Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  In her press conferences and her columns, she spoke out where others were silent; she spoke bluntly where others punted and parried. She rejected the possibility of isolation, in a dangerous world dominated by brute force and fascist vitriol. Rather, the survival of decency must depend on international cooperation—economic, political, and military alliances. She vigorously defended her husband’s decision to sell planes to France. When former president Herbert Hoover objected that the sale endangered U.S. neutrality, ER bluntly rejected her old ally’s “partisanship.” She was aghast that a former president would criticize her husband’s foreign policy and dismissed Hoover’s remarks as “a tempest in a teapot,” stirred up because the United States allowed a French pilot to test-fly a U.S. plane, “which France quite legally was going to buy. . . . It was an open transaction . . . pure commerce between two friendly nations.”

  Significantly, journalists and opinion makers who had previously trivialized or dismissed her efforts now applauded her commitment. The journalist Charles Hurd wrote a rhapsody to “Rugged Roosevelt Individualists,” a family “both unconventional and unpredictable” that “marries, divorces, makes money and subscribes to no definite rules.” Led by the matriarch and “family catalyst” eighty-four-year-old Sara Delano Roosevelt, the heterodox Roosevelts differed from one another in public and in politics while cherishing their freedom and their family. The article examined their individuality. Anna was compared to Katharine Hepburn: “tall and thin,” she favors “careless clothes,” and her speech is as “direct, as sharply critical.” ER, “the busiest member of the family,” is independent and rule-free. She travels alone and writes what she thinks. She “does not always agree with her husband,” but she is also a dutiful first lady, who fits “her personal routine” to the needs of the White House. “Not even the President,” Hurd concluded, “compares with her in vigor.”

  Surely ER was most surprised when the editors of Time celebrated her positions in the spring of 1939. Owned by Henry Luce, Time had not been kind, or even polite, to the scribbling first lady who had criticized Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women. Partly because Luce’s own antifascist commitment was now so closely in accord with ER’s views, and almost as an apology for previous articles, Time now wrote a panegyric to ER. Datelined 17 April 1939, it asked, “Where is foreign policy made?” According to Time, “a gracious, energetic, long-legged lady” made foreign policy in small, almost unnoticed ways. Agreeing with ER’s commitment to forge an Anglo-American alliance, Time rhapsodized that when Mrs. Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth met,

  one will be looking at the world’s most symbolically important lady, the other at the world’s foremost female political force. Britain’s Queen, whoever she may be, will remain superlative so long as the British commonwealth retains throne and crown. The present first lady of the U.S., on the other hand, is superlative in her own personal right. She is also a woman of unequaled influence in the world, but unlike Cleopatra, the great Elizabeth, Pompadour, or Catherine of Russia, her power is not that of a ruler. She is the wife of a ruler but her power comes from her influence not on him but on public opinion. It is a self-made influence, and, save for a modern counterpart in modern China, unique for any woman to hold.

  Six years ago the tall, restless character who moved into the White House with Franklin Roosevelt was viewed by large portions of the U.S. public with some degree of derision if not alarm. They caricatured her, joked about her, called her “Eleanor Everywhere.” They couldn’t believe that any woman could sincerely embrace the multiplicity of interests which she added to being a wife, mother, and White House hostess.

  Today enough people have met Mrs. Roosevelt, talked with her at close range, checked up on her, to accept her for what she is: the prodigious niece of prodigious, ubiquitous, omnivorous Roosevelt I. They have judged her genuine and direct. Sophisticates who used to scoff, now listen to her. They read with measurable respect her books, magazine articles, daily column which are among the most popular in America with over “four million five hundred thousand total circulation.”

  She confronts controversies, avoids platitudes, and recently challenged “the entire U.S. economic system” (Time, March 6). “I believe in the Social Security Act . . . in the National Youth Administration, never as a fundamental answer. . . . These are stop-gaps. We bought ourselves time to think. . . . There is no use kidding ourselves. We have got to face this problem. . . . This goes down to the roots of whether civilization goes on or civilization dies.”

  Henry Luce’s flagship journal noted approvingly that the first lady was “even more vocal” concerning international relations: “Mrs. Roosevelt is no warmonger. For years she has talked and worked for peace. Four years ago she argued that ‘the war idea is obsolete.’ She hoped humanity would progress to the day there would not be armies, just a world police force.” But she was now convinced “it may be necessary to use the forces of this world in the hope of keeping civilization going until spiritual forces gain sufficient strength everywhere to make an acceptance of disarmament possible.” ER identified isolationism with appeasement and wondered “whether we have decided to hide behind neutrality? It is safe, perhaps, but I am not sure that it is always right to be safe.”

  In short, Mrs. Roosevelt, oracle to millions of housewives, would bring them face to face with Right and Wrong as a world issue. “Not to do so,” she says, “would be, for me, not to live, but to have a sort of oyster-like existence.” If nothing else would preserve Right, she would approve war.

  ER’s public life was devoted to persuasion, a politics of example. She believed in the power of the written word and in the goodwill of most people. She dedicated herself to presenting her messages to the greatest possible audience, in the simplest possible terms. She deplored scholar-politicians whose views might be exemplary but whose words revealed an underlying contempt for the general public.

  As the world hurtled toward war, her commitment to democracy in the fascist era emboldened her in profound and permanent ways. On such critical questions as bigotry, race hatred, anti-Semitism, and the plight of Europe’s refugees, she realized that it was up to her to speak and write precisely what she thought. She could depend on nobody else in her household to advance the issues that increasingly dominated her days.

  Although millions of Americans read ER’s words and were influenced by her integrity, simplicity, and passionate intensity, a well-orchestrated army of detractors assailed every word she wrote. They attacked her both for what she said and for what she did not say. They attacked her for what she wore, how she looked, how she traveled, and what she believed. Politicians and pundits found an endless array of false and fraudulent personal issues upon which to pillory the most outspoken first lady in U.S. history.

  She was attacked for affirming the right to divorce for various reasons, including incompatibility: “Divorce is necessary and right, I believe, when two people find it impossible to live happily together.” In the new context of fascist propaganda and Nazi laws, which sought total authority and control, and the subjugation of women, personal decisions were now political issues. Nazi slogans were crudely specific: Start with “the cradle and the ladle,” and the state can achieve total domination. In Germany, matters of clothing and style, romance, choice, work, and recreation were narrowly defined and closely supervised. Barred from the university and most professions, women were compelled into forced breeding situations for a vast, experimental eugenics program.

  Hitler was as direct about women as he was about Jews. One Nazi propagandist argued that the Enlightenment had generated “the insane dogma of equality” and the “emancipation” of Jews and women. Women must return “to the holy position of servant and maid,” and Jews must be “eliminated.”

  The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped unmarried women of their citizenship and consigned them to an underclass, Staatsangehöriger, a category they shared with Jews, homosexuals, political undesirables, the
crippled and the enfeebled. Among those were the psychopathic and diseased, targeted for final destruction.

  As assaults on women hardened, ER steadily revealed her support for women’s choice and public health services. She had previously acknowledged that “I have been a long time member of the Birth Control League.”* During a 1940 press conference she asserted that she did not oppose family planning and supported “the use of public funds for birth control clinics.” While she had privately contributed to the maintenance of birth control clinics in New York for many years, she concluded that America appreciated diversity, and “I do not wish to impose my views on others.”

  ER’s commitment to birth control led to FDR’s support for it as well. In June 1941 ER was pleased to tell Mary Lasker that—encouraged by the enthusiasm of Ross McIntire, the surgeon general of the navy; the U.S. surgeon general Dr. Thomas Parran; and Katherine Lenroot of the U.S. Children’s Bureau—FDR had agreed to a policy of public information for servicemen and would “get the whole thing moving” despite “certain repercussions from the Catholic Church.”

  But ER also had an ever-growing and appreciative public, which included many liberal Catholics who protested gross and “unfair attacks” against her and supported birth control. Slammed in the Catholic press for her stance on birth control, a professor at Catholic University in Washington wrote, “Like your many other Catholic friends, I regret deeply the impertinence of this editorial, which does not reflect the sentiment of most Catholics. . . . However the lunatic fringe is a bit more vociferous than the rest of the membership.”

  Many, including her children’s friends, noticed ER’s new boldness. Katherine Littell, wife of the assistant attorney general Norman Littell, wrote her friend Anna Roosevelt Boettiger of an evening she had spent at the White House:

  The President was in top form—gay, witty, sparkling, and I remembered what you’d told me of his ability to put harassing cares aside at meal time, and relax. There has never been such a pair in the White House. It seems incredible that one reared as your mother was should have developed into such an incarnation of Social Justice—and that she could make even the most intolerant see her point of view. She is beyond all doubt one of the truly great women of the world. . . . She is unique in her greatness in that she has achieved her place without ever compromising the eternal verities. Where Elizabeth was devious and dissimulating, Catherine the Great under-handed and grossly immoral, Catherine de Medici scheming and inhumanly calculating, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu . . . devilish in her malice.

  Over the winter, even Hick, who had been ER’s toughest and most trusted critic, celebrated her writing skills. “I wonder if you realize how much better your stuff is (at least in my humble opinion) than it was three or four years ago.” Then in March, when asked to comment on an article ER had drafted for Look magazine, she elaborated,

  It is magnificent! Bravo! Again and again. . . . I haven’t a single suggestion to make. . . . My dear—I can’t tell you how proud I am of you! You certainly have found your stride. . . .

  Just for the fun of it, sometime next summer when you may have time, get out some of your earlier stuff, back about 1932 and 1933, and compare it with some of the things you’ve done in recent months. You’ll be amazed, I think. And you’ll understand, too, I think, why I never used to be really satisfied with what you wrote those days—and why I am so darned pleased and so proud of you now.

  Of course, one thing you have developed is a much greater facility in writing—a style, I guess you might call it. And that, my dear, comes only with hard work. You’ve earned it.

  “Conquer Fear and You Will Enjoy Living,” which appeared in Look on 23 May 1939, was a call for personal courage in the battle against bigotry and prejudice. The difference between bravery and cowardice, ER believed, lay in the ability to dominate fear. Once a person conquered fear, it was possible to act boldly in the face of opposition, even defeat or disaster. “Many a soldier has told me that when he came to a crisis all he really wanted to do was to run away from his particular responsibility but in having to think of others, he forgot his own fears and habits of thought and action reasserted themselves.”

  Now there was a need for national courage, so essential to “the growth of a nation.” It “is the individual’s courage which makes the nation’s courage.” She explained, “Our economic troubles today are largely due to our fears. We will not risk our money if we have it because the possible returns are not great enough. . . . If we have a job we dare not help a youngster to learn that job for fear he will do it better than we can and we will be thrown aside. As a nation we hate to give up any little advantage we may have over our neighbors because we cannot see where it would profit us and we dare not be generous.”

  ER specifically deplored the “newly formed patriotic societies” that had embarked on a crusade against everything “foreign.” By waving an American flag and spewing hate, these organizations created an “antagonism to foreign groups in our midst under the guise of proclaiming their allegiance to age old principles of Americanism. Americanism must be flexible to meet the changes of civilization and we should remember our past and not allow ourselves to be carried away by our fears to the point of hysterical so-called patriotism.”

  A rising xenophobia faced refugees and immigrants who sought a haven from fascism. This cruel inhospitality, she wrote, resulted in “grave injustices. . . . Sending home a few hundred thousand aliens will not solve the unemployment problem. We need something more fundamental than that, but our hysteria on this subject is one of the evidences of national fear.”

  Unemployment remained the primary emergency. It “undermines the morale of our people, saps their strength and breaks their spirit. This is the question which should be at least considered today. How do we distribute the gains of modern invention so it benefits all the people?” Instead of facing this challenge, we fling about labels to crush what we fear. “We cry that labor has become communistic . . . we cry that we are on the way to dictatorship.”

  ER’s simple, heartfelt essay was read by millions. In the pages of Look, her message of courage and resistance was accompanied with graphic illustrations of the violence that marked America in 1939: images of state violence and vigilante violence, a Nazi anti-Jewish rally festooned by American flags and swastika banners. There were also images of hope—of WPA projects and Mormon women organizing for community health. The goal was to stir Americans into action to achieve security and dignity for all.

  Surrounded by history and the turbulent past in the White House, Eleanor confided to an audience in Texas that while she worked late at night in her office, which was once Lincoln’s study, she occasionally had “a curious feeling” that she was not alone. Even though she did “not believe in ghosts,” she felt the room get cold, the atmosphere change; odd noises emerged, and she “visualized” Lincoln either pacing about the room or leaning upon the window, “staring out at the Washington landscape meditating on affairs of state.” Her ruminations evoked an appreciative New York Times editorial:

  There is nothing discomforting in this. The White House is built of memories. . . . It will remain a haunted house as long as it stands, but only in the benign sense that unseen presences may still be watching the destiny of the Republic. . . . What American, passing by that great pillared residence, in time of stress, could fail to feel reassured to sense the shadowy figure of Lincoln, just as Mrs. Roosevelt describes him, gazing thoughtfully from a window?

  During the winter and spring of 1939, ER wrote long essays, spoke to countless groups, and traveled continually. In San Antonio, on her thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, she “laughingly admitted at a press conference that she had forgotten” the date; she would “have to add up” to recall the number of years involved. The press noted that she subsequently was “reminded of the anniversary by a telephone call from Washington, presumably from the President.”

  A few days earlier,
in Dallas, Texas governor W. Lee O’Daniel had introduced ER as a faultless person responsible for FDR’s best efforts: “Any good things he may have done during his political career are due to her, and any mistakes he may have made are due to him not taking up the matter with his wife.” ER denied such influence and insisted, “A president’s wife does not see her husband often enough to tell him what to do.”

  Whatever the truth to ER’s denial, by the spring of 1939 she clearly believed she had more influence on public opinion than on her husband. FDR and his advisers conducted their protracted discussions about a third term, for example, entirely without her input. When a young scholar sent ER the transcript of a college debate on FDR’s candidacy, she responded:

  I think my own real objection to a third term is that at the present time it is very bad for a democracy to feel that the ideas they believe in can only be administered by one man. The citizens should feel their individual responsibility. . . . In an era of dictators it seems a pity for us, the greatest democratic nation, to acknowledge that we have no other leader who can carry out the ideas in which the majority of people believe. . . . However, it does not matter very much what I think as I have nothing to say about it.

  War as unavoidable combat and its alternatives continued to preoccupy her. In Photoplay, a movie magazine, she addressed the question: “Why do nations go to war? Why do people let themselves be led into war?” Perhaps, she wrote, it was “greed,” the ambition to dominate, control, and own what belonged to others. People argue that we need war because “man is never satisfied! The whole history of civilization is the history of dissatisfied man.” That argument defends envy and greed and ultimately poses war as creative and good, generating new discoveries, even progress.