Eleanor and Franklin (111 page)

Once a friend saw Eleanor go over and kiss Missy good night. “I thought to myself—how could she?” It required great strength and self-control for Eleanor to treat Missy with such warmth and friendliness. It was difficult for Missy, too. Fulton Oursler glimpsed that side of it. He ran the Macfadden publications, including
Liberty,
for which both Franklin and Eleanor had often written. Oursler's introduction to the Roosevelt household in the Albany days had been through Eleanor, but he found her too serious and high-minded. It was easier to relax with Missy, and by the mid-thirties the Ourslers were taking Missy to the races and she even considered summering near them on the Cape.

Oursler came down for dinner in May, 1935. It was a hot day. Since the president was off fishing and not expected back until dinner time, Missy invited Oursler up to the president's study for a drink. Then the president arrived and insisted on mixing the drinks. Mrs. Roosevelt was nowhere about, and in response to Oursler's inquiry the president remarked that he did not know where she was that night. Oursler was struck by the way he said it, and found it equally extraordinary that
his only companion should be Missy. That evening Missy was hostess, “and she presided with a queenly dignity as a substitute for the apparently unmentionable First Lady of the Land,” an evening, added Oursler, when it seemed to him that “everyone at the table wanted the President to have a good time.” He was impressed with Missy's devotion. “She was young and attractive, and should have been off somewhere cool and gay on a happy weekend. Yet month after month and year after year she gave up date after date . . . here she sat with him knitting,” keeping company with a very lonely man.
³⁵

Oursler again sensed the tangled relationship between Eleanor and Franklin and Missy during an overnight visit in January, 1938. It was the night of the reception for the judiciary, one of the season's more formal entertainments, and, as soon as they could, Missy and the Ourslers slipped away to have a drink upstairs. After a while Missy put in a call for the president. As she anticipated, he, too, had left the reception and was alone in his oval study. Why didn't they join him? he asked. They did and the president was in the middle of expressing his pleasure with Emil Ludwig's biography of him, which Oursler had commissioned for
Liberty,
when Eleanor, according to Oursler, came in “without any knocking.” She declined an offer of beer but readily expressed herself on the Ludwig biography. It interested her because it gave a European point of view on the president, but it was inaccurate.
*
They moved into a discussion of public figures, and it became evident that Eleanor was partial to her Uncle Theodore. And while Franklin found this irritating, Oursler offered to publish an article by Eleanor on that theme. She would consider it, she said. Then she looked at the beer and asked, “Are my friends included in this?” and when Franklin said no, Eleanor left. The Ourslers, Missy, and the president then settled in for a long, relaxed talk. The president, in a genial mood, spoke freely about men and affairs of state that were then in the headlines, and the Ourslers found the talk exhilarating. After they bid good night to the president, Missy walked with them to their room. She, too, was exultant. “The President was never so
frank before,” she told them, and it was to her friends, Oursler noted in his journal, adding, “We feel we are part of a much darker quarrel which we can only guess about.”
³⁶

Only rarely did Eleanor betray her feelings as she did in her thrust in front of the Ourslers about her Uncle Theodore. It was meant to gall, and Franklin's bristling response showed that it had reached home. Three days after that tension-filled episode, Oursler received a note from Eleanor, the “briefest” she had ever sent him: “I am sorry that I cannot write this article, but feel it would be in bad taste for me to do it.”
³⁷

Eleanor's open expression of admiration for Theodore Roosevelt rankled Franklin because he was angry with most of the Oyster Bay kin, and Eleanor, too, regarded the Oyster Bay clan as the aggressors in the feud. “I am afraid Aunt Edith would not appreciate being mentioned in my column,” she wrote a mutual friend who had asked her to praise Aunt Edith's “grit, hanging on despite a broken hip.” “There is no love lost on that side of the family for this side of it.” It was Alice who turned the knife. She infuriated Franklin at White House parties when she became the rallying center for anti-New Deal raillery and wisecracks. She was under no obligation to come to White House parties if she thought them a bore, Eleanor informed her—at Franklin's instigation, Alice thought. When James suggested to his father that Cousin Alice be appointed to a vacancy on a certain commission, “his reply, which I shall censor somewhat, was: ‘I don't want anything to do with that woman!'”
³⁸

Eleanor, although she was more often the butt of Alice's barbs than Franklin, was more detached. She tried to keep politics from disrupting family ties, and when she was in Cincinnati for a lecture she lunched with Alice at the Longworth home. “It was strictly a family affair—we never allow politics to come between us,” Alice later told the press. “I always enjoy my cousin,” Eleanor wrote with an equability that must have annoyed her husband, “for while we may laugh at each other and quarrel with each other's ideas or beliefs, I rather imagine if real trouble came that we might be good allies. Fundamental Roosevelt characteristics gravitate towards each other in times of stress!” An irate Roosevelt loyalist tore this out and sent it to Eleanor along with a report of an Alice Longworth speech in which she accused Franklin of “buying his way to a third term with the W.P.A.” On the margin of the clipping the gentleman had written, “so she's your dear, gravitating to you Roosevelts, cousin?”
³⁹

Since the death of Louis Howe, Eleanor had seen many people become White House familiars and then disappear. Each had imagined he was indispensable to the president; all were surprised at their dispensability. The president used those who suited his purposes. He made up his own mind and discarded people when they no longer fulfilled a purpose of his, she said. She could never conceive of his doing a reckless thing for a friend, except for Louis Howe. Perhaps all presidents have to be this way. Reserve is indispensable to the presidency. Yet this reserve also reflected the side of her husband that she hated. She had to have contact with people she loved; it was her way of refreshing her spirit. Franklin seemed to have no such bonds to people—not even to his children, Eleanor once said. She could never get accustomed to what she saw as his lack of real attachment to people. After Missy's stroke, Eleanor went in to Franklin on Christmas Eve to ask whether he had called her. He had not, he told her, and was not planning to do so. Eleanor could not understand that. Even Missy once confessed to Fulton Oursler that the president “was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.”
⁴⁰

His father was a lonely man, James thought: “Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, Father talked with no one.” Eleanor believed this was by choice. He never expressed regrets about the life of a public man or said that he wished things could have been different: “He lived his own life exactly as he wanted it.”
⁴¹

And while she was hurt by Missy's role and often annoyed by the procession of young women vying for the president's favor, she blamed him more than the women. And she was sorry for Missy, too, was a victim of this fascinating man's concentration upon himself and his objectives.

And at moments when his preoccupations hurt her, Eleanor told herself she did not love him, that she was simply rendering him a service of love, that she did not like to be First Lady and if it had been within her power would have lived quite differently. On her wedding anniversary in 1918 she had written Sara a letter full of thanks for the interesting and happy life Franklin had given her. In 1935 Sara mentioned this letter to her biographer, Rita Halle Kleeman, who asked Eleanor if she could see it. Eleanor was unable to find it, she said.
⁴²
That was a measure of how differently she felt. Yet somewhere she still loved him; otherwise he would not have been able repeatedly to hurt her as he did. She loved him, for only a woman in love could have written as she did after one of his great electoral triumphs:

[undated]

The White House

Washington

Dearest Honey,

I haven't had a chance to say much to you but I want you to know that I feel this should be a happy day because you have done much for many people. Everyone has a happier feeling & you are doing a grand job. Just go on thinking of others & not of yourself & I think an undreamed of future may lie ahead for the masses of people not only here but everywhere.

Much love

E.R.

She not only loved but respected him and believed in his leadership. Franklin would sometimes say to his people in the White House, “My Missus wants me to do this, and I can't.” Fundamentally she accepted his judgment of what was politically impossible because she knew that he wanted the same things for the country that she did, and that when he said he could not push a particular program it was not for lack of caring but because Congress was opposed and the country unreceptive. Sometimes in despair over public apathy she would say to him that she wondered whether people were worth saving.

“Give people time, my dear,” he would comfort her. “It takes time to understand things. You are much too impatient and would never make a good politician.”

It was not a one-way relationship. She learned from him and under his tutelage became one of the most accomplished politicians of the time.

All during the White House years she would insist that whatever praise she received for her activities as First Lady came to her because she was the wife of the president. That was partly true humility, partly superb tact, partly a canny woman's recognition that the public considered such deference to one's husband seemly. But it was also her way of saying that she was doing all these things because of Franklin's position and not because she wanted to do them. Yet after his death she would go on with most of the public activities—the organizations, the dinners, the benefits, the travels, the inspections—in which she had engaged during the White House years. She would do so because she wanted to, and she would do it better because of what she had learned from him.

 

*
She and Ludwig had not hit it off too well. “I understand you are the person responsible for your husband's interest in the underdog” had been Ludwig's opening remark, and she had quickly replied, “I am not.” He had had a long talk with Mrs. Roosevelt, a skeptical Ludwig later told the Women's National Press Club, and found her “only too modest . . . she denies having influence.”

44.
A GATHERING STORM

I
N
1932
WHEN THE
N
ATIONAL
A
SSOCIATION FOR THE
A
DVANCEMENT
of Colored People sent questionnaires to Hoover and Roosevelt asking them to state their positions on various matters of urgent concern to Negroes, neither candidate replied personally, and if either party acknowledged the questionnaire, Walter White, the urbane but tenacious leader of the NAACP, did not consider the reply worthy of record.

He knew Eleanor Roosevelt only distantly at that time, but not long after the Roosevelts arrived in Washington word went around the Negro community that here was one person who considered them as human beings and whose sense of compassion and fairness embraced them. “I certainly believe that Mrs. Roosevelt likes colored people as her illustrious uncle did,” a Harlem editor told a Negro social worker with Democratic connections, “but I don't know that her famous husband does. The mere fact that he has not made a single big appointment of any kind among colored people is my reason to believe thus.” Eleanor underscored this part of the letter from Guilford N. Crawford, director of the Harlem Children's Fresh Air Fund, and sent it over to Franklin with “read” written next to it.
¹

Her efforts to bring the Negroes' plight to the attention of her husband and his cabinet colleagues—even some of the liberals among them—was a lonely enterprise. The Negro in the North, traditionally Republican, had voted for Hoover in 1932. The white South after its 1928 defection from Smith had rallied to the Roosevelt candidacy and was again solidly Democratic. Southern congressmen and senators controlled most of the committees in Congress which held the power of life or death over Roosevelt's legislative program. Even if Roosevelt were so minded, to support the legislative objectives of the Negro community meant to risk a break with his southern supporters. Nor was Roosevelt, when he first became president, driven by any commands of conscience to give such support. He had easily
accommodated himself to the segregationist folkways of the South at Warm Springs, which did not admit Negroes.
*
Two of his White House aides, Marvin H. McIntyre, his appointments secretary, and Stephen T. Early, his press secretary, were southerners. The president wanted to better the condition of the Negro, as of all disadvantaged groups, but he did not consider himself a second Emancipator. So Eleanor had to move warily if she was to have any influence with her husband or effectiveness in the country.