The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (12 page)

Franklin was conducting a novel campaign, for no one had ever before tried to visit every small four-corners store, every village and every town. He talked to practically every farmer and when the votes were counted that election day my husband was the first Democrat to win in thirty-two years. At the same time, through that firsthand contact with the people, he had learned much of their thinking and of their needs.

I went with Franklin to one meeting before the end of the campaign. It was the first political speech I had ever heard him make. He spoke slowly, and every now and then there would be a long pause and I would be worried for fear he would never go on. What a long time ago that seems!

He looked thin, then, tall, high-strung, and at times nervous. White skin and fair hair, deep-set blue eyes and clear-cut features. No lines as yet in his face, but at times a set look of his jaw denoted that this apparently pliable youth had strength and Dutch obstinacy in his make-up.

Franklin made a good many friends in that campaign; one of them, Thomas Lynch, of Poughkeepsie, was to be a close and warm friend and follower from then on. He believed firmly that Franklin would someday be president, and showed it by buying two bottles of champagne before Prohibition, putting them away and bringing them out in Chicago in 1932 just after Franklin’s nomination. Everybody at headquarters had a sip from a paper cup to toast future success.

We rented our house in New York City, and I suppose I must have gone to Albany and looked at the house which we took on State Street, though I have no recollection of doing so. I had a new English nurse with the children, Anna, James, and Baby Elliott. I was so nervous about this new baby that we took a wet nurse to be sure of having him properly fed, as it had been suggested that the first baby Franklin, who had always been a bottle-baby, might have been stronger and better able to stand his illness if he had been breast-fed.

That autumn it was also discovered that James had a murmur in his heart, and in order to take proper care of him he must not be allowed to walk up and down stairs. He was a fairly tall though thin little boy, and quite a load to carry. However, up and down steps we carried him all the rest of that winter.

Six
    

My Introduction to Politics

WE ARRANGED
for a reception to be held in our Albany house on the afternoon of January 1 for as many of Franklin’s constituents as wished to come. We arrived in the morning, and naturally we were not very well settled. I brought three servants besides the nurses, and caterers were in the house arranging for the reception, which went on interminably. People from the three counties wandered in and out for three solid hours. When it was all over and some of the debris had been removed and the caterers were out of the house, my mother-in-law and I started to move the furniture around and make the house more homelike.

I have always had a passion for being completely settled as quickly as possible, wherever I lived. I want all my photographs hung, all my ornaments out, and everything in order within the first twenty-four hours. Dirt and disorder make me positively uncomfortable.

I sallied forth that next morning to do my marketing. I received my first shock when a lady stopped me on the street with, “You must be Mrs. Roosevelt, for your children are the only ones I do not know.” All my life I had lived in big cities, rarely knowing my neighbors. The realization that everybody up and down the street would know what we were doing and would pay attention to us was a great surprise.

For the first time I was going to live on my own: neither my mother-in-law nor Mrs. Paris was going to be within call. I wrote my mother-in-law almost every day, as I had for many years when away from her, but I had to stand on my own feet now and I wanted to be independent. I was beginning to realize that something within me craved to be an individual.

People were kind and I soon made friends and was very busy that year. Occasionally I went to the gallery in the Capitol and listened to whatever might be the order of business. I came to identify interesting figures. Senator Tom Grady could make a better speech than many people who are considered great orators today. Bob Wagner, “Big Tim” Sullivan, Christy Sullivan, Senator Sage, old Senator Brackett, who looked like a church deacon and was probably as wily a politician as ever paced the Senate floor, all stood out as individuals on the floor of the Senate. In the Assembly I had my first glimpse of Al Smith.

I was at home every afternoon and had tea with the children. I read to them or played with them till they went to bed. I tried having little Anna lunch with us, but after spending a solid hour over the meal on our first attempt I returned her to the nursery. Anna and James and the younger nurse had their room over the big library at the back of the house. The baby and his nurse were in the room next to ours.

Anna was fair-skinned like her father, with good features, blue eyes and straight hair which was bleached almost white by the sun. James was darker as to both hair and complexion, looking in this particular more like me. Luckily for them all, the children inherited their looks from their father’s side of the family. One or two of them have eyes like my side of the Roosevelts, but eyes happen to have been rather good in that branch of the family. I had prominent front teeth, not a very good mouth and chin, but these were not handed down to any of my children.

Here in Albany began for the first time a dual existence for me, which was to last all the rest of my life. Public service, whether my husband was in or out of office, was to be a part of our daily life from now on. To him it was a career in which he was completely absorbed. He probably could not have formulated his political philosophy at that time as he could later, but the science of government was interesting—and people, the ability to understand them, the play of his own personality on theirs, was a fascinating study to him.

I still lived under the compulsion of my early training; duty was perhaps the motivating force of my life, often excluding what might have been joy or pleasure. I looked at everything from the point of view of what I ought to do, rarely from the standpoint of what I wanted to do. There were times when I almost forgot that there was such a thing as wanting anything. So I took an interest in politics. It was a wife’s duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books or a particular dish for dinner. This was the attitude with which I approached that first winter in Albany.

Here, for the first time, a man who was to become a very close friend of my husband’s came upon the scene. I hardly remember meeting him. He was a newspaper correspondent, an old hand in the Albany political game, Louis McHenry Howe by name. He lived in Albany with his wife and daughter, but his home for years had been in Saratoga, so he knew the countryside and had many old friends. I saw little or nothing of the Howes that first year. I still felt myself a good deal of a stranger.

The fate of an insurgent group who stood with my husband in an early senatorial fight against Tammany influence was my first introduction into the grimmer side of machine politics. One man had a little country newspaper and depended largely on government printing of notices for his financial success. The year after, he was given none, as punishment for opposing the Democratic machine, and his paper failed. Similar stories came to us from various sources, and my blood boiled. My husband was not vulnerable but many of his friends were not in so independent a position. I realized that you might be a slave and not a public servant if your bread and butter could be taken from you; and, if you grew too fond of public life, it might exact compromises even if finances were not involved.

After the legislature adjourned I took the children to Hyde Park as usual and later to Campobello, pursuing our usual routine. My husband again had a good deal of time in summer to be with us, though he did have to spend some time in his district, and the legislature met again in August for a short session.

When I had first gone to Campobello there lived next to my mother-in-law a charming woman, a Mrs. Kuhn from Boston. When she died it was found that in her will she suggested Mrs. Roosevelt might want to buy her property, including a little point of land on the Bay of Fundy side of the island, and her house with all its furnishings, even china and glass and linen. She asked that it be offered to Mrs. Roosevelt at a nominal price in case she wanted it for her son.

My mother-in-law bought it and gave it to us, and this house became a great source of joy to me and a place with which I think my children have many happy associations.

The winter of 1912 found us back in Albany in a house on Elk Street. My first cousin, Theodore Douglas Robinson, was elected to the Assembly and came to take his seat that winter. His wife, Helen, was my husband’s half niece—J. R. (“Rosy”) Roosevelt’s daughter—and so our relationship was extremely close and complicated.

Of course, Teddy and Franklin were on opposite sides politically, and one was in the Senate and the other in the Assembly. Both Teddy and Helen had a few close friends who were not great friends of ours, and they moved in a gayer and younger group, on the whole.

I was always more comfortable with older people, and when I found myself with groups of young people I still felt inadequate to meet them on their own gay, light terms. I think I must have spoiled a good deal of fun for Franklin because of this inability to feel at ease with a gay group, though I do not remember that I ever made much objection to his being with them so long as I was allowed to stay at home.

I remember feeling a little responsible that year for the wives of some of the new assemblymen and for the wives of some of the newspapermen, who, I had been told, were very lonely. I religiously called on them and tried to have them occasionally at my house.

I remember little of what my husband did in the legislature, except that he came out for woman suffrage. He always insisted that Inez Mulholland sitting on his desk had converted him but as a matter of fact he came out for woman suffrage two months before that memorable visit.

I was shocked, as I had never given the question serious thought, for I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did, and while I realized that if my husband was a suffragist I probably must be, too, I cannot claim to have been a feminist in those early days.

I had lost a good deal of my crusading spirit where the poor were concerned, because I had been told I had no right to go into the slums or into the hospitals, for fear of bringing diseases home to my children, so I had fallen into the easier way of sitting on boards and giving small sums to this or that charity and thinking the whole of my duty to my neighbor was done.

I was not a snob, largely because I never really thought about why you asked people to your house or claimed them as friends. Anyone who came was grist to my mill, because I was beginning to get interested in human beings, and I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education.

In 1909 my brother Hall had entered Harvard College. He was ready for graduation in 1912 and won his Phi Beta Kappa key, though he belonged to the class of 1913. In the spring of 1912 the authorities allowed him to go with my husband on a trip to Panama. Never having been fond of the sea, and also being anxious whenever I went away from the children for a long period of time, I did not accompany them on the first part of their trip. Another member of the legisture, Mayhew Wainwright, joined them, and they had, from all accounts, a delightful time.

In June of 1912 my brother was married to Margaret Richardson of Boston. Hall was not quite twenty-one and she was twenty when they started off on their honeymoon to Europe.

In the latter part of the month, my husband took me to my first political convention. We had taken a house in Baltimore with Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery Hare and Mr. and Mrs. James Byrnes.

That convention was an exciting one. In front of me in the convention hall sat Mrs. August Belmont, who registered righteous indignation and said she would go out and fight the party when William Jennings Bryan practically read her husband out of it.

I understood nothing of what was going on, but I watched with keen interest the demonstration for Champ Clark, and was appalled when his daughter was carried around the room. The demonstrations all seemed senseless to me, and my opinion of conventions changed little for a number of years.

It was extremely hot. I understood little about the fight for Woodrow Wilson’s nomination, though my husband was deeply interested and was spending a great deal of time trying to bring it about. Finally, I decided my husband would hardly miss my company, as I rarely laid eyes on him anyway and the children should go to Campobello, so I went home and took them up there and waited to hear the result. I received a wild telegram of triumph when Mr. Wilson was finally nominated. It read:

MRS
.
F
.
D
.
ROOSEVELT
CAMPOBELLO
   
EASTPORT   MAINE
WILSON NOMINATED THIS AFTERNOON
          
ALL MY PLANS VAGUE
          
SPLENDID
TRIUMPH
                                        
FRANKLIN
.

We came down early from Campobello, because my husband had another campaign on hand. We traveled by boat, and neither of us gave much thought to the fact that we brushed our teeth with the water in the stateroom pitchers. We settled the children at Hyde Park. Franklin laid his plans for the campaign, and then we went down to an entirely “put up” house in New York City, which we had taken back from the people who had rented it the winter before. We were to spend only one night and our old friend, Ronald Ferguson, who was over from Scotland, was to dine with us. The evening came but my husband was too ill to go out to dinner. He had a low fever and was feeling miserable. I did all I could for him, and took Ronald out to a restaurant by myself.