Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  21 July 2016

  Introduction

  “Lady Great Heart”

  Admired and beloved, scorned and reviled, influential, controversial, and timeless, Eleanor Roosevelt changed history. As first lady in wartime, she insisted on civil rights, liberty, democracy, and economic security for all. While President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was obligated to southern Democrats for support against mostly isolationist Republicans, and therefore needed to juggle, he allowed his wife a measure of independence regarding domestic issues. As educator, journalist, and prescient activist/public citizen, ER had a profound and enduring impact. She was a democratic socialist, or social democrat, who believed all change required a vigorous, informed, popular movement. She and her allies introduced the debates that offered hope for the future then and that still do today, as struggles for peace and freedom, democracy and justice, dignity and human rights continue worldwide.

  She crossed class and race divides, built bridges and forged remarkable friendships. The playwright, journalist, and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce noted that ER was among the world’s “best loved women” for many reasons, but above all: “No woman has ever so comforted the distressed—or distressed the comfortable.” The African-American poet, activist, teacher, and priest Dr. Pauli Murray, called a “Firebrand” by ER, was inspired by their friendship and described how ER modeled what women could do. ER, she wrote, was not only “the First Lady of the World . . . she was also the Mother of the Women’s Revolution.”

  Everywhere she went, ER offered hope. Her interest and concern empowered impoverished communities and healed the wounded. Tell me, she asked, what do you want, what do you need? She traveled to war zones as cannons blazed and bombs fell, visited hospitals in every state and factories and mines both at home and abroad. She identified with, and worked especially for, people in want, in need, in trouble.

  In the miseries of those in pain or in need, she saw the sufferings of her own parents and sought to alleviate them. Forever hurt by her mother’s disregard, ER remained devoted to an illusory, alcoholic father. Her mother died at twenty-nine, when Eleanor was eight; her father died two years later at thirty-four. During these solemn years she lived with her grandmother and her difficult uncles and aunts. ER remained forever haunted by the ravages of alcoholism, a family disease.

  At fifteen, she was released from her gloomy lonely childhood when she embarked on a three-year journey of study and travel under the tutelage of Marie Souvestre, brilliant headmistress of the Allenswood Academy in England. Souvestre recognized her many talents, and she experienced “attention and admiration” for the first time: “Attention and admiration were the things throughout all my childhood that I most wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration!”

  Her mother called her “Granny” when she was six and told her that since she was so “plain,” she had best develop “manners.” ER was haunted by those words of shame. But at Allenswood she learned self-worth, and it changed her life. French-speaking upon arrival, she was an ardent student and was encouraged to be creative, independent, and bold. She was a popular leader among her classmates and Marie Souvestre’s special favorite, and her confidence grew and her eager spirit flourished. She excelled at music and became proficient at playing the piano and violin. She quickly demonstrated her gift for languages by mastering German and Italian. She danced and played games and enjoyed sports and competition. To the end of her life, she credited her years at Allenswood with her sense of social responsibility and political activism, highlighted by the cultured cosmopolitan teachings of Marie Souvestre: “Whatever I have become since had its seed in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and a strong personality.”

  Educators open doors, reveal paths to creativity, and inspire their students to reach for the best in themselves. After a lifetime of creativity and achievement, ER affirmed that “the happiest day of my life was the day I made the first field hockey team at Allenswood School.” Marie Souvestre had recognized ER’s profound gifts, encouraged her talents, and forever emboldened her quest for independence, competition, and a life of endless learning, passionate intensity, and surprising romance.

  ER’s deepest affiliations were with people, those she met across the country and around the world. Her great friend Lady Stella Reading, who became director of the Women’s Voluntary Service in wartime London, observed most clearly that “Eleanor Roosevelt cares first and always for people.” They are her “interest . . . her hobby . . . her preoccupation . . . her every thought is for human beings. . . . I believe that the basis of all her strength is in her profound interest in them and her readiness to share with them the agony of experience and the fulfillment of destiny.”

  She responded to public acclaim with self-deprecating humility. In 1939 more than a thousand activists and educators she admired honored her at New York’s Hotel Astor as an “apostle of good-will” whose wisdom helped “resolve the maladjustments in the social order.” Journalist Dorothy Thompson said “few people received universal admiration, and virtually nobody universal affection. . . . I doubt if any woman in the whole world is so beloved.” ER was grateful but bewildered. After all, she responded, she did nothing extraordinary, just what came to hand. Anyone would have done what she had done, she claimed, “given the opportunity.” Her modesty was an abiding quality. Indeed, her humility seemed to grow in proportion to the attention she received.

  ER’s profound love of people, and for the world, was fortified by cherished friendships. While she accepted Marie Souvestre’s mantra “Never be bored, and you will never be boring,” she was easily bored and often impatient. Although loyal to those she loved, she was always open to promising new relationships. Over time, her life filled with several unusual romances.

  ER returned to New York at eighteen, to “come out” into society—and in 1905, at twenty, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Their marriage, forged by love, was maintained by shared visions and political goals. To appreciate ER’s public life and many contributions, it is necessary to reconsider her formative years, which enabled her to conquer the loneliness she experienced during her childhood and the early years of her marriage. In 1918, stunned by evidence of her husband’s betrayal with her friend and social secretary Lucy Mercer, ER confronted depression, rejected suicide, and determined to live fully, with ardor and purpose. Her marriage became a generous partnership—mutually supportive, respectful, and affectionate.

  Although ER never wrote the truth about her heart and erased Lucy Mercer and her husband’s subsequent infidelities from the public record, we know that over the decades she escorted all her friends to a sheltered green holly grove to view the statue in Rock Creek Cemetery she called Grief. Commissioned by Henry Adams, that sanctuary of mourning and resistance had been created by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to honor Adams’s late wife Marian Hooper Adams, known as Clover. A pioneering woman photographer, linguist, and learned “bluestocking,” Clover was a gracious and popular hostess whose translations and research were important to Henry Adams’s early histories. He never credited her work, and forbade the sale of her acclaimed portraits when they were to be published. When she learned of Henry’s affair with her friend Elizabeth Cameron in 1885, she committed suicide by drinking photographic (prussic) acid.

  For hours on end, alone and in despair, ER sat upon the stone benches, designed by Stanford White, to face that hooded robed figure and consider the lives of women. She felt connected to generations of Washington wives who had so much to contribute but who were so routinely ignored, belittled, and humiliated. In the quiet of that holly grove, ER moved beyond pain and suicide. She was thirty-five, and her five children ranged in age from three to thirteen. She did not want them to suffer the cold embrace of her own mother’s legacy and was determined to move beyond her frozen gloom. Her mentors offered exam
ples of courage, understanding, and strength. There were alternative roads to hope, love, and forgiveness. She would forgive, but she would never forget. On her desk ER kept a copy of the poem Cecil Spring-Rice had written about the bronze statue she visited repeatedly over the years. It was among her bedside papers at her death:

  O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes

  Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!

  O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down

  Upon a world of passion and of lies!

  Restored by her contemplations of grief, ER forged with FDR one of history’s most powerful and enduring partnerships. She understood his needs, forgave his transgressions, buried her jealousies, and embarked on her own independent career. She left the role of dutiful, submissive wife at the altar of Grief in Rock Creek Cemetery. She became an activist, journalist, radio commentator, and teacher, a woman with power who enjoyed manipulating power. FDR encouraged her independence and when he silenced her did so for reasons of state. Unfortunately, as World War II progressed, many reasons of state emerged—generally regarding issues of race and rescue about which ER cared profoundly, a primary theme of this volume.

  Inspired by Marie Souvestre, ER became a great teacher and prolific writer, dedicated to continual learning and adventure. Indeed she identified herself as an adventurer. In 1960, she wrote:

  Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. . . . And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

  You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it . . . if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.

  My own life has been crowded with activity and, best of all, with people. I have seen them wrest victory from defeat; I have seen them conquer fear and come out strong and free. . . .

  I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself. . . . In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

  ER’s life as an adventurer was enhanced by her partnership with FDR, and strengthened by her intimate circle of friends, who during the 1920s helped forge her public career and remained her primary and most trusted support network. Esther Lape, a scholar, activist, and director of the American Foundation who fought for the World Court, and her life partner, the international lawyer Elizabeth Read, were ER’s mentors and life-long confidantes. She trusted them, and her traveling companion and secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, above all. Tommy, born in the Bronx, a stenographer with a grand sense of humor, became ER’s personal secretary in 1928. Dedicated to ER, she was brilliant, critical, perceptive, and fun to be with.

  During the 1920s ER was intimate with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. They worked together to build women’s influence in the Democratic Party and created Val-Kill, where they lived. Cook ran the Val-Kill furniture factory and with Caroline O’Day purchased the Todhunter School for Girls, where Dickerman was headmistress and ER was associate principal and most popular teacher. ER was delighted by this friendship until it shattered bitterly in 1938. Tensions and jealousies had intensified as ER’s circle widened. Cook and Dickerman despised Earl Miller, the state trooper whom FDR assigned to protect his “Lady” in 1929 and who became ER’s great companion; and they could not stand the journalist Lorena Hickok, called “Hick,” who was ER’s primary companion after the 1932 election. Hick considered Cook and Dickerman “self-absorbed snobs” and for years refused to visit ER at Val-Kill. In 1938 Nancy Cook verbally assaulted ER with her fantasy that she and Dickerman had “created” ER and were responsible for her public achievements. Although her precise words are unknown, they wrecked the friendship. ER was devastated. The partnership that had sustained Val-Kill, which had once been filled with so much joy and creative energy, was now marked by an icy, emotionally empty divide. It was over. ER moved into what had been the furniture factory, remodeled so that Tommy and her beloved Henry Osthagen also had an apartment there. The school was sold; ER settled money on Cook and Dickerman and expected them to move, which they refused to do until 1947. For many years, toxic tensions at Val-Kill were all that remained of their once creative friendship.

  Disillusioned by her former friends, ER plunged into gloom. Frantic with worry, Tommy telephoned Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to report that ER was depressed, had taken to her bed, refused to see anybody, and simply turned “her face to the wall.” She slowly recovered as her steadies rallied around her. She returned to her work, grateful for her growing circle of friends, and moved on. Cook and Dickerman were invited to major events and family gatherings, but they remained beyond ER’s emotional scope. Always correct and courteous, but forevermore cold and uninterested, every event for them was agony. Tommy wrote to ER’s daughter, Anna, with relief that her mother’s life “is so completely changed she does not need to depend on them for any companionship.”

  While she must have been aware of the jealousies that swirled around every aspect of her life and the rivalries that marked her many friendships, ER never overtly acknowledged them. There were tensions between Hick and Joe Lash; between Trude Pratt Lash and Elinor Morgenthau; and between Joe Lash and ER’s last great friend, the physician Dr. David Gurewitsch. Unpleasant upsets erupted among her children, and eventually Tommy disparaged almost everybody. In correspondence with her only confidantes, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Tommy was often privately critical. Once, when publicly critical, she wrote Trude with remorse about her irate words: certainly ER “has every right to invite anyone she wishes. I am a mean disagreeable old woman and can’t seem to do anything to improve myself.”

  Happily, the live-in steadies of ER’s court—Tommy, Earl Miller, and Hick, her core emotional team in New York and the White House—trusted one another and seemed harmonious whenever they were together. Although their roles were different, and their contributions to ER’s heart and hearth varied, they each put ER’s needs first and promoted her interests. Always the squire, Earl sought to protect his Lady from “chiselers and users.” He personally vetted each new friend, every newcomer to ER’s table.

  Orphaned and homeless at twelve, a wild child of many gifts, Earl Miller had wandered about, a self-creation: boxer, gymnast, and circus acrobat. He played the piano and sang, much as her father had. The most attentive and generous companion of her middle years, he delighted ER. With him she was carefree and frolicsome. Physically, Earl reenergized ER, coached her tennis game, taught her to shoot rifles and pistols, and gave her a chestnut mare named Dot, who became her favorite horse, the one she rode every morning for many years.

  He introduced her to his show business friends, especially the innovative dancer Mayris Chaney, called Tiny, who quickly entered ER’s circle of intimates. In 1943, when ER moved into her Greenwich Village apartment on Washington Square, she refused John Golden’s offer of a piano, noting that she preferred to have Earl’s, “for purely sentimental reasons.”

  There is no doubt that he brought restorative elements—music and athletics—to ER’s life, enhancing her joy in her leisure hours. But the scope of their relationship remains an ongoing mystery because their correspondence has disappeared—we have no diaries, memoirs, or letters for detail and nuance. There are rumors that a vast correspondence was purchased and then destroyed. In 1971 Joe Lash wrote that there were many ER letters to Earl “full of warmth and affection,” but he wrote in 1982 that they “have disappeared.”

  The only other reference to this correspondence is in the 1947 divorce proceedings between Ear
l and his third wife, Simone Miller. After a packet of “endearing” letters was introduced and sealed by the court, Simone was awarded a considerable but undisclosed settlement and custody of their two children, Earl Jr., six, and Anna Eleanor, three. ER was godmother to both children but remained unnamed in the rather sensational divorce. On 13 January 1947 the New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan noted, “Navy Commander’s wife will rock the country if she names the co-respondent in her divorce action!!!”

  Whatever the boundaries of their relationship, it was lifelong—and the subject of controversy and jealousy among ER’s closest friends.

  As for Hick, early in their relationship, she and ER explored their feelings about romantic love and unbridled jealousy. “You are right,” ER once wrote her. “There are only two ways to beat jealousy. One is not to love enough so as not to care if someone gives you less than you thought they might, the other is to love so much that you are happy in their happiness and have no more room for thoughts of yourself, but that is only possible to the old!”

  By 1945, those words defined ER’s feelings about FDR. She even forgave her mean-spirited cousin Laura (Polly) Delano for telling her about Lucy Mercer’s many visits with FDR. ER’s subsequent friendship with Polly, as revealed in William Turner Levy’s celebration of ER, is rather a puzzle. Indeed, the contours and depths of many of ER’s friendships remain incompletely known. She and Broadway producer John Golden met for lunch every week when ER was in New York. The financier Bernard Baruch was also one of her intimates and startled ER when he suggested they marry. She wrote Esther Lape, “Have you heard? Bernie has proposed marriage! Isn’t that controlling!” History awaits a biography of Esther Lape, who devoted her life to movements for world peace and universal health care.