Charlotte Sheedy, forever friend and agent, was always available for advice, encouragement, and comfort.
Many friends, students, and colleagues generously shared their research with me, pointed me to additional sources, sent books, articles, precious documents. I thank Mimi Abramovitz, Christie Balka, Maureen Beasley, Louise Bernikow, Allida Black, Adrienne Fried Block, Renate Bridenthal, Chris Brown, Joseph Ceretto, Anni Chamberlain, Sandi E. Cooper, Page Delano, Louise DeSalvo, Candace Falk, Abe Fenster, Joanne Grant, Bill Hannegan, Elizabeth Harlan, Alice Kessler-Harris, Susan Heske, June Hopkins, Glenn Horowitz, Mim Kelber, William Loren Katz, Susan Koppelman, Barbara Kraft, Brooke Kroger, Andy Lancet, Richard Lieberman, Deborah Ann Light, Thomas Litwack, John F. McHugh, Midge Mackenzie, Gerald Markowitz, Trudy Mason, Ted Morgan, David Nasaw, Marilyn Niemark, Ernest Nives, Eleanor Pam, Nancy Pinchot Pitman, Marjory Potts, David Rattray, Gerda Ray, Merle and Martin Rubin, Scott Sandage, Pierre Sauvage, Dagmar Schultz, Barbara Sicherman, Gloria Steinern, Alisa Solomon, Martha Swain, Amy Swerdlow, the late Patricia Spain Ward, David Wyman, and Larry Wittner. There were many others, and endless kindnesses; I apologize for those names momentarily missed.
I deeply appreciate Dr. Michael Brody’s gift of the facts and documents of ER’s relationship with the Brodsky family, and Eleanor Lund Zartman’s memories of her aunt, ER’s closest assistant, Malvina (Tommy) Thompson.
William P.T. Preston’s many feats of friendship included rare books, and a deck upon which to relive the days of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare with Virginia Durr and Patricia Sullivan. I treasure these times, and those with Marge Frantz, concerning her father Joseph Gelders, and the SCHW; and with Abbott Simon and the late Vivian Cadden for their memories of the American Youth Congress.
Sandi E. Cooper and Alice Kessler-Harris took time out from their relentless schedules to read parts of what was initially a two-thousand-page manuscript. Gerald Markowitz read the entire manuscript, in its several incarnations, and helped transform a casual Luddite into a modern computer user. These were herculean acts of friendship and generosity, for which I am forever and profoundly grateful.
I am grateful to John Jay College’s president, Gerald Lynch, and Provost Basil Wilson; to Frances Degen Horowitz at the Graduate Center; and to my generous colleagues and students. Throughout this process, I have depended on the spirit and vision of the women’s biography seminar, and I thank you all.
This book, indeed my entire life, has been fueled and replenished on a regular basis by a network of love and support. In addition to those named above, a community of family and friends had sustained me; and I marvel at everybody’s ability to put up with my nonsocial absorption in the past. For their forbearance and understanding, I thank my amazing mother, Sadonia Ecker Wiesen; my heroic sister, Marjorie D. W. Lessem; my nephews, Daniel Wayne and Douglas Jed Lessem; my nieces, Clare Ellen and Katie McGuire.
For hospitality and many nourishments in various locales, I am grateful to Marge Barton, Mary Frances Berry, Mindy Chateauvert, Frances Clayton, Rhonda Copelon, Marilyn Fitterman, Sharron Good, Jane and Jay Gould, Alvia Golden, Lucille Goodman, Gay Hemphill, Lyla Hoffman, Deborah Ann Light, Sandy Rapp, Claire and Jessie Reid, Patsy Rogers, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Lucius Ware, Leslie Weisman.
This book is in part dedicated to the memory of four women who supported and influenced this project in countless ways; their lives of example, love, and courage continue to advance ER’s legacy: Bella Abzug, Diana Roosevelt Jaicks, Audre Lorde and Connie Murray.
Finally, this book would have been impossible without Clare Coss’s keen discernment and galvanizing companionship. She emboldened and envigorated the entire quest.
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Becoming First Lady
2: Public and Private Domains
3: ER’s Revenge: Henrietta Nesbltt, Head Housekeeper
4: Mobilizing the Women’s Network:
Friendships, Press Conferences, Patronage
5: ER’s New Deal for Women
6: Family Discord and the London Economic Conference
7: Private Times and Reports from Germany
8: Creating a New Community
9: The Quest for Racial Justice
10: The Crusade to End Lynching
11: Private Friendship, Public Time
12: Negotiating the Political Rapids
13: 1935: Promises and Compromises
14: The Victories of Summer, 1935
15: Mobilizing for New Action
16: A Silence Beyond Repair
17: Red Scare and Campaign Strategies, 1936
18: The Roosevelt Hearth, After Howe
19: The Election of 1936
20: Postelection Missions
21: Second Chance for the New Deal
22: 1937: To Build a New Movement
23: A First Lady’s Survival: Work and Run
24: This Is My Story
25: This Troubled World, 1938
26: Race Radicals, Youth and Hope
27: Storms on Every Front
Notes
Notes on Sources and Selected Bibliography
Index
Sections of photographs follow pages 110 and 430.
Introduction
Eleanor Roosevelt is the most controversial First Lady in United States history. Her journey to greatness, her voyage out beyond the confines of good wife and devoted mother, involved determination and amazing courage. It also involved one of history’s most unique partnerships. Franklin Delano Roosevelt admired his wife, appreciated her strengths, and depended on her integrity.
ER and FDR had different priorities, occasionally competing goals, and often disagreed. Connected by trust, loyalty, and love, their partnership survived marital pain and affairs of the heart. They enjoyed different entertainments, and preferred different people. They offered different advice to their adult children whose personal lives were in turmoil. In the White House they ran two distinct and separate courts.
They were able to maintain a measure of privacy in their lives because a respectful press honored their privacy. Journalists accepted FDR’s request to shield the public from his paralysis; and publishers accepted ER’s intention to control information through her women-only press conferences. In 1934 when invasive reporters hounded ER on vacation with Lorena (Hick) Hickok, the First Lady responded with a high-speed auto chase that reverberates sixty years later in Princess Diana’s tragic accident. ER’s chase ended in a victory — over unwanted publicity impossible today.
ER and FDR did not have a traditional, correct, or conventionally happy marriage; but it was one of Washington’s most notably successful marriages. Fueled by power, they were each dedicated to making life better for most people. Together they did more than either could have done alone. ER served her husband’s interests, and was his primary ambassador to neighborhood people, to poor and hardworking and hidden communities in the mountains and deltas of America. She brought folks who could not vote and, until the New Deal, did not count, into the mainstream of American public life. On divisive issues which he would have preferred to ignore, notably issues of race and racism, she was his conscience, proud to be on occasion his “hair shirt.”
ER was forty-eight when she entered the White House. Her understanding of life and politics was informed and galvanized by love. She was surrounded by cherished friends, who rallied to her needs. Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read became closer than ever, and rented the First Lady a Greenwich Village apartment—a third floor walk-up that was her own private hideaway. Her former bodyguard and squire Earl Miller, and her friend and secretary Malvina (Tommy) Thompson, remained ER’s most frequent confidantes and companions.
In 1933, ER was an accomplished woman who had achieved several of her life’s goals. With her Val-Kill partners, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Caroline O’Day, ER was a businesswoman who co-owned the Val-Kill crafts factory, a politic
al leader who edited and copublished the Women’s Democratic News, and an educator who co-owned and taught at a New York school for girls. Her literature and political affairs classes at the todhunter School recalled her own education in England at Allenswood with her great teacher Marie Souvestre, who continued to inspire the paths ER chose as First Lady.
ER’s friendship with Lorena Hickok was the most ardent and absorbing relationship of her middle years. Because Hick planned to write the First Lady’s biography, ER sent ten- to fifteen-page daily letters to create a usable record. There was nothing simple about ER’s friendship with Hick. Their times together were filled with excitement, turbulence, disappointment. Throughout her life, ER’s emotions were stirred by correspondence. Beginning with her father, letters were her lifeline, the way in which she was best able to communicate her dreams, intimacies, desires.
Before she entered the White House, ER cast about for models to understand her new role and decide just what she might do from within the confines of the President’s House. The record was grim, and every one of her predecessors sickened or died in the place. Washington was a lethal town for wives, with an odious history for women. Tough and resilient, ER set out to create another example. Surrounded by her own support network, she intended to survive the ordeal of First Wifery.
She was not a saint, and though often long-suffering, ER could be mean and cold and disagreeable. Initially she went everywhere with rambunctious dogs. They growled and snarled, barked and nipped, bolted and chased. Like her head housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, who ruined the president’s food on a regular basis, and was rude and unkind, ER’s dogs represented an unacknowledged part of her character, and served various purposes. ER often admitted to feeling “low in my mind,” discontented and depressed. She rarely expressed anger directly. But when she grew cold, she could freeze the stoutest heart. She never fired Henrietta Nesbitt, and she parted with her dogs only after they had lunged at several children, and bit at least one diplomat, one senator, and one friendly woman reporter.
As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt did things that had never been done before. She upset race traditions, championed a New Deal for women, and on certain issues actually ran a parallel administration. On housing and the creation of model communities, for example, ER made decisions and engineered policy.
At the center of a network of influential women who ran the Women’s Committee of the Democratic Party led by Molly Dewson, ER worked closely with the women who had dominated the nation’s social reform struggles for decades. With FDR’s election, the goals of the great progressive pioneers, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald, were at last at the forefront of the country’s agenda. ER’s mentors since 1903, they had battled on the margins of national politics since the 1880s for public health, universal education, community centers, sanitation programs, government responsibility for the welfare of the nation’s poor and neglected people.
Now their views were brought directly into the White House. ER lobbied for them personally with her new administrative allies, in countless auditoriums, as a radio broadcaster, and in monthly, weekly, and, by 1936, daily columns. Called “Eleanor Everywhere,” she was interested in everyone.
Once a shy and lonely child, a reserved and deferential young matron with five children, ER flourished in public life. During the 1930s she became a fierce warrior on the political battlefield. At the age of seventy-six, in 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote You Learn by Living, and reflected on all she had learned at school; then as the wife of a democratic president in a time of despots. Competition and the thrill of the game of nations were at the core of her driving power. When she singled out the happiest day of her life, it was the day she made the first field hockey team at Allenswood. That sentence revealed a basic fact: ER was a very competitive woman, a team player who delighted in knockabout efforts on the muddy fields of play, and she hated to lose. She always advised her friends: “If you have to compromise, be sure to compromise UP!”
Competitive even as First Lady, she set herself the task of earning as much as FDR earned as president, $75,000.* At the end of the first year, as a result of her many lectures, articles, and commercial broadcasts, ER could write a friend: “I’ve done it! I’ve earned as much as Franklin.” Today such commercially sponsored broadcasts would be considered an illegal or immoral conflict of interest, but ER rejected all criticism. She insisted that her work was useful, and she gave almost all her earnings to worthy causes.
The legacy of her childhood of tears and longing, her family grief and early abandonment, marked her life every day of her life. She was eight when her mother, Anna, died at the age of twenty-nine; and ten when her beloved father, Elliott, died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-four. From then on, she identified particularly with people in want, in need, in trouble, and devoted her time especially to those on the margins, or beyond its borders. After each visit to women’s prisons, ER left haunted by the feeling that she could have been any one of the women on the inside.
There was no group beyond her concern, no people outside her imagination, no category of outsiders designated for abandonment. Every life was sacred and worthy, to be improved by education, employment, health care, affordable housing. Her goal was simple, a life of dignity and decency for all. She was uninterested in complex theories, and demanded action for betterment. She feared violent revolution, but was not afraid of socialism—and she courted radicals.
As fascism and communism triumphed in Europe and Asia, ER and FDR were certain that there was a middle way, what ER called an American “revolution without bloodshed.” Her abiding conviction, however, was that nothing good would happen to promote the people’s interest unless the people themselves organized to demand government responses. A people’s movement required active citizen participation, and ER’s self-appointed task was to agitate and inspire community action, encourage united democratic movements for change.
She forged new alliances with race radicals who began during the 1930s to challenge the entire structure of America’s segregated political and cultural life. She was closest to NAACP leader Walter White, and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women; and to white agitators Lucy Randolph Mason, Aubrey Williams, and Virginia Durr.
While FDR pursued a “Southern strategy” to keep peace with a congressional majority dominated by white supremacists who threatened mutiny with each effort to introduce a law against lynching, or economic justice for education, housing, relief, and rehabilitation, ER advocated for the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union created in 1934; championed the multiracial antisegregationist American Youth Congress in 1936; helped initiate—and integrate—the call for a second Reconstruction ignited by the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1938.
Between 1933 and 1938, while the Depression raged and the New Deal unfolded, ER worked with the popular front. Before the Soviets called for a united front alliance against Hitler in August 1935, ER called for alliances of activists to fight poverty and racism at home, and to oppose isolationism internationally. She was among the first to make the connection: white supremacy, segregation, and lynching here; race violence and fascism there.
Active with the women’s peace movement associated with Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Carrie Chapman Catt, ER spoke regularly at meetings of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Catt’s Conference on the Cause and Cure of War. She departed, however, from pacifist and isolationist positions and encouraged military preparedness, collective security, and ever-widening alliances.
After the publication of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I, some people recoiled from the possibility that ER might have had passion and love in her life outside her marriage and apart from FDR. They were particularly disturbed by the presence of Earl Miller and Lorena Hickok at the heart of her story. One woman, a human rights worker, was aghast that ER had “lesbian friends, or was a lesbian, or some such thing.” When asked if she read the b
ook, she replied: “No, I wouldn’t read it; I wouldn’t touch it!” Such views, even on the part of those who claim to respect and admire Eleanor Roosevelt, reflect the kind of determined ignorance she worked so hard to uproot. After a lifetime of loving, with all the difficulties and contradictions love involves, it seems a peculiar and sad commentary that people who claim to know ER do not care to know about the relationships that most absorbed and concerned her.
There are still those who dismiss ER as naïve and uninformed. Books still appear that claim she knew nothing about sex or birth control. Even in 1998 a book appeared to explain: That was why she had six children and then ended relations with her husband. But ER was a lifelong member of the birth control league. She understood the facts of life, as well as where directions of the heart might lead. She actually considered love “a form of insanity.” When in love one acted in unpredictable ways, often uncontrollably.
ER’s life was about controversy and compromise; power and action. Between husband and wife, it was often about conflict and confrontation. On domestic issues FDR encouraged his wife to “warm up” unpopular subjects, and then he would proceed. On international issues, he discouraged ER’s participation and demanded her silence as the fascist horror in Europe unfolded. These differences were the most bruising between them. ER could riot remain silent over the London Economic Conference in 1933, the World Court in 1935, or the Spanish Civil War after 1936. She spoke out, and wrote articles to explain their differences.
Concerning Hitler’s treatment of all those in his category of “lives not worth living,” ER’s silence was grievous and prolonged. Nevertheless, she struggled to remove barriers which limited hope for refugees, and she spoke to countless Jewish groups throughout the United States to demonstrate her conviction that bigotry must not be allowed to prevail here.
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