• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1721 0

its electoral effectiveness. In New York City a record 91.1 percent of the registered voters went to the polls. Overall, FDR swamped Tuttle by 725,000 votes, the largest plurality won by any gubernatorial candidate in New York history.54 Upstate, Roosevelt carried forty-three counties to Tuttle’s fourteen. In every upstate county, FDR’s vote total exceeded the number of registered Democrats in that county. He carried precincts, wards, districts that had not gone Democratic in living memory. Times were hard, and voters wanted a change. But the magnitude of the victory reflected not only Roosevelt’s determination to revive the Democratic party upstate but Jim Farley’s ability to put an organization on the ground that could actually do so. The Democrats recaptured both houses of the legislature and all statewide offices. In Washington, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives and came within one seat of taking the Senate. For all practical purposes, the alliance between Democrats and progressive Republicans in the Senate gave them effective control of that body as well.

Eleanor, who set strategy for the Women’s Division of the State Democratic Committee, did everything possible to ensure Franklin’s reelection. Campaign aides jocularly referred to the 1930 gubernatorial contest as the “waffle iron election” because of the publicity ER generated comparing the cost of operating various kitchen appliances in New York as opposed to the cost in Ontario. Jim Farley credited Eleanor with adding 10 to 20 percent to the Democratic vote in those counties where her women’s organization was active. This time ER savored the victory as much as Franklin. “Much love and a world of congratulations,” she penciled in a note left on her husband’s pillow on election night. “It is a triumph in so many ways, dear, and so well earned. Bless you and good luck these next two years.—ER.”55

The fact is, Eleanor relished her role in Albany. She often served as FDR’s proxy, speaking on his behalf, inspecting state institutions, reporting back with a thoroughness that increased with time and experience. Roosevelt encouraged state officials to believe that he and “the Missus” were a team. “I do not often go to the big places,” Eleanor told the progressive historian and journalist Ida Tarbell, “but often to the little places where they have difficulty securing speakers. I don’t do it as well as I wish I did, but after all what they want is to see the Governor’s wife.”56

Throughout the Albany years, Eleanor was accompanied on her inspection tours by New York State Police sergeant Earl Miller. ER refused to be driven in an official limousine and insisted on driving herself. This made Franklin uneasy, and he assigned Miller as her bodyguard. Miller had been Al Smith’s personal bodyguard, and he and Franklin were acquainted from World War I, when Miller, the Navy’s middleweight boxing champion, had kept watch over FDR during his trip to France in 1918. Miller was a first-rate athlete and had been a member of the U.S. Olympic squad at the Antwerp games in 1920. He was an award-winning swimmer, expert marksman, and trick rider at state fairs, and had once worked as a circus acrobat. He was also a warm and affectionate man, and he and Eleanor hit it off from the beginning.

For Eleanor, Miller provided encouragement and support. He was unfailingly attentive and chivalrous. He protected and defended her and reintroduced her to sports and activities she had long forgotten. He taught her to shoot a pistol, coached her tennis game, and built her a deck tennis court at Val-Kill for daily practice. He gave her riding lessons and eventually bought a horse for her, a chestnut mare named Dot, which ER rode regularly at Hyde Park and later in Washington. He improved her swimming and taught her to dive, a goal that required years to accomplish but something Eleanor was keen to do.

For Miller, Eleanor provided stability and accomplishment and gave his life a purpose. She was forty-four when they met; he was thirty-two. He became her unofficial escort, companion,