on, why she was called upon to do things like going to Chicago. She was not important or influential. The function of women in politics was to ease things along, smooth them over; they were not main movers. She had tried to prevent the break between John L. Lewis and the president. “You and I, Mr. Jackson, are both working for the same kind of people,” she had told Lewis’s legislative aide Gardner Jackson with a candor that both charmed him and took his breath away. “They are both prima donnas. We’ve got to try to control the prima donna qualities in both of them.” She had given up on Lewis when he had turned wholly obstructionist, but she was still trying to prevent an irreparable break between the president and Farley.§31

  She understood Farley’s wanting to be president, she went on as the little group sat through the ritual of the nominating speeches, wanting it even more ardently because he was a Catholic and attributing his failure to get it to his religion. That was inevitable when one was part of a minority. She knew from her own experience how difficult it was to overcome the sense of insecurity and of being excluded, so she understood just how Jim felt. She was sad about Senator Carter Glass’s uninspired speech nominating Farley, and when the radio carried the convention’s singing of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” a tribute to Jim, she sang along in a low voice. But she also made the point that if he were to obtain the nomination, he would be obligated to the reactionaries and would be torn to pieces.

  The nomination of Garner moved her to talk about his conservatism. He was a self-made man and in achieving success had become insensitive to the sufferings of others. He considered people in need of help failures and regarded all reform as a conspiracy to divest him of hard-won, personally achieved gains. The president, on the other hand, never having gone through bitter, personal struggle to achieve wealth and prominence, had no such feelings about his possessions and privileges. He was sensitive to suffering and privation and, once he understood, would go to the limit to change things; the problem was to get him to understand and to see a situation.

  When Senator Lister Hill placed the president in nomination, she remarked that it looked like “a very rough campaign.” The Democrats were highly vulnerable, she thought. If she were in the opposition she knew exactly what her campaign themes would be:

  We haven’t solved the unemployment problem.

  We have broken a very great tradition.

  It would be a very rough campaign, and she felt a great weariness in approaching it.

  The group at Val-Kill listening to the nominations did not break up until 3:00 A.M., but by 8:30 the next morning Eleanor had already been in for a swim and had jotted down some points she might use in her speech to the convention. She called Franklin to make sure she would not be saying things he intended to say, but his speech was not finished. He told her that Harry Hopkins had not been sent out by him, was not his personal representative, that he had no headquarters—that it was all a newspaper story. Earl and Tommy were skeptical.

  With only an overnight bag and a briefcase bulging with mail and manuscripts, Eleanor left for New York in a small plane that C. R. Smith, the head of American Airlines and a good friend, had sent up for her. There was a quiet elegance about her silk coat and dress, both blue, and a small blue straw hat added a touch of chic. At LaGuardia she was joined by Franklin Jr., who had been sent by his father with whom he had been staying. Her mission, she told reporters at LaGuardia, was “to do whatever Jim Farley wants me to do as quickly as possible and then turn around and come right back.”

  Smith flew her to Chicago, where Farley met her at the airport. On the way to the hotel he filled her in on convention developments. There was a terrible situation caused by Wallace’s nomination for vice president, he said; the delegates refused to accept Wallace. Although the president was insisting on Wallace, other candidates had to be nominated, and Farley said he was going to nominate Jesse Jones, who would tie in the party conservatives, and Elliott was going to second Jones. “The old man will have no one else but Wallace,” Franklin Jr. interrupted.

  Eleanor agreed to call the president and pass on Farley’s views. He would not take Jones, Franklin told her. Suppose he—the president—died? What kind of a president would Jones make? “He doesn’t speak our language.” Barkley was loyal but lacked backbone; if he became president, the pressure groups would pull him apart. Byrnes was splendid but was a Catholic turned Episcopalian. Franklin had promised to support Wallace and would refuse the nomination if Wallace were not accepted. It was all right to name other candidates, he agreed in the end, if they were sure of the votes for Wallace. “They say they have the votes for Wallace,” Farley responded, to which Eleanor said to herself, “Oh, my God.”

  At the convention hall she talked with Ed Flynn, who confirmed what Farley had said; he did not know whether they had enough votes for Wallace. Whatever the president had told her about not sending Hopkins out, Hopkins had set up the closest thing imaginable to a headquarters, Flynn commented, and he was summoning delegates and in general was functioning as the president’s field commander. Flynn thought the move against Wallace was a move to compel the president to refuse the nomination. Eleanor considered that too Machiavellian, but at the White House an angry Roosevelt had prepared a statement declining the nomination in the event that Wallace was voted down.

  She took a seat unobtrusively on the crowded platform and sent Franklin Jr. to look for Elliott. The convention did seem out of control, responding to Wallace’s name with a roar of boos and catcalls. Mayors Frank Hague and Edward J. Kelly (from Jersey City and Chicago respectively) came up to speak to Eleanor, and she said to herself, “Oh Lord! I’ll wager Pegler, Johnson and Clapper are all watching me.” Elliott arrived and she cautioned him against supporting Jones in opposition to his father’s wishes. The situation among the delegates was so “poisonous” that just before Barkley introduced Eleanor, Frances Perkins and Lorena Hickok panicked, although they had urged her to come to Chicago, and said it was terrible to put her on then. Eleanor calmed them. The audience was “like lambs,” she later said.

  MRS. ROOSEVELT STILLS

  THE TUMULT OF 50,000

  a headline read, and the United Press story began, “The hot and weary delegates caught her mood and gravity and fell silent.”

  A reporter had asked her upon her arrival whether she was happy about the president’s nomination. “Happy!” she exclaimed, “I don’t know how any one could be particularly happy about the nomination in the present state of the world. It is a tremendous responsibility to be nominated for the Presidency.”

  This was the theme of her speech. From the president’s comments and from his choice of Wallace, who was a bad campaigner (even though the president was not going to leave the White House for the campaign), Eleanor concluded that he had chosen a running mate solely with the thought in mind that the man he chose might become president—almost “would” become president. The president obviously sensed “that the strain of a third term might be too much for any man.” Whoever became president, she told her hushed audience, faced

  a heavier responsibility, perhaps, than any man has ever faced before in this country. . . . You cannot treat it as you would an ordinary nomination in an ordinary time. . . . So each and every one of you who give him this responsibility, in giving it to him assume for yourselves a very grave responsibility because you will make the campaign. You will have to rise
above considerations which are narrow and partisan. This is a time when it is the United States we fight for.

  In short, simple, eloquent sentences, she drove home the point, without mention of Wallace, that in asking the president to run again the delegates, too, assumed an obligation. “No man who is a candidate or who is President can carry this situation alone. This is only carried by a united people who love their country.”

  As she finished the hall was absolutely still. Petty rancors and rivalries had visibly subsided, and for the moment the convention was united. “She has done more to soothe the convention bruises than all the efforts of the astute Senators,” the Daily News reported. “Thanks to her the roll call began in a fairly dignified atmosphere.”32

  A glowing Barkley thanked her, and the balloting for vice president began. It was very close. Many said that without her, Wallace would not have won. Along with the delegates, she listened to the president’s acceptance speech, broadcast from the White House and piped into the convention hall. It explained why he had delayed issuing a statement of his attitude toward a third term until the opening of the convention. As commander-in-chief he was calling on men and women to serve their country; he had no right to decline such service himself. He stated, although in somewhat muted terms, that much remained to be done to meet domestic needs and drew once again the fundamental issue between dictatorship and democracy. Eleanor liked the speech but was unhappy over the bitter note he had sounded about the columnists. He had referred to them as “appeaser fifth columnists.” She did not want the president even to be concerned with them.

  As they left the platform, Frances Perkins observed ruefully that she was all for the democratic process, but a new party in birth was very painful. Eleanor replied that she was not so sure the new party was born yet. She spoke to Farley before she left and urged him to hold onto the chairmanship, even if he could not work actively. She thought he was weakening, and they agreed to spend a day together soon, planning the campaign.

  Escorted by Franklin Jr., whose tie was awry and collar unbuttoned, they entered a car and, with an advance guard of police cars, sirens blowing, sped out to the airport. As the plane started to taxi down the runway, it was flagged back. Franklin was on the telephone to tell her she had done a very good job. Harry Hopkins was on another phone, also full of thanks. He brought up the mistakes he had made, and she was sure as he spoke that he must have been given to believe he was responsible for the convention. Her farewell words to Harry as she prepared to re-enter the plane were: “You young things don’t know politics.”

  The letters poured in praising her performance at Chicago. It seemed to be “the determining influence in the final vote for Secretary Wallace,” wrote Helen Reid, the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, who had been present. Sam Rosenman, speaking for those who were with the president at the White House during the tense hours when he was determined to decline the nomination, said all of them had been “thrilled” by her talk at the convention: “It seemed to lift it above the petty political trading that was going and place it on a different level, far removed.” One letter that especially pleased Eleanor was from the dean of American progressivism, Senator George Norris. He had listened to the Chicago proceedings with a growing apprehension, he wrote her, and just when it seemed

  as though the convention were going to “blow up” [and] the battle for righteousness was about to be lost, you came on the scene, and what you said in that short speech caused men of sense and honor to stop and think before they plunged. . . . You turned a rout into a victory. You were the Sheridan of that convention. . . . That victory was finally realized is due, in my opinion, more to you than any other one thing. That one act makes you heroic.33

  The convention battle had been won, but Eleanor was not sure it meant victory for the purposes and programs that gave candidacies and politics their meaning. All through the summer months the issue that preoccupied her, as the Nazi war machine, supreme on the Continent, tried to bomb England into submission, was the question posed most sharply by Lord Halifax, once a leading spokesman of appeasement, in an address to the students of Oxford: “What is it that we fight for, and what prospect is there that we shall in the end secure the better world for which the fight is waged?”

  Congress was debating conscription. The Army and Navy wanted a year’s compulsory military service and nothing else. The Burke-Wadsworth bill reflected their recommendations. But Eleanor, who felt that the strengthening of democracy was an indispensable component of defense, favored a universal youth service that would be a force for democratization and national unity. She urged that military training be combined with other types of training. There was considerable talk in the press gallery, May Craig wrote from Washington, that she was “‘bucking the old man’ on the conscription bill,” so Miss Craig was glad to see Eleanor’s column making it clear she did not oppose the Burke-Wadsworth bill. “I am not bucking the President,” Eleanor replied, “but would like to see a wider service.” She did not want conscription to be exclusively administered by the Army, but felt that it should be geared in with the NYA and CCC. “National defense means more than military training,” she told a news conference. “It means the building up of physique, of character and of a people conscious of what they owe to their country and what it means to them. . . . It took more than a knowledge of the manual of arms to carry the British troops through the retreat from Dunkirk.”

  Why should the nation’s young men alone be asked to serve in this supreme moment of danger? She favored total mobilization, a national muster in which everyone would be given a job to do, women as well as men, old as well as young, with burdens and sacrifices equally shared, a mobilization that would be at heart a commitment of spirit and of faith in the democratic future. When Dr. Harriet Elliott, the only woman on the National Defense Advisory Commission, went to Val-Kill to discuss what women might do in connection with the defense program, Eleanor was ready for her. The defense program should be used to serve the purpose of community revitalization, and women should be given training that would be useful in peace as well as in war. She suggested that they be taught how to prepare nutritious meals and that this be combined with a hot-school-lunch program; she urged training in the household arts, first aid, home nursing, and hygiene; and she recommended a physical-fitness and recreational program.34

  But many of the president’s advisers, as well as the president himself, feared that efforts to combine defense with reform might drive a crucial segment of business into the ranks of the isolationists and appeasers. Asked by an alert reporter to comment on Harriet Elliott’s assertion that “defense is planes and guns” but also “building the health, the physical fitness, the social well-being of all our people. . . . Hungry people, undernourished people, ill people, do not make for strong defense,” Roosevelt, instead of endorsing the plea, wisecracked that the issue of whether women should be admitted to the White House correspondents’ dinner might also be considered a matter of national defense “but it is not immediate,” no more so than whether his Christmas tree crop would be a success that year. He had to restrict defense assistance in the social field to needs that arose clearly from expansion of defense industry and facilities! “I draw the line. I have to.” It was a sensible point, but still, as Common Sense noted, the wisecracks “came strangely from the head of the New Deal.” When Eleanor questioned him about it, the president insisted he had not been referring to Miss Elliott or her report. “I’ve checked with others and it seems hard to understand how he could have missed the meaning of the question,” Eleanor wrote to Selden Rodman. “I just can’t feel that I’ve got to the bottom of it and yet I can’t get the President now to think back.”35

  The contrasting fortunes of the conscription bill and a Treasury tax measure to take the profits out of war brought into sharp focus the compromises that Roosevelt was obliged to accept that summer. His tax message had asked for a steeply graduated excess-profits tax “so that a few do not gain from t
he sacrifices of the many.” But Congress showed little enthusiasm for the Treasury bill, which was modeled on England’s excess-profits legislation. “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country,” Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary,

  you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work, and there are a great many people in Congress who think they can tax business out of all proportion and still have businessmen work diligently and quickly. That is not human nature.36

  That was the point of view of the military men, who were primarily concerned with speed in production. On the other side, liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, concerned with democratic morale, were indignant over the attitude of business. One week end at the beginning of August, Morgenthau went to Hyde Park to talk with the president about the tax bill, and afterward he visited Eleanor at Val-Kill to bewail the president’s retreat. The Treasury’s tax bill was out, Roosevelt had told him; the president would take the bill prepared by Congress, Morgenthau reported, which meant it would be drafted by the lawyers for the chambers of commerce. The manufacturers were on strike and were refusing to negotiate contracts until Congress enacted a tax bill that assured them their profits. “Only $900,000 in contracts have been negotiated and the President is scared.”

  “It’s like the sit-down strike of capital against Léon Blum,” broke in Elinor Morgenthau.

  Couldn’t something be done through the National Defense Advisory Commission, Eleanor asked. “You can’t expect the businessmen on the Defense Council to go after fellow businessmen,” Morgenthau replied. But disappointed as the secretary was, he cautioned Eleanor to let the president alone—“at least for 24 hours. He’s in one of those moods.”37