Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER did not speak for the antilynch law during her November trip. Her tour coincided with Armistice Day, and she focused on international peace. She tended to close her meetings with poetry. One verse expressed “the futile feeling” among peace advocates as they contemplated “this world where force is still rampant,” where “the madness / That pulses in the kingdoms of men” presages the “hopelessness, horror and sadness” of the “world slaughter again….”

  On Armistice Day, ER concluded with a vivid protest by Richard Le Gallienne, “The Illusion of War,” which “expresses so well something we all should remember on this day”:

  War

  I do abhor;

  And yet how sweet

  The sound along the marching street

  Of drum and fife, and I forget

  Broken old mothers and the whole dark butchering without a soul.

  ER ended with the startling suggestion that Americans remove all glamour from war, end “the strutting of the living” that did little to memorialize the dead during Armistice Day observances. As slaughter once again appeared in Asia, Ethiopia, and Spain, ER suggested that rather than look back “to the world’s greatest mistake, why can’t we train our energies on what is to come? Even by a display of sincere respect for the war dead we somehow dignify what should be a matter of gravest shame.”

  As she toured, ER thoroughly enjoyed meeting Hick’s friends: “Darling, how you do castigate yourself! Do learn to be a little simple, free and natural and do what you want to do! I have such a bad time teaching all of you that I don’t need to be protected!… Next time you want me to see someone say so!”

  Concerning her World’s Fair interview, Hick reported that Graver Whelan “didn’t swoon exactly. But he was courteous, and I’m to see him again.” ER was encouraged: “I hope and pray you get it.” ER anticipated that they could work together on a publicity job, and “we’ll have some fun planning your campaign. I think I can help.”

  Hick was grateful for ER’s ease with her friends:

  You were a dear to send the wire and a very great dear about my friends. Oh, you always do the nice thing—and I always blunder. How you can even like me is beyond me…. I can’t for the life of me understand why a person like you would care anything about a person like me, and therefore it has been hard for me to have any confidence in you…. Torn as I was between loyalty to you and loyalty to some of my old friends I had worried about it for months….

  Hick hoped that Tommy was not hurt by her outburst:

  I think a lot of Tommy. She and I were good friends long before I knew you, and, as a matter of fact, I’d never have known you had it not been for Tommy. Anyway, she is a much better friend than I am—much less selfish….

  Hick wrote one final letter, which revealed her ultimate fear:

  You and Tommy were probably bored stiff. Tell Tommy … I’ll try not to pull anything like that on you again…. I guess I’ll drop that subject now. I acted like a damned fool, and I’m ashamed of myself.

  ER responded with letters of reassurance, and love:

  Darling, will you never learn that love can’t be pigeon-holed and perhaps we love people more for their weaknesses than for their best qualities of which you have a lot though you forget them when you are down….

  ER also appreciated Hick’s need to return to her career as a writer, and she sent Hick to her agent George Bye. He encouraged Hick to write a book about Depression America based on her FERA reports. Bye’s enthusiasm and confidence thrilled Hick: “So—with George Bye leading me by the hand, and with you pushing from behind, I MAY write a book!” She acknowledged her hesitance, however, which “amused him, a little. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘are you always so humble and so unsure of yourself in anything you do?’ ‘No,’ I assured him. ‘I was a darned good reporter and knew I was.’ “

  Despite the crowds, the ovations, the generous press coverage, ER wrote Bye that she was “a bit discouraged.” Her tour had been scheduled too soon after the election, and she feared that her resounding success was merely a reflection of FDR’s popularity. But she was wrong: Every hall was filled with people who came to hear her and left entirely satisfied. Both Bye and her lecture agent Colston Leigh were ecstatic. Hick reported that Leigh told Bye that “you were a grand success, and that he already had your March dates just about filled!”

  In Detroit, ER’s brother Hall took ER and Tommy to lunch “and made me choose a car but I begged not to have it till next Spring and I’ll turn in my Buick…. I don’t really want it but what am I to do?”

  Hick was perplexed: “Darling. I think it’s nice that Hall is giving you a car. Lord knows you give enough to other people! Why shouldn’t someone give you something now and then? Is it a convertible? I hope so. When you start driving a closed car I’ll think you are really getting old.”

  Hick wrote to ER from the White House, which in everybody’s absence was a “gloomy” place. It was conducive to writing though, Hick noted, and being good to oneself—which was a comfort just then, while she mourned her friend the great diva Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who died in Hollywood on 17 November, at the age of eighty-three.

  I wonder if, at the end, she wasn’t very weary. It was an eventful life, filled with glory, but I think she had her bad times. I wonder what will become of all the people she supported. The last time I saw her I believe she told me there were some seventy of them! Well—I hope “Erda” will be happy in Valhalla!

  ER replied: “I thought of you when Mme Schumann-Heink died. Would you like to wear her ring now or put it into safe-keeping? I am careful of it but I never want you to feel you can’t do what you want with it!”

  Hick, of course, wanted ER to wear the sapphire-and-diamond pinky ring Schumann-Heink had given her in Milwaukee so many years before, and which she gave ER in 1932. ER wore it until her death, and the subject was not referred to again.

  ER was pleased that Hick was already at work rereading her correspondence for a book on the hopes and needs of the American people and the government’s responsibility to ensure those needs. ER wrote Martha Gellhorn, who had spent time with Hick in New York, to ignore Hick’s complaints: She was not “at all frantic…. She grouses a great deal, but I think she really is much interested and I am sure she will do a good job.”

  As Hick read their daily correspondence in Louis Howe’s spacious rooms, her spirits lifted. When she returned to New York, she accepted the World’s Fair job and looked forward to earning $5,200 a year. Her publicity department would be under Joseph Clark Baldwin, whom she liked. Hick was pleased by the upswing of her life: “I came on home and celebrated, before my simple home-cooked meal, with a whiskey and soda, all by myself. And now, with that off my mind, I turn to my book.”

  ER thought that “$100 a week ought to be OK in New York and I hope you will enjoy it besides feeling confidence in yourself again!”

  With the security of her new job, which was to begin in January, Hick decided to spend her remaining money on Christmas presents. ER wrote, “I don’t approve of spending all your money on Xmas. Suppose you put one fourth in the savings account!”

  Happy that Hick would remain nearby, ER learned that Anna and John Boettiger were moving to Seattle. Her daughter and son-in-law had accepted an offer to edit and publish a Hearst paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Politically curious, there was evidently no familial discussion concerning Hearst’s proposal. Although FDR had mostly followed Hearst’s isolationist prescription demanded for his 1932 support, the publisher had turned viciously against the president after the 1934 strikes, and the Boettiger appointment was part of the newspaper’s strike settlement with the Newspaper Guild.

  ER and FDR were furious about Hearst’s 1936 campaign excesses, his brutal Red-baiting assaults. At a cabinet meeting before FDR left for his cruise, Tom Corcoran reported that, stunned by the landslide, the Hearsts and Liberty League boys had decided to promote a new “era of good feelings.” Ickes hoped that FDR would not be fooled by such
opportunism, where-upon the president gestured “thumbs down” on all future relations with the publisher.

  ER never forgave William Randolph Hearst for the role he played to keep America out of the World Court, and Hearst’s relentless crusade against the Democratic Party, transformed in his words into a foreign crossbreed of “Karl Marx and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” filled her with revulsion. After he had orchestrated one of the filthiest campaigns in U.S. history, ER considered Hearst’s apparent fondness for her children manipulative. He hired son Elliott to run his radio stations in Texas, and now offered Anna and John a sweetheart deal they accepted: $30,000 for him, $10,000 for Anna, who agreed to do the women’s page.

  However dismayed by her daughter’s move, ER made no effort to dissuade or influence her adult children. She wrote Hick, that “of course John and Anna are blissful.” Although she dreaded the “complete separation … I’ll get used to it and I wouldn’t spoil their joy by ever saying a word about it. W.R. seems to like employing the Roosevelt family, odd isn’t it?”

  To FDR, ER wrote twice: “I shall miss them badly but it does seem a grand opportunity and they will love it and so life is life, not always very pleasant!” A week later, she sighed: “I can hardly bear to have Anna & John go but they are so happy that I wouldn’t let them know for worlds & it is better than Europe….”

  Hearst’s stunning deal gave John and Anna absolute control over the editorial page; and if the struggling paper became financially solvent, they would get 5 percent of the profits as a bonus above their salaries. While neither ER nor FDR expressed an opinion, various intimates were chagrined.

  Hearst’s effort at reconciliation began on election night. FDR told Farley, who told Ickes, that while his sons answered telephone calls at Hyde Park, one of them overheard Marion Davies, Hearst’s companion, speaking with John Boettiger: “Hello, John, this is Marion Davies. I just wanted to tell you that I love you. We know that a steam roller has flattened us out, but there are no hard feelings at this end.” Then Hearst got on the phone to repeat Davies’s message. Several days later, Hearst papers ran a signed editorial in which Hearst, noted Ickes, “slobbered all over the President.” Ickes and others hoped FDR would have nothing more to do with Hearst.

  Hick, however, was not so rigid. She had a reporter’s conviction that a paper was as good as its editors and writers. After all, her friend Tom Dillon had been managing editor of the paper before Hearst bought it, and another friend, Hazel Reavis, worked on it:

  It’s an old paper and used to have a fine reputation before Hearst got hold of it. Of course, I’m thrilled, as you must be, for them. That’s a pile of money, dear! And it takes John back into the kind of work he really loves.

  And I think Anna will love editing the woman’s page, learn a lot at it, and be darned good at it. Gosh, it’s a magnificent opportunity for her to acquire professional experience, “on her own,” so to speak. Also—I think Seattle is a beautiful city—a grand place to live…. It will be good for Sisty and Buzzie. Outdoor life the year around …. in the country, with horses and dogs.

  As for you—dear, it will be tough…. I hate to think how much you are going to miss Anna…. You are one of those people who “can take it.” Aren’t’ you?…

  While ER was stoic about personal disappointments, and could “take” such setbacks, she was painfully thrown when her husband announced the first policy decision of his second administration: He would cut spending and pursue a balanced budget. Given the desperate situation of continued, actually unrelieved, unemployment, still at least 20 percent, it seemed precisely the wrong thing to do. Moreover, he called for cuts in agencies ER had hoped would be expanded, including WPA. Only Henry Morgenthau was enthusiastic about this decision; others feared it would abort the entire recovery program. Given FDR’s unprecedented victory, and his radical campaign rhetoric, this was a staggering, baffling decision.

  Hick’s reaction was mixed. She was glad she had had the good sense to leave Hopkins’s team before the cuts: “Harry is slashing his staff unmercifully” in Washington’s central office, as well as throughout the states. “Eighty were let out of one department….” Yet she considered the cuts “the right thing to do.” ER disagreed. She agonized over WPA cuts for weeks, and wrote her daughter: “This WPA cut is being badly done and I am worried….”

  While Hick waited for her World’s Fair job to begin, she worked on her book, which was harder to write than she had expected. Still, reading her correspondence rekindled her ardor, and a tone of romance reappeared in her letters to ER: “I’m awfully grateful to you, for all kinds of things. And I love you a very great deal.” Between them, carping ceased and gruff self-abasements diminished; they spent satisfying times together.

  ER wrote Anna, rather proudly, that Hick’s dramatic history of America, gathered by “her four years of investigations,” was under way. Although Hick complained to one and all, and called ER “an ogre because I’m insisting she write now while the story is fresh… !”

  ER went to Hyde Park for Thanksgiving while Hick stayed in New York with her sister, Ruby. But FDR, Jr., was stricken in Cambridge with what at first seemed a “sinus” attack. Then he began to hemorrhage dangerously at the slightest turn of his head, and a streptococcus infection resulted in a very high temperature. It lasted for almost a month, into the Christmas season.

  ER rushed to be with her son, in the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and wrote FDR, then cruising the Pacific: “Poor Mama was disappointed about Thanksgiving but [Anna & John] and the children and Johnny and Betty were with her…. You sound very jolly & I hope James is fine….”

  FDR, Jr.’s, physical battle coincided with the announcement of his engagement to Ethel du Pont, who joined ER for the holiday-hospital vigil. The irony of a Roosevelt-du Pont engagement, combined with Hearst’s employment policies, seemed peculiar in 1936 and entangled the family in unruly personal thickets: The du Ponts had financed the Liberty League, championed by Hearst, and were FDR’s most determined political enemies. ER wrote her husband:

  Of course I told FJr the drawbacks but I never opposed Ethel or the duPonts as a family just the money and his position—I’ve always dreaded those grand affairs but I did not refuse to go to the wedding—I guess we’ll survive all that gossip.

  On hospital duty Thanksgiving day, ER, feeling forlorn as she went back and forth from her empty hotel room to her suffering son, wrote Hick: “I’m rather weary, but I’m thankful for you dear today and all those whom I love, Bless you and a world of love.”

  ER left FJr to attend the Army-Navy football game, a rare event in the First Lady’s life. She had surprised and delighted Hick- and Howard Haycraft when she sent their tickets, although Hick understood that ER did not “really give a darn about seeing the game. Darling, if you don’t want to go, don’t.” But ER knew that it meant something to her friends, and her son John.

  ER confided the true feelings of her divided heart in her Thanksgiving letter to Elinor Morgenthau. “Never was I more reluctant to start out [for Boston] than last night…. Ethel comes in the morning and I return to New York.” She would “go to the game Sat so Johnny can sit in the box.” As for Anna and John’s move, ER wrote, “I might as well confess to being depressed….”

  ER’s presence at the historic game at West Point, which Navy won 7–0, created headlines. Accompanied by four companions, including her son John, and “Lorena Hickok, an aide,” ER was seen to “munch” an egg-and-lettuce sandwich before the game and bundle into a “seal coat,” which she added to her green wool coat with mink collar, in a desperate effort to keep out the blustery wind; and she was observed alone at the train station before the game ended.

  ER denied that she left the game out of boredom. She needed to dash down to Washington from West Point to “collect some clothes.” She wrote FDR that her dash to Washington was urgent: Having toured “half the nation,” everything was “dirty,” and she had nothing left to wear.

  ER k
ept the worst hospital news from her husband, and was glad to read in the newspapers that he and James were having “a grand time.” Happy at sea, FDR reported fully to both his mother and his wife. His first letter, just out from Charleston, went to “Dearest Mama: Just an au revoir note,” and a promise: “I will send you a line from Trinidad and will think of one day there 32 years ago!” He referred to the trip his mother had arranged when she tried to lure him away from his engagement with ER.

  He sent “Dearest Babs” a full description of the customarily wild cross-dressing naval tradition, which featured drink and drag, at the equator: “Great fun ‘Crossing the line’—Marvellous costumes in which King Neptune and Queen Aphrodite and their court appeared. The Pollywogs were given an intensive initiation lasting two days, but we have all survived and are now fullfledged Shellbacks.”

  The USS Indianapolis, he wrote, was an especially “happy ship.” His companions were “jolly,” and the ship was “steady” at the great speed of twenty-five knots with “no vibration.” He was relaxed, and the fish were fabulous.

  Uninformed about his son’s worrisome condition, FDR wrote that he hoped “it will clear up quickly and think it will if he will go to bed early for a week…. Jimmy is in fine form, and works daily at his ship and [Marine] Corps duties.”

  FDR had commissioned his son a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, a rank he considered appropriate for his personal aide. ER disapproved, and wrote a censorious letter inquiring if James was now “a 2nd Lieut. or a Lieut. Col.” It might have seemed a joke, but James wrote that “Father kidded me for days about that one,” and he was hardly amused: “Frankly, I felt like an impostor in that starched white uniform with silver leaves on the shoulders.” And then came Mother’s letter, “inquiring in that disingenuous way of hers….”