Eleanor and Franklin (76 page)

It was a discerning question. There was in her a craving for experience, a fear of pomp and ceremony. She did not wish to be shielded from the world but to take part in it and change it. She wanted to live a life without artifice, to do things herself, to live the truth. She had an ascetic strain—she called it the Puritan in her—and inner drives that in other times and other places had led women to renounce worldly pleasures and take vows of poverty and service. She carried about with her a prayer by Henry Van Dyke entitled “The Footpath to Peace,” to which she added the words “with oneself.” Among the prayer's injunctions were “to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends and every day of Christ”; she had circled the phrase about Christ. “Christ was born in a manger,” she wrote a few months later, “and worked all his life and in that way we were taught that the highest and best things in life may be linked with material hardship and the simplest of living.” As completely as she could, she wanted to live according to Christ's teachings.

She feared that all these things would become impossible once she was First Lady, that she would become a prisoner of protocol and tradition. Louis, an inveterate scribbler of verse, had addressed himself to her anxieties in early 1932.

We are the hooded brotherhood of fears.

Barring the pleasant path that lay ahead.

Who, grim and silent, all these futile years,

Have filled your timid soul with numbing dread. . . .

Fool! Had you dared to speed your pace

Our masking cowls aside to tear

And meet us bravely face to face

We would have vanished into air.

Louis' assurances that there would be plenty for her to do in the White House did not end her worries; the closer Franklin came to the nomination, the more certain she became that she did not want to be First Lady. Nancy and Marion had accompanied Louis to Chicago, and Nancy received a letter from Eleanor saying these things. When she showed it to Louis, he ripped it to shreds and told her not to breathe a word of it to anyone.
²
From her own personal standpoint, Eleanor later wrote, she did not want her husband to be president: “It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.”
³

Her dread of what she called “captivity” in the White House did not prevent her from pitching into the campaign with her usual vigor. While some of the party's conservatives were opposed to a strong women's division, especially a “militant” one, a major appeal was nevertheless going to be directed to the distaff side of the electorate. Molly moved over from Friends of Roosevelt to direct the drive, again as Eleanor's deputy. There was an easy and understanding relationship between the two. “I hate people to be grateful to me,” Eleanor wrote Molly in Maine, where she had been sent to rest before the campaign, “just as much as you apparently hate them to be grateful to you so you need not worry. I love working with you for just the reasons I imagine you like working with me and you need not ever worry that I will not speak perfectly truthfully to you or that you should hesitate to say whatever you have on your mind to me.”
⁴

While Molly rested in Maine, Eleanor organized and staffed the women's division. She presented the Democratic National Committee, which Farley had assembled in New York for a strategy session, with the plan developed by Molly for work in the states. There was to be a vice chairwoman in every state to head up the women's work and a committeewoman in every county, especially in the rural areas, with
whom Molly could correspond directly and to whom headquarters could send literature and gasoline money. The men agreed, although they were reluctant to have any money come into their states that was not channeled through them. They also agreed that the women in charge of their states would draft their work plans and send them to Eleanor. For the wife of the presidential candidate to hold such responsibility and to wield such authority was unprecedented in American politics, but in Eleanor's case it seemed the natural thing to do.

Eleanor and her colleagues had learned their lessons well in 1930 and knew exactly what they wanted. They did
not
want, a chagrined Howe discovered, the twelve-page brochures the men, including himself, had drafted. The women marched into his office, he later reported, “their noses visibly turned toward Heaven,” and announced loftily, “You surely don't expect us to send that to our women do you?” “Why not?” Howe inquired. “Well, I don't know about you men, but we women have no time to waste reading through stuff like that.” Women, Howe learned, had an “appalling desire for figures”; they preferred leaflets which presented a single argument. Finally they were given their own printing budget and told to produce their own literature. The ladies' “Rainbow Fliers,” as they came to be called, were printed by the millions and were so successful that the men made extensive use of them. “They were written solely by women. No man had a hand in them,” Molly commented rather smugly.
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Eleanor turned over to Molly a list of the “safe states” and the “fighting states,” where Louis figured the election would be won or lost. The women precinct leaders in the latter states were notified just how their districts had voted in 1928 and how many additional votes were needed for a Democratic victory in 1932. The most intensive campaigning was done by a corps of “grass trampers,” women who went from door to door and whose indefatigable work Louis later credited with bringing out the women's vote; he “would rather have a half-dozen women field workers than a hundred men any day,” he concluded. Moreover, they made the same amount of money go twice as far; in fact, they were sometimes too frugal, and in a campaign it was necessary to use money speedily.
⁶

Farley's and Molly's offices were at the Biltmore Hotel, while Louis and Eleanor remained across the street at the old Friends of Roosevelt office. One of Eleanor's jobs was to keep the channels of communication open between Farley and the ever-suspicious Howe, and she could occasionally be seen hurrying across Madison Avenue with Louis in
tow to straighten out a misunderstanding, smooth over a hurt feeling. After the Walker hearings ended with Tammany Mayor Jimmy Walker's sudden resignation, Franklin took off on his campaign train accompanied by James and his wife Betsy and Anna Dall. Roosevelt liked to have his children with him, and he was especially fond of Betsy, who was pert, vivacious, and enjoyed coquetting with her irresistible father-in-law. From time to time Eleanor flew out to join the campaign train, and she was in Chicago when the whole family attended a World Series game between the Cubs and the Yankees. She was not a model of attentiveness, Jimmy later claimed, having slept through most of the game, one in which Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each hit home runs.
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But during that same stay in Chicago when Bobby Fitzmaurice, who handled transportation schedules, fell ill, it was Eleanor who took the “Commissioner of the Ramps,” as Roosevelt had fondly dubbed him, to the hospital, just as, a few weeks later, when Missy's mother died, it was Eleanor who accompanied Missy to Potsdam, New York, for the funeral.

The Depression was reaching its nadir and the grim signs were everywhere—the lengthening bread lines, the Hoovervilles, the silent, sullen countryside in which smoldered the fires of rebellion, the horrifying use of troops and tear gas to rout the veterans from Washington. Eleanor shifted her emphasis from the alleviation of distress to the need for basic change. A financial system that was “man-made” was also “man-controlled,” she told the Chatauqua ladies. “We must reorganize our economic structure so it may be possible for those willing to work to receive adequate compensation.” Her ideas were not more advanced than her husband's, Tugwell noted, but she was willing to talk about them “when he was not yet ready for commitment.”
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She counseled the girls of the Junior League to prepare themselves for the big changes that were coming by learning to earn their own living and to pull their weight by making a contribution to the world. When one of her Todhunter girls remarked that “you can get anything you want in the world if you have enough money,” she asked the entire class to bring in “a list of things you think the Depression has taught people who have money and also a list of what you think it has done to people who are unemployed and have nothing.” She urged “a spirit of mutual helpfulness” in easing the hardships of the Depression but insisted that the country's leaders probe deeply into its causes with a view to fundamental reform.

It was considered unseemly for her to campaign for her husband,
but it was decided she should take the stump for Herbert Lehman, who had been nominated for governor over Tammany's objections and faced a hard fight. While Roosevelt, in Pittsburgh, to the delight of the conservatives among his advisers, condemned Hoover for his “reckless and extravagant” spending policies and promised a 25 per cent reduction in federal payrolls, Eleanor, in Syracuse a week later, was not so sure economy was such “a very wonderful thing . . . it can do a great deal of harm.” The Republicans had cut $21 million out of the state budget, but “practically all of that came out of the appropriation for the Department of Public Works . . . [which] means that thousands of young engineers, draftsmen and laborers were thrown out of work.” Since the Republicans subsequently were obliged to appropriate not only what they had cut out of the budget, but more for public relief, she wanted to know which would have been better—“to pay that money out in salaries for labor on public works, or to pay it in unemployment relief?”
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Roosevelt's goal was to get elected, and his rhetoric was shaped by that; Eleanor—as she ladled out soup on the bread lines, gave lifts to tramps, and sent hungry men to her house with instructions that they should be fed—was increasingly preoccupied with the necessity not only for fundamental changes but for preparing the country to accept those changes. Otherwise, she felt, Franklin's task might prove to be an impossible one.

She poured out her anxieties to Lorena Hickok on a midnight drive from Poughkeepsie to New York. She had attended Franklin's final rally but insisted on driving back to town afterward so that she could meet her nine o'clock class in the morning. “Of course Franklin will do his best if he is elected. He is strong and resourceful. And he really cares about people,” she said, according to Hickok. “The federal government will have to take steps. But will it be enough?
Can
it be enough? The responsibility he may have to take on is something I hate to think about.”
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The next day she was back in Hyde Park to cast her ballot and then returned to New York to prepare the buffet supper that she and Franklin gave for family, friends, and newsmen before going to the Biltmore Hotel to await the returns. Whatever her misgivings about becoming First Lady, outwardly she was as gracious and composed as ever. At the Biltmore, Franklin withdrew to a small suite upstairs to receive the returns with Flynn, Farley, and a few intimates. Eleanor
stayed downstairs in the ballroom to greet the hundreds of party workers who had gathered to celebrate the victory that appeared to be in the making.

Smilingly she moved from ballroom to State Committee and National Committee quarters, but as the returns began to come in she slipped off to give Elliott's wife a glimpse of the lights and crowds and excitement on Broadway on an election eve and to bring Sara down to headquarters. As the fateful hour arrived, Louis turned gloomy, and as if to emphasize his behind-the-scenes role, secluded himself with his wife and son in his deserted offices across the street, calling Roosevelt and Farley on the telephone but refusing to acknowledge that the early returns were as good as they seemed. When victory seemed certain, Eleanor and Farley went over to get him. The “two people in the United States,” Roosevelt saluted Howe and Farley, “more than anybody else, who are responsible for this great victory.”

The reporters assigned to stay with Eleanor were, as one of them wrote, “incredulous” at her composure in the midst of the klieg lights and the mounting hysteria of victory. Nothing seemed to penetrate her “profound calm.” She consented to a press conference. Was she pleased at the outcome of the election?

“Of course I'm pleased—if it really is true. You're always pleased to have someone you're very devoted to have what he wants.” Then she paused and went on gravely, “It's an extremely serious thing to undertake, you know, the guidance of a nation at a time like this. It's not something you just laugh off and say you're pleased about.”

The reporters had been reading Hickok's stories with their hints of Mrs. Roosevelt's reluctance to become First Lady. Did she anticipate returning to Washington and its social functions? one asked. “I love people. I love having people in my house. I don't think I know what ‘functions' are,” was her smiling response.

Would she miss New York? would she find life in Washington too restricting? the reporters pressed on. “I'm very much a person of circumstance,” she said, again avoiding a direct reply. “I've found that I never miss anything after it's gone. The present is enough to deal with. Life is always full, you know.”

The next morning the invisible bands whose fetters she had feared began to tighten. The police guard outside the Sixty-fifth Street house had been doubled, there were Secret Service men about everywhere, and the crowd of reporters outside was prepared to dog her footsteps
all day. She was up early, and only Louis and Anna's daughter Sisty, who attended Todhunter and whom she would take to school, joined her at breakfast. A reporter for an afternoon paper sent in a message begging her to come out so that they might have a story for the early editions, and she interrupted her breakfast to oblige. She told the press what she intended to do that day. She “refuses to allow the new honor that has come to her husband to interfere with the varied interests of her own life,” the
Sun
reporter wrote.