Eleanor and Franklin (20 page)

It was Pussie who came to London to accompany Eleanor on her return to America. The voyage was emotionally exhausting. Pussie, in the throes of a romantic crisis about a man she had met in London, was full of tears and avowals that she was going to jump overboard. It was a bad beginning of an unhappy summer, whose only bright note was a visit to Farmington, Connecticut, where Auntie Bye had recently moved. Eleanor helped her aunt get settled, and in the guest book next to her name she wrote “the laborer is worthy of his hire.” She was thrown together with Pussie again in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where Pussie was staying with Mrs. Ludlow and Eleanor with Mrs. Ludlow's daughter, her cousin Susie.

Something Eleanor said nettled Pussie. Because she had taken Pussie's threats to jump overboard seriously, Eleanor may have expressed surprise at the speed with which Pussie became involved in a new romantic interest in Maine. Whatever the provocation, Pussie retaliated with gibes intended to hurt Eleanor where she was most vulnerable. She ridiculed Eleanor's appearance, reviving her mother's lament that she was the ugly duckling among all the beautiful Hall women; no men would ever be interested in her, Pussie taunted. But
Eleanor, long reconciled to her plain looks, could not be provoked, so Pussie thrust more savagely. Who was she to talk self-righteously in view of her father's behavior? She hysterically told Eleanor about her father's last years and of the grief and shame his behavior had caused her mother and all the family. Distraught and shattered, Eleanor ran to her grandmother for consolation and denial, whereupon she was told that Elliott
had
ruined her mother's life.

Eleanor was thrown into despair, and wanted only to get back to Allenswood and Mlle. Souvestre. Her grandmother hesitated, but Eleanor's determination and entreaties finally prevailed and Mrs. Hall agreed to let her return for a third year if she could find a chaperone for the voyage. Eleanor went to New York and on her own engaged a “deaconess” through an employment agency to accompany her. With the help of her aunts, she bought her first tailor-made suit with an oxford-gray skirt that fashionably trailed the ground. Accompanied by the respectable-looking deaconess and dressed modishly, she turned away from that unhappy summer and returned to the peace of Allenswood.

It is a measure of how much she had grown in self-assurance that her encounter with Pussie did not cause her to withdraw into feeling unloved except by a father who was dead. Instead, her last year at Allenswood strengthened her leadership qualities.

She was happy and contented, yet she also “knew the sadness of things,” a sadness that shadowed even her moments of greatest joy and achievement. She could not abandon herself to frivolity and merriment like other young people. Mlle. Souvestre later talked with Corinne about “Totty,” and after enumerating her virtues “would throw up her hands and add ‘mais elle n'est pas gaie.'” “She took a serious view of life,” Helen Gifford recalled, “and once confided to me that all she wished for was to do something useful: that was her main object.”
¹⁷

Because her mother had bred in her an ineradicable sense of inferiority and plainness, Eleanor felt that she could never count on beauty in gaining people's affection—only helpfulness. “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced,” she later wrote. Happiness, she reasoned in an essay she wrote for Mlle. Souvestre, lay in what one did for others rather than in what one sought for oneself.

There is no more fleeting notion than that of happiness. Certain people seem to find happiness in a thoroughly egoistic life. Can we believe however that those socialites who look as if they were
enjoying happiness in the bustle of worldly pleasures are actually happy? We don't believe so, for the pleasures of the world are precarious, and there must be moments, even in the gayest and most brilliant life, when one feels sad and lonely in the midst of a frivolous crowd where one cannot find a single friend.

On the other hand, it often happens that those whose existence seems saddest and dullest are in fact the happiest. For instance you sometimes meet a woman who sacrifices her own life for the sake of other people's happiness and is happy nevertheless because she finds in her devotion the best remedy against sadness and boredom. . . .

If no life is without sadness, none is without happiness either, for in the saddest life there are moments of happiness, sometimes produced by comparing the present peace of mind with past sufferings.

Most of all, those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it for those who are busy searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

Eleanor wanted to return for a fourth year, but her grandmother insisted that she come home and be introduced into society since she would be eighteen in October.

“The more I know her the more I see what a helpful and devoted grandchild she will be to you,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote to Mrs. Hall at the beginning of 1902, adding, “Ah! to me! What a blank her going away must leave in my life!” And in her final report in July she said, “Elinor [
sic
] has had the most admirable influence on the school and gained the affection of many, the respect of all. To me personally I feel I lose a dear friend indeed.”

As for Eleanor, she wrote in an exercise that described Allenswood to an interested parent, “I have spent three years here which have certainly been the happiest years of my life.”

 

*
A fictional account of the crisis at Les Ruches and a vivid portrait of Mlle. Souvestre are to be found in
Olivia
by “Olivia” (1949).
Olivia
was the pseudonym of Dorothy Strachey-Bussy, the sister of Lytton Strachey who was a pupil at Les Ruches and a teacher at Allenswood when Eleanor was there.

9.
YOUNG IN A YOUNG COUNTRY IN A YOUNG TIME

E
LEANOR WAS ALMOST EIGHTEEN WHEN SHE RETURNED TO THE
United States in the early summer of 1902. There was a lively perception in her eyes, her face was sensitive and intelligent, and although she was tall, her movements were quick and graceful—like those of a colt, someone said. Full of dreams and hopes, her sky-reaching mood matched that of the country. Reform was in the air. The century was young, and the United States, raucous and self-confident, was responsive to the prophecies of Eleanor's uncle, its most youthful president, that this was destined to be an American and, therefore, a better century. The nation was ready to embark on “a new quest for social justice,” historian Harold U. Faulkner wrote, and Roosevelt “instinctively . . . responded to the widespread desires for a better civilization and, rushing to the head of the movement, he rose to unprecedented heights of popularity as the reform wave surged onward.”
¹

Radiant, full of optimism, Theodore Roosevelt delighted in the presidency, and the nation was infected with his enjoyment of the office. For the first time not only was a president's policy always on stage, but so was his personality—the warming smile, the outsize teeth, the striking phrase sometimes uttered with a screech, the explosive laugh. Never before had the private lives of the president and his family been so fully and continuously reported. The country adored reading about his dash with children and friends down Cooper's Bluff, his wandering off into the meadows to read an afternoon away, or such greetings to Alice's friends as “Children, come with me—I'll teach you how to walk on stilts.”
²
Alice, now dubbed “Princess,” was on the front page almost as often as her father, and he, even in his Harvard days, had been, one professor complained, “a great lime-lighter.” He now used his showman instincts to promote his public purposes. “On the whole,” William James wrote in 1902, “I have rejoiced in Roosevelt so far.”
³
His use of the word “rejoiced” caught precisely the national mood of sheer pleasure in its young president. The nation
was enchanted, and so was Eleanor, who, soon after her return, made the rounds of her Oyster Bay kin—Auntie Bye and Auntie Corinne, Uncle Gracie and Uncle Ted.

The advance of technology and the resultant new domestic comforts bolstered the sense that the new century would be a better one. “How wonderful the telephone is and how I should miss it at Hyde Park,” Mrs. James Roosevelt noted in her journal. Eleanor's family was replacing coal stoves with gas, and kerosene lamps and gas jets with electricity. They were using automobiles as a means of transportation, not only as playthings. When Alice and another girl motored alone “all the way from Newport to Boston” that summer, the newspapers hailed the journey as representing progress in travel by motor, while their families lamented the shift in moral standards among the young implied by the absence of a chaperone.

New York, too, was changing from the quiet city Eleanor had known as a child. It was now Greater New York, a teeming metropolis of 3.5 million people, and the population was still surging upward as immigration, almost wholly from eastern and southeastern Europe, approached a million a year. “More money,” the city departments cried. The budget would soon pass the hundred million mark, the editorials warned, while Fusion Mayor Seth Low bewailed the unreasonable limitations that Albany placed upon the city's borrowing powers.

It was a divided city. Jacob Riis had called his book on the subject, published in 1890,
How the Other Half Lives
. A decade later the split was deeper. There was the New York of Eleanor's family and friends, whose resplendent homes along Fifth Avenue now stretched from Washington Square to the upper Eighties. Concentration of wealth was “the outstanding feature of American economic life” in the new century, and on Fifth Avenue it was reflected in the French châteaux, Rhine castles, and Italian Renaissance mansions that replaced the old brownstones.

The other face of New York was the huddle of East Side slums, where two thirds of the city lived in 90,000 tenements, most of them of the gloomy “dumbbell” type in which ten out of the fourteen rooms on a floor were windowless. The male head of the household earned $600 a year, for which he worked a ten-hour day, six days a week. Children and women were “sweated.”

These were the ugly realities raising portentous thunderheads over the glitter and elegance of Fifth Avenue when Eleanor returned. But the omens, if more menacing, were not new; what was new were the
reforming impulses that could be felt everywhere, especially among women, whose position was changing. The women's rights movement had made enormous strides since 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton had launched it. When she died, just as Eleanor returned, she was no longer a figure of mockery, and some even called her “the greatest woman the world has ever produced.” Even Theodore Roosevelt, who was not yet a convert to women's suffrage, called her death a loss to the nation.

By the opening of the new century, American women had broken out of their traditional sphere.

When I read in the papers and heard in the Club that a dozen women of great wealth were standing along Broadway handing bills and encouragement to the girl shirtwaist strikers of last winter, I was not a bit surprised. Nowadays I can hardly go to a reception or a ball without being buttonholed by somebody and led into a corner to be told about some new reform. It is perfectly amazing, this plague of reform, in its variety, in its volume and in the intensity of earnestness with which it is being pushed.
⁴

Some well-born women went further. Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenged members of her sex to seek “economic independence” and to use their economic power for social reform, not simply to salve their consciences by charitable donations. When Professor Vida Scudder of Wellesley advocated “a new Franciscanism” and appealed to students to go into the slums and staff the growing settlement-house movement, a few New York debutantes responded. Mary Harriman and Nathalie Henderson enrolled in Barnard to study economics and sociology and then launched the Junior League, one of whose purposes was to assist the settlements.
⁵

Eleanor returned to the United States feeling that she was on the threshold of life, ready to be swept up by such an undertaking. After three years under Mlle. Souvestre's influence, she was open to the reforming currents that were in the air, and she wanted to go on with her education.

But society decreed that at eighteen, young girls who “belonged” came out. The debut was a tribal ritual, “the great test,” the society columns cruelly proclaimed, of a young girl's social talents.
⁶
The approaching rites filled Eleanor with dread, but it never occurred to her not to comply—a resolve that worried Mlle. Souvestre. Her letters
cautioned Eleanor against permitting society to “take you and drag you into its turmoil. Protect yourself,” she urged.

Give some of your energy, but not all, to worldly pleasures which are going to beckon to you. And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after-women at a ball or the woman best liked by your neighbor at the table, at luncheons and the various fashionable affairs.
⁷