Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER rejected that view, since in war there were no final victories, as the fate of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 plainly revealed to the citizens of 1939. She counseled, therefore, “a change in the whole make up of man. Instead of a desire to acquire something for himself or his particular group, he must become a cooperative animal, one who is willing to share what he knows, and what he has, with other human beings around the world.” In her first truly global essay, she argued that such a “tall order” required a fundamental change in our value system and “a long period of education.” People needed to have more to live for than to die for. They must sense that all human beings have a stake in the condition of all other human beings. We must change “the way we measure success.” If, for example, great new medical discoveries were “given to the world for the benefit of humanity,” and were not restricted “for the use of a few,” then “our world would begin to change.”

  The new motion picture industry showed potential, she suggested—it could lead the way to a worldwide education campaign, raising awareness about economic conditions around the globe. Americans must realize that their country was part of an interdependent world, “no matter how hard we try to keep our eyes turned inward on ourselves alone.”

  In her personal life, while she and Hick remained close, much of the romance had gone out of their relationship. Hick wrote on 15 February, “Your valentine came last night dear. And I loved it. I completely forgot Saint Valentine this year!” Perhaps her forgetfulness involved finances. Listing her household expenditures in four detailed budgets that enumerated her income and outlay to the penny, Hick explained that she had no extra money at all. She acknowledged that she might seem self-indulgent, but she was in debt to her three luxuries: the Little House (the house she was renting in Mastic from Bill Dana), her new car, and her beloved dog, Prinz.

  When ER questioned her debts and suggested she use her salary raise to finance her new car, Hick, in a short-lived regression, waxed positively suicidal. She acknowledged that it was “silly” and even “insane—really—for a woman of forty-five . . . without a cent in the world . . . to hang on to these three luxuries.” But they meant everything to her; in fact they defined her being.

  Living—just going on living—simply doesn’t mean a God damned thing to me, dear. I’m being perfectly honest when I say I’ll be relieved when it’s over, provided the actual ending isn’t too painful. You are always horrified when I say that I wish it had happened when I had that automobile accident out in Arizona. But I still do. I’d have died happy, as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.

  Rather than respond to Hick’s aggressive, self-indulgent letter, ER’s attitude was to try to do everything possible to help her. She lent her money for the new car and sent her extravagant and useful presents. Her generosity was unlimited: “Please take the 100 for your birthday. I really can give it without feeling it—I don’t want you to worry about returning any of it!”

  Hick was grateful but felt guilty. “I’ll not even pretend that I didn’t get a kick out of the raincoat. Of course you shouldn’t have done it, and I hope you didn’t pay too much for it. But I’m suspicious. ‘Made in England for Abercrombie & Fitch’ hardly sounds cheap. Well—it’s a grand raincoat.”

  She did what she could to return ER’s generosity. “I’m getting two more books of tickets [for the World’s Fair] for you and having them sent to the apartment, since you say they are for Hall.”

  As Hick’s good work for fair publicity and arrangements mounted and were fully appreciated, her depression abated. “Things are a little better with me. . . . You’ll never believe it, dear, but I heard myself described the other day as ‘a human dynamo’! If I’m a human dynamo, my dear, how would one describe you?”

  While ER was in Seattle to be with Anna for the birth of her newest grandson, Johnnie Boettiger, her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote an essay that asked, “Where do we go from here?” which inspired ER to address America’s 1939 graduates in an article. All high school and college graduates faced an era of unprecedented peril and danger. It was, she wrote, also a time of unlimited opportunity and adventure—entirely new frontiers and resources to develop.

  New Deal critics to the contrary, great hydroelectric projects were not mere instances of “government extravagance.” They represented, rather, “magnificent achievements” that looked far into the future toward development and planned growth. But she cautioned against waste and urged Americans to consider conservation: “You cannot drain the strength from your land by planting only one crop. You cannot let the top soil run away with the spring rains, or the floods which your lack of care for your forests has brought about. You young people must have the courage to take hold of your country, conserve it physically and own it for yourselves. It must not be owned by financial interests. It must not be owned by politicians.”

  ER emphasized the “need for housing, decent housing in which children can grow up healthily. In our haste we have been wasteful of our human resources.” Now urgent changes were required: “It is costing us more to bring up children in surroundings which breed criminals, drug addicts, victims of tuberculosis, of venereal disease, of heart disease, than it would cost us to set ourselves squarely to the task of wiping out these mistakes on a long range, planned, basis.”

  The graduates of 1939, she wrote, should dismiss the notion that experts had all the answers. People in every community understood their situations and needed to solve their problems democratically and directly. She was especially contemptuous of business and financial interests that sought to reduce taxes, allegedly to stimulate industry and business. She rejected what is now called “trickle-down economics” and insisted that “the freeing of certain timid capital by a change in certain tax laws” was insufficient. Instead, she called upon young people to organize new political movements for real societal and economic change: “You have to set a new standard of values.”

  The call to a new standard was just a beginning. Full employment, real skills, decent housing, guaranteed pensions for all old people, and “medical care which every family needs” were necessities, as was “recreation which is part of life when lived in a normal way.” Through her article, she set forth both challenges and new agendas for America’s youth and asked them to consider inequality at home.

  These were critical, death-dealing times. Lynchings in the South had increased in number since 1936. State terrorism—burning, looting, torture—was on the rise. Race hatred and brutality underlay the international epidemic of brownshirts and white sheets. The causes of violence needed to be addressed: “War will not be averted by a passive attitude which is afraid to make any decision for fear of offending other people. You cannot just sit and talk about it, you have to do something!”

  ER had great faith in the vision of the organized youth movement. She defended its radicalism even while she deplored the Communist leanings of some young people. It was possible, she believed, to forge a radical vision within the democratic mandate of American history and theory. But democracy worked only when every individual assumed the burden of responsible citizenship.

  In conclusion, she said that graduates were right to ask her for “one concrete thing you might do to start you out at once on your program as citizens.” The Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps were the essence of a caring democracy at work. Those who dismissed these agencies as too costly or too radical were foolhardy—they paid for themselves over and over in opportunity, services, and hope. ER even suggested that every young person be asked to give a year of her or his life to national service. That way, “at the end of the year, [volunteers] will all know something of their nation” and be better prepared to fight national disasters—floods, fires, medical emergencies, even war.

  In closing, she hailed the graduates, whom she called “explorers who must now harrow where your forefathers plowed.” Her c
all for a national peacetime draft shocked many, but she insisted that raw individualism did nothing for democracy. Her idea would build an understanding of the nation’s needs and provide the privileges and benefits of training, skills, and service. Many dismissed such solutions as fascistic or communistic. But for ER, a year of service was merely patriotic.

  The 1939 New York World’s Fair, with its theme “The World of Tomorrow,” celebrated extraordinary achievements in science and technology, architecture and culture. High-speed technology was not just for creating faster bomber planes but could also be used for developing innovative communications—international telephone service, advanced radio reception, and something called television. The fair was meant in part to internationalize America’s vision for the future—instant communication, global tourism, and peaceful human connectedness. ER considered it a splendid educational demonstration of alternative uses for humanity’s brilliance.

  Festive and inspiring, amazing and popular, the fair was built on twelve hundred acres of recycled wasteland in Flushing Meadows. Everything about it was grand and utopian. A seven-hundred-foot tower called a Trylon was connected to a two-hundred-foot globe, called the Perisphere, by a giant escalator called Helicline. By riding halfway up the Trylon, one entered the Perisphere to view urban and rural American neighborhoods of the future, called Democracity. Fifty-eight nations and thirty states had their own pavilions.

  Hick, whose work on the fair had occupied her for three years, regularly reported to ER with enthusiasm:

  Do you know, my dear, I think there are going to be several things at this Fair you will like very much. . . . Last night, for the first time really, I got out around the grounds and saw this place. They had it fully lighted. . . . It is very, very beautiful dear. The big white globe looks like a giant, transparent iridescent soap bubble! . . . And the colors and the reflections in the pools—gorgeous! I was very much thrilled.

  The fair officially opened on Sunday, 30 April, the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s first presidential inauguration in New York City. FDR arrived to give the opening speech. He was accompanied to the dais by his mother, as well as by Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who had just spent two nights with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park.

  Minutes later ER made a grand entrance “in a costume of printed silk whose motif was the Perisphere and Trylon. . . . The tiny printed pattern was in white against a background of luggage tan and was designed by her niece, Eleanor Roosevelt 2nd.” The first lady invited notable women leaders to join her on the receiving line, including Senator Hattie Caraway (D-AR), Representative Mary Norton (D-NJ), Ellen Woodward of the Social Security Board, and her cherished friend Isabella Greenway, a former Arizona member of Congress.

  Making his first public statement since Hitler mocked his plea for peace, FDR said he opened the fair “as a symbol of peace.” He dedicated his speech to the Four Freedoms that defined America: “freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly.”

  He acknowledged the nation’s failures, including the “unhappy trial” of Prohibition and the Civil War. But the United States had “ended the practice of slavery,” he observed, and “made our practice of government more direct, including the extension of the franchise to the women of the nation.” And in recent years “the people of every part of our land acquired a national solidarity of economic and social thought such as had never been seen before.”

  Despite current racial conflicts, he asserted, America’s good fortune was due to its form of government—and “to a spirit of wise tolerance which, with few exceptions, has been our American rule. We in the United States . . . remember that our populations stem from many races and kindreds and tongues.”

  Acknowledging the “gesture of friendship and goodwill” that so many nations had made by their presence, their messages, and their grand exhibits, the president noted that the wagon of America “is still hitched to a star,” the star of “friendship . . . of progress for mankind . . . of greater happiness and less hardship, a star of international goodwill, and, above all, a star of peace. . . . And so, my friends . . . I declare the New York World’s Fair of 1939 open to all mankind.”

  FDR’s speech was the first to be televised. With his words, television made “its formal bow.” The ceremony was beamed to an audience at Radio City Music Hall, and to the fair on twelve television receivers at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) pavilion. The transmission “was flashed eight miles to the Empire State Building and back again to Flushing on ultra-short waves.” Television receivers would go on sale in New York stores the next day. According to the New York Times, 30 April 1939 would go down in history with “the same significance as 2 November 1910,” when radio broadcasts began.

  After the speech, the Roosevelts had little time to visit any of the sights, since they had to return upstate immediately. Another set of royal guests, Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Ingrid of Denmark, were to spend the night at Hyde Park. Genuinely enchanted by the fair, ER would return as often as possible. She would bring her grandchildren, family groups, and various guests, and host a large group in honor of Marian Anderson’s Freedom Concert at the fair.

  Chapter Three

  Tea and Hot Dogs: The Royal Visit

  From January to June, Congress passed only one piece of significant legislation: the Rearmament Act, a multimillion-dollar military appropriations bill. The rearmament program called for urgent air, sea, and land defenses; new heavy and light artillery; gas masks, flight training, and thousands of new airplanes. FDR achieved cross-sectional support for this legislation. ER supported the act, believing that a fortified nation is a protected nation.

  Her friends in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, however, believed that weapons-building programs encouraged war and criticized her for it. ER explained that given the European situation, “I should think we would all of us realize that there are times when an adequate defense enables us to preserve a just peace,” while “an inadequate defense obliges one to accept injustices [and compels] future insecurity.”

  Indeed, since the defeat of Spain’s democratically elected Loyalists and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia, an entirely new era had emerged, demanding entirely new responses. “Each American family must snap out of its secure little circle and face stirring problems at home and abroad,” she told an audience. “The price of keeping our personal liberty is that we shall have to think for ourselves. We are going to have to be willing to face many situations that we have never been willing to face before.”

  Still, as she and FDR had consistently argued, rearmament represented only part of America’s defense needs. That spring of 1939 she was particularly dismayed by the stalled effort to democratize, and actually integrate racially, the Social Security Act of 1935—specifically, to include all the still-uncovered farmworkers, domestic workers, government workers, and employees of “private non-profit religious, charitable and educational institutions.” Indeed, all efforts to fortify New Deal programs concerning health, education, housing, and jobs were stalled in a climate of political acrimony, which included white supremacist bluster.

  Americans had to be secure against the ravages of poverty, sickness, and old age. The Social Security Board itself had recommended increases in old-age benefits and a new “triangle tax to be borne equally by employer, employee and government”; that “federal grants for aid to dependent children be raised to the level of those for the aged and the blind”; and that unemployment coverage be extended. All spring, in her lectures and writings, ER supported these urgent recommendations.

  While FDR increasingly concentrated on the international situation, ER attended to the nasty backlash against her husband and the New Deal. She specifically campaigned for Senator Robert Wagner’s public health bill, drafted after years of research with the involvement of her closest allies in the American Foundation led by Esther
Lape. FDR agreed that “the health of the people is a public concern,” but little was done.

  Wagner’s bill called for the restoration of the old Sheppard-Towner grants for maternal infant and child health services;* medical services for handicapped children; improved public health services nationwide, including federal grants to states for dental services; and construction of general, mental, and tuberculosis hospitals. The bill would ensure “all services and supplies necessary for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of illness and disability” state by state.

  ER also worked vigorously for the Harrison-Thomas bill to provide federal aid for education—including grade and high schools, adult education, junior colleges, special education for the handicapped, rural library services—and for children “on federal reservations and at foreign stations.”

  Above all, she championed Senator Wagner’s 1939 urban renewal bill, which sought to provide funds for slum clearance and low-rent housing construction. She saw it as an extension of her own work in the creation of Arthurdale, West Virginia, in 1934—now one of twenty-nine American communities administered by the Farm Security Administration. She considered the creation of affordable homes for America’s industrial and farmworkers among the New Deal’s greatest triumphs. Senator Wagner had a devoted supporter in ER when he said, “Of all the programs for the rehabilitation of our people and the development of our physical resources there is none which has a smaller effect upon the national debt and which yields a larger return in economic benefits and human welfare than the housing program.”

  ER’s crusade for enhancing “the human side of government” was fueled by the unemployment crisis. Congress’s stingy attitude toward the WPA, especially toward its training and work, education, and arts programs, seemed horrifying when over ten million people were still unemployed. In one city alone, four thousand women applied for twelve civil service positions that paid a modest annual salary. In the face of such demonstrable need, ER wondered, how could elected leaders be so shortsighted and actually cruel?