Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Agnes Brown Leach and Henry Goddard Leach also joined the First Family in the swimming pool. Splashing “about with Franklin and Eleanor,” Henry Leach wrote, was hilarious: “For Franklin’s long arms were not affected by the infantile paralysis that handicapped his legs, and he sprayed and ducked his wife with shouts and deep-chested laughter. In a swimming pool the Roosevelts behaved like hippopotami.”

  According to ER, after FDR’s pool time he “went to his room for a rub-down” from George Fox, “who went with him everywhere.” After his massage, FDR read through at least six evening papers, “just as many as he read in the morning; then we all joined him in his study before dinner and enjoyed a short period of rest and informal conversation.”

  He then presided over evening cocktails, which he always mixed himself, in his study. ER and her circle rarely joined FDR for cocktails. Generally, after pool time, ER presided over teas, “with a beautiful lace cloth on a small drop-leaf table, a small nosegay of flowers, cinnamon toast, tiny sandwiches, cookies, little cakes, candies….” According to Henrietta Nesbitt, it was a ceremonial time, with Chinese tea sent by “Mrs. James… like the tea Mrs. James’ father, Captain Delano, had imported a century before.”

  As chief White House authority, ER was efficient and executive. She gave orders with dispatch, often on the run, and expected them to be carried out correctly, immediately. She never became, however, as formal or curt as Lou Henry Hoover, who evidently taught her staff a variety of hand signals for all manner of table and household activities, as subtle and specific as those she used with her horses in dressage.

  Still, ER was often impatient with her staff. When she demanded a telephone installed on her desk, she expected it that day. When it failed to materialize after two days, she was annoyed. Ike Hoover explained that she was in her room so often the workers could not get in; it was improper “to have men working while the president’s wife was in the room.” ER was irritated: “Oh Spinach, [tell them] to get started!” Workmen were to ignore her presence. As owner of a factory she was, after all, “quite accustomed to having workmen around.”

  Ike Hoover, and his successors Howell G. Crim (even more formal than Ike Hoover) and, after 1941, J. B. West, were often startled by ER. West never got over his “first sight of Eleanor Roosevelt in her riding habit, jodhpurs and boots, striding into the Usher’s office, calling for her horse….” Despite his “protestations of neutrality,” Crim rather “disapproved of Mrs. Roosevelt’s breezy informality.” According to West, Crim “never quite recovered from the shock of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s early-morning visits to the Usher’s office,” when she appeared in “a yellow bathing suit!” to deliver letters for him to mail, on her way to the pool. “Eight years later,” West wrote, “Mr. Crim was still aghast.”

  While Crim was critical, West was more “in awe of this remarkable woman. She was formal and distant with her staff, yet kind and warm to people everywhere. And she accomplished so much. None of us had a tenth of her energy.”

  The Roosevelts were spontaneous, exuberant; their table conversation was intense, and argumentative. Sunday evenings especially were reserved for ER’s scrambled-egg salons, when she whipped the eggs herself in her favorite silver chafing dish. Friends and advisers were invited to discuss specific issues or work out particular problems. The weekly event was known as “scrambled eggs with brains.”

  Most evenings were notable for the ongoing sparring that occurred between ER and FDR. Generally, she chided him and he baited her. She wanted him to act on behalf of this or that outrage; he wanted her to remember the limitations of partisan politics. He tended to smile and dissemble. She tended to scowl and insist. His friends tended to think her “strident.” Her friends tended to think him “slippery.”

  Emma Bugbee recalled a typical Sunday-evening exchange. After hours of controversy, FDR provoked ER so that “she became furious and gave vent to her feelings heatedly, while he smilingly advanced contrary views. The next day [ER] was thunderstruck to hear him blandly quoting her remarks to the British ambassador as his views.”

  ER was so astonished by this event that she related it at length years later. Fully prepared to “listen in silence” and disagreement, she wrote, “I heard Franklin telling Ambassador Robert Bingham to act, not according to the arguments that he had given me, but according to the arguments that I had given him!”

  Without giving me a glance or the satisfaction of batting an eyelash in my direction, he calmly stated as his own the policies and beliefs he had argued against the night before! To this day I have no idea whether he had simply used me as a sounding board, as he so often did, with the idea of getting the reaction of the person on the outside, or whether my arguments had been needed to fortify his decision and to clarify his own mind.

  Although FDR rarely acknowledged her influence, he encouraged her public stands. She served both as “sounding board” and front-runner. He knew he could restrain her, but he rarely tried. “Lady,” he said after one evening’s argument, “this is a free country. Say what you think. If you get me in Dutch, I’ll manage to get myself out. Anyway, the whole world knows I can’t control you.”

  Once, only once, Lorena Hickok “had dinner alone with the President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Just the three of us, in front of the fireplace in her sitting room.” Since the Roosevelts were “exceedingly hospitable and liked to have company,” they “rarely dined alone, or with a single guest.” That night FDR gave Hick important advice: “Never get into an argument with the Missis. You can’t win. You think you have her pinned down here (thumping the table with his forefinger) but she bobs up away over there somewhere! No use—you can’t win.”

  Politically, ER was regarded by many as second-in-command. Some FDR advisers went to ER first, to get her advice on strategy. Others went to her afterward, for support in the struggle. Still others resented her presence at the table of decision.

  Beyond politics, the Roosevelts increasingly lived separate lives. The White House was actually a divided home, not unlike a feudal manor house: allied in purpose, but with competing courts. There were distinct loyalties; and their boundaries grew more formalized over time.

  Central to FDR’s court was his secretary and closest companion since 1920, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand. Her suite of rooms was on the third floor, bright and comfortable though small. ER accepted Missy’s presence and her role as second hostess with protective, even maternal, grace. They frequently rode together in the morning and walked arm in arm in the afternoon, two tall light-haired women who had much in common.

  ER treated Missy as a junior partner, but not without criticism: “Missy was young and pretty and loved a good time, and occasionally her social contacts got mixed with her work and made it hard for her and others. To me she was always kind and helpful, and when I had to be away she took up without complaint the additional social responsibilities thrust upon her.”

  But ER was often excluded from a private space that Missy shared with FDR and his own circle. Since he was physically constrained, entertainment needed to be brought to him—movies, card games, cocktails, convivial people. Missy discovered and cultivated the people she believed FDR would relax with. ER understood that, but carped: “As Miss LeHand lived in the White House she very often, when I was not there, invited people she thought my husband would enjoy, or whom she personally wanted, but he never gave this type of social gathering a thought.”

  Actually it was the area of their greatest divide, since the cocktail parties and nightly entertainments Missy arranged frequently included moments of liquid hilarity ER could not enjoy. Several guests observed that when a party was going on in FDR’s quarters, ER would occasionally stop by the door and ask if she and her friends were invited; when informed that they were not, she would wordlessly leave.

  Theirs was a complex arrangement. In relation to Franklin, ER still occupied a lonely sphere which echoed the isolation of her childhood. Beyond the First Family’s jolly facade, ER endured a li
felong sense of exclusion that represented for her an ongoing humiliation regarding FDR’s domain.

  Whatever she actually felt, ER’s public attitude toward Missy LeHand was that of first wife to second wife in the culture of extended ruling families. Subsequently, when she contemplated the vagaries of love for the readers of You Learn by Living, ER accepted her occasional inability to “meet the need of someone whom I dearly love,” and in a coded reference to Missy, advised others in her situation: “You must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it.” For most women, ER concluded, there was yet another element to the maturation process “that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitation and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.”

  ER was proud of her executive staff and depended completely upon them. In addition to Tommy, ER was well protected by her social secretary Edith Ben-ham Helm. Tommy Thompson was short and feisty, while Edith Helm was trim and elegant. Both were forceful women, devoted to their boss.

  Tommy seemed to some staffers rather gruff, “with a look that said no before you asked.” But she was invariably warm and friendly to the public and to journalists, who considered her a reflection of ER’s open-hearted consideration. Tommy was ER’s most important working partner, and they traveled everywhere together—except on private holidays. She worked endless hours every day, although she went home to her husband at night, usually after eleven.

  Edith Benham Helm had been part of ER’s Washington circle during World War I. The daughter and widow of admirals, Edith Helm understood the intricacies of Washington society and was associated with “all those formidable people” ER called “cave dwellers.” Formerly the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s social secretary, she was a stickler for protocol and propriety.

  Well served by her two formidable and trusted secretaries, ER was free to pursue her political and personal interests without devoting undue time to either the household or the endless details of formal Washington.

  ER brought many of the women who had worked with her during the 1920s to the White House. Most of them had worked in the Women’s Division of the Democratic State or National Committee. Her own former secretary Margaret Durand (called “Rabbit”) was now Louis Howe’s secretary. Louise Hackmeister, who had been chief telephone operator at Women’s Division headquarters, where she handled ER’s calls, became chief White House operator.

  A much underrated White House presence, “Hacky” performed her duties with an efficiency that dazzled Washington: “If anyone is alive and on earth, Hacky will get them.” A “character” and “a tall and tough gal,” Hacky “had the affairs of the world at her fingertips.” She was worldly and discreet; though nothing “escaped her,” she protected all confidences. She traveled with the president, and ER considered her “remarkable”: Hacky “recognized everyone’s voice after once hearing it,” and her own “cheerful voice and word of recognition” lent a “note of pleasure and real warmth of feeling” to the White House. On call twenty-four hours a day, she managed the presidential switchboard for twenty years; she knew and understood everything, including “who was in and who was out with the President.” According to Lillian Rogers Parks, then a young upstairs maid whose mother Maggie Rogers was head White House maid, the staff “used to laugh” that the White House was “run by Hicky and Hacky.”

  Hacky shared an apartment with Mary Eben at the Wardman-Park Hotel. She was in charge of all the gifts sent to the president, and also influenced White House staff relations. Every week Lillian Rogers went to sew at their place, and she believed Eben helped change race relations: Despite Washington’s rigid Jim Crow laws, “Mrs. Eben would have none of that,” and arranged to have the doorman hand the young black seamstress the key as she entered “through the front door.” Public defiance of back-door rituals by such Roosevelt staffers as Mary Eben, Lillian Rogers believed, helped pave the way for the civil rights movement that would “eventually open all front doors.”

  Mary Eben’s racial views were in stark contrast to those expressed by the three dominant members of the president’s intimate staff. FDR’s secretariat, the men who controlled his access to the press and arranged his daily schedule, were “good old boys” of America’s southland dedicated to all the trappings of “race etiquette,” the customs and traditions of servility, segregation, and discrimination. Over time, ER collided with them regularly.

  Press secretary Stephen T. Early of Virginia had covered the Navy for the Associated Press when FDR was assistant secretary and had been his press secretary during the 1920 vice presidential campaign. FDR wooed him back in 1932 from the motion picture industry. Appointments secretary Marvin McIntyre of Kentucky was also a longtime friend and former journalist who worked for a newsreel company. Originally detailed to the Navy, McIntyre was also known as a poker genius. He had been with FDR’s team since 1920.

  ER had more cordial relations with members of FDR’s staff who were responsible for her husband’s physical comfort. Their presence in the White House relieved her mind, and she admired the men who met her husband’s physical needs with consideration, sensitivity, and good humor, especially FDR’s black valet Irvin (Mac) McDuffie, another staffer since 1920, who traveled everywhere with FDR. His wife, Lizzie McDuffie, was ER’s long-time personal maid.

  Former New York State trooper Augustus (Gus) Gennerich was, with McDuffie, responsible for FDR’s physical well-being. A bachelor considered reclusive by some, Gus went about the White House with a frightful English pit bulldog who shared his third-floor room. With or near the president at virtually all times, Gus and Mac helped him get up and dress in the morning and put him to bed at night. But Gus, who, with Earl Miller, had been FDR’s bodyguard during the Albany years, was invited for cards and evening frolics.

  ER was particularly fond of Gus and subsequently wrote that during the Albany years he and Earl Miller brought great joy to the family when they played the piano “by the hour.” “They were always finding kind things to do.”

  Earl Miller, who was closest to ER, remained in New York. One of FDR’s last public acts as governor was to appoint Miller personnel director of the New York Department of Correction. In Washington, Gus was the president’s most intimate aide. Devoted and charming, his rare combination of “great strength, gentle manners, and a gentle touch” impressed everyone.

  However critical or aloof ER felt toward their nightly entertainments, FDR’s staff relieved her of countless burdens, unmanageable responsibilities. Along with her own staff, they enabled her to perform the purely social duties of First Wifery with remarkable cheerfulness. Moreover, they enabled her to concentrate largely on the political and public goals that most interested her.

  ER achieved her first notable White House success on 6 March with her press conference for women journalists only: “I was a little nervous at first, but the girls were so nice and so friendly that I got over it quickly.”

  The press conferences were Hick’s idea: They would establish understanding and support for the First Lady’s activities, and they would ensure jobs for women in Depression-weary newspapers and wire services. Both FDR and Louis Howe had agreed with Hick’s suggestion and encouraged ER to do it.

  That night, ER called Hick to report on the conference. Thirty-five journalists had met in the Red Room, “and there weren’t enough chairs, so some of them had to sit on the floor.” Male reporters made much of this, and wrote nasty commentary about docile newshens sitting at ER’s feet. But ER enjoyed herself: “It really wasn’t bad. I think I’ll continue with them.” And, with the kind of competitive glee that had been part of her life since she made the first team at field hockey as a student at Allenswood, she concluded: “1 really beat Franklin. He isn’t holding his first press conference until Wednesday!”

  Those
first weeks, ER felt bludgeoned by family tensions aroused by the marital woes of her children. Her mother-in-law blamed her, and the children made conflicting emotional demands. It all left her “very weary.” She turned increasingly to Hick for advice and encouragement. Surrounded by critics and pundits eager to pounce upon every mishap, she relied on Hick’s refreshing directness and seasoned political savvy. Hick encouraged her to keep a diary, which she refused to do, but she agreed to write the details of each day in her daily letters. Ultimately, ER’s letters to Hick became the fullest record of her political and emotional concerns. She confided her deepest secrets, most worrisome problems, mundane and significant moments.

  ER spent hours at her desk at the end of the day, usually at one or two in the morning, writing to Hick—as she had written daily to those she loved all her life, beginning with her father. However busy she was, however many friends and allies surrounded her, she felt alone without Hick at her side. Each day their ten-, twelve-, fifteen-page letters were filled with diary details, political tidbits, expressions of love and longing:

  Hick darling/Oh! how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try to tell you what it meant. [Eldest son] Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say Je t’aime et je t’adore as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.

  ER called and wrote on Hick’s fortieth birthday, 7 March, and they made plans to sec each other the next week. “What shall we read Hick? You choose first….” After she called again, and they spoke until two in the morning, ER added a postscript: “Hick Dearest I know how unhappy you are & I’m glad Jean [Dixon] will be with you tomorrow night…. My thoughts are around you!”

  The next night when ER called after midnight, she was relieved: “Oh! it is good to hear your voice. When it sounds right no one can make me so happy!” And “Dearest, Your two letters this morning were such a joy.”