AFTER THE ELECTION, ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN WENT together to Albany to choose a congenial house. At 248 State Street they found a sunny, spacious, three-story place, with wide rooms, and so many of them that Eleanor decided to use only two floors. It was the first home they had to which Sara Delano Roosevelt came only as a guest, and she came infrequently. ER unpacked, established order and comfort, did her own marketing, and managed her own family entirely by herself. Neither Cousin Susie nor her mother-in-law was nearby to question her purchases or influence her routine.
ER’s new freedom was as profound a change as FDR’s decision to plunge into politics, and both involved her in an immediate choice: She could emerge from her depression and fulfill her lifelong wish to be really useful to someone she loved, or remain withdrawn and morose and be a terrible liability to her husband’s new career. Her personal transformation into a woman of public affairs had begun that summer, as she contemplated and encouraged FDR’s campaign from the isolation of Campobello. Geographically distant, she was enthusiastically involved in this new phase of her husband’s life.
She experimented on every level, even before the move to Albany. Although she had breast-fed her other children, she now hired a wet nurse for Elliott, in the belief that baby Franklin might have lived had she been able to nurse him longer. ER’s relationship with the wet nurse, a woman from Central Europe “who spoke no language known to us,” reintroduced her to the ravages of poverty. ER felt “a great responsibility” toward the woman’s own baby, visited the New York City tenement where she was boarded, and suffered “agonies” when she contemplated removing the infant’s mother to Albany. Ultimately she could not do it: The mother’s suffering was unbearable. ER left the wet nurse behind, opened a bank account for her baby, and “kept in touch” for many years, until she disappeared. ER’s ability to identify with that temporarily abandoned baby, and her mother—who “always seemed to me a defenseless person”—informed her perspective as she assumed her new role as a New York State politician’s wife: “My conscience was very active in these days.” She became immediately absorbed by the issues around her, as she recognized how deeply something within her “craved to be an individual. What kind of individual was still in the lap of the gods!”
For the new house in Albany, ER hired an entirely new staff. She dismissed the French nurse the children hated and replaced her with an English governess for Anna and James, and three efficient servants. Within twenty-four hours of her arrival on 1 January 1911, ER had the house settled; she also orchestrated and catered an Inaugural Day “open house” for as many of FDR’s supporters, colleagues, friends, and constituents as cared to attend. For three hours on 2 January, the house was filled with revelers. And then it was cleaned. And then she unpacked, hung her photographs, and arranged all her ornaments. “I think it was my early training which made me painfully tidy. I want everything around me in its place. Dirt or disorder makes me positively uncomfortable!” After all that, she went to a dance at the home of the new Democratic governor, John Alden Dix.
The very next morning, she did all her marketing and began to meet her neighbors. Like Washington, Albany was a small, almost intimate political town. Everybody knew everybody; cautious friendliness was a way of life. Business was done everywhere—in the market, on the street, at meals, and over coffee. It was the kind of life ER enjoyed, the kind of politics that came naturally to her. Within weeks, she had won the heart of virtually every political notable in town. She met their wives, talked with them easily, directly, and at length. She wrote Isabella: “We had 250 constituents to lunch on inauguration day …[and] since then I have met so many people that I feel quite bewildered and I pay calls in every spare moment!” She had an amazing capacity to listen, to understand, and to care deeply. Even Tammanyites who considered Franklin a disloyal and stuffy prig quickly came to admire and like Eleanor. “I was to be very, very busy that year.”
Eleanor Roosevelt would never be a society matron again. However proper and correct she might continue to appear when with Cousin Susie or her mother-in-law, or as other circumstances occasionally demanded, ER was now a political wife. She was involved in every step of the political game. People asked her why she did so much, and she said she did it all for Franklin. Nobody ever asked her if she enjoyed it. The fact is, from her first day in Albany she loved every minute of it.
Her renewed enthusiasm reinvigorated their marriage. From the beginping, ER had encouraged FDR’s political ambitions. Unlike his mother, she understood that he would not have been satisfied with his father’s country-squire routine; she knew that he deplored his days as a junior partner in a law firm, however prestigious. His entrance into politics saved them both from the kind of ordinary upper-class life, vapid and fatuous, that ER associated with society—at least that part of society where she had never felt welcome, comfortable, or understood.
Franklin’s entrance into politics changed the family dynamics. Sara Delano Roosevelt’s previously unchallenged power over her son and daughter-in-law began to be eclipsed. Their new concerns, those related to local and progressive politics, neither required nor interested her, and she rarely visited. Now that Sara was no longer so centrally involved in their lives, Eleanor began to take over those maternal duties that had been arrogated by Sara. Every afternoon was devoted to her children, ending with a children’s tea before dinner, when she generally read to them, and she played with them after dinner.
ER patterned her entrance into the political arena on the example of her Aunt Bye. She met with people in their homes, and lobbied for causes. She encouraged debate and never avoided disagreement. Listening to all those conversations between her aunt and Uncle Theodore, ER had absorbed information, and style. FDR appreciated ER’s opinions. He listened to her ideas, and trusted her insights about his colleagues. He appreciated from the first that she was one of his biggest political assets. She built bridges, even over the most treacherous terrain; she made what might have seemed impossible alliances.
Although ER dreaded speaking in public, she wanted FDR to become an appealing orator. She criticized his first efforts, which were slow and hesitant. He needed to sound both more assured and less arrogant. He needed to be more precise with facts, and more concerned about the real needs and wants of his constituents. FDR listened to his profoundly political wife as he listened to few others. It was she who went around and found out what his colleagues, and their wives, really thought. She went out among his constituents and talked with them, she attended Senate and Assembly debates regularly, and she reported on the subtleties and tricks lodged in every issue.
Within his first year as state senator, FDR became the leader of the anti-Tammany “Insurgents.” The controversial Insurgency generated much attention, but it was a crusade that lacked substance, and it led nowhere. The Tammanyites included Boss Murphy’s hand-picked rising stars (who were, incidentally, real reformers) Robert Wagner and Alfred E. Smith. The Insurgent group included anti-Tammany upstaters, some of whom genuinely supported reform, but some of whom were opportunists all too vulnerable to the charge of being anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. They were generally considered anti-big-city elitists.
The first real battle involved the Democratic nominee to the U.S. Senate. Until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment guaranteed the voters direct election of senators, senators were selected by state legislatures. Tammany supported “Blue-eyed-Billy” Sheehan, a symbol of city corruption. The Insurgents supported Brooklyn’s mayor, Edward Shepard, a friend of J. P. Morgan and William C. Whitney. William Randolph Hearst, and his enemies Ralph Pulitzer and Oswald Garrison Villard (owner of The Nation), allied with Shepard against Tammany. It was an old battle, within a narrow frame: power, not real political change, was the issue. FDR agreed with the contours of the struggle: “Most of us want” the right kind of man—“conservative in regard to business interests and yet a man whose position can never be questioned by the radical element of society….” Within days, FDR was called the “Galahad of the Insurgency.”
There were thirty Insurgents, and they met every evening for drinks and dessert at the Roosevelts’. They shouted and smoked so much the children complained, the nurses were horrified, and ER emptied out the room above the Insurgents’ quarters, moving the children and their nurses to the third floor so that they might breathe, and sleep, again.
For months FDR heaped ridicule upon Tammany bosses. He made headlines regularly. Before he had even cast his first vote in the State Senate, FDR had become one of New York’s most famous politicians. When Tammany finally offered an acceptable compromise candidate for the U.S. Senate, Judge James O’Gorman, and FDR, one of the last holdouts against the appointment, finally agreed to it, he was denounced with a flamboyance equal to his own. Democratic newspapers attacked him as a traitor, “fop,” and fool. But he could never be ignored again. His crusade against “these political manchus who now control the party” was nationally acclaimed. And he had learned some hard lessons: In politics, “self-righteousness is not enough”; party regularity and loyalty were needed for survival. In 1911, ten Insurgents lost their Assembly seats; within two years, most of the others were finished. FDR parried and compromised; he learned to work and play well with Tammany—and in 1912 was re-elected.
During the winter of 1911, Eleanor sat with the Insurgents every evening: listening, observing. She entertained them, prepared their drinks and snacks, and learned “that the first requisite of a politician’s wife is always to be able to manage anything.” She also learned “how to get on with people of varying backgrounds.” She entertained Tammanyites and anti-Tammanyites with equal consideration. She enjoyed the company of many of these hard-drinking, hard-smoking politicians, and forged some unlikely friendships. Brooklyn Assemblyman Ed Terry brought his poetry, and they read to each other for hours.
Her understanding of the personal aspect of politics seemed almost instinctive. Although she abhorred the “grimmer side of machine politics,” her interest in people as people crossed partisan lines. Tammanyites, who hated her husband, admired her; and she judged them on the basis of their political views and their oratory, quite apart from their Tammany affiliations. The list of the politicians who immediately interested her when she heard them speak was a curious mix: Bob Wagner, Al Smith, “Big Tim” Sullivan (the “Boss of the Bowery”), and his cousin Christy Sullivan. She was particularly charmed by State Senator Tom Grady: He “could make a better speech than many people who are considered great orators today,” she said years later. She was charmed by him, even though she acknowledged that he was rarely sober. And the feeling was entirely mutual: Tom Grady wrote ER on Saint Patrick’s Day: “Be with the insurgents, and if needs be with your husband every day in the year but this—to-day be ‘wid us.’”
ER was largely responsible for smoothing FDR’s path to better relations with the Tammany reformers; men like Al Smith and Robert Wagner quickly appreciated the sincerity of her reform instincts. Although ER had withdrawn from doing settlement-house work when she married, she continued to support the emerging institutions and networks that advocated change and remained active in their behalf. Among FDR’s few surviving letters to her is a curious one that indicates Franklin’s attitude toward Eleanor’s earnest fund-raising activities for the benefit of poor Jewish children.
Dear Lady—
Your beauteous bounty requires more than a merely verbal display of homage and praise, hence this.
The honored draft for fifty plunks has gone the way of all …and you can pat your little back about fifty times and with eyes raised Heavenward exclaim in accents of deep content “Yea! I have saved the lives of a score of blessed little ones of the Chosen Race!” Truly, “this is no joking matter.”
All the same thanks again…
Your slave
FDR
After 1910, issues of reform, education, the eradication of poverty, and better working conditions involved her directly once again. But her first concern was always for the people she met and worked with. Once established in Albany, she felt “responsible” for the wives of newly elected officials; she was also concerned about the lonely hours newspaper wives endured. “I religiously called on them,” and she invited them to her home. “I was not a snob, largely because I never really thought about the question of why you asked people to your house or claimed them as friends. Anyone who came was grist to my mill …and I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education.”
With FDR’s entrance into politics, ER began her public career. Although FDR remained aloof from most of the immediate reform issues on the agenda in 1911, ER was galvanized by the debates as she watched them from the gallery. But her memories of these years contain an element of self-deprecation that is so pervasive, one must pause to wonder at its origins. She did what she did, she wrote over and over again, out of her duty to be interested in her husband’s interests, whatever they were—be it his favorite dessert or a piece of legislation. The fact is that Eleanor Roosevelt was personally ambitious in an era that denied ambition and self-fulfillment to women. In these presuffrage years, she did not yet see a political role for herself beyond helpmate and hostess.
But ER quickly became aware of potential allies in the cause of reform, and gravitated to them. Ironically, the very people ER named as of particular interest to her found FDR noxious in 1911. Big Tim Sullivan, Christy Sullivan, Thomas Grady, Al Smith, and Robert Wagner were associated with Tammany and were also ardent reformers, who knew the tall and pompous young man with the pince-nez to be disinterested in their issues. Al Smith distinguished between upstate Democrats like FDR, whose interests were limited to good government and civil-service reform, and his own allies among big-city reformers, who championed social legislation to “benefit the common people.” Smith considered FDR a “damn fool” who had an unfortunate habit of throwing his head back, which made him seem perpetually to look down his nose at people. Tim Sullivan dismissed him as “an awful arrogant fellow.”
In 1911, Franklin was not the reformer he claimed to be. After the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 25 March 1911, in which 147 women died, trapped at their sewing machines or forced to jump to their deaths because the Manhattan sweatshop doors were locked, a New York State Factory Commission was created to avoid such disasters in the future and begin to regulate the dreadful labor conditions under which women toiled. The commission was chaired by Robert Wagner, with Al Smith as vice-chair and Frances Perkins as chief investigator.
A Mount Holyoke-educated social reformer, Perkins had been secretary of the Consumers’ League, and its main Albany lobbyist, since 1910. She was also executive secretary of the Committee on Safety for New York City, specifically charged with the inspection of all dwellings and public buildings for the purpose of enforcing safety and fire-prevention needs. FDR had nothing to do with the efforts of the commission, and his name appeared nowhere in debate or support. Years later, however, FDR took public credit for the success of the fifty-four-hour week for women and children passed in 1912, and for all of the thirty-two labor reform acts that were passed because of the Wagner-Smith-Perkins investigative team. Though he may have voted for some of the bills, he was not instrumental in their passage. Perkins was in fact offended by his offhand disregard of her efforts: “I remember it clearly because I took it hard that a young man who had so much spirit did not do so well” in this area, which she considered “a test” of “progressive convictions.” FDR explained, when pressed, that he did not represent a labor constituency, and he was very, very busy.
FDR’s constituents were rural farmers and his work as chair of the Agriculture Committee, and on the Forest, Fish and Game Committee, helped broaden his view of progressive causes. He became a leading conservationist, particularly identified with reforestation, and over time his commitment to conservation led him to a more liberal progressivism. Eventually he believed that just as government intervention was needed to protect and restore America’s natural resources, so was government intervention needed to protect American citizens. Laissez-faire capitalism, unconfined and unregulated, endangered the future—the survival of resources, and the health of citizens. But as state senator his reform efforts concentrated on restraining the lumber interests, and he vigorously scorned their careless plunder. He invited Gifford Pinchot, the United States’ chief forester, to lecture to New York’s legislators. Pinchot showed slides of a Chinese valley, green and verdant in 1500; a parched, desertified wasteland in 1900: the result of careless lumbering. FDR observed: “It is an extraordinary thing to me that people who are financially interested should not be able to see more than about six inches in front of their noses.”
Of those first years in Albany, ER remembered “little of what my husband did in the legislature, except that he came out for woman suffrage.” He always claimed that he supported votes for women after Inez Milholland visited him, sat upon his desk, and persuaded him that it was the only chivalric position for a decent man to hold. But ER wanted it clear that the tall glamorous suffragist known as “the Amazon” had not dazzled him with her Vassar wiles and attorney’s arguments: “As a matter of fact he came out for it two months before that memorable visit.”
In 1911, FDR’s suffrage conversion left ER “somewhat shocked, as I had never given the question serious thought.” She “took it for granted that men were superior creatures and still knew more about politics than women.” After his announcement, “I realized that if my husband were a suffragist I probably must be, too.” Still, she could not “claim to have been a feminist in those early days.” She was not yet a member of the Women’s Trade Union League, did not actively support the Woman Suffrage Party or subscribe to The Woman Voter. She was not, on the other hand, “an anti-suffragette [a word she never used], and vigorously so,” as has been repeated so often.
ER never had anything to do with the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, nor did she support Ida Tarbell’s crusade against the vote. She never uttered a public word in opposition to the vote. And after 1911 she counted herself a suffragist. Still, her belated and vague support for suffrage set her apart from the ardent activities of so many of her future allies and friends, Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams particularly.
In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned throughout the country for Theodore Roosevelt’s new Progressive Party’s “Bull Moose” platform, on which he was trying to make his political comeback after his handpicked successor to the White House, William Howard Taft, backed away from reform politics. The Bull Moose movement emphasized votes for women, an eight-hour workday, and protective labor legislation. Although she “found it very difficult to swallow” TR’s militarist ambitions, and his promise to build two new battleships a year, Jane Addams seconded TR’s nomination with a speech so rhetorically useful to him that he had it reprinted and widely distributed:
A great party has pledged itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men. Committed to these human undertakings, it is inevitable that such a party should appeal to women….
I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because he is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal and who has caught the significance of the modern movement.
TR’s 1912 third-party platform, Jane Addams noted, “contained all the things I have been fighting for for more than a decade.” Drafted by a committee of social reformers almost all of whom later became ER’s closest allies, the platform included regulations to guarantee decent housing; a law to end child labor; protection for women workers; a national system of accident, old-age, and unemployment insurance; and “equal suffrage.” The Progressive Party platform affirmed: “No people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on the account of sex.” TR assured Jane Addams personally that he was “without qualification or equivocation” for votes for women.
Ironically, ER refrained from any public support of her uncle’s efforts, for her husband had become New York’s leading supporter of Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, having decided that he was a kindred spirit, and a winner. Wilson, trained as an historian, formerly president of Princeton University, seemed to some an arrogant, rigid, Southern Presbyterian aristocrat, to others the very model of moral rectitude in the service of progressive ideals. He had rid New Jersey of bossism, and was beholden to no one. FDR considered him the perfect candidate. Putting family loyalties aside, and considering all the angles, FDR believed that the Bull Moose movement was doomed to failure, and worked vigorously for Wilson. ER joined her husband in his defection with only quiet misgivings. She wrote her closest friends, Isabella and Bob Ferguson, who worked vigorously for her Uncle Ted, “F is of course well satisfied with Mr. Wilson’s nomination as he has been working hard for him….” But, she added, “I wish Franklin could be fighting now for Uncle Ted, for I feel he is in the Party of the Future.”
The year 1912 was a watershed time in ER’s private as well as political life. Her brother, Hall, brilliant and beloved at Groton and Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, and senior prefect, was twenty. From the moment of her mother’s death, when her father had visited her at 37th Street and made all those promises to her about their future together, she had felt responsible for her younger brothers. After Ellie died, there was only Hall. “I loved him deeply and longed to mean a great deal in his life.” Popular and charming, Hall had grown up to be much like their father—he drank too hard and partied too frequently—and since he was always surrounded by adoring young women, there were countless jokes about Hall’s harems. But he also worked hard to develop his considerable talents, and earned an advanced engineering degree on his graduation from Harvard. Like ER, he was in a great hurry to have a home of his own, and he decided to get married before he was twenty-one. His wedding to the beautiful Margaret Richardson of Boston closed a chapter in ER’s life: She felt as if “my own son and not my brother was being married.” But she remained Hall’s mother-surrogate, and rushed to Cambridge during the first year of his marriage to be with Margaret when their baby died at the age of only a few weeks, while Hall was in the hospital with appendicitis.
During the Albany years, ER and FDR were separated frequently, but they wrote daily and devotedly. In April 1912, FDR and Hall went on a vacation together aboard the United Fruit Company’s SS Carillo to Panama, to visit the new canal. FDR had wanted his wife’s company, but she was faced with the task of closing their Albany house, and agreed to meet them after their cruise. Whereas in the first years of her marriage this separation might have been the occasion for hurt feelings, it seemed now to have deepened their affection. They planned the itinerary together, and agreed to meet in New Orleans for the train to New Mexico to visit the Fergusons, who had moved there after Bob was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
On 14 April, as FDR sailed out beyond the Bahamas, he wrote:
I do wish you were here—it is hard enough to be away from the chicks, but with you away from me I feel too very much alone and lost. I hereby solemnly declare that I refuse to go away the next time without you…. I can’t tell you how I long to see you again…. Give a great deal of love & kisses to sister & Brud and Snookums—I am just so crazy to see my four precious ones again that I am almost tempted to turn around in Kingston and sail straight back. Take good care of yourself dearest, and please don’t overdo it in moving.
Toward the end of June, ER and FDR went to Baltimore for their first national political convention. It was hot and disagreeable—noisy, crowded, smoky, raucous, and stifling in many ways. FDR had failed even to be nominated as an alternate delegate—he had no particular role and could not even get on the floor—but he worked the crowd with enthusiasm, and made several new friends who would later be important to him, notably Cordell Hull, member of Congress from Tennessee, and North Carolina newspaper editor Josephus Daniels. Daniels was immediately attracted to the tall, dashing thirty-year-old independent upstart: It was “love at first sight,” Daniels recalled.
With nothing to do, virtually nobody to talk to, bored and uncomfortable, ER decided to leave the heat and histrionics of her first convention and go to Campobello. On 2 July, after the forty-sixth ballot, FDR telegraphed her in ecstasy: “Wilson nominated this afternoon. All my plans vague. Splendid triumph.” The next day, he went to New Jersey to plan New York State campaign strategy, and establish his credentials as New York’s most ardent Wilsonian booster. Then Franklin rejoined Eleanor at Campobello, and together they boarded a ship for an early return to New York City, where they could work on FDR’s re-election campaign for the State Senate.
Neither ER nor FDR thought very much about the fact that they had brushed their teeth with the water in their stateroom pitcher during their voyage home. They had planned to spend one night in the city, but FDR felt feverish and took to his bed. ER went out that night with Ronald Ferguson, who was visiting from Scotland. The next day, FDR felt worse, and though ER also felt “peculiar,” she went on about her business, ran up and down the stairs with FDR’s medicines, and generally took care of things, nobody quite knowing what was wrong. Eleanor continued to ignore her own discomfort until, after ten days of uncertainty, Sara Delano Roosevelt arrived, and upon kissing her good night, exclaimed, “You must have a fever!,” and insisted she take her temperature. It was over 102 degrees. Finally, tests were taken. They both had typhoid fever, remained in bed for weeks, and faced a lengthy recovery.
Fearing his campaign was doomed, FDR appealed in desperation to Louis McHenry Howe, a brilliant strategist and propagandist, who was a political reporter and all-purpose manipulator for Thomas Mott Osborne’s upstate Democratic leadership. Witty and artistic, Howe possessed an odd and eclectic assortment of talents. But he was a physical wreck. He claimed to be dying for decades; and for decades he hacked and wheezed with asthma, heart problems, and emphysema. Scrawny, unkempt, and ugly (he boasted that he was one of the four ugliest men in the state), he weighed less than a hundred pounds, and had pitted and scarred his face in a horrible childhood accident. He “looked like a troll out of a Catskill cave.” He rarely changed his suit, hardly changed his socks, and regularly covered himself with the ashes from his endless and malodorous Sweet Caporal cigarettes.
Howe had sought to attach himself to FDR immediately after Wilson’s nomination, and sent him a letter of congratulations with an invitation to visit him at Marblehead, Massachusetts, for “some swimming” and plotting. Howe addressed his July 1912 letter: “Beloved and Revered Future President.” ER was not immediately charmed by Howe. She appreciated his innovative advertisements and admired his wit; but his smelly cigarettes fouled the air around her sick husband. “I was very disapproving” and “simply made a nuisance of myself,” she said. It would be years before ER and Howe became friends.
Howe did, however, engineer her husband’s re-election, and Wilson won the presidency as well. On 4 March 1913, Eleanor and Franklin attended Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. FDR arrived three days early to negotiate his future, and was not disappointed. Wilson’s future son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo, designated Secretary of the Treasury, offered him alternatives: Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, or collector of the Port of New York—a lucrative plum. But Josephus Daniels, named Navy Secretary, offered him what he longed for: Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Following in TR’s wake, he answered in TR’s language: “I’d like it bully well. It would please me better than anything in the world.”
Daniels checked FDR out with his New York colleagues. Senator O’Gorman reservedly considered him “acceptable.” TR’s former Secretary of State, now New York’s Republican Senator Elihu Root, replied: “You know the Roosevelts, don’t you? Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he rides in front.” Undisturbed, Daniels wrote in his journal: “His distinguished cousin TR went from that place to the Presidency. May history repeat itself.”
During the inauguration ER remained a silent and bemused witness to the largest and most elaborate suffrage parade in United States history. She wrote Isabella: “The suffrage parade was too funny and nice fat ladies with bare legs and feet posed in tableaux on the Treasury steps!”* The President was “dignified,” ER observed, but “has none of Uncle Ted’s magnetism and really exudes little enthusiasm in a crowd. So if he becomes popular it will be entirely due to things done.” She was even less impressed by Mrs. Wilson, who “seemed a nice intelligent woman but not overburdened with charm.”
After the inauguration, ER “dashed” to Oldgate, Aunt Bye’s home in Farmington, Connecticut, for information and advice on how to be an effective partner in official Washington. An eager political wife and the mother of three children who ranged in age from six to two, ER was determined to excel in her new position, but she could not yet imagine being both a political wife and a political activist.