Eleanor and Franklin (45 page)

Again, Germany took the decision out of the president's hands with the Zimmerman telegram, which instructed the German representative in Mexico City to propose an alliance with Mexico in the event the United States entered the war, in return for which Mexico would receive “the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” Fury swept both the country and the administration. On March 18 German submarines torpedoed three American vessels. Two days later the cabinet, including Daniels, advised Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war. “The Cabinet is at last a unit,” Lane wrote. But the president, he added, “goes unwillingly.” So did Daniels.

Congress was summoned to meet on April 2 “to receive a communication concerning grave matters.” It rained on April 2, “a soft, fragrant rain of early spring,” Wilson's son-in-law, William G. McAdoo, noted. The president's address was equal to the solemnity of the moment. There was no alternative to war, he explained. Autocracy was the foe of liberty, and “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

. . . It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts. . . .

“I went,” Eleanor wrote, “and listened breathlessly and returned home still half-dazed by the sense of impending change.”
¹⁶

The period of privacy, of exclusive devotion to her family and preoccupation with purely social duties, was at an end.

20.
PRIVATE INTO PUBLIC PERSON

A
YEAR AFTER
A
MERICA
'
S ENTRY INTO THE WAR
E
LEANOR WROTE
her mother-in-law that she was taking on still another assignment: “I'm going to have charge of the knitting at the Navy Department work rooms,” in addition to the hours spent at the Red Cross canteen. “It is going to mean part of every day now except Sundays taken up at one place or another but that doesn't seem much to do, considering what the soldiers must do.”
¹
Eleanor had never shunned work, but the war harnessed her considerable executive abilities to her always active sense of responsibility. The war gave her a reason acceptable to her conscience to free herself of the social duties that she hated, to concentrate less on her household, and plunge into work that fitted her aptitudes. Duty now commanded what she could take pleasure in doing.

During the first few weeks Eleanor was so busy helping entertain the high-ranking allied missions that came hurrying to Washington that she didn't have time to think about what the war demanded of her as a person. The young couple's friendship with British Ambassador Spring-Rice and French Ambassador Jusserand, Franklin's duties with the Navy Department, and the social circles in which they moved meant a great deal of partying with members of the British Mission, headed by Arthur Balfour, whom Eleanor found “charming in the way that a good many Englishmen are and very few of our own men,” and with the French Mission, with “Papa” Joffre as the center of attraction.

Marshal Joffre brought sobering news that dispelled the lingering illusion in New York and Washington that all that would be required of the United States would be money, foodstuffs, war materials, and the fleet to see to it that they got safely to Europe. At a luncheon at the Phillipses that included the Lanes, the Eustises, the Roosevelts, the Longworths, and Mrs. Borden Harriman, the Marshal made it clear that France wanted American troops, and as quickly as possible: “You should send 25,000 troops at once, and then again 25,000 and again and again, just as fast as possible.”
²
Eleanor later accompanied Franklin
to a Navy League reception for the head of the British Naval Mission. Franklin in his remarks sought to awaken the public to the true state of affairs. The British and the French Missions had been given “fair words, and again fair words,” he said, but they had a right to ask about “the number of men that have left America for the other side. . . . It is time that they [Congress and the people] insist on action
at once
. Action that will give something definite—definite ships, definite men—on a definite day.”

Eleanor applauded; “Franklin listened to all the polite platitudes and false hopes and was called on to speak last,” she wrote Sara, at which time he “said all he has pent up for weeks. It was solemn and splendid and I was glad he did it and I think a good many people were but I shouldn't wonder if the Secretary was annoyed. Mr. Belmont was furious and said he took much too dark a view!”
³

Franklin espoused a plan to lay a mine barrage across the North Sea to bottle up the submarines in their nests as part of an aggressive antisubmarine strategy. And it
was
originally Franklin's idea, Eleanor claimed. There has been dispute about that claim, but none that he became its chief advocate at a time when Daniels questioned its practicality and the British admiralty dragged its heels. “Franklin has asked to see the President to present his plan for closing the North Sea,” Eleanor wrote Sara on May 10, 1917, “but 3 days have passed and he hasn't been granted an interview.” She thought Franklin “very brave,” Sara wrote back, “and long to hear that he could show his plan to the President.” Franklin did not get to see Wilson until June 4, when he obtained the president's support for the establishment of an interdepartmental commission to inquire into the project's advisability. “If it hadn't been for him, there would have been no Scotch mine barrage,” Admiral Harris later said,
⁴
and if the barrage came too late to be a decisive factor in winning the war, the delay was not Franklin's fault.

Theodore Roosevelt visited Washington during the hectic first weeks of the war. Blind in one eye, bothered by the fever he had picked up in the Brazilian jungles, the former president nevertheless came charging into the Capital with characteristic bravura to press his proposal that he be sent to France at the head of a division that he personally would raise. He stayed with Alice, and Franklin and Eleanor saw a good deal of him. When Uncle Ted visited them, the two youngest children, Franklin and John, were soon made aware of his presence. Full of electric vitality, Theodore burst into their room at the top of the house. “Oh, ho, ho,” the old lion roared; “these two
little piggies are going to market,” and he hooked a happily protesting child under each arm and charged down the stairs.
⁵

But apart from such family interludes there was little to cheer Theodore. “Though he was kind to us, as he always was,” Eleanor said, “he was completely preoccupied with the war.”

Franklin thought it was good policy to permit Uncle Ted to go to Europe and arranged for him to see the secretary of war. Sara also approved. “I hope he will be allowed to go,” she wrote. More substantial support came from France. “Our
poilus
ask, ‘Where is Roosevelt?'” Clemenceau wrote Wilson. “Send them Roosevelt—it will gladden their hearts.” But the War Department was afraid a Teddy Roosevelt division would drain off the best officer talent. The war would be won by professionalism, discipline, and organization, it felt, not by gallant charges up the French equivalent of San Juan Hill. “The business now in hand,” Wilson coldly announced on May 18, “is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”

“I hated to have him disappointed,” Eleanor wrote, “and yet I was loyal to President Wilson.”
⁶

All four of Theodore's sons went into the service, and he repeatedly urged Franklin to resign and put on a uniform. But General Leonard Wood, the most prestigious soldier in the Army and a Republican, said in July, 1917, that it would be “a public calamity if Franklin, an advocate of fighting the war aggressively, left at this time.” Daniels was equally firm. A year later Eleanor became quite angry with her distinguished uncle when he brought up the subject again at Douglas Robinson's funeral, urging her to use her influence to get him to don a uniform. It was her husband's own business, she felt, and she knew, moreover, how anxious he was to get into the Navy. She was quite prepared to have him serve, but there were decisions a man had to make alone.

When her brother Hall, who was just getting established professionally, teamed up with Theodore's youngest son, Quentin, to go into the fledgling air force, she backed him up, even though he had to cheat a little on the eye test to qualify. But Grandma Hall asked why he didn't buy a substitute, as gentlemen had done in the Civil War, which outraged Eleanor. “Gentlemen” owed the same duty to their country as other citizens, and it would be unthinkable, she flung out at her grandmother, to pay someone to risk his life for you.
⁷

The episode stood out in Eleanor's mind as another step on her road to independence. Under the impact of the war, her viewpoint was
changing. A letter from Cousin Susie full of complaints about minor inconveniences caused by the war evoked an impatient exclamation: “How can one be like that in these days?”
⁸

On all sides noncombatants were being urged to do their bit. “It is not an army we must shape and train for war,” said Wilson, “it is the nation.” Women, on the point of achieving suffrage—to which Eleanor was now a convert—broke loose from the Good Samaritan services to which tradition had assigned them and rallied to the war effort in every capacity except actual fighting in the field. “Is there any law that says a yeoman must be a man?” asked Daniels when the Navy faced a shortage of office workers. “Then enroll women!” Eleanor yearned to serve, but how? Her first ventures were awkward. Food administrator Herbert Hoover appealed to the country to conserve food; society responded by reducing the eight-course dinner to three, decreeing one meatless day a week, and pledging “simplicity in dress and entertainments.” There was an end to calls.

Eleanor introduced her own austerity rules in her household, and her food-saving program was selected by the Food Administration “as a model for other large households,” the
New York Times
reported. “Mrs. Roosevelt does the shopping, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, each servant has a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of others; and all are encouraged to make helpful suggestions in the use of ‘left overs.'” And Mrs. Roosevelt added, according to the reporter, “Making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.”
⁹

The story produced guffaws all over Washington. Franklin wrote:

All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table and the hand book. I will have it published in the Sunday Times. . . . Uncle Fred says, “It's fine, but Gee how mad Eleanor will be!”

Uncle Fred was right about Eleanor's reaction. “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way and I feel dreadfully about it because so much is not true and yet some of it I did say. I never will be caught again that's sure and I'd like to crawl away for shame.”
¹⁰

Although chagrined, she did not give up. She went to a meeting called by Daisy Harriman to muster support for the Red Cross. Mrs. Harriman proposed the formation of a motor corps auxiliary, but since Eleanor did not drive, she joined the Red Cross canteen, helped Mrs. Daniels to organize the Navy Red Cross, and joined the Comforts Committee of the Navy League, which distributed free wool to volunteer knitters and on Saturdays collected the finished articles.

The war kept Franklin in Washington, and Eleanor had to move the household to Campobello alone. She managed very well, as usual, and as soon as the family was settled went to Eastport to talk about the Red Cross. She wrote that she also brought “6 pyjamas to make and am going to learn to use the machine to make them myself!” She had begun on the machine, she reported the next day, “and hope to work more rapidly as I go on!” A week later she rejoiced that the last pyjama top would be finished that night, “and then I take 6 pair back tomorrow!”

During the summer Franklin was hospitalized with a throat infection, and Eleanor hurried to Washington to be with him. She returned the middle of August, bringing word to Sara that Franklin had petitioned the secretary to be allowed to go overseas in order to urge the British admiralty to use more aggressive antisubmarine tactics.

At the end of the summer, for the first time, Eleanor varied the routine of moving her family off Campobello. She shepherded her whole flock as far as Boston, saw the four younger ones, their nurses, and maids settled on the train to New York, and then Huckins, the Roosevelt chauffeur, drove her and eleven-year-old Anna west along the Mohawk Trail to visit Hall and Margaret and their children in Schenectady. “The views are wonderful and Anna is a most enthusiastic companion,” she wrote her husband in Washington. She preferred to do such things with Franklin, but if he wasn't available she would do them nonetheless, and she was determined also to learn to drive. It was another small declaration of independence.