65 ER’s press conferences: See esp. Maurine Beasley, pp. 42–46, 103–4 passim. Emma Bugbee, Oral History, Columbia.
66 No gossip, no leaks: Emma Bugbee, NY Herald-Tribune, 4 Mar. 1933; also Oral History.
66 thrown into the mud: NYT, 14 Apr. 33.
66 ER intended to manage the news, and refused to speak publicly about certain subjects, notably birth control—although she “always belonged” to the birth control league: ER to Agnes Brown Leach, 21 June 1935, 100, Box 1346. In 1931 spoke at an event to honor Margaret Sanger. See Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger (Simon & Schuster 1992), p. 339.
66 rejected ghostwriters: White House press office announcement, 15 Aug. 1933, ppf Box 1.
67 Anna Ickes’s book, Mesa Land: The History and Romance of the American Southwest, was published by Houghton Mifflin in November 1933, the same month as ER’s book It’s Up to the Women—and their reviews appeared side by side in major newspapers; their difficult marriage: See T. H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874–1952 (Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 147–51, 168–71, 219–20, passim. See also Jeanne Clarke.
67 ER on Farley: TIR, p. 66.
68 like Kipling’s cat: Dewson quoted in Furman, p. 228.
68 patronage letters: ER to Jim Farley, 20 Sept. 1933, 100, Box 1261; on McAdoo, see Douglas Craig, After Wilson, (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 32.
68 Amy Beach: See Adrienne Fried Block, “Amy Beach: From Song to Opera,” Alice Tully Hall, 13 May 1995, program; and Block’s Amy Beach (Oxford University Press, 1998). ER particularly enjoyed her “Silver Birches.” Musical Leader, 9 May 1936.
68 Amy Beach was also a family friend, particularly close to ER’s Aunt Corinne. Amy Beach to ER, 27 Apr. 1934; I am grateful to Adrienne Fried Block.
68 Ruth Bryan Owen hoped for Interior: Owen to Fannie Hurst, 3 July 1932; Hurst Papers, Austin, Texas.
69 RBO named ambassador: When FDR offered a State Department appointment, she wrote Fannie Hurst: “Please burn all the candles you have in front of your shrines and icons.” RBO to FH, 21 Mar. 1933. See Harold Ickes’s snide version of his meeting with RBO, 13 Mar. 1933; for FDR’s curious role, see Ickes diary, p. 6: “She believes [FDR said] she sold herself to me.”
69 ER honored RBO: Toasts in NYT, 10 May 1933; see Notable American Women.
69 ER named several pioneers as the great harbingers of a new day: Katharine Lenroot, chief of the Children’s Bureau; her Children’s Bureau associate, Dr. Martha Eliot; Dr. Louise Stanley, chief of the Bureau of Home Economics in the Department of Agriculture; Mary Anderson, since 1920 head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor; and Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Association of Colored Women, founder of the Bethune-Cookman College in Ocala, Florida, subsequently appointed to the National Youth Administration (NYA), and chair of the Negro Division. See esp. It’s Up to the Women, pp. 200; 193–204; TIR, p. 174; NYT, 17 Feb. 1935.
69 seventeen-page letter: Dewson to ER, 27 Apr. 1933; also Dewson to ER, 29 June, 2 July, 1933; see Ware, Beyond Suffrage, p. 49; ER to Dewson, 3 Aug. 1933, 100, Box 1259.
5: ER’s New Deal for Women
70 Initial spirit of cooperation: TIR, p. 107.
70 “a states’ rights, limited government”: Freidel, Launching, p. 238.
71 Bishop Manning on schools: NYT, 25 Mar. 1933; ER on schools, It’s Up to the Women, pp. 15–17, 21.
71 ER and FDR disagreed on the Economy Act: See especially Women’s Democratic News, Feb. 1933; and It’s Up to the Women, pp. 110, 120–21.
72 Healthy family life: pp. 85, 86–89.
72 FDR thought the teachers of America were making too much money. If they all took a 15 percent cut, he opined, “they would still be getting relatively more than in 1914!” FDR to Josephus Daniels, 27 Mar. 1933; cf. Freidel, p. 254.
72 Schools closed or closing: Bernard Asbell, The FDR Memoirs (Doubleday, 1973), p. 67; James Macgregor Burns, The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 172; Joyce Kornbluh, A New Deal for Workers’ Education, 1933–1942 (University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 25.
72 An amazing document: New Dealers, pp. 124–28.
72–73 Lew Douglas: Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 382.
73 Isabella Greenway: See Hope Chamberlin, A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress (New American Library, 1973), pp. 108 ff., and Greenway mss., congressional files, Tucson.
73 “air our minds” luncheons: Jack Greenway to BWC; ER to Isabella, 12 Apr. 1936; ER on Lady Lindsay, TIR, p. 185.
73 Greenway on the plane within 30 minutes: ER in Women’s Democratic News.
73 Their first collaboration: Greenway, in Chamberlin; Huey Long, in Freidel, p. 244; department cuts, pp. 250–52. The hated 213 clause to fire married women, first introduced by Herbert Hoover, enraged feminists across the political spectrum. See esp. Alice Kessler-Harris and Sara Evans, Born for Liberty (Free Press, 1989), pp. 201–3.
74 ER rejected FDR’s idea, government workers earning more: NYT, 11 Apr. 1933.
74 FDR’s returned 15: Freidel, p. 254.
74 A bitter rule: See esp. My Day, 24 July 1937; and Genevieve Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s Magazine, May 1935, pp. 742 ff.
74 ER specifically rejected: It’s Up to the Women, esp. pp. 143–45, and 142–52 passim.
74 Women and workplace: Ibid., pp. 166–67.
75 Mary Ritter Beard on ER: NY Herald-Tribune, 5 Nov. 1933.
76 7 Apr. 1933, for ER’s sentiments on “the evils of Prohibition,” “the power of the brewery,” and “the bootlegger,” ER to Isabella Greenway, 23 Jan. 1932, Tucson.
77 FDR asked for $3.3 billion: Rex Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt, (Double-day, 1957), p. 286.
77–78 “Joker” clause and wage discrimination: see Harper’s, p. 743; Ware, pp. 91–92.
78 “square deal for women,” and “some special reason”: NYT, 12 Aug.; ER to Hick, 11, 12 Aug. 1933.
78 Rose Schneiderman’s efforts: Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the US, 1900–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 151–54.
79 ER on women’s vigilance and boycotts: NYT, 20 June 1933; 10 Oct. 1933; and It’s Up to the Women, pp. 46–47.
79 After her husband, artist Charles Cary Rumsey, died in a car accident in Sept. 1922, Mary Harriman Rumsey turned more fully to politics. In 1929 she initiated a “block aid” campaign in New York City to mobilize communities, block by block, door to door, to assist people in need. An ardent New Dealer, she encouraged her younger brother Averell to join her in Washington. Jack Greenway to BWC; see esp. S. J. Woolf, “Champion of the Consumer Speaks Out,” 6 Aug. 1933; NYT magazine profile, Notable American Women; and Marjory Potts, “Averell Harriman Remembers Mary,” Junior League Review, 1983; Caroline Ware, Radcliffe Oral History, pp. 46 ff., and Frances Perkins, Columbia Oral History Project.
79 ER supported NRA Blue Eagle: NYT, Oct. 1933; 8 Feb. 1934; her own shop, and professionalization of housework, NYT, 20 Sept. 1933; Woman’s Home Companion (Sept. 1933).
80 NRA fatally flawed: TIR, p. 136. While the Supreme Court doomed NRA because it gave the president too much power, Bernard Bellush explains that industry was given most of the power: Bellush, The Failure of the NRA (W. W. Norton, 1975).
80–81 TVA was the first: During World War I, the federal government had built a great dam and hydroelectric power plant at Muscle Shoals, in northern Alabama. The electricity generated was to run nitrate plants to make gunpowder. But at war’s end all work stopped. Neither Coolidge nor Hoover wanted the government to maintain a public power facility, however useful or valuable.
Senator George Norris, progressive Republican of Nebraska, fought to prevent the dam and its future hydroelectric benefits from becoming privatized. FDR considered George Norris “one of the major prophets of America.” See esp. T. H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold Ickes, 1874–
1952 (Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 379–81. For TVA, see Freidel, pp. 304, 351 ff; TIR, pp. 136–37; New Dealers, pp. 190–93; and Leuchtenberg, “Roosevelt, Norris, and the Seven Little TVAs,” in The FDR Years (Columbia University Press, 1995).
81 “neither fish nor fowl”: Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, p. 179.
81 ER visited TVA: TIR, p. 137.
81 The TVA’s most enduring and challenging innovation was the sale of electricity developed by public facilities. Within ten years the Tennessee Valley experienced a “renaissance.” New Dealers, pp. 193–96.
82 On pigs: Ken Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years (Random House, 1986), pp. 271, 274, 270–81; see also Edward and Frederick Schapssmeier, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa, vol. I: 1910–1940 (The Iowa State University Press, 1968).
82 ER not credited: Ruby Black, p. 199, Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 384.
83 Tugwell’s “Chamber of Horrors”: Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II: The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 356; see esp. Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (Rutgers University Press, 1964). Press assaults against Tugwell, George Seldes, in Sternsher, p. 231; Davis, pp. 472–73, 486.
83 Publishers refused to print ER’s support: Sternsher, p. 234.
83–84 pure food and drug efforts: See esp. Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday, 1957), p. 464; Ruth deForst Lamb, American Chamber of Horrors (Farrar Straus, 1936); Sternsher, p. 247–50; See excerpts from Consumers Advisory Board Hearings, NRA, 8–9 Feb. 1934, before deputy administrator Walter White; Emily Newell Blair, 22 Feb. 34 to Malvina for ER, 70, Box 712.
84 Harry Lloyd Hopkins: See esp. George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1987); Alden Whitman, ed., American Reformers (H. W. Wilson, 1985), pp. 443–45. See June Hopkins, The First & Final Task: Harry Hopkins and the Development of the American Welfare System, Ph.D: dissertation Georgetown University, 1997).
86 Meridel Le Sueur: See Harvey Swados, ed. The American Writer and The Great Depression, pp. 181–90; Meridel LeSueur, Ripening: Selected Works (Feminist Press, 1982); Women on the Breadlines (West End Books, 1977), Introduction.
86 Ellen Woodward: See esp. Martha Swain, Ellen Woodward: New Deal Advocate for Women (University, of Mississippi Press, 1995), Preface, pp. 1–5 passim, 39–42; for Woodward and ER, see Ware, pp. 109–10.
87 Light work: Swain, pp. 45–47; and Ware, pp. 109–10.
88 FERA librarians: Swain, pp. 50–51.
88 For CCC, I am grateful to Barbara Kraft, “The CCC: A job stimulus that worked,” Progressive Review, July 1993, pp. 4–7; and Kraft’s additional CCC interview notes. During a hike down the Grand Canyon, a park ranger told of the many people who believed the site a CCC project, to BWC and CMC.
88 “She She She” camps: Kornbluh, esp. p. 83.
89 ER was angry: NYT, 19 June 1933.
89 curriculum for adult education program: Kornbluh, pp. 29–31.
89 During the 1920s Bryn Mawr’s program inspired other residential summer schools, including the Southern School for Women Workers, a similar program at Barnard College, and the Wisconsin School for Workers. See Dagmar Schultz’s dissertation on Hilda Smith. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (Knopf, 1994); and Kornbluh, pp. 34–35; 16–17.
90 By 1936: Ware, pp. 112–14.
90 The educational camps: Kornbluh, p. 87; also NYT, 20 June 1933; 16 June 1934.
90 Pauli Murray’s “idyllic existence” ended because she’d gotten too friendly with a counselor. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat (Harper, 1987), pp. 95–96.
91 “Peace time can be as exhilarating”: ER in NYT, 29 Dec. 1933.
6: Family Discord and the London Economic Conference
92 Great Excitement: Women’s Democratic News, Apr. 1933. Lew Douglas quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 382.
93 Chazy Lake plans: ER to Hick, 3–9 May 1933.
93 Al Kresse story: Ruby Black, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), pp. 208–9.
94 “Dull dinner”: ER to Hick, 23 May 1933.
94 “feel soiled”: ER to Hick, 27 May 1933.
94 “No misunderstandings between us”: ER to Hick, 4 Apr. 1933.
94 “ate into my soul”: ER to Hick, 8 Apr. 1933.
94 Right about Elliott: ER to Hick, 26 Apr. 1933; wise about emotional issues, ER to Hick, 9, 11, 23 May 1933.
95 “I’m planning our trip”: ER to Hick, 20 Apr.; 4 May 1933.
95 “Heart ached for Betty”: ER to Hick, 14–15 Apr. 1933.
95 Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Peace and Counterpeace: From Wilson to Hitler (Harper & Row, 1971), p. 517.
95 SDR’s taunts: ER to Hick, 31 May 1933.
96 ER’s meeting with Elliott arranged by Isabella Greenway: ER to Greenway, 1 June 1933; various telegrams that week, Greenway collection, Tucson.
96 During trip: ER to Hick; Anna to ER, quoted in Ted Morgan, p. 461; upon return, ER to Hick, 14 June 1933. ER to FDR, 18 July 1933, Roosevelt Family Papers, Children, Box 16.
97 World Court. See BWC, vol. I, the Bok peace prize, charges of propaganda and “un-Americanism,” the Congressional Hearing of 1924, and the creation of ER’s first FBI file. Also, ER’s articles, “The American Peace Award,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1923, p. 54; “The Bok Peace Prize,” NY League of Women Voters Weekly News, 12 Oct. 1923.
97 Elizabeth Read’s text went into a second 1927 edition, and emphasized the pioneering work of the World Court; its treaties and multilateral conventions concerning trade in arms and ammunition, opium and other drugs; mandate problems involving colonial administration and control; and “minorities conventions,” which sought to protect “racial, religious and linguistic minorities, living in nations where other races, creeds and tongues prevail.”
97 Lape to Helen Rogers Reid, 22 Apr. 1927; for work of the World Court, see esp Foreign Relations Bulletin, 10 Aug. 1927; Reid Papers, LC.
97 ER first met Helen Rogers through her beloved Aunt Bye, Anna Roosevelt Cowles. Anna Roosevelt Cowles to HRR, 29 Apr. 1931, Reid Papers, LC.
98 Hearst, the American Foundation’s enemy: Lape to Helen Reid, 18 Mar. 1924; HRR to Lape, 22 Mar. 1924, Reid Collection, LC.
99 Hearst to former wife, Millicent Hearst, 5 July 1932. I am grateful to David Nasaw for this letter, Box 12, W. R. Hearst Mss.
99 bipartisan world court delay: See esp. Lape to HRR, Oct. 1930; 11 Nov. 1930; Reid Collection, LC.
In 1932 the Republican platform urged adherence. But at the Democratic convention, the World Court plank was “in and out again.” The most unexpected opposition came from Wilson’s own son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo, who, wrote Lape, tried “to pull Hearst’s chestnuts out of the fire.” Lape, confidential report to members, HRR, 1–30 June 1932, D197/LC.
99 Actually, Hoover preferred Japan’s actions to increased Soviet influence in Asia. But he wanted to make it clear that the United States did not approve of this first breach of the Treaty of Versailles and the famous 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which fifty-four nations signed, including the United States—because it demanded nothing binding while it rhetorically outlawed belligerence, aggression, war.
100–1 Stanley Hornbeck, in Freidel, Rendezvous, p. 110. According to State Department advisers, Japan at this time did not want war but rather wanted the west to recognize its sphere of influence in Asia; see Waldo Heinrichs, American Ambassador: Joseph Grew and the Development of the US Diplomatic Tradition (Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 191–201.
101 In response to FDR’s 16 May speech: Davis, pp. 121–27.
101 within days FDR renounced: Ibid., pp. 128–29.
101 filled with pious nothings: Burns, p. 177.
102–3 ER’s editorials: Women’s Democratic News, Apr. 1933, Feb. 1935, p. 6.
103 FDR to Tumulty, 19 May 1933, FDR’s Collected Letters, III, p. 346.
103 FDR telephoned Dodd: William
Dodd Diaries, Preface, p. 3.
103 Hull embarked for London: FDR’s May correspondence in Moley, p. 217.
103 Ramsay MacDonald, “We Must Not Fail,” in Oswald Garrison Villard, “The Damage to America in London” (2 Aug. 1933), in Villard: The Dilemma of the Absolute Pacifist in Two World Wars, ed. by Anthony Gronowicz (Garland, 1983), p. 424.
103 ER urged all women: 15 June press conference in Maurine Beasley, ed., p. 11.
104 FDR’s London delegation represented a wide range of political wrangling: James Cox, former governor of Ohio and FDR’s 1920 running mate, was a Wilsonian allied with Hull. Their chief opponent was Nevada’s Senator Key Pittman, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Dedicated to cheap money and high tariffs, Pittman’s personal interest was the expanded use of silver. A wild man when drunk, he was best remembered for shooting out streetlights as he sauntered about London by night, and chasing Herbert Feis through Claridge’s corridors with a bowie knife.
See esp. Davis, pp. 129–31; see also Jeanette Nichols, “Roosevelt’s Monetary Diplomacy in 1933,” American Historical Review (Jan. 1951); and Herbert Feis, 1933: Characters in Crisis (Little Brown, 1966).
104 Hull was devastated: Arthur Schlesinger, p. 210. Others were even more horrified by FDR’s Executive Order No. 6174, issued on 16 June 1933, which distributed Public Works Administration and FERA funds, and allocated $238 million for the construction of naval vessels, including 31 aircraft carriers “sixteen to be built in private yards and fifteen in navy yards.” This was the beginning of a sustained rearmament that continued throughout the first administration, and contributed to the renewed arms race. FDR’s timing for this EO is curious, if he had any serious international goals in London. EO in Samuel I. Rosenman, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with notes by President Roosevelt (Random House, 1938), vol. II, pp. 29–251; for its impact see William Neumann, America Encounters Japan (Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 203 ff.
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