Eleanor and Franklin (46 page)

There was also the remarkable letter dated October 14, 1917, that Sara sent Franklin and Eleanor. In 1959 Eleanor told her son James that it had followed an argument about the future of Hyde Park, with Sara on one side and herself and Franklin on the other. Sara wanted the estate to stay in the family, the way Algonac and Fairhaven were kept by the Delanos and her English friends held on to their ancestral acres. Franklin dissented vigorously, Eleanor mildly, but dissent she did. He refused to make any such promise, Franklin declared and then,
according to Eleanor's later recollection, forcefully voiced his own social and political credo, an exposition that caused Sara to write the following letter a few hours after her children had left for Washington.

Dearest Franklin

& Dearest Eleanor,

. . . I think of you almost in New York and I am sorry to feel that Franklin
is
tired and that my views are not his, but perhaps dear Franklin you may on second thoughts or
third
thoughts see that I am not so far wrong. The foolish old saying “noblesse oblige” is good and “honneur oblige” possibly expresses it better for most of us. One can be democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor we owe a great example, and my constant feeling is that through neglect and laziness I am not doing my part toward those around me. After I got home, I sat in the library for nearly an hour reading and as I put down my book and left the delightful room and the two fine portraits, I thought: after all, would it not be better just to spend all one has at once in this time of suffering and need, and not to think of the future; for with the
trend
to “shirtsleeves,” and the ideas of what men should do in always being all things to all men and striving to give up the old-fashioned traditions of family life, simple home pleasures and refinements, and the traditions some of us love best, of what use is it to
keep up
things, to hold on to dignity and all I stood up for this evening. Do not say that I
misunderstand
, I understand perfectly, but I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself. Well, I hope that while I live I may keep my “old fashioned” theories and that
at least
in my own family I may continue to feel that
home
is the best and happiest place and that
my
son and daughter and their children will live in peace and happiness and keep from the tarnish which seems to affect so many. Mrs. Newbold's theory that children are “always just like their parents,” is pretty true, as
example
is what really counts.

When I
talk
I find I usually arouse opposition, which seems odd, but is perhaps my own fault, and tends to lower my opinion of myself, which is doubtless salutary. I doubt if you will have time dear Franklin to read this, and if you do, it may not please you. My love to our fine little James, and to you two dear ones.

Devotedly

Mama

At the time this was written Eleanor was deeply involved in war work, an experience that was propelling her toward a more radical assertion of independence. “Today I go canteening” had become Eleanor's password. Washington was a major railroad junction, with as many as ten troop trains a day sitting on the sidings in the Washington yards. The Red Cross set up canteens manned by volunteers to provide the waiting soldiers with soup, coffee, and sandwiches. When a train came in the Red Cross ladies were there, lugging baskets of sandwiches and buckets of steaming coffee that had been prepared in the tin shacks where the volunteers worked. His mother was “up at five this morning to go to the canteen,” James complained to his grandmother; “do not you think that Mother should not go so early?”

Edith Benham Helm described Eleanor at the canteen:

We also had a small room where we sold, at cost, cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, picture postcards and candy bars. Here Mrs. Roosevelt shone. We had to make change at quick order when the men were lined up buying the supplies and we were supposed to turn over our finances in perfect order to the incoming shift. In all my experience there were only two women whose financial affairs were in perfect condition. One was Miss Mary Patten and the other, Mrs. Roosevelt.
¹¹

Eleanor, who once had not known how to keep her own household books, worked out the canteen's accounting system, and Mrs. Helm considered her “the dynamo” behind the canteen service.

Before the troop trains pulled out, the canteen workers picked up the postcards they had furnished for the men, censored them, and saw that they were posted. But handling the mail on top of her other canteen duties was too much even for her, as it ran to about five hundred pieces of mail a day, “This post office game isn't going to work,” she informed her husband. “It needs two or three people a day.” She persuaded the Red Cross to set up a special unit under Mrs. Vanderbilt.

When she was not at the canteen she gave out wool to knitters and collected the finished products. Then she was placed in charge of the knitting at the Navy Department, which meant supervising more than forty units whose captains reported to her. At the same time she learned that if Mrs. Daniels, who was ill, was not well enough to preside at a Navy Department rally the next day to organize for war work, she would have to preside. She did it—“I hated it but it
was not as terrifying as I expected.” Then she was asked to report to an assemblage of Red Cross workers on how the Red Cross knitting operation was organized. She was “petrified” when it was her turn to speak in the huge DAR auditorium, but she managed to get through her report, she wrote Sara, “and I hope I was heard.”

She did everything that was asked of her. “I pour tea this p.m. at the Navy Yard for a Navy Relief party”; “I am collecting for the Red Cross at the Shoreham Hotel Lobby from 9–12 tomorrow a.m. and then canteen from 1–6.” “Sometimes,” she wrote Franklin, “I'd rather like to have a little while with you when neither of us had anything we ought to do, but I suppose that isn't to be hoped for till after the war!” Once when Franklin came to pick her up at the canteen they “were so busy he just turned in and worked too for an hour and enjoyed it! We had about 3,700 men during the day.” The only concession to family life she made was always to be at home at tea time with the children and to keep them with her until they went to bed.

The winter and spring of 1918 were an anxious time. “I don't think there is any doubt that the Germans will put everything they can muster into a spring offensive,” Eleanor wrote Sara.
¹²

Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador, was acutely conscious of the dangers of the interval before the weight of the fresh American divisions began to be felt on the western front. Wilson did not like the ambassador, whom he called “that highly excitable invalid,” and in January, 1918, Spring-Rice was recalled. “I feel very badly about the Spring-Rices,” Eleanor wrote. “I shall be very sorry to have them go, it will really make a big difference here.” The Spring-Rice children, Betty and Anthony, brought Anna pictures of themselves as parting gifts, and the ambassador gave Franklin and Eleanor a pen-and-ink drawing of the Washington monument which he had done himself; there was a poem on the back addressed to “sons of honour, richly fathered, scions of a sturdy brood. . . . Tell again your father's story” and ending with a warning: “Woe to them who lounge and linger when the foe is at the gate.” Within a month Sir Cecil was dead. Eleanor framed the poem and drawing and hung them on the wall.

The sorrow and tragedy of the war was always with her. Franklin reported that a transport had been sunk and they feared a thousand men were lost. “All through dinner I felt like Nero.” When the word came that Theodore's youngest son, an aviator, had been killed, “Think if it were our John,” Eleanor wrote Franklin; “he would still seem a baby to us.” She grieved for Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted, “but
I suppose we must all expect to bear what France and England have borne so long.”

Sir Cecil was not the only friend who passed from the world's stage that spring. At the end of February they dined with Henry Adams for the last time; on March 27 his “nieces” found him dead.

Franklin and I went to Mr. Adams funeral at two and I felt very sad for he was a very interesting man and the house had so many associations and now all is ended. There are not too many houses or [interiors] of that kind in this country and the end of things is sad. Alice invited us to lunch next Sunday almost before the Service was over and it offended me and made me angry, it seemed to be lacking in feeling, but Franklin said we'd go.

It was not always easy for Eleanor to follow Franklin into new experiences and to entertain new people whom he considered important to his career. When he brought Felix Frankfurter home, she sensed his brilliance but was bothered by what she considered his Jewish mannerisms—“an interesting little man but very jew,” she commented.
¹³
In her anti-Semitism she belonged to the world of Henry Adams and Spring-Rice, whose hostility to materialism and the new power of money was mingled with dislike of Jews. She had to go to a party given by Admiral Harris for Bernard M. Baruch, “which I'd rather be hung than seen at,” she complained to her mother-in-law; “mostly Jews.”
¹⁴
Two days later she wrote, “The Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels and . . . sables mentioned again.” Brandeis was exempted from this dislike, as were the young Henry Morgenthaus who had recently settled at Fishkill in lower Dutchess County. Even Sara approved of the Morgenthaus. “Young Morgenthau and his wife called this p.m.,” she wrote Eleanor from Hyde Park, “and while they were here Mrs. F.W.V. [Vanderbilt] came bringing 5 people, and we had a pleasant tea. Young Morgenthau was easy and yet modest and serious and intelligent. The wife is very Jewish but appeared very well.”

In May, 1918, the Red Cross proposed that Eleanor go to England to organize a Red Cross canteen there. “I really won't go abroad,” she assured Sara, “but it is a fearful temptation because I feel I have the strength and probably the capacity for some kind of work and one can't help wanting to do the real thing instead of playing at it over here.”
¹⁵
Why did she refuse? She was not sufficiently independent
to manage such an undertaking, she later wrote, adding that in her heart of hearts she felt her primary obligation was to stay with her children. She did not want to admit this, even to herself, but that is what she felt.
¹⁶
And she knew the family—Grandma, Cousin Susie, Sara—would not approve.

Some were even critical when Franklin went abroad on naval business in July. “I think the family are funny not to be interested in F's trip,” she wrote Sara,

for if it served no other purpose, it is really the only way of knowing the “real thing,” the problems over there and the men whom this war is daily changing. It is too silly to think you can sit here at a desk and realize them and adequately deal with them, even men of the highest imagination can't and they say so. I hear it all the time.

The next day Franklin was received at Buckingham Palace. To bolster Sara, Eleanor sent her newspaper clippings about the event. Franklin “is surely making a hit,” she observed. “The enclosed is from the
Washington Post
. I often think that you must wish his father could be here to be proud with you of Franklin.”

She was working hard and tirelessly. Sara wanted her to come up to Hyde Park in May, but when Eleanor told the Navy Department workers that she was thinking of leaving, “they groaned. I really have no right to go unless it is a necessity.” One day when there was a rush at the canteen she cut her finger to the bone while using the bread-slicing machine. She applied a bandage and kept on working, and although she saw a doctor later, she carried a scar for the remainder of her life.

She saw Alice at a party. Alice, who amused guests by turning back somersaults, expressed an interest in working at the canteen. “I'm taking Alice down to the canteen but I doubt if she does much and they told me they were almost afraid to take her on!” There were no trains the afternoon Alice came down and she decided, said Eleanor, that “she did not like scrubbing and ironing.”

Sara's sister, who lived in Washington, reported that “Eleanor is the ‘willing horse' and they call upon her at all hours, all the time.” Washington was sticky and torrid that July, especially in the tin shacks in which they worked, but Eleanor made light of the discomfort: “I've come to the conclusion that you only feel heat when idle.”

They had eight trains on July 17, a “very hectic day” made more
so because the president's daughter Margaret came in to work with Eleanor's shift. Eleanor had

to introduce her to officers, etc. Mrs. Wilson now has a uniform and comes and works fairly regularly and yesterday late the President came down and walked down the tracks and all around and they tell me seemed much interested. I rather wish I'd been on duty there instead of the station.

A week later she had second thoughts about the president's wife.

We've become the fashionable sight and yesterday Mrs. Woodrow Wilson came to look on and brought Lady Reading [the wife of the British Ambassador] and Mrs. [Newton D.] Baker and Miss Margaret Wilson worked with us! It rather tries my soul but it is good for my bump of deference.

While Franklin was in Europe she finally had the family chauffeur, Huckins, teach her to drive. She was able to drive their Stutz to the canteen with Huckins on the running board, but just when she learned to handle it, the axle broke. She then used their older Buick, but its brakes “don't hold very well so I've just escaped street cars occasionally. However, Huckins says I'm doing finely.” When General Headlam, head of a British military mission, came up from Washington to visit West Point and stayed at Hyde Park, Eleanor drove him about in the Ford, “once nearly dumping him but otherwise all serene.” By the end of August she was driving her children and assorted relatives up to Tivoli and back. She was also making a new effort to learn to swim, and thought she might at last succeed.