Eleanor and Franklin (38 page)

“Really, Honey, it becomes ludicrous!” Eleanor protested in a spurt of independence:

She made an offer then withdrew it and now wants to renew it! I think she had better decide another time before speaking and as I wrote you it would be foolish to get new servants and put them in her house as Lydia is going. I expect to let Emily go also as I overheard a conversation which made me decide that she talked
too much even though she might seem nice to me! . . . After Cousin Susie is in town I'm sure she will love having us stay there if we want to anytime and I would rather do it than go to Mama's now! I simply wrote Mama all my plans were already made and no one would be in her house and I did not expect to go there!

Eleanor's view prevailed. It usually did when she considered it worthwhile to make a stand.

When they returned to Albany for the winter 1911–12 they moved into a new house. Their friends were glad to see them both. They were “exceedingly popular . . . their home . . . the scene of good fellowship and real family life.”
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People were as interested in Eleanor as they were in Franklin, and she was now an old Albany hand. She called on the wives of the new legislators and helped make them feel at home, and she dropped in on the wives of newspapermen. Her thoughtfulness and kindness made friends for Franklin everywhere. Teddy Robinson had been elected to the assembly from Herkimer in November's Republican comeback, and the two families saw each other often. For Franklin's birthday Eleanor had the Robinsons, Hall and his fiancée, Margaret Richardson, William Church Osborn, the Rices, and some senatorial colleagues with whom Franklin worked closely. Sara was not there. “I planned to go up and surprise you today,” she wrote, “and spend one night but as Hall and Margaret get there today I think it would be foolish and also I should have to sleep with you and Eleanor!” As a birthday gift, she “enclose[d] a little motor car for the winter.”

Eleanor found marriage to a man at the center of public activity stimulating. Everyone had something interesting to contribute to her education and, in turn, she gave everyone the feeling that she was interested in them. Eleanor's “dinner record” was crowded with the names of Cleveland Democrats, progressives, and regulars. She and Franklin went to play bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Howe, although Eleanor felt that neither bridge nor Mr. Howe contributed to an attractive evening. Franklin wanted her to go, so she went.

Franklin was a key man in the 1912 legislature. “We are safely organized,” he informed Eleanor, who was in New York City, at the beginning of the year. “The Committee appointments were handed down. I drew Chairman of Agriculture, ranking member of Conservation (the old Forest, Fish and Game) and also members of Codes, Railroads and
Military Affairs!
This isn't bad and I am particularly glad that the other members of Agriculture give me control of the
Committee as against our New York City friends.” Franklin was even being talked about as a possible candidate for governor. On their wedding anniversary Eleanor gave a political luncheon attended by the governor, the lieutenant governor, Senator O'Gorman, and a gentleman whom she described in her dinner book as the “Secretary of Tammany Hall.”

By April, however, his political prospects had darkened. The Republican resurgence dimmed his chance of re-election in 1912, and the Tammany bosses detested him. The Democratic boss of Albany, “Packy” McCabe, upbraided Roosevelt as a “political prig” and said it was time the party leaders stopped coddling these “fops and cads . . . these political prudes,” phrases that echoed those used against Theodore when he was an assemblyman. One hope that Franklin and his fellow progressives had of breaking Murphy's stranglehold on the state Democratic organization was to align themselves with the burgeoning Wilson movement. Although initial efforts to drum up Wilson support at the state convention were a fiasco, Franklin and Thomas Mott Osborne decided to convene a Wilson Conference. But before the preparations were complete Franklin and Hall embarked on a winter cruise to Panama, leaving Eleanor to cope not only with the move back to town but with the Wilson movement as well.

Osborne wrote Eleanor to ask whether there was any objection to signing Franklin's name to the call for the conference, saying he was quite sure it was all right “under the approval he [Franklin] gave; but I should prefer to have your advice on the matter.” Eleanor's reply was deliberately noncommittal, which did not help him much, Osborne commented dryly, and left him “in something of a quandary.” Osborne's letter, she wrote Franklin, “has given me an uncomfortable day but I can only hope I've done as you would wish.” More of a pragmatist in politics than the uncompromising Osborne, he wanted to move slowly. Moreover, he had many irons in the fire, as Eleanor's next letter indicated. “Louis Howe told me to tell you,” she wrote, “that Evans etc., were grooming you to run for Governor against Mr. Wadsworth! Also he had a long talk with Mr. C. Osborn and felt that you could count on help from him next autumn.”

She had arranged to meet Franklin in New Orleans on his way back, since they did not like to be separated any longer than necessary. “I simply hated to have you go on Saturday,” she wrote him after he sailed, and he was also upset. “It is hard enough to be away from the chicks, but with you away from me too I feel very much alone and
lost. I hereby solemnly declare that I REFUSE to go away the next time without you. . . . ”

Her husband's involvement in the Wilson campaign created a dilemma for Eleanor, since she was devoted to her Uncle Ted. Late in March she had lunched with Auntie Bye and Uncle Ted who, with characteristic energy, was preparing his assault on Taft's renomination. When she joined Franklin in New Orleans in April they went to Cat Cañon for a three-day visit with the Fergusons and found Bob and Isabella passionately absorbed in Theodore's forthcoming campaign. The younger “progressive” elements were hitching themselves to Theodore's star, they told the Roosevelts. Franklin's law partners, Langdon Marvin and Harry Hooker, were for Teddy. Even Sara was in conflict.

Whatever Eleanor's private sentiments, her duty was to be at the side of her husband, who had accepted the chairmanship of the New York State Wilson Conference, and she accompanied him to Baltimore for her first national convention. Many people she knew were there, including Alice and Kermit. Theodore was preparing to run as a third-party candidate. “Pop's been praying for Clark,” Kermit told Franklin. Alice looked bad, Eleanor thought; in fact, all of Theodore's supporters who came to Baltimore seemed to her “restless and unhappy.”

She found the convention sessions tedious. A moralist in politics, she felt that the ritual of noisy demonstrations, parades, and seconding speeches, while colorful, did not contribute to the thoughtful consideration of the party's purposes and policies. After the first roll call Champ Clark, the candidate of the conservatives, was in the lead; but he could not muster the two-thirds majority for the nomination. As the balloting dragged on, Eleanor saw less and less of her husband, and decided to take the children to Campobello and await the results there. But the significance of the battle between Wilson and Clark had not escaped her; what struck her most was “the contempt in which the New York delegation was held and the animosity shown toward the big financiers. If we are not going to find remedies in Progressivism then I feel sure the next step will be Socialism.”
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This was a remarkably sage and sophisticated perception by someone who only a few years earlier had been the shyest of apprentices in politics.

“Wilson nominated this afternoon,” Franklin wired her in Campobello, “all my plans vague splendid triumph.” Eleanor rejoiced not only for her husband's sake but because she felt that Wilson offered the best chance for the alleviation of social injustice. However, she felt bad for Uncle Ted, who, she suspected, would not have committed himself
so irrevocably to running as a third-party candidate, had he foreseen Wilson would be the Democratic nominee. Wilson's nomination and Theodore's third party transformed the political scene. With the prospect of a Bull Moose candidate in his district who would divide the Republican vote, Franklin's doubts about running for re-election evaporated. He began to press hard for renomination, touring his district tirelessly, rousing his workers, flashing the smile that overcame all resistance. “It appears that Tammany and the ‘Interests' are really making an effort to prevent my renomination,” he wrote Eleanor, but he thought Tammany's ally in Dutchess County was spineless and would yield in the end.

As Franklin predicted, his Tammany opposition did collapse, and on August 24 he wired Eleanor, “Received designation by unanimous vote. Will wire Sunday if I can leave.” He also notified his mother, who was in Paris. She replied, “In one way I wanted you all in New York, but to be sensible and unselfish, I am glad . . . I hope the ‘bull moose' party will endorse you.” But the Bull Moosers entered a candidate against him. The Democrats on their side closed ranks around Wilson, and Osborne and Roosevelt quietly shelved their independent Wilson organization. This brought Franklin an anguished plea from Louis Howe, who had been on Osborne's payroll: “If you can connect me with a job during this campaign, for heaven's sake help me out.” A few weeks later Franklin was flat on his back with typhoid and asked Eleanor to see if Howe would run his campaign. That eccentric-looking little man had early sensed Franklin's possibilities and had cultivated his friendship. Franklin had reciprocated these overtures, somewhat to the dismay of Eleanor and Sara, who were put off by Howe's untidiness, his tobacco-specked vest, and a face that he himself cheerfully called “one of the four ugliest” in the state. Nevertheless, Howe had a sixth sense for the movement of public opinion and was something of a genius at political analysis. He loved power, Eleanor later wrote, but recognized his own limitations. In 1911 he spotted Franklin as the instrument through which he could realize his own ambitions. For his part, Franklin sensed that here was the perfect aide, brilliant politically but no potential rival. But many years were to pass before Eleanor appreciated Howe's remarkable qualities.
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A man of great sensitivity, he could not have failed to notice how uncooperative Eleanor was after he hurriedly came down from Horseneck Beach in Massachusetts to take over Franklin's campaign. She fussed over his chain smoking, seemed impatient with the length of his visits, and
generally made herself a nuisance, she confessed later, to the man who was to carry the district for her husband.

The fact that she herself was feeling ill no doubt accentuated her irritability. It was Sara who discovered that something was radically wrong when she arrived one day to find her daughter-in-law “so hot I was frightened.” Characteristically, Eleanor shrugged off her symptoms; she would get to bed early and be well in the morning. But Sara was not to be put off so easily, and insisted on taking Eleanor's temperature, which was over 103. She summoned the doctor at once and his tests showed that Eleanor, too, had typhoid. A trained nurse was brought in and Eleanor went “into the fever.” It was a week before her temperature began to come down. “She sees no one but Franklin, not even me!” Sara reported to Eleanor's Aunt Maude.

Thus the crucial election drew to a close with both Franklin and Eleanor flat on their backs. “Poor Franklin,” Eleanor wrote Maude, “has had a horrid time just up and down. . . . He hasn't been able to campaign at all so he feels a little uncertain of election.” But Howe was doing a first-rate job, and with the Bull Moose candidate expected to draw off Republican votes, Franklin's chances were good.

Theodore's campaign was roaring to a finish. Isabella wrote Eleanor that she had spent the day with Uncle Ted in Albuquerque: “He was more loveable than ever and of you he said so much that warmed my heart.” Eleanor's Uncle Eddie Hall came to tell her that he had registered so he could vote for Theodore. Sara went to Theodore's windup rally with the Parishes one night and the next she was at Madison Square Garden to hear Woodrow Wilson. On election night, however, when Eleanor and Franklin were so weak they could barely sit up, Sara chose to go with Harry Hooker to Bull Moose, not Democratic, headquarters. But there was little cheer there. “Governor Wilson has a landslide,” Sara noted in her diary. “Franklin is elected with about 1,500 majority.”

“Howe did gallant work under very adverse circumstances,” Osborne wrote Franklin. “He was about as loyal and wholehearted as a man could be.” And Sara noted critically, “Mr. Howe here a good deal.” By December, Eleanor could begin to jest about the fact that both she and Franklin had been ill. Her Christmas presents would be small, she informed Maude, “as the campaign was more expensive than it would have been had Franklin been well and of course the doctors' bills are a bit high for our joint autumn entertainment! However, we ought to be thankful as we got off cheaper than if we had had it
separately!” They were not taking a house in Albany this time, only a small apartment, and they planned to be there only from Tuesday to Thursday because, wrote Eleanor, Franklin “thinks he won't have much work this year.”

Eleanor was twenty-eight as Franklin's term in Albany ended. She presided over a large household that had to be moved several times a year—from Sixty-fifth Street in New York, to Hyde Park, to Albany, and in June to Campobello. And on each occasion it was like a small army on the march: a nurse for each of the three children, three to five other domestics, and a vast number of trunks, valises, hat boxes, and pets. The trip to Campobello meant an early train to Boston with a stopover during the day at the Hotel Touraine, then a sleeper to Eastport, Maine, and finally the
Half Moon
or the motor launch to Campobello—in all, a considerable exercise in logistics. When Franklin could not be with them, Eleanor handled it alone with a minimum of fuss. She had already developed a reputation within the family for crowding an incredibly large number of activities into a morning. “She got hats, ordered dresses, etc.—all very quickly and I dropped her off at Susie Parish's before one,” Sara noted in admiration. When she moved her family down from Albany, Eleanor “had to work awfully hard,” Sara recorded, “and think very hard before she got away and she seemed to remember everything, even tho' at one day's notice she moved a whole day earlier than planned.”