Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  The truth was that Eleanor’s world had expanded out of all proportion to Nan and Marion’s, and now included a lot of guests they didn’t approve of. Nan and Marion, despite their liberal politics and unconventional living arrangement, came from upper-class Protestant backgrounds. They had made it clear that they considered Hick unrefined. They thought Earl Miller too forward with Eleanor and were offended by his tendency to put his hands on her. Marion remembered the days when Earl was one of the state police assigned to FDR. “When Earl first came to the Big House with the Troopers,” Marion noted, “he would eat out with the servants. That changed and he was later eating with the family.” Another friend of Eleanor’s, Mayris Chaney, a music hall dancer, certainly wasn’t their sort of person either. And those were just a few of the unusual assortment of friends who wound up visiting Val-Kill.

  But Eleanor felt a genuine connection to all kinds of people. One time, when she was coming back from a vacation in the Adirondacks with Nan, a young tramp approached her at a gas station and asked for money. He explained that he had tried to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal work program for young men, but couldn’t because he had no home address. She handed him $10 and her New York City card and told him to call on her at five that Monday. Nan bet she would never see him again.

  But on Monday when she arrived at her 65th Street town house, Eleanor learned from the guard that a bum had been hanging around asking to see her. Somehow he had gotten her card. Eleanor invited him in for dinner, called a friend to arrange a CCC job for him, and suggested he stay the night.

  Even Hick, who was with Eleanor at the time, was shocked. Sistie and Buzzie, Eleanor’s oldest grandchildren, were staying in the house with them. “How do you know he won’t kidnap the children?”

  Eleanor had thought of that and locked the elevators. But she trusted her new acquaintance, Al Kresse. And her trust turned out to be well placed: he thrived in the CCC and became a supervisor. He and his parents visited her at the White House, and she became godmother to his daughter.

  Once you became Eleanor’s friend, you were her friend forever. The one great exception to the rule was her friendship with Nan and Marion, which came to a painful end that summer of 1938.

  It was “a little thing,” according to Eleanor, that made her decide to confront Nan about the Val-Kill partnership. Perhaps it was Nan’s complaint about the silt kicked up by the dredging of the swamp, or perhaps Eleanor raised doubts about some of Nan’s selling tactics in connection with Val-Kill Industries. Whatever the reason for the confrontation, it came at a time when Nan was feeling particularly vulnerable. Earlier that summer, Marion had gone to a conference in Europe. “It leaves Nan high and dry and very lonesome and a little forlorn looking,” Tommy reported to Anna. Then Eleanor went off to visit Hick. Even though Eleanor invited Nan over for one meal every day, she remained “so listless that I begin to wonder if she is ill.”

  Eleanor’s description of the conversation in her letter to Anna made it sound sensible and measured. It was “a calm talk” in which she explained that her feeling had changed toward them both and that from then on they must have “a business like arrangement.” She added that it could be “friendly” and “agreeable,” but that her “old trust and respect was gone and could not be recovered.” She thought they probably felt the same way and were as justified as she was. “I am glad to have been honest at last!” she told Anna.

  Nan Cook, however, was devastated by the same “calm talk.” Five days afterward, she met Marion’s boat at the dock looking drawn and pale, her eyelids red and swollen from weeping. There had been a conversation with Eleanor, she told Marion, a “long and tragic talk” in which each of them “had said things that ought not to have been said.”

  Nan could never, in all the searching conversations that followed, explain to Marion just what had transpired. But the subsequent legal wrangling, as Eleanor attempted to extricate herself from the partnership, gave some clues.

  Over and over, in increasingly bitter exchanges, Eleanor referred to Nan’s claim that the entire partnership had been a charitable act—an attempt to help the unhappy Eleanor find fulfillment. “[Nan] told me . . . that while we were working in the 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.”

  This wounded Eleanor deeply, not only because it was a grossly unfair characterization of the partnership, but also because she could not bear to be the object of charity. Her entire life was devoted to helping, not to being helped!

  It was true, in the early years, that Eleanor sometimes presented herself as the grateful recipient of Nan and Marion’s know-how. “You are dears,” she had written them, “to let me join in it all for I’d never have had the initiative or the ability in any one line to have done anything interesting alone!” But that had been 1926. In subsequent years, Eleanor had proved the essential spark behind all their undertakings: she turned out to be a much-loved teacher at Todhunter, a key salesman for Val-Kill Industries, and an important partner in the Democratic Party in New York. When the cottage became too small for Val-Kill Industries, the three of them shared the costs of tools, but she alone put up the money for a second building. Eleanor was also hurt by the implication, which emerged during these conversations, that her name on Todhunter School literature might scare off wealthy conservative contributors who disliked the Roosevelt administration.

  There was to be one more painful incident before the final breach. On August 27, Eleanor was hosting a picnic for about a hundred people at Val-Kill. Her brother Hall was there, sharing “a choice few cocktails” in Nan’s garden, and got “very tight.” In his drunken state, he got into a playful wrestling match with his son Danny and broke the boy’s collarbone. Marion Dickerman, without telling Eleanor, insisted on taking Danny to the emergency room with the drunken Hall at the wheel. Very soon there were shouts for help from across the pond, and Eleanor got the news that Hall’s car had turned over in a ditch.

  “I left the tables,” Eleanor wrote Hick, “and ‘managed’ Hall and the situation for nigh on an hour and a half! I’ll tell you the details when we meet but I was mad for two days!”

  In fact, Eleanor was angry for much longer than two days. She was angry with Nan for plying Hall with drinks, and she was angry with Marion for taking off with him to the emergency room without telling her. “I realize,” she wrote Marion months after the incident, “that probably not being familiar with gentlemen under those conditions . . . you did not realize what was happening. It might have been possible for me to prevent Hall taking the car had I known in time. That would at least have obviated the danger that the situation in the ditch caused, or anything else which might have occurred had you got beyond the ditch.”

  What made the incident especially painful for Eleanor was that it confronted her, in such a public way, with the fact that Hall’s alcoholism was reaching the tragic extreme so familiar to her from her family history. Eleanor was deeply attached to her tall and handsome brother and clung to great hopes for him. Hall had shown such promise, graduating at the top of his class from Groton and with a master’s degree in engineering from Harvard. Recently he had kept an apartment in Eleanor’s building in Greenwich Village and seen his big sister often, meeting her at the airport when she came to town and chauffeuring her around town on numerous occasions. She made a point of mentioning his attentions in her column. Privately, in letters to Hick, she would write hopefully when he showed up at her apartment and didn’t smell of alcohol. But she also confided, to Hick only, about how loud and wild he often was, driving her from place to place at eighty miles an hour and showing up late at her apartment with rowdy friends. The rage she visited on Marion and Nan might better have been directed at Hall.

  After that incident, Eleanor’s communications turned formal and distant. Instead of writing to Nan and Marion by hand, as she
always did to her friends, she began dictating letters to Tommy, typed catalogs of several pages evoking the history of who had contributed what to the partnership, referring to the “long and illuminating talk with Nan,” and suggesting various ways to break up and distribute the Val-Kill properties. In her hurt and anger, she went to extremes—at one point vowing to give up Val-Kill altogether. “I shall only come to Hyde Park when the President is at the big house and I will stay at the big house.”

  Nan and Marion, in turn, made exaggerated claims for their part of the assets. “Nancy has made up the accounts,” Tommy reported indignantly to Anna. “The furniture in your mother’s house and in mine amounts to over $4000. The furniture in the cottage is worth only $850.00!” To add insult to injury, Nan and Marion asked for support from Missy, who was inevitably viewed by Eleanor as FDR’s agent. “I can’t imagine why those two dames are holding out and I can’t imagine how they could have been so stupid as to enlist Missy on their side,” Tommy wrote Anna.

  Marion tried in vain to break through the wall that Eleanor had erected. “CANNOT OUR YEARS OF CLOSE ASSOCIATION HELP US AT SUCH A TIME?” she telegraphed. But her efforts were rebuffed; a return telegram from Eleanor said, “VERY SORRY EVERY MINUTE TODAY IS FILLED. IF YOU WILL ASK NAN TO TELL YOU OF CONVERSATION WITH HER LAST SUMMER THAT SHOULD MAKE EVERYTHING CLEAR.” She told them she was leaving everything in her lawyer’s hands.

  “My cottage difficulties did not smooth out till I actually ordered the water off,” Eleanor wrote Anna that November. “Then the agreement was signed.”

  In subsequent years, there were polite exchanges back and forth, and Nan and Marion were invited to major events, like the famous hot dog picnic at Val-Kill for the king and queen of England the following summer. But there would be no more camping together in the Adirondacks or idyllic summer days at Campobello. Eleanor would no longer take an active part in the Todhunter School nor work with Nan on the homestead projects. Instead they would coexist uneasily side by side, Nan and Marion in the stone cottage, where they continued to live for the next seven years, and Eleanor in the redesigned factory building with Tommy, who was now her closest companion, and with the constant stream of visitors of all kinds who filled her eventful life to overflowing.

  Marion and Nan were devastated by the breakup and never fully understood it. Eleanor was deeply wounded as well. “It has done something to me inside,” she wrote Anna, “and I never want any intimacy again.” “She has been so completely disillusioned about those two,” Tommy wrote Anna, “and realizes she cloaked them with many virtues . . . which they never had.”

  For an entire week, Eleanor refused to see anybody. Tommy was alarmed. Never before had she seen her boss so silent and closed off to everyone and everything, lying in bed with her face turned to the wall. Finally one evening, at the 11th Street apartment, Eleanor dropped in on Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to announce that she had “recovered from my disappointment. . . . I simply had to let you know that all is now well. I am unable to lead a life based on an illusion.”

  On Eleanor’s birthday, in October 1938, FDR presented his wife with a good-sized check to defray the costs of the dredging of the swamp at Val-Kill, a project that had angered Nan and Marion. “This is TOWARD the new ‘Lake Eleanor’ at Val-kill,” FDR wrote. “I will take you cruising on it.” Since Eleanor had suspected FDR of siding, through Missy, with Nan and Marion, the check was a peace offering of sorts.

  In November, Eleanor and Hick spent an evening together at 11th Street, talking about the breakup with Nan and Marion. Hick sympathized with Eleanor, writing that she “couldn’t understand how they could be such damned fools!” At least it was settled for Eleanor, if not for Nan and Marion. Hick hoped Eleanor could now get some fun out of Val-Kill. “For yourself.”

  —

  WHEN ELEANOR TOLD HER FRIENDS that she refused “to live a life based on illusion,” she was referring in particular to her relationship with Nan and Marion. But it could have described her feelings about her life in general. She no longer was willing to go along with Hick’s fantasies either.

  When Hick wrote that it would be fun “if some day we could just go off bumming, looking at things, visiting all sorts of funny little towns,” Eleanor replied, coolly, that she would only be able to travel “on a money-making basis . . . and I cannot imagine that you would enjoy it even if I were not the president’s wife.”

  Eleanor was rebelling that summer against her role as the president’s wife as well. FDR had written her twice from the Galápagos, asking her to join him on a ceremonial mission to Canada. She wrote back that “I don’t want to go anywhere I don’t have to go until my lecture trip which starts October 12.”

  Ironically, FDR’s trip to Canada was for the purpose of dedicating the International Bridge between the two countries and extending the Good Neighbor Policy to Canada, something Eleanor had long wanted him to do. “This bridge stands as an open door,” FDR announced in an historic speech. “There will be no challenge at the border and no guard to ask a countersign. Where the boundary is crossed the only word must be Pass, friend.”

  Then FDR pledged that “the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” It was an important first step toward FDR’s effort to build quietly a hemispheric defense against the threat that was increasingly the central concern of his presidency: the growing menace of Hitler’s Germany.

  The real reason Eleanor refused to play “Mrs R.” in Canada was that she was deeply involved in an event in her own backyard—one whose aims ran counter to FDR’s. While he was in Canada laying the groundwork for a military alliance, Eleanor was attending the World Youth Congress at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, a gathering of some five hundred young delegates from fifty-five countries around the world whose final resolution called for an end to the drift toward armed conflict.

  The Youth Congress, held in August 1938, was an exuberant affair, kicked off with a welcoming ceremony at Randall’s Island in New York City. American students performed the “collegiate shag,” the “Polish Falcons” gave a gymnastic display, and a Chinese choir sang, before an audience of twenty-three thousand. Then, after a boat ride up the Hudson, the delegates assembled at Vassar, just down the road from Hyde Park and Val-Kill. The president of Vassar, Henry MacCracken, set the tone: peace, he told the youths, was “the most radical, the most revolutionary idea in the world.” Eleanor echoed his welcome, hailing world youth as the “best agents for peace.” Then she settled in to listen attentively, as her knitting needles flew, to reports from youth movements around the globe.

  Afterward, she submitted to an hour and a half of tough questions from the delegates, replying thoughtfully and without condescension. Some of Hick’s reporter friends thought the students’ questions had been disrespectful and even rude, but Eleanor didn’t seem to mind. She had often complained to Hick that her own sons didn’t take her views seriously: at least these young people did.

  “I felt what they said was young and impulsive,” she explained to Hick, “but their faces and their earnestness and the good manners and restraint of the audience was remarkable.” She was impressed with their tolerance when they heard their countries criticized. It was “a lesson to their elders.”

  That evening, Eleanor returned and sat in the front row for an international variety show. Delegates from Czechoslovakia and Indonesia danced, a Negro chorus sang spirituals, and the Canadians presented a parody of themselves. The master of ceremonies, Seumas O’Heavy of Ireland, interrupted the proceedings to lead a chorus, in Eleanor’s honor, of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  The repercussions from the Vassar conference would continue for many months. Eleanor would be the target of sharp criticism from the Catholic bishops, who feared godless communism; from right-wing politicians like Martin Dies, of the House Un-American Activities Committee; and also from some thoughtf
ul critics who found her naïve. The whole experience would force her to become increasingly articulate in her own defense, and in defense of the young people she had come to like and admire.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TIME TEARS ON

  THERE WERE A LOT of ways to get around the 1939 New York World’s Fair. You could walk, of course, but the fair, whose slogan was “Time Tears On,” covered more than twelve hundred acres on sixty miles of paths, so that would require many visits. You could take a bus with a musical horn, or jump on one of the little trackless trains that snaked along to the tune of “Sidewalks of New York.” You could hire a bicycle rickshaw. You might even, if you were a person of importance, ride around in a long black open car, as did the king and queen of England on their visit in June. But on May 1, 1939, two days after the fair opened, Eleanor wired Hick requesting an unofficial night out there with her brother, niece, and nephew. “NOT TELLING ANYONE LOVE ER.” Hick suggested that their little group travel about in sightseeing “chairs,” open three-wheeled chariots with upholstered seats, steered from behind by a smartly uniformed driver. “Bring warm wraps,” she counseled.

  Hick had been promoting the fair for two years already by that time. Eleanor had been involved almost as long, because of Hick. She had lunched with Hick at her first office, high up in the Empire State Building. She had visited her several times more after her office moved to the fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows in Queens. To help out the fair, and Hick as well, Eleanor had made mention in “My Day” of various attention-grabbing events during the long buildup to opening day.

  She had even participated in the promotion of the ubiquitous symbols of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere, two gigantic geometric shapes that rose high into the air at the fairground’s hub. The Trylon was a slender three-sided spire seven hundred feet high. The Perisphere was the largest globe ever constructed by man. Their bright white shapes were visible for miles around.