Eleanor and Franklin (72 page)

At her husband's specific request they toured the battlefields, the underground forts at Verdun, Château-Thierry, Belleau Woods, and placed flowers near Quentin Roosevelt's grave. The rows and rows of crosses made a profound impression on the boys. “The thing that surprised me most was how France or Germany could go on and continue to be a world power when it had lost so many men,” John wrote to his father.

Eleanor was disappointed not to find a letter from Franklin in Paris. “I hate not knowing what you have done about Elliott, and a thousand other things,” she wrote. Had young Nesbitt, the son of a Hyde Park woman with whom she had become friendly, gotten into Cornell, she wanted to know, and would Franklin advance him money if he needed it.

As they were leaving Paris for Cherbourg, Franklin's only letter finally arrived, with the information that he intended to leave for Warm Springs soon after she returned. “I am very glad to be going with you as it will give us a little while to catch up & talk things over,” she replied contentedly. She was glad she had made the trip, she finally concluded, “& will enjoy it in retrospect when the anxiety & necessary difficulties with two healthy youngsters is past. They have been good but a certain amount of trouble is inevitable. I think next summer we will separate them for a while.” But her trials with the boys were not over. On their way to Cherbourg they visited Chartres and spent a night at Madame Poulard's at Mont-Saint-Michel, but the boys were in such a quarrelsome mood that she left them behind when she went to climb the ramparts and look at the old abbey and church. On her return, there was a commotion in the streets, and as she approached Madame Poulard's she heard screams. Franklin Jr. had pushed Johnny out of the window and was holding him head down dangling by the heels.
⁴⁹

They returned September 15, Todhunter classes resumed on October 1 and as vice principal she was soon involved in the preparations for the reopening of the school. Being mother, mistress of the executive mansion, and the governor's stand-in were all parts of her job, but the activities that she considered her own were teaching, writing, lecturing, helping run the Val-Kill Furniture Factory. She had agreed to serve as a member of the committee selecting books for the Junior Literary Guild. “She tells you with pride that this is a paid job; not her only one, for her school pays her a salary, too,” Ida Tarbell wrote.
⁵⁰
Vogue
asked Eleanor to do an article, and she was pleased that the editor thought it “splendid,” she noted in her reply to him, but he had said nothing about payment. “The only reason that I feel I must do this on a business basis is that other magazines pay me and I do not feel that unless it is for a purely educational or charitable publication, that it is quite fair not to ask the usual compensation.”
⁵¹
She could use the money, but more important to her was the professional recognition that payment signified.

Though the activities that gave her the greatest satisfaction were those that she did in her own right, the public's growing interest in her was a result of the way she used the executive mansion as a springboard for good works, revealing the First Lady had a heart awake to the problems of other people. There was a person at the center of government, the individual citizen discovered, who answered any plea for help and took up every complaint against a bureaucrat. Neither by design nor appointment, and with her husband's concurrence, she began to perform an office that later generations would call “ombudsman.”

She entered into the lives of her petitioners and thought of them as human beings, not cases. There were heart-rending appeals from the families of patients in the mental hospitals, which she sent on for investigation to Dr. Parsons, the commissioner of mental hygiene. “I enclose his report,” she wrote to the family of a Miss P., “which indicates that the patient has a mild mental disturbance to which, generally speaking, she makes a satisfactory adjustment, but from time to time she overboils in the manner indicated in the letter.” And thanking Dr. Parsons, she wrote, “I hope she eventually may be settled, . . . poor thing, she does not sound very happy.” She was swamped with letters from old people begging her help with pension problems. She had every one of these “pathetic letters” reviewed in the hope that somehow they might be entitled to some kind of help. She looked into all requests for pardons, and if clemency was impossible, as was usually the case, “I can sometimes relieve their sorrow a little.”

One of her most touching and insistent correspondents was a mother with a son in jail. “When she found I could not help her free him she begged that I go see him which I did. Now she begs that I go weekly and read the Bible to him!” A woman of eighty, so poor she could not pay for a dog license, had applied for an exemption. She sent Eleanor the “unfeeling letter” the state supervisor of dog licenses had written her; could Mrs. Roosevelt use her influence with the governor to have the tax remitted? It was Mrs. Roosevelt who paid the tax. She was overwhelmed by the trust people had in her. “I am the farmer's wife, that wrote you two years ago,” one letter began. “You remember, I laid out my case then. Will you now see that I get my pension.” “The farmer's wife,” commented Eleanor wonderingly, “when there are dozens of them daily!”

But no letter went unanswered. Sometimes she sent a petitioner to his local district leader for help, but she did not leave it there. “Will you be good enough to let me know just what help your District
Leader gave you,” she added. If she could do nothing in Albany, she would appeal to one of the many friends she had made throughout the state to look into a case for her, to see whether help might not be available locally.

Sometimes she showed these letters to Louis and, after she got to know him, to Corporal Miller, but as often as not she disregarded their warning that she was being taken in. “You're nothing but a cop,” she said to Corporal Miller.
⁵²
The appeals for help became a flood after the stock-market crash, and the rise in joblessness taxed even her resourcefulness in finding something affirmative to say to her correspondents. She strongly advised people not to come to New York to look for work: “At the present time there are countless numbers of people out of employment here and I am not able to get positions for any one.” But still she did not give up. Did he have a job for Mr. K., statistician and Yale graduate, she asked Tom Lynch, who was now president of the State Tax Commission. “He has cried in my office like a whipped child.”

Often she showed letters to her husband. “How shall I answer or will you?” she would pencil on the plea.

She functioned in a highly unorthodox way that defied all proper administrative charts. If she had been less tactful, less sensitive, if she had not always been careful to stay within the limits set by Franklin and to check with him to be sure that her activities were consistent with what he wanted done, her acts of compassion and her desire to be helpful could have degenerated into a scandal of meddlesomeness.

Roosevelt encouraged his state officials in the belief that he and “the Missus” were a team. She understood, and she was loyal. When she disagreed with him she told him, but it was kept within the family. He was the captain of the ship. “I sat next to you in the Senate chamber when the twenty million dollar relief bill was passed,” an irate upstate judge wrote her. “Officials in Albany told me you were the boss. . . . ” She had not been in the senate chamber when the relief bill was passed, she replied, “so you were wrong in thinking you sat next to me. Also any officials who told you I was boss of anything, were equally wrong.”
⁵³
Some members of Roosevelt's administration undoubtedly grumbled to their wives when she made requests they considered inconvenient, but more often they were glad to oblige. Not only was she the governor's wife and a political power in her own right, but, most important of all, she was a useful champion when their
own programs were in trouble—or when they wanted the governor's support for new ideas.

It was to Eleanor that Frances Perkins came with a plan to overhaul and modernize the moribund Public Employment Service and its neglected network of state employment offices. Eleanor immediately saw its political implications as well as economic uses. “It looks good to me for it would take in employment of middle-aged and physically handicapped, etc. and you'd get the jump on Hoover, but they won't move till you let me know what you think,” Eleanor wrote Franklin; the letter reached him a few days before the collapse of the stock market.
⁵⁴
Roosevelt, according to Perkins, “at once saw the point of developing a good modern well-supported State Public Employment Service.”

Eleanor had gotten to know a vast number of women in the small towns and rural areas and was now systematically getting to know more of them. Together with Elinor Morgenthau and Nancy Cook she was a faithful participant in the Home Economics Weeks that were organized by Cornell's Bureau of Home Economics and which annually brought thousands of rural women to Ithaca. Eleanor admired Martha van Rensselaer, the moving spirit behind the bureau, for the way she had made the bureau into a down-to-earth, sensible service to upstate women.

The women's division was ready for the 1930 gubernatorial campaign. Eleanor brought Molly Dewson into the division, and with Nancy Cook and Caroline O'Day they mapped strategy, organized meetings, issued literature—all behind the scenes. Her editorials in the
Democratic News
rallied the workers in the precincts to speak for the whole ticket. Her final editorial criticized the one-issue campaign of Republican candidate Charles H. Tuttle, who had concentrated on Tammany and corruption: what about the other big state-wide questions—taxation, farm relief, labor legislation, control of utilities, unemployment and public works, power?

What does it mean to be a candidate's wife, an interviewer wanted to know as the campaign drew to a close. “It doesn't mean a thing!” Eleanor replied. “In this particular case, at any event, the candidate's wife will go on pursuing the even tenor of her ways. Politics does not excite me. It never did. I take things as they come. If my husband is reelected, I shall be pleased. And if he isn't—well the world is full of interesting things to do.”
⁵⁵
In the meantime, however, she made sure
that not the smallest thing was left undone that might help get her husband elected.

Roosevelt's landslide victory exceeded all expectations. He was swept in with a margin of 725,000, and was the first Democrat ever to carry upstate New York—by 167,000, which included Hyde Park, to Eleanor a “greater satisfaction than anything else.” “Mrs. Roosevelt was a very great factor in Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection,” noted Molly Dewson, who was not given to flattery.
⁵⁶

The victory celebrations at Hyde Park on election night were prolonged, and Eleanor, who had to get ready for class next day, penciled a good-night note to her husband. “Much love & a world of congratulations. It is a triumph in so many ways, dear & so well earned. Bless you & good luck these next two years.—E.R.”

33.
ROOSEVELT BIDS FOR THE PRESIDENCY

I
N A YEAR OF
D
EMOCRATIC SUCCESSES
, R
OOSEVELT
'
S WAS THE
handsomest. Overnight he became front runner among the Democratic aspirants for the presidency. It gave Eleanor pleasure to see him move toward the prize that he wanted above all others. She better than anyone appreciated how much determination and self-mastery his victory represented. She was happy, too, in the joy that the triumph brought her gnarled little friend Louis Howe, who behind the scenes had masterminded the comeback. Both men were now within sight of the goal they had been pursuing almost from the time of their first encounter. But she herself was a “fatalist,” and the larger the ambition, the greater her feeling of its insubstantiality. She obtained her sense of fulfillment in service to others; to search out some hidden or defeated aspiration in the heart of a human being and then, in ways of her own, “to help this aspiration assume reality” gave her the greatest, perhaps the only, real joy in life. She had helped Franklin surmount the apparent devastation of his hopes by poliomyelitis. Now that he was the leading candidate for president, “that prospect did not interest me particularly.”
¹

Her hopes were centered on a wholly different concern—making their marriage once again a covenant of spirit and feeling and not an arrangement to benefit the children and Franklin's career. A wife's job, Eleanor told an interviewer who had been advised by a group of distinguished women that she was “the ideal type of modern wife,” was to be partner, mother, homemaker—and in that order, she emphasized. At one time she had placed the mother's role first, “but today we understand that everything else depends upon the success of the wife and husband in their personal relationship.”
²