Eleanor and Franklin (36 page)

Nov. 1st
. At a little before 5 I went in. Dr. Carr said “He is holding his own.” At a little before 7 A.M. F. telephoned me to my room. “Better come, Mama, Baby is sinking.” I went in. The little angel ceased breathing at 7:45. Miss Spring was asleep in her room but Dr. Carr and Miss Battin did what they could. F. and E. are most wonderful, but poor E.'s mother heart is well nigh broken. She so hoped and cannot believe her baby is gone from her. He was 7 months and 9 days old, a beautiful flower he always seemed and yet the delicacy certainly was there and he could not overcome it.

Nov. 2nd
. I sat often besides my little grandson. It is hard to give him up and my heart aches for Eleanor.

Nov. 5
. F. and E came home (i.e., H.P.) and it is such a sad homecoming. E. is perfectly marvelous the way she bears it.

Nov. 7th
. All to church. E. brave and lovely.

For many months Eleanor's life was darkened by the baby's death. She felt she was in some way to blame and reproached herself for not caring for him enough. The baby's death reinforced her sense of inadequacy as a woman and as a mother. When Elliott, born ten months later, turned out to be a more agitated and excitable baby than Anna and James had been, she blamed that, too, on her moodiness while carrying him. Only gradually did she conquer her grief for her dead baby, and she often laid flowers on the quiet little grave in the St. James churchyard and recalled the sad burial scene.

Such tragedies, as she well knew from childhood, were part of the human condition. Religion comforted her, as did her love for Franklin. “I miss you dreadfully and feel very lonely,” she wrote him from Campobello the next summer, “but please don't think it is because I am alone, having other people wouldn't do any good for I just want you!”

“Success in marriage,” she told an interviewer many years later, “depends on being able when you get over being in love, to really love . . . you never know anyone until you marry them.”
¹²
Five years after her marriage, just before Franklin entered politics, their friends considered them an exemplary couple and thought Eleanor remarkable for the way she fulfilled her role as wife, mother, mistress of her household, and daughter-in-law.

 

*
But secretly she resented her exclusion from the active handling of the boats on which her menfolk sailed. In 1935 Emma Bugbee of the
New York Herald Tribune
was with her in Campobello, and they went sailing. “I shall never forget the satisfaction with which she took the helm from Captain Calder, who had handled Roosevelt family boats for years,” Emma later wrote. “‘I never get a chance to sail the boat myself,' she beamed. ‘There are always so many men around. . . . One always has to let the men do the sailing'” (
New York Herald Tribune
, July 7, 1963).

†
The parallels between Chaucer's Griselda and Eleanor go much beyond this point. The prince's subjects at first could not understand why, with all the beautiful girls in the realm to choose from, he settled on Griselda. But then as she took charge of his household, they recognized her “rype and sad corage,” and before long all were her liege supporters, for

So wyse and wordes hadde she

And jugements of so greet equitee,

That she from heaven sent was, as men wende,

Peple to save and every wrong t'amende.

16.
THE WIFE OF A PUBLIC OFFICIAL

A
FTER
T
AFT
'
S ELECTION IN
1908 T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT INVITED
various younger members of the family to the White House for a final visit before inauguration day. Eleanor and Franklin went down early in January, and a week later it was the Teddy Robinsons' turn. “It is rather horrid to feel that is the last time that we will be at the White House in that way,” Helen wrote.
¹
Franklin had other thoughts. Imbued with Theodore's ideals of public service, he already contemplated a career modeled on Uncle Ted's that would bring him to the White House on his own. To his fellow law clerks he outlined a political timetable like his uncle's—the state legislature, assistant secretary of the Navy, the governorship, and then, with “any luck,” the presidency. The law office was only a way station on the road to the livelier world of politics, and “he intended to run for office at the first opportunity.”
²

Franklin's mother did not welcome the idea that her son might become involved in the “messy business” of politics, as she later told her biographer. She did not see why she should receive all these people whom she had never called on and whose families she did not know. Eleanor, however, was neither surprised nor upset by his plans.
³
While Franklin was still in law school she had written Auntie Bye, “he will not find himself altogether happy with the law he is studying at Columbia unless he is able to get a broad human contact through it.”
⁴
A career in politics would assure him of a life full of excitement and variety in which his ability to get along with people would be important.

Franklin had always voted from Hyde Park. Like his father, he was active in village and county affairs, but with Eleanor at his side to encourage him he brushed aside his mother's pleas that he follow his father and lead a “peaceful life among the family, the friends and neighbors at Hyde Park.” When John Mack, Democratic district attorney in Dutchess County, dropped into the Carter, Ledyard and Milburn offices early in 1910 to talk Dutchess politics and discuss the
possibility of Franklin running for the state legislature, he found an attentive listener.

Eleanor had known enough men in public life to realize that if her husband embarked on a political career it would mean that the family would have to move about a lot, be very adaptable, and make many sacrifices. But she wanted her husband to have large plans, and if realizing those dreams meant she would have to make adjustments, she was prepared to do so—to live in Albany if that was required and to see that his household ran smoothly. Politics was neither new nor threatening to her. She followed public affairs, read the
New York Times
regularly, and, like her husband, had been stirred by Uncle Ted's appeals to the younger generation to devote themselves to the public good. And deep within she must have realized that Franklin's entry into politics would mean an expansion of her horizons as well as his.

In June she and Franklin lunched with Uncle Ted on his return from Europe and Africa, and no doubt they discussed Franklin's decision to go into politics. Theodore was planning to return to the political wars himself, to fight the conservative drift in the Republican party under Taft. Would Uncle Ted be campaigning in Dutchess County, Franklin asked Auntie Bye a few weeks later. “Franklin ought to go into politics without the least regard as to where I speak or don't speak,” Theodore advised Bye. Franklin was “a fine fellow,” he went on, but he wished he had Joe Alsop's views. Joe Alsop, whom Auntie Corinne described as “a very strong man,” had married young Corinne and was involved in Republican politics in Connecticut. And in Herkimer, New York, Teddy Robinson was preparing to run for the state assembly as a Republican.

She had heard an amusing account, Aunt Ella wrote Eleanor from Liverpool, of how Franklin, Teddy, and Joe Alsop were “all in the limelight and Uncle Ted in the extraordinary position of being the arbiter of the Republican destinies. He has certainly infected you all with large ambitions as citizens and I am sure will be proud of you all.”
⁵

It was a measure of Franklin's independence that, admiring Theodore as greatly as he did, he stuck with the Democrats. Eleanor, although she worshiped her uncle and had been raised in a household and milieu where “Republicanism and respectability went hand in hand,”
⁶
followed her husband's political allegiance. Any suggestion that she should not would have shocked her, and she certainly did not envisage a political role for herself. She was an anti-suffragette, and
vigorously so. Pussie was the only advocate of the women's vote in the family. “The most surprising part to me,” Hall commented to Eleanor in 1908, “is that she is trying to convert you of all people.” Two years later Eleanor was still disagreeing with Pussie over the suffragette issue, and evidently with some violence, to judge by Hall's reproving remark: “I thought you had more self control.”

While Eleanor insisted that politics was a man's domain, she wanted to share her husband's interests and accomplishments, a somewhat contradictory position that was also held by other strong-minded women of that transitional era. Beatrice Webb did not recant her public opposition to women's suffrage until 1909, even though she had renounced her romance with Joe Chamberlain rather than yield to his insistence that he should have the final word in their marriage.
⁷
Eleanor made no such demand, but she did want to be part of her husband's life away from home as well as in it.

She was at Campobello most of the summer of 1910 when Franklin was meeting with the Dutchess County leaders and party workers. Her letters begged him to keep her informed about his political prospects; it was difficult enough being at Campobello without him, she wrote, but if he did not write she would feel quite lost. And if he was unable to come up as he had planned, “I shall weep.” Franklin hoped to run for the assembly, but the incumbent, Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, finally told him he had no intention of bowing out. This left the state senate seat, which had only once been won from the Republicans, in the 1880s by Roosevelt's neighbor, Thomas Jefferson Newbold. Franklin's chances of winning, Mack cautioned him, were one in five. Undaunted, Franklin decided to make the bid.

On September 23, 1910, Eleanor gave birth to Elliott, an eleven-pound fourteen-ounce baby. Two weeks later, on October 6, the Democratic leaders meeting in convention in Poughkeepsie formally nominated Franklin Roosevelt for state senator. Sara now discovered that pride in her son was stronger than anxiety over the hordes of strangers she might have to receive. She sat proudly through the meeting as he made his acceptance speech, she recalled two decades later, her head held high, sure as she heard his statement of principles that
noblesse oblige
would shape his career in politics as it had that of her old friend Theodore and the sons of her highborn friends in England.
⁸
In her diary at the time, however, she limited herself to the more pragmatic comment, “Franklin will be here now a great deal.”

Eleanor did not hear the speech. Immobilized in New York City
with her newly born baby, she had to be satisfied with the lilies, at that time her favorite flower, that Franklin had sent her. “Much love and good luck to you in your campaigning,” she wrote him as he set out to reverse the 5 to 1 odds by the unorthodoxy of his campaign tactics. “In the coming campaign,” he had pledged in his acceptance speech, “I need not tell you that I do not intend to sit still. We are going to have a very strenuous month.” He hired a red Maxwell touring car and decked it out with flags, and “at the dangerous pace of about 22 miles an hour” he and the congressional candidate, Richard Connell, a spread-eagle orator, toured the district, stopping at every country store, talking to every farmer, speaking in every village.
*
Not even a fall from a moving street car slowed him down. Eleanor spent twenty-four hours soaking his elbows and knees in disinfectant and he was off again. The Saturday before the election Eleanor heard him make his final speech outside the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie, later known as his “lucky corner”—the first time she had heard him make a political speech. She agonized over his slow delivery and frequent pauses,
⁹
but he managed, nonetheless, to convey warmth, friendliness, and self-confidence. The voters responded. On Election Day, Sara recorded, in the proper order of their importance to her, “Anna weighs 42.8; James 35.13. Franklin elected State Senator with about 1,500 majority.”

It was a Democratic sweep in which the governorship as well as both houses of the legislature were captured by the party, but Franklin ran far ahead of the state ticket. His unparalleled 1,140 majority in a rock-ribbed Republican district was noted by politicians throughout the state. “Telegrams coming all day for Franklin,” Sara recorded. Eleanor returned to New York to be with her baby, but a new period was beginning in her life, for Franklin had said that if elected he wanted his family with him in Albany. “We're thinking of your move to Albany,” Isabella Ferguson wrote Eleanor from Cat Cañon in New Mexico. The Fergusons and their two children had cut loose from
fashionable New York and were literally tenting down in the southwest desert because the dry air and hot sun had been recommended for Bob's lungs. Eleanor's impending move represented almost as drastic a break with her previous style of life as the Fergusons' had.