Eleanor and Franklin (134 page)

She found it impossible to work with them, she wrote a friend. “I asked each one individually whether they had any connection with the Communists, and received what seemed to me their honest denial. I still believe in many of their objectives, but where there is deceit and lack of trust, I can not cooperate.”
²⁷

Aubrey Williams had feared that Eleanor's experience with the Youth Congress might break her heart, but she was resilient and had a remarkable capacity to learn from disappointment and defeat. Her experience with Communist tactics in the youth movement, she later wrote, helped her to understand and cope with the Communist bloc in the UN.

Nor was she embittered toward the leaders of the Youth Congress, who were her friends, because of their failure to be candid and honest with her. Although she refused to work with them politically, she let them know that if they got into trouble personally she was always willing to help them as individuals.

She answered deception with understanding and injury with forgiveness, and at times put mercy above justice and legality.

 

*
The author has dealt more fully with these events, including his disenchantment with the Communists, in
Eleanor Roosevelt
, A Friend's Memoir
(New York, 1964). As he said in that book, nothing reported here about the position of the Youth Congress and Student Union leaders in 1939–40 should be construed as an indication of their viewpoint today. Most of the author's Youth Congress associates subsequently joined the ranks of the disenchanted, either energetically fighting the Communists or lapsing into political inactivity.

†
A term used by Jonathan Daniels in a letter to the author, Jan. 9, 1970, when the latter wrote inquiring if Daniels knew whether a certain matter had been discussed between the two.

50.
THE THIRD TERM

“I
F IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR
M
RS.
R
OOSEVELT
,”
WROTE
J
AMES
Farley of the 1940 Democratic convention which nominated Roosevelt for a third term, “it was doubtful that Wallace's nomination for Vice President would have carried.” And if the convention had turned down Wallace, Roosevelt presumably would have issued the statement he had prepared declining the presidential nomination. That it was Eleanor who reconciled the mutinous delegates to her husband's choice of Wallace as a running mate represented high irony, for she was not a Wallace enthusiast and had not wanted Franklin to run because she did not see that Congress would be any readier to give him in a third term what it had refused him in the second, and now he would be carrying responsibility for decisions affecting not only the welfare but the lives of millions.
¹

But the irony of Eleanor making it possible for her husband to accept a nomination that she viewed with the utmost apprehension was not the only one of that convention: She performed this service after Franklin had kept her in the dark up to the very last moment about his decision to accept the nomination. This, of course, was the way he had behaved in 1930 when he had decided to make his first bid for the presidential nomination, but unlike 1930, in 1940 there was no Louis Howe to tell her what Franklin was up to and to argue away her fears. Harry Hopkins, who had moved into the White House on May 10 at Roosevelt's invitation, was in no position to risk the president's displeasure by sharing confidences with her.

Personally, she told her friends, she did not want to spend another four years in the White House. Sometimes she was humorous about what was required of the wife of a public man—especially when he was campaigning for office:

Always be on time. Never try to make any personal engagements. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Never be disturbed by
anything. Always do what you're told to do as quickly as possible. Remember to lean back in a parade, so that people can see your husband. Don't get too fat to ride three on a seat. Get out of the way as quickly as you're not needed.

And when Bess Furman Armstrong went on from these rules to ask her to sum up thirty years as the wife of an officeholder, she said feelingly, “It's hell,” a reply that staggered Bess. “Strong language comes startlingly from the lips of great ladies,” she commented, “but surely there should be a special dispensation for her of whom it is said—‘She always built him up, and she never let him down.'”
²

In October, 1939, Eleanor took some time out of a busy day to allow a palmist to study her hands. It was not the first or the last time that she had her hands read, but this analysis of her character interested her particularly and she put it in the desk drawer where she kept the special items that heartened and inspired her, such as Spring-Rice's sonnet on the Saint-Gaudens memorial to Henry Adams's wife and some lines that Amelia Earhart had written on courage. The finger which showed leadership, the palmist wrote, “is much bolder in your left hand, which shows inherent potentialities, than it is in your right hand, which shows what actually happens. This leads me to believe that many times you've had to cramp your style.”
³

What was “man's chief end,” asked an old friend of Franklin's who doubted that the president should run for a third term. Each one had to answer that question for himself, Eleanor replied, but perhaps it was “the full development of whatever we have in us.” For herself that was impossible as long as Franklin was in the White House, or so she thought. Too many of the things she did as First Lady she had to do because of his position. In 1939, Tommy informed Emma Bugbee, “Mrs. Roosevelt had 4,729 for meals, 323 house guests, 9,211 tea guests, and she received 14,056, which means a total of 28,319. By ‘received' I mean groups who are just received and not given food—D.A.R. etc.”
⁴

By dint of a remarkable vitality, of never consciously sitting down to relax, of being up for breakfast at 8:30
A.M.
no matter how late she went to bed, Eleanor managed to combine these social duties with an amazingly varied and useful life. In April, 1940, United Feature Syndicate extended her contract to write “My Day” for another five years, which pleased her greatly, since it was renewed at a time when it appeared highly doubtful that Roosevelt would run again. She had
delivered forty-five paid lectures in 1939 and was under contract for almost as many in 1940. In the spring she dashed off a little book on the religious basis of democracy—it was, she felt, the Golden Rule, “the fundamental thing which we must all have is the spiritual force which the life of Christ exemplifies.” Magazines and publishers were prepared to buy whatever she wrote. In April she began a new radio series for WNBC. Her agents should find her a more suitable sponsor, advised Esther Lape, objecting to Sweetheart Soap; but Eleanor needed the money for her many charities and had long decided the benefits outweighed the criticism. She was commenting with “a noticeable increase of frankness and vigor” on politics and foreign affairs, a forthrightness that some interpreted as a sign that her husband did not contemplate another campaign.
⁵

As the public speculated on whether or not Roosevelt would run for a third term, there were many proposals of jobs for Eleanor. Some wanted her to run for president or vice president. “If you will agree to let her serve your third term,” William Allen White wrote the president, “I shall be for you against all comers. Every time she does anything she reminds me of T.R.” A group of Bryn Mawr alumnae wanted her as president of their college, and the Denver chapter of the American Newspaper Guild proposed that she succeed the late Heywood Broun as president of the guild.
⁶

There would be no lack of work for her after Franklin left the White House, of that she was sure, and it would be work of her own. At last she might be able to take on a job and see it through to a conclusion. But this was her personal preference, and because she felt it so strongly she kept silent about it, especially after the war began, believing that her husband should make his decision on the basis of the national interest.

* * *

A
T THE END
of an uncomfortable, cold, wet inauguration day in 1937, Eleanor wrote that her only consolation “was that there would never be for us another Inauguration, that this was really the last time here.” What did she mean by that, the reporters immediately wanted to know. Did she exclude a third term? Third terms had “never been the custom of the country,” she replied.
⁷

Even before the 1937 inauguration she had begun to press her husband to groom a successor. She knew the temptation of power both for him and for the many officials in Washington who held it through
him. As she went about the country, the politicians and officeholders thought they pleased her by their advocacy of a third term. When she spoke in July, 1937, to the Roosevelt Home Club, made up of the president's Hyde Park neighbors, she thought it time to oppose a third term publicly.

But this was her husband's decision to make, she felt, and when she realized, either because he told her or on the basis of her own political insight, that to close the door on a 1940 race would weaken his influence with Congress, she lapsed into public silence and became as adept as he at avoiding the traps the reporters set for her on the issue. Would her husband consider a third term in order to advance the New Deal, she was asked in Philadelphia. “You'll have to ask him that question.” “But hasn't he told you?” “I haven't even asked him,” she replied, cutting off that line of questions. What were her plans after 1940, she was asked in mid-1939. She had no idea where she would be after 1940, she replied. “If you have been married as long as I have to a man who has been in public office for a long time, you will learn never to think ahead and you will make up your mind to accept what comes along.”
⁸

In private she was less amenable about accepting whatever came along. When the Ickeses visited the Boettigers in Seattle the talk inevitably turned to a third term. Anna knew as little as they about her father's intentions, but she did know how her mother felt. Someone had suggested the possibility that the Roosevelt family might still be residing in the White House after 1940, Anna said. “Well,
I
don't intend to,” her mother shot back. What was the use of being president, she wrote an old friend who asked about the possibility of Eleanor running for the presidency, “even if you wanted to be, if you cannot do the thing you ought to do?” Mrs. Meloney, whom Eleanor helped to secure administration speakers for the
Herald Tribune
Forum, always wanted the president. “FDR she wants you for a 3rd term and I thought this most unwise. You know I do
not
believe in it.”
⁹

Although at this time (1938) Roosevelt agreed with his wife and was encouraging the candidacy of Harry Hopkins by bringing Hopkins into the cabinet as secretary of commerce, he was not averse to getting some fun out of terrifying the conservatives with the possibility that he might be the candidate himself.

Helen Robinson, a Republican committeewoman from Herkimer and daughter of Franklin's half brother Rosy, dined at the White House a few days after the Munich crisis. “Franklin held forth as usual, and seemed in very good form,” Helen reported in her diary.

The talk ran into a discussion of “third term” possibilities in the early history of this country, all pointing most definitely in my mind, from all that FDR said on the subject, to the fact that he has it very much in his mind to run again. This terrifies me beyond words. But I could only look pleasant and eat my dinner and keep a poker face.
¹⁰

Helen may have misunderstood Roosevelt's historical references. His concern at the time was the selection of a successor who would carry on the New Deal. Andrew Jackson, he was telling Democratic leaders, including Garner and Farley, should have picked someone more in sympathy with his policies than Martin Van Buren if he wanted his policies continued. Franklin's foray into history was meant to be a warning to the party's conservatives.
¹¹
Eleanor asked Franklin how she should reply to letters from friendly Democratic politicians who wanted to do the president's bidding, and his advice was reflected in her reply: “The thing for you to do is to work for delegates to the Convention who will only choose a liberal, New Deal candidate. Then, whoever is nominated, the ideas and policies will go on.”
¹²

But who was that candidate? It was evident by 1939 that the Hopkins' candidacy was stillborn. Perhaps if he had not been ill he might have been able to change that, but much of the time during the crucial pre-convention months he was either sick in bed or convalescing. There was no other New Dealer in sight to pick up the banner. The liberal cause looked desperate. Not only had the 1938 purge of conservative Democrats failed, but the Republicans had scored heavy gains. Congress was in a fractious mood, ready to vote down anything Roosevelt wanted just because he wanted it. In early 1939 a gloomy Ickes spoke of “the last-stand fight that the liberals are making under President Roosevelt's leadership,” and Ickes and other New Dealers concluded that the president was the only liberal who could be nominated and elected.
¹³