ARRIVING IN ALBANY WITH THREE small children, two maids, a wet nurse, and a household staff of three, Eleanor deployed a nomadic herder’s skills to reestablish home base in a big rented brownstone on Capitol Hill.
She accompanied Franklin—decked out in a Prince Albert cutaway, spats, tall hat, and pince-nez—to the inauguration of John A. Dix, the first Democratic governor in eighteen years. The Roosevelts hurried back to greet constituents at a catered reception where, for “three solid hours,” as Eleanor remembered it, more than four hundred guests wandered in and out of their open front door.1
Darkness came early those first days on the hill—a fast-lowering twilight that made Albany seem small and a little sinister. Her second morning, when a neighboring matron stopped Eleanor on the street with “You must be Mrs. Roosevelt, for your children are the only children I do not know,” she was brought up short—shocked to realize, after living five years in a city of more than four million, that every woman on the block would now know her every move.2
She felt she had no room to make mistakes. Partly, this was the result of having been shoehorned by fate into constricted womanhood without the grace period of an American adolescence. Indirectly, the neighbor was pointing out how unusual it was for the young Roosevelts to have set up a fully staffed household. Most legislators spent their fifteen-hundred-dollar salary on boardinghouse rooms, going home to their families at session’s end. The New York Herald and Telegram’s legislative correspondent, the gnomish Louis Howe, informed Eleanor that her husband’s importance as an upstate Democrat was “somewhere between that of a janitor and a committee clerk.”3
In Albany, political wives were all but unknown. If Eleanor so much as licked a stamp for constituent mail, she would be soiling her hands. Doing anything more than needlework, with the occasional sightseeing visit to the gallery of the senate or assembly chamber, would make her a meddler in affairs for which she had no qualification.4 Day to day, she was not expected to involve herself in anything more public than marketing at the shops on a list approved by Albany’s older Dutch families.5
But Eleanor’s need to be needed had a direct effect on her husband’s political future. She quietly found ways to manage their rental as an extension of Franklin’s senate seat. The “Sheehan business,” as Senator Roosevelt ever after called his celebrated stand against Tammany’s upstate power, marked Franklin’s first move for wider notice and the real beginning of Eleanor’s political apprenticeship.
In 1911, with the United States still two years away from the Seventeenth Amendment, New York chose its senators in the state legislature, which invested power in single-party caucuses, crooked lawmakers, rich corporate donors, and machine bosses. Since Tammany Hall had just elected the governor and ruled subservient Democratic legislators now in control of both houses, the election of a successor to U.S. Senator Chauncey M. Depew (whose term expired on March 4) put Tammany’s famously inscrutable boss, Charles Francis Murphy, in position to extend his city rule through Albany to Washington.
From a makeshift wigwam in the Ten Eyck Hotel, Murphy quietly circulated word on Albany’s Capitol Hill that he would grant no state patronage and no committee assignments until every Democrat attending the party’s binding caucus pledged himself to the Tammany nominee. The likeliest candidate was William “Blue-eyed Billy” Sheehan, a famously corrupt Buffalo Democrat and former lieutenant governor,6 now a rich New York City public-utilities lawyer to whom Murphy owed a political debt for his bundling of dozens of corporate contributions to Tammany’s war chest.7
Attendance at the caucus subordinated lawmakers to the “Quiet Boss’s”8 supreme will. Open defiance was rare, but on January 3, Edmund Terry, an anti-Tammany assemblyman from Brooklyn, had had enough; he gathered a small band from both assembly and senate to bolt the meeting. Franklin became the first senator to join the insurgents, recruiting additional assemblymen to take their political future into their own hands. A total of twenty-one insurgents walked out—enough to leave Murphy’s vote count short and the nomination in limbo.9
Their plan was to remain unbound by caucus decision, holding out until the floor session, when they would cast their unbossed votes with those of the Republicans to kill the Tammany nomination and put an end to “Murphyism.” But striking a blow for freedom of conscience in public life was one thing. Remaining organized was another. The insurgents needed a headquarters near the Capitol, and Edmund Terry had no rooms large enough. Eleanor offered the State Street house, later remarking that “the rights and wrongs of that fight meant very little to me, though I think I probably contributed somewhat to its duration.”10
As the first weeks of holding out against Tammany turned into a month, the house served the group, recalled Terry, as “a harbor of refuge.”11 The daily routine of feeding the press in his front parlor gave Franklin the job of team spokesman, which in turn encouraged the Albany press corps to cast young Senator Roosevelt as “the head and front of the insurgent movement that has caused Boss Murphy and his candidate for the Senate sleepless nights and riveted the attention of the entire country on Capitol Hill.”12
This gave Franklin a chance not just to strike a blow against bossism, but to gain confidence from a source other than snobbery. Until now, his characteristic expression—chin up, mouth pursed, cold blue eyes peering through pince-nez—was pure condescension.13 It took knowing Franklin as Eleanor did to understand that, deep down, he was fearful of being found ordinary and not so bright.14
“Shoot away quick,” he commanded, inviting reporters’ questions. “I must be back with my friends in five minutes.” This was an improvement over calling a colleague asinine,15 or giving off “chilly airs” to those asking his support on labor legislation.16 According to the New York Times, “The young lawmaker said it rather quietly and in a softly modulated voice.”17
The house-as-headquarters allowed Eleanor to join the men as an impartial aide-de-camp. She knew instinctively not to pretend that she was one of them. Instead she relaxed into their midst by knitting through their meetings, night after night, as the insurgency held out through a second month of the standoff.
Louis Howe, the Herald and Telegram’s legislative correspondent, called it “the most humanly interesting political fight for many years.”18
INTO A THIRD MONTH, THE blue haze in the library fumed upward, choking the children in the nursery directly overhead. Eleanor moved Anna and James to the third floor, which meant carrying the thirty-five-pound James up an extra flight of stairs all that spring, since he had been diagnosed with a heart murmur and forbidden from climbing stairs.
The insurgents, meanwhile, had thwarted the Tammany candidate again and again, enraging Sheehan. He threatened to go into the counties represented by Franklin and his brother bolters and make their lives miserable.19 Unless they ended their holdout at once, they would be “ruthlessly hunted out of public life.”20
Eleanor had not expected this, and it frightened her.21 Boss Murphy personally pressured Franklin, offering him plum appointments; and taking the occasion of the younger man’s birthday to ask, with a “delightful smile,” as Franklin saw it, if there was any chance of Roosevelt’s coming around on Sheehan. Franklin stood on principle: by opposing Murphy’s nominee he was honoring his constituents’ objections to the big-city utilities lawyer’s record of “bad faith, corruption, and faithless financing.”22
Hearing this, Blue-eyed Billy claimed character assassination, and said he would give Roosevelt one last chance, insisting that they meet for a private sit-down the next day. Franklin countered by inviting Sheehan and his wife, Blanche, to lunch, informing Eleanor that she would have the Sheehans as their luncheon guests on February 2 at 248 State Street. “I shall never forget my feelings that day,” wrote Eleanor in her autobiography.23
Eleanor Roosevelt had not yet disenthralled herself from anti-Semitic social thinking; the same kind of prejudice against Roman Catholics remained active in her view of Tammany villains. The old part of her that nursed superstitions expected Sheehan to be a monster.24 Lunch, however, went smoothly. Blue-eyed Billy proved to be an urbane conversationalist; appreciative and complimentary, he charmed Eleanor.
Franklin was having none of it. He shepherded his opponent into the study, leaving Eleanor to entertain Blanche Sheehan, a respectable Buffalo matron draped in a fox stole. As high and low tones volleyed behind the door, the women were careful to employ polite parlor talk. At length the men emerged—Sheehan red-faced, Franklin pale—and the Roosevelts saw the Sheehans out. Many years later Eleanor would remember asking whether agreement had been reached, and how relieved she felt when her husband snapped off a brisk “Certainly not.”25
After seventy-four days, however—the longest legislative deadlock in state history—State Supreme Court Judge James A. O’Gorman, a former grand sachem of Tammany Hall and therefore a compromise candidate’s compromise candidate, was elected on the first of April, turning the siege into a victory for Murphy, who also got to fill O’Gorman’s vacancy on the bench with his son-in-law. Franklin emerged as a champion of Progressivism, but Eleanor looked on appalled as Murphy and his thugs made good on Sheehan’s vengeful threats.
Payback came fast. Franklin had established a new law firm with two Carter Ledyard colleagues, and Murphy personally saw to it that they lost their first client.26 For others who had dared oppose Tammany, mortgages were foreclosed, loans called, notes mysteriously came due, privileges were canceled27—anything to sap their livelihoods. One man targeted for punishment was a country newspaper owner who depended on the printing of government notices to support his wife and two children. After ignoring months of persuasion and coercion, he had to stop his presses, fire his reporter, and eventually close his doors because local merchants had withdrawn their advertising and Murphy had diverted every notice to a competitor.
“That year taught me many things about politics,” Eleanor later recalled, “and started me thinking along lines that were completely new.”28 The loss of privacy left her uneasy; she enrolled in a local class on how to relax the muscles, regulate breathing, and retire for a half hour each day into silence.29
THE NEW CENTURY UNFOLDED LIKE a series of stamps commemorating heroic engineering feats that changed the world. Wireless radio broadcasting.30 The first passenger flight in an airplane.31 A canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama, the monumental construction of which Franklin took a legislative recess to witness. Meanwhile, in Albany, when a bulletin about the sinking of Titanic reached Eleanor, it seemed from first reports that all aboard the unsinkable ship had been saved. Then the “appalling and awful” reality filtered in. She thought it “almost worse for the many women who were saved and who would probably far rather have gone down with their husbands and sons.” She was glad that Franklin was “at least out of the thick of ice bergs.”32
He reached Panama as excavation of the daunting Culebra mountain ridge neared completion. “I can’t begin to describe it and have become so enthusiastic that if I didn’t stop I would write all night,” marveled the future builder of monumental engineering structures.33
In April Eleanor thrilled to hear Franklin boosted by Harriman Railroad attorney Maxwell Evarts as a potential gubernatorial candidate to oppose former assembly speaker James W. Wadsworth, Jr.,34 uncle of her schoolgirl crush, Nelly Post, and soon to be a constant political antagonist. Franklin’s renomination for the senate was far from assured and his election in November equally uncertain. Tammany was going all out to stop him. The Republicans thought him dangerous. His anti-Tammany statements, tagging its members “beasts of prey” and “hopelessly stupid,”35 had been distributed to make him look anti-Irish and anti-Catholic.36 Alfred E. Smith, the labor reform champion from the Lower East Side, dismissed Roosevelt as “a damn fool.”37 The 1912 race, moreover, was pitting him against not one but two opponents, thanks to Uncle Ted’s breakaway party.
In June, Colonel Roosevelt—fifty-four and stout, “fit as a bull moose”—had emerged from premature retirement to smash the Republican Party in two when it failed to nominate him. TR launched a third-party presidential candidacy under the National Progressive Party banner, and his followers rallied to him as “Bull Moosers.” Eleanor admitted to Isabel and Bob Ferguson that she secretly wished Franklin “could be fighting now for Uncle Ted, for I feel he is in the party of the future.”38
That month, her brother Hall, a junior at Harvard, had brought his fiancée, Margaret Richardson, to Campobello, then married her in a grand gathering of clans at King’s Chapel, Boston.39 Franklin served as best man; Auntie Corinne was the life of the party. Hall, not quite twenty-one, and Margaret, twenty, seemed to Eleanor “very young” as they sailed off to honeymoon in Paris, “but one must hope that all will go well!”40 Within weeks, news of the death of Margaret’s father, a revered Boston surgeon, cut short their happy days abroad.
Many years later, Hall’s surviving children would recall that as a young man he had predicted his own death at fifty. To Eleanor, who loved Hall as a son and longed to be a person of real meaning in his life, her brother seemed to be on that schedule by the age of eighteen.41 “From that time on,” she later reflected, “the only way that anyone could hold him, was to let him go.”42
At Harvard, Hall became a brilliant43 and popular44 member of the Class of 1913, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.45 Eleanor sorted out his early drinking messes without protest, but as time went on, her interventions with Hall assumed a shape that she later regretted when the pattern reappeared in other relationships: “I give everyone the feeling that I’ve ‘taken them on’ & don’t need anything from them & then when they naturally resent it & don’t like to accept from me, I wonder why!”46
“I am sorry not to be in Boston when you pass through,” Hall wrote in frustration in 1911, “but as you usually scorn all assistance I guess there is little difference.”47 Margaret echoed her husband’s exasperation with Eleanor: “She tried to do so much and never would accept anything, and that’s awfully hard for the others. She was always the doer.”48 Margaret later lamented that she could not seem to get close to Eleanor, an older woman wholly dedicated to her husband’s career.49
By 1912, Franklin had directed his own people-pleasing: “Is F paying any attention to his family this summer,” Hall asked Eleanor in July, “or is the bee buzzing as hard as ever?” The boy who had once served under Eleanor’s Crusoe as her “man Friday” suggested that she “build a little cell for him at Campo and tie him down.”50
Over these next eight years, Democratic party nominations for plum jobs were almost continually on offer: U.S. senator, governor of New York,51 vice president of the United States—his to decide which would advance him on the royal road to the White House, hers to follow.52
SHE WAS WELL SCHOOLED NOW. It never occurred to her to question where they were to go, or what they were to do, or how they were to do it. “I simply knew that what we had to do we did, and my job was to make it easy.”53 In fact, at this stage, well beyond offering the State Street rental as insurgency headquarters, Eleanor made the national figure of Franklin Roosevelt possible. A man who looked as Franklin did and bore the Roosevelt name was seen without explanation as a leader. And being, as Franklin liked to say, “nephew by law” to the most famous man in the country had saved the Hyde Park yachtsman ten years of acquiring a name.
The job Franklin now coveted was Uncle Ted’s old post: assistant secretary of the navy. In 1911, Franklin had met with the New Jersey governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson and subsequently organized his anti-machine New York Democrats into a formal bloc to support Wilson’s bid for the presidency. Behind Roosevelt’s clean, youthful, reformist leadership, that group had gone to the Democratic convention in Baltimore, where, without proper credentials, they were refused admittance.
But that was not the end of that. Several weeks before the convention, Franklin had gotten to know the manufacturer of the buttons that Wilson’s arch opponent, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, was supplying to hundreds of his supporters so that they could pack the hall. In a flash of Roosevelt magic, he got hold of some three hundred buttons, distributed them among his Wilson brigade, and flooded the armory with cheering Wilson partisans to make what Franklin always claimed was the tide-turning moment in the many-balloted contest.54
Baltimore wilted in record-breaking heat, and the sweaty chaos of a convention in which she had no part to play irritated Eleanor. As often as not, she just sat down wherever she was and knitted, darting a glance every so often to notice “the contempt in which the New York delegation was held and the animosity shown toward the big financiers.” These she reported to Aunt Maude, commenting, “If we are not going to find remedies in Progressivism, then I feel sure the next step will be Socialism.”55
Before dashing for New York to scoop up the children and set off for Campobello, she had a taste of being married to a small national presence. Franklin, though only thirty and a first-term state senator, was now the promising Roosevelt. He was doing a serious job, organizing Wilson delegates, meeting and impressing such members of the Southern Democratic establishment as the owner and editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, Josephus Daniels, a close old friend of the party’s great populist orator William Jennings Bryan and a passionate believer in Wilson for president. To Daniels, young Roosevelt was “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen,” and before they went their separate ways, Daniels took their chance meeting as “a case of love at first sight.”56
Turning his attention to his district, Franklin hired a red touring car, draped it in bunting, and went out one clear July day to cover 150 miles. Over the course of his route, he discovered that Columbia County’s bosses were against him and Putnam’s were for him, and so, he concluded, with a favorite son’s delight, “Dutchess must decide.” Next came the nominating convention in Poughkeepsie, where he received his designation by unanimous vote and planned to start campaigning at once.
But after leaving the “chicks” with Mama at Hyde Park and coming to the city on the first of October, Franklin fell mysteriously ill. The next morning he had a high fever and intense stomach pain. Dr. Ely was puzzled by his symptoms and could only make a general guess at “some form of intestinal poison.”
It was typhoid fever—the dirty water disease. Franklin and Eleanor had drunk from the stateroom water pitcher while brushing their teeth on the steamer hurrying home from Canada to kick off the campaign.
For the next four weeks, Franklin was slowly poisoned by Salmonella typhi. Before sulfa drugs and the dawn of modern antibiotics, sufferers of severe typhoid simply starved to death. The wasting killed one in five victims.
Eleanor cared for him in his third-floor back bedroom at 49 East Sixty-Fifth Street. She dispensed palliatives, ran trays up and down stairs, and made his bed with him in it, carrying on each of these duties as if put on earth to nurse Franklin D. Roosevelt at this turning point in his rise to power.
“All went well,” she affirmed, “except that at certain times of the day I felt very peculiar.”57 The back of her head ached.
That night, when Mama arrived to look in on Franklin and give Eleanor a good night kiss, the heat radiating off Eleanor’s forehead shocked her. Eleanor protested, declaring herself in tolerable good health, but agreed to sit still and take her own temperature.
She had 102, and by next afternoon, 104. Dr. Ely ran tests. For two full weeks Eleanor had been living uncomplainingly with typhoid fever.
AS BEFORE, ONCE SHE SURRENDERED to the point of submitting to a sickbed, she let no one enter her room. “Poor lamb,” crooned Mama, “how she hates being ill and giving up.”58 Aunt Tissie explained to Aunt Maude that Franklin’s mother was on hand, “but E sees no one.” Her Hall aunts clucked sympathetically: “Typhoid is so treacherous,” wrote Tissie, “that one can’t help worrying, as you never know from day to day what may develop…”59
With only twenty-four days to the election, and Franklin too ill to campaign, he urgently needed someone who could stump the district. Franklin’s illness, according to historian and biographer Frank Freidel, had “made the odds against Roosevelt’s reelection to the state senate seem unsurmountable.”60
Eleanor was the one to telephone Louis Howe at his house at Horseneck Beach, Massachusetts. To her relief, he agreed to come on the double, but when this single-minded, oppressive little man arrived in New York City, she was not so sure. He had big black staring eyes, the long, underslung jaw of a tortoise, and on his cheeks a rough pebbling of reptile skin. It was hard to imagine him kissing babies atop a hay wagon in Columbia County.
Yet off he went with Franklin’s check, filling in the amount as needed. Sometimes called the sickbed campaign, Howe’s success as Roosevelt’s 1912 stand-in could as well be dubbed the “blank-check rescue.” They trusted each other that much already, these alter egos in development.
To Eleanor, their arrangement seemed careless. Louis appeared weak and vague. Each time he came back to report on progress from the district, all he seemed to do was to fill Franklin’s sickroom with a wall of cigarette smoke.
But Howe had set up his headquarters in a Poughkeepsie hotel, and he proceeded to cover the district in the jaunty red Maxwell. He had never run a local campaign but understood that people needed to see an avuncular face on a poster and to hear from Franklin Roosevelt in a letter. Howe’s mimeographed formula, whether addressing apple growers or fishermen or hog farmers, expressed sympathy for every person’s situation, and while promising nothing discussed specific jobs Roosevelt might help obtain.
His main strategy was the old trick of turning the candidate’s weakness (unavailability, hauteur, insincerity) toward strength (personal contact, authenticity, warmth). Rushing at things half-cocked, letting his enthusiasm run away with him, Franklin appeared too easily swayed. Louis’s air of authority, his acumen, and especially the deep focus of his intelligence, balanced Roosevelt’s impulsiveness and made Franklin’s arrogance read like youthful idealism.
Above all, as Eleanor came to recognize through the Sweet Caporal smokescreen, Louis was in control, and that more than any other quality was what she needed from anyone stepping into the magic triangle.
UP THROUGH ELECTION DAY 1912, Eleanor and Franklin traded the lead on whose infection remained more serious. When both fevers had broken for good, Franklin had been reelected to the state senate, Uncle Ted had been defeated, and Woodrow Wilson was the next President of the United States.
In January, Franklin met with the President-elect in Trenton. Roosevelt’s willingness to fight Tammany, his field support for the New Jersey governor at the Baltimore convention, his organizing for Wilson in the powerful Empire State, and his tasteful franchising of the most famous name in American politics had made him a likely appointee in the new administration. But nothing concrete had come of the meeting, and in March, when Eleanor accompanied Franklin to Washington for the Inauguration, they were still waiting to hear their fate.
The day before, March 3, 1913, more than five thousand women rallied for the largest suffrage demonstration the capital had ever seen. Eleanor, strongly against women having the right to vote, still viewed politics as an exclusively male preserve. Indeed, among all her nearest female friends and relatives, only Aunt Pussie advocated for suffrage, and had tried for several years to convert Eleanor to the suffragist cause, bringing out such a passionate counterattack from Eleanor that Hall reproached her for not having better self-control.61
Uncle Ted, writing in Outlook, observed that suffrage and concepts of female duty struck women as incompatible: “Most of the women I know best are against woman suffrage precisely because they approach life from the standpoint of duty.” On the platform at Carnegie Hall he declared, “Go and convert my wife and daughters; I am the only one of my family who believes in woman suffrage!”62
In 1911, Franklin had resisted the appeals of Vassar College suffragists in his district. But when a vote on a constitutional amendment came before the legislature the following year, Franklin voted in favor, never failing to credit the lobbying of Inez Millholland, a young movement leader who was a practicing lawyer. Franklin liked to conjure the image of “America’s prettiest suffragist” perched atop his desk in the senate chamber, flattering him, all but tickling him with her lady lawyer’s arguments.
Now here was Millholland, astride her gray horse leading the “petticoat cavalry” up Pennsylvania Avenue.63 As the parade’s mounted herald, she held her head high no matter how often men in the crowd broke through passive police lines along the mile-long route, grabbing at the ladylike marchers, pulling at their clothes, harassing them with obscenities. Behind Millholland came a horse-drawn cart emblazoned with the demonstration’s most important demand: Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Enfranchising the Women of the Country.64
Eleanor responded to the spectacle with an impersonal eye. “Nice fat ladies,” she remarked in a letter to Isabella Ferguson.65
IT HAD TAKEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT about fifteen years in the political trenches of Albany, New York City, and Washington to be appointed to the office for which the new navy secretary, Josephus Daniels, endorsed Franklin to President Wilson two days later behind closed doors.
“How well do you know Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Wilson, “and how well is he equipped?”
Daniels sketched his prospective deputy with great conviction as a singularly attractive, honorable, and brave anti-Tammany Democratic leader—not just a “coming man,” but “one of our kind of liberal.”66
Wilson agreed—Roosevelt was a “capital” choice.67 He would give the President and the party “unexpected bragging rights.”68
Before sending up the nomination, Daniels consulted the senators from Roosevelt’s state. The first, James A. O’Gorman, the compromise candidate who owed his election to Franklin’s Insurgents, surprised Daniels by being merely “agreeable.”69 Next came the respected Republican Elihu Root, whose face took on a “queer look” when he asked Daniels, “You know the Roosevelts, don’t you?” Root had been McKinley’s secretary of war and Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He had seen TR “ride in front.” It did not matter who was officially in charge—“being the lead horse in any team” was the Roosevelt way.
Daniels replied that an assistant secretary of the navy with a mind of his own could only strengthen a chief wise enough not to fear his subordinate. But Root was vehement: “Every person named Roosevelt wishes to run everything and [will] try to be the Secretary.”70
Franklin had served just two legislative sessions and part of a third, returning briefly to Albany that spring to finish up pending business. When the U.S. Senate promptly confirmed his appointment, FDR traded legislative government and rural politics for the hot center of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, the agenda that would establish, among other progressive reforms, antitrust regulation and the Federal Reserve System.
He was now the number two in the fifth department of the first Democratic government in sixteen years. Louis Howe came to Washington as special assistant, Mama obligingly remained behind with the children, and Eleanor planned to follow briefly before relocating the household to Campobello for the summer. Franklin was thirty-one, the navy’s youngest-ever assistant secretary. Without any management experience, he had direct responsibility for budgets, procurement, and spending in a department whose 1913 budget, $143.5 million, amounted to more than a third of United States defense spending.
Eleanor felt “too much taken up with the family to give it much thought.”71 When she did think about Washington, it worried her that she “didn’t know a soul.” She was “afraid of [making] all kinds of stupid mistakes.”72
Uncertain about her actual duties as the wife of the twentieth-ranking official in the Executive Branch, she took herself to Auntie Bye, protocol expert and now the wife of an admiral, who poured tea and urged “dearest, dearest Eleanor” to think of the navy itself as her duty. She must do what she could for young officers’ wives trying to keep up their social position on small pay. Eleanor’s weekly calls would be her big responsibility, and Bye commiserated with her over this tedious obligation.73 She would do well, advised Bye, to “follow the form.” Meanwhile, it gave her aunt a “homey sensation” to think ahead to Eleanor and Franklin moving that fall as renters into “1733,” the Washington headquarters of the Oyster Bay clan on N Street Northwest.74
MARCH 17 FOUND ELEANOR IN Boston, visiting Hall and Margaret and their new baby.75 Franklin, sworn in that morning, was attempting to look busy on the third floor of the big-boned State, War, and Navy Building, later known as the Old Executive Office Building. Between the office of the secretary of the navy and the White House intervened a mere tract of asphalt. Looking across West Executive Avenue to the West Wing and the gleaming mansion beyond, the new Roosevelt on the job could not help being keenly impressed by the “significance of it all.” Only when the restrained excitements of his first official day waned, and the indolent hoofbeats of a passing horse could be heard,76 did a still greater “significance” dawn on him.
Their eighth wedding anniversary.77 Eleanor took the lapse in stride, having limited herself to ordering Franklin a modest, practical present “as we couldn’t do anything else together!”78
When she next heard from her husband—two days later79—Franklin was in charge. Josephus Daniels had gone on an inspection tour, leaving his acting secretary free to greet a gang of newspapermen: “You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied this position?”80
Insubordination, for a start. As senior deputy on duty, Theodore Roosevelt had defied his superior and wired the famous order to Commodore George Dewey to maneuver the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic squadron from Hong Kong into striking position of Manila Bay. When Spain then declared war, the strategic advantage of Roosevelt’s surprise move won the Philippines for the United States, propelling TR into the Spanish-American War and ultimately the White House.
Josephus Daniels was proud of having loaded into the system “the Democratic Roosevelt,” as he had dubbed Franklin at the convention in Baltimore. To his diary he mused, “May history repeat itself!”81
In 1913, Americans were trying to decide whether they intended to go on expanding as a world power or to shut themselves up in continental isolation. Daniels—a pacifist, religious fundamentalist, defender of the common man against vested interests, white supremacist, teetotaler, and slow-moving small-town Southern editor—had every reason to be suspicious of his deputy. Franklin—a Big Navy interventionist, fleet modernizer, Monroe Doctrine expansionist—could often be impetuous, sometimes reckless. Unable to keep under wraps his talent for authority—and obnoxiousness to superiors—Franklin sincerely believed he could run the department better than a newspaperman who meant port and starboard when he indicated left and right to his admirals. Daniels might be the President’s man, but to Franklin it was his navy—time and the right-sized emergency would prove it.
Daniels took note, as Eleanor had during her young husband’s sleepwalking episodes, that when Franklin Roosevelt decided he wanted something, he would stop at nothing to get it. Yet Daniels loved him. Franklin Roosevelt was the golden boy who could do no wrong.
IT TOOK ELEANOR TWO WEEKS to get her calling routine to six minutes a visit.82
Crossing as many as thirty addresses off her list each afternoon,83 she hit up wives of the justices of the Supreme Court on Mondays; of the representatives in Congress, Tuesdays; of the cabinet, Wednesdays; and once a month, the wives of naval attachés and the women of the Navy Yard. Thursdays were for the lofty Senate ladies; Fridays, the diplomatic women of first and second rank; Saturdays, resident society, the “cave dwellers” in their Beaux Arts marble dens. She made a point, also, of calling on the President’s wife, Ellen Axson Wilson.
Calling, or card-leaving, as the Washington ritual was known, required loading her children into the chauffeured car, buttoning her gloves, fixing her hat, gathering up her leather card case, and darting into the next house on her list to stammer out the formula: “How do you do, I’m Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt. My husband has just come as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”84 By leaving her engraved calling card on the silver tray in the vestibule, she ensured both a return visit from her hostess and a place for the Franklin Roosevelts at that particular household’s fêtes or among that department’s season’s dinners and dances.
On Wednesdays, she also received calls herself, or lent a hand to the secretary’s wife—Addie Worth Bagley Daniels, a good-natured, easygoing North Carolina aristocrat of outspoken views85—until her feet ached and her voice rasped. Naval luncheons and official dinners given by the Navy League packed her calendar. Her executive capacity found outlet in further tasks of planning and hosting official dinners, where she gained recognition as one of the few Washington women who could speak French and translate for others, a not insignificant skill when France’s Washington mission, led by Ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand, close friend of Uncle Ted’s, was a formative presence in global diplomacy.86
Cousin Alice pronounced calling and card-leaving “a Washington mania that no sane human beings should let themselves in for.”87 It was also work: it took patience and stamina and kindness; Alice did not want the authority of donkey work, nor did she have the impulse to be kind. Her object was to be feared—to be the alpha female whose invitations to her own select circle were coveted.88 Eleanor’s authority rested on being in earnest and in her instinct for knowing just when someone needed a bunch of violets or a small present for a voyage to France. She never shirked from the toil of the card case; she never claimed “delicacy,”89 or “a brief illness,” code among official ladies for marital strain, excessive menstruation, or depression.90
She made one exception to her all-in cooperation as a naval wife. To staff the gloomy house on N Street, she had brought from New York four servants, all white, who joined Auntie Bye’s two oldest retainers, both African-American. But Franklin’s boss, devoutly Christian, had also been North Carolina’s all too effective collaborator in resisting Reconstruction’s political empowerment of formerly enslaved African Americans.91 In 1898, as editor of the state’s most prominent newspaper, Daniels served as the propaganda wing of a conspiracy to overthrow the elected multiracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina, and reclaim the state legislature in order to reestablish white supremacy as official government policy. Daniels’s disinformation campaign in the News and Observer helped to incite voter intimidation and house-by-house terror, ultimately leading an armed white mob of 2,000 to execute more than sixty African-American citizens in the streets, force black city officials to resign or be butchered on the spot, and terrorize hundreds of women and children who had fled to the surrounding swamps and forests.
When the Daniels had the Roosevelts to dinner fifteen years after the carnage—a bloodbath so shameful it would remain for decades among the United States’ most carefully hidden crimes against humanity—Eleanor appreciated her host asking the traditional blessing before the meal, but had difficulty reconciling piety with the harsh reprimand Daniels gave her that night at the dinner table.
Cloaked in his soft Piedmont voice, the secretary of the navy declared it unnatural for whites to assume a servile position in the house of a white family; only Negroes could wait on their superiors. “Whom else,” he said, “could one kick?”92
Eleanor would never forget the “almost brutal feeling” of this cruelty.93 Daniels stopped short of ordering Eleanor to send home her New York domestics before they—and she—offended the social order of what was to be, in these Wilson years, a nation’s capital more deeply divided than ever by skin color and only marginally more welcoming to the advancement of women.94
COUSIN ALICE LONGWORTH WOULD LATER carp about Eleanor’s “do-goody and virtuous”95 practices in Wilson’s Washington. Yet little that could be called public-spirited appears in this early record of her thoughts or deeds concerning the groups and people that Eleanor Roosevelt spent her later life championing. During the Wilson years, she was simply eager to be charitable, and gave money to the unfortunate whom she knew. For example, having set up a bank account for the baby of Elliott’s Slovakian wet nurse, she conscientiously maintained deposits.96
Eleanor’s deeper desire to prove herself as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt made social duties seem more important than social work. Eleanor did not join Ellen Axson Wilson in her active concern for improving conditions in Washington’s system of housing. The city’s African American work force lived in disease-ridden alleyway hovels converted from gardener’s sheds originally attached to the city’s big houses. Upon Ellen Wilson’s sudden death from Bright’s disease in August 1914, Congress at last responded out of respect, but too little and too late, and the issue would lie waiting another twenty years for Eleanor to correct her own earlier failure.
On social prejudices, she followed her caste-conscious mother-in-law’s lead. Up through the First World War, in complete contradiction of her Souvestrian and Settlement House beliefs, Eleanor wore bigotry as if it were a coat slipped on to suit an occasion. All too easily she joined Mama in dinner-party anti-Semitism, expressing condescension for the people one might meet at a reception honoring the financier and soon-to-be War Industries Board chief Bernard Baruch: “I’ve got to go to the Harris party, which I’d rather be hung [sic] than seen at,” she told Mama, adding: “Mostly Jews.”97
Unchallenged by family or friends, Eleanor shamelessly reported such nasty postmortems as “The Jew party [was] appalling.… I never wish to hear money, jewels, or sables mentioned again.”98 Uncle Ted might have considered Felix Frankfurter “the most brilliant young man in America,”99 but Eleanor saw no disgrace in adjudging Harvard’s Vienna-born professor of law “an interesting little man but very Jew,”100 because Mama was fine with that—and Henry Adams was fine with that. When President Wilson’s appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court erupted into conflict, Eleanor accepted the private consensus that anti-Semitism was naturally holding up Senate approval—Brandeis would be the court’s first Jewish justice—whereas Senate Republican resistance to “the people’s advocate” had more to do with the nominee’s relentless and effective exposure of the criminal nature of banking oligarchs who controlled the nation’s financial system.101
Wilson, meanwhile, had openly established racial segregation as the new administration’s policy for federal workers. In his first year in office, the President granted the requests of his postmaster general and treasury secretary to rid their agencies of experienced African American civil servants. Positions held by Negroes in Republican administrations were now white-only. At a lower level, separate work spaces, dining tables, and restrooms divided white from black across the government; any black official unlucky enough to have white women under his supervision was fired.102 Wilson issued no executive order, but defended his abandonment of equality and fairness, and dealt brusquely with objections such as those of one group of African American professionals led into Wilson’s office by a Boston newspaper editor. “Segregation,” asserted the President, “is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”103
SOCIAL WASHINGTON REMAINED A REPUBLICAN stronghold. As Colonel Roosevelt’s niece, Eleanor was favored by the hostesses and cave dwellers as one of the “right Roosevelts.” She received special welcome at the embassies of Britain and France and from the old stalwarts of Uncle Ted and Aunt Edith’s life in Washington. Henry Adams’s niece Aileen Tone recalled that Eleanor rated a special respect from everyone who knew her. “She seemed more like a college girl then whose ideas were only beginning to bud. Her charm was of a very quiet, old-fashioned kind.”104
At one dinner party, Eleanor’s fellow Washington wife, the future novelist Nathalie Sedgwick Colby, noticed that Eleanor “came alive when she talked,” and “talked a great deal.” In the sitting room, when the men rejoined the women after cigars and brandy, Colby liked the way Eleanor “got up, a lady’s way, as if people were the element in which she wheeled easiest.”105
As for Franklin, a metamorphosis had begun that would transform the haughty state senator, celebrated local rival to matinee idols,106 into a figure of immense physical and popular appeal—the Gay Cavalier, as Franklin Lane dubbed him.107 Said Eleanor’s Cousin Corinne: “I never knew anyone who grew so much more attractive with power.”108
His job put him in charge of sixty-five thousand men, made him an authority on the construction and operation of the biggest warships in history, and demonstrated his proficiency in the procurement and maintenance of weapons, explosives, ammunition, and equipment. In the department, Roosevelt presented himself as the one real seaman capable of taking charge. He worked hard, and the sailors in shore stations and foremen in the navy yards soon realized that only when Josephus Daniels went on vacation did they get the materials they needed or the orders that got things done.109 Roosevelt was their man, quick to slash through the red tape, easy with a joke or salty yarn. For the first time in his life, Franklin was one of the boys, authentically virile—or, anyway, the men’s choice over “Joe Syphilis Daniels,”110 as they dubbed their secretary when he banned alcohol from the officer’s mess on ships at sea.
But Daniels saw deeper into the stealthy, catlike aspects of Roosevelt’s nature, observing that Franklin “always had about him what women would call glamour and charm—to the nth degree—one of the greatest things a politician can have,” adding: “Roosevelt had it just like an actress.”111
This last was a perceptive comparison. On their honeymoon, Franklin had tried out with Eleanor the feline role he now played masterfully with Daniels: that of an overwhelmingly loving creature, who loved the nation, deeply loved the sea, loved the navy and all its traditions, but was at the same time in business for himself. Upon taking office, Franklin designed a new flag with the insignia of the assistant secretary to be flown during his inspection tours. He increased the number of guns in his salute from fifteen to seventeen and took to wearing dramatic navy capes aboard ship. He spent much of his first year with Daniels lampooning the boss’s latest landlubber’s gaffe or sniggering at Washington dinner parties about what a funny-looking “hillbilly” he worked for, until finally Interior Secretary Franklin Lane stepped in: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he told Franklin. “Mr. Daniels is your superior and you should show him loyalty or you should resign your office.”112
A judge of character as canny as Josephus Daniels knew that he was dealing with a supreme user of people. Franklin had a power of focus that was magical. In his hawklike gaze and beaming bright smile was such clear longing for his chief’s goodwill, such pursuit of Mr. Daniels’s advice and wisdom, such apparent loyalty and interdependence, that Daniels felt personally needed by Franklin. He would soon discover that it was he who had been depending on Franklin.
Woodrow Wilson was dazzled by this six-foot-two star of the subcabinet, “the handsomest young giant I have ever seen.”113 English political hostess Margot Asquith declared Eleanor’s husband “the most desirable man” she had ever laid eyes on.114 The Yale football coach, Walter Camp, selector of All-American teams, described the Franklin Roosevelt he trained in a cabinet calisthenics class as “a beautifully built man, with the long muscles of an athlete.”115 Roosevelt cousins who had written him off as “the man on the handkerchief box” could not have imagined “Cousin Sallie’s boy” ever meriting acclaim for his masculine appeal, let alone as an Adonis.116 Uncle Will, Auntie Bye’s husband, Admiral William S. Cowles, had sent Franklin off to the Navy Department with more than a hint of the trouble ahead: “The girls will spoil you soon enough. I leave you to them.”117
TEN YEARS EARLIER, ELEANOR HAD seen Franklin as a prince like her father. She had joined him in a matching royal pair. But the same traits that had appealed to a debutante—charm, confidence, intellectual curiosity—looked different to a thirty-year-old mother of three. Now she saw Franklin’s nonchalance, his self-interest, his guile. For reasons she would not grasp until much later, surface lightheartedness and gaiety—the camouflage of her father’s alcoholism—turned her stomach while also drawing her. “During all these years,” recalled daughter Anna, “if [Franklin] would go out—which he did—with the men to play poker in the evening and come home with a breath on him, she died. She just couldn’t stand it. She told him this.”118
But alcohol was not the central source of their trouble. Unlike many of the Roosevelt men, Franklin was not an alcoholic, though he himself was the first to admit to the compulsions of politics. After yet another all-too-brief appearance at Campobello, he wrote to Eleanor on the dash back to Washington: “I do so wish the holiday had been longer and less interrupted while it lasted. I felt Tuesday as if I was really getting back to earth again—and I know it is hard for both of us to lead this kind of life, but it is a little like a drug habit: almost impossible to stop definitively.”119
They had entered into lasting conflict over dishonesty. “She is addicted to a frankness that would blaze headlines across the nation,” observed a later Washington columnist.120 Her husband’s first instinct was to tell the partial truth. Franklin was a bender of the facts; and he so wholly trusted in his own trickiness that he believed no one would catch on when, in his first national campaign, he lied to the people of Butte, Montana, that he had written the constitution of Haiti.121 The night of his primary election for the U.S. Senate, he declared that he had carried a majority of rural precincts. In fact, he had won in only 22 of 61 counties. Tammany had beat him two to one upstate, four to one in their city strangleholds. “Never mind,” he said to a friend, “we paved the way.”122 But Eleanor did mind.
Marital resentment can have the effect of turning people inward and selfish; Franklin and Eleanor turned outward. The more disappointed they were by each other, the more readily they took on the problems of a world that was suddenly—for them, almost mercifully—lurching toward war.