Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  For the Roosevelts in 1936, all international events were eclipsed by the U.S. election campaign—which mandated even more silence.

  *In the autumn of 1933, debts owed to the United States, in principal and not counting interest payments (which FDR insisted the Soviets pay at 7 percent), included: France, $3.9 billion; Great Britain, $4.5 billion; Italy, $2 billion; Russia, $337 million. Because of the worldwide Depression and Germany’s initial default, Allied payments were not made (except by Finland), and each country sought an official reduction of their war debt. Britain, for example, demanded an 80 percent reduction. ER believed all wartime debts should be forgiven, and wrote a column for the Women’s Democratic News to explain her conviction. After 1934 no serious effort to collect the debts was made, although the issue continued to encourage U.S. isolationism.

  *William Dodd’s opposition to Nazism disturbed his State Department colleagues. They considered his reports excessive, and useless. Moreover, he had been told by FDR upon leaving for Berlin that the Jewish issue “was not a government affair” and the United States could “do nothing” about it. Bullitt waged a relentless campaign to have Dodd replaced by someone who could get along with Hitler.

  *In 1927 Ford repudiated his campaign, and ceased his publications. On 7 January 1942 he publicly apologized to “my fellow citizens of Jewish faith,” and condemned “hate-mongering.”

  *The week of ER’s correspondence with Louise Wise, on 23 November, she presented the American Hebrew Medal to Carrie Chapman Catt for the promotion of better understanding between Christians and Jews in the United States. ER was proud to present the medal to her mentor, the first woman to receive the award. But she did not mention Catt’s petition of nine thousand Christian women to protest “the shocking German program against the Jews,” celebrated by other speakers. Nor, during her 28 February address at the Commodore did ER refer to Catt’s committee of appeal to FDR to ease immigration restrictions to allow sanctuary for those suffering persecution. According to The New York Times: “The appeal pointed out that the legal German immigration quota was 25,957, but that fewer than 600 had been admitted since last July.” U.S. consulates were rigidly enforcing a 1930 order that required definite proof an alien would not become a “public charge” and add to unemployment. Catt’s appeal was supported by Jane Addams, Mary Dreier, Lillian Wald, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, and many others close to ER.

  17: Red Scare

  and Campaign Strategies, 1936

  Every decision ER made in 1936 was related to her husband’s campaign for reelection. With the New Deal barely under way, the nation was bitterly divided. In the South, voting remained limited by poll taxes and tradition to propertied white men. Conservative businessmen joined with Southern racialists and a group of Democrats who personally hated FDR to stop the democratization of America. In August 1934 they chartered the Liberty League to end “Red” rule and kill the burgeoning labor and civil rights movements.

  Fueled by rhetorical vitriol led by Hearst, who promised to excommunicate the “imported, autocratic, Asiatic Socialist party of Karl Marx and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Liberty Leaguers represented a peculiar bipartisan spectrum. Various du Ponts, major industrialists, and oil barons were joined by former Democrat luminaries—including 1924 Presidential candidate John W. Davis; John J. Raskob, once Democratic Committee chair; and Al Smith, now FDR’s most bitter enemy. In January, they declared war.

  With unlimited campaign funds for 1936, their new Red Scare collected steam and threatened everything ER most cared about. A Democratic future depended on her husband’s reelection. She would do nothing to tempt one vote away from him. She was convinced, however, that victory depended on exciting the interests of African-Americans, women, and labor unionists.

  Politically, the first crisis ER confronted in 1936 involved another kind of silence—censorship in the federal arts program. Hallie Flanagan and Elmer Rice, director of New York’s theater project, had created “the Living Newspaper”—a brilliant form employing scores of actors and dramatizing the news without expensive scenery, just “light, music, movement.” Their first New York production was to be Ethiopia, chosen in part because an operatic company from Africa was stranded in the United States and on relief. Flanagan decided to use the members of the company as drummers and chorus “in the courtyard of Haile Selassie.” The Newspaper Guild participated in the show, and the facts were accurate. “There was no caricature; the characterizations and quotations were as literal as we could make them.”

  To dramatize Mussolini’s invasion, Haile Selassie’s resistance, and the League of Nations’ sacrifice of the struggling African country was radical enough. But then they requested permission to use one of FDR’s broadcasts, and unleashed “a crisis which threatened to end the whole idea of the living newspaper.” Joseph Baker at WPA and Steve Early objected to a government production entering dangerous international waters. On 18 January, Baker wrote Flanagan: “No issue of the living newspaper shall contain” any reference to international officials or issues without prior approval “in advance by the Department of State.” Since prior approval hampered “timeliness,” essential to the Living Newspaper, Ethiopia was not to go up “with the present script.”

  Flanagan appealed to ER: “I have the gravest fears as to the storm of criticism which will result if this is closed. Schools, universities and newspapers will read it as a political move…. Mr. Rice will probably resign and this also is very serious….”

  ER appealed to FDR, spoke with Early, and wrote to Baker: The president “feels that [Ethiopia] should not be given up, but that some adjustment should be made. No one impersonating a ruler or a cabinet officer should actually appear on the stage. The words could be quoted….”

  FDR’s compromise was not enough. The WPA banned Ethiopia. Elmer Rice cried censorship, and told Baker if it was banned he would resign. Baker thereupon took out a typed letter of resignation ready for Rice’s signature. Flanagan was furious, and sent Rice’s press statement to ER: He would not remain “the servant of a government which plays the shabby game of partisan politics at the expense of freedom and the principles of democracy.”

  Ethiopia was banned largely for political reasons. The decision occurred after Rice announced the Living Newspaper’s future productions, including plays on “the handling of relief, and conditions in the South.” ER demanded an explanation from Aubrey Williams—who wrote ER that Rice and Flanagan planned to produce works on “Soviet Russia, the Scottsboro Case, Sharecroppers, etc…. only those things which are highly controversial and which immediately bring to the fore opponents … of this sort of activity on the part of the Federal Government.” Harry Hopkins had decided to terminate this project, and understood that Rice would resign.

  In this election year, Baker assured Southern congressmen, no federal funds would support the Living Newspaper on sharecroppers. Only “standard plays the public wants” would be performed. Immediately, a “traveling company” went South “with a play called Jefferson Davis.”

  Flanagan remained convinced that Hopkins still supported uncensored theater, and she hired Rice’s assistant Philip Barber to head the New York project, and the next Living Newspaper controversy: Triple-A, a play to protest the Supreme Court’s January decision that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was unconstitutional.

  Although the play went beyond the Supreme Court’s attacks against the New Deal and included farmer-worker unity to combat excessive profits, it was not censored. It was powerful and emotional; audiences filled the theater night after night. Poverty and corruption, politics and struggle were in the air. Hearst and Republicans condemned “U.S. Dollars for Pink Plays.”

  ER supported Flanagan, and WPA pressure momentarily eased. The theater thrived, twenty plays were in rehearsal, and Flanagan was grateful for the First Lady’s interventions: “Everything is clearing up so splendidly: Mr. Baker is giving me an administrative assistant, sorely needed; and in many other ways I notice a relea
se from tensions which is, I am sure, due to your good offices.”

  But in 1936, ER set theatrical limits. The Chicago revue O’ Say Can You Sing planned to include a sketch of the First Lady. Flanagan asked for ER’s approval, and assured her it was done in a spirit of “great admiration.” A minute-by-minute account of her typical day, it recalled Time’s rendition of Eleanor Everywhere:

  Flash! The wife of the President was an unexpected visitor at one of the Federal Theatre Productions in Chicago last night. Although she claimed she was traveling incognito, the audience recognized her the minute she got up on her seat in the middle of a number and started making a speech on the plight of our coal miners….

  We take you now to the White House boudoir where we see her in the act of preparing her daily [column]….

  The scene is set between Mrs. President and her secretary, “Miss Givens.”

  Mrs. President:… At 7:30 A.M.—Arose/ 7:31—Bathed/ 7:32—breakfasted/ 7:33—Received a delegation of coal miners from Scranton and shook hands with each one personally/ 7:34—Took another bath/ 7:35—Received a long distance call from the senior class president at Vassar, inviting me to lead the annual daisy chain/ 7:36—Received miners from Albuquerque and shook hands with each miner/ 7:37—Took another bath/ 7:38—Relaxed for 60 seconds puttering in the White House garden….

  That takes us to 7:42 and a quarter—found myself with three-quarters of a minute to spare so I caught up with contemporary literature by reading Anthony Adverse! … 7:43 Finished Anthony Adverse and realized that I had spent eleven minutes in the White House. Too long! I felt hemmed in! … My Vanderlust gripped me—I went to Alaska!

  Secretary: By Plane?

  Mrs. President: No, Dog Sled! I arrived at the mines all covered with slush. … At 12:01 I shook hands with all the miners. … at 12:03—I felt homesick so I took a rocket back to the United States/12:04—… My, how good it was to see … our wonderful land with its mountains, rivers, lakes and those quaint little Republicans dotting the countryside….

  At 12:05—I was catapulted to a CCC Camp in Bear Mountain and spent two minutes preserving our forests with the boys…. At 12:07—Back in Washington—Miss Givens, how did I get back to Washington?

  Secretary: I believe you were shot from a cannon. Then you read your fan mail.

  Mrs. President: Oh yes!… Quite amusing!… I received an offer from the Olympic Committee to represent America in the hop, skip, and jump/ At 12:08—I felt a speech coming on concerning the hard coal problem. So I rounded up some miners and made it/ At 12:09—I took a bath, didn’t I?

  Secretary: No, Mrs. President, you had yourself dry-cleaned!

  Mrs. President: Oh yes! No water! The Drought! / Between 12:10 and 7:00 P.M. I amused myself by laying four corner-stones, founding two day nurseries—and one night school. And…

  It went on into the night, even into her busy dreams. ER returned the play with her two-word rejection scrawled atop the page: “Refused Permission!”

  Although ER censored this play for political reasons, she remained enthusiastic about the arts program. Indeed, her detailed involvement was almost on a par with her commitment to Arthurdale and affordable housing. On 19 February, for example, she wrote Baker:

  When in New York … I heard there was much complaint because the money for wages for the actors and actresses … was not coming through. Will you check on it? Also, there is a great deal of comment [that] rehearsals were taking so long. …

  By the end of February 1936, WPA employed 4,300 artists. Schools, hospitals, museums, armories, airports, public buildings had received paintings, murals, sculptures, prints. In the South, “experimental demonstration galleries” became the area’s first public galleries and regional museums; thousands of community centers provided leisure programs, including art classes for children and adults. There were musical groups, chorales, bands, and orchestras founded across the country. ER considered it all thrilling, heartening, the essence of New Deal community-building.

  During the 1930s, an alarming movement to get women out of the workplace, to limit them to marriage and motherhood, to brand them responsible for unemployment, family tensions, and all wickedness intensified. Distressed by the persistent attacks against women, which a surprising spectrum of Democrats participated in during the campaign season, ER became increasingly forceful in her defense of every woman’s right to choose her life’s direction.

  When John Studebaker invited ER to select any topic for a Washington Town Hall Forum, which he chaired, she quickly suggested women and work, and named her panel: Fannie Hurst, George Creel, Josephine Roche. For ninety minutes on Sunday, 2 February, ER spoke candidly to an overflow audience of fifteen hundred:

  There is something inherently good for every human being in work. Only through work can a woman fulfill her obligation to herself and to the world and justify her existence….

  It is the right of any woman who wants to work to do so.

  Her speech lasted forty minutes; then, “skillfully and good-naturedly,” she responded to a challenging, though largely agreeable, panel and audience:

  Isn’t it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard; did anybody make a fuss about it until they began to be paid for their work?

  Since widows and spinsters are now regarded as America’s greatest menace, should not they be allowed to fight our future wars? In such case, of course, men should not insist upon the sole right to declare war….

  ER received countless letters of protest on this issue, which she patiently answered: “I am afraid that your attitude towards women is completely foreign to my more modern ideas….”

  Issues of women and work remained high on ER’s agenda. In meetings with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other organizations of business and professional women, ER championed equal protection laws for women and men, eight-hour days for women and men, and equal pay for equal work.

  Working women made many contributions, and ER used every opportunity to celebrate them. She introduced Mary Breckenridge at a White House reception for women, on 6 February: Breckenridge directed the “Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, which is carried on by nurses on horseback [who presided over] small clinics dotted here and there in the mountains.”

  On 18 March, ER broadcast with Chad Ormond Williams for the ninth annual celebration of “National Business Women’s Week” as “the first business and professional woman to be mistress” of the White House. There were sixty thousand members of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, and eleven million working women in the United States. ER called upon that vast constituency to promote the idea of an important new agency the nation needed: a federal department of “education, the arts, social welfare, and health.” Charl Williams reminded the broadcast audience that ER had called for such a department, and federal aid to education, as early as 1924—when she chaired the Democratic Party’s first women’s platform committee.

  The year 1936 opened with significant upset in ER’s private life. Louis Howe was dying, and her relationship with Lorena Hickok became ever more uneasy. Although she still relied on Hick for advice on both public and family matters, she had now virtually no leisure time to offer her.

  As the New Year celebrations wound down, ER confided in Hick that she was “very sad” to see her children go off to their own homes and would especially miss the comings and goings of her grandchildren. She had no intention of growing “too dependent” on them, “for as you have so often said, I must let go!”—but they did create a jolly atmosphere.

  Time with Hick was now rarely jolly. She arrived on 7 January for a week, and ER wrote the day she left: “Darling, you were low and I know that in some way I hurt and I am sorry and I wish I had not but all I can say is, I really love you.”

  Unlike Tommy or Louis Howe, Hick could not simply fold herself into ER’s life, or White House activities. For years Hick had kept her own social life to a minimum to be available to ER, whenever she had a minute or
Jan evening to spare. Now Hick returned to the company of her New York friends. Although ER would have been pleased to join Hick and her friends, mostly newspaper people and writers, Hick discouraged her presence.

  ER seemed, at first, confused:

  Hick darling. It was nice to get your letter and hear your voice last night, but I hardly know what to do. Would you rather I did not try to see you this week-end since you have friends and other plans? I’ll call you anyway and you know I won’t feel hurt if it complicates life or if it makes it harder just to have to see me in a crowd. If it does I’ll just write and telephone and we’ll forget I’m in New York!

  Hick was torn, and their visit was awkward. ER wrote: “It was good to see you this morning being leisurely with Newky [Helen Newcomb] and I do hope the next few weeks bring you many happy times dear.”

  Each time Hick drew away, determined to regain some independence, ER responded by pulling her back. For years, ER had kept Hick’s bank books and occasionally paid her bills. When Hick decided to reclaim control of her finances, ER insisted she continue as caretaker of her accounts so that Hick would not overspend or bounce checks. Their lives remained interwoven, and ER was pleased to report: “You have in the savings $255.43.”

  As January unfolded, Hick became more aggressive about her own needs.

  I rather hope that, if you are going to call, you will call tonight. Since I’ll be out both tomorrow and Saturday evenings. I could call you, I suppose, but I MUST keep my hotel—I mean, my PHONE—bill down. What with Prinz in the hospital, a new car in the offing, and Aunt Ella coming to visit me. Finances aren’t so bad, though.

  She was “not broke,” just living rather high and on the edge.

  But independence was a relative thing. ER encouraged Hick to take advantage of the efficient White House laundry service. Hick did: “Yes, I mailed my laundry to Mabel today…. Goodnight, and much love.”