Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  In December, Hick spent many days rereading their vast correspondence in Louis Howe’s room:

  Today I stumbled into a lot of the early letters, written while I was still with the AP. Dear, whatever may have happened since—whatever may happen in the future—I was certainly happy those days, much happier, I believe, than many people ever are in all their lives. You gave me that, and I’m deeply grateful. There were other times, too—many, many of them.

  It was painful for Hick to read those early letters and confront so much passion spent. Now their relationship was neither routine nor tumultuous; moments of longing and loneliness were largely passed. Those hectic romantic times when they abandoned discretion in order to spend a week or weekend with each other in some secluded inn were over.

  Hick wondered what to do with the letters when she was finished. “Throw them away? In a way, I’d like to keep them, or have them kept somewhere. They constitute a sort of diary, as yours to me probably do, too. They might be of some use when I get around to that biography. What do you think?”

  ER’s interests, priorities, emotional needs had changed. Her political commitments now eclipsed all private considerations. But she valued their correspondence, expected Hick to write her biography, and never considered discarding the letters.

  Hick was happy to report that she did not really mind “reading them so much today, although some of them make me feel a little wistful. I don’t suppose anyone can ever stay so happy as I was that first year or so, though. Do you?…

  “Goodnight, dear. You have been swell to me these last four years, and I love you—now and always.”

  *ER wrote the producers to suggest Mrs. McDuffie for the role eventually played by Hattie MacDaniel.

  21: Second Chance for the New Deal

  FDR returned from his cruise on 15 December. At dinner that very night ER showed him a letter Hilda Smith had sent about her conversation with a Washington taxi driver, who said: “It is nice to know, isn’t it, that the American people have so much intelligence. Moreover, they have a long memory.”

  The driver had been a glass-bottle blower in Pennsylvania whose employer committed suicide when the banks failed. His company’s workers, three hundred men, were dismissed. He was on the road for two years; he stood on breadlines, slept in parks. In 1933 he arrived in FDR’s Washington, worked hard, got a taxi, and moved to Virginia to be able to vote: “I never cared before who was President…. It takes a hungry man to appreciate Roosevelt.”

  This election was about the working people of America. FDR’s promises could not be achieved by cutting the budget, or downsizing WPA. ER was disturbed by her husband’s first postelection decision to trim and cut. The election mandate, she insisted, was to push for the larger goals in housing, work security, and racial justice. They were the themes ER emphasized in her busy correspondence between the election and inauguration. Also, she introduced a subject we would now call “affirmative action.”

  She wrote Jim Farley about her visit with black Philadelphia activist and writer Crystal Bird Fauset, who reported that black women WPA administrators were disproportionately fired:

  There are 500 more colored women relief cases … than white…. But in the supervisory capacity, there have always been a great many more white than colored. So in cutting down [Fauset and her allies] have tried to bring it a little more into line. However, they have left in every case the two to one ratio, meaning two white women to one colored woman in a supervisory capacity. This seems entirely fair as … there are more colored women in actual need of work to support their children…. This is going to happen all over the country….

  ER urged Farley to speak directly with Senator Guffey, who “has a big colored constituency and I think he would perhaps want to consider it.” She concluded: “There is one other point that I should like to emphasize—we did make a tremendous play for the colored vote, and we got it, but we got it because they thought on the whole we were fairer….” The Negro vote went to FDR ten to one, and ER wanted that trust honored by Democrats—especially by her husband.

  He had agreed to an article placed in The Crisis by the Democratic National Committee, “Roosevelt the Humanitarian,” which celebrated him as a pioneer in race relations “who spread true Democracy” and ended government rule exclusively “by and for the few powerful, rich men.” PWA, WPA, NYA, and CCC benefited hundreds of thousands of Negroes, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation saved homes and farms. “FDR is America’s second emancipator.” ER now wanted those words written by his publicists translated into new action.

  ER believed that FDR could now be “independent” of Southern Democrats, since the South had voted out the most vigorous “bigots,” including South Carolina’s Ed Smith and Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge. However much the race question seemed to FDR too hot to handle, the very fact that the First Lady spoke so publicly and earnestly served to change the nature of the political landscape. During the campaign, race became a political factor in unprecedented ways. While FDR’s advisers continued to worry about the impact of ER’s racial concerns on Southern Democrats, they were the significant losers of 1936.

  For the first time, hundreds of thousands of blacks who were able to vote left the party of Lincoln and voted Democrat. For the first time black Americans were actually involved in the national democratic process. There was reason to believe that Roosevelt’s reelection might begin to end, even in the South, the worst aspects of an economy that kept black Americans landless and economically marginal.

  ER was in New York on Friday, 18 December, when FDR held his cabinet meeting, and was cheered when she heard of a “surprising” turn of events. Vice president Garner “suddenly, out of a clear sky,” bowed to each Southern cabinet member and said: “With all due respect to you… and although I live in Texas and all my ancestors came from [the South], I am in favor of an anti-lynching law.” The cabinet seemed to agree, and Ickes noted: “It begins to look as if real justice and opportunity for the Negro at long last might begin to come … at the hands of the Democratic Party….”

  It was, for ER, a very hopeful sign: Uncertain of her husband’s plans, particularly on matters of race and relief, she had confided to Elinor Morgenthau immediately after the election: “As you know I rather dread the future, but they may… manage better than I dare hope!”

  But when she pressed her husband for his response and urged him again to make a public statement on the antilynch issue, he refused. FDR had returned exhausted from his trip, and depressed by Gus’s death. He had little patience for ER’s agenda. His first order of business was to achieve an embargo around Spain in the name of “complete neutrality” and a campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize for Cordell Hull. FDR believed “no one deserves it more than Cordell and he should have had it this year instead of Saavedra Lama.”

  Spain was to be an agonizing issue between ER and FDR, and incomprehensible to his more liberal advisers. Not only did FDR seek an absolute embargo against the democratic government of Spain, his State Department in August announced that American exporters and American ships had the right to land supplies in Spanish ports held by Franco’s rebels. This despite U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers’s report that Franco’s forces were “the same element as that opposing your administration.” Like Dodd in Germany, Bowers was an historian who did his own research. He believed the fascists were hated, and doomed to fail. He wrote FDR on 26 August 1936, “the thing will be over soon.” But that was before FDR’s “neutrality” blockaded and strangled Republican Spain, while his State Department allowed oil and supplies to Franco’s troops.

  Given the Supreme Court’s ongoing opposition to the New Deal, there was a bitter irony in the fact that the Court actually gave FDR executive authority over foreign affairs. To support either side of a conflict, the Court ruled, FDR had freedom of action “in this vast external realm” of international relations. The Supreme Court’s decision involved an embargo against Bolivia and Paraguay, at war in the Chaco jungles duri
ng 1934. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation sued for the right to sell machine guns to Bolivia. The Court held that international powers did not derive from the states, but resided in the nation, and the “important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems” of international negotiation required the president to have “a degree of discretion and freedom … which would not be admissible were domestic affairs alone involved.” FDR did not actually need congressional authority for an embargo, nor for the right to supply the legitimate elected Popular Front government. Those decisions were entirely his.

  Although FDR’s sympathies were thought to be with the democratically elected government, his aggressive embargo policy devoured its ability to survive. In September he wrote Bowers: “What an unfortunate and terrible catastrophe in Spain!” FDR agreed with Claude Bowers’s report that the press falsified news from Spain:

  You are right about the distortion of the news …Over here the Hearst papers and most of the conservative editors are playing up all kinds of atrocities on the part of what they call the Communist government in Madrid—nothing about atrocities on the part of [the Franco] rebels.

  Determined to ignore German and Italian military support for Franco, FDR insisted on “our complete neutrality in regard to Spain’s own internal affairs.”

  Actually, he agreed with William Bullitt, who saw Spain as a key battlefield in the competition between expanding communist influence and expanding fascist influence. Bullitt preferred the latter. Horrified by his months in Moscow, Bullitt was now the U.S. ambassador to France, eager to achieve a Franco-German alliance. On 8 November 1936, he wrote FDR: “The war in Spain, as you know, has become an incognito war between the Soviet Union and Italy.”

  The Spanish Civil War persuaded Europeans “that there is such a thing as European civilization… [which] may be destroyed by war or Bolshevism.” To unite Europe against communism, Bullitt now urged FDR to “assist diplomatically” in a reconciliation between France and Nazi Germany. Bullitt did not want a “grand gesture”—just some quiet work to “prepare the ground” and the prompt removal of William Dodd from Berlin. Bullitt wanted America’s most outspoken anti-Nazi ambassador replaced by career diplomat Hugh Wilson. Bullitt was blunt: “Dodd has many admirable and likable qualities, but… he hates the Nazis too much to be able to do anything with them or get anything out of them. We need in Berlin someone who can at least be civil to the Nazis and speaks German perfectly….” Dodd spoke German, but he opposed a Franco-Nazi alliance, and was useless as a diplomat.

  While Spain exploded, the First Couple’s own family geography was unsettled. FDR returned home convinced that his son James was perfect to fill the empty spaces left by Louis Howe and Gus Gennerich. It was an impossible task for anyone, and ER was dismayed by her husband’s blithe assumptions about his son’s future. She wrote Anna that James had arranged for another New York State trooper for FDR “to try out,” and James would begin his new post as secretary on 15 January. But: “I am saying nothing these days & Pa has no time to be talked to except on matters of business!”

  After saying nothing for several weeks, evidently out of respect for FDR’s state of mourning, ER finally “protested vehemently.” She told FDR it was “selfish to bring James down”; and told them both that she was not only “unhappy” about their decision but “appalled.”

  ER had always opposed special privileges for her children, but she was virtually isolated in her opposition to many family decisions. The children were spoiled by their grandmother who was generally supported by FDR, and ER’s worries and sense of correctness were usually dismissed as overbearing and unnecessary. James wanted to work with his father. He enjoyed politics, and his father’s company. He especially enjoyed his role as FDR’s responsible eldest son, who served with distinction and protective intelligence.

  Proudly, FDR detailed James’s new chores as presidential secretary, at the rank of Stephen Early and Marvin McIntyre. He was to be liaison to the “little cabinet” and coordinate the activities of twenty agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the WPA, the Housing Authority, the Federal Reserve Board, the Social Security Board, the Maritime Commission, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Federal Power Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Veterans Administration, the Civil Service Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

  It was a bit much, and he was called the “Crown Prince,” and the “Assistant President.” ER had only one ally in opposition, FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano.

  Although his health failed and his marriage floundered, James considered it the happiest time of his life. It was the only time he and FDR had time to do “father-and-son things together.” It was for ER a significant ordeal. That FDR returned too busy to speak with his wife about personal matters was one thing. That she increasingly learned about his political intentions from her son was another. On 16 December, she wrote Anna: “J told me & if true I think it diverting, they plan to make Harry Hopkins Sec of War to reorganize the Dept till Congress creates a Dept of Welfare or whatnot when Harry will go in there! A pacifist in the War Dept is funny, now isn’t it?”

  Embatded and distressed at home, ER sought comfort elsewhere. Shortly after FDR’s return, she went to Val-Kill with Earl. She wanted to walk in the snow, take long vigorous horseback rides through the woods. The more difficult ER’s family situation became, the more she turned to Earl, and again to Hick. Needed and wanted as she had not been for a long time, Hick responded with renewed warmth. Moreover, Hick was in a better mood. Her new job and time away with good friends had refortified her own sense of self. With new friends Hendrik van Loon and his son Willem, and Bill and Ella Dana, Hick was no longer dependent on ER and often seemed now practically carefree.

  She was patient about ER’s unexpected schedule changes. She accepted the primacy of ER’s children’s needs, especially when they were in extremis—as FDR, Jr., was all that season. She became almost gracious about all the people, old and new, in ER’s life. Bernard Baruch, for example, entered ER’s letters more and more frequently: “Such a joke. Mr. Baruch bought me a superlative vanity case for Xmas but the catch was broken so he took it back but you can think how much I need cigarettes, lip stick and powder in a light tortoise shell case!”

  ER also turned to new allies, new organizations. Interested in sharecroppers and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, ER wanted Mary McLeod Bethune to be appointed to the new presidential study committee on farm tenancy. It was a thirty-eight-member committee, chaired by Henry Wallace, whose initial disinterest in race and the plight of the sharecropper changed after he made a fact-finding Southern tour. Surprised by the dire poverty he witnessed, Wallace was now eager to make amends for the damage done by AAA crop reduction programs. Florida’s liberal senator Claude Pepper supported the First Lady, and Bethune was appointed.

  Within the administration, and with ER’s support, Bethune did more than any single individual to move the race agenda forward. Bethune invited ER to address a January conference, sponsored by the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs, which she now chaired. Planned with Aubrey Williams, the Conference on Government Policies and the Problems and Future of the Negro and Negro Youth was to be momentous. Bethune wrote ER: “Negroes all over the country so fully believe in you that it would mean much … to have your counsel.”

  ER attended and spoke at the three-day conference, which focused on economic security, educational opportunity, improved health and housing, and equal protection under the law. Grateful for her presence and “valuable contribution,” Bethune wrote:

  You may well understand that this is the most significant conference ever held by a Negro group in connection with the Government…. It marks a new epoch and a very decided forward step…. A note of harmony and understanding was struck… that we have never before heard…. The recommendations present a unified voice o
f the twelve million Negroes of this country. Surely a new day has dawned.

  On 21 December, ER hosted the annual Gridiron Widows party, working with Elinor Morgenthau and Betty Lindley on the entertainments. Held since 1933, ER’s party for women journalists and public officials coincided with the men-only Gridiron party and tended to be just as much fun, and quite as silly. Over the years some spice was added to the parodies, but they were never scathing.

  In 1934, ER participated in the first costume party. According to Bess Furman, it was “a night of sheer delight,” and the First Lady stole the show when she appeared in complete disguise for her skit as Apple Mary, based on a film character. Her tattered rags were so dingy, her makeup so amazing, she was unrecognizable. In fact, the chief White House usher made a move to stop her.

  As the lights went up, she sat under a large umbrella, rocked back and forth, muttered, and keened. Oh so cold; oh so hungry: “Oh, the divvil, the divvil!”

  Thereupon a red devil in red leotards and tail leaped onto the stage. Anna looked hard at Apple Mary and recognized her mother: “So it has come to this! To keep yourself in the headlines you even disguise as an old Apple Woman!”

  Apple Mary was apologetic: It had seemed “such a good way to see people.”

  But the devil was harsh and forced her to return to her role as First Lady and endure the ordeals of her position, for three scenes: In an effort to remain inconspicuous and knit on a train, she was mobbed by autograph hounds. At the airport she was laden with flowers in impossible profusion. In her own car she was hounded by an obnoxious motorist who sought to keep abreast of her. ER went faster and faster but the obnoxious motorist kept up with her, all the while hurling mean comments about her children. This was achieved by ER and Anna in a race astride rapidly moving chairs.