Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  As late as 20 July, Steve Early told Ickes that “there were no campaign plans and no budget.” Ickes despaired: “We are in bad shape and in grave danger.” Stanley High told him:

  Mrs. Roosevelt is worried and so is Farley, but the President himself seems to be up in the clouds….

  Because the women were so completely organized, the situation was not really dire. They had assembled a series of appealing speakers, highlighted by stars and heroes, including Ruth Bryan Owen, who agreed to leave her diplomatic post in Denmark to tour the country for FDR. Dewson wrote:

  I am all for your having an airplane. And I do wish that you would look with favor on having Phoebe Omlie of the U.S. Department of Aeronautics to pilot you. She is a superb pilot and in the early days won cross country races from the men. She is one of the few recognized and licensed airplane mechanics. Better than all, she is a very calm and easy person to get along with.

  Ruth Bryan Owen agreed:

  I would be a poor sort of feminist if I had any inhibitions about a woman pilot. I am delighted to join up with Miss Omlie.

  Ruth Bryan Owen’s plans were only slightly upended in June when she unexpectedly announced: “Now I would suggest that you get seated and hold on to the arms of the chair before you read the following paragraph!” She had fallen in love with “one Kammerjunker Kaptjan Borge Rohde, of the Danish King’s Life Guards and Gentleman in Attendance on the King at the Danish Court.” They would be married as soon as possible, after reaching the United States. A university scholar, Captain Rohde was a linguist who impressed everyone with his vast charm and wit. On 10 July, the Roosevelts hosted their wedding party at Hyde Park. It was a memorable occasion, jolly and glamorous. Fannie Hurst was the bride’s attendant, and the party stimulated political activity. Ruth Bryan Owen Rohde resigned from the diplomatic corps, and made more than fifty speeches around the country for FDR, accompanied by her new husband.

  But as July unfolded, the Women’s Committee seemed to be working in a vacuum, and ER considered the situation alarming. Even in Campobello the inaction galled her. As she read the newspapers and polls, she could not remain silent or inactive. She considered what Louis Howe would do and fired off a rigorous memo, which covered all the issues Howe, supported by his pool of six hundred workers, had fully coordinated in the past.

  ER cast her memo widely—to the president, Jim Farley, Charley Michel-son, Stanley High, Steve Early, and Mollie Dewson—and she wanted immediate action: Landon’s people had hired advertisers and radio scriptwriters, “and the whole spirit is the spirit of a crusade.” Now “we have got to get going and going quickly.” She wanted it understood that her letter was “a matter of record” and expected “to get the answers in black and white”:

  1. At the meeting in Washington, the President said that Mr. Michelson, Steve Early, Stanley High and Henry Suydam would constitute the publicity steering committee, and I take it this must include radio, speeches, movies, pamphlets, fliers, news releases and trucks….

  I hope a meeting will be held immediately for organizing and defining the duties of the members and that you will have the minutes kept at every meeting in order that a copy may go to the President and if the committee is willing, one to me as well so that I may know just what is done each time also.

  2. Who is responsible for studying news reports and suggesting answers to charges, etc.?

  3. Who is responsible for…. the radio campaign, getting the speakers through the speakers’ bureau, making the arrangements in the states for people to listen and getting in touch with Chester Davis, for instance on agriculture…? In other words, who is making decisions under your committee…?

  4. Who is in charge of research? Have we … complete information concerning all activities of the New Deal…?

  Who is to check on all inconsistencies in Landon’s pronouncements…?

  5. What definite plans have we made for tying in the other publicity organizations, both of men and women with the national publicity organization?…

  6. Have you mapped out continuous publicity steps which will be taken between now and November? Is there any way at least of charting a tentative plan of strategy for the whole campaign…?

  7. In the doubtful and Republican states what special attention do you plan to give…?

  8. Who is handling news reels…?

  ER went on for several more points, and she had specific suggestions: “I think it would be well to start some Negro speakers, like [Mary McLeod] Bethune to speak at church meetings and that type of Negro organization.”

  Her formidable memo reflected her years as Howe’s closest colleague in building a successful political organization. ER demanded answers to her questions, “mailed to reach us” at Campobello no later than 27 July, when FDR was scheduled to arrive.

  ER wrote her daughter on 24 July that the Democratic National Committee’s “publicity was a disgrace to their organization! Steve has answered my memo with explanations and excuses and I await the others….”

  Jim Farley sent a ten-page, single-spaced reply, which reassured her. Farley had a long talk with Will Alexander, “who is very active in the Negro movement, and he would create a Negro division.” Sidney Hillman’s labor party movement promised to bring in “many thousands” of people who had not previously voted.

  ER was relieved by Farley’s full reply. She had feared his opposition to FDR’s purge campaign would limit Farley’s activities. Farley had opposed FDR’s public rebuke of powerful Southern Democratic leaders. Farley was stunned when, with Georgia’s Senator Walter George beside him on a campaign platform, FDR announced: There “is little difference between the feudal system and the fascist system. If you believe in the one you lean to the other.”

  Farley had not been among those who advised a dramatic convention courtship for the Negro vote. But ER was delighted. She had first crossed the Democratic Party’s color bar in 1924—when she invited Mary White Ovington of the NAACP to send a plank to her women’s platform committee. Ovington had replied: The NAACP intended to secure “legal and civil rights for colored men and women,” and wanted ER’s committee to include a plank that guaranteed the protection of voting rights for colored women in every “part of the country.”

  In 1936, for the first time, that seemed the official position of the Democratic Party—and it upset congressional diehards of the formerly solid South. Twelve states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, sent black delegates to the Philadelphia convention. According to William Leuchtenberg: “The convention was the first to seat a black woman as a regular delegate and the first to provide for a black press conference and to seat blacks in the regular press box.” When an African-American minister gave the opening prayer at one session, “Cotton Ed” Smith stormed out shouting, “ ‘My God, he’s black as melted midnight.” When Chicago member of congress Arthur W. Mitchell, elected in 1934, “became the first black ever to address a Democratic convention,” Smith left for South Carolina, announcing: “ ‘I cannot and will not be a party to the recognition of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”

  ER was convinced that her husband’s success depended on the votes of blacks, Southern race radicals, youth, and the left-labor coalition, and wrote immediately to Will Alexander.

  ER was no replacement for Louis Howe, but she did, move the campaign forward. Moreover, she promoted radical biracial youth and labor movements, including the Southern Tenant Farmers movement, for which she was most specifically attacked by Liberty Leaguers, breakaway Southern Democrats, and Lemkeites. This hurt Landon, not FDR. Nineteen thirty-six was a year of radical unity, and ER represented the power of the popular front.

  The haters of 1936 declared the Roosevelt administration dedicated to a mulatto America: Negroes were invited to White House banquets and slept in White House beds. ER and her friends supported the antilynching bill “for the purpose of permissive ravishment.”

  A foul and widely reprinted ditty purportedly represented the First Couple’s them
e song:

  You Kiss the Niggers / And I’ll Kiss the Jews

  And We’ll Stay in the White House

  As long as We Choose

  In 1936, Liberty Leaguers and Lemkeites fell into a political void. Landon and the Republican Party pleaded with them to take their support elsewhere.

  In August, Ickes addressed the annual convention of the NAACP and boasted that the Roosevelt administration had made the “greatest advance since the Civil War toward assuring the Negro that degree of justice to which he is entitled and that equality of opportunity under the law which is implicit in his American citizenship.” In October, Mary McLeod Bethune told a radio audience: “Never before in the history of America has Negro youth been offered such opportunities.”

  While FDR sailed with his sons, ER contemplated her own life. With her friends scattered, she mostly brooded through the most exciting campaign of her life, with time on her hands and nothing she needed to do. In a reflective mood, she felt again a need to reconnect with her past and tell her own story. During FDR’s first campaign she had decided to edit and publish her father’s letters, to write It’s Up to the Women, and to write a children’s book. Now she decided to write her memoirs. ER wrote to calm and fortify herself under duress. From July to November, around the edges of her husband’s campaign, she worked on a book to be called This Is My Story.

  Almost nonchalantly, she wrote Hick: “I rather think I’ll write up my childhood for the kids.” There was, she wrote, ho other way her grandchildren would ever know all those “people no one else can remember.” Everything was so different, and living conditions were so changed, “I could almost feel I was writing about another person it all seems so far away.”

  In mid-August, ER spent part of the week at Democratic Party headquarters in New York City. She met with all the groups to mediate their competing interests, edited the literature, and did whatever came to hand. Once campaign chair, she was now administrator without portfolio, and she hated it. Nobody in FDR’s circle asked her to do anything at all.

  She disliked her situation so entirely that she wrote about it in “My Day”—in an attempt to be philosophical:

  Since I am no longer responsible to anyone else for the accomplishment of any specific piece of work, I have had a great opportunity to observe the work of other people….

  I hope that if I am ever back in some kind of executive position, my present opportunities for observation will prove fruitful….

  ER concluded her column with hopes for youth, a future generation of activists eager for responsibility: Those who “can think up new ways of giving service, different ways of doing things … those who have imagination and originality will get somewhere. There is always room at the top….”

  While ER felt keenly the leadership gap at Democratic Party headquarters, she put her faith in the possibilities of the burgeoning youth movement, so refreshing, outspoken, and exciting.

  She was cheered by evidence of a new people’s coalition that emerged at summer’s end, with a vigor that surprised forecasters. In addition to the new power of organized labor, led by John L. Lewis, a former Republican, who contributed a vast sum of CIO money to FDR, nonpartisan progressives and humanitarians forged a new FDR coalition—based partly on loyalty to ER.

  The Women’s Democratic News was particularly pleased when Lillian Wald, founder of the Visiting Nurse Service and Henry Street Settlement, the “first lady in social work,” agreed to write an article, “Why I Am for Roosevelt.”

  Having listened to both conventions with earnest hope, she was “discouraged” that “nothing significant” was said by Republicans: “It was sad that in probably the worst crisis that the country has ever known … hate was the most obvious sentiment….”

  Wald despised their abusive carping, their petty lack of gratitude for all New Deal achievements: “I kept thinking of a valorous neighbor who at great risk and discomfort plunged through the broken ice to rescue [a] small boy…. When the rescuer carried the child to his father, he was rewarded with: ‘Where’s his hat?’ “

  Wald firmly believed FDR would “go further” in social security and “correct past mistakes” concerning all issues that involved human betterment.

  In conclusion, Wald wrote personally:

  May I say that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt have given themselves in great ways…. They have set an example of great power and unselfishness to us and to the world, and … have earned our love and gratitude and loyalty and support.

  Wald’s support was important to ER. After she and Elinor Morgenthau visited her in August, ER wrote a column to celebrate her mentor:

  I always fall under the spell of her personality and wonder what quality it is which makes an individual able to sway others by the sheer force of her own sympathy and understanding of human beings….

  But no moments of pleasure or diversion satisfied ER. To be idled and mute within the political blizzard wore on her nerves. During the autumnal phase of the campaign, the imposed silence sickened her. In September, she took to her bed with aches everywhere and a raging fever. She had never before been felled by illness, and her condition frightened everybody who loved her.

  FDR, who had never seen his wife take to her bed so completely, canceled appointments and rushed to her bedside. The New York Times explained that he left for Washington from a rain-soaked day at Harvard, where he delivered “a plea for tolerance before an international audience” assembled to celebrate Harvard’s three hundredth anniversary. Originally scheduled to go to Hyde Park to celebrate his mother’s eighty-third birthday, he changed his plans “at the last minute.”

  ER was touched by everyone’s attention, and noted in a “My Day” column:

  It is so unusual for me to be in bed that each new person arriving looks at me with a more concerned expression than the last. Even my brother, who is very much the way I am and who thinks things are better downed afoot than abed, comes in to give me a worried once-over twice a day.

  Frances Perkins sent “beautiful red roses,” with an unusually warm note: “Dear Eleanor—My dearest love & good wishes. Take care of your precious self for once!!”

  Lillian Wald wrote: “Beloved Lady and Friend … [this is to remind you] you are not the ‘forgotten woman’ and that the ‘flying buttress’ [FDR’s term for Wald] to the Administration is active and primarily laments your separation from your beloved tasks.”

  Hilda Smith and Aubrey Williams detailed the progress of ER’s special interests. Williams’s account of WPA’s first fourteen months cheered ER and pierced through her fever to remind her what they were fighting for. To “avoid the development of a permanent class of chronic dependents,” and to provide decent work at real wages: “No larger, more complicated, or more difficult task was ever attempted by a government in peace or in war.”

  WPA’s contributions were tangible for workers, and for the nation:

  In place of bitterness, gnawing and growing discontent, and wasted skills of hand and brain, we have ….

  109,000 public buildings… including 83,000 schools

  400,000 miles of road improved, 121,000 miles made new….

  5,000 water control works … 1100 new swimming pools, 5000 tennis

  courts, and 25,000 playgrounds built….

  1,000,000 children immunized against typhoid and diphtheria

  500,000 people taught to write the English language….

  For all the concerned and cheerful notes that flooded into her bedroom, ER’s illness was not quickly diagnosed, nor corrected. She was mystified: “Everyone who is sent in to make a test… goes away saying that as far as his particular branch of medicine is concerned I am a perfect specimen.” Yet her fever lingered, and she could barely move.

  Through it all, ER dictated her daily column to Tommy and studied the morning papers:

  [The newspapers] are rather terrifying reading these days, with Japan taking over Shanghai and the ever-growing tenseness in Europe. I hav
e a curious kind of resentment about the physical damage done to age-old monuments in Spain.

  It seems as though a generation that had gone mad was wiping out things which are really not their heritage alone, but the “heritage of the world at large. We have looked upon these things so long as sources of education and culture and pleasure, that to think of them being destroyed in the course of a few weeks is a very depressing sensation.

  ER could not abide the devastation of Spain and repeatedly wrote anguished columns against fascist bombings and atrocities. She did not understand why there were not howls of protest everywhere against the dreadful situations people faced:

  We read daily about people being killed in Spain, not only soldiers, but women and children. We know that in this country many people do not have enough to eat, or proper medical attention, or an opportunity to lead a normal life, but none of these situations evokes the same passionate interest as a [fictional romance or] story….

  ER’s physical collapse, with echoes and reverberations of her youthful Griselda crises, frightened FDR. At the prospect of actually losing his wife’s presence and support, FDR showed a new level of consideration, and took her less for granted. After September 1936, he personally planned special events and birthday parties for ER, as she had always done for him. Her illness drew ER and FDR closer together, and she reentered the campaign. Although she remained in the background, except when crowds called for her to speak, ER was not the only woman aboard the campaign train; she was not alone; and she was not bored.

  Bess Furman described the scene as “victory rode the rails.” Amid all the noise of a presidential special, ER sat serene, read, knitted, wrote: “Cram and jam and crush and rush and jostle. Bands, bouquets, noted names, significant speeches.” And there ER sat “calmly in the midst of turmoil knitting sweaters, dictating her column to Tommy, even writing her memoirs.” When she read some of the pages aloud, they “sounded as though they had come from the depths of silence, instead of right out of bedlam….”