Eleanor and Franklin (62 page)

You are wonderful. I love and honor you. . . . Lead your own life, attend to your charities, cultivate yourself, travel when you wish, bring up the children, run your house, I'll give you all the freedom you wish and all the money I can but—leave me my business and politics.

Her message to women was: “Get into the game and stay in it. Throwing mud from the outside won't help. Building up from the inside will.”

A woman needed to learn the machinery of politics; then she would know how “to checkmate as well as her masculine opponent. Or it may be that with time she will learn to make an ally of her opponent, which is even better politics.”
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At the Democratic state convention in April, 1924, called to launch the Smith boom for the presidential nomination, Eleanor led the women in rebellion against male monopolization of power. The issue was the selection of the delegates-at-large; the prime antagonist was Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany boss. “I have wanted you home the last few days,” she wrote Franklin on the eve of the Albany meeting,

to advise me on the fight I'm putting up on two delegates and two alternates at large. Mr. Murphy and I disagree as to whether the men leaders shall name them or whether we shall, backed by the written endorsement of 49 Associate County Chairmen. I imagine it is just a question of which he dislikes most, giving me my way or having me give the papers a grand chance for a story by telling the whole story at the women's dinner Monday night and by insisting
on recognition on the floor of the convention and putting the names in nomination. There's one thing I'm thankful for I haven't a thing to lose and for the moment you haven't either.
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Murphy held firm and Eleanor raised the flag of rebellion at the women's dinner at the Hotel Ten Eyck.

“We have now had the vote for four years and some very ardent suffragists seem to feel that instead of gaining in power the women have lost,” she challenged her audience. If women wanted to achieve the objectives for which they had fought in winning the right to vote, they must not limit themselves to casting a ballot. “They must gain for themselves a place of real equality and the respect of the men,”
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and that meant working “with” the men, not “for” them.

Then she went on with great deliberation,

It is always disagreeable to take stands. It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes. We cannot even be of real service in the coming campaign and speak as a united body of women unless we have the respect of the men and show that when we express a wish, we are willing to stand by it.

The next day she headed a committee that called on Governor Smith, and when he supported the women's demands, Murphy capitulated. “Upstate women at the Democratic convention won the principal points in their contention that the selection of women delegates and alternates-at-large should be made by them rather than by Charles F. Murphy and other men leaders,” the
New York Times
reported. “We go into the campaign feeling that our party has recognized us as an independent part of the organization and are encouraged accordingly,” Eleanor told the press. “No better evidence could be shown that it is to the Democratic Party that the women voters of this State must turn if they desire to take a real part in political affairs.” Governor Smith, she added, had been “a powerful factor” in bringing about this “very satisfactory conclusion.”

That afternoon she presented the resolution to the convention that the New York State delegates to the Democratic national convention
should be pledged to the governor. The resolution was adopted with a shout, and the chairman appointed Eleanor and Miss Martha Byrne to go to the governor's office to escort him to the platform. “It was Mrs. Roosevelt,” noted the
New York Times
editorial, “a highly intelligent and capable politician,” who introduced the Smith resolution at the convention.
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The
Times
considered that a mark in Smith's favor.

The fight at the state convention she won, but the next she lost. Cordell Hull, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appointed her chairman of a subcommittee of Democratic women to canvass the women's organizations and formulate planks on social-welfare legislation to submit to the Platform Committee at the national convention. The subcommittee she assembled was a strong one—the veteran Texas reformer, Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Mrs. Dorothy Kirchwey Brown of Massachusetts, who headed the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Women Voters, Mrs. Norrie, Elinor Morgenthau, Maud Swartz, Gertrude Ely, liberal Democrat from Bryn Mawr, Charl Williams of Tennessee, who was credited with lobbying through that state's legislature the final vote needed for ratification of the suffrage amendment, and Mrs. Solon R. Jacobs, former Alabama member of the Democratic National Committee and influential in the League of Women Voters. The subcommittee held hearings and drafted strong pro-league and Prohibition enforcement planks, equal pay for women workers, and a federal department of education, but its major objective was to commit the party to a resolution calling on the states to ratify the child-labor amendment. When the male-dominated Resolutions Committee rejected this proposal, Eleanor's committee sat outside its doors until the early hours of the morning demanding that it reconsider. The Resolutions Committee refused, by a vote of 22 to 18.

The resolute fight Eleanor and her friends made for progressive planks distinguished her group from two other claimants to leadership among women. One was Miss Elizabeth Marbury, who had been Democratic national committeewoman from New York since the passage of the suffrage amendment, for which she had fought. Though a remarkable woman, Miss Marbury gave the men no trouble; her chief interest in politics in the twenties, except for her opposition to Prohibition, was social, and her salon was famous for its mingling of high figures from the world of politics, fashion, and art. Eleanor and her colleagues were on good terms with her, but simply bypassed her. On the other side there were the embattled females of the Woman's party,
who were too masculine for Eleanor's taste. Moreover, she thought the Woman's party opposition to protective legislation for women on the basis of equal rights was downright reactionary.

Although Eleanor's group was defeated in the Resolutions Committee, forces were gathering that in time would give them what they sought in the field of social-welfare legislation, including the abolition of child labor. Franklin Roosevelt returned to the political wars to nominate Alfred E. Smith with a speech that Walter Lippmann said was “perfect in temper and manner and most eloquent in its effect” and lifted the convention for a moment above “faction and hatred.”

The national convention over, Roosevelt returned to his exercises, happy to have a legitimate reason to stand aside from the doomed national campaign, but Eleanor was deeply involved, more in support of the re-election of Smith as governor than in the campaign of John W. Davis. Because the national party had evaded the issue of ratification of the child-labor amendment, she was the more determined that the state convention should not. She appeared before the Platform Committee carrying a mandate from thirty women's organizations to urge a child-labor plank, and it was approved. She also represented the Women's Trade Union League in a plea for planks on the eight-hour day and minimum-wage legislation and these, too, were included in the platform.

Her speech seconding the renomination of Smith was one of the state convention's high points. A day earlier the Republicans had nominated her cousin Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., to oppose Smith, the same cousin who had called Franklin “a maverick” Roosevelt in 1920. Salt had recently been rubbed into that wound by Nicholas Longworth. “Mama is wild over Nick L. having called you in a speech a ‘denatured Roosevelt,'” Eleanor wrote Franklin. Nick “was just trying to be funny,” she told Sara, but she, too, was angry.
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“Of course he [Smith] can win,” Eleanor said in her seconding speech. “How can he help it when the Republican convention yesterday did everything to help him?” The delegates did not miss the thrust, and applauded appreciatively. In the spring she had feigned concern because Louis Howe had rejoiced that some of the oil from the Teapot Dome scandal had spattered Teddy.
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“I told him I was ashamed of such vindictiveness but he's been waiting to get even he says a long time!” In the campaign Louis' “vindictiveness” went further, and now he was actively abetted by Eleanor. Louis persuaded Eleanor and her lady Democrats to follow Teddy around the state in a motorcade that
featured a huge teakettle spouting steam, and in her speeches Eleanor referred to her cousin as “a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.” Eleanor later said the teakettle affair was a “rough stunt.”
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The Oyster Bay clan sizzled, Louis beamed, and we may assume that Franklin shed few tears.

There is a glimpse of Eleanor on the stump in the upstate rural areas, in her own words.

“I guess you're campaigning,” the speaker, a bedraggled woman who looked fifty but probably was thirty, stood beside our car. . . . We were on a narrow back road in a hilly country and we were campaigning so we acknowledged it and asked her politics, meanwhile taking a look at the farm and buildings. Everything bespoke a helpless struggle, the poor land, run down buildings, the general look of dirt and untidiness so we were not surprised to hear “Oh, I ain't got much time for politics but Mr. Williams the R.F.D. man says I must vote for Coolidge because he ain't had a chance yet and I've always been a Republican anyways.”

“No,” she went on, “he ain't done much as I can see for farmers, leastways I never had a worse time. . . . ”
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Eleanor was one of the few New York Democrats who stumped in the rural districts, and her talks with farmers' wives shaped her approach to agricultural distress. Her theme was rural-urban interdependence, which placed her in disagreement with those who felt that a conflict between city and countryside was inevitable. “I live in both city and country and so realize that the best interests of both are to be promoted by better understanding of each other's situation and cooperation rather than conflict.” Because city problems had been so obvious “all of the best brains in the land have concentrated on solving them” and things had improved, and rural backwardness could also be overcome “if city and country people will consider the rural problem as a joint problem vital to both and give their best thought to solving one of the greatest problems confronting our nation today.”
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Coolidge swamped Davis, who drew only 24 per cent of the vote, not much better than LaFollette's 16 per cent. But in New York, despite the Republican landslide, Smith won re-election.

29.
LIFE WITHOUT FATHER

B
Y THE END OF THE
1924
ELECTION CAMPAIGN SHE HAD BECOME
one of the busiest women in New York public life, but her responsibilities as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law were in no way diminished. A crippled husband needed more attention than ever before, both during the months when he was in New York attending to business and politics and the household revolved about him, and in the long stretches when he was away from New York in search of recovery and had to be kept in touch with every household detail and especially with his growing children.

Franklin's determination to recover the use of his legs turned into a hunt for warm waters and balmy skies. He had discovered in Vincent Astor's heated swimming tank that his legs regained some of their power in warm water. In early winter 1923 he rented a houseboat, the
Weona II
, on which he drifted through the waters off Florida in search of good fishing and sandy beaches, and this was to be his pattern for four winters. In the summer he went to Marion, Massachusetts, to work with Dr. William McDonald on the exercises that this outstanding neurologist had devised for polio victims.

While Franklin was away Eleanor remained in New York on Sixty-fifth Street and had to be both father and mother to the children, who in 1924 ranged in age from eight (John) to eighteen (Anna). Alone, too, she had to bear the brunt of Sara's harassment and discontent.

She made it seem easy and effortless, but a few lines in a thinly veiled autobiographical article that she wrote for
Vogue
in 1930 suggested how difficult those years were for her and her loneliness in facing them.

Her husband was a busy man, loving her and loving his children, but as she sat there she realized clearly that for years to come other interests must come first with him and the irony of ironies, she,
who just now was groping for help, must be the one to make these other claims seem all important because she knew so well that without them the man would never be satisfied, and would never feel completely fulfilled.
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