Eleanor and Franklin (69 page)

But Eleanor grieved for Smith. “If the rest of the ticket didn't get in, what does it matter?” she said to a reporter who asked her how she felt about her husband's victory. “No, I am not excited about my husband's election. I don't care. What difference can it make to me?”
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But of course it would make a great deal of difference. Even before Election Day she had written the Democratic state chairman, resigning from the Democratic State Committee: “It seems to me now that my husband is actually back in active politics, it is wise for me not to be identified with any of the party committees.”
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She could not withdraw from a Consumers League dinner, she wrote Franklin, who had returned to Warm Springs after the election, “because I promised long ago but it is my last appearance as a speaker on any subject bordering on politics!”
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32.
RETURN TO ALBANY

A
TRIUMPHANT
R
OOSEVELT DEPARTED FROM
W
ARM
S
PRINGS AND
left it to his wife to arrange the move into the executive mansion. She was a far different person from the anxious young woman who had accompanied the ebullient new senator to Albany eighteen years earlier. She accepted an invitation from Mrs. Smith to come to Albany, and with great dispatch decided on the changes that would have to be made to fit the comfortable, loose-jointed mansion, with its turrets, cupolas, and broad red-papered halls, to the needs of the gregarious Roosevelt family.

The first structural change she wanted represented an act of thoughtfulness: to join the ladies' cloakroom to the back hall so that it could be used as a servants' dining and sitting room because the pantry where the servants had been eating was “not really decent.”
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Governor Smith's zoo was to be dismantled, and the three monkeys, one elk, one deer, one fawn, and six dogs dispersed. Republican approval was obtained to remove the three greenhouses and install a swimming tank—a real saving, Franklin carefully pointed out to the press, since the annual upkeep of the greenhouses was $6,000 for flowers which could be obtained from commercial florists for $750.

For her husband's bedroom Eleanor chose the “grandest sunny” room in the mansion, a corner room of the second floor with two exposures and a palatial dressing room and bathroom. The library downstairs would be his study and workroom, and the room upstairs that Smith had used as his office at the mansion would, with chintz curtains and Val-Kill furniture, make a cozy family sitting room and serve as her workroom. She suggested that the only single bedroom in the mansion be given to Missy; “We can talk that over,” she wrote Franklin.
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How did she visualize her life in Albany, she was asked at a news conference. She would make the executive mansion into a home for her husband, she said, take the social side of things off his shoulders,
and see that the house was run smoothly. She would carry on with the furniture factory at Val-Kill (“sold everything,” she reported to her husband after their exhibit that autumn)
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and with the weaving enterprise that she had recently started at Hyde Park village. These activities, she felt, were helpful to her neighbors and satisfied her craftsman's instinct. She was even more determined to continue her three-day teaching schedule at Todhunter School—“I teach because I love it, I cannot give it up.” And she would arrange her life so that she could be immediately available to her children.
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John, her youngest, had just joined Franklin Jr. and Elliott at Groton, and James was at Harvard. She must be able, at a moment's notice, to dash up to Groton or Cambridge, as she did soon after Franklin's election when “F. Jr. checked into the infirmary with a belly-ache in the right side” and Johnny, “the poor lamb,” was on crutches after having banged his knee on a door “in a rush for crackers after calisthenics.” She also discovered on that trip that Elliott, in his eagerness to get on the football team, had never told the school about his old rupture, which was giving him trouble. James, whom she visited in Cambridge on the way home, disclosed that he had become secretly engaged to Betsy Cushing, “a nice child . . . but I regret that he wishes to tie himself down so young . . . in any case we can do nothing about it.”
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“A lot of things can happen to four boys away at school,” she told the press with motherly understatement.

Mistress of the mansion, mother, teacher—thus she envisaged her role in the weeks after election. But the women with whom she had worked expected more of her; they rejoiced in Roosevelt's victory as much because it brought Eleanor into the executive mansion as because it put him into the governor's chair. They were sure she would transform the position of First Lady into one of unique usefulness. “What a First Lady you will make,” exulted Emily Newell Blair, the one-time suffrage leader and veteran Democratic politician. “How splendid it is to have one in that place with the political acumen and feeling for women that you have.”
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Eleanor was eager to make a place for women in government, and under her tutelage her husband had come to a more genial and enlightened view of woman's quest for equality; but she knew that basically he still considered politics a man's business. Having freed himself from his mother's domination, he would become impatient and evasive if she pressed her point of view in ways that did not fit his purposes and defer to his moods. She would need self-control as well as feminine intuition and guile not to irritate him. They dealt differently with both
people and problems. Her responses were structured by the logic of love; his by the logic of power and governance. Her imagination was active on behalf of others and flowered in deeds of kindness; he was concerned with using others to further his political career and purposes. She disregarded convention and sometimes was impatient with legality when it stood in the way of benevolence; he often yielded to expediency and the more comfortable course. When she disapproved, tension would arise between them. But she had an inner conviction that he shared her concern to make life better for others; that, too, was part of his political purpose, and she believed that with tact, humility, and a service of anonymity she could be of help to him and to the causes to which she now was so actively committed.

Even before the new governor assumed office, she was influential in shaping the character of his administration. Roosevelt was uncomfortably aware that Smith meant to remain the power in the state. Smith had always patronized Roosevelt, the Hudson River patrician, and treated him, Roosevelt later wrote, as a piece of “window dressing that had to be borne with because of a certain value in non–New York City areas.” Robert Moses, with his gift for wounding invective, had summed up the attitude of some of Smith's circle toward Roosevelt with the gibe “He'll make a good campaigner but a lousy Governor.” The governorship need not interfere with Roosevelt's polio therapy, Smith had accommodatingly assured him in September. Once he was sworn in, he could decamp for the winter to Warm Springs, leave Lehman in charge, and return for a few days before the legislature adjourned. The suggestion that he govern by proxy had amused Franklin in September; it irked him when it was renewed with even more insistence after his victory and Smith's defeat. Smith pressed him to retain the Smith cabinet intact, and particularly to keep Robert Moses as secretary of state and Belle Moskowitz as his speech writer and strategist. The situation worried Roosevelt and he discussed his anxieties with his wife and Louis. They supported him in his determination not to be a front man for Smith.

They were particularly uneasy about keeping Mrs. Henry Moskowitz. She had been a Bull Moose progressive and was a brilliant publicist, but she was so arrogant that even Eleanor, the most tractable and cooperative of colleagues, found it difficult to work with her. She was politically astute and totally committed to Smith—as dedicated, persevering, and suspicious in his behalf as Louis was in Roosevelt's. “By all signs I think Belle and Bob Moses mean to cling to you,” she
warned her husband, “and you will wake up to find R.M. Secretary of State and B.M. running Democratic publicity at the old stand unless you take a firm stand.”
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Her next slightly anti-Semitic remark underscored how strongly she felt. “Gosh! the race has nerves of iron and tentacles of steel!” Roosevelt was perfectly clear in his own mind that he did not want Belle as part of his political household, but he could not bring himself to tell Smith. Eleanor was aware of how difficult it could be for him to be the messenger of bad news and how he hated situations where his charm and persuasiveness were impotent, but she kept after him. “Don't let Mrs. M. get draped around you for she means to be,” she prodded in a letter to Warm Springs. “It will always be one for you and two for Al.”
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“I hope you will consider making Frances Perkins Labor Commissioner,” she wrote him, starting another campaign. “She'd do well and you could fill her place as Chairman of the Industrial Commission by one of the men now on [the] Commission and put Nell Schwartz (now Bureau of Women in Industry) on the Commission so there would be one woman on it.” Then, as if she sensed male feathers being ruffled, she hastily added, “These are suggestions which I'm passing on, not my opinions for I don't mean to butt in.”
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And knowing that men will often hear with pleasure from other women what they will not accept from their wives, she had made sure that she would not be the only woman to make this suggestion. She instigated an invitation to Warm Springs for Molly Dewson, a reformer who nevertheless understood the political game; men liked Molly's down-East saltiness. She had come to Eleanor to ask how she could cash in on her services in the campaign and interest the governor-elect in the legislative program of the New York Consumers League, of which she was president.
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“Go to Warm Springs to see Franklin before others see him,” Eleanor advised, and promptly made it possible.

Molly arrived in Warm Springs well briefed. In the course of talking to Roosevelt about minimum-wage legislation she shifted the discussion to the department responsible for the administration of labor standards. “Why don't you appoint Frances Perkins your Industrial Commissioner?” she interjected. Franklin gave Molly the impression that he was not surprised by her request and that he was thinking about it favorably.
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The final confrontation between Roosevelt and Smith came during a four-hour meeting soon after his return from Warm Springs. All during December the battle had been fought behind the scenes and
through stories planted by both sides, mostly in the Democratic
World
. “While [Smith] will retire to private life, probably to banking,” wrote Ernest K. Lindley, who had covered Smith for many years, “no one doubts that he will continue to be a very powerful, if not the dominating influence in the Democratic Party in this State.” Roosevelt means “to administer the office in his own name and by his own right,” wrote another correspondent for the
World
on the same day. “This means,” the story continued, “there will be changes in the Smith Cabinet.” Lieutenant Governor-elect Herbert Lehman—a protégé of Belle's—confirmed on his return from Warm Springs, where he had gone to discuss the legislative program, that Roosevelt intended to be much more active as governor than had generally been assumed at the time of his nomination. And Roosevelt, tanned, buoyant, and “fit as a fiddle,” underscored Lehman's observation. “I am ready,” he announced as he left Warm Springs, “to carry on the duties of Governor of New York and to remain constantly on the job during the entire legislative period.”

Eleanor had alerted Franklin that Smith wanted to see him as soon as possible after his return, and three days after Roosevelt's arrival in New York the two men talked. Moses “rubs me the wrong way,” Roosevelt told Smith flatly, and that finished the campaign to keep him on. He was less definite about Belle, and an added complication was Smith's disapproval of Roosevelt's plan to appoint Frances Perkins as labor commissioner.
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He was proud of Miss Perkins, Smith said—it was he who had appointed her chairman of the Industrial Commission, and she had performed ably—but a cabinet post carried administrative responsibilities, and, he said, “men will take advice from a woman, but it is hard for them to take orders from a woman.” Smith's attitude did not surprise Eleanor. She had caught a glimpse of it in the way he had talked about the visit paid him by Nellie Tayloe Ross when she was governor of Wyoming, when Smith had gloated over her inability to produce the kind of figures that he always had at his fingertips. He did not feel a woman should be governor of a state or head of a department.
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Roosevelt, nevertheless, appointed Miss Perkins and also, as Eleanor had suggested, put Nell Schwartz on the Industrial Commission.