Each night ER placed memos in her husband’s bedside basket urging him to do what she believed needed most urgently to be done. Above all, she sought to extend her husband’s efforts so that the New Deal would become at least in part a “square deal for women.”
But no matter how many memos she wrote, no matter how much she influenced policy, the First Lady’s official domain was the White House, where she presided over the domestic continuity of the nation’s highest office. From 5 March until 15 June, while FDR worked on legislation to transform the country, ER had only one specific assignment: As first housewife she was to create a gracious and pleasant environment. The “President’s House” was intended to be democratic and simple. ER was mindful that she now lived “in a house owned by all the American people.” Within days, ER settled in and overhauled the entire place. It suited the moment—and the style of her own high-spirited and growing family. She rejected staff opposition, and insisted that the stately dignity of the old trees and the rolling greensward would survive her decision to install tree swings, slides, and a sandbox for her grandchildren. Such playthings were, after all, no less aesthetic than Pauline, the Tafts’ executive cow, who grazed the White House lawns.
The election profoundly affected ER’s children, and she sought to shield them from the dazzling new privileges, unrelenting demands, and public scrutiny heaped upon America’s First Family. Privately, the first hundred days coincided with major family upheavals.
Her youngest sons, Franklin, Jr., and John, at school in Groton, were more protected from Washington’s glare. But her daughter Anna and her children, Sistie and Buzzie, considered the place home. Anna was in love with John Boettiger, a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune whom she had met on the campaign train, and in the throes of a messy separation from her husband, Curtis Dali. ER was fond of Boettiger, but nothing was settled.
ER was particularly disturbed by her son Elliott’s decision to leave his wife, Betty Donner, and their infant son, William. Elliott at twenty-two was still the family’s most unpredictable child. He had refused to go to college and ended his formal education to marry as quickly as possible. Then, on 8 March, he left his wife and baby in the White House, announcing he would discover his true self on the Texas range. Betty, the daughter of an anti-Roosevelt family whose fortune in partnership with Andrew Mellon was associated with Pittsburgh’s steel industry, was depressed and confused by Elliott’s actions.
ER agonized over Elliott’s decision to abandon his family, and soon realized that there was little she could do to control her children or protect them from relentless press attention and scandal. But she was determined to make the White House comfortable and welcoming for her family, their extended community, and the American people.
Her first day in residence she met her own guests at the door and ended the ritual of military aides and liveried ushers announcing visitors in “sepulchral tones.” “My feeling about the White House is that it belongs to the people. Their taxes support it. It is really theirs. And as far as possible they should be made to feel welcome here…. And I want the visitors to be given every courtesy.” By courtesy ER did not mean official correctness but personal attention: “Sometimes, when visitors are being shown through, I may be passing by, and if I can, I shall stop and talk with them and show them about…. I hate the idea that I might ever lose touch with people….”
The new First Lady’s public style as national hostess amazed even her closest friends and seasoned journalists. Bess Furman wrote: “The century-old White House wore a startled air today, as though listening to the sound of shattering precedents…. She had expected 1,000 guests for tea, but 3,000 came….”
She kissed her guests as they arrived, and served tea in both the state dining room and East Room, Nothing so dramatic had occurred in the East Room since “Abigail Adams had hung her wash there to dry!”
Since FDR “was much too busy finding ways and means of meeting the financial crisis… to be bothered with anything else,” ER reorganized “the household”—and practically everything she did “shocked the ushers.” ER seemed rather proud to have distressed the man most noted for his exquisite knowledge of protocol, the longtime chief usher Irwin (Ike) Hoover, whom she had first met when her uncle, TR, was president: “My first act was to insist on running the elevator myself without waiting for one of the doormen to run it for me.” Ike Hoover announced that “that just wasn’t done by the president’s wife.” But she entered the elevator, closed the door, and replied: “Now it is.”
Nancy Cook, her Val-Kill partner, known for her carpentry skills and love for detail, stayed on to help redecorate. Nan and ER concentrated first on the second-floor family quarters: They hung her pictures, and FDR’s pictures and prints, and “much to the horror of the household’ staff” lugged and hauled furniture about. The long corridors, divided into East and West Wings, were remade into public sitting areas at the east end, a cozy breakfast nook and luncheon corner at the west end.
ER selected for herself Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom suite, a spacious room with brick fireplace and a bank of windows, a smaller room with corner windows, and a bathroom at the southwest end of the house. Just above the large magnolia tree planted by Andrew Jackson, her windows faced south onto a lovely view of the Rose Garden and the Washington Monument. ER converted the larger space into her study/sitting room. “It took me so long to move from bed to dressing table to wardrobe [in that very large room] that I decided I was wasting good time, so I had my bed moved into the small adjoining dressing room.”
The West Wing breakfast nook/luncheon space was just outside her doors, and across the corridor a small bedroom and study facing northwest was generally reserved for Hick. ER moved a Val-Kill daybed into her sitting room, and her closest friends slept there when the house was full, which it often was. Since no beds in the house were long enough for any of the extra-long Roosevelts, she ordered new Val-Kill beds made for the entire family.
ER often felt Lincoln’s presence in her room. Especially when she was working late at night, the room would get cold, and there was always the knocking of old pipes. She felt chilled as odd changes of light and air occurred, and then she would get the “curious” but “distinct feeling” that there was somebody there. The image of Lincoln would come vividly to mind, standing by the window gazing thoughtfully out over Washington. If he ever spoke to her she never mentioned it. But she never doubted that his presence and the shades of others filled the house.
FDR’s bedroom and study adjoined her rooms to the east. His bedroom faced out over the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial; his study was a place of historic action, known over time as the Treaty Room, the Monroe Room, and TR’s Cabinet Room. When seated at his desk, FDR faced a pastel portrait of his wife which hung above the hall door. A portrait of his mother was directly behind him. When he sat on the long leather couch, which he frequently did during meetings and in moments of relaxation, he faced his mother and had his wife behind him.
While the images of his mother and wife were always present in his study, at some point FDR decided to place a large seven-drawer highboy in front of the sliding doors that connected ER’s study/sitting room with his bedroom. FDR’s barrier to free and spontaneous access was no casual gesture. ER herself had placed a similar piece of furniture in front of shared doorways to end her mother-in-law’s unannounced intrusions on the bedroom floor of their twin East 65th Street home.
ER’s favorite space was the completely open and bright corner breakfast area in front of the large lunette window at the west end of the hallway. There she held her morning meetings with staff and relaxed with friends and family. Formerly Lou Henry Hoover’s solarium, the West Hall sitting area had been filled with exotic birds, wicker furniture, and extraordinary California plantings. ER brought in large wooden screens, a Val-Kill walnut drop-leaf table, and old Grant-era leather furniture, which she covered in “cheerful” cretonne slipcovers. She had breakfast and lunch there, until the weather warmed and she could eat outdoors. From spring to first frost, ER preferred breakfast and tea on the South Veranda, just below her own windows under the magnificent magnolia tree.
The corridor area outside FDR’s suite was known as the East Wing, and it served as a screening room after many dinner parties. Louis Howe’s bedroom, once Lincoln’s study, and corner sitting room were east of FDR’s suite. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on 1 January 1863 in Howe’s bedroom. These rooms were among the largest in the house, and Howe initially complained they were too grand for him. But as his health deteriorated and he became bedridden, the space seemed a small comfort.
Across from Howe’s rooms were guest suites, each consisting of bedroom, sitting room, and bath. Over the years the spacious northeast corner suite housed Winston Churchill, various visiting royals, and an endless stream of more intimate family and friends who happened by.
Like many women at midlife, ER at forty-eight experienced a new level of freedom, excitement, energy, robust health. She rarely slept more than four to six hours. She arose each morning at seven or seven-thirty, filled with anticipation and high purpose. After a glass of hot water and lemon, she did stretches and calisthenics; then rode her horse Dot, a gift from Earl Miller, in Rock Creek Park for an hour or more, usually between eight and ten.
After her ride she took a cold shower, then breakfasted. Her breakfasts tended to be hearty, with a large café au lait. She allowed nobody else to pour the steamed milk and coffee together into the oversized porcelain mugs and French coffee bowls she and FDR had collected on their travels.
FDR preferred breakfast in bed or in his large oval sitting room. Usually ER returned from her ride when her husband arose, about ten, and she went in to greet him after his tray was delivered. Occasionally he joined ER in the West Hall for coffee or lunch with special friends.
In late afternoons, after the day’s work but before her teas and his cocktails, she went for a brisk walk and then swam in the new pool, often with FDR. According to ER, the White House’s “fine pool” was built by public donations in response to an appeal made by the New York Daily News. New Yorkers responded generously to ensure the health of their former governor and favorite son.
Completed by May, it became FDR’s main form of exercise and physical recreation. Hick recalled that FDR “was a wonderful swimmer” and could “beat any of his boys across the White House swimming pool. Once in a game of water polo… he knocked one of the newspaper correspondents out cold, dragged him out and revived him! With apologies.”
Agnes Brown Leach and Henry Goddard Leach also joined the First Family in the swimming pool. Splashing “about with Franklin and Eleanor,” Henry Leach wrote, was hilarious: “For Franklin’s long arms were not affected by the infantile paralysis that handicapped his legs, and he sprayed and ducked his wife with shouts and deep-chested laughter. In a swimming pool the Roosevelts behaved like hippopotami.”
According to ER, after FDR’s pool time he “went to his room for a rub-down” from George Fox, “who went with him everywhere.” After his massage, FDR read through at least six evening papers, “just as many as he read in the morning; then we all joined him in his study before dinner and enjoyed a short period of rest and informal conversation.”
He then presided over evening cocktails, which he always mixed himself, in his study. ER and her circle rarely joined FDR for cocktails. Generally, after pool time, ER presided over teas, “with a beautiful lace cloth on a small drop-leaf table, a small nosegay of flowers, cinnamon toast, tiny sandwiches, cookies, little cakes, candies….” According to Henrietta Nesbitt, it was a ceremonial time, with Chinese tea sent by “Mrs. James… like the tea Mrs. James’ father, Captain Delano, had imported a century before.”
As chief White House authority, ER was efficient and executive. She gave orders with dispatch, often on the run, and expected them to be carried out correctly, immediately. She never became, however, as formal or curt as Lou Henry Hoover, who evidently taught her staff a variety of hand signals for all manner of table and household activities, as subtle and specific as those she used with her horses in dressage.
Still, ER was often impatient with her staff. When she demanded a telephone installed on her desk, she expected it that day. When it failed to materialize after two days, she was annoyed. Ike Hoover explained that she was in her room so often the workers could not get in; it was improper “to have men working while the president’s wife was in the room.” ER was irritated: “Oh Spinach, [tell them] to get started!” Workmen were to ignore her presence. As owner of a factory she was, after all, “quite accustomed to having workmen around.”
Ike Hoover, and his successors Howell G. Crim (even more formal than Ike Hoover) and, after 1941, J. B. West, were often startled by ER. West never got over his “first sight of Eleanor Roosevelt in her riding habit, jodhpurs and boots, striding into the Usher’s office, calling for her horse….” Despite his “protestations of neutrality,” Crim rather “disapproved of Mrs. Roosevelt’s breezy informality.” According to West, Crim “never quite recovered from the shock of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s early-morning visits to the Usher’s office,” when she appeared in “a yellow bathing suit!” to deliver letters for him to mail, on her way to the pool. “Eight years later,” West wrote, “Mr. Crim was still aghast.”
While Crim was critical, West was more “in awe of this remarkable woman. She was formal and distant with her staff, yet kind and warm to people everywhere. And she accomplished so much. None of us had a tenth of her energy.”
The Roosevelts were spontaneous, exuberant; their table conversation was intense, and argumentative. Sunday evenings especially were reserved for ER’s scrambled-egg salons, when she whipped the eggs herself in her favorite silver chafing dish. Friends and advisers were invited to discuss specific issues or work out particular problems. The weekly event was known as “scrambled eggs with brains.”
Most evenings were notable for the ongoing sparring that occurred between ER and FDR. Generally, she chided him and he baited her. She wanted him to act on behalf of this or that outrage; he wanted her to remember the limitations of partisan politics. He tended to smile and dissemble. She tended to scowl and insist. His friends tended to think her “strident.” Her friends tended to think him “slippery.”
Emma Bugbee recalled a typical Sunday-evening exchange. After hours of controversy, FDR provoked ER so that “she became furious and gave vent to her feelings heatedly, while he smilingly advanced contrary views. The next day [ER] was thunderstruck to hear him blandly quoting her remarks to the British ambassador as his views.”
ER was so astonished by this event that she related it at length years later. Fully prepared to “listen in silence” and disagreement, she wrote, “I heard Franklin telling Ambassador Robert Bingham to act, not according to the arguments that he had given me, but according to the arguments that I had given him!”
Without giving me a glance or the satisfaction of batting an eyelash in my direction, he calmly stated as his own the policies and beliefs he had argued against the night before! To this day I have no idea whether he had simply used me as a sounding board, as he so often did, with the idea of getting the reaction of the person on the outside, or whether my arguments had been needed to fortify his decision and to clarify his own mind.
Although FDR rarely acknowledged her influence, he encouraged her public stands. She served both as “sounding board” and front-runner. He knew he could restrain her, but he rarely tried. “Lady,” he said after one evening’s argument, “this is a free country. Say what you think. If you get me in Dutch, I’ll manage to get myself out. Anyway, the whole world knows I can’t control you.”
Once, only once, Lorena Hickok “had dinner alone with the President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Just the three of us, in front of the fireplace in her sitting room.” Since the Roosevelts were “exceedingly hospitable and liked to have company,” they “rarely dined alone, or with a single guest.” That night FDR gave Hick important advice: “Never get into an argument with the Missis. You can’t win. You think you have her pinned down here (thumping the table with his forefinger) but she bobs up away over there somewhere! No use—you can’t win.”
Politically, ER was regarded by many as second-in-command. Some FDR advisers went to ER first, to get her advice on strategy. Others went to her afterward, for support in the struggle. Still others resented her presence at the table of decision.
Beyond politics, the Roosevelts increasingly lived separate lives. The White House was actually a divided home, not unlike a feudal manor house: allied in purpose, but with competing courts. There were distinct loyalties; and their boundaries grew more formalized over time.
Central to FDR’s court was his secretary and closest companion since 1920, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand. Her suite of rooms was on the third floor, bright and comfortable though small. ER accepted Missy’s presence and her role as second hostess with protective, even maternal, grace. They frequently rode together in the morning and walked arm in arm in the afternoon, two tall light-haired women who had much in common.
ER treated Missy as a junior partner, but not without criticism: “Missy was young and pretty and loved a good time, and occasionally her social contacts got mixed with her work and made it hard for her and others. To me she was always kind and helpful, and when I had to be away she took up without complaint the additional social responsibilities thrust upon her.”
But ER was often excluded from a private space that Missy shared with FDR and his own circle. Since he was physically constrained, entertainment needed to be brought to him—movies, card games, cocktails, convivial people. Missy discovered and cultivated the people she believed FDR would relax with. ER understood that, but carped: “As Miss LeHand lived in the White House she very often, when I was not there, invited people she thought my husband would enjoy, or whom she personally wanted, but he never gave this type of social gathering a thought.”
Actually it was the area of their greatest divide, since the cocktail parties and nightly entertainments Missy arranged frequently included moments of liquid hilarity ER could not enjoy. Several guests observed that when a party was going on in FDR’s quarters, ER would occasionally stop by the door and ask if she and her friends were invited; when informed that they were not, she would wordlessly leave.
Theirs was a complex arrangement. In relation to Franklin, ER still occupied a lonely sphere which echoed the isolation of her childhood. Beyond the First Family’s jolly facade, ER endured a lifelong sense of exclusion that represented for her an ongoing humiliation regarding FDR’s domain.
Whatever she actually felt, ER’s public attitude toward Missy LeHand was that of first wife to second wife in the culture of extended ruling families. Subsequently, when she contemplated the vagaries of love for the readers of You Learn by Living, ER accepted her occasional inability to “meet the need of someone whom I dearly love,” and in a coded reference to Missy, advised others in her situation: “You must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it.” For most women, ER concluded, there was yet another element to the maturation process “that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitation and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.”
ER was proud of her executive staff and depended completely upon them. In addition to Tommy, ER was well protected by her social secretary Edith Ben-ham Helm. Tommy Thompson was short and feisty, while Edith Helm was trim and elegant. Both were forceful women, devoted to their boss.
Tommy seemed to some staffers rather gruff, “with a look that said no before you asked.” But she was invariably warm and friendly to the public and to journalists, who considered her a reflection of ER’s open-hearted consideration. Tommy was ER’s most important working partner, and they traveled everywhere together—except on private holidays. She worked endless hours every day, although she went home to her husband at night, usually after eleven.
Edith Benham Helm had been part of ER’s Washington circle during World War I. The daughter and widow of admirals, Edith Helm understood the intricacies of Washington society and was associated with “all those formidable people” ER called “cave dwellers.” Formerly the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s social secretary, she was a stickler for protocol and propriety.
Well served by her two formidable and trusted secretaries, ER was free to pursue her political and personal interests without devoting undue time to either the household or the endless details of formal Washington.
ER brought many of the women who had worked with her during the 1920s to the White House. Most of them had worked in the Women’s Division of the Democratic State or National Committee. Her own former secretary Margaret Durand (called “Rabbit”) was now Louis Howe’s secretary. Louise Hackmeister, who had been chief telephone operator at Women’s Division headquarters, where she handled ER’s calls, became chief White House operator.
A much underrated White House presence, “Hacky” performed her duties with an efficiency that dazzled Washington: “If anyone is alive and on earth, Hacky will get them.” A “character” and “a tall and tough gal,” Hacky “had the affairs of the world at her fingertips.” She was worldly and discreet; though nothing “escaped her,” she protected all confidences. She traveled with the president, and ER considered her “remarkable”: Hacky “recognized everyone’s voice after once hearing it,” and her own “cheerful voice and word of recognition” lent a “note of pleasure and real warmth of feeling” to the White House. On call twenty-four hours a day, she managed the presidential switchboard for twenty years; she knew and understood everything, including “who was in and who was out with the President.” According to Lillian Rogers Parks, then a young upstairs maid whose mother Maggie Rogers was head White House maid, the staff “used to laugh” that the White House was “run by Hicky and Hacky.”
Hacky shared an apartment with Mary Eben at the Wardman-Park Hotel. She was in charge of all the gifts sent to the president, and also influenced White House staff relations. Every week Lillian Rogers went to sew at their place, and she believed Eben helped change race relations: Despite Washington’s rigid Jim Crow laws, “Mrs. Eben would have none of that,” and arranged to have the doorman hand the young black seamstress the key as she entered “through the front door.” Public defiance of back-door rituals by such Roosevelt staffers as Mary Eben, Lillian Rogers believed, helped pave the way for the civil rights movement that would “eventually open all front doors.”
Mary Eben’s racial views were in stark contrast to those expressed by the three dominant members of the president’s intimate staff. FDR’s secretariat, the men who controlled his access to the press and arranged his daily schedule, were “good old boys” of America’s southland dedicated to all the trappings of “race etiquette,” the customs and traditions of servility, segregation, and discrimination. Over time, ER collided with them regularly.
Press secretary Stephen T. Early of Virginia had covered the Navy for the Associated Press when FDR was assistant secretary and had been his press secretary during the 1920 vice presidential campaign. FDR wooed him back in 1932 from the motion picture industry. Appointments secretary Marvin McIntyre of Kentucky was also a longtime friend and former journalist who worked for a newsreel company. Originally detailed to the Navy, McIntyre was also known as a poker genius. He had been with FDR’s team since 1920.
ER had more cordial relations with members of FDR’s staff who were responsible for her husband’s physical comfort. Their presence in the White House relieved her mind, and she admired the men who met her husband’s physical needs with consideration, sensitivity, and good humor, especially FDR’s black valet Irvin (Mac) McDuffie, another staffer since 1920, who traveled everywhere with FDR. His wife, Lizzie McDuffie, was ER’s long-time personal maid.
Former New York State trooper Augustus (Gus) Gennerich was, with McDuffie, responsible for FDR’s physical well-being. A bachelor considered reclusive by some, Gus went about the White House with a frightful English pit bulldog who shared his third-floor room. With or near the president at virtually all times, Gus and Mac helped him get up and dress in the morning and put him to bed at night. But Gus, who, with Earl Miller, had been FDR’s bodyguard during the Albany years, was invited for cards and evening frolics.
ER was particularly fond of Gus and subsequently wrote that during the Albany years he and Earl Miller brought great joy to the family when they played the piano “by the hour.” “They were always finding kind things to do.”
Earl Miller, who was closest to ER, remained in New York. One of FDR’s last public acts as governor was to appoint Miller personnel director of the New York Department of Correction. In Washington, Gus was the president’s most intimate aide. Devoted and charming, his rare combination of “great strength, gentle manners, and a gentle touch” impressed everyone.
However critical or aloof ER felt toward their nightly entertainments, FDR’s staff relieved her of countless burdens, unmanageable responsibilities. Along with her own staff, they enabled her to perform the purely social duties of First Wifery with remarkable cheerfulness. Moreover, they enabled her to concentrate largely on the political and public goals that most interested her.
ER achieved her first notable White House success on 6 March with her press conference for women journalists only: “I was a little nervous at first, but the girls were so nice and so friendly that I got over it quickly.”
The press conferences were Hick’s idea: They would establish understanding and support for the First Lady’s activities, and they would ensure jobs for women in Depression-weary newspapers and wire services. Both FDR and Louis Howe had agreed with Hick’s suggestion and encouraged ER to do it.
That night, ER called Hick to report on the conference. Thirty-five journalists had met in the Red Room, “and there weren’t enough chairs, so some of them had to sit on the floor.” Male reporters made much of this, and wrote nasty commentary about docile newshens sitting at ER’s feet. But ER enjoyed herself: “It really wasn’t bad. I think I’ll continue with them.” And, with the kind of competitive glee that had been part of her life since she made the first team at field hockey as a student at Allenswood, she concluded: “1 really beat Franklin. He isn’t holding his first press conference until Wednesday!”
Those first weeks, ER felt bludgeoned by family tensions aroused by the marital woes of her children. Her mother-in-law blamed her, and the children made conflicting emotional demands. It all left her “very weary.” She turned increasingly to Hick for advice and encouragement. Surrounded by critics and pundits eager to pounce upon every mishap, she relied on Hick’s refreshing directness and seasoned political savvy. Hick encouraged her to keep a diary, which she refused to do, but she agreed to write the details of each day in her daily letters. Ultimately, ER’s letters to Hick became the fullest record of her political and emotional concerns. She confided her deepest secrets, most worrisome problems, mundane and significant moments.
ER spent hours at her desk at the end of the day, usually at one or two in the morning, writing to Hick—as she had written daily to those she loved all her life, beginning with her father. However busy she was, however many friends and allies surrounded her, she felt alone without Hick at her side. Each day their ten-, twelve-, fifteen-page letters were filled with diary details, political tidbits, expressions of love and longing:
Hick darling/Oh! how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try to tell you what it meant. [Eldest son] Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say Je t’aime et je t’adore as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.
ER called and wrote on Hick’s fortieth birthday, 7 March, and they made plans to sec each other the next week. “What shall we read Hick? You choose first….” After she called again, and they spoke until two in the morning, ER added a postscript: “Hick Dearest I know how unhappy you are & I’m glad Jean [Dixon] will be with you tomorrow night…. My thoughts are around you!”
The next night when ER called after midnight, she was relieved: “Oh! it is good to hear your voice. When it sounds right no one can make me so happy!” And “Dearest, Your two letters this morning were such a joy.”
That day Bess Furman told ER that Hick had agreed to come down on 20 March for the women’s press party, which surprised and delighted her—”I miss you so much & I love you so much”—and they would have many good times together. It was late when ER wrote Hick: “I am going soon to find out if F is staying up all night or not! I think when things settle I’ll have some privacy & leisure!… Perhaps we’ll be almost human by the time you come! The one thing which reconciles me to do this job is the fact that I think I can give a great many people pleasure & I begin to think there may be ways in which I can be useful.”
ER was almost completely settled by the end of the first week: “My pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can’t kiss you so I kiss your picture good-night and good-morning. Dont laugh!”
ER’s rooms were covered with photographs—on the walls, on her desk, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. In her bedroom, on either end of her bureau were two large photographs, with a triptych in between. Earl Miller was on the right, Louis Howe on the left, and three smaller photos of a younger FDR and her brother Hall in the triptych frame. Hick shared ER’s study wall above the fireplace with Nancy Cook, Esther Lape, Tommy, and several watercolors. A larger and contemporary photo of FDR was placed over her shoulder above her reading chair. Snapshots of children and grandchildren abounded.
Throughout her adult life, ER juggled countless relationships, but very few were emotionally absorbing. She craved company and rarely had a meal or even a walk by herself. She was restless and easily diverted. She tended to divide her day into fifteen-minute meetings. When the business was done, she stood to announce the meeting’s end. For luncheons, teas, and dinners, she would combine the most unlikely people and trust to everybody’s good manners.
Nobody else in ER’s life filled the particular place in her heart now reserved for Hick:
One more day marked off…. My dear, may I forget there are other reporters present or must I behave? I shall want to hug you to death. I can hardly wait!…
The nicest time of the day is when I write to you. You have a stormier time than I do but I miss you as much I think. I couldn’t bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep. Oh! How I wanted to put my arms about you in reality instead of in spirit…. Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you!
But Hick worried about all the other people around ER, dreaded the time she spent with them, and feared the intensity of her other friendships. In response, ER wrote:
Remember one thing always no one is just what you are to me. I’d rather be with you this minute than any one else and yet I love many other people and some of them can do things for me probably better than you could, but I’ve never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.
ER’s nightly letters to Hick were filled with the often hilarious details of hectic days.
Did I tell you that the first day in his office, at 5 pm FDR found himself with nothing to do. Horrors! Nothing like that had happened to him in years! So he reached under his desk & rang all five bells, & people ran in from every side to find him calmly demanding something to do! He had the start of a cold yesterday. I fed him a pill. At the conference in the evening he took a senatorial pill, a congressional pill, a treasury one, an attorney general one, & today he is cured! He is having such a good time that his mood is amusing most of the time!
Politically, ER felt effervescent. She was enthusiastic and filled with visions of usefulness. But her heart was divided. The day after she wrote Hick that she could not “bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep,” they made plans to see each other. ER would not wait for Hick to attend the women’s press party but would journey immediately to New York. There were political things to be done to bolster FDR’s legislative activities, and they could spend two days together:
We could lunch at the [East 65th Street] house Tuesday if Anna is out or if you don’t mind having her with us but I thought you’d rather be alone in a crowd than have anyone else to talk to. It shall be just as you say dear. Stick to your diet… & you’ll forget you are 40 and please go to the doctor next week.
On Monday, 13 March, ER took a late train to New York, “scorning a private compartment.” She sat in “an ordinary Pullman seat” and dismissed Secret Service protection. Hick wrote the AP releases of the First Lady’s visit.
The next day at the Women’s Trade Union League meeting, where ER went to rally New York’s women’s network, she intended to be unobtrusive. But her very effort made headlines: “Mrs. Roosevelt Bars Police Guard.” Upon her arrival the First Lady walked up to the uniformed policemen posted at the entrance and asked:
“What are you all doing here?”
“We’re here to guard Mrs. Roosevelt.”
“I don’t want to be guarded; please go away….”
“We can’t do that, the captain placed us here.”
ER entered the building and telephoned Louis Howe, who telephoned police headquarters, which sent the captain. ER met him at the front hall, pointed to the crowd that had gathered, drawn by all the uniforms, and said: ”Please take them all away. It’s just an attraction. No one is going to hurt me.” After the police were removed, ER “partook” of the WTUL luncheon, with young working women and members of ER’s “committee on rest rooms [temporary shelters] for unemployed girls.”
After the WTUL meeting, ER walked up Lexington Avenue to visit the New York League of Girls’ Clubs canteen established “for girls looking for jobs” and the Unemployed Girls’ Hostel maintained by the Salvation Army. These were ER’s primary constituents, mostly single unemployed women whose needs New Deal legislation completely bypassed. Their very existence was ignored during the first hundred days.
ER returned to Washington by air oh the 16th. The New York Times announced: “She Set Precedent as the First White House Lady to Travel in Plane.” For ER the flight was noteworthy above all because she was not distressed by the ordeal of motion sickness, which had often plagued her, especially at sea. For some reason ER never became airsick, although her traveling companions Tommy and Emma Bugbee did: “Well, we had a very bumpy trip but I was fine….”
The 17th of March was the Roosevelts’ twenty-eighth anniversary. Seventeen guests were invited for dinner, which was festive in shades of green to honor St. Patrick’s Day. Thoughtfully, Mrs. Nesbitt, head housekeeper, provided husband and wife with their favorite desserts: angel-food cake for ER, fruitcake for FDR.
ER was impressed by the after-dinner film Gabriel Over the White House. In the classic comedy starring Walter Huston, an insecure president is surrounded by tough-minded politicians who discourage his democratic faith in the people. Knocked out by a car accident and inspired by the Angel Gabriel, he awakens determined to be all he can be, do all he can do for the people of Depression America. The film’s army of unemployed marchers who descended upon Washington from all over America caused ER to reflect upon her astonished dismay at Herbert Hoover’s cruel response to the 1932 Bonus Marchers—and to argue with dinner guests who defended him.
She wrote Hick: Like Hoover, they would call “soldiers out if a million unemployed marched on Washington & I’d do what the President does in the picture!”
From May to June 1932, the Bonus Expeditionary Force, comprised of twenty thousand World War I veterans and their families, encamped along the marshy Anacostia flats across the bridge from the nation’s capital in a sprawling “Hooverville.” There to lobby Congress for the immediate release of their promised bonus, the veterans were optimistic as the Wright-Patman bill was debated. On 15 June the House passed the bill, but two days later it was defeated in the Senate, 62–18. As Congress prepared to adjourn and the sweltering heat of Washington’s summer descended, they determined to stay until President Hoover addressed their plight. But Hoover refused even to meet with their representatives. He offered them train fare out of town, but they lingered and demonstrated. Convinced the Bonus Matchers were communist agitators, Red-controlled harbingers of an American insurrection, he decided to act. During the evening rush hour on 28 July 1932, one of the most photographed and widely witnessed moments of state terrorism in U.S. history occurred. “The Battle of Washington” was followed by a midnight attack on their campsite.
The burn-and-destroy mission was led by four units of cavalry wearing gas masks and steel helmets, with sabers drawn, backed by five tanks, followed by the infantry with fixed bayonets, all under the personal supervision of General Douglas MacArthur, with George Patton and Dwight David Eisenhower in minor roles. Over one thousand veterans and their families were tear-gassed and bayoneted. Although there was no resistance, more than 1,500 tear gas grenades and candles went off as the destitute army of unemployed and homeless Americans ran north into the night. Their campsites were burned, their meager possessions destroyed. As Washington watched the flames over Anacostia, Hoover’s humanitarian reputation went up in smoke.
ER was stunned and wrote: “I shall never forget my feeling of horror when I learned that the Army had actually been ordered to evict the veterans…. Many people were injured, some of them seriously. This one incident shows what fear can make people do, for Mr. Hoover was a Quaker who abhorred violence, and General MacArthur, his Chief of Staff, must have known how many veterans would resent the order and never forget it….”
When ER contemplated Gabriel Over the White House, which coincided with the news that Bonus Marchers prepared to return to Washington, she vowed to do whatever needed to be done “to prevent a similar tragedy.”
In May, her opportunity arrived. Bonus Marchers returned not only to demand their bonus but also to protest FDR’s Economy Act, which reduced their meager benefits by almost half. Although FDR promised nothing, he treated the veterans cordially. Administration officials met with them; they were given a clean campsite, with sanitation facilities at Fort Hood, Virginia, and three meals a day.
Louis Howe handled negotiations and met with them regularly in a government auditorium. But not until ER visited their campsite did they believe there was a dime’s worth of difference between Hoover and Roosevelt.
Howe asked ER to drive him to the campsite. When they arrived, he announced he would sleep in the car while she toured the camp: “I got out and walked over to where I saw a line-up of men waiting for food. They looked at me curiously and one of them asked my name and what I wanted. When I said I just wanted to see how they were getting on, they asked me to join them.”
ER spent over an hour with the veterans. They reminisced about the war and sang old Army songs: “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” ER was introduced to a “Negro veteran whose breast bore many decorations” and who sang “Mother Machree.” ER waded through ankle-deep mud to visit the marchers’ living quarters and the new hospital. In the large convention -tent, she addressed the group and apologized for the fact that she could tell them nothing about their bonus. But she had seen the war, toured the battlefields, and understood their anger. She had driven a truck through the railroad yards in the cold of night, and talked with the boys as they left. She had served coffee and prepared sandwiches for those young men, eager to go into the unknown. And she had seen them when they returned, hobbling on crutches or carried off the trains, and had visited them in hospitals.
Interrupted repeatedly by cheers, she concluded: “I never want to see another war. I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country. I hope we will never have to ask such service again….”
The entire group accompanied her to her car, and waved her off with songs and hope.
The veterans did not get their bonus. FDR urged them to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, which many did. Many also returned home galvanized politically. ER had helped to renew their faith. The First Lady would fight for their interests.
Many of FDR’s advisers were horrified that his wife had shown courtesy to Red insurrectionists. Her visit, they protested, encouraged mob rule and raised expectations of support. Nonsense, she insisted: There was no reason for excitement. She had merely spent a decent moment with one of America’s most deserving groups.
Although she could not persuade FDR of the wisdom of releasing the bonus, she was pleased with her first major diplomatic venture and hoped that it “had a good effect.” ER told her press conference that there had been nothing to worry about: “It was as comfortable as a camp can be, remarkably clean and orderly, grand-looking boys, a fine spirit. There was no kind of disturbance, nothing but the most courteous behavior.”
On 18 March, the day after the anniversary party, Hick arrived in Washington for a three-day visit, highlighted by the Women’s National Press Club dinner. ER was the first First Lady to attend the annual frolic, and she broke all traditions when she agreed to take the “last word” of rebuttal at the end of the evening. There is no record of her remarks to the three hundred women in the grand ballroom of the Willard Hotel, since the “rule of no reporters present” prevailed during her talk. Nevertheless, she was triumphant, and Washington’s most observant and critical women remembered her as “tall, vivacious, laughter-lit.” ER’s capacity to laugh at herself, spontaneously and robustly, was one of her most endearing qualities.
ER enjoyed these parties, and she soon introduced her own annual party for women of the press and other women in public life which alternated with the press club’s. ER’s annual Gridiron Widows party, for women only, given in the White House, was her indignant response to the fact that FDR and the men of the cabinet went off to the sacred and exclusive male journalists’ annual Gridiron Club dinner, still closed to all women.
It became the highlight of her social season. For years the Gridiron Widows dinner was an occasion for unbridled merriment, political satire, serious costumes. All the women associated with the Roosevelt administration were invited: journalists and their guests, and “women distinguished in arts and letters.” ER worked hard on her own skits for these parties, as she did for FDR’s annual birthday frolic. Thus, at least twice a year, ER conceived and performed in rather wild theatrical routines, usually done with the help of her daughter Anna, Elinor Morgenthau, and Louis Howe.
Although Hick’s first postinaugural visit to Washington was arranged around the women’s press club party, and she was elegant in her new black gown, she did not even mention it in the fifteen-page article she wrote about her weekend. That omission underscored her pain and confusion as her career as a top political journalist clashed with her efforts to protect her First Friend, and began to unravel.
In her essay, Hick tried to reconcile her rough-and-tumble life with her new status as the First Lady’s intimate friend. To protect ER and herself, she decided not to publish her story. But it provided significant insight into the tensions and dynamics of their efforts to confront and accommodate their new situation. ER was surprised when Hick hesitated upon entering her room. Hick explained:
She looked taller than I had remembered, and stately. Her voice sounded the same—only far away. Perhaps it was the gown, which I had never seen before. Or the bigness of the room…. She reached over and laid her hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t be that way,” she said.
We sat on a sofa beside the fireplace. The room was blue—blue carpet, blue hangings, blue shadows outside the yellow circles of the lamps….
At length she said, “You must go in and say hello to Franklin.”
She studied my face gravely for an instant. Then she laughed and held out her hand.
“Come on! You are a house guest, you know!”
Before the formal Saturday dinner Hick paused in discomfort as she confronted her actual situation as the First Lady’s friend.
As I tiptoed out into the corridor, Mrs. Roosevelt came toward me—tall, cool, unhurried, in a white evening gown. Again that feeling that there was something different about her. I smiled uneasily.
“Franklin and the others are going down in the elevator,” she said, taking my arm. “I’m going to take you down the grand stairway!”
My gown was new, and its hem swept the floor, the longest skirt I had ever worn. It seemed to me that black lace was wound round my ankles in great, heavy folds. Getting to the stairway required almost painful physical effort….
Ahead of me, a reassuring stretch of crimson carpet. But my sense of relief was quickly invaded by new misgivings as my eyes picked out, away down at the end of the corridor, the black of dinner coats and the white gleam of bare shoulders….
After dinner, Hick and ER joined FDR for drinks. “With amazing frankness we discussed public questions…. Seated on a sofa, smoking in an ivory cigarette holder the 15-cent brand of cigarettes he prefers, the President appeared to be enjoying himself thoroughly.” ER knitted; calm returned. When ER took her dogs for their run, Hick and FDR agreed to “one more cigarette….”
Over time the White House became in part Hick’s own residence. It was during the Roosevelt era, much like a grand hotel, and Hick’s shyness evaporated.
More immediately, on 12 April ER sailed down the Potomac aboard the Sequoia with FDR and Britain’s prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, as they discussed the London Economic Conference. But she was specifically exiled from the conversation, banished to the siderails while the men conferred beyond her hearing. As ER contemplated her isolated voyage, she wrote Hick: “Blue sky & sun, our first day on the river, and, tho I never think it is a very pretty river, still the remoteness is grand, and sun, even on muddy water, gleams and dances, and the trees are green.” She paused to contemplate the men in deep and somber conversation, and wondered: “Is history being made? What road is the world going to take? And will this day count?” Ell decried her lack of information: “I’d give something to know anything authentic on Germany or Russia.”
Initially charmed by Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald, whose views of the World Court, disarmament, and international economic policies coincided with her own, she considered him “a great man.” “What delightfully well-read, cultured people some Englishmen are!” His lunchtime stories fascinated her. “How do they read so much when they are so busy? I think they take more holidays.” She was impressed by his daughter Ishbel, who was subsequently elected to Parliament, and they became friends.
A lifelong pacifist, one of the founders of Britain’s Union of Democratic Control (UDC), which opposed World War I and called for democratic control of international affairs, Ramsay MacDonald was associated with America’s leading pacifists and social reformers, including Lillian Wald, who had been president of the American Union Against Militarism, and Jane Addams, who was president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
In 1924, MacDonald became England’s first Labour prime minister in a disastrous government that lasted less than a year. Now he headed a minority coalition government, sought to end imperial rule, and worked ardently for world peace and economic amity, particularly the reduction or erasure of wartime debts the Allies owed the United States. To right the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, his controversial “MacDonald Plan” emphasized military parity between Germany and France and voluntary British disarmament. Winston Churchill thought him mad, especially after Hitler achieved power.
The disarmament conference, which continued to meet irregularly in Geneva, had been stalled since 1931 and all MacDonald’s other efforts collapsed during the worldwide Depression. Now he hoped to achieve an accord with FDR, to present Anglo-American unity at the London Economic Conference in June. FDR was delightful company, but vague and elusive. He seemed always to agree, but promised nothing.
ER feared that FDR’s campaign deal with William Randolph Hearst, during which he promised to keep America aloof from Europe and its woes, remained his priority. She deplored isolationism and economic nationalism and doubted that her husband intended to agree to anything. On international issues he was vague and elusive with her as well, and it galled her. Ardent for peace, ER turned to her mentors for support, and astonishingly gave presidential correspondence to MacDonald’s old ally, Lillian Wald.
The day before ER sailed on the Sequoia, Lillian Wald wrote to Mary Rozet Smith, Jane Addams’s partner of forty years, promising to “send you and JA the correspondence between the Prime Minister and the President which brought about this visit.”
Presumably, when ER visited Wald in April she had brought the letters with her, determined to pursue her convictions regarding this urgent meeting to secure economic stability and world peace. But FDR made it clear that international issues were not ER’s business, and she was furious to be excluded from decisive conversations.
On 20 April 1933, ER addressed the annual meeting of the Travelers Aid Society, which had cared for over 2,600 homeless men and women during the year, over half under the age of twenty-one. The First Lady was irate that no relief was even contemplated for these young people, and spoke sharply about their neglect: “I think there has been so much emphasis on family relief work and family welfare that single men and women are having pretty much of a hard time. A basket of food does not do much good when the recipient has no place to cook or eat it.”
ER was outraged that no New Deal legislation had even considered these facts, and she said so publicly. It was the beginning of her lifelong campaign for youth, affordable housing, and economic opportunity for all people.
That night, with advance press notice, ER flew over Washington with Amelia Earhart. Press secretary Steve Early’s memo to photographers, “all right for movies and stills,” enabled full documentation of the after-dinner party. According to The New York Times, “The First Lady of the Land and the first woman to fly the [Atlantic Ocean] went skylarking together tonight in a big Condor plane.”
The flying party included ER’s brother Hall; Amelia Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam; the plane’s captain, E. H. Parker; and several reporters.
Amelia Earhart flew from Washington to Baltimore “without even removing her white evening gloves.” ER told reporters: “It does mark an epoch, doesn’t it, when a girl in evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night.” Also in evening dress, ER flew part of the trip in the cockpit with Captain Parker.
She was delighted: “It was lovely. Out there in front with no obstructions to the view one could see everything and it felt like being on top of the world!”
When “the plane made a most peculiar serpentine side swing,” Amelia Earhart laughed: “Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt’s flying the plane!”
ER had taken flying lessons and this flight was in part a celebration for the Amateur Air Pilots Association, which she had joined. She was always disappointed that FDR specifically asked her not to fly herself, not to become a pilot. He had enough to worry about, and it was one of the few limitations he imposed, or asked her to make—for his sake. She complied, but she flew as a passenger whenever possible, and logged more miles in the air than many pilots.
ER rejoiced in the modern adventure. The world had changed so dramatically within her own lifetime: electric lights, long-distance telephone, radio, automobiles, movies, airplanes. A “new woman” in the 1920s, ER was a “modern” woman in the 1930s. Occasionally her modernity astounded the world, but she celebrated the best of the changes: “We can know and see many more people, we can do so much more in a day…. There is greater opportunity to develop.” And all the new opportunities guaranteed a more “valuable and interesting” life than was previously available to women. “It is almost impossible to compare the girl of today with the girl of thirty or forty years ago.”
For ER, even social obligations offered political compensation: Teas and receptions were the means by which the American people entered the White House and came face to face with the hearth that symbolized her husband’s government. ER considered her job as First Lady important, even if “standing and shaking hands for an hour or so, two or three times a week,” was “not exactly an inspiring occupation.”
“At the first few receptions of each season, my arms ached, my shoulders ached, my back ached, and my knees and feet seemed to belong to someone else. However… I was lucky in having a supple hand which never ached.” She was particularly grateful to the military aides who gave her wise advice about “how to stand and not grow weary.” After an especially long reception line, when ER complained that she had become so stiff she could no longer bend her knees or actually move, a young Marine told her: “Oh, you should not stand so rigidly. Just bend your knees a little, frequently. No one will notice and you will be much less tired.”
People noticed ER’s warmth. One visitor wrote that she went through the line and then stood about to watch the First Lady’s energetic greeting. She wondered: “Do you shake and think, or do you just stand and shake?” ER replied that she concentrated on faces,
because being a little deaf I never really heard names. Of course, when you look at people carefully, you have various reactions: you think “what a pretty and intelligent face,” or “what a kind face,” and so on. However, when there are a great many people, toward the end faces become blurred. Once I walked into the dining room after the receiving was over and saw two old friends. “Where did you come from?” I said, and they told me they had gone through the line and that I had shaken hands with them warmly.
For all her public concerns, a peculiar flaw haunted ER’s household administration: The food served at her table was notably dreadful, and each household decision was channeled through the routinely churlish acts of Henrietta Nesbitt, ER’s stubborn choice for White House chef and head housekeeper.