Expectations

Whatever idea Eleanor Roosevelt had in 1920 “about a new independent life [she] knew that, as long as she was married to a politician, she would be expected to appear on campaign stages at her husband’s side,” Jonathan Darman wrote in Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President.

Onboard his campaign train that year, “a willow basket on a secretary’s desk was labeled Drop clippings and suggestions for speeches here—as though the people writing the news clippings and the people writing the speeches were one and the same.”

Darman noted, “Franklin adored the company of campaign reporters with their high-quality gossip and their willingness, when given the proper attention, to write flattering things. . . . At day’s end, when reporters and staffers tempted the candidate to join in long nights of drinking, card playing, and bawdy storytelling, Franklin always said yes.”

Source: Jonathan Darman. Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President (New York: Random House, 2022), 94