On election eve, in Hyde Park, with Anna instead of Missy by his side, Roosevelt assumed his usual place at the dining table, tabulating results. Eleanor was in the living room. She “swirled around among the guests,” Merriman Smith noted, “seeing that everybody had cider and doughnuts.” It was an odd group, Smith observed, watching Margaret Suckley, Laura Delano, and Marion Dickerman, “arty old ladies in tweed, or evening gowns of two decades before.”
By 10 p.m., the trend was clear: the people of the United States had returned Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House for a fourth term. Though the election was closer than it had been in 1940, Roosevelt had garnered 53.5 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes, to 46 percent and 99 electoral votes for Dewey. Dewey had carried the Midwest, the mountain states, and the New England states of Maine and Vermont, but Roosevelt had kept the support of the various groups that had supported him in previous elections—labor, Catholics, Jews, Negroes, soldiers.
At midnight, adhering to ritual, the president was wheeled out on his porch to greet the torchlight parade of villagers. Standing by her father’s side, Anna gently pulled his old navy cape around his shoulders. The president smiled broadly and waved to his neighbors. “It looks like I’ll be coming up from Washington again for another four years,” he said. In the big spruce tree to the left of the terrace, he spotted a group of young boys. Seeing them reminded him, he said, of the days when he was young and “sought sanctuary from discipline in the friendly branches of that very tree.”
After the neighbors left, Eleanor invited the shivering newsmen and photographers into the house for cider, as everyone waited for a message from the Republican challenger. It was 3:16 a.m., Hassett noted, before “the graceless Dewey” officially broadcast his concession, but he sent no message to the victor. “I still think he is a son of a bitch,” Roosevelt remarked as he headed off to bed.
In other years, the Roosevelt boys would have been present on election eve, enjoying the moment with their father, but, like millions of other American families that November, the Roosevelts were scattered, with John and FDR, Jr., in the Pacific, Elliott in Europe, and Jimmy in Hawaii. “Word has just come in that Dewey has conceded,” John wrote from an unnamed lagoon somewhere in the South Pacific. “I really missed not being with you at Hyde Park to watch the returns come in as we did four years ago . . . . I hope that at this time four years hence we can all be together again and that this show will be over.”
CHAPTER 22
“SO DARNED BUSY”
The postelection period was one of confusion and drift for Eleanor, who felt herself tugged in opposing directions. On one side, she was intensely aware, as her friends reminded her, that she commanded more power and respect than any other woman in the United States. Millions of people, Joe Lash insisted, had voted for her as well as the president, conferring on her a conspicuous position of leadership even though her name had not appeared on the ballot. The challenge, Esther Lape advised, with so much opportunity to accomplish so many things, was to take time to think out the best ways to exercise “the tremendously increased powers that are so peculiarly now yours.”
Yet, even as she contemplated new ways to use her remarkable position, Eleanor was plagued by guilt and pulled by the more traditional side of her nature. “Maybe I’d do the most useful job if I just became a ‘good wife’ and waited on FDR,” she wrote to Esther Lape a week after the election. “Anna has been doing all of it that Margaret Suckley does not do but she can’t go on doing it.
“If I did I’d lose value in some ways because I’d no longer have outside contacts. I’d hate it but I’d soon get accustomed to it. It is funny how hard it is to be honest with yourself and not be swayed by your own wishes, isn’t it.”
She found it difficult to make a decision, she admitted to Lape. Though she acknowledged her responsibilities to her husband, she felt “inadequate,” fearing there was no longer “any fundamental love to draw on, just respect and affection” and “little or no surface friction.” At times, she confessed, she felt “a great weariness and sense of futility in life but a lifelong discipline in a sense of obligation and a healthy interest in people” kept her going, and she guessed that was “plenty to go on for one’s aging years!”
The agitation the sixty-year-old Eleanor felt in not knowing what to do was echoed in the hearts of the millions of American women for whom the war had been a major turning point, creating new expectations, new adjustments, new problems. Responding to their country’s call, women had poured into jobs previously held by men, performing beyond everyone’s expectations as truck drivers, lathe operators, welders, riveters, and stevedores.
At the peak of wartime employment, over nineteen million women were employed, constituting one-third of the civilian labor force. Since five million of the total were new workers, the nature of the female labor force had been transformed. Whereas before the war the bulk consisted of widows, unmarried women, and young wives with no children, now married women with children constituted nearly one-half of the female working population. Not surprisingly, the war industries showed the largest gains: between 1940 and 1944, women’s employment in war-related work had risen 460 percent, while female membership in unions had quadrupled.
When these women were asked if they enjoyed working more than staying at home, an astounding 79 percent said yes; of this total, 70 percent were married with children. For some, the best part of work was the sociability of the workplace versus the isolation of domestic responsibilities. For others, the best part was the financial independence, the freedom from having to ask their husbands if they could buy a new dress or clothes for the kids, the knowledge that they were contributing to the family’s economic welfare. Still others relished the mastery of new skills, the sense of industry, the pleasure of a job well done. “At the end of the day I always felt I’d accomplished something,” welder Lola Weixel recalled. “It was good—there was a product, there was something to be seen.”
But now, as the war was winding down, the country was beset with worries. What would happen to women after the war? What would the men find when they came home? Would wives be glad to give up their jobs and return to being homemakers, or would they continue working?
In the summer of 1944, the War Department published a pamphlet entitled Do You Want Your Wife to Work After the War? Designed as one of a series of GI pamphlets which officers could use to provoke discussions and forums, the pamphlet tried to impress on its readers that women’s roles were changing, but the dominant voices were those that spoke against women’s working.
“There are two things I want to be sure of after the war,” one soldier in the South Pacific was quoted as saying. “I want my wife waiting for me and I want my job waiting for me. I don’t want to find my wife busy with a job that some returning soldier needs and I don’t want to find that some other man’s wife has my job.”
“Where I come from,” another soldier wrote, “we don’t send our wives to work. If I can’t make enough money to support a wife I don’t expect to get married. My mother had plenty to do right around the house . . . . I’m for the good old-fashioned way.”
As demobilization loomed on the horizon, the image of women as comrades-in-arms was replaced by the image of women as competitors for men. And with this shift came a shift in public opinion. Enthusiastic admiration for Rosie the Riveter was replaced by the prevailing idea that “Women ought to be delighted to give up any job and return to their proper sphere—the kitchen.” All of a sudden, in every medium of popular culture, women were barraged with propaganda on the value of domesticity.
Magazines that had once given prominent display to products such as Heinz soup and GE cleaners, which allowed women to fly through their chores at home so they could rush to their work in the factory, now featured menus that took a full day to prepare. Numerous articles appeared linking juvenile delinquency to the absence of a mother at home. Pictures of young children smoking cigarettes were printed as warn
ings to working mothers. Stories of women such as Liz Eck, a brilliant concert soprano, who was giving up her career because it threatened her marriage, were displayed prominently. Mrs. Eck planned to concentrate on being a wife and mother, she said, because “it’s the only lasting happiness a woman can have.”
Ignoring poll after poll that suggested that the majority of women wanted to continue working, the women’s magazines focused almost exclusively on those women who were ready to quit. “My position is to go,” Mrs. Cliff Ferguson was quoted in the June 1944 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, “unless of course my man comes back wounded. He wants me home and I want to be there. And we want kids.”
“Am I planning to stop work after the war? I’ll say I am,” Mrs. Irma Stewart told the Journal. “It will be grand to get back to normal living again.” Camilla Taylor expressed similar sentiments in Women’s Home Companion. “I really believe I’ll do better by my children and husband when I stay home. Anyhow, housework is infinitely more satisfactory than office work. You can’t tell me that any job is as worthwhile as creating a home.”
Movies and plays followed suit. Soldier’s Wife was a successful play on Broadway which Eleanor went to see in the fall of 1944. It centered, Eleanor told her readers, on the wife of a GI who “found herself an authoress overnight, but decided that her marriage meant more to her than all the possibilities temptingly held out to her.” Perhaps it was meant simply as entertainment, Eleanor wrote, “perhaps no real lesson was intended, but it certainly carries one.”
Through her columns and her speeches, Eleanor tried to present a more rounded view of women’s work, reminding her audience that different women worked for different reasons. To be sure, the women who were working solely for patriotic reasons would “gladly relinquish their jobs the day war comes to an end,” as would women who planned to raise a family as soon as their husbands returned. But, Eleanor predicted, since millions of women were working out of economic necessity, “a good proportion” would undoubtedly remain in the labor market.
The nation could not afford, Eleanor warned, to return to an economy of scarcity in which women and minorities were denied the right to work. “To give anyone who wants to work a chance to work,” she said, “it is necessary to envisage a future in which you produce to a maximum and sell to the rest of the world.” What the women workers needed, she argued, was the courage to ask for their rights with a loud voice, demanding equal pay for equal work, an expansion of day care, and a proper share in postwar planning. “Women are fully as capable as men,” she asserted. “Men and women were meant to work together.”
Labor leader Walter Reuther wholly agreed with these sentiments. Speaking to UAW delegates at the first national women’s conference in Detroit, he argued that “industry must not be allowed to settle the employment problem by chaining women to kitchen sinks.” The solution would come only through planning now for reconversion. He called for the creation of an overall production board, representing labor, management, and government, to work toward peacetime employment and toward meeting the country’s needs in housing, transportation, and durable consumer goods. “We must start planning immediately,” he urged; “sixty million jobs will not create themselves.”
But even as Reuther was speaking, women were losing their jobs with unseemly haste; their layoff rate was 75 percent higher than for men. In some factories, supervisors made a practice of harassing women into leaving—placing them on the midnight shift, reassigning them to undesirable jobs, transferring them to new locations, and closing down day-care centers. In other factories, all pretense was abandoned, as gleeful supervisors handed quit slips to every woman on the line, willingly subjecting themselves to ridicule as cartoonists satirized management’s abrupt about-face in its attitudes toward women. In one cartoon, a supervisor is depicted handing a termination notice to a distressed-looking woman. “Now that War is nearly over,” he tells her, “so sorry, have suddenly remembered you are incapable of working in factory.”
• • •
By the eleventh month of 1944, the layoffs were affecting men as well as women. War production had reached its peak in November of 1943 and was beginning to move downward. At Brewster Aeronautical in Long Island, New York, 13,500 workers had been thrown out of work on three days’ notice when the navy suddenly terminated the company’s fighter-plane contract. The navy had no problem with the quality of Brewster’s work; on the contrary, the Brewster workers, like the overwhelming majority of their fellow workers, had done their job faster and better than anyone had anticipated. Indeed, so well had the arsenal of democracy lived up to its name that the unimaginable had happened: the country was now making more munitions than were needed to win the war.
The time had come, War Production Board chief Donald Nelson argued, for reconversion to begin, for the government to design measures to ensure a smooth transition to a peacetime economy. As a first step, Nelson proposed to lift restrictions on the use of aluminum, magnesium, and other materials no longer needed for war production, so that small companies whose war work was done could begin building schools, hospitals, railroad equipment, and appliances needed in the civilian economy. Eleanor Roosevelt wholly agreed with this line of thinking. We must begin now, she wrote in her column, to work out the methods “whereby every worker will be assured of a job when his war work comes to an end.”
Creating structured programs for workers laid off from defense plants would alleviate the pressures that were leading to chaos in some factories as workers who were still needed to produce wartime goods were anxiously reconverting themselves, moving by the thousands into lower-paying non-war jobs, hoping to get a jump start on the future before the war came to an end.
But the military refused even to think about reconversion, fearing that if civilian production were allowed to expand, if refrigerators, dishwashers, and automobiles suddenly became available, the populace would think the crisis had passed and would begin to relax, opening the way “for dangerous leakages of materials and manpower.” Convinced that the war demanded undivided attention until the job was done, the War Department argued that continuing restrictions on the production of civilian goods was the only means of combating complacency. “Many people seem to believe that this is the time for the seventh-inning stretch,” supply chief General Brehon Somervell said, “and while they’re stretching, the Nazis are digging in.”
To bolster their point of view, the military argued that critical shortages of supplies still remained, despite the astonishing success of the overall production effort. Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson held a press conference with a group of soldiers just returning from France, where intense fighting was still going on. The GIs told stories of infantry units forced into battle without enough shells and grenades, of campaigns stalled and lives lost because of the strict rationing of ammunition. “It’s tough to see your buddies get killed and not be able to stop it,” one GI said.
These dramatic stories created a “misperception of the problem,” Senator James Mead of New York argued, speaking as the new chairman of the Truman Committee on National Defense. “Insufficient production in the United States has not been the cause of shortages of weapons and ammunition at the front. Any shortage has been due, up to now, solely to transportation problems overseas.” Donald Nelson agreed. For the military to focus on production shortages instead of on the difficulties of supplying a far-flung army was “one of the most dangerous bits of double talk.”
But as historian Bruce Catton has observed, “neither facts nor logic made any impression.” The military was not open to argument. Its position was utterly simple: there must be no interference whatsoever with the war effort.
The military found a natural ally in big business, who feared that speedy reconversion would confer advantage on small companies, which, because they were not essential cogs in the war machine, could more easily make the shift to civilian production. What was at stake in the reconversion battle was nothing less than the future of the
American economy. The industrial giants were determined to dominate postwar production just as they were dominating production for the war. If small businesses and independent producers were allowed to get a head start in the race for peacetime markets, the established industrial order—in which fewer than one hundred large corporations were producing more than two-thirds of all the goods and services—would be overthrown.
As chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, Maury Maverick put up a valiant fight for small business. Small business needed a head start, Maverick argued, to compensate for the overwhelming preference given to big business in the granting of wartime contracts. Much of the opposition to reconversion, he declared, “was motivated by nothing more lofty than a desire to save the postwar business opportunities for the big manufacturers.” But every attempt he made to secure peacetime work for small business or to move forward on reconversion was stymied by the developing military-industrial alliance.
“You know what they’re doing to me,” Maverick complained, referring to the big-business interests. “They started on the roof, then they took rubber hoses and beat me, on top of the roof, and then they threw me down that chute—you know—and then they threw me down the steps to the third floor, and they kicked me, on that escalator, and I got a leg cut off and both of my ears . . . . I just came out with my life.”
Eleanor found herself on Maury Maverick’s side, believing that small business must be protected. Her heart ached for every individual thrown out of work by the cutbacks in war production. In conversations and correspondence with Walter Reuther, she explored the idea of creating a pool of machine tools which could be moved around to different factories, allowing war production and civilian production to move forward at the same time.
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