Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  When women in the administration were attacked, as happened frequently, Eleanor defended them. There were periodic campaigns against Frances Perkins. “She has been quietly shoved in the wings,” columnist Ray Tucker wrote in 1935, and her job was really being handled by the department’s strong man, Edward McGrady. “FDR, this is being widely said. Is it part of the attack or has she not done well?” was Eleanor’s query to her husband. “This is columnist’s stuff and really silly,” he assured her.35

  Frances Perkins was one of the first targets of Representative Martin Dies, who accused her of malfeasance because she had not ordered the deportation of Harry Bridges, the radical leader of the Pacific Coast’s longshoremen. When Dies threatened Miss Perkins with impeachment proceedings, her friend Ann (Mrs. Arthur Osgood) Choate sent an urgent call for assistance to Eleanor. She had talked with the president, Eleanor advised Mrs. Choate, who said he would appeal to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Hatton W. Sumners, on the basis of masculine chivalry to bring the matter to a vote—either to go ahead with impeachment proceedings or definitely turn them down. Then Eleanor offered some advice:

  I realize that Frances is under a strain and I wish she could take it more lightly because I think it is purely a political attack, and in public life women must accustom themselves to these things in the way that men have. She is alone and I wish that the women of this country, particularly in the organizations, could be induced to realize what the true story is on the whole Bridges question. Frances has it and, it seems to me, could give it to the heads of the different organizations if they would only request it. Then their backing could be made vocal. At present, many of the Federation of Women’s Clubs members, who met down here, are down on Frances because they believe she is a Communist. When you get women started along those lines they are like sheep. They think Dies is doing a wonderful job and do not realize that he is doing something to make himself personally popular with the sole idea of being candidate for President, and Miss Perkins was the easiest victim.

  Frances does not know how to get on with newspaper people and neither has she a secretary who can do it. I did suggest that she try to get someone who would handle the press for her, but so far as I know she has never done it.36

  Eleanor helped Frances, although she sensed a reserve in Frances’s attitude toward her—perhaps it was Frances’s fear that working too closely with Eleanor might make life more difficult for her in the man’s world of the labor movement. The labor leaders had originally urged Roosevelt to appoint a man, and one of the stories current in Washington which, while not wholly accurate, was said to be in character so far as Eleanor was involved, described her as commiserating with her husband for the bad hour he must have put in with the labor leaders when he told them he had already made up his mind to appoint Miss Perkins. “Oh, that’s all right,” Roosevelt was said to have replied. “I’d rather have trouble with them for an hour than have trouble with you for the rest of my life.” But it was Molly, not Eleanor, who had organized the campaign for Frances in 1933, and when in 1939 Roosevelt asked his wife to tell Miss Perkins, if she got the chance, not to oppose a reorganization measure that took the Employment Service out of the Labor Department, Eleanor passed the job on to Molly: “I think if you speak to her, it will have more weight than if I were to do it?”37

  As at Albany, civic organizations prospered under Eleanor’s patronage. She brought the White House closer to the civic-minded through their organizations, and by getting them a hearing from the president enabled him to hear viewpoints that otherwise might not have reached him. Organizations like the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Public Housing Conference, the National Consumers League, the National Sharecroppers Fund, and the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War as well as the more radical groups such as the Workers Alliance and the American Youth Congress suddenly felt themselves on the inside of government, holding their sessions at the White House, being briefed by the First Lady on the president’s plans and difficulties, and, because of her sponsorship, getting a hearing from press and public. “What on earth would I do without you in the White House?,” Lucy Randolph Mason, a key CIO official in the South, exclaimed after an expression of interest by Eleanor had finally brought intervention by the Department of Justice in the case of a union organizer who had been badly beaten in Georgia.38

  Eleanor’s assistance to the housing groups when they convened in Washington in January, 1937, to press for passage of the Wagner Housing Act made up for what they considered the president’s lack of enthusiasm for the bill in the previous session of Congress. Eleanor addressed the conference, invited its leaders to the White House to fill them in on the president’s thinking, and relayed messages from them to the president and from the president to them.39

  This time, with an assist from the president, the Wagner-Steagall bill was approved, and in September the United States Housing Authority was created. Nathan Straus was appointed administrator, and he promptly wrote Eleanor, hailing her as “one of the first ‘housers’ in the country” and expressing the hope that he could discuss his problems with her. “We are all very much pleased that, when it is organized, you will be able to have the new housing group at the White House for one meeting at which you will preside. . . . ” He regularly sent her the figures on the housing loans that he had approved and reports on the progress of the projects, and he even discussed the design of the apartments with her. To install closet doors, as she had suggested, would add approximately $225 to the cost of a dwelling unit, he advised her; every extra feature added to the costs and if he did not keep rehousing down to minimal standards he might endanger his hope to rehouse all slum dwellers. She did not protest, as she was more realistic now than she had been in 1934 about what Congress might be expected to sanction. “Surely closet doors are not worth $225 per house!” she agreed. “Come to lunch to talk it over.”40

  She mediated between Esther Lape’s Committee of Physicians and the president in regard to improved medical services. Esther had moved the American Foundation, of which she was the member-in-charge, into the field of the organization of medical care. Organized medicine, particularly the American Medical Association, had successfully resisted the inclusion of compulsory health insurance in the social-security system when it was set up, and in order to keep the issue alive Roosevelt had appointed an Interdepartmental Committee to develop a program to strengthen the nation’s health services. But this committee had gone about its studies in a leisurely manner and Roosevelt appeared to have forgotten about the group when Esther moved in. Together with a group of liberal doctors she had completed a massive survey of medical practitioners on whether and how medical care should be reorganized. The report, published in two large volumes, showed that the AMA’s opposition to government involvement in the delivery of medical services and the maintenance of standards did not represent the views of the medical profession in general.

  Esther wanted the president not simply to glance at the survey but really to digest it, she told Eleanor, even though she knew better than to expect the president to go through two fat volumes. Earlier Esther had mentioned some thoughts she had on government’s relationship to business, and Eleanor told her to write them down and she would give them to Franklin. “Oh, he would not be interested,” Esther protested. “Franklin is interested in any idea that can be written down on one page,” Eleanor replied. Although the president had told Esther and Elizabeth when they had talked with him in July, 1936, that he would meet with their Physicians Committee “if they had agreed upon any clear point of view,” Eleanor found him reluctant to do so when she brought up Esther’s request for a meeting in February, 1937. She pried the reason out of him. “Somehow or other, Franklin had it in his mind that he would in some way have to line up with someone and he was not ready to do that.” When Eleanor assured him that this would not be the case, she was able to arrange a date. She “infini
tely” preferred one, Esther hastily notified her, when Eleanor could be present, even if it meant some delay. She sent along the names of her Physicians Committee.41

  Franklin did not want to have dinner. “Lunch with me first,” Eleanor had Tommy wire Esther. “Thursday April 8th. As much time as they want.” In their talk with the president the doctors urged a partnership between government, medical schools, and hospitals in order to raise the standards of all medical care and to provide medical attention for the indigent. The first practical step was to establish a Planning Commission to formulate a national policy, they said, which led to the rediscovery of the Interdepartmental Committee under Josephine Roche, and the president asked Dr. McIntire to talk Esther’s proposals over with the committee “and let me have a recommendation.”

  When the AMA learned what was going on at the White House it lifted the statement of principles Esther’s committee had left with the president and endorsed them. Esther was not sure whether to be elated or alarmed, she wrote Eleanor; “Of course they tacked on some nullifying clauses designed to lodge everything with the AMA. This will never do. But it is revolutionary to have these principles put forth under those auspices.” In any case it was more important than ever to go ahead with the Planning Commission.42

  The president evidently thought so, too, for, Eleanor telegraphed Esther, “Franklin thinks it important to move at once. Will see you Monday or Tuesday a.m.” In the end, Roosevelt decided not to appoint a new commission but to have Josephine Roche’s committee bring in a report, which it did in February, 1938.

  Guided by the Roche Report and urged on by Esther and her group, Roosevelt suggested to his Interdepartmental Committee that they convene a conference to secure the backing of medical science as well as public-health and citizens’ groups for a program of action. Esther had reservations about the Roche Report, which she felt did not sufficiently reflect medical and administrative realities. But the president had one central concern: “Esther, my interest is in getting some kind of medical care to the submerged third that has now practically none.”43 The conference was held in July, 1938. Out of it emerged the Wagner Health Act of 1939, but the AMA raised the cry of “socialized medicine” and the bill never came out of committee.

  Esther refused to give up. Her group of doctors were “the genuine representatives of a powerful group of leading medical scientists opposed to the reactionary policy of the AMA,” she wrote Eleanor begging her once more to arrange a meeting with the president. “Could you have the meeting here in September?” Eleanor queried her husband. By September war had broken out in Europe and Roosevelt had little time to think about health legislation, and in fact though there would have to be some health proposals ready for the 1940 session, he was hesitant about meeting with Esther’s group. “Franklin says he does not want to get into any difficulty with the AMA just now when he has so much to contend with, and asks that this just be an off-the-record meeting.” He saw them at the house rather than in the executive offices, and Eleanor served tea.44

  Franklin was in retreat on domestic legislation in general. Although he adopted the reasoning of Esther’s group, the “beginning” he suggested fell far short of their hopes. He asked Congress to authorize the construction of small hospitals in the needy areas of the country, “instead of waiting for a complete and perfected plan,” such as the Wagner bill, “which would cost an awful lot of money.”45 This proposal, however, never emerged from committee either.

  Roosevelt wanted medical care for the needy, but it is questionable whether he would ever have become as involved as he did without Esther’s committee and Eleanor’s mediation. Eleanor made a career of supplying the president with ideas of what might be done, placing him in touch with people and programs that otherwise might not have gained his attention.

  Ickes did not approve of circumventing channels to reach the president, and called it getting in to see the president “through Mrs. R.’s back door.” But this “back door” route to the president was open with Roosevelt’s acquiescence. It enabled him to talk with people without the press knowing it and without the formality of giving them appointments. He recognized his wife’s right to have as guests people who interested her as well as her friends, and if as a consequence Quaker pacifists, radicals, reformers, youth leaders, and “housers,” who somehow neither he nor his secretaries ever managed to find time for, had a chance to talk with him, it was no disaster. He liked people and dominated the table talk no matter who the guests were, although he might comment to his staff the next morning that “Eleanor had a lot of ‘do-gooders’ for dinner and you know what that means.” However, it was healthy for his staff to be aware that there were routes to his presence that they did not control. Eleanor did not abuse this prerogative. When she sensed that someone bored or irritated her husband, she had them to lunch or tea, and if she felt he might not want to see someone for political reasons, she made inquiries beforehand and guided herself accordingly. In any case, the list of dinner guests was always sent up to Missy, and if the guests did not interest him, Franklin pleaded work and dined in his oval study.46

  As the thirties drew to a close, the jobless seemed to Eleanor to be a standing indictment of the American economy and an unredeemed claim on its conscience. She had grown close to Hopkins and the WPA because he and his top people were as ready as she to try unorthodox, even radical, methods to help the jobless. Franklin sensed political danger in the work projects started by the WPA for unemployed artists, musicians, writers, actors, and women, but Eleanor was all for them. There was “not the slightest doubt” in Aubrey Williams’ mind “that had it not been for Harry Hopkins and Mrs. Roosevelt, for she was a powerful influence in support of width and variety in the work projects, the work program would have been much more limited in its variety and character.”47

  Eleanor wanted the well-off to visit the WPA projects because that would help them understand that “the unemployed are not a strange race. They are like we would be if we had not had a fortunate chance at life. . . . It is very hard for people who do not come face to face with suffering to realize how hard life can be.” At Hyde Park Eleanor read aloud Martha Gellhorn’s first story from The Trouble I’ve Seen, a series of WPA sketches, and some of her listeners wept. Then she was invited to the Colony Club to give a reading from the book. She trembled at the prospect, she said, but steeled herself to do it because it was important for the well-to-do to understand the situation of the unemployed.48

  Because she felt the country had not as yet faced up in a fundamental way to the problem of the machine age, she was insistent that no plan, no point of view be rejected without someone giving it careful scrutiny. “There is a Mr. Albert Lytle Deane,” she wrote Harry Hopkins, “who has submitted a plan to me. I, in turn, presented it to the President and he thinks it might be worthwhile to you to see Mr. Deane, and if, after talking to him, you think the plan has merit, the President will be glad to have you talk to him about it.” Hopkins was a little annoyed: “Mr. Deane has discussed his plan with every official here in Washington at some time or other,” he replied, and attached an analysis of the plan by Leon Henderson, who had found “very little of value” in it. Eleanor was not deterred. She wanted to be sure new ideas were not kept from the president. “This was sent me by a little man,” Eleanor advised her son James, who was then acting as one of his father’s secretaries, “and I just thought there might be something in it somewhere which would help you people who are working on the Supreme Court plan.”49

  A Tennessee farmer sent her a detailed proposal for establishing a silk industry in the United States. “He wants a silk industry. It was looked into but should we look further?” The president was sufficiently intrigued to send the proposal on to Wallace, inquiring, “Is there anything in this idea?” The labor costs were prohibitive, Wallace replied. “Did anyone go over this to find out if there is anything in it?” Eleanor asked her husband in regard to still another plan. “What can we say to Mrs. Roosevelt about
this?” the president asked Lauchlin Currie, one of his administrative assistants. “A crank, and not worth bothering with,” was Currie’s summary judgment. But as long as someone looked into these matters Eleanor was satisfied. Usually they were wild goose chases, but one of the plans she passed on to Franklin was sent by Alexander Sachs, an economist with Lehman Brothers. In 1936 he had submitted a plan for agriculture, but in 1939 he came to the White House as the intermediary for Albert Einstein and other scientists who wanted to apprise the president about nuclear fission.50

  In her search for a solution to the unemployment problem, Eleanor was as open to suggestions from the business community as from the labor movement and the left. It was through her‡ that John Maynard Keynes’ letter on the 1937 recession dealing with the impasse between the business world and the New Deal reached the president. Keynes wrote:

  I think the President is playing with fire if he does not now do something to encourage the business world, or at any rate refrain from frightening them further. If one is purporting to run a capitalist system, and not something quite different, there are concessions that have to be made. The worst of all conceivable systems is a capitalist one kept on purpose by authority in a state of panic and lack of confidence.51