Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Littell was moved and prepared a nine-page letter in which he listed all of FDR’s mistakes in his dealings with Farley. He addressed it to Anna: “Your father’s amazing success in the political history of this country is based upon leadership. . . . And your father cannot be alienated from that vast network of party relationships which Farley represents. He forms a personal link with a great mass of party workers who can only think in terms of personal loyalties.” Littell concluded, “I willingly accept the leadership of young liberals to whom the President has given his confidence. . . . Therefore I reach my own conclusion that Farley is essential to 1940.”

  Before lunch on Sunday, ER met with Littell, and the two spent significant time in intense conversation. He gave her the letter. Then she went to confer with FDR, to prepare him for his meeting with Farley. Benefiting from Littell’s efforts, and from Anna and ER’s intervention, FDR gratefully acknowledged Farley’s many contributions to his career for over twenty years. Regarding 1940, FDR was evasive. He was not a candidate, but if there were a war, “all bets will be off.”

  After Farley’s meeting with FDR, there was a family lunch with John and Anne Roosevelt, who were about to sail on the Manhattan with Farley. ER, although pleased that her son and daughter-in-law would be spending some time with their grandmother and great-aunt Dora Forbes in Paris, was uneasy that so many people she loved were off in Europe at such a threatening time. She wondered about their journeys, after having dramatically recalled ER II less than a year before.

  ER wrote Anna that Farley had left, optimistic and sanguine. With her daughter’s assistance, the boss of the Democratic Party had reunited with the most significant players. Pleased that their teamwork had succeeded, she wrote Anna that Norman Littell’s letter “was very useful in making Pa’s conference with Jim really good. I don’t think there will be any break, and Jim left on the boat today really happy.”

  After FDR returned to Washington, ER drove to New York for one of her whirligig days: errands and chores in the morning; the World’s Fair in the afternoon; and a preview of They Shall Have Music, a film featuring the violinist Jascha Heifetz, to benefit the Greenwich Settlement House Music School and the High School of Music and Art. The entire audience “was moved” by the celebration of a “great artist” and by the several fine orchestras that “played so beautifully with him. I enjoyed it very much and hope that many people will see it and be led to support music schools for poor children of talent.”

  On 29 July, ER and Tommy drove to Esther and Elizabeth’s Connecticut home for an overnight visit. Their property, Salt Meadow, extensively damaged by the hurricane of 1938, had recovered. The entire day was pleasant and relaxing, but “I suppose I had better make a confession. I was stopped by a highway patrol officer yesterday. My boys have always said that it would give them great satisfaction if I would be arrested [presumably, for speeding]. . . . I had been talking and apparently not watching my speedometer. . . . I was most humble about it, for when you are in the wrong you might as well own up. . . . I was sent on my way a much chastened and more careful individual, by a very polite but firm gentleman.”

  Two days later ER reported in her column that she had received a telegram—evidence that “someone reads my column.” It included a verse.

  Your car was stopped.

  Oh shame, oh shame

  You’ll never live it down.

  That cop should be the next President,

  The vigilantic hound.

  Much amused, she considered this “rather severe punishment.”

  ER’s attention was also on racial and religious bigotry. “Instead of acting with kindness, we seem to do the very things which promote intolerance and hatred among races and religious groups, to say nothing of the way we treat each other when we happen to be labeled workers or employers. This is happening in the United States where there is really an opportunity for leadership to create better understanding and more kindly feeling between different types of peoples.”

  ER refused to believe that the senators would continue to ignore the rolling thunder of impending war. She appealed to her former allies of 1935:

  It is wearisome to read of the balance of power. I would like to see somebody write about a balance of trade and of food for the world and the possibilities of so organizing our joint economic systems that all of us could go to work and produce at maximum capacity. . . .

  It may be somewhat impertinent for a mere, unimportant citizen, and a woman at that, to have the presumption to suggest that we are not moving forward toward the fundamental solutions at the present time. . . . Let’s ask our leaders not to weaken their stand against war, but to tell us what more could be done for permanent peace.

  But it was hot in Washington. Everyone wanted to return home. There was no further international policy debate. Congressional business was limited to spiteful rejections of FDR’s domestic policies. For example, the House resolved to investigate the National Labor Relations Board; and the Senate refused to reinstate money for Wagner’s housing bill. The president endured the final insults of the 76th Congress with equanimity.

  Congress also passed the Hatch Act, which prohibited civil servants—WPA and other federal workers—from participating in campaign and political activity. It was specifically aimed at New Deal liberals, who were increasingly labeled “subversive.” Corcoran and Cohen advised FDR to veto it, as did Ickes. Cohen wrote a suggested veto message that demanded that the “power of money” be removed altogether from politics and that urged congressional appropriation for all campaign expenses for all political parties: “No other contribution would be allowed.”

  But instead of vetoing the Hatch Act, FDR signed it into law. No liberal in his circle understood why, as it opened the door to dismissal for political beliefs, prohibited an unknown range of activity, specifically discriminated against federal workers, and established the principle of political “freedom with limits.”

  During the last days of the 76th Congress, administration liberals were in disarray. Harry Hopkins was unwell, recently diagnosed with stomach cancer and mostly absent from Washington. Ickes felt particularly aggrieved, since he lost several programs that he ran well and had enjoyed creating—most notably the Public Works Administration: “I am sore and bruised of spirit . . . and have a feeling of resentment against the President.”

  On 5 August, ER, in a most uncharacteristic letter to “Dearest Franklin,” asked him to invite Hopkins and Diana to Hyde Park, so that Harry could meet a highly recommended physician for a second opinion. Then she lobbied her husband to create a new federal post for her friend Josephine Roche—Vassar-educated, coal mine owner and administrator, Denver policewoman, and a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. Roche and ER had been allies on many projects over the decades. She had recently resigned from Treasury “to put her business in order” but now wanted to return to government. She hoped that FDR might find her a suitable position.

  After several other requests, ER concluded her long letter, “Some of the Negro leaders feel that the Administration is losing ground. Would there be any chance of putting T. Arnold Hill on the Maritime Commission? It sounds impossible to me but I do think that some attention should be given to this Negro situation.”

  The day before FDR left Washington, ER wrote a blunt column blasting the legislators for the new avalanche of suffering they created. The previous spring, when they cut funding for the WPA, they had boasted that people would find jobs; that it would be cheaper to give “straight relief” than coddle workers on the WPA; and that business would “take up the slack, if it feels that Congress is not subservient to the President.” But instead, the cuts had caused real harm. “I wish the Congressmen who enacted the bill . . . would answer some of the questions which come to me,” ER wrote, then detailed heart-wrenching appeals that she had received from the public. One family of six had no money to buy food or to send their children to schoo
l. Women and children were abandoned; many families were literally starving. A hardworking veteran wrote to her, “I am a veteran of the last war, my father, his father, and his father before him fought in the wars and I think that I am a loyal and true American, yet I am not sure that I wouldn’t rather have a full stomach and shelter under some other regime than to be hungry and homeless under the present one.”

  ER concluded, “This is not an academic discussion, this is actually what happens to human beings. Mr. Legislators, what are your answers?”

  As she assessed “the last few weeks,” she was certain that what the Republican minority, and the conservative Democratic minority, exhibited was “their sporting disposition.” This new majority “have made two bets with the public. One is that there will be no war in Europe until they return in January. . . . The other bet is with business. . . . By next spring business will put three million people to work or the bet will be lost. Let’s hope they win both bets and let’s wish them all, majority and minorities, a happy holiday.”

  These trying months had sharpened ER as she engaged both her husband and Congress on issues that caused economic strife and political divisions. FDR continued delicate negotiations with his adversaries, while she was free to write and speak more directly. Yet perhaps the one good thing about the 76th Congress was that its sorry record had drawn the first couple closer together than they had been in years. She had revived his trust and confidence.

  At Hyde Park that week the Roosevelts appeared as a team as they had never done before. FDR “let his wife join in at his regular press conference,” Time reported, and “he openly adopted her ideas and figures of speech.” He invited her opinions, and she answered with vigor. He adopted her “two enormous bets” phrase for his own and added that in the relief gamble Congress endangered 20 million Americans; in the war gamble they involved “one billion 500 million world inhabitants.” ER said that the “sudden cut-off in Government spending was like pushing the country off a precipice.” She was reminded of her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, who used to make herself and other young Roosevelts jump off sand cliffs at Oyster Bay, to teach them how far you slide going downhill and how hard it is to climb back up. “Precisely,” chimed in her husband; his latest lending program had been devised “to create a gentle gradient instead of a cruel precipice.”

  Neither Roosevelt was much damaged by Congress’s “smacking around,” reporters concluded. Rather, they were determined “to fight a whole lot more.” After that extraordinary press conference, FDR left early the next morning, 12 August, for his ten-day cruise aboard the Tuscaloosa, headed for cool northern waters.

  ER was uncommonly nostalgic after his departure. The Big House became “a silent, empty place. There is one guard at the gate and one by the house. Outside of that there is no life anywhere. I left promptly for the cottage where by 1:00 o’clock, a very pleasant group of people gathered.” The rest of her day ER, Tommy, and several guests swam and “spent a quiet evening reading and writing.” Later, she began her Christmas list: Tommy compiled lists of things to order and those “I must buy personally.”

  The guests were interesting but thoughts of her loved ones plunged her into a bone-cracking gloom she had not felt for years. So many members of her family and her closest friends were abroad, and she never liked to be home while people she cared about were away. Moreover every broadcast brought news of impending war, secret meetings, and bitter deals.

  She tried to work on her new book, The Moral Basis of Democracy, a call for the kind of activist citizenship she believed essential to the survival of democracy. But she was unsettled, impatient, and introspective.

  The last thing she did before bed was to listen to the eleven o’clock radio news. “I can’t say that the foreign news sounded very encouraging. How different our situation is when the man at the head of the government can leave on a vacation.” She found it unbearable that the “fate of the world seems to lie in the hands of one man,” meaning Hitler, ensconced “on a mountain top,” giving orders. Everybody agreed that “war would leave no victors” and would only postpone “necessary economic changes which will eventually have to be made. . . . And yet we do nothing.”

  On the night of 14 August, forty-five years earlier, ten-year-old Eleanor had learned that her beloved father had died. Ever since, she had experienced a mid-August melancholy. That evening she wrote an unusually personal column:

  I lay the other night and watched one particularly bright planet shining in the sky above me. All the little stars around twinkled with more or less brilliance. That particular bright point, however, seemed to be the only thing that really shone out of the sky and for the time it seemed to shine for me alone in all the world. It was curiously like the human relationships we sometimes allow ourselves when one particular person outshines all others. A balanced impartiality is supposed to be the ideal in family relations, and yet perhaps it is good for every individual to feel occasionally that he [or she] is the one bright star in the heavens.

  With her father, and then for a time with FDR, ER had felt secure in that feeling. There had been other relationships, notably with Hick and Earl, and her feelings of love, longing, and loss continued to swirl around her. She had been reading an informative book filled with good advice, Counseling Young Workers, by Jane F. Culbert and Helen R. Smith. “I wonder if they would agree with me that every one of these youngsters who come to be counseled should have back of them the feeling that they are the bright star on whom someone is counting? That, it seems to me, is the greatest incentive to real success.” That was how her beloved teacher Marie Souvestre had made her feel at Allenswood. Now it was how she tried to be in relation to the young people she so admired in her family, and among the activist leaders of the American Youth Congress, whose profound convictions regarding freedom and democracy impressed her.

  She had spent the day with Joe Alsop, her young cousin, who was closely connected to her Allenswood years, which triggered her ruminations and his column. At Allenswood Eleanor had been a “plain, insecure, lonely little girl,” a family orphan malnourished on “meager, weary, leftover love.” The witty, brilliant, enchanting Marie Souvestre had not only mentored her but had chosen her as her “supreme favorite.”

  After ER left Allenswood, Corinne Robinson, who had arrived during Eleanor’s last year there, became the recipient of this same “intoxicating honor.” Souvestre would read aloud to Corinne, but even so she frequently stopped to “exclaim how much she missed her chère Tottie, the wonderful Eleanor who was so courageous and intelligent and good. Then her hands would go up in the air and fall into her lap as she sighed, ‘Mais pas gaie—pas gaie.’” Corinne believed Eleanor’s childhood of tears and longing “helped forge the iron in her soul that the world came to appreciate.”

  Years later Corinne told these stories to her son Joseph Alsop. Now a journalist, Alsop had always found ER warm, charming, generous—indeed, he compared her to his great-aunt Bye Roosevelt Cowles, who had been another guide and lifeline for ER: “Auntie Bye had a tongue that could take the paint off a barn, while sounding unusually syrupy and cooing. The harsher the sentiment, the sweeter the tone seemed to be her recipe, which was regularly borrowed by her niece Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she helped to bring up.”

  Now Alsop had requested an interview with ER for a “light, cheerful sort of piece” in Life and asked if he might drop by Hyde Park: “I know you well enough to know that you will tell me frankly whether or not you want to see me, and whatever your answer, I shall be wholly satisfied.” ER had said she would be “delighted” to see him and invited him for the night “or for any length of time you can stay.”

  In her column, she wrote, “I enjoy all the younger generation in the family very much, but especially the ones who are at work. . . . I had the pleasure of having one young cousin with me, who seems to be doing more and more interesting work and to be constantly developing himself.” Her letter to FDR exp
lained, “Joe Alsop was here . . . and I like him better and better. He is doing a piece for Life called the President’s Family Album which ought to be very nice.” The result was indeed a “glowing” family profile, published shortly before the election of 1940.

  Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman continued to stay on at Val-Kill. Tommy Thompson continued to report to Esther Lape that their intrusive presence ranged from dreary to “poisonous,” but ER never mentioned the frosty tensions between them. In one column, however, she sounded almost wistful as she explicitly announced their breakup:

  When I was connected with Miss Dickerman in the Todhunter School, I always admired her extraordinary ability to combine the old with the new and to give each child under her care the type of training that child needed. I was always interested in watching her work with the young people and in the contacts which I had with the young people myself. In resigning from the school, I miss not being able to be in such close contact with an expert in handling youngsters.

  She wrote their mutual friend Mary Dreier, in Maine, “I do not understand Nancy any more than you do. She has been here most of the summer. . . . Perhaps you are correct that she has had a nervous breakdown.” ER’s ability to tolerate her ever-complaining former friends continued for years. They refused to depart Val-Kill until 1947.

  On Tuesday, 15 August, ER left to do a radio broadcast in New York and visit her brother Hall on Long Island. Hall had rented a “little cottage” on a wildlife preserve in Sayville. With a party of his friends, they ferried “to the beach on Fire Island and the water was perfect in temperature and not too rough. Even a smooth water swimmer like myself could enjoy it. There is nothing quite like lying on a sandy beach in the sun for complete relaxation. We had the best possible picnic.” ER’s hours were entirely filled, but she felt “a little guilty” that she had been in New York “without going to the World’s Fair” to see Hick.