ELEANOR ROOSEVELT BEGAN HER CAREER AS THE FOREmost political woman of the twentieth century convinced that women and men enter politics for different reasons: Men enter politics to pursue their own careers; women are motivated by a desire to change society, to improve the daily conditions of life. Impressed by the women she worked with, she came to believe that women’s public activities would determine America’s national future. Not a prewar suffragist herself, she fully appreciated the suffragists’ century of struggle, and the grass-roots strategy that ultimately triumphed.
She believed that fundamental change required active and committed women who were willing to go door to door, block by block, and educate people on an individual basis about the real needs and conditions of society. She saw the need for newsletters and information bulletins. ER was one of the first women activists to realize that little would be achieved without a mimeograph machine, and persuaded New York’s League of Women Voters to purchase one on 3 October 1922. Above all, ER understood that information and organization required local clubs and political centers, a network of women active in every town and village connected to one another through meetings, debates, round-table discussions, luncheons, dinner parties, and personal friendships.
During the 1920s, there were four centers of political power for women in New York State: the League of Women Voters, which was dominated by Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, Eleanor Roosevelt, Narcissa Vanderlip, Margaret Norrie, Carrie Chapman Catt, Agnes Brown Leach, and Helen Rogers Reid; the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), largely in the hands of Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swartz, and Mary Elizabeth Dreier; the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, which was dominated throughout the 1920s by five intimate friends, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Caroline O’Day, Elinor Morgenthau, and Eleanor Roosevelt; and the Women’s City Club, an umbrella organization dedicated to social reform and municipal affairs. Most of the two thousand members of the club were professional women—attorneys, physicians, educators, consumer activists, unionists, businesswomen, writers, artists, advertising agents, architects, engineers, printers, accountants, volunteer activists, saleswomen, office workers, and bankers—and many of them were active also in the WTUL, and the League of Women Voters. Here ER met and worked with every activist political woman in New York—social workers like Lillian Wald, Mary (Molly) Dewson, and Mary Simkhovitch; labor reformers such as Frances Perkins and Belle Moskowitz; Marie Jennie Howe, the Unitarian minister who created the women’s social club Heterodoxy.
There were many and labyrinthine connections. But a small number of women really pulled the network together. They served on the governing councils of each organization and decided on policy and strategy. ER rapidly became a leader of this group, which was made up largely of her own circle of Democratic women. She helped to raise funds, edited newsletters, moderated panels, participated in debates, presented information, toured the state on behalf of candidates and causes, and represented New York at national conventions of political women. To pursue the women’s agenda, for six years ER, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Elinor Morgenthau, and Caroline O’Day went “Trooping for Democracy.” In every weather and in every season, they toured New York State in their Democratic blue roadster, which they had bought together, or in O’Day’s chauffeured Packard. They toured every county to demand an expanded public-housing program, improved sanitation and sewerage control, frequent and comfortable public transit, new parks and public playgrounds, school lunches and nursing facilities, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, occupational-safety-and-health legislation, the eight-hour day, protective laws for women workers, mandatory-education laws, child-labor legislation, pure-food-and-milk legislation, the right of women to serve on juries, and equal representation of women on all committees of the Democratic Party.
At first public speaking was an ordeal for ER. But once she became comfortable at the podium, she was grateful for each opportunity to convey the messages she considered so urgent. Louis Howe was her tutor. Initially, he accompanied her when she spoke. He sat in the back of the room and monitored her every move. When her hands shook, he told her to hold the podium, not the paper. When she felt nervous, he recommended that she smile and breathe deeply. She laughed and even giggled inappropriately—at the wrong time, with the wrong sound. That was, he assured her, the worst thing she could do: It sent the wrong message. Howe’s advice was specific: Be prepared. Know what you want to say. Say it. And sit down. Never appear nervous.
ER’s gifts as a speaker were ultimately the result of her great love for people. Because she cared about her audience, she knew that it mattered to make eye contact and to connect directly with everybody in the room. Subsequently she hired voice trainers in an effort to control her pitch and her register. She was soon in demand as a speaker.
Throughout the 1920s, articles about ER and her political work appeared almost weekly in The New York Times. She was the subject of news accounts, columns, editorials, profiles in the Sunday Magazine section, and letters to the editor. Her public appearances were national news. Because she spoke candidly, her major statements were frequently quoted in full. On 7 August 1922, for example, ER denounced New York’s Republican Governor Nathan Miller as a reactionary:
He has shown himself affected with the hopeless moral blindness of the man who, losing his sight in early youth, finds it impossible to visualize in his mind anything but the sights and surroundings of the world as he saw it long ago.
This moral blindness is the distinguishing characteristic of the “standpatter.” It is quite as dangerous to our country as downright crookedness. The crooked politician is at least anxious to make a showing of progressiveness in public reform, but the hopeless reactionary is a stumbling block in the march of civilization.
Women are by nature progressives…. It is impossible to be both a Republican and a progressive under the leadership of Governor Miller…. [So] [t]he women of this State have …decided to go forward with the Democrats to better things rather than remain with the Republicans, futilely digging among the war-destroyed ruins of ancient standards of civilization for some charred bits of salvage with which to build a pitiful imitation of our old industrial structure….
Ironically, in her memoirs ER called the chapter devoted to the 1920s, the decade of the most robust political activity she undertook on her own, “Private Interlude.” Since she could hardly have meant by that an absorption in private or domestic affairs, one must conclude that this period in her life seemed in retrospect private in the sense that it was hers to do with as she pleased. She neither campaigned for FDR nor served as his surrogate. He was preoccupied with recovery; she was preoccupied with politics. She became famous not as FDR’s wife, but as a major political force to be reckoned with.
Yet, the more she achieved, the more she was acclaimed and celebrated in her own right, the more she sought to reassure FDR that she was doing it all for him. On 6 February 1924, for example, ER wrote him a long, rambling letter full of detail about her activities. But she concluded by reminding her husband that she was merely his temporary stand-in. She had been asked to sponsor or attend several memorial services for President Wilson, who died on 3 February. She agreed, though she understood they only wanted FDR’s name. She aimed neither to compete with her husband nor to upstage him. Only slowly and with considerable reluctance did ER admit that she was genuinely pleased by her public activities. Much more often she professed a selfless lack of interest in her own work, and her own career, and thereby contributed to our distorted image of her public self. While she was First Lady, she wrote that she was pushed into politics reluctantly—and solely in support of her husband. She never acknowledged her own joy in the game, or her own skills at manipulating the cards.
One of the myths that ER seemed actively to encourage was that she was naive politically. Not insignificantly, several people who harbored that illusion were actually victims of ER’s political intrigue and opposition. The fact that they saw her as a “dim bulb” rather than as their enemy is probably the greatest testimony to her political style and maneuvering. ER’s gracious manner often obscured intense emotions, including disapproval and dislike. She tended to avoid confrontations and occasionally walked away from angry words, but never from the battle. She did not play politics transcendentally—somewhere above the fray. She walked hard edges, made tough decisions, and followed her principles wherever they led.
Nowhere was this more clear than in her part in the Bok Peace Award controversy, which caused her to be attacked as a subversive. The Bok Peace Award was established in 1923 by Edward Bok, the former publisher and editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, who offered a prize of $50,000 to the plan that would “provide a practicable means whereby the United States can take its place and do its share toward preserving world peace, while not making compulsory the participation of the U.S. in European wars if any such are, in the future, found unpreventable.” It might be “based upon the present covenant of the League of Nations or may be entirely apart from that instrument.” A fortune equivalent to over $1 million in contemporary currency, the prize was headline news throughout the United States. It was featured in news columns, editorials, and cartoons; Will Rogers joked about it; it appeared in the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip.
Esther Lape agreed to administer the prize on the condition that Eleanor Roosevelt and Narcissa Vanderlip work with her. The contest created a stir in academic circles, and was taken seriously among leading American internationalists, especially businessmen who hoped for an expanding economic future free of both war and the current hysteria that rejected all European “entanglements”—including “foreign” trade. The former Secretary of War and Secretary of State, Elihu Root, agreed to be jury chair; Judge Learned Hand, Henry Stimson (to become Hoover’s Secretary of State and FDR’s Secretary of War), and Roscoe Pound (dean of the Harvard Law School) were dedicated members of the committee. The jury also included Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson’s former confidant; Wellesley College President Ellen Fitz Pendleton; William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette; General James G. Harbord, formerly General John J. Pershing’s chief of staff, then president of the new Radio Corporation of America; and Brand Whitlock, the novelist and progressive politician who served as Wilson’s ambassador to Belgium.
Lape considered it “deeply significant that none of the law experts” considered the campaign “a superficial popular activity.” In fact, a great optimistic mood regarding the possibility of outlawing war and achieving world peace through rational discourse prevailed during the 1920s. Thousands of plans were submitted to the jury from noted legal scholars, businessmen, former and current public officials, including FDR.
FDR worked hard on his plan, a variation of the current League, which he called a Society of Nations (heralding the United Nations). The range of submissions was vast: Harvard’s President Charles W. Eliot, for example, saw the path to world peace through increased “family discipline.” M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr’s longtime president, called for a “Declaration of Interdependence” to outlaw war and create a “Council of Vigilance and Inquiry” to resolve global tensions. Some wanted a national referendum in case of war; many sought means by which war, and the production of weapons for war, would be made unprofitable; one called for an army of hypnotists to drive warlike thoughts from the mind. Many ascribed war to propaganda, misinformation, and packaged hatred, and called for the creation of schools for international ethics and understanding. Hundreds of plans focused on the need for an equitable distribution of raw materials and natural resources; the restructuring of global markets and prices; the creation of a world economic council. The U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom called for a conference to consider the cancellation of the devastating wartime debt; the stabilization of European currencies; a reconsideration of the Treaty of Versailles, especially the evacuation of the Ruhr by the French; and general disarmament.
Of the 22,165 plans submitted, the committee chose a very simple plan by Charles E. Levermore, an academic, who recommended the United States’ immediate adherence to the Permanent Court of International Justice and cooperation with (though not membership in) the League of Nations.
Esther Lape selected twenty of the most interesting plans for publication, and introduced them with her analysis of the different Ways to Peace. Published by Scribner’s, the book sold well and was critically acclaimed. The New York Times reviewer considered Lape’s essay “better worth a $50,000 prize than any of the plans we have seen.” And the New York Herald Tribune editorialized that Lape’s book was the “best thing that came out of the Peace Award.”
The winning plan stimulated Bok, Esther Lape, ER, and their allies to promote U.S. entrance to the World Court. Senate isolationists were outraged and called for an investigation into the un-American and potentially treasonous nature of the Bok Award. They condemned it as propaganda that encouraged “foreign entanglements” and “communistic internationalism.”
On 17 January 1924, the veteran Democratic Irreconcilable James Reed called for the Senate Special Committee on Propaganda to investigate charges that the American Peace Award was the tool of “foreign governments or foreign institutions,” for the purpose of unduly and improperly influencing or controlling public opinion and legislative action, specifically regarding the “foreign policy of the United States.”
The Senate committee accused Edward Bok of conspiracy: He had attempted to manipulate public opinion with untold sums of money in behalf of the League and international peace, creating thereby “a moral menace.” Unruffled by threats of contempt charges, Bok refused to disclose the cost of the contest. He insisted that the money he donated to the American public was his affair and that he intended to spend the rest of his life giving his money to worthy causes.
According to The New York Times, the Senate committee room “was filled by over 700 men and women peace advocates” who hissed and booed the investigators and cheered Bok and Lape, who appeared as key witnesses.
Lape was particularly brilliant under fire. Although the Irreconcilable investigators sought to discredit and demean her, their questions were so insistent and their tone so assaultive that two senators, Frank Greene of Vermont and Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas (the only pro-Leaguer on the committee), frequently interrupted Reed’s harangues to “go to the aid of the witness.” (Reporters assured their readers, however, that Esther Lape did not require such chivalric services.)
Lape created the greatest flurry when she named ER and Narcissa Vanderlip as the two most significant members of the policy committee. The New York Herald took this as the signal to emphasize that the award was a plot by unscrupulous women, influenced by foreign radicals and their bipartisan henchmen (Root and Stimson were Republicans), to ensnare the United States into membership in that un-American organization the League of Nations. “The great Bok peace prize,” said the Herald, “was managed by two matrons of social distinction [ER and Narcissa Vanderlip] and a highly educated and most efficient young unmarried woman.” Lape was in fact older than ER, but unmarried women were generally perceived to be young—or at least younger than matrons of distinction. Nevertheless, the New York Times editorial “These Women” praised the skill and wisdom of Esther Lape and her “fellow conspirators.”
The Bok hearings were suspended on the news of President Wilson’s death, and then simply allowed to expire; but government isolationists pursued Bok’s Foundation and punished it by administrative fiat. The IRS removed the Foundation’s tax exemption. Its “education work” was declared “political” lobbying, in behalf of that un-American idea: international law.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s first specifically “un-American” activity resulted in the first document entered into her voluminous FBI file (only recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act). Dated 15 February 1924, and heavily deleted, it is part of the FBI’s “General Investigation” of the American Peace Award. “Recorded and Indexed,” with three copies sent to Washington and routed to J. Edgar Hoover, who signed it, the document itself is bizarrely innocuous: “The other number used by the American Peace Award, namely Murray Hill 4278 was contracted for and signed for by Mrs. Anna Roosevelt. This is presumably Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, as ‘Who’s Who’ indicates that Franklin D. Roosevelt married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt of New York on 17 March 1905.”
However criticized and harassed, ER, Lape, and the other supporters of the Bok Foundation were undaunted. They continued to work for the League, and for U.S. entrance into the World Court. In 1925, the House voted for U.S. participation, and ER urged a women’s crusade to achieve Senate approval.*
In addition to her work in behalf of international peace, ER spent some part of every day planning strategy for the New York State Democratic Party. In her 6 February 1924 letter to FDR where she minimized her activities, she reported that she, Caroline O’Day, and Nancy Cook had been to a “remarkable dinner” of “600 women from Albany and nearby and all workers!” They saw Governor Al Smith, who asked them to lobby for his new reform program, and ER spent several days in Albany, working out the details. But there was still one piece of additional news, she noted almost as an afterthought: Cordell Hull, the Democratic Party’s National Committee chairman in 1924, had invited ER—currently finance chair of the Women’s Division—to head a platform committee for women to present their demands at the June convention in New York. She was delighted, though she gave no hint of that to FDR: “I’m up to my eyes in work for the convention preparations and trying to raise our budget which is going to be an endless job.”
ER even rejected FDR’s praise for her work, the words of which are now lost along with most of his correspondence during this period: “You need not be proud of me dear. I’m only being active till you can be again. It isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world and I’ll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily! Hurry up for as you know my ever present sense of the uselessness of all things will overwhelm me sooner or later! My love to Missy, and to you, Devotedly, ER.”
When one considers the disparity between ER’s denial and the reality of her daily activities, one pauses to wonder what motivated her decision to trivialize both her work and her commitment to it. Her need to minimize her efforts and to reassure her husband that she was in fact no threat, and no competition to his primary place in the political arena, is a sturdy testimony to the proverbial double standard that was and remains the burden of political women.
Despite her modest denials, however, ER increasingly went about her own business, whether or not it served FDR, with or without his approval. On 9 April, she wrote that she planned to attend a two-day “convention of women” on law enforcement, specifically as it related to Prohibition, in Washington: “I know you will probably feel with Louis [Howe] that it is politically wrong to come but I do believe in it.” It was indeed politically wrong, as ER was quick to realize, and acknowledge.
The Women’s Democratic Law Enforcement League was one expression of the 1924 alliance between “dries” and Dixiecrats that ended Prohibition as a cause for social reformers. At this time the alliance between populists and religious fundamentalists (led until his death by William Jennings Bryan), and the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan, which dominated Dixiecrat politics, focused on the crusade for a dry America, and influenced partisan politics until 1932. ER had hoped that Prohibition might result in “less drinking now among young people than there was among our fathers.” But she would not be allied with a reactionary group who opposed progressive politicians like Al Smith because he was a “wet,” a Catholic, and a reformer.*
ER was embattled on several fronts in 1924. On 9 April, she wrote FDR that she wished he were at home to advise her “on the fight I’m putting up on a delegate and 2 alternates at large.” The fight was classic: Would the female or male party leaders get to name the women delegates? Forty-nine county chairwomen had already selected and endorsed their representatives when Tammany boss Charles Murphy claimed it his privilege to name the delegates. ER, resolute and ready for a fight, wrote: “I imagine it is just a question of which [Murphy] dislikes most—giving me my way or having me give the papers a grand chance for a story by telling [all] at the women’s dinner …and by insisting on recognition on the floor of the convention & putting the names in nomination!” Clearly, ER had already decided to do full battle: “There’s one thing I’m thankful for—I haven’t a thing to lose and for the moment you haven’t either.”
The New York Times featured ER’s fight for women’s equality at the state convention in an article titled “Women Are in Revolt.” It was the “only inharmonious note” of the convention: the women supported Smith, but demanded their right to choose their own representatives. “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt …slated to be one of the four delegates-at-large, led the fight for the women.” She said:
We have now had the vote for four years, and some very ardent suffragists seem to feel that instead of gaining in power the women have lost….
I have been wondering whether it occurs to the women as a whole that, if they expect to gain the ends for which they fought, it is not going to be sufficient simply to cast a ballot…. They must gain for themselves a place of real equality and the respect of the men…. The whole point in women’s suffrage is that the Government needs the point of view of all its citizens and the women have a point of view which is of value to the Government….
ER was in the vanguard of those feminists who protected and promoted women’s issues and the equal representation of women within the party’s committees. She demanded that women be represented on county committees “in equal numbers” and be listed among those nominated for office in all primary elections:
It is disagreeable to take stands. It was always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes….
We will be enormously strengthened if we can show that we are willing to fight to the very last ditch for what we believe in.
ER’s efforts were victorious. She was named chair of a committee that negotiated the women’s right to name their own delegates and alternates. Their meetings with Smith and other party leaders “established a precedent,” and ER felt encouraged: “We go into the campaign feeling that our party has recognized us as an independent part of the organization.”
But it was only a preliminary victory. The women’s political movement had become a significant element within the Democratic Party. It was feminist and bold. And the entrenched male power brokers hated it. They sought at every turn to set up roadblocks, brake its momentum, and destroy it. A daily and nasty battle ensued, fought meanly and through subterfuge. For example, women who finally achieved membership status on a committee often found the doors to the meetings locked, or the meetings moved to secret places. Other apparent victories were no sooner announced than betrayed.
In March 1924, the Democratic National Committee proudly announced that it was “the first political group to seek women’s views on important questions of peculiar interest to them so that these social legislation planks as incorporated in the national Democratic platform may represent their ideas.” And, with considerable public relations fanfare, the leadership announced it had asked Eleanor Roosevelt to chair the women’s platform committee.
ER agreed, and determined to base the recommendations for needed social-welfare legislation on the “requests of all women’s organizations in the country.” She appointed a panel of activist experts, including Dorothy Kirchwey Brown of Massachusetts, Margaret Norrie of Dutchess County, Elinor Morgenthau, Maud Swartz, Gertrude Ely (a noted philanthropist from Bryn Mawr who was one of ER’s closest friends), Charl Williams of Tennessee (who was credited with lobbying the final vote needed for the ratification of the suffrage amendment), and Patti R. (Mrs. Solon) Jacobs of Alabama. The committee endorsed the League of Nations, and called for the creation of a federal department of education, equal pay for women workers, and the ratification of the child-labor amendment. It called for a forty-eight-hour workweek, wages commensurate with the cost of living and health care, the creation of employment bureaus and the means to ensure “healthy and safe working conditions.”
But in June, their three months’ effort was rudely rebuffed by the Resolutions Committee at the convention. For hours ER and her coworkers sat outside the locked doors of the all-male Resolutions Committee and waited to be heard. At dawn the men voted twenty-two to eighteen, for the third and last time, to reaffirm their refusal even to hear the women’s proposals. ER wrote that at the convention of 1924 she saw “for the first time where the women stood when it came to a national convention. I shortly discovered that they were of very little importance. They stood outside the door of all important meetings and waited.” She spent most of her time during the deadlocked, heat-filled convention—every day the temperature topped one hundred degrees Fahrenheit—trying to seem calm. “I sat and knitted, suffered with the heat and wished it would end.” One day, Will Rogers noticed ER and asked: “Knitting in the names of the future victims of the guillotine?” ER was tempted to respond that she was “ready to call any punishment down on the heads of those who could not bring the convention to a close.”
THE 1924 CONVENTION WAS A SETBACK FOR THE WOMEN, AND a disaster for the Democrats. But for the Roosevelts 1924 represented another turning point. Both ER and FDR were widely perceived as the most significant contributors to the Democratic convention. The women’s political community acknowledged ER as a major leader. Personally, she was informed and toughened by her new understanding of the way male bastions of power actually work. And during the convention, FDR’s reputation as a national figure soared. In fact, the only bright moment of the divided and frequently violent convention—a convention dominated by Al Smith and his chief opponent, William Gibbs McAdoo, who was now frankly associated with the Ku Klux Klan—occurred when FDR presented the nominating speech for Smith.
His first major public appearance since he was stricken, FDR had practiced for weeks in order to be able to walk erect on his heavy steel braces, supported only by one crutch and the arm of his sixteen-year-old son, James. According to Marion Dickerman, who sat with ER, SDR, and Nancy Cook, it had been a gray, cloudy day. But as FDR reached the podium, drew himself upright, and smiled “a rather remote smile …as if he smiled to himself amid the thunderous applause and cheers,” at that very moment the clouds parted “and through the skylight came a burst of sunlight.” The entire crowd that filled the great hall of Madison Square Garden cheered with joyous relief and high regard as he walked the distance from platform to podium. His unforgettable triumph represented three years of agonizing effort.
Naming Al Smith “the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield,” FDR called in dramatic and resonant phrases for party unity in the face of all differences. “You equally who come from the great cities of the East and the plains and hills of the West, from the slopes of the Pacific and from the homes and fields of the Southland, I ask you …to keep first in your hearts and minds the words of Abraham Lincoln—’With malice toward none, and charity for all.’”
The crowd cheered for an hour and thirteen minutes. But FDR’s courageous eloquence lifted the spirit of the convention only temporarily. It was deadlocked for 102 ballots. According to the New York Herald Tribune, as “the results of the futile balloting droned on,” there was “in the exact center of the great hall the one man whose name would stampede the convention were he put in nomination…. From the time Roosevelt made his speech in nomination of Smith, which was the one great speech of the convention, he has been easily the foremost figure on floor or platform.” From that moment on, FDR was considered the real “Happy Warrior.”
Finally, the Democrats agreed on a compromise candidate, a Wall Street lawyer associated with the House of Morgan, John W. Davis. Politically indistinguishable from the Republican nominee, Calvin Coolidge, Davis inspired nobody. Almost five million Americans voted for the third-party candidate as Progressives. Even party stalwarts like Caroline O’Day supported the new Progressive Party’s canididate, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette. FDR returned to his business ventures, with frequent vacations in warm Southern waters. And ER agreed to help run Al Smith’s campaign for re-election as New York’s governor—against Republican nominee Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
ER’s willingness to support Al Smith in the face of the continued rebuffs and indignities experienced by the organized political women throughout 1924 was more than a testimony to her belief that Smith was serious about social reform. It was a demonstration of her own conviction that women needed to work systematically and earnestly within the power structure if they were to achieve political change. Votes for women could be rendered meaningless unless women organized to take over specific areas of party activity, specific areas of real power. Now was the time “to prove our strength and demand respect.”
ER appreciated that this meant working under duress with frequently hostile allies, who would attempt to undermine every victory. She spoke directly of male hostility to women in politics. In an interview in The New York Times published on 20 April 1924, she described male contempt for politically involved women. Men would say: “You are wonderful. I love and honor you…. Lead your own life, attend to your charities, cultivate yourself, travel when you wish, bring up the children, run your house. I’ll give you all the freedom you wish and all the money I can but—leave me my business and politics.” This, ER urged, women must not allow. “Women must get into the political game and stay in it.” Women together must build up new institutions of alternative power “from the inside.”
She had seconded Smith’s nomination at the New York State convention with vigor, and with a thrust at her cousin TR, Jr., that finally and forever alienated the two branches of the family. How could Smith not win, she asserted, since the Republicans, by their useless nomination of TR, “did everything to help him”? She campaigned throughout the state in an extraordinary vehicle rigged up with a steam-spouting teapot to signify TR, Jr.’s involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal. In county after county she systematically dismissed her cousin as a reasonably nice “young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.”
ER was appealing, vigorous, and dramatic on the stump. She attacked Republicans as “stupid or dishonest public servants” who were unwilling to deal with what she called the real issues: a reciprocal trade agreement, membership in the League of Nations, and economic security. She urged women who wanted improved economic conditions to register to vote. They, especially, had “a great deal at stake” in these elections. ER campaigned for a massive voter-registration drive: “It is because so many who should register and vote fail to do so that we often have what amounts to minority rule …[by] sophisticated politicians of the self-interested type.” “A full vote in every community is the most direct way of combating undesirable political forces.”
ER believed that only a fully participatory democracy would lead to honesty in government. Harding’s administration had been a carousel of corruption. Fraud, graft, and a general abuse of power characterized every Cabinet department. But no single scandal better represented the triumph of greed than did “Teapot Dome”: the giveaway to private oil interests of the United States’ vast oil reserves, which had been for decades jealously guarded by the Department of the Navy.
When FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he and Josephus Daniels monitored all efforts to capture Wyoming’s rich oil lands called Teapot Dome, owned by the United States in trust for the nation. They deemed it an essential stockpile critical to navy operations in case of emergency. Daniels and FDR stayed up all night to oppose the one serious congressional effort to grab these lands for private development interests in Wilson’s administration.
But during Harding’s presidency, Edwin Denby, Secretary of the Navy, and his assistant secretary, TR, Jr., who then occupied this seemingly traditional Roosevelt position, were less vigilant. When Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior, maneuvered to wrest control of Teapot Dome from the navy, along with California’s vastly rich oil lands at Elk Hills, nobody stopped him. Fall prepared for Harding’s signature an executive order for the transfer of the lands from Navy to Interior, and everybody acquiesced. After Harding signed, Fall exchanged a lease for Elk Hills to the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company, headed by Edward Doheny, for $100,000. He awarded Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair for $300,000 and some negotiable bonds.*
When Harding died suddenly, evidently of a cerebral hemorrhage, while campaigning on 2 August 1923, the Senate decided to investigate Teapot Dome. Although he was not directly implicated in the scandal, TR, Jr., had been employed by Harry Sinclair, and his brother Archibald continued to be. Ultimately, Fall became the first Cabinet officer to go to jail for taking bribes, but the damage was done: private speculators owned the national oil reserves.
TR, Jr., resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1924 in order to run for governor. He was succeeded by Aunt Corinne’s son Theodore Douglas Robinson, thereby keeping the position in the family. In 1924, sprayed by the steam of ER’s automotive teapot team, which frequently included her friends Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Elinor Morgenthau and her daughter, Anna, TR, Jr., lost by a land-slide—almost a million votes behind the victorious Calvin Coolidge. ER admitted that the teapot had been a “rough stunt.”
ER was delighted by Smith’s victory, and entirely pleased with the success of her “rough stunt.” Indeed, she was so proud of the teapot, which was of her own design, that she drove it to Connecticut, evidently to give her Aunt Bye a glimpse of what the fuss was all about. Aunt Bye, who had not joined in Oyster Bay’s FDR-bashing efforts in 1920, was now frankly dismayed by her niece’s unseemly display of raw political muscle: “Alas and lackaday! Since politics have become her choicest interest all her charm has disappeared, and the fact is emphasized by the companions she chooses to bring with her….”
HOWEVER MUCH ER’S POLITICAL VIGOR, NEW FRIENDS, AND public prominence might disturb the older members of her family, she herself greeted every new controversy with verve. Eleanor Roosevelt had become a feminist. She fought for women’s rights steadfastly and with determination; she championed equality in public and private matters; and she herself used the word “feminist.” But during the 1920s, the bitterly divisive Equal Rights Amendment ripped the women’s movement apart, obscuring for decades the full dimensions of historical feminism—and ER’s leadership role within it.
The vision that inspired the ERA was neither new nor frivolous. On 31 March 1777, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams: “I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors…. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” Still, Adams and his friends ignored the ladies. Thomas Jefferson opined: “Were our state a pure democracy there would still be excluded from our deliberations women, who, to prevent deprivation of morals and ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of men.”
After the Civil War women were specifically excluded from the benefits of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment inserted the word “male” for the first time into the Constitution, making it clear that the benefits of “due process” and “equal protection” excluded women. Consistently the courts endorsed this situation. In 1873, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois statute that prohibited women from practicing law. In Bradwell v. Illinois, the Court decided:
The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband….
The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.
The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1923 by the organized militants of the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul and over a hundred other women who used civil-disobedience methods to campaign throughout the war years “for suffrage—first.” From 1917 until the suffrage amendment was passed in Congress and finally ratified by the states in August 1920, they were the women who kept the suffrage-amendment issue in the headlines. They had picketed the White House, demonstrated against Wilson everywhere he spoke with banners criticizing him and cauldrons in which to burn the hypocritical words he had used to celebrate democracy while they were being arrested, jailed, brutalized, and force-fed. Largely isolated during the war, assailed as “madwomen,” “petticoat Bolsheviks,” and traitors, they remained undaunted.
Immediately after suffrage was won, Alice Paul and the militant warriors of the National Woman’s Party sought a new amendment, which they believed would erase all the laws that discriminated against women. Paul’s original Equal Rights Amendment, as introduced in Congress in December 1923, was as simply worded as its successor during the 1970s: “Men and women shall have Equal Rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”*
One of Paul’s most vigorous supporters, Crystal Eastman, believed that “this was a fight worth fighting even if it took ten years,” and recognized that its importance could be measured by the intensity of all the opposition to it. And the opposition was immediate: Within twenty-four hours after it was introduced, every member of Congress received a passionate protest against it—signed by the leaders of the seven other major women’s-rights and suffrage groups, most notably the social feminists, identified with the League of Women Voters; and settlement-house reformers, associated with Florence Kelley, Dr. Alice Hamilton, and Jane Addams, who supported protective legislation for women and children. Their goal was to isolate Paul and her movement; Paul’s goal was to dismiss them as antifeminists: humanitarians solely concerned with “family welfare.”
Entirely allied with the social feminists of the League of Women Voters, and with the effort to achieve protective legislation for women workers, ER and many of the most radical suffragists, women who had devoted their lives to fighting social evils, poverty, racism, cruelty of every kind, now opposed the ERA. They feared it was politically premature and would serve only to destroy the few laws that served to protect women and children in the industrial workplace that they had been able to achieve.
Initially, the political and geographic range on both sides of the battle included Republicans, Democrats, and socialists; Southern and Northern sensibilities. The equal-rights feminists, led by Alice Paul, Southern and conservative by any standard, were joined by Crystal Eastman, Doris Stevens, and Lavinia Dock, radical and socialist by any standard. On the protectionist side, Jane Addams was a liberal social reformer, Florence Kelley was a radical socialist who called herself a Marxist, Narcissa Vanderlip was a rather conventional Republican, and Eleanor Roosevelt represented the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The tragedy of the split was that it represented a genuine and irreconcilable difference in strategy in behalf of a shared goal: the improved economic and political condition of women, the achievement of power by women. Feminist activists dominated the battle on both sides.
The ERA-protectionist division resulted from a conflicting understanding of what was possible in an unrestrained capitalist economy. In 1923, despite years of progressive action, there was still no limitation on the number of hours or the conditions of work for women or men; and ER and the protectionist feminists—all of whom wanted protective legislation for all—sincerely believed that it was possible to achieve a fair and just administration of a forty-eight-hour workweek by demanding it for women first. Equal-rights feminists sincerely believed that shorter hours for women first would result in the loss of jobs for women, who were not as valued as men workers and were not paid on a par with them, and who were therefore required by economic need to work longer hours merely to survive. Although both sides agreed that women worked in a brutal economy that achieved profits by demanding the longest possible hours for the least possible pay, the battle between them raged in bitter tones of acrimony. The protectionists believed the ERA women were elitists and careerists who cared only for privileged and professional women and were ignorant of and unconcerned about the poor. The ERA activists believed the protectionists were old-fashioned reformers who refused to see that, until women were acknowledged equal in law, all reforms to protect women were frauds that could only work against them.
On 16 January 1922, Dr. Alice Hamilton, the United States’ leading authority on industrial medicine, wrote a letter to explain her position to the editor of the National Woman’s Party journal, Equal Rights, Edith Houghton Hooker:
I could not help comparing you as you sat there [over a “friendly cup of tea”], sheltered, safe, beautifully guarded against even the uglinesses of life, with the women for whom you demand “freedom of contract.” The Lithuanian women in the laundries whom the Illinois law …permits to work seventy hours a week on the night shift; the Portuguese women in the Rhode Island textile mills, on long night shifts …the great army of waitresses and hotel chambermaids, unorganized, utterly ignorant of ways of making their grievances known, working long hours and living wretchedly. To tell them to get what they should have by using their right of contract is to go back to the days of the Manchester School in England, when men maintained that there must be no interference with the right of women and children to make their own bargains with their employers in the cotton mills or at the pitheads. It is only a great ignorance of the poor as they actually are, only a great ignorance as to what is possible and what is impossible under our supposed democracy and actual plutocracy, that could make you argue as you do…. [If] you succeed in rescinding all the laws in the country discriminating against women and do it at the expense of present and future protective laws you will have harmed a far larger number of women than you will have benefited and the harm done to them will be more disastrous….
Remember, when you think me over-strenuous, that I have lived for twenty-two years among the poor and that for twelve years I have studied trades employing all sorts of labor…. The working woman is a very real person to me….
For the next twenty years, Eleanor Roosevelt shared Alice Hamilton’s analysis. She too tended to consider the ERA proponents self-serving aristocrats who cared little and understood less about the needs of the poor. She was drawn toward the vision of reform created by that earlier generation of community activists, unionists, and radicals led by Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Rose Schneiderman, and Dr. Alice Hamilton. Although she was the same age as many of the ERA activists, and was indeed two years younger than Crystal Eastman, ER understood society the way her earlier mentors in the settlement-house movement did. Above all, ER believed that one Utopian constitutional amendment, however virtuous, was virtually meaningless in the real political world, and she opposed the idea of a separate woman’s party. Even after 1937, when unionism and collective bargaining caused her to doubt the need for continued opposition to the ERA, she continued to take direction from the Women’s Trade Union League.
ER’s position began to change after the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which provided protective laws that covered women and men alike. Although she was ready to endorse the ERA in 1941, she still hesitated because of WTUL leader Rose Schneiderman’s continued opposition. But she became impatient with the fight. In 1944, she consented to the Democratic Party’s endorsement of the ERA, and finally, in 1946, at the United Nations, she publicly withdrew her opposition.
ER’s allies were the social activists who long before suffrage had created such abiding institutions of successful reform as the settlement houses, the National Consumers’ League, and the Women’s Trade Union League. They had pioneered such improvements as public playgrounds, school lunches, medical care in public schools, the visiting-home-nurse service, sanitation removal, and minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws for women. They regarded the ERA as a fantasy that endangered their life’s work.
They were practical women who worked vigorously on the margin of politics, where they were allowed to perform. They did domestic housekeeping for the neighborhood, the community, the city, state, and nation. It was that arena to which they were restricted. The health of women and children, the health of the state was considered women’s work. And they accepted it. They had not waited for the vote. They did not wait for the ERA. They did what they could to counter the ills of a wretched, mean-spirited society where children were allowed to starve to death; where mothers and infants routinely died unnecessarily; and where acres and acres of tenements, unfit for dwelling, stunted growth and happiness. To do other than what they did every day would have been to accept powerlessness. They had none of the power and prestige of men, but they were not powerless. They were earnest and bold and committed to the long and arduous process of creating fundamental change.
In her first book, It’s Up to the Women (1933), ER would write that she was not interested in the abstract idea of equality with men. It “sounded so well,” but it only enabled women to compete more successfully with men for jobs. It did not really improve women’s ability to change society. Of course she wanted women to run for office, to be accorded the dignity and titles, the power and prestige, reserved for male politicians. But in the meantime, she would fight directly for decent conditions for women workers.
IN 1925, HER ENERGIES WERE FOCUSED ON THE FORTY-EIGHT-hour workweek: “Aside from all the so-called sob stuff which we have heard here this afternoon,” she said at a legislative meeting, “I am convinced that a great majority of the workingwomen of this State are really in favor of this bill…. I can’t understand how any woman would want to work fifty-four hours a week if she only had to work forty-eight and could receive the same rate of wages.”
At the same hearing, the equal-rights feminists Doris Stevens and Rheta Child Dorr opposed ER’s interpretation, and argued that the male-dominated labor unions supported the bill so that women would not be able to compete with men. They urged instead that the forty-eight-hour law cover both women and men, so that women would not be unfairly hobbled. In every competitive job, where women had worked with equality during the war years, women were now fired—as, for example, the women workers of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Transit Company, who testified that all laws intended to put women on “easy street” merely put them resoundingly on the street.
The fight in the New York State legislature for the forty-eight-hour bill for women workers became bipartisan when, in 1926, the bill was denied even the courtesy of a vote and Republican Club women protested. ER considered “the courage and independence” the Republican women demonstrated by “refusing to abide by the mandates of their legislative leaders …a vindication of the value of women in politics.” She also congratulated the Republican women on the “fairness and scientific accuracy” of their six-month-long investigation of labor conditions, which revealed that 95 percent of all women workers favored the forty-eight-hour legislation.
ER believed that a great political bonus resulted from bipartisan unity on the forty-eight-hour bill: It revealed the power of voting women to remind men that they would no longer be allowed to sidestep promises made simply to catch votes, or to “neglect party platforms” so solemnly crafted. ER deplored this “final act of the farce-drama” male politicians “have conducted …for many years. I know of no more open, cynical and reckless defiance of definite platform and campaign promise than the refusal even to allow a vote on the 48-hour legislation.”
THE FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR WEEK, AND SUBSEQUENTLY THE battle for a five-day week, seem ordinary and tame demands today. But until the end of the 1930s and the general acceptance of unionism, U.S. workers, women and men, were without real protection of any kind, and routinely worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, six—frequently six and a half—days a week. According to the WTUL’s Rose Schneiderman, employers believed that endless toil kept women “out of mischief and that shorter hours would endanger their morals.” They believed also “that if working people had rooms with baths they would use the bathtubs in which to keep the coal….” Workers were not supposed to have “leisure” time, and reformers who insisted on maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws were regarded as radical or “parlor pink” if not clearly “Bolshevik.”
The disregard for workers’ needs and the ordinary dignity of working people, women especially, moved ER to support the activities and principles of the Women’s Trade Union League. In April 1929 ER debated the five day week at a well attended Town Hall meeting sponsored by the WTUL. ER’s primary opponent was the chairman of New York State’s Economic Congress, Merwin K. Hart. He argued that any law for a five-day week would limit individual freedom. Arguing as if workers actually controlled their time and their pay, he declared that people do not like to be told when and for how long they may work. There was, he assured the audience, a “natural desire of the individual to control his own efforts.” Whereupon he turned to ER and smugly remarked that she, for example, “would not want to be told you could work only five days a week.”
ER agreed: Her work was her life. But she was an independent and affluent woman, who chose her work. She was not an industrial worker: “Repeating a single motion throughout the day in a factory was not like doing work which one enjoyed.”
AS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S INFLUENCE GREW, AND AS HER confidence increased, she threw herself into a range of social initiatives aimed at strengthening government protection for women and children. She fought for the Child Labor Amendment, increased support for the Children’s Bureau and the Women’s Bureau, and worked to raise state matching funds for the $1.25-million Sheppard-Towner Act to establish maternity and pediatric clinics, and a health-care program for mothers and infants. A great victory for social feminists, who had campaigned for years to decrease the grim rate of infant mortality in the United States, the Sheppard-Towner Act was attacked as “Sovietism,” and a dangerous precedent leading to birth control and governmental programs of “social hygiene.” ER and Narcissa Vanderlip were among the leaders of New York’s crusade to raise the enabling funds.
To charges that the law was unconstitutional and not economical, Vanderlip countered: “If it is constitutional to use federal funds to save hogs from cholera, and cows from tuberculosis, it is constitutional to use them to save babies and their mothers from death.”
Every issue involving women was of concern to ER. In April 1925, she went on the radio to describe the significance of the Women’s City Club, which she termed a “clearing house for civic ideals.” The club conducted its own research on all issues, and held debates and informative lectures. To investigate the issue of outlawing dance halls, for example, the club’s members went to numerous dance halls, not as “investigators, but as participants.” They discovered, ER noted, “the fascination, the dangers and the surprisingly low percentage of disaster to the girls” despite the “unwholesome surroundings.” ER never supported the effort to outlaw dance halls.
She called for equal political education for girls and for boys, and noted with pride that “Girls nowadays may be rivals of their brothers in school, sports, and business.” But ER lamented they “lag behind in a knowledge and interest in government.” She gave as examples her own daughter, Anna, and Governor Smith’s daughter Emily, whom she had overheard complaining that politics dominated their fathers’ conversations. ER contrasted this attitude with the one that prevailed among “flappers of politically prominent families in England. British daughters not only take a keen interest in their fathers’ careers but go out to help in the political battle.” She cited the good works of Ishbel MacDonald and Megan Lloyd George in particular, and concluded that, if “our American girls are not to be left behind, something must be done to stimulate their interest in civic responsibilities.” She thought that daughters of politicians should at least want to be able “to outtalk their fathers.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s own sense of responsibility took her beyond strong words to vigorous deeds. In 1926, she made headline news when she participated in a mass picket demonstration of three hundred women in support of striking paper-box makers. Eight notable women “of prominence” were arrested for ignoring a police order “to move on,” and charged with “disorderly conduct,” including ER, Margaret Norrie, Mrs. Samuel Bens, Marion Dickerman, Evelyn Preston, and Dorothy Kenyon.
ER was proud of the achievements of women. She honored their daring, and their vision. She considered women flyers marvelously courageous, and she promoted women in flight. She herself wanted to fly, and she did. ER was one of the first women to fly at night, and she logged more hours in the air during the 1920s and 1930s than any other woman passenger. But she remained a passenger, much to her regret. FDR’s only known vigorous opposition to any of ER’s efforts was when she decided to become a pilot. Her friend Amelia Earhart gave her preliminary lessons, and ER actually took and passed the physical examination. But FDR persuaded her that he had sufficient worries without her flying above the clouds at top speed. FDR’s opposition to flying was genuine. In 1920, he was horrified when his mother flew from London to Paris, and asked her never to go aloft again. Evidently both women acquiesced to his fear; but ER always regretted not becoming a pilot, because, she said, she liked to be in control of her own mobility.
Increasingly, ER’s interests became international. In October 1927, she hosted a meeting of four hundred women at Hyde Park to launch a women’s peace movement and support the Kellogg-Briand Treaty to outlaw war. Carrie Chapman Catt was the keynote speaker, and again she stirred ER with her call for a crusade against war as mighty as the antislave crusade, as mighty as the suffrage crusade: We must find a way to “end this awful menace to civilization, the disgrace to this century, called war.”
For the next ten years, ER was to be one of the most prominent antiwar women in the United States, associated with both Jane Addams’s Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Carrie Chapman Catt’s National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War.
ER devoted considerable space in the Women’s Democratic News to issues of war and peace. In July 1926, she wrote an editorial calling for bold, spontaneous, anonymous demonstrations for peace by American women: “Have you noticed that in England there have been lately big pilgrimages of women for peace converging on London?” ER was impressed that they seemed spontaneous, and no individual women or groups took credit for their creation. “Of course, English women and European women generally feel more deeply than we do, the horrors of war. They have lost their husbands and sons in great number.” But, she asked: “Cannot we women here even interest ourselves enough to study the possible ways open to us in the world today of eliminating the causes of war and then get behind all the movements furthering these ends with some demonstrations of our own?”
Throughout the early months of 1927, ER’s editorials focused on Central America, Nicaragua in particular. In January, she wrote “Our Foreign Policy—What Is It?” Since “we do not wish to be entangled in European difficulties, our government’s only concern is to collect what money is due us.” We seem not even to consider any “constructive effort to build up good feeling,” as if it “is too much trouble since we have an ocean to protect us.”
But even in this hemisphere, she protested presciently, “we do nothing constructive to build up good feeling, and we drift into a very difficult situation.” When Mexico nationalized its oil properties, for example, the United States sent out “a little notice that ‘our Marines are being issued tropical kits.’” In contrast to FDR’s 1920 bravura over the Caribbean and Central America, ER now asked: “Can it be that we ‘the big brother of all nations on this side of the Atlantic’ are playing the part of the bully? That is not a part usually admired by our people.”
The Coolidge administration’s unwillingness to discuss the growing military situation in Nicaragua created additional problems, ER noted: “With the Mexican question is tied up the Nicaraguan question. Just what we are doing there it is hard indeed to understand from the conflicting reports …and no matter what happens in both Mexico and Nicaragua we have not shown our Central and South American neighbors a very reassuring picture of a disinterested and magnanimous neighbor….”
In March, ER featured a front-page article in the Women’s Democratic News, “Banks and Bayonets in Nicaragua,” with the banner headline: “Do We Deserve the Hatred of the World?” The article protested the increase of U.S. military forces in Nicaragua to over five thousand, “larger than either of the contending Nicaraguan forces.”
Wherever she went, or whatever her announced topic, whenever ER spoke as the decade of the 1920s drew to a close, she spoke at least in part about world peace. Long before the war clouds gathered her message was urgent: “The time to prepare for world peace is during the time of peace and not during the time of war.”
BY 1928, THE YEAR FDR RAN FOR GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK, Eleanor Roosevelt had become a major political force. For six years, she had served as finance chair of women’s activities of the New York Democratic State Committee. She was vice-chair of the Woman’s City Club of New York, chair of the Non-Partisan Legislative Committee, editor and treasurer of the Women’s Democratic News, a member of the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Association and the City Housing Corporation.
In fact, in 1928, ER was one of the best-known and highest-ranking Democrats in the United States. She was named director of the Bureau of Women’s Activities of the Democratic National Committee, and in July asked to head a Woman’s Advisory Committee, to develop Al Smith’s presidential campaign organization.
In 1928, ER held, therefore, the most powerful positions ever held by a woman in party politics. In matters of “turfing,” which we now recognize as more than symbolic, she demanded and received equality for the women political organizers: Their offices had the same floor space their male counterparts had, and equal comfort. There were windows, carpets, plants; the accommodations were light and airy. The New York Times reported that the space allotted to women in the national headquarters of the Democratic party was “said to be the largest head-quarters ever occupied by a women’s political organization.” ER’s rooms and those of John J. Raskob, then Democratic national chairman, were “identical in size and location.”
Throughout the 1920s ER worked to insure that this equality involve more than floor space. In September 1926, after a bitter struggle for equal representation for women within the New York State Democratic Party, the party convention elected Caroline O’Day vice-chair of the State Committee, and women were voted equal representation with men in 135 of 150 Assembly districts. On a “day of triumph and celebration,” ER delivered the convention’s banquet speech and hailed the victory as “the breaking down of the last barrier” to equality within the Democratic Party.
But she quickly realized that equal representation had as yet very little to do with equal power. Increasingly distressed by the manipulations of her male colleagues, ER argued that women needed to take tougher, more direct measures.
In April 1928, she published a boldly feminist article in Redbook. “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do” was a battle cry that urged women to create their own “women bosses” in order to achieve real power:
Women have been voting for ten years. But have they achieved actual political equality with men? No …In small things they are listened to; but when it comes to asking for important things they generally find they are up against a blank wall….
Politically, as a sex, women are generally “frozen out” from any intrinsic share of influence….
The machinery of party politics has always been in the hands of men, and still is. Our statesmen and legislators are still keeping in form as the successors of the early warriors [who gathered] around the camp-fire plotting the next day’s attack….
ER’s tone was outraged and unrelenting: Women went into politics with high hopes and specific intentions. They were courted and wooed. But when they demanded and expected real power, they were rebuffed. ER noted: “Their requests are seldom refused outright, but they are put off with a technique that is an art in itself. The fact is that generally women are not taken seriously. With certain exceptions, men still as a class dismiss their consequence and value in politics, cherishing the old-fashioned concept that their place is in the home.”
Although, only a few years before, ER had contended that women did not go into politics for personal gain, or the customary party reward for their work, by 1928 she expressed dismay that the hardworking women who devoted their time and energy to the political game continued to go unrewarded: “Men who work hard in party politics are always recognized, or taken care of in one way or another. Women, most of whom are voluntary workers …are generally expected to find in their labor its own reward….”
Then there was the matter of political office. Party leaders “will ask women to run for office now and then, sometimes because they think it politic and wise to show women how generous they are, but more often because they realize in advance their ticket cannot win in the district selected. Therefore they will put up a woman, knowing it will injure the party less to have a woman defeated, and then they can always say it was her sex that defeated her. Where victory is certain, very rarely can you get a woman nominated….”
ER was proud of the many women throughout the United States who had been elected to public office. And there were at the time three women in Congress. There had been two women governors, and several women had been elected to the various statehouses. But, ER asked: “Does this indicate any equal recognition or share in political power?” She answered with a resounding no: There were instead infinite “examples …of women who were either denied a nomination or who were offered it only when inevitable defeat stared the party leaders in the face.”
ER suggested a reason for this situation: Public men dislike women in public life. “Beneath the veneer of courtesy and outward show of consideration universally accorded women, there is a widespread male hostility—age-old perhaps—against sharing with them any actual control.”
To alter this, she urged women to “elect, accept and back” Women Bosses on every level of party management, in “districts, counties and states. Women must organize just as men organize.” ER did not believe in a separate woman’s party. “A woman’s ticket could never possibly succeed. And to crystalize the issues on the basis of sex-opposition would only further antagonize men, congeal their age-old prejudices, and widen the chasm of existing differences.” Rather, within the party, women needed to select, promote, and elect women bosses to positions of leadership and authority—where they could, with equality and independence and above all the assurance that they had the backing of their women’s constituency, fight it out with the men who routinely denied power to women.
ER was aware that the word “boss” might “shock sensitive ears.” She did not mean by “boss” some sleazy and easy-to-buy politician, but, rather, a “high-minded leader.” And she chose the word deliberately, “as it is the word men understand.” She explained in detail her conviction that, “if women believe they have a right and duty in political life today, they must learn to talk the language of men. They must not only master the phraseology, but also understand the machinery which men have built up through years of practical experience. Against the men bosses there must be women bosses who can talk as equals, with the backing of a coherent organization of women voters behind them.”
Tough-minded and direct, ER was also critical of women who refused to take the business of politics seriously or to consider their own political work a matter of fundamental urgency and significance: “If we are still a negligible factor, ignored and neglected, we must be prepared to admit in what we have ourselves failed.” ER believed that too many women refused to work; to take themselves and their visions seriously; and too many women lacked knowledge and refused to “take the pains to study history, economics, political methods or get out among human beings.”
She cited male contempt for learned women and acknowledged the misogynist tradition that mocked sophisticated and ambitious women. She quoted an “old politician” who “objected” to the type of political women she hoped to encourage: “Don’t you think these women lose their allure, that the bloom is just a little gone? Men are no longer interested?”
ER responded, “Frankly, I don’t know. I imagine the answer is individual. It was once said that men did not marry women who showed too much intelligence. In my youth I knew women who hid their college degrees as if they were one of the seven deadly sins. But all that is passing, and so will pass many other prejudices that have their origin in the ancient tradition that women are a by-product of creation.”
ER explained, in conclusion, that women could only achieve real power by serious organization, unlimited study, endless work. Male hostility to women was only partly responsible for women’s failure to achieve power. Women seemed to ER reluctant to claim power. She dismissed the attitude of those women who professed “to be horrified at the thought of women bosses bartering and dickering in the hard game of politics with the men.” She was cheered by the fact that “many more women realize that we are living in a material world, and that politics cannot be played from the clouds.” She understood that the task was hard and that the role of women in public life was difficult. Women’s lives, to begin with, ER noted, were always “full of interruptions.” There was the home, the children, the meals to prepare, the dinner parties to arrange. She was aware of the double standards, and the double-job burdens. And so, she argued, women have to be more organized, more methodical, and, yes, more hardworking than men. She was adamant: “Women must learn to play the game as men do.”
ER’s earlier years in Albany and Washington, and her lifelong association with politicians and their ways, had accustomed her to the vagaries and strategies of power. Silence on the sidelines never achieved a thing, and was always interpreted as consent. The more she spoke out, the more she recognized her impact. She was ready to become—indeed, had already become—the very “political boss” about whom she wrote.
ER’s Redbook article hit the stands with rather a splash. It resulted in several New York Times articles, including a Magazine interview by S. J. Woolf, “A Woman Speaks Her Political Mind,” in which ER was credited with having “a wider experience and a richer political background than most.” “Few women in politics today are in a better position to speak” on women’s lack of political equality, said Woolf. The article was entirely favorable to ER, as well as to women in politics. Nevertheless, S. J. Woolf’s emphasis revealed an ever-present double standard: ER was a mother, a teacher, and a homemaker, Woolf wrote, who never allowed her public or political activities to
interfere with her devotion to her home, nor has she sacrificed her private life in any respect to her public activities. She is the mother of five children and their upbringing has been her first consideration. She believes that a woman fitted to serve her community or her country can show that fitness best in the management of her own home….
Mrs. Roosevelt is tall and has an engaging smile. There is something about that smile that is reminiscent of her illustrious uncle, while the droop in the outer corner of her eyes likewise reminds one of the former President. There is nothing about her that marks her as a woman in public life. Her manner is that of the young suburban mother. She is the strongest argument that could be presented against those who hold that by entering politics a woman is bound to lose her womanliness and her charm.
She is the type of mother that Booth Tarkington has so well described, a woman interested in civic betterment, who believes that that finds its beginning in the home.
Woolf’s article was a clear indication of what was expected of ER if she were to maintain credibility and acceptance as a woman in public life. Among her colleagues and friends, she might depart from such prescriptions. But publicly ER understood and always worked within the limitations of her time, and her marriage. Publicly she denied to the end of her life that she ever had, or ever wanted, real political power. She acknowledged that she worked for those issues that she believed in, but not once did she profess to enjoy the game. She never publicly acknowledged that it satisfied her own interests, served her own needs, or that she delighted even in the rough-and-tumble of the deals and battles. Nevertheless, she did express dismay whenever she or other women were bypassed or blithely ignored and men took credit for their efforts and ideas. And she hated it when she was given no specific job to do, or was not encouraged to participate in a way she deemed appropriate—as in the case of the 1928 Democratic Party convention, which finally nominated Al Smith for president.
THE YEAR 1928 WAS AN INAUSPICIOUS ONE FOR A DEMOCRATIC victory. The 1920s, years of “Republican prosperity,” practically ensured the election of Herbert Hoover. Still, many believed that Al Smith, the popular four-term governor of New York State, could make a difference, and ER was one of Smith’s most vigorous boosters. In January, she responded to charges that as a Roman Catholic Smith was un-American, more loyal to Rome than to Washington, by citing two letters in her possession that her Uncle Theodore Roosevelt had written while president. He believed then that someday the United States would fulfill its democratic mandate by electing a Catholic or a Jew to the country’s highest office. Now, ER attacked religious bigotry as un-American, and “hoped for the day when presidential candidates might be selected solely on the basis of their ability to serve the people.”
In April, ER seconded the New York State party’s resolution to nominate Al Smith with a rousing speech:
We crave a man with an understanding and human heart, who will make of government not merely a perfectly running machine, but an instrument to contribute to the greater well-being and happiness of the whole people.
Democratic women …do not want the economy which refuses to help those who need and deserve the help of the State, nor do we want the kind of economy which saves a little today and loses thereby much opportunity for the future. We do not want a purely Wall Street, Aluminum Trust prosperity, a prosperity of invested capital as against several millions of unemployed. The human values mean more to us than the money values….
Throughout the spring, ER worked with Belle Moskowitz, Smith’s political-staff leader, to put together one of the most efficient campaign organizations in political history. As the convention drew nearer, the list of players included a number of Eleanor’s closest associates. Elinor Morgenthau was ecstatic at being named delegate-at-large. ER wrote FDR that both Henry and Elinor Morgenthau were “like children in their joy…. I never realized any one could care so much and only hope nothing happens to change the minds of the mighty!” Caroline O’Day went as a delegate, and Marion Dickerman as her alternate. FDR was again asked to nominate Smith. But ER, who headed the Women’s Committee for all preconvention activities, was given no particular assignment at the 1928 Houston convention despite all her work. Nor did she ask for one, or even assign herself a task—which she surely might have done. Had she resented not being named a delegate? Or did she not want to compete with Franklin?
With no explanation she decided to remain at home. James and SDR were on tour in Europe. Everybody else except the two younger boys, who were with her at Hyde Park, was at the convention. ER’s decision represented a major Griselda relapse, which she quickly regretted. Aware that she had miscalculated, she wrote FDR, “it is horrid, rainy weather and I am quite unreasonably depressed.” She would listen to the activities on the radio, “and expire if it doesn’t work!”
Years later, ER insisted: “I had no desire to take part in the hurly-burly of a convention—the 1924 convention had given me all I wanted of that type of experience. In addition, our two younger boys, Franklin, Junior, and John, were at Hyde Park and I had to stay with them.” But when Eleanor had gone to the station to see off her friends, Marion Dickerman noticed “how forlorn she looked, standing on the platform in the rain, waving, as the train pulled out.”
Listening to the proceedings in Houston from Hyde Park, Eleanor pictured the scene, and the heroic fact that Franklin had dispensed with his crutches. He leaned on his son Elliott’s arm and, with a cane, walked across the stage to deliver his nominating speech. It was another resounding triumph, even surpassing his “Happy Warrior” speech of four years earlier, and the convention united behind Smith, who was nominated on the first ballot. ER never again repeated her decision to stay home alone by her radio, while all her friends and loved ones went jubilantly off to participate in the most intense festival of the political game. From then on, she assigned herself a task, whether as a reporter or a troubleshooter. And she always understood that on most occasions she would have to create the assignment for herself.
After Smith’s nomination, ER dedicated herself to the effort of getting him elected. With Wyoming Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross, she served as codirector of the National Women’s Committee of the Democratic Party. Governor Ross toured the country, while ER was in charge of headquarters. She put together a staff that would remain with her in one way or another for decades to come. During the 1928 campaign, Malvina Thompson (called “Tommy”) became her personal secretary. Efficient and charming Grace Tully, who had been New York’s Cardinal Hayes’s secretary, also worked in the office and later became FDR’s secretary; hardworking Alice Disbrow became Caroline O’Day’s secretary during her congressional years. New Jersey Congresswoman Mary Norton ran the speakers’ bureau, and witty June Hamilton Rhodes, whom ER remembered as the one who “made us laugh and relax,” ran the publicity department. ER also drafted Molly Dewson to run the Midwestern region, which established Dewson as a major figure in the organization of the Democratic Party.
It was a congenial, committed group and, ER recalled, there was throughout the long day much laughter and pleasure. Whatever ER may have thought about the eight-hour day for other women, her staff worked—as she did—twelve-to-sixteen-hour days on a regular basis. ER arrived at her offices “early in the day” every day “and started immediately to prepare a plan for the organization of women throughout the country.” Every bureau was under her direct supervision.
On the campaign trail, ER pulled few punches. In a far-seeing reference to what we now call “trickle-down economics,” she said that she did not believe that American women wanted merely “the prosperity of the great industries from which prosperity will flow in a more moderate amount to other members of the community.” She believed American women wanted “the emphasis to be laid on things which deal with the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” “Governor Smith recognizes the necessity of business prosperity, but his mind is not a single-track mind….”
On a radio program, ER expressed pity for the poor Republican campaign workers who had to bolster their lackluster candidates from Calvin Coolidge to Herbert Hoover—whose vision no longer seemed progressive: “The life of a consistent Republican was hard. First, he must for seven years be enthusiastic over an iceberg and now he must transfer his enthusiasm to an adding machine.”
Although ER preferred to emphasize the positive—Smith’s support for the women’s reform agenda, and his opposition to “trickle-down” economics—she could not ignore the bigotry that permeated the campaign. Smith’s opposition continually returned to his Catholicism, and the thorny issue of Prohibition. ER recalled that “the kind of propaganda that some of the religious groups …put forth in that campaign utterly disgusted me. I think by nature I am a fairly liberal person, without intense prejudice, but if I needed anything to show me what prejudice can do to the intelligence of human beings, that campaign was the best lesson I could have had.”
ER indicated that her own position on Prohibition was complex. Although she had supported it earlier, she now believed the United States faced more critical issues. In 1928, ER exacerbated a major split among Democratic women when she publicly refused the invitation of the National Woman’s Democratic Law Enforcement League to attend its annual convention by writing that she considered it just as important to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, guaranteeing the vote to African-Americans, as it was to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment. And, ER wrote, if the League failed to recognize the importance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, it should change its name to the “National Woman’s Dry Enforcement League.”
Mrs. Jesse W. Nicholson, head of the League, countered that ER was emulating “reactionary Republicans in dragging in the 14th and 15th Amendments.” Her reference was to those civil-rights Republicans who continued to support voting rights for blacks, as their ancestors, known as Radical Republicans, did during Reconstruction.
In Democratic circles before Southern blacks voted, Dixiecrats set the racial agenda, and ER never once during the 1928 campaign actually spoke out in opposition to the growing violence that accompanied the disenfranchisement of black citizens in the South. In an unpublished fragment dated 1928, she admitted, “I have never attacked the South for its attitude toward the Negro,” and when directly challenged by Mrs. Nicholson to state Smith’s views on race, ER waffled. Nicholson wrote: “I note that you [merely] …inferentially deny the suggestion that ‘Governor Smith believes in equality among the blacks and whites.’ We do not feel quite willing to accept your denial on a point which is important to Southern women and their children.”
Whereas race was for most whites a nonissue, religious bigotry and Prohibition ripped party unity to shreds, and were among Democratic women just as divisive as the equal-rights issue was among feminists. In July, Mrs. Clem Shaver, the wife of the retiring Democratic National Committee chairman, astounded party regulars by denouncing Al Smith “as a charlatan and a faker” and a “booz-o-crat.” She announced that, “regardless of what Democratic leaders from top to bottom may do, we dry Democratic women will not support the dripping wet ticket.” ER responded by disparaging Mrs. Shaver and “the little group of women represented by the Women’s Democratic Law Enforcement [League] of Baltimore.” Their articles were fraudulent, she said; their assertions, false. ER argued that they considered the “enforcement of the Volstead Act more important than truth or fair play,” or any other issue.
In an editorial, “When Greek Meets Greek,” The New York Times breathed a chivalric sigh of relief that two women were exchanging political punches. Unlike Britain, the United States was unaccustomed to open political divisions “within families,” and “Mrs. Shaver’s original statement struck Washington like a thunderclap,” which her husband was called upon to explain. “Are you married?” he asked of all who demanded his opinion. His political cronies were silenced by confusion or amazement, if not quite chivalry. “But a woman is not so circumstanced,” noted The New York Times, “and Mrs. Roosevelt has replied with all the heat which many men have felt but do not venture to express. The debate may now proceed on its merits. It is in proper hands. It is politically safe. The greatest hazard of the Nineteenth [Suffrage] Amendment has been passed.”
If ER’s controversies impacted on her husband’s own campaign for New York’s governor against Albert Ottinger, the popular Republican state attorney general, neither referred to them. Although ER distanced herself from FDR’s race and campaigned exclusively for Smith, she had played a critical part in FDR’s nomination. If ER had not encouraged him to run, he would not have done it. FDR had refused all entreaties for months, believing that he needed two more years of serious exercise at Warm Springs to walk again. (Also, he had invested over $200,000 of his capital in Warm Springs and wanted to make it work.) He resisted even after the Democratic national chair, John J. Raskob, offered to pay all his debts and contribute significantly to the center at Warm Springs; and he resisted after Herbert Lehman offered to run as lieutenant governor and promised to take over whenever FDR wanted to return to Warm Springs. His family and advisers opposed his candidacy—Louis Howe considered it premature, and Missy LeHand dreaded it. Only FDR’s daughter, Anna, was positive: “Go ahead and take it,” she wired. FDR wired back: “You ought to be spanked.”
ER was never certain what FDR’s return to public office would mean to her own life, but when she appeared for the opening ceremonies of the New York State convention in Rochester on 1 October, Smith and Raskob “begged” her to call her husband. He had avoided them all day, refused all their calls. They were told he was out, and he never returned their messages. There was no doubt what her call would mean, and there is no evidence that she hesitated.
That evening, ER was put through to her husband within minutes. FDR told her, “with evident glee,” that he had kept “out of reach all day and would not have answered the telephone if I had not been calling.” She replied that she was with Smith and Raskob, and without apology handed the phone to Smith and fled to catch her train for New York City. In 1949, ER wrote, “I can still hear Governor Smith’s voice saying: ‘Hello Frank,’ as I hurried from the room…. I did not know until the following morning when I bought a newspaper that my husband had been persuaded finally to accept the nomination.”
Although ER never took credit for her role in FDR’s decision, Esther Lape believed that “the most wonderful thing Eleanor did was to encourage him to run in 1928 when most people thought he was not up to it.”
ER’s loyalty to FDR, and to what she truly believed was best for him, involved her perception of his physical progress, which had reached its limit, and her conviction that his return to political life would enhance his health and well-being. After seven years of struggle, he had learned how to walk short distances supported by canes and braces, and the strong arms of his sons and associates. But his legs had no real mobility, no actual strength. Moreover, it was her lifelong belief that one must do “what comes to hand,” which did not reflect a careless regard for fate but, rather, her sense of obligation and responsibility to the mysteries and vagaries of opportunity. It would be wrong, ER believed, to disregard destiny, when it so specifically called.
There was considerable confusion and some heavyhearted soul-searching at Warm Springs on 2 October, when FDR was nominated by acclamation and decided not to decline. Nobody was pleased. Missy LeHand wanted FDR free to concentrate on his health; Louis Howe believed the Republicans would win and wanted to avoid another personal defeat for the man he wished to help make president. Howe wired: “BY WAY OF CONGRATULATIONS DIG UP TELEGRAM I SENT YOU WHEN YOU RAN IN SENATORIAL PRIMARIES“—a reference to FDR’s misguided attempt to run for the U.S. Senate in the 1914 primary.
According to his mother, Warm Springs went into instant mourning until “Franklin’s cheery voice was heard to remark, ‘Well, if I’ve got to run for Governor, there’s no use in all of us getting sick about it!’”
Once FDR decided to run, he ran with vigor, and all his allies rallied to support his decision. His mother wrote that, no matter what, “I do not want you to be defeated!” She assured him that “all will be well whatever happens.” And, with a mother’s commitment that tells us much about the origins of FDR’s unrivaled sense of security, she wrote: “Now what follows is really private. In case of your election, I know your salary is smaller than the one you get now. I am prepared to make the difference up to you.”
ER publicly distanced herself as far as possible from her husband’s decision, and told the press that she was “very happy and very proud, although I did not want him to do it. He felt that he had to. In the end you have to do what your friends want you to. There comes to every man, if he is wanted, the feeling there is almost an obligation to return the confidence shown him….” When asked if it were because of her last-minute phone call that he changed his mind, she denied it all: “I never did a thing to ask him to run. Franklin always makes his own decisions.”
ER answered questions about her own role in FDR’s campaign: “I have plenty to do with the job I am handling now for the national campaign…. I do not think I will change my plans, but I may make a few speeches later for my husband. If I can be of any help I shall be glad to give it.”
As ER had anticipated, FDR was energized and delighted by the excitement of his nonstop campaign. He told his mother: “If I could campaign another six months, I believe I could throw away my cane.”
But the election of 1928 was such a total disaster for the Democrats on every level that ER and FDR left party headquarters at midnight convinced that he too had been defeated. They had been watching the returns in New York City’s great armory with Al Smith, who had lost not only the nation but also New York: Bigotry and Prohibition, no less than the celebrated Republican era of prosperity, had ensured his overwhelming defeat. Herbert Hoover went on to win 444 electoral votes to Smith’s eighty-seven, and Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia voted Republican for the first time in history. “Well,” Smith said that evening, “the time hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House.”
Only Franklin’s mother refused to believe that her son could actually lose. She sat and waited through the night for the final upstate returns to come in, even though they represented districts that had been devoted to Ottinger. FDR and Edward J. Flynn, the colorful “boss of the Bronx,” had telephoned upstate sheriffs threatening to investigate their suspiciously tardy returns. But Flynn also left before they arrived. Only Sara Delano Roosevelt sat through the early-morning hours as the votes trickled in. She sat in a darkened corridor, alone with a few party stalwarts and the counting staff, until 4:00 A.M., and was the only member of the family who heard the tally that announced her son’s election. Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried New York State by 25,564 votes, even though Smith lost it by 103,481.
ER’S INITIAL RESPONSE TO SMITH’S DEFEAT AND FDR’S VICtory was complex. For over nine months, she had worked daily and imaginatively for the Smith campaign. ER hated to lose. It was not merely Smith’s personal loss, or her own, but the continued defeat on the national level of all the social programs she championed. ER understood that progressive Democrats needed to regroup and reorganize. They would all have to try again in four years, and she urged all her co-workers to begin immediately.
ER was eager to continue the battle, but in terms of her own work, she considered FDR’s victory a mixed blessing. She feared that FDR’s election to office meant that she would have to withdraw from public life. To reporters, her remarks were restrained, even ungracious: “If the rest of the ticket didn’t get in, what does it matter?” “No, I am not excited about my husband’s election. I don’t care. What difference can it make to me?” In retrospect, she wondered if she had “really wanted Franklin to run. I imagine I accepted his nomination and later his election as I had accepted most of the things that had happened in life thus far; one did whatever seemed necessary and adjusted one’s personal life to the developments in other people’s lives.”
There was in 1928 no accepted place for a political wife, except in the background. ER had grown accustomed to a different role. She was a publisher, an editor, a columnist; she debated on the radio and before large audiences; her opinions were forthright and specific. She had a following, and people relied on her views and depended on her leadership.
THE ROLE OF SILENT AND SUPPORTIVE WIFE HAD BEEN LEFT in Rock Creek Cemetery contemplating Grief. There was no turning back. Yet neither was there any precedent for this new reality. History presented no other couple similarly equal in spirit, commitment, and ambition—giant personalities, powerful egos, inspiring and commanding presences. Was ER seriously meant to become again the dutiful wife at home with the children, silent by the radio, while her husband and all their friends were engaged in the work she most enjoyed? It was impossible. She could not abide the thought. She resented even contemplating it. And so the Roosevelt partnership departed yet again from tradition. ER never did withdraw from the public sphere.
*It lasted for over a decade and in 1935 resulted in failure. The World Court was only a first and rather tiny step on the long road toward international peace, she acknowledged wherever she spoke: But remember: “All big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
* These scandalous dealings surfaced again during the Nixon administration, which passed along Elk Hills to private developers. The real value to the nation in 1920s currency was over $200 million. Elk Hills alone in 1975 was conservatively valued at $50 billion.
* After more than fifty years of effort, the text of the ERA, defeated again in 1982, was: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”