by Susan Quinn
Hall was buried in the family vault in Tivoli, alongside the mother and father he barely knew. “I know he would want all of us to remember,” Eleanor wrote in “My Day,” “but to remember happily.” There were things about Hall, Eleanor wrote his daughter, also named Eleanor, that made him irresistible. “He enjoyed life in spots so spontaneously that certain moments with him stand out as the gayest moments in my whole life!” Sometimes at White House parties the Marine Band would strike up a waltz. Then Eleanor would flip her long train over her arm and take to the floor with her brother, who was even taller than she. They both waltzed beautifully. Everyone else would leave the floor to watch them.
Eleanor tried to put Hall’s death behind her quickly, numbing herself with activity. But she confessed to Hick that she was “in a horrid frame of mind” and felt “indifferent inside.” Hick wrote her back, “I think Hall’s illness and death undoubtedly took more out of you than you realize or would ever admit, even to yourself.” This was followed by a pep talk: “I know of no other woman who could learn to do so many things after 50 and to do them so well as you have.”
Eleanor was by then pouring herself into her new job at the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD). It was the first real job she had taken on since becoming First Lady, and she took it very seriously, walking the half hour from the White House to her ninth-floor office in Dupont Circle every morning and working there with her assistant and friend, Elinor Morgenthau. Her goal, as she understood it, was to heighten preparedness by encouraging people to get involved as volunteers.
It was during these months, when she was working during the day at the OCD office, and attending to everything else when she got home, that a night guard noticed that her light had stayed on all night. FDR had asked her the next day, “What’s this I hear? You didn’t go to bed at all last night?”
Franklin himself almost always managed a good night’s sleep. But in 1941, his waking hours might have seemed like a bad dream. He had persuaded Congress to approve a draft and to dramatically step up weapons production so that the country might become, in his words, the “arsenal of democracy.” He had managed to convince Churchill of America’s commitment to his cause. But he couldn’t find a way to convince the wary American public to go to war. “He had no more tricks left,” writer Robert Sherwood observed. “The bag from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty.”
Meanwhile, on October 31, a German torpedo sank the destroyer Reuben James, killing over a hundred American sailors. What’s more, those who knew most about the atrocities Hitler was committing on the ground in Europe were crying out for action. Dorothy Thompson was one of the first American journalists to truly understand that Hitler was hell-bent on carrying out the annihilation of European Jewry.
Thompson spent Thanksgiving of 1941 typing out a long memo to Eleanor Roosevelt, urging her to convince FDR to act immediately. “TAKE ACTION!” she typed in capital letters. “The action should be sudden and of complete audacity.” Her suggestion: send the Marines to seize Martinique, now a territory of Nazi-controlled Vichy France. “America will become excited with the first American coup,” she predicted.
Of course FDR could do nothing of the kind: he still had the isolationists accusing him of provoking encounters. All he could do was wait for an attack large enough to justify a declaration of war. It wasn’t long in coming.
Harry Hopkins and FDR were having lunch together as usual on December 7, 1941, when a call came in from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox: his staff had picked up a radio signal from Honolulu about an air raid—and it wasn’t a drill. Hopkins didn’t believe it at first: no one had suspected that the Japanese would target Hawaii. Roosevelt believed it right away.
Eleanor, who was at the White House that day, knew from a glance into FDR’s study that “finally the blow had fallen and we had been attacked.” All the secretaries were there, two telephones were in use, and senior military were on their way to the White House. She noticed that FDR remained “deadly calm” as activity swirled around him and news from Hawaii continued to come in, “each report more terrible than the last.”
The attack on Pearl Harbor lasted less than two hours but exacted a horrible price. Twenty-one ships of the Pacific Fleet, including eight battleships, were damaged or sunk. FDR, a naval man and lover of ships, must have felt the losses as body blows. More devastating was the loss of more than twenty-four hundred lives.
It so happened that Eleanor’s weekly radio broadcast on NBC took place on Sunday, December 7. So it was she, not FDR, who spoke first to the American people about the event. Her style, as usual, was homey and undramatic. “For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important.” Now that was over. There was no more uncertainty.
“We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it. Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.”
Horrible as the attack was, Pearl Harbor freed FDR at last to do what he had wanted to do for some time. “Hostilities exist,” he told Congress and the American people the next day. “There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.”
Eleanor accompanied FDR to the Capitol for his speech, but joined her superior at the Office of Civilian Defense, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, soon after to fly to the West Coast, where there were fears of a coming Japanese attack. The time had come to finalize and implement the plans of the OCD.
Hick, who heard the news of Pearl Harbor over the radio from the Little House, returned soon after to a chill and silent White House, “as though it had died.” Even the president’s little dog Fala didn’t bark. Outside, all day long and into the night, she heard the sound of a steam shovel digging a trench across the front lawn toward the Treasury building. Workers were creating a tunnel from the White House to a presidential bomb shelter, in a vault deep underneath the Treasury Department. FDR, ever the joker, claimed he would only go there if he could play poker with the gold bricks.
To Winston Churchill, the news of Pearl Harbor came as a great relief: the attack meant the Americans were finally “in the war, up to the neck.” Now it was a matter of coordinating a strategy for future victory. Right away, Churchill began planning a trip to visit his “great friend” at the White House. And so while Eleanor was still on the West Coast, he and FDR agreed on an extended visit, to begin on December 22 and last through Christmas and beyond. FDR had issued the invitation three days after Pearl Harbor, and Churchill embarked from England soon after for the eight-day voyage. No one had thought to inform Eleanor of this “top secret” plan, however, until the very day of Churchill’s arrival.
Eleanor was furious. Not only had she been left out of the loop, but she was going to have to completely revise her complicated arrangements of who slept where and who came to dinner. What’s more, Churchill’s visit was going to interfere with the annual Christmas rendezvous that she and Hick had planned for that very night.
Hick and Eleanor usually celebrated together in New York; it was an intimate and quiet time that both looked forward to. But in 1941 Eleanor’s schedule made that impossible. So the plan was to dine and exchange gifts in Eleanor’s sitting room at the White House. In midafternoon, Hick got a call from Tommy: could she come early? Something had come up that was going to occupy Eleanor later that evening.
At a few minutes before six, Hick walked through the West Hall to her room, observing to her surprise that there were highball glasses, liquor bottles, and ice on the tea table. She had only been in her room a few minutes when Eleanor appeared, looking quite annoyed.
Hick stared at her friend for a minute, then threw back her head and howled with laughter. Eleanor, she remembered, “didn’t see anything funny about it, at the moment.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
RISKING EVERYTHING
NEVER HAD ELEANOR ROOSEVELT felt more alone in the White House than she did during the Christmas season of 1941. It had begun badly, when her special time with Hick was spoiled by Churchill’s visit. Then, on Christmas morning, there were only two Christmas stockings for her to stuff: one for Harry Hopkins’s daughter Diana and one for FDR’s little dog Fala. “It just didn’t seem as though anywhere around there was much personal feeling,” she wrote Anna in Seattle. But she added that “I think Pa enjoyed all the officialdom.”
The “officialdom” in this case was Winston Churchill and his retinue. Though Eleanor had expressed admiration in the past for Churchill’s eloquence, there was very little she enjoyed about the prime minister in the flesh. To begin with, there was his drinking: early on in his visit he had made arrangements with the president’s butler to have a tumbler of sherry before breakfast, scotch and soda before lunch, and champagne and ninety-year-old brandy at bedtime.
Bedtime, as it turned out, was very late: Churchill liked to stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., smoking cigars and brainstorming with his new ally. FDR, who usually went to bed at a reasonable hour, found Churchill’s company irresistible, even in the wee hours. “There is no question,” Eleanor noted, “when you are deeply interested it is possible to go on working ’til all hours of the night. But for the people who have to wait up ’til you are through it is a deadly performance.”
Underlying Eleanor’s unhappiness was the realization that Churchill and FDR were engaged in an elaborate courtship that excluded her and everyone else. When they moved from room to room, Churchill gallantly insisted on wheeling FDR’s chair himself, imagining, as he later wrote, that he was like Sir Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth. FDR, for his part, opened up as never before—confessing at dinner that he had been unhappy at Harvard when he was rejected from the Porcellian Club. To which Churchill gave the perfect riposte: “When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think, my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.”
There was plenty of competitive sparring as well, with each head of state trying to top the other’s stories and arguments. But all of it took place in an atmosphere of great camaraderie. Indeed, the two men seemed to relish the terrible task they were now undertaking together—something Eleanor especially disliked. She “saw in Churchill a male tendency to romanticize war,” her grandson Curtis observed, and she distrusted Churchill’s attachment to the colonial past. It troubled her to walk by the map room, hastily assembled in what had been the ladies’ coatroom, and glimpse FDR and Churchill engaged in animated conversation before a map with pins highlighting battlefields around the world. “They looked like two little boys playing soldier,” she observed.
For Eleanor, it was impossible to forget for even a moment that there were real soldiers all around the world risking their lives. Her four sons were now among them. In another few months, Joe Lash, the new friend who occupied a special place in her heart, would join them. She was alternately saddened and enraged at the situation.
“I grow deeply resentful inside when I look at these boys,” she wrote Hick from a plane filled with soldiers, “that now we spend so much on, that they may go out and die for a way of life that a few years ago we didn’t want to tax ourselves to try to give them. . . . Will we do it all over again when those that live through it come back with the McKellars and Byrds [conservative southern Democrats] in power?”
This was her theme, over and over again, in her speeches and her writing. “At the end of this war,” she wrote in “My Day,” “that other war has to be fought.”
Eleanor had hoped to use her job at the Office of Civilian Defense to lay the groundwork for nothing less than a new social order. Defense, as she defined it, included “better nutrition, better housing, better day-by-day medical care, better education, better recreation for every age.”
But after Pearl Harbor, people were understandably more concerned about the distribution of gas masks and the hiring of air raid wardens than they were about what Eleanor liked to call “winning the peace.”
When it was discovered that several of Eleanor’s good friends, including the actor Melvyn Douglas and the dancer Mayris Chaney, were on the OCD payroll, her position became untenable. The venomous syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who made a career of attacking Eleanor, accused her of political scheming for her own ends and reducing OCD to “absurdity and contempt.” Enemies in Congress had a field day—railing against “fan dancers” on the federal payroll and pointing out that Chaney was making more money than a heroic soldier killed in action, and Douglas was making as much as General Douglas MacArthur, who was fighting a life-and-death struggle in the Philippines.
By February 1942, Eleanor realized she was going to have to resign. “I still believe in all the things we started out to do,” she wrote WPA leader Florence Kerr, “but I know if I stayed longer, I would bring more harm than good to the program.”
The truth was that the New Deal was being put on hold. Eleanor was going to have to find a way to fight for her values in a nation obsessed with war—a war that, so far, was going badly for the United States and its allies.
Under the circumstances, Democratic Party politics also seemed unimportant. It looked for a while as though the entire party apparatus might lose its budget—leaving Hick without the job she was starting to enjoy. In the past, Hick had sometimes displayed conventional biases toward strong women. Eleanor had once taken her to task for describing a woman she met who was practical, good at business, yet “very attractive,” as having “the mind of a man.” She had clashed with the previous boss of the Women’s Division, Dorothy McCallister. Hick’s attitude was one reason why Eleanor and Molly Dewson worried about whether she would fit in at the Women’s Division.
But at the Women’s Division, for the first time, Hick found herself in the company of women who were as politically savvy and passionate about making a difference as she was. On her fiftieth birthday that March, she thanked the diminutive and feisty Gladys Tillett for being “the best boss I ever had,” and promised to “try to live up to the kind things you said.” As usual, she apologized for her outbursts: “I fancy the thing I should try hardest to do is control my impetuosity and irritability.” She promised to do this “even if I explode inside in the attempt.”
Hick’s annual celebration with Eleanor changed that year. It turned out that Democratic congresswoman Mary Norton had the same birthday. Starting that year, and for many years to come, Eleanor put on a joint birthday party for Norton and Hick. It made the party less intimate, but more festive.
Congresswoman Norton, a warm and buxom Irish Catholic from New Jersey, was an unlikely trailblazer. She was handpicked to run for Congress in 1920 by Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, a man whose political machine was well known to be one of the most powerful and corrupt in the nation. According to Dewson, Mayor Hague picked Norton because he didn’t want a rival in Congress and felt “safer” with a woman.
Throughout her long career, Norton always had to battle suspicions that she was in Hague’s pocket. But it didn’t keep her from rising to a leadership position in the House and championing the New Deal. She was the first woman from the Democratic Party to be elected to Congress. As chairwoman of the Labor Committee, she fought hard for the groundbreaking Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which outlawed discrimination, mandated a minimum wage and forty-hour workweek, and outlawed child labor. Norton told Hick that she was prouder of getting that bill through the House than anything else she had ever done
in her life.
Hick and Norton had a lot in common. Mary had lost her mother when she was quite young and had been left to run the house. She had never finished high school—she stepped aside so that one of her brothers could become a priest—and kept that fact a secret throughout her career in Congress. She married a widower and had one child, who died tragically. After that, she consoled herself by becoming involved in a local nursery school—an early experience that would translate later into advocacy for childcare during the first world war. Norton might have followed her sisters into a modest career as a secretary had it not been for Mayor Hague, who was looking for an agreeable woman to represent his district.
Norton was agreeable. Some called her “Aunt Mary.” But she was also known as “fighting Mary Norton.” Her black eyes flashed and her eyebrows went into action when she was angry. When southern Democrats tried to block Fair Employment legislation, she delivered “an intelligent tongue-lashing.”
Hick and Mary Norton were coconspirators by that time, talking by phone almost every day and meeting frequently for business and pleasure. They spoke the same blunt language. Norton was pleased, she wrote Hick, when a speech she gave “made the boys mad. . . . It’s nice to get ‘under their skin.’” One of her colleagues was “a smooth son of a ___” who “loves the Pres. about as much as he does the devil.”
Mary Norton was a good Catholic who would never put a swear word to paper. But she could be forceful. When the Republicans later gained a majority in the House, she resigned from the Labor Committee in protest. She looked the new chairman of the committee, New Jersey congressman F. A. Hartley, coldly and calmly in the eye, and announced that she would not serve under him. Hartley, she said, “talks as if he knew something about labor.” But “in the 10 years I was chairman of the committee, [he] attended exactly six meetings.” Serving under Hartley, she declared, would be dangerous for her blood pressure.
