Eleanor’s call for civilian conscription provoked a violent outcry, directed to the idea of conscripting women. “This drive to Hitlerize women sets aside the civil and industrial gains of women won after centuries of struggle,” the International Woodworkers of America resolved at their national convention. It “breaks down the American home and traditional family life, robs us of the power to safeguard the health and direct upbringing of our children.” The press, assuming Eleanor was testing the wind for the administration, went after the plan with a vengeance. “If Mrs. Roosevelt’s ‘draft us all’ plan becomes part of the law,” Hugh Johnson wrote in the New York World Telegram, “we shall have here a complete Nazi pattern of forced labor.”
When the president was asked about his wife’s remarks, he noted pointedly that he had not participated in the conference she mentioned. What is more, he did not agree that civilian conscription was necessary. Wary of having the government assume too much power over something as sacred as man’s right to a job, he chose instead to rely on indirect persuasion—giving draft deferments to skilled labor in war plants, giving the war industry first call on workers registered with the Employment Service, providing carrots and sticks for peacetime plants to convert to war production. Though admitting the possibility that this less centralized approach might not be sufficient, he wished to move one step at a time, trusting that democracy and momentum would carry the country where it needed to go.
The difference between Eleanor’s call for conscription and Franklin’s reliance on democratic incentives was deep, and signaled their incompatibility of outlook. The president was temperamentally opposed to the imposition of compulsory discipline upon the rich variety of human relations; Eleanor feared that, in the absence of imposed order and discipline, confusion would result. The confusion Eleanor feared, Roosevelt saw as the necessary price for democracy.
Indeed, the great voluntary migration that would irrevocably alter the face of American society had already begun. Since 1940, more than seven million Americans had moved across county and state lines in search of employment in the burgeoning war-production centers. By the end of the war, more than fifteen million civilians would have moved to different counties. The population patterns of the country would be permanently changed.
The greatest shift was from east to west, as millions of people, drawn by the shipyards and the aircraft plants on the West Coast, flocked to California, Oregon, and Washington. More than half the wartime shipbuilding and almost half the manufacture of airplanes were centered in these three coastal states, whose population would increase by over 34 percent during the war. “It wouldn’t take any imagination at all,” one migrant to the West Coast observed, “to think that you were going West on a covered wagon and were a pioneer again.” California alone saw an enormous increase, of more than two million people. Here, journalist Richard Lingeman perceptively notes, “was the real gold rush in California’s colorful history.”
A second tide was carrying some six million whites and blacks from the country to the city and from the South to the North. In 1940, according to economists, there were far too many people on the nation’s farms to allow a decent living for all. As the war drained the surplus to the cities—to Mobile and Charleston in the South, and Detroit and Chicago in the North—the agricultural depression of the thirties would finally be broken, and the profits of the farmers who remained on the land would reach record highs.
Though the mass exodus of blacks from the South to the North would create severe social problems in Northern cities, “by and large,” economist Harold Vatter concludes, “and despite the hard, insecure, impoverished, and discriminating conditions of ghetto life the migration brought material improvement.” Economist John Kenneth Galbraith agrees. “Before the war,” he points out, “there were 1,466,701 black farm workers in the rural labor force of the Old Confederacy, all, virtually without exception, exceedingly poor. In 1970, there were 115,303.”
The bustling movement of so many Americans was a tremendous relief to Roosevelt, coming as it did after the paralysis of the Depression years, when few people had either the psychic or the economic resources to get up and go. The great migrations confirmed his belief: if Americans were given opportunity, they would rise to the challenge.
CHAPTER 13
“WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP?”
Although public concerns dominated the thoughts and activities of the president and the first lady in the early months of 1942, the Roosevelt White House, where family and friends lived and worked in unusually close quarters, was also the site of the irrepressible renewal of love and desire. In the spring, Missy LeHand returned to her old room on the third floor in the hope of reclaiming her place in the president’s heart; Harry Hopkins fell in love with socialite Louise Macy; Princess Martha visited the president again and again; Eleanor seemed obsessed by her relationship with Joe Lash; and the president, as always, seemed to be removed from everybody, in spite of his ever-tolerant, ever-cheerful manner.
In the second week of March, the president had Missy brought from Warm Springs to Washington. The hours she had put in with her therapists were beginning to pay off. Her right leg had improved so that she was able to walk with the use of a brace much like the one the president used. Her arm had not come back, however, nor had her throat condition much improved. Though she understood everything that was said to her, her speech remained almost impossible to understand. Still, there was hope that these faculties would eventually come back, and the doctors had decided that her recovery would be speeded up if she returned to the White House.
Missy reached the familiar gates shortly before 10 a.m. on March 18, and was taken immediately to her third-floor room, where Lillian Parks helped her unpack. Miss Parks recalls that Missy was depressed by the blackout curtains in her windows. White liners were fitted into the curtains so that she would not have to look at black windows.
While Missy was getting settled, the president arrived at the door to welcome her back. He stayed for ten minutes only; he was scheduled to see Admiral King in his office at eleven-fifteen. It was characteristic of Roosevelt to avoid conversation with a string of stories, but, no matter how much he talked, he could not help noticing the deep silences, the sudden shifts of expression, the dark and melancholy eyes. It must have been a somewhat strained meeting, more like a verification of the unbridgeable distance between them than a happy reunion.
For her part, nothing in the world mattered more to Missy than the understanding she had shared with the president. After four months apart, there was undoubtedly comfort in the simple sight of the familiar Roosevelt smile. During the last ten months, she had come to accept some of the inroads that her devastating stroke had made. But now, in the presence of the man she loved, her spirit seemed to gird itself for a renewed attempt to conquer her illness.
Missy’s reappearance produced anxious moments for Grace Tully. Tully had replaced Missy as the number-one secretary, working directly with the president on much the same level of competence and reliability. Although she never enjoyed the intimacy, playfulness, and absolute trust Missy had, she had grown accustomed to her new and powerful position. At the same time, Missy was her close friend, and she felt she should involve Missy in the work of the White House as much as she possibly could. Knowing that Missy could read, for instance, Grace brought her the daily decoded messages from the State Department that described what was going on around the world. “I wanted her to feel that she was keeping up with things,” Tully said.
The president provided nurses round the clock. They brought Missy her breakfast, wheeled her onto the sun porch for lunch, and kept her company at night. Now and then, Roosevelt would look in on her, but as the weeks went by, even these brief visits became less and less frequent. One night, the story is told, Missy eluded her nurse and made her way, with great difficulty, to the second floor. The door to the president’s study was slightly ajar; inside, she saw Franklin laughing and smiling with Princess Martha. Just then,
the nurse caught up with her patient and led her back to her room, where for several hours Missy wept.
As the weeks went by, Missy’s anxiety increased. To be back in the White House, aware of the president’s comings and goings but unable to participate in any real work, proved intolerable. She spent her days waiting for his visits, drifting about the White House like a wandering star in the president’s constellation. “She felt there was nothing for her to do,” Tully said; “she was getting depressed.” Sometimes she had periods of such blackness, Lillian Parks recalled, that she seemed almost bent on destroying herself. At one point, she tried to set herself on fire.
The decision was made, with Missy’s concurrence, to send her to Somerville, Massachusetts, to live with her sister, Ann Rochon. Perhaps there, in the shade of the old house on Orchard Street, she could better continue her recuperation. At seven o’clock on Saturday night, May 16, the president stopped by Missy’s apartment to say goodbye. He stayed for less than ten minutes. In his study, Princess Martha and Harry Hopkins were waiting. The cocktail hour had begun, to be followed by dinner for three. At the stroke of ten, while the president was still relaxing over coffee with Martha and Harry, the car arrived to return Missy to the Somerville house she had left behind two decades earlier. She would never again return to the White House.
In Washington, Missy LeHand’s absence from the president’s inner circle was frequently lamented. At a dinner one night at the Rosenmans’, Justice Felix Frankfurter noted, the talk turned to the “extraordinarily beneficent role” that Missy had played because of her “remarkable judgment, disinterestedness and pertinacity.” Rosenman and Frankfurter agreed that her stroke was “a calamity of world dimensions.” Missy, Rosenman said, was “one of the very, very few people who was not a yes-man, who crossed the President in the sense that she told him not what she knew to be his view or what he wanted to hear, but what were, in fact, her true views and convictions.”
• • •
Roosevelt absorbed an additional loss that spring when he bade farewell to his mother’s house on East 65th Street. The old house held many memories. It was here that he and Eleanor had come to live in the early years of their marriage; here that he had stayed during the first years of his recovery from polio; here that he had visited his mother for nearly four decades. When moving day arrived, Roosevelt drove to New York to go through the house one last time. “Knowing how deeply sentimental the President is,” William Hassett recorded, “I felt that his heart was full as he separated himself from a place that held so many associations of life and birth and death, of joy and sorrow.” Eleanor’s memories of the place were far less positive than Franklin’s, but she, too, felt a tug in her heart as she walked through the rooms, crowded with barrels and boxes, for the last time. “Many human emotions have been recorded by many people within the walls of these rooms,” she wrote, “and if walls could talk, an interesting book might be written.”
Earlier in the spring, Eleanor had found a new apartment at 29 Washington Square, which she intended to occupy whenever she was in New York. Only weeks before Sara died, she had given up her previous Greenwich Village apartment so that she could spend more time with her ailing mother-in-law at East 65th Street. Now that Sara was dead and the twin houses sold, she was free to purchase an apartment of her own.
The Washington Square apartment consisted of seven rooms—a high-ceilinged living room with a wood-burning fireplace and built-in bookcases beneath two windows facing the park’s trees and lawns, a dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms, including a master bedroom with a connecting dressing room, a maid’s room, and three baths. For Eleanor, who regularly spent a day or two a week in the city, it was a godsend to have a place of her own. “When I am in New York City,” she once said, “I feel that I am an unofficial person leading a private life.” Yet, even as she valued her independence, she had a private elevator installed just in case the president should ever want to visit. “At last I am settled here,” she wrote her aunt Maude Gray on May 9. “It is a nice apartment with a lovely view and perfectly suited to Franklin if he ever comes!”
• • •
“Just a week from tonight you will be out of reach & starting on this new life that I dread so much for you,” Eleanor wrote Joe Lash on April 6, as he was about to be inducted into the army. “A little bit of my heart seems to be with you always Joe. You’ll carry it round wherever you go & in its place the thought of you will be with me wherever I go . . . . Sometimes I think if we have chosen to love someone, we love them even more than we do the children of our bodies . . . .” Though she loved her own boys deeply, she explained, she had never enjoyed the secure relationship with them that she had with him. “With you I have that feeling of understanding & companionship. Now & then I have moments of that with the boys but it is not the same . . . .”
On April 7, Eleanor threw a large going-away party for Lash at the Hotel Brevoort in New York. “It was a curious affair,” Joe’s friend Lewis Feuer recalled. “Suddenly a telegram arrived signed by ER saying there’d be a big dinner for Joe at this classy hotel. As the dishes were served, an orchestra of seven or eight came over and serenaded Joe. The dishes were ornate. We were at war. I thought it was in terrible taste. All this sentimentality about Joe going into the service.”
On the third floor of the White House, Eleanor set aside a room for Lash to use whenever he was on leave. On her desk she placed an enlarged photo of Lash. “I want to be able to look at you all the time,” she explained. In addition, Eleanor told Joe to call her collect at the White House whenever the president was away at Hyde Park, and to “know that her love was there for him always. No other engagement can’t be given up, if there is a chance to see you!”
Before he left for his training camp in Miami, Lash gave Eleanor a miniature good-luck horseshoe, which she put on her chain “so it would be always with me as I like having something from you very near me always.” Traveling on a train with a bunch of soldiers, she imagined for a moment she had seen his face. “Wouldn’t it be fun sometime if you were in the crowd when I looked up?” In the White House, Eleanor waited anxiously for his letters and calls. “Your telegram came,” she happily noted. “I could have kissed the telegram. I was so glad to have word from you.”
Eleanor was not the central person in Joe’s life that spring, however. For more than a year, he had been involved with a fellow worker at the International Student Service, Trude Pratt. The situation was complicated, since Trude was still married to Eliot Pratt, a wealthy man who was threatening to keep the children if she divorced him. During these months, Eleanor was close to Trude as well; indeed, she seemed to fall into the role of matchmaker, much as she had done with her daughter, Anna, and John Boettiger in the heady days of their illicit romance, before their divorces were final. For hours on end, she counseled both Joe and Trude, offering advice, love, and support, providing safe cover for their meetings.
“Of one thing I am sure . . . ,” she wrote Lash, perhaps reflecting her own experience, “don’t accept a compromise. Trude must be all yours, otherwise you will never be happy.
“Someday I’ll tell you why I’m sure that is so, but just now no corroborating history is of interest to you & all the contribution I can think of which is helpful, is to beg you not to accept ½ a loaf of love.”
• • •
Perhaps only with Lorena Hickok had Eleanor ever felt the sense of being loved exclusively. In every one of her other relationships, it seemed, she was the third person in the triangle: the outsider looking in at her husband’s intense relationship with his mother; the outsider looking in at the love between Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, between Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, between Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, between Joe Lash and Trude Pratt, between Franklin and Missy and Martha and Lucy.
It was now more than a year since Hick had moved into the White House, and Eleanor remained intensely loyal to her old friend. “Our friend Hick is still here,” Tommy complained t
o Esther Lape. “The ushers call her ‘the enduring guest.’” “She can’t pay rent and her income tax and her dentist bill,” Tommy chided, “so she has cut out paying rent! . . . Elizabeth will be interested to know that one night when the Hickok was rather mellow and ranting on about how she adored Mrs. Roosevelt etc., etc. she said that if anything happened to her I was delegated to destroy all the letters which Mrs. R. had written her. I accepted the assignment but I did not add that I had already made up my mind on that score.”
Whenever Eleanor was free for breakfast, she invited Hick to join her, in the West Hall in winter, on the South Veranda in summer. The two old friends would talk until breakfast was served, and then Eleanor would retire behind The New York Times, reading aloud an item here or there. Then, when Hick got home from her work at the Democratic National Committee, usually around 10:30 or 11 p.m., she would stop in Eleanor’s sitting room so they could talk a bit while Eleanor was buried in mail. Sometimes, Hick recalled, “if she was out when I came in, she would come into my room and sit on the foot of my bed and talk for a little while.” Though the intense feeling had cooled, there remained a strong bond between them; they enjoyed one another’s company.
The same spring that Eleanor lost Joe Lash to the army, Hick became involved with Marion Janet Harron. Marion was ten years younger than Hick, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of California, a judge in the U.S. Tax Court. In the months that followed, her presence at the White House was so frequent that the guards at the gate no longer bothered to ask for her identification.
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