Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “Your dress, hat and coat were lovely,” Helen Wilmerding commented after the “old crowd’s” visit to the White House. “I wanted to snatch them off and put them on myself. . . . ” Gentle Helen had not been among those who had mocked her taste in clothes, but since so many of her contemporaries had considered Eleanor a little dowdy in her dress, Helen’s letter must have given her considerable gratification.

  “Everyone makes very low prices,” Eleanor had remarked on the afternoon she devoted to getting her White House wardrobe. She did not spurn them. She used to comment with amusement on the Scotch streak in Franklin, but it was a characteristic she shared. However, in spite of the Fifth Avenue shops’ low prices, she was quite prepared to switch to less fashionable and less obliging establishments if that was the only way to get fair conditions for labor. “I feel sure that you will understand,” she wrote to Milgrim’s, “that I will have to wait before coming to you again until you have some agreement with your people which is satisfactory to both sides.” A distraught Mr. Milgrim telegraphed her within the week that the ILGWU’s strike had been settled and that both sides were satisfied. “I was quite upset when I received your letter and am very anxious to explain the facts when you come in for your fitting which will be ready Thursday, October 12th.”20

  This pro-labor gesture was in September, but in March she had already yielded to her incorrigible reforming impulses and struck out into precisely the kind of activities she thought she would have to give up as First Lady. “Friends who have wondered how long it would be before Mrs. Roosevelt’s instinct for civic and social reform would assert itself in Washington had the answer today, when the story of her inspection trip to Washington’s alleys was told for the first time,” wrote Emma Bugbee.21 Mrs. Archibald Hopkins, eighty-one, a “cliff dweller” with a social conscience, asked her to tour Washington’s alley slums with her. By focusing public attention on these disease-and crime-ridden back streets perhaps they might be able to persuade Congress to do something about them. Eleanor made the tour, driving in her roadster. She reported her grim findings to the press and even suggested that Congress should act. Mrs. Hopkins’ committee had prepared a bill to reconstruct the alley slums, she pointed out, and while it was a rule with her that she did not comment on pending legislation, she would say, “Of course I am sympathetic with the general theory of better housing everywhere.” She spoke to Franklin about what she had seen and about the bill, and he permitted her to indicate to Mrs. Hopkins that he would help at the right moment. She enlisted the aid of the president’s uncle, Frederic A. Delano, head of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. “I have talked with Franklin and Uncle Fred about the bill,” she reported to Mrs. Hopkins. “Franklin thinks that at the special session it will be quite impossible to get through any local bills of any kind, but I feel quite certain that at the regular session it can and will be done. Uncle Fred talked to me the other night and he feels he has convinced Senator King [chairman of the Senate District Committee] that the bill should be pushed. If it should happen to slide through well and good, but if it does not get through do not feel discouraged, for I feel sure it will go through at the next session.”22 Discouraged? Mrs. Hopkins, who had first visited the White House in Abraham Lincoln’s time, at last had an ally on the distaff side. She felt invincible.

  District institutions, Eleanor believed, should serve as a model for the nation. Instead, voteless and at the mercy of an economy-minded Congress that was, in addition, singularly indifferent to the Negroes who would be the chief beneficiaries of improved services, the residents of the District had among the worst hospitals, nursing homes, and jails in the nation. Her interest in the District would be a continuing one.

  The Hoover action that had most offended the country was the eviction of the “bonus army” veterans from Washington in 1932. That Mr. Hoover, a Quaker, could have authorized the use of military force to drive jobless veterans out of their squatters’ shacks seemed to Eleanor a dreadful object lesson in what fear could make a well-intentioned man do. As a consequence, when the Veterans National Liaison Committee informed the White House that the veterans were returning to Washington and expected the new administration to house and feed them, she pressed her husband to treat them with consideration and see to it that there was no repetition of the previous summer’s panic. Louis—whose official title was secretary to the president and who called himself “the dirty-job man”—took on the job of handling the new bonus army.23 The Veterans Administration directed to house the men lodged them in Fort Hunt, an old army camp across the river, provided them with food, medical care, even dental service. A military band entertained them. Louis kept in daily touch with the leaders and received reports on the mood among the men, including the activity of the Communists. The veterans having presented their case by the middle of May, Louis told them that twelve hundred of them could be enrolled in the CCC and tried to persuade them to pass a resolution to go home. The men debated and dallied, and then Louis played his trump card: he brought Eleanor to visit the encampment. The men were pleased and heartened to see the First Lady among them and quickly took her over, proposing that she tour the camp. She went with the men through tents, barracks, and hospital, ending up at the mess hall, where she mingled with the men in the mess line and was persuaded to make a little speech. She reminisced about World War days and her work in the railroad yards when the “boys,” perhaps some of those who were here, had come through Washington on their way overseas. She also spoke of her post-war tour of the battlefields where they had fought and concluded, “I never want to see another war. I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.” She led the men in singing “There’s a Long, Long Trail” and departed amid cheers. “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife,” said one left-wing veteran, who was chagrined over the Communists’ loss of influence. Soon afterward the bonus marchers passed a resolution to disperse. “It is such fine things as that which bring you the admiration of the American people,” wrote Josephus Daniels from Mexico City, where he was the U.S. ambassador.24

  Eleanor and Louis had not allowed the Secret Service to accompany them to the encampment, and there was considerable relief when they returned safely to the White House. Eleanor’s insistence on not being shadowed by police and Secret Service enhanced the country’s image of her as a woman unafraid, seeking to be herself, but it was a sore issue with those responsible for the safety of the president and his family. After the attempt on Roosevelt’s life in Miami on February 15, 1933, he wanted to ask the Secret Service to assign a man to protect her. “Don’t you dare do such a thing,” she warned him. “If any Secret Service man shows up in New York and starts following me around, I’ll send him right straight back where he came from.” But Colonel Starling, the head of the presidential detail, brought the matter up repeatedly with the president and Louis. He was particularly worried over her insistence on driving herself around unescorted. She was unbudgeable, they explained.

  Local police found her as stubborn as the Secret Service. When she came to New York to visit the headquarters of the Women’s Trade Union League, she found four policemen in front of the building.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “We’re here to guard Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “I don’t want to be guarded; please go away.”

  “We can’t do that, the captain placed us here,” the head of the detail explained in some embarrassment. She went inside and called Louis, who phoned police headquarters. The captain came immediately. “Please take them all away. No one’s going to hurt me,” Eleanor said to him.

  “I hope not,” the captain said doubtfully, but complied. Americans were “wonderful,” she said. “I simply can’t imagine being afraid of going among them as I have always done, as I always shall.”25

  She refused to succumb to fear. By self-discipline she had conquered her childhood dread of animals, of water, a
nd of physical pain, and she kept these fears at bay by simply defying them.

  She was an inveterate air traveler, sometimes pressing air personnel to fly even when they thought the weather too hazardous. The fledgling airlines found her a stalwart advocate of air travel, quite willing to lend herself to their promotional efforts; the country was benignly responsive to her sense of adventure and her delight in sponsoring the new and promising enterprise. In order to impress the public, especially women, with the ease and safety of air travel, Amelia Earhart invited Eleanor to join her on a flight to Baltimore in evening dress. Hall Roosevelt went along, as did a few newspaperwomen and Miss Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam. How did she feel being piloted by a woman, she was asked. Absolutely safe, was her reply; “I’d give a lot to do it myself!” She seriously discussed learning to fly with Miss Earhart and went so far as to take a physical examination, which she passed. But Franklin thought it was foolish to spend time learning to fly when she would not be able to afford a plane and she came to the same conclusion.26

  Not long after she was settled in the White House she made her first transcontinental flight, to Los Angeles to see Elliott. Such a journey still was an event, and it was even more so when undertaken by the First Lady. From Fort Worth to the Coast, C. R. Smith, the president of American Airways, accompanied her, as did Amon G. Carter, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Both men admired her stamina and poise; “her rapid air tour,” wrote Carter, “twice spanning the continent, was a physical feat calculated to take the ‘bounce’ out of a transport pilot.” She came through it “smiling.”27 Will Rogers found her performance sufficiently impressive to write a letter about it to the New York Times. Yes, it was a real boost for aviation, he said, “but here is really what she takes the medal for: out at every stop, day or night, standing for photographs by the hour, being interviewed, talking over the radio, no sleep. And yet they say she never showed one sign of weariness or annoyance of any kind. No maid, no secretary—just the First Lady of the land on a paid ticket on a regular passenger flight.”28

  Not since Theodore Roosevelt’s days had the White House pulsated with such high spirits and sheer animal vitality. Colonel Starling took the Hoovers to Union Station and on his return to the White House a few hours later found it “transformed during my absence into a gay place full of people who oozed confidence.”

  “You know how it was when Uncle Ted was there—how gay and homelike,” Roosevelt had remarked at Cousin Susie’s before the inauguration. “Well, that’s how we mean to have it!”29

  As the official residence of the president, tradition and law limited the extent to which 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could reflect the tastes and habits of the family that occupied it, but within those limits the Roosevelt personalities soon placed their gregarious and buoyant stamp on the historic dwelling.

  There were grandchildren all over the place. Anna was separated from her husband, and she and her two children Sisty (Anna Eleanor), six, and Buzz (Curtis), three, stayed at the White House. Betsy and Jimmy and their daughter Sarah often visited, James to do chores for his father, Betsy because she was a favorite of her father-in-law. Franklin Jr. and Johnny, lively teen-agers, were in and out. There were nurseries on the third floor and a sandbox and jungle gym on the south lawn. There were also Eleanor’s dogs Meggie and Major, both of whom had to be exiled to Hyde Park before the end of the year, Major for having nipped Senator Hattie Caraway and Meggie after biting reporter Bess Furman on the lip.

  Some staid officials found the Roosevelt exuberance a little unsettling. The housekeeper was instructed to keep the icebox full for midnight snacks, and White House guards to let the teen-agers in even if they turned up in the early hours of the morning. What kind of place is this, an indignant Johnny wanted to know, when a fellow can’t get into his own house? Eleanor had her own run-in with a too literal interpretation of regulations when Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III, in charge of public buildings and grounds, informed her that she could not attach an old-fashioned swing to the limb of a White House tree because it might injure the bark. “Well, of course, I shall do whatever he tells me, but for the life of me I cannot get this point of view.” Eventually the children got their swing.30

  But she would not do anything that detracted from the mansion’s dignity, because it was a house that belonged to the nation. “I think it is a beautiful house with lovely proportions, great dignity, and I do not think any one looking at it from the outside or living in it can fail to feel the spell of the past and the responsibility of living up to the fine things which have been done and lived in that house.”31 The family quarters on the second floor were spacious but not intimidating. There were four large two-room suites, one at each corner of the floor, the larger room twenty-six by thirty feet, the smaller fourteen by seventeen feet. On the southern side the two corner suites were separated by the Monroe Room, a sitting room which Mrs. Hoover had furnished with authentic reproductions of Monroe furniture, and the Oval Room. On the opposite side of the house, looking toward Pennsylvania Avenue, there were two smaller guest rooms. The whole floor was bisected by a regal hall, eighteen feet wide, and the ceilings were seventeen feet high.

  When Eleanor returned from the inaugural, she found the high-ceilinged rooms and the long hall devoid of all personal belongings a little depressing, but with the help of Nancy Cook and a White House warehouse full of old furniture, the family rooms soon bore the Roosevelt imprint.

  Franklin took the Oval Room as his study, covering the walls with his naval prints and his desk with the gadgets and curios that he had collected all his life. Flanking the fireplace were the flags of the United States and of the president, and over the door he hung a pastel painting of Eleanor of which he was very fond. A door next to his desk led into a small bedroom. Eleanor felt that the bed there was too cumbersome and large, and ordered one made at Val-Kill. There were two bedside tables, one usually covered with documents and memoranda, the other with pencils, pads, and a telephone. Eleanor often left letters on this table with sections underlined and a notation in the margin, “F—read.”

  Her own suite was next to Franklin’s in the southwest corner of the floor. The larger room had been Lincoln’s bedroom, but she slept in the dressing room and used the other as her sitting room and study. She liked to be surrounded by photographs, and her walls were soon adorned with the framed portraits of family, friends, and people she had known and admired. Her Val-Kill desk was by a window overlooking a handsome magnolia that had been planted by Andrew Jackson. The view from her desk, as from the president’s bed, swept across the south lawns to the Washington monument. Louis occupied the southeast suite and Missy had a small apartment on the third floor that had been used by Mrs. Hoover’s housekeeper.

  The western end of the second-floor hall had been used as a conservatory by Mrs. Hoover, who had fitted it out with heavy bamboo furniture, a green fiber rug, palm trees, and large cages of birds to give it an outdoor, California-like air. Eleanor turned it into a family sitting room where she presided over the breakfast table in the morning and the tea urn in the afternoon. The small silver tea service had been a wedding gift from Alice and the silver statuette of Old Mother Hubbard—a dining-table bell—had belonged to her mother. It was always at her right hand, its head, to the delight of the children, nodding solemnly back and forth when she rang.

  When Eleanor saw that the breakfast tray had been brought in to Franklin, she would go in soon afterward to say good morning and exchange a few words. She did not stay long because he liked to be left alone to eat his breakfast and glance through the papers. In times of crisis there were always officials waiting in the hall to see him before he was wheeled over to the executive offices. Normally the three who went in after he had finished his breakfast to discuss the day’s schedule were Louis, press secretary Steve Early, and Marvin McIntyre, who was in charge of appointments. The executive offices were practically under the same roof, but Franklin was “just as much separated
as though he went to a building farther away,” according to Eleanor. His day was taken up with a succession of people and crises, and he had little time for private affairs. It was sometimes hard on the children, who were having problems. Anna had decided to divorce Curtis (“So the news of our family is out,” Sara lamented). Elliott was settling in Texas—“nothing could pay me to go back East again”—and was also separating from his wife. “That is terrible about Elliott and Betty,” Johnny wrote from Groton, wanting to know whether there was anything he or Franklin Jr. could do. He, too, was making important decisions. He intended to work that summer at camp as a counselor, and “I’m going to Princeton College.” Franklin Jr., senior prefect at Groton and bound for Harvard, alone among the children seemed to be serene. “It must be very satisfying to feel you’ve been married twenty-eight years,—especially in these times,” he wrote his parents on their wedding anniversary, adding, “But to get to the point, first of all please don’t forget to bring my full dress, all my stiff shirts. . . . ”