Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER was in Detroit the day Huey Long died. She had agreed to launch the Brewster Community slum clearance project, the first of Ickes’s national public works housing developments. Accompanied by her brother Hall, with whom she had lunched and toured the city earlier that morning, ER addressed a crowd of four thousand at City Hall, who cheered her words: “You see, housing is one of the things nearest my heart,” the key to every problem; it included education and health, crime prevention, and every possible social issue.

  ER agreed with PWA housing authority director Dwight Hoopingarner, who defined a slum as “an inhabited uninhabitable habitation.”

  The Brewster project comprised fifteen blocks of slums, to be replaced by “modern, low-cost apartments.” After her City Hall speech, “10,000 children and adults, the majority of whom were Negroes, awaited the ceremonies” at the site, where ER announced that $6 million was allocated for Detroit’s program, and then waved her handkerchief—whereupon a dynamite explosion caused dilapidated buildings to collapse “in a cloud of dust.”

  ER and Hall then toured the neighborhood, where “mounted police kept back thousands [who] pressed in to applaud.” ER paused in an alley slum and “stood beside a refuse heap” to give a radio interview. “I sometimes wonder whether heat or cold is more terrifying in these sections…. We must see these eyesores are wiped out….”

  Detroit’s newspapers were impressed by her gracious manner, her “characteristic” familial energy, and her costume, which honored the grateful, hopeful people of Detroit. ER dressed smartly for this gala event and the press detailed her ensemble: an attractive print silk suit, in soft shades of blue, green, and white on a background of dull rose, with bands of blue fox at the jacket sleeves, accompanied by gloves and shoes of dark blue kid, and a stylish blue hat. ER had received a large bouquet of roses and a corsage of gardenias at City Hall, which she carried with her to the ceremony, where a program of songs by Negro children preceded the demolition—the first ER had actually witnessed.

  Following that notable day, ER spent a quiet dinner hour with her brother, and they took the seven-o’clock train for Hyde Park. The many flowers given ER were sent to local hospitals and the German Protestant Orphans Home, at her request.

  But that was not the end of the story. A photographer had filmed ER smiling and leaning over to receive a bouquet of roses from a five-year-old Negro girl, Geraldine Walker, whose home was among those to be “rehabilitated.” There was another photograph of ER handing a single rose from her bouquet back to Geraldine Walker.

  Those photographs were twisted into hate propaganda for the 1936 election campaign. During the autumn of 1935, Georgia Woman’s World began an anti-administration campaign that emphasized and exaggerated ER’s relations with Negroes. It was a lurid campaign, that implied ER was un-American, actively Red. The photographs of ER and little Geraldine Walker were used to represent a crime against America’s most honored traditions. Indeed, the 1934 tactics employed against Upton Sinclair and EPIC were increasingly directed against ER personally and the New Deal generally during the 1935–36 campaign season.

  When asked about the photographs at her press conference, ER replied that they were taken with her permission and that she had no objection to their publication and distribution. She was proud to say that she and the young girl exchanged flowers during a reception for a Detroit housing project; and the two fine men in uniform who had accompanied her to her car were students at Howard University, where she had spoken.

  The crime was not that ER gave a flower to a child, or was polite to student escorts. The First Lady had crossed the color bar. Hers were irrevocable acts of defiance against the symbols of a national heritage no longer shared nor certain, but riven to the core.

  Felix Frankfurter wrote that he felt nothing but pride “that the First Lady of the nation” replied “in such a simple, straightforward, humane way…. I know it’s the very law of your being so to act—and that makes it all the more a source of pride for the Nation. ‘They know not what they do,’ these racebaiters and exploiters of unreason. And you render deep service to the enduring values of civilization by serving the nation as a historic example of simple humanity … in the highest places.”

  It is amazing how radical simple decency seems in a mean-spirited and bigoted time, when the rule of the Klan was more acceptable than handing a flower to a child. ER insisted on her right even as First Lady during the campaign season, to act spontaneously with grace and good manners and to do as much as possible to transform America’s most bitter customs. ER was among that small minority of antiracists during the 1930s who helped move America along a new, uncharted path.

  The week after Detroit, Walter White sent ER W.E.B. Du Bois’s recently published Black Reconstruction. White hoped she would read this “depiction of the background” of so many Southern and race problems. He also hoped she would invite “Roland Hayes, the great Negro tenor,” to the White House before he embarked on his tour of “France, Spain, Egypt and Italy.”

  ER promised to read Du Bois’s book “as soon as I can, and I will also try to get the President to read it.” She would arrange to invite Roland Hayes, and since “we usually have two artists at an entertainment,” hoped he would agree to sing with “the Hampton [Institute chorus] or some other group.”

  That week ER also decided to invite a black woman journalist to her press conferences. But Steve Early told her she must not: FDR had no black journalists at his press conferences, and she would create a terrible precedent that would “just make the President more vulnerable.” ER acquiesced, but the subject came up again, and again.

  Racism delayed, derailed, or minimized every effort toward decent housing ER championed. In Detroit, for example, in the spring of 1937, she received a note from her brother: “This is what happens when you withdraw your valuable interest—just nothing.” The Brewster project had been abandoned for a year. Some foundations were laid, but funding had dried up. It resembled a cemetery, a memorial “of a grand idea,” and was used as a playground. ER sent Ickes Hall’s note and asked: “Would you be good enough to tell me what has happened to the Detroit Slum Clearance Project….”

  Ickes’s staff explained: All work had stopped when the Washington PWA office rejected contractors’ bids as too high. There was some hope that work would resume by summer. But in the meantime the slum dwellers whose shacks had been rendered dust now lived in ever-worsening conditions. Detroit’s housing shortage had become “intolerable,” as everyone waited patiently upon Washington politicians who competed for dollars and counted dignity in dimes. ER was sickened that the hopeful citizens of Detroit, cast out by the wave of her fluttering handkerchief that had demolished their homes, were now in a worse situation.

  To stimulate a popular movement, ER again joined forces with New York’s most vigorous housing advocates, led by Robert Wagner and Mary Simkhovitch. In December 1935, ER helped launch the national campaign for slum clearance and affordable housing. She spoke at the National Public Housing Conference to celebrate the completion of “First Houses,” the first federal project actually built for 120 families on New York’s Lower East Side.

  Senator Wagner declared that more than 500,000 families “in this rich city barely lived in substandard homes, and one-third of the population of the country is housed in homes injurious to their health.”

  ER, Wagner, and other American “housers” now demanded that the United States join enlightened European nations and recognize housing as an aspect of public security. Mayor La Guardia referred to the opening of the Rikers Island penitentiary the same week, and emphasized the clear preference for government investment in “low-cost housing instead of high-cost prisons.”

  ER’s Arthurdale ally Herbert Bayard Swope presided at the conference and introduced ER as a “rugged individualist.” She “rejoiced in this beginning” of a nationwide effort to provide “decent living quarters,” presented greetings from the president, and said:

  I hope t
he day is dawning when private capital will devote itself to better and cheaper housing, but we know that the government will have to continue to build for the low-income groups. That is a departure for us, but other governments have done it.

  PWA representative A. R. Clas, responsible for New York’s project, assured the conference that the U.S. government was in the process of doing it: Fifty-seven projects to house 130,000 persons were under way. But everybody agreed new national legislation was needed. ER’s old friend University Settlement director Mary Simkhovitch was now president of the National Housing Conference and considered their meeting the beginning of a national crusade to ensure pleasant, affordable housing for every American.

  Everyone deserved his or her own home, ER had long advocated, and in a bold, unprecedented gesture the First Lady secured a home exclusively for herself in New York’s Greenwich Village.

  ER rented an apartment from Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read in their house at 20 East 11th Street, one block east of Fifth Avenue. On a quiet tree-lined street, it was a comfortable third-floor walkup in a typical brownstone building. One entered through a wood-frame door with an opaque glass etching of a Grecian-style woman bathing. It was her own hiding house away from her mother-in-law, the Secret Service, and official Washington duties.

  Unlike other First Ladies who broke down under the relentless pressure of their days, ER created a sanctuary where she had privacy and could entertain her very own company, in her own style, with her own things.

  Anna, excited by her mother’s New York City adventure, which she considered a major declaration of independence, asked Hick to join her in a new set of cocktail glasses for Christmas:

  Ma is really getting quite a kick out of her apartment and having people come there who will sit around and feel at home—and have a drink—on her. In a funny way I think she has always wanted to feel included in such parties, and so many old inhibitions have kept her from it until now.

  ER’s new apartment also seemed a declaration of independence from Hick, and their autumnal correspondence became even more strained. But when Hick canceled one of their few dates, ER was unusually annoyed:

  I could shake you for your letter of [19 September]. I’ve never even thought of being in Washington [without] you…. I know you felt badly & are tired, but I’d give an awful lot if you weren’t so sensitive. You are worse than Elinor Morgenthau & haven’t her reason!

  At the very end of a nine-page letter devoted to political matters, Hick replied:

  Dear, I don’t think I quite deserve that shaking you say you’d like to give me. I was only trying not to be selfish—to treat you as I would Jean, Howard, or any of my other friends!…

  Goodnight, and please don’t be cross with me. I’m not in most of my relationships with people, “worse than Elinor Morgenthau.” And sometime you may find that to be true in my relationship with you.

  ER had a very special relationship with Elinor Morgenthau. She was the First Lady’s riding companion; ER wrote to her as she did to Hick and Earl, regularly and intimately; they exchanged significant gifts, shared books of mutual interest, traveled together, worked together—particularly on skits for various parties, which were often dramatic and hilarious. They had fun together, and ER missed her when they were apart: “I wish you were here to ride with me. Missy tried it for three days and can’t stand the exercise and though I like the army groom he isn’t much company!”

  Although she was one of ER’s cherished friends and primary confidantes, Elinor Morgenthau always felt just outside the magic circle. She was not one of the four Val-Kill partners, and her relations with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman were particularly strained because she felt their anti-Semitic bias. She had little to do with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, but even during their brief encounters must have felt their disdain. Even years later, Esther Lape’s references to Elinor Morgenthau were unkind. She was “very insistent” on her friendship with ER, Lape recalled, and was a clumsy rider: “You had to feed Elinor M into her saddle like a bag.” Once she “dropped her riding crop, and ER asked, ‘Esther won’t you get it for her?’”

  As a result, Elinor Morgenthau often felt lonely and unwelcome among ER’s other friends. When Hick felt the same way, ER urged her to believe she did not have Morgenthau’s reasons for such sensitivity.

  From Cleveland, trying hard not to feel isolated, and determined not to sound like Elinor Morgenthau, Hick wrote a peppery political report. It was the kind of “long and explosive” letter that pleased ER and had attracted her to Hick in the first place:

  Well, the Cardinal is in town. And Al Smith. And, I suppose, Jim Farley, who is, according to the dope I hear, having a confab with Governor Davey between masses. They are all here for the Eucharistic Congress, in case you don’t know….

  God, but that sap, [Governor] Davey, has made a mess of things! Buzzie could run for Governor of this state and give him the trimming of his life.

  Hick’s letter detailed evidence of corruption and sleazy politics, worth a grand jury investigation. Hick was told by an AP reporter friend: “Just seeing Davey in Washington a few weeks ago apparently did the President a lot of harm….”

  In addition to the corruption, Hick found WPA “a mess.” Whereas 200,000 men were supposed to be working, only 26,000 were in fact working.

  In the meantime relief has been cut so that in October in Cleveland food allowances will be 25 percent below what they were in August, no rents will be paid, no clothing issued—and teachers are reporting that children are showing up at school without any underwear—and there’ll be fuel only for cooking. Tonight, September 23d, it’s so cold in Cleveland that I have the heat on in my room. They are expecting riots in Cleveland next month, Madame….

  Hick now identified with the people on relief, struggling and starving as they confronted New Deal inefficiencies:

  For, damn it dear, that’s just what we are—-and damned inefficient. Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Ickes fighting for power, Mr. Hopkins’ lieutenants, ambitious to make careers out of relief…. Delay. Confusion. No organized, workable plan…. I rather hope they do riot!

  The situation in Toledo was even worse:

  Men coming around to the WPA office actually weeping and begging—“For God’s sake, when are you going to put me to work?” Everybody terribly worried. Darling, it is so hard even for me not to feel a little bitter at the “big shots” these days. The President, Ickes, Harry Hopkins, all well fed, well clothed, warm, and comfortable, complacently starting off on a vacation. While out here in places like Cleveland and Toledo thousands of people aren’t getting enough to eat, are facing eviction, begging for little jobs at a “security wage” that none of us could live on…. Oh, I know it’s just human nature, and that it happens all the time in private industry…. But, dear lady, we are dealing with the welfare of millions of helpless people….

  Well, there isn’t any use in my raving on any more.

  Goodnight, dear, wherever you are. I feel a good deal as though I were shouting into space!

  ER and Tommy were with FDR, Hopkins, and Ickes to tour the West transformed forever by New Deal projects. From the Boulder Dam site, ER wrote: “The first glimpse of the newly created lake which will eventually be one hundred and fifteen miles long, surrounded by colorful hills, was a sight never to be forgotten.” Her Western sojourn gave her a new “appreciation of the size and majesty of these United States”: “We crossed the Colorado River to look from both sides at this marvelous dam,” so filled with the promise of water, flood control, and the creation of unlimited and inexpensive power.

  ER and Hopkins were taken to the base of the dam in a bucket, to “get even a better realization of its heights.” They walked about and examined the area “where the giant turbines” were to be installed. It was a thrilling sight, and ER left Colorado convinced that the New Deal permanently contributed to the well-being of America: new resources, national parks and hiking trails, waterways and hydroelectric power. The changes wer
e profound, and majestic.

  The presidential train went on to California, where FDR had “a marvelous reception.” As did ER, who spoke at the Hollywood Bowl for the Mobilization of Human Needs. The stadium was packed and enthusiastic, although her “voice behaved badly.”

  ER wrote Hick that FDR “finished in a blaze of glory” and “got off happily and safely” for his fishing cruise with Ickes and Hopkins. She questioned FDR’s wisdom in bringing the two warring New Dealers together in such a tight space: “I don’t think anything will be accomplished and I doubt if anyone except FDR has a good time but this is not my trip!”

  Actually the cruise was remarkably healing. Ickes enjoyed his companions, and ended his resignation fantasies. He was particularly awed by FDR’s courage, especially when he was “transhipped” from the Houston to his little fishing boat in rough weather: “Never once did he act self-conscious; on no occasion did he seem to be nervous or irritated. Cheerfully he submitted to being wheeled up and down the special ramps … to being carried up and down like a helpless child when he went fishing.” And with his powerful arms and shoulder muscles, he brought in huge fish—after hours of determined battle.

  Ickes especially appreciated FDR’s military aide, Colonel Edwin Martin (Pa) Watson, the man who ensured FDR’s good cheer: Watson “simply bubbles with good humor and one cannot feel grouchy or dispirited” in his company. But the real surprise was companionable Harry Hopkins, “with his easy manners and keen wit.”

  As they departed, ER’s party flew over and circled FDR’s cruiser “to say goodbye again.” It had been a splendid Western trip, and it vigorously launched the campaign season.

  While FDR cruised, ER spent most of October settling into her new apartment. She was euphoric. The simple joy and complex excitement that occurs when one claims a new space for the first time was enhanced by the fact that this move was long overdue. ER claimed her first private space during the week of her fifty-first birthday. Undoubtedly protected by her women’s press corps, her privacy was preserved. She and Hick spent one happy day together before Hick resumed her travels for WPA.