Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Then on 20 June, FDR sent what could only be regarded as an insult to his own banker team: “It is my personal view that far too much importance is being placed on existing and temporary fluctuations. Remember, that far too much influence is attached to exchange stability by banker-influenced cabinets.”

  Upon receipt of that cable, George Harrison packed his bags and left London. The others remained faithful and hopeful that some good, some agreement, could be achieved. Telegrams and telephone messages went back and forth during days of confusion as FDR sailed on.

  While her husband sailed and dissembled, away from her questioning insistence and churning emotions, ER relied upon Baruch, who kept her informed. ER spent the week in the relative tranquillity of Val-Kill with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, distracted and agitated.

  Earl Miller visited, and had a calming effect. Occasionally she was able to write when Earl worked on his reports. But her letters to Hick were filled with discontent; she simply could not concentrate: “I wish I could work as you do, but I can’t….”

  By the time she left with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook for their trip to Campobello to open the house and assemble the staff for FDR’s much-anticipated homecoming, ER was distraught by the confusion in London.

  Although the drive north was pleasant and their tour through northern New York, Vermont, and Maine was mostly “glorious,” ER was in a sour mood.

  When they arrived at Mary Dreier’s home on Mount Desert Island in Maine, ER discovered that a large party was planned for the next afternoon, and she wrote with dismay: “I don’t dare tell Nan, but this is not my idea of a holiday!”

  The next morning ER awoke to discover that “FDR and the whole fleet” had anchored outside Mary Dreier’s home in Southwest Harbor. ER worried that it was “rather overpowering for Mary Dreier, but she seemed pleased.” ER’s three sons went ashore for breakfast, and FDR invited ER and her party aboard the Amberjack II for lunch. By all accounts it was a “joyous reunion,” and nobody discussed the London Economic Conference.

  After FDR’s detour to Mary Dreier, he continued his cruise while ER headed directly for Campobello to make the beds and prepare the great welcoming picnic to celebrate FDR’s first visit in twelve years. Friends and neighbors gathered, including Louis Howe, Henry Morgenthau, the governor of Maine, and Norman Davis, who had returned with messages from the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Blanketed by fog, ER wrote Hick:

  I hope we have good weather … when Franklin and his fleet [arrive]. I love the place and like people I like to see it at its best. Fog is nice if you know a place and are with someone you like. It is like a winter storm. It shuts you in and gives you a close & intimate feeling & adds to the joy of your fire. But you don’t want to meet a new place in a fog any more than you want to be intimate with a new acquaintance.

  ER loved Campobello in all weather: the brisk sea air, the pebbled beaches and extreme tides, the mysteries of the green-and-gray mists, the incomparably azure blue skies that followed the thickest fogs. Campo had been the first home ER furnished and arranged herself. Sara had purchased a rambling, comfortable twenty-four-room house in 1909 for her children’s use. Her home was next door, separate and distinct. With no telephone and no electricity, for ER, Campo remained a refuge.

  For a time on 27 June, the sun appeared and ER went sailing with Dickerman and Cook. She wrote Hick: “I’m sitting in the bottom of the boat, sniffing salt air & every now and then looking over the water to my green islands & grey rocky shores. I do think it is lovely, & I wonder if you will…. Do you like sailing? Or don’t you?”

  But FDR was fogbound and anchored off dreary Roque Island on Lake-man Bay, where he had been stilled for three nights and two days. During that time all the news from London was dreadful. The dollar soared to $4.30 in relation to the pound; the gold nations thought they would be wrecked if no agreement, no simple statement of intent, was made. France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, clamored for a sign of goodwill.

  From New York the circle around Woodin’s bed, including Baruch and Dean Acheson, urged FDR to make a positive statement concerning stabilization. Norman Davis sailed out to the Amberjack II with the same message—the future of the Geneva Conference depended on the success of the London Conference. Everything depended on economic trust, evidence of goodwill. Hull sent urgent telegrams. And for all the press reports about Hull’s upset over Moley’s arrival, Moley’s private conferences with Ramsay MacDonald, Moley’s usurpation of Hull’s rightful role, there was now little disagreement over the need for FDR to agree to what was, after all, a most modest proposal. Moley’s cables were now the most urgent of all, and his subsequent memory the most vivid: “On the day I landed at Plymouth, the dollar was at its greatest discount since our War between the States.” Then on 28 June, the dollar went up to $4.43:

  France and the gold-standard countries were groveling in the dust, howling for something, anything, that might save them from being pushed off gold….

  England and France weren’t talking about stabilization at $4.00 any more…. They would have fainted with relief had they known that Roosevelt had indicated to me on the Amberjack on June 20th that he’d be disposed to authorize stabilization with a high of $4.25 and a low of $4.05.

  FDR’s bargaining tactics had succeeded beyond his wildest imagining. … [Now they] asked only that he make some gesture—some small gesture—that would in no way limit his freedom of action on the dollar and that would, nevertheless, tend to discourage the mad exchange speculation of the preceding three weeks.

  The gold countries had drawn up a “declaration,” with England’s agreement. Moley “was amazed as I examined it. It was brief, simple, and wholly innocuous.” And it reflected one of FDR’s own policy statements: “a statement that gold would ultimately be reestablished as a measure of international exchange value, but that each nation reserved the right to decide when it would return to a gold standard and undertake stabilization.”

  Moley believed FDR “would be overjoyed to learn that he had beaten the gold countries and England down to this.” England’s chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, visited Moley at the U.S. embassy to lobby this perfectly “harmless declaration” which would nevertheless “quiet the panic” of the continental nations.

  Then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, vastly “more emotional than Chamberlain,” explained to Moley in “vivid terms” the origins of Europe’s inflation phobia, the bitter suffering after the war due to uncontrolled inflation. They had seen it, lived it, it was not a banker’s bad dream. “Fear of it, fear that the U.S. would push their currencies off the gold and into inflation, was sweeping over Holland and Switzerland and France. The consequences of fear, unchecked, might even be revolution in those countries. The moment was critical. It would cost Roosevelt only a meaningless gesture to dispel the psychoses threatening Europe.”

  Europe’s inflation, the great inflation of 1921–23, now haunted all decisions regarding Europe’s future. In 1921 the Allies decreed that Germany owed 132 billion gold marks in wartime reparations. Payment of Germany’s reparations would enable Europe to pay its own debts to the United States. But Germany resisted with a “wheelbarrow” inflation that destroyed the economy. Personal security disappeared, savings evaporated, everything was rendered worthless as the mark, four to the dollar before 1914, seventy-five to the dollar after Versailles, went from 500:1 to 750:1, and then millions to one, up and up 20 percent higher each day during the 1923 inflation, until the government called a halt in 1924 when currency was pegged at four trillion marks to the dollar.

  After dramatic changes in government, by a stroke of the pen the mark was restored: four to one. But the damage had been done. Germany would never be the same. For most Germans the inflation was Germany’s revolution. Small businesses went bankrupt; millions of people were unemployed. For a time the madness was replaced by the appearance of stability and the hope of international reconciliation. But discontent and nationalist
enmity seethed, ready to erupt during the renewed wave of international depression that followed 1929.

  In 1928 the National Socialist Party received only 2.8 percent of the vote in a Reichstag election. But everything changed with the worldwide Depression. Financial insecurity impassioned Nazism. Few in Europe now doubted the force of Hitler’s overwhelming power, or the dangers of unbridled economic inflation.

  On Thursday, 29 June 1933, Moley’s cable demanding a positive response reached FDR. Telephone conversations between Moley in London and Baruch, Woodin, Acheson, and also George Harrison, who joined them after he left London, revealed that all FDR’s advisers were now in agreement. The hours passed. All day Friday and Friday night there was nothing but silence and delay. Saturday morning’s silence was broken only by a telephone message: FDR’s answer would be again delayed.

  On Thursday, 29 June, FDR decided to defy the fog and after breakfast sail ashore. He lifted anchor at 8:30 A.M., determined to best the weather; he was calm and happy. The Indianapolis gave him a twenty-one-gun salute, and he was jubilantly greeted by the Coast Guard cutter Cuyahoga, the local herring fleet, and every yacht and rowboat in the area. FDR arrived precisely on schedule at 4:00 P.M., just as the fog lifted, “as if some giant, invisible hand had raised a curtain” to bear witness as FDR sailed his schooner through the dangerous Lubec Narrows and tacked across choppy Passamaquoddy Bay.

  What might have been a triumphal dinner, filled with cheer and high spirits, was instead fraught with family tensions that erupted into unpleasant disagreement. Their friends were surprised by ER’s vehemence after so much care and effort had gone into preparing her husband’s return to his beloved island.

  Although the records of that meal are sparse, Marion Dickerman and Henry Morgenthau remembered that ER believed it a mistake to send Moley to London. It humiliated and belittled Hull; “it weakened Hull’s position.” Moreover, the First Lady did not trust Moley’s ambitions, and she warned FDR that he represented a “threat to the President’s own power and prestige.”

  The next day, Friday, 30 June, ER invited the four reporters from the Mary Alice for lunch “and an afternoon of relaxation.”

  According to Charles Hurd, the First Lady “greeted us on the beach, and we walked up the path to the cottage.” After lunch, the president “suggested a game of cut-in bridge.” But they played “for only an hour or so” and then FDR said, “I think it might be more interesting to talk for a while.”

  The journalists had been “trapped.” FDR’s conversation “must have been conceived as spontaneously as a message to Congress.” He talked bluntly about torpedoing the London Conference. It was off the record, not for attribution, a conversation among friends. But he suggested a Campobello byline. He wanted the story out, and he wanted it explained clearly.

  Hurd wrote that the reporters “could see why Roosevelt was disturbed…. [He] might be an internationalist, something of an Anglophile through family and friends, a cosmopolitan; but at this stage he was determined that the U.S. was not to be pushed around” by international bankers, financiers, bullies. For the most part, Europeans wanted “concessions” from the United States—even though they all, except Finland, had defaulted on their “past debts.” FDR noted that European bonds were held by private citizens; “American investors had trusted the debtor countries … and yet they had wound up with worthless and depreciated bonds….” Their “resentment” was understandable, “and furthermore … he agreed with it.”

  FDR would accept no devaluation of the dollar “so that foreign governments could trade it at bargain prices in other markets.” In fact, FDR would accept nothing from the London Conference.

  Hurd’s words are an ironic reminder of a letter FDR had written to Waldorf Astor in April. His mother would not be making her annual visit that summer: “I cannot let Mama go over because I am sure she would cancel all the debts!”

  Each reporter left to write up the story, which hit the next day “like a bombshell.” Hurd’s New York Times story was reprinted throughout Europe, and wrecked the London Conference even before FDR sent the first of his own torpedoes directly to Moley, which finally arrived at three Saturday afternoon.

  As Moley and Swope read FDR’s words they burst into laughter. It was an argument against “rigid and arbitrary stabilization,” which had nothing to do with the declaration at all. FDR pontificated that “so long as national budgets remained unbalanced currency would be unsound.” Above all, FDR insisted, American prices and currency “must be free” of foreign entanglements, international pressures.

  In the end, Moley and Herbert Swope believed they needed above all to protect FDR from his own errors. “The message must be seen by as few people as possible.” As Bacon said, “kings cannot err.” They decided to issue a statement that said only that FDR rejected the declaration in its present form. Also to protect FDR, Hull ordered the minutes “kept of the meetings of the American delegation” in London burned.

  ER escorted the journalists down the steep wooden steps to the beach with their tension and their story palpable in the air. She learned from them the news her husband had failed to confide in her. Once again she had been shut out of a decision that mattered to her deeply, and she returned to the house in a state of fury and gloom.

  Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at the 1933 inaugural ball.

  ER and FDR at the Coronado Hotel, California, 1934.

  ABOVE: Sistie (Eleanor) and Buzzie (Curtis) playing on swings on the White House lawn.

  ER and her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, at Campobello.

  Head White House housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, and ER.

  BELOW: Edith Benham Helm (standing), ER’s social secretary, and Malvina Thompson Sheider—”Tommy”—ER’s private secretary.

  ER and Marion Dickerman at the White House.

  BELOW: Nancy Cook and ER at Val-Kill.

  The Women’s Press Conference in the White House, 1933.

  FDR greets British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and his daughter, Ishbel, in Washington D. C., 21 April 1933.

  Aboard the Amberjack in Maine. Back row (left to right): Frances Kellor, Mary Dreier, Marion Dickerman, Antonia Hatvary. Middle row (left to right), Nancy Cook, FDR Jr., John Roosevelt. Front row (left to right): ER, FDR, James Roosevelt.

  Camp Jane Addams, a She-She-She camp at Bear Mountain, New York, for unemployed women.

  Lorena Hickok, 1932.

  At the White Top Music Festival, accompanied by Nancy Cook and the women of the press. Abingdon, Virginia, 12 August 1933.

  FDR’s fifty-second birthday party—theme, “Dear Caesar”—30 January 1934. Seated (left to right) Missy LeHand, Tommy Scheider, FDR, Margaret (Rabbit) Durond, Stanley Premosil. Standing (left to right) Marvin McIntyre, Grace Tully, Thomas Lynch, Kirk Simpson, ER, Irvin McDuffie, Anna Roosevelt, Charles McCarthy, James Sullivan, Marion Dickerman, Louis Howe.

  ABOVE: ER riding in Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C., with Elinor Morgenthau.

  LEFT: ER and Elinor Morgenthau at a more formal moment, 1934.

  ABOVE: ER and Hick in Puerto Rico, during the 1934 Caribbean trip.

  RIGHT: Arriving in Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, March 1934.

  Hick, on her fortieth birthday, with ER and Governor Paul Pearson in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, 7 March 1934.

  ER with journalists on the Caribbean trip. (Left to right) Emma Bugbee, Dorothy Ducas, ER, Ruby Black, Bess Furman.

  Touring Christiansted with Sammy Shulman, trip photographer.

  FDR welcomes ER home from the Caribbean on their twenty-ninth anniversary, 17 March 1934.

  Typical Arthurdale homes.

  On board the USS Indianapolis, 31 August 1934. Left to right: ER, Betsey Roosevelt, FDR, James Roosevelt, SDR.

  ER at Lake Roosevelt, Yosemite National park, with Ranger Forrest Townsley, during her vacation with Hick, July 1934.

  RIGHT: Creating Arthurdale, 1933–36.

  Relaxing at Chazy Lake, New York
, with Earl Miller, August 1934.

  ER the markswoman.

  ”I have to be tied and gagged, they’re making their movie, ‘The Lady and the Pirate.’”

  Later on this flight over Washington with Amelia Earhart on 20 April 1933, ER was at the controls.

  Walter White, NAACP leader.

  ER and her new friend, dancer Mayris “Tiny” Chaney.

  She sat by herself in her blue-and-white room overlooking the bay and contemplated her husband’s decision, while he hosted “a gay cocktail party” for his sons and the twenty-two houseguests that had arrived from all over to greet his return.

  The party was prolonged, and dinner was delayed. ER waited two hours and then summoned the guests to the table. She was upset to find her teenage son no longer sober. That, compounded by her feelings about the doomed London Conference, unleashed a public scene: She “upbraided her husband … harshly, angrily, as if he were a naughty little boy.” He became petulant: “You can’t scold me this way…. It is not my fault and I didn’t know what time supper was.”

  Curiously, several of FDR’s biographers actually blamed his wife’s anger for his truculent message to London. But FDR had already made his decision, and ER’s bitter behavior signified her disappointment and distress. She felt personally betrayed. To the end of her life, ER referred to the international failures of 1933 with regret and wonderment:

  We once had a delegate [Norman Davis], a very fine man, a very valuable public servant, who used to go to the disarmament conferences in Geneva, and I used to wonder why no one took any interest in his going or the slightest interest when he returned. We didn’t seem to care what he did or what happened….