Eleanor and Franklin (51 page)

On the train to Washington, Miss Benham had tea in their compartment, and when they went to say good-by to the president and Mrs. Wilson, Eleanor had “a nice talk with him” and Mrs. Wilson gave her and Mrs. Spellacy a “bunch of flowers.” They were home the next morning: “Greeted by chicks and Mama. All very well and very happy to be together again.”

Back in Washington they soon discovered that the opposition was not at all daunted by Wilson's thunderbolts. When they dined with Alice Longworth, Eleanor found the atmosphere “very partisan”—so much so that it was too much for Franklin's customary good nature and he became “rather annoyed.”
¹⁶
Nevertheless, Alice and her husband were invited to dinner at the Roosevelts', along with the leader of the Senate Democrats, to meet Sir Edward Grey, who had come to Washington as special ambassador to try to persuade Wilson to compromise with Senator Lodge and accept his reservations to the Covenant. “All seemed to enjoy it,” Eleanor wrote of her dinner. “Lord G. said to Alice ‘I would like to have a list of the books which you have read and I've never even heard of'! She really is extraordinary and kept us all entertained.”
¹⁷

Grey's mission was a failure, both with Alice and with Wilson. In a cold rebuff, Wilson, immured behind White House walls after his stroke, declined to receive Grey, and Alice remained a principal crusader against the League. When the Senate rejected the Covenant, the leading irreconcilables adjourned to the Longworth house for a celebratory snack, where, Alice wrote, “Mrs. Harding cooked the eggs.”
¹⁸

Eleanor took no part in the League fight, as political activity was still Franklin's domain. Nor did she take part in the final battle for women's suffrage. Although she declined Alice Wadsworth's invitation to join the National Association of Anti-Suffragists and counseled Sara
to do likewise, when Franklin went to Hyde Park to vote in November, 1918, he went alone, even though New York women had acquired the vote by state referendum in 1917.

But she was venturing into new fields and was privately expressing views on politics and public affairs that were crisply unequivocal and quite sophisticated. When Wilson dismissed Secretary of State Lansing because he had convened cabinet meetings during the president's disablement without authorization, she was indignant: “I think it will be awkward for whoever is next Secretary of State for he will be branded as a rubber stamp. The President's letter can only be considered that of a sick, peevish man and I think everyone is more seriously worried than at any time.”
¹⁹
And when New York lawyer Bainbridge Colby was named to succeed Lansing, she was harsh: “Mr. B. Colby is a good speaker and an agreeable person to meet. His ‘mind will go along' excellently. He's a non-entity and has never shown in any job much capacity and of course he has no qualifications for this one, except that I feel sure he will never hold an opinion at variance with the President as long as it pays him not to!”
²⁰
Official Washington's unhappy experience with an incapacitated president who was protectively isolated from his cabinet and political associates by his wife and physician made an indelible impression on Eleanor and would influence her own conduct in the final months of Franklin's administration when his strength began to fail.

In the fall of 1919 when Franklin went to New Brunswick for some hunting, Eleanor undertook to keep track of the Industrial Conference for him. Organized under the chairmanship of Secretary Lane, the conference was trying, amid the wave of postwar strikes, to formulate a modus vivendi between employer groups and unions. This activity brought Eleanor in touch with a new range of problems and people. “Heard Mr. Fish of the Employer group speak against a compromise resolution which was brought in on the collective bargaining issue, responded to with much heat by Mr. Wheeler of the public group. Nothing done so far!” The next day she reported, “The industrial conference came to a smash and the labor delegates walked out. Now the public groups are trying to pick up the pieces having asked the employers to withdraw. The President's letter was fine but did no good, even the
Tribune
gave it high praise this morning. The coal situation looks a little better today but the A.F. of L. has called a general conference for November and is preparing for a big struggle.”
²¹

The labor movement was beginning to engage Eleanor's sympathies.
An International Congress of Working Women took place in Washington at the end of October, 1919, and she went to a tea for the delegates. It was “of course a very advanced and radical gathering presided over by Mrs. Raymond Robins,” but evidently its radicalism did not frighten her for she found it “interesting and amusing.”
²²

She then invited some of the women to lunch with her. The U.S. delegation, in addition to Mrs. Robins, included Rose Schneiderman of the Cap Makers, Maud Swartz of the Printers, Leonora O'Reilly of the New York Women's Trade Union League, Mary Anderson of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union, Fannia Cohn of the Ladies Garment Workers, Julia O'Connor of the Telephone Operators, and Lois Rantoul of the Federal Employees Union. The time was coming when she would call many of these women her friends.

23.
THE REBELLION BEGINS

T
HE YEARS IN
W
ASHINGTON WERE DRAWING TO A CLOSE
. O
UTWARDLY
they were a time of triumph; they were also a time of deep inner travail.

“I do not think I have ever felt so strangely as in the past year,” Eleanor wrote in her diary at the end of 1919, “perhaps it is that I have never noticed little things before but all my self-confidence is gone and I am on edge though I never was better physically I feel sure.”
¹

At Christmas time she sent close friends photographs of her family. The handsome group included the five children, Franklin, and, on Eleanor's insistence, Sara. “It looks alarmingly like the ones of families that end up in the White House,” a close friend wrote. What “a grand success you've made.”

Success! When the rock upon which she had built her life and sought to lay to rest the sense of failure and inferiority had been shattered? Tightly, desperately, Eleanor clung to the old familiar ties and attachments—family, friends, and duties—yet she could not shut off the moods of black despair that seized her when she felt that no one belonged to her and she was of no use to anyone. There were moments when her belief that life had meaning slipped away from her. “There are times,” she later said, “in everyone's life when the wish to be done with the burdens and even the decisions of this life seems overwhelming.”
²
This was such a time for her. She often took refuge in Rock Creek Cemetery, sitting in front of the haunting memorial that Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to erect to his wife. The cowled bronze figure had inspired Spring-Rice to write a sonnet, a copy of which was found among Eleanor's bedside papers at her death:

O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes

Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!

O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down

Upon a world of passion and of lies! . . .

Mrs. Adams, a victim of prolonged depressions, had committed suicide, but the seated figure did not evoke thoughts of despair in Eleanor. The lips were full. The hand was strong. The beautiful face was that of a woman who had achieved absolute self-mastery. Henry Adams had sometimes called the figure the “Peace of God,” a peace, Saint-Gaudens said, that was “beyond pain and beyond joy,” and for Eleanor these were the years when sometimes she envied the peace that Mrs. Adams had achieved, and sometimes wondered whether such peace could be achieved in life through self-mastery.
³
“There was a time,” she would write a friend in 1941, “when I thought happiness didn't matter but I think differently today.”
⁴

As civilized as she and Franklin were, they had some very bad times, although inner strain flared only rarely into open conflict. “Found F.D. and E. very cool as he had been to the Fly Club dinner night before,” Livy Davis had noted in Paris.
⁵
“Dined alone,” Eleanor recorded on April 10, 1919. “Franklin nervous and overwrought and I very stupid and trying, result a dreadful fracas.”

It was a time for her of harsh self-reproach and depreciation, of desolating conviction that she had failed as a woman and was in some way responsible for Franklin's involvement with Lucy. But bitter as the experience was, it also matured her. Slowly she won through to the realization that she could not achieve fulfillment through someone else. “Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are,” she wrote in 1941, “and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's life not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.”
⁶

She buried herself in work, especially in her work for St. Elizabeth's where she could find her way back to a firm feeling that she was of some use, where she could feel herself needed. “My experience has been,” she wrote in later years, “that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.”
⁷
To wean her from self-pity and private woe there were, in addition to her duties with the Red Cross, her children, her household, as well as her obligations as the wife of one of the most promising public men in Washington.

In her final months in Washington she made considerable changes in her household. Servants had ceased to intimidate her. When Blanche, her personal maid, did not do her job, she cheerfully informed Sara, “I blew her up the other day,”
⁸
and while she did not think it had “much effect” the expression bespoke her growth in self-assurance.

In the choice of governesses she also struck a new note. “I feel when we do
burden
ourselves with one,” she told Sara, “it should be to acquire a language not just to be kept up in English to which they devote most of their winter.”
⁹
Their last year in Washington she gave Anna and James the choice of having a governess who would supervise them or making a pledge to perform their chores and duties without supervision. Both chose freedom.

In 1913 Daniels had reproached her for having white household help. Housework should be done by Negro servants, he had said, and the statement had shocked her. But now in 1919 difficulties with her white help persuaded her to restaff her household, except for an English nurse, with Negro servants—cook, kitchen maid, butler, and housemaid. Paradoxically, this was not a compromise with the southern view that such jobs were menial and for Negroes alone but a rejection of New York society's conviction that only whites were qualified and trustworthy enough to serve inside the house. It was Eleanor's first intimate contact with Negroes. “Well, all my servants are gone and all the darkies are here and heaven knows how it will all turn out!” she informed Sara.
¹⁰

Her first big dinner under the new arrangements was to take place on March 13, and she was curious to see how “my darkies manage,” but she had already found them “pleasanter to deal with and there is never any question about it not being their work to do this or that.”
¹¹
The dinner went off without mishap but sometimes there were problems. On the eve of a buffet luncheon for Marine officers the butler developed pleurisy, which she thought an odd disease for midsummer. “With darkies,” she generalized, “one is always suspicious even of a death in the family.”
¹²
But her new cook, Nora, more than made up for the butler's absence and proved to be “a host in herself. . . . She cooked the hams (4) made a wonderful grapefruit punch and vegetable salad in enormous quantities and black coffee in the same quantities.” Eleanor never regretted having made the change, although there was a long journey ahead before she freed herself of racial stereotypes and bias.

When in the summer of 1919 racial violence swept Washington, triggered by returned servicemen, her thoughts were of Franklin's safety,
not of the causes of the racial outbreak. She and the children were in Fairhaven rather than Campobello, because, she had explained to Sara, it was “a long and expensive commuting trip” to Campobello and that is what it would be for Franklin “and for me.”
¹³
Her anxiety when she did not hear from Franklin seemed excessive, its intensity a reflection of her own edginess. “You seem to have had pretty bad race riots in Washington,” she wrote him on arrival at Fairhaven. “Have you seen anything of them?”
¹⁴
She was more agitated the next day. “No word from you and I am getting very anxious on account of the riots. Do be careful not to be hit by stray bullets.” The riots had not spread to R Street, he assured her, and he had taken pains “to keep out of harm's way.”
¹⁵
But the mail was slow in reaching Fairhaven. “Still no letter or telegram from you and I am worried to death,” she wrote him. “Even if something is wrong why don't you let me know. I'd always rather know than worry. I couldn't sleep at all last night thinking of all the things which might be the matter.”
¹⁶
She seemed unduly disquieted. Evidently Franklin thought so too. “Your telegram came last night at ten,” he informed her; “as I was in my pyjamas and couldn't get Western Union I did not answer it till this a.m. as soon as I got to the office.”
¹⁷