Eleanor and Franklin (23 page)

The league's key committee was the one that determined whether a merchant had complied with the league's standards. The Rivington Street headworker was on that committee, and Eleanor became involved in its activities.

Her first trip to check on conditions in department stores proved to be valueless. Did the women have stools to sit on behind the counters when they were not waiting on customers, she was asked afterward. She had not looked, she confessed; it had not occurred to her that perhaps they could never sit down and rest. “And if I had looked I would not have understood what it meant until someone else pointed out its meaning.” But she was a willing pupil, and the league asked her to investigate the sweatshops in which artificial feathers and flowers were being made.

I was appalled. In those days, these people often worked at home, and I felt I had no right to invade their private dwellings, to ask questions, to investigate conditions. I was frightened to death.

But this was what had been required of me and I wanted to be useful. I entered my first sweatshop and walked up the steps of my first tenement. . . . I saw little children of four or five sitting at tables until they dropped with fatigue. . . .
²⁴

She was finding a vocation and a role, and she applied herself with scrupulous diligence to the settlement tasks. Already her debutante friends were classing her with Mary Harriman and Nathalie Henderson, whom they regarded as “superior beings,” and even among her more frivolous debutante associates she was not an object of fun. Would-be scoffers were deterred by Eleanor's dignity and universal helpfulness. She did not have “social lightheartedness,” but girls liked to tell her their most intimate secrets because she gave everyone the feeling that she was interested in them, as indeed she was.

Among the young men, too, she had many admirers, including some whose interest was serious. But they had missed their chance. A young man who knew his mind had asked her for her hand, and she had become secretly engaged.

10.
“FOR LIFE, FOR DEATH”

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT
'
S MOST FATEFUL ACTION AS A GAY, CHARMING
, princely young man of twenty-one was to pick shy, somewhat plain Eleanor Roosevelt to be his wife. It showed remarkable perspicacity. We can only guess at his reasons; his courtship letters were burned—by Eleanor Roosevelt, probably in 1937 when she was writing the first volume of her autobiography and his youthful avowals of constancy unto death were perhaps too painful to reread. She said she burned them because they were too private. He preserved hers.

Franklin was a junior at Harvard when he encountered Eleanor after her return from Allenswood and began to see in her an appealing woman rather than interesting cousin. They had run into each other occasionally before she went abroad. At a Christmas party in 1898 at the West Orange country house of Eleanor's aunt, Corinne Robinson, a sixteen-year-old Franklin, then a Groton student, had asked an unhappy, pathetically dressed fourteen-year-old Eleanor to dance, for which she had been deeply grateful. But it had not been just cousinly chivalry. A few weeks before the Robinson party Franklin had written his parents, “How about Teddy Robinson and Eleanor Roosevelt? They would go well and help to fill out the chinks at a Hyde Park Christmas party.” It was about this time, too, that he was said to have remarked to his mother, “Cousin Eleanor has a very good mind.”
¹

Still, his interest in Eleanor was scarcely distinguishable from his lively awareness of a number of other teen-age girls, including Alice Roosevelt, with whom he exchanged a few teasing letters. And they did not correspond while Eleanor was at Allenswood, although both were already conscientious letter writers. But one day during the summer of Eleanor's return from finishing school, Franklin saw her on the train to Tivoli, hastened over, and took her to the car in which his mother was sitting. Eleanor remembered the occasion all her life. Sara, although her husband had died two years before, was still entirely in black, with a heavy veil that fell from her hat to the ground, as was
the custom for widows. Eleanor was held spellbound by her beauty, and the son was as handsome as the mother—tall, slender, with sloping shoulders. His nose, pinched at the bridge, gave him a patrician aspect; his eyes were a cool grayish-blue, arch and gay and jauntily self-confident. And Eleanor, however insecure she may have felt, was outwardly self-assured, clothed with the authority of three years abroad. Eleanor at seventeen, said Caroline Drayton, one of her contemporaries, was “dear [and] affectionate . . . simple [and] spontaneous.” She had a Gibson-girl figure, a pensive dignity, the charm of tenderness, and the sweetness of youth.

Franklin's interest was revived, and later that autumn when the social season was under way he came down from Harvard for some of the debutante parties. Although Eleanor nowhere mentioned his presence at the social affairs that were such “agony” to her, her name began to appear in his diary with increasing frequency. He noted that she was at the horse show, and two weeks later, when he was again in New York for Christine Roosevelt's dance, his diary read “Lunched with Eleanor.” And before he went to Hyde Park for Christmas he shopped with his mother until 3:30 but then slipped away for “tea with Eleanor.”

After Christmas week in Hyde Park and New York he, too, was invited to Washington for the New Year's festivities, and stayed with Mrs. Cowles. She was “Cousin Bamie” to him, and he was one of her favorites in the younger generation. He went to afternoon tea with Alice at the White House and noted in his diary that Eleanor was staying with Alice. At the New Year's Day reception, he and Eleanor stood in the “inner circle” and watched with fascination the thousands filing through the White House to shake hands with the president, who afterward went out for his customary canter “as fresh as a daisy,” according to the papers. They all dined with the president, and then “to theatre and sit near Eleanor.” “Very interesting day,” the young man commented in his diary.
²

A month later, Eleanor was among those his half brother Rosy invited to celebrate Franklin's twenty-first birthday, an affair that Franklin described as “very jolly!” At the end of the school year in June there was a house party at Hyde Park, and Eleanor's name began to appear in Sara Roosevelt's journal as well as in her son's diary. “Muriel [Robbins, Franklin's cousin, also called Moo], Eleanor and her maid, Franklin, Lathrop Brown and Jack Minturn came yesterday. Mary Edmund and young Hollister came to dine. Had singing after
dinner.”
³
They all walked to the river “in the rain,” Franklin recorded, dined with the Rogers, who were next-door neighbors, played tennis and blind man's bluff. It was a long week end. Eleanor arrived on Saturday, and Franklin took her to the train on Tuesday.

He then dashed back to Cambridge to pick up his diploma. He had obtained it in three years but planned to return to Harvard to do graduate work and, what was more important to him, to run the
Crimson
, of which he had been elected president. His degree in his pocket, he boarded the
Half Moon
, the family's sixty-foot schooner, in New Bedford, raced her off Newport and then sailed her back to Hyde Park. Again there was a house party which Eleanor, accompanied by the inevitable maid, attended, along with those whom Sara described as “my six young people.” They sailed, dined on board the
Half Moon
, went on a hay ride, took the cliff walk along the river. A week later Sara noted in her journal that everyone had had tea with Eleanor at Tivoli, but if she suspected that Franklin's interest in Eleanor was becoming serious, she said nothing, not even when, before going abroad July 24, he invited Eleanor to come to Campobello after he returned. She arrived on August 28, and on September 3 Sara noted, “Eleanor left at six with her maid. We took her to Eastport, on the
Half Moon
.” A more perceptive observation was made by Mrs. Hartman Kuhn of Boston, whose red-shingled, green-shuttered summer home was next to the Roosevelts' at Campobello. When Franklin and Eleanor announced their engagement fifteen months later, Mrs. Kuhn wrote Eleanor that she could not pretend to be surprised: “The first summer at Campo I saw most clearly how Franklin admired you. . . . ”

Few saw that that admiration was turning to love. Already Franklin was a man who masked his deepest feelings in debonair banter, preferring to gain his way by diplomacy and charm rather than by frontal assault. Indeed, many of his contemporaries belittled him as being all shining surface and artifice. Young Corinne Robinson taxed him with lacking conviction and laughingly called him “hypocrite” and “feather duster.”
⁴
His Oyster Bay female cousins did not consider him a great prize in the matrimonial sweepstakes. “He was the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance, but not the dinner,” said Alice; “a good little mother's boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who never was at the really gay parties.”
⁵
But this was said years later when envy and politics had sharply divided the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park clans.

Some of the Delanos had their own theory to explain Alice's spitefulness. “Alice was angry about Franklin's choosing Eleanor,” Franklin's cousin Laura Delano maintained. “That's always in the picture. She was angry because she didn't catch him.”
⁶
In the course of researching this book, when the author asked Mrs. Longworth about this, her expressive face registered incredulity, alarm, and horror, not wholly unmixed with interest, as if her very active mind were examining the story for all its possibilities. “I liked him, of course,” she finally said, but he was too “prissy,” too much of “a good little mother's boy” for her. And since she was not entirely persuaded that the interviewer believed these protestations, Mrs. Longworth told the
Washington Post
that she had “tape recorded her denial, so that future generations can hear in her own voice and words just how absurd she considers such a suggestion to be.”
⁷

No other contemporary of Eleanor, Alice, or Franklin confirmed Laura Delano's intriguing theory; on the contrary, everyone was skeptical of it, but they also disagreed with the Oyster Bay portrait of Franklin as a mollycoddled lightweight. “They exaggerate” was the dry comment of a contemporary who went to the same balls, attended the same football games, moved in the same social circles, and was Republican in her sympathies.
⁸
As an undergraduate, Franklin led a strenuous social life in Boston and New York and suffered from no lack of invitations to dinners as well as dances. His diary was sprinkled with the names of young ladies with whom he teased and flirted, and when the news of his engagement to Eleanor was disclosed more than one young female heart must have fluttered with regret. No, he could pick and choose, and his choice of Eleanor showed that beneath his surface gaiety there was seriousness and a life plan. “We used to say ‘poor Franklin,'” Alice Longworth acknowledged. “The joke was on us.”

While neither his mother nor his friends seemed to perceive the strength of his feeling for Eleanor, she, persuaded of her plainness, refused to believe it. He had stayed on at Campobello after she left, a good part of the time in the company of Evelyn Carter, daughter of the governor of Barbados, who made no secret of her interest in him. From Campo he went to Oyster Bay to stay with the Emlen Roosevelts; Alice Parker, an attractive debutante whom he had seen in London, was also a guest. And Miss Carter turned up again at Lenox while Franklin was visiting Mrs. Kuhn before returning to Hyde Park. But if these dalliances caused Eleanor to wonder about the young man's
intentions, she should have been reassured by her overnight stay at Hyde Park on her way back to Tivoli from Groton, where she had left Hall. Franklin took her on a long ride through the woods in the morning and in the afternoon on a drive in the dog cart. Their talk was intimate and relaxed. She told him of her worries about “the Kid,” as she called Hall, and he spoke of his plans for the
Crimson
and his indecision about whether to enroll in the law school or the graduate faculty. She must have sensed that he was eager to please her, for he left for Cambridge the next day, ushered at the football game, and then went immediately to Groton so that he could report to her that “the Kid” was getting on “finely” and was “much liked.” No matter how devoted he was to Groton, he hardly would have left Cambridge the week end that he was preparing, almost singlehandedly (since most of the staff was not yet back), to get out the first issue of the
Crimson
if the had not wished to impress the young lady in Tivoli with his thoughtfulness.

She, too, was interested, even to the point of being a little jealous, as her first letter to him after his return to Cambridge reveals, but she was also on guard for a rebuff.