First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Although much of her influence remained private, Eleanor Roosevelt became increasingly outspoken on controversial subjects during her twelve years as First Lady. Early in her husband’s first administration she had announced that she would not comment on pending legislation, but she gradually changed her own rules.49 Her magazine articles, which had in the beginning stuck to innocuous topics such as family camping trips and baby care, gradually took on such matters as the president’s plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, the correct level of preparedness for war, and a war referendum amendment.50 Beginning in 1936, she also wrote a newspaper column, “My Day,” in which she offered her own pithy judgments of people and policies. In 1939 she used the syndicated column to publicize her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution because of the organization’s refusal to permit Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall, thus causing Time to describe her as “increasingly vocal these days.”51

  Such a visible and unconventional First Lady raised many eyebrows and she became almost immediately the subject of caricatures. Within months of the 1933 inauguration, a national magazine carried a much-repeated cartoon showing a group of miners deep under the ground, one turning to the next and announcing, “Gosh, here’s Mrs. Roosevelt.”52 By 1940, the criticism appeared on campaign buttons, “And we don’t want Eleanor either.” But the First Lady took it all as part of the job. On entering the White House, she had told Lorena Hickok, “I shall very likely be criticized, but I cannot help it,”53 and there is little evidence that she changed her mind. One reporter, who preserved shorthand notes of many of Eleanor’s news conferences, observed that she responded cordially to all questions, even those clearly hostile to her, except when she “took on an edge to her voice when asked an unwelcome question about one of her children.”54

  Eleanor could pass off much of her activity as helping Franklin, and he shrewdly saw the advantages of having a visible, politically involved wife who was known to disagree with him. When asked if her liberal views might not taint him for the more conservative voters, he could answer, “Well, that’s my wife, and I can’t be expected to do anything about her.” Yet at the same time, he gained support from those who saw Eleanor as their own champion. She simply served as “his eyes and ears,” it was sometimes said, when she inspected mines, toured slums, interviewed families of the urban poor and then relayed her impressions to him. She did show an unusual knack for catching the poignant detail, and once at a White House dinner party, she told about visiting a poor Appalachian family. They had all appeared shy about greeting such a famous visitor, but as she was about to leave, a small boy brought his pet rabbit to the door to bid her goodbye. The boy’s sister looked at the president’s wife with a “glint in her eye” and said, “He thinks we’re not going to eat [that rabbit] but we are.” With that, Eleanor recalled, “the boy went running down the road, rabbit clutched to his chest.” At least one of Eleanor’s guests felt moved to mail a check “to help keep the rabbit alive.”55

  But Eleanor Roosevelt also used her considerable influence in behalf of her own friends and projects. When the congressional committee headed by Martin Dies summoned several Youth Congress members to testify in 1939 about possible connections to communism, she went to witness their treatment. Later, she described how she had silently intervened: “At one point, when the questioning seemed to me to be particularly harsh, I asked to go over and sit at the press table. I took a pencil and a piece of paper, and the tone of the questions changed immediately. Just what the questioner thought I was going to do I do not know, but my action had the effect I desired.”56

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s multitude of activities in the 1930s led reporters to describe the Roosevelts as a team. Arthur Krock suggested that Eleanor might try to succeed her husband in 1940,57 and in 1941 Raymond Clapper, a syndicated journalist, selected Eleanor as one of the ten most powerful people in Washington, along with John L. Lewis and General George C. Marshall. “She has had,” Clapper wrote, “almost the importance of a cabinet minister without portfolio. She deserves credit for many humanitarian projects of the administration, including the National Youth Administration, nursery schools, slum clearance and others. For eight years she had been the traveling ears and eyes of the President. Now her influence is stronger than ever. Count Mrs. Roosevelt not only the most influential woman of our time but also a most active force in public affairs.”58

  Such popularity required many adjustments, and Eleanor’s childhood had not prepared her for being on a first-name basis with the rest of the world. She tried to adapt. When her husband asked her to go to the Pacific in World War II, she was taken aback in Guadalcanal to hear a young serviceman say loudly, “There’s Eleanor,” but she decided to accept it as a compliment and respond with a wave and a smile.59

  The confidence she gained in her mature years led Eleanor Roosevelt to adventures she would not have attempted in her youth and encouraged her to break out of the old limits imposed on women of her time. She flew in a plane piloted by the famous Amelia Earhart who, for that occasion, wore a long evening dress while she sat at the controls.60 Eleanor told reporters that she would “love to cross the Atlantic by plane” well before she had the opportunity, and when the time came for her to go to Europe and to the Pacific, she flew. In 1933, Good Housekeeping dubbed her “our flying First Lady,” and in 1939, she titled one of her own articles “Flying is Fun.”61 At a time when most Americans still thought flying too dangerous to try, Eleanor Roosevelt delighted in leading the way. She was photographed alongside planes and interviewed inside, doing more for the aviation industry, it was sometimes said, than anyone since Charles Lindbergh.

  As the 1940 election approached and speculation grew that Eleanor might like a political office for herself, she insisted, “Nothing under heaven could ever persuade [me to run].”62 That did not mean, however, that the subject of women in politics was far from her mind. The same month that Eleanor renounced a political career for herself, she began a three-part piece in Good Housekeeping by noting the gains women had made in the twenty years since obtaining the vote. The number serving in state legislatures had actually declined, Eleanor noted, from a peak of 149 in 1929 to 129 a decade later, but she judged this a temporary phenomenon. The presidency would never go to a woman, Eleanor predicted, until women had first established themselves in prominent business and government positions.63

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s feminism hewed more closely to the lines of the conservative branch of the movement in the 1930s and 1940s than to the radical wing, which, under the rubric of the National Woman’s Party, sought the elimination of all discrimination on the basis of sex. Since the suffrage victory in 1920, the feminists had divided, with one branch defending protective legislation for women while the Woman’s Party attacked such approaches, pointing out that women could not expect equity in pay and promotions if they insisted on superior, protected treatment. Since 1923, the Woman’s Party had advocated an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to bar discrimination on the basis of sex, but Eleanor and her friends on the other side defended the hardearned legislation that shielded women workers from night shifts, heavy loads, and other dangerous assignments. To give up these protections for a potentially unenforceable Equal Rights Amendment made little sense to her; and even in her friendly conversations with women reporters, many of whom stood on the other side, Eleanor stuck by her position. This intransigence prompted the journalist Ruby Black to say, “She talks like a social worker and acts like a feminist.”64

  The point has been made that, even without an influential First Lady, women would have increased their share of important federal jobs in the 1930s because the government moved into the kinds of social welfare areas that had traditionally been associated with home and family.65 Perkins’s apprenticeship in the Consumers’ League and in the (New York) State Factory Investigating Commission prepared her to head the country’s Labor Department. Molly Dewson’s directorship of the parole department of Massachusett�
�s State Industrial School for Girls and her involvement in minimum wage legislation equipped her for active participation in the New Deal. Whatever the routes to their new jobs, Perkins, Dewson, and many others, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, who headed the Negro affairs division of the National Youth Administration, held important decision-making positions which affected the entire nation; and they held those jobs in unprecedented numbers. Other appointments of women in the 1930s, such as those in foreign service, were unrelated to welfare issues. Franklin Roosevelt selected Ruth Bryan Owen as the country’s first woman minister when he named her to represent the United States in Denmark in 1933. In 1939, Florence Jaffray Harriman was appointed minister to Norway.

  Eleanor also used her influence in the cause of achieving civil rights for black Americans. Her years as First Lady coincided with events that emphasized very old, strong traditions of racism in American culture: the Depression, the continued migration of blacks out of the South and into northern and western cities, and a renewed reliance on lynching, which had long served in the South to help maintain white dominance. She reacted by involving herself in the campaign for equal rights as no other president’s wife had ever done. In this respect she led, rather than followed her husband, and she earned the permanent admiration of many Americans. Her resignation from the DAR over their treatment of Marian Anderson was only her most publicized stand. She also worked for the appointment of blacks to high office, appealed directly to officials to remove disabilities faced by black workers on their jobs, and served as go-between when civil rights advocates sought the ear of the president. Only the threat of harming Franklin’s chances prohibited her from doing more, and she once confessed, “I frequently was more careful than I might otherwise have been.”66

  Whatever Eleanor’s direct influence in these and other appointments, she could not have acted on so many fronts had not her incredible energy level permitted her to pack into one day more than most people could do in a week. In a typical day, she breakfasted with guests, read several newspapers, attended a conference, returned to the White House to hold her own press conference, made a radio broadcast, and dictated her own column—all before lunch. In the afternoon she saw callers, attended a five-cent dinner to learn how people on WPA wages managed, met with her husband and then worked on her mail until three in the morning.67 And she managed all this activity with a tiny staff. Only her personal secretary, Malvina Thompson, was a regular, full-time employee, assisted by various White House staffers who worked on temporary assignments. Eleanor admitted she had the benefit of a very healthy body and insisted that she never permitted herself to feel hurried. If anything kept her awake once she had gone to bed, she never admitted it.

  Such an energetic and independent national figure might have been expected to influence her daughter and granddaughters to move in the same direction, but courage to break new ground did not go with the genes. Eleanor’s formal education had ended at the English boarding school, and her daughter, Anna, bowed to her grandmother Sara Delano Roosevelt’s opinions on the proper training for her sex and did not go to college. Anna’s daughter, also named Eleanor, spent considerable time with her grandparents both at the White House and Hyde Park, but she later defined her own youth as a time of very narrow opportunities for girls: “I thought of being a teacher,” Eleanor Seagraves told a 1984 audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “or maybe a librarian, but those were really the only two options open to me.”68

  Even if she had little effect on the thinking of her daughter and granddaughter, Eleanor Roosevelt set a new standard against which all later First Ladies would be measured. Much of what she did simply extended the activities of her predecessors. Called the president’s political confidante and counselor, she repeated what Abigail Adams had done. Described as the president’s eyes and ears, she functioned as Sarah Polk had. Identified as the humane side of the presidency, its conscience and link with the underdog, she continued a long tradition associated with First Ladies since Martha Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt’s unique contribution lay in braving criticism by opening up to the press and using her influence as a force separate from the president’s, especially in extending opportunities for women and others lacking equal chances. In the process she helped destroy some old, strong prejudices against combining substantive political action with “ladylike” behavior.

  That a woman raised in one of New York’s oldest families, when considerable attention went to learning to curtsey to one’s elders, would turn up her collar and cuffs and go down in the mines to see conditions for herself or off to the Pacific to inspect military operations for her husband, surprised many people and marked a new level of performance by a president’s wife. Eleanor’s letters show that by the time she occupied the White House, she had become bored by the kind of activities that still concerned her wealthy relatives. After visiting a cousin in Rhode Island in 1933, she wrote “Newport is so smug,”69 and after seeing her mother-in-law off on a European trip, Eleanor noted how far she had moved from the older woman’s world: “I did not want to go in the least. She’s staying at the Embassy in London, going to stay with the King and Queen. … Lord I would hate it & how she will love it.”70 Only when royalty had ideas worth discussing did Eleanor appreciate conversing with them. “I talked to the Queen [Wilhelmina],” the First Lady wrote during one of the Dutch monarch’s visits to Hyde Park, “and I like her. She has quality when you talk to her seriously.”71

  Talking seriously—regardless of the status of the person on the other end of the conversation—became so important to Eleanor that she paid little attention to old ideas about what was proper for a lady, particularly a First Lady. On a car trip between Washington and New York, she picked up a hitchhiker, one of the many jobless wanderers known as “hoboes” or “tramps” in the 1930s, and she offered him a card with her New York address so that he could go there for a meal. Her old reservations about the propriety of smoking evidently had disappeared in the 1930s, and she broke precedent in the White House by having cigarettes offered to women guests at the conclusion of White House dinners. The young wife who had objected to her husband’s friends because they smoked now counted among her best friends cigar-smoking women reporters and she occasionally lit up a cigarette herself just to make her strike against the double standard. Perhaps she, too, had recognized in herself the merging of the “person” and the “personage.”

  When Franklin died suddenly on April 12, 1945, just eighty-two days into his fourth presidential term, Eleanor, then sixty-one years old, had to work out whether she still existed as a private “person” apart from the “personage” who was Franklin’s wife. She had always objected to the “fishbowl” aspect of living in the White House (although she would insist until her death that there were compensations),72 and she prepared to take up residence in a rented apartment on Washington Square in New York City. Reporters who met her train as she arrived in Pennsylvania Station got from her a terse, “The story is over,”73 but of course it was not.

  Until her death on November 7, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt continued an active public life, representing her country at the United Nations, where she surprised both her American colleagues and her Russian counterparts by showing firmness in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In December 1948, when the Declaration passed the General Assembly and the other delegates rose to applaud Eleanor Roosevelt, one of her old political adversaries, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, conceded publicly what many people were thinking privately: “I want to say that I take back everything I ever said about her and believe me, it’s been plenty.”74 Her final appointment came in 1961 when President John Kennedy named her to head the Commission on the Status of Women.

  In the seventeen years that she survived her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt achieved recognition as “First Lady of the World”—a status that would have been impossible to attain without the springboard of the White House. Living there longer than any of her predecessors, she had experimented with t
he role of president’s wife and changed it, opening up what had been hidden and breaking down barriers that had stood firm for a century and a half.

  To those searching for some explanation of why the apparently shy and insecure young woman matured into a precedent-breaking First Lady, Eleanor offered few clues. Examples of politically shrewd, risk-taking ancestors may have moved her—relatives sometimes noted that she resembled her Uncle Theodore, her father’s brother, more than any of his own children did. Eleanor herself pointed out that her Uncle Theodore often included his two sisters in discussions during his governorship and presidency. The older sister, whom Eleanor called “Auntie Bye,” lived in Washington, and Eleanor recalled, “There was never a serious subject that came up while [Theodore] was President that he didn’t go to her home on N Street and discuss with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decisions, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”75

  Eleanor’s loneliness in her own marriage may have encouraged her to look to public service for a sense of worth, especially after her children were grown. Perhaps as helpful as any explanation is one offered by Joseph Lash, her biographer and friend. Lash reported that Eleanor divided women into the “Marthas” and the “Marys,” after the biblical sisters who defined their lives in such different ways. Martha was “devoted, feminine, fun-loving, frivolous,” while Mary preferred the world of ideas and action. “[Eleanor Roosevelt] knew that she never could be the admiring female,” Lash wrote, “and while she accepted the fact that men sought their Marthas as well as their Marys, she insisted there would be only one ‘First Lady’ in the White House.”76 For 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and for the nation—that represented a courageous redefinition of womanliness.