Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Baruch—also through Eleanor—was another who advised the president to ease up on the business community. He sent her the statement he had made before the Special Senate Committee on Unemployment in which he had warned that it was wrong to rush from a “regulate everything” position. She was not persuaded, Eleanor wrote Baruch later, but she was ready “to see us let business have some of the reforms which they think will solve their difficulties, not because I agree but because I think there is much in the psychological effect.”52 Her old friend Harry Hooker, now a Wall Street lawyer and counsel to Myron Taylor of U.S. Steel, was distressed to hear her say there was no solution known to her or to anyone else for full employment, and sent her a nine-page plan which called for repeal of the capital-gains tax, reduction in income taxes, and a ban on New Deal speeches attacking business. “Whether we like it or not, Capitalism is timid,” Hooker summed up his recommendations.53 Eleanor reported them to her husband, adding that she had also heard from a reputable economist that the way to bring about full employment was a large-scale housing program. She was for trying both. Fine, the president commented, but where was he going to get the money?

  The First Lady was in advance of almost everyone in the administration in her emphasis on how much remained to be done despite New Deal achievements. At a Youth Congress dinner in February, 1939, a Republican speaker dismissed agencies such as the NYA and the CCC as ineffective and wasteful. “American youth does not want to be mollycoddled,” the Republican official asserted; what it wanted was jobs. Eleanor was moved to make an impromptu answer. She agreed that WPA and NYA might not represent “fundamental” solutions; they were, she said quietly, stop-gap measures. But the NYA “gave people hope at a time when young people were desperate,” and with the NYA and WPA we had “bought ourselves time to think.” Although she believed in the measures enacted by the New Deal, she also noted that “they helped but they did not solve the fundamental problems. There is no use kidding ourselves. We have got to face this economic problem. And we have got to face it together. We have got to cooperate if we are going to solve it.” Heywood Broun, who was in the audience, was so moved by her speech that he consulted his journalistic colleagues: “Am I just going into an impulsive handspring or is this one of the finest short speeches ever made in our times?”54

  Because Eleanor was in advance not only of her husband but of almost all of his cabinet in urging that the “fundamentals” of the unemployment problem be confronted, she had to be careful not to give the opposition a chance to raise the cry of “petticoat government.” Although the charge was completely inconsistent with the efforts to portray Roosevelt as a “dictator,” that did not deter the administration’s critics. When she was in Dallas in March, 1939, to lecture, Eleanor was presented by Governor W. Lee O’Daniel, a conservative Democrat. In his introductory remarks he said, “You’ve possibly heard of her husband. Any good things he may have done during his political career are due to her and any mistakes he may have made are due to his not taking up the matter with his wife.” Was this southern courtliness or subtle Democratic aspersion? Eleanor promptly entered a gentle disclaimer: “A President’s wife does not see her husband often enough to tell him what to do.” Simeon Strunsky, who wrote the “Topics of the Times” column, enjoyed that. “Many a man who has had the privilege of talking with the President for five minutes in the course of a year or a whole administration has been known to go on ever after mysteriously assuming responsibility for most of the President’s acts”; the First Lady was “too modest.”55

  But she knew the pitfalls of appearing to have any influence with Franklin. He had spent half a lifetime escaping the domination of his mother, and he resisted any kind of domination, especially a woman’s. And Eleanor was a very strong-minded woman. “If the term ‘weaker sex’ is to be transferred from the female to the male of our society,” commented Grace Tully, Missy’s assistant, “much of the psychological groundwork must be credited to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”56 “Men have to be humored,” Eleanor wrote in answer to Raymond Clapper’s assertion that women were too emotional to be entrusted with large matters of policy. “I know that men have to believe that they are superior to women, and women from the time they are little girls have to learn self-discipline because they have to please the gentlemen. They have to manage some man all their lives.” She loved the passage in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “John Brown’s Body” which described the lady of the plantation:

  She was often mistaken, not often blind,

  And she knew the whole duty of womankind,

  To take the burden and have the power

  And seem like the well-protected flower . . . 57

  Once, a student leader suggested the text of a message the president might send to a youth meeting; he noticed Tommy getting restive and finally she said tartly, “The President will write his own message.” Later Tommy came to the young man and said apologetically she had not meant to hurt his feelings but if Mrs. Roosevelt were to go to the president and suggest what he ought to say “he will just get mad.”58 When Dr. D. E. Buckingham told the newspapers that Mrs. Roosevelt had secured him his job as District veterinarian, she wrote him sharply, “You must realize that I never actually ask for anyone’s appointment. I simply stated your qualifications as I would have done for anyone who had done anything for us. You have placed me in a very embarrassing position, by having made it appear that I had used my influence.” And she advised the president of the District Commissioners

  that in the future I will be very glad if my name is not used in connection with any recommendation which I make.

  I write these letters merely to give any information which I have when a man’s name is up for consideration, and I would not, under any condition, want to influence your decision or have you do anything which was not in accordance with your best judgment.59

  In a story about Ickes’ appointment of Ruth Bryan Rohde to attend an Inter-American Travel Congress, the New York Times reported that Mrs. Roosevelt had suggested the appointment. She quickly wrote the secretary:

  I hope you do not think that I was the person who suggested Mrs. Rohde for any position. I simply wrote you because the President asked me to do so. There is such a concerted effort being made to make it appear that I dictate to F.D.R. that I don’t want the people who should know the truth to have any misunderstanding about it. I wouldn’t dream of doing more than passing along requests or suggestions that come to me.60

  The issue of her influence with the president also arose in connection with her promptings of her husband during a press conference at Hyde Park. The president was accusing the anti-New Deal coalition in Congress of gambling with world peace and the economic well-being of the country, and in the informal atmosphere of Hyde Park Eleanor spoke up to remind him of some vivid phrases that he had used at breakfast to illustrate his point. Mrs. Roosevelt “has come into the open as the guiding spirit and co-phrasemaker of her husband’s program,” Arthur Krock of the Times wrote afterward.61

  “Did you notice that Mrs. Roosevelt during a press conference prompted the President?” John C. O’Laughlin, publisher of the Army and Navy Journal, excitedly wrote his friend Herbert Hoover.

  Are they hereafter to cooperate rather than each to work one side of the street? Is the idea to advance Mrs. Roosevelt for something or other, even the Presidency? A fantastic notion, but in Washington suspicion follows any Roosevelt act. It may be, too, that the pair thought it advisable to show complete harmony in view. If so, the President will go much farther to the left during the remainder of his term, for you are aware of the extreme radicalism of the First Lady. . . . In any event, the incident is interesting and is welcome by the Republicans, who now feel they can attack Mrs. Roosevelt as a politician and thus avoid criticism for assailing a woman.62

  “I should have learned by this time to keep quiet when I happen to sit in at the President’s conferences,” Eleanor told another member of the staff of the Times,

  for every
time I have ever opened my mouth at one I have got into trouble. But it seemed to be such a shame that the phrase he had used, telling us the same things at the breakfast table, couldn’t be repeated for the correspondents, because it just wasn’t as good a story without those graphic expressions. So I tried to help him out—and that’s all to that.63

  As much as possible she sought to minimize and conceal from public view her intercessions with the president. In December, 1939, Walter White of the NAACP sent her a report on an investigation of two lynchings in Mississippi, in the hope of publishing the report with her sponsorship. She sent it to the president. Back came a memo: “You should not accept a place as a member of the group but I suggest that you ask the Attorney General to look into this whole case to smell out any interstate activity or effect in the crime.” Eleanor sent the report to Attorney General Murphy, saying that the president had suggested he look into it, and Murphy assigned Assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge to the case. In writing to Walter White, however, she omitted any reference to the president. “I do not think it would be wise for me to give my name as a sponsor to the report you sent me, so I think this is one request I shall have to refuse. I am giving your letter to the Attorney General.”

  Louis Fischer, the writer and analyst of Soviet affairs, appealed to Eleanor to help get his wife and two sons out of the Soviet Union. At his request she agreed to speak to the president about it to find out if he would mention it to Soviet Ambassador Oumansky. The president had suggested that she invite Mrs. Oumansky for tea and talk to her about it, she reported to Fischer. The affair went well, and passports were issued to Fischer’s family. When he later requested permission to describe the episode in a book he was writing and enclosed what he proposed to say, she wrote back:

  I hate to spoil anything you have written, but I would rather you left out my letter and any reference to the President. I do not want more than a mention of the fact that you came to see me and I said I would do what I could. I do not want it said that I interfered.64

  She sought to hide her influence and effectiveness, and she held no office in government. Yet at the end of her husband’s second term, Raymond Clapper included her among “The Ten Most Powerful People in Washington,” saying that she was “a force on public opinion, on the President and on the government . . . a cabinet minister without portfolio . . . the most influential woman of our times.” Grace Tully called her “a one-woman staff for the President,” and Jesse Jones thought of her as “Assistant President.” Without office she had developed an immense following throughout the country. It was never tested in a vote, but a poll on the subject published by Dr. Gallup at the beginning of 1939 showed that 67 per cent of those queried approved of the way she had conducted herself as First Lady, with women endorsing her activities by an even larger ratio than men.65

  The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, close to death in Cambridge, realized what she had accomplished during her husband’s first two terms in office. Writing on behalf of Mrs. Whitehead and himself, he said, “We cannot exaggerate our appreciation of the wonderful work which you are doing in transforming the bleak social agencies of the past by the personal exercise of kindness, interest and directive knowledge.” She was never able to forget, she told S. J. Woolf, “that this country or any other country is in the final analysis a collection of human beings striving to be happy, and it is the human element which is the most important consideration.”66

  Why does she bother him with such trivial matters, the president’s aides sometimes complained and oftener thought. Life might have been more tranquil for Franklin if she had not done so, but the texture of the Roosevelt years would have been different, a human touch would have been missing, the people and their government would have been less intimately involved with each other.

  * The World-Telegram in January, 1933, had spoken of a “connubial Presidency” after Eleanor, citing the danger of presidential isolation, said that her correspondence was an avenue

  through which WE [World-Telegram capitals] can keep in touch with the public.

  Not in the history of the American democracy and of the Presidency has a mistress of the White House spoken to the public in this extensive way, and so far as we know, not in the history of the democracies anywhere has the wife of a President, in alluding to the performance of the Presidential duties, used the first person plural “we” or “us.” In the case of Mrs. Roosevelt she welcomes the public to write not in the capacity of a representative of the President but as one member of a sort of co-partnership of interest.

  † See Chapter 49, “FDR Administers a Spanking.”

  ‡ Leonard Elmhirst sent it to her, requesting that she pass it on to the president.

  41.CHANGES AT HYDE PARK

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT HAD MANAGED AS FIRST LADY TO REMAIN herself, to be a person, not a personage, and to have the human being thus disclosed accepted by the American public. But to remain human she had to keep official duties from stifling her personal life. Sometimes she felt she was leading a Jekyll and Hyde existence—one moment the public personality, the next the private human being.

  In 1937 Forbes Morgan, who had been married to Aunt Pussie, died. Eleanor’s ties with him dated back to the year of her debut when as one of Pussie’s suitors he had danced with her. The funeral services were in Washington, and as usual in family crises much of the responsibility fell upon Eleanor. She comforted “Boy,” Forbes’s son, went with him to meet members of the family who converged upon Washington, and the next day accompanied him on the sad journey to Tivoli where Forbes was laid to rest in the Hall family vault. Yet all during the two days she also had to attend to such official duties as the annual breakfast of the Congressional Club, to which she had hurried after meeting her Aunt Maude at the train, for, she explained,

  these official duties, like the one yesterday and the one today, are scheduled so long in advance that it always seems to me unfair to break the engagement unless it is absolutely necessary.

  But in some ways it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its little hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.1

  There were people who spoke to the passionate side of her nature, to whom she was bound by the memories of shared joys and sorrows—members of her family, a few co-workers, a few of the waifs for whom she felt a special responsibility. They represented the “personal side” of her life. She wrote of her Aunt Maude:

  There are comparatively few people in the world whom you are always sure of finding equally interested, equally sympathetic, and equally entertaining as when you last met. When your ties go back into your childhood, however, and you have always found that a given person comes up to your expectations, you pick up the threads of relationship just where you dropped them when last you were together, and you feel a security of understanding which you do not feel with many people.2

  The president was immersed in public affairs, and her children were grown and gone. She had, moreover, always felt she had shared both her husband and her children with another woman, Franklin’s mother. She needed to have people who were close to her, who in a sense were hers, to whom she was the one and only, and upon whom she could lavish help, attention, tenderness. Without such friends, she feared she would dry up and die. When such friends were in trouble she expected them to turn to her, and she felt rebuffed if they did not. When they came to Washington she insisted they stay at the White House, and when she was in New York City or whatever part of the country in which they lived, she planned, long in advance, the things they would do together. It gave her pleasure to bring them gifts, to take them to a new restaurant, to go to the theater with them. She corresponded with them faithfully, often writing longhand letters in the early hours of the morning. Their birthdays were listed in a little black loose-leaf book, their Christmas gifts in another, and in the bulging little engagement book that she k
ept in her purse (the pages for which were Lorena Hickok’s annual Christmas present to her), the birthdays, Christmas parties, and wedding anniversaries that she unfailingly celebrated with them were the first entries. “As you know, Mrs. Roosevelt is always a year ahead of all the rest of us in her engagements,” Tommy wrote Hick. “She asked me to drop you a note to tell you that she would like to have the pages for next year when you have time to do them.”3

  Eleanor’s cousin Corinne Alsop was staying with Alice Longworth, she informed Eleanor, but she would like to come and have dinner or tea with Eleanor when Alice was otherwise engaged: “I know that in casually saying I want to see you I am treating you as ‘Eleanor’ and not quite as the Mistress of the White House and I am always finding myself shy in so doing.” “For Heaven’s sake,” Eleanor remonstrated, “why shouldn’t you treat me as Eleanor! I never think of myself as mistress of the White House with casual people, much less with my family.” Corinne, like Cousin Susie and Henry Parish and Harry Hooker and Isabella Greenway, reached back to her youth. There were the friends made during the years she entered public life—Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and Elinor Morgenthau; those like Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller, who dated back to the days at Albany; and a few like Mayris Chaney, a dancer, who had been introduced to her by Earl in the Washington years. She went to great lengths to get together with these people.4

  In the 1936 campaign reporters were mystified when a petite, shapely blonde appeared on the presidential train during Roosevelt’s tour through the Midwest. Who was she? they wanted to know, and gawked even more when the lady who they decided was someone’s femme fatale rode in presidential parades in the same car with Mrs. Roosevelt. Finally a woman reporter was delegated to ask Eleanor who she was since no one else in the official party seemed able to tell them. She was, Eleanor willingly replied, Mayris Chaney, or “Tiny” as she called her, a dancer and a friend. But why on the campaign train? “Well,” explained Marquis Childs in his newspaper column, “they had promised themselves a holiday together and when Mrs. Roosevelt discovered she would not be on the West Coast that fall she wired for her friend, Mayris, to tour with the Presidential party. It was as simple as that.”5