After her husband’s death in 1931, Alice devoted herself to ER’s humiliation. She trotted out the old stories of FDR’s wartime infidelities. She mocked and minced: “FDR is nine parts mush and one part Eleanor.” She contrasted FDR’s dependence with her father’s robust self-reliance: TR’s vigor; TR’s brawn. ER’s sons remembered that only Alice could bring their mother to the verge of tears.
Although ER never criticized Alice by name, she wrote an article in which she described her kind of malicious gossip and concluded that it reflected “not only a cruel but a despicable trait of human nature.”
To fortify her spirits and armor herself against the animus of her closest kin, ER read and studied her father’s letters—and decided to publish them. Indeed, ER wrote or edited three books between FDR’s election and inauguration: one for, children (When You Grow Up to Vote), one for redemption (her father’s letters), and one for the future (It’s Up to the Women). They enabled her to face her new position with a sense of personal liberation, and a clearly defined political program.
Moreover, while she abandoned her sponsored radio program and gave up teaching, she refused to give up editing Babies—Just Babies, a magazine she had started to help mothers avoid the kind of mistakes her parents had made and she had perpetuated with her own children. The magazine was filled with droll and informative stories, infant photographs, uplifting and curious advice, prizes, poetry, and whimsy. ER believed it offered young mothers a much-needed service. She personally guaranteed the reliability and quality of the magazine’s advertisers; and called upon all her acquaintances—rich and famous, hardworking and unknown—to contribute baby lore. Daughter Anna detailed “24 Hours of a Baby’s Life,” not quite a celebration of her infant daughter’s grueling, relentless schedule. Rosamond Pinchot wrote about “The Most Famous Baby in the World,” Helen Hayes’s daughter Mary MacArthur. “A Soviet Baby Is Born” featured extraordinary photos to illustrate healthful, contented infants and toddlers in factory nurseries.
The First Lady-elect wanted every young mother to have a less tormented and ignorant time than she had endured. She announced in the foreword to the first issue of Babies, printed in October 1932:
There is an old Jesuit saying which—”Give me a child until he is seven and you may have him all the rest of his life.”… You can decide in the first five years of a child’s life whether that child is going to be nervous and high-strung, unable to stand the hurry and excitement of modern life, or whether he is going to be given a foundation of calmness and sturdiness, a character, which in later life will enable him to gain that inner self-control which all of us strive for and only some of us attain. We can lay the foundations in those first five years of a healthy mind in a healthy body or we can lay the foundation for an undernourished, dyspeptic, uncontrolled and disagreeable man or woman.
Above all, ER sought to give advice to young parents she wished she had been given. She wrote of “tolerance,” “patience,” “forgiveness.” She wrote of marital relations: Each parent “must want the other one to be happy. Then and then only will they be happy themselves.”
ER’s monthly editorials were filled with respect for children and encouragement for mothers. Anticipating the nurturing ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock by over a decade, ER promoted demonstrations of warmth and affection. She advocated breast feeding because of its proven health benefits; and urged mothers to hug their children, hold them when they cried, rather than follow the advice of psychologist John B. Watson to allow them to cry for hours alone in a quiet room. Nevertheless, ER endorsed several prevailing notions concerning discipline and regularity: Character building depended on precise schedules for feeding and bodily functions.
ER’s own confusion regarding the proper balance between affection, “democratic self-expression,” and discipline lasted throughout her life. In the 1950s, she acknowledged that “too much belief in discipline when my children were young” was her greatest mistake as a mother: “I was so concerned with bringing up my children properly that I was not wise enough just to love them.”
Her grandchildren benefited far more than her own children from her new emphasis on absolute respect for young people and their right to their own mistakes. But her youngest boys, Franklin and John (still at Groton), also benefited from her new perspective. She encouraged them to live boldly and self-reliantly and sought to protect them from the intrusive demands of Washington life.
As ER contemplated the White House, she turned for assistance to her great friend Isabella Selmes Greenway, whose place in Arizona still recalled the West her father and uncle knew. Could John be a hand there for the summer?
He has had a little bit too much of Groton and his Grandmother and the things that money mean and I think standing on his own two feet is a very necessary experience for a time this summer.
We would be quite willing to pay for him, only we would not want him to know. He does not want to be in the same place with Franklin, Jr., [who] rather lords it over him so we are trying to do the same thing with Franklin, Jr. but somewhere else….
Sixteen, two years younger than his brother, John was about to enter his junior year. In September, ER wrote Isabella: “John had such a good time & I am so glad you liked him. He’s so different from F jr. but has capacities in his own way when certain things are either overcome or outgrown!”
Personally, ER’s most momentous decision during these months of preparation and dread was to pay tribute to her father. Elliott Roosevelt had died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-four, when ER was only ten. Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman, “Edited by His Daughter, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt,” was filled with compassion for her father’s struggle, and competitive family pride.
ER explained in her foreword that she had decided to issue his letters for personal reasons. Despite his “many shortcomings [he] was the one great love of my life as a child….” Her children would “read much in many books of their uncles and aunts… but no less important in our daily lives are the things and the people who touch us only personally….”
It was a brave book for America’s First Lady to introduce to a judgmental society. Written to avenge her father as well as to establish her right to wear the Roosevelt mantle, ER wrote nothing of her parents’ ordeal, of her mother’s suffering and premature death at twenty-nine, when Eleanor was eight, or of her own longing. The cruel attacks hurled against her husband by her own relatives surely informed her decision to publish this book in 1933, and thereby redeem the family outcast.
It was an act of competitive retribution, in which ER emphasized her father’s generosity, and youthful vigor—as opposed to her Uncle Ted, who “was delicate as a boy and shortsighted all his life.”
Although it was not her intention, the book also established Elliott and his daughter in a social tradition of fabulous wealth and international privilege. Her father’s life was one of global travel and big-game hunting that depended on an Anglo-American club of sportsmen and colonial rulership that seemed during the 1930s in rapid decline.
But ER ignored that aspect of her father’s legacy and emphasized rather his “great love and tenderness” for his family and her impression of his sense of personal democracy: “He loved people for the fineness that was in them and his friends might be newsboys or millionaires. Their occupations, their possessions, meant nothing to him, only they themselves counted.” However exaggerated her impression, that trait represented the core of her father’s bequest to her.
As she prepared for the White House, ER made other tributes to her father’s memory. She arranged to visit Abingdon, Virginia, her father’s healing refuge, in order to meet the people who had meant so much to him during his long illness and exile. Also, she hung her paternal grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece in the Monroe Room, where she later held press conferences for women journalists only. The room she chose was connected with power and influence: It had been used as TR’s Cabinet Room and was known a
lso as the Treaty Room. In 1899 William McKinley had there signed the treaty with Spain which ended the Spanish-American War and ceded Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines to the United States. FDR had suggested that ER take her grandfather’s portrait to Washington. They intended to rent their New York City house, and FDR said, “You can’t rent your grandfather.”
Undoubtedly ER’s most extraordinary tribute to her father, was an impromptu speech she delivered one Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas 1932. She astounded a New York Metropolitan Opera audience when she strode onstage between the first and second acts of Simon Boccanegra to appeal for money for Depression-ruined Americans: “When you come face to face with people in need, you simply have to try to do something about it.”
ER told the comfortable matinee crowd how it felt to meet the “jobless face to face.” She related the story of a man who came into her office saying he could not go home again without a job. He had been unemployed for months. “There was no heat at home, no food, and even the gas had been turned off. And there were five children.” ER was moved by his story, and she hoped her audience would contribute all they could to the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee. “After all, this is the richest country in the world. We cannot allow any one to want for the bare necessities of life.”
ER’s decision to address the opera audience that day was, in retrospect, no mere coincidence. Simon Boccanegra was the first popularly elected doge of Genoa. Generous, emotional, forgiving, he was a man of the people and a man of peace. Moreover, in Giuseppe Verdi’s profoundly stirring tale of politics, love, and longing, Simon is also “the Good Father” accidentally reunited with his long-lost daughter Maria. ER appeared onstage after their astonishing reunion, and one of opera’s most thrilling duets between father and daughter:
Simon Boccanegra meets Maria by chance during a bright morning stroll. She hears his lament for his country, its poverty and strife: “I weep over your fruitless Harvests/And I cry out for Peace/I cry out for Love.”
As they speak, he discovers her lost history—and their matching pendants: “Figlia! a tal nome io palpito….” (”Daughter! At that name I tremble/as if heaven had opened to me.”)
It is the moment she has waited for all her life: “Father, you shall see/ your watchful daughter/always near you;/I will wipe away your tears./We shall taste undiscovered joys…/I will be the dove of peace/of your royal palace.”
ER remained a great fan of Lawrence Tibbett, who played Simon Boccanegra, and invited him to perform at the White House whenever possible. She never mentioned Ezio Pinza, who played the cruel grandfather. Simon’s last gesture is to bless both Maria and her grandfather, whereupon Maria sings: “Oh Joy! Then the bitter hatreds are ended!” Finally, Simon Boccanegra places the mantle of leadership upon his daughter and her lover, Gabriele Adorno, named the new doge of Genoa.
ER’s reconnection with her father and her childhood helped her to reach beyond fear: her fear of abandonment, betrayal, rejection; her fear of confinement and isolation. As she reconstituted her father’s life, she embraced a powerful source of courage and vision that was her mysterious treasure. She ignored his neglect, his abusive self-indulgence, and celebrated instead her fantasy of his democratic generosity and her own commitment to all people regardless of class or station.
It enabled her to move on, beyond familial blandishments, and graciously invite seventy-two relatives to inaugural festivities. All the Delanos and Hyde Park Roosevelts, all the surviving Halls, and all the Oyster Bay Roosevelts who chose to attend, including her cousins—TR’s children Alice Roosevelt Long-worth and Kermit and Archibald Roosevelt, Aunt Bye’s son Sheffield Cowles, and their families.
Still, despite her activities and emotional preparations, ER told reporters on the blustery, overcast day of FDR’s inauguration, 4 March 1933, that she was certain about only one thing: “No woman entering the White House… can lightheartedly take up residence here.”
According to Emma Bugbee, reporting for the New York Herald-Tribune, ER “stood motionless, with lowered eyes and folded hands, while her husband became President…. Her pale face and austere demeanor bore testimony to the solemnity with which she views Mr. Roosevelt’s new position…. Many friends watched for an opportunity to wave to her, and strangers trained cameras upon her, but not once did she lift her eyes to the crowd or wave her hand or smile….” One reporter noted that over “the vast throng” of 500,000 cheering spectators, “there hung a cloud of worry.”
America was at a standstill. Men, women, and children begged on street corners, sold pencils, apples, old clothes. People spoke about gloom, despair, suicide, revolution. When farm prices fell to pennies, farm owners burned their crops, killed their livestock. Banks foreclosed mortgages and reclaimed farms and homes. There were riots at garbage dumps as people fought each other for scraps of food and kindling. Over two million people—called “hobos,” “Okies,” “tramps”—wandered the country searching for work.
The comfortable and the mean dismissed them as “bums.” The comfortable and the mean luxuriated in bargains they did not need, and blamed the poor for littering their landscape. Giant “Hoovervilles” made of tin cans and frayed tires, scrap wood and debris, appeared along river shores and railroad sidings, in parks and woodlands. People were living in caves and culverts all over America.
The Depression never really touched the Roosevelts. Their properties were unmortgaged, their troubled holdings caused no particular hardship. No child needed to leave school. Sara Delano Roosevelt, the family’s financial matriarch, was solvent, if occasionally grumpy. ER independently made ever-increasing sums from writing and speaking engagements. Her sole concern as First Lady was to improve conditions for those who suffered.
She blamed the war for the fiscal frenzy that had burst worldwide. By 1931, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and England faced bankruptcy and ruin. All international agreements made during the 1920s crumbled. The gold standard, loan and tariff agreements, visions of free trade ended. By 1933, dictators swaggered across Europe and Asia. When Germany and then the Allies reneged on their war debts, Americans became increasingly isolationist. Germany, on the day of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural, witnessed a nationwide “blaze of bonfires and torchlight parades,” in anticipation of a vote of confidence for the new Reich, the triumph of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party—already hailed as Germany’s “last election.” According to press reports, there were “no counter-demonstrations…. They were ‘verboten.’”
Since anti-Nazis were imprisoned, opposition papers banned, and debate silenced by terrorist torture centers, Hitler was certain of victory. During the entire week of FDR’s inaugural, the new U.S. administration shared frontpage headlines with democracy’s death in Germany.
Violence and poverty veiled the globe on that day FDR affirmed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” With “solemn mien,” the thirty-second president of the United States placed his hand upon his family’s old Dutch Bible and turned to “Charity,” 1 Corinthians 13, to repeat the oath of office after Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.*
In his dramatic Inaugural Address, FDR promised healing, bold action. ER was pleased; it was “a fighting speech.”
“This is a day of national consecration…. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion….
“They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
FDR promised now to restore and build a New Deal with “social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
He would pursue that goal with all the fervor of a president at war. Initially the battleground was limited to domestic crises. International issues, though important, were “secondary to the establishment of a sound economic policy.” The gravity of the domestic emergency eclipsed world trade and FDR’s promise of a “good neighbor” policy that “resolutely respects the rights of others.”
Immediately, he decla
red war on financial distress. “This nation asks for action, and action now.” Therefore: “I shall ask the Congress for… broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
While the crowd stood to cheer those words, millions more listened for the first time to a presidential address broadcast by 180 radio stations and simultaneously “flashed around the earth by short-wave radio.” Most Americans were thrilled to exuberance by FDR’s words.
Caroline O’Day left Washington ecstatic: FDR, “within twenty-four hours, lifted our country out of a slough of despair.” America had at last “found a leader and all would soon be right with the world.” His address “will remain an inspiration for all time.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was less sanguine. Words needed to be supported by bold actions. She feared the kind of desperation that had upended Germany, and she feared the random acts of violence and assassination aimed at her husband. As had been true throughout her life, occasions of joy and celebration were marked as well by sadness.
The Roosevelts’ first days in the White House were framed by death. Hourly news bulletins discussed the decline of Chicago’s Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who had been wounded in Miami on 15 February by bullets intended for FDR. Mayor Cermak and two women were shot by an assassin who attacked FDR’s open car during a short victory parade. The president-elect was saved by a spectator, Lillian Cross, who grabbed the assailant’s arm, while Gus Gennerich, FDR’s bodyguard, pushed him down on the seat, and sat on him after he heard the first shot.
When Eleanor learned that her husband had held Mayor Tony Cermak in his arms on the way to the hospital, she wrote: The ride “must have been awfully hard on Franklin. He hates the sight of blood.”
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 5
