Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  I contemplated ER’s protracted five-year silence regarding Hitler’s Europe curled in agony. As I struggled to understand it, three issues seemed significant:

  Most Americans remained for so long unimpressed by Hitler’s decrees against Germany’s Jewish citizens because they were modeled on United States’ laws against African-Americans. Humiliation, deprivation, segregation were staples of American life in the 1930s. The denial of citizen rights such as voting, access to schools, transportation, recreation facilities, park benches, swimming pools, movie houses were accepted features of life. White supremacy in the United States involved unpunished and frequent lynchings; instances of mob violence, public acts of torture and mayhem, defended as “states’ rights” and somehow sacrosanct.

  In that climate, to protest Hitler’s atrocities would have invited world protest and condemnation of America’s outrages. It was impossible. And then there was the Red Scare. From 1933 to 1938, the general feeling among democratic leaders in the United States and England, specifically among State Department officials and FDR’s closest advisers, was that Hitler in Europe and Japan in Asia were forestalling communism. The Cold War was in full swing during the 1930s, and Hitler was preferable to popular front governments which included communists; and preferable to communist influence among youth, unionists, and antifascists.

  As late as November 1938, British writer Vera Brittain wrote “Pacifism After Munich,” in part her account of a visit to the United States, where she was “astonished by the violence of anti-German feelings amongst many peace workers…, for in England—except in terms of extremists who belong to the Left Book Club and the Communist Party:—it is not felt with comparable vehemence.”

  After Kristallnacht, the mood in the United States hardened against Hitler, and it was precisely that antifascist vehemence that attracted ER to her new friends in the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and the American Youth Congress. Her alliance with the popular front began before the Spanish Civil War and lasted until it was destroyed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

  Lastly, the 1930s was a time when human rights as a concept did not actually exist; and no nation was responsible to consider the domestic deeds of other nations. We live today in a different world. Fifty years after ER worked to place human rights on the international agenda, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, every individual, citizen, committee, and nation is responsible and accountable—encouraged to protest human rights abuses, empowered to prevent ethnic cleansing, torture, lynchings, hate crimes, and genocide.

  Every issue in this book is once again before us. With seven million homeless Americans, and a world nowhere at peace, it is still and again up to us—to understand, and to act on behalf of economic security, housing, health care, justice, peace. As ER’s legacy continues to unfold it is fortified by national movements for civil rights, world movements devoted to human rights and the environment.

  In It’s Up to the Women, her first major book published as First Lady, ER told her 1933 readers that it was a national responsibility to educate healthy, socially engaged children who would work to preserve nature and prevent the extinction of “whole species.” She foresaw desertification, and cautioned against the destruction of forests: “If one cuts down all the trees… the water supply will be dried up unless wherever a tree is cut another is planted…. One does not destroy what nature gives us to love and conserve.”

  Between 1933 and 1938 ER published countless articles and six books. She wrote in part for herself, to clear her mind and focus her thoughts. But she also wrote to disagree with her husband. From that time to this, no other First Lady has actually rushed for her pen to jab her husband’s public decisions. But ER did so routinely, from her first condemnation of the misogynist clause in his 1933 Economy Act which resulted in the dismissal of federally employed wives, to her major 1938 essay This Troubled World, which was a point-by-point rejection of FDR’s major international decisions.

  Every event between them remains an issue before us. The experience of writing this biography between 1993 and 1998, sixty years after it all occurred, has been a painful but supremely hopeful experience. The world seemed ruined before the New Deal, and in so many places, faces ruin again. “Gloom” was a much-used word in Anglo-American circles during the 1930s. ER and her peers were forever being plunged in gloom. Now, the New Deal safety net, Social Security, public education face the wrecker; and we live through days of gloom.

  To contemplate ER’s life of example and responsibility is to forestall gloom. She understood, above all, that politics is not an isolated individualist adventure. She sought alliances, created community, worked with movements for justice and peace. Against great odds, and under terrific pressure, she refused to withdraw from controversy. She brought her network of agitators and activists into the White House, and never considered a political setback a permanent defeat. She enjoyed the game, and weathered the abuse. Energized by her friends and allies, she devoted some part of every day to the business of making life better for most people. To contemplate her life of action and determination is to reconsider the role of popular movements everywhere growing, reorganizing, still and again dedicated to a politics of care, love, and justice.

  24 February 1999

  * 1930s dollars are approximately ten times 1990s dollars.

  1: Becoming First Lady

  After the election of November 1932, ER worried that her talents would not be used; that she would become a shut-in, a congenial hostess in the political shadows politically sidelined. In the months before FDR’s inauguration on 4 March 1933, newspaper headlines broadcast the victories of fascism and tyranny in Europe and Asia as well as the intensifying agonies of America’s worst economic depression. In that bitter climate, ER faced her return to Washington with a burst of activity that defied her sense of dread. Officially limited to social tasks, she felt at first burdened and defiant. Her great friend Lorena Hickok was so impressed by ER’s initial distress that she titled her subsequent biography Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady.

  ER wanted above all to be a player on the political team that worked to match FDR’s campaign promises with significant deeds. To counter her fear that she would instead be forced, into a life of political confinement somewhere in the shadows, a prisoner to the presidency, she plunged into the political fray. With the women activists of the Democratic Party, ER spent hours preparing lists of notable candidates for every level of government work. She wrote columns, stunned radio audiences, created endless controversy. The First Lady-elect was in the news almost every day—upsetting the complacent, encouraging people to imagine new liberal efforts to confront the Depression, which since October 1929 had plunged fifteen million unemployed and destitute Americans into despair.

  It had been twelve years since ER’s last sojourn in Washington, that small ungenerous town that had been for her filled with ragged memories. There as a child when her Uncle Theodore was president she had felt shy, lonely, outcast. There as a young matron when her husband was Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, she had felt humiliated, isolated. Betrayed by her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer, her friend and social secretary, she had suffered the loneliest time of her adult life.

  She returned to that place that fed on gossip and power, a changed woman. Surrounded by loyal friends, she was devoted to her work, and felt secure in her life. During the 1920s, the Roosevelts had reconsecrated their partnership and created their own political bases. FDR refortified his polio-ravaged body, and ER repaired her heart; they both moved beyond the affair that had threatened their marriage.

  While Eleanor and Franklin rebuilt their private lives, the world they had grown up in, the world they knew, disintegrated. The punitive Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I and redrew the map of Europe, in addition to war debts and dizzying inflation, inflamed German nationalism and spurred popular movements dedicated to the demise of old ruling class
es. Fascism and communism took hold as monarchies dissolved, empires collapsed, capitalism wobbled. While uncollected political and economic debts left over from the World War haunted and poisoned international relations, the wounds of Eleanor Roosevelt’s earlier time in Washington marked her memories, and influenced her path.

  After 1920, ER had carefully crafted a life that suited her needs. Like her Uncle Theodore, she was an activist—delighted to be on the move, among people, dealing directly with causes and crises. Never idle, she enjoyed many careers and was all in a day teacher, editor, columnist, and radio commentator. Her primary circle included her business and living partners Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Caroline O’Day. With Cook and Dickerman, ER shared a home two miles from the “big house” at Hyde Park along a small river called the Val-Kill. With O’Day, they co-owned the Todhunter School, the Val-Kill crafts factory, and the Women’s Democratic News (WDN), a monthly newsletter.

  ER had resigned as editor and taken her name off the masthead as one of the four publishers when FDR was elected governor of New York in November 1928, but she had continued to write its unsigned editorials and attend policy meetings.

  In February 1933, ER publicly returned to the WDN with a monthly column called “Passing Thoughts of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” She was to replace Elisabeth Marbury, who had regularly reported from Washington and had died suddenly of a heart attack on 22 January at the age of seventy-seven. Eager to be back in print for attribution, ER’s first column was in part a tribute to Marbury, a Democratic Party stalwart and worldly raconteur.*

  Also in this first column, ER promised to provide “some pictures of the various activities that I imagine fall to the lot of every President’s wife,” and announced that she was free to disagree—even with her husband.

  Like the country and his closest advisers, ER did not know actually what FDR intended to do as president. His priorities were unclear, since he had campaigned as both ardent liberal and fiscal conservative: He would balance the budget, and decrease taxes. Now, ER stated her own liberal goals for the administration: She disapproved of lowering taxes in the face of so many urgent social needs and wanted relief policies extended to provide work and new training for the unemployed.

  In both her February column and her unsigned editorial, she emphasized the need for more public spending. She lamented recent talk about curtailing “some of these services.” More services were needed, and “we will have to pay for [them] through taxes and our people might just as well face this fact….”

  Her views did not coincide with FDR’s initial strategy, and he demanded space in the March issue to answer his wife and defend his first legislative acts. Between his mother and his wife, FDR was accustomed to outspoken opinionated women. But he did expect public unity on politically volatile issues. In the future ER would try to be more circumspect; this would be his only editorial rejoinder.

  ER’s views on international matters also departed from FDR’s strategy. She deplored America’s “isolationist” policies and considered economic nationalism dangerous. She wanted the United States to forgive the entire international debt, in order to end the worldwide depression and the rising tide of bitterness that threatened world peace. Her internationalism had become increasingly unpopular among politicians. ER worked most closely on these issues with her first feminist friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, who, through the American Foundation, campaigned for the World Court and now also promoted U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union.

  ER’s intimate circle also included Molly Dewson, who directed the Women’s Committee of the Democratic Party; Earl Miller, her personal squire and champion; Louis Howe, the only close friend the Roosevelts shared; and Malvina (Tommy) Thompson, her hardworking secretary and personal assistant.

  Born in the Bronx to an Irish mother and English father, Malvina Thompson was ER’s mainstay from the time she spotted her in a Red Cross secretarial pool in 1917. She worked on every campaign after 1920, and became ER’s personal secretary and administrator. Entirely loyal to ER, she was efficient, protective, and open-hearted. Tommy smoked cigarettes from morning to night, drank Scotch at day’s end, and saw something funny in almost every situation. ER relied on her quick-witted support, and her fabulous sense of humor. Tommy’s robust and hearty laugh lit up many tense situations, and she had a good time wherever she went.

  Then, in 1932, Lorena (Hick) Hickok, a leading political reporter, was assigned by the Associated Press to cover ER during the campaign. Their friendship now eclipsed all others.

  With her activist team ER contemplated the traditional fate of a First Lady. She was expected to give up her own life and stand by her man, affirming and silent.

  She could not do it. Unlike her predecessors, ER claimed her right to a public role. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1932, she boldly broadcast her conviction that the tragic economic conditions which prevailed were due to the “blindness of a few people who perhaps do not really understand that, after all, the prosperity of the few is on a firmer foundation when it spreads to the many.” She believed that everybody would soon realize there were only man-made reasons for so much deprivation in a land of overproduction. And now, because of her husband’s election, she sensed a new spirit of giving all around her, and she hailed the renewed impulse toward generosity. “We are going through a time when I believe we may have, if we will, a new social and economic order.”

  Nevertheless, she was required by custom to give up her most public activities. She even resigned from the Todhunter School, although she loved teaching “best of all.” She also agreed to end her radio broadcasts, with the hope that she might resume them.

  On 3 March 1933, the eve of FDR’s inauguration, she gave her last commercially sponsored broadcast in a Series that had become increasingly controversial. On one occasion, she ignored prohibition and counseled women on moderate alcohol consumption. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and church groups attacked her as America’s primary “Jezebel”.

  ER ended her last broadcast with a plea to her radio audience for their continued correspondence:

  The one great danger for a man in public life or for the woman who is that man’s wife, is that they may be set apart from the stream of life affecting the rest of the country. It is easy in Washington to think that Washington is the country and forget that it is a small place and only becomes important as the people who live there truly represent the other parts of the country.

  I hope that my friends will feel as much my friends as they have always felt, and as free to talk to me and to tell me what they think as ever, and I want to know the whole country, not a little part of it.

  ___________

  FDR’s election had imparted a vast sense of hope to a devastated nation, ER shared that sense of hope, and wanted to support him and be available to his needs.

  For the inauguration, for example, ER initially announced that she intended to drive her own blue Buick convertible from New York to Washington, with her two dogs. But FDR had invited a party of cabinet members and special friends as his guests on the train, and ER told reporters that he wanted her with him, “‘so my place is there as hostess.’”

  ER did not mention that she also planned to drive down with Lorena Hickok. According to Raymond Moley, then virtual leader of FDR’s Brains Trust, she changed her mind after an emotional family drama. When ER announced that she “would load her roadster with belongings and drive down with a woman friend,” FDR was stunned; It was the only time Moley heard him complain about his wife’s independence; on this one occasion FDR wanted the entire family together.

  ER consented. But then, early inauguration morning, she and Hick made a pilgrimage to the famous statue Henry Adams had erected to the memory of his wife, Clover. There, during ER’s earlier years of solitude and sadness, she found strength in that holly grove while Washington gossiped about her gamboling husband and his well-known affair. Now she decided to begin her tenure as First Lady by meditatin
g with her First Friend in the holly grove in Rock Creek Cemetery. As they sat in silence, Hick pondered ER’s mood, and the power of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue, known as Grief.

  As I looked at it I felt that all the sorrow humanity had ever had to endure was expressed in that face…. Yet in that expression there was something almost triumphant. There was a woman who had experienced every kind of pain, every kind of suffering… and had come out of it serene—and compassionate….

  FDR’s train party included his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt; sons Elliott and James, with their wives, Betty Donner and Betsey Cushing; their two younger sons, Franklin and John, students at Groton; cabinet designates, Brains Trusters, Democratic stalwarts, and various intimates including Louis Howe, Marvin McIntyre, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Basil O’Connor, Henry and Elinor Morgenthau, and Dorothy and Samuel Rosenman.

  While daughter Anna was already in Washington making arrangements, ER’s train party included Lorena Hickok, Earl Miller, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and ER’s longtime ally Agnes Brown Leach and her husband, Forum publisher Henry Goddard Leach.

  Also aboard that special train was ER’s new wardrobe, which she had collected during a shopping spree with Anna the week before. She replaced the schoolmarm look of the Albany years with a new stylish elegance, appropriate to Washington’s social demands. For her inaugural gown she chose a hyacinth shade the press called “Eleanor Blue,” and for her wrap a new shade of blue named “Anna Blue” (in compliment to her daughter). Both gown and wrap were of crystelle velvet, made by Arnold Constable. A “symphony in blue,” ER’s hat, “a Watteau type of crystal straw,” in Anna Blue was covered with banded grosgrain ribbon “forming a small wing in the back,” tilting down in the front. She carried a “large envelope bag” of Anna Blue antelope kid and wore white glacé kid gloves, “the smart eight-button length.”