ER dreaded the first campaign season since 1911 without the emotional support of Louis Howe. Fully aware that the people now around FDR wanted her to recede into the background, to say little or nothing on the campaign trail, she tried to abide by their idea of a winning strategy. As early as February she told her press conference, “I am not making any campaign speeches.” Firmly, she rejected political questions about the future, and announced that during the campaign all her public or paid lectures would be “made on a non-partisan basis.”
But she could not do it. Every word, every column, carried political messages. Reaching out, acting on her sense of responsibility in hard times, was for her a basic instinct and an emotional need. She might forever deny that she was “political,” but she was determined to fight for her goals.
No matter how embattled she became, ER always paused to notice and give thanks for the splendors of the natural world. Each sunrise was a miracle, each sunset a mystery. From the roll of the fog off the sea in Campobello to the curl of her favorite apricot-colored roses, the wonders of earth’s changes in each season were at the core of her political ethic. Her anguish at the ravages of poverty, the cruelties of dictators, was in direct proportion to her spiritual sense of gratitude while riding through the woods or walking along the shore.
Often her columns reflected the unity of her vision. During the first days of summer, for example, she wrote of a visit to Elinor Morgenthau’s farm. They went into the field to see “four of the most enchanting colts.” ER recognized “something appealing in all young animals, but a colt with its long legs and confiding ways, is somehow particularly attractive.”
When ER saw “a very large bull lying on the ground,” she asked Morgenthau if it was “well-behaved.”
“No, it is extremely vicious,” she replied. But it had fought with another bull, and now could hardly move.
That reference to vicious uncontrollable behavior led ER to discuss Dorothy Thompson’s powerful column exploring the hate-filled, mendacious political climate that defined the campaign season in 1936. Thompson had asked: “Who is to blame? You and I are to blame.” There are so many “things we tolerate and know are untrue.” ER wished Thompson’s “message could get across to thousands of citizens. She is right—we are to blame for much of the bigotry, ignorance and vice in this country because so few of us think it necessary to do more than keep quiet.”
ER had long understood that activism helped her forestall depression, and now she was urged to keep quiet. In the summer of 1936, ER felt vulnerable, lonely, and alone. Howe was gone, Cook and Dickerman were no longer friends, and it was the first summer since 1932 that she spent entirely without Lorena Hickok. Although they corresponded, Hick remained in the Middle West with various friends, Jeannette Bryce, Adel Enright, and especially Alix Holt.
ER wrote often, as she did on 1 June: “I miss you badly, and love you much.” But Hick refused to alter her plans, even when ER asked her to. She was mystified that in Chicago, with Hick so nearby at a Minnesota lake, they would not see each other.
While Hick was with Jeanette touring the Minnesota lake country and then with Alix in Michigan, ER was on the campaign trail in the South. Despite the Talmadges and bigots, the South seemed vigorous for Roosevelt. FDR “purrs like a cat under the enthusiasm and friendly welcomes….” But ER wearied “of cheering crowds” and wrote that she would “like them less if they booed but I’d be more interested!”
Her agreement to stand beside her husband, circumspect and speechless, combined with the unrelenting pace of the campaign train and a stunning heat wave, drained ER’s spirits. She spent hours on the train “fantasizing about the peace and quiet” she would have when the campaign ended. Initially, she boasted: “I can stand this pace but the others break down.” Tommy was “really exhausted.” Eventually, even ER’s “head [felt] odd with the heat!”
ER dismissed the Republican platform as “the same old bunk.” She hoped theirs would not be “so long,” although she knew it was “foolish to hope it will be any less ‘bunk-ish.’ ” She sent Hick an article by Bruce Barton about ER and the Dionne quintuplets, which “will amuse you!” But she rejected its premise: “Won’t it be a surprise to them all when I sink info peace and obscurity!”
According to Barton:
The quintuplets should be kept together, carefully nurtured, and educated in writing for the newspapers, traveling around the country and talking on the radio. At the age of sixteen they should be brought to the United States [from Canada] and put in training to become the wife of a future President of the U.S. No one woman ever can stand the pace that has been set by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Future Presidents will have to have five wives at least. It will be an advantage to have them all look alike; four can be recuperating while the fifth is out doing her stuff. Even for five, it will be a tough assignment.
On ER’s return to New York on the 18th she found several letters from Hick, and a wire—all now lost. In reply, ER was aggravated by Hick’s “decision not to come home till September. Are you taking the absent treatment because it helps? If so I won’t say a word—Otherwise, I should say sometimes too much conscience is an unpleasant thing! Well, dear it is for you to decide for you are the one who suffers and I just enjoy what I can have and learned long ago to accept what had to be—.”
Hick evidently dealt with her own disappointment about having no journalist’s role during a presidential campaign by becoming involved with two other women who were in competition for her affections. Although most of Hick’s correspondence is lost, Alix Holt’s 14 June letter to Hick sheds light on the situation:
Carissima, what did I say that made you imagine I think you quite perfect and love you for that reason? Truly, you flatter yourself! Aren’t we a bit absurd, thinking about the why and wherefore and how of this friendship of ours? And I’m afraid I started it. Anyway, in spite of your being “hollow” and my being “stupid,” we still seem to be fond of each other, and probably shall continue to be. I suspect I shall love you as long as you do me, at least, and perhaps a little bit longer. When do you suppose we shall begin to take each other for granted, as we do our other friends? I think we had better try, don’t you? But, darling, I’m glad to know you really need me. And I do you.
ER had no intention of losing this particular battle. And she did not lose it. After Hick’s June week with her, Alicent Holt virtually disappeared from the game of hearts. With stoic patience, ER waded through the moment—which lasted all summer.
As always, she sent Hick daily letters, and detailed the doings at Val-Kill, which began to resemble a three-ring circus. Earl and Roberta and Tommy and Henry and many grandchildren were in ER’s new home. They played croquet, sat around the garden, swam in the pool, prepared hot dogs at the still-shared fireplace, all of which upset Nan and Marion. Val-Kill, once an idyllic retreat, was now under a growing cloud of tension, threatening and unpleasant. In the midst of all her company ER longed for Hick, her only trusted confidante when it came to Democratic politics and her personal feelings about FDR.
On 22 June, ER went to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to honor Alice Hamilton for her pioneering work on industrial health and occupational diseases. The evening gave ER perspective about her own private anguish:
[Dr. Hamilton] is such a dear. So gentle and unassuming and yet look what she’s done! A lesson to most of us who think we have to assert ourselves to be useful and particularly good for me as I was feeling rather annoyed with FDR. Nothing unusual just a little feeling on his part that he was abused because I didn’t cooperate with his plans about Hyde Park when I wasn’t asked at the time to sit in or express an idea! Then my pride was injured at his perfect forgetfulness of part of a political suggestion I had made on the train and I was annoyed until I realized tonight how small it all was sitting by the sweet-faced woman who has probably given the impetus to workman’s compensation and research into industrial disease and saved countless lives and heartbreaks!
On the way home, ER stopped at Alderson Prison for Women “and saw two faces which haunt me. Gosh! We might any one of us be there.” She noted, “Tommy is weary in body, and I’m weary in mind.”
ER listened on the radio to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. The platform was being debated, and it seemed “to be going smoothly,” although at dinner FDR seemed worried and tired. In another room, Sam Rosenman, Stanley High, Ray Moley, and Tom Cochran all worked on FDR’s acceptance speech. ER concluded her letter with an ambiguous promise:
Goodnight dear, and bless you. Do what you think is right this summer and I’ll meet you wherever you wish whenever I can but remember I am going to do a paid speaking tour beginning November 9th till I have to go for Thanksgiving to Warm Springs. Part of October I may be on a trip with FDR and part of September I’ll be helping Earl settle his house….
During the June convention, while her closest political friends set off for Philadelphia, ER sat at home with nothing to do. Dewson invited ER to speak at one of the daily women’s breakfasts where all the steam for the campaign of 1936 was being generated. Each morning women from every region introduced their needs, and new strategies were forged. Molly Dewson planned these big breakfast rallies to guarantee an enthusiastic campaign—only the women could provide Democratic unity.
ER was sorry to write Dewson that while she “would love to be at a breakfast,” it was her political obligation to stay away from the preliminaries and arrive with FDR for his acceptance speech. “Otherwise, I might get myself into trouble!” She wrote about the preliminary festivities from a great distance:
The magnolias out of my window are in bloom and they look beautiful at night. I listened [to the convention] to the bitter end last night and wondered if in 1783 they whooped it up so much. It seems undignified and meaningless but perhaps we need it!
The Democratic women considered ER their leader. Even Frances Perkins, who was closer to the president, considered ER the heart of the Democratic women’s movement. At one breakfast, “the loudest cheers” arose when Perkins departed from her prepared speech to pay tribute to the First Lady. According to The New York Times, Perkins celebrated ER with “deep feeling”:
I want to speak of a prominent woman Democrat who is not here. She is kept away by convention—not political, but social convention, although she is not a woman to be bound by convention.
Her genius is the capacity to love the human race and to hear and understand the misery and wants and aspirations of people….
If ever there was a gallant and courageous and intelligent and wise woman, she is one.
I know that many women … when they go to vote in November for Franklin Roosevelt will be thinking with a choke in their throats of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Upon Perkins’s last words, a spontaneous demonstration of prolonged enthusiasm erupted throughout the ballroom.
Although male politicians ignored the vigorous and important work done by the Women’s Committee, ER and Dewson had organized many aspects of the convention, and the women’s famous “rainbow flyers” explaining and celebrating New Deal achievements were on every seat.
Bess Furman reported the convention was a “dull dish,” predictable and routine from the “masculine viewpoint.” But in terms of the women, “Philadelphia made history.” More women were in attendance than ever, and Molly Dewson’s committee demonstrated a “New Deal woman’s movement of impressive proportions.” However dramatic and inspiring the women’s movement, “it was so ignored by [male] politicians that it might as well have been underground.”
Four years of patient organizing by Molly Dewson and the other stalwarts of ER’s inner circle had resulted in a convention represented by 219 women delegates and 302 women alternates. More than five hundred women “surged through Molly’s huge mezzanine-floor headquarters.”
Women, led by ER, had long understood that space was symbolic. At Philadelphia, the Women’s Division headquarters were as large as Jim Farley’s “big reception room” combined with vice president Garner’s headquarters and Charley Michelson’s publicity room. It was, Dewson promised, only the beginning. M. W. (“More Women”) Dewson would not rest “until women permeate the party on a 50–50 basis.”
Daisy Harriman was “enchanted.” There were three times more Democratic women in Philadelphia than there were Republican women in Ohio. “I must dash right over and tell Alice Longworth!” When Furman asked Harriman how she managed her lifelong friendship with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the future minister to Norway replied: “Oh, we’ve had the most interesting time. We never fight.”
Harriman cited a recent dinner where she had been the lone Democrat among Republican leaders, all of whom attacked FDR and the New Deal the entire evening. As Daisy Harriman left, Alice Longworth said: “You can’t have had such a nice time.”
“Quite the contrary” Harriman replied: “I thought I was right back in 1907. It was just the way Wall Street talked about your father.”
For ER the campaign was in the details. As chair of the first women’s platform committee in 1924, ER had been insulted, excluded from final policy meetings. Her progressive platform, worked up with the advice of her social work mentors, had been discarded. In contrast to that bleak time when ER, Caroline O’Day, and Elinor Morgenthau patiently sat outside the closed platform committee door, shunned and snubbed by the party leaders, who never allowed them to present the platform they had been asked to prepare, Dew-son’s team of fourteen platform writers was given time and consideration. And it resembled, almost plank by plank, the platform ER and her associates had prepared in 1924: the eight-hour day, conservation of public lands, labor’s right to bargain collectively, a federal employment agency, equal pay for equal work, federal aid for maternal and child health, child welfare, education to eliminate venereal disease, an end to vigilante violence.
In 1924, “vigilante violence” referred to the reemergence of Ku Klux Klan and Red Scare terror that followed World War I. In 1936 it was again a political factor, with lynchings and anti-union violence everywhere on the rise.
Caroline O’Day presented the women’s platform, and proposals to change the convention rules to provide two representatives from each state (a man and a woman) on the platform committee. But real party equity remained elusive. Despite the unprecedented number of women delegates and Dewson’s many triumphs, their male allies treated women shabbily.*
Dewson had expected to be appointed vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. She assumed she had the support of Farley, Flynn, and FDR. But at the last moment she was betrayed and Farley supported her archrival, Emma Guffey Miller. Astounded, Dewson wrote Farley: “I go to your defense with loyalty and ardor practically every day…. The few times I have disagreed with you I have told you and no one else except Mrs. Roosevelt to whom I feel primarily responsible.”
Sister of Pennsylvania’s Senator Joe Guffey, Emma Guffey Miller was an ardent Democrat with clout. Jim Farley replied: “Molly, I can’t help it. Senator Guffey is using such pressure on me.” Dewson gave Farley an alternative: Appoint as many women vice-chairs as there were men, and Guffey could be one of them. He agreed, but men clung to their dominance: Farley appointed eight women, then added two men.
Although women were used to get out the vote, they continued to be excluded from policy meetings, and were generally ignored by FDR’s inner circle. In the past, Louis Howe was their bridge to power, and he made sure FDR complimented their work. That task was now left to ER, even while she herself was made to feel less and less part of the campaign. If some of the men listened to her views out of courtesy or consideration, many others merely gazed in her direction when she offered a suggestion and, without the dignity of a reply of any kind, continued their conversation as if she had not even spoken. It was an old and lingering trick; women got used to it. When they persevered, as ER did, they were called strident.
On Saturday, 27 June, ER accompanied FDR to Philadelphia for his acceptance speech. The huge outdoor stadium was filled with anticipation and ebullience. Eager Democrats had waited five days for this moment. Over 100,000 people had assembled by seven o’clock, and it had rained all evening. Their feet muddy, their clothes wet, they cheered and sang through warm evening mists, and one significant downpour.
It was the largest political rally in U.S. history. The waiting crowd had been roused by soprano Lily Pons, several bands, Eddie Peabody’s banjo, and Tchaikovsky played by the Philadelphia Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Most reporters, including Bess Furman, assembled at five o’clock, were soaked to the skin, and took bets on whether FDR’s fabled weather magic would be repeated on this unlikely night. Then, just as he appeared, the rains stopped; a half-full moon glowed brightly, and the wind grew still.
FDR’s car arrived at ten o’clock, as vice president John Garner completed his lackluster acceptance speech. The orchestra played “Hail to the Chief” as FDR walked on his son James’s arm to the rostrum. But he was interrupted by the “most frightful five minutes of my life.” It was a moment which demonstrated the complexities and triumphs of FDR’s character.
Arthur M. Schlesinger reported the scene: In “the blur of faces,” FDR recognized illustrious poet Edward Markham, and waved. As the eighty-four-year-old poet went to shake FDR’s hand, the crowd surged forward and the president was jostled. “Under the pressure,” his right steel brace “snapped out of position,” and FDR toppled over. “Mike Reilly of the Secret Service dived and caught him… just before he hit the ground.”
But pages of his speech fell into the mud. While Jim Farley and “other tall men clustered around to hide the scene,” Gus Gennerich knelt and snapped the brace back. “Reilly, fearing that some Secret Service man might shoot down the white-bearded stranger in the confusion, shouted frantically to Markham, ‘Don’t move!’
“Roosevelt was pale and shaken…. ‘Clean me up,’ he ordered”; and keep your “feet off ‘those damned sheets.’ ” But then he noticed Markham, “close to tears, a look of agony on his face.” FDR, paused, turned, smiled, “took the poet’s hand in his.” All was well. When the president reached the platform, he seemed “tranquil and unperturbed, while he quietly reassembled the smudged and crumpled pages.”
The campaign of 1936 was dedicated to the extension of the New Deal, to the demise of those who would inflict despair and permanent poverty on working Americans. Accused by his enemies of communism and fascism, FDR introduced a new way—a democratic way—to economic security. He attacked “economic royalists” who controlled America’s material life, built kingdoms of concentrated wealth which dominated industry. “These tyrants of our technology” thought they could forever control the “railroads, steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio.”
The twentieth century ushered in an age of giant “corporations, banks and securities; new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital.” Modern civilization changed everything, created new power centers and new problems, disempowered “many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants” who “were no more free than the worker or the farmer.”
The “privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction….” They erected a “new industrial dictatorship” which controlled the “hours men and women worked, the wages’ they received, the conditions of their labor….”
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real….
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended….
And now, FDR promised, democracy’s march would enlarge democracy’s scope:
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business….
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is [indivisible]. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power….
Domestically, FDR’s speech was revolutionary. He hoped it would have international consequences: All was not “well with the world: Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places.” America’s domestic success might rekindle hope among those in other lands who had grown “too weary to carry on the fight” for freedom and had “yielded their democracy” for illusions.
In America, FDR declared, “we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It … is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”
Though he never mentioned fascism or communism, FDR’s speech resounded throughout the world, and reverberated for decades with the conviction that there was another way, a democratic way: “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny….”
When she first read FDR’s speech, ER hesitated: She considered his rhetoric vividly crafted, but “not specific enough for me.” After he presented it at Franklin Field, she was enthusiastic. She wrote: “I think F felt every word of his speech.” His delivery was powerful and dramatic; “it was a wonderful sight.”
Afterward, his wife and mother beside him, his children and grandchildren close by, the cheering went on and on. The band played “Auld Lang Syne.” When it was done, FDR asked that it be repeated, and he and the entire audience joined in song. Then in an open car, to the horror of the Secret Service, ER and FDR drove around the stadium surrounded by a wild display of hope and trust, as the roaring cheers continued into the night.
Harold Ickes considered it “the greatest political speech I have ever heard”:
[FDR presented] the fundamental issue that must be decided in this country… whether to have real freedom for the mass of people, not only political but economic, or whether we are to be governed by a group of economic overlords. It is clear that the President’s speech created a profound impression in the country.
ER wanted her husband’s splendid words transformed into real action, actual legislation, democratic citizen movements committed to change. She worried, as she always worried during campaigns, that platforms and promises would dissolve into nothing after the election. In her subsequent article for The Democratic Digest she wrote about that star-filled, rhetorically galvanizing night:
You could not feel anything but solemn, for no man faces such a great crowd … without recognizing the fearful responsibility that rests upon him and how many of his fellow citizens depend on his sincerity and ability….
ER also had a message for political women in 1936. To all women in public life she offered specific advice and encouragement, based on her own experiences—and especially relevant, she noted, to this campaign:
You cannot take anything personally.
You cannot bear grudges.
You must finish the day’s work when the day’s work is done.
You cannot get discouraged too easily.
You have to take defeat over and over again and pick up and go on.
Be sure of your facts.
Argue the other side with a friend until you have found the answer to every point which might be brought up against you.
Women who are willing to be leaders must stand out and be shot at. More and more they are going to do it, and more and more they should do it.
ER subsequently added: “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide,” which seemed particularly appropriate after FDR’s triumph in Philadelphia. Upon their return to Washington, FDR complied even more fully with his advisers who wanted ER kept as quiet and as invisible as possible. With nothing to do, ER wrote Hick glum letters, and berated herself for her sense of detachment: “It has always been so [somber] a business for me (living I mean)…. Gee! I wish I could even be excited about all this, I can’t and I hate myself!”
Despite her feelings, she carried on, and called women’s meetings to plan strategy. ER’s core group of state and national leaders were the worker bees of the campaign effort, block by block; they prepared the literature; they rang the doorbells.
In New York, the entire campaign organization was built around ER’s veteran network and remained under the much-concealed direction of ER herself. Caroline O’Day was associate state chair; Nancy Cook ran O’Day’s office; Agnes Brown Leach was in charge of all organization work; Bessie Beatty ran the publicity department; Grace Greene ran the speakers’ bureau; New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff Backer was radio chair, assisted by Elinor Morgenthau; Mary Dreier conducted literature distribution; and Mrs. N. Taylor Phillips was in charge of voter registration.
State activities were coordinated weekly with Dewson’s national efforts. It was an amazing and complex apparatus—which worked. With one caveat: It was up to the men to call upon and use their efforts.
But the new group around FDR was not interested in their contributions. Moreover, the press was vicious, and ER was routinely the target. Even a friendly article declared her a debit, or at least a mixed blessing. In July a New York Times Magazine article by Kathleen McLaughlin profiled ER. Her political views were favorably presented, but her role in electoral politics was dubious:
There is no middle ground with regard to Eleanor Roosevelt…. She is undeniably both an asset and a liability…. It is possible that no woman before her will have swung so many votes both for and against….
For all ER’s disclaimers about silence during the campaign, McLaughlin wrote, everyone knew about her “private post office” to FDR, the “small basket” by his bedside she filled at the close of each day with observations, analyses, and reports. Nobody doubted that the busiest First Lady remained busy. She received over “105,000 letters in a single year” and traveled “38,000 miles in 1933,42,000 miles in 1934, and 35,000 in 1935.” Her own personal goal was still to “go everywhere and see everything.” ER remained Eleanor Everywhere, with endless influence.
The article hardened the Democratic strategy to keep her under wraps. FDR’s new advisers emphasized opposition to ER’s column, her controversial pronouncements, and especially her paid lectures and broadcasts. The Republican campaign glorified the traditional concept of First Lady: Mrs. Landon was depicted as the perfect prairie wife—hardworking, silent, at home. FDR’s inner circle was envious.
Her feelings in turmoil, ER was unusually alone. Hick, still with others, sent letters of encouragement, pep talks on paper to raise ER’s spirits. ER replied to a letter now lost concerning Philadelphia: “You sound happy and you are right, when I write you stupid, sorry-for-myself letters, I would deny all my sentiments six months hence. I know at the time I say it I’m an idiot!”
Hick’s own attitude during June and July seemed carefree. No longer a journalist on the campaign trail, she seemed almost disinterested. Her new commitment to having fun was no possible source of comfort for ER, although Hick tried to entertain the First Lady. During the summer of 1936, Hick wrote a series of uncharacteristic letters filled with follies and risqué jokes; her usual political observations were replaced with vivid descriptions of pastoral places, and visits to burlesque and drag shows.
From a resort hotel on the shore of Lake Superior, Hick wrote:
Dearest: At last I’ve found the perfect place, in all the world, to spend a weekend. This is it. A simple, quiet, scrupulously clean little hotel away up on the northernmost tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Inexpensive. Alicent and I have a lovely room, with water lapping against the rocks right outside our window…. Very good food. Nice, simple, friendly people. And all this in a setting beautiful beyond description.
They had driven over a magnificent road built by the WPA: “Really dear, that road is one of the most beautiful WPA jobs I’ve ever seen, anywhere.” And the scenery reminded her of the Gaspé Peninsula. The lake was azure, the hills lush, “beautiful forests all along the way. Lots of virgin pine. (One of the Old Man’s best remarks while I was there recently: ‘Will you please tell me of what earthly use is a virgin pine?’).” She continued:
I wish so much that you were here tonight, dear. It’s away after 9 o’clock, but still light…. This is a beautiful little bay, so deeply blue in the day time, but now all orchid and pink and gold in the sunset. Scattered about it are rocky little islands covered with scrubby, hardy little pines. They suggest Chinese screens—or Japanese prints. And it’s so quiet. So very, very restful….
But there was no radio, and no newspaper. She could not even read FDR’s speech. “Goodnight, dear. I wish I could bring you here sometime….”
They had no plans to see each other until the end of September, which was such “a long way off,” and ER assured Hick, “I can meet you anywhere you wish.”
After her Michigan vacation with Alicent, Hick went to Chicago, where she spent most of her time with a male friend named Kruger:
Kruger complicates the situation in that I have to dress every night and dine out with him. But he amuses himself daytimes, and I do like having him around. I’m gradually making a liberal out of him, and it’s fun. Tonight we dined at Colsino’s, one of the less lurid night clubs which is famous chiefly for its Capone connections. For the most part, we found it depressing. The inanities of sin! There was one funny thing. They had billed one June St. Clair “America’s most alluring woman.” After waiting all evening, we finally saw her. She was fat, forty, very much bleached. Her hair looked like cotton. She bustled about the floor for a few seconds, looking for all the world like a worried, frowsy housewife. Then she stopped in front of the curtain, dropped her dress, which was all she had on, and stood there for a split second—naked and very UN-lovely….
Came back and found several dozen flat-chested gals and anemic young men, delegates to a Baptist young people’s convention singing “Old Black Joe” in the lobby! In the Continental Room, just off the lobby—air cooled and very expensive—there’s a dancer who calls herself Countess Something-or-Other. She wears a very sheer jade green chiffon gown with nothing under it save a very tiny “jock strap” and an ineffectual brassiere…. Isn’t Chicago funny? Tomorrow morning we’re going to the zoo….
While Hick tried to cheer up the depressed First Lady with accounts of nightlife in the heartland, ER struggled to enjoy diversions. During the July Fourth weekend she joined FDR’s party aboard the Potomac for a cruise down the James River. Hardly an assemblage of her preferred mates, it included Ickes, Missy LeHand, Farley, several politicians, and FDR’s Harvard friends, courtly Virginians who impressed Ickes: Even “the abolition of slavery has not served to destroy this distinctive … culture.”
ER wrote Hick:
Dearest, how I wish you were here tonight…. It was nice on deck but I hated making polite conversation and you would have hated it even more, wouldn’t you? I think I envy you off with one person and when the day’s work is done you don’t have to be with a crowd. Oh! well, most of the time I’d rather have the crowd than be alone with any of them but I’d like a few hours with you now and then!
While ER felt refreshed by a visit with England’s outspoken social work leader and wife of the new ambassador, Lady Stella Reading, Esther Lape, and Elizabeth Read, FDR enjoyed an unusual private party at Harold Ickes’s place. Missy LeHand had told Ickes that the president “wished he knew some place in the country where he could go and have a quiet and undisturbed evening” with friends. Ickes offered his home, but since FDR had not been to the home of any other cabinet member “the White House wanted the thing kept as quiet as possible.”
It was a small group, with Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Tom Corcoran, and several others; an evening made notable by splendid food and drink. Ickes wrote:
I served Chateau Yquem, a good claret, and a good vintage champagne. We had liqueurs afterward and when the dining table had been removed, the butlers brought out and put on a table, with a supply of cracked ice, Scotch, rye and bourbon whiskey, gin and Bacardi rum….
The party was a great success…. Tom Corcoran had brought his accordion…. and sang practically the whole evening…. The President seemed to enjoy himself hugely and he entered into the fun very naturally and spontaneously….
[FDR carried] his liquor well. He must have had five highballs after dinner. He drank gin and ginger ale, but he never showed the slightest effect…. He must have had a good time because he didn’t leave until half past twelve and then only after Miss LeHand prodded him two or three times and insisted that he must go home and to bed.
It was precisely the kind of drinking party that ER would have hated. During the summer of 1936, her world and his seemed to grow ever more separate and distinct.
On 14 July, ER saw FDR and her sons off for a leisurely sail on a chartered yacht, the Sewanee, to arrive at Campobello at month’s end, when he would be joined by ER and her party. Until then ER spent time at Val-Kill, to work on political strategy with the Women’s Democratic Committee. She wrote Hick: “I feel fine and very cheerful but I’d like to feel I was going to have you in Hyde Park in August.”
FDR’s political advisers were either puzzled or enraged by his nonchalance regarding the election, and his decision to take a vacation at such a critical time. Steve Early and Stanley High were in touch with ER, who agreed to wire FDR regarding urgent decisions for speeches that needed to be made before Alf Landon’s campaign dominated the news.
FDR refused to take Alf Landon seriously; and he paid no attention to the third-party candidacy of William Lemke, whose Union Party was comprised of radicals and fascists. It was led by Dr. Frank Townsend, whose old-age insurance scheme competed with Democratic alternatives, and brutal racists and anti-Semites, including Huey Long’s successor Gerald L. K. Smith and Detroit’s radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin astounded observers when he pulled off his coat and collar at the Union Party convention to call FDR a traitor and liar. With little hope of victory, Unionists fronted for Landon; and prominent conservative Democrats defected to him all spring.
Several summer polls indicated Landon had a significant lead. FDR’s team was actually in disarray, with nobody clearly in charge, engulfed by disagreements and rivalries. ER looked on aghast and angry. Ickes was also aroused: The Landon camp has gone into high gear, and “we have continued to sit by….”
[While FDR] smiles and fishes and the rest of us worry and fume….
With even our own private polls showing an alarming falling off in the President’s vote, the whole situation is incomprehensible to me. It was loudly proclaimed that Louie Howe had supplied most of the political strategy… and I am beginning to believe that this must have been true. I do know that Howe was the only one who dared to talk to him frankly and fearlessly…. He could reach him not only directly but through Mrs. Roosevelt. Jim Farley tries to please the President…. I do not think that he takes advice from anybody….
As late as 20 July, Steve Early told Ickes that “there were no campaign plans and no budget.” Ickes despaired: “We are in bad shape and in grave danger.” Stanley High told him:
Mrs. Roosevelt is worried and so is Farley, but the President himself seems to be up in the clouds….
Because the women were so completely organized, the situation was not really dire. They had assembled a series of appealing speakers, highlighted by stars and heroes, including Ruth Bryan Owen, who agreed to leave her diplomatic post in Denmark to tour the country for FDR. Dewson wrote:
I am all for your having an airplane. And I do wish that you would look with favor on having Phoebe Omlie of the U.S. Department of Aeronautics to pilot you. She is a superb pilot and in the early days won cross country races from the men. She is one of the few recognized and licensed airplane mechanics. Better than all, she is a very calm and easy person to get along with.
Ruth Bryan Owen agreed:
I would be a poor sort of feminist if I had any inhibitions about a woman pilot. I am delighted to join up with Miss Omlie.
Ruth Bryan Owen’s plans were only slightly upended in June when she unexpectedly announced: “Now I would suggest that you get seated and hold on to the arms of the chair before you read the following paragraph!” She had fallen in love with “one Kammerjunker Kaptjan Borge Rohde, of the Danish King’s Life Guards and Gentleman in Attendance on the King at the Danish Court.” They would be married as soon as possible, after reaching the United States. A university scholar, Captain Rohde was a linguist who impressed everyone with his vast charm and wit. On 10 July, the Roosevelts hosted their wedding party at Hyde Park. It was a memorable occasion, jolly and glamorous. Fannie Hurst was the bride’s attendant, and the party stimulated political activity. Ruth Bryan Owen Rohde resigned from the diplomatic corps, and made more than fifty speeches around the country for FDR, accompanied by her new husband.
But as July unfolded, the Women’s Committee seemed to be working in a vacuum, and ER considered the situation alarming. Even in Campobello the inaction galled her. As she read the newspapers and polls, she could not remain silent or inactive. She considered what Louis Howe would do and fired off a rigorous memo, which covered all the issues Howe, supported by his pool of six hundred workers, had fully coordinated in the past.
ER cast her memo widely—to the president, Jim Farley, Charley Michel-son, Stanley High, Steve Early, and Mollie Dewson—and she wanted immediate action: Landon’s people had hired advertisers and radio scriptwriters, “and the whole spirit is the spirit of a crusade.” Now “we have got to get going and going quickly.” She wanted it understood that her letter was “a matter of record” and expected “to get the answers in black and white”:
1. At the meeting in Washington, the President said that Mr. Michelson, Steve Early, Stanley High and Henry Suydam would constitute the publicity steering committee, and I take it this must include radio, speeches, movies, pamphlets, fliers, news releases and trucks….
I hope a meeting will be held immediately for organizing and defining the duties of the members and that you will have the minutes kept at every meeting in order that a copy may go to the President and if the committee is willing, one to me as well so that I may know just what is done each time also.
2. Who is responsible for studying news reports and suggesting answers to charges, etc.?
3. Who is responsible for…. the radio campaign, getting the speakers through the speakers’ bureau, making the arrangements in the states for people to listen and getting in touch with Chester Davis, for instance on agriculture…? In other words, who is making decisions under your committee…?
4. Who is in charge of research? Have we … complete information concerning all activities of the New Deal…?
Who is to check on all inconsistencies in Landon’s pronouncements…?
5. What definite plans have we made for tying in the other publicity organizations, both of men and women with the national publicity organization?…
6. Have you mapped out continuous publicity steps which will be taken between now and November? Is there any way at least of charting a tentative plan of strategy for the whole campaign…?
7. In the doubtful and Republican states what special attention do you plan to give…?
8. Who is handling news reels…?
ER went on for several more points, and she had specific suggestions: “I think it would be well to start some Negro speakers, like [Mary McLeod] Bethune to speak at church meetings and that type of Negro organization.”
Her formidable memo reflected her years as Howe’s closest colleague in building a successful political organization. ER demanded answers to her questions, “mailed to reach us” at Campobello no later than 27 July, when FDR was scheduled to arrive.
ER wrote her daughter on 24 July that the Democratic National Committee’s “publicity was a disgrace to their organization! Steve has answered my memo with explanations and excuses and I await the others….”
Jim Farley sent a ten-page, single-spaced reply, which reassured her. Farley had a long talk with Will Alexander, “who is very active in the Negro movement, and he would create a Negro division.” Sidney Hillman’s labor party movement promised to bring in “many thousands” of people who had not previously voted.
ER was relieved by Farley’s full reply. She had feared his opposition to FDR’s purge campaign would limit Farley’s activities. Farley had opposed FDR’s public rebuke of powerful Southern Democratic leaders. Farley was stunned when, with Georgia’s Senator Walter George beside him on a campaign platform, FDR announced: There “is little difference between the feudal system and the fascist system. If you believe in the one you lean to the other.”
Farley had not been among those who advised a dramatic convention courtship for the Negro vote. But ER was delighted. She had first crossed the Democratic Party’s color bar in 1924—when she invited Mary White Ovington of the NAACP to send a plank to her women’s platform committee. Ovington had replied: The NAACP intended to secure “legal and civil rights for colored men and women,” and wanted ER’s committee to include a plank that guaranteed the protection of voting rights for colored women in every “part of the country.”
In 1936, for the first time, that seemed the official position of the Democratic Party—and it upset congressional diehards of the formerly solid South. Twelve states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, sent black delegates to the Philadelphia convention. According to William Leuchtenberg: “The convention was the first to seat a black woman as a regular delegate and the first to provide for a black press conference and to seat blacks in the regular press box.” When an African-American minister gave the opening prayer at one session, “Cotton Ed” Smith stormed out shouting, “ ‘My God, he’s black as melted midnight.” When Chicago member of congress Arthur W. Mitchell, elected in 1934, “became the first black ever to address a Democratic convention,” Smith left for South Carolina, announcing: “ ‘I cannot and will not be a party to the recognition of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”
ER was convinced that her husband’s success depended on the votes of blacks, Southern race radicals, youth, and the left-labor coalition, and wrote immediately to Will Alexander.
ER was no replacement for Louis Howe, but she did, move the campaign forward. Moreover, she promoted radical biracial youth and labor movements, including the Southern Tenant Farmers movement, for which she was most specifically attacked by Liberty Leaguers, breakaway Southern Democrats, and Lemkeites. This hurt Landon, not FDR. Nineteen thirty-six was a year of radical unity, and ER represented the power of the popular front.
The haters of 1936 declared the Roosevelt administration dedicated to a mulatto America: Negroes were invited to White House banquets and slept in White House beds. ER and her friends supported the antilynching bill “for the purpose of permissive ravishment.”
A foul and widely reprinted ditty purportedly represented the First Couple’s theme song:
You Kiss the Niggers / And I’ll Kiss the Jews
And We’ll Stay in the White House
As long as We Choose
In 1936, Liberty Leaguers and Lemkeites fell into a political void. Landon and the Republican Party pleaded with them to take their support elsewhere.
In August, Ickes addressed the annual convention of the NAACP and boasted that the Roosevelt administration had made the “greatest advance since the Civil War toward assuring the Negro that degree of justice to which he is entitled and that equality of opportunity under the law which is implicit in his American citizenship.” In October, Mary McLeod Bethune told a radio audience: “Never before in the history of America has Negro youth been offered such opportunities.”
While FDR sailed with his sons, ER contemplated her own life. With her friends scattered, she mostly brooded through the most exciting campaign of her life, with time on her hands and nothing she needed to do. In a reflective mood, she felt again a need to reconnect with her past and tell her own story. During FDR’s first campaign she had decided to edit and publish her father’s letters, to write It’s Up to the Women, and to write a children’s book. Now she decided to write her memoirs. ER wrote to calm and fortify herself under duress. From July to November, around the edges of her husband’s campaign, she worked on a book to be called This Is My Story.
Almost nonchalantly, she wrote Hick: “I rather think I’ll write up my childhood for the kids.” There was, she wrote, ho other way her grandchildren would ever know all those “people no one else can remember.” Everything was so different, and living conditions were so changed, “I could almost feel I was writing about another person it all seems so far away.”
In mid-August, ER spent part of the week at Democratic Party headquarters in New York City. She met with all the groups to mediate their competing interests, edited the literature, and did whatever came to hand. Once campaign chair, she was now administrator without portfolio, and she hated it. Nobody in FDR’s circle asked her to do anything at all.
She disliked her situation so entirely that she wrote about it in “My Day”—in an attempt to be philosophical:
Since I am no longer responsible to anyone else for the accomplishment of any specific piece of work, I have had a great opportunity to observe the work of other people….
I hope that if I am ever back in some kind of executive position, my present opportunities for observation will prove fruitful….
ER concluded her column with hopes for youth, a future generation of activists eager for responsibility: Those who “can think up new ways of giving service, different ways of doing things … those who have imagination and originality will get somewhere. There is always room at the top….”
While ER felt keenly the leadership gap at Democratic Party headquarters, she put her faith in the possibilities of the burgeoning youth movement, so refreshing, outspoken, and exciting.
She was cheered by evidence of a new people’s coalition that emerged at summer’s end, with a vigor that surprised forecasters. In addition to the new power of organized labor, led by John L. Lewis, a former Republican, who contributed a vast sum of CIO money to FDR, nonpartisan progressives and humanitarians forged a new FDR coalition—based partly on loyalty to ER.
The Women’s Democratic News was particularly pleased when Lillian Wald, founder of the Visiting Nurse Service and Henry Street Settlement, the “first lady in social work,” agreed to write an article, “Why I Am for Roosevelt.”
Having listened to both conventions with earnest hope, she was “discouraged” that “nothing significant” was said by Republicans: “It was sad that in probably the worst crisis that the country has ever known … hate was the most obvious sentiment….”
Wald despised their abusive carping, their petty lack of gratitude for all New Deal achievements: “I kept thinking of a valorous neighbor who at great risk and discomfort plunged through the broken ice to rescue [a] small boy…. When the rescuer carried the child to his father, he was rewarded with: ‘Where’s his hat?’ “
Wald firmly believed FDR would “go further” in social security and “correct past mistakes” concerning all issues that involved human betterment.
In conclusion, Wald wrote personally:
May I say that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt have given themselves in great ways…. They have set an example of great power and unselfishness to us and to the world, and … have earned our love and gratitude and loyalty and support.
Wald’s support was important to ER. After she and Elinor Morgenthau visited her in August, ER wrote a column to celebrate her mentor:
I always fall under the spell of her personality and wonder what quality it is which makes an individual able to sway others by the sheer force of her own sympathy and understanding of human beings….
But no moments of pleasure or diversion satisfied ER. To be idled and mute within the political blizzard wore on her nerves. During the autumnal phase of the campaign, the imposed silence sickened her. In September, she took to her bed with aches everywhere and a raging fever. She had never before been felled by illness, and her condition frightened everybody who loved her.
FDR, who had never seen his wife take to her bed so completely, canceled appointments and rushed to her bedside. The New York Times explained that he left for Washington from a rain-soaked day at Harvard, where he delivered “a plea for tolerance before an international audience” assembled to celebrate Harvard’s three hundredth anniversary. Originally scheduled to go to Hyde Park to celebrate his mother’s eighty-third birthday, he changed his plans “at the last minute.”
ER was touched by everyone’s attention, and noted in a “My Day” column:
It is so unusual for me to be in bed that each new person arriving looks at me with a more concerned expression than the last. Even my brother, who is very much the way I am and who thinks things are better downed afoot than abed, comes in to give me a worried once-over twice a day.
Frances Perkins sent “beautiful red roses,” with an unusually warm note: “Dear Eleanor—My dearest love & good wishes. Take care of your precious self for once!!”
Lillian Wald wrote: “Beloved Lady and Friend … [this is to remind you] you are not the ‘forgotten woman’ and that the ‘flying buttress’ [FDR’s term for Wald] to the Administration is active and primarily laments your separation from your beloved tasks.”
Hilda Smith and Aubrey Williams detailed the progress of ER’s special interests. Williams’s account of WPA’s first fourteen months cheered ER and pierced through her fever to remind her what they were fighting for. To “avoid the development of a permanent class of chronic dependents,” and to provide decent work at real wages: “No larger, more complicated, or more difficult task was ever attempted by a government in peace or in war.”
WPA’s contributions were tangible for workers, and for the nation:
In place of bitterness, gnawing and growing discontent, and wasted skills of hand and brain, we have ….
109,000 public buildings… including 83,000 schools
400,000 miles of road improved, 121,000 miles made new….
5,000 water control works … 1100 new swimming pools, 5000 tennis
courts, and 25,000 playgrounds built….
1,000,000 children immunized against typhoid and diphtheria
500,000 people taught to write the English language….
For all the concerned and cheerful notes that flooded into her bedroom, ER’s illness was not quickly diagnosed, nor corrected. She was mystified: “Everyone who is sent in to make a test… goes away saying that as far as his particular branch of medicine is concerned I am a perfect specimen.” Yet her fever lingered, and she could barely move.
Through it all, ER dictated her daily column to Tommy and studied the morning papers:
[The newspapers] are rather terrifying reading these days, with Japan taking over Shanghai and the ever-growing tenseness in Europe. I have a curious kind of resentment about the physical damage done to age-old monuments in Spain.
It seems as though a generation that had gone mad was wiping out things which are really not their heritage alone, but the “heritage of the world at large. We have looked upon these things so long as sources of education and culture and pleasure, that to think of them being destroyed in the course of a few weeks is a very depressing sensation.
ER could not abide the devastation of Spain and repeatedly wrote anguished columns against fascist bombings and atrocities. She did not understand why there were not howls of protest everywhere against the dreadful situations people faced:
We read daily about people being killed in Spain, not only soldiers, but women and children. We know that in this country many people do not have enough to eat, or proper medical attention, or an opportunity to lead a normal life, but none of these situations evokes the same passionate interest as a [fictional romance or] story….
ER’s physical collapse, with echoes and reverberations of her youthful Griselda crises, frightened FDR. At the prospect of actually losing his wife’s presence and support, FDR showed a new level of consideration, and took her less for granted. After September 1936, he personally planned special events and birthday parties for ER, as she had always done for him. Her illness drew ER and FDR closer together, and she reentered the campaign. Although she remained in the background, except when crowds called for her to speak, ER was not the only woman aboard the campaign train; she was not alone; and she was not bored.
Bess Furman described the scene as “victory rode the rails.” Amid all the noise of a presidential special, ER sat serene, read, knitted, wrote: “Cram and jam and crush and rush and jostle. Bands, bouquets, noted names, significant speeches.” And there ER sat “calmly in the midst of turmoil knitting sweaters, dictating her column to Tommy, even writing her memoirs.” When she read some of the pages aloud, they “sounded as though they had come from the depths of silence, instead of right out of bedlam….”
On the campaign train of 1936, ER recalled the emotional turmoil she felt during the 1920 campaign train when her friendship with Louis Howe really took root, and she realized that her life with Franklin would always be in part a public life, In 1920 FDR was nominated for the vice presidency, and ER wrote in 1936:
I am sure I was glad for my husband, but it never occurred to me to be much excited. I had come to accept the fact that public service was my husband’s great interest and I always tried to make the necessary family adjustments easy. I carried on the children’s lives and my own as calmly as could be, and while I was always a part of the public aspect of our lives, still I felt detached and objective, as though I were looking at someone else’s life. This seems to have remained with me down to the present day…. It is as though you lived two lives, one of your own and the other which belonged to the circumstances that surround you.
It was ER’s habit to tell her story, particularly the story of her childhood, to her closest friends and confidantes. But to share her life with the people of America was a brave and extraordinary expression of trust, and community. She wanted certain things known, and she believed her experiences and struggles would be helpful to other women. But it was also as if she now needed to reconnect with those moments in her life which had given her strength. Because she wrote her memoirs so shortly after Howe’s death, in an environment she shared particularly with him, her brief references to her great friend, particularly on the 1920 train, are evocative. It was on that trip that ER learned “a certain adaptability to circumstances,” and she credited Louis Howe for her education.
He knew that I was somewhat bewildered by some of the things that were expected of me as a candidate’s wife. I never before had spent my days going on and off platforms, listening apparently with rapt attention to much the same speech….
Louis Howe began to break down my antagonism by occasionally knocking at my stateroom door and asking if he might discuss a speech with me. I was flattered and before long I found myself discussing a wide range of subjects….
While ER told many emotional truths in This Is My Story, she carefully avoided many others. She wrote nothing of her intimate life, gave no hint of marital tension, and intended to be discreet about the controversial issues which divided America. Starkly, however, her passage on servants and race illuminated the great chasm still to cross over in order to reach beyond disrespect and diminishing stereotypes.
On Sunday, 11 October, as the train proceeded into Cheyenne, Wyoming, ER was unusually feted for her birthday. While she always made a great fuss over FDR’s birthday, she had tended to ignore her own and FDR had often been away at sea on that day.
ER wrote her daughter:
Many many thanks for my gloves and birthday letters…. I wish I could have been with you and not had quite such a public birthday. Father even mentioned it in his speech to the crowd and I told him afterwards I could cheerfully have wrung his neck!
Tiny Chaney joined the train at Omaha and, with Earl Miller, added a special glow to her birthday. There were countless letters, and a very nice party; and Mark McCloskey added an Irish toast: “May the best day you ever had be the worst one you’ll ever see.”
In October, ER felt compelled to break her political silence—for family reasons. Her cousin Alice Longworth, in her own vigorous campaign for Landon, attacked FDR as a “Mollycoddle,” with a “Mollycoddle Philosophy.”
ER was outraged, and she leaped for her pen. There she was one cold and blustery morning, as she read that headline, sitting beside her husband “without a coat,” while the rest of us “had pulled our coats around ourselves closely.” FDR was ho mollycoddle, which implied “dependency and an easy life.” She compared his dedication despite all physical odds to her Uncle Theodore’s commitment to a “strenuous life.” Nobody, she insisted, “who really knew both men” could call her husband such a name. TR always insisted on the “security of the home” first. “Naturally, that means an easy and dependent life for the youth in that home.”
FDR had “brought himself back from what might have been an entire life of invalidism, to physical, mental and spiritual strength and activity.” He could not be accused of either “preaching or exemplifying” a mollycoddle philosophy. He did not seek “greater security and ease of life” for mollycoddles, but for hardworking people. Mollycoddles were not the maids and workers, but those who have had “too much ease, too much dependency, too much luxury of every kind.”
ER explained the difference:
[I knew a woman who] complained sadly to her maid that she must close up one of her five estates and give up the support of a hospital she had subsidized, because of her increased taxes. The maid reflected … that out of her reduced wages she had to support five people during the depression instead of her customary two.
I wonder which of the two, the maid of the mistress, was in danger of acquiring a mollycoddle philosophy? Which of the two needed a little help and concern to make life easier?
By the end of October, ER discovered that even her silence made headlines. In Providence, for example, the Journal announced: “First Lady Does Unexpected Here.” Arriving on the night train from New York, ER, her secretary, and an unidentified newspaperwoman bypassed a waiting crowd and the Secret Service ready to take her to the Biltmore Hotel. Instead she “walked briskly” into the Union Station restaurant for a quiet, leisurely breakfast. “The First Lady checked her own five bags at the check room, tipped her own porters, and then proceeded to the telephone booths…. Attired in a pinstriped navy blue tailleur, a silver fox scarf and a wine-colored velour hat,” ER and her “two women escorts” were unbothered, “practically unnoticed,” in the station, although she consented to a reporter’s questions.
She had “no idea” about her future plans: “My dear, I don’t know. I go where the President goes.” Told the president’s special train had arrived and awaited her “in the siding beyond the station,” she ran off to meet him—assuring a local police official she knew the way. As she dashed down several streets, the large crowd began to recognize her, and “the clapping increased to a loud crescendo.”
In October, according to newspaper polls, the election was very close—with Alf Landon running slightly ahead. But huge and enthusiastic crowds throughout the country convinced FDR that there was no contest. In September, when he began his formal campaign with a speech in Syracuse, he dismissed the Popular Front support. As if to answer charges of communism daily hurled at him by Hearst, the Liberty Leaguers, and Father Coughlin, he announced: “I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien ‘ism’ which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy.” New Deal liberalism was American conservatism: “Reform if you would preserve.”
Then, on 31 October, FDR’s campaign tour culminated with a rousing radical speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City, which thrilled the Popular Front and most liberals, while it caused others to sputter with horror. He rejected the Republican doctrine that that government “is best which is most indifferent.” The enemies of fiscal hope and social peace were now well known:
[B]usiness and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate of me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
For some, that speech ended an era. FDR’s former friend Raymond Moley despaired: “Thoughtful citizens were stunned by the violence, the bombast, the naked demagoguery of these sentences.” For others that speech represented a new time, a truly New Deal.
Not as certain as her husband that the polls were wrong, and eager to ensure his victory, ER sprinted to the finish line. She spoke to dozens of organizations and personally went door to door. Two days before the election, ER spoke at four major events, including a Women’s Democratic Club luncheon for six hundred at the Hotel Commodore, where she praised the impact women had on politics: “As a rule women join political parties and organizations because they have certain things which they want to see accomplished.” Now more than ever the “spirit” of women and their tremendous influence could be seen throughout the government. She also spoke at teas and luncheons, where she continued to claim she did not “talk politics,” only FDR did that. She received tumultuous applause everywhere, especially at the Essex House luncheon of the National Pro-Roosevelt Association of Women Lawyers, where she addressed eight hundred women attorneys and judges.
On 3 November, the family voted at Hyde Park at eleven in the morning. FDR and his mother arrived in the first car; ER, who drove her own car with Nancy Cook, was the third to vote, and she drove off with her son Franklin, Jr. SDR was “enveloped in a royal purple cape resembling an Inverness” and wore “her usual” black velvet hat. ER wore a blue tweed suit with a white scarf, and “a sport hat.” Anna and John then voted. As she left the polls, ER promised reporters a buffet supper when they arrived to monitor the returns with the family.
On 3 November 1936, FDR won an unprecedented landslide victory. Over 44 million Americans, representing 83 percent of eligible voters, voted. FDR received 27,476,673 votes, Landon received 16,679,583. His victory was the largest in presidential history. He lost only Maine and Vermont, to achieve an electoral college victory of 523 to 8. There were great victories in each house of Congress as well. The 75th Congress would be over 75 percent Democratic.
FDR now had a mandate to fulfill the promise of the New Deal, the promise of economic and political democracy for all.
The week after the election, ER’s imposed silence officially ended. While FDR embarked on a cruise to South America, ER proceeded on a lecture tour. She told reporters who asked why she was not with her husband that she chose the lectures “instead of the cruise because her husband never had approved of women on battleships….” They would be reunited after Thanksgiving.
ER was joyous and eager to plunge into the most controversial issues before the nation. Her month-long tour took her west from Pennsylvania to Michigan. On 8 November in Philadelphia, she addressed an audience of two thousand at Temple University, where she made a rousing speech on the need for democratic action and community activism.
The most dramatic moment of the evening occurred during the question period, when she called for changes in the Social Security Act to include domestic and agricultural workers. “The act is not static…. In England where they have had social security legislation for nearly 25 years, there have been revisions nearly every year.” The fight for the future had just begun: “We must not think that our leaders can do what we wish done unless we do our share.” Elated to be unmuzzled, ER hit the lecture circuit with vigor and publicly criticized her husband’s compromises. She called upon every citizen to demand more from their government—to demand real social security.
*Still, the 1936 convention was the beginning of the long march toward the Democratic Party’s fifty-fifty rule, which Bella Abzug achieved in ER’s honor in 1978.