by Susan Quinn
“No,” said the milliner, just as firmly.
For the next ten minutes they argued back and forth. But in the end the milliner won. Even though Hick thought it impractical, and likely to break on her travels, the milliner insisted on giving her a feather quill instead of a silver one, not to mention an updated hat. At the end of the interview, the milliner gingerly picked up Hick’s old Lilly Daché model and asked, “Did you wear this hat last Spring?”
Hick answered defiantly, “Yes, I did, and nobody said a word, either!”
“You should have seen the expression on her face!” Hick wrote Eleanor.
Fortunately, Hick was going to remain hatless and inconspicuous much of the time. In the introductory profile in the Democratic Digest, she spoke of “Tillett and Company” and explained that she, Lorena Hickok, was the “and company.” She would be “behind the scenes,” the position she had come to prefer. But there can be little doubt that she was the reason that the Women’s Division and the Democratic Digest became energetic and intelligent advocates for progressive Democratic candidates over the next four years.
Since the new job would require Hick to live in Washington, D.C., for a good part of the time, Eleanor suggested that she find a country place near the District and give up the Little House. But Hick refused—the Little House was too important to her. She figured out that her $6,000 a year would allow her to sublease her Manhattan apartment and continue to spend time at the Little House, while renting a single, furnished room in D.C.
“Well, if that is the way you are going to live, you might just as well stay on here,” Eleanor told her. And so for the next five years Hick went from being an occasional to a regular resident of the White House.
Hick vowed that this stay at the White House was going to be different from the early ones, when she was so jealous of rivals for Eleanor’s attention. “That business of moping about the White House,” she wrote Eleanor. “Never again.” She planned to come and go in businesslike fashion, enjoying “glimpses of you” whenever they happened.
Her trouble had always been that when it came to Eleanor, she was “more interested in the person than the personage. I resented the personage and fought for years an anguished and losing fight against the development of the person into the personage. I still prefer the person, but I admire and respect the personage with all my heart!”
Eleanor was uncomfortable with this suggestion. “The personage is an accident and I only like the part of life in which I am a person!” Yet Eleanor’s life in the public arena left little time for anything else. Her speaking engagements, her radio talks, the constant barrage of letters, all of which she insisted on answering, kept her going through long days and longer nights.
Eleanor might have explained that she needed the money her public appearances brought. Or that she was merely doing her duty, responding to other people’s requests. But being the center of attention, as she had so wished to be as a little girl, must have been gratifying some of the time. There was also the crucial fact, which she admitted more than once, that being a whirlwind of activity staved off sad feelings that lurked beneath the surface. There were some days, she confessed to Joe Lash, when her life was so overwhelming that “I try to be a machine or I would break into tears or run away.”
Joe Lash was the one she made time for now. “No other engagement can’t be given up, if there is a chance to see you!” she wrote. She kept a large photo of him on her desk, wrote him affectionate letters daily, sometimes twice daily. “I’ve grown to love you so much that your moods and anxieties and joys and sorrows seem very close to my own heart and you are very constantly in my thoughts.” She was vicariously involved, in an intense way, in Lash’s struggle to woo Trude Pratt away from her unhappy marriage.
As her affection grew for Lash, whom she sometimes thought of as another son, her worries over her own sons continued. Not long after the election, she wrote Hick that she dreaded “getting accustomed to four more years of easy living” in the White House. Hick was quick to protest that Eleanor worked harder than anyone she knew. But perhaps Eleanor was thinking about the effect of “easy living” on her sons, who had been surrounded much of their lives by special privileges and harsh public scrutiny. It wasn’t easy to grow into adulthood in such an atmosphere.
Franklin Jr. seemed to have inherited the family drinking problem. After he got a job working in Hick’s office during the 1940 campaign, Eleanor asked Hick to keep an eye out. “If you hear of F. Jr. drinking too much let me know,” she wrote her. “I think I should talk to him but it is like talking to a feather pillow.” There had been several car accidents. After one of them, he angrily tripped a photographer and broke his camera.
Elliott, whom others in the family considered to be Eleanor’s favorite, had given her constant cause for worry, including a first marriage that lasted only a year and left a son behind. Now a second marriage to Ruth Googins, a woman Hick and everyone in the family liked, was in trouble. He too had been in a car accident that landed him in the hospital and knocked out his two front teeth—an event that Eleanor mentioned in her column. “I must say that the loss of two front teeth does cause rather a change in his appearance.” The reference was unusual: for the most part, Eleanor wrote only to Hick and her daughter, Anna, about such events. Hostile members of the press, especially a venomous columnist named Westbrook Pegler, were always eager to pounce on such family embarrassments.
The situation with her oldest son, James, over the last several years may have been the most distressing to Eleanor, because FDR was involved. In September 1938, James landed at the Mayo Clinic with what seemed to be an ulcer, but which everyone feared might be something worse. Eleanor spent two weeks there with him, and even FDR, for whom travel was a major undertaking, paid a visit. Exploratory surgery found nothing fatal, and James slowly recovered. But the background of his illness was troubling. James had married Betsey Cushing, one of a trio of sisters who had dazzled Boston society. While James was working at the White House as FDR’s aide, Betsey proved to be a lively and attractive presence who sometimes played hostess in Eleanor’s place. FDR, as James later wrote, was a ladies’ man by temperament and “at his sparkling best when his audience included a few admiring and attractive ladies.” He engaged in a flirtation with Betsey that deeply wounded his son. By the time James was hospitalized, the marriage was in serious jeopardy. FDR’s highly unusual visit may have been an attempt to make amends. Eleanor was used to Franklin’s flirtations, but this one must have bothered her more than others. She wrote Anna from the Mayo Clinic that “this situation seems to me incredibly unreal but Pa and Betsey refuse to acknowledge it.” While at the clinic, James became involved in a new romance with one of his nurses, much to both FDR’s and Eleanor’s dismay. Finally, at Eleanor’s suggestion, Harry Hopkins called the nurse’s boss, an action that infuriated James. Betsey sued for divorce, asking an enormous alimony. James ultimately married the nurse.
No wonder Eleanor wrote Joe Lash that she wouldn’t mind seeing her boys going into the armed services. Of course the public and the press would expect them to enlist, since others of their age were making the sacrifice. One by one, the four sons did sign up for military duty. In September 1940, Elliott joined the Army Air Corps. By October James was in California, drilling with the Marines. In 1941, the two younger boys reported to the Navy.
Increasingly the entire nation was consumed with war preparation. Even those who opposed a foreign war now feared an attack on the homeland. The regional conferences Hick put on for the Women’s Division now focused on “hemispheric defense.” Eleanor was traveling as much as ever, but her visits now included airplane factories and ballooning military installations. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, she told her “My Day” readers, was now home to sixty-five thousand recruits; a new building was going up there every thirty-five minutes. Her speeches now defended the all-out military buildup against the attacks of strident isola
tionists who accused FDR of warmongering. “It is stupid,” she told a Women’s Division conference in St. Paul that Hick organized, “to say . . . that safeguard[ing] the integrity of our hemisphere puts us in the category of those who desire world domination.”
Hick may have been at the White House more than Eleanor in 1941. But she worked hard at keeping that a secret from almost everyone, fearing that the women she worked with around the country would want favors if they knew she lived in such proximity to the Roosevelts.
Sometimes Eleanor would invite visiting Democratic women to the White House for tea or lunch—an especially helpful gesture whenever there were squabbles in the organization. “Many a ruffled feather she smoothed that way for us,” Hick noted. On those occasions the doormen and ushers colluded with Hick. “They would greet me formally, along with the rest, take our names, and escort us to the Red Room.”
Mrs. Roosevelt would play along too, greeting Hick as though she hadn’t seen her for a month, even though they had breakfasted together. Once, an usher, helping Hick out of her coat, asked, “In residence today? Or just a visitor?”
One hot Sunday afternoon in August 1941, Hick nearly had her cover blown in a most embarrassing way. The Roosevelts, she knew, were out of town, so the house was empty except for the servants. She went up to the White House roof after breakfast in her bathing suit to bask in the sun. Then, as she was about to return to her room, she heard a lot of male voices on the second floor. Looking down through the skylight, she recognized Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Undersecretary Sumner Welles, several generals, and a whole lot of Navy men dripping gold braid. There was no way to get to her room without passing them, and she didn’t have even a towel. She beat a quick retreat. It took a long while, but finally she managed to get a servant to bring her some clothes so she could slip by to her room inconspicuously.
The next day, she discovered the reason why all those brass were at the White House: FDR had pulled off a deception on a grand scale. While all the world believed he was on an innocent fishing trip, he had boarded a thousand-man warship for a rendezvous off the coast of Newfoundland with the man code-named “former naval person”: Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IN IT, UP TO THE NECK
FDR PLANNED HIS ESCAPE from the White House with glee: first, a train to New London, Connecticut, where he would board the presidential yacht, the Potomac, head out toward Martha’s Vineyard, and weigh anchor for the night. Then at dawn the next day, with the Secret Service left behind to impersonate a president at leisure with guests on the deck of the Potomac, he would transfer to the flagship USS Augusta, a heavy cruiser armed with an arsenal of guns and torpedoes. Accompanied by another heavy cruiser and four destroyers, the Augusta would speed north into Canadian waters off Newfoundland to meet with its opposite number, the HMS Prince of Wales, carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the man who, in Harry Hopkins’s estimation, was “the one and only person . . . with whom you need to have a full meeting of minds.”
A full meeting of minds didn’t take place: Churchill was hoping for a declaration of war from Roosevelt—a declaration the president could not give without setting off a rebellion back home. FDR proposed something quite different: a declaration of principles for a postwar, and postcolonial, world. Since Roosevelt held most of the cards, Churchill reluctantly agreed to go along—especially after FDR asked him, as wordsmith extraordinaire, to draw up the first draft. The result was the Atlantic Charter, a historic agreement granting self-determination to all nations once the war was over. It was a very optimistic undertaking, since at that moment the Germans were intent on obliterating the British nation. There was no guarantee that the Atlantic Charter had a future.
Still, FDR was pleased with the meeting. The conference produced a document that echoed the American Bill of Rights and disassociated the United States from the British colonial tradition to which Churchill clung with a passion. At the same time, it allowed FDR to take Churchill’s measure without making promises that would alarm the American people. Churchill, though he had hoped for more, announced that he had established “warm and deep personal relations with our great friend.”
As it happened, both Franklin Jr. and Elliott were able to join FDR on the Augusta—Franklin Jr. from his accompanying destroyer and Elliott from a nearby base. Roosevelt had not only the pleasure of his sons’ company, but also the added support of their strong arms and handsome uniformed presences. For FDR, there was also the sheer delight, for a man forever confined to his wheelchair, of carrying off a daring escapade, undetected by the American press. “The fact that he had pulled the trip off without being discovered,” Eleanor wrote, “gave him a deep sense of satisfaction.”
Eleanor knew nothing about the Atlantic Conference before it happened. But there can be no doubt that her influence had a lot to do with the document it produced. For years she had been speaking and writing about the importance of fighting for the core beliefs of a strong democracy rather than simply against the evils of Fascism and Communism. That was the idea underlying one of the most important speeches of FDR’s presidency, delivered to Congress that January, laying out the “Four Freedoms” worth fighting for: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Atlantic Charter drew on the same principles; it became the template for postwar peace agreements and the charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in all of which Eleanor played a critical role. When the agreement was announced on the radio on August 14, Eleanor wrote in “My Day” that “it was an important moment in the history of world progress.”
Three weeks later, the excitement in Eleanor and Franklin’s public life was suddenly overshadowed by private sorrow. Sara Roosevelt had been ailing since the spring. “I found Mama in bed with high blood pressure,” Eleanor had reported to Hick in May. “I think she just missed having a stroke and I fear it means I must be a bit more considerate of her, instead of running away. You know that won’t be to my liking.”
Sara Roosevelt died on September 7 at Hyde Park, not long after returning from Campobello. Eleanor had come up to help her move back in for the winter. They were eating breakfast together when she noticed that her mother-in-law was very pale and short of breath. Sensing that the end was near, she called Franklin in Washington. He came as quickly as he could—in time to spend the day of September 6 with his mother, recounting the details of his historic meeting with Winston Churchill at sea. His mother, who lived for his visits, seemed to revive at dinner. She died the next day, two weeks before her eighty-seventh birthday.
For Franklin, the loss was enormous. For several days, the New York Times reported, he “shut himself off from the world” more completely than at any time since he became president.
“That big house without his mother seems awfully big and bare,” his cousin and frequent companion Daisy Suckley wrote. “She gave him that personal affection which his friends and secretaries cannot do, in the same way—He was always ‘my boy,’ and he seemed to me often rather pathetic, and hungry for just that kind of thing.”
Eleanor, as usual, sprang into action, informing family members and arranging for the simple burial her mother-in-law had requested, in the graveyard at nearby St. James Episcopal Church. But her efforts were complicated by a much more troubling event: on the same night her mother-in-law was dying, her brother Hall Roosevelt, then living nearby in Hyde Park, became seriously ill and had to be hospitalized in Poughkeepsie.
“Hick dearest,” she wrote from Hyde Park on the day of Sara Roosevelt’s death, “I am so weary I cannot write.” She had been up most of the night, dealing not with Sara’s peaceful death but with putting Hall in the hospital and trying to keep him there. “I’ve got to be at the hospital at 9:30 am and try to use moral suasion.”
But moral suasion was no longer enough. Eleanor spent Hall’s last days by his hospital bed, along with hi
s companion, Zena Raset. It was, she wrote Joe Lash, “my idea of hell . . . to sit or stand and watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns and thinking ‘this was once the little boy I played with and scolded, he could have been so much and this is what he is.’”
Hall Roosevelt had been only one year old when his mother died, and he had barely known his father. “Take care of Brudie,” Eleanor’s father had charged in one of his letters. Eleanor mothered “Brudie” and felt responsible for him all his life. Hall had lived with Franklin and Eleanor early in their marriage and came to them often with his problems.
“He had great energy, great physical strength and great brilliance of mind,” Eleanor wrote, “but he never learned complete self-discipline.” Hall was twice divorced and the father of six. He had tried many things—always with flair but never for long. For a time, he worked in the relief administration in Detroit and lived on the same allowance as his relief clients. In 1938, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, he located 150 planes that could be flown across the French border to fight Franco. He flew to Paris, with a wink from FDR, to carry out the scheme, only to find that changed conditions on the ground made it impossible. Not long before he died, he was working on a book about his experiences as a young man in Alaska. “I think you will all enjoy the vivid pictures of the development of this northwestern corner of our country,” Eleanor wrote hopefully in “My Day.”
Early in the morning on September 25, 1941, Hall died at Walter Reed Hospital, with his older sister by his side. As soon as she returned to the White House, Eleanor walked into FDR’s study to tell him the news. “Hall has died,” she said. James, who happened to be with his father at the time, vividly remembered the tender scene that followed: “Father struggled to her side and put his arms around her. ‘Sit down,’ he said, so tenderly I can still hear it. And he sank down beside her and hugged her and kissed her and held her head on his chest. I do not think she cried. I think Mother had forgotten how to cry. But there were times she needed to be held, and this certainly was one. . . . And she spent her hurt in Father’s embrace.”
