Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER’s lifelong inability to reflect on the sources of her feelings resulted in headaches, sudden bursts of cold, unexpected and confusing acts of distance and derision. As a young matron she described her “Griselda” moods with impatience and dismay. She hated to acknowledge turbulence or depression. She once told a grandchild who was crying in the hallway, to go sit in the bathtub until the tears stopped. During the White House years she generally dealt with unwanted emotions by plunging into new and exciting work or mind-absorbing details. ER engineered her life. She assigned, perhaps even enjoyed, barriers and surrogates for her feelings. In addition to Henrietta Nesbitt and Lorena Hickok, to whom ER once wrote “your vehemence always makes me calm,” there were her uncontrollable, rambunctious dogs.

  Camouflaged by her considerate and gracious manner, ER’s aggressive side was indirect. She initially went everywhere accompanied by two unruly dogs. At the end of each day, she walked Tommy to the gate for a final conversation, and to exercise her dogs. Unfettered, they barked and growled, leaped and frolicked. One night her little Scottie, Meggie, became “very obstreperous.” ER wrote Hick: “barking loudly,” she chased “a rather terrified woman with a little boy, who was peacefully walking home past the White House.”

  ER’s Scottie and police dog, Major, were loyal to her and jealous of her attentions. Major was a present from Earl Miller, who trained him to protect his lady—to be suspicious of quick or sudden movements and to prevent anybody from getting too close. Once Major bit Hick on the elbow as she tried to loosen a stuck zipper for ER. Hick was amazed, since she considered herself one of Major’s pals.

  Though he was a large distracting presence, ER nevertheless brought her German shepherd to her first press conference. But Major barked at anybody who spoke, except ER. His behavior became so agitated that he was led away in disgrace. According to Bess Furman, Major preferred men in blue uniforms with brass buttons to the women of the press. Over time, both dogs nipped and growled without discrimination—friends, politicians, diplomats.

  Major bit Arkansas Senator Hattie Caraway on the arm, during ER’s first large Gridiron Widows party. ER was fond of Hattie Caraway, who, during the 1924 congressional hearings on the Bok Peace Prize and World Court, had protested the brutal questioning ER and Esther Lape endured. After Bess Fur-man wrote of Major’s indiscretions, Meggie bit her on the face during a drive with ER, requiring several stitches. After other incidents, ER finally agreed to part company with her dogs. “That was a sad day for me and no one thought it wise to say too much to me about dogs for a long time.”

  One might argue that ER had an imperious temper, even a cruel streak. But saints and melancholy Griseldas are generally unconscious of such impulses, and tend to regret them when confronted by their impact.

  Moreover, neither anguish nor spite settles the mystery of ER’s support for Mrs. Nesbitt. A continual source of household unrest, she also contradicted many of ER’s deepest convictions. Beyond FDR’s state of general annoyance, her guests were discomforted, her friends insulted, her staff disturbed. Nobody was excluded from Nesbitt’s sense of order. Upset by those who burned cigarette holes in the tablecloths, she asked ER: “Do you think the President can keep an eye on the tablecloths?”

  That was too much for ER, who snapped “Of course not!”

  Undaunted, Mrs. Nesbitt ordered a butler to keep his eyes peeled for offenders. He, alas, returned “grinning.” FDR had burned “a hole himself, and when he saw it, he looked around guilty-like, and put his salt cellar over it quick.”

  ER’s guests made demands, and Mrs. Nesbitt bristled at their presumptions, their manners, their clothes. “Some of the house guests behaved as if they were in a hotel.” But ER “never complained.” “With Mrs. Roosevelt it was intellect that mattered. I don’t believe she noticed a person’s color any more than she did their dress.”

  But the First Lady’s efforts to democratize the White House bothered Henrietta Nesbitt. Imperious with the staff, she had contempt for “foreigners,” and was rude to international dignitaries: “Usually for Orientals and South Americans we had a lot of sticky and colorful sweets.”

  According to Lillian Rogers Parks: “Getting around Mrs. Nesbitt became a way of life.” One day in preparation for a visiting Latin American head of state and his family, she told the staff: “Don’t bother to put the good linen sheets on the beds for these people.” The maids “marched right into the guest room and put on the finest sheets we could find.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt’s attitude resulted in tension and ill will, but ER ignored it. When ER entered the White House, she was told that she had to cut the household budget by 25 percent. To do so, she fired the resident staff, which was white, and replaced them with black staff, most of whom had been in service with her for many years. She explained that it was easier for white employees to find alternative jobs in Depression America.

  Katherine Buckley, who had been chief cook for seven years, wrote a bitter letter to Jim Farley on behalf of the fired staff: “I consider it a disgrace to our [Democratic] party to place colored help in the positions that we now hold. Some form of preference should be given to those of us who serve with honor and efficiency….”

  Farley sent the correspondence on to ER, who replied to Buckley that she ”grieved very much” over the need to let anybody go, but “government expenditures have to be curtailed…”:

  I have had my own servants for a great many years. They happen to be colored, because I had colored servants when I lived in Washington, and have kept on with the same ones or their friends ever since; but the question of their being white or colored has nothing whatever to do with dismissal….

  You will understand I know, that one does get attached to the people one is accustomed to, regardless of their race….”

  But then ER’s black staff was supervised by Mrs. Nesbitt, who was outraged when ER extended her belief in workers’ rights to the White House staff: The First Lady simply announced one day that “the eight-hour day had to be. It doubled our expenses, and also the help got the day and a half free every week.” Despite ER’s generous benefits, some still “grouched”. In the beginning, “the girls had worked all day, and the butlers, too, and not a peep out of them.” It left Mrs. Nesbitt exhausted.

  She had expected to find support for her views from Franklin’s mother. But when Sara Delano Roosevelt visited “during these troubles,” she agreed with ER. “Mrs. James” and the First Lady “had more in common than the Republicans seemed to think….”

  Since ER fired servants when necessary, including several who drank or in any way caused trouble, one must pause to consider her unusual attitude toward Mrs. Nesbitt. Why did she protect the household’s most continual source of discontent, who relentlessly distressed her husband’s epicurean tastes?

  Competitive and controlling, ER was politically direct, but emotionally evasive. Many of her intimates had reason to notice that when hurt or discontented, ER would withdraw, become detached. When her clear blue eyes turned to ice, warmth drained from the very walls of the room. Without a word of anger exchanged, ER could freeze the stoutest heart. ER’s long-term loyalty to Mrs. Nesbitt might then be best understood in terms of her relationship to FDR.

  According to Lillian Rogers Parks, Mrs. Nesbitt had a most determined “contempt for the desires of the President.” If he ordered hot coffee, he might get cold tea. “If he ordered something special, she just ignored it.” And every culinary thing she touched seemed to turn to gruel. While Mrs Nesbitt did not personally do the cooking, “she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined one way or another.”

  But FDR could have demanded her removal. Although he side-stepped Mrs. Nesbitt’s tyranny, he consented to her tenure. To do otherwise would have destroyed the first couple’s hard-won balance of power. Over the years, “his” people sent gift baskets filled with delicacies from around the country and the world. Neighboring hotels increasingly received White Hou
se orders. Some believed he took such frequent trips home to Hyde Park because of his mother’s exquisite chef. His friends were ever mindful of his favorite foods and from every trip hunters and fishermen sent their game—pheasants, turkeys, quail; and every sort of fish, smoked, broiled, baked. Generous offerings arrived well prepared, and ready to serve.

  Domestic matters were never ER’s favorite domain. She was convinced that women’s energy, encouraged and unconfined, would change the world. It was the essence of her philosophy, her creed, and it enabled her to become the most loved, most controversial, most hated, and most effective First Lady in U.S. history. But as First Wife, her flaws were fabled. Eleanor Roosevelt was nobody’s idea of a homebody.*

  *Bess Truman finally replaced Henrietta Nesbitt—for insolence. During the summer of 1945, the new First Lady had been assigned to bring a stick of butter to her bridge club’s pot luck luncheon. But Nesbitt refused: The White House was rationed like any other house, and no butter could be removed. “That was the last straw. All the weeks of unwanted brussels sprouts…” ended over that stick of butter.

  4: Mobilizing the Women’s Network:

  Friendship, Press Conferences, Patronage

  Derailed by the Great War, pounded by the virulence of the Red Scare, progressive values were in retreat during the 1920s. Leading artists and writers fled to Europe to escape the sense of crude materialism and political repression that had followed in the wake of wartime hysteria. Without an international war to justify their need to fight, political bullies turned their wrath upon liberals, feminists, and all innovative cultural expression or experimentation.

  Hounded and harassed by Red Scare “patriots” and Ku Klux Klan excesses, some radicals and reformers lapsed into silence. Many, including FDR, joined the business boom parade. Others, like Frederic Howe, Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of immigration, now appointed to the Department of Agriculture, wrote bitter memoirs. Diplomats, like FDR’s friend Bill Bullitt, left the disappointments of Versailles to party in exile—to “lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.” The tired and timid were overcome by a sense of political torpor.

  But the women’s social reform network remained steadfast. During the 1920s its organizations actually grew in strength and purpose—and became during the Depression America’s most vital institutions of resistance to despair. Their settlement houses and community centers fed the hungry and continued to nourish hope. Internationally, while the United States retreated from its commitment to the League of Nations, only the women of the peace movement continued to agitate for mutual security policies and the World Court—led by Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  During the first hundred days, from 9 March to 16 June 1933, Congress enacted fifteen laws and FDR created a new bureaucracy that rooted the New Deal But at every level it bypassed women.

  In the 1930s, with fifteen million Americans in a state of desperation and gloom, the women’s social reform network received a new respect. While communists and fascists threatened revolution, the women’s network had proposed only to humanize, democratize, socialize the capitalist economy.

  While FDR resurrected the economy, ER mobilized the women’s network to demand a New Deal for women. In 1933, that was revolutionary. Every woman appointed to a position of responsibility required a fight; every achievement for women involved a battle. ER confronted the task before her in a combative mood. She and her mentors, most notably Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, had been in this fight for a very long time.

  Dismissed for decades as socialists, meddlers, misfits, the indefatigable women of social reform remained eager to offer their expertise and services to the government. They hoped that with capitalism on the verge of collapse, their progressive and internationalist themes would at last be given space on the national agenda.

  Although FDR’s Brains Trust failed to credit their work, the New Deal reflected their pioneering vision. Since the 1880s the great settlement house leaders had called for changes that would have guaranteed jobs and health care; housing, recreation, compulsory free education; decency in the workplace, security at home.

  While Columbia University professor Rex Tugwell and other Brains Trusters were still schoolboys, ER’s colleagues—Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Mary Elizabeth Dreier—championed industrial codes, safety and health standards, fair work practices, trade unionism, minimum wage, an end to child labor, consumer labels.

  They introduced public playgrounds, neighborhood houses, free night classes, public health programs, and the Visiting Home Nurse Service. For a brief political moment, Progressive Party politicians sought their support. In 1912, both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson courted endorsements from Jane Addams and Lillian Wald.

  In 1924, ER chaired the first presidential women’s platform committee which presented the Democratic Party with the progressive women’s agenda. Published on the front page of The New York Times on 25 June 1924, it established goals for economic security that predated the work of FDR’s Brains Trusters by a decade: the right to bargain collectively; an eight-hour day; a federal employment agency to encourage full employment; abolition of child labor; equal pay for equal work for women and men; federal aid for maternal and child health; sex education and venereal disease prevention; public education for all; health care for all; an end to vigilante violence and the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Red Scare and then the Depression unraveled their initial state and local successes, and by 1933 many of their achievements were undone. Sweatshop conditions reappeared. Eight- and ten-hour work laws passed state by state were scuttled. State and municipal industrial codes passed in dozens of progressive communities were ignored. Humanitarian programs were defunded.

  Now ER and the women’s network confronted the future with renewed determination. The First Lady was primarily an activist who considered the game of politics a team sport. FDR liked to boast that he was a “practical politician.” He knew how to compromise, make deals, be duplicitous. ER understood the nature of the game, but wanted some assurance that it would be played for the right reasons, the most needful causes. During the 1920s she had written articles to demand real power for women and asserted that men played politics to win elections; women played politics because they sought to make things better for most people. FDR was the politician. ER was the agitator.

  She was convinced that the federal government had a primary responsibility to confront basic and urgent social issues, and was most closely identified with two organizations that specifically anticipated the changes promised by the New Deal, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and the National Consumers League (NCL).

  The Consumers League movement began in 1888 when Leonora O’Reilly, a shirtmaker, called upon philanthropist Josephine Shaw Lowell (the first woman appointed to New York State’s Board of Charities in 1876) to help recruit privileged women willing to meet with factory workers. O’Reilly’s appeal for “help and sympathy from the wealthy and educated women of New York for their toiling and downtrodden sisters” resulted in the National Consumers League, founded in 1891.

  Until her death, on 17 February 1932, attorney Florence Kelley led the NCL, and it had a mighty impact on America as consumers organized around her slogan to “investigate, agitate, legislate.” Kelley, the daughter of Quakers and educated at Cornell University, was the divorced mother of three. Brilliant and determined, when she agreed to lead the NCL, she moved from Hull House in Chicago to Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement and became an energizing center of New York’s progressive network, which included the leaders of the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903.

  Kelley was the leader of the women’s network which included ER, Molly Dewson, Frances Perkins, Rose Schneiderman, and Clara Beyer. They considered Kelley, in Perkins’s words, “the mother of us all.”

  ER rejoiced when the network’s first legislative success, the Sheppard-Towner Act, passed. Signed by President Warren Harding on 23 Novem
ber 1921, it protected mothers and infants, provided health education, well baby clinics, childhood nutrition, and prenatal nursing care. Kelley and her circle were convinced a “new day had dawned.” The act was opposed by the American Medical Association and Red Scare groups, including the Woman Patriots and the Sentinels of the Republic, which called it a conspiracy to “Sovietize” America. But the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional in 1923. The attacks continued, however, and in 1927 funding for the first federal act to protect mothers and infants ran out.

  ER campaigned vigorously for the continuation of Sheppard-Towner. On 5 January 1927, she argued for its extension on behalf of the League of Women Voters, then an activist organization. She wrote to Senator Royal Copeland of New York, a physician:

  I hardly think it is necessary to urge [your support], as I know you as a doctor must appreciate the wonderful good [it] has accomplished, especially in the rural districts of our own State….

  Of course, I realize that the old States rights cry might be raised, but then we might just as well give up any agricultural aid or any aid towards road building, and I do think mothers and babies are a fairly important asset to this country, and I feel sure that you feel the same.

  Senator Copeland read ER’s letter into the Congressional Record. But Sheppard-Towner was defunded, and not reconsidered until the New Deal. It was nonetheless so popular that forty-five states continued some form of infant and maternity care, without federal support.

  ER and her colleagues also crusaded for a National Child Labor law to outlaw factory work for young children. In 1923 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional both a federal child labor measure and a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women. Kelley was outraged: Why are “seals, bears, reindeer, fish, wild game in the national parks, buffalo, migratory birds, all found suitable for federal protection; but not the children of our race and their mothers?”