The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  FROM

  E. J. Kahn, Jr.

  JUNE 12, 1948 (ON ELEANOR ROOSEVELT)

  On April 12, 1945, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the most celebrated widow on earth. Since that date, she has spiritedly, and characteristically, upset the long-standing American tradition that the widows of Presidents should be rarely seen and practically never heard. Some observers of the contemporary scene credit her with having involuntarily jeopardized another tradition. “God knows I’m not the kind of guy who would want to sound the least bit disrespectful toward Bess Truman,” an old-school Democratic Party leader told a friend not long ago, “but there’s no getting around the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt is still the first lady of this country.” This unofficial ranking has been bestowed on Mrs. Roosevelt, in public as well as in private, by many other people, quite a few of whom have argued that she can be even more aptly termed the first lady of the world. She was thus hailed, early this winter, by Bernard Baruch, a man bristling with distinctions himself, among them the fact that he is the only admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt who has been bold enough to demonstrate his affection for her by gallantly kissing her while she was standing in the receiving line at a formal diplomatic function.

  Mrs. Roosevelt is the only representative in the United Nations General Assembly in whose honor all the other representatives have spontaneously risen to their feet, this demonstration having taken place as she walked through their ranks on her way to the speakers’ platform. Last December, when she went to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, of which she is chairman, she was received like a visiting head of state, and on at least one occasion while she was in that notably peaceful land its constabulary had to be called out to maintain order, owing to the eagerness of the Swiss—who by now might be expected to be blasé about the high-caste folk who turn up there for international debates—to get a glimpse of her. Even among Americans, except in certain die-hard quarters, Mrs. Roosevelt has attained a stature far surpassing that which she automatically had by virtue of her residence in the White House. Early in 1946, she went to London—along with the then Secretary of State James Byrnes, ex-Secretary Stettinius, Senators Vandenberg and Connally, John Foster Dulles, and many other very important people—to represent the United States at the first meeting of the General Assembly. At the end of the session, Vandenberg confessed to a friend that he had been disturbed when he heard that she was to be one of his associates but that he had certainly changed his mind about her, and Dulles told Mrs. Roosevelt that after working with her in London he considered it an honor to be one of her fans. Mrs. Roosevelt’s popularity in this country is scarcely confined, however, to elder Republican statesmen. A recent poll by the Woman’s Home Companion indicates that, at least in the minds of the readers of that magazine, she is the most popular living American of either sex, an accolade that is doubly impressive considering that for the past seven years she has been a regular contributor to the Ladies’ Home Journal.

  The esteem in which Mrs. Roosevelt is currently held undoubtedly derives in part from the circumstance that she bears her husband’s still influential name, but it is merely in part. When he died, it seemed not unlikely that his widow—though she had already acquired an immense celebrity in her own right—would gradually become less of a public figure. Three years after his death, the reverse appears to be the case. “We in the family can perhaps sense better than most people how Mother’s status has changed,” her son Franklin said a while ago. “She always used to be good for a joke, you know. Well, you hardly ever run into that sort of thing any more. People don’t kid her much now. They’ve begun to realize, little by little, that she’s an honest, serious, straightforward person who does what she does because she’s acutely conscious of the evils in the world and is anxious to help try to relieve them. When Father died, she was worried at first about having to make decisions on her own, and about assuming responsibilities, because, before, he had always been there to advise her and, if she flew off on a tangent, to check her. It’s clear now that she didn’t have to fret. Recent history has proved that she has the intelligence and the integrity not only to carry the ball but to carry it brilliantly.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s present eminence is hardly due to any concrete achievements. In the field of national affairs, she has maintained an aggressively liberal stand that has inspired few noteworthy acts by the legislative and executive branches of the government. In the field of international affairs, she has worked ardently for the welfare of the United Nations, an organization that has not gained much ground during her association with it. The principal reason for her popularity may be that in an era conspicuous for the self-interest of both nations and individuals, she has become more and more widely recognized as a person of towering unselfishness. “As far as Europe is concerned,” a man with impressive overseas connections said recently, “Mrs. Roosevelt is an outstanding figure today because she doesn’t represent a faction. There are plenty of people over there who admire, for instance, Churchill, and plenty who admire Stalin, but even the staunchest supporters of both will admit that their boys have personal motives for nearly everything they say or do. Mrs. Roosevelt never cares if there’s nothing in it for herself. She has absolutely no pride of station and no personal ambition. What’s more, many Americans who have neither the time, the energy, the contacts, nor the ability that she has look upon her efforts to improve the lives of her fellow-men as the kind of thing they would like to do themselves if only they were capable of it and could get around to it. To them—and I suspect there are an awful lot of them—she is the personification of the American conscience.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt realizes that she occupies an unusual niche in domestic and world affairs, but she doesn’t seem to be fully aware of the scope of her eminence. This was as true during the twelve years she presided over the White House as it is today. Early in the war, for example, she thought that her husband was making a needless fuss when he put in a couple of transatlantic phone calls to Churchill and the late John Winant, then our Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and asked them not to permit her to fly home by way of Lisbon on her return from a trip to England to inspect the war activities of British women. The President believed that German agents in Portugal would probably find out about her itinerary if she showed up there, and that the Nazi high command would deem her a first-rate military objective and make vigorous efforts to have her plane shot down. Her husband persuaded her to change her plans only when he pointed out, in a phone call direct to her, that if anything untoward happened to a plane she was in, its other occupants would undoubtedly be affected, too. She consented to be sneaked to an Army air base in Scotland at night and flown home from there. She was identified in preflight communications as a general. Mrs. Roosevelt said later that the crew of the plane were terribly astonished when they realized that the general was a woman. It seemed not to have occurred to her that the crew might have been surprised at discovering who the woman was. Eighteen months ago, in “My Day,” the syndicated column that Mrs. Roosevelt writes for about ninety newspapers, she furnished added evidence of her tendency to underestimate her position. She said that she must be getting old indeed, because an elderly, white-haired lady had risen and offered her a seat on a bus. It apparently had not struck Mrs. Roosevelt, whose hair is a light gray, that this courtesy might have been prompted not by her age but by her identity.

  Mrs. Roosevelt will be sixty-four on October 11th. Aside from partial deafness in the right ear, she is in excellent physical condition, but of late she has had the notion that she is getting old and infirm. The life she leads provides no proof of this. She still puts in the kind of bruising day that most women twenty years younger would find excessive. A year ago, she declined to take to her bed when suffering what she judged to be a mild indisposition. It was not until after she was feeling tiptop again that a more scientific diagnosis revealed that she had had bronchial pneumonia. Around the same time, she did ma
ke a concession to the passing years by giving up ice-cold showers and by modifying a violent schedule of daily calisthenics with which she had been torturing herself. Recently, talking about a walk she had taken with somebody, she matter-of-factly said that her companion was “trotting after me.” Her companion undoubtedly did just that, since Mrs. Roosevelt’s normal pace is a brisk lope. At Hyde Park, where she lives most of the time in a comfortable twelve-room house that she calls a cottage (not so many years ago, it was a furniture factory, and that is what she called it), she takes two or three vigorous walks a day. She walks with her body sloping forward, like a skier’s, and her legs and her stride are long. Few human beings can keep up with her, and she has little patience with laggards, so she generally elects to walk with dogs. Her favorite companions are Fala, who is now eight and graying but still spry, and Tamas McFala, a year-old, coal-black, and frisky grandson of the President’s renowned pet. Once, a weekend guest, a man troubled with insomnia, who had never seen her in sustained motion and who had heard her say she was getting old, saw her starting off with the dogs for a stroll before breakfast on Sunday morning, and asked if he might go along. Mrs. Roosevelt tried to dissuade him, on the ground that he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he insisted, and set out determinedly at her side. An hour or so later, as the rest of the household was coming down to breakfast, he slouched back, alone. He reported that he had done all right for the first mile but that Mrs. Roosevelt had gradually outdistanced him and that finally, when he rounded a bend in desperate pursuit, he found that she had disappeared, as he put it, “over the horizon.” During the big storm of last December, two and a half feet of snow fell at Hyde Park. Mrs. Roosevelt was to make a broadcast from a Poughkeepsie radio station, some five miles from her home, the next day. None of the roads on her place had been plowed out, and a studio executive phoned her that he’d send a sleigh to her house to pick her up. She said she wouldn’t hear of putting him to that trouble, and that she’d get to the station somehow. She did, by wading through the snow two miles to a cleared highway, and from there hitching a ride. After the broadcast, she was driven back to her jumping-off place and walked the two miles home. The return trip, she said, was easier, since she just followed the track she had broken on her way out.

  · · ·

  Last winter was Mrs. Roosevelt’s first in residence at Hyde Park. (In the pre–White House days, the Roosevelts spent the winter months in their town house on East Sixty-fifth Street, which they sold six years ago.) She stays there as much as possible nowadays, but a heavy calendar of engagements in the city obliges her to make frequent use of a six-room apartment at 29 Washington Square West that she has maintained since 1942. Both her homes are littered with bric-a-brac. She collects odds and ends almost as feverishly as her husband did. She is especially partial to photographs, and the walls of both places are cluttered with them. When she gets hold of a picture of someone she is particularly fond of, she often has a duplicate made, so that she can put it on both urban and rural display. Wherever she is, she is usually in the company of Miss Malvina Thompson, the amiable, efficient, and hardboiled woman, now in her fifties, who has served as her secretary for twenty-six years. Mrs. Roosevelt once said that Miss Thompson was one of her two best friends. The other, she said, was Fala. Mrs. Roosevelt calls her older best friend Tommy (as, by now, do several hundred government officials, political bosses, foreign dignitaries, and heads of organizations whose axes Mrs. Roosevelt has ground), and she tries to get Miss Thompson to call her Eleanor, as does Westbrook Pegler. The secretary, like many other people who have been close to Mrs. Roosevelt, finds it impossible not to temper intimacy with awe, and she has always addressed her employer as Mrs. R., a deferential form that has been adopted—not only in talking about Mrs. Roosevelt but in talking to her—by many government officials, political bosses, foreign dignitaries, heads of organizations, and plain acquaintances. Almost no one calls her Eleanor. Royalty excepted, modern history affords no parallel of a woman who is referred to by her first name frequently by her detractors and sparingly by her friends.

  Shortly after her husband’s death, Mrs. Roosevelt announced that she intended to lead a “private and inconspicuous existence.” It was her idea to devote her working hours merely to her newspaper column, her Ladies’ Home Journal articles, and the writing of a book of memoirs that would be a sequel to an autobiographical volume, This Is My Story, which was published in 1937. Thus far, her private existence has been so limited that she has been able to get only halfway through the book. A man who has seen some of the early chapters says that it looks like a promising entry in the sweepstakes for reminiscences that depend for their appeal mainly on the authors’ relationship to President Roosevelt. “There won’t be anything sensational in Mrs. R.’s book,” he said. “It’ll just probably be the definitive one of the lot.” Her hopes of enjoying a tranquil life ended in December, 1945, when President Truman appointed her a representative in the United Nations General Assembly. He did this on the recommendation of the State Department, which was eager to have a woman on the United States team and decided, despite the demurrers of some of its more conservative officials, that Mrs. Roosevelt was the ideal choice for this distaff role. She took the job gladly, having often expressed high hopes for the United Nations and for the idea of having an American woman in its General Assembly. She got along amicably with the State Department until it did a back flip on Palestine this March. Since then, her disagreement with parts of the Middle East aspect of our foreign policy has been sharp and outspoken. A high-ranking statesman was overheard to observe after a recent conference with her, “That was the most effective ‘damn’ I ever heard.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s language is usually impeccable, but her performance as a United Nations delegate has not been notable for the ladylike decorum that the State Department may have had in mind. She is often thought to be a dreamy, idealistic type of woman, incapable of the practical, down-to-earth wrangling expected of male statesmen. She is idealistic, and, as she has admitted, she is vague, but at the United Nations she has demonstrated many times that she can be exceedingly practical, and even tough, though in an outwardly dreamy and idealistic way. Every now and then, she will retort as quickly as possible to a statement by another delegate, as if motivated only by a righteous, womanly instinct to get in a word fast. Actually, her haste is apt to be prompted by her familiarity with newspaper deadlines and by her extremely practical realization that a rebuttal attains widest notice if published coincidentally with the remarks that provoked it. This knowledgeable trick is referred to admiringly in the State Department as the “smother technique.” Mrs. Roosevelt has, moreover, polished to a high degree an effective method of debating that comes naturally to her but of the value of which experience has made her thoroughly aware—a shy, Socratic approach to the matter at hand. In an arena dominated by men who seem to have made up their minds, she goes out of her way not to appear opinionated, even though her own mind may be pretty well made up, too. “Now, of course, I’m a woman and I don’t understand all these things,” she will remark softly, almost maternally, “and I’m sure there’s a great deal to be said for your arguments, but don’t you think it would be a good idea if …” Stating her position hesitantly, interrogatively, and above all sensibly, she sometimes manages to elicit a “Yes” or a “Maybe” from someone who a moment before had seemed in immutable opposition. This might be called the mother technique. A State Department career man, after watching her artfully maneuver her way through a delicate discussion, once murmured, “Never have I seen naïveté and cunning so gracefully blended.” On the whole, Mrs. Roosevelt gets along better with the men accredited to the United Nations than with the women. Occasionally, to be sure, her outlook seems conventionally feminine. “No one can ever tell me that women like to talk longer than men,” she wrote in her column after one session, and “I’m frank to say it is always a surprise to me to find how passionately men can feel about rules of procedure” after another. All
in all, however, she takes a dispassionate view of feminism, and at times she apparently regards herself as not typical of her sex. Reflecting in “My Day” on a conversation about current events with three of her four sons and their wives, she intimated that in such discussions women perhaps belong in the background but that the rules of the game do not apply to her. “Now here we were again,” she wrote, “all of us arguing passionately on ideas, all of us trying to talk at once, even the wives becoming so interested that they could not help but join in!”

  · · ·

  Until Mrs. Roosevelt got into the United Nations, she had had very little experience in dealing with public affairs at the diplomatic or conference level. She made no bones about the fact that the tactical intricacies of international negotiation were largely unknown to her, and, shortly before the Assembly convened in London, she wrote in her column, “Some things I can take to the first meeting—a sincere desire to understand the problems of the rest of the world and our relationship to them; a real good-will for all the peoples throughout the world; a hope that I shall be able to build a sense of personal trust and friendship with my co-workers, for without that type of understanding our work would be doubly difficult.” The United States delegation sailed on the Queen Elizabeth. It was a fairly historic occasion—the beginning of this country’s participation in a fellowship of nations—and some of our departing standard-bearers understandably made the most of the event, turning up at the pier in glittering limousines with a retinue of well-wishers and intoning solemn prepared farewell statements while floodlights warmed them and newsreel cameras purred flatteringly. Mrs. Roosevelt arrived alone in a taxi and proceeded along the pier unobserved until a Customs man spotted her and escorted her on board. The following day, a statement she had prepared in advance was published in her column. “The day is here at last when I am to set sail, apparently with quite a number of others, for London Town!” she said. “I am told we will be ‘briefed,’ whatever this may mean, during the trip.… I need it in the worst possible way.”