Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  That same day in Cleveland FDR gave one of the most stirring speeches of his presidency, envisioning a new American future:

  It is the destiny of this American generation to point the road to the future for all the world to see. It is our prayer that all lovers of freedom may join us—the anguished common people of this earth for whom we seek to light the path.

  I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime, where there is no endless chain of poverty from generation to generation, where impoverished farmers and farm hands do not become homeless wanderers, where monopoly does not make youth a beggar for a job.

  I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes—hills and streams and plains—the mountains over our land and nature’s wealth deep under the earth—are protected as the rightful heritage of the people.

  I see an America where small business really has a chance to flourish and grow.

  I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people. . . .

  I see an America with peace in the ranks of labor.

  An America where the workers are really free. Where the dignity and security of the working man and woman are guaranteed by their own strength and fortified by the safeguards of law.

  An America where those who have reached the evening of life shall live out their years in peace and security. Where pensions and insurance . . . shall be given as a matter of right.

  Step by step, FDR’s vision of a better America mesmerized his audience, including his wife, who wrote the speech, saying it “was grand and nothing that I’ve heard from Willkie can touch it.”

  Surely she was relieved by FDR’s brief but hopeful nod to racial justice. “We in this Nation of many States,” he said, “have found the way by which men of many racial origins may live together in peace. If the human race . . . is to survive . . . men and nations . . . cannot accept the doctrine that war must be forever a part of [humanity’s] destiny.”

  Perhaps that speech inspired Walter White to write ER on 4 November: “I would be grateful if you would give the President the enclosed personal note of thanks for what he did in the matter of the integration of Negroes into the armed forces of the United States.” He told ER he would vote for FDR, but he may never have told her that Willkie forces had courted him from the beginning. It was her friendship and vision that had decided his vote.

  It was a tense weekend at Hyde Park. Nobody was certain of the outcome the following Tuesday. ER was pensive, and although surrounded by a large party on Sunday, she rode her horse into the woods alone. She and her friends dined with SDR at the Big House, after which they sat on the porch to gaze at the stars, which seemed “particularly bright . . . as they do on a Western prairie. One star was particularly brilliant, and I wished . . . I was more familiar with astronomy.” That night, from her sleeping porch, she gazed upon it. “Through the bare branches of a tree. . . . It seemed to rest on the top branch and all the other smaller stars seemed to light up all the other branches.”

  At the Hyde Park polling place on 5 November, a neighborly crowd gathered for conversation and photographs. ER turned up wearing an amusing gift from a friend, a “comical silver donkey with extraordinary long ears, pinned to her left shoulder.” While FDR voted, ER helped SDR sign in and escorted her to the booth. They were about to leave when FDR reminded his wife that she had forgotten to vote. “She hurried back for the routine checking and signature” and went into the poll booth, while her family waited in the car.

  After lunch at the Big House, FDR joined a poker game with Harry Hopkins and other friends while ER and Joe Lash went for a long walk through the woods at Val-Kill. ER felt “confident of victory” and told Joe that she hoped the vote would be “a decisive mandate for liberal government,” to end the “stalemate of the last four years.”

  At seven that evening ER hosted a buffet supper at Val-Kill. More than forty people gathered, including sons Franklin III and John and their wives, the Morgenthau family, Harry Hooker, Edith Helm, Earl Miller, and Henry Osthagen, along with assorted “younger ones.” “Everyone except Granny and Pa and Missy came over,” ER told Anna. In Tommy’s kitchen, Earl and Henry were dispensing drinks. At nine-thirty they went over to the Big House. Uncertain of victory, FDR insisted on quiet, linked by one telephone to Ed Flynn at the Biltmore Hotel and by another to the White House. As the early results trickled in, the group was divided into clusters of telephone banks and radio talliers. In a “smoking room” corner off the dining room, the news services had teletype machines.

  ER sat mostly tranquil, often knitting, at a radio, with SDR, Betty Roosevelt, Harry Hooker, Joe Lash, and others. Although she denied that she was excited, she wore a flamboyant “ensemble of flame-colored chiffon with a long-sleeved, gold-embroidered jacket.” Elinor Morgenthau, Agnes Brown Leach, Edith Helm, Tommy, Dorothy Schiff Backer, and other political women clustered around another radio.

  At eleven Ed Flynn claimed victory, and the Kansas City Star reported that Willkie had conceded. FDR thought the announcement premature, but the party gathered—and ER called forth the customary scrambled-egg election night service, for journalists and guests. At midnight the family went out to greet a torchlight parade and brass band from the village. “We are facing difficult days,” FDR told his neighbors, “but I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.” There were shouts of “We want Eleanor.” She waved but refused to speak, and the party went back inside. The large crowd lingered, and yet another contingent arrived. “Mother, they want you,” said young Frank. “There are 700 people still standing out there in the dark, asking for you. You’ll have to go to them.” ER and FDR went back out to greet the crowd. Then they telephoned Anna in Seattle, Elliott in Texas, and Jimmy in Beverly Hills. They did not retire until after two-thirty.

  Almost fifty million Americans had voted that day, the largest turnout to date. FDR received 27,263,448 votes to Willkie’s 22,336,260. The president had retained the support of unionists and the white-solid South. Urban America, including blacks where they could vote, voted for FDR.

  ER faced the third administration with determination and new alliances. Her core friendship network was expanded, and she felt strengthened for the ordeals ahead. “The returns seem to indicate a vote of real confidence,” she told her column readers. “All of us, whatever our political party . . . must [now] work together. . . . In our hearts there must be gratitude that we live in a country where the will of the people can be expressed.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Heroism Is Always a Thrilling Thing”: The Politics of Race

  Between the election and FDR’s third inauguration on 20 January 1941, ER celebrated the publication of two of her own books. Advance copies of The Moral Basis of Democracy had arrived during election week. She wrote her daughter on 3 November that she would send her first copies to the family after the excitement subsided. The New York Times gave the book a glowing endorsement, calling it “one of the clearest and most sensible discussions of a subject too many people discuss without defining.” A week later her Christmas book for children of all ages, well illustrated by Fritz Kredel, was delivered.*

  Ruby Black’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography was published on 11 October, her fifty-sixth birthday. Although ER often said no biographies should appear in print until the subject was dead, she admired and trusted Black, a veteran United Press reporter who had accompanied her for seven years—on tour in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, to West Virginia, and during many White House occasions. While they were good friends and Black was part of ER’s circle of most favored journalists, they did not always agree. Black, the editor of Equal Rights magazine, was disappointed when ER urged women leaders at the 1940 Democratic convention to continue to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, after Willkie and the Republicans endorsed it. Although ER’s message to the convention
called for “equal opportunity,” it emphasized the need for full unionization before an ERA endorsement.

  Black did not publicly criticize ER’s position, but according to her daughter Cornelia Jane Strawser, she was always privately astounded by ER’s habit of addressing envelopes, even “in her own hand, to ‘Mrs. Herbert Little,’ a person that my mother claimed did not even exist.” Ruby Black and Ruth Hale (Heywood Broun’s wife) had made national headlines when they battled “the State Department to issue them passports in their own names.”

  ER, while eloquent on so many subjects, was nonetheless a private person, even shy when it came to her innermost feelings and thoughts, and being so exposed to the public through Black’s biography aroused mixed feelings. While reading the “interesting” book, she recognized herself in the first part, the years of her childhood, but then as it proceeded felt as if she were being introduced to “someone I really did not know.” The woman “I thought I knew,” she wrote, “never seems to have any of the attributes so many kind people” had reported to Black: “I hope their estimate is correct,” since she seems “like a nice person, though at times I think she is very trying.”

  ER did not refer to Black’s final pages, the description and prophecy that really generated ER’s stingy self-deprecating words:

  She walks as a queen is supposed to walk. Even in trailing evening dress and high-heeled slippers, she runs with startling grace. She waltzes with . . . sweeping rhythm. . . . Her blue eyes glow, or sparkle, or glimmer, as her feeling changes—and they sometimes shoot fire. . . . Much of her life is yet to be. . . . [After] she is liberated from the restrictions and the duties . . . she is likely to reveal sides of her nature and her ability which have been suppressed.

  Since Ruby Black had intended only to honor ER, she was puzzled by her reaction. Then at the end of FDR’s final pre-election press conference, “the President stopped me, and said, ‘Ruby, I like your book.’ I gasped, ‘You don’t mean to say you’ve had time to read it.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and it’s a grand job.’ I asked, ‘Did you find any news in it?’ ‘Yes, I really did.’ Then looking very solemn, he said, ‘But the Missus did not like it.’ . . . ‘Then she’s been deceiving me. Why didn’t she like it?’ [He] replied, ‘She said you found out too much.’ Wasn’t that swell? Tell me, honestly, [Black asked ER,] do you object to it, in any way that does not arise from your inherent modesty?”

  On 13 November ER reassured Black, “I felt you had done a remarkable job.” But “I was rather shocked to find that so many people thought I was actually responsible for things which I believe were really more coincidences or largely done by other people.” ER’s perception of herself was often at odds with reality. She saw herself as a watchdog, a keen observer, and especially a helpmate. To have political influence directly attributed to her was unacceptable. Specifically, she saw the last chapters “as a challenge. I confess that sometimes I have a very great desire to become Whistler’s Mother, sitting by the fires with a cap and my knitting, but you give me a feeling that as long as there is much that ought to be done, anyone who had any kind of capacity to be of use should keep our shoulders to the wheel.” ER wrote that she was not in the least upset and especially appreciated her emphasis on how valuable her activism was to the campaign and would be to the future: “If anything particularly useful is chalked up to me in the next few years, I think you should rightly feel that you had a part in urging me on. Of course, I do not object to any part of the book.”

  ER tended to be publicly discreet, even silent, about certain issues. She underplayed her activism and often repeated, rather disingenuously, that she “never made speeches” and knew little about politics. But in an article in Look magazine toward the end of the campaign, Black credited ER’s contributions:

  If Wendell Willkie is going to be elected . . . he has to beat not one Roosevelt—but two. And . . . [ER] may prove the more formidable. [While her] overt political acts . . . are few [and she may do no] actual campaigning, . . . she does most of her work quietly behind the scenes, and chiefly from altruistic motives in the interests of better government—[which] makes her all the more potent as a political force. Charlie Michelson, veteran Democratic publicity head who does not like women in politics, calls her the greatest politician in the world. Jim Farley says she is one of the few top politicians of either sex.

  Black named specific “elements” of ER’s power:

  1. Her personality: Eleanor Roosevelt is probably the most popular person in the country. Millions follow her doings in her column. . . . Women who referred to her as “that awful woman” in 1933–34 are now devoted to her. Even Alice Roosevelt Longworth finds she no longer gets laughs by mimicking her cousin maliciously.

  2. Her leadership among women: Not only at election time, . . . [and] since long before her husband was governor of New York she has worked tirelessly [to get] women interested in their government, then [gave] them tasks to do. Largely through her efforts the Democratic Women’s Division has become a powerful body.

  3. Her friendship for youth: Of all national leaders, ER has devoted most time and effort . . . to understand the problems of youth. Although she disapproved many actions of the Youth Congress, she has never faltered in her sympathies. . . .

  4. As a political strategist: No national Democratic campaign for years has been planned without her counsel.

  ER cringed at such fulsome direct praise, but Black’s fully illustrated article went on to detail her personal and political history. ER was grateful for its potential electoral benefits.

  Presumably she also consented to Black’s subsequent Democratic Digest essay, which celebrated ER as her husband’s partner and as an independent party leader. ER went around the country, Black wrote, asking people in every community what they thought and what they needed. “Anybody will tell Eleanor anything,” FDR said proudly. Because people trusted her, the government understood what people thought and needed. Because she “never let up for an instant” traveling, questioning, and urging people in every community to work harder for their community, she became the very symbol of New Deal energy and its philosophy. But she was “more than a symbol,” Black wrote. Loved and respected, her influence was “unique,” and “her independence, her candor, her sincerity, her serenity have won even many of the bitterest critics of the New Deal.”

  Black also rejected criticisms of ER’s work for pay, her columns, articles and public appearances:

  She slaves away at writing, lecturing, broadcasting because she wants the money to give to those less able to earn. A few of her public philanthropies are known. . . . She has given hundreds of thousands of dollars for projects to improve health, education, and working-capacity of people in depressed areas. . . . She supports homeless children of China, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland [among] other places—besides helping children of jobless Americans. It is not known, for she won’t tell, how many people’s hospital bills she has herself paid; how many . . . eyeglasses or braces or wheel chairs she has bought.

  ER ignored all the nasty charges that she was a profiteering “money grubber,” and all the friendly advice that her work was “unseemly.” She answered that the many people she helped “are more important than anybody’s opinion of me.” And so, Black concluded, ER was not only “benefactor” but today’s “living working example of true democracy.”

  ER’s failure to grasp the full significance of her power in American politics was not just due to her self-deprecating nature. It was also a symptom of the times, when powerful women in politics remained anathema. Well aware of the charges of “petticoat government” in the White House, she shied away from public acknowledgment of her contributions. But Black accorded ER the full praise she deserved for the success of many of FDR’s most significant policies.

  • • •

  Politically, ER was disheartened that Jim Crow still prevailed with violence and disrespect in too many d
istricts in too many states. In 1940 more than 200,000 new black voters were registered in the South Atlantic states, but white supremacists sought to block and disallow every black vote. Until Americans were no longer turned away by poll taxes and fraudulent literacy tests, ER would not rest. She worked ever more closely with her NAACP allies and increasingly relied on her friend Mary McLeod Bethune. Director of the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs and leader of FDR’s ever-expanding Black Cabinet, Bethune built bridges through her activism and achieved results.

  ER’s friendship with Bethune itself made a public statement, especially when they walked into a meeting together or were photographed seated side by side. According to biographer Catherine Owens Peare, “they appeared so often on the same speakers’ platform . . . many affectionately commented that America really had two first ladies: Lady Eleanor and Lady Mary.” The black press noted their friendship: on one occasion, while ER was giving a speech, Bethune began to cough in the middle of it. ER “left her seat, poured a glass of water,” crossed the stage, and stood over Bethune “while she drank it. Those who witnessed the scene never forgot that gesture of humility and service.” The white press either ignored such events or ridiculed them.

  Some White House staffers, like Steve Early, resented ER’s friends and allies, her words and activities, on behalf of racial justice. But others noted the power of ER’s simple acts of courtesy. Chief Usher J. B. West wrote that as soon as Bethune arrived at the White House, ER “always went running down the driveway to meet her, and they would walk arm in arm into the mansion. Few heads of state received such a welcome.” While ER’s behavior “aroused the wrath of [many in official] Washington, it raised the hopes of millions of Americans.”

  The U.S. war against fascism and ER and Bethune’s war against white supremacy converged. In 1934, when U.S. educators unanimously passed the first school integration resolution, ER had said segregation must end: “We will all go ahead together, or we will all go down together.” But then she had allowed political considerations to limit her work in this area. Now in the urgent fight for democracy, racial justice was at the core of her political efforts. Together, as war needs mounted, she and Bethune forged a campaign to include with respect trained nurses, black and white.