As the funeral train moved to Washington, she accompanied the president on his last journey. For Grandmère an era had ended. She faced an uncertain future, but one that she surely thought would be simpler, quieter, and less demanding. Little could she imagine what lay ahead.
Part Five
Strength, Courage, Confidence
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really look fear in the face… You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
THERE WAS A COMMON THREAD RUNNING throughout Grandmère’s life, work, and accomplishments: her ever-present inquisitiveness, which questioned the bounds of society’s status quo and challenged what was thought to be sacrosanct. Why were the laws and traditions that reinforced social injustice and economic imbalance perpetuated? In asking such questions and demanding answers, she would challenge other leaders about society’s accepted norms. She sought to strip those institutions and laws of the elements that separated people. There was a purity, some would say naïvetè, in her vision and course. She held the single belief that all people are equal, and that no law or institution can place conditions on equality. Her inquiry was always direct and unmediated, seldom mitigated. These attributes lent all the more power to her positions, for she would not hesitate to ask questions that others should ask but wouldn’t. That the conditions of some people within the family of humankind were intolerable not by their own fault but by societal strictures was an unacceptable condition of the status quo, and Grandmère was completely undeterred in her determination to make changes. She believed that one person could influence change if only they had courage and determination.
I have always seen life personally… Any interest or sympathy or indignation is not caused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes. It was the sight of a child dying of hunger that made the tragedy of hunger become of such overriding importance to me. Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, and finally to the world.
America’s Spiritual Crisis
When she arrived in the White House, Grandmère had no real plan, no specific philosophy that would guide her work, merely a strong belief that the Great Depression was America’s “spiritual crisis” that could eventually lead to a new social order, a redefinition of democracy.
The prevailing belief was that poverty was caused by the personal failure of individuals. However, the view that she had come to adopt over the years was that poverty was in fact a social ill caused by inequality and the imbalanced distribution of both social and economic resources. While the Great Depression served to solidify these beliefs for Eleanor, its greater impact was to enforce her own evolution from sporadic involvement to a strong personal commitment; from a passive observer she became a strong advocate and activist for legislative reform.
She served as the president’s eyes and ears, and the majority of Americans suddenly discovered that they had a voice in the White House, someone who truly listened to them and understood. Soon members of the administration began to recognize the important role that Grandmère was playing, and quickly gained such respect for her contributions that her advice was sought on important policy and program issues.
Her imprint and influence became apparent in many of the New Deal program designs. One of the first initiatives of FDR’s new administration was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, established under the direction of his trusted advisor Harry Hopkins. Of the more than two million people put to work within the proposed relief administration structure, initially more than one hundred thousands women would be included, and all at pay equal to that of the men.
She was also pivotal in the creation of the National Youth Administration (NYA), a combination of both relief and reform established under the far-reaching umbrella of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The program’s purpose was to provide meaningful employment opportunities for youth, combining federal planning with local community rebuilding efforts and all the while enabling the young people involved to continue their education. NYA services, at Grandmère’s insistence, had to be equally available to all youth who needed them—blacks, other minorities, and the homeless in particular. In fact, expressing a view in 1935 so prophetic for her day, she would say, “I have periods of real terror, when I think that we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”1 Her support and concern for the provision of opportunities for young people would be an abiding concern throughout her life.
Grandmère with Mary McLeod Bethune, director of the National Youth Administration, addressing the 1939 National Negro Youth Conference.
We Are a Mixed Nation of Many People and Many Religions
It was largely through her early work with the preeminent black educator Mary McLeod Bethune that Grandmère’s commitment to civil rights became a primary focus for the rest of her life. And perhaps no other issue created a greater philosophical division between her and her husband.
Grandfather was an ever-pragmatic politician, often hesitating to take any proactive stance regarding the question of blacks for fear that doing so would compromise his relationship with the Southern members of Congress, members whose support was vital to his New Deal experiment and later with the nation’s entry into World War II. Eleanor, on the other hand, refused all attempts at compromise made by FDR and was vocally intolerant of his pragmatism. It was not at all unusual for her to circumvent her husband on many civil rights matters, going directly to other influential administration leaders upon whom she knew she could depend for support, or who might one day need her support on some other issue.
Traveling extensively, in 1934 Grandmère spoke to a large assembly in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands.
Grandmère was herself realistic when dealing with the issue. Her approach before white audiences was noticeably different than that used with predominantly black audiences. With whites she would distinguish between legal and political inequality on the one hand, and moral inequality on the other, reaffirming that all discrimination was a moral issue that would certainly undermine the very foundation of American democracy Social acceptance of equality, she reasoned, would be slow in coming, since no government could dictate tolerance. On the other hand, government could and should remove all legal barriers to equality—in employment, the judicial system, rights of equal representation, and so on. With black audiences, however, she would say repeatedly, “… but great changes come slowly. I think they are coming, however, and sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods,” stressing that blacks must assume more than a nominal measure of responsibility for their own fate. She would rally them to the notion that they had to work within the existing framework of society and government to develop their skills and abilities, urging compromising as the most practical path toward achieving equality. In practice, however, she was never so compromising. When the minimum wage was first introduced in 1938, many employers felt that if they were forced to pay a minimum wage to anyone it would be to white employees, not blacks. Grandmère’s reaction was immediate and uncompromising: “This is a question of the right to work, and the right to work should know no color lines.”
With Walter Walker, consul general of Liberia, Grandmère honors Marian Anderson with the Order of African Redemption in 1943.
The Marian Anderson Affair
Perhaps the event most demonstrative of Eleanor’s intolerance of bigotry and discrimination was the Marian Anderson affair. Marian Anderson was an imposing, majestic African-American contralto whose voice, even in normal speech, so enthralled her listeners that she became one of the most highly regarded performers of her time. My grandmother and Marian Anderson’s lives interlocked when the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to grant permission for use of Constitution Hall for a fund-raisi
ng concert benefiting Howard University in Washington on the grounds that no “Negro artist” would ever be permitted to perform in the hall. The public outrage was immediate, but what made a local display of bigotry a worldwide cause cèlèbre was Grandmère’s decision to publicly resign from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her resignation received broad approval and was widely acknowledged for awakening white consciousness among conservative as well as moderate citizens.
Immediately a plan evolved for a free open-air concert to be given at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. At Grandmère’s persistent urging, Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, gained the tacit approval of FDR, and the concert was held on a Sunday afternoon to an estimated crowd of more than seventy-five thousand. As Ickes later wrote in his diary, “The whole setting was unique, majestic, and impressive.” What he could not have known was the tremendous political implications this single occasion would have on the future of civil rights in the nation. For more than thirty years Grandmère would maintain her staunch and ardent stand for the cause of civil rights.
As World War II loomed large on America’s horizon in 1940, just at the time of FDR’s third presidential campaign, one of the most troubling social issues for the Roosevelt Administration was the outright discrimination against African-Americans in the armed forces. With only a few exceptions, throughout all branches of the services blacks were relegated to performing menial jobs, and in some cases those thought to be too dangerous for white servicemen. One of the concerns within the black leadership community was that the discriminatory practices would ultimately lead to the creation of “labor battalions” made up solely of blacks. Grandmère’s involvement in the matter of civil rights, particularly as it applied to discrimination in the armed forces, was noticed in the diary of Henry L. Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of War, as “Mrs. Roosevelt’s intrusive and impulsive folly.”2 He further recalled that she had previously and often “stirred up trouble” on the race question. Nevertheless, it was only after her constant badgering of her husband and his colleagues that blacks were eventually allowed to receive equal training, serve in all-black fighting units, and experience a significant increase in the number of black officers. Through her efforts the tide began to turn, though full desegregation of the United States Armed Services did not occur until the administration of President Harry S. Truman.
Harold Ickes, one of Grandmère’s closest allies within the Administration and instrumental in arranging Marian Anderson’s famous Lincoln Memorial concert, photographed here in his private library.
I have to believe that of all of my grandmother’s work for social and civil rights, especially up to FDR’s death in 1945, her primary focus and most effective work was that performed on behalf of the African-American population. Roy Wilkins, former Executive Director of the NAACP, would say that Franklin Roosevelt was:
A friend of Negroes only insofar as he refused to exclude the Negro from his general policies that applied to the whole country, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt was the Negro’s true friend. The personal touches and the personal fight against discrimination were Mrs. Roosevelt’s. That attached to Roosevelt also—he couldn’t get away from it—and he reaped the political benefit from it.3
A year to the day following FDR’s death, Grandmère is joined at a memorial dinner, from left to right, by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Justice Hugo Black, Henry Wallace, Frank Walker, Frances Perkins, and Robert Wagner.
Leaving the White House
Within but a few days of the death of my grandfather in April 1945, Grandmère left the White House and Washington, D.C., for her Washington Square apartment in New York. It was expected that Grandmère would drift off into obscurity, only to surface for those periodic ceremonial duties expected of former First Ladies. Indeed, even Grandmère may have thought at first that such would be her future, for when asked what would happen to her now by a reporter just days after leaving Washington, she replied simply, “The story is over.”
The old insecurity—the sense that she had not accomplished anything; it was all her husband’s doing—was resurfacing. As she wrote to New Zealand’s Finance Minister, Walter Nash, “I shall hope to continue to do what I can to be useful, although without my husband’s advice and guidance I feel very inadequate.” Perhaps in those immediate days after FDR’s death she too felt the void that grasped the nation—and the world. A friend of Eleanor’s wrote, “I am frightened, who will take care of us now?” In the House of Representatives a young congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson, with tears in his eyes exclaimed, “God, God how he could take it for us all!”4
But the story was far from over. For Grandmère it was merely the beginning of a new, perhaps even more productive phase of her life. She did not realize, could not have realized, that she would survive the shadow cast by her husband, the experiences of her early childhood years, and the dominance of her mother-in-law. Perhaps without even recognizing it herself, she would emerge an emancipated woman. She was poised to move forward with a strength, energy, and renewed passion she herself had not come to realize; to stand alone; to speak not for Franklin Roosevelt but for herself on the issues that mattered most to her. She was poised, as Joe Lash would say, to “leave her mark on time.”
A friend of mine, Porter McKeever, who worked first as press officer for the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations and at the American Association for the United Nations (AAUN), precursor to today’s United Nations Association and the UNA/USA, and eventually as president of the United Nations Association, once observed that it was during these first few months following FDR’s death that Grandmère gladly relinquished her role as First Lady of the United States, only to assume the much more important role of “First Lady of the World.” Thirteen years of strenuous and tumultuous times had been a training ground for what would become seventeen more productive years of carrying the banner for world peace and equality for all humankind. Little did she realize that her day was not over; it was, in fact, just beginning.
Lying awake in her compartment on the train cortege carrying the body of the fallen president from Warm Springs to Washington and then on to Springwood, Grandmère’s future would begin to take form. “I did not want to run an elaborate household again,” she would recall thinking. “I did not want to cease trying to be useful in some way. I did not want to feel old.”
Nevertheless, she was faced with beginning her life anew as widow of a president, with tremendous uncertainty and not a little bitterness. Thus, whenever asked of her feelings about that time, her answer would be one of almost impersonal detachment. His death was “a terrible blow” but not a “personal sorrow.” It was more a sadness felt by “all those to whom this man who now lay dead, and who happened to be my husband, had been a symbol of strength and fortitude.”
As she led the family behind the coffin at FDR’s funeral service, she wore but one piece of jewelry at her throat, a small golden fleur-de-lys given to her as a wedding gift by Franklin some forty years before. She had told a close friend that she had not loved Franklin since discovering the Lucy Mercer affair, but that she had given him “a service of love because of her respect for his leadership and faith in his goals.”5 Perhaps this is what she believed, but I would question such absolute loyalty to merely an ideal. It may be that even she could not recognize the lingering but repressed love she held for the man who years before had been able to give such purpose to her life. Perhaps it was a repressed realization that an attachment to FDR and his work provided leverage for the success of her own pursuits. But whatever the reason and despite the anxieties she felt at this time, her life from now on would change dramatically. She was about to achieve her own international celebrity: no longer would she be simply a “citizen” of this nation, but of all nations worldwide.
Just days following FDR’s internment in the Rose Garden at Springwood, twelve years of life’s accumulated belongings had been hastily removed from the White House. Eleanor’s most immediate concern was what to do with the estate at Hy
de Park. Although FDR provided in his will that she and the children could live there throughout their lives, at which time it would be deeded over to the government, Grandmère decided that she would not return there. It had never been home to her, and held only an unhappy memory of a marriage so thoroughly dominated by Sara.
Life Was Meant to Be Lived
Exactly one year to the day after Franklin’s death, at a ceremony attended primarily by family, President Truman, and local residents of Hyde Park, Springwood and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library were formally transferred to the people of the United States. In making the gift, Grandmère would say, “It is with pleasure that our children and I see this house dedicated to the people and opened to them, It was the people, all of the people of this country and the world, whom my husband loved and kept constantly in his heart and mind. He would want them to enjoy themselves in these surroundings, and to draw from them rest and peace and strength, as he did all the days of his life.”6
And so, as was perhaps her intent all along, Grandmère would return to live at her beloved Val-Kill Cottage, not to recede into genteel retirement but to write her “My Day” column, give speeches, and continue her advocacy for social, economic, and political reforms. She quickly found that not only had the interest in her views not diminished; they had intensified once the restrictions of being a president’s wife were lifted. Grandmère’s freedom now provided her with an even more forceful voice on those issues of concern.
Although many of her friends and associates would encourage her to enter politics, many believing that a seat in the U.S. Senate was hers for the asking, they would be rebuffed at every turn. Politics itself held little interest for her, although what she had learned of the political process, her adeptness at “playing the game,” and the scores of important contacts made during her years at the core of state and national politics would serve her well in the days to come. Indeed, although I doubt she would ever have admitted to such, Grandmère had learned at the hands of two political masters—FDR and Louis Howe—how to be as clever and effective as the next at political manipulation. She would continue her activism in Democratic reform politics, both at the state and national levels, and she would continue to champion New Deal ideals.
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