by Susan Quinn
“It was bad,” she wrote Eleanor, “because it brought to the surface things that I’ve been secretly worrying about for weeks and weeks. He’s right, of course, and he obviously did mean well—I do think he’s really fond of me and worried about me.”
Eleanor thought the Commander was too hard on Hick, but Hick defended him as only telling the truth. In fact, she did get her next job, once again, through Eleanor’s connections. But this one, unlike the World’s Fair stint, proved to be a perfect fit—for Hick and, it turned out, for her boss, Democratic Party publicity director and former newsman Charlie Michelson. Michelson hired Hick to go out into the country, particularly the Midwest, and sample popular sentiment about FDR and the Democratic Party. Hick, even though she was stuck for long hours on buses and trains going from one town to the next, had never enjoyed herself more.
“This job is such fun, dear,” she wrote as she got ready for a three-week trip to Ohio and Indiana. It was the “nearest thing to newspaper work I’ve found since I left AP,” she wrote from Cincinnati. Her three and a half years on the road for Harry Hopkins, along with her old newspaper contacts, were “standing me in good stead.”
Two conclusions emerged from Hick’s investigations. First, the women of the country, like Eleanor, were dead set against going to war. Second, the American attitude toward a Roosevelt third term had shifted overnight with the European declaration of war in September 1939. “Darling, I’m sorry, but it’s all Third Term!” Hick wrote to Eleanor from Indianapolis. If the country was going to go to war—as seemed more and more likely—then people wanted Roosevelt to lead the way. Eleanor summed up her reaction to this news in two words: “I groan.”
A showdown of sorts between Eleanor’s point of view and her husband’s took place on February 11, 1940, when thousands of left-leaning young people brought their message to the president in a gathering called the Citizenship Institute on the White House lawn. Their message, as delivered to the president by American Youth Congress chairman Jack McMichael, was that “America’s twenty-one million youth are ready to fight, but determined to do their fighting at home—against indifference, intolerance and greed, for jobs, civil liberties and peace.”
FDR welcomed them from the White House porch, then proceeded to deliver what columnists would later describe as a “spanking.” He started with a defense of the New Deal, stressing all that had been done to improve youths’ prospects, including the American Youth Act. But he added, “Don’t seek or expect a panacea . . . a guarantee of permanent remunerative occupation of your own choosing.”
FDR was just getting warmed up. He moved on to foreign policy, criticizing the AYC for passing “resolutions on subjects which you have not thought through and on which you cannot possibly have complete knowledge.” He zeroed in on their criticism of loans to Finland, which was at that moment engaged in a “winter war” to fight off Soviet aggression. Their criticism was, he told them, “unadulterated twaddle, based on . . . 90 percent ignorance.” It was at about this point that some in the audience began to hiss—quickly silenced by others.
The lecture continued: “The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor . . . infinitesimally small.”
Eleanor, as usual, stayed cool and calm, answering questions for over an hour afterward in a “kindly, sincere and considerate” manner. She told the youths they shouldn’t pass any resolutions they didn’t believe in. “In all fairness, I think, however, it should be said that there is no excuse for a big nation invading a little nation that has not been attacked by that little nation.”
Tommy was furious with the young people’s rudeness toward the president. When some of them came to tea afterward, she upbraided them: “How dare you insult the President of the United States?” The president, when he heard about it, called her in to his office and said, “Thank you, Tommy.”
But some weeks later, Tommy reluctantly typed yet one more essay by Eleanor about “Why I Still Believe in the Youth Congress.” All the attacks on the Congress, Eleanor argued, had “only consolidated the feeling of ‘youth against the world.’” She didn’t “condone bad manners” or “disrespect for high office,” but after all, only a few of the young people had been rude. And they had been standing in the cold rain after spending the night in buses with very little sleep. “I wish we could look at this whole question of the activities of youth-led organizations, from the point of view of the wisest way for old people to help youth.”
Hick was inclined to sympathize with Tommy and FDR at this point. “I don’t believe in baiting Communists,” she wrote Eleanor, “. . . and I think making martyrs of them is silly. It’s alright with me if they want to be Communists, and I know, as well as you do, what makes Communists. I think that’s why I liked ‘Grapes of Wrath’ so much. It shows so clearly and, to my mind, convincingly what makes Communists. But Communists I do not like.”
At the same time, Hick admired Eleanor’s ability to be “sane and dispassionate” while others “get annoyed with a few brash young leaders and lose sight of the real picture. . . . I do get so irritated at times with what one might call ‘professional Youth.’” She admitted that she might have behaved “just as they do—probably worse.” Back in 1917, she had been such a vocal opponent of the war that she was briefly investigated by the Department of Justice.
Hick had engaged in passionate debates with her newspaper colleague “Hi” Austin Simons about his decision to resist the draft and go to jail in 1917. When he wound up in federal prison, she wrote him sustaining letters. “I am sitting on my bench, grinning the grin that your letter has evoked every time I have read it,” Simons wrote Hick from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. “It lies beside me, its pages margined with memory—pictures of old days, its lines interwritten with swatches of old conversations, old discussions and old projects, its ‘sincere affection’ saluting all the warm greetings and comradely emotions I have wished for many months to give you.” The memories that Hick, like so many others, carried of the First World War made it hard to accept the inevitability of the Second.
But events were slowly forcing even Eleanor to change her mind. Her April defense of the Youth Congress was to be her last. That same month, Germany occupied Denmark and took over Norway by sea; in May it invaded neutral Belgium and Holland. It looked as though France would fall too. On May 20, after reading the morning papers, Eleanor wrote to the Youth Congress leaders, warning them that she was willing to speak at their next meeting but that her speech “could not be to the liking of the group.”
Five days later, she told the closing Youth Congress session that even though “you don’t want to go to war” and “I don’t want to go to war,” “war may come to us.” It was not what the crowd wanted to hear. “Her scolding did no good,” the New York Times noted the next day. “They refused to reconsider their resolution against preparedness.”
Eleanor went through an unusually discouraged period that spring. No doubt it saddened her to part ways with her young friends after so enjoying their company. Tommy wrote Anna that her mother was frustrated because she didn’t yet have a job to do in the war effort. But Eleanor’s mood was surely most affected by the realization that everything was moving inexorably toward a third term. She not only hated the idea of carrying the First Lady’s ceremonial burden for four more years, but also dreaded the effect of the goldfish bowl on her children, who were easy prey for scandal-loving journalists. Even Franklin, she believed, would have liked to retire to the “role of elder statesman.”
But retiring was not an option. By the time the Democratic convention opened in Chicago on July 15, France had surrendered and Hitler had driven the British forces back to Dunkirk, where they were forced to abandon all their weaponry and flee home. Hitler had announced his plan, called Operation Sea Li
on, to invade Great Britain.
“Do you think Hitler really will send 3000 planes to bomb England?” Hick asked Eleanor on July 6, 1940. “The very thought makes me feel sick at my stomach.”
A few weeks earlier, the Republicans had chosen Wendell Willkie, a likable utilities magnate with no government experience of any kind, to be their presidential candidate. By the time Hick left Washington to attend the convention, there could be very little doubt in the minds of most people that Roosevelt would have to stay on for a third term. Ironically, it was going to be Eleanor Roosevelt who would smooth the way to his nomination.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A BETTER POLITICIAN THAN HER HUSBAND
TO L A HICKOK, STEVENS HOTEL CHICAGO
WILL ARRIVE ABOUT 6:40 CHICAGO DAYLIGHT SPECIAL PLANE, WILL NOT NEED A ROOM AS RETURNING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
LOVE ELEANOR
ELEANOR’S TELEGRAM TO HICK said it all. Disagreement about FDR’s vice presidential choice at the Democratic convention in Chicago was threatening to derail his nomination for a third term. Eleanor had reluctantly agreed to fly to Chicago and give a speech, in hope of smoothing ruffled feathers. But she was determined to do it with as little disruption of her life as possible. She would fly in, do her duty, and fly out again on the same day. No need to stay over at the Stevens Hotel, which would be swarming with reporters and Democratic operatives. She had always disliked all the hoopla of political conventions, much preferring to follow events from Val-Kill with Tommy and Joe Lash.
Hick, of course, was the opposite. She savored every minute of the Democratic convention of 1940, where she was privy to the plots and counterplots, resentments and surprises. One surprise, right from the start, was that Democratic Party chairman Jim Farley, who had so successfully operated FDR’s previous campaigns, was only nominally in charge. “I’m the only one around here who doesn’t know anything,” Farley peevishly told a New York Times reporter on the first day of the convention. Did he have his usual direct line to FDR at the White House? Farley was asked. “Apparently,” he replied, “there is a different situation now.”
It didn’t take reporters long to discover that if there was a “smoke-filled room” in Chicago, it was located on the third floor of the Blackstone Hotel, in Harry Hopkins’s suite. Hopkins had a direct line to the White House in the bathroom, where he could discuss tactics with FDR in private. One convention delegate, using a rustic metaphor, explained that “the boys knew they had rings in their noses, but they did not know who held the leading strings.”
Hick knew, of course. Although she was fond of the man she called “the boss,” she understood how party regulars—including her current boss, Charlie Michelson, as well as Jim Farley—would resent the intrusion of Harry Hopkins, a social worker and political amateur, into the quadrennial party rite.
Nor was Hick surprised that the delegates were less than enthusiastic in the early going, given FDR’s refusal to state his own position on running for a third term. “I have thought for some time that he was overplaying his role of indifference and was displaying too much coyness,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary. FDR didn’t want to ask for a third term, he wanted to be asked, unanimously if possible.
The mood of the convention intensified on the second day, when veteran orator Alben Barkley took the podium, starting off with a few jabs at Wendell Willkie, then moving on to shout the magic name of Roosevelt. For the next twenty-five minutes, the thirty-five hundred delegates turned into a “wild, shifting mass of screaming, standard-waving humanity.”
When Barkley finally restored order, conveyed FDR’s calculated message that he had no wish to run for a third term, and released the delegates to vote as they pleased, the crowd erupted once again in a “draft Roosevelt” demonstration. “We want Roosevelt,” an amplified voice roared. “Florida Wants Roosevelt,” came another voice. “The whole world wants Roosevelt!” “Willkie wants Roosevelt!” The shouting, interspersed with marching tunes, went on for an hour.
But Hick, watching from the sidelines, observed that grassroots Democrats from around the country weren’t joining in the cheering. What’s more, a New York Times reporter soon discovered that the loudest Roosevelt chants were coming not from the convention floor but from the basement, where the Chicago superintendent of sewers, a man with a powerful booming voice named Thomas F. Garry, had his own microphone.
Whether Harry Hopkins knew in advance about the “voice from the sewer” or not, the demonstration highlighted a deep division at the convention. From his perch at the Blackstone Hotel, Hopkins had rallied the support of power brokers like Mayor Ed Kelly, but he had alienated the party regulars across the street at the Stevens Hotel. In particular, he had ignored and infuriated Farley, a man whose long years as party boss had won him many friends. Farley had packed the balcony with his supporters, and had sentimental support among the delegates on the convention floor as well. Eventually that discontent would take the form of opposition to FDR’s vice presidential choice. The ensuing quarrel threatened to reverse the Roosevelt juggernaut.
FDR was nominated with relative ease. The trouble came when he sent word of his choice for vice president: Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace. It was a surprising choice. FDR had never been close to Wallace, but he now decided that he was “the kind of man I like to have around,” someone who “is good to work with” and “knows a lot.”
Wallace, however, was exactly the kind of New Dealer the party regulars disliked: a former Republican and an impractical left-leaning utopian. There were actually boos from the convention floor when his name was proposed.
Back at the White House, FDR was digging in his heels. Either he got Wallace, he told his advisers, or he retired to Hyde Park. He even wrote out a brief speech to that effect and sent his speechwriter Sam Rosenman off to polish it up for delivery.
Meanwhile, at Val-Kill, Eleanor was becoming more and more indignant about Hopkins’s treatment of Jim Farley. “Harry has been running things,” she told Frances Perkins, and has not been “very tactful.”
Even before the convention, Eleanor had felt abandoned by Hopkins. In the past, he had always been her ally in her mission to address societal wrongs. Now, as Tommy wrote Anna, he had “gone completely over to the other side of the house.” Not only had he moved permanently into the White House that spring, but he had become FDR’s regular companion at lunch, dinner, and in between—and before long his most important deputy, using all his connections in business, industry, and politics to mobilize for national defense. Now he had also usurped Farley’s role in the nominating process, without any consideration of the loyal old friend’s feelings.
Eleanor was genuinely fond of Farley, a bighearted Irish Catholic from upstate New York who had been Roosevelt’s political right-hand man since he had run for governor in 1928. Farley had played a critical role in FDR’s two previous presidential victories. He had worked closely, too, with Molly Dewson and Eleanor to provide jobs for women in the Roosevelt administration.
Farley had angered FDR by arguing against a third term, considered by many to be a dangerous, undemocratic precedent. Farley also had suggested himself in Democratic circles as a potential presidential candidate. Nonetheless, Eleanor didn’t think he deserved the rude treatment he had gotten thus far at the 1940 convention.
As news of FDR’s choice for vice president got around the convention, a revolt looked very possible. First Franklin had shunned Farley for Hopkins, and now he was overlooking Democratic regulars for a maverick. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was extremely worried. She wanted FDR to come to the convention and calm everyone down. When FDR refused, Perkins called Eleanor and suggested that she come instead.
When Eleanor called the president to ask if he wanted her to break precedent and speak to the convention, he asked, “Well, would you like to go?”
Her answer was, “No, I wouldn’t like to go! I’m very busy and I wouldn’t like to g
o at all.”
Then she asked, “Do you really want me to go?” It was the game the two played: neither liked to acknowledge their need for the other.
FDR managed to admit that “perhaps it would be a good idea.”
Eleanor agreed to go, provided Farley agreed.
When Farley heard that Eleanor was calling, he was so moved he could barely speak. He told her it was all right for her to come, and that he would delay the vice presidential nomination until after she made her speech. Then Farley, who knew Hick had influence with Eleanor, got in touch with Hick and told her to call Eleanor back and “tell her I mean it. Things are bad.”
That was when Eleanor figured out a way to enter and exit the Chicago convention with record speed. She arranged for a small plane to pick her up at Wappingers Falls airport, just fifteen miles from Val-Kill. On the trip south to New York City, the pilot allowed Eleanor to steer the plane, following the Hudson River. It gave her, she wrote years later, “a real sense of exhilaration.” It was probably the most carefree moment she would have that day, or for days to come.
When she landed in Chicago, Farley was waiting for her, along with the women of the press. They wanted to know if she was happy about the nomination.
“Happy!” she replied. “I don’t know how any one could be particularly happy about the nomination in the present state of the world.”
It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Did the president want you to come? they asked. “Did he wish you well?”
“I don’t remember that he wished me well,” she answered. “I suppose, of course, that he was willing for me to come—or I would not have come.”