Eleanor and Franklin (138 page)

On October 23 the president went to Philadelphia for his first “political” speech. He was in fine form. The huge crowd loved it as he
pulled out all the rhetorical stops in speaking of “the tears, the crocodile tears” that the Republican leaders were now shedding for labor, youth, the unemployed, and the elderly after having opposed all the New Deal measures that he had introduced to help these groups: “In 1940, eight years later, what a different tune is played by them! It is a tune played against a sounding board of election day. It is a tune with overtones which whisper: ‘Votes, votes, votes.'”

It was devastating, and the crowd roared in approval. Eleanor heard it in Barrytown, where she was visiting a Hudson neighbor, Alice Huntington. She listened to Willkie afterward. The contrast was terrific, she thought, and all to the president's advantage. She called Franklin and could sense that he, too, felt it had been a success. “Darling,” she interrupted his expressions of pleasure, “it's my call and it's costing me money and I have things to tell you.”

Early in June, Esther Lape had expressed concern over a Republican whispering campaign that Roosevelt wanted to get the United States into the war, which she felt ought not to go unanswered. But the president refused to make statements that he feared would give aid and comfort to the dictators. In October LaGuardia warned the White House that “the anti-third term propaganda would cease about the middle of October and a concerted drive [would] be made on anti-war.”
⁴⁸
LaGuardia was sufficiently worried to want Roosevelt to postpone the first call for draftees until after the election. The mayor's information was correct. In the closing days of the campaign the GOP began to emphasize, to the exclusion of all else, the isolationist charge that Roosevelt was going to lead the country into war. Were there secret agreements to do so, Willkie demanded, and answered his own question with the prediction that on the basis of the president's past performance with pledges, the United States would be in the war by April. As Republican orators pounded away on this theme, there was something close to panic at Democratic headquarters. Although Roosevelt refused to postpone the drawing of the numbers under the Selective Service Act, in Boston he yielded to his political advisers and inserted an assurance to the “mothers and fathers [that] your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. . . . The purpose of our defense is defense.”

Quietly, the next day, in her column, Eleanor added her own footnote to this pledge: “No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.”
⁴⁹

Upon Flynn's urging, she consented in the final days of the campaign to appear at some Democratic rallies. The Republicans had sought to make her a campaign issue, distributing
WE DON
'
T WANT ELEANOR EITHER
buttons. These sometimes backfired. Gertrude Ely reported that she had gone to a Willkie Club meeting to present the Democratic position and started out by saying that she was one of the many women “who
did
want Eleanor, too,” and to her utter amazement “this Administration-baiting group broke into sudden, spontaneous, enthusiastic applause.”
⁵⁰

Throughout the campaign Eleanor had kept her column nonpolitical. George Carlin, the manager of the United Feature Syndicate, had advised her to do so because she had “become more and more loved by the Republicans as well as Democrats.” Although nonpolitical, the column's spirit of grace and kindliness, its chatty reports on the doings of the president and his family, were more effective campaigning than any direct political utterance. That was the case, too, with her appearances at the huge receptions and rallies in and around New York City in the closing days of the campaign. A campaign worker wrote a friend:

She came in smiling, very straight, giving the feeling of great strength and confidence, waving at old friends. She had that quality of noticing people in a crowd and letting them know it. All of us were made to feel our contribution had been of great importance. All of us felt enhanced. And when she spoke, every mother knew that she understood and shared their great anxiety about tomorrow—and so, they felt reassured that the President too would know and remember and protect them in every way.
⁵¹

The Monday before election there was the traditional tour with the president through Dutchess County and his final appearance before his neighbors outside of the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie. Afterward Eleanor wrote:

I remember what it was like the first time my husband ran for the State Senate. . . . I think my feelings have always been much as they were the first time. I think I can say with honesty: “May what is best for the country happen today and may we all remember that whatever happens, this is just the beginning of some years of useful work!”
⁵²

To her Aunt Maude she wrote (and it was a measure of how her thinking had changed about her husband's candidacy): “Frankly I hate the next four years in Washington and dread what it may do to us all but there seemed nothing else for F. to do and once nominated for a number of reasons his defeat would have been undesirable.”
⁵³

After luncheon at the Big House on Election Day, the president, Harry Hopkins, Pa Watson, and Doc McIntire settled down to a poker game to speed the afternoon along. Eleanor went to Val-Kill for a long walk with a friend, which took them through wooded paths drifted over with autumn leaves up to the hilltop house where in calmer days she and the president had entertained the British king and queen. She talked about the next four years. She hoped the president would now do all the things that he had wanted to do all along, that he knew had to be done but had not done because of political considerations. She was confident of victory, and she hoped that it would be clear-cut, a decisive mandate for liberal government. Repeatedly she spoke of the magnitude of the responsibility the president would assume with victory. The rapt expressions of trust and devotion on the faces of the people lining the streets as the president passed through had heightened her sense of the awfulness of the responsibility carried by the president in such perilous times. For herself, she had a real horror of four more years in the White House, with its lack of privacy, the ceremonial occasions, the things that had to be done in which she was not interested, and the people who would have to be entertained who meant little to her. She preferred to retire to Hyde Park, live with her friends, and be a useful citizen doing productive and helpful work, with a job of her own.
⁵⁴

As dusk descended everyone at the Big House except the president and his mother went to Val-Kill for a buffet supper of creamed chicken and rice, cake, ice cream, and coffee. Early returns from Connecticut were good, but talk was subdued as the forty-odd guests grouped themselves in different corners of Eleanor's dining and sitting rooms. Toward nine o'clock everyone returned to the Big House, where the president was already set up for business in the dining room. He was seated at the table with his jacket off and his necktie loosened. The tools of the evening were spread out before him—tally sheets, a large supply of sharpened pencils, and telephones that linked him with the White House and with Flynn at the Biltmore. In a little cubicle off the dining room, called the smoking room, AP, UP, and INS teletype machines clattered away. The group with the president changed from
time to time except for Missy, Franklin Jr., and John. Harry Hopkins, to whom Roosevelt referred as “my house guest without portfolio,” was often in and out, as were Judge John Mack, who had placed Roosevelt in nomination in 1932 and 1936, Uncle Fred Delano, and the members of a small group who gathered in a little study off the foyer: Pa Watson and Doc McIntire, Captain Daniel Callaghan (the president's naval aide), Judge Samuel Rosenman, Secretary Morgenthau, and Postmaster General Frank Walker.

The remainder of the party clustered around radios in the library. From time to time Missy or one of the boys came in from the dining room with “takes” from the tickers for Eleanor or written notes based on telephone talks with Ed Flynn and other political leaders around the country. Eleanor transmitted these tidbits calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place. All evening, in an easy, effortless way, she made everyone feel at home and included, but she was detached about the returns, an observer rather than a participant in the mounting excitement. By eleven Flynn claimed victory, and scrambled eggs—an old Roosevelt custom—were being served. Some of the newspaperwomen came inside the house, and asked the president's mother how she felt. Beamingly she replied, “Am I proud of being a historic mother? Indeed I am.” But there was no elation in Eleanor's reply to such questions: “This is too serious a time for the President to feel anything but a great sense of responsibility,” she said.
⁵⁵

At midnight the traditional parade from the village arrived with red flares and a band playing “The Old Gray Mare.” The floodlights of the movie cameramen went on and there was a great cheer as the president and his family went out and arranged themselves on the portico, with the president on the right, steadying himself on the arm of Franklin Jr., and Eleanor, in a flame-colored chiffon dress, tall and commanding, on the left. There was a sense of history having been made. Harry Hopkins was standing by himself at the rear of the portico. Suddenly he did a little pirouette of triumph and in a long, swinging arc brought his right fist down into the palm of his left hand. The words “we made it” could not have been spelled out more graphically or exultantly. After some banter with his neighbors, Roosevelt made a little speech, ending with the assurance that “you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.”

As the flares burned down and he called “Good night,” there were shouts of “We want Eleanor,” but smilingly she waved her hand and went into the house. A little later a delayed contingent of the Home
Club arrived, and Franklin Jr., came in saying, “Mother, they want you. There are 700 people still standing out there in the dark, asking for you. You'll have to go to them.”

“I never do any talking when Father is around, you know that,” she put him off. Then she added, “I hate to bother your father again, but if you think we should, I guess we will.”

It was not until 2:30 in the morning that the president was satisfied that the results would not be upset. As he prepared to go to bed, he made the startling good-night observation, “We seem to have averted a
Putsch
, Joe.” When his wife asked what he meant by that, he explained that he had received information that persons purporting to speak for Willkie and the German government had come to an agreement to compel Britain to make peace in return for which the United States would have unchallenged sovereignty in the Western hemisphere. “From all we hear,” Eleanor later wrote Lady Florence Willert,

we realize now that Mr. Willkie was backed by forces which were a greater menace than many of us were willing to believe. There was a fascist tendency for an appeasement policy toward Germany which terrifies many of us and makes us feel that the decision of the Willkie backers to keep up their organization is none too good for the country.
⁵⁶

Roosevelt's and his wife's feelings toward Willkie would change quickly. A few weeks after the election the president gave his defeated rival a cordial letter of introduction to Churchill, and Eleanor joined him on the dais at an NAACP dinner. But that was not the mood on election night at the Big House.

Perhaps she had been selfish, Eleanor said that night, and, wanting to get out of the White House, had tended to underestimate the importance of the president's re-election.

 

*
A month later, when Eleanor went to Chicago to address the convention, the ever-perceptive Emma Bugbee caught and noted the nuance in Eleanor's reply to the question whether she had known the president's decision in advance. She had not, she said, adding, “at least not from him.”

†
A
Fortune
survey released late in June showed that Roosevelt would be victorious but that there would be a GOP landslide with any other Democratic candidate.

‡
Mrs. Longworth denied parentage:

Never, I never said that. I'm so glad you asked me about it. It wasn't true. They were both strong in different kinds of things. I think what happened is that I ran into a friend, Bill Hogg, and he said, “Have you heard what Jim Reed said about Franklin and Eleanor?” “Mush” is a bad, a silky word. There's no ring to “mush.” How nice to have you ask me if I said that.

It was “maddening,” she said, to have the story ascribed to her. (Author's interview with Mrs. Longworth.)

§
When in the closing days of the campaign Lewis came out for Willkie, warning that if CIO members did not vote as he urged they would lose him as a leader, Eleanor wrote James Carey, a friend who was head of the United Electrical and Radio Workers Union and at that time close to Lewis: “That is a serious threat and a dangerous way to function in a democracy it seems to me. I cannot help wondering how Mr. Ford, Mr. Weir & Mr. Girdler welcome him as an ally” (Oct. 26, 1940).

51.
A JOB TO DO