On 5 January 1934, precisely one year before Morgenthau’s great betrayal, ER had made a vivid and stirring address before the District of Columbia branch of the American Association for Social Security, which was broadcast nationally. She assumed Americans had already “accepted” the “merits of old age pensions,” to replace the situation in most states where the poor and aged were treated in “a terrible way—through poorhouses.”
She told of a family in her own village of Hyde Park: Annually, she drove this “old family—two old sisters and two old brothers—who had lived on a farm not far from us” to vote. Then one election day, she arrived to find one sister in tears because one brother had died, and the other “brother had been taken to the insane asylum”—undone by financial worry. There was no food, no money for taxes, and they were about to lose the family farm. She “was waiting to go to the poorhouse,” where her sister “had already gone.”
ER felt that she had been a dreadful neighbor, and also that the “whole community was to blame.” They were a generous family, who gave “to the church and to the charities.” They had always “done what good citizens should do and they simply had never been able to save. There had always been someone in the family who needed help; some young person to start….”
Old people, ER argued, should be allowed to live in their own homes, with dignity and respect. “And I think it costs us less in the end.”
How, ER wondered, could we be “happy knowing that throughout this country” countless people suffered so? That agricultural workers, domestic and service workers, teachers, seamen, nurses, and government workers might now remain uncovered by a social security law that excluded them was intolerable to ER.
On 27 February 1935, ER told her press conference the social security bill was just a “start.” She was certain that changes would occur “year by year, in as big an undertaking as this.” She hoped to see “a permanent ban on child labor, better unemployment insurance, better health care for the country as a whole, better care for mothers and children generally,” and a New Deal for youth and labor. “Labor must share to a greater extent and receive a fairer return for its part in the world’s work,” and “capital [must] accept the fact of a more limited and reasonable return.”
From February to May, Congress negotiated the social security bill onto, the floor for debate. During that time there were many private meetings, painful negotiations, White House dinners where agreements were made, and lost. It was, judging from ER’s letters to Hick, the winter and spring of her discontent. From the World Court to the antilynch bill to Morgenthau’s message, ER was in an unusual state of gloom.
In January, Hick was alone in New York, where she had dental surgery. ER, in Washington, had “a good talk with your boss [Harry Hopkins] last night, who does seem to know what FDR wants him to do and to like it. He says he’ll probably have work for you by the end of the week so I hope you will be healed and well.” ER thought that if they had been together the hard days “might have been pleasant” despite Hick’s “pain and discomfort.”
Here I hardly count anything in the way of personal contacts pleasant! Dear, I wish it could be a joy when we meet and are together and not such keen unhappiness but there is always the balance to everything until one gets to a certain kind of numbness. I saw my grandmother reach that after repeated blows and she retained her sweetness and ability to enjoy sun and flowers and children and whatever good things came to her. I suppose that is what we should all pray for.
Clearly depressed, she wrote Hick that she felt exhausted and found herself resting and napping. After she read ER’s letter, Hick called to apologize for adding to her troubles by describing her surgical ordeal.
ER was glad for their talk:
I don’t know why you think it egoism to tell me about Saturday’s pain. I would hate it if you didn’t and [would] always wonder what really went on and what you hid! It is good advice not to fight things, that I’m sure about. It is what I do so much down here and what makes life hard for those around me! Don’t worry over the [Arthurdale] Stories. I don’t bother at all about them except in the fact that they will hurt the Homesteaders or Louis. It is more fun to help a few people and stick to a job and see results but again life carries you and you must take what chances it gives you and not kick against the pricks! I do it all the time though I know it is futile!
Then, ER, who always wrote her own speeches and columns and never accepted anyone’s offer to ghostwrite her words, revealed the depths of her anguish: She was to broadcast on “a day in the White House,” and for the first time she asked Hick: “Would you like to write it?” Hick declined, and ER replied to her lost letter:
I know how you feel about the White House and it is partly my fault because I have no enjoyment in my life here and you feel it and think I mind more than I really do. I’ve lived so much of my life “going thro” and being relieved when certain periods are over and yet I don’t really mind. I’m just kind of cold about it and that makes me cold to those around! …
ER still hoped for greater happiness with Hick:
If you and I work together someday, I think we’ll have a swell time and if we steal a day or two away here and there and vacation in summer we’ll be having more than our share of good times!
I am perfectly well again and don’t need rest anymore….
FDR had contributed to ER’s changed mood. Worried about his wife’s depression, FDR made a point to present her with the first good news she had had in a long time: Congress would pass the $4 billion work relief appropriations bill within the next two weeks, and then he would “settle where [the] homesteaders go.”
Although the bill did not actually pass until April, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiated a massive public works program that employed millions of Americans in exciting and useful projects. It was initially to have been the work security part of the social security bill, to guarantee jobs through federally supported public works as a supplement to unemployment insurance. WPA was actually FDR’s compromise to Hopkins’s vision of full employment as an entitlement in the social security package, which ER had supported. ER considered WPA a tangible victory, but only a “stop-gap,” temporary and insufficient. She deplored especially the relief aspect of it, which continued the means test and social worker investigations that required destitution before consideration. But it was a beginning and would prevent many human tragedies.
Given ER’s mostly sour mood throughout January, Hick decided to recuperate from her dental surgery at the Danas’ place on Long Island. ER was pleased: “They are wise people and real people & it is nice to have them as friends.” Besides, at the moment ER had little to offer:
Dear one, it is a gray and gloomy day! How I envied Elliott and Ruth, their youth and their dreams…. I have a curious feeling of being thru with dreams, old age really setting in. Old age is really nothing worse than that, having no more faith in the future, no dreams! I guess it is the day, for as you well know no one plans fuller into the future than I do and that does require faith!
These were hard times between ER and Hick. Hick was needy, and lonely. Her WPA assignment pending, there was nothing in particular she really cared to do. ER was also lonely, but preoccupied, and they were apart for weeks. Hick ruminated about her life’s choices. She was only forty-two, but she felt very old, or at least worried about becoming old, and dependent. Like many single women, she had arranged her entire life to be self-sufficient. She believed in hard work, and she liked to work hard. Then, like many wives and women in love, with one dramatic flourish she had relinquished her hold on all she had achieved. She had done it for love, and out of a sense of loyalty. There was no way she could have pursued both her journalistic interest in the First Lady and her friendship with the First Lady.
ER had helped her find challenging, important jobs appropriate to her skills. But Hick never enjoyed her new work. The kind of respect and admiration she had had as a journalist now seemed filtered through
her friendship with ER. Moreover, she no longer worked for people whom she understood completely. Although her work was often praised, and even influential, she never had a sense that it made a difference. Her words were neither published nor widely available. She had become anonymous. She was a newshawk without a newspaper, a writer without readers. A woman whose days were spent mostly alone, waiting for an hour or an evening, for a phone call or a letter from the only woman she cared to be with.
In the country, at the Danas’ place, with time to reflect, she wondered about the rhythms of her life, her own chemistry and longings, her life’s choices. Increasingly, thoughts of the future frightened her. As she had the year before, when she visited with Ella Morse and her husband, Roy Dickerson, Hick wondered if it might have been better to be a wife and mother. She confided her concerns to ER: Her professional life was in tatters; she faced a future of economic insecurity, in a climate that seemed to devalue or punish single women, alone and childless. Might not all anxieties evaporate, might not everything be transformed into comfort, if not luxury, were she to marry?
Whatever the actual words of Hick’s fantasy, in a letter now lost, there were many benefits to be derived from such a solution. If she were to consent to be supported financially, she would also be protected by the mantle of society’s approval. Many women not otherwise inclined, but without economic security, made that choice. There was much to be said for marital privilege, and ER replied:
Of course you should have had a husband and children and it would have made you happy if you loved him and in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings and given you someone in whom to lavish the love and devotion you have to keep down all the time. Yours is a rich nature with so much to give that the outlets always seem meager. Dear one, I do love you and appreciate the fight you make not to make me unhappy, but there is no use trying to hide things from me because I know just how you feel!
ER’s own feelings were just then ruffled by wild press criticism. Accused of personal ambitions, lust for power, and unseemly political interference, she patiently explained that she did whatever she did because it was right and just and fair, and had to be done: “How I hate doing these things and then they say someday I’ll run for an office. Well, I’d have to be chloroformed first!” But if she could improve these terrible “conditions even a little bit I suppose it is worth it….”
ER and Hick spent some part of the weekend before Valentine’s Day together, and ER wrote: “Dear, it meant so much to have even that little time with you and it does give me so much more than you know in a sense of closeness and warmth. I love you very dearly.”
From February to April, while social security and the $4 billion WPA bill languished in Congress, ER continually pressed FDR for a bold demonstration of leadership to fight the conservatives of his own party and traditional Southern trimmers. At dinner with Molly Dewson ER was fascinated to see that her husband “gets much less annoyed at her when she tells him things are wrong than he does at me!” That night, they both urged FDR to take a more active public role on the stalled legislation which was to define the second New Deal. He was determined to stay out of it but he wanted Hick to investigate the political climate, to “verify all the most glaring ward violations,” and the people’s real sentiments. Hick agreed to return to Washington for conferences: “Mabel [ER’s upstairs maid] is so pleased you’ll be here the 23d. She says she misses you so much….”
That February, ER’s letters were songs of duality. She yearned for Hick’s company, yet was relieved when they were apart. ER frequently seemed unaware of the impact her words might have on Hick’s already low spirits. From Cornell ER wrote: “Dear I wish you were with me, I was homesick for you in Ithaca. But you would hate the crowds and the telephones and the fawning….”
With Earl the next day: “Dearest I have had a nice time and I love seeing Earl but I miss you too. One never seems to have everything at once! … Earl has a new girl, he is becoming or is in love with…. What a nuisance hearts are and yet without them life would hardly be worth while! … I love you dear, bless you sleep sweetly and won’t it be grand to see you Friday.”
ER’s last February days at Hyde Park with FDR, his mother, seveal children, Nan, and Marion were highlighted by a “really big snow storm—–I love the country in winter! [and] F seems to be having a grand time.” ER had such a pleasant conversation “with Mama for over an hour,” she felt completely restored and persuaded Hick to spend most of March and April with her in Washington.
Hick had hesitated, which ER understood since “in Washington your sense of loneliness is intensified by having few old friends and being in a place you don’t like with the only person you would like to see tied down to a very exacting job most of the time!” But ER could not leave Washington just then because Louis Howe seemed near death. FDR too had postponed his cruise because of Howe, and was now scheduled to leave on a ten-day Caribbean jaunt with Vincent Astor on 26 March.
While FDR sailed on the Nourmahal, ER and Hick spent the first two weeks of April together. Closer to congressional tension over social security and “the big bill,” as WPA was known, ER found little comfort in FDR’s notes from the Nourmahal:
Dearest Babs … just fun—wonderful weather and smooth seas and I am already much tanned….
The news from Washington about the Big Bill is most confusing, and I get long contradictory appeals for all kinds of action by me! It is as well to let them try to work it out themselves, I think….
ER was particularly mindful of the NAACP’s opposition to “Lily-White Social Security.” In March, NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, published George Edmund Haynes’s essay detailing his testimony before both the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Except for old-age insurance, which was to be federally regulated, all management was to be left to the states—which, wrote Haynes, meant disaster for Negro citizens. The bill’s purpose “is to alleviate the hazards of old age, unemployment, illness and dependency.” But it was a defective insult, because “all domestic and personal servants are excluded from unemployment provisions,” and it is “proposed to exempt farmers … thus eliminating tenant farmers….” Ultimately, “about three-fifths of all Negroes gainfully employed will not be benefited at all.”
To avoid the creation of social security for whites only, Haynes argued for “non-discrimination” clauses for certain titles: Title I, “dealing with old age [insurance]”; Title II, “dealing with allotments for dependent children”; Title III and IV, “dealing with unemployment and old age annuities [for poor people, not covered in Title I]”; Title VII, providing “maternal and child health”; and Title VIII, “providing for allotments to local and public health programs.”
“This legislation is so vital to Negro men, women, and children and to peaceable race relations that every lover of fair play” needed to rally and support antidiscrimination provisions.
ER routinely distributed Crisis articles. In 1934, for example, she sent Donald Richberg, director of the NRA and the National Emergency Council, John Davis’s charges of discrimination (”NRA Codifies Wage Slavery” and “TVA: Lily-White Reconstruction”) and asked if they were true. After weeks of correspondence, she wrote Donald Richberg: “I hope you will try to see that justice is done….” ER also expected justice to be done concerning social security.
But by mid-April, the only New Deal effort that seemed to move forward was Arthurdale. ER drove there with Nancy Cook, and was gratified to see the progress made by so many people who worked so hard. ER wanted everybody to appreciate how much ordinary people could do for themselves when they were given a chance and were not ridiculed, degraded, or belittled. ER’s commitment to Arthurdale was heartfelt, and a genuine bond developed between her and the everyday people whose homes she walked into with so little pretense, and so much love. ER hated ceremony. The days she enjoyed most were those that had “very little ‘first lady’ about it, just simple and kindly hospitality and welcome.”
But while entire communities such as Arthurdale might appreciate her support, Republican press attacks against her escalated. These rarely bothered her: “Every president and his family go through it and afterwards it is forgotten.”
She was, however, sensitive to criticisms by her own family. On her return from Arthurdale, ER spent a “free” day in New York: She took Elizabeth Read to lunch; went with Elinor Morgenthau to the Neighborhood Playhouse to see a “very modern and moving” student dance company; visited with Cousin Susie, who had become a recluse and distrusted everybody; “took Tiny and Eddie to dinner.” At some point, she spent a moment with her mother-in-law.
Their exchange added to ER’s bitter spring. It began with an impulsive remark about the 1936 election. After a winter of relative peace between them, ER confided to “Mama that it would not break my heart if F were not elected.” It was an act of simple trust about a fleeting feeling, and ER was horrified. But as she left the room, SDR turned to James and asked, “Do you think Mother will do anything to defeat Father? Is that why she stays in politics just to hurt his chances of reelection?”
ER indignantly wrote Hick, “Now I ask you, after all these years?” After thirty years, to be precise; and ER was devastated. Her old sense of being misunderstood, an outcast in the bosom of her own family, returned. It was incomprehensible that Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had worked so closely with ER on so many projects, from the WTUL to the Henry Street Settlement, to the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, to the Bethune-Cookman College, could still doubt ER’s loyalty to her son—to his ambitions, his vision, his well-being.
Characteristically, ER blamed herself for letting down her guard and trusting her mother-in-law with her doubts and innermost feelings as she contemplated all the legislation she cared about stalled by FDR’s Southern strategy. Filled with anguish and disappointment that he had refused to speak out more vigorously from January through April as she had urged him to do, she confided in her mother-in-law—who used it to attack her. ER never let it happen again. FDR’s mother would always be his champion and defender; she would remain his primary goad, and conscience.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 37
