It was their first visit after a long and trying separation, and afterward Hick wrote:
Dearest, it was a lovely weekend. I shall have it to think about for a long, long time. Each time we have together that way—brings us closer, doesn’t it? And I believe those days and long pleasant hours together each time make it perhaps a little less possible for us to hurt each other. They give us better understanding of each other, give us more faith, draw us closer….
A curious location for one of their most intimate trips together, Warm Springs had never been a cordial haven for ER. FDR’s polio healing center, it was more Missy’s place. From 1924 when he, Missy, and various friends first visited, Warm Springs became FDR’s retreat—where Missy presided. The bubbling 88-degree healing springs were the primary attraction. FDR and his friends created a country club atmosphere, with stables, golf course, swimming pools, a conference and community center, all in addition to the campus-like quadrangle dominated by Georgia Hall, the treatment center, physical therapy, and research areas. Comfortable cottages, mostly designed by Henry Toombs, were built for family and friends, including SDR. It was one of these that ER reserved.
FDR’s own white clapboard cottage with green shutters stood high and faced west to overlook a deep stand of Georgia pine. It was a simple space, with nautical motif and Val-Kill furniture. Its center living-dining area separated two bedrooms—FDR’s and Missy’s, which opened onto a sunporch built to resemble the prow of a ship. Behind FDR’s bedroom, through a connecting bathroom, was a tiny space called ER’s bedroom. But when ER visited she usually stayed at the guest cottage behind FDR’s home. She rarely visited without her own circle of friends, who stayed with her.
The kitchen was presided over by an extraordinary cook—Daisy Bonner, whose Southern feasts were legendary. When in residence, she and the other servants, FDR’s valet Irvin McDuffie and his wife, Lizzie, a longtime Roosevelt maid, lived together in one unit (with sink and toilet) above the garage that housed FDR’s favorite hand-controlled car. For bathing, the staff had an outdoor shower hose attached to the side of the garage.
While FDR did not intend to interfere with the local habits of the people, ER was always disturbed by the conditions blacks endured in Meriwether County and set out to improve them. Even sixty years later her efforts were remembered with scorn and resentment by longtime white residents, who said she was “intrusive” and “out of place.” “We didn’t like her a bit; she ruined every maid we ever had.”
In conversation, one woman insisted that she always concerned herself with “business that was none of her business.” When pressed, that turned out to be her interest in a school for Negro children. After FDR built a school for white children, she agitated for a school for black children. “And it was built; and it was built in brick too, the Eleanor Roosevelt School!”
When FDR was asked about facilities for black polio victims, he deferred to the prejudice of the area and helped build a treatment center at Tuskegee instead. According to local lore, ER was “much more interested in Tuskegee, than she was with what was going on here; and would spend more time with the polios there.” “She was not liked or admired here; and she was never happy here. This was his place.”
However accurate local memories may be, ER always made the best of her times at Warm Springs, enjoyed her rides, swam each day, and was proud of the good work FDR generated. She frequently brought her own friends to see the place, and she fully appreciated FDR’s sense of it as a healing sanctuary.
Before white conquest, Warm Springs was an Indian healing refuge for wounded fighters of warring tribes: Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and others would travel to the springs, and as FDR frequently explained, honored the sacred healing space where “wars of the body and wars of the mind are absolutely taboo.”
While at Warm Springs that January weekend, ER and Hick drove to visit Bulloch Hall, the familial home of ER’s father’s mother, Martha (Mittie) Bulloch, in Roswell, Georgia.
One can only imagine ER’s conversation with Hick during their time in Roswell, so filled with complicated and lingering legacies. Always proud of her Southern heritage, ER had no romantic illusions about some peaceful, idyllic magnolia-and-mint-julep past. She deeply appreciated the power of race traditions—and she never doubted how hard it would be to change them.
On 27 January 1934, the day after her White House race meeting, ER spoke at the first National Public Housing Conference held in Washington, and denounced “slum owners.” She declared: “Holders of property who exploit human beings must be made to feel that they are bad citizens….” Outraged that poor people were charged exorbitant rents by greedy landlords for dreadful and meager spaces, she called for a public movement of protest and awareness, to “dramatize” what “thoughtless people will do in order to make a little more money.”
Even before ER went to West Virginia in August 1933, she had toured Washington’s “alley dwellings” or “alley slums,” where twelve thousand blacks and a thousand whites lived in desperate circumstances.
Behind beautiful Georgian facades, high walls, and well-trimmed privets, Washington kept its long-neglected secrets: over two hundred ugly, crowded, festering hidden alleyways that had aroused protest for decades. As early as 1871, Washington’s Board of Health declared them “injurious to health,” and in 1874 it condemned 389 houses. But in 1878, Congress abolished the Board of Health and the program ended. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt declared dilapidated housing a menace; in 1906, Congress created the Board for the Condemnation of Insanitary Buildings. But nothing happened.
Not until Charlotte Everett Hopkins, the “Grand Old Lady” of Washington who had known every president since Abraham Lincoln, persuaded Ellen Axson Wilson, the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, to protest this community scourge was there hope of real change. But Ellen Wilson’s efforts to dismantle the alleys and convert them to parks or new roadways, which passed Congress on the day of her death, 6 August 1914, were suspended because of wartime priorities. Although the 1914 legislation had no provision for new housing, “Mrs. Archibald Hopkins” never gave up, and continued to imagine gardens and lovely homes someday where “alley dwellers hide now in Dickensian squalor.”*
Within days of FDR’s inauguration, she persuaded ER to accompany her on a tour of a hidden inner city.
On 20 March 1933, a cold and overcast day, they drove together in ER’s open blue roadster. Hopkins told journalist Martha Strayer:
We drove to North Capitol St. and I told her to drive back of Sibley Hospital. We turned into an alley. She said, “Where shall I go now?” I said, “Drive into that place that looks like a slit in the wall between two houses.”
We drove into Pierce Court…. It’s 12 feet wide. On each side are three-story wooden tenements. There’s no water in the buildings; it has to be carried from hydrants…. There are no toilet facilities except one for each building; outside, exposed, used by both sexes. In one room in that court, a social worker found 14 men and one woman sleeping….
Unrecognized, they walked through other littered, crowded spaces where garbage was never collected by authorities paid to do so. They talked to the residents, learned of the suffering, disease, and infant deaths, the troubles and humiliations. They witnessed rats as big as cats. The alley death rate from tuberculosis was 50 percent higher than elsewhere.
Washington’s leading civic activist had at last found another enthusiastic champion. ER determined to end the mean and vile conditions just behind the great and comfortable houses. The District’s budget was completely controlled by Congress, and it was unwilling to address the needs of the disenfranchised residents of segregated Washington—so many of whom worked in service for their own families.
ER demanded immediate action: In Marshall Heights there was no running water, and women and children carried buckets very long distances. ER called for emergency water, new pipes and pumps. In many districts water pumps were next to outdoor toilets and sewage lines. ER pointed out that such conditions
bred diseases that threatened the entire city. Emergency crews went to work.
ER’s Washington campaign upset traditionalists even more than her commitment to Arthurdale. She introduced the untouchable issue of race and demanded that Negro residents receive respectful attention.
FDR had immediately endorsed Arthurdale, but he disfavored the alley dwelling bill in 1933, as “not in accord with the President’s financial program.”
During the winter and spring of 1934, John Ihlder and other members of the Washington Committee on Housing—which ER now served as “honorary chairman”—struggled to win administration support. The bill was changed “in accordance with Mrs. Roosevelt’s suggestion” in order to remove “the objections of the Director of the Budget.”
Unlike Ellen Wilson’s legislation, the new bill included provisions for “a home construction program” as a “necessary complement” to alley demolition. Slum clearance was not to be another “Negro removal” project. Ihlder, a housing activist from Boston who had worked with Charlotte Hopkins for over a decade, saw the Washington project as a “demonstration” model for the nation and a key to FDR’s economic recovery program: “The substitution of good housing for bad is a great task that will continue for several years and constantly create a tremendous demand for labor and materials that will stimulate nearly every line of industry and commerce.”
ER and the Washington Committee on Housing worked continually to achieve results, but their campaign made slow progress.
On 29 January 1934, journalist Melvin Chisum, field secretary of the National Negro Press Association, wrote ER a letter about the Mobilization for Human Needs Campaign, which ER chaired. This national drive to raise private funds for all relief and social work needs that the New Deal had not yet addressed proceeded “with almost no regard for the colored people in the more than two hundred cities where the work is advancing.” Chisum continued: “You might not know that the Negro is being almost utterly disregarded and I submit that these too, with all their misfortunes and poverty are human beings and I feel quite sure that your Ladyship will agree.”
Chisum had a specific suggestion that ER pursued for months: “A capable, intelligent Negro woman of fine training should be chosen to see to it that the Negro people… be not ignored and left out….”
ER wrote Frances Perkins: “Is there anything in the idea of having a colored woman in the Women’s Bureau, and would it be possible to get one appointed?”
Frances Perkins saw no reason for such an appointment at the time. Perkins feared it would only add to the “difficulty” of race relations and increase prejudice. Although the secretary of labor opposed wage differentials, and The Crisis referred to her as “kind, patient and unbiased,” Perkins tended to flee from the race question.
ER might have turned to Ickes, who pioneered an antidiscrimination policy in his department, but she understood his well-known aversion to strong women with authority.
During the first years of the New Deal, Harold Ickes’s Public Works Administration was the key agency for black employment in the construction and building trades. Ickes issued an order banning “discrimination on the basis of color or religion in employment for public works,” and he backed it up with a quota system whereby black workers in each community were to be hired both as skilled and unskilled labor in proportion to their population in the occupation census of 1930. Although local overseers ignored his order throughout the South and elsewhere, in many urban communities PWA came to stand for “Poppa’s Working Again.”
Both officially and symbolically, Ickes uprooted generations of racial custom: He refused to have a staff member in the Department of the Interior who did not share his progressive views on race, and he single-handedly ended one area of federal segregation by integrating the department’s cafeteria and serving some of the best food in town.
ER turned instead to Harry Hopkins, who rarely refused the First Lady’s requests. When she asked about the appointment of a black woman, he immediately asked her to name a candidate. ER knew the perfect candidate for the first woman to advance Negro interests: outspoken and inspiring educator and organizer Mary Jane McLeod Bethune.
ER had met Bethune when she hosted a sit-down dinner at the East 65th Street home for leaders of the National Council of Women in 1927. The only black woman in attendance, and then president of the National Association of Colored Women, Mary McLeod Bethune entered ER’s dining room, looked around at all the white women, so many of them from the South, and hesitated. Sara Delano Roosevelt noticed, and walked across the room:
That grand old lady took my arm and seated me to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt in the seat of honor! I can remember, too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride when they saw me seated at the center of that imposing gathering…. From that moment my heart went out to Mrs. James Roosevelt. I visited her at her home many times subsequently, and our friendship became one of the most treasured relationships of my life. As a result of my affection for her mother-in-law, my friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt soon ripened into a close and understanding mutual feeling.
Born on 10 July 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children to former slaves and descended on her mother’s side from “royal African blood,” Mary McLeod grew up picking cotton and working hard. Brilliant and bold, she excelled in school and was even as a child an acknowledged leader. At ten she was enrolled in the Trinity Presbyterian Mission School, where she was mentored by a “loving and dynamic” teacher, Emma Jane Wilson, who encouraged her to go to boarding school and arranged a scholarship to the Scotia Seminary, a “missionary outpost” in North Carolina. She graduated with honors in 1894 and received a scholarship to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to prepare for a career as a missionary in Africa. But the Presbyterian Mission Board refused to send an African-American missionary to Africa, so Mary McLeod became a teacher and missionary in her own country.
With her husband, Albert Bethune, she moved to Florida in 1899 and started her own school for girls, the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute at Daytona Beach in 1904. A singer and performer, she used her talents to raise money for her school. Because her husband resented her work, they separated. Alone with her young son, she toured the country telling and singing the story of her life.
Bethune’s school grew from six students, five girls and her son, to an outstanding institution on twenty acres of land, with eight buildings, a farm, and a hospital that she established for the black people of Daytona in 1911. Hundreds of affluent and needy girls received an excellent education at Daytona Normal, a college preparatory and teacher-training school which emphasized “Self-control, Self-respect, Self-reliance and Race Pride.” In 1929 she merged it with the Cookman Institute and became president of the coeducational Bethune-Cookman College.
Mary McLeod Bethune was also a suffragist committed to women’s rights. In 1920 she organized a black women’s voter-registration drive throughout Florida in the face of KKK terrorism. She worked closely with the National Association of Colored Women until 1935, when she helped found the National Council of Negro Women, an alliance of twenty-nine national organizations.
From their first meeting in 1927, ER was impressed by the vigor of Bethune’s feminism, her race pride, and her compelling magnetism.
When ER suggested that she come to Washington in October 1934, Mary McLeod Bethune began a dazzling chapter in American politics. Originally one of thirty-five members of the National Advisory Committee of the new National Youth Administration created in 1935, she became director of Negro affairs for the NYA. The acknowledged leader of the unofficial Black Cabinet, which met each week in her home on Friday evenings to discuss priorities and strategies, she worked to forge the new activist civil rights movement.
Mary McLeod Bethune set the pace: She supported the effort to free the nine youths judged guilty of rape in the Scottsboro case even after their accuser had recanted her story, bolstered the reputation of the Southern Tena
nt Farmers Union organized in 1934, and dramatized the dreadful condition of sharecroppers throughout the South. She also created a grassroots organization in Washington, the New Negro Alliance, that boycotted discriminatory local stores, which she personally picketed, carrying “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” posters. She supported the NAACP’s efforts on behalf of anti-lynching legislation, protested the poll tax, fought for women’s rights, and in every way sought to expand work and educational opportunities for black youth.
Called the “First Lady of the Struggle,” Mary McLeod Bethune gained authority because of her ability to speak frankly with ER. They met regularly, traveled and attended conferences together, and became personally close. ER measured the reality of her own racism by the development of her friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune. At first she hesitated to embrace and kiss her on meeting, as she ordinarily did when she greeted other friends. ER was aware of that fact; it bothered her. Then, one day, her hesitation was simply gone.
ER devised a routine to greet Mary McLeod Bethune whenever she was scheduled to arrive at the White House. To avoid any disrespect by guards or an untoward incident, the First Lady waited inside the foyer door, so she could see the walkway, then ran down to embrace her and take her arm as they strolled up the hill. ER’s public embrace was noticed and their friendship deemed a scandal by those who mourned any challenge to America’s cruel race customs—which included a surprising assortment of Washington insiders, members of Congress, and members of FDR’s personal staff.
In 1934, ER’s behavior publicly announced that the private quarters of the White House had been integrated. She had tea for the Hampton Institute choir, dinner with Mary McLeod Bethune, lunch on the patio with Walter White. Although the indignities of segregation were not yet on the national political agenda, several ceremonies upon which America’s “race etiquette” depended were defied at last.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 24