Eleanor and Franklin (43 page)

Eleanor tried to lead the children in games and sports. She went fishing with them—“James and Anna and I fished off the float yesterday morning and got about 11 flounders in about an hour and a half.” She taught them croquet and found it “a good exercise for her temper” to take their disregard of the rules calmly. She accompanied Anna and James to their dancing class at Lady Spring-Rice's. She took James on a tour of Annapolis and could “hardly drag him past the football practice field.” All the children had an assortment of dogs and rabbits—“We had a great tragedy yesterday, one of the bunnies died. . . . The chicks were very sad but they buried it with great ceremony and are going to put a mound of stones above him today and that seems to be a great consolation.” When she played with her children she tried to forget herself, to enter into the spirit of the occasion and to be like a child herself, but she was not easy-going in such matters. The moralist in her was always in command, standing between herself and her children, whose irrepressible spirits cried out for acceptance,
not judgment. “She felt a tremendous sense of duty to us,” Anna later said. “It was part of that duty to read to us and to hear our prayers before we went to bed, but she did not understand or satisfy the need of a child for primary closeness to a parent.” “I was certainly not an ideal mother,” Eleanor wrote later. “It did not come naturally to me to understand little children or to enjoy them. Playing with children was difficult for me because play had not been an important part of my own childhood.”
¹⁰

Even without Sara, Eleanor's overly active conscience would have been both a burden and a blessing to her children, but Sara made escape from the demands of that conscience more difficult. Sara spoiled the children, but she was also very conventional and she imposed her essentially Victorian standards of good behavior on the children by “a procession of ‘proper' English ‘nannies,'” wrote James, that she “foisted on our household.”
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Their really intimate lives, said Anna, “were run by nurses and governesses.”
¹²
One of these nurses, whom James called “Old Battleaxe,” tyrannized the children, cuffing them about, locking them in closets, subjecting them to humiliations, all in the name of discipline. Eleanor discovered that she was also “a secret drinker,” and that was her end. “From the time I got rid of that person,” she said many years later, reminiscing with her children, “and took over the selection of the type of nurses I wanted, I began to have more confidence in my ability to handle the children.”

There was a severe polio epidemic in 1916, which frightened Franklin and Eleanor, and Franklin was glad his family was at Campobello. “The infantile paralysis in N.Y. and vicinity is appalling,” he wrote back after leaving them on the island. “
Please
kill all the flies I left. I think it really important.” Eleanor tried to do as he wished: “The flies are fairly well exterminated,” she reported.

Franklin spent little time at Campobello that summer, and Eleanor was restless and when Franklin intimated he might have to cut short his holiday at Campobello, she proposed to bring the family down earlier: she and the children could “easily go down from here by train alone.” But Franklin did not like that idea. “No one is thinking of moving children by rail,” he told her. And he wanted his family to stay there until he could get the
Dolphin
to bring them back directly to Washington rather than have them go to Hyde Park as they usually did in September, but that would not be until mid-September. Eleanor did not share Franklin's anxieties about having the children stay at Hyde Park.

I think the chicks will be safest at Hyde Park and even Mama does not seem to worry. They are exposed
possibly
anywhere and all we can do is to keep them as well as we can and I think the long season in Washington would be worse for them than the risks at Hyde Park.

But having made clear how she felt, she would not press the point: “
of course
if you decide it best to go to Washington or to stay later here I will do as you think best.”

She yielded to him even though she found it “annoying to have to stay here just the one year I really want to get back!” The
Dolphin
finally picked them up at Eastport at the beginning of October. It was commanded by William D. Leahy, who recalled later that the forty-two-hour journey to New York City was considerably enlivened by the children, who took over the ship. They went to Hyde Park after all, Franklin finally agreeing with Eleanor “that H.P. is really no more risk than a long autumn in Washington.”

It was Eleanor's “complete unselfishness,” William Phillips wrote, that kept the household on an even keel, although Sara's “jealousy made life difficult in many ways” for her.

Caroline was always impressed by Eleanor's willingness to efface herself so that there would be no trouble between mother and son. It was her thoughtfulness of other people rather than of herself which made it possible to preserve a calm and tranquil attitude in such domestic difficulties.

No wonder we all admired her.
¹³

But was her attitude so admirable? She did not think so in later years. Neither did her children.

19.
THE APPROACH OF WAR

A
CCORDING TO
B
ILL
P
HILLIPS, WHO KNEW HIM AS WELL AS
anyone in World War I Washington, Franklin did not seem fully mature. “He was likable and attractive, but not a heavyweight, brilliant but not particularly steady in his views,” Phillips later wrote. “He could charm anybody but lacked greatness.”
¹
What was more, he was inclined to cockiness in his relation with his superiors, especially Daniels; if audacity did not more often lapse into presumption, he probably had Eleanor to thank for it.

She tried to discipline his brashness, because although she appreciated her husband's abilities and loyally supported his ambitions, she also knew that he could be egocentric and impulsive and give the impression that no one could refuse him anything. She took pleasure in passing on any praise of him that came her way, but usually coupled it with a chastening qualification. Harry Hooker “talked of you last night in a wonderful way and so did Maude and David the other day”—that was the garland; then came the bramble: “It is a great responsibility to feel such trust in one's character and brains and I'm glad it doesn't lie on my shoulders. I'd be bowed down!” Adulation bothered Eleanor. It intoxicated her husband.

His exuberant self-esteem usually amused her, but occasionally she dressed him down sharply. She read in the papers that Franklin had launched his campaign for senator with a statement “congratulating” his old political ally William Church Osborn on his resignation as New York Democratic state chairman by using such snide phrases as “had Mr. Osborn been in the thick of every political contest” and “had Mr. Osborn's political experience been deeper. . . . ” “Isn't it just a bit patronizing?” Eleanor rebuked her husband. “If I were ‘he' I would rise up and smite you for an impertinent youth.”

Bill Phillips recorded an exchange between Franklin and Eleanor that he thought characterized Eleanor's steadying influence on her husband in those years. It took place in a hotel suite in San Francisco
which the Phillipses shared with the Roosevelts in March, 1915, when they accompanied Vice President Marshall to the opening of the Panama Pacific Exposition. One morning while the four of them were breakfasting together, Eleanor asked Franklin whether he had received a letter from a certain person. “‘Yes,' said F.D.R. and drank his coffee. ‘Have you answered it, Dear?' she asked. ‘No,' said he and swallowed some more coffee. ‘Don't you think you should answer it?' ‘Yes,' was the reply. ‘Don't you think you should answer it now?' ‘Yes.'” Phillips added, “He answered it then and there. I gathered that the letter might never have received a reply without the watchful eye of his wife.”
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When Josephus Daniels had cleared Roosevelt's appointment as assistant secretary with Elihu Root, then senator from New York, Root had cautioned him that “whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front,” and it was not long after his confirmation that Franklin was confiding to Eleanor how much better he could run the department than his chief. He and the secretary had slaved all day

on all the things he
should
have decided before and as I expected
most
of them were turned over to me! The trouble is that the Secretary has expressed half-baked opinions on these matters and I don't agree. I know that he would decide right if he'd only give the time to learn. However, he has given me
carte blanche
and says he will abide by my decision.

Eleanor thought this showed Mr. Daniels to be a man of magnanimity and strength. “I think it is quite big of him to be willing to let you decide,” she cautioned Franklin. “Most people want to put their opinions through at all costs whether they are half-baked or not! It shows great confidence in you.”
³

At an early meeting of his cabinet President Wilson had referred to the Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's secretary of the Navy, which had prompted Eleanor to read it and to point up its moral to her husband. She was struck by the “pettiness” of the men around Lincoln. “It was very wonderful we ever came through the Civil War. There seems to have been poor management at the War Department and so much jealousy and littleness among Cabinet members.”

It was easy to underestimate Daniels, and Franklin did. The secretary's porkpie hat, string tie, and country-editor pleasantries gave him a look of rustic innocence, but underneath there was stubborn character and coherent conviction, and his feeling for power and how
to hold onto it was just as strong as his ambitious young aide's. If Franklin raged impatiently against Josephus in the privacy of the N Street dining room, Bill Phillips felt equally strongly about his chief, William Jennings Bryan, who was Daniels' closest political associate. Both secretaries were pacifists, and neither was willing to look at his department through the eyes of its career men—the professional diplomats at State, the admirals at Navy.

To Daniels, navalist meant imperialist, while Franklin was an early disciple of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great theoretician of sea power in relation to world politics. The admirals considered Franklin a sympathetic soul and cultivated him enthusiastically. The outbreak of war seventeen months after he joined the Navy Department brought Franklin's impatience with the secretary to a boiling point. If Eleanor had misgivings about her husband's hawkish views, she suppressed them and sided with him in the controversies he had with Daniels over the size and pace at which the Navy should be built and the aggressiveness with which the United States should assert its maritime rights against Germany.

The coming of the war shook the foundations of the world in which Franklin and Eleanor had grown up. To Caroline Phillips it seemed “like the end of the world.”
⁴
Like Caroline, Eleanor watched gloomily as diplomatic efforts to damp down the blaze that had been kindled at Sarajevo yielded to inflammatory ultimatums and intimidating mobilizations. “It does seem unthinkable that such a struggle should take place,” she wrote her husband from Campobello, where she was awaiting the birth of the second Franklin Jr., and comforting her French and English household help, whose relatives were being called to the colors. “I wonder if war can be averted,” she wrote on August 2. War in fact had already begun, and a long letter Franklin wrote her that same day described the situation at the department. He had

found everything asleep and apparently utterly oblivious to the fact that the most terrible drama in history was about to be enacted. . . . These dear good people like W.J.B. and J.D. have as much conception of what a general European war means as Elliott has of higher mathematics. They really believe that because we are neutral we can go about our business as usual. . . .

“I am not surprised at what you say about J.D. or W.J.B. for one could expect little else,” she wrote back. “To understand the present
gigantic conflict one must have at least a glimmering of understanding of foreign nations and their histories. I hope you will succeed in getting the Navy together and up to the mark for I think we're going to need its moral support.”

Franklin thought a long drawn-out struggle could be averted: “I hope England will join in and with France and Russia force peace
at Berlin
!” Eleanor concurred, and wrote, “The only possible
quick
solution to me seems the banding together of France, Russia and England and then only if England can gain the decisive victory at sea.” Three days later a harried Franklin wrote again: “I am running the real work, although Josephus is here! He is bewildered by it all, very sweet but very sad!” Eleanor's reply was sympathetic: “I can see you managing everything while J.D. wrings his hands in horror. There must be so much detail to attend to all the time and so many problems which must, of course, be yours and not J.D.'s.”
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