by Marc Peyser
And that’s just from the letters that still exist. Hickok burned hundreds more, chiefly those written by her, but also some of Eleanor’s. “Your Mother wasn’t always so very discreet in her letters to me,” Hickok told Eleanor’s daughter, Anna.70 The implication was that those letters contained details too risqué to survive. But did they? Eleanor and Lorena never hid the intensity of their relationship. They would kiss each other hello in public. The first summer of Franklin’s presidency, they took off—alone, without any Secret Service—on an extended road trip through the Northeast and parts of Canada. They had planned to travel anonymously, and they pulled it off until Eleanor got a little too chatty with a farmer in Maine. When they reached the next town, they found themselves greeted by a parade thrown in their honor. “I shall never forget how Miss Hickok looked; she was badly sunburned and had covered herself with sun-tan cream,” Eleanor wrote. “I doubt if I looked much better, but there was no time to think of appearances. Miss Hickok said I used some unbecoming language as I tried to drive properly in the crowd and still wave with one hand.”71 Not surprisingly, Washington wags began to speculate about them. “And so you think they gossip about us,” Eleanor wrote to Lorena in November 1933. “Well, they must at least think we stand separation rather well! I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little what ‘they’ say!”72
Eleanor’s indifference to the gossip provides an important clue to her relationship with Lorena. She likely wouldn’t have been so blasé if their relationship had contained a life-altering secret at its heart. Loyalty and self-control were the touchstones of her personality. Duplicity simply wasn’t in her nature. She could never forgive Franklin’s failings in that regard, and she was repeatedly disappointed when her children followed their father’s weak example. Also, the fact remained that sodomy was illegal in the United States. The public was violently opposed to homosexuality. However accepting Eleanor might have been of Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Esther Lape, Rose Schneiderman, and the others in her sapphic circle, if she and Hickok were lovers, the political fallout would have exploded Franklin’s career and restored the Republicans to power. Her sense of duty to her country and to her family almost certainly wouldn’t have allowed her to risk so much.
What’s more, their emotionally charged correspondence isn’t necessarily the smoldering gun it appears to be from our twenty-first-century viewpoint. “Remember, my mother was brought up in an era when children read the Brontes and read Jane Austen, and they adapted that effusive form of writing,” Franklin junior said in 1979, when Hickok’s collection of letters was opened to the public.73 There’s a sense of emotional hyper-ventilating in many of Eleanor’s letters over the years. “My heart [is] full of love, and I hate my pen for being so inadequate—but you know without words I think what I feel always for you and yours,” she wrote to her friend Isabella Greenway.74 “I do so want to kiss you, and in a little over a month I will be able to,” she wrote to her mother-in-law.75 In 1947, Eleanor’s bodyguard and friend from her days in Albany, Earl Miller, was sued for divorce by his third wife, Simone. Simone Miller threatened to name Eleanor as a co-respondent in the divorce, claiming that she had been having an affair with Miller. The evidence: a cache of letters from Eleanor to Earl. The case was settled, and the letters, sealed by the court, have never been seen in public. When her son John asked if they would support Mrs. Miller’s claims of adultery, Eleanor replied, “In the sense that you mean, there was nothing.”*13, 76
Eleanor’s letters to Hickok sometimes showed the First Lady pushing back against a truly romantic relationship. “I know you often have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind but I feel I love you just the same & so often we entirely satisfy each other that I feel there is a fundamental basis on which our relationship stands,” she wrote to Lorena in 1935.77 Eleanor occasionally redirected their conversation, taking whatever same-sex impulses Hickok might have been experiencing and drowning them in heterosexual context. “Of course you should have had a husband & children & it would have made you happy if you loved him & in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings & given you someone on whom to lavish the love and devotion you have to keep down all of the time. Yours is a rich nature with so much to give that the outlets always seem meagre.”78 Even the fact that both women discuss “kissing at the corner of your mouth” suggests that Eleanor had drawn a line. That was the way society ladies greeted each other at tea or a mother kissed her adult son.
Whatever the truth about their relationship, one person who almost certainly wouldn’t have minded if Eleanor had been a lesbian was Alice. Despite her quips about Eleanor’s “female impersonators,” Alice had always been remarkably open-minded about homosexuality. Years earlier, when Maggie Cassini tried to scandalize Alice by telling her that a mutual friend, Alice Barney, was in love with her, Alice’s nonchalant reply was a disappointment: “I don’t think that’s nasty, why I think it’s lovely, so nice. I’m so glad to hear she is.”79 Alice’s innate iconoclasm gave her a natural affinity for gays and lesbians. With her sharp wit and sharper tongue, she could have been a character in The Boys in the Band. In a town not exactly known for rebels, Alice was as close as anyone to being Washington’s own gay icon. “I wonder what [my father] would have made of a letter I received from one of the Gay Liberation groups offering to make me their first Honorary Homosexual,” she said when she was in her nineties. “I’ve always been a supporter of people’s sexual rights ‘as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,’ as Mrs. Patrick Campbell*14 says. Who knows? Perhaps homosexuality is nature’s way of keeping the population down. At least it is one of the best natural remedies we could possibly have, and if it keeps them happy and pleased, why not?”80
Unlike others in Washington’s gossip-industrial complex, Alice apparently never even entertained the idea that Eleanor was a lesbian. She heard the rumor being bandied about in a fancy Washington restaurant one day, and her response was immediate—and loud. “I don’t care what they say,” she announced. “I simply cannot believe that Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”81 It’s hard to know exactly what Alice meant by that. That she didn’t think Eleanor would participate in anything taboo and illicit? That she didn’t think Eleanor was interested in sex at all? That she couldn’t accept having her cousin stake a claim to the title of Roosevelt family bad girl? Or maybe it was a little bit of them all.
* * *
*1 It was not a coincidence that the name given to FDR’s policies, “the New Deal,” sounded a lot like President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” of three decades earlier. Many New Deal programs could be traced directly back to the progressive initiatives of that earlier era; much to Alice’s chagrin, Franklin continued his eager appropriation of her father’s legacy throughout his presidency.
*2 Though the president was consulted and supported his wife’s decision to invite Jessie De Priest, it was Mrs. Hoover who earned the brunt of the criticism. Newspapers throughout the South vilified her, and several state legislatures issued formal condemnations of her.
*3 At the time, there were no women assigned to cover the president. The first female correspondent assigned to the White House by a news service was Helen Thomas, at the start of the Kennedy administration. Women weren’t allowed to join the National Press Club until 1971.
*4 Once again, Eleanor was inspired by her famous uncle. TR realized, as few had before him, the importance of using the press to get his story out to the public on his terms. During his tenure as governor of New York, journalists were rounded up every day at 11:00 and 5:00 for a press conference. “It is not often that he tells much that is of importance, but he is listened to most carefully.” “A Day with Gov. Roosevelt,” New York Times, April 23, 1899.
*5 At the onset of World War II, when the costs of the various federally administered New Deal housing projects were examined, the per-house cost at Arthurdale was assessed at $16,635, significantly higher tha
n the average cost of $9,691. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 416.
*6 In addition to having the White House as her official residence during her husband’s presidency, Eleanor used a variety of home bases in between road trips, including Val-Kill, Springwood, an apartment in New York City, and any number of friends’ spare bedrooms.
*7 Another of FDR’s “brain trust” and Howe’s eventual successor as the president’s chief adviser.
*8 The New York Times called Crowded Hours a “sparkling flood of reminiscence” and included it on its list of the best books of 1933, right along with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (“Gertrude Stein, articulate at last,” the Times said.)
*9 During the 1930s, McNaught’s impressive talent pool included Al Smith, Walter Winchell, Dale Carnegie, and even Albert Einstein, who produced a grand total of one syndicated piece.
*10 Alice’s column ran under several names in addition to What Alice Thinks during its brief life. Among these were Chatting with Alice Longworth, Alice Longworth Says, and even the unfortunate Alice Longworth’s Terse Comments on News Events.
*11 Seen in retrospect as a dress rehearsal for World War II, the conflict pitted a right-wing coalition (backed by Germany and Italy) of the military, conservative Catholics, fascists, and monarchists against a loosely cobbled-together coalition of republicans, socialists, and communists (backed by the Soviet Union and attracting idealistic volunteers from western Europe and the United States).The war raged from 1936 to 1939, when the fascist general Francisco Franco triumphed and began a thirty-six-year reign as Spain’s generalissimo.
*12 Throughout the latter half of the 1930s, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the hopes of preventing U.S. involvement in a foreign war. The acts applied strict limitations on the government’s—or U.S. citizens’—ability to aid a nation at war. By failing to differentiate between victim and aggressor, the laws had the practical effect of leaving nations such as China, Ethiopia, and Poland vulnerable to the militarized Axis powers.
*13 Eleanor’s son John actually believed that his mother had an affair with Earl Miller. “There are two sides to every coin,” he said. “As Victorian as mother may have been, she was a woman, too, who suffered from her self-imposed separation from father.” If that were true, it implies that she either wasn’t a lesbian or was actively bisexual. Could staid Eleanor Roosevelt, who once told her daughter that having sex was a “cross,” secretly have had affairs with men and women? It doesn’t seem likely.
*14 Beatrice Tanner, a.k.a. Mrs. Pat, was a British actress credited with coining this colorful phrase. Coincidentally, George Bernard Shaw, with whom she worked frequently, wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion expressly for her.
Chapter 9
CLOUDS OF WAR
Franklin collected stamps. Alice collected vices: smoking, gambling, gossiping, sleeping past noon; she was like a Girl Scout in reverse, gathering demerit badges. Among her most persistent temptations was her taste for a nice, ripe surprise. She pulled off plenty of them: jumping into a shipboard swimming pool wearing a dress, inviting Lucy Mercer to dinner without telling FDR, having a baby at forty-one—and with her lover, no less. Her latest shocker wasn’t her juiciest, but it astonished Washington just the same. In April 1938, Alice announced she was going to launch a national speaking tour. She might have wielded a silver dagger of a tongue in her own dining room, but she was notoriously shy about talking in front of crowds. She almost never made a campaign speech, even in support of her father or brother. A microphone in a nearly empty room was enough to make her clam up. “After Nicholas Longworth died, Alice was somewhat straitened for funds,” said Ruth McCormick’s daughter Ruth Tankersley. “Dorothy Thompson and my mother arranged for her to go on a radio show with them, and even on a radio show in a studio she was absolutely struck dumb. She couldn’t say a word.”1
Money hadn’t been powerful enough to unglue her lips, but blood apparently was. Alice titled her tour “The American People and Their Government,” but the press knew that it could just as easily have been called “The Roosevelt Cousins and Their Rivalry.” Eleanor had long been moonlighting as a lecturer, with various tours built around a theme—peace, social justice, international law, the changing role of women—and delivered in her high-pitched squeak to packed venues across the country. Even before Alice had spoken a word on her tour, the media was anticipating her tit-for-tat retorts to her cousin. “Verbal Political Exchanges with First Lady Seen as ‘Princess Alice’ Signs for Lecture Tour,” wrote the Washington Post, which led its story with a nasty little jab cloaked in a high-minded literary allusion: “The late Rudyard Kipling told the world ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male,’ but no one has ever authoritatively stated what may happen in a contest between two ladies. Especially when it is cousin against cousin.”2
And so the battle of the dueling columnists (which Eleanor won handily) gave way to the dueling speakers. Once again, Alice found herself in an intra-family dogfight. Eleanor claimed, privately, to have outearned Franklin from the very first year of his presidency. She made as much as $1,400 per lecture (almost $25,000 in 2015 dollars), $1,000 a month for her My Day column, and thousands more for her books and assorted magazine articles. The president’s salary in 1933 was $75,000. Some critics argued it was unseemly—even unethical—for the First Lady to profit from her position, and Eleanor ultimately donated most of her earnings to charity. But her paychecks kicked up far less controversy than the things she said and wrote to earn them. “There is no middle ground with regard to Eleanor Roosevelt,” wrote the New York Times. “She is undeniably both an asset and a liability to the Democratic ranks. It is possible that no woman before her will have swung so many votes both for and against her candidate, though the sum total will necessarily remain conjectural.”3 Yet a little criticism was hardly enough to slow her down. The agency for Eleanor’s speaking tour scheduled grueling itineraries, sometimes with multiple speeches per day to audiences of two thousand to three thousand people and little time in between. For Eleanor, the cold soup and restless nights in bad motels, the incessant jostling in Pullman sleeping cars and overnight flights, were worth it. Every time she stepped in front of an adoring, applauding crowd, she buried the shy, awkward, unlovable child of her past just a little bit deeper. By November 1936, she had gained so much confidence that she was able to write to Franklin, “It would be easy to be a lecturer or the wife of the President but both. Oh! My.”4
Alice’s tour was as different from Eleanor’s as everything else about them. She was booked into just twelve cities, mostly in politically friendly venues such as the Greenwich, Connecticut, Women’s Club and made even friendlier because the press was barred from attending. What’s more, the audience had to write its questions on slips of paper and hand them up to her onstage, like Greeks making an offering to the Oracle of Delphi. The ticket buyers were also asked, improbably, to not blab to reporters about her comments.5 The Washington Times Herald reported that she would receive $1,000 per lecture, regardless of ticket sales. That was 20 to 40 percent less than Eleanor.6
In Chicago, one member of the audience handed Alice the question she was waiting for: Would President Roosevelt seek a third term? It was a topic she addressed at every stop, along with the ballooning size of the federal government and the possibility that the United States would end up in another global war. Of course, a third term had been a bully idea three decades earlier when Alice’s father wanted one; it even justified his splitting the Republican Party and launching his Progressive Bull Moose Party. Now that there was talk of FDR’s wanting to extend his stay in the White House, Alice decided that a third term would be tantamount to installing a dictator—just the argument John Schrank made when he shot TR in Milwaukee in 1912. Her remedy for avoiding “the return to the kingship method of government in this country” was simple: amend the Constitution to limit the president to two terms. She got her wish, but not until 1951.
Less simple,
however, was Alice’s analysis. The question in Chicago had been whether FDR would “seek” another term. She replied, “I would say not ‘seek’ so it will be noticed too much.”7 What she meant was that it was obvious Franklin wanted a third term, but politically he couldn’t appear to want it—to seek it. He needed to have it essentially bestowed upon him by a desperate nation grateful that he was willing to continue in office. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Less than two years later, despite FDR’s protestations that he didn’t want a third term, the Democrats drafted FDR on the first ballot. Yet however prescient Alice might have been, it was difficult to give her much credit, because the average listener wouldn’t have been able to parse her explanation in the first place. She was simply unwilling, or incapable, of simplifying her style for the masses. The same thing happened when she was asked to explain why she’d taken so long to overcome her fear of public speaking. “I was afraid I would feel like Lady Godiva with a brushed up bob,” she said.8 In other words, she had been terrified of looking nakedly ridiculous. But the mid western folks who paid to see the Rough Rider’s daughter didn’t all get that, nor did the reporters who managed to sneak into her lectures. They complained that Alice’s legendary wit seemed to evaporate outside the rarefied air of her drawing room, much as her newspaper column had lain on the page like limp pasta. Without what the New York Times referred to as “the insouciance of the moment, the knowing flick of an eyelash and Mrs. Longworth’s instinctive sense of timing…the rhythms of the born raconteur…and her aristocratic, often ironic, use of the language,” Alice became the one thing she loathed most: a bore.9 Even worse, she was more boring than Eleanor, at least according to one paper’s side-by-side comparison: “Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt is frank and gossipy, tells about herself, people in Washington, the human side of being a first lady. Mrs. Longworth, on the other hand, talks only about issues and does it in a very dreary manner…[She] talks with the spontaneity of a supreme court justice reading an opinion.”10
