Eleanor and Franklin (53 page)

“You must have been hideously uncomfortable,” Franklin went on.

“Well, it wasn't
very
uncomfortable.”

She was quite sure, Eleanor commented later, that she had made Franklin “feel guilty by the mere fact of having waited” in the vestibule. They were not, she said in a massive understatement, the best years of her life.

Her immense physical vitality seemed to drain away, one of the few times in all her years that she registered such a complaint. “I was dead,” she wrote on April 19, attributing her exhaustion to dinner guests who stayed “till 11.30.”
³⁹
The next day she noted again “I was a dead dog,” having dined with Aunt Kassie at eight. And the evening after that she went to the Army and Navy League Ball. “I stood and received till 11 p.m. and went home 11:30 dead again.” This would have been a normal reaction for most women, but Eleanor was always able to tap hidden springs of energy and her exhaustion was not normal. In May when she was at Hyde Park, she and Sara had a quiet dinner “but I might as well not have eaten it for I promptly parted with it all!”
⁴⁰
She insisted it was “just weariness,” but the weariness was only another manifestation of the conflict within her between a nature seeking to find its true vocation and the life of conformity that the effort to please her husband and mother-in-law had shaped.

While she sought to rebuild her relationship with Franklin, she began to turn against Sara. In July, 1919, when she had left Hyde Park and taken her younger children to Fairhaven, she confessed to her husband, “I feel as though someone had taken a ton of bricks off me and I suppose she feels just the same.”
⁴¹
But Sara evidently was not aware of Eleanor's inner stress. “A letter from Mama this morning,” Franklin wrote her. “It will amuse you as she says everything is going very smoothly.”
⁴²
At the end of September they all returned to Hyde Park. “Mama and I have had a bad time,” she noted on October 3, “I should be ashamed of myself and I'm not. She is too good and generous and her judgment is better than mine but I can
learn
more easily.”
⁴³
(The italicized word is almost undecipherable, but “learn” seems to fit the context best.)

On a Sunday two days after this rebellious entry, Eleanor wrote, “Went to Church but could not go to Communion.”
⁴⁴
The words were austere and their implication stark, for she was the most faithful of churchgoers, the most sincere of communicants, for whom prayer was not a matter of rote but a daily influence in her life. Religion was of the utmost seriousness to her and prayer a kind of continuing exchange with God, a way of cleansing the heart and steadying the will. To say that she could not take Communion meant that she could not say that she “truly and earnestly” repented of her sins and that she was in a state of “love and charity” with those around her, as the Episcopalian Communion service required. She was temporarily cut off from divine grace, a condition that she must have found insupportable.

That week end she lost her temper with her mother-in-law one of the rare times in her life she did so. Her letter of October 6 begging Sara's forgiveness disclosed how deeply alienation and despair had taken command of her feelings. “I know, Mummy dear, I made you feel most unhappy the other day and I am so sorry I lost my temper and said such fool things for of course as you know I love Franklin and the children very dearly and I am deeply devoted to you. I have however, allowed myself to be annoyed by little things which of course one should never do and I had no right to hurt you as I know I did and am truly sorry and hope you will forgive me.”

Although she was remorseful, her rebellion against Sara and the way of life Sara represented was only beginning, and it spread to Cousin Susie. When Eleanor went to New York to have dinner with the Parishes, “we had in some ways a very stormy evening.”
⁴⁵
She was finding Cousin Susie's self-indulgence and her unfriendly attitude toward people outside of her little circle difficult to bear. Eleanor “fairly jumped with joy,” she wrote, when she and Franklin did not have to spend a summer week end with Cousin Susie, “though I'm sorry of course she isn't well.”
⁴⁶

By the time she and Franklin left Washington her estrangement from Sara's and Cousin Susie's outlook was very deep. In early December, 1920, she spent an evening in New York talking with Sara and her two sisters, Dora and Kassie, and wrote Franklin afterward: “They all in their serene assurance and absolute judgments on people and affairs going on in the world, make me want to squirm and turn bolshevik.” She was beginning to follow the “remorseless logic” of her love for others. Her desire to serve, which deference to her mother-in-law and Franklin had confined to the family circle, was breaking free. Humiliation and despair did not quench her ardent nature. Tenderness flowed into new channels. She clipped a poem, “Psyche,” by Virginia Moore, out of the newspaper and wrote on it “1918,” meaning that it conveyed her own slow climb out of the depths. It, too, like the Spring-Rice sonnet about the Saint-Gaudens statue, was filed among her bedside papers.

The soul that has believed

And is deceived

Thinks nothing for a while.

All thoughts are vile.

And then because the sun

Is mute persuasion,

And hope in Spring and Fall

Most natural,

The soul grows calm and mild,

A little child,

Finding the pull of breath

Better than death, . . .

The soul that had believed

And was deceived

Ends by believing more

Than ever before.

But her soul, which ended by “believing more,” was moving toward wider, more general sympathies. Speaking of her wartime experience, Eleanor later wrote that from then on she saw herself and others more realistically. “No one is entirely bad or entirely good,” and she no longer was sure of what was right and what was wrong; out of it all she emerged “a more tolerant person, far less sure of my own beliefs and methods of action, but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.”
⁴⁷

III

THE
EMERGENCE
OF
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

24.
A CAMPAIGN AND FRIENDSHIP WITH LOUIS HOWE

“S
HALL WE HAVE TO FIGHT EACH OTHER THIS FALL?
” A
LICE
Wadsworth, the wife of the incumbent Republican senator, asked Eleanor. “I'd hate to have either of our good men beaten—so let's go after different jobs!”
¹

It was 1920, a presidential election year and the end of the Wilson years. The “club” dispersed. Lane resigned to take a job with Edward L. Doheny's oil company at $50,000 a year; it was strange employment for a man who had been one of the most progressive members of Wilson's cabinet, but he was already suffering with the illness that in a few months would kill him. Phillips was posted as U.S. minister to The Hague. Franklin spent much of his time out of Washington touring New York State to prepare the way to run either for governor or senator in the 1920 elections.

When Franklin left for San Francisco to attend the Democratic national convention, Eleanor did not know which office he would finally seek, but in either case he would need, if not the sponsorship, at least the neutrality of Tammany at the state convention. She was, therefore, surprised to read in the papers that he had helped wrest the state standard from a Tammany stalwart when the New York delegation refused to join in the demonstration in Wilson's honor. “You and Tammany don't seem to agree very well. Mama is very proud of your removing the State standard from them! I have a feeling you enjoyed it but won't they be very much against you in the State Convention?”
²

Her letters to him sounded as if she, too, wanted to be in San Francisco. Two of his old Poughkeepsie supporters, John Mack and Thomas Lynch, were with him. “I can't help thinking what fun you will all have together.” Politics interested her more than she sometimes acknowledged. She would like to have heard William Jennings Bryan's speech about the Democratic platform, she said, and then added a terse comment on the platform itself that might well apply to most such
documents—“too much self praise and recrimination, too long but better than the Republican on the whole.”
³

She wished she could meet Franklin in Washington after the convention was over and hear all about it, she wrote, but on July 4 she transported her brood to Campobello. She did not dream that her husband might end up being the vice-presidential candidate, and since McAdoo, Cox, Palmer, and Smith seemed to be in a stalemate over who the candidate would be, Eleanor's major anxiety was that Franklin's arrival at Campobello would be delayed. “Please, please don't let your staying an extra day make any difference in coming up to us!”
⁴
She still did not know what had happened when she wrote him, “I suppose you started tonight for the East. I heard tonight in Eastport Cox was nominated but am in the dark as to the rest. I wonder if you are really satisfied.”
⁵
Then the telegrams began to arrive. “It would have done your heart good to have seen the spontaneous and enthusiastic tribute paid when Franklin was nominated for Vice President today,” Daniels wired her; “Franklin was nominated by acclamation,” Lynch informed her. “This certainly is a world of surprises,” she wrote Sara that evening. “I really think F. had a better chance of winning for the Senatorship but the Democrats may win, one cannot tell and at least it should be a good fight.”
⁶

So little was known about Eleanor that a long profile of Franklin Roosevelt in the Democratic
New York World
stated in the last sentence of the last paragraph, “Mrs. Roosevelt ‘goes in' but little for society, finding her occupation in the management of her home and the welfare of her one daughter and her three sons.” A Washington society reporter gave a somewhat different picture in the
New York Times:
“Mrs. Roosevelt is one of those women who, while she is absolutely at ease in the frilliest of social frills—she was born to them—yet finds them unimportant in her scheme of life.”
⁷
After describing the Roosevelt family, the reporter continued, “She has her own circle of warm friends. She is—well, as one of her friends put it, she is too much of a Roosevelt to be anybody's prize beauty, but she's pure gold. . . . Few women are so generally esteemed by their acquaintance as Mrs. Roosevelt. . . . She was up to her eyes in war work . . . [but] she is essentially a home woman. She seems to particularly dislike the official limelight. . . . Just how she would endure the Vice-Presidential status . . . remains to be seen.” “Papers are demanding your picture,” Howe wired her from Washington. “Is there one at the house here that I can have copied?” “Are no pictures of me,” she replied. As a result,
the
Daily News
that Sunday published a picture of some other woman that it had cropped from a photograph of the Roosevelts at a baseball game, thinking it was the candidate's wife.

The
World
sent a correspondent from Eastport to Campobello to interview Eleanor. He came away with a brief, rather stilted statement that could hardly have satisfied his editor. “I am very much pleased and happy to know of Mr. Roosevelt's nomination,” she said, “but I realize that it will take up much of his time during the coming campaign, and he may not have much time to enjoy a rest here. While he may not have looked for the honor, I am proud of his nomination and hope he will be elected.”
⁸
An
Evening Post
reporter who went to Hyde Park, on the other hand, found a great dowager, quite at ease, overawed neither by press nor by the honors accorded to her son. “There is a stark and undeniable atmosphere of noncompromise about this house and its lady,” the reporter commented, and found everywhere and in everything about Springwood—in the commodious and sturdily built mansion, the stone walls, the spreading trees—“a stamp of ancient solid things, of good beginnings which have persisted well.”
⁹
Sara declined to talk about Franklin except for his connection with Hyde Park, the one place on earth, she said, that he loved best. In such surroundings, the perceptive reporter remarked, “there is no necessity ever to speak of what is one's belief; it is so certain and so sure.”