Eleanor and Franklin (56 page)

A comment on Franklin K. Lane's death illuminated her frame of mind as well as the respect in which her wartime friends held her. Lane had checked into the Mayo Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, and one of his last letters before undergoing the operation from which he did not recover was to Eleanor.

Just because I like you very much, and being a very old man dare to say so, I am sending this line—which has no excuse in its news, philosophy or advice;—has no excuse in fact except what might be called affection, but of course this being way past the Victorian era no one admits to affections. I will not belittle my own feeling by saying that I have a wife who thinks you the best Eastern product—and probably she'd move to strike out the word Eastern. At any rate I think I should tell you that I am to be operated on tomorrow by Dr. Will Mayo and am glad of it. We shall see what we shall see. . . . I'd love to see you and the gay cavalier—but let us hope it won't be long till we meet! Au revoir.

“It is a loss to the country,” Eleanor wrote in her diary when she learned of Lane's death, “and I do not feel that we who are privileged to be his friends can gauge our loss but we must try in his memory to make the world a little better place to live in for the mankind which he loved so well.”
⁴

Among the organizations she turned to in the hope of being able to help improve the world was the League of Women Voters, the successor to the National Woman Suffrage Association. Its leaders had emerged from the long suffrage struggle as militant advocates of better working conditions for women, children's rights, reform of the political process, and peace. Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, the chairman of the New York State league, invited Eleanor to join the board and keep track of the league's legislative program. Eleanor hesitated, doubtful that she was equipped to handle such an assignment. She could have
the help of a lawyer, Elizabeth F. Read, Mrs. Vanderlip said, to go through the Albany calendar and
Congressional Record
with her and indicate the bills of interest to the league.

Eleanor decided to accept, and one morning each week she went to Elizabeth Read's law office to review the documents and to select the bills she wanted to brief herself on more fully. She became acquainted with Esther Everett Lape, who had been active with Elizabeth Read in the suffrage movement, and shared a small apartment with her on East Eleventh Street. Esther, an energetic member of the league's state board who had taught at Swarthmore and Barnard and was an effective publicist, combined a driving political activism with tact and sensitivity; Elizabeth—calmer, more scholarly, more practical—stayed in the background. Both were highly qualified professional women. They were co-editors of the
City-State-Nation
, a weekly legislative review issued by the league, and although they were volunteers, they did an expert job. Franklin had stolen his wife's copy of the review, he wrote Esther Lape, and “I wish that the subscription list . . . might contain as many names of men as of women.”
⁵

Esther and Elizabeth's careful, documented workmanship shaped Eleanor's standards in her approach to public issues and helped her to do serious, sustained work. They were liberal in outlook but it was a pragmatic liberalism with which Eleanor sympathized. At meetings of the state board Esther was impressed with the way Eleanor “wanted always to know exactly what she could do before the next monthly meeting.”
⁶
Her serenity had a stabilizing effect upon the board; she had a way of calmly rising above intramural disputes over personalities and jurisdictions to keep the board's attention focused on the league's larger purposes. “The rest of us,” recalled Esther, “were inclined to do a good deal of theorizing. She would look puzzled and ask why we didn't do whatever we had in mind and get it out of the way. As you may imagine, she was given many jobs to do.” Within a year the most tangled problems of reorganization were turned over to her to unsnarl.
⁷
Esther and Elizabeth were impressed with their new friend's attitude and performance, with her insistence upon doing her own work, with the strength and clarity that lay beneath the shyness. The esteem was mutual. Eleanor came to depend greatly upon their counsel and soon she was often spending evenings with them. They were cultivated, sensitive women with a strong sense of privacy, enormously useful citizens who had found in domestic arrangements that did not include men a happy adjustment. Their tender relationship was not unique in
the suffrage movement, especially among women of great professional competence. They and several of their counterparts would in the next few years play a big part in what Eleanor herself called “the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

At the end of January, 1921, Eleanor attended the state convention of the League of Women Voters in Albany as a delegate from Dutchess County. It was a lively introduction to the league's activities. The Republican machine still smarted from the league's campaign against Senator Wadsworth, who had opposed the suffrage amendment even after New York voters had passed it. Regulars in both parties thought it was time that the women, heady with success, were tamed. The newly installed Republican governor, Nathan L. Miller, enraged the convention with a denunciation of the league as a menace to American institutions because of its social-welfare program and lobbying activities.

“I want to tell you why Governor Miller has suspicion of you,” cried Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the white-haired leader of the suffrage struggle and its most eloquent spokesman. “The League of Women Voters constitutes the remains of that army which for 50 years in the State of New York fought the battle for the enfranchisement of the sex.” The women now intended to bring to the new struggle for welfare legislation the hard-hitting tactics they had learned in the suffrage battles.

The male politicians were very critical, but Miller's frontal attack soon proved to have been a blunder. Although Republican women outnumbered the Democrats by 5 to 1 at the convention, the league, led by Mrs. Vanderlip, a Republican, protested the governor's speech and reaffirmed the right of women “to work as a group outside the political party for political measures.” The governor beat a quick retreat: he had been misunderstood, he said. The politicians realized that more subtle methods would have to be used to keep women in their place.
⁸

Eleanor had long followed politics as an observer, but this was her apprenticeship in political activity on her own. Her role at the convention was limited to explaining to the delegates the work of her legislative committee: all bills introduced into the legislature would be reviewed, and the good and bad features of the key measures circulated to the league's membership. The next few months showed that there was more to the committee's activities than that.

The league decided to sponsor a bill requiring the political parties
to give equal representation to men and women at all levels, and it was Eleanor's job to get the bill drafted and to obtain bipartisan sponsorship for it.
⁹
When the politicians in the legislature moved to weaken the direct primary law by excluding the governorship and other state-wide offices from its stipulations, the board asked Eleanor and Esther to formulate the league's opposition to the measure.
¹⁰
Eleanor led a state-board discussion of proposals to reorganize the state government which ended with the board's reaffirmation of its support of a longer term for governor, an executive budget, a shorter ballot, and departmental consolidation, reforms that in time would all be adopted. She had interested FDR in the work, enough so that the league minutes of March 1 read “on motion duly made and seconded, it was voted that a vote of thanks be sent Mr. Roosevelt for his help in the Legislative work.” He was not making Governor Miller's mistake.

Franklin enjoyed coaching his wife in political tactics. The re-election of Narcissa Vanderlip as state chairman of the league was contested on the grounds that there had been electioneering in the vicinity of the polls. A committee was set up to investigate. Esther and Eleanor were both supporters of Mrs. Vanderlip and quite enraged over the investigation. At dinner at Sixty-fifth Street they told Franklin about the situation. “Eleanor, you be there early and sit up front,” he advised. “Just as soon as the report is read, you get up and move that it be tabled. That motion is not debatable.”

“It worked,” recalled Eleanor gleefully. “You should have seen their jaws drop.” Eleanor made a striking figure, thin and very tall. She had on a rose-colored suit, and a long fur, that went around her neck and down. It gave her a special pleasure to do what Franklin had told her to do.

In April, 1921, Eleanor was in Cleveland as a Dutchess County delegate to the league's second national convention. “I've had a very interesting day and heard some really good women speakers,” she wrote her husband.

Mrs. Catt is clear, cold reason, Mrs. Larue Brown is amusing, apt, graceful, a Mrs. Cunningham from Texas is emotional and idealistic, but she made nearly everyone cry! I listened to Child Welfare all the morning and Direct Primaries all the afternoon, lunched with Margaret Norrie, drove out at five with Mrs. Wyllis Mitchell and called on Mrs. (Newton) Baker, dined and heard some speeches
on Child Welfare and attended a N.Y. delegates' meeting and am about to go to bed, quite weary! Meetings begin tomorrow at ten.
¹¹

Twenty years later Eleanor still recalled the speech of Minnie Fisher Cunningham, veteran of a hundred reform battles in Texas, who made her feel “that you had no right to be a slacker as a citizen, you had no right not to take an active part in what was happening to your country as a whole.”
¹²
She was moved particularly by Mrs. Cunningham's plea “that she hoped the day would not come when her children would look at her and say: ‘You knew certain conditions existed and you did nothing about those conditions.'”

Mrs. Catt may have been “clear, cold reason” on the subject of direct primaries and other measures to weaken boss control of political parties, but she was all flame and passion when she ripped into President Harding, who in his first address to Congress a day earlier had declared “this Republic will have no part” in the League of Nations. Mrs. Catt threw aside a prepared speech.

You have heard politics all day. I can't help saying something I feel I must. The people in this room tonight could put an end to war. Everybody wants it and every one does nothing. . . . I am for a League of Nations, a Republican league or any kind the Republicans are in.

She summoned the women, most of whom were by now on their feet, to “consecrate” themselves

to put war out of the world. . . . Men were born by instinct to slay. It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: “No, you shall no longer kill your fellow men.”
¹³

There was dead silence, followed by wave after wave of applause. Not until Eleanor Roosevelt achieved her full powers would another woman have a comparable authority over female audiences; but Eleanor had many years of training, discipline, and speechmaking ahead before she achieved such mastery. Back from Cleveland, a diary entry for April 23 noted that “worked in a.m. at typewriting review of legislative work for winter.” The next day, Sunday, she went back
to her typewriter after church, finished her notes on legislation, “and wrote out speech for Tuesday” for the Dutchess County chapter of the League of Women Voters. Margaret Norrie, her Staatsburgh neighbor, made the main report on the Cleveland convention. “I added a few words,” Eleanor noted. The next day she went to New York to have her hair done and again say “a few words on legislation” to a league luncheon at the Colony Club. Speaking in public was a torment; her cultivated voice—which in conversation was relaxed and warm—rose several octaves and became high-pitched, and frequent distracting giggles reflected her self-consciousness. She was, however, determined to do better.

Regardless of the difficulties she had making speeches she was doing her job, and at the May meeting of the Dutchess County league was nominated for chairman but withdrew in favor of Margaret Norrie.
¹⁴
Also at that meeting she became involved in public controversy for the first time—in defense of civil liberties. In an article in the
Delineator
Vice President Coolidge had alleged that women's colleges were filled with radicals, Vassar being one of his targets, and in particular Professor Winifred Smith, who worried the vice president because she had contrasted the “moderation and intelligence” of the Soviet representative in Washington with the “narrowness” of the congressmen who were demanding his deportation. Coolidge thought Professor Smith's reactions were dangerous. Eleanor introduced the club's resolution on the subject. The club knew Miss Smith as “a public-spirited and devoted citizen,” her resolution read, and in times of “public excitement” the national interest was best served by “calm and critical judgment.” The resolution ended with a protest against “all thoughtless aspersion on such public-spirited citizens.”

The
Poughkeepsie Eagle News
headlined the censure of the vice president: “Mrs. F. D. Roosevelt Offers Resolution Taking to Task Husband's Victorious Rival.” The local press was “indignant” over the resolution, Eleanor noted in her diary, and added, “Foolish of me ever to do anything of the kind.”
¹⁵
The criticism bothered her less than the fact that she had involved her husband. It was a problem she would face often in later years—did she have a right to engage in controversy if her husband might be adversely affected?

The circles in which Eleanor moved were greatly concerned with equal rights for women, and so was Eleanor. But the harsh stridency of some feminists irritated her; she was not what Franklin and Louis sarcastically called a “she-male.” She attended a Westchester County
Democratic dinner where Franklin spoke, as did Harriet May Mills, who had been president of the New York Women's Suffrage party and was now a leading Democrat. Eleanor admired Miss Mills but thought she overdid the women question.
¹⁶
Eleanor enjoyed masculine society and working with the men. From Cleveland she had written Franklin, “Much, much love dear and I prefer doing my politics with you.”
¹⁷