Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  These were trying days for Alice Longworth. Until the arrival of Franklin and Eleanor she had been Washington’s “Roosevelt.” She was still one of the most entertaining people in Washington as well as one of the most malicious. She had always been the star, Eleanor the retiring one, but now it was Eleanor of whom everyone talked. Even her burlesque of Eleanor, which everyone implored her to do, lost some of its savor when at a White House party Eleanor invited her to perform it for her. “Alice has a talent for that sort of thing,” she said amiably, shrugging off questioners who hoped perhaps to stoke up a feud. It did not add to Alice’s pleasure in the arrival of the Franklin Roosevelts to hear Auntie Corinne say that Eleanor was more like Theodore “than any of his children.” Only a few of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts had not campaigned for Hoover; Auntie Corinne had refused to serve as a Republican elector—“You must understand my own beloved niece is the wife of the Democratic Candidate”—and Kermit Roosevelt had turned up at the Biltmore election eve to congratulate Franklin. But Alice Longworth had campaigned for the Republican ticket. Like her seventy-year-old stepmother, who had come out of retirement to introduce Hoover at a Madison Square Garden rally, she could not bear the idea that the name Roosevelt should be associated in the public mind and affection with someone other than Theodore. But after the election, Eleanor set aside political differences and wrote Alice, inviting her to feel free to come to all the parties, even though she must never feel any obligation to come.

  By the end of Roosevelt’s first hundred days, he had piloted the greatest budget of remedial laws in American history through Congress, and Eleanor had demonstrated to herself and to an astonished country that the White House, far from being a prison, was a springboard for greater usefulness. The opportunities that came to her were not of her own making. As First Lady she automatically commanded national attention, was showered with good will, and could get anything she wanted. As the wife of a president who was lifting the hearts of the nation with the example of his forcefulness, courage, and energy, she shared in the adulation that flowed from a reviving people toward the White House. It was not a life and existence that she had shaped or willed for herself; it was something that was happening to her by virtue of her husband’s election and success. The pattern was set by him. The purposes she served were his. Her real self, she felt, was buried deep within her.48

  Yet there was more to it than that. For by the end of the hundred days, she as much as her husband had come to personify the Roosevelt era. She as much as he had captured the imagination of the country. Far from being a prisoner of the White House and having to content herself with riding, catching up on her reading, and answering mail, as she had predicted to friends, she found herself so busy that she had no time to have her hair washed and would gladly have seen “the days so arranged that one never had to sleep.”49 Most of the women who molded public opinion shared the view expressed by Fannie Hurst in her broadcast from the Chicago World’s Fair on the women who were making history for their sex: never before had the White House had “a woman so closely allied to the tremendous responsibilities of her position as wife of the President. . . . ” Her mail, which at the end of the hundred days was heavier than ever, showed that hope was returning to the country, that morale and self-confidence were bounding upward. That represented the nation’s response to Roosevelt’s fulfillment of his pledge of “action, and action now,” and it also expressed the nation’s recognition that in Eleanor as well as in Franklin it had again found leadership.

  Cissy Patterson, whose fast behavior had shocked Eleanor in her debutante days, interviewed her for the Washington Herald, of which she was the publisher. What was Eleanor’s secret, she wanted to know—the whole country was astonished by her energy and her ability to move through “these cram-crowded days of hers with a sure, serene, and blithe spirit.” They were old acquaintances, Cissy said, who had moved in the same social circles, and she knew what a transformation had taken place in Eleanor. She was not satisfied with Eleanor’s first answer—that she was blessed with a robust constitution. Nor did her second reply (“When I have something to do—I just do it”) seem very enlightening. How did she escape the “sick vanity” and “wounded ego” that drained the vitality of most people? “You are never angry, for instance?”

  “Oh, no. I really don’t get angry. . . . You see I try to understand people.”

  “But when you were young, were you free like this? So free—so free of yourself?”

  “No. When I was young I was very self-conscious.”

  Then how had Eleanor achieved mastery over herself? Somewhere along the line there must have been a struggle.

  “Little by little,” Eleanor replied. “As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do—I just did it. Really, I don’t know—.”

  Cissy then ventured the opinion that Eleanor was “a complete extrovert, of course.” Either Eleanor didn’t care for the question or did not care “for Dr. Freud,” Cissy thought, for she did not answer. “She just glanced up over her knitting needles, with those clever grey eyes of hers.”

  Cissy gave up her effort to get Eleanor to talk about her “night of the soul.” However Eleanor had achieved her self-mastery, of one thing Cissy was certain: “Mrs. Roosevelt has solved the problem of living better than any woman I have ever known.”50

  IV

  THE

  WHITE

  HOUSE

  YEARS

  36.THE POLITICS OF CONSCIENCE

  AN ALERT PUBLISHER RUSHED INTO PRINT A 40,000-WORD compilation of articles and speeches that Eleanor Roosevelt managed to put together in the course of getting settled in the White House. The book, entitled It’s Up to the Women, had as its unifying theme the reforming role that women must assume if the nation was to come through the crisis of the Depression successfully. It chattily interlaced workaday advice on menus household budgets, child rearing, and getting along with one’s husband and children with apostolic appeals to women to lead in the movement for social justice, to join and support trade unions, to set up consumers’ groups to police the NRA, and to enter politics.1

  The new order of things, Eleanor exhorted, should reflect not only “the ability and brains of our men” but also “the understanding heart of women,” because especially in times of crisis women had “more strength of a certain kind than men.”2 “Perhaps it is better described as a certain kind of vitality which gives them a reserve which at times of absolute necessity they can call upon.”3 Above all, she wanted women to take the leadership in the movement to abolish war, and hoped that the adventure of building a better world might take the place of the excitement and glamor of war. She did not expect much from the men when it came to manifesting a will to peace: “Only the women and youth of any country can initiate this change. They will have the men to help them later on in the fight, but they will meet some of the same unbelief and lethargy that they have come up against in the past.”4

  It’s Up to the Women was a call to action. It also indicated that the First Lady had her own set of priorities—peace, the abolition of poverty, and a concern for youth, women’s rights, and the rights of minorities generally. Mary Beard concluded her enthusiastic review of the First Lady’s book with the surprised observation that “the implications of some of her economic statements reach to the borderlands of political, social and cultural change.”5

  Eleanor’s role as mistress of the White House was thrust upon her by virtue of being the president’s wife, yet she also actively sought to shape that role in accordance with the laws and purposes of her inner being. “I am not a philosopher,” she said.6 Indeed, she was acutely conscious of her lack of a college education, which left her, she felt, at a disadvantage in the analysis and judgment of competing intellectual claims. Nevertheless, she did have a philosophy of living shaped by her religious upbringing and fed by
a seemingly inexhaustible spring of human sympathy that turned the Golden Rule into a vital and moving force in her approach to men and institutions. In a Washington crowded with rebels and reformers her rigorous effort to live by the Golden Rule moved her into the vanguard of those who wanted the New Deal to mean a new, better order.

  Her speeches and writings called for the building of a new world, and though her language was that of the Gospel and the Declaration of Independence rather than the Communist Manifesto, her underlying message was revolutionary. People “must understand what it is in the past which held us back, what it is in ourselves, in human nature as a whole, which must be fought down if we are successfully to have a new deal.” The nation’s goal had to be the creation of “a new social order based on real religion” rooted in people leading the lives “they would live if they really wished to follow in Christ’s footsteps.”7

  She had her own concept of utopia. She sketched it softly, in phrases disarmingly modest and simple, in an article she wrote shortly after becoming First Lady, “What I Hope to Leave Behind Me.” She would like to live in a community where every individual had an income adequate to provide his family with the ordinary comforts and pleasures of life but no individual had an income so large that he did not have to think about his expenditures. Such a community, she felt, “would have the germs of a really new deal for the race.” But it would not happen without a shift in thought and a reconstruction of values—less concern with creature comforts and more cooperation in everything that might help people “acquire a little more graciousness and freedom in life.”8 If that was the type of community the Technocrats, who were much in the headlines at that time, were aiming at, she could view it sympathetically.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was fundamentally a moralist. She believed that the Depression was caused as much by defects of spirit and character as of institutions. The nation had gone through a ten-year “orgy” of speculation and quick profits, “of money bringing returns which required no real work.” Selfishness and a preoccupation with material things had been the hallmarks of the decade. Selfishness, she felt, had been responsible for America’s imposition of higher tariffs and had flawed Americans’ relationship with each other—the financial East ignored the distress in the farmlands, and everywhere the rich paid little attention to the poor.9

  In the frenzy to make money, Americans had lost some of the qualities that made life worthwhile, the ability to enjoy simple things—a landscape, “the breath of a crisp October day,” “the play of the sun and shadow,” “the view from a high hill”—and above all the joy that came from sharing: “As I grow older I realize that the only pleasure I have in anything is to share it with some one else. . . . I could not today start out with any zest to see the most marvelous sight in the world unless I were taking with me someone to whom I knew the journey would be a joy.”10

  If the Depression had taught men any one thing, Eleanor hoped it was the lesson of “interdependence”—that “one part of the country or group of countrymen cannot prosper while the others go down hill, and that one country cannot go on gaily when the rest of the world is suffering.” Perhaps the Depression might reunite the country and give it the sense of community that comes from shared hardships. The Pilgrim Fathers, in the small settlements that they had wrested from an unyielding continent, knew that to survive “they must survive together. . . . In our complicated modern civilization, we are so separated from each other, that we forget our interdependence. The depression has brought it back to us. . . . If we can get back to the feeling that we are responsible for each other, these years of depression would have been worth while.”11

  She invoked the Sermon on the Mount in order to persuade people, especially “the old crowd” with which she had grown up, to accept changes that meant higher taxes and fewer luxuries. If the country did just the temporary and expedient things “we will find ourselves again just where we are today, still building a civilization on human suffering.”12 What distinguished such pleas for benevolence and altruism from sentimental exhortation was the psychological understanding behind them. The personal disasters she had surmounted had taught her that although moments of stress and danger could paralyze and destroy, they could also liberate and strengthen. She had turned her father’s death into a constructive, sweetening influence in her life. And instead of crushing her, the Lucy Mercer crisis and her husband’s paralysis had become occasions of personal transcendence and growth. In the face of great emotional excitement, wrote William James, “proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs” and men are given courage to say “Yes” to life’s challenges.13 That was how Eleanor had responded to personal disaster; that was how she now responded to the nation’s ordeal. It was a time of hardship and distress, but it was also a time when men and women might be more disposed than usual to subordinate selfishness, faction, and private interest to the common cause. Such moments had to be seized before hardness and the old cautions returned and used in order to bring about a basic reconstruction of institutions.

  The National Industrial Recovery Act represented the kind of basic reform the nation needed, and Eleanor hoped the NRA codes would be charters of “fair play” among the various elements in the industrial process. But since she was also a realist about the relationship of power to justice, she helped the unions in their drive to organize under Section 7A, and when the codes turned into agreements for administered prices and restricted production she did her utmost to get consumer representation on the code authorities and state recovery boards and to strengthen the consumers’ division under Mary Harriman Rumsey. “I wish I could tell you or that you knew how much you have helped the whole range of consumer problems and policies,” Mary Rumsey wrote her. Eleanor was equally clear-eyed about another great pillar of the New Deal reconstruction, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It seemed senseless when people were starving and in rags to pay farmers to plow under cotton and slaughter piglets: “While it may be necessary to raise farm prices, I do think some way should be found to take things which are not needed and give them to people who, in any case, will not be able to buy them.”14

  With seeming naïveté, she asked the AAA administrator over the telephone, “Why do you dump all these pigs into the Mississippi, when there are thousands of people in the country starving?” Before the startled official could reply, she went on, “Why not give the meat away to them?” Her strong objections to the destruction of food in the midst of hunger led to a scheme that anticipated the food-stamp plan. “Surplus farm products are being fed to the hungry instead of being destroyed because she asked a government official a question,” reported Ruby Black in Editor and Publisher at the beginning of 1934.15 “Of course all the male officials are convinced they would have thought of it themselves,” Ruth Finney later wrote in the Scripps-Howard newspapers, “but they had not done so up to the time she insisted it was the thing to do.”

  Eleanor’s greatest hope for bold, innovative moves to bring idle men and idle resources together lay with the Civil Works Administration set up by the president in November, 1933, and charged with the task of putting four million unemployed to work. “I hope that Mr. Hopkins, in his new corporation, will do some of the things which need to be done. He is really a remarkable person and gradually things may work out.”16

  She approved and defended her husband’s program, but there was a radical charge to her advocacy of the New Deal that was absent from his. By the end of 1933 there was some improvement in the economic situation and considerable recovery of confidence. There was “more hope in the air,” Eleanor wrote her friend Florence Willert in England, “in spite of the fight we have on our hands over here just now.”17 The fight was being waged by an owning class, which, its nerve restored, was beginning to resist further changes.

  Eleanor devoted the opening lecture of her civics course at the New York Junior League to the need for continuing deep-rooted reform. She sought to bring home to the three hundred debutantes and society matrons who c
rowded the small auditorium the hunger and the cold that Lorena Hickok was reporting from the Dakotas, the desperation in Appalachia. People “simply won’t live that way,” she warned. She begged her listeners to make the effort to put themselves into the minds and hearts of the wretched and deprived because if they did so they would not be able to complain about higher taxes and government interference.

  She told the story of a man who had gone to jail for stealing food to feed his starving family. He had been a model prisoner and was released for good behavior, yet as he left he swore to the warden he would do the same thing again if necessary. “I wouldn’t blame him,” Eleanor commented, and as her audience stirred uneasily she added, “You would be a poor wishy-washy sort of person if you didn’t take anything you could when your family was starving.”18 The protests flooded in; editorialists and correspondents were horrified that the First Lady should seem to be encouraging lawlessness and violence. “I certainly did not tell the story of the starving man’s stealing to feed his family to promote or encourage lawlessness or dishonesty,” she answered one such critic. “I was merely trying to bring home to my audience, which was made up of people who know little of the suffering of poverty, that people were being driven to desperate ends.” Give a job to the man whose case she cited, and to others like him, she said, and they would be the “most loyal and law abiding citizens.”19

  “Nothing I said in my talk justifies starting a revolution by violence,” she replied to another critic.

  I simply pointed out the historical fact . . . that revolutions do not start until great groups of people are suffering and convinced of the hopelessness of their cause getting a fair hearing. I have always made it a point that we are going through a revolution without violence and I hope it will continue to be so, but certain changes must come and we should be willing to have them come.20