The year 1935 opened with such promise that ER proclaimed it an “epochal” year. FDR’s State of the Union address on 4 January was a fighting speech that radiated confidence and launched the second New Deal:
Throughout the world, change is the order of the day…. In most nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal…. We seek it through tested liberal traditions….
We find our population suffering from old inequalities…. In spite of our efforts … we have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged….
We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear … the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well….
FDR’s powerful rhetoric was backed by specific plans to achieve “a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life,” including “decent homes.” And he repeated his June 1934 promise to “place the security of men, women and children of the nation first” on the national agenda. Specifically, he promised “a definite program for putting people to work” and a security package that included “unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, benefits for children, for mothers, for the handicapped, for maternity care, and for other aspects of dependency.”
Work would replace the dole. “To dole out relief … is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit…. Work must be found….” But not made work, leaf raking, paper removal, junk work; real work to promote dignity and self-respect at real wages.
Initially social security legislation included work security, which was to be federally administered and not subject to the whims of state control where regional habits threatened race equity. The federal government would establish a vast program of public works, which would permanently improve “living conditions [and create] future new wealth for the nation.”
These aspects of social security had long been demanded by the women’s social reform movement—by Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley. Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins were part of that movement, and now Frances Perkins chaired FDR’s cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security, which included Harry Hopkins.
All winter their plans progressed, and ER invited her mentors to the White House to contribute their thoughts. Lillian Wald wrote Jane Addams three weeks before FDR’s address: “Most Beloved Lady … Mrs. R. acts truly as if she had been brought up in the Settlement. All the things we were wont to talk over in our conspiracies are important to her happiness.” Wald also observed FDR carefully, and concluded:
[The president is] a wizard in many ways. I swear he is absolutely sincere and wants to get across the best things possible for the least personality on our continent…. It’s quite different of course than to have a great philosophy of economics or social fulfillment but he has the wish to have the country made a happy country for all who live therein….
Of course he sees too many people and they don’t all advise alike and there are too many things that pull upon his attention but not much more than upon his wife’s. They do team work….
On 17 January, FDR presented his social security package, which included unemployment compensation, old-age benefits, federal aid to dependent children “through grants to states for the support of existing mothers’ pension systems and for services for the protection and care of homeless, neglected, dependent, and crippled children,” and federal aid to state and local public health agencies, with a strengthened Federal Public Health Service.
In this speech, FDR still included work security, as championed by ER, the social workers, and Harry Hopkins—which correlated unemployment insurance “with public employment so that a person who has exhausted his benefits may be eligible for some form of public work.” The federal government was to assume half the cost of the old-age pension plan, “which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”
Only on health care did FDR waffle from the beginning. The medical profession, well organized and devoutly opposed to “health insurance,” caused the president to withdraw that provision from the report submitted by his Committee on Economic Security. He announced simply: “I am not at this time recommending the adoption of so-called health insurance,” although he said he intended to work with cooperating medical groups to find a compromise.
FDR wanted social security to be universal, simple, nondiscriminatory—as ER, Wald, Addams, and Harry Hopkins assumed it would be. According to Frances Perkins, FDR was adamant: “I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system.” It could all be operated out of post offices, just “simple and natural—nothing elaborate or alarming about it.” Every child at birth would receive a number; every unemployment claim and every old-age benefit would be delivered by the “rural free delivery carrier.” Social security was sent to Congress with FDR’s intentions clear: He did not intend to limit benefits to “just the industrial workers…. Everybody ought to be in on it….” But Congress greeted the legislation with acrimony; fierce debates raged throughout the spring.
After FDR’s speech, ER hosted the annual reception for the Supreme Court and then boarded the midnight train to New York to attend her daughter’s marriage to John Boettiger. A private ceremony was held at nine o’clock in the morning in the second-floor library of the New York City home that Sara had built for ER, FDR, and herself. Boettiger had resigned from the anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune and temporarily became executive assistant to Will Hays, Hollywood’s self-censorship officer. He and Anna rented a small apartment in New York, and Anna’s children, Sistie and Buzzie, remained at the White House to complete the school year.
On the train, ER wrote John a letter that reflected her own experiences as a young wife and daughter-in-law:
I won’t get a chance to talk tomorrow so this is a last word of motherly advice. You know I shall always want to help you both to be happy but never let me interfere & remember that Anna is I think rather like me, she’d always rather have the truth even if it is painful & never let a doubt or a suspicion grow up between you two which honest facing can dispel….
ER signed her letter “L.L.”—for “Lovely Lady,” John Boettiger’s name for his mother-in-law. Charmed by the endearment, she always used it in her letters to him.
ER returned to Washington to participate in one of FDR’s January initiatives, which the Senate took up immediately. For fifteen years, ER had been one of the lonely crusaders for the World Court. Despite his 1932 shabby convention deal with William Randolph Hearst, which was their most enduring public disagreement, finally, on 16 January 1935, FDR sent a message to the Senate:
The movement to make international justice practicable and serviceable is not subject to partisan considerations…. At this period … when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the U.S. has an opportunity to throw its weight into the scale of peace.
That brief message represented the culmination of a long campaign ER and her immediate circle had led. To secure peace through mediation, negotiation, international law, seemed to ER and her friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read the last chance to avoid another round of world carnage.
Fascist terror and rearmament, war in Asia and Latin-America heightened their sense of urgency. Should “outlaw” nations become dangerous, they would face a World Court with influence and authority, able to adjudicate differences and speak with a moral and united voice. They had championed America’s entrance into the World Court since 1920, and in January 1935 their efforts seemed about to be rewarded by Senate ratification.
The World Court represented an ideal the United States had promoted and endorsed in 1899 at the International Peace Conference at the Hague, which established a court for international arbitration. In 1902, TR was the first national leader to submit a case to that court. It concerned a commercial land dispute with Mexico that had “dragged on almost fifty years.” When the Hague ruling favored the United States, Jane Addams pointed out, Americans proudly championed international law.
But in the United States, “isolationism” swamped internationalism after the Great War. Except for international business ventures, any entanglement in Europe’s woes or membership in international organizations seemed to self-styled “isolationists” dangerous, un-American, wicked.
In April 1933, FDR went out of his way to assure California Senator Hiram Johnson that he would not raise the World Court controversy during the “hundred days” special session devoted to domestic legislation. Then came the collapse of the London Economic Conference, and on 14 October 1933 Berlin announced its withdrawal from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The American Foundation resumed its campaign for U.S. adherence. But in December, FDR told ER to inform Esther Lape that “politically speaking … it would be unwise to do anything about the World Court.”
In January 1934, following a conference with the president, Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas told the press that “the situation in Europe is so complex that this is not the opportune time to take up the World Court protocols.”
Lape was furious. She and Curtis Bok went to Washington to meet with FDR and present the results of their independent poll, which revealed widespread popular and Senate support: sixty-five senators favored the Court, sixteen were opposed, fifteen were doubtful.
With fascism on the rise and German rearmament well under way, it seemed important for the United States to send a signal of support for international law. Never impolite to ER’s closest friends, FDR told Lape he would consider action if the issue was “warmed up.” Then, “when he judges the atmosphere to be propitious,” he would, if he could, present it: “On this hope we rest.”
Lape, ER, Carrie Chapman Catt, and countless others warmed the issue up, as FDR suggested. They wrote articles, gave speeches, lobbied senators. Hearst was furious, and Lape considered it a great victory when he editorialized against their “propaganda.”
Congenial hearings were held in March 1934 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lape was pleased to have Catt and the women of the organized peace committees behind her. She wrote ER: “Everybody understands Franklin’s feeling—that he cannot place his personal prestige with the Senate behind everything, and that the whole legislative picture must be taken into account.” But the women were convinced: “If the Court comes up it will pass. Trouble is to get it up….”
Lape asked ER to attend the 1934 hearings, but she could not: “I am terribly sorry, but Franklin thinks that I had better not go to any hearings. I never go to either the code hearings or to any of the others at the Capitol….” She invited Esther and Elizabeth to stay at the White House. But Lape telegrammed her regrets: It “might on this particular occasion be embarrassing to you and even be interpreted as committing someone else to more aggressive line on court action than he wants to show at moment.” Moreover, Hearst ran “cartoons three times during past week,” and she was named among the “arch propagandists.” Lape stayed at the Mayflower with Narcissa Vanderlip and Curtis Bok.
After the hearings, ER sent Lape the sad news that although they were a great success FDR’s advisers were “all convinced” the World Court should not be brought up until after the 1934 congressional elections, since “it would just give Mr. Hearst another thing to pin his attack on. So I am afraid there is not much chance.”
On 24 March, Senator Hiram Johnson confirmed ER’s fears: If the Court was introduced, he warned, nothing else would get done. Johnson, who had voted against the Versailles Treaty, now announced that the World Court represented “the destruction of American sovereignty” and won an agreement to shelve the issue until Congress reconvened in January 1935.
The November 1934 elections had given the Democrats five more than the needed two-thirds majority, and a sufficient number of Republicans favored the Court to reassure ER’s circle. The First Lady entered the January 1935 debates with essays and speeches that earned her a reputation as one of America’s most vigorous peace advocates.
On 7 January, she wrote Hick about her “satisfactory day.” There were morning meetings, lunch with Tommy, a drive with Louis. And from three to five, she locked her door and with Tommy wrote three radio speeches and one article. Nan arrived at five for tea; at six ER swam with FDR, then read for half an hour: Pearl Buck’s latest novel, A House Divided, the final volume of her trilogy preceded by The Good Earth and The Sons, “and it is fascinating.”
During that routinely hectic day, ER wrote one of her most provocative and enduring speeches for Carrie Chapman Catt’s seventy-sixth birthday. Presented on 9 January 1935 at the tenth anniversary conference of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and published in the book Why Wars Must Cease, ER’s essay was in part a stirring rally for the World Court.
“Because the War Idea Is Obsolete” began with a headnote by George Washington: “My first wish is to see this plague of mankind [war] banished from the earth.”
ER set out “to prove” that although we have not “as yet recognized it,” in fact “the war idea is obsolete.” There were many traditions which humans clung to until they simply gave them up, because they were obsolete—and eventually it was commonly recognized that they were obsolete. Killing witches, for example, was once the rage throughout Europe and America. When “people revert” to the killing and torture of old women somebody calls a witch, “we now say they are crazy.”
But among nations “the war idea … hangs on … with outmoded and long-drawn-out cruelty.” However, ER wrote, war “no longer worked,” it no longer achieved its stated goals: During the American Revolution, “we desired separation from England and we achieved it.” During the Civil War, fighting had “two objectives.” Though “wasteful and costly” the Civil War “freed the slaves” and preserved a “unified nation.” Therefore, the war idea was not yet obsolete.
But the “world conflagration” of 1914–18 “proved for the first time in our history that the war idea is obsolete…. It did not achieve its objectives.” The United States fought, we were told, “to preserve democracy, to prevent the people of Europe from coming under the control of a despotic government which had no regard for treaties or the rights of neutral nations, and, above all, to end all future wars.”
In terms of those objectives, “these four years were absolutely wasted.” Then, at Versailles, the horror was compounded: Instead of “preventing future wars, the settlements arrived at have simply fostered hostilities. There is more talk of war today, not to mention wars actually going on in the Far East and in South America, than has been the case in many long years. The world over, countries are armed camps.”
Civilization itself was threatened by modern warfare. There was no moral gain, and it was not good for the soul.
Private profit is made out of the dead bodies of men. The more we see of the munitions business, of the use of chemicals, of the traffic in [armaments], the more we realize that human cupidity is as universal as human heroism…. If we are to do away with the war idea, one of the first steps will be to do away with all possibility of private profit.
She defined war as quite simply a lose-lose situation: All families suffer the same when their sons are killed in battle. Moreover, “economic waste in one part of the world will have an economic effect in other parts of the world. We profited for a time commercially, but as the rest of the world suffers, so eventually do we.”
ER rejected the widespread conviction that wars were inevitable; that human nature was warlike and thrilled especially to banners and cannons, trumpets and muskets. “That seems to me like saying that human nature is so made that we must destroy ourselves. After all, human nature has some intelligence,” and is demonstrably capable of “good will,” at least on an individual basis. Wars would end, therefore, when enough people worked to persuade “their government [to] find the way to stop war.”
ER’s speech was the clearest statement of her international views to date. She was proud to have it included in Catt’s book with essays by women she so admired—including Alice Hamilton, Jane Addams, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Woolley, and Judge Florence Allen. Why Wars Must Cease represented an urgent appeal to prevent the next war, which seemed so imminent, and so preventable.
Although Time, generally in favor of internationalist solutions, considered the World Court “the deadest political issue in the land,” the Senate debate was filled with fearful hyperbole. Isolationist “Bitter-Enders, the ragged remnant of 1919,” including Hiram Johnson and William Edgar Borah, joined by Louisiana’s Huey Long, did their rhetorical best to inflame fears about U.S. involvement in Europe’s hideous disasters should the United States join the Court.
Huey Long, with dramatic frenzy, shouted that this meant the end of American sovereignty, the end of everything: “We are being rushed … into this World Court so that Señor Ab Jap or some other something … can pass upon our controversies.”
Throughout the two-week debate, Hearst papers conducted an avalanche of opposition. From his retreat at San Simeon, Hearst “tossed his long, horsey head and charged.” His editorialists “throughout the land shrilled and thundered with the threat of war. No attack on the Court was too preposterous to be splashed across the front pages of Hearstpapers.” Moreover, his personal army of lobbyists descended on the Senate, met privately, made endless calls and unnamed deals.
Minnesota’s Senator Thomas D. Schall not only attacked “37,000 foreign agents in the U.S. now working for passage of the so-called World Court,” he roared: “To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations.” He also attacked ER personally, until majority leader Robinson interrupted him: “I am not going to yield [to allow Minnesota’s senator] to make one of his characteristic attacks on Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s radio priest, who broadcast nationally, led an incipient fascist movement that was crudely anti-Semitic, and his assault against the World Court included his charges that it would be dominated by Jewish money changers: America’s “national sovereignty” was about to be sacrificed on the altar of the international bankers, that well-known crowd dominated by Rothschilds, Warburgs, Kuhns, and Loebs. Vote no. Vote against the World Court. “Today, tomorrow may be too late … whether you can afford it or not, send your Senators telegrams … vote NO! …”
ER broadcast to counter Father Coughlin’s radio appeals against the godless, wicked World Court. She called for telegrams to illustrate the real “spirit of our country,” which was unafraid “to join the World Court … I beg of you to let your [senators] know at once….”
When the debate ended, on Friday afternoon, 25 January, prospects still looked favorable. But Senator Robinson agreed to a weekend recess. During that time, Hearst papers and Coughlin’s broadcasts unleashed a propaganda carnival: It was the duty of every loyal American to save the country. Wire your senator. Keep America safe from foreign entanglements, foreign wars, foreign plunder.
Over forty thousand telegrams rolled into the Senate Monday morning. Individuals, churches, Sunday schools in little towns all over America sent wires. Western Union hired thirty-five extra clerks; the telegrams were delivered by wheelbarrow. It was unprecedented. When the vote was taken on Tuesday, 29 January, the Court lost by seven votes. Of ninety-six senators, fifty-two voted for, thirty-six against, the rest absented themselves.
After the tally, “jubilant Hearstlings tumbled over each other in their rush to telephone San Simeon. No less than 15 Senators telephoned congratulations to Detroit.”
Privately, FDR thanked Senator Joe Robinson, and noted: “As to the 36 Senators who [opposed] I am inclined to think that if they ever get to Heaven they will be doing a great deal of apologizing for a very long time—that is if God is against war—and I think He is.”
Publicly, however, FDR did little to block the drift away from the Court. He did not go on the radio, and he failed to throw any of the mighty weight of his office into the fray. Time wondered if the president had “really been heart & soul behind the Court? The wisest answer seemed to be: No.”
When reporters trooped into his office the next day, FDR was dressed for his birthday “in a new grey homespun suit, a white rose and his best smile.” When asked about the World Court vote he said only: “I am sending a note to Senator Robinson thanking him for a very able and very honorable fight.”
ER, who had broadcast, trumpeted the Court at her press conference, and spoken at every available forum, including a great convention of Chautauquas that met at the White House, was devastated but did not criticize her husband.
Lape, who sat in the gallery throughout the World Court debate, was bitter about FDR’s failure to prepare Senate leaders: “The votes were there … but there was nobody on the floor to deal with perfectly simple questions, nobody really handled it. Robinson was the leader, but inadequate and F should have realized that….” It had been “a dreadful, dreadful experience,” and she blamed FDR: “If the President wants something, the men know it.” But even decades later, Lape was reluctant to criticize him: “The Court needed the. President’s leadership, but I don’t think there is any point making that point.”
Immediately after the vote, Lape canceled her expected visit to the White House—”I wasn’t fit for anyone’s dinner table”—and left Washington.
In her editorial for the Women’s Democratic News, ER called the World Court defeat a “serious set back in our efforts to deal peacefully with the rest of the world…. We need a court of law to build up a body of international law.” Now all the years of effort by genuine statesmen had been “brought to naught by a chain of newspapers and a limited number of broadcasts.”
Unreconciled to the defeat, ER nevertheless defended her husband. She replied to a disappointed letter critical of her husband’s public silence by a member of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War:
I doubt if any public word by the President would have helped matters much. He sent for every Democrat and Independent Senator and talked to him personally, besides sending his message. I am afraid that the pressure must come from the people themselves and, until it does, we will never become a member of the World Court.
Actually, FDR had not rallied senatorial support, and on 30 January, ER confided her deeper feelings to Hick: “I rather expected the vote to go as it did. We are so prone to be led by the Hearsts and the Coughlins and the Longs and I am only really sorry that I pushed FDR to try to pass it.” ER hoped especially that her efforts did not “imperil any of our other things!”
ER characteristically blamed herself, and was forever dismayed by the loss of what she considered the last hope for collective security in the struggle for democracy and peace. America’s rejection of the World Court was for her a personal defeat, as well as a political tragedy which carried a cruel and bitter message to the future.
Unknown to ER, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, also considered it a major diplomatic disaster: If the Court had passed, “our Government’s prestige in Europe would have been raised by about 50 percent.” Like ER, Dodd rejected the international debt question as a fraudulent argument. Shortly after the Court vote he met with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and explained why it was a chimera from a historical point of view: The United States had, from 1820 to 1850, repudiated over “200 million [dollars] of valid obligations and had failed to pay interest on nearly all obligations for a period often years.”
Dodd did not understand why the senators were not better informed, and was convinced that if they had had such facts before them prior to the vote “we should have had a different result.”
Other members of FDR’s team did not agree. Harold Ickes was among those who censured ER’s involvement. Ickes considered the vote a “decisive defeat” for the administration and blamed ER personally:
[Senators] were bitter in their criticism of Mrs. Roosevelt…. It does seem to me that she is not doing the President any good. She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think that she is harmful rather than helpful. After all, the people did not elect her President….
A shocking aftermath of the World Court defeat was an administrative assault against Esther Lape’s American Foundation: Federal tax authorities “served notice” that if the American Foundation continued its campaign for the World Court, it would lose its tax-exempt status. Lape blamed neither Morgenthau nor FDR, but that order silenced the American Foundation on international issues. World Court membership did not come up again until after World War II.
Lape never discussed the political decision to threaten the American Foundation’s tax exemption. But tax investigations and similar fiscal harassments were a bit of political hardball FDR had used against such dangerous enemies as Huey Long.
Defeated, and punished, Lape transferred the American Foundation’s “campaign of public education” to other issues of urgency, notably “public health, and medical care.” Lape and her allies prepared a national health care proposal for the upcoming social security debates.
Whatever bitter feelings ER may have felt after the Court defeat, she and Louis Howe managed to be amusing and “worked up some things” for FDR’s birthday dinner on 30 January. Then she joined Anna, Ruth, Elliott, Tommy, and Missy at the birthday balls, for “as short a time as I can manage!” But for weeks after what she realized was the final defeat for the World Court, she performed her obligations and chores within the grip of an unusually severe emotional depression. Until the spring, almost all her letters were despondent.
Her sense of personal loss and anguish was heightened by FDR’s continued refusal to address the ongoing lynching issue. Walter White was distressed that it went unmentioned in his State of the Union speech—despite the autumn lynching of Claude Neal, advertised in fifteen newspapers and broadcasts over the radio. Men, women, and children were invited to one of the most savage lynchings in U.S. history on 26 October 1934.
Over one hundred men stormed a county jail at Brewston, Alabama, to seize Claude Neal, accused of the murder of a white woman in Marianna, Florida, where he was transported and tortured to death before a frenzied crowd of cheering participants. After an orgy of unspeakable violence and mutilation, the charred, disfigured remains of a man hung from a tree in the courthouse square, and photographs were sold for fifty cents each.
When FDR was asked by reporters if he would now support the Costigan-Wagner bill, he asked for time so that he might “check up and see what I did last year. I have forgotten.”
Walter White sent ER the NAACP report that described the Marianna lynching and asked her if the Justice Department could not prosecute on the basis of the new Lindbergh law, since Neal had been taken across state lines. Attorney General Homer Cummings denied the law’s relevance, since no ransom was involved. ER wrote White: “The Marianna lynching was a horrible thing. I wish very much that the Department of Justice might come to a different point of view and I think possibly they will.”
Regretting that many people had “become more cynical regarding the attitude of the administration,” White asked ER to appear at a protest meeting at Carnegie Hall. ER dropped a memo into her husband’s bedside basket: “FDR I would like to do it, of course talking over the speech, but will do whatever you say.” He said, through a memo sent by Missy: “This is dynamite.” ER wrote White: “I do not feel it wise to speak … but I will talk to the President and see what can be done in some other way….”
White encouraged his constituents to remain patient, “saying that perhaps the President will send a special message to Congress. He wrote ER: “I wonder if you could advise me if my optimism is well founded. It would help during this very trying period to know that our efforts have not been in vain….”
ER replied:
I talked to the President … this morning. He wants me to say that he was talking to the leaders on the lynching question and his sentence on crime in his address to Congress touched on that because lynching is a crime. However he, himself, will write you more fully a little later on.
While FDR’s Southern strategy kept him aloof, ER worked ever more closely with the NAACP. She welcomed James Weldon Johnson’s invitation to attend a 12 February dinner to honor Arthur Spingarn’s twenty-one years as chair of the National Legal Committee of the NAACP and looked forward to visiting a controversial art exhibit at a major New York gallery—the NAACP’s “Art Commentary on Lynching.” It featured works by Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Thomas Benton, Julius Bloch, José Clemente Orozco, Harry Sternberg, Noguchi, William Gropper, and many others. Pearl S. Buck opened the exhibition, and there was vivid commentary written by Sherwood Anderson and Erskine Caldwell. The paintings and drawings were stark and blunt, including Reginald Marsh’s award-winning New Yorker illustration of a mother holding her child on her shoulders to get a better view, captioned “This is her first lynching.”
The New York Times called it a “macabre exhibition.” The New York World Telegram’s art critic wrote: “It is an exhibition which tears the heart and chills the blood … this is not an exhibition for softies. It may upset your stomach. If it upsets your complacency … it will have been successful.”
ER wanted FDR to support the Costigan-Wagner bill and did not intend to upset him with a political gesture he might deplore. She wrote Walter White:
The more I think about going to the exhibition, the more troubled I am, so this morning I went in to talk to my husband…. [He] said it was quite all right for me to go, but if some reporter … [described] some horrible picture, it would cause more Southern opposition. They plan to bring the bill out quietly as soon as possible although two Southern Senators have said they would filibuster…. He thinks, however, they can get it through.
ER decided, therefore, that it would “be safer if I came without any publicity or did not come at all.”
In the midst of negotiations regarding the lynching exhibit, an unfortunate incident confused ER’s NAACP friends, and embarrassed the First Lady. Ellen Woodward received a picture of “three namesakes of the President,” sent by Virginia’s director of women’s work, Ella Agnew. She thought the photograph “from the field” attractive and asked Woodward “to be sure that either Mr. or Mrs. Roosevelt sees it.” Woodward wrote ER: “We know that you receive many foolish things but the pickaninnies are right cute! Also we note that it took three children to bear the one name, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
ER replied: “Thank you so much for sending me the pictures of the little pickaninnies. They certainly are cunning and the President was very much amused.”
On Sunday, 13 January, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a story about the “New Deal Triplets,” thirteen-month-old Franklin, Delano, and Roosevelt Jones—Prince Edward County relief clients: “John and Mary Jones came on the relief rolls only a few weeks before the babies were born.” To demonstrate their appreciation, “they decided to name their offsprings after their benefactor….”
ER’s letter was published as part of the story. Woodward had sent it on to Agnew, who said it was taken from her personal files. Many apologies went around, as did angry letters, including one from a Negro club:
We wish to call your attention to the fact that the above term is highly resented by the Negro people. Feeling that your interest in this group would not willingly lead you to offer any offense, we respectfully bring this matter to your attention, confident in the belief that you will do whatever is necessary to correct the impression which its use has created.
ER replied: “I have your letter and assure you that no lack of respect was meant…. We always considered ‘pickaninny’ as a term of endearment and often use it for any child.” Although she was in the vanguard of considerable change regarding race relations, for ER language changed last of all.
Throughout February and March, White trusted in FDR’s good intentions, based on ER’s encouragement. But the waiting game was hopeless, and embarrassing for White. His own reputation was jeopardized by FDR’s continued silence. In February, former Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, who had introduced the famous Dyer antilynching bill of 1922, chided White for his faith in the Roosevelts. White had been “deceived.”
You and the CRISIS ought to tell the colored people the truth, which is that there is no chance whatever for this legislation [in a] Democratic Congress. … If the CRISIS is to continue in this deception I hope you will discontinue sending it to me.
Again White turned to ER: If he could only talk with the president; would she make one more appointment; they had the votes all lined up. ER tried, but McIntyre replied that FDR was too busy, and wrote a memo to Tommy: “Confidentially, this is a very delicate situation and it does not seem advisable to draw the President into it any more than we have to.”
ER had penciled on White’s letter to FDR: “I do think you could see him HERE and help him on tactics with advice. This ought to go through.”
Two weeks later, Costigan brought his bill up—and the Southland arose. Prepared to filibuster for months, the almost solid South would block everything on the Senate calendar, including the social security bill passed by the House. FDR was asked to call off the filibuster by an expression of righteous indignation. He refused to utter one public word of protest. Costigan caved in, and on 1 May withdrew the antilynch bill. The New York Times opined that the surrender looked like “Appomatox in reverse.”
White thanked ER for her “deep personal interest” and resigned in protest from the Virgin Islands Advisory Council—which she had recommended him for. To FDR he wrote: “It is my belief that the utterly shameless filibuster could not have withstood the pressure of public opinion had you spoken out against it. In justice to the cause I serve I cannot continue to remain even a small part of your official family.”
Fascist brutality and racialist rhetoric in Europe encouraged American lynchers. America’s failure to demonstrate official opposition encouraged racialist violence in Europe. The message seemed to be: Lynching was done; torture was acceptable. ER committed herself to a long struggle. She wrote White: “I am so sorry about the bill. Of course all of us are going on fighting….”
She sent FDR a scathing editorial White had sent her which condemned the president’s silence, with a note: “Pretty bitter isn’t it? I can’t blame them though….”*
FDR’s silence and ER’s interventions on behalf of the Costigan-Wagner bill revealed a deep level of political tension within the White House. Familial disagreements increasingly involved profound principles and ethical concerns. FDR insisted that practical politics, issues of strategy and tactics, were involved, and he expected ER to accept his wisdom on these matters. ER did not agree, and on this issue continued to write, network, and organize support. But she spoke publicly only when and where FDR approved.
In May, Roy Wilkins invited ER to attend the closing session of the NAACP’s twenty-sixth annual convention in St. Louis. This would be, Wilkins wrote, a “particularly significant Conference,” which would address “the greatest crisis ever faced by the twelve million colored American citizens.” There was, moreover, “great restlessness, doubt, and even some hostility among the colored people” toward the administration.
Wilkins cited the discriminatory practices of NRA, PWA, AAA, and FERA especially. Atop all the disappointments of 1933–34 was the recent failure of the antilynching bill even to get a hearing. Now, as the presidential campaign season approached, even the proposed work relief program, which was to become the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was met with “greater and greater cynicism.” He believed “it would be good strategy from the Administration’s standpoint, and good Americanism from the standpoint of the welfare of all our people, for some emissary to give a sincere word of reassurance…. We hope that you will consent to be that ambassador.”
ER asked: “FDR should I go? or could you send someone really good & interested.” Missy wrote Tommy to suggest that Oscar Chapman represent the First Lady, who should not go. ER acquiesced, but sent a public message of “deep regret that I was obliged to refuse to attend the conference.”
The winter-spring congressional season of 1935 filled ER with despair. In addition to the collapse of the World Court and the Costigan-Wagner bill there were brutal negotiations over the social security bill. For months her letters were punctuated by unusual exhaustion, frustration, genuine confusion.
For over twenty years, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and others had publicly fought for mothers’ pensions, widows’ benefits, old-age security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance. From 1924 on ER championed universal protection, decent housing, and public health care for all Americans. The fight for economic security was not new, and it was wrong to credit Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Clubs and California’s Dr. Francis E. Townsend with radicalizing FDR and driving the second New Deal into old-age pensions and steps toward real security.* ER and her circle had been agitating for these issues for decades.
FDR had introduced them to New York State when he was governor, and now they were about to become national policy. But something happened to social security between FDR’s thrilling January speech, which so gratified ER, and the springtime compromises that devoured the universal aspect of his promise.
ER’s papers contain an important file on social security, with FDR’s heavily marked marginalia in an effort to explain changes in administrative policy. FDR instructed his wife to see especially pages 9 and 10 of “Statement of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Economic Security Bill.” There one reads Henry Morgenthau’s testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee opposing the president’s stated intention that the federal government defray half the cost of old-age insurance and provide universal coverage:
The national contributory old-age annuity system, as now proposed, includes every employee in the United States, other than those of governmental agencies or railways…. This means that every transient or casual laborer is included, that every domestic servant is covered, and that the large and shifting class of agricultural workers is covered.
Morgenthau proposed instead that they be excluded: “Under the income tax law, the Bureau of Internal Revenue last year handled something less than five million returns;* with the present nearly universal coverage of the Bill’s provisions,” he estimated 20 million people would be involved. That would require “minutely detailed, and very expensive enforcement efforts.” Therefore, to avoid “the imposition of administrative burdens … that would threaten … the entire system,” Morgenthau helped doom the promise of social security for all Americans.
Morgenthau’s testimony astonished liberals. On 5 February 1935, he called for the exclusion of America’s neediest and most insecure workers in what was to have been a universal system to abolish need and insecurity. The race factor was publicly ignored, but clearly FDR and his treasury secretary caved in to Southern opposition. Since the vast majority of Negro workers were in precisely the categories excluded, Morgenthau’s proposal was part of FDR’s Southern strategy and guaranteed a “Lily White Social Security System,” which the NAACP immediately editorialized against.
Frances Perkins wrote that of the entire Committee on Economic Security, which she chaired, only Morgenthau “indicated his flat opposition” to the government “contribution out of general revenues” for old-age insurance. Instead he proposed a 1 percent tax by employers and employees, with no federal contribution at all. This created the regressive payroll tax for old-age security, which many considered reactionary. No security system in Europe, where social insurance was widespread,* was based on such a collection system, without governmental contribution.
According to Perkins, every member of her Committee on Economic Security was “startled” by Morgenthau’s betrayal, since universal coverage “had been agreed upon” from the beginning. But: “There was nothing for me to do but accept, temporarily at least….”
A truly liberal bill, introduced by Ernest Lundeen, Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party representative, called for universal coverage and unemployment benefits for every unemployed worker to be paid for by federal funds and corporate taxes. But the administration bill, with Morgenthau’s limitations, was happily accepted by the conservative and Southern-dominated House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Robert Doughton of North Carolina, and the Senate’s Finance Committee, chaired by Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison.
Everything ER had ever said on behalf of old-age security, work, and equity contradicted Morgenthau’s proposals. What had happened to FDR’s universal “cradle to the grave” security package? There is no paper trail to indicate the route to Morgenthau’s decision. There is no evidence to indicate the discussions that must have dominated White House conversations. From her correspondence we know that ER was bewildered. Did her husband now really intend to curtail social security for the vast majority of working women and black men for reasons of administrative simplicity and ease?
On 5 January 1934, precisely one year before Morgenthau’s great betrayal, ER had made a vivid and stirring address before the District of Columbia branch of the American Association for Social Security, which was broadcast nationally. She assumed Americans had already “accepted” the “merits of old age pensions,” to replace the situation in most states where the poor and aged were treated in “a terrible way—through poorhouses.”
She told of a family in her own village of Hyde Park: Annually, she drove this “old family—two old sisters and two old brothers—who had lived on a farm not far from us” to vote. Then one election day, she arrived to find one sister in tears because one brother had died, and the other “brother had been taken to the insane asylum”—undone by financial worry. There was no food, no money for taxes, and they were about to lose the family farm. She “was waiting to go to the poorhouse,” where her sister “had already gone.”
ER felt that she had been a dreadful neighbor, and also that the “whole community was to blame.” They were a generous family, who gave “to the church and to the charities.” They had always “done what good citizens should do and they simply had never been able to save. There had always been someone in the family who needed help; some young person to start….”
Old people, ER argued, should be allowed to live in their own homes, with dignity and respect. “And I think it costs us less in the end.”
How, ER wondered, could we be “happy knowing that throughout this country” countless people suffered so? That agricultural workers, domestic and service workers, teachers, seamen, nurses, and government workers might now remain uncovered by a social security law that excluded them was intolerable to ER.
On 27 February 1935, ER told her press conference the social security bill was just a “start.” She was certain that changes would occur “year by year, in as big an undertaking as this.” She hoped to see “a permanent ban on child labor, better unemployment insurance, better health care for the country as a whole, better care for mothers and children generally,” and a New Deal for youth and labor. “Labor must share to a greater extent and receive a fairer return for its part in the world’s work,” and “capital [must] accept the fact of a more limited and reasonable return.”
From February to May, Congress negotiated the social security bill onto, the floor for debate. During that time there were many private meetings, painful negotiations, White House dinners where agreements were made, and lost. It was, judging from ER’s letters to Hick, the winter and spring of her discontent. From the World Court to the antilynch bill to Morgenthau’s message, ER was in an unusual state of gloom.
In January, Hick was alone in New York, where she had dental surgery. ER, in Washington, had “a good talk with your boss [Harry Hopkins] last night, who does seem to know what FDR wants him to do and to like it. He says he’ll probably have work for you by the end of the week so I hope you will be healed and well.” ER thought that if they had been together the hard days “might have been pleasant” despite Hick’s “pain and discomfort.”
Here I hardly count anything in the way of personal contacts pleasant! Dear, I wish it could be a joy when we meet and are together and not such keen unhappiness but there is always the balance to everything until one gets to a certain kind of numbness. I saw my grandmother reach that after repeated blows and she retained her sweetness and ability to enjoy sun and flowers and children and whatever good things came to her. I suppose that is what we should all pray for.
Clearly depressed, she wrote Hick that she felt exhausted and found herself resting and napping. After she read ER’s letter, Hick called to apologize for adding to her troubles by describing her surgical ordeal.
ER was glad for their talk:
I don’t know why you think it egoism to tell me about Saturday’s pain. I would hate it if you didn’t and [would] always wonder what really went on and what you hid! It is good advice not to fight things, that I’m sure about. It is what I do so much down here and what makes life hard for those around me! Don’t worry over the [Arthurdale] Stories. I don’t bother at all about them except in the fact that they will hurt the Homesteaders or Louis. It is more fun to help a few people and stick to a job and see results but again life carries you and you must take what chances it gives you and not kick against the pricks! I do it all the time though I know it is futile!
Then, ER, who always wrote her own speeches and columns and never accepted anyone’s offer to ghostwrite her words, revealed the depths of her anguish: She was to broadcast on “a day in the White House,” and for the first time she asked Hick: “Would you like to write it?” Hick declined, and ER replied to her lost letter:
I know how you feel about the White House and it is partly my fault because I have no enjoyment in my life here and you feel it and think I mind more than I really do. I’ve lived so much of my life “going thro” and being relieved when certain periods are over and yet I don’t really mind. I’m just kind of cold about it and that makes me cold to those around! …
ER still hoped for greater happiness with Hick:
If you and I work together someday, I think we’ll have a swell time and if we steal a day or two away here and there and vacation in summer we’ll be having more than our share of good times!
I am perfectly well again and don’t need rest anymore….
FDR had contributed to ER’s changed mood. Worried about his wife’s depression, FDR made a point to present her with the first good news she had had in a long time: Congress would pass the $4 billion work relief appropriations bill within the next two weeks, and then he would “settle where [the] homesteaders go.”
Although the bill did not actually pass until April, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiated a massive public works program that employed millions of Americans in exciting and useful projects. It was initially to have been the work security part of the social security bill, to guarantee jobs through federally supported public works as a supplement to unemployment insurance. WPA was actually FDR’s compromise to Hopkins’s vision of full employment as an entitlement in the social security package, which ER had supported. ER considered WPA a tangible victory, but only a “stop-gap,” temporary and insufficient. She deplored especially the relief aspect of it, which continued the means test and social worker investigations that required destitution before consideration. But it was a beginning and would prevent many human tragedies.
Given ER’s mostly sour mood throughout January, Hick decided to recuperate from her dental surgery at the Danas’ place on Long Island. ER was pleased: “They are wise people and real people & it is nice to have them as friends.” Besides, at the moment ER had little to offer:
Dear one, it is a gray and gloomy day! How I envied Elliott and Ruth, their youth and their dreams…. I have a curious feeling of being thru with dreams, old age really setting in. Old age is really nothing worse than that, having no more faith in the future, no dreams! I guess it is the day, for as you well know no one plans fuller into the future than I do and that does require faith!
These were hard times between ER and Hick. Hick was needy, and lonely. Her WPA assignment pending, there was nothing in particular she really cared to do. ER was also lonely, but preoccupied, and they were apart for weeks. Hick ruminated about her life’s choices. She was only forty-two, but she felt very old, or at least worried about becoming old, and dependent. Like many single women, she had arranged her entire life to be self-sufficient. She believed in hard work, and she liked to work hard. Then, like many wives and women in love, with one dramatic flourish she had relinquished her hold on all she had achieved. She had done it for love, and out of a sense of loyalty. There was no way she could have pursued both her journalistic interest in the First Lady and her friendship with the First Lady.
ER had helped her find challenging, important jobs appropriate to her skills. But Hick never enjoyed her new work. The kind of respect and admiration she had had as a journalist now seemed filtered through her friendship with ER. Moreover, she no longer worked for people whom she understood completely. Although her work was often praised, and even influential, she never had a sense that it made a difference. Her words were neither published nor widely available. She had become anonymous. She was a newshawk without a newspaper, a writer without readers. A woman whose days were spent mostly alone, waiting for an hour or an evening, for a phone call or a letter from the only woman she cared to be with.
In the country, at the Danas’ place, with time to reflect, she wondered about the rhythms of her life, her own chemistry and longings, her life’s choices. Increasingly, thoughts of the future frightened her. As she had the year before, when she visited with Ella Morse and her husband, Roy Dickerson, Hick wondered if it might have been better to be a wife and mother. She confided her concerns to ER: Her professional life was in tatters; she faced a future of economic insecurity, in a climate that seemed to devalue or punish single women, alone and childless. Might not all anxieties evaporate, might not everything be transformed into comfort, if not luxury, were she to marry?
Whatever the actual words of Hick’s fantasy, in a letter now lost, there were many benefits to be derived from such a solution. If she were to consent to be supported financially, she would also be protected by the mantle of society’s approval. Many women not otherwise inclined, but without economic security, made that choice. There was much to be said for marital privilege, and ER replied:
Of course you should have had a husband and children and it would have made you happy if you loved him and in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings and given you someone in whom to lavish the love and devotion you have to keep down all the time. Yours is a rich nature with so much to give that the outlets always seem meager. Dear one, I do love you and appreciate the fight you make not to make me unhappy, but there is no use trying to hide things from me because I know just how you feel!
ER’s own feelings were just then ruffled by wild press criticism. Accused of personal ambitions, lust for power, and unseemly political interference, she patiently explained that she did whatever she did because it was right and just and fair, and had to be done: “How I hate doing these things and then they say someday I’ll run for an office. Well, I’d have to be chloroformed first!” But if she could improve these terrible “conditions even a little bit I suppose it is worth it….”
ER and Hick spent some part of the weekend before Valentine’s Day together, and ER wrote: “Dear, it meant so much to have even that little time with you and it does give me so much more than you know in a sense of closeness and warmth. I love you very dearly.”
From February to April, while social security and the $4 billion WPA bill languished in Congress, ER continually pressed FDR for a bold demonstration of leadership to fight the conservatives of his own party and traditional Southern trimmers. At dinner with Molly Dewson ER was fascinated to see that her husband “gets much less annoyed at her when she tells him things are wrong than he does at me!” That night, they both urged FDR to take a more active public role on the stalled legislation which was to define the second New Deal. He was determined to stay out of it but he wanted Hick to investigate the political climate, to “verify all the most glaring ward violations,” and the people’s real sentiments. Hick agreed to return to Washington for conferences: “Mabel [ER’s upstairs maid] is so pleased you’ll be here the 23d. She says she misses you so much….”
That February, ER’s letters were songs of duality. She yearned for Hick’s company, yet was relieved when they were apart. ER frequently seemed unaware of the impact her words might have on Hick’s already low spirits. From Cornell ER wrote: “Dear I wish you were with me, I was homesick for you in Ithaca. But you would hate the crowds and the telephones and the fawning….”
With Earl the next day: “Dearest I have had a nice time and I love seeing Earl but I miss you too. One never seems to have everything at once! … Earl has a new girl, he is becoming or is in love with…. What a nuisance hearts are and yet without them life would hardly be worth while! … I love you dear, bless you sleep sweetly and won’t it be grand to see you Friday.”
ER’s last February days at Hyde Park with FDR, his mother, seveal children, Nan, and Marion were highlighted by a “really big snow storm—–I love the country in winter! [and] F seems to be having a grand time.” ER had such a pleasant conversation “with Mama for over an hour,” she felt completely restored and persuaded Hick to spend most of March and April with her in Washington.
Hick had hesitated, which ER understood since “in Washington your sense of loneliness is intensified by having few old friends and being in a place you don’t like with the only person you would like to see tied down to a very exacting job most of the time!” But ER could not leave Washington just then because Louis Howe seemed near death. FDR too had postponed his cruise because of Howe, and was now scheduled to leave on a ten-day Caribbean jaunt with Vincent Astor on 26 March.
While FDR sailed on the Nourmahal, ER and Hick spent the first two weeks of April together. Closer to congressional tension over social security and “the big bill,” as WPA was known, ER found little comfort in FDR’s notes from the Nourmahal:
Dearest Babs … just fun—wonderful weather and smooth seas and I am already much tanned….
The news from Washington about the Big Bill is most confusing, and I get long contradictory appeals for all kinds of action by me! It is as well to let them try to work it out themselves, I think….
ER was particularly mindful of the NAACP’s opposition to “Lily-White Social Security.” In March, NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, published George Edmund Haynes’s essay detailing his testimony before both the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Except for old-age insurance, which was to be federally regulated, all management was to be left to the states—which, wrote Haynes, meant disaster for Negro citizens. The bill’s purpose “is to alleviate the hazards of old age, unemployment, illness and dependency.” But it was a defective insult, because “all domestic and personal servants are excluded from unemployment provisions,” and it is “proposed to exempt farmers … thus eliminating tenant farmers….” Ultimately, “about three-fifths of all Negroes gainfully employed will not be benefited at all.”
To avoid the creation of social security for whites only, Haynes argued for “non-discrimination” clauses for certain titles: Title I, “dealing with old age [insurance]”; Title II, “dealing with allotments for dependent children”; Title III and IV, “dealing with unemployment and old age annuities [for poor people, not covered in Title I]”; Title VII, providing “maternal and child health”; and Title VIII, “providing for allotments to local and public health programs.”
“This legislation is so vital to Negro men, women, and children and to peaceable race relations that every lover of fair play” needed to rally and support antidiscrimination provisions.
ER routinely distributed Crisis articles. In 1934, for example, she sent Donald Richberg, director of the NRA and the National Emergency Council, John Davis’s charges of discrimination (”NRA Codifies Wage Slavery” and “TVA: Lily-White Reconstruction”) and asked if they were true. After weeks of correspondence, she wrote Donald Richberg: “I hope you will try to see that justice is done….” ER also expected justice to be done concerning social security.
But by mid-April, the only New Deal effort that seemed to move forward was Arthurdale. ER drove there with Nancy Cook, and was gratified to see the progress made by so many people who worked so hard. ER wanted everybody to appreciate how much ordinary people could do for themselves when they were given a chance and were not ridiculed, degraded, or belittled. ER’s commitment to Arthurdale was heartfelt, and a genuine bond developed between her and the everyday people whose homes she walked into with so little pretense, and so much love. ER hated ceremony. The days she enjoyed most were those that had “very little ‘first lady’ about it, just simple and kindly hospitality and welcome.”
But while entire communities such as Arthurdale might appreciate her support, Republican press attacks against her escalated. These rarely bothered her: “Every president and his family go through it and afterwards it is forgotten.”
She was, however, sensitive to criticisms by her own family. On her return from Arthurdale, ER spent a “free” day in New York: She took Elizabeth Read to lunch; went with Elinor Morgenthau to the Neighborhood Playhouse to see a “very modern and moving” student dance company; visited with Cousin Susie, who had become a recluse and distrusted everybody; “took Tiny and Eddie to dinner.” At some point, she spent a moment with her mother-in-law.
Their exchange added to ER’s bitter spring. It began with an impulsive remark about the 1936 election. After a winter of relative peace between them, ER confided to “Mama that it would not break my heart if F were not elected.” It was an act of simple trust about a fleeting feeling, and ER was horrified. But as she left the room, SDR turned to James and asked, “Do you think Mother will do anything to defeat Father? Is that why she stays in politics just to hurt his chances of reelection?”
ER indignantly wrote Hick, “Now I ask you, after all these years?” After thirty years, to be precise; and ER was devastated. Her old sense of being misunderstood, an outcast in the bosom of her own family, returned. It was incomprehensible that Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had worked so closely with ER on so many projects, from the WTUL to the Henry Street Settlement, to the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, to the Bethune-Cookman College, could still doubt ER’s loyalty to her son—to his ambitions, his vision, his well-being.
Characteristically, ER blamed herself for letting down her guard and trusting her mother-in-law with her doubts and innermost feelings as she contemplated all the legislation she cared about stalled by FDR’s Southern strategy. Filled with anguish and disappointment that he had refused to speak out more vigorously from January through April as she had urged him to do, she confided in her mother-in-law—who used it to attack her. ER never let it happen again. FDR’s mother would always be his champion and defender; she would remain his primary goad, and conscience.
FDR always remained detached and above the fray when familial strife emerged, which only added to the tension. For days after SDR’s remark, ER felt “ready to chew everyone’s head off!”
Then Harlem exploded on 19 March 1935, when a young boy was caught stealing a 10-cent penknife and momentarily disappeared into the cellar of a Kress department store. Immediately, neighborhood women ran to the street and cried that he was to be beaten, lynched just as in the South. Police were called, not to placate the fearful, but to tyrannize them. Nobody knew that the boy, Lino Rivera, had been released and was on the subway headed home; nobody spoke to the people. Lynchings were much in mind. The Costigan-Wagner bill was in the headlines, and the death of Claude Neal lingered.
Residents assembled to protest and protect each other. An ambulance arrived, and a woman screamed: There is the hearse, to take him. The neighborhood exploded. All day and night, fires raged, windows were shattered, people were beaten. The toll was high: 100 wounded, shot or knifed; 125 arrested; 250 shop windows smashed; three dead, shot by the police.
A young assistant pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Dr. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., explained: “Continued exploitation of the Negro is at the bottom of the trouble … as regards wages, jobs, working conditions.” Everyone, businesses, utilities, even government assistance programs, “discriminated against Harlem’s population…. And the people were finally fed up.”
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia initiated a study, done by Negro sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. A monumental work, The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of 19 March 1935, revealed after twenty-five hearings what was widely known: A concerted effort to degrade the lives of Harlem’s residents included everything from “the most vicious Negro hater” in charge of Harlem’s relief bureau, to neglect and abuse in housing, health, education, and jobs; and a pattern of violence that “likened the New York Police Department to a racist army of occupation.” La Guardia suppressed the report, but vowed to make changes, and did. Frazier’s work stimulated consideration of America’s ghettoes for years to come, and ER would participate on every level. But in 1935, there was little she could do, except cajole, request, argue—which she did.
Despite ER’s confession of dread to SDR concerning four more years in the White House, as early as February 1935 ER and her circle had launched the women’s campaign for FDR’s reelection. Every state had a women’s Reporter Plan committee, which published attractive pamphlets to highlight FDR’s legislative achievements and future goals. Written and designed largely by Dew-son and ER, they “put vitality into the party” and served as the major organizing effort of the entire 1936 campaign.
There was little resistance among ER’s friends when asked to work for FDR’s reelection. When various programs important to them failed, they dug in for the next battle. Agnes Brown Leach, a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and an ardent internationalist who supported the World Court, was pleased to chair New York State’s Reporter Plan committee. Leach once called her friend Frances Perkins “a half-loaf girl: take what you can now and try for more later,” and that was generally the attitude of all the women in ER’s network.
Ellen Woodward, for example, urged ER to speak to her husband about WPA—which until April seemed to limit work projects exclusively to men—and there was “much uneasiness felt by women all over the country.” But there was no public criticism, as they closed ranks to support FDR’s efforts.
Even Lucy Randolph Mason, a pioneering Southern rebel with proud Georgian roots, who was soon to spend the rest of her life campaigning for black representation, women’s rights, and civil rights, said nothing about discrimination in social security in April 1935. Indeed, as head of the National Consumers League, Mason consented, and Dewson was proud that the NCL “swung into line with complete support” for social security: “I think we were the first organization to give support without criticism or further suggestion.”
FDR’s silence concerning these critical issues continued, and by the end of April ER was in a rare state. It was so bad she canceled a long-planned weekend with Hick, and told her to stay away for a few more weeks:
I’m too darn busy these days to be good to anyone and also too deeply upset I think. I’m glad I’m going to be away for a bit before you come home for I’m so on edge it is all I can do to hold myself together just now. That is not a good mood for you to return to, is it?…
ER “asked Tommy to have the [press] girls to supper [at her home] tomorrow night. I just had to get out of here and do something I enjoyed!” She hoped Hick would see Hall in Detroit and listen to FDR’s speech. ER wanted Hick’s reactions: “Mine are not reliable just now!”
ER’s mood was transformed by FDR’s 28 April 1935 Fireside Chat on the WPA and social security. As inclusive as ER had urged him to make it, when his resonant reassuring voice boomed across America’s heartland to “My Friends,” nobody was left out.
“The job of creating a program for the nation’s welfare is … like the building of a ship,” he said. You could not see it all as it was being built, and made seaworthy to sail “the high seas,” but out of the many “detailed parts … the creation of a useful instrument for man ultimately comes.”
FDR wanted it understood that he spoke this night to “the American people as a whole.” There was no hint that he intended entire groups to be excluded from old-age pensions or unemployment insurance: At a certain age of retirement, people would “give up their jobs … to the younger generation,” and “all, old and young alike,” would have “a feeling of security as they look toward old age.”
The work plan was the “most comprehensive” in U.S. history. WPA would “put to work three and one-half million employable persons, men and women….” There it was: Woodward, Dewson, Perkins, and his wife had all urged him to say it, and he did:
Our responsibility is to all of the people in this country. This is a great national crusade, a crusade to destroy enforced idleness which is an enemy of the human spirit…. Our attack upon these enemies must be without stint and without discrimination. No sectional, no political distinctions can be permitted.
ER was relieved, and had only one remaining cavil: FDR said nothing about one of the most important pending pieces of legislation, the Wagner labor relations bill, to promote democratic labor organizing and create a National Labor Relations Board to guarantee federal support for independent unionism.
ER supported Senator Wagner’s comprehensive labor law, and her old friend Robert Wagner was impressed that she showed up unannounced and uninvited at several hearings and conferences to knit, listen, and demonstrate her approval. FDR supported it belatedly, after it was certain to pass.
Nevertheless, after FDR’s speech, ER felt “much more cheerful.” The next day she had a grand morning ride; spoke on the radio for child health care; saw congressional leaders, Helen Keller, several others; and received 2,800 guests at the garden party: “My calm has returned and my goat has ceased bleating. Why do I let myself go in that way?”
Now that peace was restored, Hick admitted she had been mightily worried that ER planned to leave her husband. The thought horrified Hick; it would be a national catastrophe. ER reassured her: “Hick darling…. I’m sorry I worried you so much. I know I’ve got to stick. I know I’ll never make an open break and I never tell FDR how I feel…. I blow off to you, but never to F!”
Their correspondence emphasized ER’s springtime upset for over a week, and ER explained: “Darling I do take happiness in many ways and I’m never likely to fight with F. I always ‘shut up.’”
On 2 May, ER celebrated Jane Addams’s seventy-fifth birthday and WILPF’s twentieth anniversary with a White House reception and festive dinner at the Willard Hotel that had been planned for months by a committee chaired by Anna Wilmarth Ickes. In January, during the Cause and Cure of War Conference meetings, ER had suggested that a Congressional Medal of Honor be issued to Jane Addams—to acknowledge that military service was not the only honorable international work to be rewarded.
But Addams considered it a “wild” idea. She had been viciously attacked during 1935 by isolationists and Red-baiters who called her a communist; and the well-funded, widely distributed Red Network called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Since Congress was dominated by conservatives, Addams believed her entire career would be mired by controversy. WILPF reluctantly agreed, and the medal committee was disbanded.
At the “biggest dinner ever held at the Willard,” Jane Addams’s life and vision were celebrated by America’s foremost reformers, activists, and New Dealers. Caroline O’Day was toastmaster and ER first speaker. She hailed Addams as one of America’s “greatest living women.” Broadcast nationally over NBC, the event also featured an international hookup that beamed from WILPF headquarters in Geneva. ER was, however, prevented from participating in that part of the festivities.
Silenced by the State Department on most international issues, ER evidently acceded without protest to a State Department memo: “It is the opinion of the State Department that Mrs. Roosevelt should not speak over the international broadcast. In foreign countries … it would be considered as official and as the equivalent of the royal family….” As a result, ER’s name disappeared from the final “Round-the-World Broadcast” list, which included Harold Ickes from Washington, Arthur Henderson from London, Madame Krupskaya and Madame Litvinov from Moscow, and Prince Tokugawa from Tokyo, among others.
On 7 May, ER wrote Hick to continue their discussion of love and loyalty, relative and real happiness. She differed with Hick “on the thing which counts in the long run.” For ER it was “never any one person’s happiness, it is that of the greatest number of people.” If one achieved happiness incidentally, “well and good, but remember always you are damned unimportant! No, dear, we [ER and FDR] won’t have scenes. I made up my mind to that last time and I never have spoken to him about this but this burying things in your heart makes certain things look pretty odd in the future and I think a little plain talk then will be a violent shock….”
Another source of ER’s springtime upset involved FDR’s insistence that eldest son James move to the White House to replace Louis Howe as his primary assistant. ER disapproved, foresaw press criticisms, and felt miserable when cruel articles about nepotism, favoritism, and scandal were printed. James, profoundly disappointed, withdrew—but only temporarily. Both her son and her husband were angered by ER’s lack of support.
Dismayed to feel the culprit, ER looked forward to a serene week at Val-Kill with Earl. On a lighter note, she was delighted that Hick was now able “to touch the floor!”
The new pool at Val-Kill was lovely, and new pine trees were planted. When all the trees are in “we will be completely sheltered from the road and able to take sun baths in peace!” Earl had left for a guards meeting, “so Nan and I are getting our own supper and having it before the fire—That is the kind of thing I’d like to do with you. Perhaps we will on Long Island.”
ER loved the peace of the cottage, and it was a “grand day,” despite the “succession of notables” who visited the big house.
On her return from Val-Kill, three of Hick’s lost letters and a wire awaited ER, and “made me think and try to formulate what I believe” about love and the meaning of happiness. Dealing with emotional issues was hard for ER. For years she simply avoided them, although her fundamental understanding about love remained constant from adolescence on, when Marie Souvestre sparked her feelings about romance with literature and poetry.
Her truest feeling about love survived hurts and disappointments. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem which she had sent FDR in 1903 reverberated through time and echoed in each loving relationship: “Unless you can swear, ‘For life or death!’/Oh, fear to call it loving!”
ER’s letter was labored, but carried a message of permanence. Yet it contained other messages about the vagaries of love and happiness. The wounds to her heart had left her wary and self-protective. She would not be hurt that way again. Not by FDR, not by Hick, not by anyone. Still, she did not retreat from love, or the pursuit of love:
I think it is this way, to most of us happiness comes through the love we give and the return love we feel … from those we love. There does not have to be a balance however, we may love more or less since there is no measure of love. Over the years the type of love felt on either side may change but if the fundamental love is there I believe in the end the relationship adjusts to something deep and satisfying to both people. For instance I know you often have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind but I feel I love you just the same and so often we entirely satisfy each other that I feel there is a fundamental basis on which our relationship stands….
ER grew up surrounded by people; she sought and found happiness in groups, juggled many relationships. Hick grew up isolated on the prairie; she often felt reclusive, craved solitude, and wanted an exclusive relationship. Wrenched from her profession, Hick now focused on one person to satisfy all her needs. But ER was increasingly preoccupied by affairs of state and the needs of all Americans. As a journalist, Hick had been secure, dashing, and independent. Now she had sacrificed her work and her selfhood, and was often irritable and needy. ER’s role became increasingly maternal and care-taking, which satisfied neither of them. Still neither wanted their relationship to end, and she continued to pull Hick back when she moved away.
ER wanted Hick to find real satisfaction in her new WPA work, and she wrote hopefully: “It is a little like newspaper work again, isn’t it?” For the first time in their correspondence, ER acknowledged that only when Hick was happy at work would there be contentment between them—which she promised to promote during their reunion the next week: They “must have happy times together always.” And she encouraged Hick to see herself more clearly. Upon hearing that Hick’s reunion with her friend and teacher Alicent Holt went well, ER noted: “You will never learn what a strong personality you have and how much people admire you but then I like that about you!”
The next day she wrote: “I love you dearly. Only four more days before I see you! A world of thoughts go to you daily and Mabel says ‘sure be nice to have Miss Hickok home’!” And a day later: “Dearest I can hardly wait to hug you. There is no doubt about it part of one’s joy in life is anticipation, if only one doesn’t suffer as you do when fulfillment doesn’t come up to the anticipation!”
On 20 May, ER held one of her most memorable press conferences. Ellen Woodward announced that women were to be integral to the new WPA program. She was again in charge of “women’s work,” only this time the projects were broadened to include “Recreation, Art, Music, Dramatics, Health and Research.” There would be new adventures in publishing and theater, including state Guidebooks, historical records, book repair, and library work of all kinds. Artists, white-collar workers, and professionals would be included as never before. Delighted, ER introduced the “grand idea!” to America’s journalists.
There would also be new programs for “Training Household Workers,” which ER thought should be supplemented by programs for the housewife, “to set up standards for her household that would be decent and equitable to workers” and establish “a decent standard of living.”
During the 1930s when so many working women served as household workers, ER’s views were heretical and were condemned as subversive. Her support for WPA’s servant training program and her insistence that servants deserved respect and equitable pay engendered rumors of “Eleanor Clubs,” comprised of servants and malcontents who demanded minimum wages, maximum hours, and no longer acknowledged their servility or “their place.” Eleanor Club rumors escalated over the years and included “pushing days” when Southern servants insisted on walking on the wrong (paved) side of the street and pushing whites off the sidewalk. After ER’s press conference, she was routinely attacked for “ruining” America’s servants.
On 21 May, ER made headline hews: “First Lady Tours Coal Mine in Ohio.” Invited to go down a coal mine with Clarence Pickett, ER had asked Hick to join them. It would be a two-hour trip “and we will get dirty. So wear suitable clothes, if you know what is suitable. I confess I am stumped.”
They wore miner’s caps and rode at the front of a mine train for two miles deep into the shaft, where they watched four hundred miners at work. The New Yorker commemorated the occasion with a cartoon of two coal miners looking up surprised, “Here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!” It became one of the most reproduced cartoons of the White House years.
Afterward, ER addressed the first graduates of “the People’s University,” in Bellaire, Ohio. A community-involved adult education miners’ school that featured over forty courses, the university was initiated by local activists, teachers, unionists, and housewives, who taught two hundred students without salary. ER considered it an inspiring project and told her audience of 2,500: “We must educate ourselves to study changes and to meet these changes.” Americans must begin to “know each other’s problems.” ER was told by a miner at the school that he had not only learned skills to earn more money, but ways to “lead a more satisfying life.” That, ER insisted, was what all education must be about. She worked to see such schools emerge throughout the country, as part of WPA.
During the evening of 21 May, ER was informed that Jane Addams had died. She told reporters: “I’m dreadfully sorry, America has lost a great source of inspiration.” The day before, she had heard of Addams’s emergency cancer surgery and sent her a telegram: “Deeply distressed to hear of your illness. Good luck and best wishes to you.” Her friends were unprepared for her sudden death, despite her long illness. Jane Addams told philanthropist Louise deKoven Bowen as they prepared to leave for the hospital: “I’m not afraid to die; I know I’ll go on living, and I want to know what it’s going to be like.”
Bowen marveled at her serenity: “I went into her room and said, ‘Jane, the ambulance will be here in an hour.’” She replied: “‘That’s all right, for that will give me the time to finish this book I am reading.’” Jane Addams “was never known to be afraid of anything….”
Jane Addams’s obituary in The New York Times was detailed and generous: Known as the “greatest woman in the world,” the “mother of social service,” she also pioneered the activist peace movement.
For ER, who on 2 May had called her a “pioneer who still pioneered,” Jane Addams’s important legacy carried a new urgency—which was dramatized by the placement of her front-page obituary. In the next column The New York Times headlined Hitler’s Reichstag speech on European affairs: In “a defiant and uncompromising speech,” Hitler had announced German rearmament, the draft, and his intention to “achieve territorial revisions.” All treaty agreements were ended, although Hitler asserted territorial changes would occur “only through peaceful understanding”—which was the only phrase of his speech “received in silence.”
* ER’s message was penned on an NAACP broadside that reproduced a 4 May editorial from The Des Moines Register sent to every senator, “Irony, Politics and The Negro” quoted FDR’s 1932 campaign promise: Wherever the desperation of “the socially underprivileged” cannot be addressed by the states, “‘it becomes the positive duty of the federal government to step in to help.’” It concluded: “The silence of this same speaker boomed from the White House during debate on the Costigan-Wagner bill…. When the next mob dances in the light of flames about a stake in the south, that declaration of high duty and intent will be a ghostly wisp of smoke, drifting off toward the heavens.”
*Dr. Townsend called for the retirement of everyone over sixty; each retired person would receive a monthly pension of $200, paid for by a sales tax, to be spent each month, which would provide security and keep the economy pumped up. Many thought a Long-Townsend third party loomed for 1936.
*The low number of income tax returns reflects the very limited taxation system which prevailed until after World War II, when taxation was extended to cover virtually every income.
*Most of Europe had some form of social security before World War I. Pioneered in Bismarck’s Germany (1870), it was achieved quickly in Austria (1881), Norway (1894), Finland (1895), Britain (1897), and France, Italy, and Denmark (1898).