Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  6: Family Discord

  and the London Economic Conference

  In April and May, while FDR labored over New Deal legislation and the economy continued to sag, he addressed monetary issues with a suddeness that startled many—and had profound international implications.

  On 19 April, FDR took the United States off the gold standard. Paper money would no longer be redeemable in gold; the dollar would fluctuate; U.S. prices would rise.

  FDR considered it a boon for domestic market prices, whatever its consequences on international trade. But higher U.S. prices would further curtail foreign commerce, already diminished by the world Depression. FDR was unconcerned: After all, Britain went off the gold standard in 1931. Budget director Lewis Douglas, however, was horrified and threatened to quit. With images of runaway inflation raging in his mind, the kind of inflation that had devastated Germany in 1923, he wailed: “This is the end of Western Civilization.”

  ER was not convinced that “Western Civilization”, was doomed; but international peace was threatened if Europe could not sell its products, correct its economy, and pay interest on the large wartime debt owed to the United States—a matter of grievous contention. ER worried about the impact FDR’s decision would have, especially on England and France. She wrote a critical column for the Women’s Democratic News to explain the situation and urge women to consider the grave international implications of her husband’s decision:

  Great excitement is caused … by the President’s announcement that no further gold exports will be permitted … until at least foreign countries now having a depreciated currency return to the gold standard…. This action … puts us practically on a parity with Great Britain and other countries that have gone off the gold standard….

  While we may undertake many measures to improve our national conditions, those of us who are really thoughtful, know that the world is too closely bound together … ever to really prosper unless we all of us enjoy a certain amount of well being together….

  Also in April, FDR held meetings in Washington with representatives of eleven nations in preparation for the London Economic Conference. His sole priority was America’s fiscal strength, but he sought also to be a world leader. He had no specific strategy, and was surrounded by advisers who disagreed completely. ER worried. He seemed to support each of the diplomats who left his office, smiling and satisfied. But, she knew, they disagreed with each other.

  By May, ER felt exhausted, almost despondent. She craved a vacation, and went upstate with Nancy Cook, Earl Miller, and his wife, Ruth. “We all played pool,” and since ER and Nan were “novices,” they “furnished the hilarity of the evening.” ER and Earl took a three-hour drive to visit a camp on Chazy Lake that he planned to rent for the summer. ER “promised to spend two weeks with” Earl and his party in September: “It will be very restful & yet plenty to do.”

  On her way home, ER had a curious experience, she wrote FDR, “with a young tramp.” Unemployed, witty, and earnest, he approached ER for money as she sat in her car and waited for gas. She asked him why he didn’t go into the CCC. He had tried, but the CCC required a home address. ER gave him $10 and her New York City card, with a specific invitation to call on her at five o’clock that Monday. He could pay her back when he got a job. Nancy Cook bet the First Lady that she would never see him or her money again.

  He rather charmed ER, and she thought her husband should know that while she might “never see him again,” he might in fact “turn up” at the White House, or in New York. If he did, she wanted her husband to do everything possible “to get him in a reforestation camp,” or onto some other suitable project. “He probably won’t turn up but he might!”

  Al Kresse did turn up, That Monday, as she pulled up to the East 65th Street house, a guard told her that “a bum had been hanging around saying Mrs. Roosevelt told him to meet her…. I don’t know where he could have got that calling card of yours.” She saw him on the corner, invited him for dinner, called a friend at Bear Mountain Park to take him into the CCC, and said, “You are going to work tomorrow. Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

  She invited him to stay. Hick was horrified: “Sistie and Buzzie are sleeping in the nursery. There’s nobody else here but you and me. How do you know he won’t kidnap the children?”

  ER had considered it all, and locked the elevator doors. But she trusted the young stranger. Al Kresse flourished in the CCC and became a supervisor. She entertained him and his parents at the White House; they corresponded for years, and she became godmother to his daughter.

  People were not “tramps” or “bums” to ER. They were people with hopes, needs, unknown abilities. She trusted human nature, and believed in change. She opened her heart, took risks with caution, and was rarely disappointed—except by those who reviled the unemployed as if they were a different species.

  The next week, for example, she enlivened a dull dinner for senators: “I threw bomb shells at them about federal control & setting minimum standards.” She wanted homeless youth respected and decent wages ensured.

  For all her enthusiastic work, in her most private life ER was disturbed. She did not know what her husband planned to do about the international issues which most concerned her, and her family life was diminished by her children’s marital woes. She blamed herself, and wrote Hick:

  I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling of responsibility for Elliott and Anna. I guess I was a pretty unwise teacher as to how to go about living. Too late to do anything now, however, and I’m rather disgusted with myself. I feel soiled, but you won’t understand that.

  ER had been troubled by Elliott’s behavior for over a year. In May 1932 she wrote FDR:

  I wish I knew what to do for Elliott and Betty. He is so utterly inconsiderate—and lacking in care and gentleness. I am writing to him today to try to make him understand certain things but I can’t say that I feel very hopeful.

  Then in March 1933, not quite twenty-three, Elliott abandoned his family. In April, after worrying about his whereabouts for weeks, Betty called with relief: Elliott had “reached Little Rock!”

  “Well, my dear,” ER wrote Hick, “there will be no misunderstandings between us.”

  The press was filled with details, and her mother-in-law became incensed and judgmental: “And so news of our family is out and about.” SDR blamed ER for her grandchildren’s troubles, and they released in her a tremendous surge of bitter memory. Hick sought to calm ER’s spirits, and ER was grateful:

  Hick darling what a dear you are! Your letter warmed my heart and made me a little ashamed. What have I to be depressed about! I hate to see the kids suffer, but I know one has to, and I suspect they suffer less than I sometimes think…. I never talked to anyone. Perhaps that was why it all ate into my soul, and I look upon so many more emotions more seriously. … I was a morbid idiot for many years! Only in the last ten years or so have I made friends to whom I talked!

  While FDR relied upon his wife to handle family crises, ER relied upon Hick for emotional advice concerning affairs of the heart. She sent a draft of a letter to Elliott, because “you see his side better than I do perhaps, and I do want to help him and not be too hard,” “too preachy,” or “austere.”

  ER considered Hick wise about emotional issues, in a way she herself wanted to be: “I love you on Elliott & you are just right.” Her children’s upheavals caused ER to reflect on the pain that accompanies human relations: “I’m feeling tonite that the greatest responsibility anyone can have is that of making someone else suffer, and I suppose we all do it. Lord, keep me from it ever again is going to be my daily prayer.”

  Ironically, ER had no idea how actually tormented Hick felt just then by her Associated Press colleagues, who pressured her to reveal what she knew about the Roosevelt family problems. She refused, and her emotional conflicts mounted as her position as star reporter unraveled. When Hick confided in Louis Howe, he told her that it was wrong for a reporter to get too close to
her source. Throughout April and May, while ER leaned upon Hick and planned their summertime escape, Hick suffered in silence.

  ER was aware of Hick’s conflict, but minimized her agony. Protected by her own economic security, marital and class privilege, she encouraged Hick to consider other work, and future diversions: “I’m planning our trip.” “FDR doesn’t care which time I go off with you, so, having talked with him, I’m sure of being free and you can arrange for whichever two weeks you want. What fun we’ll have just doing nothing—or doing anything. Some day we must see Europe!” In July, they would go north to Canada.

  In May, Elliott announced his intention to divorce Betty and marry a woman he had just met. ER wrote Hick that her heart ached for Betty, who had “offered to give me back my pearls (which I did not take) & was swell” in many ways. ER agreed to meet Elliott in Los Angeles for a family conference. As she prepared to leave, her mother-in-law tormented her with accusations. Displeased by her grandchildren’s divorces, unable to control their decisions, the family matriarch blamed her daughter-in-law privately, and publicly. Although their political alliance had strengthened as “Mama” increasingly supported ER’s activities on behalf of poor and disenfranchised Americans, she continually goaded her concerning the children and relentlessly criticized her mothering.

  Hamilton Fish Armstrong, founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and a “Hudson River” family friend, recalled one lunch shortly after the election, at the Big House presided over by SDR. Lord and Lady Astor and Amelia Earhart were among, the guests, when a grandson needing money arrived “without notice.” Miffed, though not discourteous, she told Armstrong: “I always like having the children, but don’t like having extra vegetables picked just on the chance they may come. They never bother to telephone…. But of course they have had no bringing up.”

  In a moment of self-reflection, ER admitted that Sara Delano Roosevelt’s taunts wore her down: “My zest in life is rather gone for the time being. If anyone looks at me, I want to weep, and the sooner this western trip is over, the better…. I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight and my mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run, and I can’t, and I despise myself. I can’t get away from thinking about myself. Even though I know I’m a fool, I can’t help it!… You are my rock, and I shall be so glad to see you Saturday night. I need you very much as a refuge just now.”

  While Father got all the credit for the good times, Mother carried the burdens on a daily basis, and always the blame. ER felt worst about Elliott, her father’s namesake: Elliott was the baby she carried in 1909, when she was filled with grief after the death of the first baby Franklin. She believed everything her son did was somehow her fault; and nobody in her family discouraged that thought.

  On 1 June, ER had an ordinary day: She rode in the morning with Elinor Morgenthau and Esther Lape, who had spent the night to discuss the international situation; held a press conference to express her dismay that work camps for women were insufficiently enrolled; met with the head of the art department of Howard University to discuss new programs for “teaching art to the Negroes.” At five o’clock “all the world came to tea,” and at six she “shook hands with a group of champion spellers.” That evening, she received an honorary law degree and spoke at the commencement of the Washington College of Law.

  But no matter what she did, she was distracted by her impending meeting with Elliott.

  On the evening of 2 June, ER left for her first transcontinental flight—which, she wrote Hick, was perfect.

  Deep in her thoughts as she flew to her son, ER was surprised to be bothered by the press at each refueling stop. “I must say that if all of us showed the same energy that the press photographers do there would be no stone left unturned anywhere in this country. I was even asked to get up and out of the plane at three and again at four o’clock in the morning so that pictures might be taken.”

  Although the details are lost, her meeting with Elliott was satisfactory, and ER liked his fiancée, Ruth Josephine Googins of Fort Worth, Texas. Charming, and determined, she wanted to marry Elliott “without delay.”

  Upon her return to New York, ER encountered two irritating letters from her mother-in-law and they had an unpleasant telephone conversation. When they met, ER confided to Hick, she had been “most agreeable superficially, but really horrid, so I am not proud of myself!”

  ER wrote her husband in July:

  Dearest Honey … I can’t believe he’s getting married for he has no job but I’m writing Anna to find out if he actually needs money. I think it is better to let him fend for himself but I don’t want him to borrow from others or to give the impression to others that we won’t give him anything….

  Upon her return from California, her family crises ongoing, ER turned her attention to the international situation. Closest to her heart was the fight for the World Court and cooperation with the League of Nations, which she continued to believe was the world’s best hope against the devastations of war. While Senate opposition had kept the United States out of the League and in a diplomatic state of relative “isolation,” Eleanor Roosevelt was in the leadership of a vigorous band of women and men who, since the 1920s, kept the World Court idea before the nation.

  Although FDR publicly shied away from international controversy and said not one word in support of the World Court after 1932, ER never wavered from her conviction that “America, by some form of cooperation with the rest of the world, must make her voice count among the nations for peace.”

  As a board member of the bipartisan American Foundation, ER continued to agitate the cause with an unlikely team who disagreed on many issues but were longtime friends and fervent internationalists. It included Hoover’s secretary of state Henry Stimson, Elihu Root—Taft’s secretary of war, and most persistent champion of the World Court, and New York Herald Tribune publisher Helen Rogers Reid. It was led by ER’s great friends Esther Lape and her partner, international lawyer Elizabeth Read, author of International Law and International Relations, a leading college text used in over 570 universities. Read was also ER’s personal tax accountant and financial adviser.

  ER’s surprisingly close alliance with Helen Rogers Reid, later known as the heart of New York Republicanism, survived all differences during the White House years. Their friendship was rooted in old family loyalties, as well as in Reid’s liberal and feminist vision. Born in Wisconsin, Helen Rogers was a Barnard graduate who became social secretary to Elisabeth Mills Reid, wife of Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and ambassador to the, Court of St. James from 1905 to 1912. She continued to work as Mrs. Reid’s social secretary, commuting between New York and London for eight years, until she married her boss’s only son, Ogden Mills Reid, in 1911.

  An ardent antifascist, Helen Reid was one of the first American publishers to give full attention to the German situation as it unfolded. On Sunday, 19 March 1933, the New York Herald-Tribune Magazine published a long and bitter analysis of “Hitler’s War on Culture” by leading German intellectual Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger:

  In the land of Lessing and Goethe free scope is being given to man’s destructive urge. School children are being taught prayers of hatred against other children. A concerted attack has been made upon the arts….

  The universities of Germany have been transformed into hotbeds of extreme nationalism….

  The apostles of Fascism … have made man’s worst instincts their god and they have stirred senseless racial hatred to fever pitch. They declare that the Jews are to blame for everything. Hitler declares that “the Jews have conquered Europe and America,” and are now embarked on an effort to conquer Asia….

  People ask, how could this great civilization have been brought to “the verge of ruin almost overnight? … Greatest is the amazement” of the world’s ten million Jews “who have always looked up to Germany as the spiritual home of world culture….”

  Feuchtwanger believed Hitler’s rise bega
n with the war in 1914. “For more than four years nations worshiped force and exalted might…. The barbaric instincts and atavistic impulses … have taken deep roots….”

  Then came “the bitterness of defeat.” “German Nationalists believed they could not have failed”; rather, they were betrayed by a “domestic foe,” a “demoniac power … and they found this demoniac power in the Jew….

  “German super-nationalism” coupled with militarism now rules, and blames the Jews for everything: Hitler sees them reflected in every window, on every screen, responsible for the World War, its outbreak and its loss; for Bolshevism and capitalism.

  As Hitler declares war on Jews, he decrees war on culture. He insists that Germany suffers “from too much education…. What we need is instinct and will … For our liberation we need more than an economic policy and industry; what we need is pride, spite, hatred, hatred, and once more hatred.” He calls himself the Trommler (the drummer) and calls for agitation, nighttime torchlight parades, and random acts of brutality and violence to drum up hatred.

  In ER’s circle, Lion Feuchtwanger’s article became the subject of intense discussion. Something frightful was happening that required international scrutiny. The World Court recognized the international conventions to protect racial, religious, and linguistic minorities. But in March, FDR decreed that national events within Germany and other nations were beyond the range of U.S. interests.

  FDR’s refusal seriously to consider them was tied to his election deal with William Randolph Hearst, the American Foundation’s chief publishing enemy since 1924. Indeed, Helen Rogers Reid once wrote Lape that nothing could be done to “harness Hearst.” He had the power to make and break leaders, to dictate policies.