Empty Without You
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9 Nan Cook designed the furniture that was then crafted at the Val-Kill factory.
10 Allan Hoover was the son of former President Herbert Hoover.
11 Lorena was part of the Roosevelt administration that had defeated Allan Hoover’s father.
12 Lorena had to struggle not to become angry when people recognized her as the first lady’s friend.
13 Lorena detested spending time with Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman; Hick considered the same-sex couple snobs. She also was jealous of the time Nan and Marion spent with ER.
14 “Stepchild” was the Plymouth that had replaced Bluette after Lorena’s accident in Arizona.
15 In its August 4 edition, the Saturday Evening Post had published a devastating exposé of the subsistence homestead project in West Virginia. The article reported that Louis Howe, eager to respond to the high priority the first lady had placed on the project, had ordered fifty Cape Cod prefabricated houses to be shipped to Arthurdale. The houses were fine for a young couple on summer vacation at a beach resort, but they were totally inadequate for large Appalachian families enduring harsh winters. Also, the former coal miners who were in charge of erecting their own houses had mis-measured the dimensions. Only after the houses had been shipped and assembled did the homesteaders realize that the houses didn’t fit the cinder block foundations they had built. This combination of errors meant that the inexpensive houses had been constructed and painted, then torn down, then rebuilt and repainted, and then modified and repainted once again. The estimated $2,000 that each was supposed to cost had soared to a staggering $10,000.
16 Rex Tugwell was assistant secretary of agriculture.
17 Lewis Douglas had vehemently opposed FDR’s departure from the gold standard, predicting that it would result in “the death of Western civilization.”
18 Eleanor had given a speech in New York City.
19 Now that Lorena was working on the East Coast, she was spending part of her time in her New York apartment.
20 Eleanor was planning a trip to New York City where Lorena also was staying.
21 St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church is located at the corner of Eighteenth and Church streets in Washington.
22 Lorena was coming down from New York to spend a few days between Christmas and New Year’s at the White House.
1 The Tidal Basin is the lagoon in front of the Jefferson Memorial a few blocks from the White House.
2 FDR’s political mentor, now a near invalid, continued to live on the second floor of the White House. Eleanor often took him for drives to get him out of the mansion.
3 Eleanor had become friends with Edith Bolling Gault Wilson when FDR was serving in President Wilson’s administration.
4 Eleanor was continuing to write monthly newspaper articles for the McNaught Syndicate and now was also attempting to persuade Selby Shoe Company to sponsor a series of radio programs.
5 ER earned $70,000 for her radio broadcasts during 1934 and 1935. In one memorable program, she enlisted the help of her press “girls” to stage a White House press conference broadcast live on the air.
6 Eleanor’s comment about Earl’s discontent with life may have been an allusion to Lorena’s similar feelings.
7 Eleanor had asked Lorena to join her in the various activities she had planned for the weekend.
8 Eleanor had promised Lorena they could spend a weekend alone at the Long Island cottage of friends.
9 James had sometimes suffered from various health problems.
10 James returned to New York. It was not until several years later that he finally moved to Washington to serve as FDR’s secretary. Curiously, the concerns that his father had raised in 1935 eventually proved valid, as a combination of the stress of the White House job and press charges that he was using the position for personal gain forced James to resign and seek treatment for an ulcer—two-thirds of his stomach ultimately had to be removed.
11 George Lorrimer was editor of the Saturday Evening Post.
12 George Bye was a well-regarded figure in New York literary circles who had agreed to become Eleanor’s literary agent and help her to publish articles in major magazines.
13 The article, published by Cosmopolitan in October, was, indeed, controversial. It began with a concise summary of the first lady’s thesis: “Can a woman be elected President? Certainly, a woman can be elected President, in all probability some time a woman will be, but she may not, in my opinion, be elected at the present time, or in the near future.” Eleanor said society’s perceptions of women and women’s own behavior were both impediments to a woman being elected president. She concluded with practical—but some would also say radical—advice on how American women could move toward having one of their own sex as chief executive: “They must learn to take other women with them. They must learn that only in proportion as women as a whole are educated in public affairs will individual women succeed in positions of importance.”
14 The Works Progress Administration replaced the Federal Emergency Relief Administration as the branch of the federal government putting the unemployed back to work.
15 James Hilton’s novel, published in 1935, told the story of a dedicated teacher who guided several generations of boys attending a British boys school.
16 Various house guests were scheduled to arrive at Hyde Park within the next several days.
17 Lorena had edited a manuscript Eleanor had written about the subsistence homestead program.
18 Whenever Franklin came to Hyde Park, he insisted that Eleanor move into the mansion with him.
19 After Tommy corrected Eleanor’s grammar and Lorena worked on the content and organization, it was published in the November issue of Current Controversy. In the piece, Eleanor argued that the New Deal increasing the government’s involvement in citizens’ lives did not mean that people should stop supporting private charities.
20 Lorena had again mentioned the possibility of going to Europe as a war correspondent. Now realizing how badly Lorena wanted to return to newspaper work, Eleanor supported the idea this time.
21 The letter was the one containing Lorena’s lengthy comments on the manuscript about subsistence homesteads.
22 Eleanor had been concerned that magazine editors published her work only because of the prominence of the Roosevelt name. She was pleased, therefore, that the public affairs magazine Liberty had rejected her first draft, insisting that it was not yet of a publishable quality.
23 In the first lady’s first draft of the article about subsistence homesteads, she had described the program in glowing terms. Lorena’s editing comments urged Eleanor to acknowledge at the beginning of the article that the program had been criticized and then to respond to those criticisms one by one. Eleanor revised the article along the line that Lorena had suggested, and Liberty published the revision in its November issue.
24 Lorena and her friend Howard Haycraft, a fellow Minnesotan who was living in New York and often attended boxing matches with her, had spent the weekend in Pennsylvania’s Cotoctin Mountains. As part of their trip, they visited the Gettysburg historical site that memorializes one of the major battles of the Civil War.
25 Esther and Elizabeth owned a country estate near Westport, Connecticut.
26 Dr. Carl Weiss was the Baton Rouge physician who shot Long and then was immediately killed by Long’s bodyguards.
27 Long died the day after Lorena wrote this letter.
28 White nights was the term Lorena used for the nights when she couldn’t sleep because her emotions were spinning out of control.
29 Eleanor had rented a pied-à-terre in Greenwich Village.
30 Ohio Governor Martin Davey was a Democrat.
31 Buzzie Dall was Eleanor’s five-year-old grandson.
32 Jean Dixon was Lorena’s friend who worked as an actress.
33 Howard Haycraft was Lorena’s friend who worked in a publishing house.
34 Harold Ickes was head of the Public Works Administration, which constructed f
ederal buildings, dams, bridges, highways, and other public facilities.
35 Harry Hopkins was now the head of the Works Progress Administration, which coordinated all relief efforts and federal construction projects.
36 Under Hopkins, two million people a month were being paid by the federal government. Some were building facilities such as schools, libraries, parks, and hospitals, while others were creating artistic works such as plays and murals. Ickes argued that the jobs were only temporary and the only way to relieve unemployment in the long run was by subsidizing private enterprise.
37 In the article that Cosmopolitan had published in January, the first lady had argued that unless the New Deal included programs for young people, the deprivation of the Great Depression would handicap the entire next generation of Americans for the rest of their lives.
38 Anna had been hospitalized for severe tension and exhaustion.
39 Lorena had given Eleanor a tote bag for her fifty-first birthday that was the day after this letter was written.
40 Lorena’s next task was to assess the political landscape in West Virginia.
41 After John Boettiger had been offered a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, he was accused of getting the job only because he was the president’s son-in-law. Boettiger ultimately opted not to take the job.
42 Red House, West Virginia, is a city located between Charleston and Huntington. It was the site of the state’s second subsistence homestead project.
43 The subsistence homestead project at Red House, like the one at Arthurdale, had failed to attract any private businesses.
44 Francis Turner was the relief administrator for the state of West Virginia.
45 In 1940 the State Department, after much coaxing from Eleanor, finally sent the African-American opera singer to Argentina and Brazil as a goodwill ambassador.
46 Helen Wilmerding had been a childhood friend of Eleanor’s and a bridesmaid in her wedding.
47 Helen Hayes was the Academy Award-winning actress known as the “First Lady of the American Theater.”
48 Lorena was coming to the White House for Christmas.
49 Lorena and Anna had, at Lorena’s suggestion, gone together to give Eleanor a set of cocktail and brandy glasses for her new apartment in Greenwich Village.
50 Mary Rumsey had been the former head of the consumers division of the National Recovery Administration.
1 Anna and her family were moving to Seattle where John Boettiger would become publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
2 Eleanor had just returned from a week-long speaking tour.
3 Hartley was Louis and Grace Howe’s son.
4 Missy LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary, was so close to him that some scholars have described her as being comparable to a wife, including having a sexual relationship with the president.
5 On May 11, Eleanor’s column said of the steel mills: “This industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression $10,000,000 had been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using 10,000 fewer men than in 1929.”
6 Roy Howard was head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and an FDR confidant.
7 Theodore Francis Green, a Democrat, was the governor of Rhode Island.
8 To honor immigrants completing the steps necessary to become American citizens, Eleanor routinely hosted group receptions for them at the White House.
9 The Republican Party had nominated the governor of Kansas for president.
10 Alice Hamilton was the country’s leading authority on industrial medicine.
11 FDR was making structural changes to the Springwood mansion.
12 FDR had fashioned his acceptance speech to inspire party regulars rather than to give details of his second term. The crowd of 105,000 offered its loudest cheer—the Washington Post dubbed it a “mighty roar”—when the president alluded to his inaugural speech in 1933 and boasted, “We have won against the most dangerous of our foes—we have conquered fear!”
13 Ruby Black covered the first lady for the United Press.
14 Bess Furman covered the first lady for the Associated Press.
15 Martha Strayer covered the first lady for the Washington Daily News.
16 Lorena found Missy LeHand’s constant adoration of FDR to be irritating.
17 Spain was in the grips of a violent civil war between democratic forces and fascist rebels led by General Francisco Franco. When the fascists seized several major cities but were defeated in Madrid and Barcelona, Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy came to their aid.
18 During this session, Eleanor joined FDR’s inner circle of political advisers in deciding how the president—now in the heat of his re-election campaign—should respond to the fear of war that had swept the country because of the Spanish Civil War. ER agreed that, for his political sake, Franklin should reassure the country that he would do everything possible to avoid America being drawn into a foreign war, but she argued that the United States should stop the rise of Spanish fascists as soon as the election was over.
19 Sara Delano Roosevelt felt it was unseemly for a proper lady to write publicly about herself.
20 Although the head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain was such a close political confidant of the president that he came to dinner at the White House often, there is no indication that Eleanor ever talked to Roy Howard about hiring Lorena.
21 Grover Whalen was chairman of the 1939 New York World’s Fair then in its planning stages.
22 In 1936, Ishbel Ross, a former New York Herald Tribune reporter, wrote the first history of American women journalists, titled Ladies of the Press. Ross devoted eight pages to Lorena, labeling her a “star” reporter and writing, “She did it on sheer capability. She covered straight politics, which is considered the most difficult and unsuitable work for newspaper women.”
23 Lorena was referring to the biography of Eleanor that she was planning to write.
24 Joe Baldwin, head of the promotion department of the World’s Fair staff, was Lorena’s boss.
25 Joe Cohn was Joe Baldwin’s deputy.
26 The husband of Henrietta Nesbitt, the head housekeeper at the White House, had died earlier in the week.
27 In his “fireside chat” on the radio, FDR took credit for the nation’s successful economic recovery, saying that the national income rising from $38 billion in 1932 to $68 billion in 1937 had been entirely due to New Deal programs.
28 Eleanor’s secretary Tommy Thompson accompanied the first lady on her speaking tours.
29 Eddie Roddan was a former International News Service reporter who was now working at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
30 Jim Farley was now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
31 Lorena and Howard Haycraft were spending most weekends at the house they shared on Long Island.
32 Charlie Michelson was another Democratic National Committee staff member.
33 Ruby and Julian Claff, Lorena’s sister and brother-in-law, had both lost their jobs.
34 Lorena could not afford to buy Christmas gifts in either 1938 or 1939.
35 Lorena had arranged with neighbors in the country to take care of Prinz during the week so he could get more exercise than he could in the city.