Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  To her husband she put it more concretely. He needed to build someone as his successor. The party organization had to be transformed, as the women’s division had been, into an instrument of education and citizen involvement in public affairs.

  “Do let me know,” she wrote him just before he boarded the cruiser Indianapolis for a trip to Latin America, “if you’ve decided anything about Harry Hopkins, Ed Flynn, or Eddie Roddan. The people in certain positions seem to me very important these next few years.”49

  Then she struck a gayer note. “You should hear the messages that come to us from everywhere, by letter, by wire, by telephone! You could be a king or a dictator and they’d fight for you! Lucky you have no aspirations!”

  * Although Louis played along, he had moments of doubt. “But you will be there,” protested John Keller, a young man who came to the hospital to read to him. “No,” Louis disagreed softly. “I will not be there. Franklin is on his own now.”4

  † A distinction drawn by the sociologist Daniel Bell, discussing Eugene Victor Debs.

  ‡ One of “the three musketeers,” as the three press-association correspondents assigned to the White House were dubbed. The other two were Frances L. Stephenson of the Associated Press and Frederick A. Storm of the United Press.

  § Mrs. Longworth had seconded Landon’s nomination, and as a columnist covering the Democratic convention wrote, “The talk is quite general that Mr. Roosevelt now is laying the groundwork for a third term” and asked the president to disavow such ambitions.42

  40.WISE AS A SERPENT, GUILELESS AS A DOVE

  BY THE BEGINNING OF ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM, HIS WIFE had become a virtuoso in making her views known and her influence felt throughout the vast reaches of the federal government. Of her husband it would later be written that “there never was a prominent leader who was more determined about his objectives and never one who was more flexible about his means.” Something similar might be said about his wife’s adeptness in the uses of government, except that in her case the flexibility related to the ways by which a woman exercises influence in a milieu where power was in the hands of the men. She had learned from experience that if women wanted to be effective in politics and government they needed “the wisdom of the serpent and the guileless appearance of the dove!”1

  Since she held no office and possessed no authority except that which derived from her husband, she left it to official Washington to guess what she did at his request and what she did on her own, what she did with his knowledge and what she did in order to place a situation before him and thus prod him and his aides into action. Officials received invitations to lunch with her at the White House, and when she steered the conversation into some field of interest to her, everyone wondered if the president had put her up to it, and usually she did not enlighten them. Sometimes she invoked the president, as in the case of a conference on leisure and recreation, when she wrote that “the President thinks it would be a very good thing if we could have a meeting on leisure time activities. He does not want to have it a White House Conference, but he felt if it could be called he could give it his blessing.” What the recipients of the letter did not know was that because of her interest in the problem she had gone to the president and suggested the national conference in the first place. How could they know, when the president himself liked to keep his associates guessing as to his wife’s authority since it often served his purposes to have her test a plan’s acceptability before he embraced it fully.2

  They assumed that if anyone knew where the president was heading, she did, and to a large extent they were right. How often, remarked Grace Tully, had she heard “Mrs. Roosevelt examining the Boss on what was going to be done about such and such a situation.” But he did not disclose himself fully to anyone, and much that Eleanor wanted to know he did not tell her. Sometimes his reticence reflected a reluctance to discuss the seamier side of politics. (For example, Esther Lape was interested in a friend’s candidacy to become ambassador to Russia, but Eleanor reported that she could not find out anything, for “these little political deals are not the things they tell the ladies readily as you know.”) More often Franklin kept silent because he wanted to keep open as many options as possible. “I’m just not ready to talk about that yet, darling,” he would say to her. On a lovely October day in 1937 in Hyde Park when the maples and oaks were in full autumnal glory the president talked with the press, and Eleanor in low-heeled shoes with a ribbon around her hair listened intently as the reporters tried to find out how he intended to “quarantine” an aggressor. She would have liked to have asked some questions, too, she wrote the next day. Of course, she could ask him in private, “but it always seems to me a little unfair to force anyone to talk shop when they might be thinking of something else.”3

  Yet when at her own press conference she was asked about the frequent coincidences between views expressed in her column and by the president, she replied with the conciseness for which the press admired her: “You don’t just sit at meals and look at each other.” During one insistent dinner-party cross-examination Anna cautioned her, “Mother, can’t you see you are giving Father indigestion?” Some of Roosevelt’s friends felt she harried him unduly. If there were matters she could not take up with him at dinner because of the presence of guests, she could bring them up when she went in to say good night or good morning—“if there’s anything we want to talk about, we do.” And on occasion she even hurried through the columned portico that led to the executive offices and slipped into his office to ask or tell him something, whispering in his ear if others were present. But she did not like to do that: “I always feel I am taking too much time and there are too many people waiting.”4

  She had other ways of finding out about Franklin’s policies and plans. Often she passed on letters from troubled citizens to him asking how she should answer them, and occasionally these letters reflected her own uneasiness about some development. A Philadelphia woman asked her to use her influence “to defeat the awful increase in military preparedness.” “FDR what is the answer?” she wrote across the top. “The answer to this type of letter is, I think, this,” he replied, and summed up the argument against unilateral disarmament. “Write a letter along these lines,” she in turn instructed Tommy.5 A student at the University of Puerto Rico sent her a chapter of a book that dealt with democracy represented by the New Deal and asked, “Did I catch the real spirit of the New Deal?”

  “FDR you are a better judge than I. Did she?” Eleanor inquired.

  “I think this is pretty good,” the president replied.

  “Tell her an authority to whom I submitted her chapter thinks it ‘pretty good,’” she instructed Tommy.6

  “I was talking with a man the other day, and he said . . . ,” she began a speech to a group of women. Impressed by the shrewd analysis that followed, one of her hearers asked, “Who was that man you talked to?”

  “Franklin,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.7

  The officials in her husband’s administration assumed she had his backing and knew she had a large public following, but the most important source of her influence was a personality that radiated goodness. “Charismatic authority,” wrote Max Weber, represents leadership to which men submit “because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of a person.” When the English novelist and pacifist Vera Brittain arrived at the White House for lunch she felt herself in the presence of a natural aristocrat; photographs of Eleanor had not prepared her for “the resolute, penetrating blue-grey eyes beneath their strongly marked brows” that caused her to forget every other feature of the First Lady’s face and to hang on to every word she said.8

  Eleanor refused to admit that she had any influence because of the power of her own personality, insisting that what she was able to accomplish had little to do with her as an individual. Rather, it had “a great deal to do with the circumstances in which I found myself.”9 She continually minimized her own importance. She advised a Texas woman whom she was enc
ouraging to write and who decided an article about Eleanor Roosevelt was the way to break into the magazine market “not to tell only good things. . . . It will be more interesting if it is not too flattering. After all, you have only had the experience of helpful things whereas there are many people whom I have not been able to help and who probably feel that I could have done so if I had had the right understanding of their problem.” When you know your own weaknesses, she said to a friend whose mother she had visited in her grocery shop, you know you are no better than other people, but because of your position you have a greater chance to do good. That is all. “You don’t permit yourself false airs.” She carried in her purse the prayer attributed to St. Francis in which the petitioner asks the Lord to grant “that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love . . . ” We look at life as through a glass; the poet invests it with more poetry than it has in fact; the politicians see it as the struggle for power; Eleanor Roosevelt surrounded it with love. She profoundly influenced the thinking of some of her husband’s aides, partly because she was the wife of the president but mostly by example. She insisted on being her natural self, and as Washington came to know her as a person rather than as a personage and began to sense her kindness, her genuine interest in people, her lack of egotism and boastfulness, it realized that here was no designing female Rasputin but a woman of mercy right out of First Corinthians. She ruled because she had learned to serve, and service became a form of control. She wanted people to feel that their government cared about them, and because she was in the White House she felt an added obligation to make people feel they knew her, had a right to tell her about themselves and to ask her for help.10

  She showed compassion for all living things. “Can you suggest anything?” she asked Frances Perkins about a case that had come to her attention. “His legs are useless, his father is a drunkard, the home is very poor but he has put up a grand fight for an education.” To Harry Hopkins at the Works Progress Administration, she wrote: “These poor gypsies seem to be having a difficult time. Is there any chance of their being put on a homestead in Florida or Arkansas, where they could be warm and where they might carry on their coppersmith work as well as farming? It seems to me the only solution for them.” When Steve Vasilikos, the peanut vendor who stationed his cart near the White House, was driven away by the police, Eleanor wrote Steve Early from a sickbed at Hyde Park that he should take it up with the District authorities: “I would myself miss him on that corner. We had better let him stand at the White House gate.” A protest against the manner in which Army mules were disposed of brought a memorandum to Steve Early: “Could the War Dept. either explain the reasons for doing so or make the whole situation clearer as I am quite sure they do not sell them without making sure they will have good homes.”11

  She transgressed against all the rules of tidy administration, though this, of course, was in the New Deal style. She asked help for supplicants whom officials often thought were malingerers and charlatans, and sometimes were. “Aside from the fact that I am disappointed in finding your story was made up entirely out of whole cloth,” she wrote a woman in California, “I feel I must call your attention to the fact that when a letter is received which is as untrue as yours, it takes the time and energy of people here in Washington to follow it through which really should go toward trying to help someone who is really in difficulty.”12 She had not expected Governor Brann of Maine to help an applicant personally with a loan which she had referred to him, she wrote, slightly appalled, but since the governor and his aide had done so, Tommy informed them that “the money she [Mrs. Roosevelt] has is all pledged at the moment, but she does not want you and the Governor to suffer and she will take over the note and pay as she can.”13

  Officials often took her suggestions as commands when she had really meant them to use their own judgment, she said, but it was also true that she made her wishes known rather forcefully. Sometimes she was naïve and sometimes she asked for things that really meant a great deal of effort, yet only the most overweening in her husbands administration did not respond to the disinterested desire to be helpful that was back of her steady flow of communications to all the government departments. It might violate all the rules of political economy, but how was one to say no to a woman who felt the exhilaration of battling wind and snow on a wintry day and then immediately thought of what the foul weather meant to the poorly housed and poorly clothed?14

  Her methods of getting the bureaucracy to respond varied with the degree of her outrage. Usually she sent a letter with a query—how should she answer? What was being done? Couldn’t something be done? “Right in the mails she got a great many of these appeals,” Will Alexander recalled. “She looked at the thing and decided whose business it was in the government to find out about it, and sent that letter with her own initials on it and wrote, ‘Find out about this letter. You know what it’s all about.’ You’d better do it. She never forgot.”15 If she felt very strongly she invited the appropriate official to lunch and, since her right ear was slightly deaf, placed him on her left regardless of protocol. Or she asked him to tea. The day she received a delegation of sharecroppers in the Red Room she invited Henry Wallace and Dr. Alexander to be present. Sometimes she marched over to the offices of an agency in order to insure speedier action. On a letter she had from the National Federation of Federal Employees protesting the lack of housing for middle-income workers at a naval gun factory, she wrote,

  Take to Mr. Hillman and Mr. Knudsen. Make appointment for me on Tuesday at 12 with Mr. Hillman and Mr. Knudsen together if possible. Call Mr. Hillman and ask if it can be so arranged and I will go to their office. I want to talk about housing. If Tuesday not possible would Thursday at 11:30 do?16

  If an administrator’s response to a letter seemed inadequate, she took it up with the president. She sent Acting Secretary of War Louis Johnson complaints she had received from residents of Maroc, California, that the Air Force’s use of Maroc Dry Lake as a bombing range was endangering life and property; she did not like the Army’s reply. “Give whole thing to F.D.R. and say I think answer of Mr. Johnson a bit lame!”

  Experience and intuition taught her to which officials she was obliged to use the formidable words, “The President has asked me . . . ” The readiness to do her bidding did not follow ideological lines. With Wallace and Ickes she usually invoked the president’s authority. Wallace steered clear of her. On the way over to the White House, Wallace warned Will Alexander, whom he had just appointed administrator of the Farm Security Administration, “Now, Will, I want to give you some advice. You want to let that woman alone. She’s a very dangerous person. You don’t want to get mixed up with her.” Wallace did not trust her judgment, Alexander thought. “I, of course, trusted Mrs. Roosevelt almost more than anybody I ever saw.”17 Ickes was as distrustful of her judgment as Wallace. With Hopkins and Jim Farley it was quite the opposite. Hopkins’ aides were under standing instructions to give her whatever help she required, and Farley did her bidding even when he did not quite understand what she was after. Although Chester C. Davis, who succeeded George Peek as administrator of the AAA, was the leader of the “agrarians” as opposed to Rex Tugwell’s “liberals” in the Department of Agriculture, he was a relaxed, kindly man, and Eleanor found him open-minded. When she came back from a trip to upper New York State where farmers had complained to her about the operations of the Federal Loan Bank, she got in touch with Davis about the matter. “Here is a concrete letter showing just what I mean,” she followed up a few days after speaking to him about it. “Will you see that someone takes it up and looks into other conditions which I feel sure they will find throughout New York State?” No mention of the president.18

  She lunched regularly with the wives of the cabinet and hoped her example might inspire some of them to join her in some of her undertakings. Few did. Young Jane Ickes, newly married to the secretary, wrote her in October, 1938, that because o
f a common devotion to progressive causes, Mrs. Roosevelt might be able to give her some advice on how to avoid Washington’s pitfalls. Eleanor replied that she would be happy to do so.

  I think, however, that the person who can help you more than anyone else is Mrs. Morgenthau. She has succeeded in doing work which interests her in Washington, on things which are not controversial and which, therefore, do not jeopardize her husband’s position. I think the general feeling is that our husbands have to do enough jeopardizing for themselves and therefore we should do as little as we possibly can along that line!

  It is a little easier for me. . . . Because of my years and old affiliations, I am apt to be blamed singly and not to put quite so much on my poor husband.19

  She comforted herself with the thought that the country realized she had her own point of view with which Franklin might not agree. And he did have his ways of conveying to people that in her activities and opinions she was an independent personality. Once she entered his office while newsmen were jammed around his desk for a press conference. She wanted to bid her husband good-by as she prepared to leave in order to attend Cornell Week. The president looked out at the falling snow and told her to telephone if she got caught in a snowdrift.

  “All right. I will telephone you from a snowdrift,” Eleanor called over her shoulder as she left the room.