Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  The press complimented ER’s “elegant dignity” and the fact that her outfits were designed and made entirely in the United States, “so far as known.” Her evening gowns especially were “of great beauty.” For “very formal dinners,” she ordered a gown of “misty blue satin, a new Lanvin shade,” from Le Mouchoir of Madison Avenue, who described the effect as “regal.” “The waist is draped in front. The back décolleté forms a deep V….” Le Mouchoir also created daytime ensembles of various blues and “a rough tweed coat suit of mixed brown, beige and blue.” Four hats to accompany the daytime costumes were made by Mme. Lilly Dache, also of Madison Avenue, and nine dresses were ordered from Milgrim’s, including a “misty blue and silver brocade” gown with long sleeves and high neck that could be used for formal late-afternoon and evening affairs. In the evening the sleeves could be removed and the back unfastened to render it décolleté; undipped “it falls in two wide revers, revealing a deep V….”

  ER was pleased by most of the initial press coverage: “Tall, slim and girlish, in a dark blue ensemble and hat… the next First Lady looked more nearly like an elder sister than the mother of Mrs. Curtis Dall, her daughter [Anna)….”

  Only Hick, whose campaign articles on ER had emphasized her routine thrift, her plain $5 and $10 street dresses bought off racks and on the run, seemed disturbed. She protested in a letter that ER had spent an unseemly amount of money on lavish and extravagant display, given America’s grave fiscal situation. But ER believed that it was good for the economy to buy as much as possible and give work to many people.

  While the press reported every detail of each outfit, ER referred to her buying spree in one sentence at the end of a long political letter to FDR: “I got a lot of clothes for myself & Anna in one afternoon last week as I imagine it is better to have plenty & not buy any new ones for quite a while!”

  The point of her letter was an urgent appeal to FDR:

  Henry Morgenthau came to see me the other day & told me he felt he could serve really well only as Sec of Ag. & all the big farm organizations were for him. He had done well on all of your missions, he had made your ag policy in this State a success & got the men who were helpful on your ag speeches. He did not feel he could be Asst. Sec. because he had been so near you he could not be under a chief & loyally work THROUGH him. He does not think [Henry] Wallace will be easy for you to manage or others to get on with and he is no administrator. He won’t say he won’t take… anything else but he does not feel he could serve you as well & he wants you to talk it over with him before you settle on Wallace. Please at least talk to him.—I have transmitted my message!

  FDR appointed Wallace to Agriculture. ER was disappointed, as was Louis Howe. For decades Howe had been FDR’s main adviser, closest friend, political confidant. But the presidency changed everything. Although Louis Howe remained first secretary, his influence was now rivalled by the young Columbia University professors around FDR, the new Brains Trust boys Howe despised.

  Ray Moley, Rexford Guy Tugwell, and A. A. Berle were part of a new political landscape marked by intrigue and jealousy, stealth and duplicity. FDR enjoyed the political mix, the harrowing juggling that left everybody uncertain. It caused ER and Howe to forge an even tighter alliance. Regarded as outsiders among FDR’s new insiders, they increasingly relied on each other.

  ER and Howe ended each day with a drive and a meeting. They collaborated on big projects, and negotiated petty grievances. Howe was ER’s greatest ally, and during the first administration, ER and Louis Howe were FDR’s most honest and critical friends. With his health failing, no longer FDR’s unchallenged lieutenant, Howe increasingly turned to ER for solace, support, and company. Together, they were a formidable team.

  FDR’s decision on Morgenthau intensified ER’s efforts. With Louis Howe and Molly Dewson, she struggled for influence over FDR’s appointments, and it was due to their insistence that he became the first president to appoint a woman to the cabinet: Frances Perkins as secretary of labor.*

  ER was pleased to learn that her old school chums rallied behind her. They were not only delighted by her “lovely” new costumes, but they supported her goals. One of her six bridesmaids, Helen Cutting Wilmerding, a cousin and former Roser classmate, wrote with enthusiasm: “All the old tribe we grew up with in New York have turned towards you like sun flowers.” ER was grateful for that information, “for I felt the old crowd might disapprove of many things which I did.” And she was determined to challenge the women of her own class and culture. She asked Junior Leaguers, for example, to consider what they themselves might do, might contribute, might actually give up in order to make life better for those rendered homeless or impoverished during the Depression. She even suggested they convert space in their many-roomed apartments or country houses to provide temporary shelter for homeless families in distress. Privileged women and men, she repeatedly emphasized before the inauguration, had special obligations during these hard times: “Sooner or later we are going to realize that what touches one part of the human race touches all parts. Thus we are going to have to learn that the few must sacrifice for the good of the many if we are to preserve our present civilization.”

  The White House itself would be open to all her extended circle, even when they came to carp. ER’s most violent detractors, including her increasingly reactionary cousins Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Corinne Robinson Alsop (mother of columnists Joseph and Stuart Alsop) were invited whenever they chose to attend. Despite nasty imitations of ER, Cousin Alice was not barred from White House functions until she publicly announced in 1940 that she would rather vote for Adolf Hitler than for her crippled cousin one more time.

  As ER prepared herself for the Washington fray, she carefully considered and often repeated the dreary details of the lives of Washington wives, and her husband understood her discontent. Indeed, FDR’s fiftieth birthday on 30 January 1933 was celebrated by a surprise party at Hyde Park orchestrated by ER and Louis Howe. It was a well-planned and hilarious affair; every guest played a role to evoke an event in Franklin’s life. In the end, he responded with rhymes for all present. Regarding his wife, FDR recited:

  Did my Eleanor relate

  All the sad and awful fate

  Of the miserable lives

  Lived by politicians’ wives?

  ER derived little comfort from the examples of the First Ladies who preceded her. In her Uncle TR’s Washington, she had met Ida Saxton McKinley, and she knew all her twentieth-century forebears. They all seemed to her hardworking earnest women whose lives were limited by invalidism, neurasthenia, depression. Many of ER’s predecessors took to their beds, broken down by their efforts to cope with unending publicity, criticism, their husbands’ wrath or neglect, the demanding but ill-appreciated responsibilities of political wifery.

  Athletic, wealthy, and brilliant, Ida Saxton McKinley was raised by her father to take over his financial interests and run his bank. When she married attorney William McKinley, she was politically ambitious and extravagantly social. But during her husband’s first years in Congress, which coincided with the sudden deaths of her mother and two daughters, Ida McKinley plunged into a mysterious invalidism that resembled epilepsy. She became pale and fragile. Grotesquely overwhelmed by her flamboyantly feathered and bejeweled costumes, she seemed bundled in satin swaddling offset by oversized diamonds. Generally carried to state dinners, she was confined to a wheelchair and propped high by overstuffed pillows. Her fainting spells and seizures were sudden and unpredictable. Whenever one occurred at table her husband simply placed a napkin upon her face until it subsided, whereupon she would remove it and continue the conversation as if nothing had happened.

  Argumentative and bad tempered, Ida McKinley was called “the most demanding” invalid wife in political history. To “cure” her headaches and quiet her manner, she was dosed with “barbiturates, bromide sedatives, laudanum, and other powerful narcotics.” She embarrassed her husband’s friends, and they considered him a marv
el of devotion: the “saint” of domesticity.

  But when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, she arranged his funeral and her return to private life without assistance. Upon her arrival home, Ida McKinley’s era of total dependence mysteriously ended. Until her own death on 26 May 1907 she never had another seizure.

  Although Ida McKinley’s style was unique, even the women ER most admired seemed to suffer in the White House.

  Helen (Nellie) Herron Taft trained as a teacher and thoroughly enjoyed politics. She was a daughter and granddaughter of congressmen, and many believed she badgered her reluctant husband to run for president and advised him on all appointments and issues. Most visibly her husband’s partner, she was outspoken, progressive, creative. She was the skilled diplomat who arranged Japan’s gift of three thousand cherry trees to adorn Potomac Drive and the Tidal Basin. But in May 1909, less than three months after Taft assumed office, she suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed her and left her speech permanently impaired.

  ER was particularly informed and impressed by Ellen Axson Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s first wife. A career artist who continued to paint, she was widely recognized as a “Great and Good Lady.” Renowned as an American Impressionist and associated with art communities in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Cornish, New Hampshire, Ellen Axson Wilson participated in competitive exhibits and sold her paintings.

  When her Cornish circle, which included Maxwell Parrish, met at her summer home in 1913 to consider the kind of national support for the arts France enjoyed, they imagined an official government bureau to encourage artists, award prizes, purchase works. Ellen Wilson replied that the congressmen who would endorse that view were “not yet born.”

  Ellen Wilson’s efforts to build decent housing and abolish Washington’s “alley slums” particularly captured ER’s imagination as First Lady. Like Wilson, ER believed that adequate and healthy housing was the fundamental key to a more democratic future.

  As Ellen Wilson prepared for her daughter’s White House wedding, she wrote a relative: “Nobody who has not tried can have the least idea of the exactions of life here and of the constant nervous strain of it all.”

  Diagnosed with kidney tuberculosis, or Bright’s disease, Ellen Wilson died on 6 August 1914, having been First Lady for only seventeen months. The New York Times concluded that her condition was aggravated “by a nervous breakdown, attributed to the exactions of social duties and her active interest in philanthropy and betterment work.”

  If ER had any particular feelings about the gossip concerning Woodrow Wilson’s affair with Mary Hulbert Peck, during the time when ER’s own marriage was in such disarray, she never referred to them. Evidently, Woodrow Wilson’s advisers paid Mary Peck, an attractive divorcée, some still debatable sum of money for the intimate letters he had written to her over the years. The scandal surfaced between Ellen Wilson’s death and the election of 1916, when some Wilson advisers hoped the mysterious Mrs. Peck would become the new First Lady.

  It was the kind of gossip ER detested, and avoided. She never, for example, referred to Florence Kling Harding’s much publicized marital strife, although she spent time with “the Duchess” during the war.

  ER particularly admired two gifted and generous public citizens who became, for different reasons, silent as First Ladies. Her immediate predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, chose silence; Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s husband imposed it.

  Unlike her husband, Grace Coolidge was witty, charming, and gregarious. She had been a dedicated and innovative teacher of the hearing-impaired. She believed all children could learn to speak, and she taught lip-reading as well as sign language. Calvin Coolidge, on the other hand, believed no woman could or should communicate in public life. He mandated his wife’s silence on all political issues and also denied her many ordinary pleasures, including horseback riding. Her friends complained on her behalf: “Calvin felt that woman’s place was at the sink.” Although Grace never protested, she confided to a friend that lives of political wives were “very confining.”

  ER’s first official act as First Lady-elect was to attend Calvin Coolidge’s funeral. On 7 January 1933, she journeyed to Northampton with her son James. ER’s decision to attend was appreciated as “a sign of respect” for her Republican predecessors, Grace Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover.

  Geologist, linguist, and scholar, Stanford University graduate and outspoken feminist, Lou Henry Hoover had been for decades her husband’s partner. They traveled together in search of mineral deposits and new speculative investment markets throughout Europe and Asia. In London and Washington during the war, she founded canteens, a war hospital, a knitting factory, a home for women war workers. She was an equal-rights feminist, headed the Girl Scouts, and as the only woman on the board of the National Amateur Athletic Association, led a campaign to introduce physical education for women “in every institution” in America.

  Nobody believed Lou Henry Hoover when she announced that as First Lady she would be nothing but a pleasant “backdrop for Bertie.” But she meant it. Except for occasional radio broadcasts, she ended her public role in American life. She hosted dinners and parties to entertain her husband, not to promote causes. Inexplicably, she refused interviews and banished the press. Controversy engulfed her only when she decided to invite Jessie DePriest to a tea for congressmen’s wives.

  In 1930, Chicago elected Republican Oscar DePriest, the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction. Despite their Quaker opposition to discrimination, the Hoovers did not decide immediately to open their White House. But it bothered Lou Henry that Jessie DePriest was not invited with other congressional wives her first year in Washington. Many meetings were held on the subject, and the president finally consented. Determined to avoid a rude incident, Lou Henry Hoover queried every congressional wife and found twelve who agreed to be cordial at a tea that would include the first black White House guest since TR invited Booker T. Washington and his wife for lunch.

  On 12 June 1931, Jessie DePriest was received by the First Lady. Her visit in the company of twelve congenial women was brief and pleasant. But astonishing howls of protest followed. Virtually every Southern newspaper editorialized against this “arrogant insult to the South and to the nation.” While several Northern newspapers celebrated the First Lady’s effort to “put into practice the brotherhood of man,” Southern editors and politicians predicted disaster, race intermingling, and Republican defeat in 1932. In response, Lou Henry Hoover went on a tour of Southern states, presumably to reassure white clubwomen.

  Inevitably, as ER contemplated her new role, her thoughts lingered on her Aunt Edith’s White House. With Edith Roosevelt, rules and ceremony dominated. Sumptuous feasts and formality were her legacy. Guests foregathered, and were greeted after a grand processional whereby the president and First Lady descended the White House’s central staircase “to trumpets.” “Not wanting to shake hands, she clutched a large bouquet.”

  Edith Roosevelt presided over a circle of scolds who collected information about Washington’s “immorals.” Those who “transgressed her code of upright conduct” were banished. Working women were not invited; adulterers were shunned. Aunt Edith detested the press and scorned “camera fiends.” Her political sensibilities ran counter to everything her niece believed.

  Noted for her ability to walk and talk as fast as her husband, some of TR’s friends thought she controlled him; others believed she bullied him. Henry Adams always marveled at Edith’s ability to silence TR: “He stands in abject terror of Edith…. What is man that he should have tusks and grin!” But for ER, Aunt Edith’s assertive, imperious, even terrifying manner was eclipsed by her discontent. A prisoner to her “beloved shackles,” she was plagued by headaches and assorted neuralgias.

  Although never close, ER did not want to sever relations with her father’s family. When Anna Roosevelt Cowles (Aunt Bye) died peacefully at her home in Farmington, Connecticut, during the night of 25 August 1931, ER’s warmest link to h
er father’s generation ended. Aunt Bye had been one of ER’s great champions, the woman who most urgently insisted she be sent to school at Allenswood in England.

  After Aunt Bye’s death, ER made a special effort to reach out to her father’s surviving sister, Aunt Corinne, a lifelong Republican who voted for Franklin because, she said, Eleanor was her niece, after all. But Corinne Roosevelt Robinson died suddenly of pneumonia on 17 February 1933 at the age of seventy-one. Her funeral, which both FDR and ER attended, was the last family gathering before FDR’s inauguration. Now Aunt Edith was the last surviving member of her father’s generation. And she never forgave ER for campaigning against her son Ted in that Teapot Dome car when he ran for governor in 1924.

  Although Aunt Edith actively campaigned against FDR, ER nevertheless wrote from the White House—as if there were nothing but family tradition and warmth between them. Interested in her niece’s initial tribulations as First Lady, Edith replied: “Your letter was an answer to prayer, full of things which I wanted to know. Much such conditions met me in the White House, and I am quite sure that I did not deal with them as efficiently as you have done.”

  ER’s ability to invite her cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth to inaugural events was even more extraordinary. Alice had, after all, declared war on Democrats and never missed an opportunity to deride Eleanor publicly. Her opposition to Franklin was shrill, often vulgar and cruel. She not only attacked his policies, she mocked his physical condition: “My poor cousin, he suffered from polio so he was put in a brace; and now he wants to put the entire U.S. into a brace, as if it were a crippled country—that is all the New Deal is about….”

  Alice seemed now to concentrate all her wit and flair into a private crusade to hurt her cousins. She had been the ruling Washington widow, the only important Roosevelt. Miserably married to Nicholas Longworth, the popular Speaker of the House who had rivaled Eleanor’s father Elliott in his drinking and romantic escapades, Alice had nevertheless reveled in Washington society, and few knew the truth of her marriage.