ALBANY HAD BEEN ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S FIRST POLITical home. There, in 1911, she learned the nuances of political survival, the obligations and expectations of public wifery. Now, after seventeen years, she returned to Albany a very different woman in very different circumstances.
At midlife, ER was a teacher, writer, and public activist. Her husband was governor, her children were grown, she had become a grandmother, and she liked her life. Although she did not think of herself as a politician—nor did she encourage anybody else to think of her as one—everybody in her circle understood that she had a considerable amount of raw political power. Still, she regarded the return to Albany with dreary foreboding, until she and FDR made a deal: She would do it all—she would be the governor’s wife, and she would pursue her own agenda.
ER now consciously recognized that only an activist’s life served her needs and temperament. By May 1927, she had already published an article, “What I Want Most Out of Life,” in Success Magazine, in which she urged mature women to enter politics in order “to guard against the emptiness and loneliness that enter some women’s lives after their children are grown.” She was persuaded that women needed to have “lives, interests and personalities of their own apart from their households.” “And,” she concluded, “if anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say—the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be obtained.”
In 1928, ER took a giant step along the road that confirmed her career as the most nontraditional wife in American politics. She would continue to support her husband’s goals, and she would continue to pursue her own interests. When they disagreed, as they did frequently, they disagreed fully. They would always have different priorities and different emphases. Over the years, the World Court, the League of Nations, civil rights, equal rights, and a great variety of social issues were far more important to Eleanor than to Franklin. But one of the most remarkable aspects of the Roosevelt marriage is the sense of mutual respect that marked their public partnership. They consulted each other, and they influenced each other. FDR never did insist that his wife drop anything she personally cared about to become exclusively the first lady of the Empire State. At a time when financially solvent wives rarely worked outside the home, ER juggled several careers as well as her position as one of America’s most public wives and mothers.
On 10 November, The New York Times ran a headline: “Mrs. Roosevelt to Keep on Filling Many Jobs Besides Being the ‘First Lady’ at Albany.” Half the week she would be “mistress of the Executive Mansion,” the rest of the week she would continue to teach history, literature, and public affairs at Todhunter, and to serve as the school’s associate principal. “In spare moments she also will help run a furniture factory, serve on a few committees and boards of directors and keep up with current history in which she is keenly interested. And all the time, as the mother of four boys away at school, she will be on call….”
However unconventional their arrangement, both Roosevelts understood that public appearances mattered. They were and remained discreet. After FDR’s election, Eleanor announced that she would remove herself from the most visible political forums. She resigned as editor of the Women’s Democratic News, and refused several lecture offers. On 16 November 1928, she wrote Franklin that Henry Morgenthau had invited her to attend “his agricultural meeting next week but I’ve written him that I’m not going to any meetings that savor of politics. I have also been asked by four upstate [women’s] committees to come to dinners …and I’ve refused them all, so you see I’m being most discreet!” On 1 December, ER wrote that she attended her classes, had students for dinner, and presided at the Consumers’ League banquet “because I promised long ago but it is my last appearance as a speaker on any subject bordering on politics!”
When she resigned as editor of the Women’s Democratic News in November 1928, her friends and closest associates on the paper—Caroline O’Day (president), Elinor Morgenthau (vice-president), Nancy Cook (business manager), and Marion Dickerman (secretary)—testified in a farewell editorial to their appreciation of all that she had contributed to politics and history since women achieved suffrage:
In this difficult undertaking and through the struggle of succeeding years, one woman has stood out preeminent because of her brilliant political sense, inherited from her long line of ancestors, distinguished in statesmanship, because of her unfailing energy and blithe courage, because of her understanding of human nature and her sympathy and patience with its failings.
This woman is Eleanor Roosevelt whose resignation lies on the desk before us….
Courageous, unselfish, untiring, and with a sense of humor that has helped us over many a rough place, we love Mrs. Roosevelt for these qualities but I think we love her most because of her unswerving loyalty to women and to the high ideals of women from which expediency has never swayed her.
Elinor Morgenthau also resigned from the News at this time, but her resignation represented strained personal circumstances between the five friends. They were not quite the five of hearts: ER supported her friend Elinor Morgenthau, but she was intimate with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and Marion Dickerman in particular was close to Caroline O’Day. Moreover, there always existed some tension—some rivalry, actually—within this circle for ER’s attention. Elinor Morgenthau, always correct and less flamboyant than the others, had evidently criticized Nancy Cook, who seemed to her overbearing, occasionally rude, abrupt, and self-serving. ER wrote Elinor Morgenthau that she did not wish to discuss her criticisms of Nancy Cook:
I am devoted to her & it will be wiser for you not to talk to me about it as you cannot expect me to agree with you or to be influenced by your feelings….
I have worked more years than you have with Caroline, Nan & Marion & enjoyed it & had no real difficulties & I resign now with regret, only because I know if I take any part in politics everyone will attribute anything I say or do to Franklin & that wouldn’t be fair to him….
I have always felt that you were hurt often by imaginary things & have wanted to protect you but if one is to have a healthy, normal relationship I realize it must be on some kind of equal basis, you simply cannot be so easily hurt, life is too short to cope with it! Cheer up & forget about it all, do what you enjoy doing & be happy! I’ll be home for lunch tomorrow & Thursday at 1:30….
Much love dear,
Devotedly,
Eleanor
Despite ER’s public resignation, however, she remained active behind the scenes. Within weeks, she returned to her old post at the News: she continued to write most of the editorials, raise most of the money, and do most of the trouble-shooting. Only the masthead changed. Neither ER’s nor Elinor Morgenthau’s name now appeared on it—officially, after 1928, Caroline O’Day served as editor. But ER commuted from Albany to New York, to her classes at Todhunter and to the little office of the Women’s Democratic News at 15 East 40th Street, every week. ER had not removed herself from the fray; she merely removed herself temporarily from the appearance of being always at its center. Her commitment to the cause of Democratic women, to the work she had begun in 1920, remained absolute. Moreover, she retained control of every detail and continued to preside over the contents and format of each issue of the Democratic News.
On 6 March 1929, for example, she wrote to Frances Perkins:
Could you and Nelle Swartz write me an article for the Women’s Democratic News telling of the work of the Labor Dept. and any particular things which you would like the women of the state to appreciate and have brought to their notice?
I would like to have this …by next Tues…. Are there any new appointments in the Dept. you would like mentioned? Also I would like a photograph of Nelle.
Frances Perkins, always a much less intimate friend than ER’s colleagues on the News, nevertheless shared their assessment of her, especially during the Albany years. Perkins wrote that during this time ER “was a very easy woman to know.” She
was very much a woman’s woman. She talked with another woman on the frankest, pleasantest terms. There wasn’t any of this waiting for the men to come in…. What she had to say, she was delighted to say to you…. Some women don’t open up or show off at all until the gentlemen come in from dinner. Some quite brilliant women have nothing to say while the ladies wait in the drawing room. They won’t say a word. They’re brilliant, witty, entertaining the minute the gentlemen come in…. It’s all right, but you notice that that particular kind of woman doesn’t care a hoot what you say or what you think. You’re just another woman. There are very few men who won’t open up except before women. Men talk much more freely, show themselves and strut their stuff before men much more than women do.
Like many other women, Frances Perkins noticed a physical charm about ER that the cameras rather consistently failed to capture. During the Albany years,
Mrs. Roosevelt was perhaps as handsome as I have seen her. Her dress and her way of dress for the street and for ordinary circumstances was not very elaborate or charming or interesting, but her evening clothes …were perfectly magnificent…. Her hair was still quite blonde, so light that you were aware of the blondeness…. It was an extraordinarily heavy head of hair, but with a natural wave or braids around her head or piled up on top of her head…. She was so big and tall that this big head of hair was becoming. It fitted her shape, size and height.
ER also wore unique and impressive jewelry. Perkins particularly remembered the tiger’s-tooth necklace ER’s father had mounted “with beautifully wrought gold links and balls.” ER wore it frequently, and it was so large it “would have been dreadfully unbecoming to most women.” But ER had “a very long neck, very sloping shoulders, with a large expanse around the collar bone area,” and she could carry it beautifully.
Other, more casual observers also noticed the complexities of ER’s attractiveness. One reporter, Helena Huntington Smith, wrote that people tended to see in Mrs. Roosevelt “an almost austere streak of responsibility, of duty, which is very Rooseveltian and a shade British.” But that emphasis camouflaged more interesting qualities. While Eleanor seemed to cultivate a careless if not random style, and her everyday clothes were loose, long, and unflattering, one needed to see beyond the camera’s vision of her. According to Huntington Smith, the camera’s emphasis was “very unjust.” “It misses her immaculate freshness of appearance, her graciousness, and the charm of a highly intelligent, forceful, and directed personality.”
Subsequently, Lorena Hickok, the highest-paid woman reporter with the Associated Press, made much the same observation. She described a costume Eleanor wore during a 1928 luncheon debate with a “self-possessed, witty and always beautifully dressed” Republican society matron:
Mrs. Roosevelt that day, had she searched the world over, could hardly have found a more unbecoming costume. Her black skirt was longer than those worn by most women. She had on a knitted silk kind of jumper, very long, of a shade of green that made her skin look gray. Her hat, set squarely on top of her tightly netted hair, looked like a black straw pancake.
“You poor thing!” I thought. “It will be murder for you at that luncheon.”
But Hick was surprised. ER was radiant and generous in debate, and for the first time she “became interested in Mrs. Roosevelt on her own account,” noticing that although ER could look “rather awkward and ungainly” while standing still, “when she moved it was with the grace of a fine athlete. Her carriage was magnificent.” Later, when Hickok saw ER in evening clothes, she was “amazed at the change in her appearance.” Her gown was long, of a sensual white chiffon: “Tall and slender and erect, she looked like a queen…. I decided that she was as some English women are said to be—they may look rather dowdy in daytime clothes, but in evening clothes they are beautiful.” Hickok decided at that moment—as others had before her—that the first lady of New York State deserved closer scrutiny.
DURING FDR’S TERM AS GOVERNOR, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S impact was felt not only in her own sphere, but in her husband’s as well. Both Eleanor and Franklin always denied the true extent of ER’s influence on his daily activities, his policies, and his selection of advisers and associates. But even the most cursory reading of their correspondence indicates its primary significance. Soon after the election, on 16 November, ER wrote: “If I were you Franklin, I would keep personal publicity and state committee publicity more or less apart. Don’t let Mrs. Moskowitz get draped around you for she means to be and it will always be one for you and two for Al!”
In 1928, FDR was slow to decide what to do with Smith’s people. Smith, after all, had made much of FDR’s political life possible. The retention of Robert Moses (as secretary of state) and Belle Moskowitz (as personal secretary to the governor) was the only favor Smith had asked of FDR.
Eleanor had had a friendly association with Belle Moskowitz, and greatly respected her organizing talents: a respect that intensified her conviction that FDR would do well to end Moskowitz’s leadership role. Strategist and speech-writer, she was Al Smith’s Louis Howe—and there was simply no room in FDR’s entourage for both Howe and Moskowitz. The Albany team would be Howe and FDR, or Moskowitz fronting for Smith. They represented different circles and competing interests. ER was consistently clear about who would serve her husband’s interests and who would not.
ER distrusted both of Al Smith’s closest advisers—Belle Moskowitz and Robert Moses. Though she had just fought a vigorous battle against prejudice, her remarks about them were bluntly bigoted: “By all signs I think Belle and Bob Moses mean to cling to you and you will wake up to find R.M. Secretary of State and B.M. running Democratic Publicity at her old stand unless you take a firm stand. Gosh, the race has nerves of iron and tentacles of steel!” Anti-Semitism was rife when it came to references to Smith’s intimate advisers—a popular jingle began “Moskie and Proskie [Joseph Proskauer] are the brains of Tammany Hall”—but Eleanor’s distrust of Moskowitz was motivated more by political turf than by bigotry. Whether she was called Mrs. Moskowitz, Lady Belle, or Moskie, Smith’s chief adviser was one of the most powerful women in the United States. As governor, Smith did nothing without her advice. And ER saw her as a stalking-horse for Smith’s interests.
Eleanor credited her with all the significant social-reform and educational programs Smith’s administration introduced or supported. Indeed, ER and Belle Moskowitz had worked together for many of Smith’s policies, most of which FDR would try to build upon and encourage a reluctant Republican legislature to fund. Under Smith, New York supplemented the Sheppard-Towner federal program for maternal and infant health; pursued a worker-compensation system; opposed censorship and teachers’ loyalty oaths; sought an improved educational system, greater labor-management conciliation, a better health-care program, a coordinated housing program, a public-parks and road-building program, and a public water-power development system.
Belle Moskowitz was a remarkable public-relations pioneer and social reformer—a brilliant politician, who knew whom to talk to and when to deal. As an early “industrial counsellor,” she had developed the field of public-relations motion pictures, subsequently called “commercials.” Her first film, made in 1920, publicized the New York-New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission, the Port Authority.
She worked on that project with Al Smith, one of the Port Authority’s chief proponents. But her relationship with Al Smith began in 1918, when as governor-elect he appointed Moskowitz to head a new commission to reorganize the state’s administration and implement his social-reform program.
The year 1918 was the first time women could vote in New York State, and Smith wanted advice about how to attract the new electorate. Belle Moskowitz volunteered, despite his association with Tammany and his well-known contempt for women, especially women do-gooders, whom he then called “crackpots.” Their first connection occurred when Moskowitz arranged a luncheon for Smith at the Women’s University Club. He attended reluctantly, afraid that he would be dismissed as an uneducated boor, a Tammany hack. As he sat at the dais and regarded his elegant and very wary audience, he turned to Moskowitz:
“’What the hell am I going to say to a bunch of women like this?’ he growled.
“’If you’re smart,’” Moskowitz replied, “‘you’ll make the same speech you’d make to a bunch of businessmen.’”
He spoke about the economic issues of the campaign, and noticed that Moskowitz’s strategy worked. The women were not only attentive but enthusiastic. Smith never went anywhere without Moskowitz again. They were inseparable, and her influence prevailed. It was her idea to form a Commission for Reconstruction, Retrenchment and Reorganization to reform New York’s entire administrative machinery.
Moskowitz always preferred to work in the background, and “without portfolio.” However discreetly she worked, from 1918 to 1928 her power throughout New York State was simply absolute; and her commission was the determinant of all changes and policies.
Moskowitz selected Dr. Robert Moses—a Ph.D. from Oxford University, then working at the Bureau of Municipal Research, where his arrogance and his brilliance were equally remarked upon—to be the commission’s chief of staff. Although Belle Moskowitz and Robert Moses disagreed frequently and vehemently, their partnership was invincible. Moreover, Moses learned most of what he learned about the political game from Belle Moskowitz, and he was a lean and hungry student.
Robert Moses came from an assimilated and affluent German-Jewish family that had joined the nondenominational Ethical Culture Society before he was born. He had no training or education as a Jew, had participated in no Jewish ceremonial rite of passage—he was neither circumcised nor bar mitzvahed—and he never considered himself Jewish. But in the anti-Semitic era that preceded the Holocaust, Robert Moses was considered a Jew. And in 1928 he was perceived by Eleanor Roosevelt as a Jew first.
ER’S ANTI-SEMITISM WAS IMPERSONAL AND CASUAL, A FRAYED raiment of her generation, class, and culture which she wore thoughtlessly. She did not quite remove it until the era of the Holocaust caused her to consider deeply, actually to study, her own feelings. Eleanor Roosevelt was not a bigot, and she opposed prejudice in public life. She never assessed worth or quality on the basis of religion or race. She was revolted by the anti-Catholic hatred in part responsible for Smith’s defeat, and deplored the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic practices which played so large a role in politics during the 1920s. Yet, however much ER opposed bigotry in public life, she had very few Jewish friends until World War II; Elinor and Henry Morgenthau were notable exceptions. Even Bernard Baruch—who over time became one of Eleanor’s most intimate friends—was viewed disparagingly during the 1920s. Indeed, when ER met Baruch—at a 1920 Navy party in his honor, to celebrate his contributions to the war effort—she wrote her mother-in-law: “The Jew party was appalling.”*
As with her wariness about Belle Moskowitz, it was not specifically Robert Moses’s Jewish ancestry that caused ER to distrust and dislike him. ER had more personal, and political, motives. Robert Moses had insulted Louis Howe and ridiculed her husband. Smith had appointed FDR chair of the Taconic State Park Commission, and Moses head of the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924. In those capacities, they were equal in authority. But Moses monopolized all monies through his control of the State Parks Council, and he refused to appoint Louis Howe secretary to FDR, as FDR had requested. Moses publicly announced that, if FDR needed a “secretary and valet,” he could hire one. Moses would not spend one state cent for the services of that ugly creature he called “Lousy Louie.”
As Smith’s secretary of state, and chief creator of Long Island’s parks and parkways, Robert Moses worked to sabotage all FDR’s efforts in behalf of the Taconic State Parkways. He continually denounced FDR as an untrustworthy playboy and a lightweight. He could not believe that Smith had backed FDR for governor, over himself. Moses frequently denounced both Eleanor and Franklin, in rude and sensational terms. Many of his remarks got back to the Roosevelts, including his snide dismissal of FDR as “a pretty poor excuse for a man.” As Roosevelt’s popularity in Smith’s circle grew, Moses’s attacks became more and more outrageous—until finally they were “vicious,” and ER was among the first fully to perceive that he was a thoroughgoing cad, a bully and liar.
ER’s distrust of Belle Moskowitz was more impersonal. FDR told Frances Perkins:
Eleanor said to me, “Franklin, Mrs. Moskowitz is a very fine woman. I have worked with her in every campaign. I never worked with anybody that I liked to work with better. She’s extremely competent. She’s extremely able. She’s far-sighted. She’s absolutely reliable. What she says she’ll do, she does. You can count on that. I think a great deal of her and I think we are friends. But I want to say this to you. You have to decide, and you have to decide it now, whether you are going to be Governor of this state, or whether Mrs. Moskowitz is going to be Governor of this state. If Mrs. Moskowitz is your secretary, she will run you. It won’t hurt you. It won’t give you any pain. She will run you in such a way that you don’t know that you’re being run a good deal of the time. Everything will be arranged so subtly that when the matter comes to you it will be natural to decide to do the thing that Mrs. Moskowitz has already decided should be done. That is the way she works. That is the kind of person she is. She doesn’t do it in any spirit of ill will. It’s simply that her competence is so much greater than anybody else’s that even with Al Smith, as much as she loves him, she still ran him in that same subtle way.”
Eleanor phrased her advice to Franklin carefully. She did not actually tell FDR not to reappoint Belle Moskowitz. She left the decision entirely up to him, with a warning: “If you decide to take Mrs. Moskowitz it will be all right. She will make good decisions. She’s a capable woman, she knows and she will make them in the direction of the welfare of the people of New York…. But they will be her decisions, not yours.”
Ultimately, Moses and Moskowitz were the only significant members of Smith’s staff FDR dismissed—a move that enabled him to assert his independence from Smith, and prepare for his journey to the White House with his own team.
FDR, for so long under his mother’s thumb, resented any direct advice from his wife; but he never turned away from her counsel. He always sought her opinions, her perceptions. He trusted her, above all other reporters he sent out into the field, to return not only with the details, but with the nuances and hidden meanings. Still, he rarely credited her with a job well done, or with any substantial contribution to his decisions. And she tempered her advice with rather disingenuous assurances that she was not giving any advice at all. Neither he nor she ever acknowledged her influence on his appointments.
On 22 November 1928, for example, ER wrote to FDR: “I hope you will consider making Frances Perkins labor commissioner. She would do well and you could fill her place as chair of the Industrial Commission by one of the men …and put Nell[e] Swartz (now Bureau of Women in Industry) on the Commission so there would be one woman on it. These are suggestions which I am passing on not my opinions for I don’t want to butt in!”
Subsequently, after Eleanor became critical of Perkins and relations between them soured, Perkins denied ER’s role in her appointments, both at the state and federal levels. “It has been said that ER urged FDR to appoint me. I don’t know if that was true, and I wouldn’t know. She certainly never said anything to me about it. I doubt that he said something to her about it, though she may have broached the subject. I really wouldn’t know whether she initiated the idea.” “I always knew him better than I knew her.” Reluctantly, after intensive questioning, Perkins admitted that FDR had told her that he had in fact consulted ER, Nancy Cook, and Caroline O’Day on her appointments.
The fact is that in 1928 Perkins was appointed because ER and her associates thought it would be a good idea; and women were appointed to several other key positions because of the activities of the women’s committee which ER did so much to develop. Indeed, increasingly influenced by his wife and her colleagues, FDR celebrated women politicians as the wave of the future in a 1928 essay for the election issue of the Women’s City Club Quarterly, “Women’s Field in Politics”:
It is my firm belief that had women had [an] equal share in making the laws in years past, the unspeakable conditions in crowded tenement districts, the neglect of the poor, the unwillingness to spend money for hospitals and sanitariums, the whole underlying cynical attitude towards human life and happiness as compared to material prosperity, which has reached its height under the present Republican administration, would never have come about….
I have always believed in giving women an equal share in the making of our laws. I have regarded their entry into politics—for they must enter politics if they are to have a voice in our legislative halls—the most noteworthy step toward securing greater happiness and greater prosperity for the individual that we have ever taken.
Those were virtually the same words ER had been using for eight years. Louis Howe shared that vision, and FDR now publicly affirmed his agreement. Still, whatever their shared convictions, ER’s public role as first lady of New York State was confined to those domestic chores traditionally reserved exclusively for women. Her very first task was to arrange the sprawling Gothic edifice that was to be their household.
While FDR was in Warm Springs, she rearranged the rooms, redesigned the servants’ quarters to make them more spacious, removed the greenhouses to replace them with a swimming pool for Franklin, and made certain that the departing Smiths would be accompanied by their entire zoo of bear cubs, goats, six dogs, three monkeys, assorted elks, foxes, a raucous family of raccoons, and at least one tiger.
She did it all on a one-day inspection tour with Nancy Cook, and wrote FDR that she was “appalled at the number of people who go with the Executive Mansion.” She hoped the size of the staff could be reduced dramatically since the household monetary allowances were all insufficient. Nevertheless, “the head man” seemed “nice and all will be comfortable.”
For FDR she selected “the grandest sunny room,” which boasted “a bathroom and closets so palatial that you can get lost in them.” She thought the library would “be a grand den and work room for you and the old office the Governor had upstairs can be made into a family sitting room or Mrs. Smith’s dressing room can be made into one.” But the latter was “the only single room in the house and I thought we might want to give it to Missy so we will talk that over.”
For herself, ER chose a sitting room and study, but not a proper bedroom. ER considered her time too divided for her actually to require a really pleasant bedroom. Although she wrote nothing about her own space to FDR, during one evening when Frances Perkins was invited to stay over after a late-night party ER explained her willingness to give up her room whenever the house got crowded.
According to Frances Perkins, “you have no idea how many people they used to ask to stay when there’d been some big occasion.” Then ER would give up her room and move into a servant’s room on the third floor with Perkins or some other friend. On one such occasion, Perkins complimented Eleanor on the “wonderful …way you casually disturb yourself and move out of your room …and adapt yourself to camping out with me.” ER replied: “I’m so glad you’re here and I can do it, but as a matter of fact, it isn’t something for me. You know, this isn’t my home. That isn’t my room that I sleep in down there. You know, I’ve never had a home of my own. First I lived with my relatives…. Then I lived in a boarding school. Then I came home and still lived in somebody else’s house….” In Eleanor’s account, as she made the rounds of her aunts and grandmother, she was reluctant “to ask for anything because, after all, they were taking her in.”
Then I married Franklin and …Franklin’s mother took us right in…. Nothing could ever be even said about it…. She went and bought new carpets, rugs and furniture…. I’ve never bought so much as a tea cup for myself…. I never had anything.
Then we moved up here to the Executive Mansion. This doesn’t belong to us. This isn’t my house. It belongs to the State of New York. It’s furnished by the State of New York. It’s furnished in the official taste of the State of New York. Even the servants are civil servants hired by the State of New York. Nothing belongs to me except my maid…. I’ve been living in other people’s houses and now I’m living in a public institution. So I don’t mind giving up my room. That’s nothing.
After FDR was elected president, Perkins once reminded ER of that Albany evening. ER laughed. “Isn’t it funny? My next move was into a museum.”
BY 1928 ER DID HAVE A HOME SHE CONSIDERED HER OWN, AT Val-Kill. And work of her own, which she loved. ER co-owned, was vice-principal of, and taught at Todhunter. Her schedule was extraordinary. She left Albany Sunday afternoon of each teaching week to travel to New York City and meet her classes: 9:00-1:00 on Mondays, 9:00-5:00 on Tuesdays, 9:00-11:00 A.M. on Wednesdays. In New York City, her afternoons and evenings were given over to a variety of activities, most of them political. On Wednesday at noon, she returned to Albany, where she presided over the social whirl demanded of the governor’s wife. There were Cabinet dinners, afternoon teas, legislative dinners, formal and informal meetings of all variety; lectures and columns; interviews and investigations; and correspondence without end. ER answered every letter sent to her. And there was always her concern for the needs of her children.
About the children, ER noted shortly after the election that Anna and her husband, Curt, were to leave “for a week of shooting in North Carolina”; and the news from Groton was “pretty good.” Franklin, Jr., troubled with “a bellyache on the right side,” was recovering, and it was not appendicitis. John, who had hurt his knee in an accident, would “be on crutches for a month. Poor Lamb!” Elliott was well, although he threatened to irritate an old stomach rupture by his insistence on playing football. James, a junior at Harvard, was to become secretly engaged to Betsy Cushing. ER was sorry to see her eldest son rush into marriage before graduation, much as she and FDR had. But, she wrote her husband after meeting the Cushings, Betsy “is a nice child, family excellent, nothing to be said against it…. Perhaps it will be a good influence & in any case we can do nothing about it.”
Above all, during the state house years, ER’s central concern and primary focus was the Todhunter School for Girls. ER had always wanted to teach, to be part of that honored community that celebrated intellectual stimulation and public responsibility. She saw teaching as a vehicle through which she might communicate feminist and life-enhancing principles that would help empower future generations of American women. And she had no intention of abandoning this mission because her husband had been elected governor.
*See the chapter on ER and the Jews in Volume Two of this biography.