Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Hall’s final agonies recalled her father’s ordeal and unleashed memories of hurt and abandonment. A lifetime of petty cruelties and disregard surfaced to rekindle ER’s wrath. During the long hours she sat with Hall, she recalled many bitter moments concerning her late mother-in-law. Sara had despised ER’s father’s weakness and expressed contempt for Hall. Once, when Hall’s eldest daughter, little Ellie, then ten, visited the Big House and sat alone reading, SDR called her over. She twirled her around, studied her closely, and said coldly, “I see. So you are Hall’s daughter!” Then she pushed her away without another word. ER never forgot that moment; nor did her niece.

  Joe came to Washington and spent almost a week in the White House, where his presence was comforting to ER. After he left, she wrote:

  My idea of hell, if I believed in it, would be to sit or stand & watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns & thinking “this was once the little boy I played with and scolded. He could have been so much and this is what he is.” It is a bitter thing and in spite of everything I’ve loved Hall, perhaps somewhat remissedly of late, but he is part of me. I do have a quieting effect on him & so I stood by his bed and held his hand and stroked his forehead and Zena stood beside me for hours.

  On 17 September, she wrote Anna, “It’s such an unattractive death. He is mahogany color, all distended, out of his head most of the time. . . . It is really most distressing.”

  ER’s son James and his new wife visited. Hick and Tommy were in and out. Joe called often, which she appreciated: “I love saying goodnight and because this is a hard time for me, it means a lot to talk to you.” She appreciated his daily letters even more:

  I should indeed feel shut away & buried in my present horror if you did not write about yourself. . . . Of course you can say anything to me—I want you to be as sure of me as my own children are. These days are hard because Hall was always a little my child and the waste of a life seems a bitter thing. This way of dying seems so unnecessarily hard and I am weary & heartsick for Zena. I’ll tell you some of the things she said which make me want to weep but I shall not for I cannot let go. . . . I feel sure this cannot last much longer. . . . I have slept in my clothes. Tonight will be the third night but we both sleep and dare not leave. He is quieter tho tonight which means weaker I imagine.

  At five in the morning on 25 September 1941, Gracie Hall Roosevelt died. The funeral was held the next day at the White House, attended by fifty relatives and close friends. The New York Times reported: “Pale, but stately and grimly composed, [ER entered] after all the others were seated, accompanied by the president.” They sat beside two of Hall’s five living children, ER II and Henry P. Roosevelt.

  In its obituary, the Times detailed his life. ER’s “shy and brilliant brother was little known to the American public partly because of his own aversion to publicity, partly because he was overshadowed by his famous relatives. . . . But even if he had not belonged to the nation’s first family, he could have been justly proud of his career as an electrical engineer, World War flier, banker, financier and municipal official.”

  Hall’s now-divorced second wife, Dorothy Kemp Roosevelt, a concert pianist and teacher, had written regularly to ER over the years, often to complain about Hall in the years before they divorced. At first ER complimented Dorothy on her endurance: “Hall is strong and very hard to help, but . . . you are infinitely more gifted than I am.” But by 1935, the marriage broken, ER wrote: “I am sorry you still feel so bitter about Hall. I do not think anyone is entirely selfish . . . You may not always be able to see or understand things that people do, but at least you can keep from hurting yourself by being forgiving.” Their intense correspondence revealed a great deal about ER’s own struggles with love, disappointment, and forgiveness.

  Neither Dorothy nor any of their three daughters, Diana, Amy, and Janet, attended Hall’s funeral. After the service, FDR canceled his weekend appointments to be with his wife. Hall was buried in Tivoli in the family vault. James, who was with his parents during much of their ordeal, had never seen them so close or so emotional. At one point, while ER recounted memories of Hall, she was stricken midsentence by grief. In a rare moment of intimacy, FDR “sank down beside her and hugged her and kissed her and held her head on his chest.” We have no accounts of their private conversations during these weeks of mourning for the death of SDR and Hall and the loss of Missy.

  After Missy’s departure from FDR’s life, new women friends appeared significantly and flirtatiously—most notably Crown Princess Martha of Norway and Dorothy Schiff Backer, as well as FDR’s attentive and jolly cousins Laura Delano and Margaret (Daisy) Suckley. ER accepted their presence and made them comfortable. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd also made return visits to FDR’s hearth, always while ER was away. There is no evidence that ER knew about them. But she understood that while she was on the road, increasingly at her husband’s behest to enhance America’s international position and his political goals, there would be people about to entertain and amuse him. She believed that was necessary and was determined not to grow cold and bitter as her mother had.

  • • •

  While she was still in mourning, ER was thankful to be offered a high position in the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), established to coordinate federal and state programs in case of war. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia had agreed to serve as director, and he needed an assistant director in charge of community services and volunteers. Anna Rosenberg and Harry Hopkins encouraged ER to take the position, as did her husband.

  ER accepted, in part because she believed she could be of service to the nation. Particularly interested in promoting a greater role for women and youth, she asked Elinor Morgenthau to be her assistant and Joe Lash to participate in the youth campaign; Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White would also serve in various ways. She intended to build the kind of health, recreation, family security, and educational program in every community that Lady Stella Reading had established in Britain. She thought she could work well with La Guardia. But his interests as director were limited to firefighting and setting up air raid precautions for civilian defense. ER subsequently noted that all the activities La Guardia “did not want” were “thrust into my division.”

  ER dreaded adverse publicity and respected FDR’s disdain for “petticoat government,” especially in regard to social and economic programs. However, regarding such urgent issues as rescue and civil liberties in wartime, she considered her active involvement her primary responsibility. And in the wake of her brother’s death, she wanted above all to be occupied. “The loss of someone whom you love is hard to bear,” she wrote in her memoir, “but when sorrow is mixed with regret and a consciousness of waste there is added a touch of bitterness which is even more difficult to carry day in and day out. I think it was in an attempt to numb this feeling that I worked so hard at the Office of Civilian Defense.”

  ER walked a mile each day to her new office and worked long hours. She was assigned staff there, so Tommy accommodated. “I will carry on here,” ER told Anna, “do the columns, the broadcasts, etc. and help in any way I can, mostly by working at night on the writings.” Tommy usually went home by midnight, but occasionally ER worked through the night. “One morning my husband said to me: ‘What’s this I hear? You didn’t go to bed at all last night?’ I had been working on my mail . . . when it began to get light, I decided it was not worth while going to bed.” The night patrol “reported it to the household, and someone told my husband.” Clearly, FDR was impressed—although, ER noted, “I did not do that very often.”

  In October, ER’s fifty-seventh birthday was celebrated uniquely. Usually, she insisted on no party or presents. “Her friends and family have a terrible time,” Joe Lash lamented. “She seems to need nothing, is annoyed at lavish gifts, makes life difficult for all of us wanting to celebrate her.” But for the first time, ER agreed to her husband’s sugges
tion of a river cruise on the presidential yacht Potomac. The party would include Joe, Jimmy and his new wife, Rommie, and Helen Gahagan Douglas.

  That day ER worked on her mail for three hours, while the president worked on his stamps. The guests sat around and talked and played gin rummy until six-thirty, when cocktails were served. The abstemious ER drank an old-fashioned, considering it a “kind of fruit punch.” Then followed a “sumptuous” champagne dinner, with presents and good cheer. “The President drank a toast pointing out this was the first time he had gotten [ER] on a naval vessel,” Joe reported, “and that by next year at this time [they] would have met the Prime Minister of Japan on an island in the Pacific.” ER laughed and said, “Not unless she could fly.”

  But shortly thereafter, ER plunged into a significant depression, an actual “Griselda mood.” Anna and John arrived from Seattle to discuss SDR’s estate and spent time alone with FDR. Before SDR died, ER had moved out of her New York City apartment on Eleventh Street to reclaim the Sixty-fifth Street town house. She planned to make significant changes in the Big House at Hyde Park—to make it in some part her own. FDR had not disagreed with her then. But now he told Anna and John he did not want any changes. When Anna told ER of her father’s decision, she was devastated. She would not live there, then, except when FDR was in residence.

  She grew cold and found life wearying. “I feel as you sometimes look,” she wrote Hick. “You know how I get these moods, they pass but they are a nuisance.” The next day she wrote, “I’m in a horrid frame of mind, but I think it will pass & I hope I don’t show it.” Hick reassured her, “Remember, even when you’re feeling that way, you do a better job [at every task] than most people.”

  • • •

  By mid-November, FDR and the War Department agreed that war was imminent. An order of high alert had been issued to all Pacific theater personnel. On 30 November Japan announced that it was determined to end all American and British influence in Asia “for the honor and pride of mankind,” and Cordell Hull requested that FDR return from Warm Springs immediately. Negotiations continued that week between State Department officials and two envoys who represented Japan’s moderate group. They were in conversation at the State Department on Sunday afternoon, 7 December 1941, when Japan bombed the airfields and naval base at Pearl Harbor.

  FDR and Hopkins were alone, waiting to be updated, when they got the news. ER was entertaining guests at a large luncheon, including FDR’s cousins Ellen Delano and Frederick B. Adams, and their children, who were disappointed by FDR’s unexpected absence. ER did not learn what happened until midafternoon, “when one of the ushers told me.” The White House immediately filled up with generals, admirals, and aides. Congressional leaders of both parties arrived. Cabinet officials arrived in the evening and remained until after midnight.

  Horrified by the carnage, FDR nonetheless spoke to them with restraint, announcing that this was “the most serious situation that had confronted any Cabinet since 1861.” Everybody seemed to agree. Well after midnight, before the president turned in, ER went into his room, and “my husband and I did have a chance to talk.” She “thought that in spite of his anxiety Franklin was in a way more serene” and more clear and determined than he had been in many months. The “long uncertainty was over.”

  The next day ER and a large White House contingent accompanied FDR to a speech before a joint session of Congress. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked,” he said, and asked for a declaration of war. That day Montana representative Jeannette Rankin cast the sole vote against war. Caroline O’Day, too sick to attend, sent a cable: had she been there, she would have voted aye.

  On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The dreaded thing had happened: the U.S. joined the world at war.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “To Know Me Is a Terrible Thing”: Friendship, Loyalties, and Alliances

  On 8 December, during FDR’s speech before Congress, ER sat beside Edith Wilson feeling “a curious sense of repetition” as the United States once again joined the world at war. Afterward, eager to embark on her war work with the Office of Civil Defense, she left for California, where she and Fiorello La Guardia would consider the West Coast’s most urgent defense needs.

  As Japanese victories in the Pacific mounted, fear of and prejudice toward Japanese-Americans had soared. Some Americans were agitating for their removal, while others were taking immediate reprisals against citizens and businesses. The U.S. Navy ordered all fishing boats owned by Japanese fishermen to be seized.

  While ER was on the West Coast, she observed this disturbing “trend of thought.” Yes, some German, Italian, and other Axis-allied agents were at work in the United States, and some Japanese too “are here to be helpful to their own nation and not to ours.” Suspicious activities should be reported, and “these people are gradually being rounded up by the FBI and the Secret Service,” she observed. “But the great mass of our people, stemming from these various national ties, must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans.”

  Nonetheless Japanese nationals were now considered “enemy aliens.” When the Treasury Department froze their assets, ER protested that hardships would result for the families. In response, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau agreed to release limited funds for living expenses and needs. “I do not know how the freezing of Japanese money has affected your two men. I know the situation on the west coast was very serious with the winter vegetable growers,” Tommy explained to Esther Lape. “The crops were ready . . . they represented 75% of the total supply of winter vegetables for the whole country and no one had any money, not even enough to live on. However, the Treasury made a ruling that . . . $100 a month could be paid to Japanese nationals so this gardening could go on.”

  “The greatest test this country has ever met,” ER wrote in a prescient plea, was to face fear and propaganda with unity and respect. “Perhaps it is the test which is going to show whether the United States can furnish a pattern for the rest of the world for the future. Our citizens come from all the nations of the world. Some of us have said . . . we were the only proof that different nationalities could live together in peace and understanding.” Passing this test was America’s obligation in “the present chaos,” she maintained.

  If we cannot meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of every nationality, of really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed or color; if we cannot keep in check anti-semitism, anti-racial feelings as well as anti-religious feelings, then we will have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.

  The 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights fell on 15 December. Since Americans were frequently ignoring its precepts in these barbarous days, ER wrote, eternal vigilance was required “if we are going to keep our freedom.” In the nation’s capital, a staff member was denied housing when the landlord asked his “religious affiliation,” and he replied “Jewish.” Outraged, ER wrote, “I hope every person in this country will read the Bill of Rights again.” She also recommended that Americans take two pledges: “to be a little thoughtful every day about the meaning of freedom” and to consider “how, in a time of national danger . . . [our] own rights as a citizen are entangled and interwoven with the rights of others and these rights always deserve a decent respect.”

  ER departed the West Coast sure that her presence had calmed and reassured the communities she visited. Although the trip had been “strenuous,” she wrote Hick, it was “useful and I have learned a great deal. It seems like a completely changed world.”

  ER received “an amazing letter from Pearl Buck” in which the novelist warned that “more basic than Chinese antagonism to Japan was colored races’ antagonism” to white supremacy. Anglo-American promises “to police the w
orld,” she wrote, contributed to Asian fears of “domination by the white man.” Such rhetoric, Buck wrote, would create an Asian-Russian-Negro “combination to resist white domination.” ER was upset, Tommy confided, and urged FDR to initiate an antidiscrimination policy. Most immediately, she sought to protect the civil and human rights of Japanese-American citizens and their families from wrathful propaganda. “ER said she was surprised by FDR’s sympathetic appreciation of the problem,” Tommy wrote. “He said we would have to compel England to give dominion status to India,” and “to get more equal rights for Negroes here.”

  ER believed the OCD should build “comprehensive community programs” for defense. It should establish day care centers to relieve working mothers and fathers; nutrition, counseling, and community health services; and recreation and educational programs. She hoped that people would volunteer in each community to create these services and acknowledge such activity as part of America’s first line of defense.

  Many young men failed army recruitment standards, which moved ER to fight harder for an expanded national health program. She urged labor unions and employers to forge a new spirit of cooperation regarding health care and accident prevention, since “health is a stepping stone to all real welfare and security.” In her view, “real defense begins in every home.”

  She called upon a range of allies to help build social justice programs and home defense, notably Bernard Baruch; Justine Wise Polier; Florence Kerr, who headed WPA Community Service Projects; her friend and radio agent Betty Lindley; Jane Seaver, who worked with Joe Lash to build a youth division; Mary Dublin, the research director of the National Consumers League; and Paul Kellogg, the great social worker, activist, and journalist. Almost immediately after she entered the OCD, she addressed seven hundred members of the National Council of Negro Women—representing forty states, Cuba, the West Indies, and the Virgin Islands—to announce that “in the operating policy of the civilian defense program” there would be no Jim Crow. All programs were to be integrated. She brought in Mary McLeod Bethune, Walter White, and her activist allies for a campaign against the poll tax. She believed she had her husband’s support on issues where congressional opposition kept him silent.