Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER added:

  I have always been sorry that I did not have the courage to go and see you when you were living near Poughkeepsie. I wanted to so often, but felt I had no right to intrude upon you. I have so admired your books for so many years and have used your Hillsboro people—especially “Petunias, That’s for Remembrance”—so often in my classes to emphasize [that] my girls should see a little more of the world than their own surroundings, with an understanding eye and heart, that it would have been the greatest pleasure for me to have had an opportunity to talk with you.”

  ER invited Fisher, then living in Vermont, to visit her at the White House. Fisher was delighted by ER’s letter, “with its unexpected news that you know my work.” She had also longed to meet, and had decided to make contact. “When I read what you said to the assembled DARs:

  I fairly bounded into the air with joy—and relief—and pride in you! And now I cannot resist writing you to tell you that the mental health of this big country is being infinitely improved by your courage in saying right out, on so many occasions, what intelligent good citizens think but had never dreamed could be said in public by someone in authority. Yes, you are “in authority” now, by virtue of the extraordinary prestige your personality gives you.

  While Villard deplored the conservatism of New Dealers, Molly Dewson worried about radical challenges. As Dewson made plans to attend FDR’s new advisory council assigned to develop Social Security legislation, she sent ER a letter filled with her concerns for the future—including evidence of growing radicalism in the youth movement, which she wanted ER to pass on to the president: “FDR likes his ear to the ground. He was talking to me about this difficulty of getting the young students on middle ground.” She enclosed an appeal for money from a socialist college society associated with Norman Thomas, which showed how far from “middle ground” they were: Their letterhead called for “production for use and not for profit,” and they actively recruited on college campuses:

  Joseph P. Lash, Editor of the Student Outlook, Monroe Sweetland and George Edwards—have been remarkably successful in building up vigorous and militant groups on almost every campus they have been able to reach. They have enrolled four times as many students this October than … a year ago…. They are building a strong student movement….

  Side by side with this radical activity on the campus however, we are hearing of the formation of new and sinister types of college organizations. We have the spectacle of college officials in the East and West expelling students for their participation in the work of building a new social order. College presidents are organizing fraternities and athletic groups into vigilante organizations. This necessitates greater activity on our part than ever before.

  Their activity was facilitated by successful publications: Socialism’s New Beginning, The Plight of the Sharecropper, fascism, Traffic in Death, Campus Strikes Against War, and Italian Intellectuals Under Fascism. New pamphlets, ready for the printer, included The Negro in America by Abram Harris, George Streator, and Norman Thomas, and Labor Conflicts Under the NRA.

  By 1934 the issues of youth leaders were increasingly ER’s issues.

  Earlier Hick had also alerted ER to the radical path America’s students had embarked upon. In May, Hick had met a young FERA colleague in Phoenix:

  [She is an] interesting and amusing little girl, three years out of Vassar, who now worked on a statistical survey on transients…. We spent the evening talking politics and economics. She is afraid there won’t be a revolution, and I’m afraid there will be—so our argument was rather amusing. She admires the President greatly, but doesn’t think he’ll be able to put his reforms over because of Congress and the selfishness and stupidity of both Capital and Labor. She gnashes her teeth over what Congress is doing … and over the [conservative] tactics of the A.F. of L…. She feels very earnestly that there ought to be a change in the whole system and that, if the President can’t swing it, we must have a revolution. What interested me most was that she said most young people she knows feel the same way! And she says the boys are for the most part dead set against war—that they say they’ll go to jail first. Boys who were at Yale and Princeton when she was at Vassar! Interesting, isn’t it?…

  Unlike Dewson and Hick, ER was attracted by the causes that most engaged America’s young radical students. She looked forward to fighting for them with the support of new allies in Congress, especially Caroline O’Day. A reconstructed southerner, born in Georgia and educated in Paris, O’Day had long campaigned against lynching, and all forms of discrimination. A member of the NAACP board, she was a fighter and bridge builder.

  Shortly after the election, ER joined her husband for two weeks at Warm Springs. ER had invited Earl Miller and the Morgenthaus, but they had other plans. Still, Tommy, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook arrived. Pleasant swims and strenuous rides through the countryside with Missy were diverting, and ER wrote several essays and columns with Tommy.

  As ER and FDR drove together through the South, the impact of the New Deal was evident. Entire towns turned out for the president, “and everywhere they hang on his words.” They “do look better Hick in spite of all your gloom.” ER was pleased especially by all the “interesting things” being done by TVA “with cheap power.”

  ER wrote Hick daily, but their painful experiences together in groups, including gatherings of the extended family, rendered all longing senseless: “Dearest I don’t wish you were here, you would hate it, but I miss you and think of you often and hope you are not too tired. My dear love and a tender kiss.”

  Hick was alone in the White House with Anna and John in November 1934, and they had a provocative conversation about the mercurial intensities of romantic love and unbridled jealousy. Although Hick’s letters referred to are lost, ER replied:

  Hick dearest. Your letters of the 15th, 16th & 17th greeted me this morning…. You have been gay and I think on the whole you sound as tho life has been pleasant…. You poor dear with those two young things but just be comforted for Anna at least can’t control her emotions & she knows it. They are sure of themselves for the moment just wait till their confidence is shaken….

  You are right, there are only two ways to beat jealousy. One is not to love enough so as not to care if someone gives you less than you thought they might, the other is to love so much that you are happy in their happiness and have no more room for thoughts of yourself, but that is only possible to the old!

  Then ER admitted her own discontent:

  I behaved very badly last night to Nan & this A.M. to FDR so I am not exactly “persona grata” to him or to myself & the sooner I can get away gracefully the happier I shall be. I’ll tell you about it someday but it is too stupid to write about. Train quarters & this cottage are a bit cramped for me! … How discouraging it is that we must creep in this world. I wonder if we walk in the next, if there is one!

  To Anna, ER explained her outburst in terms of one of FDR’s habits she despised: He enjoyed mixing stiff drinks that rendered his company at first loose-tongued, then uncontrollably looped:

  I will probably fly home in a day or two. I’d like to leave at once but I injudiciously told Father I always felt like a spoil sport & policeman here & at times elsewhere, because I lost my temper last night. He’s been giving Nan a cocktail every night & for two nights it went only a little to her head but it was so strong last night that she not only talked incessantly much to their amusement but couldn’t talk straight & I felt he did it on purpose tho’ he swears he didn’t. Anyway he needn’t make them so strong…. I just revolt physically from anyone in that condition & that makes her unhappy & yet I hate to be the one that keeps her from taking anything so I’d give the world and all to be out of the way quite aside from the fact that I’d like to be where I could have an eye on you young lady! Father says however if I leave before I have to he will feel hurt so! I’m an idiotic puritan & I wish I had the right kind of sense of humor & could enjoy certain things. At least, thank God
, none of you children have inherited that streak in me, it is as well to have some of Father’s ease & balance in these things….

  ER’s upset in a situation that recalled those uncontrollable days at healing spas in Europe with her father released long letters of introspection. The situation was “disagreeable,” but she noted, “I am behaving fairly well I think.” She credited Hick for what she considered her new forbearance in such situations:

  Between your efforts and mine, two grown people who ought long ago to be past all such foolishness, may be achieving something for themselves at last! I am glad at least I can laugh at myself even in my worst moments and I think you can also.

  Hick sought to bolster her spirits:

  Dearest: I don’t know what you did to Nan and the President, but I don’t believe you behaved very badly. Because it simply isn’t in you to behave very badly. The trouble is, dear, that most of us demand and expect too much of you—and this despite the fact that you really do give more of yourself to your friends than almost anyone else I ever knew. I suspect that at one time or another you’ve spoiled most of us. You did me. I say all this perfectly aware that I am the worst of the lot in the business of expecting and asking too much.

  But, darling, I’m trying not to be that way any more, and—I’m going to succeed. I only ask you to be a little patient…. Though, I don’t think you’d be letting me down if you did lose patience with me. Anyway, we’re, most of us, pretty selfish—and you mustn’t worry about behaving badly, because you don’t, really.

  ER replied: “Hick dearest, wouldn’t you, like every one else, spoil me if you could! Tommy will tell you, however, just how disagreeable I was. Nobody was demanding anything of me. I was lacking in a sense of humor!”

  Hick spent most of November touring pockets of poverty along the Mason-Dixon line. Everywhere the meanest sentiments prevailed. Schoolchildren starved while school lunches, which consisted of bread and soup, were reserved for those who had absolutely nothing at home. Also, the NRA was mostly ignored, and industry was planning to get it declared unconstitutional. A labor leader she respected told her that the NRA had “made about as much dent on industry as a sparrow’s bill could make on an alligator’s back!”

  On 18 December, ER’s holiday season was suspended and saddened by Mary Harriman Rumsey’s death. One of ER’s oldest friends, she was responsible for her first social activism in 1903, when she encouraged ER to join a small group of debutantes and college women who began to consider the poor. Mary Harriman founded the Junior League in 1901 and created the University Settlement House on Rivington Street where ER worked.

  A fountain of magnetic enthusiasm, she was compared to “that youthful, winsome spirit with which Maude Adams endowed Barrie’s Peter Pan—the boy who never grew up. She is volatile and effervescent….”

  An ardent patron of the arts, her life combined activism and sport. A member of one, of the first women’s polo teams, the Meadowlarks, Mary Harriman Rumsey was “one of the best horsewomen of her generation.” She arose at dawn on her birthday, Saturday 17 November, to join the Piedmont fox hunt near Middleburg, Virginia. But shortly after noon, her horse stumbled after clearing a stone fence, and rolled over her. Riding sidesaddle, clamped to her mount, she broke four ribs and fractured her right thigh. It did not seem life-threatening, but fatal complications developed.

  She died on 18 December with her three children, Frances Perkins, and her brother Averell at her bedside. FDR had just appointed Averell Harriman to replace Hugh Johnson as head of the NRA, and he always credited Mary for his career. She “lured him to Washington,” where, she said, the New Deal marched with “humor and humanity to create a secure future” for consumers and workers, and “to put industry in its proper place.”

  ER canceled all engagements for the next two days and sat with Frances Perkins during the funeral services at St. Thomas’s Church in Washington, then left with her that night for the burial at Arden.

  Mary Harriman Rumsey’s death was devastating to ER’s small circle of confidantes. Their laughter-lit “air our minds” luncheons would never be the same. Isabella Greenway wrote: “The color seems to be wiped from the face of life with the going of Mary. I miss her a thousand ways over the hours….”

  At her memorial ER contemplated the political loss of her “daring drive” just when the fight for economic and social security was under way, and the personal loss of her longtime ally, who believed as she did that “the sole reason for the existence of any government is to improve the condition of its citizens.”

  13: 1935: Promises and Compromises

  The year 1935 opened with such promise that ER proclaimed it an “epochal” year. FDR’s State of the Union address on 4 January was a fighting speech that radiated confidence and launched the second New Deal:

  Throughout the world, change is the order of the day…. In most nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal…. We seek it through tested liberal traditions….

  We find our population suffering from old inequalities…. In spite of our efforts … we have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged….

  We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear … the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well….

  FDR’s powerful rhetoric was backed by specific plans to achieve “a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life,” including “decent homes.” And he repeated his June 1934 promise to “place the security of men, women and children of the nation first” on the national agenda. Specifically, he promised “a definite program for putting people to work” and a security package that included “unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, benefits for children, for mothers, for the handicapped, for maternity care, and for other aspects of dependency.”

  Work would replace the dole. “To dole out relief … is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit…. Work must be found….” But not made work, leaf raking, paper removal, junk work; real work to promote dignity and self-respect at real wages.

  Initially social security legislation included work security, which was to be federally administered and not subject to the whims of state control where regional habits threatened race equity. The federal government would establish a vast program of public works, which would permanently improve “living conditions [and create] future new wealth for the nation.”

  These aspects of social security had long been demanded by the women’s social reform movement—by Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley. Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins were part of that movement, and now Frances Perkins chaired FDR’s cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security, which included Harry Hopkins.

  All winter their plans progressed, and ER invited her mentors to the White House to contribute their thoughts. Lillian Wald wrote Jane Addams three weeks before FDR’s address: “Most Beloved Lady … Mrs. R. acts truly as if she had been brought up in the Settlement. All the things we were wont to talk over in our conspiracies are important to her happiness.” Wald also observed FDR carefully, and concluded:

  [The president is] a wizard in many ways. I swear he is absolutely sincere and wants to get across the best things possible for the least personality on our continent…. It’s quite different of course than to have a great philosophy of economics or social fulfillment but he has the wish to have the country made a happy country for all who live therein….

  Of course he sees too many people and they don’t all advise alike and there are too many things that pull upon his attention but not much more than upon his wife’s. They do team work….

  On 17 January, FDR presented his social security package, which included unemployment compensation, old-age benefits, federal aid to dependent children “through grants to states for the support of existing mothers’ pens
ion systems and for services for the protection and care of homeless, neglected, dependent, and crippled children,” and federal aid to state and local public health agencies, with a strengthened Federal Public Health Service.

  In this speech, FDR still included work security, as championed by ER, the social workers, and Harry Hopkins—which correlated unemployment insurance “with public employment so that a person who has exhausted his benefits may be eligible for some form of public work.” The federal government was to assume half the cost of the old-age pension plan, “which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”

  Only on health care did FDR waffle from the beginning. The medical profession, well organized and devoutly opposed to “health insurance,” caused the president to withdraw that provision from the report submitted by his Committee on Economic Security. He announced simply: “I am not at this time recommending the adoption of so-called health insurance,” although he said he intended to work with cooperating medical groups to find a compromise.

  FDR wanted social security to be universal, simple, nondiscriminatory—as ER, Wald, Addams, and Harry Hopkins assumed it would be. According to Frances Perkins, FDR was adamant: “I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system.” It could all be operated out of post offices, just “simple and natural—nothing elaborate or alarming about it.” Every child at birth would receive a number; every unemployment claim and every old-age benefit would be delivered by the “rural free delivery carrier.” Social security was sent to Congress with FDR’s intentions clear: He did not intend to limit benefits to “just the industrial workers…. Everybody ought to be in on it….” But Congress greeted the legislation with acrimony; fierce debates raged throughout the spring.