No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Soon all four of the Roosevelt boys would be in the armed forces: thirty-year-old Elliott would accept a captain’s commission in the Army Air Corps, and twenty-four-year-old John would join the navy. Of all the boys, Eleanor was closest to Elliott. “Elliott was the most like her father and brother,” Minnewa Bell, his fourth wife, observed. “She had the feeling that Elliott was going to be a drinker. She was closer to Elliott because she worried about him more.” Like all the Roosevelt boys, Elliott had gone to Groton, but when the time came to apply to Harvard he had willfully flunked his entrance exams. Unable to get his feet on the ground, he had moved from one career to another and from one woman to another. In 1940, his second marriage was already in trouble.

  The youngest son, John, was quieter and more reserved than his older brothers. When he entered Harvard, his father warned the freshman dean that “he has to study to get things done” and “will not be good at assuming or seeking leadership.” The only one of the four boys who would never run for political office, John once worked under a pseudonym to avoid the favoritism that was attached to the Roosevelt name. Married at twenty-two to socialite Anne Lindsay Clark, he was a manager at Filene’s department store in Boston when he entered active duty with the navy.

  The boys’ disappointing careers and broken relationships (between the four of them there would be eighteen marriages) devastated Eleanor. “None of them really lived up to the name,” Eleanor’s friend Abram Sacher observed, “and some of them, in fact, demeaned it” by exhibiting an astonishing lack of sensitivity about using their father’s influence to make money. “She didn’t know what to do with her sons,” Anna’s son Curtis Roosevelt admitted. “They were often very rude to their father. At dinner, arguing about politics, particularly FDR, Jr., and Elliott, they were so extraordinarily arrogant with FDR.”

  Characteristically, and perhaps not without some cause, Eleanor blamed no one but herself. “I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling of responsibility . . . ,” Eleanor wrote Hick in the mid-thirties, at the time of Elliott’s first divorce. “I guess I was a pretty unwise teacher as to how to go about living. Too late to do anything now, however, & I’m rather disgusted with myself. I feel soiled . . . .”

  “She felt that the guilt was all hers,” Elliott later wrote, “because she had been unable to extend to us in our nursery days the warmth of love that the young find as necessary as food or drink.” Eleanor believed she had failed as a mother because “she was so unsure of herself in the early days.” Lacking confidence in her mothering skills, she allowed her ever-confident mother-in-law to take charge of hiring the nurses and setting up the nursery, accepting Sara’s intervention both grudgingly and gratefully, cowed by inexperience and fear. “I was not allowed to take care of the children,” Eleanor recalled, “nor had I any sense of how to do it.”

  “At a visceral level,” Curtis Roosevelt recalled, “a kid can sense lack of confidence in a parent. My mother, Anna, lacked it. ER lacked it. Sara had it. She was the grande dame. She knew who she was and what she wanted.” Even as a great-grandchild, Curtis recalled, he was drawn to that supreme confidence, “like a moth to the flame.”

  The struggle between the two women was no mere skirmish; it was war. Since Sara was unable to prevent her son’s marriage, Eleanor observed in an unpublished article, “she determined to bend the marriage to the way she wanted it to be. What she wanted was to hold onto Franklin and his children; she wanted them to grow as she wished. As it turned out, Franklin’s children were more my mother-in-law’s children than they were mine.”

  Granny referred to them as her children, Jimmy recalled. She told them, “your mother only bore you, I am more your mother than your mother is.” Even as a young boy, Jimmy recognized that this was a cruel thing for his grandmother to say, but he loved her and needed her too much to condemn her: “She was sort of a fairy godmother.”

  The children remembered Eleanor as a dutiful but preoccupied mother who read to them in bed, heard their prayers, and tried to teach them right from wrong. “It did not come naturally to me to understand little children or to enjoy them,” Eleanor confessed. “Playing with children was difficult for me because play had not been an important part of my own childhood.”

  In contrast to their tangled feelings about their mother, the children would remember for the rest of their lives the adventures they shared with their father. “Franklin loved his small children,” Eleanor recalled. “They were a great joy to him; he loved to play with them and I think he took great pleasure in their health and good looks and in their companionship. He made the children feel that he really was their age.” On Saturday afternoons, he would “play the most ridiculous baseball games with them and go on paper chases and do all the things that . . . children enjoy.” In later years, when their father had less and less time for them, the children tended to romanticize their playful romps, setting their father’s spontaneity against their mother’s stiffness.

  Discipline was always a source of trouble in the Roosevelt household. “I was the disciplinarian, I’m afraid,” Eleanor recalled. “[Franklin] found punishing a child almost an impossibility. He just couldn’t do it. I remember distinctly once telling Johnny to go upstairs to his room, and just having a feeling that he hadn’t gone. I went into my husband’s study at Hyde Park and found Johnny sitting in his lap, weeping his heart out on his father’s shirt front, and both of them looking equally guilty when I discovered them.”

  • • •

  Although Eleanor anguished over her inability to communicate easily with her sons, she derived priceless comfort from her close relationship with her only daughter, Anna. When Anna was small, however, Eleanor was no more at ease with her than with the boys. Anna later told her third husband, James Halsted, that her mother was “very unpredictable and inconsistent in bringing up her children. Inconsistent in her feelings—sweet and lovely one hour and the next hour very critical, very demanding, and very difficult to be with. You could never tell what she really meant.” Until Anna entered adolescence, she was closer to her father than to her mother. All the happiest moments of her childhood revolved around him, riding with him on the front of his horse to “the most unexpected spots in peaceful deserted glens deep in the woods,” coasting with him down the steep hill behind the house at Hyde Park, where there were sudden bumps and the sled “would take off into the air,” walking the mile and a half or so with him to her school in Washington, talking about “all sorts of things I liked to hear about—books I was reading, a cruise we might be going to take . . . .”

  Anna was fifteen the summer her father contracted polio. Suddenly the wonderful playmate who had taken long walks with her and sailed with her and done so many physical things was now struggling to walk with heavy steel braces, the sweat pouring down his face. It was “traumatic,” Anna later admitted. The situation was aggravated by the fact that Anna was in a new school in New York, much larger than her previous school, and was having trouble making friends. Meanwhile, Eleanor was so consumed in helping Franklin recover that she “did not realize that Anna was in difficulty.” Interpreting her daughter’s sullenness as typical adolescent behavior, Eleanor failed to appreciate that, with all the focus on Franklin, Anna had become convinced that she no longer mattered to either her mother or her father. “It never occurred to me,” Eleanor later admitted, “to take her into my confidence and consult with her about our difficulties or tell her just what her father was going through.”

  The tension between mother and daughter was finally released late one afternoon that fall. Eleanor was reading a story to her youngest boys when the strain of trying both to nurse her husband and to mother her children suddenly overwhelmed her. She began to cry and she could not stop. Emancipated for the moment from the felt need of remaining in control (the only time in her life she remembered having gone to pieces in this manner), Eleanor flung herself on her bed and sobbed shamelessly for hours. “This outburst of mine had a good result so far as Anna and I
were concerned,” Eleanor later recognized. “She saw that I was not cold and unfeeling after all. And she poured out her troubles to me, saying she knew she had been wrong in thinking I did not love her. It was the start of an understanding between us.”

  From that day forward, Eleanor gave Anna her best hours. When Anna returned from her first round of debutante dances, Eleanor waited up for her in case she wanted to talk. Though Anna was blonde and beautiful with marvelous long legs, Eleanor recognized some of her own insecurities in her daughter’s awkward presence. One night, they talked until dawn. During these intimate exchanges, Eleanor shared with Anna the sorrows of her own childhood, the buried anger at her mother, the disillusionment with her father.

  And then, one night, in the most memorable talk of all, Eleanor told her daughter about Franklin’s love affair with Lucy Mercer. “I felt very strongly on Mother’s side,” Anna recalled. “I was mad—mad at Father” for his having hurt her mother so deeply. “Emotionally from then on I was always closer to my mother than I was to my father.”

  When Anna’s youthful marriage to New York stockbroker Curtis Dall began to fall apart only a few years after they were wed, it was Eleanor who provided understanding and support. Then, when Anna fell in love with John Boettiger, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, during the 1932 campaign, Eleanor watched over and protected their love. In the forbidden phase of the romance, while both lovers were still married, Eleanor provided empathy, sanction, and encompassing love. “Eleanor saw in John the nice son she might have had,” Anna’s son Curtis observed. “He was smart, very good-looking, and knowledgeable about the issues. At the same time, he was very responsive to her, calling her Lovely Lady and flirting with her. It was nice for Anna that her mother and John got along so well.”

  On the eve of Anna’s marriage to John in 1935, Eleanor sent a private letter to John. “I love Anna so dearly that I don’t need to tell you that my willingness to let her go speaks much for my trust and love of you,” she wrote. She would never interfere, she promised, but she had one last word of motherly advice: “Remember that Anna is I think rather like me, she’d always rather have the truth even if it is painful and never let a doubt or suspicion grow up between you two which honest facing can dispel.”

  The following year, Anna and John moved to Seattle, Washington, where they had an unusual opportunity to work together on a major West Coast daily—the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At William Randolph Hearst’s invitation, John was made publisher and Anna became associate editor of the women’s pages. “The Northwest welcomed the Boettigers with bands and fireworks,” a reporter from The Saturday Evening Post noted. “Crowds met the train at hinterland stations. Seattle threw a big banquet.” It was a happy time for the young couple. Under their leadership the Post-Intelligencer expanded its circulation, and the two of them became the toast of the town. Glowing features portrayed John, with his “jovial manner, resonant voice and big physique” as a natural-born politician while Anna was likened to movie star Katharine Hepburn, with her long legs, her figure “as slim and boyish as a schoolgirl,” her careless clothes, and her manner of speaking directly.

  Eleanor was despondent when Anna left Washington. “Perhaps I needed to have you away . . . .” she wrote, “to realize just how much it means to have you . . . . I have felt sad every time we passed your door.” But she was determined not to let the distance diminish their relationship. She wrote to her daughter several times a week, talked to her frequently on the phone, and scheduled her lecture tours so that she could spend a week in Seattle every spring and fall. So, this October, after watching Jimmy drill with his battalion on the evening of October 16, Eleanor flew to Seattle, where she spent the rest of the week with Anna and John in their new home, a sprawling white house on Lake Washington with ten bedrooms and five baths. “I begin to feel really at home in Seattle,” a relaxed Eleanor told her readers. “There seems to be an endless flow of conversation that can fill up long hours of time.” With the boys, Eleanor confided to Hick, she felt only tolerated, but with her daughter, she felt wanted and needed. “I suppose that is why I enjoy being with Anna and John so often.”

  • • •

  Everything Eleanor heard on her cross-country trip convinced her that the Willkie campaign was gaining momentum. His crowds were growing with each passing day; his polls were steadily rising, and his message was gaining strength and substance. In late September, the Republican challenger had shifted his strategy, adopting a more strident tone. If Roosevelt continued in office, he shouted to audiences at every stop, “you can count on our men being on transports for Europe six months from now.” The specter of American boys fighting in Europe opened what one historian has described as a “wide crack in a dam holding back floodwaters of popular emotion.” Willkie’s polls began to move upward; Roosevelt’s victory margin began to shrink.

  Eleanor sensed this change in sentiment and predicted that the president would lose unless he took to the road himself in a full-scale campaign. Though she conceded that he was coming into contact with thousands of people through his “inspection trips,” she believed there was something fundamentally deceptive about his insistence that these forays to factories and arsenals were not campaign stops. The American people, she argued, did not want to be taken for granted. The president’s responsibility was to go to them directly, to outline his positions, to counter Willkie’s charges, and to ask for their support.

  “Dearest Franklin,” she wrote in mid-October. “I hope you will make a few more speeches. It seems to me pretty essential that you make them now as political speeches. The people have a right to hear your say in opposition to Willkie between now and the election.”

  Harold Ickes agreed with Eleanor. After presenting his arguments to Steve Early, Ickes went in to see Missy. Knowing that Missy had no fear of speaking honestly to the president, Ickes shared with her his worries about the campaign. “I painted her a pretty dark picture,” Ickes recorded in his diary. “I asked her frankly whether the President wanted to win and suggested that the way he had been acting I was disposed to doubt whether he did or not. She said that he did . . . but he didn’t like to put himself in a position of making it possible for Willkie, to say that he, Willkie, had smoked him out. I told Missy that in his speech of acceptance the President had said in effect that he would feel free at any time to correct any misrepresentations or misstatements and that certainly Willkie had given him a sufficient basis on this ground to justify his going out on the stump.”

  Under pressure from both Eleanor and Ickes, the president finally announced on October 11 that he would make five major campaign speeches in the weeks ahead. Following Ickes’ suggestion, he justified his departure from his convention pledge by referring to the gross misrepresentations of the Willkie campaign, which required him to counter falsifications with facts. “I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty,” he told a cheering crowd at his first speech, in Philadelphia on October 23. “I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight.”

  The president may have spoken the truth when he said he loved a good fight, but two days later, when CIO chief John L. Lewis delivered a vitriolic personal attack against him in a speech that was broadcast on national radio, he was perceptibly disturbed. The isolationist labor leader had been criticizing the administration for months; he had denounced the creation of the NDAC as a turn to the right and had fought against conscription on the ground that it would deprive labor of all its gains under the New Deal. But few observers predicted that he would actually break with Roosevelt and support Willkie.

  At 9 p.m., as Lewis moved up to the microphones to speak, the president was sitting by his radio in his study, accompanied by Harry Hopkins and Grace Tully. Eleanor was at the Olney Inn for dinner with a group of female journalists, including Ruby Black, Martha Strayer, Emma Bugbee, and Bess Furman. It had been a busy day for Roosevelt, starting with a press conference in the morning, various appointments, lunch with Eleanor, a meeting with the Cab
inet, a brief appearance at a tea Eleanor had arranged for the National Conference of Negro Women, and a visit to the doctor. He was tired, but with only ten days left before the election and thirty million Americans tuned in to the event, the Lewis speech was too important to miss.

  Delivered in a deep baritone voice, rich in rhetoric, Lewis’ speech was perhaps the most vigorous attack ever launched against the popular president. He denounced the president as a man whose motivation and objective was war. “His every act leads me to this inescapable conclusion. The President has said that he hates war and will work for peace but his acts do not match his words.” Indeed, Lewis argued, “the President has been scheming for years to involve us in war.”

  “Are we,” Lewis asked, “to yield to the appetite for power and the vaunting ambitions of a man who plays with the lives of human beings for a pastime? I say no. I think the reelection of President Roosevelt for a third term would be a national evil of the first magnitude . . . . It is time for the manhood and the womanhood of America to assert themselves. Tomorrow may be too late. If not Roosevelt whom do I recommend?

  “ . . . Why, Wendell Willkie, of course . . . a gallant American,” a man with a common touch, a man “born in the briar and not to the purple,” a man who “has worked with his hands and has known the pangs of hunger.” Then Lewis issued a surprising ultimatum. Convinced that the division between Roosevelt and Willkie was so close that labor’s vote would carry the election, he told his immense constituency that if Roosevelt was re-elected it would mean that labor had rejected his advice. If that were so, he would have no choice but to resign as president of the CIO. In other words, “sustain me now, or repudiate me.” The choice was the public’s: a vote for Roosevelt would be a vote against Lewis.

  Both Roosevelt and Hopkins were “sad and low” after the speech. Visiting the White House the following morning, labor leader Sidney Hillman said that he had never seen either of them “so thoroughly scared.” For Roosevelt, the depth of the hatred so evident in the speech was hard to comprehend. Though the president could understand and accept opposition to his domestic and foreign policies, Lewis’ anger ran so deep that it could not be categorized in ordinary terms.