First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Unless you can swear “For life, for death!”

  Oh, fear to call it loving.

  At the time, she had added: “I wondered if it meant ‘for life, for death’ for you at first.” Franklin’s infidelity with Lucy Mercer confirmed this primary doubt, and—in the opinion of more than one biographer—triggered all the anger Eleanor felt but could never express about her charming, dissolute father.

  Henceforth Eleanor Roosevelt vowed to seek love and consolation elsewhere. She distinguished sharply between the “personage” who was the public wife of Franklin Roosevelt and the “personal” woman, who lived a very different life. For a long time these were almost two separate people. “I think the personage is an accident and I only like the part of life in which I am a person,” she told one friend.

  When she became First Lady, this habit of mind intensified. “It was almost as though I had erected someone a little outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I lived and worked until I left the White House,” she told another friend.

  She summed up her psychological technique in a letter to still another friend: “I have the power of disassociating myself from things, because I’ve had to do it so often, and I’m not unhappy that way, you should cultivate it, you won’t be happy but you won’t be unhappy.”

  All this does not add up to a parable of forgiveness. There must have been times when Eleanor yearned to achieve that spiritual ideal. But it remained tragically beyond her reach. The marital wound never really healed, the resentment never ceased to fester. Their son Jimmy described his parents’ relationship as an “armed truce which endured to the day [FDR] died.” Jimmy added that several times he saw his father “in one way or another hold out his arms to Mother and she flatly refused to enter his embrace.”

  This was the context in which Eleanor Roosevelt launched her epochal career as First Lady. It deserves that imposing adjective. The mere catalog of her activities would fatigue a squadron of Olympic athletes. She held 348 press conferences in her twelve years in the White House. She received and tried to answer as many as three hundred thousand letters a year. She wrote books, a monthly magazine column, a daily newspaper column, and she worked tirelessly to win access to the President for people and groups she supported.

  At first she seemed to do everything right. When departing First Lady Lou Hoover offered to send a car for her first visit to the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt replied she would walk—neatly recapitulating the decision of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, to walk to his inaugural rather than ride in a coach and four. At her press conferences she allowed only women reporters—a neat riposte to the male chauvinists of that era of newspapering, who relegated females to the women’s page, when and if they put them on the payroll.

  These self-satisfied males were soon an envious green—or furious purple—over the press coverage Eleanor Roosevelt generated. One scholar has taken the trouble to count the number of stories on her in The New York Times during her first year in the White House—320. Only Jacqueline Kennedy won more ink in a comparable period. Barbara Bush, for example, while a popular First Lady, did not even come close to such a figure. Another interesting statistic, which I freely admit astonished me, shows how Eleanor Roosevelt increased the coverage of her successors: Bess Truman had 118 articles in The Times in her first White House year.

  The newspapers were only the first of Eleanor’s targets in her campaign to expand job opportunities for women. Even before she got to Washington, she had established a network of activist women inside the Democratic Party. In 1928 she had served as head of the national women’s campaign for Democratic candidates, one of whom was her husband, who was running for governor of New York. One of the people Eleanor recruited for this endeavor, which included the doomed attempt to make Al Smith the first Roman Catholic President, was a dynamic social worker named Molly Dewson.

  When Eleanor went to Washington as First Lady, Molly Dewson went with her as head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party. Even before she acquired that title, Party Chairman Jim Farley was calling Molly “The General.” On April 27, 1933, six weeks after FDR was inaugurated, Molly sent Eleanor a seven-page letter listing the names and qualifications often women who “absolutely” had to be recognized with good jobs and another thirteen who were next in line. In FDR’s first term, they put over a hundred women into jobs that ranged from employees of the National Aeronautics Board to the secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet post.

  Eleanor Roosevelt backed Madame Perkins, as my father sometimes called her, from start to finish. A shy New Englander, Ms. Perkins was appalled by the way the Washington, D.C., press corps wanted to know every imaginable detail of her private life. (She was married to an economist and had one daughter.) Her reticence eventually gave her a poor public image, which her mostly male enemies did not hesitate to use against her. She constantly sought the First Lady’s advice and support. Often that took the form of telling her to become resigned to the fact that “men hate a woman in a position of real power.”

  Laws and social programs we now take for granted were born under Frances Perkins’s leadership, with Eleanor Roosevelt’s vigorous endorsement: unemployment insurance, social security, the Wagner Act, which made trade unions viable. The reserved Yankee became a devoted admirer of the First Lady. “She was a very easy woman to know,” Ms. Perkins said.

  Meanwhile, another Eleanor Roosevelt surrogate, Ellen Woodward of Mississippi, became head of the women’s division of the Works Progress Administration, better known as the WPA. Woodward was there to make sure women got a fair share of the jobs being funneled to the state directors of this gigantic effort to put America back to work. (For a brief while Missouri’s director was Harry S Truman—until he decided to run for the U.S. Senate.) The First Lady forwarded to Ms. Woodward over four hundred letters a month from desperate women seeking help.

  Eleanor Roosevelt also recognized the importance of access to the President. “When I needed help on some definite point,” Molly Dew-son later recalled, “Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup.” The First Lady also used the White House to strengthen friendships within her women’s network. She compiled a list of women in executive positions in the government and regularly invited them to receptions and dinners. So many of them shared their problems with her, she launched a series of spring garden parties exclusively for them—where they could really communicate with one another.

  During these same dramatic years of FDR’s first term, Eleanor Roosevelt led the fight against the Depression notion that women should be fired from as many jobs as possible to aid men with families to support. She also played a key part in opening up lesser jobs for women in various federal departments. In the Post Office alone, one historian credits her for the hiring of four thousand women.

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s visibility soon began to attract criticism. She regularly issued disclaimers to possessing any political power. “I [have] never tried to influence Franklin on anything he did,” she declared at one of her press conferences, “and I certainly have never known him to try to influence me.” The latter part of that statement is probably true. FDR remarked more than once that it was impossible for him to win an argument with his wife. The first part, though, is a country mile from the truth.

  Virtually every insider in the Roosevelt White House testified to Eleanor’s often relentless attempts to influence her husband. She sometimes shocked friends by talking of “getting my time with him”—as if she were simply one of several members of the inner circle—and was determined to use her access to the fullest.

  Many Presidents’ wives have wielded political influence, back to the second First Lady, Abigail Adams, whose enemies called her “the presidentress.” What was unique about Eleanor Roosevelt was the incredible scope and variety of the causes and iss
ues she embraced—and the tenacity with which she pursued them, not only with her husband but with other members of the administration. Seldom if ever did she invite a cabinet officer or other official to the White House without having an agenda of what she called “ideas I think we should work on.”

  More than one cabinet officer expressed irritation at her intrusions into his department. When she pestered Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to spend budget-busting amounts of money on a housing project in West Virginia, Ickes, who shared many of the First Lady’s liberal views, confided to his diary: “She is not doing the president any good. She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think she is harmful rather than helpful.”

  As early as 1934 Willard Kiplinger, author of a powerful Washington newsletter, warned Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that he was going to attack Mrs. Roosevelt. “She is throwing monkey wrenches into the government departments and they are all afraid to say something because she is the wife of the President,” Kiplinger said.

  These were comments from Eleanor’s friends. From her legions of conservative enemies came a barrage of invective and denunciation that portrayed her as a walking, talking menace to the American way of life.

  Eleanor brushed aside these criticisms. Early in her husband’s presidency, she appointed herself its conscience. She was determined to extend the range of the reforms that the New Deal promised, often in vague terms, as it struggled to renew the American economy. As one of her biographers put it grandiloquently, “That conscience of hers was like a steady Gulf Stream of goodness radiating out from the White House through all the ambits of New Deal power and along its coasts of ambition, gentling them to beneficent purposes.”

  The First Lady was an early proponent of civil rights and did everything in her power to support that cause in the teeth of ferocious hostility from conservative southerners. In Birmingham, Alabama, when she attended a meeting of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, she found the auditorium segregated. She calmly moved her chair into the center aisle, symbolically bridging the racist gap. She entertained blacks in the White House. She pushed again and again for blacks to be appointed to government jobs—usually with little success. FDR, always a political realist, feared the wrath of the southern Democrats, who chaired many powerful committees in Congress.

  In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the great opera star Marian Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and denounced the ban as a disgrace. Her protest, in which thousands joined, led to a triumphant concert on the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Although the DAR remained unrepentant, the episode was a major step forward in American race relations.

  Perhaps the most important cause in Eleanor Roosevelt’s activist panoply, after equal rights for women, was American youth. She maintained they were the hardest hit by the Depression—unable to marry or start careers, the last to be hired, the first to be fired. It was not an idea for which FDR had much enthusiasm. In his memoirs, the magazine editor and author Fulton Oursler told of attending a White House dinner during Roosevelt’s first term at which Eleanor urged her husband to set up youth programs. He curtly told her the young were no different from the millions of other Americans looking for jobs. As the dismayed guests watched, the president and his wife were soon redfaced and snarling at each other. She persisted until he wearily agreed to consider the matter.

  Eventually, Eleanor persuaded FDR to launch the National Youth Administration, whose goal was to propose and execute measures to help young Americans. In pursuit of this, Mrs. Roosevelt developed close links with two private organizations, the American Youth Congress and the American Student Union. Unfortunately, both of these groups were heavily infiltrated by Communists, who devoted a great deal of their time and energy in the thirties to wooing idealistic young people. Until 1939 the AYC backed most New Deal legislation, asking only for larger and more forceful programs, such as a five-hundred-million-dollar government loan fund to enable young people to establish homes and families. Internationally, both organizations agreed wholeheartedly with the President’s growing hostility to the fascist dictatorships of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But when Russia’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, signed his infamous nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, the two organizations did a 360-degree turn and launched an all-out attack on a flabbergasted FDR, calling him a militarist and a warmonger for trying to rearm the country.

  Seldom if ever has a President been more politically embarrassed—and it got worse. The following year the AYC met to pass still more anti-Roosevelt resolutions, including a condemnation of the President for his criticism of the Russian invasion of Finland. Nevertheless, when AYCers made a February 1940 “pilgrimage” to Washington to publicize their views, Mrs. Roosevelt urged FDR to address them. She persuaded friends up to the level of cabinet wives to provide beds, and squeezed some of the AYC leaders into the third floor of the White House. The U.S. Army was requisitioned to provide additional beds and meals.

  In a cold drizzle, several thousand AYC members gathered on the lawn of the White House. While the First Lady sat in mortified silence, FDR gave them the tongue-lashing of their lives. He told them their ideas were “twaddle.” The future of freedom in the world was at stake, and they were trying to sabotage American attempts to defend it. Never before or since has a President so totally repudiated his wife’s politics in public. Several months later Eleanor severed her connections with the AYC and the American Student Union.

  The failure of her youth outreach wounded Eleanor Roosevelt deeply. Even before this disappointment, there were signs that she was wearying of her role as the conscience of the New Deal. She told several friends she did not want FDR to run for a third term, unless a world crisis made it necessary. She felt he had nothing more to give the country. These comments need to be viewed against the background of the drift and irresolution that engulfed the Roosevelt administration in its second term. FDR’s attempt to increase the number of justices so he could pack the Supreme Court with New Deal supporters triggered a tremendous revolt in Congress, ending in a humiliating defeat for the President. In 1937 a recession almost as bad as the first Depression left the New Deal’s social engineers looking feckless and dismayed.

  As the emphasis of the Roosevelt presidency shifted to foreign affairs, Eleanor felt herself more and more excluded from the inner circle around FDR. She was sometimes driven to desperate expedients to keep in touch with what was happening inside his administration. One of the saddest stories I came across while researching this book was told by Betsy Cushing, Jimmy Roosevelt’s wife, who happened to be in the Oval Office when Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, called. FDR greeted him, then paused and said: “Mamma, will you please get off the line—Mamma I can hear you breathing, will you please get off the line?”

  Another reason why Eleanor opposed a third term may have been her awareness of FDR’s deteriorating physical condition. As early as 1938 he had suffered a fainting spell at Hyde Park but quickly recovered and joined his guests for dinner. However, Eleanor eventually concurred with his decision to shatter the two-term precedent in 1940 because she shared his fear that the southern conservatives under Vice President Jack Garner or British-hating Irish Catholics under London Ambassador Joe Kennedy would seize the presidency and capitalize on the widespread American loathing for another European war to make a deal with Hitler. The President himself was aware that his fragile health made another four years in office a risky gamble. At a 1940 meeting with Jim Farley, the Democratic Party chairman, he said he would run, even if it meant he would only live a month into a third term.

  After Pearl Harbor propelled America into World War II, FDR’s physical decline accelerated. Electrocardiogram readings revealed a worrisome lack of oxygen to the heart, caused by hypertension and worsening arteriosclerosis. When cardiac specialist Dr. Howard Bruenn examined him in March of 1944, he was appalled by the President’s condition. His heart was alar
mingly enlarged, a prime symptom of congestive heart failure. His lips and fingernails had a bluish tinge. Bruenn told the White House physician, Dr. Ross McIntire, Roosevelt could die at any moment.

  Although a regimen often hours sleep each night and a reduction of his workday to four hours produced some slight improvement, the President’s condition was visible to anyone who saw him up close. When my father conferred with him after he had been nominated for the vice presidency in the summer of 1944, he came home and told my mother FDR was a dying man.

  No President more desperately needed the zone of peace within the White House that other First Ladies have felt it was their primary duty to create. But Eleanor Roosevelt was unable to provide it for her husband. Instead, she continued to play FDR’s political conscience. Again and again she pressured him to do something about segregated rest room facilities in southern post offices or the conservative policies of a federal housing administrator when the President was grappling with the complexities of global coalition warfare and a recalcitrant, ever more hostile Congress.

  By this time the Roosevelts’ daughter, Anna, was old enough to pass judgment on her mother—and it was harsh. She felt Eleanor constantly miscalculated people’s moods and insisted on bringing up issues and problems when they wanted to relax. Anna described her parents as living virtually separate lives during the war years, when she spent a lot of time in the White House as her father’s companion.

  Even loyalists like Frances Perkins noticed the alienation and the frequency of Eleanor’s absences from the White House. “I really think you ought to be here in the White House more often,” Ms. Perkins told her. “I think it would be better for the President.”

  “Oh no, Frances, he doesn’t need me anymore,” Eleanor said. “He has Harry Hopkins…. Harry tells him everything he needs to know.” The former head of the WPA, Hopkins had emerged as FDR’s foremost wartime adviser.