Praise for Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: 1933–1938
”In Volume 2 of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Blanche Wiesen Cook continues her diligent pentimento, getting at the tender, sprightly creature behind the starchy, strident image, chronicling how the timid housewife and mother of five shed her chrysalis and turned into the New Deal’s relentless ‘Eleanor Everywhere.’”
—The New York Times Book Review [Front Page]
“In this admiring biography Cook shows how Mrs. R. embarked on an unprecedented role for a First Lady, and how, although legally powerless, she became a political authority and a widely beloved figure.”
—The New Yorker
“Excitement fuels these pages, especially since Cook never simplifies the trials and triumphs that shaped [Eleanor Roosevelt’s] progressive vision.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Cook pulls no punches when it comes to examining her heroine’s political or personal shortcomings, but she also delights in showing us the excellence of her character and the scope of her achievements.”
—Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor
“The most vicious of Eleanor Roosevelt’s many critics and her scores of admirers could have agreed on one thing: She changed America.”
—The Seattle Times
“Cook details the remarkable energy and dedication Eleanor Roosevelt brought to fighting for her ideals… A masterful assemblage of facts and insights that illuminate a great woman’s life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A hardworking, passionate woman, Eleanor Roosevelt is fascinating—but it’s Cook’s elegant, richly detailed treatment of her that will keep you reading.”
—OUT magazine
“Cook’s portrait of a woman in the thick of things during the hardest of hard times likely will stand as definitive.”
—The Washington Post
PENGUIN BOOKS
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, VOLUME 2: 1933–1938
Historian and journalist, Blanche Wiesen Cook is Distinguised Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Senior editor of the Garland Library of War and Peace, author of Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, The Declassified Eisenhower, and the bestselling Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I: 1884–1933, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is former vice-president of research for the American Historical Associaton.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK
Eleanor
Roosevelt
The Defining Years
VOLUME TWO
1933–1938
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi — 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,
Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices; 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2000
10
Copyright © Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1999
All rights reserved
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
In first photo section, pages 1 (top), 2 (top), 8 (top), 9 (below), 16 (below): Corbis/Bettmann; 7 (top), 12 (top): AP/World Wide Photos; 12 (center): West Virginia & Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries; 12 (below): Arthurdale Heritage.
In second photo section, pages 3 (top and below), 4 (top and below), 5 (top), 7 (top), 8 (top), 9 (top), 11 (top), 12 (top and below), 15 (top and below): Corbis/Bettmann; 5 (below), 6 (top), 8 (below), 14 (below): AP/World Wide Photos; 11 (below): Bachrach; 13: the Estate of Margaret Bourke-White.
All other photographs courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Cook, Blanche Wiesen.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two 1933–1938/Blanche Wiesen Cook.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
EISBN: 9781101567456
1. Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962. 2. Presidents—United States—Wives—
Biography. I. Title.
E807.1.R48C66 1992
973.917’092—dc20
[B] 87–40632
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Minion
Designed by Francesca Belanger
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
TO MY MOTHER, SADONIA ECKER WIESEN
a constant inspiration
“Someone sent me a most amusing present of a goldfish bowl. I doubt if anyone living in the White House needs such a reminder… So, if I may offer a thought in consolation to others who for a time have to live in a goldfish bowl, it is: ‘Don’t worry because people know all that you do, for the really important things about anyone are what they are and what they think and feel, and the more you live in a “goldfish bowl” the less people really know about you!’”
(My Day, 7 January 1936)
“If you care for your own children, you must take an interest in all, for your children must go on living in the world made by all children.”
—ER to the Southern Women’s Democratic Union, New York; in the New York Times, 26 February 1933
“Peace time can be as exhilarating to the daredevil as wartime. There is nothing so exciting as creating a new social order.”
—ER in the New York Times, 29 December 1933
“I think we had better begin to decide whether we wish to preserve our civilization or whether we think it of so little use that we might as well let it go. That is what war amounts to.”
—ER, “Ways of Peace,” 1936
“How men hate women in a position of real power!”
—ER to Lorena Hickok, concerning Frances Perkins, 1937
“What a nuisance hearts are, and yet without them life would hardly be worth while!”
—ER to Lorena Hickok, 20 February 1935
“How I hate doing these things and then they say someday I’ll run for an office. Well, I’d have to be chloroformed first! [But if it improves these terrible] conditions even a little bit I suppose it is worth it….”
—ER to Lorena Hickok, February 1935
“I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come, and we must learn to work together all of us, regardless of race or creed or color…. We go ahead together or we go down together….
—ER, 11 May 1934 Washington Conference on Negro Education
“Don’t dry up by inaction but go out and do things…. Don’t believe what somebody else tells you, but know things by your own contacts with life. If you do that you will be of great value to the community and the world.”
—ER to Todhunter graduates, 3 June 1938
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Everyone of a certain age, in every part of the United States, has an Eleanor Roosevelt story. Some say she was a good wife but a bad mother, a good friend but a bad wife, a bad woman with Communist friends, a good woman with Communist friends, a reckless and wicked activist with black friends, a good and visionary leader with black friends. Her life continues to illuminate our ongoing political and social divides. She is bellwether and key to the enduring controversies of the twentieth century.
To contemplate ER’s life and times has been an exciting journey, a quest filled with discovery and surprise, agony and delight. ER wrote or dictated countless words many hours each day, every day. There are miles and mountains of ER’s words, and those written by hand are often difficult to decipher. Even her great friend Lorena Hickok was occasionally perplexed. On 20 May 1937, Hick queried: “What is it you offer to send me, a Bible or a Girdle?… Since you mention it right after something about your riding and spell it with a small ‘b’—it might be a bridle. On the other hand, I have no horse, so a Bible would make better sense. I’m very curious!”
Words ER dictated, and typed, are frequently connected to long reports, official papers, articles, columns, books—endless material to document many facts, especially the details and strategies of ER’s influence and power.
My gratitude to the archivists and researchers who facilitated the search through the hundreds of manuscript boxes that comprise Series 70 at the FDR Library is profound. My former graduate student Paula Gardner coordinated a splendid team to look through each box. Without the excavations and photocopies made by Paula Gardner, Sue Murray, and Renah Feldman, this would have been a different book.
As with Volume I, this book could not have been written without the involvement of good friends, scholars and activists working for women’s rights, peace, and justice.
Clare Coss was partner and companion throughout the research, writing, and editing process. As far as possible, we retraced ER’s steps and met people who knew her in Greenwich Village, Washington, Detroit, Saint Louis, Chicago, and Campobello; at Arthurdale; in Warm Springs and Roswell, Georgia; in the high Sierra of Yosemite National Park; in San Francisa) and Los Angeles.
We toured Arthurdale and the surrounding region with Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and environmental activists Regina Birchem and Dan Boleff. Their knowledge of Appalachia, the coal counties and devastated rust-belt areas so in need of another New Deal and other Arthurdales, dramatized all the information we gleaned as we visited Arthur-dale, West Virginia, and Norvelt, Pennsylvania.
I am particularly grateful to Arthurdale Heritage Foundation’s excellent staff—especially Bryan Ward, Deanna Hornyak, and historian Barbara Howe—and enthusiastic residents, including Marilee Hall and Annabelle Mayor, for an unforgettable journey in time and community. As Bryan Ward noted, Arthurdale may have been dismissed as a wasteful failure, but the 165 homes on three to five acres never failed the people. Of the original homesteaders and their descendants, eighty-three percent are still there—private home owners, who were once given an opportunity to work and survive by their government.
For ail the snickers about waste and losses, for ER and the people of Arthurdale, it represented security, and it remains a usable model to end homelessness and deprivation, urban crowding and rural waste., It is a program for national development and housing security urgently needed, yet to be seriously considered.
In Norvelt, Pennsylvania, Mary Wolk, then eighty-nine, took a day to tour us through the American Friends Service Committee model community for miners and steel workers, where Clarence Pickett and ER encouraged Doris Duke to consider privately funding model-home building, which she did. Mary Wolk thought the community should be called Brightness because everything “was so bright and airy and the future seemed so bright.” But the town unanimously voted to name it after Eleanor Roosevelt, Norvelt, “and that was prefect.”
The Atlanta Historical Society facilitated a marvelous March 1994 week that Clare and I spent contemplating ER’s southern roots. From Atlanta to Bulloch Hall, the home of her paternal grandmother Mittie Bulloch, one takes a short drive to Roswell, Georgia, where administrator Pam Humphries and docent Deborah Gammon gave us a cordial tour through the home and grounds. From there, we drove to Warm Springs and benefited from the tour and materials given us by Beverly Bulloch, director of development, and Diane Blanks.
We are especially grateful to them, and to the residents of Warm Springs who opened their homes and shared their memories with us.
Hillary Rodham Clinton kindly arranged a tour through the family and private quarters of the White House. Curators Betty Monkman and Lydia Tederick generously prepared archival material and photographs to illustrate Roosevelt arrangements, including the seven-drawer highboy FDR at some point placed as barrier in front of his wife’s connecting door.
In New York City, Dean Dresser thoughtfully arranged our visit to ER’s private Greenwich Village retreat, rented from Esther Lape, at 20 East 11th Street; and Pat Paterline took time to tour us through ER’s 1930’s sanctuary.
For a delightful visit to Hick’s Little House on the Dana estate at Mastic Beach in Center Moriches, I want to thank Doris Dana for her tour into the past with Hick and her father, Bill Dana; and the current owner, Anne Farr for her consideration and assistance.
Over the years, Clare and I visited Campobello several times. I am particularly grateful for the weekend seminar arranged by Linda Cross Godfrey, where we enjoyed the hospitality and warmth of that rugged island’s local residents: Evelyn Bowden, Vera Calder, Elayne Gleason, Bette Lank, Cecille Matthews, Kathleen MacFeat, Lena Mills, Trudy Newman, Susan Plachy, and John McCarthy of the Lubec Light. I also want to thank the generous staff of the Roosevelt-Campobello International Park: Anne Newman, Carolyn Parker, and Jane Radcliffe.
A special joy of our location research was our effort to follow ER’s trail to a remote lake in the High Sierra within the Yosemite National Park. We tried to get there on our own. One year, well on our way, we were turned back by a sudden electric storm, which we ignored until lightning bounced off our boots. Finally, we agreed to seek professional help. I called Elizabeth Stone O’Neill, the biographer of ranger-naturalist Carl Sharsmith and author of the beautiful Meadow in the Sky: A History of Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows Region. We had never met, but I admired her books and was determined to get to Lake Roosevelt. She promised to find “the perfect guides,” and introduced us to Ann Abbott.
Ann coordinated our trip to Lake Roosevelt, with intrepid Sierra Club guide Victoria Hoover, who forged the path to our goal. In July 1994, fifty years after ER and Hick camped at Lower Young Lake, we imagined ER’s steps from there to the long, narrow mysterious lake named in her honor. We decided to go on foot, though ER rode on horseback. You cannot actually see this glacial lake until you are virtually upon it. Above the tree line, surrounded by meadows of tiny wildflowers, heather and snowbanks, it ripples with ice throughout the year. We presumed that after her journey, ER dove right in—and so did we. I am deeply grateful to Vicki Hoover, Ann Abbot, and Clare Coss for this incomparable lifetime adventure; and to Betty and Carroll O’Neill for all we have subsequently experienced together in the High Sierra.
After our Yosemite trips, we visited in San Francisco with Agar and Diana Roosevelt Jaicks; Andy and Janet Roosevelt Karten, and Eleanor Roosevelt II. I am deeply grateful to ER’s nieces for their family albums and many resources and I cherish their friendship and support for this project.
I am thankful to Jack Meyer, in Los Angeles, who arranged a most moving visit with ER’s great friend Mayris (Tiny) Chaney and her daughter Michelle Martin.
Biographers
and historians depend on archives and libraries, and I deeply value the important work done by the keepers of ER-related papers. The FDR Library is a congenial and helpful environment, enhanced by the concern and diligence of its professional staff, Frances Seeber, John Ferris, Mark Renovitch, Hallie Galligan, Susan Elter, Paul McLaughlin, and Ray Teichman, among others.
The Columbia University Oral History Project, under the superb direction of Ron Grele, is a unique resource for ER. I want to thank Tobias Markowitz for his research into the many interviews at Columbia, and Frances Madeson for her year as research assistant in New York’s magnificent Public Library archives.
I want to acknowledge archivists at Harvard University Houghton Library, and the staff at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Until her untimely death, the hospitality of Schlesingers director Pat King made every visit to Cambridge a delight. I particularly appreciate the kindnesses of Eva Mosely, Susan Van Sorlis, and Barbara Haber; and researcher Heidi Sander.
At the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University, I thank archivist Warner Pflug and research assistant Sandy Kimberly. I am, as always, grateful to David Wigdor, at the library of Congress, and at the State Department Historical office to David Patterson and William Slaney. For materials relating to Washington’s Housing Commission, Dorothy Provine of the District of Columbia Archives is a treasured resource.
In Arizona, I am indebted to Harold Clarke and Bert Drucker for use of the Esther Lape collection in their possession; and to the archivists at the Arizona Historical Society, which houses the Isabella Greenway collection, notably Adelaide Elm and Rosemary Adeline Byrne. I am grateful to Isabella Greenway’s son John Greenway for his memories and insights, and to Harold, Mary, and Bill Coss, Annette Kolodny and Dan Peters, for their hospitality in Tucson.
I appreciate the steady commitment of the overworked, efficient, and skilled editorial team at Viking: Barbara Grossman, Courtney Hodell, Reeve Chace, Beena Kamlani, and Wendy Wolf. Deftly, and with good cheer, Beena and Wendy helped trim, shape, and shepherd a towering historical pile into a liftable volume. I hope readers will peruse the footnotes, the last refuge for exiled material.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 1
