The Lives Of Franklin And Eleanor Roosevelt

I have spent the past month submerged in the lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and it’s a very interesting place to be. I first read the new book by Hazel Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, and I liked that so much I moved on to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning book, No Ordinary Time, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.

The two books cover much of the same ground but their focus is different. Rowley’s book, which is much more approachable at 300 pages than Goodwin’s more involved 700-plus page treatise, deals directly with the Roosevelt marriage. Goodwin’s book offers a captivating day-by-day account of the Roosevelt’s life during the war. Both books are well written and engaging.

The Roosevelt marriage started conventionally enough, bowing to the aristocratic standard of the day: a more or less chaste courtship, honeymoon in Europe, and then a ten-year settling in period which produced six children, five of whom survived infancy. Franklin, an only child raised by an adoring, overbearing mother, was a charming and rambunctious fellow, full of joie de vivre. Eleanor, on the other hand, orphan child of an alcoholic father and distant, beautiful mother, mostly raised by a harsh and old-fashioned grandmother, was painfully shy.

Franklin’s burgeoning political career forced Eleanor out of her shell and into the limelight where, in the end, she flourished. As assistant secretary of the Navy during the Wilson administration, Franklin moved the family from New York to Washington, D.C. And as the wife of such a personage, Eleanor, pregnant with her sixth child, was required to make daily high profile social calls. I cannot imagine the act of will it must have taken for this awkward and uncertain young woman to pull herself together and knock on those doors.

Hazel Rowley quotes Eleanor (not especially known for her prose style) on the subject of those early years in Washington: “I learned a liberating thing. If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy.” Liberating words, indeed.

It was around this time that Franklin had is first “affair” (which may or may not have been sexual) with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor found a packet of love letters from Lucy and Franklin and was rightfully devastated. Because a divorce at that time would have ended Franklin’s (and, for that matter, Eleanor’s) political career, the couple decided to soldier on.

This set the stage for the rest of their rather bizarre married life. No longer physically intimate yet still politically linked, they went forward as man and wife, but both maintained very strong relationships outside of the marriage.

Franklin became extremely close to his secretary, Missy LeHand. When he contracted polio and needed to spend months at a time convalescing in the healing waters in Warm Springs, Georgia, it was Missy who stayed in a cottage with him and took care of him. Missy essentially became a second wife to Franklin, and it seems that Eleanor was more than happy to hand him over.

Eleanor, on the other hand, was forming close relationships with some of the more radical women of her time. Through her work with the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee she met a captivating and liberating group of women, many of them openly lesbian, a few of whom would become her friends for life. And Franklin encouraged her. He liked these women. He even went so far as to build a special house for them (Val Kill) on his family’s estate on the Hudson River to give them a bit of privacy from his disapproving mother.

By the time Franklin was elected President in 1933, the Roosevelt marriage had expanded on both sides into a large extended family. The Roosevelts invited many of their closest friends and advisors to move into the White House with them, transforming that celebrated address into something like a wonky, boho, “who’s zoomin’ who?” hotel. How they pulled this off in that fishbowl of the White House, I have no idea.

Eleanor was a hugely influential First Lady. Almost no one in the country knew that Franklin got around in a wheelchair (indeed, the King and Queen of England were shocked to discover this during a royal visit early in FDR’s first administration). The press amazingly conformed, never printing pictures of the President being wheeled or carried anywhere.

It was left to Eleanor to be Franklin’s eyes and ears. For twelve years she traveled the country with an eye to weeding out social and economic injustice. She lobbied hard for worker’s rights, civil rights and voting rights. During the war she tried desperately (vainly, alas) to get visas for European Jews trying to flee Hitler. She traveled the world visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals. From all reports, she was indefatigable, exhausting everyone around her.

Franklin, despite the saintly aura that has perpetuated through history, was more of a political genius. He inspired total devotion in his closest advisors. Many gladly gave up their lives and their families to serve the President literally 24 hours a day. He weathered the Republican barrage screaming “Socialist!” and bullied his New Deal through Congress. But he was mostly silent on Civil Rights (not politically expedient), very reluctantly integrated the armed services during the war, cozied up to Big Business at the cost of worker’s rights during the industrial build up to the war, and flatly refused to offer refuge to the European Jews (political suicide, evidently).

There is no doubt he was a great president, but he was no saint. He must have had a huge personality. He evidently charmed the socks off people, chatting them up and telling stories until they fell into his orbit. There are wonderful scenes in both books of FDR and Winston Churchill throwing back drinks and talking strategy in their bathrobes late at night in the White House, the fate of the world literally hanging in the balance.

In the end, I come away from this month’s sortie with the Roosevelts with a greater admiration for Eleanor than for FDR. She, it seems, was the heart and soul of the operation. She put in decades of legwork, taking time to stop and talk to people, to really listen to them and report back what they were saying. She had her finger on the pulse of American life. She wrote a newspaper column every day (every day!), often late at night after a scheduled day packed with travel and meetings. She injected a shot of humanity into the intensely political scene at he White House. She, in a sense, kept everyone honest.

She Had Her Finger On The Pulse Of American Life. She Injected A Shot Of Humanity Into The Intensely Political Scene At He White House.