The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (21 page)

All that summer at Hyde Park my husband struggled to do a great number of things which would make it possible for him to be more active. He learned to use crutches and walked every day to gain confidence. Each new thing he did took not only determination but great physical effort.

That autumn of 1922 I took Elliott to Groton School. I drove him up myself, unpacked for him and left a much more miserable little boy than even James had been. I felt that he would settle down as James had done. He was far better prepared in his work, for he had had one year at the Buckley School, where he had done very well. He passed his examinations without any conditions. My hopes were vain, however; he never really loved the school as James did.

When we went back to New York, and when my husband was there, he followed an ordinary businessman’s routine. He now had a chauffeur to take him back and forth between his office and our house every day.

Through my interest in the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League and the Democratic State Committee, where now I had become finance chairman, I was beginning to find the political contacts that Louis wanted. I drove a car on election day and brought people to the polls. I began to learn a good deal about party politics in a small place. It was rather sordid in spots. I worked with our county committee and our associate county chairwoman. I saw how people took money or its equivalent on election day for their votes and how much of the party machinery was geared to crooked business. On the other hand, I saw hard work and unselfish public service and fine people in unexpected places. I learned again that human beings are seldom all good or all bad and that few human beings are incapable of rising to the heights now and then.

We were rid of a trained nurse and we never treated my husband as an invalid. Anna had graduated to the large room and we were much less crowded with James and Elliott at school. In the holidays we usually went to Hyde Park. The whole family relationship was simpler. Anna continued to tell me about things which upset her, and her trials and tribulations away from home, and I was able more intelligently to manage the various elements of our existence.

The boys at school had on the average one accident each autumn during the football season which would necessitate my bringing them home or taking them to a hospital for a short time. We had, of course, a certain amount of illness among the children at home, but my husband’s general health was good and I had not been ill since John was born. There was really no time for me to think of being ill.

In winter my husband had to go south, so for two winters we had a houseboat and cruised around the Florida waters. I went down and spent short periods with him; this was my first glimpse of the South in winter. I had never considered holidays in winter or escape from cold weather an essential part of living, and I looked upon it now as a necessity and not a pleasure. I tried fishing but had no skill and no luck. When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me. The beauty of the moon and the stars only added to the strangeness of the dark waters and the tropic vegetation, and on occasion it could be colder and more uncomfortable than tales of the sunny South led me to believe was possible. Key West was the one place I remember as having real charm.

In New York I had begun to do a fairly regular job for the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee and was finding work very satisfactory and acquiring pride in doing a semiprofessional job. We started a small mimeographed paper with which Mr. Howe gave me considerable help. We finally had it printed, and in an effort to make it pay for itself I learned a great deal about advertising, circulation, and make-up. From Mr. Howe I learned how to make a dummy for the printer, and though he never considered I was really capable of writing the headlines, I became quite proficient in planning, pasting, and so on.

Miss Cook and Miss Dickerman and I had become friends in just the way that Miss Lape and Miss Read and I had been first drawn together through the work we were doing. This is one of the most satisfactory ways of making and keeping friends.

Many of my old friends I saw very little, because they led more or less social lives. I had dropped out of what is known as society entirely, as we never went out. Now and then I would go to the theater with a friend, but my free hours were few. Ever since the war my interest had been in doing real work, not in being a dilettante. I gradually found myself more and more interested in workers, less and less interested in my old associates, who were busy doing a variety of things but were doing no job in a professional way.

Slowly a friendship grew with a young couple who lived in Dutchess County, New York, not far from us—Mr. and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. They were younger and perhaps for that reason we did not at first see so much of one another. We had many interests in common in the county, and Mr. Morgenthau and my husband were thrown more and more together. Mrs. Morgenthau came eventually to work in the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee, and she and I grew gradually to have a warm affection for each other. Good things are all the better for ripening slowly, but today this friendship with Elinor and Henry Morgenthau is one of the things I prize most highly.

During these years I also came to know Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, Mrs. Raymond Brown, Mrs. Louis Slade, Mrs. Henry Goddard Leach, Lillian Wald, Mary Simkovitch and many other women who had a great influence on me. To all of them I shall be deeply grateful always for opening up so many new avenues of thought and work.

I was beginning to make occasional speeches and on various occasions Louis Howe went with me and sat at the back of the audience and gave me pointers on what I should say and how I should say it. I had a bad habit, because I was nervous, of laughing when there was nothing to laugh at. He broke me of that by showing me how inane it sounded. His advice was: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down.”

Under Mrs. O’Day, who was vice-chairman of the Democratic State Committee, I did a certain amount of organization work each summer among the Democratic women of the state. I usually went with either Miss Dickerman or Miss Cook. I paid my own traveling expenses and so did Mrs. O’Day; because money-raising was hard for women we felt every expense must be kept down. Miss Cook did wonders of economical management. All the work among the women had been started by Miss Harriet May Mills, who for many years was the outstanding Democratic woman leader of New York State. Even after her retirement as vice-chairman of the state committee, she responded to every call for assistance. I was always glad of this experience because I came to know my state, the people who lived in it, and rural and urban conditions extremely well.

Since his illness my husband had undertaken the presidency of the Boy Scout Foundation, the presidency of the American Construction Council, the chairmanship of the American Legion campaign, and a number of other nonpolitical activities. His only political effort during those years was in the summer of 1922 when he helped to persuade Al Smith to run again for the governorship.

He was entirely well and lived a normal life, restricted only by his inability to walk. On the whole, his general physical condition improved year by year, until he was stronger in some ways than before his illness. He always went away in the winter for a time and in summer for a long vacation, trying in each case either to take treatment or at least to keep up exercises which would improve his ‘ability to get about. In the spring of 1924, before the National Democratic Convention met in New York, Al Smith, who was a candidate for the presidential nomination, asked him to manage his preconvention campaign. This was the first time that my husband was to be in the public eye since his illness. A thousand and one little arrangements had to be made and Louis carefully planned each step of the way.

I had been asked to take charge of the committee to present to the resolutions committee of the convention some of the planks of interest to women. This was to be a new step in my education. I knew a little now about local politics, a good deal through the League of Women Voters and, through my Democratic organization work, about my state legislature and state politics, and I was to see for the first time where women stood when it came to a national convention. They stood outside the door of all important meetings and waited. I did get my resolutions in, but how much consideration they got was veiled in mystery.

I heard rumors of all kinds of maneuvers and all the different things that the men were talking about drifted my way, but most of the time at the convention I sat and knitted, suffered with the heat, and wished it would end.

At this convention I caught my first glimpse of Will Rogers when he wandered by the box one day and asked, “Knitting in the names of the future victims of the guillotine?” I felt like saying that I was almost ready to call any punishment down on the heads of those who could not bring the convention to a close.

Finally, in spite of all that could be done, in spite of a really fine nominating speech by my husband and the persuasion and influence of many other people in the convention, Al Smith lost the nomination. My husband stepped gracefully out of the political picture, though he did make one or two speeches for John W. Davis.

And so ended the early phases of the education of Eleanor Roosevelt, both in life and in politics.

PART II

This I Remember

Thirteen
    

The Private Lives of Public Servants

AS I BEGIN
this book it seems to me an infinitely more difficult task than the previous volume. In the first place, it can no longer be only my autobiography. Most people will be interested primarily in what I may have to tell about my husband.

Perhaps I shall be able to give some impressions which may help in the understanding of the stream of history during those complicated years. What I have to say, if it is to contribute anything to the understanding of his life and character and objectives, must be about him as an individual.

I do not claim that I can be entirely objective about him, but there are some things I know that I feel sure nobody else can know. Although no human being ever completely knows another, one cannot live for many years with a person without learning something about him. Other people may know certain sides of Franklin’s character or particular facets of his personality better than I; but if I can contribute what I learned and what I believe to be true I may help to fill in the true picture for future historians.

The books that have already been written about Franklin show quite plainly that everyone writes from his own point of view, and that a man like my husband, who was particularly susceptible to people, took color from whomever he was with, giving to each one something different of himself. Because he disliked being disagreeable, he made an effort to give each person who came in contact with him the feeling that he understood what his particular interest was.

Often people have told me that they were misled by Franklin. Even when they have not said it in so many words, I have sometimes felt that he left them, after an interview, with the idea that he was in entire agreement with them. I would know that he was not, but they would be surprised when, later, his actions were in complete contradiction to what they thought they would be.

This misunderstanding arose not only from his dislike of being disagreeable but from the interest that he always had in somebody else’s point of view and his willingness to listen to it. If he thought it was well expressed and clear, he nodded his head and frequently said, “I see,” or something of the sort. This did not mean that he was convinced of the truth of the argument, or even that he entirely understood it, but only that he appreciated the way in which it was presented.

There is another fact which few people realize: the President of the United States gets more all-round information than most of the people who come to see him, though any one of them may know his own subject better than the President does. The President, however, must have a general outlook which takes in over-all considerations; whereas other people think primarily about their own ideas, plans and responsibilities for the specific thing they hope to accomplish. This circumstance puts on a President the responsibility of gathering all possible points of view, of often hearing conflicting ideas on a given subject, and then of making a final decision. It is one of the most difficult things a President has to do.

In addition, the fact that he can never have a personal loyalty greater than that to the nation sometimes makes it seem as though he were disloyal to his friends; but a man holding the office of President of the United States must think first of what he considers the greatest good of the people and the country.

I know Franklin always gave thought to what people said, but I have never known anyone less influenced by others. Though he asked for advice from a great many people, he simply wanted points of view which might help him to form his final decision, and which he sifted through his own knowledge and feelings. But once he reached a decision, people flattered themselves if they thought they ever changed it.

Franklin often used me to get the reflection of other people’s thinking because he knew I made it a point to see and talk with a variety of people. I did not need to go on lecture trips or to inspect projects in different parts of the country, but my husband knew that I would not be satisfied to be merely an official hostess. He often suggested that I interest myself in certain things, such as the homestead projects. For my sake he was glad when he found that for a few weeks in spring and fall I could and did go on paid lecture trips. I would not plan such trips unless I had definite commitments and had signed formal contracts; but when they were an obligation, I arranged my time so they were possible. The trips took me to many places throughout the country to which otherwise I might never have gone.

Naturally, these lecture trips gave me more money for things I wanted to do than my husband could afford to give me. At the same time I felt that Franklin used whatever I brought back to him in the way of observations and information as a check against the many official reports he received.