During the summer of 1934 ER began to acknowledge, to herself at least, that she did not actually want an exclusive relationship. Once she realized she could not satisfy Hick’s demands for exclusive time and their mutual expectation of private moments, ER understood that she had contributed to their problem by making promises she could not keep.
For years ER embraced a fantasy of her future retirement, in which she would be content to live a nonpublic existence. She encouraged Hick to join that romantic fantasy and consider where they might live, what remote country space they might build together. She spoke earnestly of a future life of privacy, shared work and travel. For now, public issues were her priority. Hick understood that, but still believed they had a right to exclusive time together. As their differences grew, ER sought to protect their changed relationship, convinced it would all work out, somehow.
After ER joined FDR, Hick returned to Bill and Ella Dana’s ranch and Bill became Hick’s boon companion. They enjoyed many of the same things—the peace of the countryside, roaring laughter, a good stiff drink, political conversation—and they enjoyed each other’s company. Above all, Bill offered Hick a delightful cottage on the Dana estate on Long Island’s South Shore. Hick was to live in the “little house” in Mastic for over twenty years.
Doris Dana, Bill’s daughter, recalled that they went fishing in the morning, drove around much of the day, talked for hours. Around the place, they dressed alike, in corduroy knickerbockers or work pants, big hunting boots, checkered Western shirts, and great floppy hats in the rain; and they laughed alike—loudly, deeply, with gusto. But in August 1934, Hick seemed surprised that the Danas enjoyed her company—even without ER’s presence. ER replied impatiently: “For heaven sake why shouldn’t they like you for yourself? They are genuine people.”
Hick was resourceful, and never wanted to be a burden or a bore. But there were days when she hated her life, days when she knew that she had made some seriously wrong choices.
After the summer of 1934, she tried to pull away from ER, to create a new life, restore aspects of her old life and professional successes. But ER always pulled her back.
On the road for FERA and alone in strange towns, Hick sent letters detailing her gourmand pleasures, accompanied by martinis and bourbon, wine and cigarettes. She knew she was wrecking her health. Her feet were swollen and sore; she had trouble breathing, disliked exercise, lacked stamina. She was stressed and depressed, and she ground her teeth in her sleep. Her gums bled, her teeth loosened. She needed dental care.
Hick was in fact unhappy in a romance she could neither control nor walk away from. It would be better, she occasionally assured ER, if they just did not see each other. But that was not Hick’s first choice, and ER dismissed it as ridiculous. When Hick seemed most aloof or disappeared for a week, ER drew her back with renewed promises for the future; and her magic was compelling. The chemistry was forceful. And so their relationship continued, each trying to minimize the unpleasant moments, each trying to accommodate the other. Although they each made a generous effort, they moved from vastly unequal spaces, with very different expectations.
ER did not want to be free. But she wanted mobility, and spontaneity. She wanted to be able to move quickly and casually from the intimacy of a private conversation to the intensity of politics. She wanted, above all, to be unconfined.
Although she always denied it, her life was now driven by one simple fact: Her public life was her chosen life. She would always long for quiet moments with intimate friends, and she needed to be needed. Hick needed her; Earl Miller needed her; the people of America needed her. Increasingly, she embraced an ever-widening field of public activity, and an ever-growing community of new and cherished friends.
As ER scheduled her public life, routinely full eighteen-hour days—she also reserved some part of each day for joy.
Her morning rides through Rock Creek Park, afternoon swims in the pool with Franklin or alone, and long contemplative walks enabled her to concentrate and work effectively, often until three in the morning. But “joy” for ER depended upon her private friendships—especially when they advanced causes she cared about. As one considers the people ER toured around Arthurdale, for example, one appreciates her expanding network—and her ability to weave into each day work and pleasure.
Gertrude Ely, who became one of ER’s closest friends, went to Arthurdale with her in 1934. “We drove there, just the two of us, [she] at the wheel of her open convertible. She was so happy, yet so busy. That’s a good combination.”
It was a good combination, for which she relied on women like Gertrude Ely, a public-spirited philanthropist and activist. Like ER an organizer of the Junior League and League of Women Voters, she was an old friend who shared many of ER’s interests, including birth control, world peace, racial justice, affordable housing, and social security. Fun-loving and adventurous, in 1931 Gertrude Ely was part of a merry but curious trio to tour the Soviet Union. Her companions were Nancy Astor and George Bernard Shaw.
ER spent significant time over the decades at Ely’s home, especially when she sought privacy. Ely would casually tell other guests, often her young musical protégées, “I have a friend here for the weekend,” and they would be astonished when ER came down to join them for dinner.
There was yet another side to ER that enjoyed spontaneous adventure, carefree companionship. She spent two weeks hidden in the Adirondack Mountains with Earl Miller, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and dancers Tiny Chaney and Eddie Fox.
ER’s time at Miller’s Camp Dannemora at Chazy Lake had been restful in 1933, and was even more fun in 1934. It was “absolutely quiet and peaceful and lovely,” when ER wrote Hick that she hoped that she too was getting into “the right frame of mind to enjoy life.”
Their turbulent vacation had marked their friendship: “I’m afraid you and I are always going to have times when we ache for each other and yet we are not always going to be happy when we are together….” In contrast to their tensions, ER wrote effusively about her frolics at camp. Her day began at 7:30, when “we all, except Nan, did calisthenics in our bathing suits on the porch.” They hiked mountain trails, played wild games, and somehow nobody intruded on her quest for quiet time, when she read, wrote letters, and contemplated the upcoming political campaign. ER proudly noted their various skills: As a straight shooter, Tiny was “about as good as Earl. She has the steadiest hand I ever saw.” She wrote nothing of her own prowess with a pistol, although, when asked, she acknowledged she mostly hit the bull’s-eye.
ER’s hands were rarely still. When she did not read, she knitted, especially during long philosophical conversations on the porch in the evening. She wrote Hick that “your sweater is getting on, as I can knit without being rude.”
One day ER sat unrecognized “with three elderly ladies and listened to their gossip: ‘Uh! She is a dancer? I suppose that’s her husband.’ On my part blank indifference and apparent deafness! Three years ago I would have hated yesterday. I was amazed what a long way I have come in indifference to what people think!”
When Hick asked if she were really happy, in that place with those people, ER answered: “Yes I am happy here and … I was analyzing [the reasons] today. Perhaps the real one is that I think I am needed and wanted … I suppose that is why I enjoy being with Anna and John, so often with the boys I feel tolerated! What curious creatures we are.”
In 1934 Earl needed ER more than usual. On 24 June ER wrote Hick: “It is hard for me ever to believe in anyone having a nervous breakdown but I can see Earl has had one and is working hard to pull out.” Evidently, Earl’s unhappy marriage, which ER had encouraged, and his abiding sense of loneliness wore him down.
On 14 August, the anniversary of her father’s death, ER visited Elinor Morgenthau, whose mother was failing, and who felt hurt and neglected by ER that summer. ER wrote Morgenthau:
I can’t think what I did to make you feel I didn’t want to hear from you this summer. In fact, I did very much and missed having no letters and thought of you often….
I’m so sorry about your Mother and I know how you are feeling for it is much worse to watch someone you love suffer than suffer yourself. Poor darling, you have so many troubles and never seem to get a real rest. I’m going to try to plan in early Nov. to take you away for a long week end!
Friendships are always important to me and please don’t ever think the opposite no matter what stupid things I do which hurt your feelings. It is never intentional.
Hick evidently analyzed the reason ER’s friends seemed disgruntled, and ER agreed:
Yes, dear, you are right, I give everyone the feeling that you have that I’ve “taken them on” and don’t need anything from them and then when they naturally resent it and don’t like to accept from me, I wonder why! It is funny I know and I can’t help it something locked me up and I can’t unlock!
ER’s reference to her inability to “unlock” has been used to “prove” an amazing variety of emotional and physical limitations. The wonder of her life is that despite all limitations, all childhood hurt and adult complexity, ER protected herself from further pain as best she could, while indulging her habit of emotional curiosity and commitment. The barriers she created to protect herself were not barriers to loving. She cherished Hick, and also Earl, because they had determinedly crashed through her protective barriers. Her aloof, seemingly cold demeanor, so forbidding to some, had represented a challenge to them. ER, in turn, responded to their persistence, trusted and felt secure with them. She felt needed by them, depended on their love, and intended to preserve it.
Actually many of ER’s old friends were dismayed by how much of her heart she chose to unlock. They considered some of her new friendships, and activities, fraught with abandon. ER tended to ignore the tensions and endless jealousies that marked her many circles. When her friends were unavoidably thrown together, she trusted in everyone’s good manners, and spent her time precisely with whom she pleased.
With her merry band at Chazy Lake, ER was mostly anonymous—until they made headlines: Their little motorboat grounded on a rock in the middle of the lake and ran out of gas. Neighbors saw their plight, rowed over with gas, and pulled them back into the water.
FDR sent a telegram glad that all were safe; but it was too embarrassing for a Roosevelt to run aground in a rowboat. Would his wife henceforth please remember to tank up, or manage to stay out of the papers. ER’s summer frolic continued when her party joined FDR’s at Hyde Park. By month’s end, Hick felt ER was at peace with herself and her life. But ER assured her:
F was amused by your comment. No dear, I am not at peace with God and man, not even at all times with myself so you need not be afraid of me….
Oh, dear one, what wouldn’t I give to have you here with me tonight and … be able to take care of you. I always feel that you and Earl need me more than anyone when things go wrong for neither of you have anyone nearer to whom to turn and whom I must remember not to offend.
Harry Hopkins and his wife arrived at Hyde Park for Labor Day weekend, to discuss his European tour of relief work and housing. Although in Germany during Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, which announced his “thousand-year Reich,” he said nothing about it. Nor did he publicly refer to any of the fascist activities that made headlines and coincided with his tour through Germany, Italy, and England. But his visit reinvigorated the president’s goals for the New Deal.
Hopkins’s study of Europe’s social insurance reconfirmed his commitment to public works programs and job security. Above all, Hopkins believed, a government program of economic or social security depended upon the creation of work: full employment.
Hopkins’s weekend visit launched America’s first national and permanent Social security program. Current New Deal laws were limited state by state, needed to be refunded by Congress annually, and were regarded as emergency measures. New Dealers now believed the economy faced permanent conditions of unemployment and distress, and FDR appointed an Advisory Committee on Economic Security to begin work after the November elections.
As the 1934 campaign heated up at summer’s end, fascist rumbles out of Europe and violent industrial reprisals against union activities within the United States encouraged New Dealers to be bold. ER argued repeatedly that the New Deal had so far “only bought time,” that so much more needed to be done. Now, she wrote Hick with delight that FDR was in a “militant” mood. “He is very angry with [Budget Director] Lewis Douglas for choosing this moment to resign though he is glad to have him out.” ER was interested that FDR was able to work “his rage out by having a good time” at the Morgenthaus’ annual clambake.
Lew Douglas had opposed all public relief and public works measures. A conservative representative of the business community who wanted a balanced budget, he timed his resignation to the midterm elections without warning—which seemed to FDR a personal betrayal. Shortly thereafter, Douglas joined the Liberty League to attack the New Deal, and FDR personally. FDR called Morgenthau over to Hyde Park the morning of the clambake to announce: “Henry, in the words of John Paul Jones, we have just begun to fight!”
At the party that evening, FDR sang with vigor, and had the happiest time in recent memory. Since he became president, he had not seemed to his closest family and friends “so jolly as he was that night.”
During this time of action within the Roosevelt household, a tone of tenderness toward Hick, rather missing in August, returned to ER’s letters. She sent Hick a photograph that Tiny had taken of her—”I thought you might like to have it”—along with long letters that “take you worlds of love and I wish I could lie down beside you tonight and take you in my arms.”
Hick worried that Lew Douglas’s departure would hurt FDR, and the conservative press was bitter against alleged New Deal excesses. But ER was unbothered; “the papers don’t worry me as much as they do you.”
In the long minuet of their relationship, Hick now pulled back, and ER was mystified that Hick had failed to send her schedule. She went to Hopkins to learn Hick would return on the 15th. “I would die if you were that near and I didn’t see you till the 23d.”
In September, ER spent time with Earl, whose marriage was about to end in divorce—which evidently pleased him; and consoled Tommy, whose marriage was also about to end in divorce.
While at Val-Kill with Nan and Earl, ER awaited news of her son James, who had disappeared during a sailing regatta in a terrible storm. All the boats were in except his. ER and James’s wife, Betsey, spent seven hours on the phone, “getting Coast Guard & naval boats out & we didn’t want to tell Mama & at midnight he was reported in Portland & we just talked to him, 180 miles away from the place he was supposed to be! It’s funny—how calm you are when … something serious is hanging over you. I felt queer in the pit of my tummy but perfectly fatalistic and numb.”
On the 12th, ER wrote Hick from Newport, where she spent her obligatory annual weekend with Cousin Susie: “Well your photograph is on my desk and I will try to behave tonight.” Dinners at Newport, surrounded by Republicans and her most social relatives, were always difficult. But this time much of Rhode Island was on strike, and “with Myron Taylor [president of U.S. Steel] on one side of me and [Rhode Island Governor Theodore Green] on the other,” ER feared she would be indiscreet, or explode.
A national textile strike called by the United Textile Workers was under way, and virtually every factory along the East Coast from Rhode Island to Florida was engulfed by or threatened with violence. A Democrat, Governor Green told the Rhode Island legislature that the textile workers of Providence represented a “communist uprising.” But unionists protested industry’s failure to live up to their codes, including the abolition of child workers and minimum wage provisions.
FDR appointed John Winant, New Hampshire’s liberal Republican governor, to chair a special board of inquiry when ten strikers were killed and scores wounded in the South. In Georgia, National Guardsmen rounded up 116 women and men, white union workers, and put them in what the press called a “concentration camp.” Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge loathed FDR and despised the New Deal, which encouraged unionism. He and other conservatives were determined to crush this strike. It was their declaration of war against communism, and against the New Deal.
Desperate for a settlement, Winant’s committee and the union settled for a tragic compromise that left the union unrecognized, the strikers unprotected, and the deal a disgrace. FDR signed it, but no peace was thereby restored.
The textile strike highlighted America’s new battlefields. After Winant’s settlement, employers ridiculed the idea of national arbitration, and Southern industrialists vowed to rid the region of unionists. The vicious episode dramatized the urgency behind Senator Robert Wagner’s independent labor bill, intended to protect against just such events, siderailed by the 1934 Congress. For ER, so long a WTUL activist, industrial violence against unionism was a dreadful development.
To fortify herself before her Newport dinner, ER had lunched with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read at their Connecticut estate, Saltmeadow. They too deplored antiunion violence, and ER wrote Hick, “You would like them…. Darling I must dress. I love you and how I dread the next few hours. I hope someone is praying for me.”
Ultimately the dinner was a courteous affair. FDR had once said that “Myron was a moron,” but ER was surprised to find Myron Taylor interesting, and found she actually liked him. “The strikes are bad and I hate seeing soldiers and guns used, it makes me sick,” but the violent situation kept the governor away from dinner.
Happy to leave Newport, ER drove with Louis Howe from his home in Horse Neck Beach near Fall River to Cape Cod, where she particularly enjoyed Provincetown. Optimistically, ER wrote Hick: “I think you’d like it—I’ve not been bothered at all on this trip by reporters so we might get away with it.”
At Cousin Maude’s in Portland, Maine, ER was joined by her daughter and John Boettiger. “They sat on my bed last night and talked and though you know that kind of happiness can’t last, it is nice to have it for a time!” On her way home ER stopped in Cambridge to visit her sons.
ER and Hick arranged for their reunion to coincide with ER’s fiftieth birthday in New York: “I’ll be driving Anna down on Sunday as she takes the midnight to Washington—so don’t be worried if she appears…. Tommy has a key and sleeps on the 4th floor but she won’t bother us!” There was a hint of anxiety in her letters as she assured Hick that “we will have a peaceful time.”
But they were interrupted by her daughter’s medical emergency, and ER apologized: “I wish I had not had to leave you last night, tho of course I wanted to [visit Anna in the hospital]. You are a grand person dear, & don’t ever think I don’t appreciate what you are going thro for me.”
Hick was again disappointed and ER felt in part a failure. Her solution was to persuade Hick to live in the White House whenever she was in Washington. But even as a live-in member of the household, she had very little time with ER.
That autumn for the first time a First Lady actively participated in a political campaign. ER campaigned vigorously for Caroline O’Day, who ran for member of Congress at large for New York State. A position that no longer exists, it was tantamount to senator—the “congressman-at-large” represented the entire state.
Supported in her decision to campaign by Louis Howe and FDR, and occasionally accompanied on the stump by her mother-in-law, ER dismissed newspaper attacks as “funny.” Besides, she enjoyed every minute of it—the speeches, the “very big crowds,” the partisan hoopla.
This one was for the women. ER’s original political team, who had been “trooping for democracy” since 1920, now campaigned for one of their own. Caroline O’Day, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and ER were the Four Musketeers of New York State. Caroline O’Day ran for Congress with the men of the party behind her. FDR wanted her in Washington, and everything she and ER most cared about was on the agenda—women’s rights and opportunities, labor rights, Negro rights, the World Court, international peace, social security—and she had a chance to win.
O’Day ran against a reactionary Republican attorney, Natalie Couch. Blunt in the political fray, ER considered Couch dreary: “I’m sorry to say that I thought Miss Couch made a rather terrible speech and I shall be really sorry if she is elected.”
ER was glad to be back “at my old work.” “I like being in a campaign and with people I know again.” She ignored all opposition, and served as Caroline O’Day’s finance chair. She was delighted to support a remarkable friend who had given so many years of her life to the women’s movement and to social service, she said almost every day, in her speeches to large audiences throughout the state:
I think that Mrs. O’Day represents in herself the real reason why most women enter politics, which is in order to achieve changes in our social organization which they become convinced can be reached only through government.
That was a theme ER had consistently repeated since her 1928 article “Women Bosses,” when she wrote that men go into politics to win elections and women go into politics to change the world: “The vast majority of women, I believe, turn to politics as the only means through which to accomplish the ends they seek.”
ER’s long friendship with O’Day served to contradict that false “theory that women cannot work together or for each other…. I never knew Mrs. O’Day to be jealous of anyone…. It has been a pleasure and privilege to work with her and under her.”
In Buffalo on 25 October, over a thousand women attended ER’s first debate against Couch, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. The audience was volatile. Although all speakers were warmly received at first, ER became crimson with outrage when Natalie Couch was booed. She was applauded when she attacked the Roosevelt administration for extravagance, but booed when she announced: “The people of the United States realize they no longer have a republic.”
ER was the last speaker of the evening, and as reported in The New York Times began by scolding the booers. She admired “the League of Women Voters because we always listen to all points of view … because we know that all … opinions expressed … are truthful and are wholly worthy of our respect whether we agree with them or not.”
Natalie Couch stood and bowed to ER, and the audience reunited in a round of applause. Then ER described the difference between Couch and O’Day, between traditional Democrats and Republicans: Couch wanted a balanced budget, and business incentives to the business community to lower the unemployment rate, which would reduce the relief rolls. But nobody sincerely believed that kind of trickle-down economics ever happened. How, ER asked, could a balanced budget be justified while so many remained unemployed, and suffered? “Are you going to stop feeding the hungry …?”
Against all criticism, ER insisted: “I am acting as an individual…. I believe in certain things, and I think a person who does believe in certain things has the right to support them.”
To charges that as First Lady she used her position unfairly, she replied: “As a citizen I too must live up to what I think is right.”
It was ER’s kind of political season, and she did not miss an opportunity. She attacked all those who attacked the New Deal, and she attacked especially her husband’s enemies. “Hammering a fist into the palm of her hand and raising her voice,” ER told twelve hundred women in Syracuse that the critics of her husband’s administration were howling in the hollow. New Deal programs were “wasteful” only if the people helped were to be wasted:
We have short memories. In the Spring of 1933 people came to Washington and said, “Take our business. Do anything with it to make it run.”
Now the sick man is better and doesn’t like “regulation.” He wants to get back and make as much profit as possible. He doesn’t think about his neighbors. But the only good we care about is the good of the people.
ER emphasized that the NRA codes, under vicious attack, were “made by the industries themselves.” “Now the industrialists try to pretend that they were imposed.” As for government borrowing, ER considered it “a choice between two evils,” debt or widespread misery.
Caroline O’Day was a lifelong pacifist, and her international views were absolute. In 1934, ER shared them: “The time is coming when we will discover that there are wars that are not worth having.” In war there are no final victories, and “no question is permanently settled.” ER believed in defense but wanted to take “every step toward peaceful solutions.”
During the campaign, Hick lived most of the time in the White House, and ER’s whirlwind schedule was unrelenting. There were also missed moments, and mixed signals:
I am sorry you were hurt dear. But weren’t you a bit hasty? I was back at 6:45 & lay on the sofa and read from 7:15–7:45 which was the time I had planned for you. I do plan times dear one to be with you but you have been here a good deal and the steady routine gets on your nerves….
I am sorry & cross with myself for not thinking ahead … but I wouldn’t give up our times together and our happiness for these little troubles. You have been a brick and don’t think that I don’t know how hard it is.
Surely that note, and stingy half hour, added to their troubles.
On 1 November, ER delivered her last major speech for Caroline O’Day at a dinner attended by eight hundred notable Democrats and party leaders at the Hotel Biltmore. Independent third party candidate, who mostly ran against ER’s presence in the campaign, attorney and Great War veteran Dorothy Frooks “crashed” the dinner, to confront ER. Daisy (Mrs. Caspar) Whitney, who chaired the meeting, refused to allow her to debate, although ER agreed to answer any questions she might have from the floor. But she failed to ask any questions. According to The New York Times, “Miss Frooks’s presence was unknown to the large audience. Although Mrs. Roosevelt passed within arm’s length of her as she left the dining room, Miss Frooks made no effort to interrogate her.”
Hick worried about ER’s image:
Damn the newspapers! Here am I, keen to know what you said last night and how it went. And what do the papers carry? Complete and lurid accounts of Miss Frooks’ presence….
And I hated the stories. They didn’t say YOU ran out on it, but they certainly sounded as though Mrs. Whitney had placed you in the position of running out.
Hick was even more upset to read that ER wore “a blue velvet dinner gown,” while Miss Frooks crashed the gate “in street clothes.” Then, on leaving, ER was reported to have been “surrounded by a party of friends.” “Damn it—I hated it. It made you sound like a rotten sport. Of course the stories may be inaccurate….”
It all made Hick feel very radical, actually “red.” Her “red” feelings that night were compounded by the fact that she had just spent two full days “with relief clients.”
God damn it—none of us ought to be wearing velvet dinner gowns these days! Not when, as the chief attendance officer in the Baltimore public schools said today, 4,000 Baltimore children couldn’t go to school in September because they didn’t have clothes. As she was saying that, the thought of that new dress of mine and of you in a blue velvet dinner gown—even though you are my friend, and I love you—irritated me profoundly.
Despite her ire, Hick signed off with a gentle note: “Darling—in a blue velvet dinner gown or out of it … I love you….”
ER was at Hyde Park, in the process of writing Hick a long letter, when her protest arrived: “Miss Frooks borrowed a UP press pass to get into the dinner. Mrs. Whitney when she first saw her was unduly excited and insisted she must not speak.” ER invited her to ask questions, however, and she “never asked one. She could have several times during my speech for I paused and spoke slowly.” ER felt unjustly accused:
I stood in the hall, right outside the door for 15 minutes waiting to find my coat and many people came to talk and she could have done so—She is crazy and I did not want to go on the radio with her … so I’m writing her to reach her after [the] election and not answering her wires….
ER offered no apologies for her costume:
Darling, if we all stopped wearing velvet dresses there would be worse times than there are. If you have money you must spend it—now, so I don’t feel as guilty as you do. Of course if you could give it all where it would do the most good that would be grand but we can’t always do that! Don’t think me heartless but your vehemence always makes me calm!
Also, ER warned Hick not to let the wicked conditions she had witnessed in Baltimore swamp her emotionally. “If one feels too absolutely the misery around one, life becomes unbearable and one’s ability to be useful is really impaired….”
The elections of 1934 represented a great Democratic victory, and a mandate for the New Deal. Caroline O’Day won easily, and ER was credited with her success. New York’s new congresswoman-at-large protested the mean-spirited press coverage: “The up-State papers said Mrs. Roosevelt spoke for me because I was too dumb to speak for myself. I resent very much the intimation that Mrs. Roosevelt would speak for a dumb-bell.” Though clearly, O’Day said, “most people feel that ‘what is good for Mrs. Roosevelt is good enough for me.’”
According to some newspapers, Caroline O’Day would merely be a Roosevelt yes-woman in Congress. O’Day admitted that possibility, except if it came to America’s participation in war. In that event: “I think I would just kiss my children good-bye and start off for Leavenworth.”
In Arizona, ER’s great friend Isabella Greenway was reelected, but her various conservative friendships gave rise to rumors that worried FDR. ER wrote:
Franklin wants to know if by any chance you really are a financial backer of an organization called America First? It is doing much the same type of thing that the Liberty League is doing and apparently is causing a great deal of trouble. Some one is spreading the report that you are the financial angel. Having heard a number of such reports … I doubt if this is accurate, but I would be glad to have my doubts confirmed.
I never heard of “America First,” but have a vague memory that Mrs. [Phoebe] Hearst started something in behalf of Franklin in October ’32 called “America Incorporated” and we all contributed ten dollars. It’s wonderful what we hear about ourselves, isn’t it?…
Although Isabella was basically loyal to FDR’s program in Congress, she departed publicly in 1933 and again in 1934 when she stood up for the veterans’ bonus. Despite political disagreements, her friendship with ER was not diminished.
Initially, FDR sought to reassure and appease the corporate lobby that sought to destroy New Deal efforts and crush the burgeoning union movement. He tended to ignore growing discontent on the left, especially among workers and minorities.
Throughout the autumn, ER’s correspondence with NAACP leaders revealed the profound dismay of organized black communities and voters. Efforts to renew the fight against lynching in the upcoming Congress intensified in the face of new and grisly violence. In September ER met with Walter White about “the very unsatisfactory way” Negroes were integrated into the Homestead Division’s “subsistence colonies.” She asked Clarence Pickett to give her the details of the Interior Department’s efforts. Within weeks, Ickes’s office compiled a report, “What Actually Is Being Done to Integrate Negroes into the Various Projects.” Five projects were “under consideration,” in Tuskegee, Alabama; Newport News, Virginia; Orangeburg, South Carolina; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Dayton, Ohio. Tuskegee would consist of seventy-five homesteads, and land was “being purchased”; Philadelphia was to be a “bi-racial unit of 200 homesteads.”
In November 1934, the New Deal scored a zero in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. In “The Plight of the Negro Voter,” Oswald Garrison Villard—one of the NAACP’s founders, long identified with reform causes, and The Nation’s publisher—wrote a particularly bitter assessment:
Never before has the Negro voter in the North found himself in a worse quandary than today. Whatever the New Deal has done for the white workman it seems to have done less than nothing for the Negro…. Mr. Roosevelt is frankly not interested in the Negro problem; so far as I am aware a study of the Negro situation has not been one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s multitudinous activities.
Villard more correctly observed that the power of the Democrats continued to reside in the hands of Southern congressional bullies, McAdoo, Pat Harrison, and Joseph Robinson of Arkansas particularly, all “typical anti-Negro southerners.” Still, Villard admitted, the New Deal’s effort to restore prosperity might trickle down and benefit “all Americans,” while the Republicans “have absolutely nothing to offer anyone.” This party of “big business, great capitalists, and tariff barons” exclusively represented, in Theodore Roosevelt’s words, “the malefactors of great wealth.”
ER was not unmindful of Villard’s criticisms, and it engendered a correspondence with novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
After Fisher sent her Villard’s Nation editorial on federal aid to education, ER wrote: “there is much truth in what he says and it is always well said, but there are also some inaccuracies…. I always wish that he would be a little more temperate, because I think he would carry greater weight and not arouse antagonism, and at the moment we need all the influence we can get….”
ER added:
I have always been sorry that I did not have the courage to go and see you when you were living near Poughkeepsie. I wanted to so often, but felt I had no right to intrude upon you. I have so admired your books for so many years and have used your Hillsboro people—especially “Petunias, That’s for Remembrance”—so often in my classes to emphasize [that] my girls should see a little more of the world than their own surroundings, with an understanding eye and heart, that it would have been the greatest pleasure for me to have had an opportunity to talk with you.”
ER invited Fisher, then living in Vermont, to visit her at the White House. Fisher was delighted by ER’s letter, “with its unexpected news that you know my work.” She had also longed to meet, and had decided to make contact. “When I read what you said to the assembled DARs:
I fairly bounded into the air with joy—and relief—and pride in you! And now I cannot resist writing you to tell you that the mental health of this big country is being infinitely improved by your courage in saying right out, on so many occasions, what intelligent good citizens think but had never dreamed could be said in public by someone in authority. Yes, you are “in authority” now, by virtue of the extraordinary prestige your personality gives you.
While Villard deplored the conservatism of New Dealers, Molly Dewson worried about radical challenges. As Dewson made plans to attend FDR’s new advisory council assigned to develop Social Security legislation, she sent ER a letter filled with her concerns for the future—including evidence of growing radicalism in the youth movement, which she wanted ER to pass on to the president: “FDR likes his ear to the ground. He was talking to me about this difficulty of getting the young students on middle ground.” She enclosed an appeal for money from a socialist college society associated with Norman Thomas, which showed how far from “middle ground” they were: Their letterhead called for “production for use and not for profit,” and they actively recruited on college campuses:
Joseph P. Lash, Editor of the Student Outlook, Monroe Sweetland and George Edwards—have been remarkably successful in building up vigorous and militant groups on almost every campus they have been able to reach. They have enrolled four times as many students this October than … a year ago…. They are building a strong student movement….
Side by side with this radical activity on the campus however, we are hearing of the formation of new and sinister types of college organizations. We have the spectacle of college officials in the East and West expelling students for their participation in the work of building a new social order. College presidents are organizing fraternities and athletic groups into vigilante organizations. This necessitates greater activity on our part than ever before.
Their activity was facilitated by successful publications: Socialism’s New Beginning, The Plight of the Sharecropper, fascism, Traffic in Death, Campus Strikes Against War, and Italian Intellectuals Under Fascism. New pamphlets, ready for the printer, included The Negro in America by Abram Harris, George Streator, and Norman Thomas, and Labor Conflicts Under the NRA.
By 1934 the issues of youth leaders were increasingly ER’s issues.
Earlier Hick had also alerted ER to the radical path America’s students had embarked upon. In May, Hick had met a young FERA colleague in Phoenix:
[She is an] interesting and amusing little girl, three years out of Vassar, who now worked on a statistical survey on transients…. We spent the evening talking politics and economics. She is afraid there won’t be a revolution, and I’m afraid there will be—so our argument was rather amusing. She admires the President greatly, but doesn’t think he’ll be able to put his reforms over because of Congress and the selfishness and stupidity of both Capital and Labor. She gnashes her teeth over what Congress is doing … and over the [conservative] tactics of the A.F. of L…. She feels very earnestly that there ought to be a change in the whole system and that, if the President can’t swing it, we must have a revolution. What interested me most was that she said most young people she knows feel the same way! And she says the boys are for the most part dead set against war—that they say they’ll go to jail first. Boys who were at Yale and Princeton when she was at Vassar! Interesting, isn’t it?…
Unlike Dewson and Hick, ER was attracted by the causes that most engaged America’s young radical students. She looked forward to fighting for them with the support of new allies in Congress, especially Caroline O’Day. A reconstructed southerner, born in Georgia and educated in Paris, O’Day had long campaigned against lynching, and all forms of discrimination. A member of the NAACP board, she was a fighter and bridge builder.
Shortly after the election, ER joined her husband for two weeks at Warm Springs. ER had invited Earl Miller and the Morgenthaus, but they had other plans. Still, Tommy, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook arrived. Pleasant swims and strenuous rides through the countryside with Missy were diverting, and ER wrote several essays and columns with Tommy.
As ER and FDR drove together through the South, the impact of the New Deal was evident. Entire towns turned out for the president, “and everywhere they hang on his words.” They “do look better Hick in spite of all your gloom.” ER was pleased especially by all the “interesting things” being done by TVA “with cheap power.”
ER wrote Hick daily, but their painful experiences together in groups, including gatherings of the extended family, rendered all longing senseless: “Dearest I don’t wish you were here, you would hate it, but I miss you and think of you often and hope you are not too tired. My dear love and a tender kiss.”
Hick was alone in the White House with Anna and John in November 1934, and they had a provocative conversation about the mercurial intensities of romantic love and unbridled jealousy. Although Hick’s letters referred to are lost, ER replied:
Hick dearest. Your letters of the 15th, 16th & 17th greeted me this morning…. You have been gay and I think on the whole you sound as tho life has been pleasant…. You poor dear with those two young things but just be comforted for Anna at least can’t control her emotions & she knows it. They are sure of themselves for the moment just wait till their confidence is shaken….
You are right, there are only two ways to beat jealousy. One is not to love enough so as not to care if someone gives you less than you thought they might, the other is to love so much that you are happy in their happiness and have no more room for thoughts of yourself, but that is only possible to the old!
Then ER admitted her own discontent:
I behaved very badly last night to Nan & this A.M. to FDR so I am not exactly “persona grata” to him or to myself & the sooner I can get away gracefully the happier I shall be. I’ll tell you about it someday but it is too stupid to write about. Train quarters & this cottage are a bit cramped for me! … How discouraging it is that we must creep in this world. I wonder if we walk in the next, if there is one!
To Anna, ER explained her outburst in terms of one of FDR’s habits she despised: He enjoyed mixing stiff drinks that rendered his company at first loose-tongued, then uncontrollably looped:
I will probably fly home in a day or two. I’d like to leave at once but I injudiciously told Father I always felt like a spoil sport & policeman here & at times elsewhere, because I lost my temper last night. He’s been giving Nan a cocktail every night & for two nights it went only a little to her head but it was so strong last night that she not only talked incessantly much to their amusement but couldn’t talk straight & I felt he did it on purpose tho’ he swears he didn’t. Anyway he needn’t make them so strong…. I just revolt physically from anyone in that condition & that makes her unhappy & yet I hate to be the one that keeps her from taking anything so I’d give the world and all to be out of the way quite aside from the fact that I’d like to be where I could have an eye on you young lady! Father says however if I leave before I have to he will feel hurt so! I’m an idiotic puritan & I wish I had the right kind of sense of humor & could enjoy certain things. At least, thank God, none of you children have inherited that streak in me, it is as well to have some of Father’s ease & balance in these things….
ER’s upset in a situation that recalled those uncontrollable days at healing spas in Europe with her father released long letters of introspection. The situation was “disagreeable,” but she noted, “I am behaving fairly well I think.” She credited Hick for what she considered her new forbearance in such situations:
Between your efforts and mine, two grown people who ought long ago to be past all such foolishness, may be achieving something for themselves at last! I am glad at least I can laugh at myself even in my worst moments and I think you can also.
Hick sought to bolster her spirits:
Dearest: I don’t know what you did to Nan and the President, but I don’t believe you behaved very badly. Because it simply isn’t in you to behave very badly. The trouble is, dear, that most of us demand and expect too much of you—and this despite the fact that you really do give more of yourself to your friends than almost anyone else I ever knew. I suspect that at one time or another you’ve spoiled most of us. You did me. I say all this perfectly aware that I am the worst of the lot in the business of expecting and asking too much.
But, darling, I’m trying not to be that way any more, and—I’m going to succeed. I only ask you to be a little patient…. Though, I don’t think you’d be letting me down if you did lose patience with me. Anyway, we’re, most of us, pretty selfish—and you mustn’t worry about behaving badly, because you don’t, really.
ER replied: “Hick dearest, wouldn’t you, like every one else, spoil me if you could! Tommy will tell you, however, just how disagreeable I was. Nobody was demanding anything of me. I was lacking in a sense of humor!”
Hick spent most of November touring pockets of poverty along the Mason-Dixon line. Everywhere the meanest sentiments prevailed. Schoolchildren starved while school lunches, which consisted of bread and soup, were reserved for those who had absolutely nothing at home. Also, the NRA was mostly ignored, and industry was planning to get it declared unconstitutional. A labor leader she respected told her that the NRA had “made about as much dent on industry as a sparrow’s bill could make on an alligator’s back!”
On 18 December, ER’s holiday season was suspended and saddened by Mary Harriman Rumsey’s death. One of ER’s oldest friends, she was responsible for her first social activism in 1903, when she encouraged ER to join a small group of debutantes and college women who began to consider the poor. Mary Harriman founded the Junior League in 1901 and created the University Settlement House on Rivington Street where ER worked.
A fountain of magnetic enthusiasm, she was compared to “that youthful, winsome spirit with which Maude Adams endowed Barrie’s Peter Pan—the boy who never grew up. She is volatile and effervescent….”
An ardent patron of the arts, her life combined activism and sport. A member of one, of the first women’s polo teams, the Meadowlarks, Mary Harriman Rumsey was “one of the best horsewomen of her generation.” She arose at dawn on her birthday, Saturday 17 November, to join the Piedmont fox hunt near Middleburg, Virginia. But shortly after noon, her horse stumbled after clearing a stone fence, and rolled over her. Riding sidesaddle, clamped to her mount, she broke four ribs and fractured her right thigh. It did not seem life-threatening, but fatal complications developed.
She died on 18 December with her three children, Frances Perkins, and her brother Averell at her bedside. FDR had just appointed Averell Harriman to replace Hugh Johnson as head of the NRA, and he always credited Mary for his career. She “lured him to Washington,” where, she said, the New Deal marched with “humor and humanity to create a secure future” for consumers and workers, and “to put industry in its proper place.”
ER canceled all engagements for the next two days and sat with Frances Perkins during the funeral services at St. Thomas’s Church in Washington, then left with her that night for the burial at Arden.
Mary Harriman Rumsey’s death was devastating to ER’s small circle of confidantes. Their laughter-lit “air our minds” luncheons would never be the same. Isabella Greenway wrote: “The color seems to be wiped from the face of life with the going of Mary. I miss her a thousand ways over the hours….”
At her memorial ER contemplated the political loss of her “daring drive” just when the fight for economic and social security was under way, and the personal loss of her longtime ally, who believed as she did that “the sole reason for the existence of any government is to improve the condition of its citizens.”