by Susan Quinn
One Thursday evening in February 1942, Hick was with Mary Norton when it looked as though an important part of her signature legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act, might be undone by an amendment from the conservatives. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mary more tired and discouraged,” Hick wrote Eleanor.
But the next day, when Mary called up, she was jubilant. The Smith Amendment, “which would have cancelled practically all decent labor legislation enacted in the last 50 years,” was overwhelmingly defeated. “It certainly is a nice surprise, for last night we all thought it would be passed like a shot.”
The triumph in Congress added to the upbeat feeling at Hick and Mary’s first joint birthday party a week later at the White House. So did the presence of Marion Harron, a friend of Mary’s who was becoming more than a friend to Hick. Her gift to Hick was a Kachina doll, sacred to the Hopi people, and a wish that “the best will come to you in great abundance.”
Harron was the most serious contender as a replacement for Eleanor in Hick’s life. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California Law School, she was another of the women reformers who now surrounded Hick. Harron had fought for the minimum wage for women even before she graduated from law school. After coming east, she worked on a New York state commission aimed at improving workers’ lives. In 1932 she joined the Roosevelt administration, probably through the good offices of the Women’s Division under Molly Dewson. She worked for two New Deal agencies—first the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and then, after NRA was vitiated by the Supreme Court, the Resettlement Administration (RA), the agency that oversaw the development of newly built communities like Arthurdale. After the RA too was attacked and weakened, the Women’s Division managed to get Harron appointed to a twelve-year term on the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals, replacing the court’s first and only female member.
Judge Marion Harron was ten years younger than Hick, and a physical opposite. Her face was slender and delicate, her hair carefully parted and pulled back to the nape of her neck in a bun. Her eyes looked resolute, as did the set of her mouth. She in fact proved to be forceful in the courtroom—so forceful that some male lawyers felt intimidated. But she was a complete pushover when it came to Hick.
“You don’t even have the faintest notion of how magnificent you are,” Harron wrote Hick later that March. “I shall try to introduce you to yourself.” In May, after a trip together in the Shenandoah Valley, she wrote to Hick about “how good the week end was” and “how grateful I am to you for it. . . . It seems as though the time was not hoarded enough.”
Hick now started doing for Marion what Eleanor had done for her: giving her gifts that would change her life for the better. She sent Judge Marion off to get a new suit from Nardi, the tailor Eleanor had sent her to, and encouraged her to outfit herself with new shoes. Marion added a new marcelled hairdo.
Hick also urged the overserious Marion to “take my eyes off the fine print.” Marion, for her part, wrote amusingly of how absurd her job was at times. “How in God’s name did I ever fall into this morass?” she wrote Hick as she studied a case. Sitting in a tax court in Columbus, Ohio, she told Hick that she could draw an exact diagram of the pattern of decorations on the courtroom ceiling—“where my eyes travel while slow attorneys and slow witnesses travel along trails of questions and answers which are very familiar to me.”
Hick and Marion became a couple. Marion visited often enough at the White House to be waved through by the guards. She and Hick were frequently together as well at the Little House, where they took moonlight walks and spent many hours adding new varieties of flowers to Hick’s garden. Increasingly, Hick divided her time in Washington between the White House and Marion’s place in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Eleanor seems to have taken Hick’s new love interest in stride. Probably she was relieved that Hick had found someone else and needed her less. Her own attentions at that moment were focused on Joe Lash, whom she cared for in a way that was intense, yet motherly. Lash had long since given up his antiwar activities and joined the Army. In April, when he left for training, Eleanor gave a party for him in New York, complete with catered food and music. While he was away, she traveled with Trude Pratt to Nevada to keep her company while Pratt filed for divorce in order to marry Joe, just as she had when Anna sought a divorce years before.
Tommy, who watched at close range, was appalled by Eleanor’s involvement with Lash and Pratt, whom she referred to, in an indignant letter to Esther Lape, who had become her confidante, as “the Lash” and “the Pratt.” But then Tommy was indignant about all the “satellites” who circled around Eleanor, taking up her time and energy with their demands. Earl Miller was noisy and had a girlfriend who called at all hours, and Mayris Chaney was two-faced. But some of her sharpest complaints in her ongoing rant to Lape were reserved for Hick.
“Hickok is still here,” Tommy wrote Lape in 1941, “she can’t pay rent and her income tax and her dentist bill—so she has cut out paying rent! The Treasury isn’t as cooperative as the White House.” And then, two years later, “Our friend, Hick, is still . . . here and I imagine it will take dynamite to blast her out.”
Hick’s little room at the White House had changed dramatically since Pearl Harbor. The heavy blackout curtains, which were everywhere, made it very dark and gloomy in winter and hot in summer. After a while the edges of the curtains began to curl and stretch, so they had to be pinned together. Twice Hick was called because guards reported light escaping from her windows.
Along with the black curtains came garbage cans painted bright red and filled with sand. No fires were allowed in the fireplaces—a winter hardship in the big, tall-ceilinged rooms—so the cans of sand must have been provided in case a bomb dropped. Two large mirrors covering the east and west walls of the lobby were crated now, so that they wouldn’t shatter if the White House were hit.
Even when everyone was there, the White House was more somber than it used to be. In the early days, FDR’s laugh could be heard all over the house. It was “a great, ringing, musical laugh,” Hick remembered, “so joyous and so infectious that you involuntarily laughed too.” After the war began, the laugh was heard less and less frequently.
Partly it was because the war wasn’t going very well: news of setbacks in the Pacific came in relentlessly over the wire in the White House press office. But partly it was because FDR’s small inner circle was sadly diminished. Louis Howe was long gone. Then, in July 1942, the man FDR had chosen to take his place, Harry Hopkins, married a lively young editor from Harper’s Bazaar, Louise Macy. After that, even though he continued to live in the White House with his wife, Hopkins was no longer available morning, noon, and night.
The greatest blow by far, however, was the loss of Missy LeHand. Missy had been at FDR’s side for most of his waking hours for twenty years—as his immensely capable secretary who needed only a yes or no to answer most of his correspondence, but also as his adoring companion.
In June 1941, when she was only forty-three years old, Missy suffered the first of two strokes that would leave her without the ability to speak. After attempting to recuperate at Warm Springs, she returned to her room on the third floor of the White House. She felt helpless and deeply unhappy there, where the reminders of her old life by FDR’s side were all around her. Eventually she moved back home to her family in Somerville, Massachusetts.
FDR had made only brief, uncomfortable visits to Missy’s third-floor room when she was at the White House. But he did quietly change his will so that half of his estate could go to pay for her care. “I owed her that much,” he told James. “She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return.”
At the same time, FDR began to look elsewhere for companionship. One day after Missy suffered her first stroke, the name “Mrs. Johnson” appeared on the president’s calendar. “Mrs. Johnson” was in fact Lucy Mercer, whose affair with FDR in 1918 had shattere
d the Roosevelt marriage. Lucy had married the much older Winthrop Rutherfurd, who was now incapacitated. Over the next few years, FDR would see more and more of his old flame.
FDR also invited Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who was living in exile nearby, to join him on numerous occasions. The princess was a stylish and flattering companion, and her husband, Prince Olav, was in England. It was obvious to everyone in FDR’s circle that he was involved in a flirtation with her, at the very least.
According to son James, FDR may have also been hoping for renewed closeness with Eleanor. Even though it was hard for him to ask, Franklin seems to have wanted Eleanor to travel with him, in September 1942, on his eight-thousand-plus-mile cross-country inspection tour of munitions factories.
In the push and pull that characterized their relationship, Eleanor agreed to join him—but only for part of the trip. Still, Franklin made sure there was backup: his quiet and attentive distant cousin Daisy Suckley went along too.
Daisy was often by FDR’s side now, listening and admiring. She was a seemingly uncomplicated person, a lover of dogs who had raised and presented him with Fala. FDR could tell Daisy when he felt “a bit ‘cast down’”—something he couldn’t admit to others. He complained to her, as he never would to Eleanor, about the pain his braces caused. Daisy seemed to have an intuitive understanding of what might please FDR. In the spring of 1942 she had arranged for him to go out bird watching with her at Hyde Park in the early morning hours: drawing on his boyhood skills, Franklin identified 108 species that morning, including 22 from their songs alone. With Daisy, FDR exchanged design ideas for Top Cottage, the stone house he was building on a hillcrest at Hyde Park.
FDR’s first cousin Laura Delano, a flamboyant contrast to Daisy with her lavender hair and jangling bracelets, came along on the cross-country trip too. Laura, who was called Polly in the family, provided the gossip. FDR liked having them around because he did not have to make any effort with either of them. That, of course, was not true of Eleanor, who always brought along problems she had learned of from her many correspondents—problems she believed FDR needed to do something about. The cross-country journey did little or nothing to bring Franklin and Eleanor closer. But it did everything to bolster FDR’s confidence in ultimate victory. Everywhere he went, he saw evidence of the astonishingly swift buildup in production. In Detroit, he inspected a factory that would soon be turning out thirty tanks a day. At Ford, in Willow Run, a B-24 airplane was coming off the line every sixty-three minutes. And in Seattle, an entire ship was being turned out every fourteen days. By the end of the year, the United States would produce more war materiel than Japan, Germany, and Italy combined. FDR also witnessed the transformation of U.S. military forces. America’s army and air force, which had once been smaller than Romania’s, would number 7.5 million by the end of 1942.
Perhaps even more important, FDR witnessed a kind of defiant fervor everywhere he went. “Bring the Germans and Japs to see it,” boasted Ford’s production chief at Willow Run, “hell, they’ll blow their brains out.” A woman worker at Kaiser shipyard, where 576 ships were built in eighteen months, talked about her pride in finishing “one of those beautiful ships. . . . Once it . . . withstood the test of water your whole body thrilled because you’d done something worthwhile.”
More and more women were now part of the defense industry, a fact that Eleanor celebrated often in her column. Women at home were being called on to do their part as well.
DID YOU EVER SAY ANY OF THESE THINGS? the Democratic Digest asked its female readers in May. A list of false statements followed: “Our real enemy is the Japanese, we should unite with Germany against the yellow peril”; “Stalin and Bolshevism will sweep Europe”; “The cost of war will bankrupt the nation”; “We are lost in the Pacific”; “The British are telling our government what to do.”
DID IT OCCUR TO YOU, asked the Digest, THAT YOU MIGHT BE SAYING EXACTLY WHAT HITLER WANTED YOU TO SAY?
“Be a lie swatter,” urged Gladys Tillett in her editorial.
The Digest energetically promoted salvage of every kind. “Buy carefully,” Tillett instructed readers in the month after Pearl Harbor, “use carefully what you have, waste nothing.” March brought recipes for sugarless cookies. April called for women to “Take the Offensive in Your own Home” with a Victory Garden. Save fabric, save rubber, save paper, urged the Digest. To strengthen the argument, the Digest provided detailed conversion lists: a newspaper could make three twenty-six-pounder shell cups, and old letters could make a box for rifle cartridges.
The drive for scrap aluminum was an obsession: reports came in from all over the country on how many pounds various Democratic women’s clubs had collected. “Metals over Miami,” read one headline. The story described a contest involving hats made out of scrap aluminum: large utensils were trimmed with smaller ones like cookie cutters and spoons, “perhaps a cake turner,” perhaps “pom-pom partitions” made from ice cube trays. In the end, all that aluminum wasn’t pure enough to use for fighter planes. But it almost didn’t matter, as long as the aluminum drive stirred up enthusiasm for the war effort.
FDR returned from his inspection tour convinced that the war could and would be won. The Axis powers, he explained in a fireside chat in October 1942, had already reached their full potential, and “their steadily mounting losses in men and materiel cannot be fully replaced.” He assured Americans that the “worst times are now over.”
But the American public wasn’t convinced. So far, they had made enormous sacrifices and seen very little in the way of results. That meant, as FDR well knew, that the midterm elections of 1942 were going to be an uphill fight for Democrats—especially New Deal Democrats.
No one understood this better than Hick and Tillett. They organized speaking tours, described in the Digest as “Mrs. Charles W. Tillett’s flying squadron of wisdom and eloquence,” to meet with Democratic women’s groups and urge them to get out into the precincts, where the battle would be won or lost. The Digest claimed that these women provided “that rare experience, much light without heat. Don’t miss them.” One of the “flying squadron” was Hick’s partner, Marion Harron.
Hick organized ambitious regional conferences as well, with prominent speakers. Eleanor spoke at the midwestern one in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the spring. In September, as midterm elections drew near, a star-studded event in Los Angeles featured Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.—good Democrats all. It ended, as the Digest reported, with one thousand on their feet, “singing America as they had never sung it before.”
The Digest carried a full page of quotes from leading Republican isolationists who had inveighed against the war. “Where Would We Be Today If These Philosophies Had Prevailed?” asked the headline.
The last issue of the Digest before the vote included a letter from a war worker who reported proudly that the men at his plant had been working at top speed, had taken no time off on strike, and had even worked New Year’s Day, July Fourth, and Labor Day. He had had “quite an argument” at the plant about whether it was “patriotic” or not to take time off to go vote. The Digest put the question to Donald Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board.
Nelson gave the obvious answer: the worker should vote. “The right to vote is what this war is all about.” Nelson added that he didn’t care who the worker voted for. Then he added, “When you vote, vote fast and get back on ‘the machine.’”
Despite the Digest’s message, only 35 percent of eligible voters turned up at the polls, and more of them were Republicans than Democrats. The GOP picked up nine seats in the Senate and forty-four in the House. Afterward, Gladys Tillett declared that “our heads were unbowed, but pretty bloody.”
Mary Norton retained her seat, but that was not a surprise. The real worry was the survival of the New Deal. Although the Democrats were still in the majority in both houses, Congress
was now composed, as Hick wrote Eleanor, of “Republicans and the worst Democrats.” She didn’t think Norton would be able to “hold the line any longer in that House.”
The one good piece of news, Hick reported, was that California had bucked the national trend and gotten most of its Democratic congressmen elected, in large part due to the work of Helen Gahagan Douglas and the Women’s Division. It was, Hick wrote Douglas, “the one bright spot in our lives last week.” The California success was an important step in Douglas’s own political career. Two years later, she would become the first woman elected to Congress from California. Through the experience of working together, Hick and Douglas cemented a partnership and friendship that would last for life.
Still, for Hick, the overall election results were “awful” for the president and “what he stands for.” Surprisingly enough, FDR seemed untroubled by the election losses. In a phone call soon after with Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, he pointed out that, “everything considered,” it wasn’t too bad to still have control of both houses of Congress in a third term.
The reason for the president’s upbeat mood, in the face of political defeat, was hinted at by Daisy Suckley in her diary. “For weeks,” she wrote, “the P. has had something exciting up his sleeve.” A few days later, the world would find out just what that was.
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AFTER PEARL HARBOR, FDR and Churchill had agreed that Americans must initiate a major action sometime within the next year. The question was where to strike. Initially, military advisers in both countries toyed with the idea of a cross-Channel invasion of the European mainland. FDR was one of the first to realize that that was too big an undertaking for year one of U.S. engagement. Churchill and the British soon came to the same conclusion.
