Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  On 30 June, FDR finally responded to John L. Lewis’s appeals to speak out. He did, quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.” Hoping to forestall labor’s rage, he later explained he meant to condemn the “extremists” of both houses. FDR wrote vice president Garner, whose antagonism was reserved exclusively for unionists, that he was “very confident” his strategy had created “the right psychology on the public as a whole. They are pretty sick of [both unionist and Girdler] extremists.”

  But the people were not equally divided, and FDR’s rejection of unionists under siege threatened to separate him from his largest democratic base.

  At the same time, ER publicly endorsed the CIO when she attended a picnic at the Heywood Brouns’ for members of the Newspaper Guild. Then she hailed Hallie Flanagan’s Living Newspaper on housing, “One Third of a Nation,” as “truly excellent.” With Ellen Woodward ER opposed cuts in both WPA arts and women’s programs.

  While FDR remained locked in budget battles in Washington, ER spent several weeks at Val-Kill. She read, gardened, ruminated; rode her horse Dot through an army of mosquitoes, until she gave it up when horse and rider returned covered by bites and blood. With Earl, she tried her hand at archery, which she found complicated but challenging.

  For all their disagreements, ER was sympathetic to her husband’s lonely struggle. Without keen advisers to protect him during his first year without Howe, he was vulnerable. She admired his resilience and buoyant spirits as he confronted implacable political enemies. One of the most remarkable columns she wrote that summer seemed a celebration of the man whose struggle she witnessed from crisis to crisis, sometimes from a distance, but always with an intimate perspective: “One of the qualities I admire most in the world is the courage which accepts whatever life may bring, and goes on with undiminished zest in life and apparent joy.”

  ER’s column portrayed a woman physically handicapped and largely immobile, who nevertheless faced each day with “an eager spirit,” forever curious, kindly, “gallant and gay.” It was a perfect description of FDR, written during a trying time, and revealed the direction of her heart. However much they differed over strategy, tactics, even purpose, she sought in her writings to advance his efforts, even as privately she worked to change and redirect them.

  But during the summer of 1937, FDR did not feel gallant or kindly; he felt peeved, and angry. He vowed again to “purge” his congressional enemies and defeat them in the 1938 elections. The idea spilled over even into ER’s closest circle. While ER’s personal friends were not “purged,” a curiously partisan emphasis emerged that took everybody by surprise.

  To avoid “misunderstanding,” Esther Lape detailed the situation: “Dearest Eleanor, Three times in comparatively recent months, at the White House, retainers or friends (McIntyre, Dewson, Dickerman) have rather pointedly raised the question of the political affiliation of Lizzie and me.” Marion Dickerman, “on the train the other day,” actually asked Lape, “with what motive one can only guess—whether I had not been an ‘organizer for the Republican Party.’”

  Lape was indignant:

  For the record it is to be said that Lizzie and I are both enrolled Democrats. Lizzie always has been, I more recently…. I once enrolled in the Republican Party in order to be an officer of the Young Republican Club—which was to be a Liberal organization but… turned out to be as hidebound as the regular group…. I helped Leila Pinchot get out the vote….

  That is the whole story. While we do reserve judgment on several policies of the present administration I think we are at least as “loyal” as if we accepted everything without qualifications. We are not alien, and we care.

  We know you would care about us just the same if we were communists or economic Royalists or whatever. The question of what we were has never even come up between you and us and would not now if we did not raise it. We do so because these questions put to us seem a bit purposeful and to call for a bit of plain speaking.

  She ended: “Our dearest love,” and “Lizzie says she wants to sign too.” ER was startled. Why would FDR send snoops after her dearest friends? Clearly, many of the board members of the Amerian Foundation were Republicans, including Helen Rogers Reid, but they were liberals. Perhaps it was their shift from the World Court to a national health care program, widely condemned as socialized medicine. Was it their views, their independence, or their closeness to ER that merited this sudden scrutiny?

  ER replied:

  I have never cared what you and Lizzie were politically, but it turns out that you are exactly what I thought you were. I cannot imagine why McIntyre should inquire and certainly don’t understand why Marion should ask you. Molly Dewson has [party loyalty] always on her mind, of course. It does not make the slightest difference unless either of you were trying for a Democratic Party job. I know that isn’t even a remote possibility but if it ever happens, I will just simply have to beat them over the head. I will keep your letter for the record in case I am ever asked….

  ER and Hick saw each other only occasionally during the summer of 1937. Hick declined all invitations to Val-Kill. When they made dates, Hick canceled them. She currently preferred the life of a recluse: “I do so need to be alone—especially these days, when my temper and my state of mind are so uncertain. I’m getting so that I dread being with people….”

  Hick was now unhappy and discomforted at the World’s Fair: “The truth is that I am absolutely unfit… to be an executive. All day I ‘sit on myself’… to control my impatience, my natural irascibility, my loathing of friction and disorder. By night I’m exhausted.” Her temper worsened with the heat, and she gave it free rein: “I guess my trouble is that, even at the ripe old age of 44, I still have not learned to live comfortably with people. I loathe them and despise them, mostly. Pigs!”

  ER often enjoyed such fumings, which she never allowed herself. “Darling, what a pest conflicting personalities are…. If everyone liked everyone else it would be so simple and I suppose so dull!” But ER also worried: “Dearest, it was nice to see you last night but I was troubled at the way your hands shake. Your nerves must be pretty taut and I wonder if you don’t need a real rest for a few days. Try to get here Thursday night next week.”

  Hick was busy but they planned a weekend away. They would travel together to Gloucester to visit Hick’s theater friend Jean Dixon, then ER would motor on alone, incognito, to visit Cousin Susie at Newport. On the way home she would visit Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read in Connecticut. ER’s plans, especially the risky part that involved traveling unnoticed, delighted her. After their visit ER wrote, “Dearest, I enjoyed every minute with you—and it was such fun seeing Jean and her family….” But the big news was that she arrived in Newport without being recognized behind “large black goggles.” Nobody called, there were no crises, and ER felt “that for once I was an acceptable guest!”

  But their good time/bad time pattern was repeated almost immediately. No sooner had she returned home than ER realized she had messed up carefully crafted plans for another weekend with Hick: “Dearest, You are going to think me an unmitigated ass and I deserve it. I never looked in my engagement book.” Now she had discovered that on the day of their date she was to lecture in Poughkeepsie, and FDR was due to arrive. “Dearest, I know how upsetting my uncertainties have been and this is the worst of all and I am so sorry, please try to forgive me….”

  In August, when FDR arrived at Hyde Park, ER moved into the Big House. To her relief, things went smoothly. With Uncle Fred Delano, often her ally, they had long discussions about the strikes—which restored ER’s faith in her husband’s good intentions about the labor situation: FDR believed “in the democratic process and [feels] everyone has been getting educated lately and perhaps he’s right.”

  But FDR’s cavalier Shakespearean plague on both houses created an irreparable rupture between the president and America’s most effective union organizer. On Labor Day, John L. Lewis broadcast nationally o
ver CBS, to attack the administration: Labor, he said, needed to identify its true friends and enemies.

  [Labor’s] cause is just and its friends should not view its struggle with neutral detachment….

  Those who chant their praises of democracy but who lost no chance to drive their knives into labor’s defenseless back must feel the weight of labor’s woe….

  Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen, and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

  In addition to her concern over the labor struggles, ER was upset by the decision to close Camp Jane Addams at Bear Mountain, “for financial reasons.” She had supported the camp with various gifts and more than $3,000 in contributions. As far as she was concerned it was a success, but it would close on 1 September. In a last-minute effort to save it, she toured the camp with Nan and Marion. Although all the 130 campers wanted it to continue, and despite all the classes and training projects, all the good work done, now under the direction of the National Youth Administration, it was doomed. ER was outraged: No similar cuts were made in CCC camps. To balance the budget it was condemned as a loss despite human gains, and she was powerless.

  ER felt philosophical during the summer of 1937, and she read more than she had in years. For days, her columns were filled with quotations that moved her. Pericles inspired her to consider that not just “famous men” but all of us “can weave bitterness and hate and cruelty in other men’s lives, or we can weave kindliness, love and joy.” She wrote Hick there was “one thought I love and must pass on to you,” from David Grayson’s The Countryman’s Year: “Long ago I made up my mind to let my friends have their peculiarities.”

  Surrounded by guests and controversy while at Val-Kill, ER sought to follow those precepts. Earl and three friends arrived, as did her brother Hall, with a “young lady,” though not “the young lady.”

  ER wrote Anna about Hall’s plans. Always her brother’s champion, ER worried about Hall. But he had just become vice president of a New York investment firm at a “magnificent” salary and would be living partly in New York. Esther Lape agreed to lease him the apartment below ER’s on 11th Street, and she was glad: Hall “sounds on the crest of the wave.” His divorce would become final in three months, and he would then decide “whether he marries again at once or… [will] remain free to flit!”

  Anna wanted to write an editorial about how rudely immigrants were treated. She had interviewed people on the West Coast and had been shocked by cruel displays of contempt and barriers of delay and hostility against all refugees. ER encouraged her daughter to write honestly:

  I think it would be swell for you to do that…. When I used to go with people in New York [to the Immigration and Naturalization Bureau] for the Women’s Trade Union League, I used to boil & a story such as you could write would do a lot of good & I don’t see that it could do Pa or the administration any harm.

  Despite guests, meetings, correspondence, and regular columns, ER wrote her daughter: “I’ve done so little work this summer that I’m ashamed.” Nevertheless, she enjoyed most of her guests, including Harry Hooker, who arrived from Europe bearing many “amusing” stories “about Mama and Johnny.”

  Sara Delano Roosevelt’s trip was highlighted by visits with European notables. She had tea with Mussolini, whom she considered a splendid leader of all the people, and wrote FDR: “The Duce sent me a grand bunch of flowers [and] all seems very flourishing and peaceful and the devotion to the ‘Head of the Government’ is general in all classes….”

  Concerning Spain, she spoke with exiled nobility and had it on royal authority that Franco’s victory was essential. One Spanish countess assured her that Franco’s forces “are the only hope for poor Spain.”

  SDR’s blithe disregard for democracy was a subject of amusement in the White House. According to James, his father would read passages from his mother’s “Assistant Secretary of State bulletins,” which were “not always to Father’s taste,” and “wryly say: ‘Well Ma-MA is having a grand time!’”

  ER rarely commented on her mother-in-law’s enthusiasm for dictators and royals. She wrote Hick: “Do you know Mama met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at tea? I wonder how she will now feel about them!” But she hated “the papers these days with nothing but, war and rumors of war.”

  FDR’s holiday after his bruising Washington summer of delay and defeat was serene. ER marveled at her husband’s spirit, and wrote of his time at Hyde Park in her column:

  [It] has been one of the most peaceful visits he has had in the last few years…. No one has been here to discuss any business or political problems…. We have almost forgotten we have a President among us.

  ER contrasted his peaceful week with the “tension one usually feels in the Presidential atmosphere,” even on vacation:

  The constant stream of visitors, the constant feeling that affairs of importance are going on, the rapid… adjustment that must be made in the household by the family, by the secretaries, to meet the requirements for as much peace and quiet as possible for the President himself, make for exhaustion. To understand this one has to experience it.

  ER marveled at FDR’s ability to unwind, concentrate, adjust to various personalities and subjects—and still retain an “inner calm. I have never seen my own husband ruffled, which must require a vast amount of self-control….”

  In September, ER and Hick made time for each other and discussed their hurt feelings and bruised friendship. Hick had tried to be on her own and happy with her friends all summer, rather than wait upon ER’s infrequent availability. But now Hick veiled her anger at ER with a lament: she could not “give Alicent what she wants—which is a lot of affection and consideration. I can’t seem to give those things to anyone any more. I’m all dried up inside, I guess….”

  Unable to explore such emotional turmoil, ER refused to feel guilty and replied with reassurance and advice: “Hick darling. I hate you to say you can’t give affection and consideration. You can and do give both….” ER blamed Hick’s disagreeable feelings on her physical health and recommended rest, exercise, fewer foods to agitate Hick’s diabetes.

  After they spent a day together in ER’s New York apartment, ER believed they had swept the air between them clean, and she felt refreshed: “It was very sweet to be with you even for so short a time and it was good for me. I am really better and I will try to be on an even keel!”

  But Hick doubted that “we got anywhere much,” and feared they were “drifting apart”:

  I’ve tried hard to be perfectly acquiescent this summer. I think the feeling that I had to do most of the trying just got me down and completely discouraged…. And I’ve hated the thought so of seeing you—or trying to see you—when you didn’t want to see me…. I may have been wrong. I don’t know any of the answers.

  I guess the only thing I really do know is that I love you, with all my heart. And that it’s a Hell of a lot harder to see you unhappy or listless than to be unhappy myself.

  After a summer when her sincere efforts to get together were rejected, ER replied with crisp indignation. Considering her usual tone of empathic understanding, it was for her a cry of wounded fury:

  You don’t realize that I have not been once to NY without trying to see you. There is no use in your coming here [Val-Kill] to be miserable. I could go to you, but there has been a good bit to do here and I didn’t realize you felt we were drifting apart. I just take it for granted that can’t happen!

  But they had drifted apart. In the spring ER wrote, after a long separation while Hick was very social, “No, I don’t much like your gypsy life!” Earlier, in an undated letter, ER had exploded with aggravation and wrote Hick while returning from New York to Washington on the train:

  I think you can scarcely real
ize how you made me feel tonight. I did not ask you and Ella to dine to be rude and yet you made me feel that I had been. You went right by me at the [radio] studio without speaking. You told me you would entertain yourselves in Washington before I had time to tell you whether I was busy or not. You barely spoke to Earl and Jane [Brett] at the play who were my guests and certainly did nothing rude to you and when I asked you to go in so you would sit by me you deliberately changed and sat as far away as possible.

  I am sorry if I’ve done something to offend, but I’m so deeply hurt tonight that I almost wish that I had no friends. Acquaintances at least preserve the social amenities and make life pleasant on the surface. I was happy to be seeing you but evidently you were not. For Saturday and Sunday at least let’s try to be cheerful and polite and not make everyone around us uncomfortable!

  Despite this unusually bitter undated letter, their friendship survived and ER continued to depend upon Hick—who remained her emotional cornerstone. Hick made her feel good, and made her feel strong. ER believed their letters kept them together through all troubles and separations, and now wrote: “I’m really not unhappy and listless so don’t worry. I think I just get annoyed with life as it is and my inability to change it for the moment! Bless you and I love you too.”

  After this exchange, Hick tried harder not to attack or hurt the First Lady. Although professionally she felt like a racehorse put out to pasture, her sense of pride demanded that she see new people, find new friends, keep herself occupied, and protect ER from her true state—which was often furious and depressed. There was now Dorothy Cruger, and her assistant at the World’s Fair, Barbara—who lived in Greenwich Village and spent many weekends with Hick at the Little House.