Eleanor and Franklin (40 page)

The Wilson years in Washington thrust them on—Franklin toward national leadership, Eleanor toward wider sympathies and a radical independence.

Franklin had to learn the ropes of his new position, and so did Eleanor, whose job was to make things easier and pleasanter for him. But what were the duties of the wife of the assistant secretary? “When I see Eleanor,” Theodore wrote Franklin in congratulating him, “I shall say to her that I do hope she will be particularly nice to the naval officers' wives. They have a pretty hard time, with very little money to get along on, and yet a position to keep up, and everything that can properly be done to make things pleasant for them should be done.” Auntie Bye, the wife of an admiral and as knowledgeable in the ways of the Navy and the Capital as anyone, gave Eleanor similar advice. Mrs. Cowles also briefed her in the Washington ritual of calls.

As long ago as 1823 General Jackson had protested the practice—“There is nothing done here but visiting [
sic
] and carding each other—you know how much I was disgusted with those scenes when you and I were here, it has been increased instead of diminishing”
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—but in 1913 it was still a “sacred rite.” Ladies in white gloves, carrying cardcases, went forth daily on their appointed rounds, and none was more determined or conscientious than Eleanor: Mondays the wives of the justices of the Supreme Court, Tuesdays Congress, Thursdays Cabinet, Fridays diplomats. Wednesday would be the day she received, but she was sure no one would call on her.

A letter to Maude described her first weeks in Washington that spring.

I've paid 60 calls in Washington this week and been to a luncheon at the Marine barracks, the kind, where the curtains are drawn & candles lit & course after course reduces you to a state of coma which makes it almost impossible to struggle to your feet & leave at 4 P.M. I've received one long afternoon next to Mrs. Daniels until my feet ached and my voice was gone & since then I've done nothing but meet people I saw that day & try to make them think I remember them quite well! We've been out to dinner every night, last night a big Navy League affair for Mr. Daniels where there was some really good speaking. Mrs. Daniels is a dear & I'm looking forward to knowing her better. Mrs. Bryan is nice too though not so attractive, but some of the others are not so exciting.

Ten days later she was still at her calls. “I got here yesterday about 2 and started out at 3 to call on the Navy Yard people & the Justices' wives, about 20 calls in all and the same number almost everyday this week!”

As the wife of the assistant secretary she considered it her duty to master Navy protocol and ceremony, to keep her poise when the guns thundered out a seventeen-gun salute when her husband boarded a flag ship, and to shake hands only with the officers, not the enlisted men, as the Marine guard on the quarter deck presented arms. There were sterner tests of her self-command. The secretary invited members of the cabinet and their wives to join him and the assistant secretary in watching the Navy at target practice at Hampton Roads, “the most spectacular sight on sea or land,” he called it. The men went to the firing division and the women were brought aboard the
Rhode Island
, the battleship that was towing the target. The executive officer of the
Rhode Island,
Commander Yates Stirling, detailed an officer to each lady to explain anything she might wish to know. Lieutenant Emory Land was assigned to Eleanor.

As Eleanor recalled the day, the sea had been quite rough and she had begun to feel queasy. When the young officer asked her if she would like to climb the skeleton mast, she quickly agreed—anything to distract her from the way she was feeling would be a relief—and up the mast she went. It was a dizzying climb, but she got over her seasickness. The impression she made on the
Rhode Island
's officers was totally different.

She wanted to see all there was, and when I went to the wardroom, where all were assembled, she had donned a suit of dungarees, trousers and all, and Land was taking her up the mast to the top, an excellent place from which to witness the firing. None of the other women seemed willing to risk climbing the mast.
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Even in New York and Hyde Park there was no escape from her duties as the wife of the Navy Department's second-in-command. When the secretary did not require them, a 124-foot converted yacht, the
Sylph,
and an older but larger dispatch boat, the
Dolphin
, were at Franklin's disposal, and he made frequent use of them for trips down the Potomac and occasionally up the Hudson. He could also thumb rides on other ships. One time Eleanor asked Maude if she were going
to Tivoli, because “if so we want you to go up the River 8 A.M. Saturday with us on a destroyer.” When they moored off Hyde Park, Sara went on board with Anna and James, and fifty sailors came up to the house for ice cream.

Life at Campobello was also considerably changed as a result of Franklin's new position. Not only did Eleanor see even less of him, but he was as likely as not to bring a large naval vessel along when he was able to get away from Washington. The first time this happened was when Franklin ordered one of the fleet's most powerful ships, the
North Dakota,
to anchor off Eastport on the Fourth of July week end of 1913. The job of entertaining the ship's senior officers fell on Eleanor, who arranged teas, bridge, games, dinners, and other festivities. After the week end, Franklin left but the
North Dakota
lingered on, delayed by a dense fog. Eleanor played bridge with the captain, the commander, and the paymaster until she was sure they must be quite sick of her; but the children loved it. Eleanor dressed three-year-old Elliott in a blue sailor suit, and when he boarded the ship he faced the stern and saluted the flag as his father had instructed him. He even displayed “a real swaggering walk.” Finally the fog cleared and the
North Dakota
departed, “thank heavens.” But a few days later Eleanor heard alarming rumors that a flotilla would be turning up in August. “Is it so?” she wrote pleadingly to Franklin. “I could hardly bear such excitement again.”

“No, no more battleships coming,” he reassured her. “I may come up in a destroyer later, but that means only 3 officers!”

“I shall welcome you on a destroyer or with whole fleet,” she wrote back, “if you will just come a little sooner on their account but of course the destroyer will be easier to entertain!”

The Navy yards were under Franklin's jurisdiction, and in the autumn Eleanor accompanied him on a tour of Gulf installations. It was her introduction to the exertions, excitements, and crises of an official inspection. Diminutive, handsome, sharp-tongued Laura Delano also went along. She was having a stormy love affair, and the Roosevelts thought the trip would be good for her.

From the moment they arrived in New Orleans, they were “busy every minute.” After breakfast they left with a delegation of “prominent political (not social) citizens,” Eleanor said, drawing a distinction that still seemed immensely important to her. At the Navy yard Franklin “counted every rivet,” she noted impatiently; a time would come when such inspections would not seem tedious, when she would
painstakingly do the same. They were due to dine with a “real old bird,” a retired admiral, in one of New Orleans' most elegant cafés, but “of course Franklin had to be late so we started off alone.” Not usually given to gourmandizing, Eleanor nevertheless noted that their dinner was exceptional, ending, as it did, “with coffee poured into burning brandy, the prettiest thing and also the best thing I ever tasted,” one of the few occasions on which she had anything good to say about liquor. She was less keen on the champagne that was served the next morning before breakfast en route to Biloxi on a yacht. While Franklin inspected the harbor, she and Laura were motored around Biloxi, and in the evening they all attended a banquet “where husbands and wives sat side by side and salad came after the soup!” Afterward she and Laura “just sat down and laughed for 15 minutes.” At Pensacola, where they arrived at six the next morning, and at Brunswick they followed the same hectic schedule of tours, picnics, and receptions, their tour ending with a twenty-four-hour train trip back to Washington. It was an exhausting, demanding journey with little sleep and less privacy, but one kept silent about headaches and weariness and extended never-failing courtesy to everyone because, Eleanor said, the point of her presence was “to make life pleasanter” for her husband, not to add to his burdens.
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The trip, moreover, had been stimulating. It confirmed her view that “it is always good to break away from accustomed surroundings.”

In Washington they lived in Auntie Bye's house at 1733 N Street, which they had sublet from her. The red-brick residence on a narrow tree-shaded street had a “postage stamp of a lawn” and a little garden in back with a rose arbor where Eleanor liked to breakfast when the weather permitted. Sara, after her first visit, noted: “Dined at 1733 N. Street. Moved chairs and tables and began to feel at home.”

Washington is never as vibrantly alive as in the first months of a new administration. New policies, new men—all things seem possible. The 1912 election had boiled down to a race between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but whatever the differences between Wilson's New Freedom and Roosevelt's New Nationalism, both philosophies recognized the need for social change and both were energized by the nation's reforming and humanitarian impulses. Bull Moosers and Wilsonian liberals alike felt a quickening of spirits with the end of Wilson's inaugural address: “Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. I summon all honest men, all patriotic, forward-looking men, to my side.”

Since they were related to Theodore and were members of Wilson's official family, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt seemed to represent what was best and most promising in both camps. The belief that Franklin was a coming man in politics and would some day be the heir of both progressive traditions enhanced Washington's fascination with him. “It is interesting to see that you are in another place which I myself once held,” Uncle Ted had written him, and Josephus Daniels had the same thought. “His distinguished cousin T.R. went from that place to the Presidency,” he wrote in his diary. “May history repeat itself.”
⁸
Franklin himself was not averse to pointing up the Theodore Roosevelt analogy. Two days after becoming assistant secretary of the Navy, he assured newsmen that there need be no fear of a repetition of what happened “the last time a Roosevelt was on the job”—a reference to Theodore's reversal of department policies in accordance with his own ideas while his chief was away.
⁹
Eleanor thought it was “a horrid little remark.” Now many men in addition to Louis Howe were busy planning Franklin's future. “My head whirls when I think of all the things you might do this coming year,” Eleanor teased him, “run for Governor, U.S. Senator, go to California! I wonder what you really will do!”

They were invited to nearly all the big parties, including occasional dinners, musicales, and receptions at the White House, and Eleanor did her own share of entertaining. Her first big dinner was in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Daniels. “Our dinner went off quite well,” she reported to Sara, “and I think the cook is good.” The only untoward event was that “the Sec. and Mrs. Daniels came early but luckily I was ready.” They gave a dinner for Secretary of State and Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, the most pacifistic member of the cabinet, at which the other guests were chiefly admirals and generals. They dined with Justice and Mrs. Charles Evans Hughes. It was very pleasant, noted Eleanor, and after dinner the attorney general and the justice talked to her and she was fascinated by what they had to say but was unhappy when one of the guests began to play the piano, for that made conversation “rather scrappy.” Franklin, she said with mock disdain, “indulged entirely in children. Nona McAdoo and Miss Hughes at dinner and Miss Wolcott afterwards.” A few days later they were guests of General John Biddle, who lived next door. “I had Justice Holmes [on] one side (you may remember the speech of his which we read last winter). He is brilliant and full of theories and epigrams and Franklin thinks Mrs. Holmes wonderfully clever and quick so we both enjoyed ourselves.” On her
other side was Vice President Marshall, who had recently warned the Wall Street plutocracy that “if the tendency of certain men to accumulate vast fortunes is not curbed America may face socialism or paternalism.” Eleanor questioned him about the speech; he had not been correctly quoted, he told her, but “nevertheless,” she wrote Maude, “he is a good deal of a socialist with a desire for the millennium and it seems to me no very well worked out ideas so far of how we are to get there.”
¹⁰

While she did not advocate socialism, she did not approve of Henry Adams' pessimism, either. A frail one-man Greek chorus, the aristocratic, cynical Adams was at that period commenting sourly on the passing Washington scene from his study overlooking Lafayette Square. He had ceased going out socially in Theodore Roosevelt's day, but he would stop his victoria in front of the Roosevelt house on N Street and ask to see the children, whereupon all of them, including the dog, would climb into his carriage. Justice Holmes said that Adams turned everything “to dust and ashes” but Adams was nevertheless attracted by this golden couple and invited them to lunch. Sometimes Eleanor stopped in alone for a cup of tea, “rather exhausted after an afternoon of calls,” recalled Aileen Tone, “Uncle Henry's” secretary-companion, who had taken charge of him after his stroke. “She had the routine of calls so well organized that she kept to a schedule of six minutes a call. Uncle Henry liked her—it was difficult not to,” Aileen continued; Eleanor had “a kind of universal friendliness and kindness that enveloped you.”
¹¹