Eleanor and Franklin (68 page)

“Every morning,” Eleanor wrote in a post-election account of the women's organization in the campaign, she “called a meeting of the various executive secretaries and went over their work with them, each one listening to the problems and questions of the other, thus learning what was going on and thus avoiding duplication. All work done in the various bureaus was under [my] direct supervision.”
³⁴
She prodded the states in which the organization was unsatisfactory and ironed out the inevitable disputes. One trouble spot was the midwest region, whose headquarters were in St. Louis. She telephoned Molly Dewson at her summer house in Maine.

Harry Hawes says the women in the Midwestern Headquarters of the Democratic National Committee are fighting and I must come out, but I cannot possibly leave headquarters in New York. Will you go in my place? I know only two women whom it would be safe to send and you are one of them.
³⁵

Of this request Molly later wrote, “scattered all over this country are, I imagine, a great many persons who have never been able to say ‘no' to the Roosevelts or even ‘I will think it over and telephone you.' I am no exception.” The choice was a wise one, for Senator Hawes begged Molly “to stay through the campaign.” After that, no campaign would be run without Molly's help.

Sara, still in Europe with James, wrote Eleanor that “I long to hear that my Franklin was not used up by Houston.”
³⁶
When she and James reached Vittels in the Vosges she informed Franklin that she had been given a first-hand account of the convention by Bernard Baruch.

Mr. B. Baruch is here and he came to our table last evening when he finished dinner and said he had been at the Convention and heard your fine speech. He seems to think Smith has a good chance, chiefly because many Republicans are anxious not to have prohibition. . . . Mr. Baruch says Elliott was perfect, helping you and taking the sheets as they fell from your hand. How lovely to have had James four years ago and Elliott now.
³⁷

Baruch also reported to Sara that the Smith forces were trying to draft her son for governor, but Roosevelt was firmly determined to avoid a draft for the governorship. Eleanor was less certain that he should turn down the nomination if it were offered to him. Agnes (Mrs. Henry Goddard) Leach, who was New York State chairman of the League of Women Voters, recalled being at Hyde Park around the time of the Houston convention. In the middle of luncheon Franklin was informed that Belle Moskowitz wanted to talk to him on the telephone. He refused to take the call, but then he was told Smith was on the phone and so he had himself wheeled out for what proved to be a long talk. “What did Smith want?” Eleanor asked on his return. “The same old thing,” he replied. “He wants me to be the candidate for Governor. It's ridiculous.”

“I don't think you should say it's ridiculous so quickly,” Eleanor cautioned him.
³⁸

When the delegates began to arrive for the state convention in Rochester at the end of September, Franklin was ensconced in Warm Springs and evidently expected to stay there, for he had instructed Eleanor to have the
Times
and the
World
sent there for three months. Always buoyant and hopeful, he thought that with a few more years of exercises at Warm Springs he would be able to walk without braces. Moreover, he and Louis did not believe that 1928 was a good year for the Democrats, and he deliberately put himself out of immediate reach of Smith and his friends. As a result, their pressure to have him run focused on Eleanor and to a lesser degree on Louis. “My conviction that you should not run is stronger than ever and Eleanor agrees with me in this,” Louis wired him on September 25. Tammany leader George Olvaney, Louis informed Franklin the next day, “has been trying to reach Eleanor who is speaking in New Hampshire apparently to persuade her to persuade you,” and Franklin should let them know whether his decision “not to run is still final.” If Franklin would head the ticket, Colonel Herbert Lehman told Eleanor, Lehman “would gladly run as Lt. Governor” so that Franklin could feel he “could go away each winter and leave [a] competent person in charge.”

“I have to go to Rochester but I wish I didn't have to go for everyone makes me so uncomfortable,” she wrote her husband. “They feel so strongly about your running and even good explanations can be made to sound foolish. The Governor called me yesterday and I told him to call you.”
³⁹
Smith had telephoned her from Milwaukee, and she arrived at the Hotel Seneca in Rochester almost at the same time he did. Roosevelt had sent a telegram to the governor reaffirming his reasons for refusing to run—that Smith did not need him in order to win and that he needed two more years to get rid of his leg braces; he owed it to his family to follow through his curative program to the end. A haggard Smith closeted himself with Mrs. Roosevelt. He wanted to know Franklin's
real
objections to accepting the nomination—health? Warm Springs finances? Would the governorship endanger his chances of walking again? At two she emerged from the governor's suite. “Will Mr. Roosevelt run?” the reporters wanted to know. “I don't think it is possible,” she answered. Was she willing for him to run? She told them what she had told the county leaders who were insisting that it had to be Roosevelt: “It is entirely up to him. I am not trying to influence him either way.” The reporters admired her poise.

The county leaders went into session again, but the discussion always came back to Roosevelt. Franklin was refusing to take Smith's
calls and Eleanor agreed to get her husband on the phone; the rest would be up to Smith. As soon as Franklin answered, Eleanor turned the receiver over to Smith and raced for the train in order to be back in New York in time for the opening of Todhunter. “All day long,” the
New York Evening Post
commented on the day's activities, “Mrs. Roosevelt had been in conference with the leaders, quiet, unruffled, probably the calmest person in all the crowded hotel.”
⁴⁰

When she heard that he had yielded to the party's entreaties she wired Franklin: “Regret that you had to accept but know that you felt it obligatory.” The pressure on Roosevelt was described in a Lippmann editorial in the
World:
“The demand for Mr. Roosevelt came from every part of the State. It could not be quelled. It could not be denied. The office has sought the man.”

Sara was surprised but accepted the decision in good spirit, considering her earlier opposition to her son's remaining in public life. “Eleanor telephoned me before I got my papers that you have to ‘run' for the governorship,” she wrote Franklin.

Well, I am sorry, if you do not feel that you can do it without too much self-sacrifice, and yet if you run I do not want you to be defeated! . . . Now what follows is
really private
. In case of your election, I know your salary is smaller than the one you get now. I am prepared to make the difference up to you.

One member of the family had no doubts. Anna wired her father, “Go ahead and take it,” to which he replied, “You ought to be spanked.”

But what did Eleanor really think about her husband's candidacy? When the press caught up with her at Democratic headquarters, she said

I am very happy and very proud, although I did not want him to do it, he felt that he had to. In the end you have to do what your friends want you to. There comes to every man, if he is wanted, the feeling that there is almost an obligation to return the confidence shown him.

The reporters questioned her persistently about a story that had appeared in that morning's
World
under the headline “Mrs. Roosevelt's ‘Yes' Final Factor.” Based on what “intimate friends” of Mrs. Roosevelt told
its reporter, it asserted that she had been on the phone with her husband in the late afternoon, that he had told her he might not be able to refuse in the end, unless she was not satisfied to have him run. “Mrs. Roosevelt held the receiver in silence for several minutes,” the story stated. “The decision was left to her. Then she assured Mr. Roosevelt that she was of the opinion that he might enter the campaign, and, if elected, accept the office without harmful effects.”
⁴¹

She would not deny that she had talked to him, but insisted, “I was very surprised at the nomination. I never did a thing to ask him to run.” Had she had a hand in changing his mind, the reporters wanted to know. “My husband always makes his own decisions. We always discuss things together, and sometimes I take the opposite side for the fun of the thing, but he always makes his own decisions.”
⁴²

She did not think it right, as she had told Smith and John J. Raskob, then chairman of the National Democratic Committee, to ask him to do anything he felt he should not do, but did she herself want him to run? Edward J. Flynn, the Bronx Democratic leader, at Smith's request, had been sounding out Roosevelt during the summer on his real reasons for resisting the nomination. Flynn felt that among other things Roosevelt was concerned about what would happen to Warm Springs and the considerable money—all his fortune, in fact—that he had put into it if he could no longer give it his full attention. Eleanor, who was always practical and hard-headed in money matters, would no doubt have wanted to be assured on this score, as she would have had to be persuaded in her own mind that her husband had gone as far as possible to recover the use of his legs. But in the end it seemed to Flynn “that she was anxious that he should run, and that she would be happy if he would consent to it.”

Thirty years later when she saw
Sunrise at Campobello
, she noted that the play depicting Franklin's victory over polio could have been a play about almost any other victim of infantile paralysis. There was another drama, she went on, “which came later in my husband's life” when “he made his decision as to whether he would devote himself to his efforts toward recovery or accept his disabilities in order to play a more active role in the life he was leading.” Perhaps that was a subject for another play, she added.
⁴³
“I think the most wonderful thing Eleanor did was to encourage him to run in 1928 when most people thought he was not up to it,” said Esther Lape.
⁴⁴

If she did influence his decision, she kept it well hidden. Her
account of what happened in Rochester in
This I Remember
ended with the ambiguous remark, “I sometimes wonder whether I really wanted Franklin to run.”
⁴⁵

Her husband's decision to run did not alter Eleanor's primary political responsibility, which was to the Smith campaign organization. She kept an eye on the state through Elinor Morgenthau, Caroline, and Nancy and even helped them with the campaign caravans they were sending out all over the state, but she had her hands full with national problems. Her mail reflected the unprecedented bigotry and snobbery elicited by Smith's candidacy. “Can you imagine Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the White House as the leading family of the nation?” one letter from a Republican woman “who had always admired you” asked. Eleanor defended Smith in the Junior League
Bulletin
, saying that his “human” sympathies were wider than Hoover's; men worked
“under”
Hoover but “with” Smith; Hoover stressed “material prosperity,” Smith would be concerned with “the human side of government.” The many letters demanding to know how she, a supporter of the Volstead Act, could support a man who, if elected, would nullify Prohibition, were relatively easy to answer. But the southern propaganda was irrational. If Smith were elected, the pope would be coming to the United States on a battleship, “
AL SMITH THE NEGRO LOVER
” leaflets throughout the South proclaimed. “I want to assure you,” Eleanor wrote an Alabama Democrat,

that Gov. Smith does not believe in intermarriage between white and colored people. He has a full understanding of conditions as they are in the South and would never try to do violence to the feelings of Southern people . . . the Democratic Party has always better understood and sympathized with Southern feelings and prejudices than has the Republican.

As Election Day approached, Smith's defeat seemed likely, but Eleanor was a good trooper and sought to counteract a mood of defeatism. “I bring you good tidings,” she told 2,500 women Democrats. “All the women of the country have been passing before me at my desk at headquarters. . . . The tide has turned and Gov. Smith's most recent speech has made us all feel that we are going to roll up a better and better vote.”
⁴⁶
But the day before election the betting odds favored Hoover and also Roosevelt. She made the traditional end-of-the-campaign swing through the Hudson Valley with Franklin, who
was wearing the battered felt hat in which he had campaigned in 1920. The campaign ended with “Mr. Ottinger and I coming through it with the most kindly of feelings,” he said. What were her husband's chances of success, a reporter asked Eleanor. “I don't know the State situation. I haven't been active with the State. I feel sure the Governor is going to win, though.”
⁴⁷

She spent Election Day working at the polls, and in the evening was hostess at a buffet supper for their friends at the Biltmore. At nine Smith came by. “Frank, let's go down and hear the verdict.” For a brief moment it looked as if Smith were carrying New York and the South, but then the returns moved decisively the other way. At midnight Smith dictated a telegram of concession, buttoned up his topcoat, put on his brown derby, and walked out. With heavy heart, Eleanor went to the Biltmore. “I may be here all night,” Franklin said. It was “as exciting as a horse race.” By morning he appeared to have survived the Democratic debacle. Smith lost New York by 103,481 votes; Roosevelt carried it by 25,564.

Smith's defeat notwithstanding, Eleanor had made her mark. Elizabeth Marbury, Democratic national committeewoman from New York and considered the dean of women politicians, conferred the accolade. “They won't need people like me. They've got their Mrs. Roosevelt now.”
⁴⁸