ELEANOR ROOSEVELT NEVER WROTE THE TRUTH ABOUT her heart. As she erased Lucy Mercer, as she denied her husband’s infidelities, so she obscured her own emotional being from the public record. Regarding her relationship with her husband after 1919, we have only her deeds—as a politician, and as a politician’s primary and most devoted partner.
Ironically, during the years of her own deepest pain, ER was called upon to rally behind her husband as never before: to encourage him and support him during a series of ugly political scandals, and to stand beside him on his political rounds as Democratic vice-presidential candidate during the campaign of 1920.
Tensions over the scandals began in February 1920 when FDR shocked and dismayed Josephus Daniels by making a boastful, self-serving, and bizarre speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to support partisan charges against the navy, and Daniels particularly. Admiral William Sims, formerly commander of the U.S. naval forces in Europe, had returned from London to resume the presidency of the Naval War College in Newport, and began vituperative attacks against Daniels—who had prevented Sims from accepting the title of honorary sea lord from the British Admiralty. In retaliation, Sims attacked Daniels’s medal and awards policies, his wartime judgment, and his early pacifistic tendencies. Republicans, eager to discredit Wilson, his entire administration, and all Democrats called for a Senate investigation into the Sims charges, especially his accusation that Daniels’s inaction prolonged the war by four months, thereby causing the Allies to lose “2,500,000 tons of shipping, 500,000 lives, and $15,000,000.”
Before an audience of fifteen hundred, FDR confirmed Sims’s charges, and took for himself all the credit for whatever action the navy had initiated: “Two months after the war was declared, I saw that the Navy was still unprepared and I spent $40,000 for guns before Congress gave me or anyone permission to spend the money.” FDR boasted further that he had “committed enough illegal acts” to be impeached and jailed had he made “wrong guesses.” He even bragged that he personally chose Sims for the London post.
Although there is no record of ER’s reaction to her husband’s indiscretion, or to his personal disloyalty toward his boss, Livy Davis, FDR’s own “jolly boy,” was astonished: “What in the world is the matter with you for telling the public that you in your tenure of office committed enough illegal acts to keep you in jail for 900 years?”
Perhaps his motivations for this astounding speech were political. It was an election year, and his name was being batted about for senator; for governor; for vice-president. Presumably he intended to distance himself from Wilson and Daniels and appear as always independent, fearless, and free. Besides, he was under a lot of pressure and not in the best of health, having suffered a seemingly endless array of ailments during this period: throat infections and tonsilitis, pneumonia, “the grippe,” gastrointestinal upsets, and influenza. Josephus Daniels used to say that if there were a mean bug running about Washington it would just automatically lodge in FDR’s overworked body. Possibly he was depressed, a condition he never acknowledged except by seeking out still more work and distraction. There certainly were reasons for depression—in addition to Lucy Mercer, FDR was in deep financial distress. His mother had sent him a significant check for his birthday, and his gratitude was profound:
You are not only an angel which I always knew, but the kind which comes at the critical moment in life! For the question was not one of paying Dr. Mitchell for removing James’ insides [appendix], the Dr. can wait, I know he is or must be rich, but of paying the gas man and the butcher lest the infants starve to death, and your cheque which is much too much of a Birthday present will do that. It is so dear of you.
By the time he wrote that letter to his mother, on 11 February, he could report that “the office is less busy, the Sims episode being quiet for the moment and of less public interest as time goes on.”
Whatever his motives, Roosevelt had played a dangerous game. It could not have served him politically to embarrass Daniels; public insubordination looks too much like treachery—and Daniels might have fired and disgraced him. As mysterious as FDR’s motivations for betrayal is the history of Daniels’s extraordinary generosity and paternal protectiveness toward his assistant. FDR retracted his statements, and supported Daniels with such vigor during the hearings, which lasted from March to May, that the committee chose not to have him testify. Still, Sims and his allies were not through with Daniels, or FDR. Other charges and hearings regarding immorality in the navy were under way—relating to activities FDR himself had officially authorized.
The Newport sex scandal involved “the most extensive systematic persecution” of homosexual men in American history. Although the intensity of FDR’s involvement in the “clean-up” of Newport remains unclear, he signed the order that gave a team of undercover agents, agents provocateurs, and entrapment volunteers authority to go “to the limit.” And he put the team directly under the authority of his personal office. When the facts emerged, he denied all responsibility for them.
World War I had transformed Newport, society’s favorite resort. By 1917 it was the home of a major naval training center, and there were more than twenty-five thousand sailors in town. Town officials and Josephus Daniels protested the kind of vice associated with military centers, and every effort was made to end the drug traffic in cocaine, to close the houses of “ill fame,” and to end all access to liquor. Daniels’s introduction of Navy Prohibition was particularly effective. But access to prostitutes and reports of widespread homosexuality continued. Since consenting adults, and young sailors simply walking with their “buddies” two by two, were not breaking any particular law, and did what they did in private, a team of investigators decided to entrap sailors. It was a sleazy business, and the investigators used were young sailors who volunteered. They would seduce a suspect, date him, and to collect evidence go as far as necessary, or “to the limit.” In the process, they entrapped a popular local chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Nash Kent. He denied all allegations against him, blew the whistle on the naval entrapment procedures, and was acquitted in two separate trials, where his bishop, fellow clerics, and scores of local dignitaries served as character witnesses.
Feelings about homosexuality in many Newport circles, and indeed throughout the navy, were still unsettled at this time. Drag shows, for example, were popular, and nobody had protested them. Indeed, ER referred to the entertainment on navy ships during her European voyage home in 1919, when they traveled with the president’s party. It was the only time she saw anything of President Wilson’s “understanding of young people,” and she was impressed: When President Wilson “came down under pressure” to watch the drag show, he “received only perfunctory applause” when he entered and took a seat on the aisle directly in front of the ship’s captain, Edward McCauley.
At the end of one of the popular songs, the “ladies” of the chorus attired in pink tulle and pink socks in spite of hairy legs, arms and chests, still most coy, ran down into the audience. One boy, carried away by the spirit of the play apparently, as he passed the President chucked him genially under the chin. I thought Captain McCauley would have apoplexy and everyone held his breath. You almost heard the unspoken order: “Put him in irons on bread and water.” When it was over and the President’s party had retired, Captain McCauley received a message from the President to the effect that he hoped the young man would receive no punishment.
Similarly, Admiral Sims enjoyed the frequent drag shows navy personnel put on in Newport. After a thoroughly entertaining performance of Jack and the Beanstalk, in June 1919, Sims wrote: “I have never in my life seen a prettier ‘girl’ than ‘Princess Mary.’ She is the daintiest little thing I ever laid eyes on.”
But at the same time, the sailors of Newport were being entrapped by a squad of sex-hunters created and trained by a physician, Dr. Erastus Hudson, and a former detective, Ervin Arnold, who claimed to be able to tell a homosexual just by looking at him. Evidently impressed by their diligence, FDR, in March, went to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to have the Justice Department begin “a most searching and rigid investigation” to uproot the “conditions of vice and depravity” that existed in Newport. Palmer refused. He could not afford to take any of his investigators away from his more urgent anticommunist crusade. In May, FDR turned to Naval Intelligence, which seemed less than interested. On 11 June 1919, he took it upon himself: The entire secret sleuthing detail, its funds and personnel, was hidden in an undercover department called simply “Section A, Office of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”
In January 1920, the publicity that surrounded Reverend Kent’s second acquittal resulted in blistering attacks against Daniels and Roosevelt. Local newspapers and a committee of Newport clergy were outraged. The clergy petitioned Woodrow Wilson for an immediate investigation, and included their understanding of the facts and the “vicious methods employed by the Navy Department.” Under the supervision of Dr. Hudson and Ervin Arnold, a team of dozens of sailors were “instructed” in the details “of a nameless vice and sent through the community to practice the same …and in particular to entrap certain designated individuals.” These activities persisted for months, despite the
strong and continued protests [from many of the most] prominent citizens of Rhode Island….
It must be evident to every thoughtful mind, that the use of such vile methods cannot fail to undermine the character and ruin the morals of the unfortunate youths detailed for this duty, render no citizen of the community safe from suspicion and calumny, bring the city into unwarranted reproach, shake the faith of the people in the wisdom and integrity of the naval administration.
Wilson, incapacitated by his stroke, had the petition sent to Daniels, who assigned Admiral Herbert O. Dunn to head the naval board of inquiry. It quickly became common knowledge that Dunn and FDR were personal friends: They had vacationed together in the Azores in 1918, and FDR had helped to secure an Annapolis appointment for Dunn’s nephew.
FDR appeared before the Dunn Board in May. Arrogant in manner and dismissive in tone, FDR acknowledged that he had signed the order to create Section A on 11 June 1919. But he knew nothing of the details of its operations. Several times during that summer, Dr. Hudson (Lieutenant, USN) had reported to him that “the investigation was proceeding very satisfactorily.” But he knew nothing else, and asked for no further information. Why did he not ask “what methods” were used?
“Because I was interested merely in getting results….”
“Mr. Roosevelt, would you sanction the method of having enlisted men in the Navy submit their bodies to unnatural vices to obtain evidence?”
“As a matter of information, of course, no.”
And had he known what was going on, he would have stopped it. But, the investigator asked him, how did he suppose evidence for sodomy “could be obtained?”
“As a lawyer, I had no idea. That is not within the average lawyer’s education.”
“Did you realize as a lawyer or as a man of intelligence that the investigation of such matters, very often has led to improper actions….”
“I never had such an idea. Never entered my head….”
“How did you think evidence of these things could be obtained?”
“I didn’t think. If I had I would have supposed they had someone under the bed or looking over the transom.”
In October, the Dunn Board presented its findings. It censured the “use of immoral methods,” acknowledged that it had been “unfortunate and ill-advised” that FDR had “either directed or permitted the use of enlisted personnel to investigate perversion,” and condemned Hudson, Arnold, and several others for “extremely bad judgment.” No disciplinary action was recommended, FDR and Daniels were exonerated, and the enlisted investigators were immune from prosecution.
Admiral Sims—still seeking to discredit Daniels—was outraged, the clergy were outraged, the Newport press claimed a cover-up and called for a full and fair investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. Although the Dunn Board hearings were held throughout the campaign, and the report issued less than a month before the election of 1920, the matter was never publicly discussed outside Newport and received no national news coverage. The Senate investigation did not begin until after the election. Therefore, when FDR went to the Democratic convention in June 1920, he was under no particular cloud.
FDR WENT TO THE CONVENTION IN SAN FRANCISCO ALONE. ER did not accompany him. With the war’s end, Washington wives, like other women workers who had served the country and the administration so well, were rendered jobless and simply sent home. ER’s canteens closed and her Red Cross work subsided, her last effort being “to get restrooms for the girls established in the [Navy Department] with a woman doctor in charge!” Although she continued to raise money for several causes that interested her, notably the Women’s [Theodore] Roosevelt Memorial Association, for the first time in years she was without significant public activity and her future looked empty. She complained to Isabella: “Sometimes I wish I could disappear and lead a hermit’s life for a year….” But what she really wanted was to be invited into the political game. At San Francisco, ER had no task. No service was asked of her; and she was not encouraged to attend. She took the children to Campobello, while FDR went to the convention to second the nomination of New York’s Governor Alfred E. Smith.
Initially there were three major contenders: Al Smith represented the progressives who considered reform the best guarantee against violent revolution. A. Mitchell Palmer represented the worst excesses of bigotry and reaction. William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, was committed primarily to the League of Nations and was on all other issues profoundly vague. McAdoo was not a progressive in the manner of Smith: He was supported by and associated with the Ku Klux Klan. For forty-three ballots, the convention was deadlocked over Smith, “Ku Ku” McAdoo, and Palmer.
The Democrats were in disarray. They were regionally, ideologically, and personally divided on virtually all major issues having to do with the future direction of the party and the country. On the forty-fourth ballot, exhausted and eager to be done with it, the convention chose a relatively unknown reform governor of Ohio, James M. Cox, as their compromise candidate. Not identified with Wilson, and not known to be committed to the League of Nations, he was nevertheless intent on party harmony and suggested a Wilsonian loyalist for his running mate: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Earlier, FDR had not only stirred the convention with his rousing speech for Smith, he had won the approval of all Wilsonians with his display of athletic bravura during the only exciting moment of the tedious proceedings. At the opening of the convention, a tribute to Wilson and the League was followed by the unveiling of a large oil portrait of their president. This touched off a jubilant demonstration. State after state marched with wild convention fanfare, their banners flying high, behind Wilson’s portrait. But the New York delegation, controlled by Tammany boss Charles Murphy, refused to join the parade. Furious, FDR leaped for the New York State banner. Murphy held it firm. They struggled until, with one final wrench, FDR lifted that banner proudly, amid great cheers, and led New Yorkers into the line of march.
On 3 July ER wrote that his heroics troubled her, and she worried about Tammany’s opposition: “Mama is very proud of your recovering the state standard from them! I have a feeling you enjoyed it but won’t they be very much against you in the state convention?” They were against him. But Cox had diplomatically consulted Murphy on Roosevelt’s nomination. Flattered, Murphy replied that he despised FDR but would support anybody Cox wanted.
ER learned of FDR’s unexpected victory when she received a telegram from his proud boss, Josephus Daniels: “IT WOULD HAVE DONE YOUR HEART GOOD TO HAVE SEEN THE SPONTANEOUS AND ENTHUSIASTIC TRIBUTE PAID WHEN FRANKLIN WAS NOMINATED UNANIMOUSLY FOR VICE-PRESIDENT TODAY.” FDR’s achievement may have been less a surprise to ER than the expression of Daniels’s joy and support for his assistant, which overcame months of antagonism between the two men. ER’s own initial response to her husband’s nomination to the vice-presidency was guarded and desultory: “I was glad for my husband, but it never occurred to me to be much excited.” She intended to carry on her own life, and her children’s, calmly, no matter how intense the political climate might become. For the moment, she felt an outsider, as if watching a new and interesting game being played while she was left to gaze silently behind a glass partition. Until she was welcomed into the political scene, ER “felt detached and objective, as though I were looking at someone else’s life.”
Generally, ER agreed with FDR’s campaign emphases on internationalism and progressivism:
Some people have been saying of late: “We are tired of progress, we want to go back to where we were before…; to restore “normal” conditions. They are wrong…. We can never go back…. In this faith I am strengthened by the firm belief that the women of this nation, now about to receive the National franchise, will throw their weight into the scale of progress…. We cannot anchor our ship of state in this world tempest…. We must go forward or flounder. America’s opportunity is at hand. We can lead the world by a great example…. The Democratic program …is a plan of hope…. We oppose money in politics, we oppose the private control of national finances …the treatment of human beings as commodities …the saloon-bossed city …[and] we oppose starvation wages….
As FDR delivered his acceptance speech to a crowd of more than eight thousand people from the front porch of his mother’s Hyde Park home, ER sat on the balustrade looking intent and involved. Years later, her predominant memory about FDR’s debut as a national political candidate was a feeling of sympathy for her mother-in-law. It was the first political rally held on SDR’s lawn: That moment ended an era. Throughout her life, Sara Delano Roosevelt had protected the sanctity and privacy of her home. She had invited few guests: “The friends were chosen with great discrimination and invitations were never lightly given.” When ER saw that “lawn being trampled by hordes of people,” her admiration for SDR’s remarkable adjustment was boundless.
ER wrote nothing of her own adjustment, or of her feelings during the first weeks of the campaign. Her chores were to take James, now twelve, to Groton; close the house in Washington; pack and unpack; settle and rearrange. Women’s work. And not very satisfying.
Occasionally she gave interviews to the press. Brought up a staunch Republican, she told the Poughkeepsie Eagle News, she was now a convinced Democrat, “for I believe they are the most progressive. The Republicans are,—well they are more conservative, you know, and we can’t be too conservative and accomplish things.” She was committed to the League of Nations because she believed it was “the only way that we can prevent war,” but opposed giving up the constitutional mandate that Congress declares war. She hoped the League of Nations would be adopted with that reservation. If she was disappointed that the Democrats did not do more to encourage the new women voters, she said nothing to criticize her husband’s party.
WOMEN WERE TO VOTE NATIONALLY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN the 1920 presidential election, but their hard-won suffrage victory was greeted with minimal enthusiasm within the Democratic Party. Although 299 women attended as delegates or alternates (only twenty-two women attended in such positions in 1916), no particular effort was made to include them in the more significant convention proceedings. The Republican Party, for so many more years the party that supported suffrage, was still the party that vigorously courted the women’s vote.
On 1 October, Harding held a day for suffragists, “Respectable Women’s Day,” and invited an extraordinary range of women: Corinne Roosevelt Robinson and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, of course; and the wives of several progressive governors, senators, and officials—most notably Cornelia Bryce (Mrs. Gifford) Pinchot. But he also invited socialist economist Florence Kelley, journalist Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Esther Everett Lape, who was associated with the Women’s Trade Union League, was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters, and was soon to become ER’s closest friend.
The Republican women were angry that the Democrats had adopted twelve of the fifteen planks the League of Women Voters had introduced, while the Republicans had adopted only five. After considerable pressure by such Republican feminists as Margaret Dreier Robins (who was a member of the Women’s Division of the Republican National Executive Committee), Harriet Upton, and Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, Harding made amends: He sponsored another day to woo progressive supporters, especially the women. During “Social Justice Day,” he called for equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour day, the end of child labor, prevention of lynching, maternity and infancy protection, an extended Children’s Bureau, appointment of women to state and federal employment boards, a minimum wage, national health-care programs, and the creation of a department of social justice. The women were astounded. Harding had adopted virtually the entire program of the League of Women Voters. As a result, the vast majority of progressive women who voted in 1920 voted for Harding.
Still, the women’s vote was up for grabs, state by state. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association created the National League of Women Voters in 1919, their intention was to be nonpartisan, and to support those candidates, regardless of party, who promised further reform. Carrie Chapman Catt wanted to make it clear: The League was not a woman’s party intent on sex segregation. Nor was it “a parlor uplift movement.” Women intended, she declared, to join parties, to work within parties, to claim and achieve power “in the fight for women’s progress.” “If the League of Women Voters hasn’t the power and the vision to see what is coming, and what ought to come, and to be five years ahead of the political parties, then our work is of no value.”
When ER personally entered the political fray, she cast about for her own place and carefully considered the divisions within the suffrage movement. Unlike Carrie Chapman Catt and the women of the League, the women of the National Woman’s Party predicted the betrayal of women in male-dominated parties. By 1925, Anne Martin, the founding chair of the National Woman’s Party and the first woman to run for the Senate (as an Independent from Nevada in 1918), concluded that Catt’s advice to women to join the majority parties “sounded the doom of feminism” for decades. Women needed, Martin argued, a party of their own—a party that would select and nourish and train women for office. She was supported by one of the most generous feminist philanthropists, Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont. As president of the National Woman’s Party, she considered membership in the old parties an “indignity.” “I do not want to see any woman in the Senate as a Republican or a Democrat.” The man-made world would not be reconstructed reconstructed through man-made parties. Only women, she and her allies believed, could redeem the world.
Although ER was unimpressed by the Democrats’ efforts toward women, and was not fooled by Harding’s rhetoric, she was never a separatist, and soon gravitated to the activists of the League of Women Voters. Over time ER became a Democratic Party loyalist, but she was disappointed by the run of politicians she knew in 1920. “I feel rather sad about politics,” she wrote Isabella, “there are so many who are out for themselves and not for the good of the country in both parties and conditions are so unsettled that we need a really fine leader.” Initially, she had hoped that Herbert Hoover would declare himself a Democrat. ER considered Hoover “the only man I know who has firsthand knowledge of European questions and great organizing ability and understands business not only from the capitalistic point of view but also from the worker’s standpoint….” But when he announced himself a Republican, only to be overlooked by his party, as were other progressive contenders such as Chicago reformer Harold Ickes and Senator Hiram Johnson of California, she had no doubts about the conservative direction of her paternal family’s traditional party.
Although virtually all the women of her familystumped for Harding, they privately considered him a scoundrel. Alice Roosevelt Longworth reputedly made a deal with Harding, to support her brother Ted’s political career in exchange for her strenuous efforts. But she remained aghast at Harding’s private manners, his stand-up affairs (in a closet, while his wife pounded on the door), his whiskey-filled White House poker games, and she would decry the air of corruption that quickly surrounded his presidency. “My God,” Alice Longworth announced, “we have a president … who doesn’t even know beds were inventedand his campaign slogan was ‘Back to Normalcy!’”
His running mate, more sober by far and with no progressive pretenses, was Massachusetts’s Governor Calvin Coolidge, who had achieved national prominence when he fired and blacklisted Boston’s striking police force and made dire warnings about Bolsheviks in civic office.
They were an undistinguished team, surrounded by politicians who seemed cynical and craven. Progressive Republican journalist William Allen White believed that he had never before seen a convention “so completely dominated by sinister predatory economic forces.” Whereas Harding’s convictions were unclear, Coolidge idealized business and enshrined businessmen: “The chief business of the American people is business… . The man who builds a factory builds a temple…. The man who works there worships there.”
But the Democrats offered little more by way of an alternative vision for America’s future. Both Cox and FDR promised to further Wilsonian goals and were generally vague about the great and impending issues that faced the nation. Nevertheless, the campaign of 1920 forged a new political partnership between ER and FDR.
Previously Franklin had discouraged Eleanor’s company. For eight years they had done most of their public work separately. Everything changed in 1920. Now FDR wanted ER with him on the campaign train. He wanted her to record the doings, to keep notes, a record, a diary. Now, as never before, she was called upon to smile and be gracious and at her husband’s side from town to town across America. She agreed, and in September joined the campaign train for the second tour of the country.
The Roosevelts were widely perceived as a devoted couple, an outstanding team in Washington circles. Steady and stable, they were the envy of most political families-especially at a time when talk of divorce abounded, as it did during the campaign of 1920. When Harvard’s former president Charles W. Eliot withheld his support for James M. Cox because of his divorce, FDR wrote Eliot that the Hardings were equally tainted by divorce: “Mrs. Harding was divorced by her first husband, and almost immediately afterwards married Mr. Harding. I hate, of course, to have this sort of thing enter into the campaign at all, but if the Cox divorce is made a factor …you may be sure that the Harding divorce will be brought out….”
In July FDR had written ER: “I miss you so, so much. It is very strange not to have you with me in all these doings.” But he only wanted her with him to bear witness. He was delivering from two to twenty speeches a day, and spent most evenings playing poker. There was really nothing for ER to do.
After ER publicly joined the campaign, the political and personal rift in her family deepened. FDR was frequently mistaken for Theodore Roosevelt or his son, and the Oyster Bay clan became increasingly incensed. Alice Roosevelt Longworth honored her father’s memory by battling Wilsonians, including FDR. All semblances of family loyalty, all memories and pretenses of friendship, were obliterated. TR, Jr., was sent out to haunt FDR’s whistle-stops and make it clear that he represented a different tribe. Cousin Ted announced in Wyoming that FDR was “a maverick—he does not have the brand of our family.” Alice Longworth’s husband, Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth, joined the family’s nasty brigade by calling FDR a “denatured Roosevelt.” And Edith Roosevelt, TR’s widow, announced: “Franklin is nine-tenths mush and one-tenth Eleanor.”
ER, always an outsider among her father’s people, deeply resented their antics and public name-calling. She never forgave them, and eventually participated in increasingly imaginative political brawls of her own design. As the family feud intensified, FDR asked ER to keep “some kind of diary please or I know I will miss some of the things that happen!”
ER was the only woman on the four-week train trip from New York to Colorado. Surrounded by hard-drinking, continually smoking politicians, virtually ignored for hours on end and with absolutely nothing to do but look at the scenery, knit, and write letters, ER hated most of the journey. She took to her cabin for longer and longer periods, and ate many meals alone. She was bored and uncomfortable. Her only task was to appear at whistle-stops to look gracious and smile adoringly as FDR addressed the crowd. FDR had hit a new stride. Crowds loved him; they shouted and cheered. When he was asked to speak for ten minutes, he spoke for twenty. If he was scheduled for an hour, he spoke for two. His staff was amazed. He would not stop. His advisers—Louis Howe, Marvin McIntyre, Stephen Early, Tom Lynch—made faces and waved their arms, calling time. But he went on and on. ER’s chief contribution was to pull his coattails with vigor. Only then might he subside.
Although Steve Early complained that FDR was largely a playboy, unprepared and casual about his commitments during this campaign, most of his speeches were earnest, if occasionally condescending. There were, however, several disturbing moments.
In Butte, Montana, before ER joined the campaign train, FDR defended the League of Nations against the complaint that Britain would have six votes, and the United States only one, with a grandiose imperial boast: “Well, I will say that the U.S. has at least twelve votes.” At least twelve nations “will stick with us through thick and thin through any controversy.” “Does anyone suppose that the votes of Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua and of the other Central American States would be cast differently from the vote of the United States? We are in a very true sense the big brother of these little republics.”
FDR went so far as to take personal credit for that situation. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he had “something to do with the running of a couple of little Republics. Until last week, I had two of these votes in my pocket. Now Secretary Daniels has them. One of them was [Santo Domingo, and the other was] Haiti. I know, for I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and if I do say it, I think it was a pretty good little Constitution.”
FDR had in fact participated in several expeditions of gunboat diplomacy during Wilson’s presidency: He helped quell revolution in Mexico, and personally applauded Marine activity in Santo Domingo and Haiti. Haiti’s new constitution tied the country firmly to the United States. U.S. intervention and appropriation of Haiti was not a secret precisely, but in 1920 it seemed impolite and aggressive to boast about it on the campaign trail.
After a howl of protest greeted his words, he denied them. But he had repeated his Butte speech again in Billings, and thirty-one citizens signed a letter to local editors affirming that they heard FDR say what the Associated Press said he did. His timing was grievous. The Nation, a liberal journal, had just run a series of articles on the cruelties and horrors of America’s naval occupation of Haiti.
The postwar climate was anti-interventionist, anti-imperialist, nationalist. Within weeks, Harding used FDR’s words to full advantage: “Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to secure a vote in the League….” Harding called FDR’s bravura “shocking” and irresponsible, and promised: “I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by U.S. Marines.”
FDR gave those Democrats who hoped that the Cox-Roosevelt team might be a departure from Wilson’s legacy of Red Scare and foreign entanglements little to cheer about. Although he spoke of progressivism, he emphasized Americanism with equal ardor. In a blast at immigrants, whom Woodrow Wilson had called “hypenated Americans,” FDR accused Republicans of “making special appeals to the very small but dangerous element in our country which was not loyal or was of doubtful loyalty during the war. Republican leaders are making open solicitation of the Italian-American vote….” Presumably to woo the Dixiecrats and xenophobes who then dominated a large pan of the Democratic Party, he exclaimed: We “want all-American votes only.”
He presented his most Palmerite speech in Centralia, Washington, on 20 August, also before ER had boarded the campaign train. Centralia was the site of a bloody battle between the American Legion and lumberjack members of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), which resulted in one of America’s most notorious lynchings. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1919, the American Legion had paraded through Centralia with rubber hoses and gas pipes, vowing to destroy every Wobbly in town. (Although most of their leaders were in jail, and their movement was shattered by 1919, remaining IWW groups were militant: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”)
When Centralia’s vigilantes stormed Wobbly headquarters, they were shot at by defending Wobblies, all of whom were quickly arrested—except one, Wesley Everest. A veteran, Everest ran for his life, fought off the mob, fired into the crowd, only to be caught in the current of Centralia’s Skookumchuck River. He was tied behind a car and dragged to town, tied up to a telephone pole, and hanged for hours. Still not dead, he was thrown into a jail cell, where that night the mob returned to cut his genitals off, hang him from a bridge, and finally throw his body into the river. Subsequently the local coroner announced that this clever Wobbly lumberjack had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge “and then shot himself full of holes.” Eleven Wobblies were tried for killing a Legionnaire. Throughout America, Wobblies had been imprisoned for their antiwar views, their antidraft demonstrations, and their militancy. Most remained in jail until they were pardoned by FDR, then president, in 1933. But in 1920 the vice-presidential candidate said:
I particularly wanted to make this visit to Centralia. I regard it as a pilgrimage to the very graves of the martyred members of the American Legion who here gave their lives in the sacred cause of Americanism. Their sacrifice challenged the attention of the Nation to the insidious danger to American institutions in our very midst. Their death was not in vain for it aroused the patriotic people of our great nation to the task of ridding this land of the alien anarchist, the criminal syndicalist and all similar anti-Americans.
During the campaign, ER monitored the press for FDR. Even his worst gaffes were treated mildly, and the Republican papers treated him generally as “an amiable, young, boy. Belittlement is the worst they can do.”
Although there is no record of ER’s response to any of FDR’s speeches after she arrived on board, there is a consistency to her mood. She was tense, disgruntled, dissatisfied. Her effort to look generally enraptured by her husband’s words, the same words or different, as they rode south and west through America, began to wear on her spirit.
His were words she never used in speeches, and her emphases were always different. If she urged him not to get so carried away by the crowds, by their enthusiasm and zeal, and to remember always his own principles; if she urged him to emphasize the League of Nations more and conquest less, and especially to stress his progressive commitments and shun xenophobic impulses; if she encouraged him to be more a statesman and less a careless politician, she never criticized him or challenged him in public.
In her stateroom for hours on end, ER was stirred by the fleeting scenery, and she read a lot, often a book a day: novels, poetry, and journals, as well as newspapers and broadsides. But she was frozen out of the political discussions and was never invited to a policy or strategy meeting. At night, after a full day’s campaigning, speech-writing, and meetings, FDR drank and played poker. ER thought he should get a good night’s rest and set an example to his staff. She also thought that FDR might want to spend some time with her, since he had begged her to come. It was not until Louis Howe noticed her long disappearances that ER’s presence was actually taken into account.
LOUIS HOWE HAD BEEN FDR’S PRIMARY ASSISTANT SINCE HIS election to the New York State Senate, and had served as FDR’s chief assistant and troubleshooter in Washington for eight years. Howe had believed from the first that FDR would become president of the United States, and he sacrificed his own private life to work toward that goal. He coached FDR in every way. He provided information, intelligence, bills to support, people to meet, contacts, and connections. He arranged deals, wrote speeches, made friends in business, labor, and Congress. During the war, he was known as “an ambidextrous genius” who solved the navy’s labor-management problems while he continued to build Democratic party strength.
Howe packaged FDR. They were also intimate friends and spent hours of each day together, planning the day, planning the future. Howe’s influence over FDR, over his vision and style, were extraordinary. ER had at first resented it. Then she ignored it. She ignored his influence and his existence for almost a decade, even though she saw him practically every day. In Washington, he arrived at her home each morning to collect her husband for their stroll to the office. More recently, the Roosevelts and the Howes and their children had spent weekends and holidays together. She was always polite and correct. She was to him as she was to a variety of servants: executive, but distracted and inattentive. ER had never imagined that Louis Howe would become her friend, or that he would be in the least interested in her views.
Moreover, she had been for many years simply revolted by his appearance. He was gaunt and unhealthy, and smoked foul Sweet Caporal cigarettes end on end. ER watched with amazement as he allowed the ashes to dribble onto his shirt, his tie, down his vest. He coughed and wheezed with an advanced case of asthma for twenty-five years. He looked and sounded as if he were about to die. ER wrote that “Louis was entirely indifferent to his appearance; he not only neglected his clothes but gave the impression at times that cleanliness was not of particular interest to him.” For many years she thought nothing of his sensitive, creative mind, did not notice his “rather extraordinary eyes,” and like SDR deplored his gnomelike presence. For years, in fact, their mutual dislike for Louis Howe was a primary connection between ER and her mother-in-law. But during the campaign of 1920, ER and Louis McHenry Howe developed a deep and lasting friendship. In addition to all the warmth and support they gave each other, their new unity impacted fully on the political career of FDR—refining the tone of his speeches and enlarging the direction of his vision.
HOWE DISSOLVED ER’S ANTAGONISM DURING THE LONG tedious train rides when he knocked on her stateroom door and asked her to review speech drafts, consider new ideas, contemplate proposals for press conferences. They talked for hours, and he persuaded Eleanor that he cared about her opinions and that her views mattered. “I was flattered and before long found myself discussing a wide range of subjects.” Eventually Stephen Early, FDR’s campaign advance man, also a journalist, joined their conversations.
During that trip ER and the journalists became friendly. Howe explained their behavior, and the political etiquette. They were brusque but shy; she was in charge: She had to cut the ice. ER’s first face-to-face conversations with the political reporters of America were a revelation to her. She liked their hearty style; she liked their no-nonsense approach to politics and to life. And they liked and admired her.
From then to the end of her life, ER was relaxed in the company of reporters. She enjoyed their jokes, their direct manners. She felt comfortable with them, and they appreciated her unexpected warmth, generosity, and good-humored intelligence. As ER and the journalists “became more friendly, they helped me to see the humorous side” of all those daily incidents that had in the past enraged and depressed her. When countless women flirted with FDR, the newsmen stood behind her and teased. The campaign of 1920 inaugurated a new phase of ER’s public life. Even on the campaign trail, she no longer felt alone, and isolated.
For ER, Niagara Falls was the highlight of this long and tumultuous journey. She had never seen the Falls, and Louis Howe persuaded her to run off with him on a day trip. They both loved the incomparable grandeur of the sight, and responded to its free-flowing energy with the kind of romantic intensity that people feel who truly love nature in its untrammeled wildness. Their excursion gave them a chance to know each other under the best possible circumstances. They thrilled to the same experiences, were moved by the same purpose.
For ER, Howe was transformed from her husband’s unappealing acolyte to a friend and confidant with many and unusual talents. Louis Howe was an artist. In Washington he sang in the choir of the Saint Thomas Church. He painted landscapes and portraits, almost always in watercolor. He loved the seashore in all seasons, and was happiest in his cottage at Horseneck Beach in Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Grace, often vacationed together with their children—a daughter, Mary (a student at Vassar), and a young son, Hartley. But Howe and his family were frequently separated. And Howe never really took time off: His work went with him wherever he went. He continually wrote speeches, press releases, letters, fund-raising appeals. During the Washington years, he spent his leisure time working at his true love, the theatre. He wrote plays, acted and directed in the little-theatre movement, and was especially noted for his remarkable wit.
If Howe’s motives for befriending ER on the campaign train related to his hopes for FDR’s political future, their friendship as it developed over time had a life and a force all its own. They were devoted to each other. Louis Howe was the first of many intimate friends that ER grew to trust and to love, with a warmth and generosity both spontaneous and unlimited. He encouraged her political talents, and helped her express them. He understood her moods, and the reasons for them. He cared profoundly about her well-being and her happiness. He dedicated himself to bridging the emotional distances between ER and FDR. On occasion he would teeter to one side or the other. But he always managed to transcend any possible conflict, and position himself equidistant from either side. Louis Howe was important to Eleanor, and she trusted him sufficiently to be able to share him with FDR. In that regard, his friendship was unique.
Its impact was immediate. When ER and Howe returned to the train from Niagara Falls, she exhibited a new level of confidence. They were greeted with frolicsome tales of FDR’s flirtatious day campaigning in Jamestown, surrounded by groups of political women who adored his company. For the first time, ER could joke about the “lovely ladies who served luncheon for my husband and who worshiped at his shrine.” FDR “had to stand much teasing from the rest of the party about this particular day.”
By the end of the campaign of 1920, ER seemed resigned to the antics of her womanizing husband, who was seen by many as a knight-errant and a “playboy.” She even seemed resigned to the permanent presence of his new secretary, Marguerite (Missy) LeHand, who had joined his staff during the campaign.
Like Lucy Mercer, she had extraordinary blue eyes and was almost as tall as ER. Eleanor described Missy LeHand as “young and pretty but delicate, for she had had rheumatic fever as a child. While she could ride and drive and swim, the more strenuous forms of exercise were forbidden. Though she did not come to live with us until we went to Albany [in 1928], she often stayed with us in Warm Springs and in Hyde Park, and was devoted to my husband and his work.” ER always treated Missy LeHand with warmth and protective affection, and seemed to favor her as an elder daughter or, in the manner of Asian matriarchs, as the junior wife.
Freedom was now a cherished factor in the Roosevelts’ family arrangement—but balance, fairness, equality were still to be achieved. FDR’s freedom necessitated ER’s freedom. In an undated 1920s article, “Politics Here and Elsewhere,” ER wrote: “News comes that the ladies of Thibet find it necessary to have at least three husbands each in order to make up between them the necessary qualifications for a model spouse.” ER considered the “Thibetan idea” “food for thought” so that women might “get all of the qualifications we consider” needed and desirable from “our better halves.” Moreover, if men by custom and circumstance might have many spouses in different supporting roles, how refreshing to think that in Tibet at least so had the women.
THE ELECTION OF 1920 WAS A DISASTER FOR THE DEMOCRATS. Harding and Coolidge won with 61 percent of the popular vote, and vast majorities in thirty-seven states. The Republicans also took most of the statehouses and Congress. In New York, Governor Al Smith was defeated by the antisuffrage, antireform conservative Nathan L. Miller.
Despite the enormity of the defeat, FDR maintained his usual buoyancy, at least on the surface. He was thirty-eight, and eager for new battles. He joined the business-boom parade, and dedicated himself to making serious money for the first time in his life. There were a variety of speculative schemes—slot machines, oil refining, lobster traps, Zeppelins as commuter transports. FDR was willing to gamble. Sometimes he won; sometimes he lost. With Grenville Emmet and Langdon Marvin he created a new law partnership. Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt was a Wall Street operation specializing in estates and wills—all of which bored him to death, FDR later acknowledged. He also accepted his Harvard friend Van Lear Black’s offer of a lucrative job as vice-president in charge of the New York office of the Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland, one of the United States’ most successful bonding firms. Van Lear Black, owner of the Baltimore Sun, offered FDR $25,000 to use his Washington and Albany business and labor connections to increase the company’s assets. Having earned no more than $5,000 in all his years in government service, and frequently forced to dip into his mother’s capital, FDR and his family were delighted with the change.
While FDR returned to New York to make money and await the next election, ER returned to New York to embark on her own political career.