DURING FDR’S TWO TWO-YEAR TERMS AS GOVERNOR, Franklin and Eleanor’s life together seemed to have achieved a sustained compatibility. They understood each other, respected each other, and protected each other from the barbs of the outside world. But they were also fiercely protective of their own needs and their own interests; and these were guarded in turn by their respectively devoted inner circles.
In these years, there was a pattern to Roosevelt family life. ER and FDR and their staffs spent Christmas and the early winter months in Albany, Hyde Park, and New York, with Eleanor commuting between the Executive Mansion and Todhunter. FDR, Missy LeHand, and assorted associates spent April and May in Warm Springs—with occasional but infrequent visits from ER and Louis Howe. The summer months were generally spent in Albany and Hyde Park. In the autumn, and always for Thanksgiving, FDR returned again to Warm Springs, where ER joined him for at least a week.
Crowded and unconventional, the Roosevelt household was generally full of fun, purposeful activity, and countless friends and politicians who came and went, day and night. The statehouse, like the White House after 1933, was rather like Grand Hotel. But there were no separate tables, and there was only one purpose: to advance and promote the policies and visions of FDR, and to entertain him and each other. So much entertaining occurred at home because it was impossible for FDR to get around. He hated the inconvenience of restaurants, and it was easier to bring a film to him than for him and his entourage to go out. FDR’s friends went to great lengths to keep him entertained, and were largely successful. Besides card games and parties, there were theatricals and performances—frequently directed and master-minded by Louis Howe. And every meal was either a meeting or ceremony, or some kind of organized frolic. ER was always mindful of FDR’s needs. She participated in the hilarity as fully as she could, given that his entertainments frequently did not represent her preferences. When her work took her elsewhere, she arranged for his friends to be there and to be well received and cared for in her absence.
The Roosevelts were charming and informal. They tended to transform their households into an extended family unit that generally pulled in one direction. Still, formal distinctions were maintained between upstairs and downstairs, between servants and served, staff and leadership. Moreover, during the Albany years, their respective circles became increasingly distinct.
In addition to Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook, Elinor Morgenthau, Caroline O’Day, and Louis Howe, ER’s primary domain expanded to include her lifelong secretary Malvina (“Tommy”) Thompson. Efficient and political, with wartime experience in the Red Cross, Tommy had worked diligently in the 1928 campaign and was devoted to her boss.
During the gubernatorial campaign of 1928, several other people were also added to Eleanor’s permanent network of political allies and intimate friends: the delightful publicity director June Hamilton Rhodes; Mary Norton, a New Jersey labor reformer, subsequently elected to Congress; and that spectacular strategist of all reforms dedicated to empowering women in public life, Molly Dewson. They each admired ER’s gifts as a leader and considered themselves ardent members of her loyal brigade.
Within FDR’s personal sphere, Missy LeHand, always the mistress of Warm Springs, now moved into the statehouse with the family and became more routinely and entirely FDR’s companion. Her assistant, Grace Tully, also joined the inner circle. Originally Eleanor’s secretary in the Women’s Division during the Al Smith campaign, she moved on to FDR after his election. ER was gracious to both women, and always regarded Missy LeHand with particular warmth. ER worried about her fragile health, monitored her cigarettes, and repeatedly urged her to get more sleep. They shopped together, and took long walks in the countryside and along the river. If ER was ever jealous of Missy LeHand, she never showed it.
Franklin’s team also included Lieutenant Governor Herbert Lehman, a banker who had been one of Smith’s chief financial supporters; Edward J. Flynn, known since 1922 as the Boss of the Bronx, whom FDR named secretary of state; James Farley, a Democratic Party stalwart, contractor, and state boxing commissioner; Frances Perkins; Henry Morgenthau; FDR’s law partner Basil (“Doc”) O’Connor; and speech-writer and counsel Sam Rosenman. They talked politics, played cards, went fishing, and were in a variety of ways entirely available to the “Boss.”
Only Louis Howe, who spent the gubernatorial years as FDR’s business representative in New York and worked out of his law office to enhance the Boss’s national political visibility, was actually a member of both Eleanor’s and Franklin’s networks. By 1930, ER and Howe had virtually divided the gubernatorial campaign committees between them. ER, now with Molly Dewson, ran the Women’s Division, and Howe ran publicity as never before—with enhanced radio and movie coverage. When ER and Howe were both at home on East 65th Street, they made special time for each other: to plan strategy, to have fun. They both enjoyed the same quiet local restaurants, and delighted especially in the theatre. Howe spent only occasional weekends in Albany between 1928 and 1932.
Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook also considered themselves at home in both camps, although their primary friendship was with ER. But at some point, charmed by the seduction of influence and the beacon of office, they began their slow slide toward that dangerous abyss they considered neutrality.
Although the final and tragic break in their friendship did not occur until 1938, Eleanor became increasingly disenchanted with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. In addition to their mercurial sense of loyalty—now to ER, now to FDR—there were occasional breaches of what for Eleanor mattered significantly: propriety and gentillesse. It was not about “good manners” in any conventional sense but, rather, an emotional carelessness, a lack of sensitivity. When, for example, ER’s adolescent sons called her “Muddie,” she did not like it but recognized it as part of their adolescent nonsense. But when Marion Dickerman called her “Muddie” at Todhunter with students present, ER was stunned. It was not only disrespectful or unkind: It was unprotective. And that, for ER, was unacceptable.
Still another aspect of the tensions that emerged between ER and her Val-Kill partners was that ER tended to move on: Once her work was done in one area, she selected another. Once she was satisfied in one way, she turned her attentions elsewhere. She was searching, endlessly curious—and restless. She sought and made new friends, who represented different classes. They looked and behaved differently, and they were increasingly unacceptable to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. Whether or not they were merely snobs who did not share ER’s interests in working people, recent immigrants, and members of America’s various minorities, or they were simply jealous, the fact is that Dickerman and Cook did not like ER’s new friends.
It happened gradually and, for a time imperceptibly—but their interests diverged. During the summer of 1929, ER undertook what was to be her final vacation trip with Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook, and two of her sons—John (thirteen) and FDR, Jr. (fifteen). Throughout the 1920s, the three friends, with assorted children, had spent several weeks of each summer together. They had hiked and camped and motored throughout the countryside, thoroughly enjoying one another’s company. But the two months they spent in Europe between July and September 1929 were almost entirely disagreeable. In many ways, this trip ended an era.
The trip began amid an agony of misunderstanding. ER had wanted to hike and camp in Europe with her friends and two younger sons—now adolescents—much as they had in the States: alone in their own automobiles, without chauffeurs or formal clothes. When they discussed their trip at dinner one night, FDR seemed quite satisfied with the plans. But SDR objected vehemently: Her grandchildren should not travel like vagabonds across the capitals of Europe. Moreover, they were no longer private citizens. It was unseemly and impossible for the governor’s wife to drive her own car. The family had standards to maintain, appearances to consider.
Unfortunately, FDR, Jr. (called Brother), chose that moment to support his grandmother, and mock his mother. Yes, he agreed; besides, Mother would probably land the car in a ditch, or smash a gatepost, as she was wont to do. ER turned for support to FDR, who said, as usual, nothing. Never once had he taken his wife’s side against his mother. Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, immobilized by the tension that swelled the air, said nothing. ER, who had relied especially on Brother as an ally in their many adventures, felt particularly betrayed. Coldly, without apparent emotion, she addressed her mother-in-law: Your grandchildren will travel in the manner you deem appropriate. And then she stood up, threw her napkin on the table, and stormed out of the room. Only then did FDR order Brother to apologize, and persuade ER to return to the table. He did apologize when he saw his mother in tears, and he did persuade her to return. But the trip was doomed.
In suits, stiff collars, and ties, the boys sat with ER behind liveried chauffeurs in rented limousines. They wanted to sit in front, or accompany Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, who toured in the car ahead—their own Buick roadster, with the top down. But Eleanor was adamant. Marion Dickerman recalled with a sigh, “Brother paid very dearly for that remark. Eleanor could be very hard.”
Formally and decorously they toured Ireland, England, Belgium, Germany, and France. Despite the many cultural sights, the warm visit with older brother James, now married to Betsy Cushing, also vacationing in Ireland; despite several good horse shows, and the beauty of the Lake Country, nobody enjoyed the trip very much, least of all ER. There were pleasant moments: Everybody had a good lunch at Rum-pelmeyer’s; there was a delightful dinner in Soho at a restaurant Marion and Nan had frequented during the war, where “the food was excellent”; and they all enjoyed some splendid shopping, especially at Harrod’s: “I assure you I am ruined but [the boys] are swank and very happy!” She also bought FDR “some silk pajamas & 2 lovely soft pleated silk shirts all very expensive but very good & I hope you like them as well as I do.” For herself, ER bought a raincoat and hat at Burberry’s. And then proceeded to Liberty’s, where she “bought presents, 2 cute dresses for [her granddaughter] ‘Sisty’ & a knit suit for Missy.”
There were excursions and exhibitions. Nan and Marion enjoyed their wartime friends “& they say so far none of their old friends have been a disappointment which is remarkable after ten years!” The boys went to a motorcycle race, and a cricket match—which they found “too dull for description.” ER thought the boys had “a good time,” but she felt “too old” to enjoy the unexpected. And she resented particularly “the constant care & supervision” the boys required. Although she wrote that they had “been very good,” they found countless ways to burst out of their enforced restraints, especially by battling each other. Daily they tested their mother’s endurance. She tried to keep them walking, and they climbed to the top of every mountain and tower in sight. Her hope was that, if they were tired at night, they would sleep. But they fought anyway. It was all “rather wearing,” ER admitted.
London was crowded, and ER had never seen so many “tourists in my life.” And then there was a “tragedy.” When John went to buy a tiepin for Franklin, Jr.’s birthday, he discovered his purse had been stolen. “Tears & desperate sorrow! I’ve made it up to him but it was a good lesson for I had told them to keep their purses in their inner pockets & he put his in his outer coat pocket.”
After England, the party proceeded to Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, Coblenz, and Luxembourg. They visited “Roman remains,” in which “the boys seemed much interested.” Franklin, Jr.’s birthday was toasted with local champagne. ER wrote FDR: “The others had some champagne …for dinner & drank your health & wished you were present. I joined in [with] Evian water! FJr has had a taste of everything and likes it but I won’t let him have it as a rule!” In Verdun they visited the battlefields, and then went to Rheims and Paris, where they were joined again by James and Betsy. En route to Cherbourg, from which they would sail for home, they visited Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. The boys had been fighting, and Eleanor left them at their hotel in Mont-Saint-Michel to take a long and tranquil walk through the Gothic splendor and peacefulness for which she was by then positively parched. As she returned to the hotel, she saw that a crowd had gathered, their heads back; people shouting and pointing up: Franklin, Jr., had pushed John out of the window and held on to him, precariously, by his ankles, as he faced death.
For ER, the trip had been an unbearable ordeal. They returned on 15 September, and Eleanor vowed that she would never travel that way again. In fact she never again traveled for any length of time with her sons, nor did she, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook ever again resume their traditional summer holiday excursions.
In other significant ways, an era was ending. On 24 October, the New York Stock Exchange plunged in the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In the coming years, both ER and FDR would address profoundly new and difficult challenges. Although Al Smith had left the state in efficient working order—in his six years as governor, he had introduced almost every one of those controversial social ideas that came to define progressive politics in America—it was up to FDR to see them through a Republican and reluctant state legislature. Every major issue and policy subsequently associated with the New Deal was advanced during FDR’s governorship.
In his gubernatorial inaugural address on 1 January 1929, FDR had introduced his vision of the future. It would become an American crusade:
To secure more of life’s pleasures for the farmer; to guard the toilers in the factories and to insure them a fair wage and protection from the dangers of their trades; to compensate them by adequate insurance for injuries received while working for us; to open the doors of knowledge to their children more widely; to aid those who are crippled and ill; to pursue with strict justice, all evil persons who prey upon their fellow men; and at the same time, by intelligent and helpful sympathy, to lead wrongdoers into right paths—all of these great aims of life are more fully realized here than in any other State of the Union.
FDR’s 1929 inaugural included unemployment relief through public-works projects, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, the development of public utilities and the regulation of private utilities and banks, farm relief, reforestation, conservation, urban planning, home-steading, prison reform, rural electrification, the use of public funds for housing, education, and support of the handicapped.
But Roosevelt presided over an opposition legislature dominated by “stand-pat” Republicans. The enactment of a progressive vision depended on new elections, and a sense of urgency for needed social legislation that only emerged as the Depression deepened.
The Roosevelts were slow to appreciate the significance of enormous changes that threatened Europe during the 1920s: The struggle between socialism and capitalism, the emergence of fascism, and the intensity of racism and anti-Semitism. During the winter of 1925, for example, when Sara Delano Roosevelt took Anna to Europe, she prearranged their visit to Rome so that they might have audiences with both the Pope and Il Duce. Anna was surprised, about the audience with the Pope since SDR “had grown up a Unitarian and became a low church Episcopalian only when she married my grandfather.” Her decision to “pull strings” for a “private audience” with Mussolini was even more mysterious. Anna attributed it to “Granny’s intellectual adventurousness,” and noted that she was vastly impressed with the dictator who seemed since 1923 to have cured unemployment and arranged for the trains to run on time.
Subsequently, she and her husband, Curtis, left their two-year-old daughter with ER and embarked on a European tour that heralded momentous events. On 24 March 1929, Anna Roosevelt Dall wrote to her parents from Vienna that she and Curtis “have fallen in love with Vienna”:
We had a letter of introduction to a Countess Hoyos, and she and her family have been very nice to us…. The old lady is Granny’s age and very keen, but a stickler for the old customs and manners, and very much the “grande dame.” Her son and daughter-in-law seem to be more or less lost in this day & generation…. They are delightful, however, and know their history…. They, of course, want a king, and firmly believe it is only a matter of time before nearly every country in Europe will be a limited monarchy. They say Vienna itself is very Socialistic but the country districts are not. Of course, they are frightfully bitter over the way Austria was cut up after the war…. The old Countess’ second daughter married Bismarck’s eldest son. They think nothing of Emil Ludwig’s [biography of Bismarck]…. Ludwig is a Jew & dropped the name Cohen, which was his family name, when he became a biographer! By the way, here in Vienna Jews are taboo. They are the only really wealthy people and have the most beautiful houses & gardens in Vienna. However the younger Countess said “We regard the Jewish question here as you regard your negro question in America!” It is considered frightful for a gentleman to marry even a Jewess of the best family. The Rothschilds were received at court so they are grudgingly accepted. It seems to me that the truth is they fear the Jews, who are clever & hard workers & very powerful & wealthy. They are very numerous and have a very large Society of their own….
Regarding the “Negro question in America,” FDR seemed as indifferent as he was to the rise of fascism. He refused to act against Robert Moses’s discriminating policies in the management of the state’s park system, which made it difficult for poor people, and especially black people, to benefit from the new beach parks, particularly Jones Beach. Moses accomplished this by prohibiting the use of public transportation to Long Island’s parks and beaches. Then other deliberate policies were introduced to discourage people Moses considered the “dirty” and the “riff-raff”: There were very few black lifeguards, and they were assigned to the most remote and least developed beaches. In addition, since “Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water …the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out.” Protests were filed. Legislators were addressed. The press was notified. Civic groups were aroused. At this point, FDR ordered an investigation, which confirmed the allegations, and the governor sent Moses a letter of inquiry. When Moses denied everything, however, FDR did not press the issue—not even when Moses imposed a fifty-cent public parking fee to discourage poor patrons further, at a time of mounting unemployment and worsening depression. FDR wrote to ask Moses to reconsider the fee, but when he refused (to do so would alter the “entire character of the place”), FDR backed off. When, in response to one of the most vigorous public outcries against discrimination in New York history, the legislature actually passed a bill to prohibit fees in state parks, FDR vetoed it.
Although both FDR and ER had continually expressed concern about rising unemployment and the farm crises that preceded the Great Depression by almost ten years, when the stock market actually crashed on “Black Thursday” it seemed a remote situation to Franklin. By 15 November, the lists of the New York Stock Exchange had fallen in value by 40 percent, a paper loss of over $26 billion. But on 1 December, FDR advised Louis Howe to go to the Anderson Galleries for “the final liquidation sale” of a late, lamented friend: “It is just possible that the recent little Flurry down town will make the prices comparatively low. I have marked several items.” Both FDR and Missy LeHand were also interested in an auction of “Chinese things.” FDR sent Howe a check and urged him to “do some Christmas shopping of your own …for the things might go fairly cheap.”
Always more deeply involved with working people, especially women workers associated with the Women’s Trade Union League, ER responded to the Depression more personally. She intensified her own work with the WTUL, and as chair of the Finance Committee, initiated efforts to fund new projects, and to pay off the mortgage for the WTUL clubhouse.*
Before the disaster unfolded, ER and her committee raised the $30,000 to retire the WTUL mortgage, and then the money needed for remodeling, rewiring, and painting. The women owned their five-story townhouse at 247 Lexington Avenue outright by June 1929, the WTUL’s twenty-fifth-anniversary year; and a feeling of optimism and confidence in the future prevailed. The WTUL leaders planned a party to celebrate their anniversary—and Sara Delano Roosevelt, who increasingly supported her daughter-in-law’s political work with a new personal extravagance—sent an invitation to the entire League, offering to host the party at Hyde Park.
ER persuaded the governor to attend, telling him “you are the piece-de-résistance.” Mary Dreier wrote a pageant, which was well rehearsed and artfully produced. And on 8 June, over two hundred factory workers, “shop-girls,” secretaries, union leaders, and their philanthropic allies chartered a boat for the journey up the Hudson for the party, highlighted by FDR’s remarks, dinner on SDR’s terrace, and the $35,000 check raised by ER’s committee.
AS THE “ROARING TWENTIES” GROUND TO A HALT FINANcially, ER was not alone in her conviction that there really was opportunity and productivity enough for all. There was no reason technologically or materially for women to be denied access to or advantages in work; no reason for poverty, deprivation, or exclusion. There was enough for everybody. The machine age changed everything, except the consciousness of those who ruled. To deny that reality was willful and wrong. ER was among the first to protest loudly and specifically against the continued outrages that barred women from rewarding work and new opportunities.
In October 1929, ER keynoted the eighth annual Exposition of Women’s Arts and Industries. Countless displays filled the rooms of the grand old Hotel Astor with the activities and achievements of women in business, politics, and the arts. In her address, ER assailed Henry Ford’s contention that women were too “imprecise” for industrial work, and that in any case their “proper place” was limited to the home, as narrow-minded, old-fashioned silliness.
ER proudly noted: “The best answer to Mr. Ford is this exposition.” “All women are seizing the ever-increasing opportunities which are being opened to them.” The advances of “the machine age [are] changing the education and achievement of women so that in the future” women, no less than men, would have every opportunity for gratification, success, and fulfillment.
ER herself was regarded as one of the new breed of women industrialists. Her furniture-reproduction factory at Val-Kill was the subject of considerable attention—one New York Times interview with ER bore a headline that termed her “Woman-Run Factory” a “Feminine Industrial Success” where ER, and her partner Nancy Cook, directed a large crew of “expert craftsmen.” “As one of the few factories …in the country initiated, built, managed and owned entirely by women, it is in a sense a milestone on woman’s industrial highway.” But ER saw it as only the beginning. “There is no reason why we should not have a female Henry Ford. I am hopeful for women in industry. They will have to overcome prejudice …which will disappear as soon as they prove themselves capable industrial heads.”
Just days into the greatest economic collapse the world had yet seen, ER encouraged women to be bold: to borrow money, invest in ventures and industries that previously barred them. “There are many small factories throughout the country that could be run successfully by women. Some could in fact be run better by women than by men.” And throughout the Eastern states many of these were closed and for sale at “ten times” below their value. ER believed that women had to give up their peculiar reluctance “to borrow money” in order to expand industrially.
ER urged women to face the business future as she had urged them to face the political future: They needed to play the game as men do. Her own experience emboldened her. The Val-Kill plant had expanded from six workers to thirty; it had grown in size and services. Profits were used for expansion, and Val-Kill “weathered the Wall Street crash and its subsequent unemployment crisis without having to lay off one workman.”
AS DEPRESSION CONDITIONS WORSENED, ER CONTINUED TO insist on women’s right to work, to educate themselves for gainful employment, and to resist the growing demand that in hard times women should not compete with men but should return with docility, if not joy, to the role of homemaking. Rising unemployment created understandable opposition to college-trained women who did not need to work, or married women who worked only for “pin money.”
ER urged comfortable parents to keep their children in school and out of the labor market as long as possible, and suggested that affluent women serve their communities through volunteer services. She considered it “not an utterly unreasonable attitude that women not driven by compelling necessity refrain from entering into competition with women who must have a job to live.” But, she insisted: “It is a different matter to insist that as a permanent truth married women should stay out of the gainful occupations. The contention that they create unemployment will not hold. It happens that in good times there is work enough for everybody, however large the labor supply, and in times of depression there is idleness, no matter how small the supply.”
She worked with the Junior League leadership, which sought to contribute solutions to the problems of unnecessary competition during this tense time. In November 1930, ER agreed to write an article entitled “What the Country Expects of the Junior League in the Unemployment Crisis” for the League’s magazine. ER called for equality in ambition and career goals. And she urged affluent and privileged girls to give of their time and talent creatively, to create jobs in the process of pursuing their own interests:
Now there has never seemed to me to be any question but what the girl had the same right to work that the boy had. A college boy, from the same type of family from which the membership of the Junior League is drawn, may take any job if he is not trained in some profession but he knows and his employer knows and his coworkers know that he is only gaining experience. It is an accepted premise that he is aiming for and will achieve an executive position, something where he creates work for others. Why should not this same conception hold for the girls?
ER did not accept the notion that affluent girls should be reduced to “elegant idleness.” Some will be happy in volunteer work, in philanthropy or the arts. But, ER wrote, the measure of success in the contemporary world was work—”financially profitable” work. “A girl having had great opportunities should realize that her job is to create, to make work for others.” Such girls might start new businesses with the money they would have spent on clothes or parties. “I wish,” ER concluded, “that I could make every Junior League girl see that her greater opportunities put on her greater obligations.”
ER understood the tensions between “factory girls” and “business girls,” and deplored them. She sought dignity and justice for women workers, and wanted to add a recreational program and a course in “body rhythmics” to the activities the WTUL sponsored. Rose Schneiderman, president of the Women’s Trade Union League, agreed that such an undertaking was welcome, since “industrial girls” did “not mix easily with the group to be found in the Y.W. and the League of Girls’ Clubs,” where factory workers were often patronized. ER agreed to send fund-raising letters for the effort and wrote Schneiderman: “I am deeply interested…. Why is it that we must be divided into strata?”
As the Depression worsened, ER campaigned for better living conditions for workingwomen, and keynoted a two-day conference sponsored by the Association to Promote Proper Housing for Girls, Inc. She called for imaginative ways to end unemployment, and a wage scale to end the perpetuation of dreadful and unsanitary housing conditions. ER considered unionization the key to all economic security for working women.
While union organizers were being harassed and arrested for their activities, Eleanor publicly supported strike efforts. When 450 women struck for a decent contract between the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Fifth Avenue dressmaking firm of Hattie Carnegie, ER sent a message of support from Albany in praise of “the movement which has as its object improvement of conditions for those women workers in the dressmaking establishments where, up to this time, the women workers have not been organized.”
Referring to these activities, The New York Times explained that ER was “noted for her sympathies toward organized labor, and especially toward women in industry.” Over the years, ER consistently reaffirmed her conviction that it was not unionism, or strikers, or radicals, or even communists that concerned her: it was unemployment and the economic devastation that mocked our pretenses at civility and decency. In March 1930, she told a meeting of two hundred representatives of the Southern Women’s Democratic Organization that she was “not excited about the Communists” but, rather, the “great number of people …who cannot get work.”
By 1932, Eleanor had become convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with a system and a civilization that tolerated the cruel conditions so many Americans faced. In January, she told the New York City League of Women Voters that there was a need for “something more than temporary alleviation of suffering through emergency aid” or “charity.” Emergency relief was simply not enough, for it did nothing to alleviate the real problem. “It is nice to hand out milk and bread. It gives you a comfortable feeling inside. But fundamentally you are not relieving the …reasons why we have to have this charity.” ER urged women to become dissatisfied with temporary, superficial solutions. It was time to “face the fact that we may have to have great changes, …new solutions. So we must be prepared to meet things with open minds and go to the roots of questions as they come up. We can’t go on drifting.”
Over and over again, in all the speeches ER made during the early years of the Depression, she called for new and bold solutions, a revolutionary level of courage and imagination equal to these critical times: “A spirit which is not afraid of new difficulties and new solutions, nor afraid to stand hardships.” ER believed that women especially could create fundamental change, if they organized.
In an address to hundreds of women of the Congress of States Societies, representatives from women’s groups in twenty-eight states, ER said: “We are not only a part of the government, but we are the government, and on each one of us devolves the responsibility of trying to help solve these economic problems. The women together can do a great deal. Therefore, let us realize that it is not just for pleasure that we have met and let us try to unite at a time quite as serious as war.”
In her increasingly visible attacks on the status quo, Eleanor now ran afoul of one of the members of FDR’s inner circle—the attorney, speech-writer, and former state assemblyman Sam Rosenman, who had moved into the executive mansion with his wife, Dorothy. An outsider with pretensions of power and a sense of self-assurance some considered arrogance, Rosenman was not warmly received by Louis Howe. As Rosenman described it: “Like a faithful watchdog he showed his teeth at anyone who came near Roosevelt, and if a person was welcomed too heartily or got too close, Howe became his jealous enemy. He did not really like me from the very start—and he liked me less the more work Roosevelt gave me to do.”
Rosenman was impatient with ER’s ideals and frankly annoyed at FDR’s willingness to listen to his wife’s views on all issues. By 1932, Rosenman had joined the ranks of those who, whether for misogynist or political reasons, sought to “get the pants off Eleanor and on to Franklin.” Rosenman considered ER too assertive, even aggressive: He personally preferred Missy LeHand’s quiet, more deferential manner. In 1960, he recalled the happy Albany days, especially those days when ER was away: “Miss LeHand was the hostess, and she could preside at a table and direct servants and the general conduct of a social gathering with even greater efficiency than Mrs. Roosevelt could. In addition to that, she could sit at the table and entertain guests, lead the conversation, and charm them with her gracious manner.”
Eleanor’s position in the extended Roosevelt household was now frequently embattled, since she represented liberal positions that FDR was only occasionally willing to include in his program and actually fight for. Many of his advisers resented her influence, her activities, and indeed her presence. The increased criticism prompted her to write a series of articles disclaiming any power, influence, or even interest in her husband’s affairs.
In “Wives of Great Men,” she wrote: “Even if a woman has the most definite ideas, she must never try to persuade her husband to do anything he does not consider right….”
ER believed that a political wife was always entitled to her opinions. She had a right to maintain them, and to announce them. But “she should never nag her husband…; nor need she make [their differences] public.” ER drew a very distinct line.
I say what I believe, but I will not stump against my party, regardless of its program. I will not sit on the platform where the subject of the speeches is one upon which I differ with my husband and his party; nor will I issue statements about it….
There are few avenues of life where men and women agree on everything. In politics they differ along very definite lines.
Men tend to look at things from a legalistic point of view; women from a practical one….
Women generally are more interested in reforms than in tax laws. Consequently, if a bill dealing with maternal and infant welfare is before the legislature a wife is quite likely to consider it the most important measure…. Her husband might disagree, insisting that income tax revision should take priority. Here there is no adjustment of opinion. Each must keep his own. The approach is fundamentally different.
ER considered it “impossible for husband and wife both to have political careers.” “It requires all the energy and united effort of an entire household to support one.” There might be negotiation about who should be the chosen and agreed-upon candidate in the household. She pointed with pride to Nancy Astor in England as the obvious case where a woman “had such an intense interest and love of politics, and such an obvious flair for it, that her husband withdrew from any family competition. He helps her, instead.” She also gave examples of women and men who shared the political game in equal measure. But, ER concluded, every politician needed “a conscientious, competent wife. Matrimony in official life is no small job.” And the wife’s responsibilities were important. “She must do her official entertaining heartily and graciously. Her work is practically a career in itself.”
Happily, she explained, she and FDR agreed on most issues. They agreed on the tariff, on the need for customs reduction. They agreed that the United States had been “too completely absorbed in our own materialistic gains…. A state ruled wholly by the self-interest of a few cannot be just.” “Governor Roosevelt and I both have great confidence in the judgment of the average [person]…. The more power resides in the people as a whole, the better we think it is for each of them and for the nation.” Also, they agreed “heartily in our liberal views on foreign relations, although I tend to be somewhat more radical than he.” And despite her wifely effort not to disagree publicly, ER evidently could not resist the temptation to make the feminist point: “This is a common phenomenon in this realm, where women have no heritage or national inhibitions, no obsolete credos taught in youth to obstruct their views.”
However much ER might secretly have envied Lady Astor, she assured her readers that she had no intention of emulating her: A political wife may have her own opinions, “but she must keep them to herself.” Despite her protestations, however, she found it impossible to ignore affairs of state. In the Roosevelt household there were always two politicians. On 2 October 1930, for instance, ER wrote FDR: “Miss Perkins came to see me today and she has a secret offer which will be made if you agree. The commission she got together to look into the public employment department will recommend if you are agreeable that a commission similar to the old age pension one be appointed.” There were discussions about private-foundation funding, and ER was very enthusiastic about the proposal: “It looks good to me for it would take into account middle aged and physically handicapped, etc., and you would get the jump on Hoover, but they won’t move till you let me know what you think.”
Although ER and FDR differed in emphasis and political timing, especially regarding such issues as civil rights and the World Court, they were able to transcend the pettier power games, and remained united by a sense of basic decency and principle. Moreover, they served each other’s political needs.
On election night 1930, when FDR amassed the greatest vote any Democrat had ever received in New York State, Eleanor cabled him: “Much love dear and a world of congratulations. It is a triumph in so many ways dear and so well earned. Bless you and good luck these next two years.”
ON 11 OCTOBER 1929, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT CELEBRATED HER forty-fifth birthday. Being forty-five impressed ER. She talked about it and she wrote about it. Serene and in many ways content, she did not experience a midlife crisis but, rather, a midlife liberation. She marked the year, assessing her life to date. And when she felt unexpected, yet familiar chemical emotional stirrings, the kind women in menopause know are much like those metabolic sensations first ignited during adolescence, she determinedly denied them—for a while.
At the end of that year she wrote a rhapsody to self-awareness, “Her Forty-fifth Birthday!,” for Vogue. She summarized her childhood, her years as a young mother. All that was behind her. Her children were grown, she “was quick and executive…. She enjoyed books, she liked people and she had many interests.” She celebrated her new ability: “To be as an old French Lady once put it ‘in the front line trenches of life….’”
ER believed that by forty-five certain things ought to be well learned—especially the fact that “happiness does not come from the seeking, it is never ours by right.” She wrote of responsibility, discipline, and self-control. She never referred to self-denial, but she noted that
you must learn to love without criticism, to see things as others see them, even though it may be a point of view alien to your own. If you have learned these things by forty-five, if you have ceased to consider yourself as in any way important, but understand well the place that must be filled in the family, then the role will be easy. Your years up to now have been well spent and you can go on to the next step, the building up of an individual life and personality which will make you happier in yourself, and more interesting to all those who come in contact with you….
At forty-five, ER no longer needed to nag her children or brood “over her deserted state.” She had kept “an open and a speculative mind,” and was now “ready to go out and try new adventures, create new work for others as well as herself, and strike deep roots in some community where her presence will make a difference to the lives of others.”
Forty-five has many compensations, the storm and stress bound up with the emotional life of youth is over, one can no longer be interested in oneself, but one is thereby freed for greater interest in others…. Nature means more to us, a blue sky, a flight of birds, a sunset, all become part of the infinite goodness of God and we learn to say with Stevenson “the world is so full of a number of things I think we should all be as happy as Kings.”
ER was glad to have the “storm and stress” of her emotional youth behind her. She did not anticipate the reappearance of Grief’s counterpart: the kind of excitement and joy awakened by romance and passion. The young girl who longed for her father to return and be different, who yearned for her mother to love her just a little, seemed to have moved far beyond Grief. But there lingered a memory, if not a longing, for those passionate feelings of her past—part romance, part expectation—that could delight or devastate her soul.
Consciously, ER emphasized her commitment to a life of responsibility. She talked endlessly to reporters about discipline, duty, and self-control. After long and thorough interviews, Helena Huntington Smith wrote that ER was
a personality ruled by reason. As to emotion, she probably rather dislikes it. A visitor once referred carelessly to her “passionate interest” in welfare legislation; Mrs. Roosevelt smiled her quick smile and interposed:
“Yes, but I hardly think the word ‘passionate’ applies to me.”
Nevertheless, from 1928 until her death in 1962 the word “passionate” did apply to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her politics were the politics of passionate intensity. And her affections, as she was soon to learn, were to be woven in new fabrics of surprising and romantic design.
* ER’s finance committee included her longtime friend Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, who first introduced ER to Rose Schneiderman and the work of the WTUL at a tea in her home; and Mrs. Thomas Lamont, who had rented the Roosevelts’ 65th Street house during the war years. A partner with J. P. Morgan, Thomas Lamont figured prominently in a banker’s consortium of the “Big Six” that speculated vigorously during the first week of the stock market’s collapse. In an effort to revive confidence, they bought up endless quantities of sagging stock, with considerable fanfare. Lamont and Richard Whitney (vice-president of the Exchange) appeared on the floor themselves, ostentatiously bought significant shares, and dismissed the implications of what Lamont called “a little distress selling.” But they evidently unloaded their bargains quickly and quietly, found few new words of confidence with which to greet the press, and only served to create greater panic. When Herbert Hoover denounced unprincipled speculation, Lamont criticized the president, eliciting Hoover’s famous rejoinder: “The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy.” But few believed in the winter of 1929 that the collapse would be long-lasting.