The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Credit 5.20

  Mrs. Roosevelt speaks to bonus marchers during an unannounced visit to their encampment at Fort Hunt, Virginia, May 16, 1933. Some three thousand of the disgruntled jobless veterans whom Herbert Hoover had driven from Washington returned to the area that spring, still determined immediately to obtain the bonus that had been promised to them. FDR was not willing to provide it, but he did offer them places in the CCC and, unlike his predecessor, supplied food, medical care, even concerts by the navy band. And, at Louis Howe’s urging, Eleanor inspected the camp without an escort, shared coffee with the men, and later assured her press conference that she’d been in no danger from such “remarkably clean and orderly-looking, grand-looking boys.” “Hoover sent the army,” a bonus marcher told a reporter. “Roosevelt sent his wife.”

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  A World of Love

  Lorena Hickok—“Hick” to Eleanor Roosevelt—had been one of America’s top newspaperwomen in 1932, when she was assigned by the Associated Press to cover the Democratic candidate’s wife—and soon found herself so in love with her subject that she quit her job with the Associated Press because she felt she could no longer be objective. The result was one of the most intense friendships of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life. When apart, the two women wrote one another daily.

  Hick dearest,

  It was good to talk to you.… The one thing which reconciles me to this job is the fact that … I begin to think there may be ways in which I can be useful. I am getting some ideas which I want to talk over with you. …

  A world of love to you & good night & God bless you, “light of my life.”

  In July of 1933, the two friends quietly took off alone together in Eleanor’s blue Buick convertible for a sixteen-day vacation on the back roads of New England and the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. The Secret Service wanted to send an escort; the first lady refused to have one, but she did agree to carry a revolver in her glove compartment—though she carried no ammunition with which to load it.

  When one man in Canada heard Eleanor give her last name he asked if she happened to be any relation to the late Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had greatly admired. Yes, she answered, “I am his niece.” They had tea together without his ever figuring out that she was married to the current president of the United States. That kind of anonymity would not last long. Eleanor Roosevelt’s frequent travels would soon help make her the best-known woman in the world.

  The nature of her relationship with Lorena Hickok was a subject of controversy among some of their friends during their lifetimes and has been debated among historians and biographers ever since. There is no question of Hickok’s feelings for Mrs. Roosevelt and also no question that Eleanor felt strongly about her. But a letter from Eleanor to Hick, written in 1935, offers a possible clue: “I know you often have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind but I feel I love you just the same & so often we entirely satisfy each other that I feel there is a fundamental basis on which our relationship stands.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A favorite portrait of Lorena Hickok in 1932, when she first fell in love with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a fragment from one of Eleanor’s letters to her, written from the White House. It was Hickok’s idea to have the first lady hold her own press conferences.

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Amateur snapshots of Lorena Hickok and the first lady during the trip they took together in the summer of 1933 without security of any kind: driving virtually unrecognized down a street on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, and arriving at the Richmond Hotel in Lawrence, Massachusetts. “It has been a wonderful trip,” Eleanor wrote Franklin afterward from Campobello, “& Hick is grand to travel with. Nothing bothers her. She isn’t afraid. She doesn’t get tired and she’s always interested.”

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  Arthurdale

  When Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok ended their vacation in the summer of 1933, Hickok moved into her own room at the White House and then went to work traveling the country as chief investigator for Harry Hopkins, the head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

  Able and impatient, fueled by cigarettes and black coffee, Hopkins combined the hard-eyed sensibilities of a seasoned political operative with the conscience of a committed social worker. Told a new federal program was likely to succeed in the long run, he answered that wasn’t good enough. “People don’t eat in the long run,” he said. Hopkins would remain one of Roosevelt’s most effective and devoted advisers throughout his presidency, eager always to know from Hickok what was really happening outside Washington. His instruction to her couldn’t have been more direct:

  What I want you to do is to go out around the country and look this thing over.… Go talk with preachers and teachers, businessmen, workers, farmers. Go talk with the unemployed, those who are on relief and those who aren’t. And when you talk with them don’t ever forget that but for the Grace of God, you, I or any of our friends might be in their shoes.

  Eleanor read every one of the reports Hickok wrote and made sure they were among the papers she left on FDR’s bedside table each evening so that he could read them, too.

  In late August, Hickok telephoned Eleanor at the White House. If she wanted to see for herself how bad things were, she should come to the company town of Scotts Run, West Virginia.

  “[It was] the worst place I’d ever seen,” Hickok remembered. “In a gutter, along the main street … , there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor.”

  The first lady of the United States came, driving alone in her Buick. The American Friends Service Committee had been working in the region to help unemployed coal miners and their families. Some men, blackballed for daring to protest conditions, had been without work for eight years. There was already a plan by West Virginia University to shift some families to a big plot of gently rolling land nearby owned by a family named Arthur.

  Eleanor returned to Washington, committed to taking over the project and making “Arthurdale” a model community.

  FDR shared Eleanor’s enthusiasm. So did Louis Howe. All three believed that the lives of the rural poor should be improved so that they would not be tempted to move to the already overcrowded industrial cities. Roosevelt had long hoped to resettle as many as a million families into planned rural communities. Arthurdale seemed a good place to start.

  One hundred and sixty-five families were eventually chosen. Each was to be given a furnished home—complete with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a refrigerator, all rarities then in much of rural America—as well as a plot of land, farm equipment, and livestock, with thirty years to pay the government back for its investment.

  The project was troubled from the beginning. The first prefabricated houses did not fit their foundations. The finished homes cost four times what had been budgeted. When Interior Secretary Ickes complained to FDR, the president just shrugged. “My Missus,” he said, “unlike most women, hasn’t any sense about money at all.”

  When Eleanor tried to attract small-scale industries to the area, congressional opponents refused to provide any funds. A vacuum cleaner plant failed. So did a shirtmaker and a tractor manufacturer.

  Eleanor refused to give up. She was as dedicated to Arthurdale as her husband was to Warm Springs. When federal funds proved insufficient, she contributed nearly all her earned income and canvassed wealthy friends to underwrite projects, including a progressive high school that allowed miners’ children to get advanced schooling that their parents could not have imagined.

  To its critics, Arthurdale came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the New Deal. They
charged that it was wasteful, overambitious, socialistic, and, like most of the hundred or so other rural communities built by the New Deal, unlikely to survive for long.

  But for those who lived there, Eleanor Roosevelt was a godsend and Arthurdale was a triumph. “We woke up in hell,” one of the first homesteaders remembered, “and went to bed the next night in heaven.”

  Harry Hopkins. “I am for experimenting … in various parts of the country,” he said, “trying out schemes which are supported by reasonable people [to] see if they work. If they do not work, the world will not come to an end.”

  Credit 5.26

  A coal miner’s daughter fetches kerosene for her family’s lamps in Scotts Run, West Virginia, in the middle of the region Lorena Hickok called “the damndest cesspool of human misery in America.”

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  Project manager Bushrod Grimes explains to Eleanor Roosevelt and Nancy Cook, whom she had appointed as an adviser on housing, how the new community of Arthurdale is to be laid out.

  Credit 5.28

  A Scotts Run coal miner at his woodstove. “Some of the older miners still could speak only enough English to understand the orders given by the mine boss,” Eleanor recalled. “Nobody had taken the trouble to help the adults who were going to live and work in this country, learn English and understand our government.”

  Credit 5.29

  Rapt Arthurdale residents listen to Mrs. Roosevelt: “I want you to succeed,” she told them, “not only for yourselves, but for what it will mean to people everywhere … who are starting similar projects. You are the first and your success will hearten [them].”

  Credit 5.30

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Arthurdale, not long after its first residents moved in, 1934

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  Eleanor talks with reporters on an Arthurdale construction site. “The homestead projects were attacked in Congress, for the most part,” she said, “by men who had never seen for themselves the plight of the miners or what we were trying to do for them.”

  Credit 5.33

  Happy Birthday, Mr. President

  January 30, 1934, was Franklin Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. Ever since the vice presidential campaign of 1920, the Cuff-Links Gang had gathered on or about his birthday to reminisce and celebrate with toasts, speeches, and elaborate costumed skits organized by Louis Howe. This time, Howe suggested that since the Republican opposition had begun to denounce FDR as a Caesar—dictatorial and answerable to no one—they make the Roman imperial court their theme. Photographs of the memorable tableau that resulted, staged at one end of the hallway in the White House living quarters, were distributed among the guests—who managed to keep them private for nearly three decades.

  On that same evening, a more serious Roosevelt tradition was born: the president’s Birthday Balls, arranged annually all across the country to raise money for the Warm Springs Foundation and, after 1938, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—better known as the March of Dimes.

  Emperor Roosevelt and his court: Eleanor and Anna flank the throne; Irvin McDuffie, FDR’s White House valet, stands behind it. Missy LeHand and Eleanor’s longtime secretary, Malvina Thompson, are seated at the lower left. The master of the revels, Louis Howe, is the helmeted figure at the right, just above the president’s press secretary, Stephen Early.

  Credit 5.34

  Looking uncannily like her son, the president’s mother acknowledges applause at one of the first Birthday Balls, held at New York’s Astor Hotel in 1934.

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  The ticket entitled the bearer to dance at a less glittering version at the Highland Park Casino in Quincy, Illinois, the following year.

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  Gold cuff links belonging to Charles H. McCarthy, FDR’s secretary during the 1920 campaign and one of the seven original members of the Cuff-Links Gang

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  A New Deal for Black Americans

  Most Americans suffered during the Depression, but African Americans suffered most. Three out of four still lived in the Jim Crow South. More than half of them were without work—and federal relief almost always went to needy whites first. Some 400,000 desperate people migrated north during the 1930s only to discover that, in many big cities, there was no work to be had.

  Theodore Roosevelt had once sought to deal with African American citizens through a single representative: Booker T. Washington.

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt understood that the world had changed, and FDR’s administration would prove more sympathetic to African American aspirations than any of its predecessors.

  Eleanor Roosevelt obtained several posts within the administration for her friend the educator Mary McLeod Bethune. When Bethune came to the White House for dinner for the first time, so the story goes, a gardener stopped her. “Hey there, Auntie,” he said, “where y’all think you’re going?” She looked him up and down, then asked, “Which one of my sister’s children are you?” No one ever tried to stop her again.

  Following the advice of Bethune and others, FDR appointed an informal network of second-level officials who came to be called his “black cabinet,” and Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins struggled to ensure that New Deal relief programs did not discriminate.

  By 1935, one-third of all black Americans would be receiving federal help of some kind—and African Americans all over the country were shifting their allegiance from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.

  Local prejudice persisted in federal programs. Most CCC camps were segregated. The coal miners of Arthurdale voted to keep out black homesteaders. Black reporters were barred from the president’s press conferences. Still, as Mrs. Bethune wrote, African Americans, “for the first time in their history,” felt their grievances would be heard with “sympathetic understanding and interpretation” during the Roosevelt administration.

  Twenty of the forty-five members of Roosevelt’s so-called “black cabinet”—African American officials whom FDR had appointed to positions in the executive branch. Mrs. Bethune is at the center. The third man from the left in the front row is Robert C. Weaver, who began his public career in 1933 as an assistant to Harold Ickes. Thirty-three years later, President Lyndon Johnson would appoint him as secretary of housing and urban affairs, the first African American ever to serve in the cabinet.

  Credit 5.37

  Mary McLeod Bethune, director of Negro Activities for the National Youth Administration, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Aubrey Williams, executive director of the NYA

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  African Americans at work on the Fort Loudon Dam, the uppermost of nine dams on the Tennessee River, built by the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide the region with electricity and flood control.

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  Gordon Parks captured this portrait of a Washington, D.C., domestic worker with a photograph of the president on whom she and many other African Americans now pinned their hopes.

  Credit 5.40

  A Vile Form of Collective Murder

  The shame of lynching persisted. In 1933, twenty-six Americans died at the hands of mobs, three times as many as had been lynched the year before. New York Senator Robert Wagner and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado introduced a bill to make any local official who failed to protect his prisoners against a mob subject to prosecution in the federal courts. Southern politicians denounced it as an assault on states’ rights.

  FDR had declared lynching a “vile form of collective murder” and was willing to sign the bill—if it was passed. But he felt he could not back it in public. On April 26, 1935, southern senators, vowing “the bill shall not pass,” began a filibuster.

  Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked to see the president, hoping he would intercede. His appointments secretary said the boss was far too busy. Eleanor intervened and invited White to tea on the South Portico with the president and the president’s mother
.

  There was really nothing he could do, FDR said. Eleanor persisted. So did Sara Delano Roosevelt.

  FDR was immovable. Seniority had given southern Democratic senators and congressmen more than their share of chairmanships. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told White. If he came out for the anti-lynching bill, he would be unable to pass legislation the whole country needed—including African Americans. The bill died on May 1st. The president liked to remind critics who thought him too cautious that “you have to wait, even for the best things, until the right time comes.” Although bills to end lynching would be revived again and again during his administration, that time would never come.

  But Eleanor Roosevelt argued for all of them, at the risk of irritating her husband. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” she wrote. “That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.”

  Pickets march outside Washington’s Constitution Hall, where a National Crime Conference was getting under way whose agenda did not so much as mention lynching, December 1934. Civil rights groups were then still hopeful the president would lead the fight to end lynching.