Gellhorn wanted ER to understand that despite all propaganda, neither she nor any other journalist ever saw Russian troops:
I doubt if there are 500 Russians in Spain, not as many Russians as Americans. The Russians, like the Americans, come on private initiative as volunteers…. The ones whom I saw (I saw ten in all) are all technicians, engineers and aviators and munitions experts and writers….
In July, ER invited Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, and Joris Ivens to Hyde Park so that the president could meet them and see their film. Both ER and FDR were riveted by The Spanish Earth. Gellhorn wrote:
You did really like the film didn’t you? Joris and Ernest were very happy about it. They were also impressed that you and Mr. Roosevelt said to make it stronger… by underlining the causes of the conflict. I think [Harry Hopkins] was very moved by it. You were heavenly to us and I hope you liked my two trench buddies, both of whom I adore…. It’s awful hard to thank you adequately for all the good things you do….
But for all the presidential enthusiasm for the film, the pain in the bombings of Madrid and the village of Morata, the agony of the attack at Jarama, FDR never considered changing his policy on Spain, which at the time prohibited the shipping of even medical equipment and ambulances.
Domestically, labor tensions continued. ER spent an afternoon with Frances Perkins, who was severely attacked for her support of the sit-down strikers, especially for her contributions to Governor Murphy’s negotiations between the CIO and GM, which represented labor’s most dramatic victory and stimulated unionism in every industry. During the summer of 1937, there were hundreds of strikes, and organizers at every workplace.
ER wrote Hick, in praise of Perkins: “How men hate a woman in a position of real power!”
But on 24 July 1937, ER celebrated a great congressional victory for women: The hated Section 213, which she had editorialized against since 1933, was abandoned. Federally employed women would not again be fired because they were married to federally employed men: “I am particularly happy today” because the “so-called Married Persons clause of the Economy Act” was finally repealed. Part of her husband’s first act in office, it had caused “a great deal of hardship among government employees.”
ER warned, however, the debate still raged. She had just received mail from an organization that vowed to remove any married woman from the workforce “whose husband earns enough to support her.” ER was disgusted:
“Who is to say when a man earns enough…. Who is to say whether a woman needs to work… for the good of her own soul?”
ER refused to see a conflict between “a woman’s career and a woman’s home.” The reason for the ongoing conflict was that women’s needs were never considered: “A woman, just like a man, may have a great gift for some particular thing. That does not mean that she must give up the joy of marrying and having a home and children.” People had yet to consider how “women’s lives must be adjusted and arranged for in just the same way that men’s lives are.”
On her 12 May radio program with Rose Schneiderman, they discussed not only women’s right to work outside the home, but wages for housework. ER insisted: Wives and mothers needed at home “should receive a definite salary for their work.” A woman or girl at home “has a job just as surely as anyone who operates a machine in a factory.” And “if she is not needed at home, she loses out by not working.”
ER predicted that wages for housework would someday seem ordinary, and current resentment over women working in industry would disappear. Schneiderman agreed: “Can you imagine what would happen if the 11 million working women in the U.S. suddenly quit their jobs and just waited for the men to support them?”
In her July column ER continued the argument: Some women worked for financial reasons, some for emotional reasons.
This does not mean they are not good mothers and housekeepers, but they need some other stimulus in life…. It seems to me that the tradition of respect for work is so ingrained in this country… fathers have handed it down to their daughters as well as their sons.
ER predicted that the future guaranteed “respect for women who work.”
The family’s most significant 1937 milestone was Ethel du Pont and Franklin, Jr.’s, wedding. Surrounded by mean-spirited gossip, rumors of mergers between Liberty Leaguers and New Dealers, ER and FDR ignored it all. “Personally, I’m pretty immune!” ER worried only that the president did not steal the show, as her Uncle Theodore had at their wedding.
The 30 June wedding at Owl’s Nest, the du Pont family home in Greenville, Delaware, was sumptuous and long. ER left the receiving line to broadcast. She wrote Hick: “The church was beautiful but the house,—well, for a variety of reasons I found it a bit hard to swallow. I ran away for about an hour…. Well, it’s over and the future will be what it will be.”
At her weekly broadcast, for which she drove to Wilmington, ER said: “I don’t know whether to be happy or sad, but simply say prayers that fundamentally their lives may so develop that they may be useful lives and therefore happy ones.”
Ambivalent, if not cynical, about the possibility of happiness in marriage, ER considered it “a very lovely wedding,” but was always “torn” at such moments “between the realization of the adventure that two young things are starting on and its possibilities for good and bad.”
ER had a tooth infection at the time of the wedding and wrote four letters to Hick that weekend in which she sounded “dreadfully uncomfortable.” Hick noted that her pain “must have complicated an already burdensome situation…. Was there much drinking? I had an idea that there was.”
ER replied: “The wedding reception was all you surmised but I was only sorry for the children.”
According to James, FDR was particularly gay at Owl’s Nest: He “relished infiltrating the du Pont nest, flanked by such staunch New Deal aides as Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and Henry Morgenthau.” Pa enjoyed the food and champagne, and “kissed all the bridesmaids.” Even TR could not have taken up more space, nor had more fun. Surely his selection of companions—radical Hopkins, the” controversial secretary of labor, and the Jewish treasury secretary—appealed to FDR’s sense of mischief and merriment.
On the way home from Delaware, ER learned of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. ER wrote her daughter that she heard “about Amelia over the radio & felt even lower. I do like her and I’ll miss seeing her if she’s gone but perhaps she’d rather go that way. Life might not have held such a happy future for her.”
The mystery of Amelia Earhart’s Pacific disappearance during an around-the-world expedition, traveling with navigator Fred Noonan (an alcoholic who may or may not have been drinking), under risky weather conditions and unknown political conditions, has never been solved. ER’s words are equally mysterious. Did she refer to Earhart’s marital situation, or another reality we know as yet nothing about?*
The day she left, ER wrote:
All day I have been thinking of Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, and I hope she will make her flight safely. She is so utterly simple, which I suppose is an attribute of all great people. She never seems to think anything she does requires any courage….
ER had long been impressed by the woman who said in June 1928 that it would have been “too inartistic” to refuse her first transatlantic flight. She inspired ER to fly, and they had become friends. She stayed at the White House, attended Gridiron Widows parties, and was a confidante.
When Earhart was insulted by Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane after her successful 1935 long-distance flight, which introduced two-way radio communications, ER joined the groundswell of protest. Bess Furman sent her the details of Brisbane’s attack, which climaxed in his insistence that Earhart quit flying to have babies: “‘Six or seven children’ was ‘the real Earhart job’ [since] men and birds could fly.”
ER had helped facilitate arrangements for her final flight. Earhart’s husband and chief promoter, publisher George Palmer Putnam, was deeply grate
ful:
[After ER’s intervention] everything is in splendid shape. The Navy has been most cordial and helpful…. Indeed so have all the Departments. Incidentally, the President was kind enough to make possible the construction of an emergency landing field on a tiny pin-point of an island called Howland, just north of the Equator, half way between Honolulu and Australia. If all goes well, Amelia will be the first to use it…. That one feature of the flight is quite an adventure in itself.
After Earhart’s disappearance, Putnam wrote several letters to thank ER for her many kindnesses: “For you Amelia had a real devotion. Often I’ve heard her call you ‘the most intelligently civilized woman I know.’…”
On 7 July, ER wrote Hick that FDR was “not very hopeful that they will find Amelia. It just makes me sick.” Then on 20 July 1937, The New York Times announced the search had ended, and the “disappearance of Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick J. Noonan [had been] officially declared one of aviation’s mysteries.” The aircraft carrier Lexington had sent planes thousands of miles around Howland Island, and now returned to San Diego. The battleship Colorado, the minesweeper Swan, and the Coast Guard cutter Itasca were also ordered returned.
George Palmer Putnam still hoped for “a miracle,” but had no plans to charter a private yacht, since the Navy had been “so thorough.” ER was certain that Earhart’s last words were “I have no regrets” when her plane disappeared on 2 July 1937. The First Lady believed “to her it was worth the cost…. I only hope she went quickly and that she was not subjected to great pain.”
ER began her column with Amelia’s own words, written in 1934:
“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace,
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things….”
I am very sure that when she made the decision to go on this last trip, she had every possible risk in mind. I don’t suppose any of us ever really feel we are about to die, even though our reason tells us death may be waiting around the corner. I am quite sure she met death in the spirit of [her] poem…. This attitude is one which we must never forget, for a nation is poor indeed when it does not have men and women with this kind of spirit.
ER and others paid many tributes to the first woman of the air. Fannie Hurst saluted “her deathless spirit”:
We do not know where the corporeal Amelia Earhart of the slender boyish body, of the clear fearless eyes, of the tousled mane, may be at this moment. What I personally do feel, and think that the entire world feels… is that her bright transcendent spirit of valor, duty and idealism hovers over and blesses the century….
Jacqueline Cochran said that Amelia did not lose, “for her last flight was endless.”
July was a month of profound loss for the Roosevelts. Amelia Earhart’s disappearance was followed by the sudden death of Joseph Robinson, who had served with distinction as Senate majority leader and was the man FDR had depended on to move his Court reform plan forward. In sweltering Washington, where air-conditioning was still uncommon, tempers frayed and spirits sagged as Congress contemplated FDR’s “must” bill to enlarge the Supreme Court. Democrats were bitterly divided; Republicans were quiescent and enjoyed the disunity that rendered the 75th Congress a New Deal failure. Nothing had been achieved as FDR squandered his popularity on the Supreme Court business—even after the Supreme Court had responded to his pressure.
In a series of 5–4 decisions, with Justice Owen Roberts reversing himself, the Supreme Court finally upheld progressive and New Deal legislation. In March, Washington State’s minimum-wage law, similar to New York’s decreed unconstitutional the year before, was upheld. In April, Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act was affirmed. On 24 May, the Social Security Act was allowed. Suddenly the Court acknowledged that Congress and state governments had the power to protect the interests of the people.
Then, on 18 May, seventy-eight-year-old Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his resignation. FDR’s congressional team urged him to claim victory and withdraw his plan. But he refused. He had promised the first vacancy to his loyal floor manager Joe Robinson, who was a sixty-five-year-old conservative from Little Rock, known as a down-home diehard. It would be a defeat for the New Deal, FDR’s image, and his entire political gamble if he replaced one aged conservative justice with another.
The NAACP was horrified by the prospect of Robinson. Walter White wrote ER that rumors about Senator Robinson’s appointment stunned Negroes. He enclosed protesting editorials that “besieged” NAACP offices. ER sent them to her husband, who promised to call White.
Then suddenly, while action was pending on the Court bill, anguish erupted about racial discrimination that confronted Negroes at the PWA’s most celebrated projects, at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington and the Bonneville Dam near Portland, Oregon. NAACP field secretary William Pickens implored ER to address the situation, which had been ignored and left to fester for years: “The grossest and meanest discrimination” existed at Grand Coulee Dam, “against both colored American employees and visitors. The Negro workers cannot get their food at the common eating places… or by the concessionaires, unless they ‘eat in the kitchen’ or other insulting segregated corners.” Also, workers were not permitted to live in Mason City, the official Grand Coulee Dam city, and “must tramp the weary miles to and from work.”
Pickens was indignant that the U.S. government made no effort to change contractors and prevent further discrimination: Could not the U.S. government arrange its contracts “for which the money of the people is being spent, subject to the plain provisions of the 14th amendment… and the common laws of humanity?” Pickens suggested a clause to forbid federal contracts to discriminate in employment and accommodations against Americans regardless of “race, color, creed, or politics.”
ER forwarded his letter to Ickes, with a query: “What should be done?” She was informed that Bonneville Dam was under the jurisdiction of the War Department, but that Interior would investigate the situation at the Grand Coulee Dam. Ultimately, Ickes removed the ranger responsible for insulting Pickens by sending his party to the back of a line and issued an order to contractors to end their discriminatory practices. That June 1937 decision was the beginning of a long and sustained crusade against federal discrimination.
Then on 14 June the Senate Judiciary Committee “damned” FDR’s Court plan with a vehemence that shocked the press. Columnists Doris Fleeson and John O’Donnell were stunned that Democrats “would scourge themselves into an emotional frenzy to denounce” the most popular head of their party. To some it sounded like a call for impeachment.
The debate raged for weeks. Joe Robinson tried to manage the Senate floor. He made appeals, offered compromises, avoided a filibuster. After long brutal days, he left the Senate emotionally and physically drained. He was found dead of a heart attack on the morning of 14 July. By his bed were the pages of the previous day’s blistering debate. Progressive senator Burton Wheeler thundered that FDR should now withdraw his plan, “lest he appear to be fighting against God.”
On 15 July, ER left Hyde Park on the midnight train for Washington. Senator Robinson, she wrote, “was a loyal and devoted friend who fought under the party banner, sometimes subordinating his own preferences to those of the majority.” The Senate funeral “was impressive,” and many on both sides “truly mourned Joe Robinson, the man.” Curiously, neither ER nor FDR went to Little Rock. That decision made FDR seem ungrateful, or careless.
As the congressional train returned from Little Rock, there were caucuses in every compartment. Vice President John Garner, who had unprecedentedly absented himself during the debate to protest both FDR’s stubbornness on the Court and his silence on the sit-down strikes, went from car to car to assess the situation. The temper of Congress was clear; the game was over. FDR was defeated.
The president did not acknowledge defeat; he had lost the battle, but won the war. In fact, FDR had achieved a major constitutional transformation th
at promised economic justice and workers’ rights. Under his threat, the Court reformed itself and for the first time legitimized national action for the common good. His great victory was to put the force of the national government, and the Supreme Court, behind the century-long struggle against discrimination, unbridled greed, and states’ rights.
But it was a costly war. Democrats and liberal Republicans were in disarray and angry. In that overheated climate of discontent, FDR again called for a balanced budget and instituted new cuts in the most needed programs. He thereby derailed the drive toward a New Deal for poor and struggling Americans.
ER wrote another column to object to her husband’s decision: While she, like all women, understood the need to pay one’s bills each month, “I do hope that in this budget-balancing business we make our economies without making people suffer who are in need of help. There are wise and unwise economies….”
FDR’s summer 1937 budget cuts resulted in immediate deflation. By summer’s end, the country was plunged into a deep recession. FDR’s rhetorical concerns for significantly improved social security services and housing reform subsided. Economists disagree about how much FDR’s policies contributed to the renewed recession, but there is no doubt his 1937 strategy curtailed the impact of the only two remaining New Deal bills still pending, which ER most championed: The Wagner-Steagall housing bill to build low-cost housing passed with its budget halved; and the Bankhead-Jones farm tenancy bill, to assist and encourage farm ownership among sharecroppers and tenant farmers through low-cost loans, was severely underfunded.
The bilious spirit surrounding the Court controversy spilled onto every issue. FDR believed the people were still with him, but the people were confused, and discouraged by his silence during the summer violence against strikers. He said nothing about the Memorial Day massacre, and then new blood was spilled in Youngstown. Tom Girdler, chosen by Republic Steel and the “little steel” companies to break the union, was eager to bludgeon the CIO’s advance. With bullets and tear gas he succeeded.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 66
