Eleanor and Franklin (107 page)

She and Franklin had suffered so greatly from Sara's efforts to run their lives that they leaned over backward not to do the same with their children. They were unhappy when their children married too young and divorced too easily, but beyond being available to them for counsel and understanding when their private lives ran into difficulties, they resisted the impulse to interfere. Eleanor was more accessible than Franklin, for he, in addition to being tied down by his presidential duties, found it difficult to talk about intimate matters. Never once did either parent, although the children's divorces were a source of political embarrassment, advance political considerations as a reason for their not doing what they felt they had to do. The president said that “he thought a man in politics stood or fell by the results of his policies,” Eleanor wrote; “that what their children did or did not do affected their lives, and that he did not consider that their lives should be tied to his political interests.”
¹⁶

Unlike Sara, Eleanor could not tell others what was right and what was wrong, since so often she was not sure herself. “Even if there were what the World calls sin,” she replied to a woman who had written to criticize the Roosevelt children's divorces.

I think we should remember that the Christian religion is patterned on the life of Christ, and that Christ showed in many of his actions that he believed one should judge not so much by what people had done but by the motives and a complete knowledge of the situation. Few people ever have that about other human beings. That knowledge is given only to the Lord.
¹⁷

She found it difficult to condemn divorce if behind the decision to do so there had been careful consideration and a genuine effort to make the marriage work. She thought the real culprit in most divorces was incompatibility: “Incompatibility of temper sounds like a trivial cause for divorce and yet I am not sure that it is not the most frequent cause. It is responsible for quarrels over money, and it drives husbands and wives away from each other to other interests and other people and brings about the most serious acts for which divorce is usually granted.” For that reason she thought people should be able to separate legally without moral stigma:

Naturally, the people who, like the Catholics, believe that marriage is consummated in Heaven, are not going to agree on this point, but I think people can be made far more unhappy if they find they have developed different standards and different likes and dislikes, than they sometimes are by really very serious things. It does not seem to me necessary to brand everyone who gets a divorce with something as serious as adultery or desertion, when frequently it is a case of different development and different opportunities for development.
¹⁸

Eleanor rejoiced in the marriage of Anna and John because she felt they had not gone into their second marriage in any lightness of spirit. Both had profited by the sufferings and mistakes of their first marriages and now were drawn together by shared values and interests and by temperaments that were attuned to each other.

She no longer felt that a marriage should be preserved for the sake of the children. She deplored divorce, she wrote, “but never for a minute would I advocate that people who no longer love each other should live together because it does not bring the right atmosphere into a home.” It was very sad when a couple was unable to make a success of marriage, “but I feel it is equally unwise for people to bring up children in homes where love no longer exists.” Such views did not sit well with the church.

I am afraid I cannot claim to be a very good churchwoman. In fact, when I was tendered the
Churchman's
Award this year for promoting goodwill among certain groups, I carefully explained that while my husband was a good churchman, I was not particularly orthodox. I have a religion but it does not depend especially upon any creed or church.
¹⁹

There was another reason why she hesitated to judge her children critically: being the children of public figures, especially of a president, they were at all times in the pitiless spotlight of publicity, so that every misstep or case of bad judgment became the subject of headlines, the slightest scrape was blown out of all proportions, the most improbable tale given the widest currency. “It seems so futile,” she wrote a woman in Jamesport, Missouri, “to answer such foolish statements. . . . However, I assure you that I have never seen any of my boys dance with a nude woman.”
²⁰

“Incidentally, both our younger boys in college are having a very bad time as the sons of a man in public life,” she wrote her Allenswood schoolmate, “Bennett.” “It is not so easy . . . unless you never do anything or unless you have a Secret Service man with them all the time. Neither of these seems to go with the temperament of these two young things.”
²¹

The children resented the publicity. Franklin Jr. wanted to know why he should make headlines for actions which passed unnoticed when the Joneses or Smiths did them. His mother's reply that being the son of a president carried advantages as well as drawbacks, privileges as well as responsibilities never quite satisfied him. Franklin Jr., or “Brud” as he was called in the family, was a speed demon who held the unofficial Harvard-to-New-York record and was often stopped for speeding. “Will you speak seriously & firmly to F. Jr. & John about drinking & fast driving?” Eleanor begged her husband. “I really think it's important.” Neither of the boys had any memory of their father having done so.
²²

“Father had great difficulty in talking about anything purely personal or private,” Franklin Jr. recalled, “especially if it involved anything unpleasant. He left that to Mother.” On one occasion, at Eleanor's insistence, Franklin finally agreed to speak sternly to “Brud” about his fast driving, but, Franklin Jr. recalled, his father “couldn't even bring himself to summon me to his little office on the porch of the Big House. It was Mother who had to say ‘Your father wants to see you.'” When Franklin Jr. went in, his father hemmed and hawed and finally said, “‘Your Mother tells me I must ask you to give me your license until you have learned your lesson.' He put it all on Mother. That was a basic trait with him. He couldn't fire anyone. I'm the same way. I hate an unpleasant showdown with anyone.”
²³

Bad as the publicity was, it was equally injurious when officials excused offenses for which a Smith or a Jones would have been penalized. On one occasion when Franklin Jr. was picked up for speeding, instead of fining him the judge took him home for dinner.
*
“Father was simply furious,” Eleanor recalled. Her children, wrote Eleanor, were “five individualists who were given too many privileges on the one hand and too much criticism on the other.”
²⁴

While Johnny was in Cannes in 1937 for the annual festival which
ended in a “battle of flowers,” he made international headlines when he was accused of having emptied a bottle of champagne in the mayor's plug hat. He denied the story, and William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, backed up his account. His parents believed the denial, and Eleanor was at the boat to meet him on his return:

If it had been one of my other boys I would have felt the incident was more than probable, for they have great exuberance of spirit. It just happens that John is extremely quiet, and, even if he had been under the influence of champagne, I doubt if he would have reacted in this manner.
²⁵

But these episodes of publicity were minor compared to the steady attack on the older children on the grounds that they were trading on their father's position in order to make money and win favors for their associates. The children felt that the reverse was true—that government officials bent over backward when Roosevelts were involved in order to avoid the suspicion of favoritism. This was Elliott's complaint to his mother when she visited him in Texas. “He is dreadfully upset,” Eleanor wrote her husband,

that no decision is given on Ruth's station & says that it is hurting him in getting the management of stations he sells for everyone thinks the Com. [Federal Communications Commission] will give no decisions on stations if his name is connected with them. It does seem as tho' they had had ample time to make up their minds. Couldn't you or James say a word which w
^1d
hurry them? You know Elliott's disposition, he is beginning to think you are both agin' him.
²⁶

Despite this plea, according to James, who was at this time one of his father's principal secretaries, he and his father stayed out of it, and in time the FCC licensed the stations that Elliott sought in the name of his wife. Elliott was an able executive, but whether the FCC would have granted the licenses if his name had not been Roosevelt is a question to which no determinate answer is possible. But even if the commission had been influenced by the Roosevelt connection, was that so different from the advantages that all children reap who bear illustrious names?

James, particularly, had trouble over the nepotism issue. In late 1930, while he was still in law school, he teamed up with an insurance broker who offered him fifty dollars a week for part-time work. Although Louis Howe reported favorably on James' prospective employer and Eleanor wrote delightedly “James has got a job!,” James said his father “was fit to be tied.” Roosevelt cautioned James against allowing his name to be used to elicit political business and said that when he saw him he would explain “some of the reasons for the great willingness of some people to be awfully nice to you.” James tried to avoid soliciting political business, but in his disarming memoir,
Affectionately, F.D.R.
, he acknowledged that the line sometimes was pretty close. “Possibly I should have been sufficiently mature and considerate enough of Father's position to have withdrawn from the insurance business entirely. But I was young, ambitious, spoiled—in the sense of having been conditioned to require a good deal of spending money—so I went right ahead in pursuit of what seemed to me the easiest solution.”
²⁷

The issue arose in acute form when the president asked James to become one of his secretaries after Louis' death. Eleanor objected strongly and told Franklin he was being selfish. She also tried to talk to her son, telling him that she felt the appointment would draw down an unceasing political drumfire. “Why should I be deprived of my eldest son's help and of the pleasure of having him with me just because I am the President?” was Franklin's reply. Eleanor proved to be right and James was cartooned as “Crown Prince” and chivvied as “Assistant President.” The attacks culminated in a
Saturday Evening Post
story by Alva Johnston entitled “Jimmy's Got It” in which it was insinuated that James' income from his insurance business and government connections ranged from $250,000 to $2 million a year. Eleanor was so angered by the Johnston piece that she wanted to answer it herself, but her husband dissuaded her. Instead, James submitted to questioning by Walter Davenport of
Colliers
, to whom he turned over his income-tax returns from 1933 to 1937. These showed that his income ranged from $21,714.31 in 1933 to $23,834.38 in 1937, reaching its highest point in 1941 with an income of $49,167.37.

“One of the worst things in the world,” exclaimed the president to James' assistant, James H. Rowe, Jr., in a rare display of personal feeling, “is being the child of a President! It's a terrible life they lead!”
²⁸

Deeply devoted to his children yet preoccupied with public business, Franklin was less available to them than most fathers are to their
offspring. He tried to make up for it by having at least one of them with him if it did not interfere with other things they ought to be doing, and one or two were always along when he traveled around the country on the presidential special or went for a cruise on a Navy vessel. “It was grand to have a couple of days wtih Anna and her family,” Eleanor wrote Josephus Daniels in Mexico City, and then added poignantly, “and the President had one whole day in which he could be just a father and grandfather with no official duties.”
²⁹

But she nevertheless felt that he should have devoted more attention to his children's problems. “Mother was very hard on Father for not doing so,” Anna said.

Mother could go tearing off to be with the boys in their crises. Father had to wait until the boys came to him and he was a very busy guy. He settled these things in his own way and it may not have been the perfect way. When I was sick Mother dashed out to spend Christmas with us in Seattle. I felt embarrassed. I felt Mother should have been at the White House. I had a husband and Mother should not have been with me.
³⁰

The attacks on James helped to break down his health, and by the middle of 1938 his stomach ulcers became so painful that, accompanied by Eleanor, he went out to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

A decision was made to operate in September, and after six weeks of following the regimen prescribed by the doctors, James returned to Rochester, again accompanied by Eleanor. “The family as a whole seemed to feel that while he would probably be here only for a day still it would be a good idea for someone to go with him to make sure that he told us all the truth about what the doctors had to say!” Instead of allowing him to go home, the doctors reported that his illness was critical and recommended immediate major surgery. On September 11 Eleanor reported, “The President has arrived and shortly the operation for which the doctors have been preparing James will take place. I dislike operations!” She described the day of the operation in her next day's column:

As I said before, I dislike operations! Like many other disagreeable things, however, they bring out the best that is in people. . . . Jimmy's operation seemed to take a long time yesterday and when the young doctor who operated finally came to report to
my husband, he looked as though he had been through quite an ordeal. . . .