Eleanor and Franklin (94 page)

Anna and John were also unhappy about the last chapters when she left the manuscript with them during a visit to Seattle. There was an undercurrent of “bitterness” in the later part of the work, and although it dealt with a most difficult time in her life, it did not show how she had mastered her bitterness and developed her present philosophy of life. They felt that her quarrel with Anna over the room that she had given to Louis Howe should be left out and hoped that she would modify expressions that made it appear “that you had little part in, and little interest in, your husband's career.” She softened offending passages, rewrote others.
⁴⁸

As she reworked the last chapters, the Goulds began to purr. She had picked up the “dramatic thread” again, Bruce wrote encouragingly, but he pressed her to deepen her account of her husband's illness with additional material on how she felt upon seeing that her whole life would have to be revised. “What you have given of your philosophy of learning to adjust yourself to the difficult business of life is so sound, so illuminating, that you cannot blame us for wanting more.”
⁴⁹

Nothing in
This Is My Story
as it finally was published was false but much was said circumspectly. The Lucy Mercer affair went unmentioned, and her struggle with her mother-in-law was muted; her “night-of-the-soul” could be glimpsed but dimly. And yet, in retrospect, considering that she was First Lady when the book was written, it was astonishingly frank, and this was the public's appraisal of the volume when it appeared.

There had been some criticism of the Goulds within the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Curtis publishing organization because they had accepted a Roosevelt book, but their editorial judgment was swiftly vindicated when the “smash success” of
This Is My Story
became a major factor in helping the
Ladies' Home Journal
overtake
McCall's
and the
Woman's Home Companion
. “Even more pleasing than this liking expressed in numbers was the exciting discovery that Eleanor Roosevelt's biography was read, in effect, by everyone—in government, parlors and slums.”
⁵⁰

Following serialization, the autobiography was to be published in book form by Harper & Brothers. In advance of the book's appearance Eleanor had several sets of the
Ladies' Home Journal
containing the complete autobiography bound in limp leather and marked in gold letters for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, Malvina Thompson Scheider, and Earl R. Miller.
†
The copy she gave Franklin was accompanied by a jingle:

This may not look it but it is,

A book which will some day appear

It promises to be a whiz,

So little less you'll get my dear!

On her way through New York City in early November she went to Harper's to receive her copy of the book. “It looks much more important than I had ever imagined it would be, but I am still inexperienced enough to feel a real thrill and to be very proud when Mr. [Cass] Canfield said that they considered it a good piece of work and were glad to be the publishers.”
⁵¹

The book was widely acclaimed because the experiences she described in it were, she discovered, widely shared. The “harmless childish weaknesses of character” that she had written about in language that was “classic” in its “plain simplicity,” said Dorothy Canfield Fisher, are universal. The painfully honest account of her struggle to overcome shyness and insecurity, wrote educator Alice V. Keliher, “will help young people in their adjustments to life more than anything else written.” Women embraced the story as their own. “I saw so much in the story so far that every woman experiences,” wrote one.

Old Bishop Atwood touched on another aspect of the book's appeal. Eleanor had been too harsh in judging her own character, the bishop thought, but had “succeeded in making a living picture of a social life now in the past.” Karl Bickel, the former president of the United Press, thought it was one of “the greatest human documents he had
read in modern times,” and Captain Joseph Patterson, the president of the
Daily News,
in a bold black scrawl let her know that “I think your book is splendid; and that it may become a classic.” There was praise, sweet to her ears, from Alice Longworth, who at a party was heard to say “Have you read it? Did you realize Eleanor could
write
like that? It's perfect; it's marvellous; she can
writ
e
. . . all at the highest pitch.”
⁵²

As Alice Longworth acknowledged, Eleanor could write, but the basic appeal of
This Is My Story,
like the basic appeal she had as a lecturer and columnist, flowed from her personality. “You see I think you are a kind of genius,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “Out of your personality and position you have certainly created something of first-rate and unique value—not a book or statue or painting—an example.”

 

*
Her first literary agent was Nannine Joseph. But since Nannine was also Franklin's agent Louis Howe placed Eleanor with George Bye, telling Nannine it was not right for her to be the agent for both the president and First Lady. Nannine became Eleanor's agent again in the late forties.

†
Franklin, for Christmas, 1936, had distributed bound copies of the speech he had delivered at Chatauqua, New York, in August, 1936, “I Have Seen War, . . . I Hate War.” Copy number 1 went to his wife; number 2 to his mother; the next five to children; number 8 to Missy; number 9 to Daisy Suckley, a Hudson River neighbor; number 10 to Grace Tully; number 11 to Marvin McIntyre; number 12 to Steve Early; number 13 to Doc McIntire; number 14 to Bill Bullitt; numbers 15 to 24 to the members of the cabinet beginning with Secretary of State Hull.

39.
WITHOUT LOUIS HOWE—THE 1936 CAMPAIGN

T
HE
1936
CAMPAIGN WAS THE FIRST WITHOUT
L
OUIS
H
OWE
. F
OR
Eleanor, whose life had been molded by this misshapen eccentric genius almost as much as by Mlle. Souvestre, his death left a void as impossible to fill as it was for Franklin, with whose rise to the presidency Louis' name would be forever linked.

Louis' final decline began in the autumn of 1934 when his breathing became more labored, his eyes more sunken, his thin frame more wasted. He found it an ordeal to walk to the office and began to stay in his paper-littered bedroom off the Lincoln room. It was directly across the hall from Eleanor's sitting room, and his pajama-clad figure, wracked with coughing, was often seen shuffling from one room to the other. In January, 1935, he took a turn for the worse, and the annual Cuff Links party of those who had been associated with Roosevelt's 1920 campaign was canceled. Franklin and Eleanor had no heart for a party without Louis, who had always been the impresario on such occasions, dreaming up stunts and writing scripts with Eleanor as a willing accomplice. In March, Eleanor warned his children, Mrs. Mary Baker and Hartley, that while there was no immediate danger, their father needed cheering up and letters would help. Ten days later, after a bronchial collapse, he drifted into unconsciousness. “He seems to cling to life in the most astonishing manner,” Eleanor reported to Molly Dewson, “but I am afraid it is the end.”
¹

But he rallied, opening his eyes two days later to ask for one of his Sweet Caporals. For another year, much of it spent under an oxygen tent, he battled for breath and life. When Louis' wife Grace could not be at the White House, Eleanor watched over him faithfully. She kept track of what he ate, insisted that he follow the doctor's orders, kept him informed on the comings and goings in the White House, and encouraged him in his hopes that he would manage the 1936 campaign as he had the others.

When the doctors recommended that he be moved to the Naval
Hospital it was Eleanor who took him there in the White House limousine and did not leave until she saw him settled. He went “peacefully,” she reported to Grace, and only got into a “tizzy-whiz” because no telephone had been arranged.
²

From his hospital bed he continued to plot strategy for the coming campaign by way of memos dictated to his secretary, Margaret Durand (“Rabbit”), and the telephone. When the inspiration seized him he insisted that “Hacky,” the White House switchboard operator, put him through to Franklin immediately whether the president was at Hyde Park, Warm Springs, or in bed. The president finally requested that Louis' direct line to the White House be available only from 10:00
A.M.
to 4:30
P.M.
, but he also asked his chief aides to treat Louis with respect and courtesy no matter what orders he issued by phone.
³

The president visited Louis at the hospital and those were moments of cheer, for Roosevelt was a great jollier, but there were not as many visits as Louis wished. Not only were the pressures of the presidential office remorseless, but Roosevelt had a faculty for blotting from consciousness the people who were unable to keep up with him. It was Eleanor, who had taken so long to appreciate Louis, who was steadfast to the end. She came to see him every day she was in Washington, “but yesterday he was too busy,” she wrote Grace Howe, for sometimes he played the same game with her he did with Farley—that “he was still a busy man of consequence.” She brought friends like Baruch, who promised to be helpful to his son Hartley and also to underwrite the Good Neighbor League, an organization that Howe felt would be needed in the campaign to appeal to Republicans and Independents.

He was saving his strength for the campaign, Louis informed Rabbit, and when the time came he would leave the hospital and move his operations to the Biltmore Hotel in New York. All of his friends joined in the sad charade that Louis would be with them in the campaign.
*
On the day Louis died Eleanor wrote Farley, “The President tells me that everything is to clear through both you and Louis and anything you are not entirely sure about is to come to him.” That night, April 18, he slipped quietly away while asleep. Franklin was informed while he was at the Gridiron Dinner and Eleanor as she was giving her annual party for the Gridiron widows. The president ordered the
White House flags to be half-masted, and the funeral services were held in the East Room. The choir of St. Thomas' Church, which Louis had joined when he first came to Washington with Franklin, sang the music he had always liked. The president and the First Lady accompanied the body to Fall River for the burial. “There is nothing to regret,” Eleanor wrote in her column, “either for those who go, or for those who stay behind—only an inheritance of good accomplishment to be lived up to by those who carry a loving memory in their hearts.”

There was one comforting thought, General Hugh Johnson wrote her: “In his impaired health he would have been very miserable as the campaign advances—and he not able to get into it vigorously.” Eleanor agreed: “It was the happiest solution for Louis.” She was grateful to Baruch: “You were wiser than the rest of us. You knew that it was medicine, food and drink to Louis to know that he was still in there fighting, doing something for Franklin.”
⁵

Even before Louis' death, she had felt that as a consequence of Louis' illness, Franklin was seeing a narrower range of people and his mail was being analyzed with insufficient sensitivity. “F.D.R.,” she penciled on an aggrieved letter, “I think this letter answering is really vital. That was how L. H. built your popularity. I don't like R.C. but he's right about the way they feel. Couldn't one person take over this mail? E.R.” He was “entirely right,” she informed the writer, Russell Carney: “Louis Howe's not being on hand has meant that many people were not appreciated and had been forgotten.” Molly Dewson complained that she was not able to get to see the president although the 1936 campaign was coming up and she had to get the women's division in readiness. Eleanor arranged for her and other women's division leaders to spend an evening with him. Afterward Molly commented, “I miss Louis Howe awfully.”
⁶

One of the jobs Louis had performed for Franklin was to keep track of the Roosevelt coalition, to evaluate by the statistical methods that were then available the inroads that were being made into the president's support from both left and right. The large followings attracted by the radical demagogues Huey Long, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, and Dr. Francis E. Townsend demonstrated that more rather than less action by government was necessary. Yet, on the other side, big business was outspokenly hostile to the New Deal, and men like the duPonts, Alfred Sloan, and John J. Raskob in alliance with conservative Democrats like Alfred E. Smith, Albert Ritchie, and John
Davis had established the American League to oppose Roosevelt and his New Deal reforms.

The progress of the demagogues frightened the New Dealers, who raised an anguished cry for more vigorous leadership by Roosevelt. In early 1935, they were asking what had happened to FDR. What should she say in reply? Eleanor asked Franklin, sending him several letters that reflected the liberals' complaint. Perhaps she also shared their restlessness, but in selecting these letters for his attention her primary purpose was to make sure that with Louis no longer analyzing the White House mail, Franklin was aware of the questions among significant groups of his supporters. She felt, more strongly than her husband perhaps, that the New Deal could not be considered complete, but she also believed that significant changes in national direction could not simply be declared. They had to be worked at long and patiently.