Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  It was hot during the day, but freezing at night; “we simply could not get too many clothes and blankets.” Although they had rejected a “VIP” tour, their guides were prepared for VIPs and they were made entirely comfortable. Ranger Billy Nelson was in charge of camp details, and he seemed to understand “celebrities.” Famous for telling King Albert of Belgium, “You call me Billy and I’ll call you King,” Billy gave ER a hot-water bottle to put inside her sleeping bag. Subsequently, he rated her “first-rate like King Albert.”

  While ER enjoyed her vigorous day climbs, Hick found the nights “enchanting. … It’s a wonderful experience to lie, warm and snug in a sleeping bag, high up in the mountains, and look at the stars.” One of the rangers made fabulous flapjacks, and meals were memorable, especially the trout, which ER helped clean. But during the day, Hick had a grueling time. She was not an easy rider, could hardly breathe when she walked, and did not swim.

  Each morning shortly after dawn she watched as ER dashed into the icy lake, which faced “a big bank of snow,” and swam. She did not just plunge in and run out, she swam about. Hick jumped in only once—”and thought I’d never catch my breath again. It didn’t bother her, though. Every morning those days she would take an ice cold shower or tub, as she had done since she was a child.”

  She continued, “Climbing mountains … didn’t bother her either. One morning she and the Chief Forest Ranger climbed up to an elevation of some 13,000 feet. When they came down, I thought the Ranger was going to have a stroke. His face was purple.” But as for ER, “You’d have thought she had come in from a stroll in Central Park!”

  Hick referred to ER’s fabulous day trip to a secretive, elusive lake near the base of Mount Conness which she helped stock with rainbow trout, now called Lake Roosevelt in her honor.

  A scooped-out glacial basin, this long, lean, mysterious lake cannot actually be seen until virtually upon it. Above the tree line, surrounded by snow, it ripples with ice throughout the year, in an alpine world of red heather and purple lupin, mosses and magic.

  It takes over three hours to reach this lake by foot from their base camp at Young Lake, up and down, fording winding Conness Creek which flows into the Tuolumne Meadows, across a forest of Larchpol pine and mountain hemlock.

  With the exception of Lake Roosevelt, it is unclear precisely where ER went on her day trips out of Young Lake. One presumes she wanted to see as many of the sites John Muir introduced her Uncle Theodore to thirty years before.

  After their sojourn in the high country, ER’s caravan rode down to the ranger’s station in the Tuolumne Meadows. They walked across the extraordinary “meadow in the sky,” then motored to the Yosemite Valley, with its wondrous waterfalls: “and anything more beautiful than that valley by moonlight I have never seen.”

  Yosemite had special meaning for ER: She never forgot those bitter early days of her marriage, when so many of her efforts at physical activity were discouraged, or mocked—as they still were by some. Her physical stamina and courage at Yosemite were for ER a triumphant contrast to that drear day when she had so disappointed her father because she was afraid to ride her donkey down the hill in Sorrento; or the mean morning when she hesitated for just a moment and her new husband went off during their honeymoon to walk that relatively easy path up the four-thousand-foot Faloria in the Dolomites—with New York’s fashionable hatmaker Kitty Gandy.

  ER felt now a sense of victory over long-held taboos. She was free, unconfined, competent. A skilled horsewoman who exercised daily, she met the challenges of the High Sierra with ease, confidence, and surprising resources. Curiously, ER wrote nothing of the rough terrain, or the reality of her climbing feats across uncharted high-country mountains no CCC boys had pathed. Rather, she emphasized her failure to catch fish. But her high-seated horsemanship and long-legged gambols became the stuff of ranger legend; and Hick looked on with wonder and merely marveled.

  Hick complained about nothing, and enjoyed herself as much as she could. Although bothered by the altitude, she learned to trust her gentle horse. The only “embarrassing” moment of Hick’s wilderness adventure occurred on the long way down to the Tuolumne Meadows when her horse decided to play in the river: “I managed somehow to slide off and landed sitting down on the sand bar in water up to my chin, while my little friend went into the deep water and rolled!”

  ER looked back to see her companion caught in the rapidly moving river, and the rangers quickly rushed to her aid. Long lectures on exercise and smoking followed.

  Years later, ER wrote:

  [The days in Yosemite] were for me days of enchantment, but I was worried about Lorena Hickok. I learned that nobody who smokes a great deal and whose heart is not strong should try to camp above 10,000 feet. She more or less panted throughout the days we were there, while I climbed easily to 13,000 feet….

  After their camping trip, they spent a night at the luxurious Ahwanee Hotel in the valley. In the midst of dinner, Harold Ickes walked in and joined them.* Hick was undone. Her boss Hopkins and Ickes were then at the height of their feuds over New Deal projects and expenditures. Their differences were simple. Hopkins’s projects were labor-intensive and intended to get the most possible people back to work. To build a road or housing development, Hopkins hired scores or hundreds of people with shovels and hand tools. Ickes “used what we in FERA derisively called ‘the trickle-down method.’” Heavy machines built more efficiently and helped “heavy industry,” which would then, presumably, rehire labor for its private needs. Nobody in Hopkins’s shop believed in that method, and Hick had written reports lambasting Ickes. “It took us longer to build a road, but … it was just as good a road.” FDR played them against each other and declared himself neutral. Everybody knew he gave Hick’s reports to Ickes.

  After dinner, ER was briefly called away. Hick and Ickes sat for a moment in silence on the terrace in the tranquil star-filled night. Ickes smoked his cigar, and Hick smoked her cigarette, and the cloud between them grew thick, until Ickes said: “I’ve been reading your reports…. Interestin’.” Hick said, “Thank you, Mr Secretary,” and prayed for ER’s return.

  Not another word was spoken, but Hick ranked that moment close to the worst of their trip. Another bad time was when hordes of tourists discovered them on a path to the lower Yosemite Falls, where they had paused to feed chipmunks. “We had just started to feed them when I realized that we were completely surrounded by tourists, all pointing cameras at us. Bending over to feed a chipmunk is not a very dignified position … and I lost my temper. We left hastily,” ER all the while “trying to ‘shush’ me.”

  The absolute worst occurred on the way out of the park, when they stopped at the Mariposa Grove of giant redwoods. Awed by the majesty of the great sequoia trees, Hick felt “almost prayerful.” But they were soon surrounded by tourists, and guides “who kept hurling statistics at us.” “The final indignity” was when a guide named “one of those trees—which was probably a sapling when Christ walked this earth,” General Sherman: “To me, it seemed positively sacrilegious. And I said so, right out loud. Of course I shouldn’t have done that.”

  If ER was momentarily embarrassed by Hick’s outburst, it evidently represented precisely her own feelings. She subsequently wrote:

  As we stood and looked at these giants of the forest and realized that they have been there from three to 4000 years and have withstood fires and storms and disease, we had a sense of time and of our own insignificance which is good for the soul and helps one to bear with fortitude the “bludgeonings of chance.”

  From Yosemite on 27 July, they began the long drive down to San Francisco. For Hick, that was “to be the high point” of their vacation, and she had prepared for it with as much consideration as ER had prepared for Yosemite. She chose a small, intimate hotel behind the St. Francis, where she had often stayed, “without telling the management who my companion was to be.” The desk clerk and manager seemed startled when they entered. But they recovered quickl
y, and sent a bouquet of flowers to the room, with several letters for ER, addressed to Hick, that awaited them—including several from FDR, then anchored off Hawaii.

  FDR had written regularly to keep ER informed during his cruise to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Haiti, Colombia, through the Panama Canal, and across the “broad Pacific.” “The Lord knows when this will catch up with my Will o’the Wisp wife, but at least I am proceeding according to schedule.”

  FDR’s party continued on to Colombia and the Panama Canal, where the “bitter feeling” against U.S. imperialism seemed to have waned. He was happy to be greeted by enthusiastic crowds and thrilling ceremony, “since in a sense this was a test visit to a South American Republic.”

  FDR signed these letters “Ever so much love, devotedly.” Before he left for “that long 12 day trip to Honolulu,” he added: “I so wish you were here with me.”

  Despite their eight-hour drive down to San Francisco, ER and Hick felt “rested and relaxed” as they went out to dine late in Hick’s favorite restaurant. A quiet place, virtually unknown to tourists, it served “the best French food I’d ever eaten.” It was exquisite and discreet, romantic and candle-lit, and nobody in the restaurant noticed them.

  After dinner, they strolled, then took a cable car up to Russian Hill, where Hick pointed out the building she and Ella had lived in, “with its picture window that gave us a great sweeping view of the bay from our living room.

  “Then we went over to a tiny park and sat in the moonlight, quietly talking and looking at the bay….

  “Around eleven o’clock we took the cable car back down the hill, stopped at a drugstore … for ice cream sodas and started to walk back to our hotel. It had been a perfect evening, we agreed….”

  But as they approached their hotel, the manager ran to meet them. He was “in a state of panic.” The “lobby was filled with reporters.” Presumably, with the eleven-week longshoremen’s strike over on 27 July, America’s journalists had nothing to do but hound the First Lady and her friend.*

  The manager insisted: “I didn’t tell anyone … I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered—if you had, you wouldn’t have come to my hotel. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  Hick “believed him”; they were “good friends. I did suspect the hotel’s one bellboy….

  “Through a barrage of exploding flashlights we walked through the lobby to the elevator. Mrs. Roosevelt shook her head as the reporters fired questions….

  “‘I’m here on vacation … I’d like to be left alone, if you don’t mind.’”

  In the morning the hotel seemed quiet, and they braved breakfast. But as they ate their cereal, a photographer walked up to them, kneeled before their table, and shot “flashlights right in our faces.”

  All that day they were followed by reporters, and tourists. From Fisherman’s Wharf, to a ferry ride across to Sausalito, to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner, there was no peace, no privacy, no chance for a quiet or unphotographed word. They had managed shampoos at a beauty parlor unmolested, but it had all been too much. There is no record of their words to each other, except Hick’s memory that as they locked the door to their room that night, ER “said quietly: ‘I think we may as well leave tomorrow morning. Don’t you?’”

  As they drove away, Hick was hit by the final indignity: Tourists had stripped her car of all removable “souvenirs,” including sunglasses, road maps, chocolate bars, a cigarette lighter. Nevertheless, their trip up the coast through the Muir Woods and along the Pacific “was leisurely and beautiful.”

  Their final evening together before they arrived in Portland, where ER was to join FDR and his party, was spent in a lovely hotel in Bend, Oregon. Windblown and road-weary, they arrived only to be told by the manager that the word was out, “and a lot of people would like to meet you.”

  ER asked to be excused, and they were allowed to freshen up and dine in peace. Shown to a table at a picture window “with one of the most breath-taking views,” they relaxed. It was sunset, the mountains were snow-capped, and the food was perfect. ER and Hick left the dining room “very contented.” But they walked into a lobby filled with people, reporters, and a reception line headed by the mayor.

  Silently, ER handed Hick the keys. “I was apt not to behave well under such circumstances, she had learned.” Almost an hour later, ER entered the room, “slammed the door behind her—something I’d never known her to do before, nor did I ever know her to do it since that night—and sat down on my bed. On either cheek was a red spot. They used to appear that way when she was annoyed.

  “Franklin was right!” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “Franklin said I’d never get away with it, … and I can’t.”

  She was silent for a moment….

  “From now on I shall travel as I’m supposed to travel, as the President’s wife, and try to do what is expected of me.”

  Then she added defiantly:

  “But there’s one thing I will riot do. I will not have a Secret Service man following me about, NEVER!”

  That was the last conversation recorded in Hick’s book Reluctant First Lady.

  Although ER did not refer to the evening in Bend at all, she noted that when they arrived in Portland, her room was filled to capacity with flowers. Hick, who had “a macabre humor at times, said: ‘All you need is a corpse.’”

  In fact there was a corpse to mourn: Anonymity and privacy had become historical fantasies. ER, the First Lady, belonged to the American people. There were no discreet hotels, no sacred groves, no secret passages. Their vacation was over. Hick returned to San Francisco, to resume her FERA reports, “and I returned to official life.”

  On 3 August 1934, ER joined FDR and his party for a reunion aboard the USS Houston. After lunch they drove east to the Bonneville Dam, and from there boarded the president’s train for the five-day trip across the country, which served in part to launch the 1934 campaign.

  They made many stops along the way, but saw nothing so amazing as the work under way for the Grand Coulee Dam, planned as “the largest dam on earth” and the source of cheap hydroelectric power. They drove fifty-seven miles through the Grand Coulee canyon, about two miles across, “bordered by rock walls rising 1,000 feet … which in past times was the bed of the Columbia River.”

  At the construction site, before an estimated forty thousand celebrants, FDR delivered “a militant defense of public works.”

  The Northwest was to prepare for “the probable migration of persons seeking … better opportunities of life than [are now possible] in worked-out or inhospitable areas, due to the vagaries of nature….”

  While the presidential train included five cars filled with reporters and officials, the private party included Tommy, Louis Howe, Steve Early, Harold Ickes, Senator Burton Wheeler, other officials, and sons FDR, Jr., and John, now joined by James. Evidently their dinner reunion immediately burst into familial disagreement, when ER suggested “a more equitable distribution of income” between rich and poor, with a ceiling or “strict limitation” on income, which her sons dismissed as “subversive.” To the amazement of observers unaccustomed to Roosevelt family table talk, a great shouting match ensued.

  While “they were all going on at once,” Ickes shouted to say he now knew how FDR learned “to manage Congress,” whereupon Senator Wheeler observed: “Congress was never as bad.” Ickes considered the evening “all very interesting and very amusing.”

  But ER worried: Ickes and the others “looked so horrified, when they heard the boys arguing violently with Franklin … that I felt impelled to explain that in our family the boys had always been encouraged to express their opinions.” She wrote nothing of her own role in the argument, which her views had precipitated.

  ER’s correspondence with Hick resumed that night:

  Darling, how I hated to have you go. It is still a pretty bad ache and I’ve thought of you all day especially as we drove along the road we had c
overed yesterday and which you drove over this morning—Well, dear one, I sent you a wire…. We have had happy moments and there will be more in the future but take care of yourself and remember I love you.

  Although Hick had returned to her friends in San Francisco, she too-felt forlorn: “There have been times when I’ve missed you so that it has been like a physical pain….”

  For ER, the only memorable stop during their long trip home was at Glacier National Park in Montana. There FDR, ER, and Harold Ickes were taken into the Blackfoot tribe in a ceremony attended by hundreds of the three thousand remaining members of the tribe. Ickes was named Big Bear, FDR named Lone Chief, and ER named Medicine Pipe Woman. FDR was given two other titles, Love Chief and Fearless Blue Eagle, and ER was also called Grand White Mother.

  After the ceremonies, ER wrote, her sons “induced me” to join them for a swim in the lake. The woman who had just days before been swimming in the coldest waters shortly after dawn now paused:

  As I stood, hesitating and wondering whether I could bear the icy water, one of the boys gave me a push and I found myself gasping and swimming back as quickly as possible. The Indians stood watching us silently, as much as to say, “What fools these mortals be.” … I decided the Indians were right and ran to the cabin….

  That unwelcome and unseemly push causes one to contemplate how vigorous ER was in the company of those who gave her courage and comfort, and how different she became with those who discredited or humiliated her. No longer the “reluctant first lady,” she was determined to play an active political role in a country that needed her, among people who needed her; she faced her future with the hard-won knowledge that to act boldly or to pursue pleasure, whether in the high mountains or in the most frigid waters, she needed to feel free, to be cared about and considered, to be wanted and needed.