Eleanor and Franklin (106 page)

But Franklin and Eleanor took youthful irreverence in their stride. Ickes described a dinner on the presidential train when they went to inspect the Grand Coulee dam site:

It resolved itself into a debate between the members of the Roosevelt family, with all of them frequently talking at one and the same time. Mrs. Roosevelt precipitated the discussion by raising some social question and her three sons at once began to wave their arms in the air and take issue with her. She expressed belief in a strict limitation of income, whether earned or not, and the boys insisted that every man ought to have a right to earn as much as he could. The President joined in at intervals, but he wasn't President of the United States on that occasion—he was merely the father of three sons who had opinions of their own. They interrupted him when they felt like it and all talked at him at the same time. It was really most amusing. At one stage when they were all going on at once, I raised my voice and observed to the President that I now understood how he was able to manage Congress. Senator Wheeler followed my remark with the observation that Congress was never as bad
as that. That was about the sum and substance of outside contribution to the dinner talk that night, but it was all very interesting and very amusing.
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Eleanor and Franklin encouraged their children to have their own opinions and to express them without fear of embarrassing their parents. Yet Eleanor was slightly appalled when James, who was deeply involved in the politics of Massachusetts, a state with a large Catholic population, voiced his opposition to its ratification of the child-labor amendment. At the time newspaper publishers were insisting that the NRA Newspaper Code should permit employment of newsboys. “No civilization should be based on the labor of children,” Eleanor said tersely. What about James' views, she was asked. She had written him in Boston asking for his reasons, she replied. “Of course, everybody is entitled to his own opinion,” she added. “I am merely asking his. I would never dream of doing more. Jimmy must have reasons which seem sufficient to him. They wouldn't seem sufficient to me.”
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She and the president were equally tolerant of Elliott in the late 1930s when, as a radio commentator over the Texas network of which he was an executive, he frequently voiced anti-New Deal views and as a politician allied himself with the anti-New Deal crowd which favored pledging the state's 48 votes to Garner in order to head off a third term. Elliott was a citizen of the United States and over twenty-one, and as such, Steve Early told the press, he was entitled to exercise his right of free speech. Although Eleanor and Franklin loyally defended Elliott's right to oppose his father's policies, a few months later Franklin, not without some satisfaction, filed in the family folder a news dispatch from Waco, Texas, reporting that supporters of a third term had drowned Elliott out with boos when he sought to introduce the keynoter, who favored pledging the state's delegation to Garner. And still later he filed another clipping, describing a thirty-minute ovation for the president that Elliott had precipitated at the Texas Democrats' state convention when he had defended New Deal spending and answered the charge of waste with the standard New Deal defense that hope had been kept alive.
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After his marriage to Anna, John Boettiger was offered and, with Franklin's encouragement and Eleanor's approval, accepted the publishership of the
Post-Intelligencer,
the Hearst paper in Seattle. “I shall miss them sadly but it does seem a grand opportunity and they will
love it and so life is life, not always very pleasant,” Eleanor wrote her husband, who was en route to Latin America on the U.S.S.
Indianapolis
. “I can hardly bear to have Anna & John go,” she added a few days later, “but they are so happy that I wouldn't let them know for worlds but it is better than Europe for at least one can fly out if necessary.”
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If Elliott and Ruth were associated with the anti-New Deal crowd in Texas, Anna and John were as staunch New Dealers as Eleanor herself, and this was an added bond between them. “Our voters reelected a complete New Deal delegation to Congress,” John reported to his father-in-law in November, 1938. “So far as we are concerned in Washington [state], you can write your own ticket in 1940.” The president did not comment on this last point when he replied to John; he was more concerned with his son-in-law's success as a publisher: “I am keen to hear all about the progress of the paper. Somebody told me that either you are in the black or about to get there. It goes to prove that a Hearst paper, minus Hearst's management, can be made to pay if it is run by a fellow like you.” A few Seattle citizens were unhappy that, as a Hearst paper, the Boettigers published syndicated material critical of the president and First Lady; “they are not treating you and the President as they should as far as I can determine by the paper,” one of them wrote Eleanor. “I assure you,” she replied, “that they treat the President and myself with the highest respect and affection and the fact that they have one of Mr. Hearst's papers has nothing whatever to do with their attitude towards us personally.”
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No sooner were Anna and John in their house in Seattle than Eleanor flew out, a “slow trip” because of low ceilings, to see them and to report to Franklin that their house was “lovely,” that they were “making a real place for themselves,” and that “Sis & Buzz are very well & happy. . . . Their teeth are being straightened so bars are rather in evidence.”
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There were innumerable jokes, inside the family and out, about Eleanor's travels. “Dearest Babs,” Franklin wrote her from the U.S.S.
Houston,
“The Lord only knows when this will catch up with my will o' the wisp wife, but at least I am proceeding according to schedule.” Admiral Byrd set two places for supper at his South Pole hut just in case Mrs. Roosevelt should drop in; a child who heard the Robinson Crusoe story knew that the footprints in the sand were those of Mrs. Roosevelt; and the newswomen, in their 1936 stunt party, had Mrs. Roosevelt shooting to Mars in a rocket ship. The most famous story
became a part of American presidential lore: the
New Yorker
cartoon in which two startled coal miners are looking up and saying, “Good gosh, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt.” And when life did imitate art and Mrs. Roosevelt went down a coal mine in a miner's coveralls, Sara sent a barbed comment to her son, “I hope Eleanor is with you this morning. . . . I see she has emerged from the mine. . . . That is something to be thankful for.” Sara never gave up trying. “So glad Eleanor is there with you dear,” she wrote her son in Warm Springs, and sometimes she was even blunter: “I see Eleanor is back in Chicago, so perhaps you will have her at home tomorrow—I hope so.”
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Yet much of Eleanor's traveling was done in order to keep in touch with the children. They were getting married (and divorced), settling down, having children, and setting up in business, and she was there to nurse them, to celebrate a birthday, to inspect a new grandchild, to counsel them, and to give them news of the rest of the family. She spent Christmas week, 1936, in Boston where Franklin Jr. was hospitalized for an operation on his sinuses, and stayed through New Year's Eve, sometimes in the company of, sometimes spelling, Ethel duPont, whom Franklin Jr. was to marry in June, 1937. Ten months later she was back in Boston to be with Johnny while he had four wisdom teeth removed, spending much of her time in the company of his fiancée, Anne Clark, a North Shore debutante. A few weeks later during Christmas of 1937 she canceled all engagements to fly out to be with Anna's family while Anna went into the hospital for an operation. And she made a special plane journey to Seattle to be with her daughter for the birth of her third child and to keep a promise to Buzz to be there for his ninth birthday, but she had to cancel the latter when the telephone rang at supper and she learned that Hall's son Danny had been killed in an airplane accident in Mexico. Dan Roosevelt had been a brilliant youngster, adventurous, with every promise of using the talents Hall had so tragically thrown away. “I am so deeply sorry for the boy's mother and my brother,” Eleanor wrote an old friend, who had been one of the Morgan sisters of Staatsburgh. “Hall was so proud of Danny and was really very deeply affected. We can't put old heads on young shoulders and they seem always to confuse recklessness with courage.” She left Seattle immediately to be with Hall and wrote him that “we must believe that there is a reason for all things in the universe, and turn to helping those, if we may, who are left behind, and will carry through life the scar of a great sorrow.” She
accompanied Hall to Dedham for the burial. “It meant a lot to us,” Margaret Cutter, Hall's former wife, wrote her, “and I feel that you were the one person that kept Hall going. I was so terribly sad for him. Dan had been such a belated discovery and had proved such a perfect companion and was something for him to cling to.”
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Eleanor was still the one the family turned to in moments of stress and tragedy. One wintry morning the telephone rang between 4:00 and 5:00 and she heard Franklin Jr.'s voice saying that he and Ethel had run into a car without lights parked on an icy road and were in the hospital. Would she come? When she reached the hospital, she discovered that Franklin Jr. had a concussion and did not remember having called her and could not imagine how she came to be there; “his action was probably subconscious,” she recalled in
This I Remember,
“a reassertion of the childhood habit of turning to one's mother automatically when one is in trouble.”
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She was “well conditioned to coping with family crises,” she wrote. She could not afford to go to pieces because the president could not be worried more than was absolutely necessary.

The wedding of a Roosevelt to a duPont, the family which had heavily subsidized the American Liberty League, was one of the story-book romances of the thirties. The day before the wedding Eleanor walked into her husband's oval study, but seeing a group of gentlemen engaged in what seemed to be a very serious conversation, began to back away, when Franklin motioned to her. “The question under discussion is, what do I do tomorrow afternoon? I don't think I had better stand in the line.” She was not very helpful, she said, but remembering the way the guests had abandoned her and Franklin at their wedding to cluster around their Uncle Theodore, she murmured, “It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you don't steal the show.” The wedding was beautiful—that is, “the church part of it,” Eleanor reported to a newspaperman to whom she wrote frequently to encourage him in his effort to cure himself of alcoholism; “Ethel was a most beautiful bride. There were so many people at the house for the reception, the bridal party never sat down for five hours and they were utterly exhausted.” Eleanor herself had to abandon the receiving line at the duPont home in Greenville, Delaware, to make a broadcast in Washington. “I don't know whether to be happy or sad,” she told reporters as she left, “but simply say prayers that fundamentally their lives may so develop that they may be useful lives and therefore happy ones.” That was her
attitude, too, a year later when John married. “So our last child is leaving us,” she wrote Caroline Phillips in Italy. “He seems so very young, but he is determined to get married and I do love Anne Clark very much.” To Anne she gave the last string of pearls from the five-string choke collar that Sara had given her on her wedding day. Had she also given any “motherly advice” to Anne and Johnny, a relentless press wanted to know. “I am not good at giving advice,” she replied. “I believe in letting them work out their own plans.”
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She was not inclined either to give advice or to make predictions as to how a marriage might turn out. The younger the couple was, the greater the hopes and dreams that were vested in the marriage relationship, yet when the fires of infatuation cooled who could be sure that the partnership would not fall apart, especially if because of immaturity neither husband nor wife understood that any human relationship to prosper must be carefully tended? “It would be better if people did not marry too young,” she felt, “and if they waited until they had more experience. Unfortunately, most people in this world have to learn by experience.” She partly blamed herself for the early marriages of James, Elliott, and Anna. The Governor's Mansion had not been a home, and they did not feel that the Sixty-fifth Street house was theirs, nor even Hyde Park. That made them anxious to establish homes of their own and had added to their need to make money quickly.
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Elliott was the first to get a divorce. Anna was very close to him at the time, and at his bidding went to Chicago to talk things over with him. The family had heard rumors that he intended to get a divorce and marry Ruth Googins of Texas. “See if you can't keep him from rushing into it,” Franklin asked his daughter. “He did not say he and Mother were opposed. He did not say ‘don't do it' and when I called him from Chicago and told him Elliott was going to remarry right away, he was very annoyed, but his annoyance was at Elliott's doing it so quickly.” Eleanor was more outspoken. She found it impossible to believe, she wrote her husband, that Elliott was considering remarriage, especially since he had no job. She flew to the West Coast to talk with him, but he was a restless young man, determined on his own course, and when he went ahead, despite his parents' pleas that he delay, they, of course, like most parents, loyally supported their headstrong child. Children should feel, Eleanor said, that they could always return to the home of their parents “with their joys or with their sorrows. We cannot live other people's lives and we cannot make
their decisions for them.” She had learned to accept “any change in her children's lives without making them feel guilty about it.”
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