Empty Without You
Page 29
26 Elton Fay, chief political reporter for the Associated Press, and his wife had a new baby.
27 Elinor Morgenthau was a close friend of Eleanor’s and the wife of newly designated Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.
28 Lorena had been feeling unusually fatigued since returning to New York City to resume her job as a news reporter.
29 On March 10, a major earthquake had shaken Southern California, killing 100 people and injuring 4,000.
30 Businessmen Forbes and Harry Amory had made large financial contributions to the Roosevelt presidential election campaign.
31 Eleanor had her hair shampooed and set as well as her fingernails manicured once a week throughout her years in the White House.
32 Senator Walsh, seventy-three, had married the much younger Nieves Perez Chaumont de Truffin in her native Cuba only five days before his death; they had known each other less than a month.
33 Mary Miller was a long-time friend of Eleanor’s whose husband Adolph Miller was a member of the Federal Reserve Board.
34 Based on the satirical novel that Thomas F. Tweed published in 1933, the movie Gabriel Over the White House told the story of an easy-going president who was knocked on the head in an auto accident and suddenly enacted an extraordinary program of reform.
35 The president depicted in the film welcomed unemployed protesters into the White House and listened to their concerns.
1 Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 120.
2 Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 121.
3 Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 121.
4 Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 122.
5 Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 125.
6 Roosevelt, This I Remember, 121–22; Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 122, 130.
7 Roosevelt, This I Remember, 122–23.
8 Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, untitled article written for the North American Newspaper Alliance, August 1933, Box 3026, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers.
9 Roosevelt, This I Remember, 124.
10 Roosevelt, This I Remember, 125; Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, 128.
1 Eleanor is saying that driving by car from New York to Washington with Betsey, James’s wife, would have been a painful reminder of how much she missed Hick and their road trip of the previous summer.
2 For the first time, the United States had recognized the Soviet Union that had come into existence after 1917’s Russian Revolution.
3 William Bullitt was a wealthy businessman who had made major financial contributions to FDR’s presidential campaign.
4 William Bullitt had begun dating Missy LeHand.
5 Eleanor was leaving for Hyde Park.
6 While investigating the relief programs in Minnesota, Lorena was staying with her journalistic mentor Thomas Dillon, editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, and his wife Clarissa.
7 The photo on the cover of the November 20 issue of Time magazine showed Eleanor wearing a somber expression, but the story inside praised her as the most active first lady in history.
8 “Mrs. Doaks” was the fictitious name that Eleanor and Lorena used to refer to the ordinary and inconspicuous private citizen that both women often wished that Eleanor could be.
9 Lorena sent Eleanor road maps marked with the cities she was planning to visit, along with the names and addresses of the hotels where she would be staying.
10 Margaret Fayerweather had been a friend of Eleanor’s since FDR’s days as governor.
11 Franklin Jr. was a student at Harvard. Each year the Roosevelt family spent the Thanksgiving holiday at Warm Springs, Georgia.
12 Eva LeGallienne was a Broadway producer.
13 LeGallienne was lobbying for a national theater that would hire unemployed actors to present quality plays at low prices. Her theater ultimately was established as part of the New Deal, although Congress killed the project in 1939.
14 Earl Miller was a New York state trooper assigned to protect FDR when he was governor. A tall, handsome former Olympic gymnast with a flirtatious manner, Earl spent a great deal of time with Eleanor, and several scholars (as well as Eleanor’s son James) have speculated that they were romantically involved, even though Earl was twelve years Eleanor’s junior. In 1947, Earl’s third wife, Simone, named Eleanor co-respondent in divorce proceedings. After the court documents were sealed, Simone won a hefty financial settlement as well as custody of their two children, Earl and Anna Eleanor—ER was godmother to both children. No correspondence between Eleanor and Earl has been preserved, however, to document the depth of their relationship. Earl later admitted that he married his first wife (the ceremony took place on the Roosevelt estate) as well as Simone to quell rumors about his relationship with Eleanor. After FDR chose to take a trooper other than Earl with him to Washington, Earl took a job with the New York Department of Corrections. When Earl’s first marriage ended in the fall of 1933 (after less than a year), Earl moved to Glens Falls, New York, and often visited Hyde Park when Eleanor was there.
15 While traveling from Iowa to Minnesota, Lorena had passed near Chicago where Eleanor’s son Elliott was living with his second wife, Ruth Googins Roosevelt. A gulf had developed between Elliott and his parents because Eleanor and Franklin were not in favor of him marrying so quickly after his divorce from his first wife. Because of this gulf, Elliott had not yet informed his parents that Ruth was, in fact, expecting their first child.
16 Eleanor’s abstinence from liquor had encouraged Lorena to reduce the amount of alcohol that she drank.
17 “Little Pabywork” was the child of one of the miners who was homesteading at Arthurdale.
18 Between November 1932 and March 1933 when Eleanor and Lorena were both living in New York City, they often had found privacy in Eleanor’s bedroom at the Roosevelt town-house.
19 FDR was being criticized because recovery was not occurring as fast as he had promised voters that it would.
20 The National Recovery Administration approved codes for various industries that provided, among other things, for price fixing. The result was that already-destitute American farmers were having to pay higher prices for many consumer items.
21 The Great Depression had pushed American farmers into a state of economic crisis and deprivation so catastrophic that they had been preparing, both psychologically and through organized action, to undertake the nation’s first large-scale farm strike.
22 The Chicago Tribune was one of the leading Republican newspapers in the country.
23 The November 18 article described Lorena as “an experienced newspaperwoman who is a close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s” and reported that it was Lorena who had prompted the first lady to visit the West Virginia coal mining region and take the lead in the subsistence homestead project.
24 One reason the women championed the first lady was that several of them owed their jobs to her. The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and United Press were among the organizations that had not employed any woman reporters in Washington until Lorena’s suggestion to create the news conferences forced them to—or get scooped every week.
25 The Civil Works Administration created government jobs for unemployed workers.
26 Lorena was planning to spend Christmas at the White House.
27 Lorena was spending Thanksgiving with her former editor and his wife Clarissa in Minneapolis.
28 Dillon’s Minneapolis Tribune was one of many papers that had published Republican accusations that Eleanor was selling pieces of Val-Kill furniture to the government to place in the Arthurdale houses to make money for herself. ER had denied the accusations, pointing out that the hand-crafted items from Val-Kill were far too expensive for government housing and, furthermore, that she had never made a cent of profit from the Val-Kill factory. Lorena was angry at Dillon for publishing the accusations, even though Eleanor defended him, pointing out that he also had published her denial.
29 Monticello is Thomas Jefferson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia.
30 Luray, Virginia, is a picturesque
town in the Shenandoah Mountains.
31 FDR’s press conference was so lacking in news that the New York Times did not even publish a story about it.
32 Eleanor was concerned that Franklin merely reacted to crises and did not have a long-range strategy for strengthening the American economy to avoid another depression.
33 In his nationwide NBC broadcast, publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst supported FDR’s position of departing from the gold standard and lambasted Al Smith and others opposed to that move, accusing financiers of being driven by the big commissions they would receive on loans to foreign organizations rather than by what was best for the United States.
34 Fannie Hurst was a popular novelist in the 1930s.
35 The Sedalia Choir was composed of African-American students who attended the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina. The institute received much of its funding by having the choir give musical recitals.
36 Because women reporters were banned from the Gridiron Club dinners where the president and other male Washington newsmakers socialized with male reporters, Eleanor inaugurated Gridiron Widows parties at the White House for women reporters, women newsmakers, and the wives of the men attending the Gridiron Club dinners.
37 Lorena had covered Floyd Olson while she was reporting for the Minneapolis Tribune.
38 FDR told the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ that the church and state should not necessarily be separated in all endeavors but sometimes should work together for mutual goals—such as outlawing lynching.
39 Dr. Ross McIntire was the White House physician who had advised Lorena to lose weight.
40 Eleanor gave dozens of Christmas gifts to a wide variety of friends, relatives, and people she had come into contact with over the years. She began her Christmas shopping each January in order to complete it by the end of the year.
41 Eleanor’s reference to Lorena’s drinking suggests that Lorena may have had serious concerns that she had been suffering from alcoholism. During her newspaper days, Hick had been a heavy drinker, but after becoming involved with Eleanor, she had reduced her alcohol intake. Perhaps now, being hundreds of miles away from the first lady and with the increased attention on alcohol because of the end of Prohibition, Lorena was becoming concerned that she was drinking too heavily again.
42 Mt. Vernon is George Washington’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C.
43 Surplices are the long, loose-fitting white garments that Episcopal priests wear over their robes during church services.
44 Katharine Dayton wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and Consolidated Press news service.
45 Eleanor and her guests at the party performed skits and lighthearted speeches.
46 Eleanor’s comment about Lorena not flying was a joke—she meant that Lorena shouldn’t drive so fast that her car flew. Lorena had never considered taking an airplane back to Washington, as it would have been too expensive.
47 Each year Eleanor hosted a Christmas party for some 1,000 children from the Central Union Mission.
48 Eleanor was mistaken. Missy’s mother had died in October 1932, before the previous Christmas.
49 Eleanor served as hostess for the annual Salvation Army Christmas party that included singing hymns and distributing hundreds of food baskets and gifts.
50 FDR used the oval-shaped room on the second floor of the White House as his study.
51 As a joke, Lorena had given Eleanor a plastic gun, a reference to the revolver that the Secret Service had persuaded her to carry in the glove compartment of her car.
52 Lorena had given Eleanor a book of poetry.
53 Harry Hopkins had told Lorena that he wanted her to visit Puerto Rico to investigate the relief programs in that island territory. The schedule for the trip would place Lorena in the Caribbean in early March, which would mean that Lorena would spend her birthday away from Eleanor, as she had the previous year. Lorena had suggested that the first lady go with her to Puerto Rico so the trip could double as a vacation.
54 Bill Dana was a long-time friend of the Roosevelts who had met Lorena.
55 Lorena’s insistence on doing “nothing else” but sleep probably meant that she would not participate in any public events at the White House.
56 Eleanor had made an appointment with the White House physician for Lorena to have her blood sugar tested.
1 Mayris “Tiny” Chaney and Eddie Fox were professional dancers who had become friends of Eleanor through Eleanor’s friend Earl Miller.
2 Eleanor wanted Arthurdale’s schools to be more progressive than the public schools in other West Virginia communities. So she and her long-time friend Elinor Morgenthau were visiting various private schools to gather ideas.
3 Eleanor invited the wives of her husband’s Cabinet members to the White House on a regular basis.
4 Eleanor invited several of her loyal secretary’s friends to tea to celebrate Tommy’s birthday.
5 Eleanor’s use of the adjective “intimate” was sarcastic, as such White House events typically included dozens—or even hundreds—of guests.
6 Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body was about the controversial abolitionist.
7 Eleanor referred to Susie Parish, her godmother and wife of her Uncle Henry Parish, as “Cousin Susie.”
8 In June 1933, Good Housekeeping magazine writer Rita Halle criticized Eleanor for traveling more than any other first lady in history, suggesting that the proper place for a president’s wife was at home, but in December Halle praised ER’s many activities on behalf of American women.
9 Will Rogers letter, New York Times, 7 June 1933, 17.
10 Eleanor’s press conferences were routinely on Monday.
11 To escape briefly from her public life and spend time alone with Lorena, Eleanor was attempting to keep her planned four-day trip to Warm Springs a secret.
12 Fritz Kreisler was an Austrian violinist whose interpretive artistry placed him among the world’s foremost musicians of the early twentieth century.
13 Louis Howe, whose White House bedroom was directly across the hall from Eleanor’s sitting room, had become seriously ill with consumption. By this point, FDR’s long-time political adviser rarely left the second floor or dressed in anything but pajamas.
14 “Wife of President Terminates Week-End of Rest at Warm Springs,” Atlanta Constitution, 22 January 1934, 1; “Mrs. Roosevelt Tells of Eluding Press on Warm Springs Trip,” Atlanta Journal, 23 January 1934, 4.
15 Gay Shepperson was head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Georgia.
16 When the Atlanta Journal initially heard that the first lady might be coming to Georgia and reporter Wright Bryan telephoned Lorena to ask her if the rumor was true, she hung up on him.
17 Nicht wahr? is German for “Don’t you agree?” or “Isn’t that right?”
18 Harold Ickes was secretary of the interior.
19 The Home for Incurables was the predecessor of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C.
20 Pellagra is a chronic disease caused by niacin deficiency and characterized by digestive disturbances and eventual mental deterioration.
21 Alice Davis was a Quaker woman who was involved in the Arthurdale homestead project.
22 Betsey Roosevelt was James’s wife.