Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  “Oh, really, Franklin?” Mrs. R leaned forward. If she had caught the suggestion in his tone, she didn’t let him know. “Did Harry tell you where Hick will be going?”

  Into exile, I thought, trying not to look at her. We had been allowed to have our trip together. Now it was time to pay the piper.

  “Pennsylvania,” the president replied in a cheery tone. “And West Virginia. And Kentucky.” He chuckled. “That’s pretty country you’ll be seeing, Hick. Coal mining country—or it was at one time, before the mines played out. I understand there are pockets of poverty there, but you’ll like the people, I’m sure. Salt of the earth. Yes, indeedy, salt of the earth.”

  West Virginia it was. Scotts Run, West Virginia.

  Whether it was intended as a punishment or not, I would never know. But the day I arrived in Scotts Run, I knew I’d been sent to hell.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Deeply and Tenderly”

  I’ve always been a practical, let’s-get-the-details person, and as a reporter, I had internalized the cardinal AP rule: Report what you see, not how you feel. Don’t get involved. It’s not your story, it’s his, or hers, or theirs. Don’t become part of what you’re seeing.

  I went out for Hopkins and FERA with the same expectations. I was a reporter doing a job: collecting details, assembling the most meaningful into a coherent narrative, giving the whole a story shape that would convey its truths to its readers. And that was it.

  But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw and heard out there in the country in 1933 and 1934. Ragged, barefoot children hauling water from a stream polluted with sewage and mining refuse. A family of six—six!—sleeping, head to foot, in one filthy bed. Young girls on a Houston street selling their bodies to men for “just a dime, only a dime, Mister, please?” A South Dakota farm wife offering to share the tumbleweed soup she’d made for her family: “It don’t taste so bad, dearie, but it ain’t very fillin’.”

  I had been a reporter for nearly twenty years, and I’d honed the skill of assembling the stories of people’s lives, detail by detail. But in my decades on the job, I had never seen such sights or heard such tales. For the two years I worked for Harry Hopkins, it sometimes seemed impossible to keep from being swallowed up by what I saw and heard. But my mission was even more impossible: to witness these horrors and then recount them in a way that would get the attention of people inside the bubble that was Washington, people who were cocooned in their comfortable lives, bolstered by their possessions, buttressed by their firm belief that everything was working the way it was supposed to work. I wrote ninety-some reports for Hopkins in those years, and each time I sat down to write, I was submerged in hopelessness. I felt I was simply putting words on paper, words that could do nothing to heal the country’s wounds. Still, the stories had to be told. Someone, someday, might find something important in them.

  Coping with the challenges of everyday existence was hard in those years, too. As a traveler, I was setting out in the worst year of the Depression. The trains rarely ran on time, banks and businesses were closed, utilities (public and private electricity, water, and sewage) had failed. The muddy country roads were appalling, the city streets downright dangerous. The food was usually unappetizing and often inedible and the accommodations simply dreadful. Unheated hotel rooms in the dead of winter, beds crawling with bedbugs, toilets overflowing in bathrooms where we lined up to get a bath, howling drunks in the room next door.

  And through all these difficult months, I was grappling with my longing to be with Eleanor and with the growing sense that I had been exiled from the life we had together. Worse, as one lonely month followed another and a crowd of new people and activities filled her letters, I began to understand that she was being pulled away from me, into a world where I didn’t belong. She was changing, becoming a person I didn’t know. Toward the end (and yes, there was an end), she was becoming a personage, a figure who belonged to everybody, to the country, to the world.

  And I was changing, too. Maybe loving Eleanor had softened my hardboiled reporter’s shell. Maybe I was learning to see with softer eyes, to look through the outside to what was within. Whatever it was, however it happened, what I witnessed over the next months would drive a lance into my heart and take me to the farthest edge of my capacity to see, experience, and record.

  And that, in the end, would be my story.

  The sun was barely up, but it was already hot as hell when my train pulled into the Market Street Station in Harrisburg. The thermometer would top one hundred on that first day of August. The capital of Pennsylvania stood on the banks of the brown, fetid Susquehanna River, and the stench of the city’s ugly industrial pollution hung heavy in the air. As I left the train station, I stopped to pick up the latest edition of the New York Times, which headlined the lethal heat across the Northeast (at least thirty would die before the weather cooled), two more kidnappings, a plague of bank robberies.

  As an antidote for the unpleasant news, I had a letter from Eleanor in my purse, asking me to send her the details of my investigations into the coalfield relief situation, so she could stay connected with my work. Our letters had already settled into a comforting routine. Long and diary-like, they were filled with the details of our work and framed by assurances of love. We wrote about the future, not just our next time together but that longed-for time when FDR was out of the White House and she could drop back into anonymity and we could spend all our time together. At least, that’s what I thought then.

  She thought so, too. Darling, she wrote, I love you deeply and tenderly and oh! I want you to have a happy life. To be sure I’m selfish enough to want it to be near me but then we wouldn’t either of us be happy otherwise, would we? We often wrote about what we might do, where we might go, the kind of home we might have together. At one point, she had her eye on a Val-Kill piece she planned to buy for us. One corner cupboard I long to have for our camp or cottage or house, which is it to be? I’ve always thought of it as in the country but I don’t think we ever decided on the variety of abode nor the furniture. We probably won’t argue!

  The daily reports of our doings kept each of us connected to the other’s life and helped to make up, if only a little, for being apart. Now, looking back over the letters, I see how valuable they are and hope, when they are opened (although perhaps by people who may be dismayed by what they read), that the details will reveal something of the lives of two women who lived through—and wanted to do something about—a time of great national pain and turmoil.

  I spent the first week on the road learning who the chief political players were. As in many states, the people with power proved to be the biggest barrier to getting help to people who needed it. In coal country, the relief situation was complicated by the total control of the mine owners. One payroll I saw credited a miner with $2.08 for ten hours of work but debited $2 for fuel for his lantern, leaving the poor man with a check for eight cents. South of Pittsburgh, I met thirty or forty jobless and forgotten men, stooped, malnourished, and ill with the lung disease they’d contracted in the mines. They were living in abandoned coke ovens, like hermit monks in caves.

  The guide for the southwestern leg of that first trip was the soft-spoken, highly respected Clarence Pickett, who worked with the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers. Pickett had been working with coal mining communities in Pennsylvania and West Virginia since 1928 and understood the situation better than anybody else. He took me to Scotts Run, a five-mile-long coal hollow south of Morgantown in Monongalia County, West Virginia—a nightmare example of the way unregulated mining created unrelenting human misery.

  Mining had exploded during and after World War I, when coal was needed to fuel the national war machine and the postwar economic expansion. During the boom, Scotts Run had been one of the most intensively developed coal districts in the United States. Now, the coal was exhausted. Most of the mines were closed, the miners had been out of work for five years or more, and the people along Scotts R
un were stranded, unable to leave and powerless to change the situation.

  “Looks like hell, doesn’t it?” Pickett remarked as we stepped out of the car.

  It didn’t just look like hell, Scotts Run was hell. Ill-maintained company houses and tarpaper shanties, black with coal dust and infested with rats, lined the main dirt road. The creek that ran beside the road was contaminated by drainage from the mines, tipples, refuse dumps, and—worst of all—from the privies on the slopes above the stream. But the filthy water, streaked with iridescent reds, yellows, and greens and thickened with algae, was all the residents had for drinking, cooking, bathing, and laundry. People were so hungry that they couldn’t wait for their pitiful hillside gardens to mature: they ate the tomatoes before they could ripen and tiny, bitter potatoes that they pulled out of the ground. Forty percent of the children were suffering from malnutrition. One calamitous outbreak of disease was followed by another: measles, typhoid, diphtheria, polio. The children couldn’t go to school regularly because there was only one dress or one pair of trousers in the family, and no winter coats. I was dumbfounded. I thought I had known poverty in my childhood, but we’d been rich, compared to this. I had never seen people reduced to such despair.

  “So,” Pickett said, watching me. “What are you going to do?”

  “Write a report to Harry Hopkins,” I replied. “Tell him what I’ve seen. That’s my job.”

  “A report? What else?” He frowned. “There’s so much to be done here. Can’t you help?”

  “It’s a horror,” I said. “I understand how you feel. But I’m just a reporter, that’s all.” I looked around me, thinking that no matter how many people offered to help, this hell couldn’t be fixed.

  “But you know people in Washington,” he protested. “Surely one of them could help. How about Mrs. Roosevelt? I’ve read your articles about her. She’s interested in social problems.”

  “Well…” I hesitated. Keep your head down, Hopkins had said. You’re an objective eye, that’s all. Keep quiet about your Washington connections… especially the White House.

  “Well?” Pickett repeated. “Isn’t there something else you can do?” His tone was challenging, but his shoulders were slumped. He wore an air of defeat.

  “No,” I said, knowing it was the wrong answer. “I’m just here to write a report.”

  The next day, I went into Kentucky, driving with another guide over twisting dirt roads through the mountains of Knox County, then parked and walked a mile to a mining village. On the steep, rain-slicked trail, we met a woman wearing a calico sunbonnet and feed-sack dress, stumbling along on bare, gnarled feet, leaning heavily on a walking stick. Her name was Cora. She was suffering, my guide said, from pellagra, a usually fatal disease caused by a diet of fatback, cornmeal, and molasses. When I asked her how old she was, she said she was forty, just my age. But she was stooped and toothless, her face a mass of leathery wrinkles.

  As I turned to go, she seized my arm with her callused claws and rasped, fierce and hard, “Don’t you forget me, honey. You go back where you come from and tell ’em what you seen. Send somebody to help us—you hear? You send ’em soon.”

  I stared at her, my heart thudding in my ears, beating time to Hopkins’s dispassionate instructions: Keep your head down. Don’t get involved in the story.

  But in the end, I would forget Hopkins’s caution. It was Cora I would remember. Thirty years have passed since that day, but I can still hear her cracked voice and see her face, wrinkled and wizened as a windfall apple. “Don’t you forget me, honey. You go back where you come from and tell ’em what you seen.”

  In my hotel room that night, I wrote my report, ten typed pages about Scotts Run, about Cora, about all the rest. Ten typed pages, a story of horrors, of boys with old men’s faces, of women bearing a child a year, of Cora’s gnarled feet. Detail after grotesque detail, pointing to a truth too dark to be seen, too large to be comprehended. Finished at last, I dropped my hands in my lap and sat, staring at the paper, thinking of the people who would read this and would not understand. Could not understand, because they were too far away, too rich, too safe.

  Listen! I wanted to cry. Something has to be done. Pay attention!

  I sat there for a moment. And then—not wanting to put the call through the hotel desk—I got up and walked through the pitch dark to the pay phone on the corner, where I made a long-distance collect call to the White House.

  “Oh, no,” Eleanor murmured, when I told her about Cora. “Oh, Hick, that’s horrible! I don’t know what I can do, but surely there’s something. Something!”

  Several days later, she arrived—alone, no entourage, no Secret Service, no reporters—in her Buick roadster. Wearing a simple white blouse and dark blue skirt, a white bandeau around her hair, she got out of her car and walked toward me, her eyes warm, smiling.

  “Hello, my very dear one,” she said, and took my hand. “Show me what you want me to see. I’ll help if I can.”

  Show me. For the rest of that day, Eleanor and Clarence Pickett and I walked up steep trails on Cheat Mountain, stopping to talk with miners and their families. The men, and especially the women, were silent at first, but quickly warmed to the First Lady’s obvious interest. Several invited us into their homes, and if they had coffee or tea and extra cups, they shared with us. She sat down with them and asked the kind of ordinary questions one concerned woman asks another: the price of bread and bacon, and whether the hens she saw in the yard were able to keep the family supplied with eggs, and how the garden had fared in the summer heat and drought. When there were children, she asked their names, and one little baby proudly showed her his new tooth.

  She looked, listened, asked questions and then more questions. Later, at dinner in Morgantown, she talked with Clarence and his fellow Quakers about what ought to be done, what was possible to do, who could best do it, and how. On the brink of this new idea, she was filled with energy and imaginings. In our room, we talked late into the night, an unexpected and wholly delightful reprieve from the loneliness and sense of exile that had already begun to wrap itself around me like a chilly blanket. Now, wrapped in her arms, I could feel myself coming to life again.

  The next day, Eleanor went back to Washington, rolled up her sleeves, and got busy. That was the birth of Arthurdale, the experimental homestead community that over the next few years would be built on twelve hundred acres of rural land in Preston County, West Virginia, not far from Scotts Run. Once she became passionate about something, it was impossible to stop her, and I watched and cheered her on as Eleanor turned the project into a crusade, getting government funding, raising tens of thousands of dollars from her friends, and pouring most of the money she earned from her writing and speaking into the project. She fussed over it, Tommy once wrote to me, “like a mother hen with one chick.”

  Arthurdale—along with the ninety-eight other New Deal Communities planned or initiated by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads—was hugely controversial, and there was a continuous political barrage from critics who insisted that these settlements smacked of socialism or might even be part of a Communist plot aimed to undermine American capitalism. There were continuous practical challenges, too, from the way the houses were built and the difficulty in attracting industry to the selection of the people who would live there. Eleanor was deeply unhappy when she learned that Arthurdale’s residents had voted to exclude Negroes.

  But for the stranded families who were lucky enough to find a home at Arthurdale, it would be a story with a happy ending. Over and over, they said the same thing: “We woke up one morning in hell and went to bed the same night in heaven. We love Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  I’m glad I was there at the beginning of a project that became Eleanor’s passion—one of them. Later, I would wish that she had left a little more room for me in her increasingly long list of passions, or at least kept me close to the top. But there’s no dictating the directions a heart can take, or how far it will go to follow its u
rgings, or how many large loves it will embrace.

  Deeply, tenderly. That was the way Eleanor loved. It would be one of the lessons she would teach me.

  “Oh, there you are, Hick!” Tommy exclaimed. “Sit down and have some breakfast, dear.” She pulled out a chair for me at the small table in front of the wide lunette window.

  We were seated at the west end of the hall that ran through the center of the First Family’s White House residence. Tommy was as brisk and cheerful as always, but under her trimly dressed, neatly combed surface, there was something rather sad. I wished I dared ask her whether she got everything she needed from the First Lady, and if not, where did she go to get it? It was a question I would begin asking myself in another year or two.

  “You’ve just missed the Boss,” Tommy went on. “She’s gone riding. She said to tell you she’d be back in an hour.” She nodded toward several chafing dishes on a small sideboard. “Scrambled eggs, bacon, Mrs. Nesbitt’s hot biscuits, and—” She put her hand on a stack of newspapers. “The morning papers, with all the news that’s fit to print. Help yourself.”

  I filled my plate, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down across from Tommy. I had returned from the coalfields to meet with Harry Hopkins and tell him I would take the job. The decision had actually been pretty easy to make. The scenes I witnessed were heart-wrenching, but I could feel myself learning, changing, growing. And working for FERA, I felt I was furthering Eleanor’s agenda and doing my bit, for what it was worth, to support the New Deal. I would be meeting with Harry later that day to get my next assignment.

  While I was in Washington, Eleanor insisted that I should be her guest. After Louis Howe had sent me packing earlier in the year, I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. For one thing, the Roosevelts’ daughter Anna was staying in the White House, trying to avoid the press until arrangements could be made for her divorce from her Wall Street broker husband. She was sleeping in my room, so Eleanor wanted me to share her suite. There was no keeping this from the servants, and I knew that tongues would wag at both ends, endlessly.