Eleanor and Franklin (61 page)

With a quarter of a million inquiries and plans pouring in by the thousands, Eleanor was more sanguine than her husband and brother. The purpose of the competition, she said in her speeches, was not only to focus public thinking upon the form of association Americans felt their country ought to have with the rest of the world, but to submit the winning plan to the supreme test of practicality—passage in the Senate. “Esther wants me to do rather a job at the Bok office the next few weeks,” she wrote Franklin at the end of October (the deadline for entries was November 15, 1923). “I told her after Election I'd devote my major activities to her and let up a bit on the Democrats!” On the closing day of the contest 700 plans were received, bringing the total to 22,165. “Amazing indeed, is the interest that has been called forth from every part of the country, and from every walk of life,” the
Times
commented. On January 7 the winning plan was released. Again it was the lead story in the
Times
, which also published the full text. Briefly stated, it called for U.S. entry into the World Court and conditional support for the League of Nations, in effect cooperation without membership.

Promptly the Senate isolationists raised the cry that it was “a pro-League proposal pure and simple.” An inquiry was launched headed by Senators Reed and Moses, two leading “irreconcilables,” designed to show that the competition was a sinister propaganda exercise, that it was a rigged contest, and that the committee of jurors had been packed. Women crowded the hearing room, with Alice Longworth in a privileged seat on a huge leather sofa in back of the committee. Bok was treated with kid gloves at the hearing but Reed's examination of Esther Lape was so severe that other senators chivalrously came
to her aid. How was the policy committee chosen, Reed demanded. Mrs. Roosevelt was the first one invited to join, Esther replied, and then Mrs. Vanderlip; Mr. Bok had left the selection of the remainder to the three women. “Do you mean that you three ladies then selected the rest of the members of the Policy Committee?” Reed asked incredulously. He was not alone in his outrage at such female presumption. “
THREE WOMEN ENGINEERED BOK PEACE PRIZE CONTEST
,” was the Republican
New York Herald
's headline. “The great Bok peace prize contest,” the head of the
Herald
's Washington bureau wrote, “was managed by two matrons of social distinction and a highly educated and most efficient young unmarried woman.” Front-page photographs of Eleanor, Esther, and Mrs. Vanderlip accompanied the story. Franklin's unofficial press representative in Washington, Marvin McIntyre, came up to Esther, Elizabeth, and Eleanor after the committee excused Esther. “I think we're a thousand percent!” he told them. Miss Lape was one of “the most marvellously acute witnesses” to appear on the Hill, the
Boston Transcript
correspondent wrote. “They never went on with the hearings,” Esther said. “They used Wilson's illness as a pretext to adjourn them.”
²⁵
But the isolationist orators called the Bok Peace Award a “peace-at-any-price” enterprise and equated internationalism with treason.

When Eleanor and Esther went to Washington March 17 to try to persuade some senators merely to introduce the winning plan, they were treated with cordiality and friendliness, but they were turned down. “It is discouraging to see people on an errand like this,” Eleanor wrote her husband. “They have so little courage! They agree that their private views are met but the party isn't for it!”
²⁶

For Eleanor it was an intense education in the substantive issues as well as the politics of internationalism. Together with Esther and Elizabeth she read all of the entries, twenty of which Esther published in a book called
Ways to Peace
. The contest also helped Franklin crystallize his thinking on international cooperation. He had little sympathy for the isolationists (“You have doubtless seen the grand hullabaloo in the Senate over the Bok. Peace Award,” he wrote George Marvin. “What fools Reed, Moses, etc. are. Eleanor is just back from Washington, where she went to hold Esther Lape's hand”), but he also had a healthy respect for political realities.

My objection to the accepted plan is that it is not practicable, i.e. politically practicable. The dear judges must have known that in
choosing that plan they would revive the League of Nations very largely along existing lines. My plan avoided this by providing for an International Conference to establish a brand new permanent International organization.
²⁷

Because of his wife's membership on the policy committee, Franklin had not submitted his plan, but he did show it to Esther and it shaped his own approach to international cooperation when he was president.
*
The fundamental commitment to internationalism was there, but as a politician he thought it prudent to avoid open battle. Perhaps he felt he was bearing sufficient witness to the internationalist cause through the activities of his wife; since the public identified her advocacy with his convictions, that added to his reputation as a statesman without increasing the risks to him as a politician. He lapsed into relative silence but Eleanor pressed on. Public opinion admittedly was apathetic, even hostile; all the more reason to go forward with the work of education and organization. In her engagement book she transcribed the lines

Never dreamed, though right were worsted

Wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.

The peace-award group evolved into the American Foundation, whose main purpose was to work with those who shaped national opinion to promote U.S. entry into the World Court. Esther was the member-in-charge, Elizabeth the foundation's legal scholar, Eleanor the activist. A succinct statement on the “next step” in international cooperation that Eleanor wrote in 1925, when the House of Representatives approved U.S. participation in the World Court's activities and for a brief moment it looked as if U.S. acceptance was certain, revealed that although she would not compromise on goals, she advocated being flexible on tactics; a strong sense of practicality tempered her utopianism. Her speech was prepared for a meeting of women's clubs, and Louis went over it and made a few changes, chiefly shortening some of her sentences. Entry into the World Court was a first step in America's acceptance of its international responsibilities, she
stated. She was concerned with the “attitude of mind” with which a next step should be approached:

Many of us have fixed ideas of what we think our own country and the various other countries of the world should do, but if we rigidly adhere, each to our own point of view, we will progress not at all. We should talk together with open minds and grasp anything which is a step forward; not hold out for our particular, ultimate panacea. Keep it in our minds, of course, but remember that all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.

The speech also showed how strongly her approach to politics was grounded in religious conviction:

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations. When we center on our own home, our own family, our own business, we are neglecting this fundamental obligation of every human being and until it is acknowledged and fulfilled we cannot have world peace.

Peace was “the question of the hour,” and for the women “this should be a crusade”:

The abolition of war touches them more nearly than any other question. Now when many of the nations of the world are at peace and we still remember vividly the horrors of 1914–1918 and know fairly generally what the next war will mean, now is the time to act. Usually only the experts, technical people, busy with war plans know, but at the moment we all know that the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?
²⁸

 

*
It is Esther Lape's recollection that Franklin did submit his plan and that “his objection to the winning plan was simply that it was not his.”

28.
THE 1924 CAMPAIGN

S
HORTLY AFTER THE
B
OK
P
EACE
A
WARD CONTROVERSY QUIETED
down and Eleanor was again concentrating on politics, Josephus Daniels wrote Franklin that he was relieved to learn that

I am not the only “squaw” man in the country. . . . I think the
World
showed good taste when it announced that you were taking the helm of the Smith campaign they published the picture of your wife. I have had that experience on similar occasions and have always wondered how the newspapermen knew so well who was at the head of the family.

Franklin replied in the same tone:

You are right about the squaws! Like you I have fought for years to keep my name on the front page and to relegate the wife's to the advertising section. My new plan, however, seems admirable—hereafter for three years my name will not appear at all, but each fourth year (Presidential ones) I am to have all the limelight. Why don't you adopt this too? It will make it much easier to put that Democratic national ticket of Daniels and Roosevelt across in 1928 or 1932.
¹

Was Franklin wholly jesting? In less than two years Eleanor had moved into a position of state leadership. Newspapers called her for statements and she was beginning to speak over the radio as well as on the stump. Her voice was still high, sometimes shrill, but her speaking style had improved and she gamely stuck by the rules Louis had laid down. The traits of helpfulness, modesty, and energy that made her universally admired within the family now inspired equal admiration in the public arena.

Franklin esteemed his wife's abilities highly, but he never happily
surrendered the limelight to anyone. “Eleanor has been leading an even more hectic life than usual,” he wrote Rosy. “Bok Peace Award, investigation by the Senate, Democratic females, in Philadelphia, etc. etc.—I think when I go away she will be more quiet as she will have to stay home more!”
²

Eleanor understood how difficult it was for Franklin not to be front and center, especially in politics. “You need not be proud of me, dear,” she wrote him on February 6, 1924:

I'm only being
active
till you can be again—it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve the world and I'll fall back into habit of sloth quite easily! Hurry up for as you know my ever present sense of the uselessness of all things will overwhelm me sooner or later!

She had a stoic, almost fatalist, sense of resignation, yet like Marcus Aurelius, whose
Meditations
she admired, she was strongly motivated by a sense of the efficacy of moral effort. If the two attitudes were contradictory, it is a contradiction philosophers have never been able to resolve.

Directed by Franklin, coached by Louis, with a group of highly able women as co-workers—Esther, Elizabeth, Nancy, Marion, Caroline O'Day (widow of a Standard Oil heir) Elinor Morgenthau, Rose and Maud, a group to which in 1924 was added Mary W. Dewson, the new civic secretary of the Women's City Club—she was becoming a major force in public life. Whenever Eleanor was mentioned, wrote Isabella, who was now Mrs. John Greenway, “I say ‘there is probably the greatest woman of this generation!'” A great many people were beginning to feel that way about her.

She made her office in the women's division of the Democratic State Committee. Caroline O'Day, socially prominent and strongly antiwar, had succeeded Harriet May Mills as chairman and Eleanor was chairman of the Finance Committee. Their efforts to organize the women, especially in the rural counties where there was no men's organization, and obtain recognition from the men, involved hard, often tedious work. Eleanor's journeyings with Nancy Cook or Marion Dickerman were fragmentarily recorded in her engagement book: “Left Massena in the rain. . . . The man Nan wanted to see was away.” “Ran out of gas” in Ithaca and “searched for Mrs. T. unsuccessfully.” “A good supper at St. James, proprietor a Democrat.” “Gloversville—lovely country—meeting about 20 women and stayed till 3.” Although
they had requested modest lodgings, in one hotel they were ushered into “palatial suite. . . . Think F.D.R. may have to send us money to get home on.”

By the spring of 1924 all but five counties of the state we organized, and the men were impressed. “Organization is something to which they are always ready to take off their hats,” Eleanor said, but she realized how much women still had to learn before they would belong to the game as completely as did the men. In an interview with Rose Feld of the
Times
she related what she told women as she went around the state. “They have the vote, they have the power, but they don't seem to know what to do with it.” Their lack of progress stemmed from the hostility of the men, and Eleanor summed up the real masculine attitude toward women in politics: