Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Ultimately, the La Follette Committee’s revelations helped change the industrial climate of the country. Even though Southern senators opposed its investigations into local industrial habits and threatened to defund the committee, public opinion shifted in favor of the CIO. Logan and Gelders, the only Southern witnesses, dramatically improved the situation in Alabama, and their testimony influenced Myron Taylor, who announced that U.S. Steel would recognize the CIO.

  By 1938, ER worked closely with Joseph Gelders and the CIO’s Southern field representative Lucy Randolph Mason. Together they launched and organized the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Gelders initially wanted a conference of liberals and labor leaders to focus on the economy and civil liberties. ER invited him to the White House to discuss his plans and arranged a meeting with FDR, who suggested the conference deal with all Southern controversies, including voting rights and the poll tax.

  While the La Follette Committee broadcast the plight of unionists and encouraged workers’ rights, the United Auto Workers organized General Motors plants in fifty-seven communities throughout the United States and Canada. ER subsequently became close to the Reuther brothers, who built the UAW, which in January and February changed labor history as thousands of strikers sat down in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Unprecedented and dramatic, tense and dangerous, the six-week stand-off seemed like the dawn of Armageddon. Led by Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther and supported by the wives, mothers, and grandmothers of the striking autoworkers, a grassroots movement democratized industrial America.

  “With Babies and Banners,” the Women’s Emergency Brigade and the Women’s Auxiliary, organized by twenty-three-year-old Genora Johnson, fed and protected their husbands and sons. With red armbands and red tarns, they marched and sang, broke windows when their men were gassed, and put their bodies in front of threatening police. The strikers were family, creating a new social order. “A new type of woman was born in the strike.” Union wives would never again, they vowed, be silent or uninvolved. “The home and the union are becoming fused….”

  The songs and rallies, the perseverance and courage, at Detroit and Flint changed industrial life and remained legendary: “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Union Maid,” “Sit Down,” “Write Me Out My Union Card,” “Solidarity Forever.”

  CIO president John L. Lewis expected a sign of presidential support, at least a promise of relief for the strikers. The strikers assumed the president was “completely on their side.” But FDR would say nothing to endorse the lawless occupation of private property.

  Flint, Michigan, was the center of the vortex. Rubber workers and coal miners arrived to help out; “a revolutionary spirit surged through the town.” Michigan’s New Deal governor Frank Murphy, close to FDR, held frantic meetings with GM president Alfred P. Sloan, Frances Perkins, and John L. Lewis.

  Charges of radicalism, of communism, abounded. But when Sloan refused Perkins’s offer for government mediation, public opinion was with the strikers. Then, on 2 February, a Flint judge issued an injunction and ordered the strikers out. They refused, and sent a telegram to Governor Murphy:

  Unarmed as we are, the introduction of the militia, sheriffs or police … will mean a blood-bath of unarmed workers…. We have no illusions about the sacrifice this decision will entail. We fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us many of us will be killed and we take this means of making it known to our wives, to our children, to the people…. You are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths!

  John L. Lewis headed for Detroit. Everything depended on Murphy’s next move. He was with the union, but he was obliged to enforce the law of an injunction. When Lewis arrived, Murphy reported that FDR wanted sit-down strikes ended. Lewis was surprised. FDR had told him to “let them sit.” Murphy called for clarification, with Lewis on an extension. They heard FDR together: “Disregard whatever Mr. Lewis tells you.”

  According to Saul Alinskey, those words started the unending and “deadly feud between Lewis and Roosevelt.” Lewis later told Alinskey it was at that moment he “discovered the depths of deceit, the rank dishonesty and the doublecrossing character of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

  ER dreaded the implications of FDR’s evenhanded silence, and grieved to see capital actually mobilized to crush labor in America on her husband’s watch.

  With a militia of thirteen hundred, reinforced by twelve hundred heavily armed cavalry and other military personnel, the strikers were surrounded. For a time a blockade threatened the workers with starvation. But Murphy called it off, and the CIO’s auxiliary women’s battalion got food to their men. Then Murphy replaced one National Guard unit with the 125th Infantry, from Detroit: Comprised of autoworkers and their sons, brothers, cousins, and friends, it was a heroic demonstration of support. Still the atmosphere crackled with trouble as unionists descended from every area, and street fights with armed vigilantes ensued.

  Insurrection, even revolution, was in the air. GM turned off the heat, to drive the workers out. Workers opened the windows, which threatened to freeze everything inside, including the firefighting apparatus—which rendered GM’s insurance policies void. In a frenzy, GM representatives at Murphy’s insistence sat around a bargaining table with Lewis and Murphy, but refused to bargain. They dickered for a week, and settled nothing. On 9 February, Murphy alerted the National Guard. Death seemed imminent, as did the destruction of GM’s plants. Flint was to become a battlefield, a cemetery. Murphy was about to give up; Lewis invoked the names of Murphy’s Irish revolutionary forebears and urged the governor to remain steadfast. At 2:45 A.M. on 10 February, GM capitulated.

  At noon on 11 February 1937, General Motors recognized the United Automobile Workers, CIO. Both sides of the strike now called for industrial peace. ER, like all friends of unionism, was relieved by the monumental victory.

  In a February column, ER showed her support for organized labor—and workers’ unity: She had been visited by six New York City unionists, five of them unemployed “probably because they belong to this union, which is not a very strong one as yet.” Their demands seemed to her entirely reasonable: a wage to guarantee decent living, a forty-hour week, fair notice before layoffs. ER explained: “Many people do not believe in unions”; industrialists had competitive business needs; “unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair, any more than any other human beings.” Nevertheless, she concluded, only unionization will protect workers; and she, like the “majority of the people,” favored unions because they represented a democratic means to a necessary goal.

  FDR’s support for Murphy’s arbitration helped avoid bloodshed and advanced union recognition. But his silence did not protect him. It invoked Lewis’s bitter enmity and failed to stem charges of communism against the New Deal. The winds of the “little Red Scare” intensified as CIO victories mounted: Firestone, Goodyear, Studebaker, General Electric, Pittsburgh Plate Glass.

  On 2 March 1937, Myron Taylor announced U.S. Steel’s contract with Lewis. Without a strike, 60 percent of the steel industry was now CIO. But Walter Chrysler, considered a just and fair man by autoworkers, opted for a showdown with the strikers at Chrysler.

  Ironically, Nicholas Kelley was Chrysler’s general counsel. Florence Kelley’s son was not spared Lewis’s Shakespearean wrath: After a litany of his mother’s pioneering support for workers and unionism, economic justice and democracy, Kelley shouted: “STOP IT, STOP IT, MR. LEWIS! … I—I—AM NOT AFRAID OF YOUR EYEBROWS.” The stalled negotiations ended in laughter, and Chrysler signed the. CIO contract. Walter Chrysler told Lewis: “I do not worry about dealing with you, it is the Communists… that worry me….”

  ER’s steadfast friends and political allies Esther Lape, RIGHT, and Elizabeth Read, BELOW.

  SDR’s 80th birthday, 21 September 1934. Back row (left to right): FDR, Jr., Elliott, James, John; Middle row (left to right): ER, SDR, FDR. Front row (left to right): Ruth, Betsey, Sara, Eleanor (Sistie), Curtis (Buzzie), Anna.

  ER wi
th Ruth Bryan Owen, the U.S.’s first woman ambassador, 4 October 1934.

  LEFT: The “Cause and Cure of War” dinner, 21 January 1936, with Dr. Mary Woolley and Carrie Chapman Catt.

  Jane Addams, ABOVE, and Lillian Wald, RIGHT, ER’S great mentors and models.

  In Washington, ER met regularly with the Four of Hearts, childhood friends Mary Harriman Rumsey, Isabella Greenway… …and Elizabeth, Lady Lindsay. Frances Perkins regularly joined their “air our minds” lunches.

  Aubrey Williams, ER, Josephine Roche, and Harry Hopkins, National Youth Administration luncheon, 21 August 1935.

  The first of ER’s famous visits to coal mines, Bellaire, Ohio, 1935.

  Louis Howe, the bridge between ER and FDR.

  ER with her brother, Hall Roosevelt, at a ceremony for new PWA housing in Detroit, 1935.

  In 1935, ER exchanged flowers with six-year-old Geraldine Walker in Detroit. The Georgia Woman’s World ridiculed the tender moment in its hate campaign with the headline “BELIEVE IT OR NOT!” In 1998, the U.S. Post Office celebrated the same event with a commemorative stamp.

  Bernard Baruch and ER at a Metropolitan Opera benefit for unemployed women, 2 April 1935.

  On the campaign train for the 1936 election.

  Jim Farley, Molly Dewson, and ER launch the campaign in 1935.

  ER and Tommy at Democratic National Headquarters, 1936.

  ER’s valentines to Hick illuminate the arc of their relationship. In 1934 there is romance, and “it is you I want, my dearest, only you.” By 1935 “life’s rough seas” have intruded. In 1937 even tea for two is difficult to arrange.

  Weddings in the family: Franklin, Jr., marries Ethel Du Pont, June 1937.

  And John Roosevelt marries Anne Clark, June 1938.

  Mary McLeod Bethune, leader of the Black Cabinet.

  Molly Dewson at a celebratory Democratic dinner, 1938.

  Thanksgiving at Warm Springs, Ga., ER, FDR, and Robert Rosenbaum, 24 November 1938.

  ER relaxing on the Sequoia.

  Square dancing at Arthurdale.

  Signing a copy of This is My Story.

  Listening and knitting at the World Youth Congress at Vassar, 1938.

  OVERLEAF: ER at Norris Dam.

  The great CIO victories of February-March 1937 led to dignity for workers and the mobilization of a new American movement that united economic and racial justice.

  On 5 February 1937, while the CIO dominated headlines, FDR eclipsed the news. The president held a startling news conference in which he announced that he wanted legislation enabling him to appoint a new Supreme Court justice for every justice over seventy who refused to retire. At the time six justices were over seventy. Though it was not an outrageous suggestion, given the Supreme Court’s contempt for New Deal legislation, it exploded unexpectedly.

  The plan he had referred to only obliquely on 6 January was now introduced without warning. He had alerted nobody, prepared no public support. The press went wild. Congress was frantic: “Power mad,” FDR intended to “pack the court” and ruin the nation.

  Never before had FDR acted without consulting his closest allies, or creating a congressional support base for his most controversial decisions. In part, he simply misjudged the political circumstances. After all, he enjoyed one of the greatest majorities in both houses of Congress in U.S. history. After the election of 1936, there were 76 Democrats and 16 Republicans in the Senate and 332 Democrats and 89 Republicans in the House. Clearly he expected support from his co-partisans. But the landslide was a political illusion. Where real issues of liberal change were involved, Northern Democrats had little in common with Southern Democrats, and black and white Democrats remained embattled in every region.

  FDR’s secrecy was a misguided tactic. Fears of dictatorship, charges of a brutal violation against constitutional sanctity, emerged from unlikely quarters; a wide spectrum of friends and foes opposed his “court-packing” proposal.

  ER was surprised and troubled by FDR’s scheme. Although she agreed there was a need to transform the Court, she doubted the wisdom of his decision to increase the number of justices from nine to fifteen. She invited Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to the White House to discuss what they considered FDR’s threat to the nation’s celebrated “balance of powers.” Attorney and legal scholar, and ER’s personal investment adviser, Elizabeth Read had actually sat and wept at her dining-room table when she first read of FDR’s intentions. Nothing he had done, not even their differences over the World Court, had ever seemed to her so wrong and dangerous. She feared charges of dictatorship would create opposition to all his good works.

  Bipartisan opposition to FDR’s court-packing bill suspended all other issues for months. ER subsequently wrote that “he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble” had he had the patience to wait until several justices died or retired.

  ER was mostly perplexed by her husband’s priorities. Given his great election victory, he might have instead focused on positive solutions to the nation’s ills. And she was always disturbed by FDR’s secretiveness. She frequently lamented that everybody who left his office left convinced that he had been promised something specific, when he had been promised nothing at all. As ER contemplated FDR’s Supreme Court proposal, she believed Howe would have prevented this boner, and she fully realized how far outside FDR’s decision-making process she now stood.

  Despite her private qualms, ER publicly defended her husband. Charges that he had become a dictator to grant favors to “a minority” were ludicrous. She wrote that all opposition to FDR’s Court reform plan came from the very people who opposed the “social legislation of the present Administration, and the views of the people on this legislation were rather clearly expressed in November,” by a vast majority. The people of America had voted for FDR; he represented them and was obliged to protect their needs and interests.

  Although she initially told FDR that as she traveled across the country, she heard opposition to his plan across the political spectrum, she was persuasive in her defense. June Rhodes wrote: “I am reading everything you write about the Supreme Court each day, and … it seems in my humble opinion that [the President] is doing the right thing at the right time.”

  Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read remained bitterly opposed; Hick was in favor, but wavered; her circle was mostly opposed. ER’s correspondence emphasized the subject for months as it absorbed the nation’s business and dominated Congress.

  In February, Hick spent several days at the White House to attend Democratic Party festivities and private events. On 15 February, “we all spent a very happy evening” celebrating Jim Farley. Hick enjoyed wearing her new black velvet gown, and for ER “the high point” occurred “when I suddenly saw my very dignified friend, Molly Dewson … turn and pin a rose on her chief, giving him a kiss at the same time.”

  ER made much of Molly Dewson’s ceremonial kiss, and explained to the Democratic women of New York that tall, muscular Molly, Polly Porter’s longtime partner, rarely if ever kissed men, and so this occasion “was not as spontaneous as it seemed for she is not accustomed to embracing gentlemen and I think she must have had some coaching—but it was profitable coaching for it went off very well.”

  That week ER had an “air our minds” luncheon with Elisabeth Lindsay and Isabella Greenway—who had decided not to run again for Congress, evidently because of her differences with FDR, and had moved to New York. Far less pleasant was tea with Alice Roosevelt Longworth. ER wrote her daughter that Alice had arrived “at her request, and she can’t see why any of us should mind anything she has said.”

  Although Cousin Alice had been vicious during the campaign, and her “mollycoddle” column was unforgivable, ER nevertheless avoided a final break. Besides, she had for the moment won their lifelong competition. Alice’s daily column, printed in some papers beside “My Day,” was initially a spirited lark. ER wrote her old friend, now congresswoman, Nan Honeyman: “She certainly writes well. I wish I were as free as she,
though I do not wish ever to be as bitter.”

  But Alice’s columns were dull and soon canceled, and the final insult came when the Ladies’ Home Journal, which had been losing money, was taken over by Bruce and Beatrice Gould. To get the serial rights to ER’s memoir, they not only offered her $75,000, they offered Alice “a settlement of $2,000 to give up her column,” so that ER would consider their bid more kindly.

  On 16 February ER and Elinor Morgenthau drove off “in a young blizzard,” heading north to Cornell, and Tommy wrote Anna that “your father was really upset. He told the usher that no matter what he was doing to bring him word from her at once that she had arrived safely somewhere for the night. He told your mother she was a little mad and she said she was glad—she got more fun out of life that way!”

  At home, White House tensions bristled over the Supreme Court. ER wrote Hick: “FDR is tired and edgy and they are all working on a speech.”

  Elizabeth Read had a stroke that affected her memory and her ability to write and “to find the right words.” ER rushed to be with Esther Lape: “Elizabeth is ill and must be absolutely quiet…. I rather hate leaving Esther she looks so worried. Theirs is a companionship of long standing with Elizabeth the more unselfish & understanding in the past.”