The strain of accommodating herself to Sara’s wishes finally proved too much for Eleanor. A few weeks after she and Franklin moved into the new house on East 65th Street that Sara had bought for them, Eleanor broke down. “I did not quite know what was the matter with me,” she recalled years later, but “I sat in front of my dressing table and wept and when my bewildered young husband asked me what on earth was the matter with me, I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live. Being an eminently reasonable person, he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.”
Eleanor pulled herself together in short order, but the tension with Sara failed to subside. When Eleanor decided to redecorate her half of the town house, Sara told her not to bother, for “she could make it attractive in half an hour,” and, besides, everyone liked her house better than her daughter-in-law’s. Again and again, Eleanor was stung by Sara’s belittling jibes about her clothes, posture, and appearance. “If you’d just run a comb through your hair, dear,” Sara would tell Eleanor in front of dinner guests, “you’d look so much nicer.”
“What happened would never have happened,” Anna mused years later, “if Mother had the self-assurance to stand up to Granny. There would have been separate houses, but Mother didn’t know how to stand up at that period.” Over the years, a blistering anger formed in Eleanor’s heart—directed mainly toward herself, for having submitted for so long to everyone else’s wishes but her own. Though she had long since ceased to be dependent on her mother-in-law, it was not until Sara’s death that Eleanor fully comprehended how far she had journeyed from the early days of her marriage. “I looked at my mother-in-law’s face . . . ,” she told Joe Lash, “& understood so many things I had never seen before.” Had Sara had her way, Eleanor realized, her daughter-in-law would have lived a quiet life along the Hudson, tending mainly to hearth and home. “She thought that the land was tied with the family forever.”
Having achieved a measure of peace in her own feelings about Sara, Eleanor was able to reach out to Franklin in ways she never could before. “Mother went to father and consoled him,” James recalled. “She stayed with him and was by his side at the funeral and through the difficult days immediately afterward. She showed him more affection during those days than at any other time I can recall. She was the kind you could count on in a crisis, and father knew that.”
A renewed commitment to one another is evident in the communications between husband and wife in the weeks that followed. Knowing that her husband needed her, Eleanor canceled a long-awaited trip to the West Coast so that she could stay in Washington. “Can I have MacKenzie King at Hyde Park on the 31st,” Franklin asked his wife, recognizing that, with Sara gone, Eleanor was now the mistress of the house. “Will you let me know?” Then, the following day, confronted with a long letter of sympathy from one of Sara’s friends, Franklin sent it on to Eleanor with a personal note: “Do be an angel and answer this for me.” Even Henrietta Nesbitt noticed that something was different when she approached Eleanor’s bedroom one morning and discovered, to her surprise, that the president was having breakfast with her—“a rare treat for them both,” Nesbitt remarked.
Still, Eleanor remained wary of letting herself get too close. “Pa sprang on me today that I had better take Granny’s room [which was twice the size of her own Spartan cubbyhole], but I just can’t and I told him so,” she wrote Anna. “Of course, I know I’ve got to live there more, but only when he is there and I’m afraid he hasn’t realized that and isn’t going to like it or understand it. Will you and the boys understand or does it make you resentful?”
To Eleanor’s mind, the Big House had taken on the old lady’s forbidding personality. The only way to make it her home was to redecorate it. Her first thought was to turn Sara’s snuggery into a study for herself. But, as she quickly discovered, the prospect of changing any of the rooms stirred deep anxiety in her husband. He wanted to keep the old house exactly as it was. The only change he supported in the fall of 1941 was a request Sara had made just before she died to rearrange the room in which he was born so that it looked as it had in 1882, the year of his birth. Franklin never flatly rejected Eleanor’s plans; such a confrontation would be unthinkable for him. Instead, he waited until Anna came east and then let her know that he wanted absolutely no changes in the house. In other words, Eleanor said after Anna relayed Roosevelt’s wishes to her, “Hyde Park is now to be a shrine and it will still not be a home to me.”
• • •
The same week that Sara died, Eleanor’s brother, Hall, collapsed in his home and was taken to Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. Years of chronic alcoholism had destroyed his liver, “as they told him it would,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray. When Eleanor arrived at her brother’s bedside, he begged her to grant him two wishes: to have him moved to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and to bring him a bottle of gin. The first was easy; with one telephone call, the transfer was arranged. The second was more difficult. Eleanor regarded liquor as her mortal enemy; it had killed her father and destroyed her uncles and her brother. But now that Hall was dying, she wanted to give him as much comfort as possible. Against everything she held dear, she took a bottle of gin from the house at Hyde Park and smuggled it into the hospital.
The boisterous Hall struck everyone as extraordinarily unlike his sister. His features were like hers—a large frame with dark hair and blue eyes—but his face wore the never-failing smile of irrepressible youth, whereas hers invariably wore a look of anxiety and fretfulness. With Eleanor’s father, mother, and younger brother Elliott dead, Hall was all she had left of her family, and she loved him deeply, often treating him as a son instead of a brother. When she married, she kept a room for him in her New York town house so he would always feel he had a home.
But, the more responsibility Eleanor undertook, the more self-indulgent and irresponsible Hall became. While he was a dazzling student at Harvard, with an intellect which both Franklin and Eleanor recognized as superior to their own, he was never able to commit himself to a steady line of work, moving from engineering to banking to civil service. He began drinking when he was in his twenties and never stopped. By the time he was fifty, he had divorced twice and was drinking between three-quarters and a whole gallon of expensive wine a day, in addition to gin, rum, and whiskey.
When Hall drank, he became querulous and crude. Curtis Roosevelt, Anna’s son, remembers being petrified of his great uncle. “The level of noise was so high,” Curtis recalled, “the tone of voice so abrasive, the horseplay a little out of control. I was terrified he’d pick me up, throw me in the air, and then forget to catch me.” At formal White House dinners, Elliott Roosevelt recalled, Hall “had a penchant for applying a playful squeeze to a person’s knees on the nerve just above the joint. In the middle of the first course, a shriek from Missy rose above the conversation of the fourteen other guests, and she leaped from her chair. We knew that Hall had been up to his tricks again.” From her end of the table, Eleanor said softly to her brother, “I wish you wouldn’t do those things.”
Yet there was no one who could make Eleanor laugh or smile as much as Hall. He radiated charm and seemed to have an inexhaustible talent for having a good time. “There was nothing that made Eleanor happier,” Hall’s daughter, Ellie Wotkyns, recalled, “than dancing with my father. He was such a wonderful dancer and she loved to waltz with him. When she saw happiness you could almost feel her touching it and liking the warmth of it. I believe both my aunt and my father were basically unhappy; he hid his unhappiness with a jolly demeanor, she hid hers with hard work. And in the end, she hung on to work as tightly as he hung on to drink.”
Eleanor returned to Washington immediately after Sara’s funeral so she could be with her brother. Though he was slipping in and out of consciousness and failed to recogni
ze either his live-in companion, Zena Raset, or his daughter, Ellie, he seemed to know Eleanor and her presence served to quiet him. “This watching Hall die and seeing Zena suffer is a pretty trying business,” Eleanor wearily confessed to Anna. “It is such an unattractive death, he’s mahogany color, all distended, out of his head most of the time and his speech is almost impossible to understand. He moves insistently and involuntarily so you try to hold him quiet and it is really most distressing.”
While Eleanor attended her dying brother, Franklin was readying a major speech for delivery to the nation on September 11. He had committed the United States to convoys at the Atlantic Conference, but he had not yet revealed the new policy to the American people. A submarine attack on the U.S.S. Greer gave him the incident he needed to mobilize public support behind convoys.
The events surrounding the Greer attack were not quite as the president described in his nationwide radio address. He said the German submarine had “fired first upon the American destroyer”; he claimed the Greer’s identity as an American ship was “unmistakable.” In fact, the Greer had deliberately stalked the German sub, having been alerted to its presence by a British plane. The British plane had attacked the U-boat with depth charges while the Greer continued in pursuit. The sub fired a few torpedoes, the Greer responded with a few depth charges, and the chase came to an uneventful end. There was no positive evidence, the navy told the president, that the sub knew the nationality of the ship at which it was firing.
But the fact that German torpedoes had been fired on an American ship was all Roosevelt needed to reassert the principle of freedom of the seas. “No matter what it takes, no matter what it costs,” the president warned the Axis powers, “we will keep open the line of legitimate commerce in these defensive waters . . . . Let this warning be clear. From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril . . . . When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.”
To implement this warning, the president announced the final decision of the government to convoy British supplies, and a new policy by which the navy would shoot on sight any German raiders that came into our defensive zones. “It was,” Stimson wrote, “the firmest statement and the most forward position yet taken by the President.” Churchill was exultant. The shooting war in the North Atlantic had begun.
The president’s “shoot on sight” policy won the solid support of 62 percent of the American people. “Sentiment on Capitol Hill has changed almost overnight,” Washington correspondent David Lawrence reported. The news of the attack led “many a Congressman to say that the American people will not have their ships fired on and that defense of the freedom of seas will once again command substantial support in both houses.”
Yet, for all the positive results that the president’s depiction of the Greer attack produced, an unfortunate precedent was set that would return in later years to haunt the American republic. “Roosevelt’s deviousness in a good cause,” Senator William Fulbright said after the Gulf of Tonkin incident helped propel escalation in Vietnam, “made it easier for Lyndon Johnson to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”
• • •
The following weekend, the president brought a dozen guests to Hyde Park, including Crown Princess Martha and her three children, FDR, Jr.’s wife, Ethel, and two grandchildren. Though it was only two weeks since his mother’s death, he wanted to fill the Big House with life and laughter once again. On Sunday, Hall’s condition worsened. Hall had “suddenly gone very bad,” Dr. McIntire informed the president at Hyde Park. “He may not last throughout the afternoon.” While Eleanor, who had remained in Washington, hurried to the hospital, the president headed for Highland Station to catch the overnight train to Washington. Hall’s condition was so bad when Eleanor reached the hospital that she decided to stay with him through the night. Sleeping fitfully in her clothes, she awoke to find him emitting ghastly noises as he struggled for breath.
This had been a bad day, she admitted to Joe Lash, who had been staying with her at the White House. “My idea of hell, if I believed in it, would be to sit or stand & watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns & thinking ‘this was once the little boy I played with & scolded, he could have been so much & this is what he is.’ It is a bitter thing & in spite of everything I’ve loved Hall, perhaps somewhat remissedly [sic] of late, but he is part of me.”
“The President returned this morning,” Tommy told Anna, “with the Crown Princess and Mme. Ostgaard and Jimmy has the Maurice Benjamins staying here. If anything happens to Hall today or tomorrow, I wonder if they will have the sense to leave. I doubt it.”
The end came at 5 a.m. on Thursday morning, September 25. Eleanor was by her brother’s side when he died. Exhausted, she returned to the White House before breakfast and went straight to her husband’s bedroom. Jimmy was with his father when his mother arrived and was so struck by the intimacy of the scene that followed that he remembered every detail years later. “‘Hall has died,’ Eleanor told Franklin simply. Father struggled to her side and put his arms around her. ‘Sit down,’ he said, so tenderly I can still hear it. And he sank down beside her and hugged her and kissed her and held her head on his chest. I do not think she cried. I think Mother had forgotten how to cry. She spent her hurt in Father’s embrace . . . . For all they were apart both physically and spiritually much of their married life, there remained between them a bond that others could not break.”
Though Eleanor was grateful that Hall’s agony had finally ended, she felt as if she had lost a child, and grieved terribly over the waste of a potentially brilliant life. “My mother-in-law was 86 and she had a great life, full of rich experience,” Eleanor observed to her journalist friend Martha Gellhorn. “Hall was just 51 and could have had much more out of life.” What bothered her most, Tommy observed, was “the terrible waste of a promising life. If he had some illness from a natural cause, I think she could bear it better.”
For hours that night, Tommy recalled, Eleanor dug out old photos and letters from Hall and talked about their childhood. Among the photos was a picture of Hall as a toddler, with blond curls and a little round face. In one of the folders, she found a letter from her father to her grandmother at a sad period of his life, as well as a batch of letters from Hall to her. Reading the letters made her so unhappy that Tommy suggested she burn the entire correspondence and get it out of her life. Eleanor agreed; she lit a fire and slowly fed one letter after another into the flames.
“The loss of someone whom you love is hard to bear,” Eleanor observed years later in her memoirs, “but when sorrow is mixed with regret and a consciousness of waste there is added a touch of bitterness which is even more difficult to carry day in and day out. I think it was in an attempt to numb this feeling that I worked so hard at the Office of Civilian Defense that fall.”
• • •
The president had created the OCD the previous spring with a broad mandate to enlist men, women, and children as defense volunteers. When her friend Mayor LaGuardia was named director, Eleanor thought she had won her battle for including social service in defense. But in the months that followed, as the OCD remained narrowly intent on signing up air-raid wardens, aircraft spotters, and volunteer fire brigades, Eleanor was disappointed.
At a press conference the week before Sara died, Eleanor had indirectly charged the OCD with failing its mission, declaring that “no government agency as yet had given civilian volunteers an adequate opportunity to participate in the defense effort.” Her comments were construed by the press as criticism of LaGuardia’s leadership. “There are 135,000,000 people in this country,” LaGuardia wrote Eleanor. “The criticism of 134,999,999 wouldn’t touch me. Yours did.” The mayor went on to suggest that if she really wanted to imp
lement her ideas she should come to work at the OCD as assistant director.
Eleanor was tantalized by LaGuardia’s offer. Since her first days in Washington, she had longed for a specific job of her own to focus her energies. With a defined job, she believed, she would finally be able to follow through on her ideas and see the end results of her efforts. Yet, on the eve of accepting the unpaid assistant-directorship, she was overcome with apprehension. This would be the first government job ever held by a first lady; what if she ended up as a target for everyone who wanted to get at the president? What if she and LaGuardia clashed? “I’m worried about the civilian defense job,” she confided to a friend, “because I don’t want to do it & . . . at this moment I feel very low.”
In spite of her fears, Eleanor accepted the offer and promised to report for work at the end of September. She then threw herself wholeheartedly into familiarizing herself with the organization. “I honestly think your mother is going to get a tremendous amount of interest out of the civilian defense job,” Tommy wrote Anna. “When she talks about it, there is a gleam in her eye and a sparkle which has been absent for a long time.” Indeed, during the black days of watching Hall die, the prospect of the OCD job was the one sustaining hope that kept Eleanor going.
After Hall’s burial on Saturday, September 27, at Tivoli, New York, in the Hall family vault, Franklin and Eleanor drove to Hyde Park for the weekend. Unable to sleep, Eleanor came downstairs at 3 a.m. and spent the next three hours mentally organizing the OCD work. At dawn, she began making notes which detailed the goals she hoped to accomplish in her first month on the job. “If I feel depressed,” she once said, “I go to work. Work is always an antidote for depression.”
For her first day on the job, Monday, September 29, the first lady chose a trim black silk dress with a touch of white at the collar and several strings of pearls. The early-morning air was crisp as she set forth on foot from the White House to the OCD offices at Dupont Circle. It took a good half-hour, even at Eleanor’s long-legged pace, but since she did not think she would get exercise any other way, she was determined to walk to and from work. En route, a young woman came up beside her and said: “You are Mrs. Roosevelt and I am from California and I have always wanted to shake hands with you.” The encounter buoyed Eleanor’s spirits as she approached her ninth-floor office.