Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Eleanor’s recommendation of Mayris Chaney for a post with OCD had been unwise, a response of the heart rather than the head. Her unwillingness to turn her back on friends and associates whom unscrupulous critics stigmatized as “communists” made her vulnerable to attack. The exercise of power has its laws. The name of the codifier of those laws has entered the dictionaries as a synonym for political expediency, craft, and deceit. Those who place friendship, loyalty, and righteousness above power, wrote Machiavelli, are better off as private citizens.

  Eleanor’s love of people, when it came to her friends, expressed itself in a “loyalty . . . that is boundless—and even reckless, on occasion,” said her old friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

  “To know me is a terrible thing,” Eleanor quietly remarked.56 But even if she had not known or been fond of Mayris Chaney and the others under attack, she would have stood by them. Rare was the administrator or politician who was willing to employ someone whose background and record did not conform to conventional standards of success and propriety. But for Eleanor, to blow on the spark that encouraged another human being—defeated, flawed, despondent—to try to transcend his limitations gave life its savor. And an unconditional integrity made it predictable that she would not apply to others a “loyalty” test that she felt she herself would not pass if she were not First Lady.

  The attacks on her confirmed her deepest forebodings about taking an official post in her husband’s administration. She had come to OCD to help the program, and here she was, lessening its effectiveness. Her mail was heavy with letters about the Chaney-Douglas appointments, seven out of every eight critical, over half “more or less abusive” and, added Tommy, “still coming in.” Eleanor had never had such an unfavorable press. The columnists who defended her were the exceptions, and one of them was Walter Winchell, who at the height of the hue and cry, concluded a weekly broadcast, “I remain your New York correspondent, Walter Winchell, who wishes the House of Representatives would again read the Bill they voted for on December eight. . . . It was a Declaration of War on the Axis—not Mrs. Roosevelt! Goodnight.”

  “I am not in the least disturbed by this latest attack,” she wrote Kellogg. “It is purely political and made by the same people who have fought NYA, CCC, WPA, Farm Security, etc.” Yet even before this final flareup she had concluded she must resign. The Interdepartmental Committee in OCD had to be under his chairmanship, she wrote Dean Landis. “You must preside over it, and you must have contacts with the other departments. I am afraid that being the President’s wife would make it pretty awkward for a good many people if I were to do the job.”57

  It was awkward even for Dean Landis. It was “a perfectly impossible situation to have as an assistant director the wife of the President of the United States.” She tried to do the best she could, according to Landis:

  For example, she had an office just one floor away, and this was a constant problem. I would call her up and say, “I’d like to see you about a matter,” and she’d say, “Oh, no, I’ll come up and see you.” She made it a point always to do that so that outwardly the line of command would be there.

  But, after all, she would have channels of communication with the President considerably closer than mine! It was a difficult situation. And then, if she would take a position, that would involve the President; whereas if just an ordinary assistant director took a position it didn’t involve the President. It might involve me but it didn’t involve the President.58

  Eleanor was glad to stay on as the executive in charge of community planning “for the time being,” she had written Landis shortly after he came into OCD, “at least until everything is running smoothly, then if we can find just the right person, we can put him in.”59

  Landis talked to Roosevelt, who, he said, understood the difficulties of having as his associate the president’s wife. On February 10, at Cornell, where Eleanor had gone to address the Home and Farm Week exercises, she stated in response to reporters’ questions that she expected to resign “very soon. I always intended to resign once we were organized, but not until the civilian participation side is thoroughly organized.” In her speech she added, “I realize how unwise it is for a vulnerable person like myself to try a government job.”60

  A week later she formally resigned. “By remaining in the Office of Civilian Defense I would only make it possible for those who wish to attack me, because of my beliefs, to attack an agency which I consider can prove its usefulness so completely to the people that it should be free of attack, in order to render its maximum service.” Dean Landis had assembled the staff in the departmental auditorium for the occasion, and in a statement of its own the staff asserted that the resignation brought “a deep sense of personal loss to us all.”

  LaGuardia, accustomed as he was to brickbats in public life, was astonished at the “abuse” heaped upon the First Lady. He found it difficult to understand, he said, and “perhaps the real reason—the real cause—happened a long, long time ago. It happened, perhaps thirty-seven years ago this coming St. Patrick’s Day, when a young man by the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt married the right girl.”61

  After Franklin’s death, Eleanor, in a characteristic refusal to acknowledge she had any importance in the New Deal years except as the wife of the president, ascribed the attack upon her at the OCD to her relationship to the president: “I offered a way to get at the President and in wartime it is not politically wise to attack the President.” But this did her position an injustice. The abuse and criticism were directed as much at her for what she represented as at the president for the power he wielded. She recognized this in a broadcast two days after she resigned, when as “a private citizen” she spoke her mind and assailed the “small and very vocal group of unenlightened men” who are now “able to renew, under the guise of patriotism and economy, the age-old fight of the privileged few against the good of the many.” She reaffirmed her belief that defense included “better nutrition, better housing, better day-by-day medical care, better education, better recreation for every age. Perhaps we must all stand up more and be counted in this fight, the virtuous Westbrook Peglers on the one side, the boondogglers, so-called, on the other.”62

  Landis proved to be as unsympathetic to the volunteer participation program as LaGuardia had been. “Poor Jonathan Daniels,” Eleanor wrote of her successor, “he’s up against an impossible situation I fear—Landis is proving like LaGuardia & I know what he is going through.” The OCD had six million volunteers. Landis acknowledged that there were a great many people in the country who wanted to do something in the war effort, “and perhaps the best thing for them was to baby sit for women working in munitions plants.” But he shared congressional suspiciousness of social workers and do-gooders, and after six months Daniels resigned, and the dream of the OCD as a “people’s movement” ended.63

  * Eleanor subsequently enjoyed a good working relationship with Palmer as housing coordinator. “Do help the USHA,” she urged him. “Mr. Straus has done such a good job, but he does not understand getting on with Congress.”

  † Landis, who doubled as head of the Harvard Law School and the New England OCD, tried to reach LaGuardia and finally did so at nine or ten in the evening. After he informed the mayor of the standby measures he had instituted, including an alert to all his wardens and auxiliary policemen, LaGuardia commented: “Very fine, but I think you want to get them to march. Can you get a big parade going in Boston tomorrow?”

  “Mayor, my men don’t march. They don’t know how to march.”

  “You ought to get them to march.”

  “ . . . They know marching isn’t going to do anything here. They know exactly what their tasks are. . . . ”42

  52.GI’S FRIEND, I: JOURNEY TO BRITAIN

  ELEANOR CARRIED A NEW, A “WARTIME” PRAYER IN HER PURSE:

  Dear Lord,

  Lest I continue

  My complacent way,

  Help me to remember,

  Somehow out there

>   A man died for me today.

  As long as there be war,

  I then must

  Ask and answer

  Am I worth dying for?

  She grieved for the young men who were going off to war, for she knew what the last war “did to people’s souls,” and she dreaded it for this generation. She was anxious for her sons. One morning during the OCD travail a friend spoke to her on the telephone and, sensing distress and despair in her voice, rushed over, imagining some new disaster at the OCD. She and the president had just bade good-by to their two eldest sons. James was off to the West Coast to train with the Marine Raiders Battalion being organized by Major Evans Carlson, and the much maligned Elliott was under orders to join a bomber squadron. Eleanor began to sob as she spoke of how difficult it had been to say good-by. She knew they had to go, but it was hard. Simply by the laws of chance, not all of her sons—all four were in uniform—would return. Then she regained control of herself and firmly sent her visitor away. As she wrote Maude a few months later when James’ battalion had moved to Midway Island preparatory to its daring raid on Makin Island, “perhaps we have to learn that life was not meant to be lived in security but with adventurous courage.”1

  An American Legion commander, reading a slight into her plea to the home front to safeguard the interests of the GIs or face the probability of a dangerous veterans’ lobby after the war, suggested she make her contribution to the war effort by “keeping quiet for the duration.” Asked at her press conference if she had any such plans, she shook her head and said simply, “None along that line.” To lapse into silence, not to fight with every resource that she commanded, not to do everything that she was permitted to do was to betray the generation in uniform to which she had given her heart.

  She was confident, she wrote Gil Harrison, who resigned from the OCD to join the RAF soon after she resigned, that there would be the courage “to make the kind of world we want . . . if youth is allowed to have its say and I, for one, am all for giving youth all the power it can handle.” It was the older people who scared her:

  The democratic process is a slow one, and day by day I am becoming convinced that the people who hold it back are the elderly statesmen like Byrd, McKellar and Glass, and I think I am going to become an advocate of a fifty-year limit for activity, even though it will put a terrible crimp in my own feelings, and I realize it can never be made universal because I do pin many of my hopes for the future on people, including my husband who would be wiped out by such a limitation. Perhaps we will have to prove, in some way, that people’s mentality remains younger than their years. [June 23, 1942]

  Her letter ended with a bit of motherly advice: “remember to take your training very carefully and never to neglect the smallest detail. Flying is safe only for those who remember that it requires eternal vigilance.”

  Soon after Eleanor quit the OCD she departed on a swing around the country to see her children. At Fort Worth she found herself the only civilian on a plane full of ferry pilots. After the first moments of an awed “It’s Mrs. Roosevelt,” they clustered about the First Lady, delighted to talk, even to tease her. “We got into long arguments, would we be able to prevent more wars? Was there a moral equivalent for war? What about Russia after the war? etc. etc. Those boys are certainly doing some talking & thinking,” she wrote a friend. She spent all of a day in San Diego with “James’ boss” Major Evans Carlson, commander of the Second Marine Raider Battalion.2

  He believes in the Chinese cooperatives. Those not government controlled, he thinks the profit motive must be eliminated & he’s teaching his men that they must make all people their friends, they are fighting the system that forced all people to war, but they must not hate the people! His men are farm boys, many Southerners, C.C.C. boys but he talks to them. James gives them a “news review” on Sundays & answers questions afterwards. He preaches race equality & has taught them a Chinese rallying cry meaning “we cooperate”—He does everything they are asked to do & so does every officer. The Marine Corps thinks it is horrifying but the men think he & they are the finest things on earth.

  To her husband she wrote almost bitterly that she was

  finding it harder & harder to talk to these groups of boys. We spend now to send them to die for a “way of life,” & a few years ago the very men who spend so willingly to speed them on their way were afraid of taxes to make this same way of life give them a chance to earn a living.3

  There was no diminution of interest in all the groups and causes that turned to her for help, but first claim upon her ombudsman talents now belonged to the GI. General George Marshall assigned one, and later, two members of his staff to insure that the complaints which she transmitted from GIs, their wives, and parents and which were distinctively “flagged,” and numbered in the hundreds, were investigated and corrective action taken if necessary. Although she was, according to Marshall’s biographer, “the special advocate of Negro troops,” no plea for help went unacknowledged. A corporal sent her a poem that he hoped to have published. Eleanor sent it to her agent, George Bye—could he help? He did. She suggested to Navy Secretary Knox that overseas news broadcasts to the armed forces be made more human and personal with news from the home towns of the boys, as the British were doing in the Middle East; perhaps, if it could be managed, even messages from the boys’ families. She agreed with Mrs. Meloney that the message prepared for the president’s signature to the “next of kin” was too cold and formal, and cooperated with Archibald MacLeish in drafting a more warmhearted communication. When a soldier at Fort Lewis complained that officers at the post were taking all the best seats at the USO shows she contacted General Osborn, chief of the War Department’s Morale Branch, who agreed that such situations were “deplorable” and said he was trying to change officer attitudes. She persuaded the National Gallery to stay open on Sundays for the benefit of servicemen visiting Washington, D.C., on leave and helped to obtain funds in order to have the National Symphony Orchestra play for the GI visitors. She persuaded the Army surgeon general to meet with a committee of psychiatrists who felt their services were not being well utilized. A pregnant wife complained that it was difficult to have a baby on a private’s twenty-one dollars a month. Eleanor spoke to Franklin, who agreed that even with the contemplated increase in GI pay, it still would not be very much and authorized her to ask the American Red Cross to help. Viola Ilma, whose Vocational Foundation helped young men coming out of jail to obtain jobs, requested the members of her board to write to foundation boys going into the service. Eleanor took her quota of names. “Miss Ilma tells me that you like to be called Tony, but as this is my first letter I feel a little bit shy about doing so,” she wrote Private Anthony Castorino. Every soldier who wrote her received a reply—not a formal, polite communication, but a chatty, news-filled letter. She had great hopes for this younger generation: “all the young men who worked for me in the O.C.D. or whom I’ve known in the college groups are somewhere in camp & they write such interesting letters. This generation is much more serious than the 1918 army was in regard to the future.”4

  As she went in and out of Union Station she noted large groups of servicemen standing in line to get something to eat and drink, or stretched out on the hard benches to sleep. She got after the Red Cross and the USO to open a canteen and to find some place in the station to put up cots. Her old friend from the NYA, Mark McCloskey, now with Charles Taft’s Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services, looked over the station and suggested that a possible sleeping area was the president’s reception room, where the State Department received distinguished visitors. The State Department resisted. “A war need is more important than an occasional diplomat,” Eleanor told Sumner Welles. The department yielded. Thanks, Taft wrote her, “for putting the heat on the State Department so effectively. I had given up completely.”5

  And the most difficult duty of all:

  I’ve just visited the children & also all hospitals on the coast. Lots of casualties now
coming but the rate of killed is 4–1 which seems appalling to me but is modern warfare. We do wonderful things for the wounded & I was happy to see seven out of the 14 boys in James’ Makin Island raid all apparently getting well.6

  The illusion of leisure that she had after she left the OCD was quickly dispelled by an inrush of new obligations, and by July she was writing Lady Willert in Oxford, “Somehow I do not seem to have had any free time this summer”; yet she also lamented, “I do not seem to be doing anything useful.” Helen Ferris of the Junior Literary Guild asked her to write something for the Guild’s Bulletin about her war work. She complied, but reluctantly; she did not think it would appeal to the young.

  I try to put as much as I can in War Bonds; to pay my debts; to do what I can for people who write about their friends and relatives in the Services, and to answer the many letters from soldiers themselves. I visit hospitals and see innumerable people from other countries in order to try to find out how they are meeting their problems and pass along the information here which could be useful in meeting some of our problems.

  I have tried to help all the women in the Government who are charged with specific problems that touch on the war situation. And I have, of course, given what I could to various war charities.7

  As she contemplated the list, it seemed to her “pretty nebulous.” From time to time there had been stories in the press that she might visit England, and Lady Reading had strongly urged her to do so. The papers were talking of her going to England in a bomber, she said to Franklin after he had met Churchill at Argentia. “Are you and Harry cooking up something?” “Winston” had said to give her his regards, Franklin had replied; he had not said he wanted to see her. That was September, 1941. Now, perhaps because he sensed his wife’s discontent, he began to encourage the project. “There is a very remote chance that sometime FDR may let me go to England this summer or autumn or winter if by doing so I can serve some good purpose both there and here,” she informed Maude. The British and American people ought to know “a great deal more about each other,” she wrote her Allenswood classmate Bennett. She would like to bring home to some of the women in the United States “what the average household in England is going through.”8