Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  A child labor amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress and signed by Calvin Coolidge in 1924, but state ratification was blocked by shrieks of Bolshevism: Various church groups and opponents of public health, public education, and all public improvements protested the amendment as a government intrusion into the “freedom” of family life. ER personally campaigned for it in 1928, and was attacked in the pages of The Woman Patriot. The amendment languished until 1933, when ER and her circle reignited interest in the outrages that faced “our toiling children.” During the first months of the New Deal, several industries, including textiles, banned workers under the age of sixteen. But most industrialists preferred their economic traditions: Why hire a man for a dollar, or a woman for fifty cents, when you can hire a kid for a dime?

  Even some of FDR’s political allies squirmed away from the issue. In 1934 ER wrote Robert Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, to protest an editorial that branded Florence Kelley and other amendment supporters communists.

  Actually ER’s letter to the ambassador was a curiously diplomatic document, which revealed her ability to combine personal flattery with blunt political criticism:

  It seems rather dreadful to make a complaint and ask a favor in the same letter, but that is what I am about to do.

  A very old friend of mine, who worked very hard for the President in the campaign, has a daughter, Faith Whitney, who would like to be presented at court some time in the not too distant future….

  And now for my bitter complaint: I feel quite sure that you are not in sympathy with this editorial, but all the world has sent it to me and I wonder if you could say something, gently but firmly, to your editor about classing as communists these people who have worked for years for exactly what the administration has now done through its [National Recovery Administration] codes. Because of the code, great numbers of states are rapidly ratifying this amendment, and this would put the administration, and the President himself, in the class of communists.

  With all good wishes and many apologies for being disagreeable….

  The real issue, ER wrote for publication, was the government’s right to regulate, to intervene into the sacrosanct realm of private property, private enterprise, and the family: “It is said that this is no time to pass [the Child Labor Amendment] because many families are dependent upon the pennies which their children may pick up.” ER did not argue with the right of children to make small amounts of money, but noted that the real objection was that this amendment “would be an entering wedge and would mean that Congress would tell the fathers and mothers of the country where they should send their children to school, and how they should educate them. I can only say that an entering wedge is already with us, for we already tell people that their children must be educated. We also tell people they must have their children vaccinated.”

  ER also intensified her commitment to the NCL’s struggle against toxic wastes that imperiled the health of factory workers and people who lived near toxic dumps. During the 1920s, the NCL’s first effort was to achieve a ban against industrial radium poisoning, especially among workers in watch and clock factories. ER joined that effort, along with the NCL’s protests against untrue advertising practices, now reintroduced by Rex Tugwell.

  Although Tugwell failed to credit her, Florence Kelley introduced the concept of ethical advertising and product labeling in a consumer campaign against advertising abuses as early as 1899: “What housewife can detect, alone and unaided, injurious chemicals in her supplies of milk, bread, meat, home remedies?” The NCL then published a “white list” of retail stores which met minimum standards of hygiene “and treated their employees fairly.” The NCL’s first white label campaign involved underwear—since every “lady,” affluent or worker, purchased, for example, “drawers, chemises, petticoats, corsets,” and “flannelette goods.” To be awarded a white label, a manufacturer had to answer several questions: Were children employed? Were factory laws violated? Were decent work standards met?

  The National Consumers League became the most influential consumer movement of the early twentieth century. By 1906 there were sixty-three leagues in twenty states; by 1913 there were thirty thousand members. When National Recovery Administration codes were introduced in 1933, the NCL’s white label campaign became government policy.

  Shortly after FDR’s election, ER and her friend Lady Astor, the former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, spoke at the thirtieth anniversary luncheon of the National Consumers League, which was also a memorial to Florence Kelley. The first woman to sit in Parliament, Nancy Astor’s politics were complicated, but she admired ER and considered her Kelley’s heir. “I came to pay tribute to two great women, Florence Kelley and Eleanor Roosevelt…. I was thrilled to think that you are to have a woman in the White House who doesn’t deal with things at the top but with those at the bottom. I don’t believe the world quite realizes what a wonderful asset it will be to have such a First Lady….”

  In response, ER’s speech was uncommonly bold: “There is something fundamentally wrong with a civilization which tolerates conditions such as many of our people are facing today. We talk of a ‘new deal’ and we believe in it. But we will have no ‘new deal’ unless some of us are willing to sit down and think this situation out. It may require some drastic changes in our rather settled ideas and we must not be afraid of them.”

  Throughout the White House years, the NCL and the WTUL were the foundations upon which ER stood as she fought for a New Deal for women. To rally public support for the changes she championed, she also relied upon her weekly press conferences for women journalists only.

  Every Monday morning, ER met with forty accredited “newsgirls,” many of whom were hired because of her press conferences, and they tended to be loyal to the First Lady and to protect her from public criticism. They included, outstanding reporters, representatives of both national press syndicates and small-town newspapers. Decades later, former Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, during the 1930s wife of Maine congressman Clyde Smith, remained grateful that ER invited her to attend even though she wrote for one of America’s smallest weeklies, in Skowhegan, Maine. During her first conference, ER created a relaxed atmosphere in the Red Room on the first floor, surrounded by roses and spring flowers. She passed around a box of candied fruit, and established the ground rules. She brought members of the women’s network eager to address urgent issues; occasionally she brought visiting notables, women writers, performers, artists.

  ER intended to manage the news. Her conferences were coordinated, carefully arranged. Louis Howe, Stephen Early, and Hick considered the participants and gave ER advice. FDR’s advisers worried that she might get him ”into trouble”. “Louis Howe and my husband alone seemed unworried.” She credited Howe with her “confidence” in journalists. “He had a very high regard for his own craft and insisted that newspaper people were the most honorable group in the world.” ER shared his conviction, despite occasional tricksters who betrayed her trust. ER hated to be misquoted, and Tommy attended every conference to take her own notes.

  However informal and charming, ER had a stern side. Her first announcement sounded fierce: The press conferences were “planned for your convenience,” and everyone was to be guided by specific rules of conduct—no gossip, no leaks, no scoops. No kidding. She would take “no political questions whatever. Whoever does ask such a question never comes back.”

  Eventually, she changed her mind; and her press conferences became a vital source of news. But the women of the press respected ER’s boundaries and acknowledged her threat: If she was displeased, they would be banished.

  ER said that “all women in public life needed to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.” Focused on public policy, she ignored personal insults. Although attacks on her children upset her, she remained unruffled by criticism. When friends like Hick feared she would be wounded by a particularly vicious article, she was inv
ariably unconcerned. During the first month in Washington, several male reporters trailed her everywhere, eager for a story. When her horse slipped in the mud, the press reported the mishap with a certain glee:

  ER “was thrown into a mud puddle in Potomac Park.” But, ER told reporters, the horse merely fell to its knees, and “I slid off very gracefully right into the mud…. It wasn’t a real fall, I just slipped down to the ground.” She remounted and continued her ride, and delighted in the cherry blossoms and Japanese magnolia trees just coming into full bloom.

  On this occasion, ER sounded defensive. But generally the First Lady was resilient and tough regarding the press, and she used intrusive reporters, as she did her press conferences, to advance her political agenda. According to Bess Furman, at FDR’s press conferences, “all the world is a stage”; at ER’s press conferences, “all the world is a school.” The fact is, both Roosevelts enjoyed “the bully pulpit.”

  Although she invited controversy, ER strictly limited discussion to those activities she considered newsworthy. She also rejected ghostwriters. When NBC asked her to read a script somebody had written for her, she replied with an official announcement issued by the White House press office: The First Lady would “never consent to have anyone write a broadcast or make one for her. She is sorry but has made this rule and has kept to it consistently.”

  Through her public activities, writings, and broadcasts, ER set a new pace, new goals, a new understanding of what was possible and acceptable for women to achieve. If her views represented heresy and radicalism to some, for ER and the women’s progressive network they represented the substance and soul of America, the long-postponed American Dream.

  Positions of influence and respect for women were central to that dream. As soon as FDR was elected president, Mary Williams Dewson (called Molly) and ER met to draw up a list of qualified women for federal appointment. Dewson arrived in Washington for the inauguration armed with the names of sixty women of achievement, all of them dedicated Democrats. By 1935 over fifty women had been appointed to ranking national positions and hundreds to leadership positions in various government agencies on the state and local level.

  ER and Molly Dewson, officially chair of women’s activities of the Democratic Party, actually controlled patronage for women directly. ER personally submitted their lists to Jim Farley, who as boss of the Democratic Party presided over patronage, or to Louis Howe or Frances Perkins, or an agency or cabinet official on whose goodwill she could rely. She could generally rely upon most cabinet members, except Harold Ickes.

  Close to Jane Addams, Ickes had been legal counsel to Chicago’s WTUL and was a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But he disliked ER, criticized her privately, and publicly disapproved of her “meddling.” Some observers thought she reminded him of his wife, Anna Wilmarth Ickes, a forceful, independent woman of wealth whose published anthropological studies of Indians of the Southwest were highly regarded. Their difficult marriage was the subject of considerable Washington gossip.

  The impact of Ickes’s opposition to ER’s influence was minimized by her alliance with Jim Farley. They had worked together since the Smith campaign of 1924. ER understood Farley, and respected his position. Her first words upon landing in Chicago during the 1932 convention were addressed to him: “A fine job, Mr. Farley.” With FDR’s entire party waiting on the tarmac, ER headed directly for Boss Farley, hands outstretched to thank him for his role in getting her husband nominated. Not everybody remembered to do that, and Jim Farley never forgot it. In return he accepted her judgments, which tended to be final, even though he often disagreed with her. “He trusted me as a person….”

  ER and Molly Dewson worked publicly and privately for every woman FDR appointed. Dewson recalled that she first went to Warm Springs, FDR’s healing center in Georgia, in 1928 to lobby for Frances Perkins’s appointment to New York’s Industrial Commission, at ER’s suggestion. Neither Dewson nor ER was personally close to Perkins. According to Dewson: “She is like Kipling’s cat that walks alone. It was just that I admired her work for trade unionism and for better working conditions.”

  Patronage for ER involved two issues: She wanted to see progressive women Democrats in power to build momentum for a New Deal for women, and she wanted women who traditionally worked hard and long with no reward to receive tangible recognition. Occasionally ER sought to reward hardworking women with patronage jobs for their husbands, sons, nephews. “There is a young man… whose mother was a great help in the campaign. If he could get some kind of a job either in Seattle or in Idaho…”

  ER was outraged when her preferred candidates were passed over for political reasons—such as competing patronage claims by male politicians.

  ER’s personal involvement in such matters was ongoing: “Dear Jim: I am horrified at the Donahue appointment! How could you do it before some of the other women had been considered? Is it McAdoo, and must we have terrible women who are opposed to us, just because McAdoo wishes it?” ER was rankled in part because she deplored “KuKu” McAdoo—Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and a presidential aspirant who had accepted Klan support in 1924. By 1933, California Senator William Gibbs McAdoo was a regular stumbling block for progressive women.

  While every achievement was arduous, Dewson and ER got notable women appointed to significant office. In addition to Frances Perkins, Mary Harriman Rumsey headed the Consumers’ Advisory Board of NRA, Florence E. Allen was a judge of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Josephine Roche was assistant secretary of the treasury, Nellie Tayloe Ross was director of the Mint; and others.

  ER celebrated every breakthrough women made. She hosted musical receptions in the East Room to honor Amy Beach, for fifty years America’s most notable woman composer. Other women composers also gave concerts, including Iris Brussels, Charlotte Caldwell, Dorothy Radde Emery, Grace Boles Hedge, Mary Howe, and Florence Lowenberg.

  ER worked hard to achieve a major appointment for her friend Ruth Bryan Owen. Daughter of Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, and attorney Mary Baird Bryan, Ruth Bryan Owen was appointed envoy to Denmark and Iceland. Elected to Congress in 1928 and 1930, representing Florida’s fourth congressional district, from Jacksonville to Key West, she initiated legislation to protect the Everglades as national parkland; served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, fought for a Department of Education, and a better funded, enlarged Children’s Bureau.

  She hoped to be appointed secretary of the interior, and wrote her friend Fannie Hurst: FDR “thinks the time has come to put a woman in the cabinet,” and Interior “having Education, Conservation for forests, care of Indians, National Parks & general safe-guarding of natural resources,” appealed to her because of her congressional experience and environmental struggles.

  However disappointed, when FDR named her “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Denmark,” she became the first woman to hold a major diplomatic post. ER honored her with a festive dinner attended by eight hundred women and men, where Fannie Hurst toasted her great friend: Owen “was blazing a trail in diplomacy just as the women in covered-wagon days had blazed a trail in geography.”

  But for all ER’s connections, Molly Dewson’s vigor, and FDR’s goodwill, opposition to women in public life continued. While Jim Farley considered ER’s recommendations “with respect,” Dewson realized “how much more clamorous the men are” about patronage. In April 1933 she wrote a seventeen-page letter to ER detailing Farley’s reaction to the first hundred names they had submitted. There were delays and detours; they were unable to present more than one name at a time; it was agonizing. By June, Dewson reported, only seven women recommended by the Women’s Division were appointed; six others were “pending.” By July she was exasperated and wrote ER: “Heavens but the nicest of men are slippery as eels.”

  “Throughout the 1930s, ER and Dewson worked every channel of influence to promote women to positions of respect, pres
tige, power. Only women in power, ER believed, would consider the needs of women without power; men in power rarely, if ever, did.

  5: ER’s New Deal for Women

  ER’s response to FDR’s first hundred days was hopeful but also critical. After years of anxiety, drifting, waiting upon the “laissez-faire” or “natural” course of the economy to correct itself, the government acted. With amazing unity, Congress, the president, and business leaders agreed: The government had a role to play to save America from fiscal disaster. The president’s first act in office was to call Congress into special session to deal with three problems: banking, the federal economy, and unemployment.

  ER was impressed by the initial “spirit of cooperation.” Business leaders “who ordinarily would have scorned government assistance were begging the government to find solutions for their problems, willingly accepting almost anything that was suggested.”

  But she considered it all merely a first step toward a far distant goal. Experimental and imaginative, the first New Deal still ignored the very foundations upon which, ER believed, democracy depended: housing, health care, and education. And virtually all of it discriminated against women.

  Bankers and economic “royalists” were thrilled by FDR’s first two pieces of emergency legislation: the Banking Act, which passed the first day with little opposition; and the more controversial Economy Act, which appealed exclusively to fiscal conservatives. It passed the House 266-138 only because sixty-nine Republicans voted for it, while ninety-two Democrats voted against it.

  The Economy Act eliminated or downsized government agencies, reduced government salaries, cut veterans’ pensions and medical support, and called for the firing of all federally employed women married to federally employed men. It made FDR seem “a states’ rights, limited government, penny-pinching Democrat.”