Kati Marton (10 page)

BOTH FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR SUFFERED
excruciating pain during those early months and years following his betrayal. She was let down beyond imagination; he was unmasked for the first time in his life. He had to face the disappointment of the two women who were at the core of his existence: his wife and his mother. One photograph captures the family’s dark mood during a period of forced togetherness. Taken in 1920 on the front steps of their summer home on Campobello Island, Franklin and Eleanor flank Sara Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor is looking down, an expression of unbearable sadness on her face. For once Franklin is not masking distress with his winner’s smile. His five children and his mother all seem to have caught the contagion of the couple’s anguish. The Roosevelts’ agony, however, stayed private.

In one of the last photos taken before he contracted polio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits confidently between the two warring women in his life, his mother and Eleanor. Eleanor, whose discomfort is palpable, had recently learned of her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer.

Eleanor and Franklin found a common and safe language in politics. Eleanor started small, building up her confidence in groups like the League of Women Voters and Democratic women’s organizations. At this stage, she wrote better than she spoke, but her prodigious energy and lack of ego or vanity were great gifts. Her full focus was on issues: housing, child labor laws, voter registration and birth control. Along the way she earned her husband’s respect, admiration and, though rarely expressed, gratitude. The two forged a new relationship based not on passion or intimacy but on shared values, mutual need and, eventually, affection.

One of the people who first recognized and nurtured Eleanor’s political skills was Louis Howe. A former Associated Press reporter, Howe grasped Franklin’s enormous gift and potential. “Beloved and Revered Future President,” Howe called him. He was also the first to see the Roosevelts’ formidable potential as a political couple. He worked with Eleanor to improve her shrill, nervous speaking voice. He also told her to “say what you need to say and sit down.” With Howe’s guidance, she began to develop her own style, as different from Franklin’s as she was from him herself, but effective in its way.

With lowered expectations of her marriage and suppressed rage at her husband, she invested her emotions in friends. “Out of a long experience I have decided that to me lasting friendships and intimate contacts with people mean more than any other things in life,” she wrote. She sought out people who needed her. “In all our contacts,” she later wrote, “it is probably the sense of being really needed which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.”

In the early years after their trauma, reserve, good manners and familiarity eased her relations with Franklin. Hesitantly at first, they began to weave a new pattern for their union. “Dearest Honey,” Eleanor wrote Franklin from a League of Women Voters Convention in Cleveland,
“I’ve had a very interesting day and heard some really good women speakers. Mrs. [Carrie Chapman] Catt is clear, cold reason …. I listened to Child Welfare all the morning and Direct Primaries all the afternoon … attended a N.Y. delegate’s meeting and am about to go to bed, quite weary. Meetings begin tomorrow at ten …. Much much love dear and I prefer doing my politics with you!”

The story of how everything changed for Franklin and Eleanor in the summer of 1921 never loses its power. Franklin had taken his children sailing at Campobello. After an icy ocean dip, he caught what seemed at first to be merely a summer chill. He took to his bed—and never walked again. Due to his polio, Eleanor became the strong one, Franklin the dependent one. It was only then that the Roosevelts discovered who they really were and how dependent they were on each other. For weeks after Franklin was stricken, Eleanor slept on a couch in his room and nursed him day and night. She did not weep in front of him. She said later that Franklin with his collapsed legs reminded her of Michelangelo’s
Pieta.
It helped that Franklin was not given to introspection and that Eleanor lacked the time for it. “To tell the truth,” Eleanor wrote, “I do not think I ever stopped to analyze my feelings [regarding Franklin’s illness]. There was so much to do to manage the household and the children and to try to keep things running smoothly that I never had any time to think of my own reactions. I simply lived from day to day and got through the best I could.”

Franklin’s courage matched Eleanor’s as he submitted to his wife’s total care with a stoicism that no one could have predicted. Several times a day, Eleanor and Louis Howe raised and lowered his large frame, bathed him, rubbed him, ministered to his every need. Whether he would ever walk again was at best uncertain, but from that uncertainty, Eleanor and Franklin gleaned hope and strength. He made up his mind he would walk again. She knew that his only chance to escape the invalid’s half-life was by returning to the political arena.

“He was still pretty sick and pretty weak,” FDR’s future Cabinet member, Frances Perkins, recalled of his early return to politics. “It wasn’t just a question of rousing his interest. It was a question of his actually being able to bear the burden that came with more responsibility. I
heard [Eleanor] say, ‘I do hope that he’ll keep in political life. I want to keep him interested in politics. This is what he cares for more than anything else. I don’t want him forgotten. I want him to have a voice in various things …. It’s
good
for him.’”

But first she had to face down her mother-in-law. “Mama made up her mind that Franklin was going to be an invalid for the rest of his life and that he would retire to Hyde Park and live there,” Eleanor wrote. “I hated the arguments, but they had to happen. I had to make a stand.” She had come far from the shy girl who could only say, “Yes, Mama.” In their shared determination to return him to public life, Eleanor and Franklin drew close together again. “My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet,” Eleanor recalled. “She always thought that she understood what was best, particularly where her child was concerned.” Sara lost the war for her son’s soul. “[Politics] was a growing bond between Mother and Father,” Eleanor and Franklin’s daughter, Anna, recalled. “[Mother] was very much more realistic than Granny ever would have been capable of being, because of [Granny’s] background which didn’t have any of these social and political interests which Mother did have …. The polio was very instrumental in bringing them much closer into a very real partnership … their overall goals were the same.” Ultimately, their son James noted, “[Franklin] came to admire his wife more than he did his mother.”

The next several years changed them both. Franklin learned lessons about pain, loss and vulnerability that were already familiar to Eleanor. She now saw as a strength his ability to mask despair with a smile. The fact that they were almost never alone—for Franklin needed almost constant help—no doubt eased them through the crucible of those years. And Eleanor, who loved to feel needed, was now desperately needed.

Franklin was the strategist as Eleanor began her role as his “eyes, ears and legs,” at first to keep his name alive. His future depended largely on her good political instincts. The qualities that first drew Franklin to her—her modesty, her self-effacement and her seriousness of purpose—now inspired admiration from a wider public. Her high-pitched voice was becoming familiar on the stump and on the airwaves
as she crisscrossed New York State, preparing for Franklin’s return to politics. I’m only being active until you can be again, she constantly reassured him. She was still very much the traditional wife at this stage, encouraging and bolstering, but never acknowledging her own ambitions or passions. A wife’s job, she told an interviewer, was to be a partner, mother, homemaker, in that order. Earlier, she had placed the mother’s role at the top of the list. “But today,” she noted revealingly, “we understand that everything else depends upon the success of the wife and husband in their personal relationship.”

At times, the combination of her crushed hopes for personal happiness and the burden of restoring her husband and raising five children overwhelmed her. “I was trying to read to the two youngest boys,” Eleanor remembered. “I suddenly found myself sobbing as I read. I could not think why I was sobbing, nor could I stop …. Mr. Howe came in and tried to find out what the matter was …. The two little boys went off to bed and I sat on the sofa in the sitting room and sobbed and sobbed.”

Politics proved therapeutic for her as well. “I was beginning to find the political contacts Louis [Howe] wanted,” Eleanor wrote. “I drove a car on election day and brought people to the polls. I began to learn a good deal about party politics in a small place. It was rather sordid in spots …. I saw how people took money or its equivalent on election day for their votes and how much of the party machinery was geared to crooked business …. I learned again that human beings are seldom all good or all bad and that few human beings are incapable of rising to the heights now and then.”

“I AM BACK,”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed, having hauled his crippled legs up to the Madison Square Garden stage in the tumult of the 1924 Democratic convention. He was there to nominate Al Smith, “the Happy Warrior,” for president, but it was his own comeback that the crowd cheered. “All the delegates to the national convention remembered …this beautiful, athletic, handsome young man,” Frances Perkins recalled. “Then they heard he had polio and he was dead, so
far as they knew …. He came to life and there he was. He looked so well that day … and his voice was strong. The man on the street just assumed … this fine fellow we thought was dead still lives.”

Franklin applied himself to forcing his lifeless legs to walk again, seeking relief on a houseboat and in the soothing waters of Warm Springs, Georgia. Eleanor encouraged him to take his time, freeing him of any guilt about his long absences from the family. “Don’t worry about being selfish,” she wrote him. “It is more important that you have all you need and wish than anything else and you always give the chicks more than they need and you know I always do just what I want!”

With a surge of energy, she formalized her independence from both Franklin and Sara. She moved into her own house. Val Kill Cottage was a modest stone house two miles from the Roosevelt mansion. Building it was Franklin’s idea, a sign that he was reconciled to her need for autonomy. “My Missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods …,” Franklin wrote to Elliot Brown, a friend whose help he enlisted on the building project. Privately, he referred to Val Kill as “Honeymoon Cottage” or “the love nest.” Indeed, Eleanor’s circle of politically active women—Nan Cook, Marion Dickerman, Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape—were lesbians. Next door to her new home, Eleanor built the Val Kill Shop, a furniture factory employing locals. She was putting into practice a theory dear to both Roosevelts: creating small industries in agricultural areas would keep farmers busy in the off-season and keep them on the land. But this was only the embryo of her expanding activism. Released from her old insecurities and inhibitions, it seemed there was nothing she would not try. She and her friend Dickerman bought the Todhunter School, a New York City private school for girls. Eleanor taught literature, drama and American history there.

By 1928, after seven years of physical therapy and Eleanor’s tireless activism, Franklin was ready to accept the call from New York State Democrats to run for governor. “The demand for Mr. Roosevelt,” Walter Lippmann wrote, “came from every part of the state. It could not be quelled. It could not be denied. The office has sought the man.” Eleanor shrewdly deflected rumors that she was responsible for her long-absent
husband’s candidacy. “I never did a thing to ask him to run …. My husband always makes his own decisions. We always discuss things together, and sometimes I take the opposite side for the fun of the thing, but he always makes his own decisions.”

Instinctively, she understood the public’s limited tolerance for a high-profile political spouse. Once the Roosevelts moved into the Albany Governor’s Mansion, Eleanor declared her political days behind her. “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,” she wrote in her letter resigning from the Democratic State Committee. It was not the last time Eleanor would underestimate both her love of politics or her husband’s need for her to stay in it.