Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  She said she would jog along until we leave Washington and in the meantime look around for a place which she could own and control. She gave me permission to tell Henry [Osthagen] and of course he wanted to start ripping out the plumbing fixtures, tiles, sinks, etc., in order to leave the building the way ER found it. I told her what he said, fully expecting her to be shocked and to my utter amazement she said that is what she intended to do if she found a place where she wanted to build!…

  On 9 November, ER wrote a long letter that served finally as the basis of their separation agreement and in which she told Dickerman much of what had been said during that dreadful 12 August conversation with Nancy Cook:

  She told me, for instance, that while we were working in the [Women’s Democratic] committee, in the school, and in the industries together, you had both always felt that whatever was done was done for the sole purpose of building me up. My whole conception was entirely different. I went into the industries because I felt that Nan was fulfilling something which she had long wanted to do. I would never have done it alone. I had neither the knowledge nor the background nor the interest.

  I went into the school because I had an interest in education and in young people and being fond of you I was anxious to help you in what you wanted to do. It gave me an opportunity for regular work which I was anxious to have. I went into the political work because Louis was anxious to have me do something to keep up Franklin’s interest in a field which he eventually hoped Franklin would return to. I had no personal ambitions of any kind and I have none today….

  [To accommodate my] firm decision that I do not care to live in the shop building unless I pay you and Nancy for the money you have involved there, therefore I make the proposition of a payment of a thousand dollars a year over the next ten years to be paid jointly to you and Nancy or separately as you desire.

  The letter continued for many paragraphs of financial and household details. Every step was agonizing, and ER left nothing to chance.

  The agreement was more than generous in anybody’s language, and Cook and Dickerman finally signed it on 12 November.

  They evidently got some aid, or at least comfort, from FDR, and Nancy Cook sent a handwritten letter of gratitude on New York State Democratic Committee Women’s Activities stationery:

  Franklin dear:

  You were a dear to bother with us and I did hate to worry you with it all. As a peace negotiator you are Number One! We should have had your help before emotions ran so high.

  Bless you dear and a world of thanks and love.

  For a time, Dickerman tried to hold on to a semblance of the Todhunter partnership. She also tried to get ER to make a distinction between Nancy Cook’s role and her own in the breach between them. But ER rejected her efforts.

  In May 1939, Dickerman asked ER if she wanted her name removed entirely from Todhunter literature, and she used the opportunity to rehash their estrangement. Marion felt innocent, and unjustly treated:

  The only instance in which I am conscious of having displeased you was on the night I went to the hospital with Danny. My judgment in that instance may not have been wise. My motive however was a kindly one. I have never understood why you spoke to me that night as you did…. Three times I asked to see you… [and] you refused. I know nothing of what has brought this on my head save the incident [with Danny]… and that, unless far more was implicated than I know of, seems rather out of proportion to all that went before.

  ER’s answer to this letter represented her interpretation of the entire situation, and was her final personal communication with Dickerman except for formal invitations and courteous notes. In the end, ER’s decision was influenced by FDR: “One real factor was that certain things came back to me through Franklin which made me realize many things which I had never realized before.” Whatever FDR’s words, they convinced her to terminate the friendship entirely.

  Dickerman rejected ER’s explanation and disclaimed all responsibility:

  First I was no part of your talk & Nan’s last summer and feel that I should be allowed to speak for myself. I do not know where this ‘building up’ idea came from…. I have never used the expression nor entertained the idea….

  I know nothing of what came back to you from Franklin….

  Unless you wish to refer to this matter again I shall consider it closed for I have found nothing in it but disillusionment and unhappiness.

  The partnership of the Val-Kill was devoured. The place—the gardens and pool, the tennis court and picnic area—once filled with so much joy and spontaneous gaiety was now marked by a cold, emotionally empty divide. Cook and Dickerman held on to the illusion of friendship with Franklin. Whatever FDR’s role, in the final breach between “the three graces of Val-Kill,” his words were key, and among the most hurtful.

  For years, Cook and Dickerman lingered beyond ER’s emotional scope. They neither moved away nor distanced themselves from the social whirl of official life. They were invited to major events and family gatherings, but ER now felt to them cold and severe, however correct and courteous.

  Without the warmth and intimacy that had so fully marked their friendship, every event turned into an agony of neglect. What had seemed an enchanted era ended in everlasting pain.

  Tommy reported the final agreement to Anna and observed: “I think it is an empty victory for your mother. But her life is so completely changed she does not need to depend on them for any companionship.”

  Tommy was now closer to ER than anybody else. They were together most of the time, and she took dictation for books, articles, and lectures on trains, in cars, waiting at airports, and while ER was in her bath. Except when ER exercised, she hardly allowed herself an unused moment. Tommy was by her side, and fun to be with.

  Unlike Hick, who had no use for crowds or strangers and barely managed to be polite in public, Tommy was unfailingly amiable. She never complained and seemed rarely to tire. Devoted to her job, she was available whenever ER needed her.

  When Tommy took a moment off for some minor surgery in June, Lucy Randolph Mason wrote a letter of concern to ER:

  I have resisted the impulse to write either of you to say how sorry I was about it. She is a grand person for your partner and since I met her I realized more than ever what her good sense, good judgment and good feeling mean to you. May she soon be well again—God bless her.

  ER replied with relief that Tommy was “much better and is home again.” After her surgery, ER was glad for the opportunity to do something useful for Tommy, who asked Anna:

  Did [your mother] tell you that Dr. Steele prescribed hypos for me and showed her how to do it and once each week she gives me a jab in my posterior? She is really expert, it never hurts a bit. Wouldn’t that make a good story, especially to these people who chant: “I don’t see how you do all the things you do.”

  Tommy, like all ER’s closest friends, understood ER’s pain over the demise of the Val-Kill friendship: “I do however feel that a complete disillusionment and disappointment such as this hurts deeply, especially as she defended them all these years against all criticism.”

  ER and Hick dined together after it was over, and Hick wrote:

  I hate to see you disillusioned that way. I cannot understand how they could be such damned fools!… You are one of the kindest, most thoughtful humans I’ve ever known. I think I’ve said that to you before, haven’t I? Well—it’s all settled now for you, anyway, and I hope you’ll enjoy your place up there for many, many years. Please do try to get some fun out of it. For yourself.

  Negotiations with Cook and Dickerman went on from August to November, while ER became increasingly preoccupied by national and international emergencies.

  *The U.S. delegation elected Joseph Cadden, twenty-five-year-old Brown University graduate, chair; Myrtle Powell of the Business and Professional Women’s Council, YWCA, and Carol Morris, chair of the Christian Youth Conference, vice-chairmen; and Dorothy Height of the youth division of National Negro C
ongress, secretary.

  †The first Dies committee hearings began on 12 August 1938. During the week of the World Youth Congress, Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theatre Project were under assault for days. Artists and writers were among HUAC’s first targets: Committee member J. Parnell Thomas had announced in July that both the Theatre Project and the Writers’ Project were infested with communists. “Practically every play presented… is sheer propaganda for Communism or the New Deal.”

  * ER had once before tried to get Marion Dickerman a job. In a remarkable letter to Harry Hopkins on 14 June 1935, she sent him a list of three people she wanted to help and thought might be useful, including FDR’s Groton mentor George Marvin, whom ER felt protective of for familial reasons. He was alcoholic, and ER hoped Harry might find “some writing” project for him to “do at home,” when he was sober. “He is a writer of experience and a very old friend of ours… a perfectly uncertain quantity,” but would perform assigned tasks well. He might be disappointing, “but black sheep have to eat too! He can write if he will stay straight….” As for Marion Dickerman, ER wrote candidly: She “wants to work for a month this summer… to go out anywhere or do anything at all. I thought she might be helpful to Aubrey Williams on account of her interest in and knowledge of young people, and he could get rid of her at the end of the month. Her great desire is to get a feeling of being in something that is being done… because she feels that running a school is rather narrowing. She would have to have her expenses if she were sent away and a small salary.”

  27: Storms on Every Front

  In September, war clouds gathered at a furious pace and New Dealers struggled to avert political ruin, after the collapse of congressional support for social reform. FDR resumed his purge campaign to end the conservative domination of Congress by condemning the South’s reliance on peonage and poverty. In a series of stunning speeches, he compared fascism in Europe and feudalism in the South, “both controlled by oligarchy” which allowed people no rights or freedoms.

  During the summer, his startling words infuriated antiunion, states’ rights conservatives and thrilled ER’s allies as they organized the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. But FDR’s opponents won their primaries by large margins, and now the campaign turned ugly. New Deal issues of economic security were replaced by tirades for white supremacy—rand tirades against communism, foreigners, foreign ideas. For both ER and FDR it was a harrowing campaign season.

  All political activity suddenly stopped, however, as they dealt with son James’s emergency surgery. On 9 September, ER flew with James to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Because of Harry Hopkins’s recent surgery, ER feared the worst and felt that nobody was giving her accurate information. “Betsey arrived this morning and the situation is most confusing to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that I like facing facts and I hate living unrealities!”

  To everybody’s relief, James’s bleeding ulcers were not life-threatening. Although both parents were by his side at the Mayo Clinic and ER had flown up with him and stayed for the duration, James did not mention his mother’s presence:

  Father came to Rochester to see me before I went under the knife, and remained there several days until I was out of danger. He was in my room, squeezing my hand, soon after I came out of the anesthetic….

  ER also described the hospital vigil:

  Franklin, with his usual necessary entourage, arrived the morning of the operation. He was very calm, as he usually was in a crisis, and chatted as though nothing were on his mind. I can be calm and quiet, but it takes all the discipline I have acquired in life to keep on talking and smiling and to concentrate on the conversation addressed to me. I want to be left alone while I store up fortitude for what I fear may be a blow of fate…. I still remember waiting through the operation that morning and then waiting some more until the doctors came with the laboratory report that said nothing malignant had been found. They told James the nervous strain was bad for him, and he accepted their advice not to return to his duties at the White House.

  His marriage in shambles, and his health diminished, James resented ER’s unwanted advice and excised her presence from his life. For ER, it was only the first ordeal of a turbulent autumn.

  On 12 September, in the presidential railroad car on a siding near the Mayo Clinic, ER and FDR listened to Hitler’s violent rhetoric—threats against Czechoslovakia and grotesque lies about Czech persecution of Germans living in the Sudetenland. On 15 September, ER wrote with disgust: “Hitler patting himself on the back because Chamberlain is going to see him makes me sick. Just the same if war can be averted by flattering him why it is worth doing.”

  For weeks, war seemed imminent. France vowed to mobilize if Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia; Britain vowed to follow France if France mobilized. At first, Hitler only demanded the Sudetenland, a mostly German-populated area of Czechoslovakia carved out of the heart of the former Hapsburg Empire. A rich industrial nation that extended from the Elbe to the Moldau, Czechoslovakia contained areas that Germany, Hungary, and Poland considered their rightful territory. To legitimize his claims, Hitler railed against imaginary offenses against birthright Germans by Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes, who were less than human.

  France and England intended to prevent war by compromise and capitulation. With James out of danger, ER and FDR rushed directly back to the White House. ER wrote Anna that FDR and the State Department were in continual communication to see if the United States might prepare a useful statement to forestall war “and the tension in the house is great.”

  ER had long believed Hitler would never be satisfied, as she had said when he absorbed Austria. Europe’s disunity, England’s appeasement, and America’s isolationism encouraged Hitler’s ambitions. ER joined those among FDR’s advisers who urged him at least to signal his moral commitment to England and France and his opposition to the demise of democratic Czechoslovakia.

  The crisis peaked after the Nuremberg Rally when the the nineteenth meeting of the League of Nations Assembly opened at Geneva—and Czechoslovakia was not even on the agenda. Only Maxim Litvinov at Geneva, on 21 September, reaffirmed his country’s treaty with Czechoslovakia.*

  Someone told journalist William Shirer, as they walked around Lake Geneva, to look at the “beautiful granite sepulchre! Let us admire its beauty.” As they paused to contemplate the League’s contours, he said; “There, my friend, are buried the dead hopes of peace for our generation.”

  In Czechoslovakia everyone expected Hitler’s bombers; the Czechs declared martial law in the five Sudeten districts and prepared to fight. American journalists reported what they could over one working phone at a Prague hotel as they witnessed “Jews excitedly trying to book on the last plane or train” out of their homeland.

  On 14 September, Japan and Italy announced their commitment to Germany. Russia mobilized its fleet, and Chamberlain announced he would fly to Berchtesgaden to meet with Hitler.

  On 15 September, Chamberlain agreed to the secession of the “German-speaking areas.” According to Shirer, the Czechs were “dumbfounded” by Chamberlain’s “sell-out.” In London, on 18 September, Daladier and Bonnet drew up an Anglo-French plan by which all areas of Czechoslovakia with majority German populations should be transferred to Hitler without a plebiscite—a total betrayal. Some imagined the Czechs would fight alone.

  On 22 September, Chamberlain returned to Germany, only to be told even the Anglo-French capitulation was no longer sufficient. Shirer observed the meeting place at Godesberg: “The Swastika and the British Union Jack flying side by side in this lovely Rhine town—very appropriate, I find.” It was after all a Wagnerian town, filled with myths of frolic among “Wotan, Thor, and the other gods of the early Teutons.”

  France refused to accept Hitler’s new terms; Britain again threatened to support France; both countries mobilized, as did Czechoslovakia. War seemed imminent.

  Virginia Woolf wrote her sister, Vanessa Bell, that everyone in London “t
ook war for granted. They were digging trenches in the parks, loud speakers were telling one to go and be fitted for gas masks…. Not much gossip, only eternal war talk.” All one’s friends, she wrote, believed London was to be bombed every twenty minutes with gas and explosives.

  One of ER’s Allenswood chums cabled urgently: “Dear Eleanor, one word from America will save Europe. Your school fellow, Marguerite Few, Once Baxter.”

  At one in the morning, 26 September, FDR sent a message to Chamberlain, Daladier, Czech President Edvard Beneš, and Hitler urging continued negotiations: “Should hostilities break out the lives of millions of men, women and children in every country involved will most certainly be lost under circumstances of unspeakable horror.” Europe’s economic systems would be shattered; its social structures would be wrecked:

  On behalf of the 130 millions of people of the United States of America and for the sake of humanity everywhere I most earnestly appeal to you not to break off negotiations…. Once they are broken off reason is banished….

  The three democracies assured FDR they wanted peace, but Hitler was bellicose: Versailles’s injustices and the League’s failure “to carry out its obligations” doomed peace. It all depended entirely on Czechoslovakia’s decision.

  FDR sent a personal appeal to Mussolini and another to Hitler to suggest a wider conference.

  On 27 September the French army and British fleet partially mobilized; more than two million Czech soldiers fortified the German border. Mussolini proposed another conference, at Germany’s request. On 29 September, the Munich Conference convened. Nicolson was convinced that Hider sought time after Britain and France mobilized their navies, and Britain reaffirmed its alliance not only with France but with Russia.