Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  In November, 1943, Franklin had cheered her by saying that he intended to fight on the domestic situation:

  F. said he knew we were at a low point at home, he knew liberals were discouraged but it was better to have it so now than later. He had to deal with realities & get all that was needed for war purposes & immediate postwar needs by keeping conservatives with him. If he had to run, & he hoped he wouldn’t have to, he’d put in a fighting Nat. chairman & make a liberal campaign & clean out a lot of people playing with the Republicans whom he couldn’t do without till certain things were sewed up. He also remarked that internationally he had to deal with many prima donnas & at home they were almost as bad.9

  But the conservative coalition was more completely in control than ever when Congress reassembled in January, 1944. “Congress seems to behave worse daily,” Eleanor grieved, and while Roosevelt spoke his mind freely on such issues as an economic bill of rights, soldier vote legislation, and equitable taxes, in order to get any legislation whatsoever he increasingly had to make use of conservative-minded men. So the new national chairman, instead of being a fighting liberal, as Franklin had hoped he would be, was a man with whom the bosses felt comfortable. “I had a talk with our new Nat. Democratic Chairman, Mr. Robert Hannegan, Irish Catholic from St. Louis,” she wrote. “Practical politician, but that may be necessary.” That was Hannegan’s last visit in a long time. Despite repeated invitations to come to see her, he stayed away. Eleanor may have frightened him, especially with her stand on civil rights.10

  More alarming to Eleanor than Hannegan’s appointment was the president’s portrayal of himself as “Dr. Win-the-War.” “The remedies that old Dr. New Deal used were for internal trouble,” he told a press conference, “But at the present time, obviously the principal emphasis, the overwhelming first emphasis should be on winning the war.” Afterward, with victory, reform would be in order again, but “we don’t want to confuse people by talking about it now.” Eleanor was sufficiently disturbed by the president’s statement to dissent publicly—something she rarely did—when she was asked about it at her press conference. She, for one, she replied, had not laid the New Deal “away in lavender.” Of course, the New Deal “has become rather old, rather stable and permanent, too, in many ways.” But if it were to be dropped as a goal, the country needed something more in its place than “win-the-war.”

  She did not doubt the president’s purposes, but she felt it necessary to offset the steady drumbeat of conservative pressures that played on the White House. In February, Congress overrode Roosevelt’s veto of the tax bill, which he said provided relief “not for the needy but the greedy.” The president, Eleanor said,

  is more philosophical daily. He knows he will only be elected if they can’t find anyone else & I really think he doesn’t care except he means to say & do as he thinks right at home. He’s also fighting the British now at every turn & perhaps he’s getting a bit weary but he’ll go on as long as the people want him.11

  She had to be away in March on the third of her wartime trips. “I’m leaving Miami with Tommy on the 6th to go to our stations in the Caribbean. F. wants me to go & so apparently does the Army & Navy. There won’t be overseas wounded on this trip but they think the men feel out of it & forgotten.”

  Just before she left she received the upsetting news that Ruth and Elliott were getting a divorce:

  It has been a hard day, Ruth wrote announcing that she had heard from Elliott & in ten days would send him papers to sign & file for her divorce. I had hoped they would wait till after the war & I am sick at heart & grieve for the children. I said goodbye to Johnny. When his ship leaves they go straight to the Pacific. . . . You said I was strong, well, I feel remarkably weak tonight, my “tummy” has felt queer all day & I’d like a shoulder to weep on!12

  In the first few days of her Caribbean tour, she covered Puerto Rico, which she had not seen since 1934 (Rex Tugwell was now its governor), the Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. The routine was much the same as it had been in the South Pacific and England—hospitals, military installations, speeches, press interviews, state receptions. Her husband must have cautioned her to be nice to officers as well as enlisted men, for she assured him in her first letter that she was seeing “officers & men,” underlining the words. Their wedding anniversary was on the seventeenth: “I’m sorry I won’t be home but will you get something you want & let me pay for it on my return? I have $50-earmarked & I’d like you to squander it.”13

  She teased the president about a communication that came to her in Curaçao. A local merchant presented her with a medallion, and the accompanying note said that in the early part of the century President Roosevelt, “then Lieutenant on an American warship, visited our Island and at his request we gave him a small goat as mascot on the ship.”

  “Show FDR,” she wrote on this, “& ask what he has been holding out on me all these years?” The president replied in kind:

  I have an alibi. The only time I was ever in Curaçao in my life was in 1904 when I went through the West Indies on a Hamburg-American Line “yacht.” I was accompanied by and thoroughly chaperoned by my maternal parent.

  I was never given a goat—neither did anyone get my goat!

  This looks to me like a German plot!14

  She got as far west as the Galapagos Islands and as far east as the tip of Brazil, visiting American bases at Belém, Natal, and Recife, and writing Sra. Vargas, wife of the president of Brazil, afterward, “It is such a great country with potentialities for development which seem limitless.” The commanding officers said her visit had been “helpful with Brazilians and good for our men,” she informed her husband, obviously pleased that she was doing a good job. In addition to Brazil, she covered bases in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Guatemala, and Cuba. Although her primary purpose in these countries was to visit American troops, the welcome she received from the local populace showed how far her reputation had spread. The press was struck by the “spontaneous ovations” accorded her, especially as her movements were rapid, her arrivals in most cases unheralded. Noteworthy, too, they thought, was the turnout of women everywhere, who clearly saw her not only as a symbol of democracy and good neighborliness but as a champion of the rights of women. Even Cordell Hull, usually not one of her enthusiasts—for he rightly regarded her as a partisan of Sumner Welles, whom he hated—wrote her that she had made “an important contribution” to hemispheric solidarity.15

  She returned to Washington to find Franklin still miserable and Dr. McIntire sufficiently concerned, especially by Franklin’s “racking cough,” to insist on a complete medical checkup. “FDR is not well but more will be known by Monday & I think we can help keep him in good health but he’ll have to be more careful. I think the constant tension must tell & tho’ he has said nothing, I think he has been upset by Elliott & Ruth.” She was to see the doctors after the tests, but she herself felt the causes of his illness were not simply physical: “The nervous tension as well as the long burden of responsibility has a share in the physical condition I am sure.”16

  The results of the tests, Dr. McIntire later wrote, showed “a moderate degree of arteriosclerosis, although no more than normal in a man of his age; some changes in the cardiographic tracing; cloudiness in his sinuses; and bronchial irritation.”* The doctors said he had to quit smoking in order to get rid of the sinus and throat trouble, and they also prescribed a vacation. He decided to go to Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch’s 23,000 acre plantation in South Carolina. Perhaps Eleanor would have been less than happy about this plan had she known that Lucy (Mercer) Rutherfurd wintered not too far away and would be a secret visitor to the plantation while Franklin was there.17

  He stayed at Hobcaw almost a month. During the first week Eleanor had no word from him at all but she heard through the Secret Service that he was leading a most restful existence. At the end of the second week she flew down for the day with the Curtins of Australia.

  F. looks well but said he still has no “pe
p.” Dr. McIntire says they will do final tests when he gets home in Sunday & put him on a strict regimen. He ought soon to get well. I’m trying to get him to come to Hyde Park at the end of June & only return two or three days a month during the summer months.18

  Part of her husband’s problem, she thought, was that he suspected the doctors did not really know what was the matter with him, and that worried him. Yet Dr. McIntire assured her that he was “confident the doctors do know & he [Franklin] is getting better.” After Roosevelt returned to Washington, McIntire brought in the specialists again for a final examination in May. They found that he had recovered from “the infection in his sinuses and chest,” but recommended avoidance of overwork, “a rest period after luncheon and free evenings, certainly after nine o’clock, so that he could relax.” Despite the doctors’ reassuring report, Eleanor continued to be anxious, for Franklin tired very easily and still had indigestion so that no outsider was allowed to come to meals. And that was an additional anxiety, for she thought it was “bad for him to have so much of the same people tho’ of course he does have a good many in the office.” What she meant was that access to the president would now be almost wholly controlled by his secretaries and that her opportunity to introduce dissenters and liberals through the luncheon- and dinner-guest list would be considerably reduced. “Pa is enjoying not doing things which bore him,” she wrote James, “and he’s getting so much pleasure out of having Anna around that I think he’s going to shirk any but the office hour things for some time but it isn’t necessity—just preference!”19

  She had a toughness about physical ailments, always minimizing her own, and she tended to take the same attitude toward her husband’s. Franklin Jr. told her before he left for the Pacific that he believed “the old man” loved to play the delicate one in order to have her concerned and to have her around a lot.20 While she thought Franklin Jr. was right that his father exaggerated his frailty, she also received the impression that Franklin needed her more:

  I must really live in the Big House this year, but whenever I can I want to be at the cottage. . . . My heart is in the cottage. I’ll never like the Big House but suddenly F. is more dependent, the children & grandchildren look upon this as home & the cottage is just mine, so I must try to keep this lived in & really pleasant. Never from choice would I live here however & never alone.21

  She knew Hyde Park’s restorative powers for Franklin, and while he was still at Hobcaw she had written urging that he spend more time at Hyde Park, putting it in terms of Anna and her children rather than his health:

  Anna has arranged to bring the children East & we will have to open & run the Big House from about the middle of June on. Couldn’t you arrange to go up & stay a month at a time & only come back for two or three days once a month? It would be heavenly for us all.

  I want to buy some little upholstered chairs & some few little things to make the servants’ rooms more livable. I won’t spend much & I think there is enough in the House account to do it. May I? Also, if I made a diagram of Mama’s room so everything could be put back in place could I arrange it as a sitting room with a day bed in case someone had to sleep there? It could be very livable I think but we might have to repaper or paint over in that room.22

  What a pathetic request. It was over forty years since Franklin had first brought her to Hyde Park, and Sara had been dead three years, yet Eleanor still felt she had to ask his permission to rearrange the furniture in Sara’s bedroom.

  She had made it pleasant, she announced triumphantly, in time for the first big week end in June when the president came up, accompanied as he often was by Princess Martha and her entourage: “I can work in it & not feel her [Sara’s] presence in the room but over here there is no getting away from the bigness of the house & the multitude of people.” There were compensations. Anna’s children—Sistie, Buzz, and Johnny—were there, as was Elliott’s first child, Bill. “It is years since I’ve had to see children go to bed & I love it & am having a good time.”23

  Franklin was more dependent, but he was also more in need of an uncritical companionship that she could not give. The surest sign was the way he turned to his daughter, Anna Boettiger, whose husband was overseas with the Army’s military-government branch. When Hearst officials used his absence to bring the Post-Intelligencer’s editorial policies into line with the chain’s, Roosevelt suggested that Anna come back East, live at the White House, and help him. He was a lonely man—Missy was gone; the Hopkinses had moved to their own house in Georgetown, and, moreover, there was at this time some estrangement in his relationship with Harry; Eleanor was too independent, too strong, ethically too unrelenting to provide him with the kind of relaxed, unjudging company that he wanted. The one thing she was not able to bring him, wrote her son, James, “was that touch of triviality he needed to lighten his burden.”24

  Yes, Anna said, she would love to move into the White House and help him, “‘but not until I have talked with mother.’ She was very frank with me. It would be wonderful for her. She personally would love it but she did not want to go through with me what she had gone through with Louise Hopkins.”25 It was the old story. Eleanor did not want another woman, even her daughter, pre-empting her prerogatives as mistress of the White House. Just before her trip to the Caribbean, Eleanor had discovered that Missy, a helpless invalid since 1941 when she had suffered a stroke and now under constant care in Massachusetts, had been invited to stay at the White House during her absence. She canceled the visit. “I was away last week when Grace [Tully] and Franklin arranged for you to come down on the 7th of March,” she wrote Missy. “I am terribly sorry that they did not realize that I want to be here when you come.” She should come for a week in April: “I am very sorry that they did not consult me before making plans but it is hard to get everyone together and I have been away for a few days at a time.” She instructed Tommy to “show Grace letter & my answer. FDR has seen & approved answer.”26

  Since Anna had no wish to make life more difficult for her mother, there seemed to be no problem, and so Anna, with Johnny Boettiger, her youngest child, moved into the White House in the spring of 1944. But whatever mother and daughter’s intentions, the relationship was shaped by the president—his needs, his weariness, his desire to be shielded from the one person who knew him beyond all masquerade and stratagem. More and more he lunched and dined alone with “Sis.” More and more frequently Eleanor was heard to say, “Anna is the only one who would know about that”; “I’ll have to ask Anna”; “We’ll have to get Anna to ask the President.”

  There were other ladies whose company he liked. Princess Martha continued to entertain him, as did two spinster cousins, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley and Laura “Polly” Delano. Laura Delano was full of spice, snobbery, and malice, but like Daisy she did not contradict the president. Eleanor might remonstrate quietly about de Gaulle, whom the president detested and ridiculed, but Laura would egg him on. He should be tough on “that unspeakable person.”27

  Someone else who came to dinner at the White House—when Eleanor was away—was Lucy Rutherfurd, she of the “Mona Lisa smile.” Mrs. Rutherfurd was another good listener. There was, too, when she and Franklin saw each other, the magic of remembered love to cast its glow over their present encounters. There were always other people around—Anna, Daisy Suckley, Laura Delano, the Secret Service, White House secretaries like Pa Watson, Steve Early, and Bill Hassett. It was all aboveboard, except that Eleanor was not told. They said to themselves that they were protecting her and they wanted to do so, for she was a woman of commanding dignity and of an almost saintly selflessness, whom all admired and some even loved. Within the limits of their loyalty to Franklin they were eager to do everything possible to protect her from hurt and humiliation. Yet for a woman who was intransigent about knowing the truth and facing up to it, such a deception, if and when she learned of it, would prove to be almost the final indignity. Franklin knew that even if no one else did.

  May, 1944, was
dominated by the impending invasion of Europe: “I feel as though a sword were hanging over my head, dreading its fall and yet know it must fall to end the war. I pray that Germany will give up now that the Russians are approaching and our drive in Italy has begun. However, I have seen no encouraging signs.”28 A service at the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington was almost more than she could bear—“I dread the invasion so much that it is getting on my nerves a bit I guess.” The OWI asked her to prepare a radio speech to be used after the invasion began. “It is addressed to the mothers of the U.S.A.,” she wrote, “& I can’t think of what I want to say. I only know I don’t want to say any of the things they suggested!”

  She heard the invasion news from Franklin on June 5 before she went to bed, and she slept very little that night. Although it could not be a happy day because of the inevitable suffering, loss, and destruction, the tension was eased. The president seemed to her to be his old self again: he “keeps us all a bit undecided by saying he doesn’t know what he will do & that when he hears Hitler is ready to surrender he will go to England at once & then in the next breath that he may go to Honolulu & the Aleutians!” If he did go to London, he informed Eleanor a few weeks later, he wanted her to accompany him.

  There was other news in June that indicated a turning point in the war. Rome fell to the Allied armies and Marshall Pietro Badoglio’s government, which had been denounced by liberal opinion as fascist-tainted, was replaced with a cabinet headed by a prominent anti-fascist. “I’m beginning to think I ought to be more patient for in the end FDR does seem to get pretty much what we want.”29

  The State Department began to move faster on its postwar planning. Eleanor wanted women to be drawn in and presided over a conference at the White House on “How Women May Share in Post-War Policy Making.” “I wish very much,” she wrote Jonathan Daniels, now one of the president’s secretaries, “that you and Judge Rosenman would divide the day and come in as observers.” Daniels did attend, and one of the items he received was “a roster of qualified women.” It was clear from the comments of the participants that Eleanor Roosevelt led the list, even though her name was not on it.30