What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  During FDR’s first term, Eleanor happened to read a popular new novel called Time Out of Mind, by Rachel Field. She was so taken by the portrait of the heroine that she wrote about the book in her syndicated column, “My Day.” The novel is set in a village on the coast of Maine, at the end of the nineteenth century, and features a woman whose crushing disappointments in love have left her profoundly detached not only from others, but from herself as well. In Eleanor’s words, the heroine is “absolutely self-forgetful,” as if her own humanity has fled. She puts in hours of hard, physical work each day and hopes to think of nothing else. “The description of the times when she tried to be just hands and feet, a mechanical automaton that moved and yet was numb, is very poignant,” Eleanor wrote. “For one reason or another, many of us can remember times like that in our lives.” Eleanor certainly could—the word “automaton” was one she used about herself more than once; and “times like that” extended over much of her life. It was during those times that she cultivated a detachment from the ordinary pleasures of eating and drinking. “How I wish I could enjoy food!” she cried out in a letter once. And yet she did enjoy food, as we’ll see, when the place and the people were right. They were never right in the White House.

  • • •

  Early in their marriage, the Roosevelts established a Sunday-night ritual that featured Eleanor playing the part of a cook. She and Franklin invited friends to come for supper, and when everyone was gathered around the table, she sat down at her place and made scrambled eggs in a chafing dish. Fashionable from the late nineteenth century until well into the 1950s, the chafing dish was widely recognized as a vehicle for what women’s magazines called “dainty cookery,” for a hostess could prepare an entrée or dessert in full view of her company without wearing an apron or putting her hands into a lot of raw, messy food. Any prep work necessary, such as cutting up meat or sautéing onions, could be done in the kitchen beforehand. At the Roosevelts’ table, the chafing dish was already warming up when the guests took their seats, and the ingredients were arrayed in front of Eleanor: a bowl of eggs, a dish of butter, a pitcher of cream, the salt and pepper. She began by dropping a chunk of butter into the pan and letting it melt. Then she cracked each egg directly into the pan, added the cream, the salt, and the pepper, and beat the mixture with a fork until the eggs were done. There was more to the meal—bacon or sausage, hash browns, sometimes cold cuts, and cake or pudding for dessert—but all these came from the kitchen, where the real cook was at work as usual.

  Eleanor clung to this tradition throughout the forty years she was married. It was the only version of homemaking she felt she was good at: everybody liked the eggs and the convivial atmosphere, and nobody questioned the casting. Otherwise she struggled hard with the role of wife and mother; nothing about it came easily. Her own mother had been cold and disapproving; her father, whom she adored, drank himself to death; and Eleanor, an orphan from the age of ten, had been raised mostly by a grandmother who had few instincts for bringing up children. Discipline was constant and irrational. “She so often said ‘no’ that I built up a defense of saying I did not want to do things in order to forestall her refusals and keep down my disappointments,” she wrote in This Is My Story, the first of her three memoirs. When she married her distant cousin Franklin, she was deeply in love but anxious and ignorant, captive to what she later called “an almost exaggerated idea of the necessity for keeping all one’s desires under complete subjugation.”

  Like all their friends and relatives, Eleanor and Franklin had a house full of servants. Both of them had been brought up with cooks, maids, and nurses and wouldn’t have known how to live any other way. But looking back on those early years, Eleanor regretted that she hadn’t been thrown into homemaking unassisted for a few years to acquire “knowledge and self-confidence.” Had she gained some practical skills, she believed, “my subsequent troubles would have been avoided and my children would have had far happier childhoods.” These “subsequent troubles” ran deeper than the mishaps she recorded in her memoir, such as the time their cook quit the day before a dinner party (“I was simply petrified, because I knew nothing about preparing a meal”). Eleanor had the bad luck to enter married life with another woman hovering right at her shoulder—Franklin’s widowed mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had raised her son with ferocious care. He was still bound to her, loyally if uneasily, especially since he never tried to live within his income and depended on his mother for financial support. Sara had every domestic skill that Eleanor lacked, not to mention the confidence of a long-seated monarch; and she imposed her wisdom ruthlessly on the Roosevelt household. Grateful at first, Eleanor soon began to squirm and finally to resist, but combat rumbled along in one form or another until Sara’s death more than thirty years later.

  Shortly after Eleanor and Franklin were married, they moved into a town house on East Sixty-Fifth Street in New York—built for them by Sara, with a twin town house adjoining it for herself. The two houses were connected with sliding doors on every floor, to permit easy access back and forth. Eleanor hated living that way, but she didn’t know how to object. When she burst into tears of frustration one day, telling Franklin the house wasn’t hers and didn’t represent her taste or her wishes in any way, he was astonished. “He thought I was quite mad and told me so gently,” she wrote later. After that she retreated into self-enforced docility.

  Nor did she ever feel at home during the long stretches of time they spent at Springwood, the lavish estate in Hyde Park where Franklin had grown up. He was deeply attached to the house and its farmland, woods, stables, and gardens, and Springwood became the family’s permanent second home. During his presidency he retreated there often, not least because in his mother’s house he could be assured of getting a good meal. Sara was renowned for her fine table: she wrote out her menus in French, kept first-rate cooks, and put considerable time into planning meals and supervising the kitchen. The fresh produce, milk, and eggs came right from the estate, and sometimes Sara herself went into town to do the shopping. This was the culinary background that had shaped FDR’s gourmandise, and Eleanor grew to despise it. She was always uncomfortable staying in Sara’s house, and she was especially irked by the dinner table. Sara made a point of arranging it around herself and Franklin, so that mother and son presided over the meal at opposite ends of the table. After dinner, mother and son occupied the two easy chairs set before the fire. No special seat was ever planned for Eleanor.

  Even more distressing was the fact that Sara appropriated Eleanor’s role as mother. Eleanor spent the first eleven years of her married life having babies—six of them, including a boy who died at seven months. She blamed herself for the loss. Anxiety pursued her through motherhood; she was never at ease taking hands-on care of her children. Discipline was easier for her to dispense than hugs and treats. Sara, by contrast, indulged her grandchildren freely, often reversing Eleanor’s decisions—to the children’s delight. “What she wanted was to hold onto Franklin and his children; she wanted them to grow up as she wished,” Eleanor wrote many years later. “As it turned out, Franklin’s children were more my mother-in-law’s children than they were mine.”

  Thirteen years into the marriage came the now famous crisis that would slam down a permanent barrier between husband and wife. They were living in Washington, D.C., comfortably outside Sara’s immediate orbit for once, and both of them were thriving. President Woodrow Wilson had given a boost to Franklin’s political career by appointing him assistant secretary of the navy, and Eleanor was hurtling through a schedule tightly packed with wartime volunteer work. Raising money for the Red Cross, visiting the wounded, staffing a canteen for waves of troops passing through the city—she was discovering that jobs like these were far more satisfying than supervising the household help or making the seating charts for official dinner parties. Then, in 1918, Franklin returned from a trip to Europe with pneumonia, and while he was recuperating Eleanor sorted t
hrough his mail. To her horror, she came across letters from a pretty young woman named Lucy Mercer, who had worked for Eleanor as a social secretary four years earlier. Lucy and Franklin had been a semisecret couple for some time, as many Washingtonians in her circle knew; but if Eleanor had suspected anything, she kept her worries far below conscious awareness. Now the truth flew directly at her, and she was devastated.

  Eleanor’s personal commitment to the role of wife was absolute. It was the heartbeat of her identity: she was Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, nothing else. Now the man whose existence made her whole had slipped away and left her standing alone. As she told a friend much later, the bottom fell out of her world. But despite the scandal and humiliation that would accompany a divorce, despite the five children who would suffer, despite the bleak uncertainty of the future, she was willing to end their marriage. As far as she was concerned, it was over anyway. She told Franklin that if he wanted to leave her, he was free to go. Sara, however, was horrified at the possibility of a divorce in the family and told her son she would cut off his financial support if he left Eleanor. This was a serious threat to a man who spent as freely as he did, but worse was knowing that he would have to give up a future in politics. He had been mapping his road to the White House for years, and in 1918 a divorce would have put an end to any such dream. He promised Eleanor he would never see Lucy again, and Eleanor agreed to keep the family intact. But she knew very well that it was ambition, not love, that drove the decision.

  “Few pictures from these years . . . show ER with her face to the camera,” Blanche Wiesen Cook has written in her multivolume biography of Eleanor. “She rarely smiled; she was depressed. . . . She felt profoundly tired, suffered headaches, and had days when she wondered about her will to live.” Eleanor was eating very little and often threw up whatever she had managed to get down. She quarreled with Sara, then frantically apologized. Though she went to church as she had always done, something stopped her from taking Communion. According to Joseph Lash, another insightful biographer and a friend of Eleanor’s for many years, “Religion was of the utmost seriousness to her and prayer a kind of continuing exchange with God, a way of cleansing the heart and steadying the will.” The wild incoherence of her heart, mind, and moral core was tearing away at her, Lash wrote; she felt “cut off from divine grace.” Perhaps to reach communion of a different sort, she began driving out to Rock Creek Cemetery every few days, to sit on a bench in front of the statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens known popularly as Grief. Commissioned by Henry Adams in memory of his wife, Clover, who committed suicide in 1885, the statue is a long, slim figure of a seated woman, draped and hooded. Her face is visible but in shadow, her expression is tranquil, one hand is raised to her chin, and she projects a calm strength that appears to have outlasted her suffering. Eleanor gazed at this figure often, not only during her own period of anguish, but on visits that continued for the rest of her life. She used to bring friends out to the cemetery with her, as a way of opening herself up and sharing with them her own darkest time.

  In 1920 the Roosevelts returned to New York, and as soon as they were back home, Eleanor arranged for cooking lessons. Twice a week she went to her teacher’s apartment and prepared a dinner, leaving the meal for the woman’s family to eat and criticize. Did she ever taste her own cooking? She didn’t say in the memoir, but it’s doubtful that this was an exercise in gastronomy. The goal was to acquire practical skills: she knew she would never be without a hired cook, but she wanted to understand the nature of female independence. In the same spirit, she took lessons in typing and shorthand. Up until then, she wrote later, “I looked at everything from the point of view of what I ought to do, rarely from the standpoint of what I wanted to do. In fact, there were times when I think I almost forgot that there was such a thing as wanting anything.” Now she launched a crash course in being her own person. A year later Franklin was stricken with polio, and she cared for him around the clock throughout the worst of his illness. He went on to spend most of the 1920s focused on physical therapy and recuperation, traveling often to the South for the warm-water swimming he believed would strengthen him. This left Eleanor relatively free to pursue whatever challenges appealed to her, and increasingly these were out of the house and political. The 1920s became the most exhilarating decade of her life.

  Franklin’s closest adviser, Louis Howe, who lived with the Roosevelts and had earned Eleanor’s trust and affection, was determined to see Franklin return to public life, even if he had to do so as a paraplegic. Partly to keep Franklin in touch with political events, partly to keep the Roosevelt name in play, and partly because he was sure Eleanor would take to it, he urged her to get involved in women’s Democratic Party politics. He was right; Eleanor turned out to be very good at organizing, strategizing, and fund-raising. By the time of the 1924 Democratic convention, she was chair of the women’s platform committee, responsible for an array of progressive planks including equal pay and endorsement of the League of Nations. The women’s proposals were dismissed without so much as a hearing, but she was gaining widespread recognition as a popular and effective new player on the scene.

  Eleanor loved the work, but what turned her life around was the women she was meeting. They were very different from her friends in Washington, the obedient political wives doing their duty by volunteering at the Red Cross. These new friends had fought for suffrage, they had won, and now they were determined to use the vote to advance women’s interests. They did not define themselves by their achievements as wives. Their zeal, their brains, their integrity, the inspiring vision they brought to politics—all of it was thrilling to Eleanor. The activists she met in the 1920s became her tribe.

  • • •

  They were also her teachers—indeed, it’s possible to say they invented her. Contrary to everything she represents as a historical figure today, Eleanor was not a natural-born radical. The bold and eloquent progressive principles that became her personal manifesto were acquired over time; she didn’t think that way at first. She had been raised with all the bigotry considered acceptable in her social world, and she retained it longer than she knew. Well into the 1930s she was using the word “darky” and warmly recalling the tales of old plantation days told by her Southern relatives. Similarly, it was almost impossible for her to talk about Jews without summoning stereotypes. “I think much can be done to overcome anti-Semitism in this country,” she wrote in 1941. “Jewish people themselves can help by trying to be as natural and unself-conscious as possible . . . trying not to be too aggressive or too ingratiating. . . .”

  Most surprising of all, Eleanor was not a born feminist. Women had been fighting for the vote since 1848, but she had never paid much attention to the battle and neither had Franklin. She was “shocked,” she wrote, when he came out in favor of women’s suffrage in 1911. “I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and still knew more about politics than women,” she recalled. Dutifully she adopted the same position as her husband but did not become an active suffragist. Many women her age remembered for the rest of their lives the day they cast their first vote; Eleanor didn’t even include it in her memoirs. But in the course of the 1920s, as she worked with her new colleagues on the wide-open frontiers of feminism and progressivism, she began to understand what the struggle for the vote had been all about. Nobody talked about “consciousness raising” back then, but that’s what was happening to her. She delved into the Women’s Trade Union League; she cofounded a political journal called the Women’s Democratic News and became its editor; she worked on child labor laws, unsafe housing, minimum-wage legislation, and world peace; and she recognized that all these were women’s issues. What she gained from her feminist friends was an outlook on moral and political activism that helped her grow into leadership and thrive for decades to come.

  Franklin did not feel the same way about Eleanor’s friends—he called them “she-males”—which may be why it took Eleanor a little time
to completely shift her allegiance. Writing to him from the second national convention of the League of Women Voters in April 1921, she reported on a flock of women speakers and concluded, “I prefer doing my politics with you.” Two days later, however, she saw the great suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt push aside a prepared text in favor of an impromptu speech that shook the hall. President Warren Harding had just declared his opposition to the League of Nations, and Catt was livid. “You have heard politics all day,” she told the delegates. “I can’t help saying something I feel I must. The people in this room tonight could put an end to war. . . . It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: ‘No, you shall no longer kill your fellow men.’” Here was a cause, and a call to women, that sprang right from Eleanor’s own soul. She continued doing politics with her husband—it was one of their few lasting bonds—but she was coming into her own. “During this time ER relinquished the old ‘puritan’ habits of social duty that had prevented her from enjoying spontaneous fun and the most casual pleasures,” wrote Blanche Wiesen Cook. “She embraced the countryside. . . . She could outwalk anybody. She enjoyed swimming and riding. She loved to drive, and she drove fast.” To her family’s astonishment, she and one of her women friends showed up one day in matching British knickerbockers and jackets—Eleanor had had them specially made. The she-males were in her life for good.

  But there was one cause she embraced far more fervently than her new friends did. Remember, this was a woman who jump-started her decade of personal liberation by taking cooking lessons. Eleanor was never going to be a feminist who railed against domesticity; what she longed to do was conquer it. So when she discovered that there was an entire political movement dedicated to the home and woman’s place in it, she was enthusiastic—and she was enthusiastic instantly. No learning curve, no gradual dismantling of old prejudices. Home economics was the first reform movement that fired up her passion from the moment she heard about it.