by Susan Quinn
Once out of the public eye, Eleanor went to work patching things up. She called FDR and insisted he talk to Farley and affirm Wallace as his choice. Farley, after arguing to no avail, agreed to try to make it happen. But by that time mutiny was in the air.
At 10:30 p.m., when Eleanor slipped quietly into a seat on the crowded platform, the delegates were a screaming multitude. “Mention of Wallace started a roar of boos and catcalls,” Hick recalled, “in which even the magic word ‘Roosevelt’ was so drowned that it gave the impression that he was being booed too.” Hick and Frances Perkins stood in the wings and “watched with horror as [Eleanor] moved forward through the haze of dust and tobacco smoke under the glaring lights to the speaker’s stand—tall and proudly erect, her head held high.” The boos and the catcalls stopped. In dead silence, without written notes, she spoke “as calmly as though she were talking directly to each man and woman in that crowd.”
She began by thanking “our National Chairman,” Jim Farley. “Nobody could appreciate more what he has done for the party.”
Then, instead of endorsing Henry Wallace by name and setting off more protests, she stayed on higher ground, emphasizing “responsibility,” a word she used six times in her brief speech. The man who would become president (no mention of FDR either) would be faced with “a heavier responsibility than any man has ever faced before in this country.” This man would have to stay “on the job,” leaving the “grave responsibility” of campaigning to the delegates. They would have to rise above “narrow and partisan” considerations. And they would have to understand that “no man who is a candidate or who is President can carry this situation alone.” Without saying it, she was suggesting that the nominee, at such a critical moment in history, had the right to choose his replacement. “This is a time when it is the United States we fight for.” As she returned to her seat, the organist softly played “God Bless America.”
Noise and confusion returned as the delegates rallied behind their vice presidential nominees. Mrs. Wallace, sitting next to Eleanor on the platform, looked very unhappy, commenting to Eleanor, “I don’t know why they don’t seem to like Henry.” But eventually Eleanor’s argument that her husband deserved to choose his possible successor in such perilous times saved the day. Wallace won—by a mere seventy votes—over House Speaker William Bankhead of Alabama.
As soon as Wallace’s nomination was assured, Eleanor said a quick goodbye to Mrs. Wallace, left for her chartered plane, which was waiting for her on the tarmac, flew back to LaGuardia, picked up her car, and drove on to Val-Kill, arriving in time for nine o’clock breakfast.
FDR had managed to reach Eleanor at the airport just before she left Chicago and tell her she had done a good job. Afterward, he told several people that her speech had been “just right.” Others were more effusive. According to the New York Daily News, Mrs. Roosevelt’s remarks did “more to soothe the convention bruises than all the efforts of astute Senators.” Hick’s boss Charlie Michelson observed that “on that occasion, at least, she was a better politician then her husband.”
Tommy wrote Hick from Val-Kill that they were “swamped” with letters and wires of approval, including a “beautiful letter” from the grand old man of progressive Republican politics, Senator George Norris, which especially pleased Eleanor.
“When it seemed to me all of the good work President Roosevelt had done . . . all of his ability to continue his work in the future,” Norris wrote Eleanor, “were about to be cast aside . . . when it seemed the battle for righteousness was about to be lost, you came on the scene, and what you said in that short speech caused men of sense and honor to stop and think before they plunged. . . . You turned a rout into victory. . . . This country owes you a debt of gratitude it can never repay and which it does not now fully comprehend.”
Tommy had worried that Eleanor’s unprecedented speech at the convention might resurrect the old antisuffrage cry of “petticoat rule.” But after seeing her “quiet that bunch of wild kids at the Youth Congress,” she never had any doubts that she could handle any crowd.
“She is truly a magnificent person,” she wrote Hick, “and while you and I have always known that . . . it takes a dramatic thing once in a while to recharge us.”
Eleanor herself may have been the only one with mixed feelings about her appearance. “I felt,” she remembered later, “as though it had all been a dream with a somewhat nightmarish tinge.”
—
FOR THE FIRST TWO MONTHS after the convention, FDR left the campaigning to others, as Eleanor said he must. Willkie, on the other hand, campaigned vigorously, even frantically, laying great emphasis on the dangers of an unprecedented third term. In a world menaced by dictatorship, he argued, Roosevelt was nearly as dangerous as Hitler or Mussolini.
Willkie was prone to making wild accusations: at one point, he accused FDR of telephoning Hitler and Mussolini and urging them to “sell Czechoslovakia down the river at Munich.”
“Golly he must be tough to cover,” Hick wrote Eleanor. “So much extemporaneous speaking—and always a chance to deny he said a thing, or to say that he was misinterpreted. Bet the correspondents will get plenty sick of him.”
“The more he hollers,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “the plainer it will become that he is really saying nothing. He will be lucky if his laryngitis returns, and his friendly doctors lock him up for the duration.”
But Willkie was, in Harold Ickes’s estimation, “an attractive, colorful character” who wasn’t going to be easy to defeat. There were other major threats to FDR’s reelection as well. One was a venomous speech by John L. Lewis, powerful leader of the CIO, saying that the reelection of FDR would be “a national evil of the first magnitude.”
Lewis’s attack backfired: telegrams of support poured in to the White House afterward. But FDR’s determination to put the nation on a war footing was controversial. Just weeks before the election, FDR announced that he had reached an agreement to supply Great Britain with World War I destroyers in exchange for British-controlled bases in the Caribbean. At just the same time, Congress was considering a bill that would establish the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Add to that the near-unanimous endorsement of Willkie by major newspapers—including the New York Times and the Washington Post—and by October, FDR’s supporters were urging him to shed his presidential detachment and go on the offensive.
FDR did so with relish. “I am an old campaigner,” he began telling crowds, “and I love a good fight.” He accused Willkie of using totalitarian techniques: repeating falsehoods over and over until people believed them. “The overwhelming majority of Americans will not be scared by this blitzkrieg of verbal incendiary bombs.”
FDR paired stern rhetoric with a playful mocking of the house’s three die-hard isolationists: Congressman Joseph Martin, Congressman Bruce Barton, and Congressman Hamilton Fish. He told a crowd of twenty-two thousand at Madison Square Garden that Great Britain would never have gotten any help at all had it been up to “now wait, a perfectly beautiful rhythm—Congressmen Martin, Barton, and Fish.” By the end of the speech, the audience had turned “Martin, Barton, and Fish” into a chant. For the rest of the campaign, audiences waited for “Martin, Barton, and Fish.” FDR happily obliged. He also kept his listeners happy by promising not to go to war “except in case of attack.” On one important occasion, late in the campaign, FDR neglected to add that qualifying phrase, causing his advisers to worry that he was making a promise never to go to war.
Hick spent election night at the party’s press headquarters in New York, wearing a path in the carpet between the “tabulator” and Charlie Michelson’s desk. The earliest returns, trickling in from New England towns, didn’t look good. But then came Boston, which turned the Massachusetts tide. Then Connecticut began to look good. When the president swung into the lead in Ohio, confidence swelled. And when the Cleveland Plain Dealer conceded Ohio, it was all but over.
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br /> “Along about 1 am,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “the drunks began to pile in.” By 2 a.m., “it was just a question of how many states we would carry.”
The final tally in electoral votes was 449 to 82. FDR lost Maine and Vermont, as in the past, but he also lost in the heartland for the first time. Thanks to the hard work of political operatives like Hick, however, the Democrats maintained their majorities in both the House and Senate, which were going to be critical in the president’s efforts to lead the country in the dangerous days ahead.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Winston Churchill was watching anxiously. By that time, more than ten thousand Londoners had perished in the Blitz, and Churchill grumbled in private that the Americans were “very good in applauding the valiant deeds of others” while keeping out of the war themselves. His message to FDR, however, was restrained and gracious: “I did not think it right for me as a foreigner to express any opinion upon American politics while the election was on but now I feel that you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it. . . . I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IN RESIDENCE
AS USUAL, ELEANOR AND HICK observed the Christmas holiday together in New York in 1940, a few days early. “One of my friends,” Eleanor noted in “My Day,” “with whom I always make it a point to have a reunion before Christmas, came to dinner and we spent a happy evening together.”
Hick gave Eleanor special logs for her fire, a basket of jellies, and something Eleanor described in her thank-you note as a “lunch set.” But Hick, like all of Eleanor’s friends, had long since given up competing in the gift department. “Madame,” she protested to Eleanor, “am I never to stop receiving Christmas presents from you? Oh, damn it—what have I ever done to deserve a friend like you! Well, anyway, I thank you—for a very great deal of pleasure.”
According to Eleanor’s Christmas notebook, Hick received oranges, raisins, and a fur coat for Christmas. But then there was also a surprise fruitcake for dessert. And of course there was a toy for Prinz, which he had to wait to open. “He’d lie on the floor and look at it long minutes at a time!” Hick reported. “You should have seen him open it!”
Hick had an extra reason to celebrate. The November election had brought an end to her publicist’s job. Then, two weeks before Christmas, she learned that she would be hired as executive secretary of the Democratic Party’s Women’s Division.
It hadn’t been easy to get the job. Both Eleanor and Molly Dewson, who had made the Women’s Division into a Democratic powerhouse, worried that Hick wouldn’t have the patience “to answer endless letters constructively and help endless ‘little’ women to move up one step at a time in organization.”
Eleanor and Molly felt proprietary about the Women’s Division. Some of Eleanor’s happiest times in earlier days had been spent raising money and awareness for it. With Louis Howe’s encouragement, she had taken charge of what became the Democratic Digest, a “serious but gay and friendly messenger,” first in New York and then in Washington. After FDR won in 1932, Eleanor was the one who convinced him to establish the Women’s Division as a permanent part of the Democratic National Committee.
As director, Molly Dewson conferred almost daily with the First Lady on placing women in patronage jobs and had more success than any previous administration. She also worked energetically to educate women, America’s newest voters, at the grassroots level. It was her idea to introduce a character called “Mrs. County Leader,” a perky little woman with a big can-do smile, wearing a small felt hat with a single feather. Handouts showed Mrs. County Leader bent double in front of her car, rear end in the air, turning a crank. “Be a self-cranker,” read the caption, because the Party “has no automatic starter.” Elsewhere, Mrs. County Leader is fishing in “rock-ribbed Republican” waters, to “catch voters not lucky enough to be born Democrats.”
The Women’s Division under Dewson turned out information flyers in rainbow colors, addressing succinctly every issue from farming to taxes to nutrition to rural electrification. Metal banks in the shape of donkeys were distributed for the purpose of raising gas money so that women could travel around knocking on doors. The women, under Dewson, were one of the reasons the 1936 election was the most lopsided Democratic victory in American history.
Charlie Michelson described Molly Dewson as “the greatest she-politician of my term.” To Jim Farley, she was simply “the General.” Even though “the General” had retired in 1938, both she and Eleanor remained influential. There was no doubt in Eleanor’s mind, or Molly Dewson’s, that Hick was carrying on their tradition. They sensed that Hick’s rough edges might be a problem on the job.
Dewson was hardly a conventional lady herself. She and her life partner, Polly Porter, went from cow farming in western Massachusetts to working for the Red Cross in the south of France during World War I. She wasn’t afraid to use her elbows in fighting for progressive causes: “I am oblivious to a few digs in the ribs and cracks on the head,” she told a colleague. “I just pull my hat on straight and prepare for the next objective, while all the time continuing [to be] the perfect Yankee with a complete sense of humor.”
Dewson wore homespun suits—the jacket pockets sagging a little because of her habit of thrusting her hands into them—comfortable shoes, no makeup, and small wire-rimmed spectacles. But she was a Wellesley graduate from a respectable New England family, while Hick had neither college degree nor pedigree. Hick had acquired her style, and the unladylike nickname, in the tough world of daily journalism. But, perhaps hearing “the Commander’s” lecture in her ear, she argued passionately for herself.
“I honestly don’t think you and Molly have any real cause for worry about my getting bored or impatient with the ladies,” she wrote Eleanor. “What neither of you seems to realize is just how desperate my plight is—and how little I can afford to be choosy!” She was forty-seven—an age when it is “very, very difficult” for a woman to get a job. “This particular job appeals to me more than any other I might get.” She suggested there could be a “front woman” to make most of the speeches and pose for photographers. “And whatever else I have to do I can do.”
In the end, Charlie Michelson, her boss during the campaign, may have won the day for Hick. Michelson had hired Hick because Eleanor recommended her, but whatever doubts he had were dispelled on the first day, when she did exactly what he asked her to. Like Michelson, Hick could turn out copy in a hurry: over two days at one point she wrote seven speeches for Democratic candidates on a wide range of issues. It didn’t hurt that she listened with rapt attention to Michelson’s stories about his early days in journalism, going back to the McKinley assassination. “What a newspaper career that man had!” Hick wrote Eleanor. Michelson told Hick she was the only woman qualified to take over the Women’s Division; he came back early from his vacation to lobby on her behalf.
In the end, Eleanor and Dewson decided to act on Hick’s suggestion about hiring a “front woman.” Mrs. Gladys Tillett would be given the title of director of the Women’s Division. Hick would have the title of executive secretary and work behind the scenes. “You are under her,” Eleanor wrote pointedly, “and work out plans with her.” Hick would have a one-year contract. “But,” Eleanor added, “I’m sure you can count on four years if you get on with the gals coming in.” Mrs. Tillett, according to Eleanor, was “delighted to have you.”
Gladys Avery Tillett was the daughter of a North Carolina Supreme Court justice and a graduate of the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. She had been an early leader of the League of Women Voters in her state and a delegate to three Democratic conventions. She was also married to a lawyer, had three children, and was, according to one society page profile, “one of the most eloquent and ‘to the point’ speakers on the American scene.”
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sp; This story was accompanied by a photograph of Tillett’s long, delicate face in profile. Her hat, made of some gauzy material stretched over wire, resembled a large exotic flower. It was tilted forward at a becoming angle. Clearly, Mrs. Tillett had the style required of a “front woman.”
No matter how serious the occasion, the press still paid a remarkable amount of attention to the dress and appearance of women in politics. When Eleanor arrived at the 1940 Democratic convention to make her historic speech, the New York Times spent two whole paragraphs on what she was wearing. “Her traveling suit was a tailored ensemble of navy cloth coat with long lapels of Eleanor blue, with the soft crepe dress beneath in the same shade. Her hat was a small one of navy straw in a modified beret type with Eleanor blue flowers topping the low crown. She carried a large navy calf purse, and later . . . added a shoulder spray of white orchids to her costume.”
Hick was an old pro at this kind of fussy writing: she had done plenty of it in her early days in Milwaukee and Minneapolis. In truth, she was better at describing the style than living it. Still, “front woman” or no, she was going to have to meet certain sartorial expectations.
One of them was a hat. In the Democratic Digest, there is hardly a woman, in all the hundreds of photographs of women at meetings, who is pictured without a hat—often an outlandish one. In one of the pictures Eleanor wears a hat that has an off-kilter twisting tornado shooting out of the top. Others wore tiny flying saucers precariously perched on top of their hairdos, or more daring styles, including a fat roll wrapped around the head suitable for an imam. A lady Democrat needed a hat.
So one day in March, when a milliner visited her on Mitchell Place, Hick brought out her black straw hat with silver quill. It was a Lilly Daché, Hick noted proudly. Eleanor had given it to her just seven years earlier.
“I want a hat just like this one,” she told the milliner firmly.
