With no mother of her own, Eleanor tried hard to forge a relationship with Sara. Although there were happy moments and times of agreement, Eleanor felt like she was in a decades-long tug-of-war with her mother-in-law.
Once they decided to stay together, Franklin and Eleanor tried to mend the cracks in their marriage. Yet the deceit ate away at Eleanor, literally—she developed a form of anorexia. She also lost a good deal of the hard-won confidence she had worked for over the years. Still, she was ready to turn around her life. One defining moment came when she attended the funeral of Grandmother Hall at Tivoli in 1919. During the service, Eleanor pondered her grandmother’s unhappy, unfulfilled existence. After being widowed, Mary Hall had done little with her life but try—unsuccessfully—to cope with her children. What a waste. Eleanor came away with one conclusion: “Life was meant to be lived.” And lived to the fullest on one’s own terms.
Franklin, Sara, Eleanor, and the five Roosevelt children in 1920
Eleanor set about making changes. For her own interest, she took typing and business classes. And she began taking charge of her household, to Sara’s annoyance. In 1919, Eleanor dismissed all the white servants Sara had hired over the years and replaced them with black staff. Years later she wrote that perhaps it was “the Southern blood of my ancestors [who had owned slaves], but ever since I had been in Washington, I had enjoyed my contact with such colored people as came to work for me. I never regretted the change which I made when I completely staffed my house with colored servants.” This statement showed a naïveté about race relations, generally and personally.
Despite her previous interest in the plights of immigrants, Eleanor paid virtually no attention to the difficulties of African Americans, who faced prejudice every day. It would be almost two decades before she came to this understanding, despite her awareness of the great turmoil in the black community.
In 1919, while Franklin was serving as assistant secretary of the navy, terrible race riots rocked Washington, D.C. African American soldiers who thought fighting in World War I would open job opportunities or somehow decrease prejudice came home to even more segregation. As one historian put it, “The benefits of the war to make the world safe for democracy was restricted to whites.”
The Ku Klux Klan was active, and not just in the South. Racial tensions spiked. In most cases, whites attacked blacks, and blacks fought back in more than thirty cities across the country during that hot summer. Washington, D.C., was one of them. Eleanor, who was at Campobello with the children, was worried about Franklin’s safety, as her letters show: “No words from you and I’m getting anxious because of the riots. Do be careful not to be hit by stray bullets.” The next day she added, “Still no letter or telegram from you and I’m worried to death.”
Eleanor’s and Franklin’s concern in their continuous correspondence was for his personal safety. They didn’t mention the riots in Washington, D.C., that left fifteen people, both white and black, dead, and many, many more injured. Nor did they discuss why the riot in Washington, D.C., was only one of dozens of race altercations across the United States that year. These riots and the lack of protection from law enforcement galvanized the African American community, and a new civil rights movement was born, though Eleanor and Franklin seemed oblivious to it.
Through much of Eleanor Roosevelt’s adulthood, a thread emerged. She began to care for repressed communities when she came to know their members as individuals. As a young woman, she had casually made anti-Semitic comments; prejudice against Jews was common in her social circle. Her feelings changed when she made close friends who were Jewish. In 1919, she didn’t know any African Americans except as servants. She may have felt sympathy for those who had been killed or wounded, as a general matter, but she had little interest in the root causes of black anger.
If the plight of African Americans was not a concern to Eleanor, there was one cause that caught her full attention after World War I. Eleanor became involved in the push for women’s voting rights.
The fight to get women the right to vote in the United States had been going on since the 1850s. Women’s suffrage had never been of much interest to Eleanor. She had always assumed men were “superior creatures” and could handle the voting. It was actually Franklin who became a suffragist first, in 1912. He was a state senator when a bill allowing women to vote in New York was presented to the legislature, and he backed it. Franklin’s stance woke Eleanor up. It soon became apparent to her that the progressive reforms she was interested in seeing come about—better working conditions, child welfare laws, improved housing—would have more of a chance of happening if women could vote.
In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and women were granted the right to vote (although some states had granted this previously). In less than three months, women were allowed to vote in a national election for the first time. Eleanor enthusiastically voted, and she also decided to get more involved by joining the League of Women Voters. The league’s purpose was to inform women about issues and encourage them to get involved in the political process. Eleanor’s talent for leadership was quickly recognized, and she was soon appointed to the league’s board.
There was another important element to the 1920 presidential election for the Roosevelt family. Franklin, who had left his navy job to return to politics, was chosen to run for vice president on the Democratic ticket with presidential nominee James Cox. Once again, Eleanor was again asked to play the role of political wife, now following Franklin on the campaign trail. The long train trips around the country bored her at first. One of her chief jobs was motioning to her husband when he talked too long. His oratory had vastly improved since his first speeches, but he never spoke for five minutes when he could stretch it to ten.
Louis Howe saw more important work for Eleanor, however. Over the years, he had remained indispensable to Franklin, and Eleanor had come to appreciate his skills and overlook the cigarette ashes. Louis, for his part, had always been impressed by Eleanor’s brains and instincts. He sought her input during the 1920 campaign, giving her early looks at Franklin’s speeches and encouraging her to voice her opinions. He made sure to introduce her to both the politicians and newspaper reporters they met as they crossed the country, and she made friends in both groups. And perhaps just as important, he taught her how to speak in public effectively.
Before television, and long before social media, candidates for national office conducted campaigns by riding trains across the country, stopping in cities and towns to talk to voters.
All Eleanor’s insecurities came back in front of an audience. Her hands shook, her high voice could become screechy. Sometimes she would giggle from sheer nervousness. Louis, experienced in the ways of campaigns, worked with Eleanor and gave her simple rules she could follow that both calmed her and made her a much better speaker. His advice was: "Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down.”
Almost everyone knew that the Cox-Roosevelt ticket didn’t have much chance of winning, and it did lose to the Republican, Warren G. Harding, who became the twenty-ninth president. But during that campaign, Louis and Eleanor forged an unbreakable bond. Here was someone, Eleanor felt, who understood her and knew how to channel her energies. Louis was insistent in his belief that Franklin would be president of the United States and told Eleanor when Franklin’s term was finished, he would make her president!
After Franklin’s vice presidential loss, the family returned to their town house in New York City, and he to careers in both law and business. He hadn’t made much money during his years in government and was eager to support his family without help from Sara.
For Eleanor, her confidence restored, the time had come to truly take back her life. Along with the League of Women Voters, she joined other progressive women’s organizations dedicated to social change. Through this network, she made friends who broadened her horizons about everything from poetry to politics. These “New Women,” as they were nicknamed, reminded Eleanor of Mlle. Souvestre and her ideas and ideals. Often unmarried or living with other women in same-sex relationships, members of Eleanor’s circle were passionate about social reform and were not afraid to organize for political power. Eleanor felt comfortable with these bright and dedicated friends. They exemplified her goal of living life on one’s own terms, and she was inspired by them. They were responsible, as she put it, “for the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Then, in the summer of 1921, something happened that turned Eleanor’s life upside down and threatened to dash every one of Franklin’s political dreams.
Franklin and Eleanor on Campobello Island. Franklin’s parents had had a home there since 1883, and it became a summer home for Eleanor and Franklin’s family. Here the couple enjoy the beach in 1920, the summer before he contracted polio.
It was August, and the Roosevelt family was on Campobello Island. They had spent a busy day sailing, swimming, even helping put out a small fire on one of the neighboring islands. Franklin came down with a chill, and then he began running a fever. He went to bed, but the next morning he noticed his legs weren’t working properly. Horrified, he soon realized that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
The local doctors were not able to make a diagnosis as Franklin’s high fever grew worse. Finally, a specialist was brought up from New York. He gave the family the devastating news. Franklin had infantile paralysis—polio. Though the disease mostly struck children, adults were certainly not immune. Today, vaccination has wiped out polio in the United States, but in the 1920s, there was no cure and almost no treatment. It was a disease that frightened everyone, and the Roosevelts were no exception.
Eleanor sprang into action. She became Franklin’s devoted nurse, exhausting herself. A doctor told her, “You will surely break down if you too do not get immediate relief.” Eleanor did get assistance from the ever-present Louis Howe. Together, they took care of Franklin—bathing and massaging him, even brushing his teeth—until they could move him back to New York. Franklin, an optimist by nature, assumed that eventually he would fully recover, and Eleanor became his cheerleader.
It slowly dawned on all the Roosevelts that this wasn’t to be. Over time, Franklin taught himself to shuffle his heavily braced legs forward for short periods, as long as he was holding on to someone’s arm or on crutches, and to stand if gripping a lectern while giving a speech. But despite the appearance of movement, he never really walked by himself again. Although the public rarely saw it, Franklin spent most of his waking hours in a wheelchair.
Sara had been in Europe during the first few weeks of Franklin’s illness. Upon her return, and as his prognosis became less hopeful, she argued—strongly—there was only one thing to do. Franklin must return to the place he’d loved since boyhood, Springwood in Hyde Park, and live quietly. Eleanor and Louis Howe were violently opposed to this notion of what his life should be. Louis still saw a great political future for him, while Eleanor knew that being idle and solitary was against everything in Franklin’s outgoing nature.
One of Franklin’s doctors, George Draper, witnessed “the intense and devastating influence of these high-voltage personalities on one another.” A polio specialist, he found himself in the middle as Sara argued that her son should be treated as an invalid. Eleanor angrily replied that “if he fights he may overcome his handicap.”
This was one battle Eleanor won and Sara lost. Dr. Draper told Eleanor she was right and that Franklin should live as normal and vigorous a life as possible. Though he’d spend the next several years recuperating, Franklin kept his hand in politics, staying active in both local New York happenings and on the national scene. In 1924, his rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention nominating Alfred E. Smith for president marked his full-time return to the political stage.
Once the dust of the medical crisis began settling, Eleanor and Franklin continued trying to find a way to lead their lives, apart and together. Franklin, in an effort to find relief and new treatments for his legs, began spending time first in Florida, then in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he eventually set up a sanitarium to help himself and other polio sufferers.
Eleanor did not care for the South—she didn’t like the heat, the bugs, and the more casual lifestyle. Now approaching middle age, she spent most of her time in New York. She began to untangle herself from Sara—she even blocked the connecting doors to the town houses!—and took more responsibility for her children.
One stark realization was that Franklin could not be the same kind of father he was before his illness, especially to the younger boys, Franklin Jr. and John, who were only seven and five years old when their father contracted polio. The older children, Anna, James, and Elliott, had witnessed their father’s physical agony as he’d tried to rehabilitate himself. They had been shocked, and Anna had become furious with her mother when she gave Anna’s town house room to Louis during the first weeks after the family returned to New York from Campobello. But the three eldest could cope. “It began to dawn on me if the two youngest boys were going to have a normal existence,” Eleanor wrote later, “I was going to have to become a good deal more companionable . . .” That she did, spending more time with them, and even taking the boys camping.
Even with all that was going on her life, Eleanor didn’t slow down when it came to the causes that were ever more important to her. Her deep interest in politics and reform movements led her to become an ardent member of the New York State Democratic Committee. She edited the Women’s Democratic News, a political newsletter, and perhaps most controversial, became a member of the Women’s Trade Union League in 1922. This group, which some considered aligned with radicals, wanted women to form unions so they could insist on better working conditions. Eleanor not only raised money for the group, she also hosted parties for working-class women who, she felt, could use some fun in their lives.
Eleanor on Campobello Island in 1925 with her friends Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook
During the 1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt became a working woman as well. Along with her friend Marion Dickerman she bought the Todhunter School for upper-class girls in New York City, where she began teaching history and literature. It was a wonderful experience for Eleanor, who was able to emulate her heroine, Mlle. Souvestre, and in response received the same affection and respect from her own students. Decades later, one of those students stated emphatically, “And I never forgot a damned thing she ever taught me!”
Building on what she’d learned at Allenswood, Eleanor considered her main job was to get her students to think for themselves. It wasn’t enough for them to regurgitate the lessons she taught. She demanded to know what they thought. In her literature courses, she made sure her students read women authors, and her educational goal was to lead her students “into an enlivened understanding of every possible phase of the world where they were going.”
Still, as in many of her stands, there was contradiction. Though she believed wholeheartedly in public education (and that teachers, mostly women, were not paid enough), Todhunter was an expensive private school, the sort of place her own children went to.
In 1928, Franklin—often called by his initials FDR in newspaper headlines, a nickname that stuck—ran for and won the governorship of New York State, and Eleanor had to give up some of her own political work to take on the role of the state’s First Lady. She still continued to take the train from Albany, the state capital, to Manhattan once a week to stay for several days of teaching. “I like teaching better than anything else I do.”
It was a great source of pleasure to Eleanor that during his term, she and Franklin developed a serious working partnership. Since his mobility was limited, he often sent her out into the state to learn about the workings of various agencies and programs. One of her first visits was to a state hospital. When she returned, Franklin began asking her questions. “‘What was the food like?’ I said, ‘Oh, I looked at the menus and they seemed very adequate.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t ask you about the menus. I asked you what the food was like. You should have looked in the pots on the stove.’ After that I was much better as an inspector.”
One more thing happened during those years that made Eleanor’s life easier and happier. She had never really felt comfortable at the Hyde Park estate. Springwood was Sara’s house. Franklin came up with the idea to build a stone cottage on a piece of his land for Eleanor, Marion Dickerman, and their friend Nancy Cook (who was also a financial partner in Todhunter). The house, named Val-Kill after a nearby stream, was a sanctuary for Eleanor and where she lived when she was at Hyde Park. It was, at last, a home that she could call her own.
But there was another house calling—the White House. Eleanor knew that running for the presidency had always been Franklin’s long-term plan. It was not hers. Eleanor was content with the life she had and did not look forward to living in the White House fishbowl, where her every move would be watched and commented on. Nevertheless, in 1929 a national event occurred that rocked the United States to its core: The stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. People lost their savings and their jobs, and they watched the economy collapse. For a while, it looked as if the country might collapse as well, and the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, seemed unable to do much about it.
Eleanor’s cottage at Val-Kill was her sanctuary for decades.
In 1932, Franklin ran for the presidency on the platform of a New Deal for Americans. If he won, he would have no less a job than repairing and restoring a broken country. Whatever her personal feelings, Eleanor knew she had to support the man she felt could handle that enormous job. And that man just happened to be her husband.