by Marc Peyser
From a conservative standpoint, Ted’s apocalyptic whining was certainly justified. Within what came to be called “the first hundred days” of his administration, President Franklin Roosevelt set about expanding and changing the government more radically than any president before or since. From March through June, he let loose with a fusillade of legislative initiatives, fifteen in all and some of them still in effect eight decades later: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Securities Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, the National Recovery Administration, and the Home Owners Refinancing Act, to name just a few of the pillars of the New Deal.*1 The Emergency Banking Act, which closed banks nationwide to forestall a run on deposits, was rammed through Congress so quickly the members of the House had to listen to the clerk’s reading of the draft to know what they were voting on because the bill hadn’t been printed yet. “Congress doesn’t pass legislation anymore,” Will Rogers quipped. “They just wave at the bills as they go by.”7
Eleanor would often spend part of the day observing the congressional chaos from one of the family galleries, briskly knitting all the while. Watching the legislative process had been a favorite spectator sport since her days with the League of Women Voters. She had already spent more time on the Hill than any First Lady had, perhaps more than all of the previous First Ladies combined. That said, she was hardly the first president’s wife with her own life and interests. Her immediate predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, had been a Stanford-educated linguist, the president of the Girl Scouts, and on the board of the National Amateur Athletic Association. As First Lady, she made periodic radio broadcasts on what would have been called “women’s topics” and even found herself in the middle of a firestorm after she invited the wife of the Illinois representative Oscar De Priest, the first black congressman elected in the twentieth century, to the White House for a tea with other congressional wives.*2 But Mrs. Hoover generally kept her distance from political issues, and she steadfastly refused to give interviews. She thought of her job much as the women before her did: an apolitical social appendage to the president.
Eleanor apparently expected to follow the same below-the-radar path as the rest. “I knew what traditionally should lie before me; I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect,” she said.8 Her enforced vow of monotony lasted exactly two days into Franklin’s term. On the Monday after the inauguration, Eleanor conducted a press conference in the Red Room. That was noteworthy on its own; no First Lady had ever held her own White House press conference before. Eleanor also added a twist: she only allowed female reporters to attend. It was her form of affirmative action, a way to underscore the disadvantages women faced in most professions, including the media.*3 The first conference attracted thirty-five female reporters, some of whom had to sit on the floor because there weren’t enough chairs. Eleanor arrived carrying a box of candied fruit and passed it around as if she were hosting a neighborhood bridge party. There was a decidedly clubby feeling at her conferences. She focused on topics she felt would interest women and pledged not to answer anything blatantly political, which she insisted was the president’s realm.*4 When she seemed to stray too close to hot-button territory, it was the women reporters who would sometimes caution her by yelling out, “Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt, you’d better put that off the record!”9 The female press corps developed a strong (and some would say unprofessional) sense of loyalty, even devotion, to her. They had a vested interest in her success, not only because she gave them unprecedented access, but because she was, in some respects, one of them, a woman trying to make her way in a male-dominated world. Eleanor stuck to her women-only rule for the next twelve years almost without exception. Her last press conference as First Lady was held on the morning of April 12, 1945. The president died that afternoon.
On her first tour of duty in Washington, when Franklin was assistant secretary of the navy, Eleanor was terrified to color outside the lines of protocol. Now she was like a high school senior who gleefully flouted the rules. She was the first First Lady to attend the Congressional Club tea, a welcoming event for the wives of new members of Congress, and the Women’s National Press Club dinner, an off-the-record society affair featuring satirical skits of prominent Washington women. Alice was at the National Press Club dinner too, and she got to see herself mocked twice. The first skit featured her and Dolly Gann frolicking to the tune of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” which ended with them singing, “Where the hell do they sit now?!” The second skit didn’t mention Alice by name. In it, a woman identified only as “Mrs. Democrat” is eager to talk to her friend “Mrs. Republican.” At first, the slightly dotty Mrs. Democrat dials her at National 1-4-1-4, only to discover that she’s called the White House—and it’s her own number now. Mrs. Republican’s number is actually Deflator 0-0-0-0. Everyone in the room knew whose sharp Republican tongue was the best “deflator” in Washington.
Eleanor even broke the First Law of First Lady Dynamics: she disagreed with her husband’s policy—in public. The second piece of legislation FDR signed (after the Emergency Banking Act) was called the Economy Act, a far-reaching, budget-slashing tool that cut defense spending, veterans’ pensions, and the salaries of federal employees (including the president’s). It also stipulated that when both halves of a married couple worked for the government, the woman’s job must be eliminated first, regardless of the couple’s respective departments or positions. Men, after all, were supposed to be the breadwinners; women’s salaries were an expendable luxury. Eleanor was outraged. She called the provision a “very bad and very foolish thing” at her press conference (so much for staying apolitical).10 The president didn’t budge, and Eleanor was forced to pipe down, at least temporarily. Four years later, when Congress repealed the law, she applauded—and made a prescient prediction. “It seems to me that the tradition of respect for work is so ingrained in this country that it is not surprising that fathers have handed it down to their daughters as well as to their sons,” she wrote. “I wonder if we are not going to feel more respect in the coming years for the women who work and give work to others, than for the women who sit at home with many idle hours on their hands.”11
Eleanor’s experience with the Economy Act taught her that she’d do better to take more nuanced stands in public while applying her activist muscle behind the scenes. In the depths of the Great Depression, of course, there was no shortage of worthy causes she was pining to champion. In the summer of 1933, Eleanor’s journalist friend Lorena Hickok, now working at Eleanor’s behest as a sort of roving reporter on poverty with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, sent her a report on Scotts Run, West Virginia, a coal-mining community in the northern corner of the state near Morgantown. The area had become a wasteland of unemployed miners and their families, many of them blacklisted by the big coal companies after daring to try to organize a union. Hickok told Eleanor that Scotts Run was “the worst place I had ever seen. In a gutter, along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags spread out on the floor.”12 A group of Quaker volunteers did what they could to feed and clothe the desperate residents, but the combination of the Depression and the languishing mining industry had dealt the area a deathblow. On August 18, Eleanor drove the 225 miles from Washington—alone, but with FDR’s blessing—to see the place for herself. She was still relatively unknown, at least in this corner of rural America, and she was able to travel without being recognized. The Quakers took her from one hovel to the next, where she gathered the people’s heartbreaking stories and brought them back to Washington in
search of a lifeline.
Using her experience with Val-Kill Industries as an example, Eleanor persuaded Franklin to fund a kind of collective in West Virginia through the New Deal agencies. Working with the Department of the Interior, she helped construct a plan to purchase a twelve-hundred-acre farm from the nearby Arthur family and construct a small community. Arthurdale ultimately included more than 160 houses, a school, and several community buildings, along with factories and enough farmable land to make the new Arthurdale residents self-sufficient. Eleanor was a frequent and hands-on visitor. She personally chose the refrigerators for each of the houses and ultimately befriended many of the settlers, attending their square dances and graduations and often writing and speaking about the community’s progress. Over time, Arthurdale would become a prototype for more than fifty planned communities developed across the country under the auspices of the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Department of the Interior.
And yet Arthurdale would prove to be a source of both inspiration and frustration for Eleanor. She donated a significant amount of her radio earnings to the Quakers’ efforts there. She also involved many of her friends, including the financier Bernard Baruch, encouraging them to open their hearts—and their wallets—to the cause. The downside of her very public activism was that Arthurdale became a lightning rod for congressional critics, as well as for certain factions within her husband’s administration. In a rush to show quick progress, the government made numerous, often expensive, mistakes, such as purchasing prefabricated houses that couldn’t withstand West Virginia’s harsh winters and ultimately needed to be replaced.*5 In 1941 alone, the government spent an estimated $2.5 million on Arthurdale ($40 million in 2015 dollars), an exorbitant amount to lavish on one small community at the height of the Depression. Not long after that, the government sold the town back to the residents, and at a considerable loss. Still, Eleanor was tremendously proud of Arthurdale, and she would never apologize for her work there. “There is no question that much money was spent, perhaps some of it unwisely,” she said. “Nevertheless, I have always felt that many human beings who might have cost us thousands of dollars in tuberculosis sanitariums, insane asylums, and jails were restored to usefulness and given confidence in themselves.”13
Eleanor brought a similar commitment to the advocacy of the arts through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the multiyear, multibillion-dollar public works omnibus that oversaw the construction of thousands of public buildings and bridges and more than half a million miles of road. Eleanor was a tireless champion of all aspects of the WPA, but its arts-related initiatives received her special attention, another vestige of the influence of Mlle Souvestre. Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, and John Houseman were among the thousands of artists who were, at some point, employed by the WPA. This kind of big-ticket public funding naturally touched off its own wave of controversy and debate: paying for theater when people are hungry and overtaxed? Alice was among the program’s fiercest critics, deriding the entire WPA as a boondoggle designed to buy votes and reward constituencies at public expense. “The New Deal practice of ‘political clearance’ reaches into the life of the humblest worker on W.P.A. projects,” she wrote. “They are told that they are working on Roosevelt jobs, that they are being paid with Roosevelt money, and that in order to hold down those jobs and get that money they must electioneer and vote for Roosevelt. They are threatened with dismissal if they fail to contribute out of their meager pay to the New Deal campaign funds. The bare existence of these men and their families depends on what they can earn. No one can learn of the intimidation…they are subject to without feeling a wave of hot indignation. It is playing particularly vicious politics with human need.”14
As the 1936 election season loomed, Alice was commissioned by her father’s old friend Edward Bok to write a piece for the Ladies’ Home Journal titled “The Ideal Qualifications for a President’s Wife.” Journalistically, it was inspired casting. And yet, Alice passed up the chance to go after her cousin directly. Instead, she shared memories and tame observations of the First Ladies she had known, starting with Mrs. Cleveland, Mrs. McKinley, and of course her own stepmother. When it came to Eleanor, Alice applied far more charm than smarm, giving her ample credit for using her White House perch in bracingly new ways. She took a poke or two at her cousin, but she wrote in a sort of invisible ink, focusing on Eleanor’s means—her noblesse oblige and obsession with saving the world—rather than her actual policy choices. “She travels thousands of miles investigating conditions in all parts of the country, doing on a tremendous scale what the lady of the manor did in other days when she looked after the tenantry,” Alice wrote. “She makes as many speeches as the President, if not more. She is here, there, and everywhere, gracious, friendly, interested, always with something to say.”15 If Eleanor was overstepping her boundaries as the president’s wife, Alice certainly wasn’t going to say so directly, even as she reminded readers that the First Lady was still fair game. “There is always the possibility,” she warned, “that people will say, ‘We didn’t elect her. What is she horning in for?’ ”16
Eleanor horned in because, like her Uncle Ted, she knew the value of a bully pulpit. A meeting with the First Lady, or just her brief presence at an event, could shine a light on an issue or problem she cared about. She spent considerable time and energy visiting with schoolchildren, labor representatives, women’s groups, and social service organizations. And her activities were not just “events” staged for public consumption. She was now a seasoned political veteran who coached, mentored, and organized everywhere she went. She knew the importance of getting women and fellow progressives into key roles in the committees and party infrastructure that generated policy, selected candidates, administered patronage, and turned out the vote. In addition to her own priorities, she continued her now-familiar role as her husband’s stand-in. In New York, as the wife of a governor in a wheelchair, she was obligated to travel from one corner of the state to the other; as the wife of a president in a wheelchair, she had to do it on a national scale. In one thirteen-day period in June 1936, she trekked from New York to Chicago to Des Moines to Fulton, Kentucky, to Little Rock to Fort Worth to Grayville, Illinois, to Indianapolis and finally back to New York.*6 In her first year as First Lady, she logged thirty-eight thousand miles (and even more the next).17 She was the first First Lady to travel by airplane, though she was perfectly happy using less stylish modes of transportation. She frequently spent the night on a train, sometimes sleeping in her seat if a sleeper car wasn’t available. “I do not mind riding in day coaches,” she wired the reception committee in Jackson, Mississippi, when it began hunting for a sleeper train for her trip there. “Please do not put yourself or the railroad to extra expense.”18 She didn’t like being fussed over by anyone, really. On March 15, 1933, she went to New York City to visit the Women’s Trade Union League and to speak to her old students at Todhunter. It was one month to the day after the assassination attempt on Franklin in Florida, and she noticed a small army of police milling around at her first appointment. “I don’t want to be guarded, please go away,” she said. “No one’s going to hurt me.”19 When the police wouldn’t budge, she called Louis Howe, who called the NYPD and persuaded them to back off. She spent the rest of the day in the city traveling by cab—without an official escort. In November 1933, she made the cover of Time magazine (more than six years after Alice earned that honor). The apt headline was “Eleanor Everywhere.” “As every reader of newspapers is by now aware, Franklin Roosevelt’s Eleanor uses No. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. less as a home than as a base of operations,” the story said. Though it included the requisite biography and quotations, almost half the story was a list of her many activities—so many that by the end of the piece, the Time reporter seemed exhausted: “Such a routine would soon put many an ordinary woman in a sanitarium. Mrs. Roosevelt is no ordinary woman.”20
Perhaps just as remarkably, she now travele
d without regular guidance from her most faithful adviser. Louis Howe’s health had been failing for years, and now that he’d successfully masterminded the election of President Roosevelt, he seemed to slip further. Howe spent most of the winter of 1934 confined to his room in the White House—the Lincoln Bedroom—battling pneumonia and the flu. Keeping him quiet enough to recuperate was no easy task. At one point, the White House staff was instructed to hide his pants, as a way to discourage him from heading downstairs to work. “It’s an outrage for doctors to make such a handsome man as I receive visitors before I get my makeup on,” Howe said.21 Eleanor visited him every day, and Franklin came nearly as often. But Louis still managed to sneak out. He often hijacked one of FDR’s wheelchairs and conducted himself to the Oval Office for a chat with the boss. In the summer of 1934 he turned up all the way across the country in Portland, Oregon, to meet the president after a tour of the Pacific and join him for the trip home.
But by March 1935, he was down again, presumably for good. His wife, Grace, who lived most of the time at the Howes’ home in Fall River, Massachusetts, hurried to Washington, as did their daughter, Mary. Franklin and Eleanor both canceled scheduled trips, and a train was ordered to stand ready at Washington’s Union Station to take Louis home to be buried. His comatose body was put into an oxygen tent. “No hope beyond twenty-four hours,” Mary wrote to her husband on March 19. At 5:00 p.m. that same day, Louis suddenly opened his eyes, like a cat on his ninth life. “Why in Hell doesn’t somebody give me a cigarette?” he barked.22 A few days later, his doctors caught him red-handed with another one of his vices. “Do you know what that little boss of yours has done now?” one of the doctors reported to Howe’s longtime assistant, Lela Stiles. “While we were out of the room this morning he reached out under the oxygen tent for the telephone, called Harry Hopkins*7 and talked to him for 15 minutes.”23 (Louis was also known to place a tented call to his bookie.) The doctors and the Roosevelts were only able to relocate him to the far more suitable naval hospital when the electricity was turned off in the Lincoln Bedroom during a large-scale renovation of the White House. Naturally, he insisted on having a direct line to FDR installed in his hospital room.
