Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  She felt as I did. That night, she wrote that she had loved every minute of our time together. I am going to live on it during these next few weeks, she added tenderly, sounding resigned to a heavy schedule. The next day, she wrote that she always had a “lost feeling” after we parted, but then the infinite succession of things takes hold and though I’m not always interested at least I am numb!

  Numb to what? I wondered. To the job of being First Lady? To whatever private demons might be driving her? When she gave in to the infinite succession of things, was she trying to outrun the dark? Whatever it was, she was constantly busy. There were her press conferences and radio broadcasts, as well as her Washington alley project, which was now a bill moving through Congress. She designed the costumes, decorations, and favors for FDR’s birthday gala, attended three charity balls, and stayed with her son John when he had his appendix removed. (Unhappily for me, this meant that she had to cancel our plan to meet for the weekend in Charleston.) And Arthurdale clamored for her attention, as always, with a thousand management questions. Arthurdale loved the First Lady, and their needs were always on her mind.

  In the Deep South, I was dealing with another kind of clamor, the noisy opposition to the Civil Works Administration. The CWA, a short-term, temporary job creation program, promised to be the most controversial New Deal agency. But in less than a year, it put more than four million people back to work, built or improved 40,000 schools, 469 airports, and 255,000 miles of roads. It was designed to use government funds to pay unemployed people to do useful work for close to the prevailing wage, which was opposed by those on the political right as “socialist.”

  In the South, though, the opposition wasn’t philosophical. It came from white planters and businessmen who balked at paying blacks the 30 cents an hour imposed by the CWA, which was more than twice the 12 1/2 cents an hour they had been paying. Stacey Turner, a local banker and chairman of the relief program in Jackson County, Georgia, was dead set against 30 cents an hour. I wrote to Eleanor about his reaction when I told him what he had to do. “It’s charity and nothing else,” he roared—he’s the kind that roars and then looks out of the corner of his eye to see if you’re scared. “Pay ’em 12 1/2 cents an hour and let ’em play checkers for it. They ain’t doing any work that amounts to anything, anyway.”

  I’d grown up in the Dakotas and had never given racial issues much thought. When I first came to Dixie, I saw things through the eyes of the business people I was interviewing—white business people. But even in my ignorance, I couldn’t help seeing the cruel and violent racism, the poison that infected the entire South. There would be fifteen lynchings of blacks in 1934, but to a man, every Southern senator would oppose a bill designed to make lynching a federal crime. Eleanor told me that FDR refused to back the bill, adding candidly that he was afraid that if he pushed for anti-lynching legislation, the Southern Democrats would retaliate by refusing to fund his New Deal bills. And when the CWA and FERA money was gone, field hands would go back to earning 12 1/2 cents an hour.

  It was Gay Shepperson, Georgia’s FERA director, who pushed me up against the ugliest truth and made me see it and feel it. She showed me that in the rural areas, there was no work except sharecropping, which gave a family a shack, a few sticks of stove wood, some grits and a little pork, and the sweet potatoes and collards they raised in their garden. There were no schools worth the name, and no medical facilities to cope with the epidemic tuberculosis and pellagra. But these problems weren’t caused by the Depression and they couldn’t be remedied by short-term government-funded employment. They were caused by prejudice and race hatred, and things would never be different until hearts and minds were changed. And change would be a long time coming.

  In the meantime, Eleanor and I had another trip to look forward to. In December, Harry Hopkins had told me that he was sending me to Puerto Rico in March to survey the situation there, and I had asked her to go with me. It would be a lovely vacation, just the two of us. I would have to work, of course, and the First Lady would most likely have a few official duties. But we could surely manage a weekend to ourselves, and I had imagined the two of us enjoying a private, sun-blessed tropical holiday. In Puerto Rico, we would be as anonymous as we had been in French Canada the summer before. We wouldn’t attract attention, much less any media attention.

  I was wrong on all counts. It was no vacation. It wouldn’t be “just the two of us.” And the media attention would begin with a vengeance even before we left Washington. Conservative, anti-New Deal Time magazine put Harry Hopkins on the cover of its February nineteenth issue and a photo of me (a very attractive one, actually) on page thirteen, where I was named FERA’s chief undercover investigator.

  The accompanying text wasn’t as complimentary as the photo. Time’s Miss Hickok was a “rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, baggy clothes… in her day one of the country’s best female newshawks.” And then it got even more malicious. After Miss Hickok had covered the candidate’s wife during the presidential campaign, she and Mrs. Roosevelt had become “fast friends” and now traveled together “a lot.” Oh, and incidentally, Miss Hickok had gotten the job with FERA because Mr. Hopkins was “a great admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt.” When Mrs. Roosevelt went to Puerto Rico in March, Miss Hickok would naturally go along, “to look into relief work there.”

  The piece gave me heartburn. I couldn’t complain about “rotund” or “husky” or even “baggy.” On the job, I wore comfortable clothes that I didn’t have to fuss with and that didn’t set me apart from the poverty-stricken people I was there to interview. But “businesslike” would have been more accurate than “peremptory,” and I resented the suggestion that I had been given the job because I was Mrs. Roosevelt’s “fast friend.” Hopkins wouldn’t have hired me if I hadn’t been a damn good reporter. What’s more, I wasn’t tagging along on the First Lady’s trip to Puerto Rico. It was the other way around: she was “going along” with me.

  But while the trip may have begun with my invitation to her, that’s not how it worked out. Not only was I going with her, but so were four other women reporters: Bess Furman of the AP, Ruby Black of the UP, Dorothy Ducas of the International News Service, and Emma Bugbee of the New York Herald Tribune. Sam Schulman, a press pool photographer, would fly in from Miami. None of this press extravaganza could be laid to the First Lady’s charge, of course. The scheme was concocted by Steve Early and Louis Howe, and Eleanor was in tears when she told me about it during one of our long-distance telephone talks.

  “Four reporters and a photographer?” I exclaimed. “I like those women and Sam is a good guy. But with them on our heels, we’ll never have a private moment.”

  Eleanor sighed. “I am so, so sorry, Hick. I didn’t intend this to happen. It was meant to be just the two of us. The trip was taken out of my hands.”

  I believed her, then, because I understood that Steve and Louis would want to take advantage of her travel in Puerto Rico—and who better to send with her than the four top women in the Washington press corps?

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just so hard.”

  “Yes, it is,” she replied. “I’ll try to make it up to you, even if just a little.”

  And she did—at least as far as our accommodations were concerned. On Haiti, we stayed in the sumptuous National Palace. On St. Thomas, where the First Lady was welcomed by a crowd that serenaded her with a chorus of protest and union songs, we were the guests of the governor and slept on the third floor of the impressive Government House. (We didn’t understand about the union songs until we heard, later, about the ongoing labor union strike—one of the things the First Lady wasn’t supposed to know about.) The next morning, we went swimming with the press at the governor’s gorgeous private beach, where Bess and Dorothy filmed a sequence of Eleanor in a bathing suit, skipping rope.

  For our stay in San Juan, Madam arranged for us to share a splendid room in the magnificent seventeenth-century La Fortaleza, the Puerto Rican gove
rnor’s mansion. The old fort had been transformed into a palace many decades before, and its pale blue-and-white facade, tiled roof, and many fountains recalled the Moorish elegance of colonial Spanish architecture. Our room—with marble floors and opulent gilded ceilings and wall panels—looked out onto the Caribbean, and that evening, we stood arm in arm on the balcony, enjoying the tropical breeze and marveling at the blue, blue water. Bess, Dorothy, Ruby, and Emma, all having a wonderful time on their own, were booked into a hotel some distance away. So Madam and I were able to dine quietly in our room and go for early morning ocean swims while the reporters were still asleep.

  For me, the luxury of our surroundings was a sad contrast to the island’s misery, and my connection to the First Lady’s eager entourage made it difficult to do much meaningful investigating. But I saw enough, and the lengthy report I wrote for Harry Hopkins (it went to the president, too) outlined the difficult situation. Economically, Puerto Rico was in a bad way indeed, and the people—American citizens of an American territory—were even worse off than the rural blacks I had met in Georgia.

  But as in Georgia, the Depression had very little to do with Puerto Rico’s poverty, and government-funded relief, while it might put food on a few tables, wasn’t going to create any fundamental change. The island was suffering from serious overpopulation, dangerous malnutrition, an epidemic of tuberculosis and malaria, and a chronic lack of decent jobs. The coffee plantations had been wiped out by several recent hurricanes, and sugar cane was now the only viable crop. But sugar was a seasonal industry that barely paid a living wage and left the workers with nothing during the six months they were idle.

  The depth of the island’s poverty was illustrated in the photographs that Sam Schulman took as the First Lady and her press entourage walked through the filthy streets of the “swamp slums,” where refugees from the 1932 hurricane still lived in huts cobbled together from storm debris. Eager to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Roosevelt, they trailed wherever we went and darted ahead to toss flowers in her path.

  Their plight touched her heart, and after she returned to Washington, she spent nearly as much time on projects for Puerto Rico as she did on Arthurdale. My recommendation for a change in administering the island (from the War Department to the Department of the Interior) was implemented, and other changes we recommended were in the works: new school buildings, higher prices for Puerto Rican products, and a minimum wage scale for women seamstresses. It had been a hard trip, and I had begun it with the sense that I had been ill-used. In spite of everything, though, we had managed some private time together. The trip was good for Puerto Rico—and for us. But it was the last good trip we would take together.

  We were back in Washington by St. Patrick’s Day. A little more than a week later, Bluette and I were on our way again, bound for a ten-week swing through Alabama and points west. I wouldn’t be back until the second week of May. That night, Madam wrote: Hick darling, I believe it gets harder to let you go each time, but that is because you grow closer… I ache for you… and always much love dear one.

  The busyness of our work swallowed both of us, but our personal concerns were eclipsed by waves of violence that seemed to engulf the whole world. After a year-long robbing and killing spree, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were ambushed and killed by a Texas posse on a rural road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Notorious outlaw John Dillinger went to the Biograph Theater in Chicago to see Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama and was gunned down by police when he came out of the movie. A strike by San Francisco longshoremen shut down U.S. ports all along the Pacific coast and spelled disaster for businesses that relied on shipping. Fierce dust storms blew an estimated 350 million tons of topsoil from the Plains states all the way to the Atlantic, ironically engulfing Washington in the same week that Congress was hearing testimony about soil conservation. On the other side of the world, German chancellor Adolf Hitler made a state visit to Italy, building closer relations with Mussolini; back home, he got rid of nearly eighty of his enemies in a slaughter that came to be called “The Night of the Long Knives.”

  For me, the long swing through the Southern states felt endless, and what I saw seemed to get worse and worse the farther I went. And it wasn’t just the poverty, either. There was political interference, graft, and outright thievery. In northern Alabama, I reported to Harry that I had visited a county with a population of twelve thousand, of whom ten thousand were on relief. It was a coal-mining area and the union bosses, who were out to line their own pockets, were telling people that in order to get a relief check from the government, they had to join the United Mine Workers.

  In Louisiana, I wrote that New Orleans, where 85 percent of the case load was black, looked simply hopeless, and that the office where people went to apply for relief was revoltingly filthy and smelled so that the odor clung to me for hours after I left.

  And in Houston, in mid-April, I wrote that Texas was a god-awful mess, with the relief rolls so overburdened that single women were getting a food allowance of thirty-nine cents a week. In Beaumont and Port Arthur, relief workers told me that they were taking the white applications first and turning the blacks away. “We’ve got to,” they said, “because of the attitude of the whites. We’ve been threatened with riots here.”

  There were a couple of bright spots, though. One was Arnaud’s famous restaurant in New Orleans’s French Quarter, where I had the best meal in years. Two legal gin fizzes, shrimps Arnaud, pompano baked in a paper bag, potato soufflé, crepes Suzette, sauterne, and chicory coffee. To which Eleanor, when I reported my gluttony, replied with a sigh, “Oh, how I wish I could enjoy food the way you do, Hick!” The indulgence wasn’t healthy, I knew, and I would pay for it. But after all I’d been through, I damn well needed it, and I refused to feel guilty.

  The second bright spot was Fort Worth, where I spent an afternoon with the Roosevelts’ oldest son, Elliott, and his pregnant wife. Ruth was a “vast improvement,” I told Madam candidly, over Elliott’s first wife, Betty, whom I had met often at the White House. During the visit, I told Elliott that I was worried about what people were saying about the president—this, after a pair of Texas businessmen had told me that in their opinion, FDR was in danger of becoming another Mussolini. Elliott had a very different view.

  “The trouble with Father,” he said, “is that he has too much of a tendency to compromise. He hates to say no to anybody.” Which didn’t sound very much like Mussolini to me.

  It was in Arizona that Bluette and I had the wreck that nearly ended my career as an investigator—and my life. I had spent several dispiriting days in New Mexico and Arizona, where the public works jobs were handed out to Anglos only in an entrenched system of political patronage, and where the economic gap between the whites and the Mexican-Americans seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon. On the last Sunday of April, on a gravel road that was notorious for producing a fatality every few months, Bluette skidded on loose gravel, went briefly airborne, and rolled twice. I rolled with her, taking her weight on my neck as we went over. The state patrolman who showed up a little later could only shake his head and mutter that he couldn’t believe I had crawled out of the wreckage alive.

  I ended up in the hospital for a day, but other than some scratches, bruises, and a very sore neck, I was undamaged. But for poor Bluette, it was the end of the road. I said a tearful goodbye as she was hauled off to the wrecking yard and then took the train east.

  I arrived back at the White House on the eleventh of May, looking forward to the quiet two weeks Eleanor had promised me. But our time together was an infinite succession of interruptions. The First Lady’s days were scheduled full, from early morning to late at night—not just with meetings and the usual press conference and fundraisers and lunches with the “press girls” and Democratic women, but with magazine articles and radio speeches to write and stacks of mail to answer.

  I thought often of Tommy’s remark about demons and wondered once again whether this radical busyness was Eleanor�
�s way of holding them at bay. Whatever it was, her life was simply full. In the short time I was at the White House, she had official guests for dinner every single night. One evening, she held an East Room reception for the Swedish minister, his delegation, and 334 guests. The next, she presided over a formal dinner for eighty-five guests honoring the governor of New York and his wife, followed by an orchestral evening. Knowing my love of music, the First Lady invited me to that event. I wore my black lace gown and she wore her silvery blue. We looked splendid, I thought. We sat together during the performance, but I would rather have had the evening to ourselves.

  The president seemed to have forgotten whatever animosity he’d held toward me and asked Eleanor and me to join him and Missy for a weekend cruise on the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia. It was a lovely, relaxing trip down the Potomac and into Chesapeake Bay, in a yacht that seemed (to me, anyway) like a floating palace. While the president and Missy fished for bluefin tuna, Madam and I read the Sunday papers and talked in a sheltered corner of the deck. At one point, I got up from my chair.

  “Where are you going, Hick?” Madam asked idly.

  “Downstairs,” I replied and turned to go. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Below, Hick! Be-low!” the president shouted over his shoulder. “I’ll make a sailor out of you if it takes me two full terms in office.” Two terms? Eleanor and I rolled our eyes and the president laughed. But it wasn’t funny, at least for me. We were only in the second year of a first term.