Every decision ER made in 1936 was related to her husband’s campaign for reelection. With the New Deal barely under way, the nation was bitterly divided. In the South, voting remained limited by poll taxes and tradition to propertied white men. Conservative businessmen joined with Southern racialists and a group of Democrats who personally hated FDR to stop the democratization of America. In August 1934 they chartered the Liberty League to end “Red” rule and kill the burgeoning labor and civil rights movements.
Fueled by rhetorical vitriol led by Hearst, who promised to excommunicate the “imported, autocratic, Asiatic Socialist party of Karl Marx and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Liberty Leaguers represented a peculiar bipartisan spectrum. Various du Ponts, major industrialists, and oil barons were joined by former Democrat luminaries—including 1924 Presidential candidate John W. Davis; John J. Raskob, once Democratic Committee chair; and Al Smith, now FDR’s most bitter enemy. In January, they declared war.
With unlimited campaign funds for 1936, their new Red Scare collected steam and threatened everything ER most cared about. A Democratic future depended on her husband’s reelection. She would do nothing to tempt one vote away from him. She was convinced, however, that victory depended on exciting the interests of African-Americans, women, and labor unionists.
Politically, the first crisis ER confronted in 1936 involved another kind of silence—censorship in the federal arts program. Hallie Flanagan and Elmer Rice, director of New York’s theater project, had created “the Living Newspaper”—a brilliant form employing scores of actors and dramatizing the news without expensive scenery, just “light, music, movement.” Their first New York production was to be Ethiopia, chosen in part because an operatic company from Africa was stranded in the United States and on relief. Flanagan decided to use the members of the company as drummers and chorus “in the courtyard of Haile Selassie.” The Newspaper Guild participated in the show, and the facts were accurate. “There was no caricature; the characterizations and quotations were as literal as we could make them.”
To dramatize Mussolini’s invasion, Haile Selassie’s resistance, and the League of Nations’ sacrifice of the struggling African country was radical enough. But then they requested permission to use one of FDR’s broadcasts, and unleashed “a crisis which threatened to end the whole idea of the living newspaper.” Joseph Baker at WPA and Steve Early objected to a government production entering dangerous international waters. On 18 January, Baker wrote Flanagan: “No issue of the living newspaper shall contain” any reference to international officials or issues without prior approval “in advance by the Department of State.” Since prior approval hampered “timeliness,” essential to the Living Newspaper, Ethiopia was not to go up “with the present script.”
Flanagan appealed to ER: “I have the gravest fears as to the storm of criticism which will result if this is closed. Schools, universities and newspapers will read it as a political move…. Mr. Rice will probably resign and this also is very serious….”
ER appealed to FDR, spoke with Early, and wrote to Baker: The president “feels that [Ethiopia] should not be given up, but that some adjustment should be made. No one impersonating a ruler or a cabinet officer should actually appear on the stage. The words could be quoted….”
FDR’s compromise was not enough. The WPA banned Ethiopia. Elmer Rice cried censorship, and told Baker if it was banned he would resign. Baker thereupon took out a typed letter of resignation ready for Rice’s signature. Flanagan was furious, and sent Rice’s press statement to ER: He would not remain “the servant of a government which plays the shabby game of partisan politics at the expense of freedom and the principles of democracy.”
Ethiopia was banned largely for political reasons. The decision occurred after Rice announced the Living Newspaper’s future productions, including plays on “the handling of relief, and conditions in the South.” ER demanded an explanation from Aubrey Williams—who wrote ER that Rice and Flanagan planned to produce works on “Soviet Russia, the Scottsboro Case, Sharecroppers, etc…. only those things which are highly controversial and which immediately bring to the fore opponents … of this sort of activity on the part of the Federal Government.” Harry Hopkins had decided to terminate this project, and understood that Rice would resign.
In this election year, Baker assured Southern congressmen, no federal funds would support the Living Newspaper on sharecroppers. Only “standard plays the public wants” would be performed. Immediately, a “traveling company” went South “with a play called Jefferson Davis.”
Flanagan remained convinced that Hopkins still supported uncensored theater, and she hired Rice’s assistant Philip Barber to head the New York project, and the next Living Newspaper controversy: Triple-A, a play to protest the Supreme Court’s January decision that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was unconstitutional.
Although the play went beyond the Supreme Court’s attacks against the New Deal and included farmer-worker unity to combat excessive profits, it was not censored. It was powerful and emotional; audiences filled the theater night after night. Poverty and corruption, politics and struggle were in the air. Hearst and Republicans condemned “U.S. Dollars for Pink Plays.”
ER supported Flanagan, and WPA pressure momentarily eased. The theater thrived, twenty plays were in rehearsal, and Flanagan was grateful for the First Lady’s interventions: “Everything is clearing up so splendidly: Mr. Baker is giving me an administrative assistant, sorely needed; and in many other ways I notice a release from tensions which is, I am sure, due to your good offices.”
But in 1936, ER set theatrical limits. The Chicago revue O’ Say Can You Sing planned to include a sketch of the First Lady. Flanagan asked for ER’s approval, and assured her it was done in a spirit of “great admiration.” A minute-by-minute account of her typical day, it recalled Time’s rendition of Eleanor Everywhere:
Flash! The wife of the President was an unexpected visitor at one of the Federal Theatre Productions in Chicago last night. Although she claimed she was traveling incognito, the audience recognized her the minute she got up on her seat in the middle of a number and started making a speech on the plight of our coal miners….
We take you now to the White House boudoir where we see her in the act of preparing her daily [column]….
The scene is set between Mrs. President and her secretary, “Miss Givens.”
Mrs. President:… At 7:30 A.M.—Arose/ 7:31—Bathed/ 7:32—breakfasted/ 7:33—Received a delegation of coal miners from Scranton and shook hands with each one personally/ 7:34—Took another bath/ 7:35—Received a long distance call from the senior class president at Vassar, inviting me to lead the annual daisy chain/ 7:36—Received miners from Albuquerque and shook hands with each miner/ 7:37—Took another bath/ 7:38—Relaxed for 60 seconds puttering in the White House garden….
That takes us to 7:42 and a quarter—found myself with three-quarters of a minute to spare so I caught up with contemporary literature by reading Anthony Adverse! … 7:43 Finished Anthony Adverse and realized that I had spent eleven minutes in the White House. Too long! I felt hemmed in! … My Vanderlust gripped me—I went to Alaska!
Secretary: By Plane?
Mrs. President: No, Dog Sled! I arrived at the mines all covered with slush. … At 12:01 I shook hands with all the miners. … at 12:03—I felt homesick so I took a rocket back to the United States/12:04—… My, how good it was to see … our wonderful land with its mountains, rivers, lakes and those quaint little Republicans dotting the countryside….
At 12:05—I was catapulted to a CCC Camp in Bear Mountain and spent two minutes preserving our forests with the boys…. At 12:07—Back in Washington—Miss Givens, how did I get back to Washington?
Secretary: I believe you were shot from a cannon. Then you read your fan mail.
Mrs. President: Oh yes!… Quite amusing!… I received an offer from the Olympic Committee to represent America in the hop, skip, and jump/ At 12:08—I felt a speech coming on concerning the hard coal problem. So I rounded up some miners and made it/ At 12:09—I took a bath, didn’t I?
Secretary: No, Mrs. President, you had yourself dry-cleaned!
Mrs. President: Oh yes! No water! The Drought! / Between 12:10 and 7:00 P.M. I amused myself by laying four corner-stones, founding two day nurseries—and one night school. And…
It went on into the night, even into her busy dreams. ER returned the play with her two-word rejection scrawled atop the page: “Refused Permission!”
Although ER censored this play for political reasons, she remained enthusiastic about the arts program. Indeed, her detailed involvement was almost on a par with her commitment to Arthurdale and affordable housing. On 19 February, for example, she wrote Baker:
When in New York … I heard there was much complaint because the money for wages for the actors and actresses … was not coming through. Will you check on it? Also, there is a great deal of comment [that] rehearsals were taking so long. …
By the end of February 1936, WPA employed 4,300 artists. Schools, hospitals, museums, armories, airports, public buildings had received paintings, murals, sculptures, prints. In the South, “experimental demonstration galleries” became the area’s first public galleries and regional museums; thousands of community centers provided leisure programs, including art classes for children and adults. There were musical groups, chorales, bands, and orchestras founded across the country. ER considered it all thrilling, heartening, the essence of New Deal community-building.
During the 1930s, an alarming movement to get women out of the workplace, to limit them to marriage and motherhood, to brand them responsible for unemployment, family tensions, and all wickedness intensified. Distressed by the persistent attacks against women, which a surprising spectrum of Democrats participated in during the campaign season, ER became increasingly forceful in her defense of every woman’s right to choose her life’s direction.
When John Studebaker invited ER to select any topic for a Washington Town Hall Forum, which he chaired, she quickly suggested women and work, and named her panel: Fannie Hurst, George Creel, Josephine Roche. For ninety minutes on Sunday, 2 February, ER spoke candidly to an overflow audience of fifteen hundred:
There is something inherently good for every human being in work. Only through work can a woman fulfill her obligation to herself and to the world and justify her existence….
It is the right of any woman who wants to work to do so.
Her speech lasted forty minutes; then, “skillfully and good-naturedly,” she responded to a challenging, though largely agreeable, panel and audience:
Isn’t it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard; did anybody make a fuss about it until they began to be paid for their work?
Since widows and spinsters are now regarded as America’s greatest menace, should not they be allowed to fight our future wars? In such case, of course, men should not insist upon the sole right to declare war….
ER received countless letters of protest on this issue, which she patiently answered: “I am afraid that your attitude towards women is completely foreign to my more modern ideas….”
Issues of women and work remained high on ER’s agenda. In meetings with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other organizations of business and professional women, ER championed equal protection laws for women and men, eight-hour days for women and men, and equal pay for equal work.
Working women made many contributions, and ER used every opportunity to celebrate them. She introduced Mary Breckenridge at a White House reception for women, on 6 February: Breckenridge directed the “Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, which is carried on by nurses on horseback [who presided over] small clinics dotted here and there in the mountains.”
On 18 March, ER broadcast with Chad Ormond Williams for the ninth annual celebration of “National Business Women’s Week” as “the first business and professional woman to be mistress” of the White House. There were sixty thousand members of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, and eleven million working women in the United States. ER called upon that vast constituency to promote the idea of an important new agency the nation needed: a federal department of “education, the arts, social welfare, and health.” Charl Williams reminded the broadcast audience that ER had called for such a department, and federal aid to education, as early as 1924—when she chaired the Democratic Party’s first women’s platform committee.
The year 1936 opened with significant upset in ER’s private life. Louis Howe was dying, and her relationship with Lorena Hickok became ever more uneasy. Although she still relied on Hick for advice on both public and family matters, she had now virtually no leisure time to offer her.
As the New Year celebrations wound down, ER confided in Hick that she was “very sad” to see her children go off to their own homes and would especially miss the comings and goings of her grandchildren. She had no intention of growing “too dependent” on them, “for as you have so often said, I must let go!”—but they did create a jolly atmosphere.
Time with Hick was now rarely jolly. She arrived on 7 January for a week, and ER wrote the day she left: “Darling, you were low and I know that in some way I hurt and I am sorry and I wish I had not but all I can say is, I really love you.”
Unlike Tommy or Louis Howe, Hick could not simply fold herself into ER’s life, or White House activities. For years Hick had kept her own social life to a minimum to be available to ER, whenever she had a minute or Jan evening to spare. Now Hick returned to the company of her New York friends. Although ER would have been pleased to join Hick and her friends, mostly newspaper people and writers, Hick discouraged her presence.
ER seemed, at first, confused:
Hick darling. It was nice to get your letter and hear your voice last night, but I hardly know what to do. Would you rather I did not try to see you this week-end since you have friends and other plans? I’ll call you anyway and you know I won’t feel hurt if it complicates life or if it makes it harder just to have to see me in a crowd. If it does I’ll just write and telephone and we’ll forget I’m in New York!
Hick was torn, and their visit was awkward. ER wrote: “It was good to see you this morning being leisurely with Newky [Helen Newcomb] and I do hope the next few weeks bring you many happy times dear.”
Each time Hick drew away, determined to regain some independence, ER responded by pulling her back. For years, ER had kept Hick’s bank books and occasionally paid her bills. When Hick decided to reclaim control of her finances, ER insisted she continue as caretaker of her accounts so that Hick would not overspend or bounce checks. Their lives remained interwoven, and ER was pleased to report: “You have in the savings $255.43.”
As January unfolded, Hick became more aggressive about her own needs.
I rather hope that, if you are going to call, you will call tonight. Since I’ll be out both tomorrow and Saturday evenings. I could call you, I suppose, but I MUST keep my hotel—I mean, my PHONE—bill down. What with Prinz in the hospital, a new car in the offing, and Aunt Ella coming to visit me. Finances aren’t so bad, though.
She was “not broke,” just living rather high and on the edge.
But independence was a relative thing. ER encouraged Hick to take advantage of the efficient White House laundry service. Hick did: “Yes, I mailed my laundry to Mabel today…. Goodnight, and much love.”
On 20 January, news came of King George’s death, which caused ER to reflect: “No, one can’t be sorry for people who are dead unless one believes in a hell after death which I do not, but it is bad for those who live on here and don’t know what the future holds beyond the barrier.”
On 24 January ER’s cousin Corinne Alsop arrived to stay at the White House, although she was in Washington to participate in the anti-FDR Liberty League festivities, which were to feature New York’s former governor Al Smith. Unprepared for the profound change in the once liberal Democrat whose presidential campaign she ran in 1928, ER had even invited Al Smith to stay at the White House.
One of ER’s contributions to FDR’s 1936 campaign was her lecture tour, “Ways of Peace,” which reinforced in part the administration’s strict neutrality policy. The new weaponry already used against Ethiopia by Italy and against China by Japan escalated war’s devastation. Everywhere she spoke, she emphasized one theme: Military defenses “would be of comparatively little value in the next war,” which would be an air war against civilians and destructive beyond imagining. “I think we had better begin to decide whether we wish to preserve our civilization or whether we think, it of so little use that we might as well let it go. That is what war amounts to.”
ER wanted to keep the United States “out of war,” and remained convinced that only collective security, united action, would prevent war. If war erupted, it would swamp every nation. ER disagreed with peace advocates who counseled unilateral disarmament. She wrote Jeannette Rankin, pacifist and former member of Congress, that “armaments caused distrust between nations, but that disarmament must be international so that no one country leaves itself open to attack or invasion.”
On 1 February, she addressed the American Youth Congress and criticized its commitment to absolute pacifism. While she agreed that military training in schools “should never be compulsory,” it should be offered for “those students who desire it.” Above all, she criticized supporters of Youth Against War and Fascism who endorsed “anti-war strikes,” and the Oxford pledge, which affirmed that under “no circumstances” would this generation fight in any future war.
On 9 February 1933, students in the Oxford Union initiated the pledge, as a protest against empire, militarism, and conservative rule. By 1936, radical students throughout the United States took it. But ER feared for the future, and understood the pacifist’s dilemma: Peace required collective security, which meant resistance against aggression. To defend a small nation attacked by a militarized power required preparedness and confrontation, an economic blockade at least. Nations must be willing to cut off oil, copper, steel, basic trade with the aggressor. Unilateral disarmament in a militarized world with Hitler and Mussolini at the helm seemed to her madness, as insane as war itself. She told her student audience that they had not “thought through all its implications.” ER lamented both her husband’s official non-involvement which led to the sacrifice of Ethiopia, and the students’ absolute pacifism.
As ER contemplated the demands of the presidential campaign and the daunting international situation, she began to draw on new friends and allies. She asked Fannie Hurst to keynote the Women’s Press Party: “I do like her.” Mount Holyoke’s president, Dr. Mary Woolley, the only woman delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, arrived for tea and evidently stayed for dinner with Anna Louise Strong. It was a scintillating evening.
Lillian Wald initially asked ER to meet with Anna Louise Strong in 1935: “You may remember her as the girl who went to Russia thirteen years ago and who … has been back numerous times to lecture and to try to have us see Russia as she sees it.” Wald wrote ER that Strong’s “numerous books have been well received” and “she knows Russia now better than anybody else.”
Best known as the woman who launched the Seattle general strike of 1919, Strong first went to Russia for the Quakers; she worked there mostly as a journalist, and taught Trotsky English. Her controversial autobiography, I Change Worlds, was published in 1935, and now, Wald wrote ER, she planned to return with a mission:
It is whispered … that the rich Jews in Europe and America are negotiating for 10,000 German émigrés to go to Buro Bidgin [as a safe haven for Jews]. Anyway Anna Louise Strong is going to visit the place in Siberia.
If it means anything at all to you let me know. … She is an attractive creature and fair. …
ER replied immediately:
I would love to see Anna Louise Strong. Do you think she would care to come to lunch with me …? If so, I will try to get Franklin here or arrange for her to have a chat with him afterwards. Thank you so much for thinking of it.
ER was eager for more information about Russia since Maxim Litvinov was the only foreign minister who consistently called for collective security against fascism, and ER distrusted U.S. ambassador Bill Bullitt. But it was bold indeed for the First Lady to invite the first lady of U.S. radicalism to the White House.
A persuasive, action-oriented woman, Anna Louise Strong impressed those who met her as formidable, the kind of woman who “commanded everyone to drop what [he or she was] doing and concentrate on what Anna Louise was doing.” Ella Winter, married to Strong’s mentor Lincoln Steffens, described Strong as “a huge woman with cropped gray hair, china-blue eyes, and a manner so impersonal that I wondered if she would go on talking if one went out of the room.”
ER was not bothered by her manner; they shared an ethic, but differed about how to achieve it. Strong championed socialism, then communism. ER believed capitalism could be transformed into something humane that included economic democracy as well as political justice. They were fascinated by each other, and a cordial friendship and lasting correspondence developed between the First Lady and one of America’s most notorious heretics.
After their February 1936 dinner, ER wrote Hick: “Anna Louise Strong evidently thinks we are beaten.” But Strong wrote ER:
I am glad for your sake that you are much more optimistic than I am…. To a person as sincere as you I felt that I owed the most sincere and thoughtful analysis I could make.
But wisdom did not begin and will not end with me, and you have thousands of wise people helping you as well as millions who trust your leadership. So perhaps you may succeed either in repairing the capitalist system to fit human needs or in making a more or less painless transition to some system that will. If anyone can, I think you can.
In any case, if there is ever any time when anything I know can be of use to you, please call on me. This applies not only to your term or terms in the White House, but to … whatever future awaits us.
Preoccupied by publishing deadlines and the demands of the campaign, ER impulsively sent Hick a telegram asking her, “if free,” to meet her train at Grand Central on 17 February. But Tommy accompanied her to the city. When Hick saw them descend the train steps, she stormed away. ER wrote the next morning:
Hick darling. I am so very, very sorry. I ought to know it must be alone or not at all and you probably felt I brought you down under false pretenses but I didn’t mean to even though I did. You were sweet to telephone this morning and I am grateful.
For ER the trip-up and back to Washington was not wasted: “Tommy and I worked all the way down on the train.”
Upset by opposition to her efforts to protect immigrants and refugees, Frances Perkins met with ER “to talk over her troubles on the Jewish question.” For over a year, Perkins sought to find a way to “relieve the strain on terrorized people” by removing some of the restrictions against immigration. Herbert Hoover’s Depression-era executive order against economically dependent immigrants without American relatives to vouch for them was still rigidly interpreted so as to prevent even the allowable immigration quotas from being filled. Perkins wanted FDR to issue a new executive order. But he refused, and anti-immigration contempt swelled in Congress.
Over half Germany’s Jews were already in exile by 1936. While most had fled to neighboring countries, those with friends or relatives in the United States sought sanctuary with them. A growing population of immigrants on tourist visas and immigrants with no papers at all created a grievous situation of harassment and deportation. Concerned about rising anti-alien sentiment, ER and Perkins were allied with Caroline O’Day, who wanted to introduce legislation to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens—many of whom had been in the country for years, were employed, and had young children born here. ER believed that a more liberal Labor Department interpretation might facilitate their becoming citizens.
Perkins assured her that was impossible. Nobody “who is in this country illegally can become a citizen, under existing statutes.” Deportation remained a possibility—even “for persons of good character,” although there were individual Jewish cases over which Perkins had jurisdiction that she tried to resolve happily, with visa extensions; others were denied.
Charles Milgram, for example, appealed to ER for an extension of a “temporary visitors stay for two worthy Rabbis,” Salamon Horowitz and Szmul Elia Epstein. They were well known and highly respected. ER wrote: “Send at once to Frances Perkins and ask if it can be done.” Their visit was extended, for six months. Perkins was embattled over each case, and confronted a mostly hostile Congress and State Department. Although ER responded to each letter sent her by needful refugees and forwarded most of them to Perkins, unless FDR issued a new executive order there was no hope for a policy change.
At the end of March, the Women’s Democratic Committee veterans, ER’s core team, arrived in Washington to spend several days with her to strategize the 1936 campaign. Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Molly Dewson, and Agnes Brown Leach, along with Caroline O’Day, met regularly, and were particularly annoyed that the men seemed so confident while their enemies got off to a vigorous start.
Only several days after Al Smith damned FDR at the Liberty League banquet in January, 3,500 Southern Democrats met in Macon, Georgia, to denounce the New Deal and repudiate FDR. Led by Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge and funded largely by Liberty Leaguers, Dixiecrats blasted “Russocrats” and made dire warnings about Negro influence and the loss of states’ rights.
At the Macon meeting, ER was the primary target: She had encouraged Southern Negroes “to embrace” collectivism; and was determined to destroy white supremacy. The Georgia Woman’s World magazine with photographs of ER receiving flowers from a black child in Detroit, and the First Lady escorted by two black youths in uniform, Howard University students, was on every seat. Thomas Dixon, author of The Klansman, filmed as “The Birth of a Nation,” received the loudest cheers when he called the NAACP the “worst communist organization” in America.
The NAACP defended the New Deal. The Crisis editorialized that ER and FDR were attacked for “forcing social equality on the South” because they “received a handful of Negroes at the White House with ordinary courtesy” and because FDR appointed several Negroes “to richly deserved positions. They forget that Blacks of northern and western states voted for FDR….”
The creation of a Southern opposition party with Talmadge as its nominee must have jolted FDR, who had compromised so much in order to maintain Democratic unity. Walter White, for example, wrote ER an indignant letter during the 1934 campaign when FDR agreed to end the national work relief minimum wage after his meeting with Talmadge: “I most certainly do feel [abolishing the minimum wage] was aimed at the Negro. It is significant that this ruling came immediately after Governor Talmadge of Georgia had visited the President at Warm Springs….” For Talmadge, every New Deal program that failed to discriminate was odious. White was stunned that the administration would do anything “to conciliate him,” since it was known that Talmadge planned “one of the dirtiest anti-Negro campaigns that has been promoted in recent years in the South.”
Now, Talmadge initiated a campaign dedicated to FDR’s defeat. All the President’s prior efforts to conciliate the diehard South seemed wasted, and bitter.
ER was never sanguine about elections. Tricks and traps might derail any “sure” victory. She was disturbed that the Democratic campaign was slow to start. The racist South was in the enemy’s camp, the working South doubtful, and she was troubled that Alf Landon, a progressive Republican, courted the traditional black vote. He tried to distance himself from the Liberty League and the Macon Democrats, who were nevertheless in his camp. ER wanted this fully understood, and was impatient for the campaign to begin.
Moreover, Democratic women were irate: They needed to be reconciled, their enthusiasm reignited. For months, as Molly Dewson prepared work for the women’s committee, she complained to ER about the haphazard men’s team, headed by FDR:
I was disappointed that Franklin could not see me but not surprised because I marvel night and day at what he does. Yet sometimes to be perfectly frank with you I wonder whether some of the persons the papers say he sees are more important to see than I am….
Dewson was particularly disappointed that her effort to get her rainbow flyers filled with New Deal information into every neighborhood was slighted. Like ER, Dewson wanted no votes taken for granted. Their literature was first-rate and their speakers were ready; but spring conferences were not yet planned, and they lacked “some human wonder like the President to go into the states and make the women forget their disappointment over patronage, to draw out the stored up venom.” An “emotional orator” was needed to go around the country and ready “women leaders” for the battle. Apathy reigned; there were “rotten situations” in several states; Dewson felt “powerless,” and signed her letter “Your gloomy Gus, Molly.”
By April, ER was puzzled and miffed that the men continued to do virtually nothing and had not even begun their campaign. On 18 April 1936, she wrote Jim Farley: She wanted at least “one really good woman’s speech” made at the convention in June. ER was eager to go over details with Farley and sent personnel and patronage suggestions:
“Senator and Mrs. Costigan are very hard up.” Despondent over the failure of his antilynch bill, the senator was ailing and ER wanted Mrs. Costigan to “have a job on some commission….
“Don’t forget that Molly wants a job either on the Social Security Board or as an assistant secretary doing [something] she is fitted for.
“I forgot to say that Phoebe Omlie should be given consideration. Is there any chance of moving [Eugene] Vidal? If so she might be assistant secretary in charge of aviation and considering all the fighting she might be rather acceptable to all concerned….”*
Farley assured ER that he would discuss all her suggestions “and be governed by your wishes on anything I do relative to the activity of the women.”
When John Studebaker invited ER to select any topic for a Washington Town Hall Forum, which he chaired, she quickly suggested women and work, and named her panel: Fannie Hurst, George Creel, Josephine Roche. For ninety minutes on Sunday, 2 February, ER spoke candidly to an overflow audience of fifteen hundred:
There is something inherently good for every human being in work. Only through work can a woman fulfill her obligation to herself and to the world and justify her existence….
It is the right of any woman who wants to work to do so.
Her speech lasted forty minutes; then, “skillfully and good-naturedly,” she responded to a challenging, though largely agreeable, panel and audience:
Isn’t it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard; did anybody make a fuss about it until they began to be paid for their work?
Since widows and spinsters are now regarded as America’s greatest menace, should not they be allowed to fight our future wars? In such case, of course, men should not insist upon the sole right to declare war….
ER received countless letters of protest on this issue, which she patiently answered: “I am afraid that your attitude towards women is completely foreign to my more modern ideas….”
Issues of women and work remained high on ER’s agenda. In meetings with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other organizations of business and professional women, ER championed equal protection laws for women and men, eight-hour days for women and men, and equal pay for equal work.
Working women made many contributions, and ER used every opportunity to celebrate them. She introduced Mary Breckenridge at a White House reception for women, on 6 February: Breckenridge directed the “Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, which is carried on by nurses on horseback [who presided over] small clinics dotted here and there in the mountains.”
On 18 March, ER broadcast with Charl Ormond Williams for the ninth annual celebration of “National Business Women’s Week” as “the first business and professional woman to be mistress” of the White House. There were sixty thousand members of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, and eleven million working women in the United States. ER called upon that vast constituency to promote the idea of an important new agency the nation needed: a federal department of “education, the arts, social welfare, and health.” Charl Williams reminded the broadcast audience that ER had called for such a department, and federal aid to education, as early as 1924—when she chaired the Democratic Party’s first women’s platform committee. their enthusiasm reignited. For months, as Molly Dewson prepared work for the women’s committee, she complained to ER about the haphazard men’s team, headed by FDR:
I was disappointed that Franklin could not see me but not surprised because I marvel night and day at what he does. Yet sometimes to be perfectly frank with you I wonder whether some of the persons the papers say he sees are more important to see than I am….
Dewson was particularly disappointed that her effort to get her rainbow flyers filled with New Deal information into every neighborhood was slighted. Like ER, Dewson wanted no votes taken for granted. Their literature was first-rate and their speakers were ready; but spring conferences were not yet planned, and they lacked “some human wonder like the President to go into the states and make the women forget their disappointment over patronage, to draw out the stored up venom.” An “emotional orator” was needed to go around the country and ready “women leaders” for the battle. Apathy reigned; there were “rotten situations” in several states; Dewson felt “powerless,” and signed her letter “Your gloomy Gus, Molly.”
By April, ER was puzzled and miffed that the men continued to do virtually nothing and had not even begun their campaign. On 18 April 1936, she wrote Jim Farley: She wanted at least “one really good woman’s speech” made at the convention in June. ER was eager to go over details with Farley and sent personnel and patronage suggestions:
“Senator and Mrs. Costigan are very hard up.” Despondent over the failure of his antilynch bill, the senator was ailing and ER wanted Mrs. Costigan to “have a job on some commission….
“Don’t forget that Molly wants a job either on the Social Security Board or as an assistant secretary doing [something] she is fitted for.
“I forgot to say that Phoebe Omlie should be given consideration. Is there any chance of moving [Eugene] Vidal? If so she might be assistant secretary in charge of aviation and considering all the fighting she might be rather acceptable to all concerned….”*
Farley assured ER that he would discuss all her suggestions “and be governed by your wishes on anything I do relative to the activity of the women.”
ER also pursued major political alliances and policy issues. The Women’s Trade Union League was scheduled to have its first national convention in seven years in Washington. Close to the working women’s group she had supported for so long, ER invited a delegation to stay at the White House. Rose Schneiderman was “overwhelmed”: “You are a perfect saint…. It will be something they will remember all their lives.”
The press made much of the White House’s week-long house party for fifteen union women, including “seven Alabama textile workers, six New York garment workers, a waitress and a stenographer.” When a reporter asked Nell Morris how she felt about her proposed visit, she said: “I think it’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to a Southern girl. It’s an honor to the state of Alabama.”
FDR greeted the delegation on their arrival, and made them welcome. ER promised to keep the kitchen icebox unlocked and looked forward to breakfast at seven.
New York dressmaker Feige Shapiro was awed to be assigned Lincoln’s bed, where for the first time her “toes didn’t touch the end.” She awoke the first night, and exclaimed aloud: “Imagine me, Feigele Shapiro, sleeping in Lincoln’s bed!”
Forty years later, Pauline Newman noted that it was the first time working women had been White House guests. Annelise Orleck considered that fact key to their enthusiasm for FDR: For all the wage differentials and Democratic opposition to working women, he “treated them with respect.”
That respect was extended as well to an amazing gathering of six thousand country women from every state in the union and twenty-four nations, representing Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Associated Country Women of the World triennial convened in Washington in June. The women were hosted at a White House garden party, where FDR announced that their meeting proved farmers and farmers’ wives and daughters could learn from each other and cooperate to achieve conservation as well as bountiful crops.
FDR emphasized the need to undo “past mistakes,” restore “the former gifts of nature to their former value,” and see that “harmful practices of the old days shall not be repeated.” It was a diplomatic event as well as an environmental one, and peace and international trade were part of the agenda.
At an evening reception ER celebrated country women as leaders and “full partners” in building the future. Radio gave rural women access to the “outside world;” better transport enabled easier travel; the telephone “banished loneliness.” It was an extraordinary convention that heralded a concept later called sustainable development and the movement toward women’s emancipation in rural communities throughout the world.
Howe’s death plunged ER into gloom. Funeral arrangements “always recall previous experiences and depress me unreasonably. I hate funeral parlors. I hope I get put rapidly in the ground in the least expensive of coffins. It all seems so unimportant when ‘you’ no longer exist.”
ER arranged every detail of Louis Howe’s funeral. “There have been endless questions all day, seating, flowers, etc.” ER comforted his family, arose early to meet his daughter, Mary Baker, and others at the train, and considered the services, held in the East Room, just as Louis “would have wanted them to be”—filled with his family, friends, allies—and his most significant enemies and detractors. The journey to Fall River for Louis Howe’s burial “was a trying trip,” but the cemetery service “was lovely and the place itself is beautiful.” According to newspapers, FDR seemed dazed, and “appeared oblivious to everything around him….”
For eight hours on the train back to Washington, ER contemplated Louis Howe, who since 1911 had been her husband’s chief advocate and adviser, and since 1920, her own confidant, mentor, and jolly chum.
He painted; had a wild sense of humor, a pleasing and trained tenor voice. They both loved the theater, and they enjoyed creating theater together. Since FDR never went out, much of their time together was spent inventing entertainments for his amusement. They worked on sets, lyrics, spoofs.
Howe was considerate of her foibles. ER marveled that he once sat at a restaurant table he did not like, eating food he found disagreeable, without a complaint—because he knew a complaint would embarrass her. Very little embarrassed him. Called a medieval gnome in the press, he answered the phone: “This is the Medieval Gnome speaking.” He had cards printed: “Colonel Louis Rasputin Voltaire Talleyrand Simon Legree Howe.”
Their relationship was intimate and unique. She shopped for his clothes; he bought her extraordinary gifts. Wherever he went he thought about what she would like. When his great friend Fannie Hurst served him cognac in a “tiny ruby glass,” one of a Venetian set of mixed and vivid colors he thought exquisite, he said: “How Eleanor would love these.” Fannie Hurst offered them for her as a gift. But Louis never accepted gifts, as a political rule. Hurst—flamboyant and generous—was stunned and hurt. When he realized she was offended, he accepted them for ER—which pleased everyone.
ER worried especially about his devoted assistant Margaret Durand. “A merry freckle-faced girl” he called “Rabbit,” Durand joined the Roosevelt team in 1928. According to Howe’s secretary and biographer Leila Styles, Rabbit “devoted her life to him… as he devoted his to Franklin Roosevelt and no tribute paid her would do her justice.”
That night, ER wrote Hick: “Rabbit is the one I am most sorry for just as if I should outlive FDR I know Missy would be the one I should worry about! I rather hope however that I will be the one to go, before I go through this again….”
ER learned lifelong lessons from Howe: “Never admit you’re licked.” She added: “If you have to compromise, be sure to compromise up!”
She pondered Howe’s death in terms of FDR’s loss. Howe was older than FDR, deeply trusted and respected: “Louis Howe’s death left a great gap in my husband’s life…. For one reason and another, no one quite filled the void.” Each new adviser “disappeared from the scene, occasionally with a bitterness which I understood but always regretted. There are not many men in this world whose personal ambition is to accomplish things for someone else, and it was some time before a friendship with Harry Hopkins, somewhat different but similar in certain ways, again brought Franklin some of the satisfaction he had known with Louis Howe.”
Personally, Louis Howe had never disappointed ER. Above all, they shared a sense of why the game of politics was actually played. One built places like Arthurdale, with dispatch and despite all opposition, because it was right to do so. They shared a vision of public responsibility, which was for each of them in entirely selfless ways what the quest for public power was all about. At the time of Louis Howe’s death, ER wrote in her column:
There never was a more gentle, kindly spirit. He hated sham and cowardice, but he had a great pity for the weak and helpless in this world, and responded to any appeal with warmth and sympathy. His courage, loyalty and devotion to his family and friends will be an inspiration to all of them as long as they live.
Over the years, ER wrote about Howe’s impact on her own life, her political evolution, and her public style. But ER rejected his conviction that she could serve in any elective or public office she chose. Specifically, Howe wanted ER to contemplate the presidency.
In a letter to Hick, ER explained his vision of the future: “He always wanted to ‘make’ me President when FDR was through, and insisted he could do it.”
One of Howe’s last legacies was an eleven-page essay, “Women’s Ways in Politics,” a celebration of women’s activities. Howe wrote it for Molly Dewson to use in the 1936 presidential campaign: “Forty years ago … a woman interested in politics was as scarce as an Irish snake.” Public interest among women was “regarded with raised eyebrows as denoting a perverted and plebeian taste which raised grave suspicions as to the social standing of her ancestors.” Even after women achieved the vote, “male political leaders” regarded women “with an indifference that to me was incomprehensible.” But women’s demands for social reform “rudely awakened” men from their “peaceful sloth,” and they began to concede power to women in local party organizations.
Since 1928, Howe concluded, women had actually transformed the political game. He credited ER and her circle with introducing a new sense of determined independence: “Our women once tasting a sense of political power, have made in this short time many sweeping changes in the men’s organizations … and now are rapidly approaching an equal power with the men.”
Howe listed women’s attributes: They wanted and demanded facts. They wanted their facts free of rhetoric and confusion. They understood how to write leaflets free of cant and artifice. They were always skeptical, and unlike men who were willing to accept “their leader’s statements” without evidence or investigation, women demanded real arguments. Howe believed his female coworkers “revolutionized the character of campaign literature.”
Howe also considered “women very much superior to the men” in their “actual work among the voters.” The women’s division of the Democratic Party “organized a flying corps of women.” Without any compensation, they went door to door, in every community, “armed with literature and prepared to debate any question with intelligence. We called them at headquarters the ‘Grass Trampers’ and to their devotion, to their intelligence, to their tireless activities I cannot pay too high a tribute.”
Howe concluded his essay “with a prophecy which will be violently disputed by almost every man.” If women continued to progress in politics during the next decade as they had in the past, they would run for every possible office and there was “not only the possibility but the advisability, of electing a woman as President of the United States.” He continued:
And if the issues continue to be as they are now—humanitarian, educational, and all the other features of the so-called “New Deal,” it is not without the bounds of possibility that a woman might not only be nominated but elected to that office on the ground that they better understand such questions than the men.
Howe died firmly convinced that ER could be that candidate.
*ER’s reference to tensions between Gene Vidal, director of air commerce, and other Department of Commerce officials, including its secretary, Daniel Roper, is one example of her endless ability to involve herself in every aspect of FDR’s administration. In September, Vidal (Gore Vidal’s father) was removed. Amelia Earhart (his champion and lover) was furious and threatened to abandon her promise to ER to campaign. She wrote ER, who appealed to FDR, and Vidal was temporarily restored. After that Earhart made twenty-eight speeches for FDR throughout the country.
*ER’s reference to tensions between Gene Vidal, director of air commerce, and other Department of Commerce officials, including its secretary, Daniel Roper, is one example of her endless ability to involve herself in every aspect of FDR’s administration. In September, Vidal (Gore Vidal’s father) was removed. Amelia Earhart (his champion and lover) was furious and threatened to abandon her promise to ER to campaign. She wrote ER, who appealed to FDR, and Vidal was temporarily restored. After that Earhart made twenty-eight speeches for FDR throughout the country.