Eleanor and Franklin (50 page)

Theodore Roosevelt had died while they were en route. “I feel it must have been sudden and I am so sorry for Aunt Edith and the boys in Europe,” Eleanor wrote. She was sorry, too, that the last few years had been so full of disappointments for Uncle Ted. In Europe, when Wilson was informed of the passing of his old antagonist he dictated a cool message of condolence to Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and remarked to his intimates that Roosevelt had no constructive policy to his record. Eleanor's evaluation of her uncle's role was more just: “Another great figure off the stage,” she wrote sadly in her diary.

The news about Uncle Ted's death came while she was reading
The Education of Henry Adams,
which she had given Franklin for Christmas. Theodore was for her a symbol of “active participation in the life of his people,” while Adams symbolized withdrawal from life. “Very interesting,” she commented on the Adams book, “but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”

“A wonderfully comfortable and entertaining trip,” Eleanor summed up the voyage as the
George Washington
approached the port of Brest. After the landing ceremonies, demobilization business claimed the men of the party, while Admiral Henry B. Wilson took Eleanor and Mrs. Thomas J. Spellacy, the wife of the U.S. attorney from Connecticut who was Franklin's legal adviser on the mission, on a drive through the town and its environs. “Every other woman wears a crepe veil to her knees,” Eleanor noted. An exhausted Mrs. Spellacy begged to be allowed to sit in the car during the last part of their tour of the city and naval base and stayed behind when Eleanor walked with the admiral to a shop that sold the work of war widows.

The next day they were in Paris. Eleanor had never seen anything like it, she reported. “It is full beyond belief and one sees many celebrities and all one's friends.” In one respect her outlook had changed little since her honeymoon visit; the women still scandalized her. “The women here all look exaggerated, you wonder if any are ladies though all look smart and some pretty.” Now, however, puritan ethic was fortified by social outrage. “In contrast to this element are the women in plain black and deep mourning that one sees in all the streets.”

She and Franklin went to tea with Mrs. Wilson at the Palais Murat, and it seemed to Eleanor that all of Washington was congregated there. She attended a luncheon given by Admiral Benson's wife, at which Mrs. House and Mrs. Lansing were also present, and noted, “Much talk of the President's not having been to the front yet and Mrs. Wilson only having seen two hospitals.” Eleanor helped remedy the latter complaint, according to Miss Benham, Mrs. Wilson's social secretary, who wrote that Eleanor “swept Mrs. Wilson up into her project of visiting the war wounded in the hospitals.”
¹⁴
Although the president had not yet visited the front, Eleanor did so on the way to Boulogne with Franklin. It was a journey through recently fought-over battlefields that, said Franklin, “we shall never forget.” Eleanor, he added, had a “very achy side and shoulder” but insisted “on doing everything and getting out of the car at all points of interest.” The land was gashed by trench systems and scarred by barbed-wire entanglements. “Ghastly,” Franklin exclaimed at the Somme battlefield. “In the bigger places the Cathedral is
always
destroyed, and the town more or less, mostly more,” Eleanor noted. “The streets are all clear, all is neat and clean but you feel as though ghosts were beside you.” Their army guides, who had been through the fighting at St. Quentin, described the attack the previous September in the face of massed machine guns and the
breakthrough in the Hindenburg line at the St. Quentin Canal. “An almost incredible feat,” said Franklin. “How men ever did it I cannot imagine,” wrote Eleanor. When they finally arrived at Amiens for the night, they were informed that express orders forbade ladies to go to the front, “but as I'd been,” wrote Eleanor, “there was nothing to do about it!”

“Eleanor laid out with pleurisy,” Livy recorded when they reached London. Admiral William S. Sims met them at the station and took them to the Ritz, and when Muriel Martineau, one of Eleanor's bridesmaids and Franklin's cousin, came to see them, she immediately called a doctor, who ordered a protesting Eleanor to bed. Franklin and his staff had a great deal to do in London, but he came back to the hotel for lunch and later for tea, and at the end of the day dined at the hotel, “bringing me my dinner. He has been too sweet in looking after me,” Eleanor recorded. In the next few days she ran a temperature, admitted to feeling tired and even conceded she might have a touch of influenza, but when Franklin insisted on taking her temperature and, finding that it was over 100, would not let her go out, she was furious. “He made me back out to my rage.”

After she recovered she had reunions with those of her Allenswood schoolmates who were in London. They recalled the years that were among the happiest in her life, and although she was deeply fond of them she had progressed beyond them in the breadth of her interests and sympathies. Lady Gertrude of Osberton came to call. Eleanor's honeymoon stay at Osberton had been a nightmare; now she was at ease and self-assured. Lady Gertrude was “a dear old Lady” but Eleanor had scant sympathy for her lament that Osberton was ruined because the woods had to be cut down to pay the death duties. And she was amused by Lady Gertrude's distress that her grandson, who had been a prisoner of war, had married his nurse, a Polish woman; “of course one would prefer an Englishwoman even though she was nice and had twice saved his life,” Lady Osberton said.

Yet interlaced with judgments and reactions that showed how much Eleanor had grown since her honeymoon days were avowals of allegiance to Sara that were as affectionate as those of 1905. “I do hope we never have to separate again. As I grow older I miss you and the children more and more. I think instead of becoming more independent I am growing into a really clinging vine!” Her old puritan conscience was as outraged in London as it had been in Paris. She and Franklin dined with a British admiral, and she was shocked: “Just wait
till I get home and tell you what these respectable people now let their daughters do, your hair will curl as mine did!” Franklin, however, was intrigued. One lady so fascinated him, Eleanor wrote, that it was with difficulty she “dragged” him home at eleven o'clock. “We have nothing like some of their women or some of their men!”

She learned anew how cold London could be in the winter. “I don't wonder they consume much wine here, they have to in order to rise above the cold houses or the cheer would indeed be cold cheer!” She wore spats, a flannel petticoat, and her heavy purple dress “all the time” and never felt even “mildly warm.” She was disappointed in herself for minding: “Decidedly we are growing effete at home from too much comfort and I always thought myself something of a Spartan!”

Franklin left on the thirty-first of January for Brussels and the Rhineland without Eleanor; it would be easier for everyone, he told her, not to have women along in the occupied areas. “I hate to miss the trip to Brussels and Coblentz,” she wrote in her diary, “and to have him going off without me.”

She stayed on in London with Muriel Martineau and then returned to Paris, but it was depressing without Franklin. “I hope he arrives. Somehow I feel lost and lonely in a strange town alone and I do get so blue. I suppose it must be the result of pleurisy!” She decided that activity was the best cure for melancholy.

She and Aunt Dora, who all through the war had refused to abandon her beloved Paris, visited the Val de Grâce Hospital. “It is here that Morestin operates and he has been so successful with the horrible face wounds,” she wrote. The sight of shattered faces devastated her, and much as she tried she could not help but feel revolted “even though one does not show it.” Aunt Dora seemed to love hearing about the various operations, but it made Eleanor feel ill. She even found the plaster casts oppressive, and “could hardly bear to look at the men with the horrible face wounds.” But she did.

The next day was waiting-for-Franklin day, and from 6:00
P.M.
on she began her waiting in earnest. Lieutenant Commander John M. Hancock, one of Franklin's aides, came to dine at 8:00; they waited until 8:15 but “still no sign, so we dined.” Livy joined them after dinner and stayed until 10:30, when he pleaded sleepiness and went to bed. At 11:30 Hancock felt “it wouldn't do for him to wait longer so he left.” Finally, at about 12:30 Franklin and his party turned up. Eleanor had a cold supper waiting for them and Admiral Long, who met them in the hall, “came up with some liquid refreshment.” They
were laden with “loot” from the battlefields and were “full of a delightful and interesting trip,” she reported. The party broke up at 1:30, probably due to her.

A few days later they prepared to sail for home, again on the
George Washington
. Eleanor was relieved that young Sheffield Cowles and David Gray were going back with them; Paris was “no place for the boys, especially the younger ones, and the scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy.” Sara sounded a similar theme. “One hears a great deal here from returning officers and privates,” she wrote. “One tale is that the common soldier behaves better than the officers, asking ‘where is Napoleon's Tomb' ‘where is the Louvre gallery' etc. The officers say: ‘Where is Maxim's?'”

The president and Mrs. Wilson were also to be on board the
George Washington
. The Covenant of the new League of Nations had been finished on February 12, and Wilson was returning, House said, “to confront his enemies in the Senate.” Sara had kept her children apprised of the way sentiment had turned against Wilson, at least in the circles in which she moved. She had stayed away from Mrs. Whitelaw Reid's, she informed them, because everyone had told her that Mrs. Reid did nothing but criticize the president and the administration “and I am rather tired of it.” At a luncheon, another report went, she had sat next to Mrs. Berwind, who said that her husband looked upon Wilson as the “head of the Bolsheviki in this country.” People generally were “so nasty about the Peace Conference and League of Nations that when anyone is full of admiration of our President and his ideals it is a pleasant surprise.”

The boat train on which the Roosevelts were passengers preceded the president's by twenty minutes, and as they flashed by between lines of troops and roofs crowded with Bretons their train was mistaken for the president's. “The troops present arms and gaze in the hope of seeing the President,” Eleanor noted in her diary. “It rains gently as usual.” A newspaperman gave them a copy of the Covenant. “The High Contracting Parties,” they read, “in order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security. . . . ” They read the twenty-six Articles eagerly and had high hopes that the new machinery could effectively safeguard the peace. In Brest they joined the French dignitaries who were there to bid the president good-by. “Great consternation and great upsetting of plans” when Mrs. Wilson and Miss Benham—on the president's insistence, but contrary to Navy custom—went on board ahead of the president. Eleanor and
Franklin went in to talk with the president and Mrs. Wilson. “The President is not very flattering about the French government and people,” she recorded. Franklin left to go to the bridge as the vessel got under way, and stayed for nearly an hour's chat with the president, who was also there.

Auntie Bye's son Sheffield, a tall, lantern-jawed, kindly young man, saw a great deal of Eleanor on that trip. “She used always to be telling Franklin, ‘I met so-and-so. He's an interesting fellow. You should talk with him. He's interested in more than sailing,'” he recalled.
¹⁵
Eleanor did the same kind of reading as his mother, he noted; “I was surprised how much she referred to Mother and was influenced by Mother.”

On the fourth day out the president and Franklin made an official inspection of the ship, but “I can't say the President looked as though he saw much!” Eleanor noted. She herself visited the sick bay, and her inspection was thorough. “The arrangements for sick and wounded are ideal in every way. Splendid operating room, cleanliness, good food and good nurses.” It was a far cry from the young woman who had complained that Franklin had inspected “every rivet.”

One evening the crew put on an entertainment in which a boy dressed up as a chorus girl chucked the president under the chin. “Consternation and later reprimand but the President took it calmly,” noted Eleanor. On Washington's Birthday they were invited to lunch with the president and Mrs. Wilson along with Dr. Grayson, Captain McCauley, Miss Benham, and the U.S. ambassador to Russia. The talk, Eleanor said, was, as usual in such cases, “chiefly stories,” but two things the president said made a deep impression on her. He had read no papers since the beginning of the war, Wilson told them; Joseph P. Tumulty, his secretary, “read all and cut out important news or editorials,” for him. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she exclaimed in her diary. She also noted that the president spoke of the League, saying, “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”

Eleanor accepted that. Her visits to the hospitals and battlefields of Europe had imbued her with an implacable hatred of war, a sentiment that would be a ruling passion with her for the remainder of her life. Two days later when they landed in Boston and rode in the fifth carriage in the president's procession, she noted approvingly that the streets “were all packed with people wildly shrieking. I never saw a better crowd or more enthusiasm.” At the luncheon following the parade
she was seated next to Governor Calvin Coolidge. It was, despite her best efforts, a wordless encounter. She thought Mayor Peters of Boston made “a courageous speech,” coming out for the League despite the hostility of his Irish constituents. Governor Coolidge meant to speak guardedly but committed himself to “feeling sure the people would back the President.” It was the president's speech, however, that set his listeners on fire, a “fighting” pronouncement, the
New York Times
reporter said, in which the president threw down “the glove of defiance to all Senators and others who oppose the League of Nations.” “A very wonderful speech,” was Eleanor's comment.