The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (25 page)

Louis Howe was not happy about Franklin’s candidacy. He always thought in terms of the future, and he had planned that Franklin should be a candidate four or eight years later. Louis feared that if Governor Smith lost nationally, it might not be possible for Franklin to carry the state for the governorship, which might spoil any chance he had for future political office.

I used to laugh at Louis and say one could not plan every move in this world, one had to accept circumstances as they developed. Louis hated to do that. He liked to feel that he dominated circumstances and, so far as it was humanly possible, he often did.

Comparatively speaking, I knew very little about the 1928 campaign for the governorship. Since I had started to work in the national office, Franklin felt I was obligated to continue there, and that took the greater part of my time. I did go to hear him speak occasionally, and he made a complete campaign throughout the state. I think he did not expect to carry the state if Governor Smith lost the Presidency, and when we left the state headquarters at a late hour on election night we were still uncertain of the outcome. The next morning, when the final figures were in, my husband was governor-elect by a very narrow margin. He had a feeling that it was a great tribute to have been elected while Governor Smith, who had such a large following in the state, had been defeated.

On that election night I visited the national as well as the state campaign headquarters, and I thought that Governor Smith accepted his defeat very gallantly. It must have been hard for him to have Franklin elected while he himself was defeated, but he never showed it in any way. He went back to work in the state and on January 1, 1929, he received us when we went to Albany.

Many people have suggested to me that when Governor Smith asked my husband to run for the governorship, while he himself was running for the Presidency, he had it in mind that he would still be able to direct the work of the governor.

One of the ways in which he undoubtedly expected to keep his hold on the state government was through Mrs. Belle Moskowitz. He suggested a number of times to my husband that she would be invaluable to him, and each time Franklin replied that while he had great respect for Mrs. Moskowitz’s ability and knew what her advice and help had meant to Governor Smith, he felt it would be unwise for him to retain her in his own close administrative circle. He thought it impossible for anyone to transfer loyalty after working so long and so closely with someone else.

Governor Smith had asked Franklin to nominate him for the Presidency and to run on the state ticket as governor because Franklin would bring him needed strength. However, I think that Governor Smith did not have much confidence in the Harvard man who had a different kind of education and who cared about many things which meant little or nothing to Governor Smith.

There are two kinds of snobbishness. One is that of the man who has had a good many opportunities and looks down on those who lack them. The other kind is rarely understood, that of the self-made man who glories in his success in overcoming difficulties and admires greatly people who have achieved the things he considers of importance. Governor Smith had a great deal of respect for material success, but he tended to look down upon a man like Franklin who was content not to make a great deal of money so long as he had enough to live comfortably.

In those days I think that in some ways I understood Governor Smith better than Franklin did, because during my intensive work with the Democratic State Committee, while Franklin was ill, I had had more opportunity to observe him from different points of view. While he and Franklin had known each other for a long time, they were never really intimate. Franklin thought only of his ability as an administrator, as a campaigner, as a statesman and as a governor, and he had the greatest admiration for his knowledge of government.

I agreed that he had an extraordinary flair for government and that his memory and his knowledge of New York State were phenomenal. Indeed, I believed in him and considered him a great man in many ways, and I worked for him. I thought that had he been elected president, he would have chosen his Cabinet well, even though his knowledge of the country as a whole was slight and his advisers in the state knew little of the nation. However, I never felt he could have handled our foreign relations or gauged what was happening in the world. Also, I thought him less of a humanitarian than most people did, crediting Mrs. Moskowitz with the social welfare plans for which he was generally acclaimed, and which he carried out, I thought, largely because he knew they were politically wise.

It was natural for him to feel that he was responsible for Franklin’s success in politics, since he had urged my husband to run for governor. Franklin himself, however, felt the request to run had been made to help Governor Smith, and it was on that basis and that basis alone that the appeal had been considered.

In many ways Governor Smith did not know my husband. One of Franklin’s main qualities was that he never assumed any responsibility that he did not intend to carry through. It never occurred to him that he was not going to be the governor of New York with all the responsibility and work that position carried. That ended the close relationship between my husband and Governor Smith, though there was no open break, so far as I ever knew.

Franklin had some clear ideas about state government. He studied the reorganization plans that had been initiated under Governor Smith and he approved practically everything that he had done. Franklin’s attitude toward the objectives that later were developed on a national scale were apparent in his approach to questions in the state. For instance, he pushed old-age pensions.

As governor, Franklin also showed his interest in labor and his belief in labor’s rights. He felt that workers should receive the same consideration that management’s rights received; and when times became hard, the theory that government had a responsibility toward the people was incorporated in the state policies. Franklin had been accused of giving labor too much power, but his effort was simply to equalize the power of labor and capital. As a close student of history, he knew how great and unhampered capital’s power had been during some previous administrations.

His particular personal interest was in soil conservation and forestry. However, his interest in the development of water power, in the Indian problem, transportation, education, and finally in relief and general welfare was also stimulated by his experience as the administrator of a state. All these objectives, as well as his understanding of them, were expanded during the presidential years. And because he had traveled so extensively even before he was president, he knew how different the problems were in different areas of the country. All this was excellent preparation for the years ahead.

Once back in public affairs, Franklin’s political interests and ambitions reawakened. When he found he could again play an active part in politics he took a satisfaction in the purely political side of the struggle, in achieving new office. It is hard to dissociate his ambition and enjoyment of the science of politics for its own sake from his desire to achieve through political action real gains for the people, first of the state, then of the nation, and finally of the world. The objectives grew as circumstances developed the need for them and the horizons broadened as time went on and we, as a nation, were swept into a position where the world was depending on us.

In Albany he had the experience of working with legislative groups in which his political party was in a minority. Later, in Washington, I often wished that it were possible for him to carry out with the Democratic representatives there the kind of educational work he had done in Albany. There were occasional meetings when all the legislation backed by the administration was talked over and explained and the entire campaign mapped out. My husband always said the group in Congress was too large and he did not see how it was possible to hold the same type of meeting.

The years in Albany cast their shadow before them. Frances Perkins was in the New York State Labor Department, Harry Hopkins was doing a job on relief and welfare, Dr. Thomas Parran was commissioner of public health, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was conservation commissioner. Many experiments that were later to be incorporated into a national program were being tried out in the state. It was part of Franklin’s political philosophy that the great benefit to be derived from having forty-eight states was the possibility of experimenting on a small scale to see how a program worked before trying it out nationally.

My own life during those governorship years was a full one. In my teaching I really had for the first time a job that I did not wish to give up. This led to my planning to spend a few days every week in New York City, except during the school vacations.

My husband, who loved being on the water, found that the state of New York had a small boat used by state officials for canal travel on inspection trips. He decided to use it himself during the summers for the same purpose. During the day we would leave the boat and visit various state institutions. This was valuable training for me. I had paid occasional visits to state prisons, insane asylums or state hospitals for crippled children, but never with the intention of looking into the actual running of any institution or gauging its good and bad points.

The head of the institution that we were visiting usually got into the car with my husband and drove around the grounds, pointing out what new buildings were needed and where they should be built. In this way Franklin gained a personal knowledge of the exterior of the institution which helped him when he met with the legislative appropriations committee.

Walking was so difficult for him that he could not go inside an institution and get a real idea of how it was being run from the point of view of overcrowding, staff, food, and medical care. I was asked to take over this part of the inspection, and at first my reports were highly unsatisfactory to him. I would tell him what was on the menu for the day and he would ask: “Did you look to see whether the inmates were actually getting that food?” I learned to look into the cooking pots on the stove and to find out if the contents corresponded to the menu. I learned to notice whether the beds were too close together, and whether they were folded up and put in closets or behind doors during the day, which would indicate that they filled the corridors at night! I learned to watch the patients’ attitude toward the staff, and before the end of our years in Albany I had become a fairly expert reporter on state institutions.

In the summer of 1929 we made an inspection trip on the canal which eventually brought us out to a point from which Franklin went down the St. Lawrence River to discuss the St. Lawrence Waterway with Canadian and United States officials.

That summer, with the two younger boys, I went to Europe. My husband had particularly wanted me to show them the fronts over which our men had fought in World War I, Quentin Roosevelt’s grave, and some of the cemeteries. I had already pointed out to them in the little villages of England the monuments to the men who had been killed in that war. The cemeteries, with their rows and rows of crosses, made an impression on the boys, but they were, of course, unable to gather the significance of the new buildings in the old French villages and towns. To young Americans, new buildings were not strange, and while I was impressed by the way nature had covered her scars in the woods and fields, I pointed out to the boys the whitened stumps and the fact that the trees were young, showing that whole forests had been mowed down just a few years ago. In the fields I pointed out the ditches, which had been dug by soldiers for protection, and the curious holes made by bursting shells, now covered with grass.

My older son said to me one day: “This is a funny country. There are only boys our age and old men coming out of the fields. There don’t seem to be any men of father’s age.” That was simply another proof that the war had taken from France a heavy toll of her young men from 1914 to 1918.

This same sense of the loss of a generation came to me vividly at the first organizational meeting of the United Nations in London, in 1946. So many of the Europeans were older men who had made the effort with the League of Nations and were doubtful about a second international effort to keep the world at peace. The loss of a generation makes itself felt acutely twenty to thirty-five years later, when many men who would have been leaders are not there to lead.

Back in Albany, I became immediately submerged again in the busy routine of my life as mother, governor’s wife and teacher, and there were few breaks until the state campaign of 1930. That was an easy campaign, and it was a satisfaction to all of Franklin’s supporters that he won the largest vote cast for any Democrat up to that time in a gubernatorial election. This circumstance had the double advantage of making Franklin strong in the state and strong as a potential candidate for the Presidency. This prospect did not interest me particularly but it did interest his political supporters.

During his terms as governor of New York he attended many of the Governors’ Conferences, because he felt that they were important. Whenever possible he wanted the advantage of contact with other governors for the discussion of problems. Sometimes I went with him. I remember particularly one of the last Governors’ Conferences, at which President Hoover started to make an address. The wind blew away his papers and he was so completely dependent on them that he had to break off his speech.

In the course of that conference, which was at Richmond, Virginia, all the governors were invited to dine at the White House. My husband was already considered one of the strongest possible candidates for the Democratic nomination for president. I was familiar with the way in which guests had to stand in the East Room at a state dinner before they were received by the President and his wife, so I was worried about Franklin, who had to have somebody’s arm and a cane. In addition, he became tired if he stood without support for any length of time.