FDR - Jean Edward Smith [175]
What ER did was confide her doubts to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. On the eve of FDR’s nomination she wrote to Cook, who was in Chicago with the campaign. Cook shared the letter with Dickerman and then with Louis Howe. According to Dickerman’s account, ER’s tone was almost “hysterical.” She could not “bear to become First Lady!” She did not wish to be “a prisoner in the White House, forced onto a narrow treadmill of formal receptions, ‘openings,’ dedications, teas, official dinners.” Howe’s face darkened as he read the letter. When he finished, he tore it into shreds and dropped the pieces into his wastebasket. “You are not to breathe a word of this to anyone, understand? Not to anyone.”
In her 1970s interviews with the historian Kenneth S. Davis, Marion Dickerman went on to say that ER wrote that she intended to file suit for divorce and run away with Earl Miller. Because the information was privileged and confidential, Davis chose not to report it until after Dickerman’s death. Blanche Wiesen Cook appears to accept Dickerman’s version, and Earl Miller’s denial, reported by Joseph Lash, is less than categorical. What we know for certain is that after the election FDR took Sergeant Gus Gennerich to the White House but Miller remained in Albany, where he was appointed personnel director of the New York State Department of Corrections.
Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 69 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933 330–331 (New York: Random House, 1979); Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 445–447 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992); Joseph Lash, Love, Eleanor 119–120 (New York: Doubleday, 1982). Writing later, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Conrad Black report ER’s unhappiness at the prospect of becoming first lady but exclude the reference to Earl Miller. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 90 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 239–240 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). David B. Roosevelt, ER’s grandson, reports Eleanor’s romance with Miller but makes no mention of divorce. Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt 139–141 (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
* Shortly after the convention adjourned, Long went into neighboring Arkansas to support the Senate candidacy of Hattie Caraway against the conservative Democratic establishment. Mrs. Caraway was the widow of Senator Thaddeus Caraway and was serving out his unexpired term when she decided to run for the full six-year term. No one gave her a chance. Long barnstormed the state for ten days, and when the votes were counted Mrs. Caraway carried sixty-one of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties and her popular vote equaled the total of her six opponents’. Mrs. Caraway was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long 583–593 (New York: Knopf, 1969).
* The Ford 5-AT Tri-Motor, often referred to as the “Tin Goose,” had a top speed of 110 miles an hour. Built with a corrugated aluminum exterior, the plane had a seventy-seven-foot wingspan, was almost fifty feet long, and weighed 13,000 pounds. It had three propellers, low-pressure tires for landing on rough surfaces, and a swiveling rear wheel with a shock absorber. “With its fixed landing gear, exposed air-cooled engines, and boxy shape, it exemplified the problems of drag that designers were trying to identify and fix in the late 1920s,” wrote the aviation historian R. G. Grant. Flight: 100 Years of Aviation 140–141 (New York: D. K. Publishing, 2002).
FOURTEEN
NOTHING TO FEAR
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, MARCH 4, 1933
“THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in a political campaign is to make as few mistakes as possible,” wrote Ed Flynn, and the 1932 Democratic presidential campaign was nearly flawless.