The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (26 page)

We arrived a little ahead of time, since we knew we should have to walk rather slowly down the main hall to get into line, and then we waited and waited. The President and Mrs. Hoover did not appear. My husband was twice offered a chair, but he thought that if he showed any weakness someone might make an adverse political story out of it, so he refused each time. It seemed as though he was being deliberately put through an endurance test, but he stood the whole evening very well, though the half hour before President and Mrs. Hoover appeared was an ordeal.

This idea may seem preposterous but in political life you grow suspicious. The strategists on both sides weigh how far they can go without awakening in the people a feeling that the rules of fair play have not been observed. You hear a whisper of this or that, but the whispers are never brought to the attention of the candidates and no official recognition is given to them.

I can hardly remember a campaign in which, in our village of Hyde Park, scurrilous things were not said about my husband and his mother and myself, and even about the children. Some of my friends came to me in anxiety because they had heard a story that my husband did not have infantile paralysis but had some other disease which was progressive and would eventually attack the brain.

During the 1932 campaign Louis Howe heard that the Republicans planned to issue a statement claiming that infantile paralysis was a progressive disease which eventually affected the brain. Louis immediately asked Dr. George Draper, a leading authority on polio, who with Dr. Lovett had taken care of Franklin, for a counterstatement which he could use if necessary. Dr. Draper gave him a full statement, from the medical point of view, refuting any such ideas. He noted that Sir Walter Scott had had infantile paralysis when he was a small boy, and no one could point to any impairment in his brain.

My husband’s mother was never happy about the gossip and rumors concerning her and her son and her grandsons. Disagreeable letters upset her very much, and the statement that she was paid by the government for the use of her house at Hyde Park as a summer White House distressed her above everything. She was proud of her home and extremely happy when her son and his family and friends could be with her, and nothing would have induced her to accept money from any source. In any case, there was at no time a suggestion of government pay, and after her death my husband continued to pay the expenses of the house and grounds out of his own pocket.

All people in public life are subject to this type of slander. Circumstantial evidence can almost always be produced to make the stories that are circulated about their private lives seem probable to the people who want to believe them. A man who chooses to hold public office must learn to accept the slander as part of the job and to trust that the majority of the people will judge him by his accomplishments in the public service. A man’s family also has to learn to accept it. In my husband’s case, even his little dog, Fala, came in for his share of false accusations.

Sixteen
    

I Learn to Be a President’s Wife

FRANKLIN DID NOT
tell me when he decided to run for the Presidency, but I knew that for a year or more everything that Louis Howe had undertaken for my husband had been with the idea of broadening his acquaintanceships and knowledge of conditions throughout the country. This little man was really the biggest man from the point of view of imagination and determination I have ever known. He made few personal friends and he judged most of those by their loyalty to “the Boss,” as he called my husband. He was one of the few people who never said “yes” when he meant “no.”

It was Louis Howe who mapped out the preconvention campaign. The strategy and the choice of men were left largely to him and, though he talked his plans over with Franklin, he really “masterminded” the whole campaign. He loved the sense of power and, though he wanted a few people to know he had it, on the whole he preferred anonymity. It was he who chose Edward J. Flynn and James Farley to play their important roles, though Franklin liked and trusted them both. Ed Flynn came to understand much that my husband believed in and worked for. Jim Farley believed in the man for whom he worked, but he was not so much concerned with the ideas and ideals for which the man stood. He had a marvelous gift with people; he could do a prodigious amount of work, and he carried his share of the burden as magnificently as did Louis and Ed Flynn.

There were many other devoted and loyal men who believed in my husband and who, contributing generously of their time and money, worked directly in the campaign. Among them were Frank Walker, the Henry Morgenthaus, Sr. and Jr., W. Forbes Morgan, and Bernard Baruch. These men gathered about them other men who became active in planning to meet future problems. The men who formed the so-called brain trust were picked chiefly by Louis Howe and Sam Rosenman. They were a group with whom Franklin consulted in laying plans to meet the problems ahead, lawyers, professors, politicians, all gathered together to think out ways and means of doing specific things. The original “brain trust” consisted of Professor Raymond Moley, Professor Rexford G. Tugwell, and Judge Samuel I. Rosenman. Later, Adolf Berle was brought in and on certain occasions Dr. Joseph McGoldrick and General Hugh Johnson were consulted.

Through the whole of Franklin’s career there never was any deviation from his original objective—to help make life better for the average man, woman and child. A thousand and one means were used, difficulties arose, changes took place, but this objective always was the motive for whatever had to be done. In the end, in spite of all his efforts to prevent it, a war had to be fought, because the inexorable march of events showed that only by war could fascism be wiped out. The persecution of the Jews was only the beginning of the persecutions that would have been inflicted upon all those who differed from the Fascist leaders. All freedom for the average man would have gone, and with its going, the objectives that Franklin and all other men in democratic nations believed in would have been lost.

While Franklin’s desire was to make life happier for people, mixed with it, as I mentioned earlier, was his liking for the mechanics of politics, for politics as a science and as a game which included understanding the mass reactions of people and gambling on one’s own judgment.

Franklin always felt that a president should consider himself an instrument chosen by the people to do their bidding, but that he should also consider that as president he had an obligation to enlighten and lead the people.

I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security. I never heard him say there was a problem that he thought it was impossible for human beings to solve. He recognized the difficulties and often said that, while he did not know the answer, he was completely confident that there was an answer and that one had to try until one either found it for himself or got it from someone else.

I never knew him to face life or any problem that came up with fear, and I have often wondered if that courageous attitude was not communicated to the people of the country. It may well be what helped them to pull themselves out of the depression in the first years of his administration as president. He knew quite well that he could not pull them out with the best policies in the world unless the people themselves made those policies work. But he believed in the courage and ability of men, and they responded.

From the personal standpoint, I did not want my husband to be president. I realized, however, that it was impossible to keep a man out of public service when that was what he wanted and was undoubtedly well equipped for. It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.

The nominating convention was held in Chicago, with Senator Thomas J. Walsh as permanent chairman. Franklin owed much to his skillful handling of the convention.

Alfred E. Smith also was a candidate for the nomination and had many ardent supporters. I think he felt that gratitude should have compelled Franklin to withdraw in his favor, since he had been instrumental in getting Franklin to re-enter public life previously. My husband believed that he could meet the tremendous crisis the country was facing better than anyone else in the party. A man must have this confidence in himself or he could never undertake the heavy responsibilities of leading a nation. People used to comment to me on the egoism of my uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt. I know many people felt that Franklin D. Roosevelt had the same quality. Undoubtedly he did to a certain extent; a man could not carry the burdens of the Presidency otherwise.

The regular machinery of the Democratic National Committee, which handled the tickets to the convention, was, of course, favorable to Smith, and refused to give a fair proportion of tickets to our convention committee. The day after my husband made his acceptance speech, however, a large carton of convention hall tickets was sent to our suite in the Congress Hotel!

As each state delegation to the convention was pledged to support my husband’s nomination, that state was painted red on a large map of the United States which hung just outside the Franklin D. Roosevelt headquarters in the Congress Hotel. One morning it was discovered that during the night someone had pasted a large sign over the map: “It’s votes not acres that count!” The Smith supporters were suspected.

The night before my husband was nominated, we sat up until morning in the Executive Mansion. Two days later, my husband, John, Elliott, and I flew to Chicago where Franklin was to accept the nomination.

The plane trip was something no candidate had ever before undertaken and it created considerable excitement. Previously, the candidate had not been notified officially of his nomination until later in the summer.

Mr. Raymond Moley has stated that he wrote that acceptance speech. I feel sure he was never aware of the things that happened in connection with it. There were two versions of the speech. Evidently they were somewhat alike, and thus the confusion must have come about. My husband wrote one speech himself, dictated to a stenographer in Chicago over the long-distance telephone from Albany, Franklin, Miss LeHand, Miss Tully and Judge Rosenman taking turns at dictating.

That speech, together with one that Mr. Moley and Mr. Tugwell wrote as an improvement on it, were brought by Louis Howe when he met us at the Chicago airport. As he started to hand both versions to my husband, Franklin said: “Oh, I’ve revised it and have a new draft in my pocket. I have been working on it in the plane.” The one in his pocket was the one he read at the convention, though he read through the others and consented to include one or two things that Louis felt were especially important and that were not in Franklin’s own revised draft.

Governor Smith and his family and supporters did not wait to congratulate Franklin but left Chicago immediately. The other candidates stayed and felt less bitter.

In September Franklin started on a long campaign trip across the country. Some of the children accompanied him but I did not join him until he reached Williams, Arizona, on the way home. Fortunately, one or more of the children were always able to be on all the campaign trips, for he loved having some of the family with him. They not only helped to entertain people on the train but also kept him amused, for we made it a family practice to look for funny incidents to make him laugh.

Exhilarated as always by contact with people, Franklin came home from the 1932 campaign trips with a conviction that the depression could be licked. He had an extraordinarily acute power of observation and could judge conditions in any section from the looks of the countryside as he traveled through. From him I learned how to observe from train windows; he would watch the crops, notice how people dressed, how many cars there were and in what condition, and even look at the washing on the clotheslines. When the CCC was set up, he knew, though he never made a note, exactly where work of various kinds was needed.

On the 1932 campaign trips Franklin was impressed by the evidences of our wastefulness, our lack of conservation, our soil erosion; and on what he saw he based his plans for action. But the thing he felt most strongly was that there was a vitality in the people that could be salvaged. I believe it was from his faith in the people that he drew the words of his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The campaign speeches and later the fireside chats, as they came to be known, entailed a great deal of work on Franklin’s part. In the campaigns the subjects were carefully chosen, the places and times to speak discussed with many advisers. Then the research began. Franklin expected the people assigned to this to bring him arguments on both sides of the question, and as much information on the subject as it was possible to gather. He went over all their material carefully and picked out the facts that were to go into the speech; then he gave it to those whom he entrusted with the writing of the first draft. When they brought this back to him, he worked over it with them two or three times.

I have known him, even after a draft had been submitted for literary criticism to the best person who had been asked to help from that point of view, to read the final copy over and over again, put in words or take them out, transpose sentences, and polish it until he knew it by heart and it completely represented his own thought.

I have sometimes been asked what role I played in connection with my husband’s speeches. The answer is that I played no role at all. It is true that he sometimes used parts of letters or paragraphs from articles I gave him to look at; and I often read his speeches before he actually delivered them. But that was the extent of it.

His voice lent itself remarkably to the radio. It was a natural gift, for in his whole life he never had a lesson in diction or public speaking. His voice unquestionably helped him to make the people of the country feel that they were an intelligent and understanding part of every government undertaking during his administration.