EUROPE WAS AT WAR AND the United States would join the Allies in 1917. With her husband working for the navy, and no end to his tasks in sight, Eleanor eventually joined him in Washington, where it did not take long for her to feel an unusual restlessness. She started to dwell less on herself and the problems that had long plagued her and began to think she might find a larger and more distracting role in the larger world, where such turmoil and violence now reigned. It is another way of saying that, perhaps for the first time in her life, she sought a purpose for herself, a purpose outside of herself, “the opportunity to move beyond her limited social circle” and into the virtually unlimited realms of politics and world affairs. It was a move that did not come easily.
Years earlier, when her “Uncle Ted” took the presidential oath of office, “politics still meant little to me,” Eleanor admitted, and further confessed, referring to his inaugural address, that “I have no recollection of what he said!” Some time after that, while traveling abroad with her husband, she found herself in the company of Sir Ronald Ferguson, the governor-general of Australia, and his wife, Helen.
One afternoon at tea I was alone with Lady Helen, when she suddenly asked me a devastating question: “Do tell me, my dear, how do you explain the difference between your national and state governments? It seems to us so confusing.”
I had never realized that there were any differences to explain. In fact, I had never given a thought to the question. I knew that we had state governments, because Uncle Ted had been Governor of New York State. My heart sank, and I wished that the ground would open up and swallow me. Luckily, Sir Ronald and my husband appeared at that moment for tea, and I could ask Franklin to answer her question. He was adequate, and I registered a vow that once safely back in the United States I would find out something about my own government.
Just as her knowledge of politics did not come easily, neither did it come quickly. When Eleanor and her children finally moved to Washington, several months after the United States had declared war on the Central Powers, she discovered that, as the wife of a member of President Wilson’s subcabinet, she was automatically assigned to tedium. Initially, says Franklin’s biographer Jean Smith, her days “had been almost as circumscribed as her life had been in New York, restricted to paying formal calls and leaving visiting cards, entertaining and being entertained, while supervising a household that grew larger each year,” eventually numbering six children and various quantities of household help.
Supposedly, she was working on behalf of the Allied cause, but for the life of her she could not see how. By talking up American involvement at minor social events, by pleading for assistance for the troops and reciting platitudes that were supposed to boost morale—preaching, in other words, to the choir—she was not doing enough to suit herself.
Eleanor matured later in life than most people, and in a sense the process was just now beginning. Before long, she stopped handing out calling cards, declined invitations to social events, and took her first tentative steps toward becoming the Eleanor Roosevelt that always lay within, finding a way to do more for the American fighting man. But, at the start, it was not much.
Joining thousands of other women across the country, she picked up a pair of extra-long needles and started turning out blankets for the soldiers, to keep them warm in the trenches. “I did very little war work that summer beyond the inevitable knitting which every woman undertook and which became a constant habit. No one moved without her knitting. I had always done a certain amount but never had achieved the ease which the war brought as a natural result.”
But Eleanor’s goal was not greater proficiency with knitting needles. She knew from her first stitch that she needed a different kind of role, one that would not be merely helpful to the war effort but indispensable. It could not help but become a priority of hers, having relocated to Washington and dwelling in the midst of so much dedication to keep the world safe for democracy. Her father had taught her, when she was a child, to do what she could to assist those less fortunate than she. Once, the less fortunate had been children with various disabilities, including poverty. Now they were grown men whose lives were threatened daily.
Besides, her husband was busier than he had ever been before and, even though they were living in the same city now, she saw him remarkably little. But she did not feel abandoned as she had previously; rather, she felt free to devote herself to the national interest, to invigorate herself through meaningful activity. So, two or three days a week, she volunteered at the Red Cross canteen, for which duty she wore a sharply pressed khaki uniform and a cap resembling the woolen hats worn by doughboys overseas. She worked the day shift, getting home in time for dinner, and was proud to have her children see her in such official attire.
Everyone in the canteen . . . was expected to do any work that was necessary, even mopping the floor, and no one remained long a member of this Red Cross unit who could not do anything that was asked of her. I remember one lady who came down escorted by her husband to put in one afternoon. I doubt if she had ever done any manual labor before in her life, and she was no longer young. The mere suggestion that she might have to scrub the floor filled her with horror and we never again saw her on a shift.
In that long ago letter of his, Eleanor’s father had wanted her to lay one stone on top of another to build a wall of education for herself. She was now doing so, although hers was a wall of self-confidence as well. Stone upon stone. It occurred to her that soldiers who had not yet gone to battle, or had returned for home leave or recuperation from injuries, should have a meeting place, that it was important for warriors to gather with their mates, to swap experiences and reflections, to console each other, perhaps to shoot a game of pool. To her own surprise, she was not shy about advocating such a haven. “I went to the Red Cross and begged them to build one of their recreation rooms, which they did.” At one point, her uncle Theodore cabled money to Eleanor for her military activities; it is likely that she donated some of it to rec room construction.
Still under the aegis of the Red Cross, Eleanor was sent to Saint Elizabeth’s, a naval hospital and the primary mental institution in Washington. She didn’t want the assignment, didn’t believe she could handle it. “I cannot do this,” she thought, but then: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” So once a week she went to the hospital, where she “took flowers, cigarettes and any little thing that might cheer the men who had come back from overseas.” Many of them had returned with injuries that would never heal, some physical and some emotional. To be in the company of such wounded men was an experience Eleanor never expected to have, and she was not only aghast at seeing the ravages of war directly in front of her; she was toughened. And educated, in a way even the best school could not have taught.
One boy—for he was just that, little more than a child—seems to have caught her eye more than the others. He was young and his hair was the color of wheat.
The sun in the window placed high up, well above the patients’ heads, touched his hair and seemed almost like a halo above his head. He was talking to himself incessantly and I inquired what he was saying. “He is giving the orders,” said the doctor, “which were given every night in Dunkirk, where he was stationed.” I remember my husband telling me that he had been in Dunkirk and that every evening the enemy planes came over the town and bombed it and the entire population was ordered down into the cellars. This boy had stood the strain of the nightly bombing until he could stand it no longer, then he went insane and repeated the orders without stopping. . . .
I asked what chances he had for recovery and was told that it was fifty-fifty, but that in all probability he would never again be able to stand as much strain as before he had had this illness.
Eleanor’s work at Saint Elizabeth’s did not go unappreciated, either by those on the hospital staff or, at least in one case, by the parent of one of her patients. “I want to thank you,” a mother wrote, “as one of the boys who was in the Naval Hospital at Washington from the first of April until July 8th for the kind words—the little favors—the interest you took in my son . . . He always loved to see you come in. You always brought a ray of sunshine with you, always had something to say to him.”
That she was gratified by the note goes without saying. That she was appalled by conditions at the hospital was no less true. Stepping out of character—the character we have known so far, at least—she wrote to her husband’s friend, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane. It was the first time she had taken advantage of her union with the assistant secretary of the navy, and she had not asked his permission.
She urged Lane to visit the hospital, to see the abysmal conditions for himself. He declined. But she refused to take no for an answer. She wrote again, telling him there were not nearly enough attendants to provide proper care for the patients, or even to keep them company in their suffering. This time Lane was motivated to investigate Eleanor’s complaints and he found them valid. He thanked her for alerting him, and increased the funding for the hospital; more attendants were immediately hired.
It was all Eleanor’s doing. Yet to no one did she admit her pride, perhaps not even allowing herself to feel entitlement for what she had accomplished. “Out of these contacts with human beings during the war,” she wrote later, “I became a more tolerant person, far less sure of my own beliefs and methods of action, but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives. I had gained a certain assurance as to my ability to run things, and the knowledge that there is joy in accomplishing a good job. I knew more about the human heart, which had been somewhat veiled in mystery up to now.”
Her childhood memories of loneliness and the cruelty of indifference would always be with her. But they were slowly beginning to recede, drifting further back in her consciousness. All of those except the ones involving her father. To him she would have admitted her pride in having come so far. To her he would have expressed his confidence that she would do so.
And, in its own way, the conversation probably did take place.
WHEN THE WAR ENDED, FRANKLIN left the navy and the family moved back to New York. He joined a law firm, became vice president of a surety bonding house, headed the local Navy Club and the Greater New York Boy Scout Council, and served as an overseer for his college—Harvard, of course.
He was, in other words, as busy and distant from his wife and children as he had been in Washington. Eleanor took it as a sign. No longer dismayed by his absence, she resolved to continue on her own path, to make a life of her own. And so she began to gather even more stones for her wall.
The first few toppled quickly. With the world at peace, she could see no obvious direction for herself. “If I had to go out and earn my own living,” she said, “I doubt if I’d even make a very good cleaning woman. I have no talents, no experience, no training, for anything.” Not long after assessing herself so pessimistically, she tried, as she had done once before, teaching. The pessimism remained. “I can’t say I am set up by the exams my children did,” she wrote to her husband, whose mind was on his future in politics, not his wife’s seeming lack of a future. “I only flunked one, but the others were none too good.” Of course she blamed herself for her students’ poor showing, not the students themselves.
Still, she did not give up, and in 1920 finally found a place for herself in the world of politics—a small one, to be sure, but a toehold nonetheless. In This Is My Story, she writes:
In New York I had begun to do a fairly regular job for the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee, and was finding work very satisfactory and acquiring pride in doing a semiprofessional job. We started a small mimeographed paper with which Mr. Howe [Louis Howe, one of Franklin’s top advisers and unyielding supporters] gave me considerable help. . . . I learned a great deal about advertising, circulation and make-up. . . . I learned how to make a dummy for the printer, and . . . I became quite proficient in planning, pasting and so on.
It sounds as if Eleanor learned more about the trade of printing rather than that of politics, which was more and more becoming her goal. But, as she surely realized, a long wall begins with the placement of but a few stones.
And then came 1921, and the world suddenly spun off its axis.
THE YEAR BEFORE, FRANKLIN DELANO Roosevelt had been the Democratic Party’s brightest young star. He had lost his bid for the vice presidency of the United States, but the defeat was rightly blamed on the man at the head of the ticket, Senator James M. Cox from Ohio, who had been thumped in the election by Warren G. Harding. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was viewed as having acquitted himself well in the campaign. Presidentially, some even said. Privately, he allowed himself to agree.
The following summer, a few months after Harding and Calvin Coolidge began to occupy the nation’s top two offices, Roosevelt was vacationing with his family on Campobello Island, off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada. With the future seeming to hold such promise for him, he was exuberant. One day, despite a strange and lingering ache in his legs, “Franklin and the children splashed and whooped into the water, and swam to the other side, then they hurried up and over a low ridge, ran across several yards of sandy beach, and hurled themselves into the frigid Bay of Fundy.” He thought the exercise would help, that the cold water would stimulate him, soothe him—but his legs still ached. He did not feel “the glow I’d expected.”
Nor would he ever feel it again. He became increasingly fatigued, and that night started to shiver. Despite the summer temperatures, Eleanor piled all the blankets in the house on him. The next morning, getting out of bed after a largely sleepless night, “his left leg buckled beneath him.” His back was now hurting as much as his legs and his temperature had soared to 102. He climbed back into bed, afraid to venture even a few steps. And even more afraid of the future. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had contracted polio.
Perhaps because it was such a blow to her, perhaps because she was by nature a private woman, and perhaps because the whole world would learn of it in time, Eleanor would write little of this momentous event in the future. But the disease upended her life as much as it did that of her husband. Louis Howe, one of Franklin’s most trusted advisers, not to mention greatest admirers, was nonetheless quick to accept the new reality and the most Machiavellian in his assessment of its political ramifications. There were a number of Democrats who had looked askance at Roosevelt because of his upper-class background, perhaps secretly envying him. Howe believed that those same people might now be persuaded to view the man differently, to sympathize with him. Howe reasoned, then, that the sympathy would cancel out the envy and make FDR an even more powerful presence in Democratic circles. If, that is, he could somehow remain a viable political figure. It would not be easy. There had never been a handicapped man in the White House, which was already Howe’s vision as well as Franklin’s.
How could Americans be made to believe Roosevelt was up to the job when mere locomotion could seem a job in itself? What kind of image would such a man project of the country he led? The questions seemed so large as to defy answers. That was where not only Howe came in, but Eleanor.
And so, for months—for years, actually, but especially in those first months, when she was always at his side—she worked tirelessly in his behalf. ER brought friends and political associates to his bedroom to keep him informed and entertained. She clipped newspaper items for him, marked editorial he would either enjoy or abhor. She insisted, during the days of dread and despair, when he struggled without success to move his limbs or even his toes, that he continue to take a vital interest in the political world. In concert with Louis Howe, she kept up a running commentary on the current political scene—on who among FDR’s associates was feuding with whom on any given day, what deals were being made with and without his approval, for or against his interests.
Eleanor amazed herself that she, she of all people, could instruct her husband in politics, both the gossip and substance of it, instruct him so well that no one would know, from talking to him, that he had been felled by a vicious disease. But that is exactly what she did. And, as a result of her unceasing effort, her constant questioning of Howe and other government insiders, and the application of her own growing intellectual acuity, she kept her husband so informed that his voice could not be ignored. She had moved well beyond the nuances of the printing press now.
“‘Mrs. Roosevelt’s activity with the Democratic women,’ the New York Herald Tribune wrote in 1927, ‘has caused a revival in Tammany circles of the talk the Governor [Al] Smith favors Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . as Democratic candidate for Senator.’” Instead, Smith would be the party’s presidential candidate, losing to Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Roosevelt, with his nominating speech for Smith at the convention, would spring back into presidential consideration by taking Smith’s old position as governor of New York. It was, for its time, a remarkable accomplishment.
WHAT IT MEANT WAS EVEN more work for Eleanor. But she welcomed it. Determined to prepare herself, she enrolled in business school to learn shorthand and typing, while at the same time signing up with the League of Women Voters. The latter would prove to be the most formative of all early influences for a life devoted to public service.
Once again, Eleanor amazed herself. Her interest in politics might have been ignited by her husband’s, but only she could fuel an ongoing commitment. And fuel it she did. She soon became a member of the league’s board of directors, and took an active role in fund-raising for the group’s initiatives. A constitutional amendment had given women the right to vote in 1920, but the league had so many more items on its agenda:
[N]ational health insurance, unemployment insurance, state and federally funded old-age pensions . . . an end to child labor, maximum-hour and minimum-wage legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infant Protection Act, pure-milk-and-food legislation, federal aid to education, civil-service reform, full citizenship for women “whether or not married to U.S. nationals,” the participation of women at every level of national life, the promotion of international peace and membership in the League of Nations.
It is impossible to imagine a more ambitious list of goals. To one degree or another, Eleanor involved herself in all of them, and reported back to members of the league on how their programs were progressing through the legislative process. It was a series of time-consuming, often complicated tasks, and often disappointing in their outcomes. No matter. Eleanor Roosevelt, once shy, was exhilarated.
And although there is no evidence to suggest that she spent much time now thinking about her mother, it is intriguing to contemplate Anna’s decision to teach her daughter etiquette. She had done so because she believed Eleanor could aspire to nothing more than good table manners. As it turned out, there was an entire world of more important matters to which Eleanor could aspire, and in which she would play increasingly important roles. It was a world that involved her attendance at a number of dinners to raise both money and awareness, as well as to plot strategies. Eleanor attended many of them, demonstrating that she knew not just what utensils to use, but what arguments to make for her evolving positions.
ALTHOUGH RAISED A REPUBLICAN, TO the extent that she was raised in a political culture at all, she was now a Democrat—and not just because of Franklin. “I believe that the best interests of the country are in the hands of the Democratic Party,” she said, without going into further detail, “because I believe they are the most progressive.” As for Republicans, “well, they are more conservative, you know, and we can’t be too conservative and accomplish things.”
And her desire to accomplish things was beginning to match that of her husband, whose increasing political ascendancy might have surprised even Louis Howe’s ambitions for him. Having crossed the country on Smith’s behalf in 1928, despite having to drag his legs beneath him, proved to be evidence of strength and courage, not a handicap. And as governor of New York, his patrician bearing now made him appear more dignified than elitist.
Eleanor’s involvement in her husband’s campaign for Albany was little short of superhuman. She stepped up her duties with the New York Democratic State Committee and the League of Women Voters, and began to turn out even more pieces for a monthly New York publication called the Women’s Democratic News, to which she had already been contributing her time. “She wrote the editorials, solicited contributions from prominent Democrats . . . and kept in touch with a network of correspondents in every county.” [Italics added.]
One of the editorials composed by this woman, who only a few years earlier could not explain the difference between state and federal governments, was called “Our Foreign Policy—What Is It?” She bemoaned the fact that “we do nothing constructive to build up good feeling, and we drift into a very difficult situation. . . . Can it be that we, ‘the big brother of all nations on this side of the Atlantic’ are playing the part of the bully?” About the other side of the Atlantic, Eleanor believed US policy was dismissive, writing that, since “we do not wish to be entangled in European difficulties, our government’s only concern is to collect what money is due us.”
Other than the editorials, Eleanor did not write for the Women’s Democratic News herself, but everything that appeared on its pages reflected her emerging views, and at this time affairs overseas remained her most abiding concern.
The Republican Administration has no foreign policy; it has drifted without plan. This great nation cannot afford to play a minor role in world politics. It must have a sound and positive foreign policy, not a negative one. We declare for a constructive foreign policy based on these principles:
(a) Outlawry of war and an abhorrence of militarism, conquest and imperialism.
(b) Freedom from entangling political alliances with foreign nations. . . .
(d) Non-interference with the elections or other internal political affairs of other foreign nations. . . .
(k) We condemn the Republican Administration for lack of statesmanship and efficiency in negotiating the 1921 treaty for the limitation of armaments . . .
With statements like these, Eleanor seemed to be rehearsing for the part she would play in just a few years, when the prize her husband sought was not the governor’s mansion, but the White House. It was a place she would occupy as forcefully as her husband.
OF COURSE, ELEANOR’S CONTACTS AND labors—the speeches she gave, the articles she wrote, the contacts she made, the funds she raised, the campaign literature she helped to disseminate—were hardly the sole reason that her husband won election as president of the United States in 1932. But that it was helpful, and that the groundwork she had laid in preceding years was an important part of Franklin’s victory cannot be denied. She had opened doors through which he was able to make his way with ease when the time came, helping him to amass 22,821,513 popular votes, compared to 15,761,532 votes for Hoover, the Depression-riddled incumbent. The future, once so promising for Franklin Roosevelt, and then apparently denied him, had been realized after all.
It was a miracle in American politics.
And Eleanor, still at some level the lonely, fearful little girl who agreed with her mother and other adults close to her that she was so unattractive as to be ugly, this little girl was about to become the First Lady of the United States. Although, as she had stated to Lorena Hickok, she would do so against her will. “If I wanted to be selfish,” she insisted, “I could wish Franklin had not been elected.” She went on to say that “I never wanted it, even though some people have said that my ambition for myself drove him on. They’ve even said that I had some such idea in the back of my mind when I married him. I never wanted to be a President’s wife, and I don’t want it now.” Hickok listened to her attentively, but there was something in her expression that Eleanor could read instantly. “You don’t quite believe me, do you?”
One recalls Eleanor’s childhood essay, “Ambition.” At the same time one is certain that the desire she expressed to succeed did not extend nearly this far.