After the election of November 1932, ER worried that her talents would not be used; that she would become a shut-in, a congenial hostess in the political shadows politically sidelined. In the months before FDR’s inauguration on 4 March 1933, newspaper headlines broadcast the victories of fascism and tyranny in Europe and Asia as well as the intensifying agonies of America’s worst economic depression. In that bitter climate, ER faced her return to Washington with a burst of activity that defied her sense of dread. Officially limited to social tasks, she felt at first burdened and defiant. Her great friend Lorena Hickok was so impressed by ER’s initial distress that she titled her subsequent biography Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady.
ER wanted above all to be a player on the political team that worked to match FDR’s campaign promises with significant deeds. To counter her fear that she would instead be forced, into a life of political confinement somewhere in the shadows, a prisoner to the presidency, she plunged into the political fray. With the women activists of the Democratic Party, ER spent hours preparing lists of notable candidates for every level of government work. She wrote columns, stunned radio audiences, created endless controversy. The First Lady-elect was in the news almost every day—upsetting the complacent, encouraging people to imagine new liberal efforts to confront the Depression, which since October 1929 had plunged fifteen million unemployed and destitute Americans into despair.
It had been twelve years since ER’s last sojourn in Washington, that small ungenerous town that had been for her filled with ragged memories. There as a child when her Uncle Theodore was president she had felt shy, lonely, outcast. There as a young matron when her husband was Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, she had felt humiliated, isolated. Betrayed by her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer, her friend and social secretary, she had suffered the loneliest time of her adult life.
She returned to that place that fed on gossip and power, a changed woman. Surrounded by loyal friends, she was devoted to her work, and felt secure in her life. During the 1920s, the Roosevelts had reconsecrated their partnership and created their own political bases. FDR refortified his polio-ravaged body, and ER repaired her heart; they both moved beyond the affair that had threatened their marriage.
While Eleanor and Franklin rebuilt their private lives, the world they had grown up in, the world they knew, disintegrated. The punitive Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I and redrew the map of Europe, in addition to war debts and dizzying inflation, inflamed German nationalism and spurred popular movements dedicated to the demise of old ruling classes. Fascism and communism took hold as monarchies dissolved, empires collapsed, capitalism wobbled. While uncollected political and economic debts left over from the World War haunted and poisoned international relations, the wounds of Eleanor Roosevelt’s earlier time in Washington marked her memories, and influenced her path.
After 1920, ER had carefully crafted a life that suited her needs. Like her Uncle Theodore, she was an activist—delighted to be on the move, among people, dealing directly with causes and crises. Never idle, she enjoyed many careers and was all in a day teacher, editor, columnist, and radio commentator. Her primary circle included her business and living partners Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Caroline O’Day. With Cook and Dickerman, ER shared a home two miles from the “big house” at Hyde Park along a small river called the Val-Kill. With O’Day, they co-owned the Todhunter School, the Val-Kill crafts factory, and the Women’s Democratic News (WDN), a monthly newsletter.
ER had resigned as editor and taken her name off the masthead as one of the four publishers when FDR was elected governor of New York in November 1928, but she had continued to write its unsigned editorials and attend policy meetings.
In February 1933, ER publicly returned to the WDN with a monthly column called “Passing Thoughts of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” She was to replace Elisabeth Marbury, who had regularly reported from Washington and had died suddenly of a heart attack on 22 January at the age of seventy-seven. Eager to be back in print for attribution, ER’s first column was in part a tribute to Marbury, a Democratic Party stalwart and worldly raconteur.*
Also in this first column, ER promised to provide “some pictures of the various activities that I imagine fall to the lot of every President’s wife,” and announced that she was free to disagree—even with her husband.
Like the country and his closest advisers, ER did not know actually what FDR intended to do as president. His priorities were unclear, since he had campaigned as both ardent liberal and fiscal conservative: He would balance the budget, and decrease taxes. Now, ER stated her own liberal goals for the administration: She disapproved of lowering taxes in the face of so many urgent social needs and wanted relief policies extended to provide work and new training for the unemployed.
In both her February column and her unsigned editorial, she emphasized the need for more public spending. She lamented recent talk about curtailing “some of these services.” More services were needed, and “we will have to pay for [them] through taxes and our people might just as well face this fact….”
Her views did not coincide with FDR’s initial strategy, and he demanded space in the March issue to answer his wife and defend his first legislative acts. Between his mother and his wife, FDR was accustomed to outspoken opinionated women. But he did expect public unity on politically volatile issues. In the future ER would try to be more circumspect; this would be his only editorial rejoinder.
ER’s views on international matters also departed from FDR’s strategy. She deplored America’s “isolationist” policies and considered economic nationalism dangerous. She wanted the United States to forgive the entire international debt, in order to end the worldwide depression and the rising tide of bitterness that threatened world peace. Her internationalism had become increasingly unpopular among politicians. ER worked most closely on these issues with her first feminist friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, who, through the American Foundation, campaigned for the World Court and now also promoted U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union.
ER’s intimate circle also included Molly Dewson, who directed the Women’s Committee of the Democratic Party; Earl Miller, her personal squire and champion; Louis Howe, the only close friend the Roosevelts shared; and Malvina (Tommy) Thompson, her hardworking secretary and personal assistant.
Born in the Bronx to an Irish mother and English father, Malvina Thompson was ER’s mainstay from the time she spotted her in a Red Cross secretarial pool in 1917. She worked on every campaign after 1920, and became ER’s personal secretary and administrator. Entirely loyal to ER, she was efficient, protective, and open-hearted. Tommy smoked cigarettes from morning to night, drank Scotch at day’s end, and saw something funny in almost every situation. ER relied on her quick-witted support, and her fabulous sense of humor. Tommy’s robust and hearty laugh lit up many tense situations, and she had a good time wherever she went.
Then, in 1932, Lorena (Hick) Hickok, a leading political reporter, was assigned by the Associated Press to cover ER during the campaign. Their friendship now eclipsed all others.
With her activist team ER contemplated the traditional fate of a First Lady. She was expected to give up her own life and stand by her man, affirming and silent.
She could not do it. Unlike her predecessors, ER claimed her right to a public role. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1932, she boldly broadcast her conviction that the tragic economic conditions which prevailed were due to the “blindness of a few people who perhaps do not really understand that, after all, the prosperity of the few is on a firmer foundation when it spreads to the many.” She believed that everybody would soon realize there were only man-made reasons for so much deprivation in a land of overproduction. And now, because of her husband’s election, she sensed a new spirit of giving all around her, and she hailed the renewed impulse toward generosity. “We are going through a time when I believe we may have, if we will, a new social and economic order.”
Nevertheless, she was required by custom to give up her most public activities. She even resigned from the Todhunter School, although she loved teaching “best of all.” She also agreed to end her radio broadcasts, with the hope that she might resume them.
On 3 March 1933, the eve of FDR’s inauguration, she gave her last commercially sponsored broadcast in a Series that had become increasingly controversial. On one occasion, she ignored prohibition and counseled women on moderate alcohol consumption. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and church groups attacked her as America’s primary “Jezebel”.
ER ended her last broadcast with a plea to her radio audience for their continued correspondence:
The one great danger for a man in public life or for the woman who is that man’s wife, is that they may be set apart from the stream of life affecting the rest of the country. It is easy in Washington to think that Washington is the country and forget that it is a small place and only becomes important as the people who live there truly represent the other parts of the country.
I hope that my friends will feel as much my friends as they have always felt, and as free to talk to me and to tell me what they think as ever, and I want to know the whole country, not a little part of it.
___________
FDR’s election had imparted a vast sense of hope to a devastated nation, ER shared that sense of hope, and wanted to support him and be available to his needs.
For the inauguration, for example, ER initially announced that she intended to drive her own blue Buick convertible from New York to Washington, with her two dogs. But FDR had invited a party of cabinet members and special friends as his guests on the train, and ER told reporters that he wanted her with him, “‘so my place is there as hostess.’”
ER did not mention that she also planned to drive down with Lorena Hickok. According to Raymond Moley, then virtual leader of FDR’s Brains Trust, she changed her mind after an emotional family drama. When ER announced that she “would load her roadster with belongings and drive down with a woman friend,” FDR was stunned; It was the only time Moley heard him complain about his wife’s independence; on this one occasion FDR wanted the entire family together.
ER consented. But then, early inauguration morning, she and Hick made a pilgrimage to the famous statue Henry Adams had erected to the memory of his wife, Clover. There, during ER’s earlier years of solitude and sadness, she found strength in that holly grove while Washington gossiped about her gamboling husband and his well-known affair. Now she decided to begin her tenure as First Lady by meditating with her First Friend in the holly grove in Rock Creek Cemetery. As they sat in silence, Hick pondered ER’s mood, and the power of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue, known as Grief.
As I looked at it I felt that all the sorrow humanity had ever had to endure was expressed in that face…. Yet in that expression there was something almost triumphant. There was a woman who had experienced every kind of pain, every kind of suffering… and had come out of it serene—and compassionate….
FDR’s train party included his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt; sons Elliott and James, with their wives, Betty Donner and Betsey Cushing; their two younger sons, Franklin and John, students at Groton; cabinet designates, Brains Trusters, Democratic stalwarts, and various intimates including Louis Howe, Marvin McIntyre, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Basil O’Connor, Henry and Elinor Morgenthau, and Dorothy and Samuel Rosenman.
While daughter Anna was already in Washington making arrangements, ER’s train party included Lorena Hickok, Earl Miller, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and ER’s longtime ally Agnes Brown Leach and her husband, Forum publisher Henry Goddard Leach.
Also aboard that special train was ER’s new wardrobe, which she had collected during a shopping spree with Anna the week before. She replaced the schoolmarm look of the Albany years with a new stylish elegance, appropriate to Washington’s social demands. For her inaugural gown she chose a hyacinth shade the press called “Eleanor Blue,” and for her wrap a new shade of blue named “Anna Blue” (in compliment to her daughter). Both gown and wrap were of crystelle velvet, made by Arnold Constable. A “symphony in blue,” ER’s hat, “a Watteau type of crystal straw,” in Anna Blue was covered with banded grosgrain ribbon “forming a small wing in the back,” tilting down in the front. She carried a “large envelope bag” of Anna Blue antelope kid and wore white glacé kid gloves, “the smart eight-button length.”
The press complimented ER’s “elegant dignity” and the fact that her outfits were designed and made entirely in the United States, “so far as known.” Her evening gowns especially were “of great beauty.” For “very formal dinners,” she ordered a gown of “misty blue satin, a new Lanvin shade,” from Le Mouchoir of Madison Avenue, who described the effect as “regal.” “The waist is draped in front. The back décolleté forms a deep V….” Le Mouchoir also created daytime ensembles of various blues and “a rough tweed coat suit of mixed brown, beige and blue.” Four hats to accompany the daytime costumes were made by Mme. Lilly Dache, also of Madison Avenue, and nine dresses were ordered from Milgrim’s, including a “misty blue and silver brocade” gown with long sleeves and high neck that could be used for formal late-afternoon and evening affairs. In the evening the sleeves could be removed and the back unfastened to render it décolleté; undipped “it falls in two wide revers, revealing a deep V….”
ER was pleased by most of the initial press coverage: “Tall, slim and girlish, in a dark blue ensemble and hat… the next First Lady looked more nearly like an elder sister than the mother of Mrs. Curtis Dall, her daughter [Anna)….”
Only Hick, whose campaign articles on ER had emphasized her routine thrift, her plain $5 and $10 street dresses bought off racks and on the run, seemed disturbed. She protested in a letter that ER had spent an unseemly amount of money on lavish and extravagant display, given America’s grave fiscal situation. But ER believed that it was good for the economy to buy as much as possible and give work to many people.
While the press reported every detail of each outfit, ER referred to her buying spree in one sentence at the end of a long political letter to FDR: “I got a lot of clothes for myself & Anna in one afternoon last week as I imagine it is better to have plenty & not buy any new ones for quite a while!”
The point of her letter was an urgent appeal to FDR:
Henry Morgenthau came to see me the other day & told me he felt he could serve really well only as Sec of Ag. & all the big farm organizations were for him. He had done well on all of your missions, he had made your ag policy in this State a success & got the men who were helpful on your ag speeches. He did not feel he could be Asst. Sec. because he had been so near you he could not be under a chief & loyally work THROUGH him. He does not think [Henry] Wallace will be easy for you to manage or others to get on with and he is no administrator. He won’t say he won’t take… anything else but he does not feel he could serve you as well & he wants you to talk it over with him before you settle on Wallace. Please at least talk to him.—I have transmitted my message!
FDR appointed Wallace to Agriculture. ER was disappointed, as was Louis Howe. For decades Howe had been FDR’s main adviser, closest friend, political confidant. But the presidency changed everything. Although Louis Howe remained first secretary, his influence was now rivalled by the young Columbia University professors around FDR, the new Brains Trust boys Howe despised.
Ray Moley, Rexford Guy Tugwell, and A. A. Berle were part of a new political landscape marked by intrigue and jealousy, stealth and duplicity. FDR enjoyed the political mix, the harrowing juggling that left everybody uncertain. It caused ER and Howe to forge an even tighter alliance. Regarded as outsiders among FDR’s new insiders, they increasingly relied on each other.
ER and Howe ended each day with a drive and a meeting. They collaborated on big projects, and negotiated petty grievances. Howe was ER’s greatest ally, and during the first administration, ER and Louis Howe were FDR’s most honest and critical friends. With his health failing, no longer FDR’s unchallenged lieutenant, Howe increasingly turned to ER for solace, support, and company. Together, they were a formidable team.
FDR’s decision on Morgenthau intensified ER’s efforts. With Louis Howe and Molly Dewson, she struggled for influence over FDR’s appointments, and it was due to their insistence that he became the first president to appoint a woman to the cabinet: Frances Perkins as secretary of labor.*
ER was pleased to learn that her old school chums rallied behind her. They were not only delighted by her “lovely” new costumes, but they supported her goals. One of her six bridesmaids, Helen Cutting Wilmerding, a cousin and former Roser classmate, wrote with enthusiasm: “All the old tribe we grew up with in New York have turned towards you like sun flowers.” ER was grateful for that information, “for I felt the old crowd might disapprove of many things which I did.” And she was determined to challenge the women of her own class and culture. She asked Junior Leaguers, for example, to consider what they themselves might do, might contribute, might actually give up in order to make life better for those rendered homeless or impoverished during the Depression. She even suggested they convert space in their many-roomed apartments or country houses to provide temporary shelter for homeless families in distress. Privileged women and men, she repeatedly emphasized before the inauguration, had special obligations during these hard times: “Sooner or later we are going to realize that what touches one part of the human race touches all parts. Thus we are going to have to learn that the few must sacrifice for the good of the many if we are to preserve our present civilization.”
The White House itself would be open to all her extended circle, even when they came to carp. ER’s most violent detractors, including her increasingly reactionary cousins Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Corinne Robinson Alsop (mother of columnists Joseph and Stuart Alsop) were invited whenever they chose to attend. Despite nasty imitations of ER, Cousin Alice was not barred from White House functions until she publicly announced in 1940 that she would rather vote for Adolf Hitler than for her crippled cousin one more time.
As ER prepared herself for the Washington fray, she carefully considered and often repeated the dreary details of the lives of Washington wives, and her husband understood her discontent. Indeed, FDR’s fiftieth birthday on 30 January 1933 was celebrated by a surprise party at Hyde Park orchestrated by ER and Louis Howe. It was a well-planned and hilarious affair; every guest played a role to evoke an event in Franklin’s life. In the end, he responded with rhymes for all present. Regarding his wife, FDR recited:
Did my Eleanor relate
All the sad and awful fate
Of the miserable lives
Lived by politicians’ wives?
ER derived little comfort from the examples of the First Ladies who preceded her. In her Uncle TR’s Washington, she had met Ida Saxton McKinley, and she knew all her twentieth-century forebears. They all seemed to her hardworking earnest women whose lives were limited by invalidism, neurasthenia, depression. Many of ER’s predecessors took to their beds, broken down by their efforts to cope with unending publicity, criticism, their husbands’ wrath or neglect, the demanding but ill-appreciated responsibilities of political wifery.
Athletic, wealthy, and brilliant, Ida Saxton McKinley was raised by her father to take over his financial interests and run his bank. When she married attorney William McKinley, she was politically ambitious and extravagantly social. But during her husband’s first years in Congress, which coincided with the sudden deaths of her mother and two daughters, Ida McKinley plunged into a mysterious invalidism that resembled epilepsy. She became pale and fragile. Grotesquely overwhelmed by her flamboyantly feathered and bejeweled costumes, she seemed bundled in satin swaddling offset by oversized diamonds. Generally carried to state dinners, she was confined to a wheelchair and propped high by overstuffed pillows. Her fainting spells and seizures were sudden and unpredictable. Whenever one occurred at table her husband simply placed a napkin upon her face until it subsided, whereupon she would remove it and continue the conversation as if nothing had happened.
Argumentative and bad tempered, Ida McKinley was called “the most demanding” invalid wife in political history. To “cure” her headaches and quiet her manner, she was dosed with “barbiturates, bromide sedatives, laudanum, and other powerful narcotics.” She embarrassed her husband’s friends, and they considered him a marvel of devotion: the “saint” of domesticity.
But when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, she arranged his funeral and her return to private life without assistance. Upon her arrival home, Ida McKinley’s era of total dependence mysteriously ended. Until her own death on 26 May 1907 she never had another seizure.
Although Ida McKinley’s style was unique, even the women ER most admired seemed to suffer in the White House.
Helen (Nellie) Herron Taft trained as a teacher and thoroughly enjoyed politics. She was a daughter and granddaughter of congressmen, and many believed she badgered her reluctant husband to run for president and advised him on all appointments and issues. Most visibly her husband’s partner, she was outspoken, progressive, creative. She was the skilled diplomat who arranged Japan’s gift of three thousand cherry trees to adorn Potomac Drive and the Tidal Basin. But in May 1909, less than three months after Taft assumed office, she suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed her and left her speech permanently impaired.
ER was particularly informed and impressed by Ellen Axson Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s first wife. A career artist who continued to paint, she was widely recognized as a “Great and Good Lady.” Renowned as an American Impressionist and associated with art communities in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Cornish, New Hampshire, Ellen Axson Wilson participated in competitive exhibits and sold her paintings.
When her Cornish circle, which included Maxwell Parrish, met at her summer home in 1913 to consider the kind of national support for the arts France enjoyed, they imagined an official government bureau to encourage artists, award prizes, purchase works. Ellen Wilson replied that the congressmen who would endorse that view were “not yet born.”
Ellen Wilson’s efforts to build decent housing and abolish Washington’s “alley slums” particularly captured ER’s imagination as First Lady. Like Wilson, ER believed that adequate and healthy housing was the fundamental key to a more democratic future.
As Ellen Wilson prepared for her daughter’s White House wedding, she wrote a relative: “Nobody who has not tried can have the least idea of the exactions of life here and of the constant nervous strain of it all.”
Diagnosed with kidney tuberculosis, or Bright’s disease, Ellen Wilson died on 6 August 1914, having been First Lady for only seventeen months. The New York Times concluded that her condition was aggravated “by a nervous breakdown, attributed to the exactions of social duties and her active interest in philanthropy and betterment work.”
If ER had any particular feelings about the gossip concerning Woodrow Wilson’s affair with Mary Hulbert Peck, during the time when ER’s own marriage was in such disarray, she never referred to them. Evidently, Woodrow Wilson’s advisers paid Mary Peck, an attractive divorcée, some still debatable sum of money for the intimate letters he had written to her over the years. The scandal surfaced between Ellen Wilson’s death and the election of 1916, when some Wilson advisers hoped the mysterious Mrs. Peck would become the new First Lady.
It was the kind of gossip ER detested, and avoided. She never, for example, referred to Florence Kling Harding’s much publicized marital strife, although she spent time with “the Duchess” during the war.
ER particularly admired two gifted and generous public citizens who became, for different reasons, silent as First Ladies. Her immediate predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, chose silence; Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s husband imposed it.
Unlike her husband, Grace Coolidge was witty, charming, and gregarious. She had been a dedicated and innovative teacher of the hearing-impaired. She believed all children could learn to speak, and she taught lip-reading as well as sign language. Calvin Coolidge, on the other hand, believed no woman could or should communicate in public life. He mandated his wife’s silence on all political issues and also denied her many ordinary pleasures, including horseback riding. Her friends complained on her behalf: “Calvin felt that woman’s place was at the sink.” Although Grace never protested, she confided to a friend that lives of political wives were “very confining.”
ER’s first official act as First Lady-elect was to attend Calvin Coolidge’s funeral. On 7 January 1933, she journeyed to Northampton with her son James. ER’s decision to attend was appreciated as “a sign of respect” for her Republican predecessors, Grace Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover.
Geologist, linguist, and scholar, Stanford University graduate and outspoken feminist, Lou Henry Hoover had been for decades her husband’s partner. They traveled together in search of mineral deposits and new speculative investment markets throughout Europe and Asia. In London and Washington during the war, she founded canteens, a war hospital, a knitting factory, a home for women war workers. She was an equal-rights feminist, headed the Girl Scouts, and as the only woman on the board of the National Amateur Athletic Association, led a campaign to introduce physical education for women “in every institution” in America.
Nobody believed Lou Henry Hoover when she announced that as First Lady she would be nothing but a pleasant “backdrop for Bertie.” But she meant it. Except for occasional radio broadcasts, she ended her public role in American life. She hosted dinners and parties to entertain her husband, not to promote causes. Inexplicably, she refused interviews and banished the press. Controversy engulfed her only when she decided to invite Jessie DePriest to a tea for congressmen’s wives.
In 1930, Chicago elected Republican Oscar DePriest, the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction. Despite their Quaker opposition to discrimination, the Hoovers did not decide immediately to open their White House. But it bothered Lou Henry that Jessie DePriest was not invited with other congressional wives her first year in Washington. Many meetings were held on the subject, and the president finally consented. Determined to avoid a rude incident, Lou Henry Hoover queried every congressional wife and found twelve who agreed to be cordial at a tea that would include the first black White House guest since TR invited Booker T. Washington and his wife for lunch.
On 12 June 1931, Jessie DePriest was received by the First Lady. Her visit in the company of twelve congenial women was brief and pleasant. But astonishing howls of protest followed. Virtually every Southern newspaper editorialized against this “arrogant insult to the South and to the nation.” While several Northern newspapers celebrated the First Lady’s effort to “put into practice the brotherhood of man,” Southern editors and politicians predicted disaster, race intermingling, and Republican defeat in 1932. In response, Lou Henry Hoover went on a tour of Southern states, presumably to reassure white clubwomen.
Inevitably, as ER contemplated her new role, her thoughts lingered on her Aunt Edith’s White House. With Edith Roosevelt, rules and ceremony dominated. Sumptuous feasts and formality were her legacy. Guests foregathered, and were greeted after a grand processional whereby the president and First Lady descended the White House’s central staircase “to trumpets.” “Not wanting to shake hands, she clutched a large bouquet.”
Edith Roosevelt presided over a circle of scolds who collected information about Washington’s “immorals.” Those who “transgressed her code of upright conduct” were banished. Working women were not invited; adulterers were shunned. Aunt Edith detested the press and scorned “camera fiends.” Her political sensibilities ran counter to everything her niece believed.
Noted for her ability to walk and talk as fast as her husband, some of TR’s friends thought she controlled him; others believed she bullied him. Henry Adams always marveled at Edith’s ability to silence TR: “He stands in abject terror of Edith…. What is man that he should have tusks and grin!” But for ER, Aunt Edith’s assertive, imperious, even terrifying manner was eclipsed by her discontent. A prisoner to her “beloved shackles,” she was plagued by headaches and assorted neuralgias.
Although never close, ER did not want to sever relations with her father’s family. When Anna Roosevelt Cowles (Aunt Bye) died peacefully at her home in Farmington, Connecticut, during the night of 25 August 1931, ER’s warmest link to her father’s generation ended. Aunt Bye had been one of ER’s great champions, the woman who most urgently insisted she be sent to school at Allenswood in England.
After Aunt Bye’s death, ER made a special effort to reach out to her father’s surviving sister, Aunt Corinne, a lifelong Republican who voted for Franklin because, she said, Eleanor was her niece, after all. But Corinne Roosevelt Robinson died suddenly of pneumonia on 17 February 1933 at the age of seventy-one. Her funeral, which both FDR and ER attended, was the last family gathering before FDR’s inauguration. Now Aunt Edith was the last surviving member of her father’s generation. And she never forgave ER for campaigning against her son Ted in that Teapot Dome car when he ran for governor in 1924.
Although Aunt Edith actively campaigned against FDR, ER nevertheless wrote from the White House—as if there were nothing but family tradition and warmth between them. Interested in her niece’s initial tribulations as First Lady, Edith replied: “Your letter was an answer to prayer, full of things which I wanted to know. Much such conditions met me in the White House, and I am quite sure that I did not deal with them as efficiently as you have done.”
ER’s ability to invite her cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth to inaugural events was even more extraordinary. Alice had, after all, declared war on Democrats and never missed an opportunity to deride Eleanor publicly. Her opposition to Franklin was shrill, often vulgar and cruel. She not only attacked his policies, she mocked his physical condition: “My poor cousin, he suffered from polio so he was put in a brace; and now he wants to put the entire U.S. into a brace, as if it were a crippled country—that is all the New Deal is about….”
Alice seemed now to concentrate all her wit and flair into a private crusade to hurt her cousins. She had been the ruling Washington widow, the only important Roosevelt. Miserably married to Nicholas Longworth, the popular Speaker of the House who had rivaled Eleanor’s father Elliott in his drinking and romantic escapades, Alice had nevertheless reveled in Washington society, and few knew the truth of her marriage.
After her husband’s death in 1931, Alice devoted herself to ER’s humiliation. She trotted out the old stories of FDR’s wartime infidelities. She mocked and minced: “FDR is nine parts mush and one part Eleanor.” She contrasted FDR’s dependence with her father’s robust self-reliance: TR’s vigor; TR’s brawn. ER’s sons remembered that only Alice could bring their mother to the verge of tears.
Although ER never criticized Alice by name, she wrote an article in which she described her kind of malicious gossip and concluded that it reflected “not only a cruel but a despicable trait of human nature.”
To fortify her spirits and armor herself against the animus of her closest kin, ER read and studied her father’s letters—and decided to publish them. Indeed, ER wrote or edited three books between FDR’s election and inauguration: one for, children (When You Grow Up to Vote), one for redemption (her father’s letters), and one for the future (It’s Up to the Women). They enabled her to face her new position with a sense of personal liberation, and a clearly defined political program.
Moreover, while she abandoned her sponsored radio program and gave up teaching, she refused to give up editing Babies—Just Babies, a magazine she had started to help mothers avoid the kind of mistakes her parents had made and she had perpetuated with her own children. The magazine was filled with droll and informative stories, infant photographs, uplifting and curious advice, prizes, poetry, and whimsy. ER believed it offered young mothers a much-needed service. She personally guaranteed the reliability and quality of the magazine’s advertisers; and called upon all her acquaintances—rich and famous, hardworking and unknown—to contribute baby lore. Daughter Anna detailed “24 Hours of a Baby’s Life,” not quite a celebration of her infant daughter’s grueling, relentless schedule. Rosamond Pinchot wrote about “The Most Famous Baby in the World,” Helen Hayes’s daughter Mary MacArthur. “A Soviet Baby Is Born” featured extraordinary photos to illustrate healthful, contented infants and toddlers in factory nurseries.
The First Lady-elect wanted every young mother to have a less tormented and ignorant time than she had endured. She announced in the foreword to the first issue of Babies, printed in October 1932:
There is an old Jesuit saying which—”Give me a child until he is seven and you may have him all the rest of his life.”… You can decide in the first five years of a child’s life whether that child is going to be nervous and high-strung, unable to stand the hurry and excitement of modern life, or whether he is going to be given a foundation of calmness and sturdiness, a character, which in later life will enable him to gain that inner self-control which all of us strive for and only some of us attain. We can lay the foundations in those first five years of a healthy mind in a healthy body or we can lay the foundation for an undernourished, dyspeptic, uncontrolled and disagreeable man or woman.
Above all, ER sought to give advice to young parents she wished she had been given. She wrote of “tolerance,” “patience,” “forgiveness.” She wrote of marital relations: Each parent “must want the other one to be happy. Then and then only will they be happy themselves.”
ER’s monthly editorials were filled with respect for children and encouragement for mothers. Anticipating the nurturing ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock by over a decade, ER promoted demonstrations of warmth and affection. She advocated breast feeding because of its proven health benefits; and urged mothers to hug their children, hold them when they cried, rather than follow the advice of psychologist John B. Watson to allow them to cry for hours alone in a quiet room. Nevertheless, ER endorsed several prevailing notions concerning discipline and regularity: Character building depended on precise schedules for feeding and bodily functions.
ER’s own confusion regarding the proper balance between affection, “democratic self-expression,” and discipline lasted throughout her life. In the 1950s, she acknowledged that “too much belief in discipline when my children were young” was her greatest mistake as a mother: “I was so concerned with bringing up my children properly that I was not wise enough just to love them.”
Her grandchildren benefited far more than her own children from her new emphasis on absolute respect for young people and their right to their own mistakes. But her youngest boys, Franklin and John (still at Groton), also benefited from her new perspective. She encouraged them to live boldly and self-reliantly and sought to protect them from the intrusive demands of Washington life.
As ER contemplated the White House, she turned for assistance to her great friend Isabella Selmes Greenway, whose place in Arizona still recalled the West her father and uncle knew. Could John be a hand there for the summer?
He has had a little bit too much of Groton and his Grandmother and the things that money mean and I think standing on his own two feet is a very necessary experience for a time this summer.
We would be quite willing to pay for him, only we would not want him to know. He does not want to be in the same place with Franklin, Jr., [who] rather lords it over him so we are trying to do the same thing with Franklin, Jr. but somewhere else….
Sixteen, two years younger than his brother, John was about to enter his junior year. In September, ER wrote Isabella: “John had such a good time & I am so glad you liked him. He’s so different from F jr. but has capacities in his own way when certain things are either overcome or outgrown!”
Personally, ER’s most momentous decision during these months of preparation and dread was to pay tribute to her father. Elliott Roosevelt had died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-four, when ER was only ten. Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman, “Edited by His Daughter, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt,” was filled with compassion for her father’s struggle, and competitive family pride.
ER explained in her foreword that she had decided to issue his letters for personal reasons. Despite his “many shortcomings [he] was the one great love of my life as a child….” Her children would “read much in many books of their uncles and aunts… but no less important in our daily lives are the things and the people who touch us only personally….”
It was a brave book for America’s First Lady to introduce to a judgmental society. Written to avenge her father as well as to establish her right to wear the Roosevelt mantle, ER wrote nothing of her parents’ ordeal, of her mother’s suffering and premature death at twenty-nine, when Eleanor was eight, or of her own longing. The cruel attacks hurled against her husband by her own relatives surely informed her decision to publish this book in 1933, and thereby redeem the family outcast.
It was an act of competitive retribution, in which ER emphasized her father’s generosity, and youthful vigor—as opposed to her Uncle Ted, who “was delicate as a boy and shortsighted all his life.”
Although it was not her intention, the book also established Elliott and his daughter in a social tradition of fabulous wealth and international privilege. Her father’s life was one of global travel and big-game hunting that depended on an Anglo-American club of sportsmen and colonial rulership that seemed during the 1930s in rapid decline.
But ER ignored that aspect of her father’s legacy and emphasized rather his “great love and tenderness” for his family and her impression of his sense of personal democracy: “He loved people for the fineness that was in them and his friends might be newsboys or millionaires. Their occupations, their possessions, meant nothing to him, only they themselves counted.” However exaggerated her impression, that trait represented the core of her father’s bequest to her.
As she prepared for the White House, ER made other tributes to her father’s memory. She arranged to visit Abingdon, Virginia, her father’s healing refuge, in order to meet the people who had meant so much to him during his long illness and exile. Also, she hung her paternal grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece in the Monroe Room, where she later held press conferences for women journalists only. The room she chose was connected with power and influence: It had been used as TR’s Cabinet Room and was known also as the Treaty Room. In 1899 William McKinley had there signed the treaty with Spain which ended the Spanish-American War and ceded Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines to the United States. FDR had suggested that ER take her grandfather’s portrait to Washington. They intended to rent their New York City house, and FDR said, “You can’t rent your grandfather.”
Undoubtedly ER’s most extraordinary tribute to her father, was an impromptu speech she delivered one Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas 1932. She astounded a New York Metropolitan Opera audience when she strode onstage between the first and second acts of Simon Boccanegra to appeal for money for Depression-ruined Americans: “When you come face to face with people in need, you simply have to try to do something about it.”
ER told the comfortable matinee crowd how it felt to meet the “jobless face to face.” She related the story of a man who came into her office saying he could not go home again without a job. He had been unemployed for months. “There was no heat at home, no food, and even the gas had been turned off. And there were five children.” ER was moved by his story, and she hoped her audience would contribute all they could to the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee. “After all, this is the richest country in the world. We cannot allow any one to want for the bare necessities of life.”
ER’s decision to address the opera audience that day was, in retrospect, no mere coincidence. Simon Boccanegra was the first popularly elected doge of Genoa. Generous, emotional, forgiving, he was a man of the people and a man of peace. Moreover, in Giuseppe Verdi’s profoundly stirring tale of politics, love, and longing, Simon is also “the Good Father” accidentally reunited with his long-lost daughter Maria. ER appeared onstage after their astonishing reunion, and one of opera’s most thrilling duets between father and daughter:
Simon Boccanegra meets Maria by chance during a bright morning stroll. She hears his lament for his country, its poverty and strife: “I weep over your fruitless Harvests/And I cry out for Peace/I cry out for Love.”
As they speak, he discovers her lost history—and their matching pendants: “Figlia! a tal nome io palpito….” (”Daughter! At that name I tremble/as if heaven had opened to me.”)
It is the moment she has waited for all her life: “Father, you shall see/ your watchful daughter/always near you;/I will wipe away your tears./We shall taste undiscovered joys…/I will be the dove of peace/of your royal palace.”
ER remained a great fan of Lawrence Tibbett, who played Simon Boccanegra, and invited him to perform at the White House whenever possible. She never mentioned Ezio Pinza, who played the cruel grandfather. Simon’s last gesture is to bless both Maria and her grandfather, whereupon Maria sings: “Oh Joy! Then the bitter hatreds are ended!” Finally, Simon Boccanegra places the mantle of leadership upon his daughter and her lover, Gabriele Adorno, named the new doge of Genoa.
ER’s reconnection with her father and her childhood helped her to reach beyond fear: her fear of abandonment, betrayal, rejection; her fear of confinement and isolation. As she reconstituted her father’s life, she embraced a powerful source of courage and vision that was her mysterious treasure. She ignored his neglect, his abusive self-indulgence, and celebrated instead her fantasy of his democratic generosity and her own commitment to all people regardless of class or station.
It enabled her to move on, beyond familial blandishments, and graciously invite seventy-two relatives to inaugural festivities. All the Delanos and Hyde Park Roosevelts, all the surviving Halls, and all the Oyster Bay Roosevelts who chose to attend, including her cousins—TR’s children Alice Roosevelt Long-worth and Kermit and Archibald Roosevelt, Aunt Bye’s son Sheffield Cowles, and their families.
Still, despite her activities and emotional preparations, ER told reporters on the blustery, overcast day of FDR’s inauguration, 4 March 1933, that she was certain about only one thing: “No woman entering the White House… can lightheartedly take up residence here.”
According to Emma Bugbee, reporting for the New York Herald-Tribune, ER “stood motionless, with lowered eyes and folded hands, while her husband became President…. Her pale face and austere demeanor bore testimony to the solemnity with which she views Mr. Roosevelt’s new position…. Many friends watched for an opportunity to wave to her, and strangers trained cameras upon her, but not once did she lift her eyes to the crowd or wave her hand or smile….” One reporter noted that over “the vast throng” of 500,000 cheering spectators, “there hung a cloud of worry.”
America was at a standstill. Men, women, and children begged on street corners, sold pencils, apples, old clothes. People spoke about gloom, despair, suicide, revolution. When farm prices fell to pennies, farm owners burned their crops, killed their livestock. Banks foreclosed mortgages and reclaimed farms and homes. There were riots at garbage dumps as people fought each other for scraps of food and kindling. Over two million people—called “hobos,” “Okies,” “tramps”—wandered the country searching for work.
The comfortable and the mean dismissed them as “bums.” The comfortable and the mean luxuriated in bargains they did not need, and blamed the poor for littering their landscape. Giant “Hoovervilles” made of tin cans and frayed tires, scrap wood and debris, appeared along river shores and railroad sidings, in parks and woodlands. People were living in caves and culverts all over America.
The Depression never really touched the Roosevelts. Their properties were unmortgaged, their troubled holdings caused no particular hardship. No child needed to leave school. Sara Delano Roosevelt, the family’s financial matriarch, was solvent, if occasionally grumpy. ER independently made ever-increasing sums from writing and speaking engagements. Her sole concern as First Lady was to improve conditions for those who suffered.
She blamed the war for the fiscal frenzy that had burst worldwide. By 1931, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and England faced bankruptcy and ruin. All international agreements made during the 1920s crumbled. The gold standard, loan and tariff agreements, visions of free trade ended. By 1933, dictators swaggered across Europe and Asia. When Germany and then the Allies reneged on their war debts, Americans became increasingly isolationist. Germany, on the day of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural, witnessed a nationwide “blaze of bonfires and torchlight parades,” in anticipation of a vote of confidence for the new Reich, the triumph of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party—already hailed as Germany’s “last election.” According to press reports, there were “no counter-demonstrations…. They were ‘verboten.’”
Since anti-Nazis were imprisoned, opposition papers banned, and debate silenced by terrorist torture centers, Hitler was certain of victory. During the entire week of FDR’s inaugural, the new U.S. administration shared frontpage headlines with democracy’s death in Germany.
Violence and poverty veiled the globe on that day FDR affirmed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” With “solemn mien,” the thirty-second president of the United States placed his hand upon his family’s old Dutch Bible and turned to “Charity,” 1 Corinthians 13, to repeat the oath of office after Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.*
In his dramatic Inaugural Address, FDR promised healing, bold action. ER was pleased; it was “a fighting speech.”
“This is a day of national consecration…. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion….
“They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
FDR promised now to restore and build a New Deal with “social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
He would pursue that goal with all the fervor of a president at war. Initially the battleground was limited to domestic crises. International issues, though important, were “secondary to the establishment of a sound economic policy.” The gravity of the domestic emergency eclipsed world trade and FDR’s promise of a “good neighbor” policy that “resolutely respects the rights of others.”
Immediately, he declared war on financial distress. “This nation asks for action, and action now.” Therefore: “I shall ask the Congress for… broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
While the crowd stood to cheer those words, millions more listened for the first time to a presidential address broadcast by 180 radio stations and simultaneously “flashed around the earth by short-wave radio.” Most Americans were thrilled to exuberance by FDR’s words.
Caroline O’Day left Washington ecstatic: FDR, “within twenty-four hours, lifted our country out of a slough of despair.” America had at last “found a leader and all would soon be right with the world.” His address “will remain an inspiration for all time.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was less sanguine. Words needed to be supported by bold actions. She feared the kind of desperation that had upended Germany, and she feared the random acts of violence and assassination aimed at her husband. As had been true throughout her life, occasions of joy and celebration were marked as well by sadness.
The Roosevelts’ first days in the White House were framed by death. Hourly news bulletins discussed the decline of Chicago’s Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who had been wounded in Miami on 15 February by bullets intended for FDR. Mayor Cermak and two women were shot by an assassin who attacked FDR’s open car during a short victory parade. The president-elect was saved by a spectator, Lillian Cross, who grabbed the assailant’s arm, while Gus Gennerich, FDR’s bodyguard, pushed him down on the seat, and sat on him after he heard the first shot.
When Eleanor learned that her husband had held Mayor Tony Cermak in his arms on the way to the hospital, she wrote: The ride “must have been awfully hard on Franklin. He hates the sight of blood.”
The assassin, Joseph Zangara, an unemployed thirty-three-year-old bricklayer, told the court: “I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally. I hate all Presidents, no matter from what country they come, and I hate all officials and everybody who is rich.” Following Mayor Cermak’s death on 6 March, Zangara was executed.
An additional note of gloom came with the sudden death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh, who was to have been FDR’s attorney general. A vigorous and early Roosevelt supporter, the popular seventy-three-year-old senator from Montana had exposed and relentlessly pursued the Teapot Dome scandal. An aging widower, he secretly married the former Señora Mina Nieves Perez Chaumont de Truffin of Havana. Aboard the train to Washington from their honeymoon in Florida, he died of a heart attack. His wife of less than one week found him in their stateroom at dawn on 2 March, the day FDR and his entourage arrived in Washington.
Senator Walsh had chaired the almost-deadlocked Democratic convention in Chicago, and ER believed that “Franklin owed much to him for his skillful handling” of that unruly situation. Without him, FDR might have been denied the nomination. FDR considered Walsh “one of the three or four wisest men in the Democratic party,” and he was stunned by his death.
At the inaugural, flags flew at half-staff in Walsh’s honor, and ER initially canceled several social events and declined to attend the Inaugural Ball. But after countless protests, “the pleas of hundreds” demanding her presence, expressions of fear that all the money raised by the charity ball would be lost, and the disappointment of her own friends, she agreed to attend.
FDR did not attend this first ball, or any subsequent ones. Rarely seen in a wheelchair, he avoided public appearances that might reveal the full extent of his polio disability. Moreover, he was reportedly visiting with the woman he had promised never to see again, Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
The ball opened to a concert-reception during which the Army, Navy, and Marine Bands played, followed by the U.S. Indian Reserve Band, “composed of twenty full-blooded Indians, representing 18 tribes,” many from Dakota and Oklahoma reservations. Chief Yowlache, a Cherokee leader and noted baritone, gave a concert in “full Indian regalia, including a $5,000 headdress of golden eagle feathers.”
ER was resplendent. Her eyes sparkled with warmth and delight as she greeted everybody and was escorted through the vast throng to the platform by an enthusiastic floor committee. The fact is, ER loved to party, and to dance.
According to Cissy Patterson’s Washington Star, “The new First Lady was a striking figure in a gown of blue and silver lamé.” She greeted her friends in their boxes and mingled throughout the auditorium. Rosa Ponselle, “the Metropolitan Opera prima donna,” sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Given a prolonged ovation, she contributed “Dixie” for an encore. After the ceremonies, three dance orchestras presided: Rudy Vallee and “his famous Connecticut Yankees, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, and the Central Park Casino Orchestra.”
ER’s personal party included her mother-in-law, her brother Hall and his family, her children and their guests, Earl Miller and his wife, Louis Howe and his family, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, Mary Dreier, and a full assortment of Roosevelts and Delanos. Although Lorena Hickok returned to New York after a supper reception but before the ball, ER’s friends in attendance included publisher Eleanor (Cissy) Patterson, former member of Congress Ruth Bryan Owen “in a striking gown of black satin,” and novelist Fannie Hurst, “perhaps the most picturesque figure at the reception.”
Never again would ER be the wallflower at a Washington party, the silent partner off in a corner. The circumstances of 1933 demanded experiment and challenged all tradition, and ER was not the same woman who had been so blithely mistreated during those drear Wilson years. Nor was FDR the same man. However much Eleanor resented Franklin’s presumptions, she admired his aplomb, fearlessness, vigor. However much Franklin resented Eleanor’s goading, he admired her principles, honesty, loyalty.
If ER resented FDR’s political wiles, his conniving and duplicity, she believed that his “desire was to make life happier for people.” He faced life with a contagious courage. He gave people hope, and she trusted him generally to act on behalf of human betterment: “I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security. I never heard him say there was a problem that he thought it was impossible for human beings to solve…. I never knew him to face life or any problem that came up with fear.”
In addition, she admired his mind, the range and intensity of his interests. He read voraciously, biography and history particularly, and remembered everything significant. ER was proud of her husband’s “amazing ability to skim through any kind of book and get everything out of it.” When she gave him Gone With the Wind, he returned it “in a very short time.” She doubted he “read it so quickly.” But he answered every question, and “I couldn’t catch him out on a single point.”
ER was happy when others recognized her husband’s talents, and eagerly passed on compliments. A Swedish diplomat told her, for example, that when he met Calvin Coolidge, “he marvelled how any one could be president and know so little. But when he talked with you he marvelled how any one could know so much….”
For all their differences, ER and FDR respected each other, depended on each other, understood each other. FDR never contemplated an uninvolved or silent First Lady. His wife was his adviser, partner, inspector general of choice. He relied on her advice, trusted her vision.
On 8 March 1933, when he asked his friend and mentor Felix Frankfurter to accept the post of solicitor general, the Harvard Law School professor was reluctant. FDR encouraged him, and said: “Well, there’s no hurry about this. I tell you what I want you to do. I sometimes find it useful, and you might find it useful—I wish you would talk to your Mrs. about it.” Frankfurter took the president’s advice, consulted his wife Marion, who thought it was a bad idea and he declined.
Throughout the White House years, ER was to spend between sixteen and twenty hours a day running actually a parallel administration concerned with every aspect of national betterment. Domestically, nothing was beyond her range of interest, and she monitored every department through a friend or agreeable contact. FDR never credited ER with a job well done or publicly acknowledged her political influence. But little of significance was achieved without her input, and her vision shaped the best of his presidency.
*Known as a generous hostess whose parties in partnership with her companion Elsie de Wolfe had highlighted the social season in Paris and New York before World War I, Bessie Marbury was a theater and literary agent with offices in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. Her clients included James M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde.
*In addition to Perkins and Wallace, FDR’s original cabinet included Cordell Hull, secretary of state; William Woodin, secretary of the treasury; George Henry Dern, secretary of war; Homer S. Cummings, named attorney general after Thomas J. Walsh’s sudden death; Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior; and Daniel Calhoun Roper, secretary of commerce.
*”And now abideth, faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”