“And she would, too!” the president told the newsmen. This was more than husbandly admiration; it was testimony to his wife’s independence.
Once she asked him whether her advocacy of the anti-lynching bill might hurt his efforts to get southern votes for his rearmament program. “You go right ahead and stand for whatever you feel is right,” he said. She was not wholly persuaded that he had meant what he said and repeated her question. “Well, I have to stand on my own legs. Besides, I can always say I can’t do a thing with you.”20
Franklin never tried to discourage her, she wrote later, discussing some of the controversy she had created.21 But it was more than that. He approved. Just because he had to ease up on his efforts to get New Deal legislation, he wanted her to press harder. It helped politically with the groups whose claims he had to postpone and, more important, it helped him resist the temptation of following the easiest course. That was her old role. One of the reasons he had married her was to keep him from sinning. “She had stronger convictions than he on the subjects of social welfare and social progress,” observed Arthur Krock, who had occasionally been invited to small family dinners by Eleanor. “She was also a very determined woman—determined not only to make a career for herself so that she would not be just the President’s wife, but also to make a career that would in her opinion put pressure on her husband to pursue the path of social and economic reform that he was embarked upon.” She was not, she said in later years, “what you would call a ‘yes-man’ because that wasn’t what he needed.” Nor was it what the president particularly wanted, she added. “He might have been happier, if he had always been perfectly sure that I would have agreed. He wasn’t. And it was probably good for him that he wasn’t. But there must have been times when he would have liked it if he didn’t have to argue things.” She acted as a spur, she said, “because I had this horrible sense of obligation which was bred in me, I couldn’t help it. It was nothing to be proud of, it was just something I couldn’t help.”
Rexford Tugwell recalled:
No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt sit down facing her husband and, holding his eyes firmly, say to him “Franklin, I think you should . . . ” or, “Franklin, surely you will not . . . ” will ever forget the experience. . . . And even after many years he obviously disliked to face that devastatingly simple honest look that Eleanor fixed him with when she was aware of an injustice amenable to Presidential action or a good deed that he could do. . . . It would be impossible to say how often and to what extent American governmental processes have been turned in new directions because of her determination that people should be hurt as little as possible and that as much should be done for them as could be managed; the whole, if it could be totalled, would be formidable.22
They were, in the White House years, consorts rather than bosom companions. Her relationship to him was less intimate than some wives had with their husbands after three decades of marriage but she was more influential. She had a point of view, a platform, a following, and he was a large and secure enough man to respect her for it.*
Cabinet officers often grumbled, some of them used her, but generally they complied with her requests. Some, like Henry Morgenthau, Jr., did so because there were times when they wanted her to find out what the president’s mood was before they went in to see him, sometimes even to intercede with him.
On one occasion Morgenthau, sensing presidential displeasure with his views on tax policy, wrote in his diary that he had gone to Eleanor Roosevelt. “I told her that if she would be willing to accept the responsibility I would like to place myself in her hands as I felt that Franklin and I were drawing further and further apart. She said she was going to talk to the President.” A few days later the president seemed to have softened toward Morgenthau’s views and remarked at the cabinet meeting that “he and his wife had a discussion on economics in the country. . . . When he got through he gave me a searching look,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. When Morgenthau and Hopkins were trying to get the president to approve a $250,000 special outlay for milk for needy children in Chicago and were getting no response, Morgenthau went to Eleanor. “I’ll ask Franklin about it tonight,” she told him, “not as though you said anything, but as though I were troubled.” Her intercession worked, commented Morgenthau.23
The bristly Ickes occasionally sought her patronage for one of his projects. When she was in Knoxville, for example, he wanted her to drive through the newly opened Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She did and expressed her pleasure in a column. He even tried to enlist her in his empire building. The wife of the naval governor of Samoa complained to her about the sanitary conditions on that island after thirty-seven years of United States’ ownership. She sent the letter to Ickes because Roosevelt had placed the Division of Territories and Island Possessions in the Interior Department. But in doing so, Ickes informed Eleanor, the president had excluded Samoa and Guam. “Needless to say, I would be happy if in the process of governmental reorganization Samoa and Guam should be transferred to the Division of Territories and Island Possessions.” Eleanor, however, did not take up the hint.24
She was glad to agree to requests to receive the staffs of federal agencies at the White House, but she deftly put such visits to her own use. The assistant to the public printer, Jo Coffin, brought the women who worked in her office to tea at the White House. “The nicest thing of all,” she informed Eleanor afterward, “was the little conference when you gathered the girls around you on the lawn. You spoke of the urgent need of raising the standard of living of the colored people.” The Children’s Bureau brought its child-welfare field staff to Washington. “The opportunity for informal discussion of problems with Mrs. Roosevelt following the delightful tea was the highlight of the conference,” Katherine Lenroot, chief of the bureau, wrote Tommy.25
Eleanor was careful in dealing with the members of Congress, fully aware of how jealous that body was of its status and how quick to resent what it considered pressure from the president or his wife. Occasionally a flare-up of moral indignation caused Eleanor to depart from her rule not to comment publicly on what Congress was doing, but she did so circumspectly, almost always asking Franklin’s permission beforehand. If she sent a letter to a senator or representative, the note that accompanied it was studiedly neutral; it was simply for the gentleman’s information to do with as he saw fit and generally elicited a courtly letter of thanks. But even in this area, when she was confronted with injustice she was not to be contained, especially if there was some bond of fellowship, either political or social, to make a direct appeal for help to a congressman appear to be the most natural course. That was the case in the matter of the sharecroppers.
Sherwood Eddy, clergyman, reformer, and publicist, came to her with an agitated account of the reign of terror in Arkansas instigated by the landlords to keep their sharecroppers out of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Many had been evicted, and Eddy wanted to resettle them on a cooperative farm he had purchased at Hill House, Mississippi. He asked Eleanor if these sharecroppers could be placed on relief until the first crop was brought in. “Is there any way in which you could be helpful, if you feel he should be helped?” she in turn asked Hopkins. “I want to be sure, of course, that you think something should be done, but I was horrified at the things he told me.” It was Tugwell’s job, Hopkins told her, and Tugwell, with whom she promptly communicated, said the Resettlement Administration would be prepared to take over the farm but they must then have the management of it. Eddy refused, and Eleanor informed Clarence Pickett, who had brought Eddy to her, that “under the circumstances I do not know what more could be expected” of the government.26
She did, however, write Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, an old acquaintance. Eleanor had been on the delegation in 1928 that had gone to Arkansas for Robinson’s notification ceremonies as vice-presidential candidate, and she wrote him without invoking the president’s name. She was troubled about what the leaders of the sharecroppers and E
ddy had told her, she said; “I am very anxious about it and know you must feel the same way”—would it be possible to send someone down on a mission of reconciliation? Robinson proved to be wholly on the side of the planters; there was no trouble between landlords and tenants except that which was instigated by “a group of agitators from time to time,” he replied, going on to say that the landlords were willing to provide houses for the tenants who had been evicted “but they were prevented from doing so by the agitators.” Eleanor pressed no further. She had made her views known and done all she could, and there was no point in alienating a mainstay of Franklin’s working majority in the Senate. “The situation is a difficult and complex one,” she wrote Robinson mollifyingly. “The whole system is apparently wrong and will take patience and a desire on all sides to straighten things out ultimately.”
Yet her desire not to irritate Robinson did not hold her back a few months later when the Emergency Committee for Strikers’ Relief telegraphed her that there was “a new reign of terror against 5,000 tenant farmers in Arkansas. Wholesale arrests of striking farm workers. Thirty-five Negro and white men held in small jail at Earle . . . workers charged with vagrancy. . . . ” She requested Hopkins to have someone investigate and let her know if this was true. Their man in Arkansas had confirmed the arrests, Hopkins informed her a few days later, and the Department of Justice had a man down there to see whether there had been any infringement of federal law. Her next request was for Hopkins to arrange relief for the sharecroppers.27
Eleanor’s efforts to improve the social-welfare institutions of the District of Columbia usually involved Congress and usually meant getting the president’s explicit approval. Jail Lodge #114 of the American Federation of Government Employees called her attention to the “unsatisfactory working conditions” in the District jail. “Take up after I’ve been there,” she noted on their letter, meaning that she should take it up in her column, and in the meantime she had Tommy send the substance of the letter to District Commissioner George Allen. Allen readily acknowledged that the complaint had merit, but it all went back to getting more money from Congress. “Would it be proper for me unofficially to draw attention of Committee to this condition?” Eleanor queried her husband. “Yes—sure—!” was the economic reply. A two-page letter detailing the conditions she had found in the District jail went to all members of the Appropriations Subcommittee concerned with the District’s budget. “We did a good job for the National Training School for Girls,” Senator Copeland replied; “Let’s help the jail!” Senator Capper went further than his colleague: “I spent a couple of hours at the jail and became convinced that you had not overstated matters. . . . I think it is wonderful that you are interested in a matter of this kind.”28
The head of the League of Women Voters consulted Katherine Lenroot, the chief of the Children’s Bureau, on how to persuade the Appropriations Committee to vote more money for improved children’s services in the District. Miss Lenroot’s advice was to ask Mrs. Roosevelt to convene a conference of citizens’ groups and interested congressmen. Eleanor questioned whether such an approach might not stiffen congressional resistance, and the president, to whom she mentioned her doubts, agreed. “The President thinks the Congressional Committee might look upon it as an effort to coerce them,” she wrote the league, but if they would get her a list of all the things the Social Service agencies wanted, she would ask the chairman “if he would get the Committee together and let me come up there and tell them that I realize I have more opportunity to see things first-hand than many of them,” and they might like to know what she had learned. Congress did approve a budget for child welfare, but she was distressed, she wrote the chairmen of the House and Senate subcommittees a few weeks later, that no coordinator was named. “I know your deep interest in seeing that the children of the District are well cared for. This seems to me so vital that I am writing to you in the hope that you will immediately exert your influence to clear up that point.” It was a moment when Roosevelt’s influence with Congress was at its lowest point, and Eleanor’s note ended, “I am sending this simply as a private citizen and I hope that you will not mention that I have sent it to you.”29
Cautious as were her early approaches to Congress, by the end of the thirties they were increasingly unorthodox, occasionally even daring. In January, 1934, she told the Citizens Committee on Old-Age Security, “I could not possibly appear before a Congressional hearing on anything,” but later she began to accept invitations to testify before congressional committees. She appeared before the Tolan Committee, which was investigating the problems of migratory workers, and was prepared to testify before a Senate subcommittee on discrimination against Negroes in defense industry. And in December, 1939, she created a sensation when she turned up uninvited at hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee when it had subpoenaed her friends in the American Youth Congress.†30
Often she used a report on what she had seen on one of her endless journeys around the country as a peg with which to begin an exchange either with her husband or with the director of a government agency. “I can’t say what happens to these reports,” she was quoted as saying. “Some of them may never be read at all. Some of them I know have been. But I made them because I have been trained that way.” She usually made notes on the things she thought might interest the president and local officials and the public generally took it for granted that what she saw went back to him. “No other President has had a trusted emissary going about the land talking to poor people, finding out what is good and what is bad about their condition, what is wrong and what is right in the treatment they receive,” wrote Ruth Finney.31
Eleanor was as proficient as the president in the nonpolitical tour and inspection. Wherever she went she toured government projects, saw an endless stream of visitors, questioned reporters about local conditions—often as closely as they asked her about larger matters—and avoided public discussion of politics. Irrepressibly curious and a sympathetic questioner, she arrived in a community as her husband’s inspector general, or so the local people thought, and came away its confidante.
“I would never presume to make recommendations,” she insisted, speaking about the reports she submitted. But she defined “recommendations” in a Pickwickian sense, meaning they were not commands. “I forgot to tell you the other day how much impressed I was by the hospital for tubercular Indians at Shawnee, Oklahoma,” she wrote Ickes in one of those missives she insisted were not recommendations. “I did feel, however, that the occupational therapy work might be made of more value if they could develop some of the arts in which some of the Indians must have skill and do a little better work than is being done at the present time.” If less than a command, this was more than a suggestion. Ickes was in a benign mood; he thanked her for her letter: “It is gratifying that you found time during your busy trip to visit the Indian Sanitorium.”32
Except for the homesteads, she was more deeply involved with the WPA than any other New Deal agency, and she did not hesitate to offer advice, often quite bluntly. She criticized the poor public-relations job the agency did, stating that some project officials seemed to avoid publicity “for fear of stirring up trouble. This is an age old attitude and never leads anywhere successfully.” She admonished Aubrey Williams that the NYA representative in a discussion over which she had presided had been “rather dull. . . . Do you think a little coaching as to how to keep an audience on the qui vive would be advisable?” She returned from a visit to New York City and was immediately on the phone to Williams about the difficulties encountered there by the WPA-sponsored nursery school: “I think Dr. Andrus [the director of the nursery] is probably more interested in doing a good job than in government regulations. There ought to be a way by which both can be accomplished.” Aubrey’s follow-up report caused her to explode:
The habit of having situations which arise investigated by the people about whom the complaint is made seems to me a most pernicious one and entirely futi
le. Exactly the same thing happened in the Illinois gravel pit situation. I do not see how you could expect a fair report from the people who are being accused of doing things which are not justifiable.
On the back of one of the letters in the series exchanged on this matter she wrote, “Give me these. Ask if he, Mrs. [Florence] Kerr & Harry [Hopkins] if he is in town would like to come & dine & talk NYA & WPA matters over. Will gladly have Mrs. Woodward also if they like.” Her test of successful management was whether the job got done rather than whether a regulation was complied with. In Chicago she met at Hull House with the supervisors of Hilda Smith’s Workers and Adult Education projects: “The main difficulty seems to be that Mr. Maurer because of the set-up has to contact so many people every time he does anything that most of the time is spent running around to the people above him rather than supervising the teachers.” Couldn’t Aubrey “dynamite” the WPA official in charge?33
Often she worked through the women in her husband’s administration. She and Molly Dewson kept a watchful eye over all appointments on the distaff side to make sure that women were not overlooked. The right of women to be considered on the basis of merit for all jobs was still far from established. She protested Hull’s plan to send a woman to succeed Mrs. Owen in Denmark; she and Molly would “far rather” see him “send a man to Denmark and put a woman in some other place.” In 1937 Molly accepted an appointment as one of the three members of the Social Security Board, and Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, sister of Senator Guffey and Democratic national committeewoman from Pennsylvania, maneuvered to succeed her. Eleanor and Molly considered Mrs. Miller too close to the old-line organization, too traditional in her political methods. “Molly has had a conception of work for the Women’s Division which I consider very valuable,” Eleanor wrote Mrs. Miller, who had mounted a considerable campaign against Molly; “she has put education first and I think the women needed that more than anything else.” Molly, backed by Eleanor, succeeded in having Jim Farley name Mrs. Dorothy McAllister of Michigan as director of the women’s division. There was a weekly, sometimes daily, flow of memorandums from Mrs. McAllister asking for help, reporting on developments, building up regional meetings around her. Columnists spoke of the influence that Felix Frankfurter wielded in Washington through the many young lawyers, most of them graduates of Harvard Law School, whom he had spotted strategically throughout the New Deal. “Frankfurter’s hot dogs,” Hugh Johnson derisively named them. The women who looked to Eleanor for their marching orders and support were as numerous and perhaps more militant than Frankfurter’s disciples.34
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