Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER considered curiosity “a fault” only when limited to “idle gossip” used to demean and undermine people. She believed in privacy, and the right of even the most public figure to live a private life: “Every human soul has its own secrets and its own right to keep them buried if it wishes.”

  But every human contact depended on curiosity, an open and free exploratory mind. There were rich people, ER wrote, who could not imagine how poor people lived, and did not care to know: When she took her own students to see tenements in order to inform them about the need for public health, some of their parents worried about contagious diseases. They failed to realize that residents of these communities visited their own Park Avenue homes every day, as messengers, servants, and workers.

  Her own curiosity led her to contemplate the night sky:

  I often wonder, as I look at the stars … if someday we will find a way to communicate and travel from one to the other. I am told that the stars are millions and millions of miles away, though sometimes they look so near, but it seems to me, at times, to be almost as hard for people who have no curiosity to bridge the gap from one human being to another….

  ER’s goal was to create a groundswell of interest in world events among ordinary people who would seek to influence policy, who would pressure FDR and his State Department advisers.

  The U.S. response to Mussolini had been at first benign, if not supportive. FDR appointed his friend Breckenridge Long, an affluent Democratic Party loyalist, ambassador to Italy. Long initially rhapsodized about the achievements of Mussolini’s new “corporate state.” His dispatches from Rome compared fascism favorably with the New Deal: “Italy today is the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formulation of the Constitution 150 years ago.” Mussolini “is one of the most remarkable persons … And they are doing a unique work in an original manner, so I am enjoying it all.”

  A son of the old South (the Longs of North Carolina, the Breckenridges of Kentucky), Long was dazzled by Italy’s new “sanitary conditions”:

  The cities have changed…. The streets are clean. The people are well dressed…. The country roads are well paved and clean. The farms are all teeming with people, just now reaping wheat by hand. The country seems as if it had been manicured every morning. The whole temper and attitude of the people have changed. They all seem happy. They all seem busy…. They are spending large sums on public works…. Roads have not only been built but they are being carefully attended to and swept clean…. Many men are in uniform. The Fascisti in their black shirts are apparent in every community. They are dapper and well dressed and stand up straight and lend an atmosphere of individuality and importance to their surroundings…. The trains are punctual, well-equipped, and fast….

  During the summer of 1933, Italy had moved to devour Albania—and Long counseled neutrality: “I think we are entirely justified in playing the game with Italy in Albania.”

  But when Italy moved into Ethiopia in February 1935, Long regarded Mussolini’s militarism with concern and urged FDR to pay more attention to international matters: “I think we must contemplate that Europe will be at war within two years,” and make “our plans for the future.”

  FDR called Long a pessimist, but Long insisted he was merely a realist. By September 1935, Long condemned the Fascisti: They were “deliberate, determined, obdurate, ruthless, and vicious.”

  According to Ickes’s secret diary, FDR’s cabinet began to recognize the seriousness of the situation on 27 August 1935, the same day ER wrote to Elinor Morgenthau. According to Ickes, FDR introduced the subject with levity:

  Some interest is being shown at Cabinet meetings these days in the Italian-Ethiopian situation. The President said recently that the Italian army of occupation places most of its orders for supplies in the British colony of Kenya and that recently the first item on a large order that went to the suppliers in Kenya was for five hundred women of easy virtue. War is certainly a great civilizing influence.

  ER was disturbed by America’s inaction concerning Italy’s aggression and now joined Hick’s fantasy of new work as a war correspondent: “I think the war idea is a good one … I’ll be tempted to join you if war comes in some capacity,” provided FDR did not get reelected, “but I think he will by a small margin.”

  On 31 August, ER wrote Hick: “That Ethiopian development does put some questions up to us, doesn’t it?” By the 20th of September she noted that FDR “thinks war in Europe is very near but I still hope Mussolini will come to his senses.”

  On 3 October 1935, without a declaration of war, Mussolini’s tanks invaded Ethiopia. The League of Nations condemned the invasion, and on 11 October “economic sanctions” were imposed. But steel, iron, coal, petroleum, gasoline were unmentioned; trade continued and the League’s rhetorical sanctions were meaningless.

  Breckenridge Long counseled absolute neutrality for the United States. Covertly, England and France supported Mussolini’s drive into Ethiopia, abandoning the principles of the League. Ethiopia, a League member, had formally appealed for protection of its sovereignty as early as 3 January 1935, and then again on 17 March. “Watchful waiting” involved the League’s permission for Italy’s use of the Suez Canal to transport arms, supplies, and troops. Italy mobilized, and was ready to advance from its colony in Eritrea as soon as the rainy season ended. England and. France conducted secret negotiations that doomed the principle of collective security.

  Perhaps ER slipped George Padmore’s Crisis editorial into FDR’s basket: “Where profits are concerned there is no morality among imperialists.” And then there was the race factor: Who disagreed with Mussolini’s expression of contempt over Ethiopia’s membership in the League? What official spoke up when Mussolini asked a French interviewer: “Has the League of Nations become the tribunal before which all the Negroes and uncivilised peoples, all the world’s savages, can bring the great nations which have revolutionised and transformed humanity?”

  Even Winston Churchill, who alone among English leaders had opposed the Anglo-German naval treaty, who alone warned against German rearmament and the Nazi menace throughout 1935, was uncertain about Ethiopia: “a wild land of tyranny, slavery, and tribal war,” an unequal, unworthy “member of a league of civilized nations.” Moreover, in “the fearful struggle against rearming Nazi Germany … I was most reluctant to see Italy estranged.” Nevertheless, Churchill feared that if the League collapsed, there would be no deterrent “to German aggression,” and urged England to defend the sanctity of the League covenant “even to the point of war.” But he was, again, virtually alone.

  England and France were concerned about their own African imperial interests, which Mussolini promised not to disturb. Since England and France, as members of the League, were pledged to defend Ethiopia, their failure to act signaled the death of collective security, the death of the League. When the United States considered its own boycott, but also excluded oil, Italy was given the means to pursue its war to victory—entirely unimpeded.

  On 18 June, England had signed a naval pact with Germany in response to France’s 2 May 1935 pact with the Soviet Union. The world seemed now to teeter on the brink of disaster. Competitive nationalism ruled the waves, and washed ashore to swamp the last independent African nation.

  After seven months of brutal warfare, of poison gases, and aerial bombardment, Emperor Haile Selassie made his final appeal to the League:

  Do the peoples of the world not yet realise that by fighting on until the bitter end I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people, but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security? Are they too blind to see that I have my responsibilities to the whole of humanity to face? I must hold on until my tardy allies appear. And if they never come, then I say prophetically and without bitterness, “the West will perish.”

  England’s appeasement policy was self-interested: To counter Mussolini in Africa would be to encourage the growing anti-imperialist movements underway
in Asia and Africa, and to bolster as well antifascist groups that were perceived as overwhelmingly radical or communist. England, the Soviet Union, and the United States continued to sell oil to Italy throughout the war.

  Few diplomatic betrayals were as crude as the Hoare-Laval agreement, whereby Britain, and France acceded to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, gracing it with the mantle of “territorial concessions” agreed to by statesmen in concert united, rather than condemned as the first major war of fascist aggression.*

  It was a bitter time for peace advocates. On 2 May 1936, after months of atrocities and the use of weapons forbidden by Geneva agreements, Haile Selassie left Addis Ababa. Subsequently, ER received an urgent letter from a regular correspondent in London:

  May I draw your attention to the terrible state of things in Abyssinia. The cruel Italian occupation goes on with the help of poison gas and bombs used on a defenseless people. But the worst feature of all is the vile treatment of women by the bestial Italian soldiery. Reports have filtered through to the Ethiopian Legation in London that no woman is safe in her house & that any Italian soldier has the right to enter any house & abuse the wife, mother or daughter & the husband, if he resists, is put in gaol.

  I think the women of the world should rise in protest against this vile treatment of their Ethiopian sisters. You, as the wife of the President, could do much. I beg you to raise your voice on their behalf….

  Given FDR’s isolationist policy, there was nothing ER could do. She wrote her daughter prophetically: Even if the Italians won, they would be unable to colonize the area.

  Haile Selassie was also prophetic: Ethiopia was a prelude. And America remained, in Churchill’s words, “remote and indifferent.” In the United States, the most consistent coverage of Ethiopia appeared in The Crisis, which editorialized in September 1936:

  When the League failed Ethiopia it failed the world…. A weak country like Ethiopia should not have appealed in vain to the rest of the civilized world when she had been subjected to wanton aggression.

  The betrayal of Ethiopia, the growing threat of fascist militarism, segregated social security, the future of WPA and NYA, consistently derided as wasteful and communist, created a vast sense of disappointment in the Negro community. Walter White feared the growing bitterness among Negro leaders because of “the generally wretched conditions in which so many Negroes find themselves.”

  In September, White appealed to the First Lady to help arrange an urgent conference with “a small and carefully selected committee to discuss confidentially and frankly the situation with regard to the Negro.” The NAACP board promised “no publicity … either before or after … in order that there might be frank discussion” between the president, White, Joel Spingarn, James Weldon Johnson, and several others on immediate matters of national and international concern.

  ER promised to try to arrange a conference after FDR returned from his Pacific cruise at the end of October. Before that, she was told, the president “has every minute taken.” FDR’s upcoming Western tour and Pacific cruise were to be in part a healing conference between the feuding titans of his work relief programs, Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins. Also FDR hoped the fishing and relaxation would benefit Ickes, recently widowed and much distressed.

  ER and Ickes were the two people close to FDR who cared profoundly about race issues, but they were only occasionally allied. Part of the problem between them was ER’s friendship with his wife Anna Wilmarth Ickes and Ickes’s feelings about outspoken women—who reminded him of his wife. According to Ickes’s biographer, Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Harold and Anna were in “a power struggle” throughout their twenty-five-year marriage. Moreover, until his appointment to FDR’s cabinet, Anna was the one with the power.

  Harold was a poor boy married to a rich and domineering woman. T. H. Watkins described their marriage as “an emotional charnel house,” marked by uncontrolled tempers, jealousy, and cruelty. He was a womanizer; she was a scold. She was cold; he was colder. “More than once she broke my glasses.” He denied he ever struck her; he just did whatever he needed to do to subdue her, whereupon “her hysterics” subsided and she lapsed into a prolonged “semi-cataleptic” state. By the 1930s they lived apart, but kept up appearances.

  On the night of 17 November 1933, Anna Ickes attended her first White House dinner for the cabinet and returned with Harold, contented. He used the warmth in the room to announce he loved another. Harold wrote in his journal that he “really felt sorry for Anna that night. It was a blow between the eyes.” She tried to kill herself with pills, but changed her mind and called the doctor. Their scenes worsened. Publicly a dutiful and devoted wife, she lived mostly in Illinois, where she served in the state legislature from 1928 to 1934, and New Mexico, where she continued her studies of the Pueblo, Taos, and Navajo peoples.

  Then, on Saturday night, 31 August 1935, Ickes, alone in his office, was surprised to see one of his staff walk in looking grim and upset. Anna had been in a car accident in Santa Fe, returning from a tour of the Taos Pueblo with journalist Genevieve (Genno) Forbes Herrick, with whom Anna had spent the month of August; a member of the Turkish embassy, Ibrahim Seyfullah; and her driver, Frank Allen. Their car was hit and overturned. Anna was dead; the others were expected to recover.

  ER and several cabinet members attended Anna’s funeral in Winnetka on Tuesday, 3 September. Ickes wrote that he felt nothing; “my feelings were absolutely dead.”

  We can only imagine ER’s own feelings during that funeral, as she considered yet another Washington wife who suffered grief. Since Ickes had confided in Louis Howe when his affair was about to create a public scandal, there is no doubt that ER knew many of the details of their last turbulent years. It had become a subject of considerable gossip, because Harold’s lover and her fiancé were both on his payroll and the fiancé, an irate fellow who sought revenge, sent anonymous letters threatening to go to the press. In dread, Harold turned to Louis Howe, who initiated a Secret Service investigation. Moreover, Harold, in love with a much younger woman, behaved with adolescent indiscretion and admitted: “It’s funny what sex can do to a man.”

  As ER contemplated the passing of a public-spirited reformer and scholar whose private life was marked by pain and misery, she worried too about her friend Genno Herrick, who remained in critical condition in the hospital. One of the newspaperwomen with whom ER was closest, Herrick was now a popular syndicated columnist who had quit her job as a “front page girl” for the Chicago Tribune because she did not want to write anti-Roosevelt stories for her Republican publisher.

  Three years later, when Ickes decided to marry Anna’s friend Jane Dahlman, ER wrote her daughter: “I’m glad you like Jane Ickes, but I am sorry for her.” In another letter ER noted: “I don’t find Harold Ickes attractive, but I think he is honest in his belief in the New Deal…:”

  ER left Winnetka for Hyde Park and signed a contract for another series of articles with her new agent, George Bye, She wrote Hick: “Will I ever have any leisure I wonder? I haven’t since I was married!” ER continued to use her relentless schedule to guard against hurt or upset feelings: “Mama is probably furious with me but I’m so busy I don’t care!”

  ER also agreed to write a daily column to be syndicated six days a week to scores of newspapers nationally. Hick had initially suggested that every woman in America would be interested in the details of ER’s life. ER’s new column, “My Day,” would begin in January 1936.

  Although ER had edited and written monthly columns for the Women’s Democratic News since 1925, and also a range of random articles for various publications, she decided now to become a professional writer and a syndicated columnist. She wanted, and received, Hick’s advice and editorial commentary. Their daily September correspondence was dominated by notes for the revision of ER’s work and letters of gratitude for Hick’s help. Hick read and rewrote patiently and generously, but their role reversal made her weary and grumpy. She destroyed most of her letters written during
this period. ER wrote:

  I think I know what you mean about structure, it comes from not [thinking] through from the start and building up step by step and I think I can do that better. It is muddy thinking. I’ll be glad to have your analysis but I hate you to do it when you are so tired.

  ER never paused to consider that her great friend was depressed about this turnaround in their lives.

  Hick and Louis Howe together helped ER develop a more journalistic style, and her writing gave her a new sense of confidence.

  Dearest, you can be as tough as you like in your criticisms…. I want to do good work and I want the help which you can give me, no one else is half as good as a critic and I’m very grateful to you. And don’t mind at all!

  On 8 September 1935, Huey Long was shot. Hick, on the road in Indiana, wrote ER:

  Well, Madame, what do you make of the Long business? I’ve been thinking today about all the people who must be secretly hoping he’ll die, but who would hate to admit it even to themselves! Boy, it creates an interesting situation!… But if Huey dies, he’ll be a martyr.

  Thirty hours later, at 4:06 A.M., Tuesday, 10 September, Huey Long died—forever a martyr to the lost cause of “Every Man a King.” FDR’s potentially most formidable opponent in the 1936 campaign—the man Jim Farley predicted would take millions of popular votes away from Roosevelt—was gone.

  Hick also sent good news from Indiana: Everyone supported FDR. “Farmers. Prosperous as Hell. And, on the whole, strong for the President. Sentiment out here much, much better than in the East.” A fabulous sunset made Hick feel wistful: “I wonder if the time will ever come when I’ll not long for you when I see a beautiful sunset, or hear music that stirs me.”