On the 12th, ER sent Hick a Valentine’s card and enclosed a long letter:
I love you dear one deeply, tenderly…. I can’t tell you how precious every minute with you seems to me in retrospect and in prospect. I look at you long as I write—the photograph has an expression I love, so you and a bit whimsical, but then I adore every expression.
On the 14th, ER drove to Cornell with Louis Howe for her annual lecture. She spoke until 10:30, and wrote Hick: “I am very full of thoughts of you & I’d give a lot to talk to you…. I love you with all my heart & your picture is with me…. And will you be my Valentine?”
While ER was with Howe, Hick had three traffic accidents in North Carolina. In Fayetteville, a milk truck backed into her and “crumpled” her right fender “like a piece of cardboard.” While standing still in a traffic jam in Durham, a bus backed into her. She honked on her two horns to no avail. The driver dented her fender, broke her horn, and “bent my temper.” Then Hick scraped a fender in a narrow hotel entrance. Her beloved Bluette now resembled a battlefield relic.
The accidents combined with the Time article sent Hick into a frenzy. She wrote Kathryn Godwin: “Why the Hell CAN’T they leave me alone? … I’m so fed up with the publicity I want to kick every reporter I see. Which is a bad state for me to get into, since I’ll probably be back in the business myself….”
ER’s efforts to comfort and soothe Hick’s distress could not lessen the fact that she now felt dependent and insecure, whereas before she had felt robust and powerful behind her byline.
On 4 March they began their journey to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was the first time the actual conditions of the people in the territories, their needs and wants, were seriously considered. ER’s visit set in motion the beginnings of a New Deal for the islands.
There was no discussion, however, of radical, union, and nationalist movements that raged during her visit. She was kept from any chance to observe them or speak with their representatives.
ER and Hick were accompanied by a party of reporters who were also good friends, Emma Bugbee (Herald Tribune), Bess Furman (AP), Ruby Black (United Press), Dorothy Ducas (International News), and one press photographer chosen from the photo pool, Sammy Shulman. They flew from Miami with Rexford Guy Tugwell, then assistant secretary of agriculture.
ER’s first overseas flight landed in Cuba and then went on to Haiti. In Cuba, ER’s visit was curtailed by a transportation and communications strike, which she was not allowed to see. Indeed, she evidently saw no Cubans at all, except the mayor of Havana and four soldiers. The mayor told her that a general strike was imminent, “a political strike that the communists are trying to cause.”
Nor did she tour Haiti, where there was also unrest and no particular appreciation for the wife of FDR. ER and Hick dined privately with the governor and her party left at dawn. They stopped in the Dominican Republic for a formal reception with the island’s president, General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
ER’s first significant stopover was St. Thomas, where she was welcomed by a crowd that sang “John Brown’s Body,” protest and union songs.
On the first presidential-level fact-finding tour, ER scouted the situation for her husband, who was interested in the area’s economic development. ER agreed with those who sought to establish a tourist industry in the U.S. Virgin Islands and in Puerto Rico. But she believed that all tourism discussions should be postponed until the wretched effects of poverty, starvation, and disease were overcome.
Wherever she went, ER had Sammy Shulman photograph the most outrageous sights—open sewers, vermin-infested courtyards and playing fields, tin-and-cardboard neighborhoods where makeshift shacks served as housing in areas destroyed by recent hurricanes.
In St. Thomas, ER and Hick were the guests of the first civilian governor of the Virgin Islands, Paul Pearson. Purchased from Denmark in 1917, the U.S. Virgin Islands were initially under Navy rule. Then in 1931, Herbert Hoover transferred them to the Department of Interior and appointed Pearson, to oversee America’s “effective poorhouse.” But Governor Pearson, the father of columnist Drew Pearson, was a controversial figure. A liberal Republican and a Quaker, he was stunned by the desperate poverty he encountered. Sympathetic to the native population, he was quickly opposed by Southern Democrats who feared that he intended to desegregate the islands. But ER liked him. On 10 March she wrote FDR: “My impression is the fundamental point of attack is housing. I like the Governor. I like his balance particularly, [and his] social viewpoint….” In ER’s honor, Pearson had “cut across the color line” and integrated the reception he held for the First Lady and her party. According to Bess Furman the evening “went off so well that we didn’t know until the next day that it had been news—we had taken it to be an old island custom.”
ER began her first day on St. Thomas by swimming with her press companions at Pearson’s private beach. Furman and Dorothy Ducas “managed to steal a movie sequence of Mrs. Roosevelt coming up the beach toward us, in a bathing suit, skipping rope.”
She dedicated the new Eleanor Roosevelt ward in the municipal hospital and met with local women at the new high school. It was the first public women’s meeting on St. Thomas. The women of the Virgin Islands were still without the vote, as were the vast majority of men—who could not pay the exorbitant poll tax.
ER encouraged the women to organize a political club and become actively involved. Only if they organized, she said, could they expect to win the vote and end the hated poll tax. And then they would be free to pursue their own needs in their own way: “No matter how little you have done in the past, reach out for influence, and try to use it to make your government respond to what is best for your homes….”
In St. Croix, ER inspected new government housing, new subsistence farms, CWA schools, a leprosarium, and the site of a proposed government rum distillery and made four speeches. She visited old slave quarters, the new federal hotel site, which she thought beautifully located, and new community centers.
Throughout her forty-mile tour, entire neighborhoods turned out to greet her. People seemed to her “happy and healthy,” but there was so much more that needed to be done. When she suggested that flies be kept out of cooking pots, local officials assumed that she meant to insist that screens be made mandatory in the new housing. Virgin Islanders never forgot ER’s brief visit and credited many new homesites, with windows and screens, to her expressions of dismay and concern.
In Puerto Rico, ER wanted her tour to be private. She wanted to travel only with her party of reporters and her friends currently resident on the island, Dorothy Bourne and Rose Schneiderman. She dismissed all police and military escorts; insisted that the governor’s car in which she rode be stripped of all official insignia and that the license plate be changed. She even asked the driver to change out of his chauffeur’s uniform into a white linen suit. Although many towns had prepared for her visit and the streets were lined with people to greet her, in other areas she visited factories, schools, and homes as an unknown stranger.
Again, ER was kept away from areas of tension and labor strikes, which in Puerto Rico were caused by CWA wage reductions. As in the South the local gentry had no intention of paying “relief” workers the CWA’s minimum wage of 30 cents an hour; and as in the South, in some cases the wage was reduced to 10 cents or less an hour. ER avoided political issues and declined to comment on the growing movement for Puerto Rico’s independence.
The economic situation in Puerto Rico was more obviously desperate than in the Virgin Islands, and ER was frankly alarmed by the level of official neglect. Despite a recent hurricane, in some rural areas no new construction was anticipated and chickens and children shared the earthen floor. Dozens of people crowded into one-room houses that had no windows, occasionally no roofs. In San Juan, shanties on stilts stood above malaria-ridden swamps. She explored the “swamp slums,” where refugees of the 1932 hurricane still lived in huts of debris, and “swamp water and grasses sh
owed through the cracks of the floor,” and ordered Sammy Shulman to “Get this, to really show what it is like.”
She was disgusted to learn that $1,200,000 in relief funds had been cut to $500,000 and limited to 522,000 of the neediest cases, and that the neediest families received between 50 cents and a $1 a week—to meet the needs of six, or eight, or fifteen people.
ER met with a group of sixty nurses who worked in a children’s health program and heard of their battle against the island’s four scourges—tuberculosis, malaria, hookworm, and enteritis. She promised to address their plight in Washington.
For two days ER motored through the hill country and rain forest, the mountain areas, where hurricanes had destroyed banana, coffee, pineapple, and grapefruit plantations, leaving only palm-thatched cottages where young girls and old women toiled over hand-embroidered lingerie and handkerchiefs for which they earned between 10 and 25 cents per dozen. It was an artful craft performed under cruel conditions. Relief workers assured ER that a garment code for Puerto Rico would be established, with minimum-wage provisions. It would abolish home work by creating municipal workrooms.
ER saw no reason for any such expectation, and nobody had asked the women if they would prefer municipal workrooms. While her expressions of concern pleased the liberal establishment, they sounded hollow to the rapidly growing nationalist opposition. To the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, ER was merely the wife of “Puerto Rico’s greatest oppressor.” A local newspaper reported that after she visited impoverished needleworkers in the mountains, she dined on squab at the most sumptious mountaintop villa. Evidently only Puerto Rico’s Senator Luis Muñoz Marín considered ER the “American conscience in Puerto Rico.”
ER’s last day in Puerto Rico included a visit to the university, a tour of the old Spanish town, and a private shopping spree with Hick. She returned laden with gifts, and suspected she had been recognized, but “everybody was very nice and polite.”
When asked on her departure what her plans were for the reconstruction of Puerto Rico, she said: “I think the island is extraordinarily lovely…. It has wonderful possibilities for pleasure….” When pressed on what might be done to combat malnutrition and malaria, she replied only that these matters were not her “province.” Privately she made every effort to secure a measure of decency in a much-abused American colony.
Upon her return ER persuaded the president “to send down some labor people and industrialists” to see conditions for themselves. She also urged him to see the situation personally, which he did in July. After FDR toured the islands, he wrote “Dearest Babs” that the problems were as complex as she had described, and he did drive over to see “those vile slums in the water.”
Hick’s report to Harry Hopkins was stark: Puerto Rico was not a job for FERA. One hundred miles long and thirty-five miles wide, Puerto Rico was overpopulated and chronically undernourished. Except for the small class of colonial rulers, everybody was on minimal subsistence relief, or should have been. To curtail starvation, given the cut in funds that had already occurred, Hick recommended “more surplus commodities.” Everything was needed, beginning with sanitation:
No one could give you an adequate description of those slums…. Photographs won’t do it, either. They don’t give you the odors. Imagine a swamp, with stagnant, scum-covered, muddy water everywhere, in open ditches, pools, backed up around and under the houses. Flies swarming everywhere. Mosquitoes. Rats…. Put in some malaria and hookworm, and in about every other house someone with tuberculosis, coughing and spitting…. And remember, not a latrine in the place. No room for them. No place to dispose of garbage either. Everything dumped right out into the mud and stagnant water….
In Ponce, for example, half the population of 87,000 lived in such conditions. In San Juan, the largest city (114,000), there were five such slums.
Housing was the primary problem. As on the mainland, money needed to be allotted for subsistence homesteads, farms, a resettlement program.
ER put into motion programs for new housing for the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico—where the first new housing project was named Eleanor Roosevelt. She contacted allies in the Department of the Interior, especially Oscar Chapman, to discuss the political situation in the Virgin Islands and to promote suffrage, including women’s suffrage. She also endorsed tourism and tax reduction.
According to Ruby Black, ER spent almost as much time on projects for Puerto Rico as she did on Arthurdale. She promoted ideas for reforestation, restoration, and reconstruction. The hurricanes of 1928 and 1932, which had ruined the citrus fruit, coffee, and pineapple industries, were only part of the problem. There were also chicanery and corruption. These were plantation economies, marked by race, class, and imperial violence.
Ickes convened a new Virgin Islands Advisory Council and at ER’s suggestion invited Walter White to serve on it. The first meeting was held on 19 April 1934, and Chapman wrote ER that “our plans for the Islands are progressing favorably” and the housing program was under way. There would be “standard type” dwellings of two rooms and kitchen, “of concrete construction, at a cost of $525 each.” By 1935 over fifty units of low-cost housing and several resettlement homestead communities enabled small farming to flourish on the islands.
ER had traveled 6,638 miles and presented the United States with its first account of conditions in its closest island dependencies. But ER was shielded from many of the hardest political dilemmas. She never referred to the upheavals that coincided with her journey throughout the Caribbean and Central America—even though a strike had curtailed her own landing in Cuba, where a revolutionary movement had just been defeated and the liberal Grau government was replaced by the conservative rule of Carlos Mendieta, with the backing of Cuba’s military chief Fulgencio Batista.
FDR had originally threatened to withhold recognition unless certain democratic conditions were met, but instead recognized the Mendieta government only five days after it had seized control. In March, while ER toured the islands, he approved a $4 million loan to the new repressive regime.
ER’s visit to the Caribbean also shared headlines with the aftermath of the assassination of Nicaragua’s hero General Augusto Sandino and his brother Socrates. Everybody knew that “General Somosa was primarily responsible for the killing,” and still the assassins continued to enjoy “complete freedom and parade in the streets of Managua, boasting of their crime and displaying the pistol and gold teeth of Augusto and locks of Socrates’ hair.”
FDR supported Somosa. One of the most quoted presidential statements he ever made characterized Nicaragua’s dictator: “He is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Every improvement ER considered regarding America’s territories had to be filtered through FDR’s international policies. The nature of the Good Neighbor Policy was complex and contradictory, and for many years it had nothing to do with a New Deal.
Over the years, ER persuaded friends and allies to visit the islands and see what could be done. Some invested in new industries, others promoted the tourist trade, still others found philanthropic organizations in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. When Rexford Guy Tugwell was appointed governor of Puerto Rico in 1940 he introduced the reforestation programs she envisioned. But it was all sparsely funded, neocolonial.
After their trip, ER’s first letter to Hick revealed that the pleasure of their time together and the excitement of shared work was frayed by Hick’s growing discontent. Hick had actually been miserable in the company of her high-spirited colleagues; with them, she felt most keenly the loss of her professional life and status.
To console Hick, ER discussed the possibility of their living together and reassured her about the importance of her work with FERA:
I believe it gets harder to let you go each time…. It seems as though you belonged near me, but even if we lived together we would have to separate sometimes and just now what you do is of such value to the country that we ought not complain only that doesn’t make me miss
you less or feel less lonely…. Darling, I ache for you….
To a lost letter, the first of Hick’s return trip south, ER replied:
You are not childish only I get swallowed up by duties…. You give me so much more happiness than you realize dear for when we are together you are the “perfect companion.” And I love to feel you love me just as you do & I do….
In Washington, ER continued her round of daily doings; groups to see; luncheons, dinners, an occasional delight: She took several houseguests, as well as the Hopkinses, the Tugwells, and Anna and John to the opera. She sent Hick an amusing editorial by William Allen White: “Just in case you missed this choice bit!”
These Roosevelts are born with ants in their pants and tacks in their chairs. They cannot sit still. Somewhere back of Franklin, Eleanor, and Teddy, back into the ancient line that runs past the golden age into the realm of Mother Goose, some gay Roosevelt grandmother must have had an unfortunate but felicitous moonlight affair with a jumping jack.
ER and Hick would not see each other again until May. It seemed “so far away…. I wonder if always I’m not going to feel that a day is incomplete which we do not start and end together? Well, I do it on paper anyway.”
Repeatedly, ER counseled Hick to discount people’s emphasis on their friendship. But whenever colleagues referred to it, she felt assailed. ER noted: “I can just see how annoyed you were…. But it was natural. They probably think if they didn’t know [then] you’d mind, if they only knew!”
Although ER courted good relations with the press, everybody in the extended Roosevelt family felt occasionally hounded and harassed. Hick hated to be named or noticed; all the Roosevelt children sought privacy and anonymity, to no avail. On 8 April, ER wrote, “F Jr has gone and done a fool thing.” He had tripped a photographer, roughed him up, and broken his camera.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 26
