ER’s careless attitude toward food during the White House years has long been dismissed as a reflection of her lack of interest in mundane matters. But ER was actually fussy, obsessed with details. She and FDR personally researched and designed the new White House dinner service of a thousand pieces of ivory china. Dirt and dust annoyed her to the point of conducting top sergeant equivalents “of a white glove inspection.” She personally arranged fresh-cut flowers and centerpieces from the White House greenhouse and selected from a variety of silver and crystal decorations, always mindful of FDR’s favorite, a silver boat sailing on a sea of glass. Flowers pleased ER. She attended flower shows and studied her friends’ gardens. She took and gave cuttings; she was proud of her own garden at Val-Kill and fully appreciated the White House gardens and greenhouses. In light of her attention to detail, ER’s determination to retain Henrietta Nesbitt, who exasperated FDR, reveals an aspect of ER’s complex emotional reality.
Whatever the First Lady’s conscious reasons, no household decision was better suited to dampen the president’s pleasure. She could have had the services of the most accomplished chefs and household managers in North America. But she insisted on Henrietta Nesbitt, a political ally in the League of Women Voters and Hyde Park neighbor. She had operated a pleasant tea house, and ER liked her baked goods. Because her husband, Henry, was ill and out of work, she needed a job. ER also gave Henry Nesbitt a job on the White House staff. Moreover, ER transferred to Mrs. Nesbitt full responsibility for the White House. She supervised the kitchen, dominated the staff, controlled the food and the flavors.
White House meals served by “La Nesbitt” were noteworthy. The porridge was runny; the soups were watery; the salads were tossed with chunks of marshmallow and canned fruit. FDR complained. Guests commented. Gossips gossiped. The staff was embarrassed; friends and intimates were distressed. Some, like Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, were discreet and relegated their thoughts to their private diaries:
The President and Mrs. Roosevelt gave their annual official dinner to the Cabinet last night. There were about eighty at table. I am bound to confess that the White House dinners are neither inspiring nor do they stand out as Lucullan repasts. I am not very fussy about my food… but it does seem a little out of proportion to use a solid-gold knife and fork on ordinary roast mutton.
It was not that ER did not herself care about food. When she traveled, she wrote home about new dishes, flavors, and spices that delighted her. She routinely took her friends to fine restaurants, and, in homage to her great mentor Marie Souvestre, preferred French cuisine. She regularly paused to compliment the creators of well-prepared dishes and sent praise to various chefs she considered exceptional. Nevertheless, tough meat and exhausted vegetables became expected White House fare.
Despite her genuine consideration for the needs and wants of her guests, ER allowed the food and drink served at her White House table to become a subject of derision. When wine was again served for the first time since Woodrow Wilson’s administration, ER was quick to say the prewar custom of four to six dinner wines would not be revived. She would serve only “light American wines,” and only two of them—a white and a red, “perhaps a sauterne and a burgundy.”
According to Ickes, “Mrs. Roosevelt had announced that she would serve one glass each of two domestic wines and she kept her word. The sherry was passable, but the champagne was undrinkable. I hopefully took one drink and then set my glass down with a final gesture.” Elizabeth Ann Farley, James Farley’s wife, “almost made a face when she tasted the champagne. She was quite indignant…. She seems to be quite fussy about the quality and quantity of her wines, although Jim [the son of a saloonkeeper] never touches a drop…. It does seem to me that if decent champagne can’t be made in the United States, it ought to be permissible, even for the White House, to serve imported champagne.”
Days later, FDR “joked” about the dreadful drinks and explained that only minutes “before dinner he had asked Mrs. Roosevelt about the wine and she said she was going to serve domestic champagne from New York State, recommended by Rex Tugwell. The President told her that she ought not to serve domestic champagne, but she replied that it had been on the ice and that it was too late to change. The President said that he has been apologizing ever since.”
ER’s failure to consult a wine steward about what was possible or agreeable to serve after so many years of Prohibition was consistent with her refusal to employ anybody but Mrs. Nesbitt to preside over the kitchen. In anticipation of ghastly repasts, some White House guests routinely dined before they arrived.
ER was not unmindful of the complaints. She brought FDR’s objections to Mrs. Nesbitt. But the head housekeeper always had an excuse: She was saving money, as she was told to do. But you said there would be thirty for dinner, and there were forty-two; of course the soup was watery.
Undoubtedly, some of the criticism heaped upon Mrs. Nesbitt actually belonged to ER. Gracious and generous, ER invited people to dinner throughout the day. House guests filled every room. Each had their own menus and needs; some were served separately on trays in their rooms. Teas and larger social affairs were attended by literally hundreds more than originally planned for.
Also, ER was interested in inexpensive and experimental foods that her nutritionist friends promoted for Depression-ravaged America. Enthusiastic about “new foods” Flora Rose and her team of nutritionists had developed at Cornell University, ER introduced them into the White House. For weeks, she served “economy meals” to illustrate the new range of inexpensive and healthful diets.
Until ER’s efforts, the home economics movement in New York State was an under-funded educational Cinderella. ER championed it as a life-enhancing part of the struggle for women’s rights and empowerment. One of ER’s earliest trips as First Lady was to Cornell in March 1933. She and Hick were impressed with Flora Rose’s inexpensive, “correctly balanced” meals. At a cost of 7 1/2 cents for each adult and 9 1/2 cents for each child (the difference between the 1933 costs of coffee and milk), the first 7 1/2-cent White House lunch consisted of hot stuffed eggs with tomato sauce, whole wheat toast, mashed potatoes, prune pudding, and coffee or milk. ER assured the press that her low-cost menus would be limited to “occasions when there were no guests.”
But neither household generosity nor her interest in 7 1/2 cent meals explained ER’s twelve-year defense of Henrietta Nesbitt, who was one of the greatest anomalies of the Roosevelt White House. Completely unprepared for her job, she was fifty-nine years old and had never worked for anybody else before. She told her husband: “It’s just keeping house, and I’ve kept house all my life. Only, instead of seeing that you and boys are cared for, I’ll have the President and his family to worry about. You’ll see how simple it will be. I’ve been keeping house for six. Now I’ll multiply by ten, and keep house for sixty!” She recognized that the “White House would be a big responsibility, but Mrs. Roosevelt had said I could do it, so I knew I could.”
Politically, Mrs. Nesbitt was a fervent Democrat, and she credited ER for her views: She had studied “astrology, and the stars foretold that this was the start of the woman’s era, that the man’s world was coming to an end… Think of the progress women have made in the last eighty years! Before then a woman couldn’t call her second-best bonnet her own.”
However flamboyant Mrs. Nesbitt was politically, even ER was mystified by her culinary disasters. When confronted by the damage done to new peas she had herself bought from a woman’s stand in the country, she complained: “Will you tell whoever cooked the peas tonight that they were just as hard as bullets, though they were small and should have been very nice.”
Since Mrs. Nesbitt managed to ruin even salads and steamed vegetables (ER’s favorite foods), ER proposed that Mrs. Nesbitt visit Schrafft’s to learn how their chefs worked: “So I went to New York and spent a couple of days in Schrafft’s kitchens, and… they showed me just how they managed to get every bit of vegetable from kitchen to plate, looking as if it were specially cooked.” But all the “tricks” she learned were sabotaged by her discovery that she could cook “the vegetable water down to a broth” which she then used to smother the fresh steamed vegetables: That “was a trick of my own,” and made everything “tastier.”
Mrs. Nesbitt dismissed all criticism. When FDR said, “The vegetables are watery,” he was bored by sweetbreads and brains, or “sick of liver and beans,” she said, “these were figures of speech.”
The White House food situation actually made national headlines in 1936: “FDR DEMANDS NEW DEAL—REFUSES SPINACH—CRISIS STRIKES.” Mrs. Nesbitt “felt terrible. I was sensitive and overworked, and this was ridicule that curled up my very soul.” And “I was doing my best. Keeping him content was my job….”
But she failed, as did ER. He was merely given to “tizzy-wizzys” over food, she once told her head housekeeper. ER had persuaded herself that FDR, widely known for his epicurean tastes, really had no serious gourmet interests. Actually, before Henrietta Nesbitt entered the scene, ER told a reporter that if she served FDR “bacon and eggs three times a day he would, be perfectly satisfied.”
ER’s curious disregard for her husband’s tastes suggests an explanation for her persistent defense of Henrietta Nesbitt: The housekeeper was one expression of her passive-aggressive behavior in a marriage of remarkable and labyrinthine complexity.
Endlessly embattled but irrevocably united, Eleanor and Franklin had in their separate courts achieved a balance of power. ER only rarely but modestly complained about Missy; Franklin only rarely but quietly complained about Mrs. Nesbitt. Later, after Louis Howe’s death in 1936, the balance between them was temporarily upended by the presence of Betsey, James’s wife, in FDR’s court. During that tense time, FDR bellowed rather loudly about Mrs. Nesbitt. ER reached for-her pen, and seemed to jest at her husband’s distaste and distress in her column. When his “tizzy-wizzy” over spinach made headlines, he became furious, and it was a serious moment between them—not actually healed until ER took to her bed, after which FDR worked earnestly to restore his wife’s good cheer.
ER’s lifelong inability to reflect on the sources of her feelings resulted in headaches, sudden bursts of cold, unexpected and confusing acts of distance and derision. As a young matron she described her “Griselda” moods with impatience and dismay. She hated to acknowledge turbulence or depression. She once told a grandchild who was crying in the hallway, to go sit in the bathtub until the tears stopped. During the White House years she generally dealt with unwanted emotions by plunging into new and exciting work or mind-absorbing details. ER engineered her life. She assigned, perhaps even enjoyed, barriers and surrogates for her feelings. In addition to Henrietta Nesbitt and Lorena Hickok, to whom ER once wrote “your vehemence always makes me calm,” there were her uncontrollable, rambunctious dogs.
Camouflaged by her considerate and gracious manner, ER’s aggressive side was indirect. She initially went everywhere accompanied by two unruly dogs. At the end of each day, she walked Tommy to the gate for a final conversation, and to exercise her dogs. Unfettered, they barked and growled, leaped and frolicked. One night her little Scottie, Meggie, became “very obstreperous.” ER wrote Hick: “barking loudly,” she chased “a rather terrified woman with a little boy, who was peacefully walking home past the White House.”
ER’s Scottie and police dog, Major, were loyal to her and jealous of her attentions. Major was a present from Earl Miller, who trained him to protect his lady—to be suspicious of quick or sudden movements and to prevent anybody from getting too close. Once Major bit Hick on the elbow as she tried to loosen a stuck zipper for ER. Hick was amazed, since she considered herself one of Major’s pals.
Though he was a large distracting presence, ER nevertheless brought her German shepherd to her first press conference. But Major barked at anybody who spoke, except ER. His behavior became so agitated that he was led away in disgrace. According to Bess Furman, Major preferred men in blue uniforms with brass buttons to the women of the press. Over time, both dogs nipped and growled without discrimination—friends, politicians, diplomats.
Major bit Arkansas Senator Hattie Caraway on the arm, during ER’s first large Gridiron Widows party. ER was fond of Hattie Caraway, who, during the 1924 congressional hearings on the Bok Peace Prize and World Court, had protested the brutal questioning ER and Esther Lape endured. After Bess Fur-man wrote of Major’s indiscretions, Meggie bit her on the face during a drive with ER, requiring several stitches. After other incidents, ER finally agreed to part company with her dogs. “That was a sad day for me and no one thought it wise to say too much to me about dogs for a long time.”
One might argue that ER had an imperious temper, even a cruel streak. But saints and melancholy Griseldas are generally unconscious of such impulses, and tend to regret them when confronted by their impact.
Moreover, neither anguish nor spite settles the mystery of ER’s support for Mrs. Nesbitt. A continual source of household unrest, she also contradicted many of ER’s deepest convictions. Beyond FDR’s state of general annoyance, her guests were discomforted, her friends insulted, her staff disturbed. Nobody was excluded from Nesbitt’s sense of order. Upset by those who burned cigarette holes in the tablecloths, she asked ER: “Do you think the President can keep an eye on the tablecloths?”
That was too much for ER, who snapped “Of course not!”
Undaunted, Mrs. Nesbitt ordered a butler to keep his eyes peeled for offenders. He, alas, returned “grinning.” FDR had burned “a hole himself, and when he saw it, he looked around guilty-like, and put his salt cellar over it quick.”
ER’s guests made demands, and Mrs. Nesbitt bristled at their presumptions, their manners, their clothes. “Some of the house guests behaved as if they were in a hotel.” But ER “never complained.” “With Mrs. Roosevelt it was intellect that mattered. I don’t believe she noticed a person’s color any more than she did their dress.”
But the First Lady’s efforts to democratize the White House bothered Henrietta Nesbitt. Imperious with the staff, she had contempt for “foreigners,” and was rude to international dignitaries: “Usually for Orientals and South Americans we had a lot of sticky and colorful sweets.”
According to Lillian Rogers Parks: “Getting around Mrs. Nesbitt became a way of life.” One day in preparation for a visiting Latin American head of state and his family, she told the staff: “Don’t bother to put the good linen sheets on the beds for these people.” The maids “marched right into the guest room and put on the finest sheets we could find.”
Mrs. Nesbitt’s attitude resulted in tension and ill will, but ER ignored it. When ER entered the White House, she was told that she had to cut the household budget by 25 percent. To do so, she fired the resident staff, which was white, and replaced them with black staff, most of whom had been in service with her for many years. She explained that it was easier for white employees to find alternative jobs in Depression America.
Katherine Buckley, who had been chief cook for seven years, wrote a bitter letter to Jim Farley on behalf of the fired staff: “I consider it a disgrace to our [Democratic] party to place colored help in the positions that we now hold. Some form of preference should be given to those of us who serve with honor and efficiency….”
Farley sent the correspondence on to ER, who replied to Buckley that she ”grieved very much” over the need to let anybody go, but “government expenditures have to be curtailed…”:
I have had my own servants for a great many years. They happen to be colored, because I had colored servants when I lived in Washington, and have kept on with the same ones or their friends ever since; but the question of their being white or colored has nothing whatever to do with dismissal….
You will understand I know, that one does get attached to the people one is accustomed to, regardless of their race….”
But then ER’s black staff was supervised by Mrs. Nesbitt, who was outraged when ER extended her belief in workers’ rights to the White House staff: The First Lady simply announced one day that “the eight-hour day had to be. It doubled our expenses, and also the help got the day and a half free every week.” Despite ER’s generous benefits, some still “grouched”. In the beginning, “the girls had worked all day, and the butlers, too, and not a peep out of them.” It left Mrs. Nesbitt exhausted.
She had expected to find support for her views from Franklin’s mother. But when Sara Delano Roosevelt visited “during these troubles,” she agreed with ER. “Mrs. James” and the First Lady “had more in common than the Republicans seemed to think….”
Since ER fired servants when necessary, including several who drank or in any way caused trouble, one must pause to consider her unusual attitude toward Mrs. Nesbitt. Why did she protect the household’s most continual source of discontent, who relentlessly distressed her husband’s epicurean tastes?
Competitive and controlling, ER was politically direct, but emotionally evasive. Many of her intimates had reason to notice that when hurt or discontented, ER would withdraw, become detached. When her clear blue eyes turned to ice, warmth drained from the very walls of the room. Without a word of anger exchanged, ER could freeze the stoutest heart. ER’s long-term loyalty to Mrs. Nesbitt might then be best understood in terms of her relationship to FDR.
According to Lillian Rogers Parks, Mrs. Nesbitt had a most determined “contempt for the desires of the President.” If he ordered hot coffee, he might get cold tea. “If he ordered something special, she just ignored it.” And every culinary thing she touched seemed to turn to gruel. While Mrs Nesbitt did not personally do the cooking, “she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined one way or another.”
But FDR could have demanded her removal. Although he side-stepped Mrs. Nesbitt’s tyranny, he consented to her tenure. To do otherwise would have destroyed the first couple’s hard-won balance of power. Over the years, “his” people sent gift baskets filled with delicacies from around the country and the world. Neighboring hotels increasingly received White House orders. Some believed he took such frequent trips home to Hyde Park because of his mother’s exquisite chef. His friends were ever mindful of his favorite foods and from every trip hunters and fishermen sent their game—pheasants, turkeys, quail; and every sort of fish, smoked, broiled, baked. Generous offerings arrived well prepared, and ready to serve.
Domestic matters were never ER’s favorite domain. She was convinced that women’s energy, encouraged and unconfined, would change the world. It was the essence of her philosophy, her creed, and it enabled her to become the most loved, most controversial, most hated, and most effective First Lady in U.S. history. But as First Wife, her flaws were fabled. Eleanor Roosevelt was nobody’s idea of a homebody.*
*Bess Truman finally replaced Henrietta Nesbitt—for insolence. During the summer of 1945, the new First Lady had been assigned to bring a stick of butter to her bridge club’s pot luck luncheon. But Nesbitt refused: The White House was rationed like any other house, and no butter could be removed. “That was the last straw. All the weeks of unwanted brussels sprouts…” ended over that stick of butter.