Eleanor (3 page)

A photographer caught Eleanor’s picture at the WNBC microphone. It showed a face drawn and strained. The black dress and hat, the straying wisps of hair, all contributed to an effect of gauntness. It was the face of a strong woman, but of a woman acquainted with grief.
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Old Josephus Daniels came into the
New York Times
building, to see its publisher. The librarian, Freeda Franklin, was asked to bring him a copy of FDR’s undelivered speech about the United Nations. “How is she?” Miss Franklin asked Daniels as she handed over the clipping. Daniels immediately understood to whom she was referring. “Bearing up very well,” he replied, and added, “she’s just as great a woman as he was a man.”
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Under the president’s will Eleanor and her children had a right to live in the Big House during their lifetimes. All agreed, however, with the letter Franklin had left for his wife, urging that it be turned over as soon as possible to the government. He hated to think of them—it amused him to tease them even after death—having to take refuge in the attic or cellar, which they might very well have to do in order to have some privacy.
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Disentangling and dividing Franklin’s possessions would be “the hard thing,” she predicted. She had in mind the difficulty of distributing those possessions in a way satisfactory to all of her five children. But going through her husband’s belongings occasioned a renewed stab of anguish about Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. There was, she found, a little water color of Franklin that had been painted by Mme. Elizabeth Shumatov, an artist whom Mrs. Rutherfurd had brought along on her visits to Franklin in Warm Springs. With what feelings, one wonders, did Eleanor ask Margaret Suckley to send it on to Mrs. Rutherfurd in Aiken. She had long wanted to tell her, Mrs. Rutherfurd replied gratefully, that she had seen Franklin and how helpful he had been during her husband’s illness and how kind he had been to her husband’s boys. She could not get Mrs. Roosevelt’s grief out of her mind, Mrs. Roosevelt whom she had always considered to be the most fortunate of women.
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After Franklin’s executors consulted the government, Eleanor’s son James, who was one of the executors, told her that the Big House had to be emptied of everything they wanted by June 15—linen, china, silver, glassware, jewelry, furs, furniture, books, ship models, paintings—and either shipped to the children or stored. She had the first choice, but decided to take very little. She had never “worked harder physically,” she confessed after a few weeks of sorting, unpacking, and packing.

I took the china and glass as my share and divided it equally among you with the exception of a very small amount which I kept and certain pieces of Dresden china which belonged to me anyway and I have just added a few pieces which Granny had. That you will all have to fight over when I die, but I assure you that there will be much less trouble when I shuffle off this mortal coil, than going through the Big House. I got myself into the eaves today to discover the old swinging cradle Pa used and which I used for all of you and I sent those over to the Library on loan. I also sent his baby clothes in a box and some of his early essays as I did not think they would be considered valuable documents.
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A decision that shaped the rest of her life was to use all of her own money to buy Val-Kill and about 825 acres of farm lands, woods, and buildings from the president’s estate. She did it on the basis of Elliott’s willingness to settle there: “I will be very glad to have you here to supervise some of the men on the place,” she wrote him in California. “They are getting me down and I can not keep track of what everybody ought to be doing and I know I am not doing the right thing.” Elliott and his wife (the former Faye Emerson) arrived the second week in June. They were to live in the president’s top cottage.
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“We are getting the top cottage in order & I take my hat off to Faye. She works!”
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She wanted to rent from the executors, but they told her they had to sell the land and buildings, except for her cottage at Val-Kill, to the highest bidder. “I have to buy the Hyde Park land because when it came to selling it all at once I could not bear not to try to hold it in the hope that some child would want to run it some day. I’m sure that is what Franklin wanted.” Franklin Jr. vehemently urged the executors to hold on to the land. He thought his mother unwise to use her own capital to buy the place. He “told me capital was a sacred trust,” she wrote this author, “& I said ‘Nonsense!’ Work was sacred not money & you can imagine the rest!"
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“How I hate ‘things’!” she wrote in midsummer. “When it is all done & the business settled I will feel as though I might be able to breathe again. Now I walk on eggs!” She vowed to reduce her own possessions while she still lived so that her heirs would not be burdened with so depressing a task.
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After the memorabilia and special bequests had been divided there were other violent quarrels among the children over an intangible but weightier inheritance—the movies and books that people clamored to do about their father, and, most important of all, the dividing up of the political legacy—which son was to have precedence in running for political office in New York and California.

Family conferences turned into angry shouting matches among
the boys that were more than she could bear. After one particularly uproarious session, all turned to her and begged her to act as arbiter. She knew her children and doubted that they would be willing to be guided by her views. In any case she did not want to make decisions for them. But she was willing to serve as a clearing house for the family, she said, adding,

I want you to agree that you will never say anything derogatory about each other or make any kind of remarks that can be so construed, and you will never allow people in your presence to say anything which will reflect on the integrity and character of the family.
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In 1940 Geoffrey T. Hellman had ended his profile of Mrs. Roosevelt in
Life
with the prediction that at the end of the Roosevelt administration the United States was going to face a new problem:

. . .what to do with an ex-First Lady. This question has not existed before because no President’s wife has ever before made a career of the First Ladyship. In any case, Mrs. Roosevelt can be counted on to solve the problem better than most ex-Presidents have solved the problem of what to do with ex-Presidents.
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On the funeral train returning to Washington from Hyde Park Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had come into her car and urged her to get her business affairs “rounded up as soon as possible so that she could speak to the world as Eleanor Roosevelt. . . .She sort of questioned whether now that she was the widow of the President anybody would want to hear her.”
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Even while she was settling the estate and working out a way of life at Hyde Park without Franklin, her mind was busy with thoughts of what she might do once she returned to public activity. There had been proposals, just before the San Francisco conference, that President Truman appoint her as a special delegate, but she had begged Congresswoman Mary Norton, who was about
to make a speech to the House to that effect, not to do so. There were two jobs that she was obligated to do and that she wanted to do, she wrote at the time: her question-and-answer page for the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and her daily column. She had always wanted the latter to be considered on its merits. “Because I was the wife of the President certain restrictions were imposed upon me. Now I am on my own and I hope to write as a newspaper-woman.”
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She was not fooled by the rise in the number of papers buying her column immediately after the president’s death. “Of course, it is curiosity as to how I handle this period and will soon wear off.” By the end of the year, Lee Wood, editor of the
New York World-Telegram
, the New York outlet of the Scripps-Howard chain, who did not approve of Mrs. Roosevelt, relegated her column to the rear of the paper, except on the occasions that she made news, and that was to be quite often.

One line of activity she ruled out immediately—running for political office. Harold Ickes very seriously urged her to do so. He came up to Hyde Park to look over the Big House, which was to be under his jurisdiction. During the two days that he and his wife, Jane, spent with Mrs. Roosevelt they pressed her to become a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York State, and Ickes followed up the visit with a letter that forcefully embodied his views. Nothing should be left undone to defeat Governor Dewey in 1946 so as to dispose of him as a possible candidate for the presidency in 1948. A ticket on which Sen. James M. Mead ran for governor and she for senator was the strongest available to New York Democrats, he thought. “You would be unbeatable and you would help greatly to defeat Governor Dewey.”
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She had not decided what she intended to do in autumn, she replied, but running for office

is not the way in which I can be most useful. My children have labored for many years under the baffling necessity of considering their business of living as it affected their Father’s position and I want them to feel in the future that any running for public office will be done by them.

Although she wanted to work with the Democrats, she did not want to have to follow “the party line.” She intended to help “the liberals in the country and if I can write interesting columns and do an article now and then my voice would not be silent.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt was already being heard. An intimate, sympathetic correspondence had sprung up between President Truman and herself. During the week that she was still in the White House she had given him her evaluation of the men and women around FDR. “She told me,” a friend wrote in April, “that she would tell Truman what she thinks of people (like Byrnes, Hannegan, Pauley, etc.) but that she will tell him only once,—after that the responsibility will be his.”
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Her column of May 10, 1945, expressed surprise that the Russians had delayed their announcement of the end of the war almost a day after the simultaneous announcements by Truman and Churchill. Truman, upset lest she think he was not keeping U.S. engagements with Russia, promptly sat down and wrote her an eight-page letter in longhand, giving a detailed account of the surrender arrangements and adding that his difficulties with Churchill were almost as irritating as those with the suspicious Russians.
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She was touched and somewhat appalled that he should have spent so much time writing her:

Please if you write again, do have it typed because I feel guilty to take any of your time.

I am typing this because I know my husband always preferred to have things typed so he could read them more quickly and my handwriting is anything but legible.

Your experience with Mr. Churchill is not at all surprising. He is suspicious of the Russians and they know it. If you will remember, he said some pretty rough things about them years ago and they do not forget.

Of course, we will have to be patient, and any lasting peace will have to have the Three Great Powers behind it. I think, however, if you can get on a personal basis with Mr. Churchill you will find it easier. If you talk to him about books and let
him quote to you from his marvelous memory everything from Barbara Fritchie to the Nonsense Rhymes and Greek tragedy, you will find him easier to deal with on political subjects. He is a gentleman to whom the personal element means a great deal.

Mr. Churchill does not have the same kind of sense of humor the Russians have. In some ways the Russians are more like us. They enjoy a practical joke, rough housing and play and they will joke about things which Mr. Churchill considers sacred. He takes them deadly seriously and argues about them when what he ought to do is laugh. That was where Franklin usually won out because when you know when to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

You are quite right in believing that the Russians will watch with great care to see how we keep our commitments.

A rumor has reached me that the message from Mr. Stalin to you was really received in plenty of time to have changed the hour but it was held back from you. Those little things were done to my husband now and then. I tell you of this rumor simply because while you may have known about it and decided that it was wise just not to receive it in time, you told me in your letter that you did not receive it and I have known of things which just did not reach my husband in time. That is one of the things which your Military and Naval aides ought to watch very carefully. . . .

I will, of course, keep confidential anything which comes to me in any letter from you and I will never mention, and I would not use, a private letter in any public way at any time.

I would not presume to write you this letter only you did say you would like me to give you some personal impressions of these people, gathered from my husband’s contacts, before you went to meet them and as I realize that may happen soon, I thought perhaps you would like this letter now. . . .
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She had given him much information that would be helpful, he replied. Elliott had been in to see him, as she had urged, as well as Anna, and both had supplied him with information that he thought would come in handy.
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In June she went down to Washington for a couple of days. She lunched with the president. It seemed “a little strange to go to the White House as a visitor,” but Truman could not have been more gracious. There was some talk about politics. The president expressed his concern about the situation in New York, where Ed Flynn was the Democratic national committeeman; and thus encouraged to express her views, she gave voice to her misgivings about the national party picture under Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. She had sent the president a copy of a three-page letter on the subject that she had just addressed to Hannegan. That blunt missive said that the president himself was doing well from the liberals’ point of view, but in Congress, especially in the Senate, if the southern Democrats managed to kill the fair employment practices (FEPC) and the poll tax bills without record votes, large numbers of Democratic supporters would be alienated. The party no longer could rely upon city machines such as Tammany in New York and Pendergast’s in Kansas City to swing elections. Program and policy were the keys. She was concerned also about the party’s disregard of women: “There will be no woman in the Cabinet and there has been no suggestion so far of any woman or women in comparably important positions.”
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