by Marc Peyser
Not surprisingly, Alice’s interest in her career as a lecturer lasted about as long as an after-dinner cigarette. Toward the end of the tour, the audience was surprised to hear her discoursing not on politics but on entomology. “Mrs. Alice Roosevelt, lecturing in Cleveland, disclosed that she ‘found it absorbingly interesting to consider the cockroach. How ancient is its history!’ she exclaimed. ‘In a straight line, we can see it runs back so far into the past that it fairly takes your breath away.’ ”11 Reporters speculated that she was trying to get fired from her own lecture series.
Before that could happen, the cousins finally crossed paths, in Ohio. Less than two weeks after Alice warned that Franklin was an aspiring dictator, the aspiring dictator’s wife dropped in at Rookwood, the old Longworth estate in Cincinnati. To the disappointment of the press gathered at the gates, Alice and Eleanor were all smiles. “The luncheon was strictly a family affair—we never allow politics to come between us,” Alice told the reporters.12 She even had thirteen-year-old Paulina show Eleanor her bedroom and her pets. “Paulina, who is apparently a born horsewoman and loves animals, showed us a Jerusalem donkey, her own horse and a fat little pony whose usefulness is long past. These animals wander around the grounds entirely free,” Eleanor wrote.13 Then the dueling lecturers parted, apparently as happy as five-year-olds romping together on the beach at Oyster Bay. Eleanor was typically sanguine about her relationship with her cousin when describing their meeting in her column the next day. “I always enjoy my cousin, for while we may laugh at each other and quarrel with each other’s ideas or beliefs, I rather imagine if real trouble came that we might be good allies.”14
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Besides, Eleanor was far too busy to dwell on petty family arguments when she had bigger ones to pick—with her husband. Despite the Roosevelt administration’s achievements in helping the poor and the elderly, Eleanor openly griped that FDR had brushed aside the needs of black Americans. Throughout the country, but especially in the South, mob violence and brutal vigilantism remained tools of terror wielded primarily against black Americans.*1 She lobbied behind the scenes for Franklin to give his backing to antilynching legislation, but he refused to take a stand. The president sympathized with his wife, but he felt that to preserve any hope of getting the rest of his ambitious domestic agenda through the legislature, he had to avoid antagonizing the Democratic Party’s dominant southern wing. The southerners held strategic posts on most of the Senate and House committees, and they made clear they would block every bill FDR wanted Congress to pass if he moved too aggressively on the issue of race. In 1937, the Dixiecrats brought Congress to a standstill for six weeks, until an antilynching bill was withdrawn by its sponsor.*2
Finally, in 1939, Eleanor had had enough of staying silent. At a conference concerning the “problems of the Negro and Negro youth” in Washington, Eleanor was asked if she would say what she thought about the antilynching bill that had been reintroduced but was again stuck in Congress. Her honesty won over the crowd and caused heartburn back at the White House. “Yes, I’ll answer that on the clear understanding that I am speaking for myself, as an individual, and in no other sense,” she said. “I doubt very much if that law would do away with lynching, but I would like to see it passed because it would put us on record against something we should all be against…Even if it does not succeed at once in doing away with all the evils we would like to see done away with, I think it would be a good thing.”15 Four years later, with the nation still lacking an antilynching law, she picked up the challenge again in a public way. When the Washington Post wrote an editorial condemning lynching, Eleanor used her column to urge people to read it. Referring to “mass murder” and “mob violence,” she argued that “we can not be trusted to deal justly with the rest of the world if we do not deal justly at home.”16
Alice might have excelled in the gamesmanship of legislation—wooing the fence-sitters, building and toppling alliances, bartering for and counting votes—but Eleanor never enjoyed playing games. Yet like any good Roosevelt, she didn’t like to lose either. So to get what she wanted on the race question, she resorted to her version of passive-aggressive political hardball. It started in November 1938, when she attended the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. The organizers had chosen Birmingham precisely because it sat in the belly of the segregation beast, the beast being the rabidly racist Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor. Eleanor, who was known to cut off any conversation in mid-sentence to avoid being late to her next appointment, intentionally arrived at the first session a few minutes after it was called to order. Without having to follow the crowd or the ushers, she was in a position to select her own seat—in the Negro section. It wasn’t long before a Birmingham police officer tapped the First Lady on the shoulder. “I was told that I could not sit on the colored side,” she wrote in her My Day column. “Rather than give in, I asked that chairs be placed for us with the speakers facing the whole group.”17 Coverage in the local press was predictably scathing.
Yet Birmingham turned out to be just a warning shot. In January 1939, Howard University had applied to use Washington’s Constitution Hall for a concert by the world-famous contralto Marian Anderson. Anderson would ultimately become the first black woman to perform with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and she was as renowned for her determination as she was for her voice. A few years earlier, she had been scheduled to make her Carnegie Hall debut; the day before her concert she fell and broke her ankle. She showed up at Carnegie as planned, singing her entire piece standing on her one good leg and braced against the piano for support.
She would need that steeliness for the Constitution Hall booking. The hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a prestigious, social-patriotic organization made up of women who could trace their families to the Revolutionary War era.18 The DAR also had a clause written into every contract to perform at Constitution Hall: “Concerts by white artists only.”19 That kind of door-slamming insult was hardly out of the ordinary in America’s largely segregated capital. Washington had long acted like a southern city despite its lack of magnolia trees, decent cuisine, or enchanting accents. (As President Kennedy would later say, Washington was a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.) But Eleanor detested the idea that the past should dictate a person’s destiny—or the destiny of an entire people. Because each First Lady was made an honorary member of the DAR, she was in a position to play the flamethrower, albeit in typically unassuming fashion. In her February 27 My Day column, which began with ruminations about the weather, friends’ vacation plans, and a plea to save the redwoods in Yosemite, she slipped in a comment about ditching the DAR—without ever using the organization’s name:
I have been debating in my mind for some time, a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life. Usually I have decided differently from the way in which I am deciding now. The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past, when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed in until I had at least made a fight and had been defeated. Even then, I have, as a rule, accepted my defeat and decided I was wrong or, perhaps, a little too far ahead of the thinking of the majority at that time. I have often found that the thing in which I was interested was done some years later. But, in this case, I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked of in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.20
At a press conference the next day, the reporters demanded to know if the organization she referred to in her column was the DAR and if the action she disapproved of had anything to do with Marian Anderson. In true Washington fashion, Eleanor neither confirmed nor denied anything, insisting
that it was the unnamed organization’s prerogative to announce changes in its membership. Of course, her coyness led to even more press coverage; she wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite niece for nothing. The letter she wrote to the DAR, however, was anything but coy: “I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist. You have set an example which seems to me unfortunate, and I feel obliged to send in to you my resignation. You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”21
Eleanor knew that this wasn’t just a battle. It was a war, and she kept right on fighting with gestures grand and subtle. She maneuvered behind the scenes with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to facilitate another concert for Anderson, this one at the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall. On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, it was Eleanor’s friend, political ally, and singing teapot veteran Caroline O’Day who escorted Anderson to the microphones, where she performed to an integrated audience of more than seventy-five thousand people. The audience at home was even bigger, perhaps in the millions, thanks in part to the pressure Eleanor put on the radio networks that carried her popular talk show to broadcast the Anderson concert live.
Eleanor still wasn’t finished. Less than two weeks later, on April 21, came the long-scheduled DAR reception at the White House, a tradition since the late 1890s. Even though the First Lady was no longer a member, the White House graciously opened its doors to the more than seventeen hundred DAR delegates who arrived for tea and finger sandwiches. At the head of the long reception line, the grandes dames were greeted cheerfully by Mrs. Garner, the wife of the vice president, and several of the wives of cabinet secretaries—but not by Eleanor. She had conveniently headed to Seattle for a few days to visit her daughter, Anna.
In June 1939, not long after the Easter Day concert on the mall, the First Lady invited Anderson to perform at another landmark occasion: a visit from the king and queen of the United Kingdom. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were the first reigning British monarchs to visit their former colony. George hoped that his trip would humanize the royals and help encourage Americans to abandon their isolationism as Europe slipped closer to war. President Roosevelt and his Wilsonian wife were more than happy to join the charge; Eleanor was so eager to help recast the royals as just folks she picked a food fight of international proportions. Even more daunting, she took on her own mother-in-law.
It was an oppressively humid ninety-four degrees on the day King George and Queen Elizabeth arrived at Washington’s Union Station, and it didn’t help that the major public event of their stay was a fifteen-hundred-person garden party at the home of the British ambassador, Ronald Lindsay. A-list Washington hadn’t pined for a social event this badly since Alice’s wedding in 1906. Competition for an invitation to the Lindsay party was fierce, given that it was the politicians’ wives who did most of the angling with the hostess, Lady Lindsay. “Ladies, my head is bloodied but unbowed,” she said when asked about the danger of leaving some prominent people, such as the Republican leader of the Senate, off the list while including the likes of the labor leader John L. Lewis, an avowed FDR foe. Alice, however, had no problem making the cut. Lady Lindsay was born Elizabeth Hoyt of Oyster Bay, New York. The Hoyts’ Long Island estate was just down the road from Sagamore Hill, and Elizabeth was a regular playmate and lifelong friend of both Alice’s and Eleanor’s. Naturally, Alice managed to repress her own indignant isolationism in order to be among the ne plus ultra to meet the royal couple. She even chatted alone for a few minutes with Queen Elizabeth. She did not, however, curtsy.
The biggest diplomatic kerfuffle of the royal visit unspooled a few days later, when the First Couple and the royal couple repaired for a few relatively quiet days to Hyde Park. As Eleanor herself noted repeatedly throughout her life, Springwood was never really her home. It belonged to Franklin—and to his mother. Sara, in fact, was the official “hostess” to the king and queen, and she had firm ideas about how they should be received. When the couples gathered before their first formal dinner at Hyde Park, the president pulled the king aside and gave him some bad news. “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea,” Franklin said. The king replied, “My mother would have said the same thing, but I would prefer a cocktail.” At which point Franklin mixed the martinis.22
Franklin’s mother didn’t approve of the menu for the next day’s lunch, either. When the White House announced that the First Lady was planning a good old American picnic for the royals complete with beer and hot dogs served on paper plates, the old guard was outraged. “Oh dear, oh dear, so many people are worried that ‘the dignity of our country will be imperiled’ by inviting royalty to a picnic, particularly a hot dog picnic,” Eleanor wrote in her column about a week before the royal visit. She made a point of singling out one woman whose knickers had been especially twisted by the very idea: “My mother-in-law has sent me a letter she received, which begs that she control me in some way and, in order to spare my feelings, she has only written a little message on the back: ‘Only one of many such.’ ”23 It was a sign of Eleanor’s growth that she not only felt confident enough to tweak Sara’s pride in public; she also served the hot dogs—and to great success (though the queen still insisted on eating hers with a knife and fork). Alice, who was usually first in line to scramble the expectations of polite society, was still smarting years later at Eleanor’s hot-dog-diplomacy triumph. In 1961, when the Kennedys threw their own outdoor shindig (for the Pakistani president), Jackie had the decor designed by Tiffany and served mint juleps, crab and chicken, and strawberries and cream. When Alice arrived and had surveyed the landscape, she walked up to the Republican senator Everett Dirksen and announced, “Humph! This certainly beats the hot dog parties that FDR used to give at Hyde Park!”24
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Alice, being Alice, had her own battles to fight in the years leading up to the war. The most public feud—beyond the skirmishes with Franklin and Eleanor and their politics—was with Alexander Woollcott, the critic, commentator, and sometime actor. The Oyster Bay Roosevelts were an unusually literate family. They spent many an afternoon or evening reading and reciting poetry, much as families today gather around the television. TR would think nothing of dashing off a fan letter to Edna Ferber or chatting about his favorite Icelandic author with a random White House visitor. Writers ultimately filled a significant part of the family’s social circle: Rudyard Kipling, Owen Wister, Will Rogers, and Booth Tarkington were all regular correspondents or dinner guests within the larger Roosevelt clan. It was Ted junior, while working as a vice president at Doubleday in the late 1930s, who befriended Woollcott. Aleck shared the family’s quick and caustic humor, their obsession with politics, and of course their love of all things literary, right down to the revolving series of nicknames he used to address his letters to them: “Dear Mistress Quickly” he wrote to Ted’s Eleanor, in a letter that he signed “Wackford Squeers.”25 (Quickly is an innkeeper who turns up in four Shakespeare plays; Squeers is the brutal headmaster in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.) Woollcott even talked Ted and Alice into editing an anthology of underappreciated poetry, The Desk Drawer Anthology, based on submissions from the listeners of his popular radio show, Town Crier. Ted junior sent a copy to cousin Eleanor for Christmas in 1937, and she gave it a nice plug in My Day. “No two people I know of are better fitted to do a book of this kind. They were brought up on poetry, for Uncle Ted and all his family loved to read and recite it. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his sister must have heard every variety, both classical and non-classical, from their earliest youth. I don’t remember much about Ted’s memory, but I have always regarded Alice’s with awe, for she could recite a long poem after reading it over once.”26
The fact that the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and Woollcott stood on opposite sides of the Democratic-Republican divide didn’t seem to matter tremendously, especially when another Roosevelt cousin, the politically a
mbidextrous columnist Joe Alsop, joined their circle. Woollcott had great fun needling Alice on her political views, such as the time when he told his radio listeners about their $100 wager on the 1940 election: “The lovely Alice Longworth was so incautious as to make an election bet with me. Her check has just arrived with the suggestion that I give it to my favorite charity. I shall. It may console her to know that the entire sum will be devoted to providing food, clothing, shelter and medical attention for a poor broken-down old newspaperman named Alexander Woollcott.”27 Alice enjoyed a good sparring match as much as anyone, and Woollcott was perhaps the only person alive who could match her slashing wit. “I am a creature of shame for not having thanked you weeks ago for your check,” she wrote to him on another occasion. “We owe a number of small vacation extravagances to you—and to Franklin—and of course to Czolgosz.*3 If I find myself within motoring distance of your island I might send you a wire and stop off for a meal, if it were convenient for you. Though possibly it were better for us not to meet until after the election.”28
Woollcott could manage being away from Alice; he had an abundance of Roosevelts at his disposal. About the same time that he, Alice, and Ted junior grew close, Aleck began cozying up to the Hyde Park side of the family. The attraction was largely toward FDR, but the president couldn’t spare much time for Woollcott, so he turned his attention to Eleanor. He didn’t have the same kind of intellectually symbiotic friendship with her that he shared with Alice. When Woollcott insisted that she see Thornton Wilder’s landmark play Our Town right after it opened on Broadway in 1938, the First Lady admitted that she was unimpressed. “When you come right down to it,” she wrote to him, “I missed the scenery.”29 But he doted on her, cultivated her, and ultimately came to adore her. “Mrs. Roosevelt is the greatest woman alive,” Woollcott once told Booth Tarkington, “and if she came into this room, we all ought to get down on our knees before her.”30 Eleanor tolerated the manic brilliance that seemed to swirl around Aleck like a dust storm, and he seemed to know just how far he could push her. Early in their friendship, he invited Eleanor to tea at his suite in New York’s Gotham Hotel. When Woollcott’s buddies Harpo Marx and Charlie Lederer (who co-wrote the screenplays for His Girl Friday and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) got wind of his esteemed guest, they asked if they could drop by to meet her. Aleck said no. Marx and Lederer weren’t about to give up that easily, so they headed to a nearby sporting goods store, bought a croquet set, and assembled it in the hallway outside Woollcott’s room, banging the ball into his door over and over again—all under the watchful eye of the First Lady’s secret serviceman. Woollcott tried to ignore the commotion, but when Eleanor suggested he investigate, he had no choice. Woollcott opened the door and discovered his two pals standing there, mallets in hand amid the detritus of their makeshift game. “Is it someone for you, Aleck?” Eleanor bellowed. “There is no one here,” he replied, barely swallowing his rage, “absolutely no one.” And with that he slammed the door in the men’s faces.31
