Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER looked forward to Hick’s spring visit:

  The tennis court is now in order and I think it would do us good to play a little! You sounded cheerful about the job too! Isn’t it nice when things turn out better than you feared? It rarely happens however….

  On 23 April, ER replied to a lost letter from Hick reminding her that however lonesome and troubled she felt, she was loved “above everyone else”:

  Dearest one. It was grand to find your letter when I came in tonight and I was amused at your soliloquy on consoling unhappy husbands and wives! Darling, you are lonely but you granted that the experience of loving and being loved above everyone else or to the exclusion of everyone else is one worth having. There is no guarantee that you won’t be more unhappy in the long run and you who don’t accept change easily would find it harder than most people. No, I rather think that tho you suffer now you might have suffered more the other [married] way. You are a sympathetic sweet person tho the way you put up with everybody’s confidences and by jinks I’m going to try to be happy with you!…

  Hick’s April visit to Washington, where she agreed to medical tests, revealed that she had a diabetes flare-up and required a strict regimen of rest, exercise, and diet. It helped explain her fatigue and her irritable moods. She returned to New York to spend time with her Minnesota librarian friend Jeannette Bryce, and ER wrote that she was glad Jenny was there to monitor her new dietary regimen. But whenever Hick was with another or had a good time without ER, Hick’s letters were filled with words of agony and complaint. It was as if she was afraid to admit she was happy or in any way satisfied in the company of others. Perhaps she hoped to reassure ER, or forestall jealousy. While ER only rarely expressed jealousy, she could not hide her true feelings—which leaked out, however disguised:

  I am glad that Jenny is an attractive companion but gosh I should think she might just spend Sunday reading and taking a walk, what will happen when you work on your report for two days? You’ve certainly taken on a responsibility!

  When Jenny and Hick traveled through the countryside, ER felt wistful: “I miss you dear and often wish I were Jenny….”

  ER hated to be alone and managed to have virtually no time in that condition. Surrounded by people, she generally managed to do two or more things at once. At meetings, listening to speeches, traveling, even watching films in the dark, her hands were always busy—writing or knitting.

  There were meetings with union women; an “air our minds” lunch with Lady Stella Reading, Frances Perkins, and Isabella Greenway; several important speeches; and a fascinating dinner with Earl Miller to meet his new date, Roberta Jonay, a dancer whom ER liked immediately. After dinner, she met with Baruch to discuss WPA, Arthurdale, and the election. ER had a most “amusing time” another evening as she discussed adult education with various “big wigs.” ER thought she did “a good turn” when she explained “why I thought worker’s education important and oh! boy some of these men are naive!”

  In the spring of 1936, workers’ education was assaulted. Hilda Smith was accused of supporting communism, and ER was accused of supporting Smith. One correspondent considered it “odious” that ER contributed $4,000 from her radio speeches to support Hilda Smith’s “communistic” work.*

  ER declared that she actually could not give money to the WPA’s Workers’ Education Division, since “the Government can accept no money from private individuals.” She did contribute to a school for “union and non-union girls,” for which Smith had donated her own home. ER also gave $25 a year to Bryn Mawr’s summer school for working women, which was not “communistic.” She observed:

  Of course, if you do not approve of unions nor of allowing workers to become educated you might disapprove. They do discuss communism, but I have always believed ignorance was a sure way to fall a victim to propaganda. I do not believe in communism, because I do believe in freedom and in our form of government, but I did not attain that loyalty through repression.

  But the renewed Red Scare targeted ER’s activities and closest allies. At one of its first sessions, in February 1935, Martin Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), charged that “communists” captured and controlled workers’ education. Republicans and Southern Democrats escalated those charges for the campaign season, and emphasized that some programs for working women were actually biracial. ER did not consider workers’ education communistic in the land of opportunity, and publicly defended its importance, as well as the controversial books used.

  ER was unbothered by the ongoing controversy Louise McLaren, director of the Southern Summer School for Workers, engendered. In her report, McLaren proudly listed the authors found in the school’s library and curriculum, including such radicals as Mother Bloor, Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, Fielding Burke, Leo Huberman, Agnes Smedley, and Langston Hughes. HUAC charged: “REDS RULE FERA SCHOOLS.” ER defended the freedom to read, dissent, learn; the need for public controversy in a democracy.

  As a result of her persistent support, Hilda Smith noted, workers’ education was actually expanded.

  By the summer of 1936, the National Youth Administration had conducted more than two thousand classes taken by 65,000 workers in thirty-four states. Over eleven hundred teachers were employed, and there were winter follow-up classes for their ninety camp and resident school programs.

  Still, many snags and discriminatory aspects concerning women’s camps and opportunities persisted, when compared to the CCC program. Although the puny women’s “allowance” of 50 cents a week was scrapped for a $22.50 monthly wage, to be sent home to “dependents,” that represented about half the wage CCC youth received. Also, “single, unattached” women were discouraged by the WPA program, since they were “not part of family groups.” Above all, the issue of appropriate work was still unresolved. “Landscaping” remained “unsuitable” for women, although ER argued that many women were landscapers. Clerical work, sewing projects for toy and recreational products, and the manufacture of braille books seemed the safest, though land “beautification” projects, gardening, and canning became possible.

  Despite all opposition, from Vermont to Mississippi and west to Utah and Montana, local enthusiasm and widespread support flourished for workers’ education and the women’s programs. Smith was endlessly grateful to ER for the program’s triumphs:

  I know we have you, the President and Harry Hopkins to thank—an invincible trio! You have given Workers’ education a chance to demonstrate what could be done. To see all the new young people, teachers and workers, throughout the country, who have identified themselves with the movement makes me very happy.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1936, ER also defended Camp Jane Addams at Bear Mountain, now routinely called a Red citadel. With Tommy and Mark McCloskey, regional director of the NYA, ER spent three hours at the camp and spoke personally with the 126 campers. ER upheld the right to disagree in America: “You can’t take human beings and put them into molds and say I want you to believe this…. You have got to let things come to them through their own experience….”

  While the conservative War against workers’ education and ER’s views raged, the left also mobilized to protect and expand WPA programs. In that campaign, ER stood with radical workers, who annoyed Mark McCloskey. ER saw no contradiction between capitalism and programs to ensure workers’ education and opportunity. Some, including McCloskey, thought that made her a dupe of communist propaganda.

  ER had responded favorably to a radical worker, Sarah Rosenberg of the Workers’ Alliance, who had complained that Camp Jane Addams did nothing to prepare women for their future: They had no real training, left without jobs, and faced ongoing misery. Some therefore considered “suicide or tramping on the roads.” McCloskey assured ER:

  No one in NYC knows the resources of the Relief Agencies better than the Workers’ Alliance. It is one of the “leftist” groups that have been camping on the doorstep of every federal and local agency… and undoubtedly every girl wh
o attends Camp Jane Addams is advised of all private and public relief agencies….

  It seemed that everything ER did to make life for America’s most neglected people better, sweeter, and more hopeful was assailed in 1936. She was particularly criticized for hosting an integrated White House garden party for sixty delinquent girls, aged thirteen to twenty, residents at the National Training School for Girls. Eleven of the inmates were white, fifty were Negroes; and ER dared to unlock their doors, invite them from behind their “ten foot brick walls,” for an afternoon of cake and ice cream. That seemed unbearable to her many critics. But ER considered her party a simple, human thing to do. She had been so “appalled” when she visited the reform school, which was “not a school at all, having no teachers” and no educational programs, she invited them to the White House “to have a good time.” After the party, she demanded a completely new rehabilitation program that would train and educate the young women to return to their communities as useful citizens: “It seems to me that complete segregation in gloomy surroundings is hardly the way to achieve this objective.”

  It remained a source of amazement to ER that so many people could disregard people in need, ignore their hurt, dismiss their humanity, from outcast girls in distress to the unemployed. ER urged comfortable Americans to consider all individuals “human beings with all the tastes, likes, dislikes, and passions we have ourselves.” She wondered:

  how we can make the more fortunate in this country fully aware of the fact that the problem of the unemployed is not a mechanical one. It is a problem alive and throbbing with human pain.

  New Deal programs had done little actually to lessen unemployment, which remained a growing problem. Mechanization in both agriculture and industry rendered “labor” idle, perhaps permanently.

  On 4 May, Hick wrote a long letter about conditions in the Ohio steel industry:

  Youngstown is terribly depressing. The steel mills are running full blast, 80 percent of capacity, as good as 1929. They never get up to 100 percent except in war time. And yet—

  In the last three years they’ve spent Ten Million Dollars modernizing these plants, and the result is that in 1936, with the mills operating at 1929 production, they are employing 10,000 fewer men than in 1929!

  I obtained these figures, Madame, from the Chamber of Commerce. They are probably very conservative. And this year $2,000,000 more is to be put into modernization. That means more men laid off….

  The whole population is worried…. Ninety percent of the men employed by WPA used to work in steel. They run all the way from roustabouts, in the majority … to skilled and semi-skilled workers, such as rollers, shear-men, catchers, and so on. The gloom you hear in the coal country … is nothing compared with this. These people are afraid—and getting desperate…. They see their jobs slipping right out from under them—snatched away by the machine that was supposed to make life an easier, more gracious thing, but which is really taking away their bread and butter.

  To run these modernized plants, the steel companies are going out after college and high school youngsters…. The process of turning a steel ingot into a sheet of [metal] that can be bent into the body of an automobile can now be performed by three or four bright young men in white shirts, who stand in a little nook away up in a gallery and—press buttons.

  The same process under the old system … involved the hard, sweaty labor of a hundred men or more!…

  ER read Hick’s report to FDR, who encouraged her to write a “My Day” column, using Hick’s words. ER wrote:

  If you mind I’m terribly sorry, I wanted to wire for your consent but F wouldn’t let me. I think he wants me to be the whipping boy and though he can’t bring the question out he wants it out…. A week from tomorrow you will be here. Bless you and all my love.

  If Hick did in fact mind that her words were now grist for another reporter’s column, there is no evidence that she complained to ER. Clearly, ER’s priority was to advance FDR’s goal, regardless of the inevitable corporate protest—which soon occurred.

  While Hick traveled, ER prepared for the Democratic convention and spent time with SDR, who had broken her hip. ER was relieved by her mother-in-law’s high spirits while confined to her bedroom: She seemed positively “cheerful,” and insisted that she was comfortable; she “has her lovely trees to look at, and an oriole, which came twice yesterday….” For all their conflicts, ER admired her tenacious independence and resilient outlook. ER enjoyed her mother-in-law’s favorite maxims: “All weather is good weather,” and, when one complained of insufficient time: “You had all the time there was.”

  By 1936, ER’s expanded interests eclipsed her friendship with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. While Cook worked with ER on various resettlement projects, a palpable strain had intruded into their once harmonious partnership. Also, Marion Dickerman complained that most of Todhunter’s parents were Republicans, and its reputation as “ER’s school” was a handicap.

  The first tangible evidence of their frayed bond was the decision to abandon Val-Kill Industries. They agreed to disband the furniture and pewter shop and to give the tools, machinery, and stock to their workers. ER was eager to let it go, and wrote Hick: “Dearest a glorious day…. Nan’s lawn is lovely and we had a grand, quiet time…. Tons of work… moving the shop out.”

  Nan and Marion would remain in the cottage; ER would take over the factory building, reconstruct it as a home for herself, and build an apartment for Tommy. Everybody would have more privacy. Until then, ER had had, to negotiate with Cook and Dickerman whenever she had houseguests for the night, an arrangement that had become exceedingly annoying. Although Hick refused to visit ER at Val-Kill, regular visits by relatives and grandchildren and Earl Miller’s frequent presence, alone or with his ever-changing young women and their relatives, had increasingly disturbed Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman.

  ER believed the new situation was mutually agreeable. She wrote Hick that the move was “really a great relief to [Nan] and will mean a more peaceful life.” But she was deluded. Marion Dickerman condemned as cold and detached ER’s public announcement regarding the shop:

  [The furniture machinery] will be taken over and operated by one of the expert craftsmen, Otto Berge…. The weaving will continue under the direction of Nellie Johannesen. During the winter months she will teach the art of weaving to any women who wish to learn…. Miss Nancy Cook, President of Val-Kill, who has conducted the shop since its founding, finds the various craft projects have grown to such an extent that she can no longer give them her personal attention….

  Dickerman lamented that these “dry, matter-of-fact words told nothing of the heartache this meant to Nancy Cook, who had invented the enterprise and for whom it had been the center, the essence of creative self-expression.” Cook and Dickerman felt abandoned, rejected.

  ER sought to rely on Hick, but she was mostly unavailable—and in Michigan with Alicent (Alix) Holt, ER endured several days without a note, and on the 28th wrote Hick with some irritation: “I shall be glad to get some letters from you tonight! I’m not accustomed to being so long without news and I don’t like it.”

  At Cornell, while she was on her annual visit with Flora Rose, ER and Elinor Morgenthau received a disturbing call from Henry Morgenthau, who reported that FDR was “upset and taking it out on his friends; he had been horrid all week.” ER supposed part of the reason for FDR’s mood involved the Supreme Court’s ongoing opposition to the New Deal, the rapidly deteriorating international situation, “and I can imagine some other things!”

  Actually FDR’s ordinarily buoyant spirits had been unraveling ever since Louis Howe died. He had postponed his entire campaign effort until September, and he acted as if the impending Democratic convention in June had nothing to do with him. Although Howe had been bedridden since January 1935, FDR wrote Ambassador Robert W. Bingham in London on 4 May 1936: “It was sad, indeed, to have Louis taken from us and the end was very unexpected and sudden.”

  Wit
h Howe’s death, all associations at the Roosevelt hearth were transformed. The circle was broken. New friendships were created; old ones were terminated; every relationship was jostled in some way. During the spring and summer of 1936, while ER worked and campaigned, Hick took long vacations with others.

  At Val-Kill, Tommy and Henry Osthagen helped design ER’s new cottage. Earl was there with Roberta Jonay. ER had seen her perform at the Copacabana and other nightclubs, thought her talented, and wanted her seriously to study dance: “She is a sweet child!” But Roberta was torn between wanting to be an artist and her love for Earl. “Roberta fears that ‘to be hurt again would be too much for him’ and I entirely agree!”

  ER enjoyed the plans for her new home: “I’ll have definite estimates this week. It is fun to build or change things over.” ER’s decision to remodel her private space, to alter both the business and living arrangement of Val-Kill, occurred within weeks of Howe’s death. It was as if without her most trusted champion and reliable political mentor, ER needed to fortify her own domain. Her decision to renovate the factory for herself where she would be fully in charge, where her time and space would be fully protected, reflected major changes in her intimate circle. She now had an apartment in the city and a home of her own at Val-Kill over which she presided with complete independence and control.

  Still, she longed to hear from Hick; “I wonder where you are, I hate not knowing—A world of love.” The next day, ER wrote with relief: “It was just grand to have your wire this morning and know where you were….”

  During the summer of 1936, they were very far apart.

  *Hilda Smith and her sister donated their familial home, Vineyard Shore, and thirty-six acres to New York State for the Vineyard Shore School, with ER’s advice and support.