Still, during this Easter season, family disasters seemed only to annoy her—and her judgments were harsh. When her daughter-in-law Ethel, Franklin Jr.’s wife, had a hunting accident, ER virtually blamed the victim and launched into a public lecture. The accident “upset us all considerably,” she wrote, and we are “grateful that she was not killed. I suppose one cannot blame the horse, for the ground was still somewhat slippery. . . . I suppose it is a great deal to ask, but I wish that all young married people with children would give up hunting. I know how much fun it must be for them and that they never expect any accident to happen, but to an old and timid person like myself to take risks seems unnecessary.”
Ethel du Pont Roosevelt’s hunting accident surely must have evoked for ER the 1934 tragedy that took Mary Harriman Rumsey’s life—which orphaned her children and deprived ER of her great friend and closest Washington confidante. Still, ER gave structure to her grief in the form of a scolding:
I suppose weeks in bed give us an opportunity for inner growth which nothing else might achieve and so, perhaps, this is one of the ways in which the Lord educates His children. When I was a child, we had an old nurse who used to say whenever anything particularly unfortunate happened to us: “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.” Perhaps it is comforting to feel that whatever happens to us is probably intended to give us a chance for spiritual development.
Neglecting to follow her own advice, ER rode her new horse in Rock Creek Park, despite the fact that it was stormy and “the coldest” Easter week since 1890. She recommended the new film Rebecca, based on Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel and starring Judith Anderson. It was “excellent,” the cast “charming and convincing,” and the subject was close to home—everybody’s home. “They were wise to end the picture so that you can imagine the future will be happier and that Rebecca’s evil influence will finally pass away,” ER concluded on a philosophical note. “Evil influences have a dreadful way, however, of sticking around and one disagreeable person in a family can shadow the present and the future for a long time.”
The subject of ER’s reference is unknown, but it was not her mother-in-law. By this time, SDR was ER’s most abiding ally on issues closest to her heart—racial justice, education, housing, and health care reform. Increasingly, ER admired her intrepid, courageous, hearty way of being. In New York, en route to the second round of her western lecture tour—which would include a stopover to visit Anna and her family in Seattle—ER’s plane was delayed by a storm. She used the extra time to visit SDR, who had also been sick for a week but was “up at last.” As ER arrived, the doctor was telling SDR to rest much more. Her solemn reply was “Why, I do nothing but give up things I want to do!” ER wrote, “Let us hope we all keep that amount of enthusiasm for doing things, it gives zest to life.”
At this time, ER was preoccupied by the problems refugees faced. “These homeless people,” she insisted, “must find shelter somewhere.” The Dominican Republic announced it was considering taking in sixteen hundred Polish refugees.* But the United States was not a welcoming nation. Indeed, senior State Department officials actually sought to dismantle FDR’s Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which FDR angrily resisted. Still, his vision for long-range plans and solutions after the war did not involve action during the war.
ER continued to urge public activity for sanctuary, and during these tense days family visits comforted her. In Seattle, Anna and her grandchildren Eleanor (Sistie), Curtis (Buzzy), and one-year-old Johnny were a source of delight. There was a birthday party and a walk in the woods with Tommy and Anna, featuring new spring flowers along the path. Across the lake stood white-capped mountains. Seattle was a beautiful and serene place, and ER felt refreshed to return to her lecture tour.
Traveling south, ER stayed in her son Jimmy’s Beverly Hills apartment, although he was away on film business. While in California, she asked Tommy to arrange a visit with Mayris “Tiny” Chaney, the dancer whose company ER enjoyed. But Tommy did not approve of Tiny and dreaded ER’s time with her, “with the press stalking her every move.” Tommy could not understand the friendship and wrote to Esther Lape, “I can’t imagine there could be any kind of conversation, except when Tiny unburdens her troubles and Mrs. R seems to have a yen for listening to people’s troubles. . . . If she were my friend, I know Mrs. R would raise her eyebrows at my choice.”
In the same letter Tommy ripped into Hick, who now worked for the Democratic National Committee and lived most of the time in the White House: “Our friend, Hick, is still holed in her room here and I imagine it will take dynamite to blast her out. . . . How does she make a sinecure out of every job she has? How does she convince Mrs. R that she is killing herself with work?”
Tommy’s protective impatience with ER’s deep need to help people she cared about was an ongoing source of static between Tommy and ER’s “pets,” as she called them. While Tommy criticized almost every one of ER’s friends (except Lape and Read), she had become ER’s sole companion during most of her travels.
• • •
The political highlight of ER’s California trip was a tour of migrant camps and quarters with Melvyn and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Hollywood stars and activists for justice, the Douglases were ardent New Dealers outraged by the desperate conditions endured by farm families who had been “tractored out” by mechanization or who had migrated from the dust bowls of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. During the mid-1930s an estimated six thousand Okies poured into California each month, to be met with indifference or contempt.
Their plight was described in John Steinbeck’s powerful novel The Grapes of Wrath, a feat of emotional reportage that stirred people to action. The Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization was formed to press for decent living conditions, expanded Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps, and the creation of a farmworkers’ union to provide migrants with better working conditions and a fair wage. Members of the Steinbeck Committee included Paul Schuster Taylor, a social scientist; his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange; and the great civil libertarian Alexander Meiklejohn and his wife, economist Helen Everett. The chairperson was Helen Gahagan Douglas. The committee worked with Laurence Hewes, regional FSA head, to improve housing and work conditions everywhere. Meanwhile the growers and their allies, Helen Douglas observed, had nothing but hostility and contempt for the “ragged starving people” in their midst. They were very bitter against the New Deal and ER personally.
“DEAR YOU MUST READ GRAPES OF WRATH,” Hick wrote to ER, who did so and joined the movement, supporting all the Steinbeck Committee’s efforts. On the morning of 3 April, ER and the Douglases arrived at the Bakersfield airport, where Laurence Hewes met them, and they set off in two cars for a tour that would permanently influence the first lady’s work. When she “spotted a cluster of makeshift shacks constructed of old boards, tarpaper and tin cans,” she demanded that the driver stop the car, and she walked across the field. Helen Douglas “followed at a trot,” amazed that one of the “bent figures . . . recognized [ER] at once. He greeted her with hand outstretched and a beam on his face. ‘Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt, you’ve come to see us.’” When ER headed toward his shack, he “tried to stop her. ‘Please don’t go in there. . . . My wife and children are sick with the raisins.’” According to Douglas, “migrants called all skin rashes ‘raisins,’” but this was chicken pox. ER insisted that it did not matter, “and in she went.”
The migrant farm families’ homes ranged from unbearable to hopeful. “Squatters pay no rent,” ER wrote, “and may be moved at any time. Private camps are large pieces of land leased by an individual, who then re-leases it into lots about big enough to hold a tent and a car.” Three families who had been driven out of a squatters’ camp into a private camp “all came from Oklahoma and before that . . . a New England village. There were young women with their children and women who looked old before their time.” Yet she also noticed “a universal effo
rt to make life as decent as possible under appallingly difficult circumstances.” For example, in a “narrow strip beside one of the tents, I spied a small flower garden which was evidently tended with loving care. Even the children playing about it [were careful not to harm] this one little effort to bring beauty into drab surroundings.”
ER detailed the costs and the difficulties the migrants faced: a family paid five dollars a month for a lot, got “an electric light in your tent; without it you pay only three dollars. . . . There are two outside toilets for the use of fifty or more families. There are some hydrants from which you may draw water.” The Grapes of Wrath, she told a reporter firmly, had not exaggerated the living and working conditions of the migrant workers.
At the Kern County camp, “the county authorities take some responsibility. The land is free, they put in water and electricity and people are given sites on which to pitch their tents.” But in wet weather, the tents were “deep in mud. Several people yesterday had to change their sites because they were flooded out. Their pitiful belongings were stacked up waiting to be moved. In hot weather, all these camps must be well nigh unbearable. This county camp . . . is better, but even here living conditions are hardly what we call decent.”
Finally, ER visited FSA camps at Shafter and Visalia that offered the possibility of new “standards for decent existence”—including a nursery school, playgrounds, health clinics, and a cooperative store. “They are run by the people themselves so that democracy may be seen in action.” California, ER wrote, “must be proud of this effort to find a way to meet the problem of the migratory worker, who must always be with us because he is needed to follow the crops” around the nation. But for the uprooted, the real solution was land redistribution, getting these people onto land that they owned. “Above everything else, I carried away from my day in the migratory camps an admiration for the indomitable courage which can continue to have faith in the future when present conditions seem almost unbearable.”
Subsequently ER would write Helen Douglas, “I know the President will be enormously interested in what I have to tell him” about her trip to the San Joaquin Valley. ER’s memories and descriptions of her trips provided context for FDR’s efforts on behalf of the farmers.
When they returned to Los Angeles, the Douglases hosted a concert for ER, performed by the National Youth Administration orchestra on their patio. Then they attended her lecture at Long Beach. They were “filled with apprehension,” because early “that evening we heard rumors that an attempt would be made on her life.” In the end, there was no violence. The “huge crowd” that gathered to hear the first lady was polite, although the auditorium was filled with “hostile” opponents who asked rude questions.
• • •
The next day ER and Tommy flew to San Francisco, where ER finally had her long-planned private time with Tiny Chaney. The first lady relaxed in Tiny’s company and trusted her completely. Soon after Earl Miller introduced ER and the dancer in 1932, their intimate talks over late-night sherry while all the household slept, had resulted in shared confidences and painful memories, in both cases, of a childhood defined by a beloved alcoholic father.
Born on 7 April 1902 in San Francisco, Mayris Chaney had vowed never to marry and never to share a home with any man. Earl understood that, although he always loved Tiny. All her dependent and faithful dance partners understood it. As soon as any man got possessive, she fled. The reason, she explained to ER, was simple: her father, a loving, brilliant engineer, drank. Her mother, born in London, had been a beautiful woman, with pretensions and debtor’s disease. He drank and drank; she spent and spent. Her childhood home, not unlike ER’s, was filled with alcoholic rage, regret, and cold empty spaces. She and her sister were somewhat protected by good schools, music, and dance lessons. Books and dance became Tiny’s life. In her teens she fled San Francisco for a successful career that took her around the dance floors of the world, to countless clubs and cabarets. Ambitious and enterprising, she established several businesses. But her affections, like ER’s, were for neglected, hurt people.
Vital and beautiful, with penetrating, luminous eyes, Tiny, at five foot two and 108 pounds, was indeed tiny. For extra height she wore her long blond hair piled high atop her head and the highest heels she could find. Quick-witted and charming, flirtatious and popular, she was widely regarded as a “show-girl”—which caused some with money and power to wonder why the first lady preferred her company to theirs. When ER decided to stay at her home, Tiny got used to being asked, “Miss Chaney, just who are you?” Tiny replied, “I am nobody, just ER’s friend.” A true friend, opinionated and honest—and alert to ER’s needs—Tiny gave her the luxury to be herself and to bring down, if only for a short while, the “protective wall” she had built around her emotions.
Tiny also advanced ER’s performance skills. Before each public appearance, she said, remind yourself: “I must lower my voice.” Tiny recommended a voice coach for ER’s lectures, then another for the radio. Because they shared a childhood of sorrow, they shared a need to help, to contribute, and to laugh at the foibles around them and deep within.
ER’s California lecture tour ended on 5 April. Tommy wrote Lape that the speeches were everywhere successful, with “good audiences and full houses,” and that both Los Angeles and San Francisco signed up for next year.
Their hard work was rewarded when Chief Ranger Forrest Townsley arrived at their hotel to drive ER and Tommy to Yosemite National Park. ER was happy to see Townsley—he had been one of their guides when she and Hick visited Yosemite in 1934. ER had a magnificent weekend. “The waterfalls are beautiful, and the blue sky made our day in the open a great joy. Mariposa Grove, with its giant sequoia trees, was even more impressive than I remembered it.” She attended the seventh-anniversary celebration of the founding of the CCC camps in Yosemite and was impressed with the vast work done.
At some point during these two days at Yosemite, Tiny called ER to alert her to a barrage of newspaper stories that followed her purchase of a kimono in a Japanese shop on Laguna Street near Tiny’s Nob Hill home. According to the New York Times, the Japanese community of San Francisco was “‘tickled’ by the spectacle” of ER making such a purchase “after leading the boycott on Japanese silks.” ER, reached at Yosemite, “laughed over the telephone, and denied that she had ever aided a Japanese boycott,” adding, “This country is not at war with Japan and the Government has not boycotted Japanese goods. . . . Neither as the wife of a Government official nor as an individual do I believe in boycotting the goods of any nation with which this Nation is at peace. We should preserve good will if we possibly can. I have many Japanese friends and many Chinese friends. Any report I ever led a boycott on Japanese silk is erroneous.”
Grim news arrived as they drove to Reno: the Nazis had bombed and invaded Norway and Denmark. Denmark would succumb to Hitler’s Blitzkrieg within hours, while Norway put up a fierce resistance. But on 10 April, once the Nazis captured Oslo and four key seaports, Major Vidkun Quisling declared his pro-Nazi government in the capital, while King Haakon and his cabinet set up a resistance movement in the northern mountains.
ER’s scenic drive through the high country contrasted with brutal international events: in this world of “emerald green, merging into a deep purple and blue,” across the snow-covered range, the beauty of nature fortified “the soul against the ugliness of much that is going on in the world today.”
ER wrote FDR to commiserate over the news from Europe: “It is all horrible & goes deep in our theories of civilization for if this is done then only force counts, & our concepts that right & wrong had to be considered all go by the board.” No longer in her peevish March mood, she concluded, “Much love & try to take some rest & relaxation even in this crisis!” She may have felt apologetic, since FDR’s fever and flu had lasted for over three weeks—and his lingering discomfort worried her.
• • •
For the final phase of her lecture tour, she and Tommy enjoyed the leisure of a cross-country train. One afternoon ER was amused to read Time magazine’s mockery of her upcoming radio series. Midafternoon, each Tuesday and Thursday for many weeks, “Sweetheart Toilet Soap” would present ER “over NBC’s Network.” ER, “in her seventh paid radio job,” noted Time, “will broadcast for a soap company.” For each fifteen-minute broadcast, she would reportedly receive “her standard rate: $3000.” Since 1932, according to Time, ER had received that fee from Simmons (Beautyrest) mattresses, Johns-Manville building materials, Selby shoes, and Pond’s cold cream, among others. “An indignant citizen” once protested that nobody was worth $500 a minute of airtime. ER agreed but pointed out that she gave most of it away, to taxes and the AFSC, which would also receive the net proceeds of her upcoming series.
In between her lectures as she proceeded east, ER read newspapers, wrote letters, drafted her address for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) meeting in Chattanooga, and gazed out the window. The comfortable train ride through such a beautiful place was a momentary balm—since nobody could “think of anything but the war news.” Even when people made polite conversation, “you soon find out that it is the one thing they are thinking about. No wonder, for what is a world going to be like which is ruled entirely by force?”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 30
