FDR - Jean Edward Smith [126]
The letter was front-page news throughout the state. So too was Smith’s “Dear Frank” reply. The former governor agreed to accept the party’s call. Hearst saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately withdrew.46
AL NOMINATED WITH GREAT ENTHUSIASM, Howe wired FDR from the Democratic convention in Syracuse. MORGENTHAU [Henry Morgenthau, Jr.] AND YOUR MISSUS LED THE DUTCHESS DELEGATION WITH THE BANNER THREE TIMES AROUND THE HALL.47
Smith shared Howe’s elation. “Everything went along first rate,” he wrote Franklin. “I had quite a session with our lady politicians as Mrs. Roosevelt no doubt told you. I was delighted to see her taking an active part and I am really sorry that you could not be there, but take care of yourself—there is another day coming.”48
Eleanor was now committed to the Democratic party. At Louis Howe’s urging, she had broadened her nonpartisan attachment to the League of Women Voters to include active participation in mainstream politics. As Howe put it, Eleanor “had to become actively involved in Democratic politics in order to keep alive Franklin’s interest in the party and the party’s interest in him.”49 In June 1922, when Nancy Cook of the New York State Democratic Committee asked her to address a fund-raising luncheon, she dutifully accepted despite her terror of speaking in public. “I trembled so that I did not know whether I could stand up,” Eleanor wrote later. “I am quite sure my voice could not be heard.”50 Evidently ER exceeded her expectations: she was immediately asked to chair the finance committee of the Women’s Division of the party and later edited the Women’s Democratic News.
Nancy Cook and Eleanor became fast friends almost immediately, and through Nancy, ER soon met Marion Dickerman, the first woman to run for legislative office in New York. Cook and Miss Dickerman had been partners since their days as graduate students at Syracuse in 1909 and shared an apartment in Greenwich Village. Ardent feminists and committed pacifists, they had served as Red Cross volunteers at a London hospital during the war. After the war ended, Cook managed Dickerman’s campaign for the legislature.51
Cook was short, athletic, and excitable, with close-cropped hair and expressive brown eyes. One biographer described her as “dashing and roguish, flirtatious and irreverent.” Dickerman, by contrast, was tall, calm, steady, and soft-spoken—a woman of “rhythmic regularity.”52 When ER met them, Dickerman was dean of New Jersey State College in Trenton and taught English at Bryn Mawr during the summer; Cook was assistant director of the women’s division of and an indefatigable organizer for the New York Democratic party. Eleanor, who sometimes lamented her lack of a university education, rejoiced in the company of these professional women. During the next dozen years, she, Nancy, and Marion would become almost inseparable.53
At Franklin’s urging, Eleanor devoted as much time to Dutchess County politics as to her work with the state committee. FDR recognized that an upstate Democrat had to secure his base if he were to be effective statewide. He also believed that the dismal showing of the Democratic party upstate was the result of poor organization and neglect.54 Franklin directed the local effort from his sitting room at Hyde Park, and Eleanor and Howe became his eager lieutenants.* ER recruited several friends and set out to organize and register the women in the county. She spoke frequently to various civic groups. Initially, Howe accompanied her, sat in the back of the hall, and monitored her performance. When her hands shook, he told her to grip the lectern; when she felt