Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Although Eleanor relished telling that story, she did not really believe that the president’s commitment to liberalism had weakened. But she saw the pressures on him to abandon New Deal ground, and because she sensed the anxiety among Negroes, young people, and working men and women that their interests were being forgotten, she felt a compulsion to speak out more vigorously than ever on the whole range of home-front issues. She felt that the failure of many men to meet Army physical standards made a comprehensive national health program more rather than less urgent, and she said so. Her biggest disappointment with Harry Hopkins was his failure, now that he had become Franklin’s closest adviser, to speak up for such a program: “Harry Hopkins could not be bothered.” She fought for the farm tenant and for the young; “FDR insisted tonight neither farm security nor NYA was being curtailed.” At the request of the Department of Agriculture, she alerted the president to moves in Congress to get rid of the school-lunch and food-stamp programs as “non-essential.” She actively backed the fight for repeal of the poll tax, arguing that “we cannot be a democracy and deny the vote to any individual,” especially when many of the disenfranchised were being called to the armed forces. In public and private she pushed against the barriers that kept Negroes out of the defense industries and confined them to service jobs in the armed forces. She advocated rent controls and wage and price ceilings. If the vital energies of democracy were to be tapped, she said, democracy, like Communism and Nazism, must “give hope of a new order.”18

  While Roosevelt sometimes wearied of his wife’s pressure, he, too, acknowledged, when the moment of irritation passed, that the conservatives were out to scuttle the New Deal and he, too, thought of civilian defense as “a social defense organization,” as he would make clear in his Executive Order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense. Where was “that home defense thing,” he was asked at a press conference early in March. “That’s one of the most difficult things to put together in administrative form that I have yet had,” he confessed, “because it covers so many different things in life.”19

  One of the major hurdles to issuing the order was to get agreement among the government agencies. Ickes was briefly involved in the planning of the home-defense setup. Too many women were being consulted, he huffily remarked, and Mrs. Kerr’s plan was “cockeyed.” He rallied to the side of Federal Security administrator Paul V. McNutt, who felt that Mrs. Kerr was trespassing on a proposal for an Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Services, which he had drafted—also, it turned out, at the suggestion of the president. “It seems that Mrs. Roosevelt is mixed up in this,” Ickes noted pessimistically, “and I told McNutt that he was likely to run into difficulties.”20

  In May the president issued his Executive Order. He had come down squarely on the side of the ladies, and the duties he assigned to the OCD were broad in scope. In addition to civilian protection, volunteer participation, and morale responsibilities, the new organization was given the job of securing the cooperation of the federal agencies in meeting the needs of communities resulting from the defense program. In effect, he deputized it to serve as home-front watchdog.21

  The president appointed Fiorello LaGuardia to head up the organization. The ebullient little mayor had been pressing for a war assignment and Roosevelt had wanted to appoint him secretary of war, but Judge Rosenman, alerted by Justice Frankfurter, had talked the president out of that, describing LaGuardia as “a mad genius.” A later suggestion that LaGuardia be appointed as the president’s deputy with the defense-production group had also met with opposition. According to Ickes, it was felt that “LaGuardia would not work with the team but would run all over the field with the ball.” When Ickes heard that LaGuardia had been named head of civilian defense, including morale, a field in which Ickes himself had ambitions, he wrote angrily that Fiorello “is not God” and could not handle home defense, campaign for re-election, and operate as chairman of the U.S.-Canadian Joint Defense Board. In this respect he had a point.22

  The women wanted Eleanor to be in charge of volunteer work, and Roosevelt asked them to get in touch with LaGuardia, who saw the advantages to having the president’s wife as his associate. It meant not only prestige and publicity, but unique leverage in establishing the new organization within the federal bureaucracy. He wanted her to join him, but she hesitated. Long experience had taught her that her presence incited jealousy as much as it elicited helpfulness, that officials in other agencies publicly acquiesced to her requests and privately grumbled because what they felt obliged to do for the wife of the president they would have refused to the assistant director of OCD. As for the publicity she would bring the fledgling, perhaps it was better for it to stay out of the limelight until a pattern of efficiency and usefulness had been established.23

  She functioned most effectively when her leadership was exercised indirectly through someone like Molly Dewson. In June, Eleanor turned down the chairmanship of the women’s division of civilian defense. She would only embarrass the president, she told friends; everything she said and did would be construed as officially coming from him and she did not want to add to his troubles.

  She was more than willing, however, to help LaGuardia behind the scenes. Her interest was in the community-participation program, but the mayor’s first thought in regard to women volunteers was to deck them out in attractive uniforms. He had set up a committee of New York’s best fashion people, he informed Eleanor. “After you have seen the costumes and the insignia, do please let me have the benefit of your criticism.” A stylish uniform, the mayor felt, would encourage women to volunteer, but Eleanor was not enthusiastic. It was “very unwise,” she remonstrated, to release publicity on the uniforms “until we announce what work the women are going to do.” Nor was she interested in elegance. She favored the “simplest kind of work uniform, one that was cheap and practical.” The uniform that caught her eye at the New York display was a wrap-around apron of washable blue-gray cotton, a sort of cover-all, priced at under three dollars.24

  Apart from uniforms for women volunteers, La Guardia was almost exclusively concerned with civilian protection—air-raid warning systems, practice blackouts, and especially fire precautions. Harry Hopkins was not surprised; it was an extension of the mayor’s well-known fondness for dashing to three-alarm fires in New York City. “LaGuardia was in the President’s hair,” Baruch informed Ickes not long after the mayor took over the OCD job. “He is a poor executive and he won’t work with anyone. He is too spectacular to keep his feet on the ground.” The White House begged Anna Rosenberg, a hard-headed liberal who knew how to get along with the men, even the labor movement’s rough diamonds, to stick close to the mayor and, above all, to keep him away from the president.25

  Florence Kerr was in despair over the mayor’s lack of interest in the volunteer-participation aspect of civilian defense. He not only was uninterested; he refused to let her do anything. “I was not allowed to do one single constructive thing. I did neither good work nor bad work—I did no work,” she wrote later. The mayor’s indifference became a form of pressure on Eleanor to become more actively involved in the program, and perhaps that was his intention. To get the mayor to move she offered him the use of the White House for the initial meeting of the Volunteer Participation Committee and asked the president to say a few words to the group: “I feel that you will have to make it clear that civilian participation is important. Otherwise the Mayor will not do much with his volunteers.” The president did what she asked. “The Mayor’s work is really in two parts,” he told the forty-five members of the Civilian Participation Committee.

  The first is what I call quasi-military—a thing like preparing sandbags . . . air raid alarms, and so forth and so on . . . but beyond that is your work, which is at least equally important—more important. . . . We know the fact that women in London—mothers of families—are just as important in the defense of Britain as men on a destroyer. They are all part of this defense. And I think we have a long ways to g
o in this country.26

  The mayor did not construe the president’s remarks as criticism of his leadership. He thanked Eleanor for her “splendid cooperation. I think it was you who made the meeting. I believe that it was most profitable and that we are going to get considerable help from all of the members for the entire program.” Despite these fine words, the volunteer plans of OCD lagged. Eleanor said so at a press conference at end of August. As she explained to LaGuardia the next day,

  I was asked by one of the women reporters if I was completely satisfied with the work done by women volunteers in civilian defense, and I said I was not, and went on to explain that we are not fully launched on a real program, that there was still much to do. . . . I know that you feel as I do, that we have a big job ahead of us and are only just getting started.

  With LaGuardia’s approval she convened a meeting at the White House to discuss a civilian-defense program for young people, and at the meeting she criticized OCD’s failure to enlist youth. When LaGuardia spoke to her about it afterward they made an oddly contrasting pair—the mayor gesturing emphatically with his index finger as if to compensate for his shortness, the First Lady unruffled, benign, motherly, as if to minimize her tallness. “There are 135,000,000 people in this country,” he said to her. “The criticism of 134,999,999 wouldn’t touch me. Yours did.” He was going to tell the president that he intended to draft America’s Number 1 volunteer. “I’m worried about the civilian defense job,” she wrote that night, “because I don’t want to do it but if the Mayor asks me I’ll have to try. Just at the moment I feel very low.”27

  The two people who persuaded her to accept the civilian-defense post were Anna Rosenberg and Harry Hopkins. “Anna Rosenberg told me that only I could make the Mayor let anything be done on the civilian participation and she thought I wanted to do it.” The president, Eleanor said, “was completely neutral, though he told me he thought it would help Mayor LaGuardia.” Mrs. Rosenberg received a different impression of Roosevelt’s attitude. “He wanted his wife to do it. He was glad to channel her energies into one area so that she would leave him alone in other areas. He knew that she felt frustrated because many of the liberal programs had to be put aside.”28

  “I spoke to the Mayor last night,” she informed Anna Rosenberg, “and he said I could ask for anything I wanted.” Anna should send her—and here she enumerated the charts, job analyses, and field reports she wished to see. She planned to be in the office on September 29 “at 9 a.m.”29 She had told the mayor she did not care how he straightened out the situation with the woman then in charge of volunteer participation.

  I could say that I was working with her, but she must understand that my word goes and that we are together, going to plan to achieve two things:

  1) The participation of every individual throughout the country in a volunteer job who is able to do so.

  2) Make the volunteer jobs useful to the communities.

  Before going into the office she planned to meet with OCD officials in the field during a trip to Seattle, but the trip had to be canceled. On September 7 the president’s mother died. “Mama had a very wonderful end,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray.

  She had been somewhat of an invalid all summer but was home from Campo for a week, enjoyed Franklin’s day at home tho’ she had a slight temperature. About Sat. midnight a clot in the lung caused a circulatory collapse & she became unconscious & remained so till her breathing stopped at noon last Sunday. I think Franklin will forget all the irritations & remember only pleasant things which is just as well. The endless details, clothes to go through, check books, paper. I began on Sat.

  Eleanor was “of course attending to everything,” Helen Robinson reported in her diary.30

  Eleanor wrote a tribute to her mother-in-law in her column: Sara was “a very vital person” whose “strongest trait was loyalty to her family. . . . She was not just sweetness and light, for there was a streak of jealousy and possessiveness in her where her own were concerned.” The word “‘grande dame’ was truly applicable to her.” Franklin could push unpleasant memories out of his mind, she wrote a friend, but not she:

  What ironical things happen in life & how foolish it all seems. I looked at my mother-in-law’s face after she was dead & understood so many things I’d never seen before. It is dreadful to have lived so close to someone for 36 years & feel no deep affection or sense of loss. It is hard on Franklin however.31

  She hoped Franklin would now be ready to make changes in the Big House so that it would be more livable and more theirs than Sara’s. He did not say yes or no to her, but when Anna and John came East at his request, he told them that he wanted the house kept as it was. When Eleanor heard this from Anna, she said that she was unable to live in a museum: she would live in her cottage at Val-Kill and go to the Big House only when the president was there. The insistency with which she made it clear, even to strangers, that this had been her mother-in-law’s house, not hers, betrayed how deeply she had been hurt: “My mother-in-law owned the house and ran it herself up until she died a year ago, and it is exactly as she left it. It never was my home in the sense that I had anything to do with the furnishing or running of it.”32

  September was one of the most difficult months in her life. No sooner had she begun to go through Sara’s clothes and papers than she was summoned to Washington, where her brother Hall was in Walter Reed Hospital. He had had a few good years in the thirties as assistant to Frank Murphy when the latter was mayor of Detroit. But after the death of his son Danny he had disintegrated and had settled in Hyde Park where he was experimenting with prefabricated rural housing built on the president’s land. “His liver is gone as they told him it would,” she wrote Maude Gray. For the next ten days she lived at the hospital, sleeping in her clothes, keeping vigil with Hall’s companion of his final years, the faithful Zena Raset.

  My idea of hell, if I believed in it, would be to sit or stand & watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns & thinking “this was once the little boy I played with & scolded, he could have been so much & this is what he is.” It is a bitter thing & in spite of everything I’ve loved Hall, perhaps somewhat remissedly of late, but he is part of me. I do have a quieting effect on him & so I stood by his bed & held his hand & stroked his forehead & Zena stood by me for hours. She won’t give up hope of his recovery & keeps asking me if I don’t think he’s strong enough to pull through till I could weep.

  “It has been a hard two weeks,” she wrote after Hall’s death, “& from last Sunday until yesterday morning more harrowing than I could tell you, till the end which was quite peaceful. I wish all youngsters who drink & abuse their health could see the results of great strength with the liver gone.” In her column she recalled a small boy with golden curls whom their young aunts called “cherub” which made her jealous. From the time he was eighteen, “the only way that anyone could hold him was to let him go. . . . He loved life, he could enjoy things more than almost anyone I have ever known.” He had generosity, warmth of heart, courage amounting to recklessness, a brilliant mind, “and a capacity for work which, in his younger days, made him able to perform prodigious tasks, both physically and mentally.” After a service in the East Room she accompanied the body to Tivoli for burial in the Hall family vault in St. Paul’s churchyard.33

  Two days later she reported for work at the OCD offices in Dupont Circle. The situation was not promising. “I had a talk with Corrington Gill today who has just come in to the Mayor’s outfit & we agree that there is none [organization] & that we must have some.” The Sunday before she went to work she had awakened at three in the morning and, finding herself wide awake, calm and rested, spent the next three hours mentally organizing the OCD work. At six she made some notes, which she gave to Tommy at breakfast to type out.34

  The notes began with a section on “over-all objectives,” enumerated the “goals of Department heads” to be achieved “by November 1,” and then went on to a
section that stated “our first job [is] to organize headquarters office.” Each person was asked to “begin” by writing out for her the duties they had, salary agreements made, their staff in Washington and in the field.

  Elinor Morgenthau, who had volunteered to come in to the office with her, “will confer when I am not available. All letters involving policy or any new procedure to be submitted to me before going out and not to be sent until approved. A copy of all letters on business matters to be sent at end of each working day to my secretary.”

  She wanted a detailed report on how work in the field was carried on and checked. A policy would have to be established on “our responsibility to the rest of organization and to the Mayor.” This was followed by precise instructions on the handling of press and publicity. She enumerated the people who were to be put through on the phone, and added, “only listen in when I request it.” All mail was to be opened but brought to her at first “until we can establish system.” She set times for staff meetings. No visitors were to be put through except when they were on the appointment list or at the request of Mrs. Betty Lindley or Miss Dorothy Overlock.

  She showed her plan to Baruch, who “approved my setup as far as charts went but I don’t think he realizes what Defense Councils are going to be like to deal with!” The lack of organization, the absence of clearly defined tasks for the volunteers, the jealousies of the established departments, not to mention state and local defense councils, were even greater than she had anticipated:—“things are devious & I wonder if I have knowledge & courage to go on successfully.”35

  “We have an amazing reservoir of volunteers ready and willing,” she wrote Lady Reading. “The difficulty has been in organizing the Washington office so it would be able to react down into the local communities and into our rural areas.” The president had understated it in March when he had complained that working out the administrative setup for the OCD was one of the most difficult jobs he had ever faced.36