ER was profoundly moved by the “glorious day” of triumph FDR’s vote of confidence represented. The people had voted with thunderous clarity, “in the privacy of a voting booth. In the end the will of the majority is carried out peacefully.” For all the name-calling and crude misinformation, American democracy worked. But only individual involvement, grassroots activism, would result in the actual changes needed to fulfill her husband’s promises.
In column after column, in every public lecture, she urged citizens to realize “that true democracy is the effort of the people individually to carry their share of the burden of government.” People, acting on behalf of their own needs and wants, must hold government accountable.
ER wondered what her husband really meant to do now, actually do. She wrote her daughter as she toured the Middle West:
I’ve just written Pa to say goodbye…. Darling, if he wanted to be King or dictator they [would] fight for him! It is terrifying & yet it must thrill him to know how many people he has put on their feet. A rather grand, gaunt looking detective who was with us last night [in Kansas City] said to me “I was lost in ’33, didn’t believe in the country or in anything. I’m 53, I’ve worked for the public all my life & never been late to work once & I’ve been a [Republican] didn’t vote for Mr. R in ’32 but in two years he had me. He gave me back my courage & I’ve got back all I thought I’d lost & this year I worked for him!”
ER devoted her lecture tour to the need for ardent citizen action. Everywhere she spoke, from River Forest, Minnesota, to Far Rockaway, New York, large audiences responded with enthusiasm. She even managed to keep her unruly voice low, aided, she wrote Hick, by “this catarrh which is a pest.”
Eventually, even she was satisfied with her own performance. To FDR she wrote that all went “well but very hectically. It would be easy to be a lecturer or the wife of the President but both. Oh! My.”
ER was relieved to be back in public life on her own terms, and her depression lifted entirely. She was also cheered that her protracted separation from Hick was over. She had not returned even when ER took to her bed in September. Rather, she considered removing herself completely from ER. After Spain was torn by civil war, Hick decided to become a foreign correspondent. ER discouraged her, and wrote in September: “I’d hate to go to Europe & see a war” but “if you really want it I’ll speak to Roy Howard,” owner of the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate. With more enthusiasm, she noted that Tommy thought Grover Whelan “would give you the NY Fair publicity job.” Unable to break away, Hick again abandoned her reporter’s dream, and agreed to the World’s Fair job. ER was relieved.
Before ER left for her tour, she and Hick had a pleasant reunion. The only tension of the evening involved Hick’s Minneapolis friends, whom ER looked forward to meeting. But Hick worried they might be treated casually, or coldly. ER was stunned by Hick’s lack of trust. Hick was stunned that ER did not appreciate how torn she felt, both hesitant and eager for her old best friends to meet her new best friend. Tommy had compounded Hick’s agony when she tried to protect ER’s time, and said ER was booked many hours each day. Evidently Hick exploded; then she apologized profusely, for weeks.
Ultimately she sent ER a long letter filled with information about each friend, practically dossiers. She ranked them in importance to her and explained who might want to meet ER, with personal time, who might merely attend her lecture and shake her hand: “Well, if any of these people should show up, will you please be extra nice to them? For my sake?”
The prospect of ER’s meeting her great friends sent Hick into a frenzy. Perhaps she feared that ER would not like or appreciate her down-home, unpretentious, hard-drinking, mostly journalist buddies, women and men. Perhaps she feared that they would tell her too much, repeat hilarious stories, reveal old secrets. Perhaps she merely felt guilty, since she hated to be with ER’s friends. Whatever the reason, for days her letters were filled with apologies and insecurity.
ER knitted Hick a sweater while she traveled; it “is growing rapidly and looks lovely.” Hick sent the monthly calendars she hand-created, which ER used for her appointments. She also sent ER clippings and assorted correspondence to entertain her on the road. Hick was glad to see that three thousand people filled the hall in Philadelphia—“pretty darned good wasn’t it?” She particularly liked “what you said about the people with greatest opportunities sometimes being in greatest need for education in civic matters.”
In New York, Hick concluded her WPA job with a festive social whirl. She dined out often and well, went to special places for special cocktails, took out-of-towners sight-seeing; she thanked ER for arranging her interview with Grover Whelan.
Hick wanted ER especially to enjoy Milwaukee:
How I used to love Milwaukee—years ago when I was a cub reporter there…! a little German coffee shop, made famous by Edna Ferber—that’s where I started to put on weight—and that beautiful, beautiful [Lake Michigan]! And I was young then and full of hope and bright dreams. No money. I lived at the YWCA. Sometimes mostly on beans. But those were brave days!
ER replied that she did have a magnificent view of the lake, and in fact had made a pilgrimage to Edna Ferber’s coffee shop for Hick’s sake, but it was gone!
In Milwaukee ER was told she would have no audience “because the old lady running the show has a communist introducing me who tried last year on Armistice Day to tear down the flag and so all patriots [would] stay away.” And her talk was scheduled for the big auditorium “which at best only FDR would fill! I dread it! Why will they take these huge places which no woman can fill—I think I’ll go out for $200 per and have a smaller audience, what think you?”
Hick rejected it as a terrible idea: ER would always be able to pack the largest possible auditorium. Just wait and see. Actually, thousands showed up to hear ER, as Hick anticipated. “I’m keen to know what the papers say about your speeches. Have you tried out the anti-lynch stuff? Of course you wouldn’t get much reaction on that in the North.” Hick also thought that the introducer in Milwaukee might not be a “Communist after all, dear. So many people are labelled Communist these days!”
ER did not speak for the antilynch law during her November trip. Her tour coincided with Armistice Day, and she focused on international peace. She tended to close her meetings with poetry. One verse expressed “the futile feeling” among peace advocates as they contemplated “this world where force is still rampant,” where “the madness / That pulses in the kingdoms of men” presages the “hopelessness, horror and sadness” of the “world slaughter again….”
On Armistice Day, ER concluded with a vivid protest by Richard Le Gallienne, “The Illusion of War,” which “expresses so well something we all should remember on this day”:
War
I do abhor;
And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife, and I forget
Broken old mothers and the whole dark butchering without a soul.
ER ended with the startling suggestion that Americans remove all glamour from war, end “the strutting of the living” that did little to memorialize the dead during Armistice Day observances. As slaughter once again appeared in Asia, Ethiopia, and Spain, ER suggested that rather than look back “to the world’s greatest mistake, why can’t we train our energies on what is to come? Even by a display of sincere respect for the war dead we somehow dignify what should be a matter of gravest shame.”
As she toured, ER thoroughly enjoyed meeting Hick’s friends: “Darling, how you do castigate yourself! Do learn to be a little simple, free and natural and do what you want to do! I have such a bad time teaching all of you that I don’t need to be protected!… Next time you want me to see someone say so!”
Concerning her World’s Fair interview, Hick reported that Graver Whelan “didn’t swoon exactly. But he was courteous, and I’m to see him again.” ER was encouraged: “I hope and pray you get it.” ER anticipated that they could work together on a publicity job, and “we’ll have some fun planning your campaign. I think I can help.”
Hick was grateful for ER’s ease with her friends:
You were a dear to send the wire and a very great dear about my friends. Oh, you always do the nice thing—and I always blunder. How you can even like me is beyond me…. I can’t for the life of me understand why a person like you would care anything about a person like me, and therefore it has been hard for me to have any confidence in you…. Torn as I was between loyalty to you and loyalty to some of my old friends I had worried about it for months….
Hick hoped that Tommy was not hurt by her outburst:
I think a lot of Tommy. She and I were good friends long before I knew you, and, as a matter of fact, I’d never have known you had it not been for Tommy. Anyway, she is a much better friend than I am—much less selfish….
Hick wrote one final letter, which revealed her ultimate fear:
You and Tommy were probably bored stiff. Tell Tommy … I’ll try not to pull anything like that on you again…. I guess I’ll drop that subject now. I acted like a damned fool, and I’m ashamed of myself.
ER responded with letters of reassurance, and love:
Darling, will you never learn that love can’t be pigeon-holed and perhaps we love people more for their weaknesses than for their best qualities of which you have a lot though you forget them when you are down….
ER also appreciated Hick’s need to return to her career as a writer, and she sent Hick to her agent George Bye. He encouraged Hick to write a book about Depression America based on her FERA reports. Bye’s enthusiasm and confidence thrilled Hick: “So—with George Bye leading me by the hand, and with you pushing from behind, I MAY write a book!” She acknowledged her hesitance, however, which “amused him, a little. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘are you always so humble and so unsure of yourself in anything you do?’ ‘No,’ I assured him. ‘I was a darned good reporter and knew I was.’ “
Despite the crowds, the ovations, the generous press coverage, ER wrote Bye that she was “a bit discouraged.” Her tour had been scheduled too soon after the election, and she feared that her resounding success was merely a reflection of FDR’s popularity. But she was wrong: Every hall was filled with people who came to hear her and left entirely satisfied. Both Bye and her lecture agent Colston Leigh were ecstatic. Hick reported that Leigh told Bye that “you were a grand success, and that he already had your March dates just about filled!”
In Detroit, ER’s brother Hall took ER and Tommy to lunch “and made me choose a car but I begged not to have it till next Spring and I’ll turn in my Buick…. I don’t really want it but what am I to do?”
Hick was perplexed: “Darling. I think it’s nice that Hall is giving you a car. Lord knows you give enough to other people! Why shouldn’t someone give you something now and then? Is it a convertible? I hope so. When you start driving a closed car I’ll think you are really getting old.”
Hick wrote to ER from the White House, which in everybody’s absence was a “gloomy” place. It was conducive to writing though, Hick noted, and being good to oneself—which was a comfort just then, while she mourned her friend the great diva Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who died in Hollywood on 17 November, at the age of eighty-three.
I wonder if, at the end, she wasn’t very weary. It was an eventful life, filled with glory, but I think she had her bad times. I wonder what will become of all the people she supported. The last time I saw her I believe she told me there were some seventy of them! Well—I hope “Erda” will be happy in Valhalla!
ER replied: “I thought of you when Mme Schumann-Heink died. Would you like to wear her ring now or put it into safe-keeping? I am careful of it but I never want you to feel you can’t do what you want with it!”
Hick, of course, wanted ER to wear the sapphire-and-diamond pinky ring Schumann-Heink had given her in Milwaukee so many years before, and which she gave ER in 1932. ER wore it until her death, and the subject was not referred to again.
ER was pleased that Hick was already at work rereading her correspondence for a book on the hopes and needs of the American people and the government’s responsibility to ensure those needs. ER wrote Martha Gellhorn, who had spent time with Hick in New York, to ignore Hick’s complaints: She was not “at all frantic…. She grouses a great deal, but I think she really is much interested and I am sure she will do a good job.”
As Hick read their daily correspondence in Louis Howe’s spacious rooms, her spirits lifted. When she returned to New York, she accepted the World’s Fair job and looked forward to earning $5,200 a year. Her publicity department would be under Joseph Clark Baldwin, whom she liked. Hick was pleased by the upswing of her life: “I came on home and celebrated, before my simple home-cooked meal, with a whiskey and soda, all by myself. And now, with that off my mind, I turn to my book.”
ER thought that “$100 a week ought to be OK in New York and I hope you will enjoy it besides feeling confidence in yourself again!”
With the security of her new job, which was to begin in January, Hick decided to spend her remaining money on Christmas presents. ER wrote, “I don’t approve of spending all your money on Xmas. Suppose you put one fourth in the savings account!”
Happy that Hick would remain nearby, ER learned that Anna and John Boettiger were moving to Seattle. Her daughter and son-in-law had accepted an offer to edit and publish a Hearst paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Politically curious, there was evidently no familial discussion concerning Hearst’s proposal. Although FDR had mostly followed Hearst’s isolationist prescription demanded for his 1932 support, the publisher had turned viciously against the president after the 1934 strikes, and the Boettiger appointment was part of the newspaper’s strike settlement with the Newspaper Guild.
ER and FDR were furious about Hearst’s 1936 campaign excesses, his brutal Red-baiting assaults. At a cabinet meeting before FDR left for his cruise, Tom Corcoran reported that, stunned by the landslide, the Hearsts and Liberty League boys had decided to promote a new “era of good feelings.” Ickes hoped that FDR would not be fooled by such opportunism, where-upon the president gestured “thumbs down” on all future relations with the publisher.
ER never forgave William Randolph Hearst for the role he played to keep America out of the World Court, and Hearst’s relentless crusade against the Democratic Party, transformed in his words into a foreign crossbreed of “Karl Marx and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” filled her with revulsion. After he had orchestrated one of the filthiest campaigns in U.S. history, ER considered Hearst’s apparent fondness for her children manipulative. He hired son Elliott to run his radio stations in Texas, and now offered Anna and John a sweetheart deal they accepted: $30,000 for him, $10,000 for Anna, who agreed to do the women’s page.
However dismayed by her daughter’s move, ER made no effort to dissuade or influence her adult children. She wrote Hick, that “of course John and Anna are blissful.” Although she dreaded the “complete separation … I’ll get used to it and I wouldn’t spoil their joy by ever saying a word about it. W.R. seems to like employing the Roosevelt family, odd isn’t it?”
To FDR, ER wrote twice: “I shall miss them badly but it does seem a grand opportunity and they will love it and so life is life, not always very pleasant!” A week later, she sighed: “I can hardly bear to have Anna & John go but they are so happy that I wouldn’t let them know for worlds & it is better than Europe….”
Hearst’s stunning deal gave John and Anna absolute control over the editorial page; and if the struggling paper became financially solvent, they would get 5 percent of the profits as a bonus above their salaries. While neither ER nor FDR expressed an opinion, various intimates were chagrined.
Hearst’s effort at reconciliation began on election night. FDR told Farley, who told Ickes, that while his sons answered telephone calls at Hyde Park, one of them overheard Marion Davies, Hearst’s companion, speaking with John Boettiger: “Hello, John, this is Marion Davies. I just wanted to tell you that I love you. We know that a steam roller has flattened us out, but there are no hard feelings at this end.” Then Hearst got on the phone to repeat Davies’s message. Several days later, Hearst papers ran a signed editorial in which Hearst, noted Ickes, “slobbered all over the President.” Ickes and others hoped FDR would have nothing more to do with Hearst.
Hick, however, was not so rigid. She had a reporter’s conviction that a paper was as good as its editors and writers. After all, her friend Tom Dillon had been managing editor of the paper before Hearst bought it, and another friend, Hazel Reavis, worked on it:
It’s an old paper and used to have a fine reputation before Hearst got hold of it. Of course, I’m thrilled, as you must be, for them. That’s a pile of money, dear! And it takes John back into the kind of work he really loves.
And I think Anna will love editing the woman’s page, learn a lot at it, and be darned good at it. Gosh, it’s a magnificent opportunity for her to acquire professional experience, “on her own,” so to speak. Also—I think Seattle is a beautiful city—a grand place to live…. It will be good for Sisty and Buzzie. Outdoor life the year around …. in the country, with horses and dogs.
As for you—dear, it will be tough…. I hate to think how much you are going to miss Anna…. You are one of those people who “can take it.” Aren’t’ you?…
While ER was stoic about personal disappointments, and could “take” such setbacks, she was painfully thrown when her husband announced the first policy decision of his second administration: He would cut spending and pursue a balanced budget. Given the desperate situation of continued, actually unrelieved, unemployment, still at least 20 percent, it seemed precisely the wrong thing to do. Moreover, he called for cuts in agencies ER had hoped would be expanded, including WPA. Only Henry Morgenthau was enthusiastic about this decision; others feared it would abort the entire recovery program. Given FDR’s unprecedented victory, and his radical campaign rhetoric, this was a staggering, baffling decision.
Hick’s reaction was mixed. She was glad she had had the good sense to leave Hopkins’s team before the cuts: “Harry is slashing his staff unmercifully” in Washington’s central office, as well as throughout the states. “Eighty were let out of one department….” Yet she considered the cuts “the right thing to do.” ER disagreed. She agonized over WPA cuts for weeks, and wrote her daughter: “This WPA cut is being badly done and I am worried….”
While Hick waited for her World’s Fair job to begin, she worked on her book, which was harder to write than she had expected. Still, reading her correspondence rekindled her ardor, and a tone of romance reappeared in her letters to ER: “I’m awfully grateful to you, for all kinds of things. And I love you a very great deal.” Between them, carping ceased and gruff self-abasements diminished; they spent satisfying times together.
ER wrote Anna, rather proudly, that Hick’s dramatic history of America, gathered by “her four years of investigations,” was under way. Although Hick complained to one and all, and called ER “an ogre because I’m insisting she write now while the story is fresh… !”
ER went to Hyde Park for Thanksgiving while Hick stayed in New York with her sister, Ruby. But FDR, Jr., was stricken in Cambridge with what at first seemed a “sinus” attack. Then he began to hemorrhage dangerously at the slightest turn of his head, and a streptococcus infection resulted in a very high temperature. It lasted for almost a month, into the Christmas season.
ER rushed to be with her son, in the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and wrote FDR, then cruising the Pacific: “Poor Mama was disappointed about Thanksgiving but [Anna & John] and the children and Johnny and Betty were with her…. You sound very jolly & I hope James is fine….”
FDR, Jr.’s, physical battle coincided with the announcement of his engagement to Ethel du Pont, who joined ER for the holiday-hospital vigil. The irony of a Roosevelt-du Pont engagement, combined with Hearst’s employment policies, seemed peculiar in 1936 and entangled the family in unruly personal thickets: The du Ponts had financed the Liberty League, championed by Hearst, and were FDR’s most determined political enemies. ER wrote her husband:
Of course I told FJr the drawbacks but I never opposed Ethel or the duPonts as a family just the money and his position—I’ve always dreaded those grand affairs but I did not refuse to go to the wedding—I guess we’ll survive all that gossip.
On hospital duty Thanksgiving day, ER, feeling forlorn as she went back and forth from her empty hotel room to her suffering son, wrote Hick: “I’m rather weary, but I’m thankful for you dear today and all those whom I love, Bless you and a world of love.”
ER left FJr to attend the Army-Navy football game, a rare event in the First Lady’s life. She had surprised and delighted Hick- and Howard Haycraft when she sent their tickets, although Hick understood that ER did not “really give a darn about seeing the game. Darling, if you don’t want to go, don’t.” But ER knew that it meant something to her friends, and her son John.
ER confided the true feelings of her divided heart in her Thanksgiving letter to Elinor Morgenthau. “Never was I more reluctant to start out [for Boston] than last night…. Ethel comes in the morning and I return to New York.” She would “go to the game Sat so Johnny can sit in the box.” As for Anna and John’s move, ER wrote, “I might as well confess to being depressed….”
ER’s presence at the historic game at West Point, which Navy won 7–0, created headlines. Accompanied by four companions, including her son John, and “Lorena Hickok, an aide,” ER was seen to “munch” an egg-and-lettuce sandwich before the game and bundle into a “seal coat,” which she added to her green wool coat with mink collar, in a desperate effort to keep out the blustery wind; and she was observed alone at the train station before the game ended.
ER denied that she left the game out of boredom. She needed to dash down to Washington from West Point to “collect some clothes.” She wrote FDR that her dash to Washington was urgent: Having toured “half the nation,” everything was “dirty,” and she had nothing left to wear.
ER kept the worst hospital news from her husband, and was glad to read in the newspapers that he and James were having “a grand time.” Happy at sea, FDR reported fully to both his mother and his wife. His first letter, just out from Charleston, went to “Dearest Mama: Just an au revoir note,” and a promise: “I will send you a line from Trinidad and will think of one day there 32 years ago!” He referred to the trip his mother had arranged when she tried to lure him away from his engagement with ER.
He sent “Dearest Babs” a full description of the customarily wild cross-dressing naval tradition, which featured drink and drag, at the equator: “Great fun ‘Crossing the line’—Marvellous costumes in which King Neptune and Queen Aphrodite and their court appeared. The Pollywogs were given an intensive initiation lasting two days, but we have all survived and are now fullfledged Shellbacks.”
The USS Indianapolis, he wrote, was an especially “happy ship.” His companions were “jolly,” and the ship was “steady” at the great speed of twenty-five knots with “no vibration.” He was relaxed, and the fish were fabulous.
Uninformed about his son’s worrisome condition, FDR wrote that he hoped “it will clear up quickly and think it will if he will go to bed early for a week…. Jimmy is in fine form, and works daily at his ship and [Marine] Corps duties.”
FDR had commissioned his son a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, a rank he considered appropriate for his personal aide. ER disapproved, and wrote a censorious letter inquiring if James was now “a 2nd Lieut. or a Lieut. Col.” It might have seemed a joke, but James wrote that “Father kidded me for days about that one,” and he was hardly amused: “Frankly, I felt like an impostor in that starched white uniform with silver leaves on the shoulders.” And then came Mother’s letter, “inquiring in that disingenuous way of hers….”
FDR concluded his letter to his wife with “Loads and loads of love—and try to get lots of sleep preparatory to that—Social Season. Another year let’s cut it out and take a trip to Samoa and Hawaii instead! / Devotedly F.”
FDR’s fantasy trip together to Samoa and Hawaii was particularly welcome just then as ER prepared not only for Christmas but the “Social Season” compounded by the demands of the Twentieth Amendment, which ended the “lame duck” term and for the first time moved the president’s traditional March inauguration to 20 January.
While FDR sailed, ER and Hick enjoyed an increasingly rare week together, mostly anonymous and happy. After several days in Washington, they drove to Arthurdale, then visited Alice Davis and other friends in Virginia.
After the holiday part of his cruise, FDR had a triumphant reception in Rio de Janeiro. The enthusiasm of the crowds for the hero of the New Deal and the Good Neighbor Policy was unprecedented, and heartening. ER would have been pleased, her husband wrote:
I do wish you could see Rio. The harbor—the colors and the orchids—common as sweet peas!… YOU have been given a huge silver tea set by the Brazilian government, very old Brazilian hammered silver! and a great rarity and not at all bad looking.
There was real enthusiasm in the streets. I really begin to think the moral effect of the Good Neighbor Policy is making itself definitely felt.
FDR’s speech to the congress of Brazil made a strong impression worldwide: The fact of international “understanding and good will,” of friendship within this hemisphere as a model of true amity, was the “best answer to those pessimists who scoff at the idea” and all possibilities of peace.
Although Brazil’s President Getulio Vargas was a fascist-allied dictator, everywhere FDR went, crowds cheered, “Viva la democracia! Viva Roosevelt!” Along the beautiful streets of Rio that day everything seemed possible, negotiable. FDR felt ebullient. Vargas even whispered into his ear as they drove through the tightly packed, wildly cheering crowds: “Perhaps you’ve heard that I am a dictator?” FDR smiled as he continued to wave and replied, “Perhaps you’ve heard that I am one, too.”
When FDR addressed a huge gathering in Montevideo, James proved himself a protective and quick-witted aide. His father removed from his pocket a blue-and-white handkerchief to mop his brow. Suddenly the crowd cheered wildly, and James realized that they were responding to the Uruguayan national colors in FDR’s hand. Instantly, James leaned over and “whispered ferociously” in his father’s ear: “For God’s sake, don’t blow your nose in that handkerchief.” Immediately, FDR waved it vigorously at the crowd.
In Buenos Aires, FDR was greeted by two million Argentines, who showered him with flowers. According to one eyewitness, his reception “exceeded in warmth and spontaneity anything that has ever occurred in Argentina.”
On 1 December, FDR opened the first Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace with a stirring address to “members of a family [who represent twenty-one republics of the Americas] and meet together for their common good”:
I am profoundly convinced that the plain people everywhere in the civilized world today wish to live in peace…. And still leaders and Governments resort to war. Truly, if the genius of mankind that has invented the weapons of death cannot discover the means of preserving peace, civilization as we know it lives in an evil day….
The madness of a great war in other parts of the world would affect us and threaten our good in a hundred ways. And the economic collapse of any Nation … must of necessity harm our own prosperity.
Can we, the Republics of the New World, help the Old World to avert the catastrophe which impends? Yes; I am confident that we can….
FDR’s prescription for hemispheric peace included strengthened democratic movements, more freedom and security, greater trade and commerce through reciprocal agreements, frontier and territorial mediation, cultural and educational exchanges.
Ongoing border controversies within South America required adjustments, FDR declared, which “may appear to involve material sacrifice.” But, he concluded, there “is no profit in war. Sacrifices in the cause of peace are infinitesimal compared with the holocaust of war…. Democracy is still the hope of the world….”
FDR was impressed, even pleased, that his Buenos Aires speech was banned in both Germany and Italy. But his words concerning democracy and peace puzzled various Latin American delegates to this Buenos Aires conference. Concerned about investments, material interests, and the future of U.S. commerce, the United States supported new hemispheric dictators Trujillo, Somoza, and Batista. The bitter factor of regional control was still alive. U.S. activities in the Americas since the Monroe Doctrine had been domineering, acquisitive, violent. The Colossus of the North, El Pulpo—the octopus—was distrusted despite FDR’s personal appeal.
Any extension of U.S. power in the region was resisted. Argentina particularly warned against any further encroachment on Latin American sovereignty. Indeed, the Argentine foreign minister, Dr. Carlos Saavedra Lamas, who had just returned from Geneva, where he presided over the League of Nations Assembly, insisted that only the League should be called in for arbitration, negotiation, and general peace-keeping.
FDR, in his speech, had honored Saavedra, the recipient of the 1936 Nobel Prize for Peace. He had great influence, and his commitment to the primacy of the League was supported by the five Central American nations as well as Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile.
There were many achievements at Buenos Aires, but there was no mutual accord: Each nation remained free to define its position, as well as its commercial and military relations, independently. There was only unanimous support for the principle of nonintervention: A treaty was signed that banned direct or indirect intervention in the internal or external affairs of any Central or South American nation. Ultimately this first of many conferences laid the foundation for a regional organization, the Organization of American States (OAS), and for improved hemispheric relations.
FDR left the conference with the cheering citizens of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay uppermost in his thoughts. Millions of people had appeared on the streets to rally and chant, “Democracy! Democracy!” FDR perceived their enthusiasm as a repudiation of both the fascist and communist challenges. He told Ickes that he believed his trip “strengthened the democratic sentiment throughout the world and has had favorable repercussions among the peoples of Europe.”
But in Latin America, as Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler ravaged the Spanish countryside and bombed civilians, there was little enthusiasm for FDR’s policy of strict neutrality. Many in the Spanish-speaking republics identified with and supported Spain’s Popular Front government.
Modern unrestricted warfare had been under way since fascist rebels declared war on the democratically elected government of Spain on 17 July 1936. In response, the great nonfascist powers led by Britain, France, and the United States declared absolute neutrality. Franco was armed and supported by Rome and Berlin. Neutrality created a fantasy of containment: FDR joined that fantasy and gambled that war and fascism might thereby be limited to Italy, Spain, and Germany, while communism and threats from the left would be crushed in Spain, as in Germany and Italy.
Fear dominated the situation. France’s Popular Front Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, feared that French aid to Republican Spain might cause Britain’s conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to aid Germany. Blum also feared that France’s aggressive right would topple his government if he aided Spain. The Conservative rulership of Britain considered fascism an acceptable barrier to Popular Front, radical, and dangerous democratic movements. Nobody doubted that uninvolvement, or neutrality, in Spain was an aggressive act of support for fascist forces.
FDR joined that policy with unnecessary enthusiasm. His policy of noninvolvement went so far as to call for an end to private commerce and airplane sales to Spain—despite conventional international law, which specifically allowed commerce, including arms sales, with legitimate, recognized governments and nations in a state of civil war. For many, including peace advocates and Senator Gerald P. Nye, strict neutrality and an embargo against Loyalist Spain was an act of war. Nevertheless, that was what FDR called for.
ER disagreed completely with her husband’s policy on Spain. It was the first international issue she refused to be silent about. ER spoke and wrote about Spain continually.
The situation worsened on 26 November when Germany and Japan sealed a pact of mutual accord, which threatened to isolate Russia—Spain’s only ally. ER and her circle of peace advocates had hoped that FDR’s Latin American tour would strengthen the League of Nations response against fascist aggression in Spain. But no serious discussions about Spain were held, and FDR left Buenos Aires with a display of triumphant achievement.
Personally, FDR’s trip was plunged into gloom by the sudden death of his closest and most trusted personal aide, Gus Gennerich. A former New York City police officer, first assigned to the governor in 1928, Gennerich had been closer to FDR than any man besides Louis Howe.
Fifty at the time of his death, August Gennerich was six feet tall, muscular, agile, and efficient. He traveled everywhere with “the Boss,” listened to his speeches, made useful suggestions. FDR called him “my humanizer,” his dependable “ambassador to the man in the street.”
Gennerich had guaranteed FDR’s physical dignity, from his morning rituals to his nighttime needs. He helped the Boss bathe, dress, and move; he carried him with assurance and aplomb. He locked his braces, wheeled his chair, got him in and out of cars and fishing boats, up and down stairs, onto stages.
In less than six months, FDR had lost the two men who had ensured him both emotional and physical support. More than most, they had pierced FDR’s facade of endless cordiality and determined good cheer—which served also as a notable barrier to intimacy, even to knowing. Gennerich was one of very few companions with whom FDR could enjoy moments of carefree relaxation, or abandon. It was Gus Gennerich who accompanied FDR to such intimate parties as Ickes hosted; and it was Gus Gennerich who participated, with a watchful eye, in the liquid revelries at Warm Springs and elsewhere that ER disliked so much.
FDR was devastated by Gennerich’s death, and he wrote ER full details as soon as the ship left Buenos Aires on 2 December: “Dearest Babs: The tragedy of poor Gus hangs over all of us….” It was “a real shock and a real loss for as you know good old Gus was the kind of a loyal friend who simply cannot be replaced.”
ER wrote:
Dearest Franklin, I am so sorry your trip had to be saddened and I’m deeply grieved that you have lost Gus who was so loyal and devoted. I’ll miss him a great deal for I really loved him but for you the loss is very hard in so many, many ways. I’ve had his room locked [as FDR had requested] and asked… to keep everything intact until you return.
ER was particularly thankful that “Jimmy was with his father on this trip” that went so quickly from cheer to grief, which ER felt was the sorrowful pattern of life.
Hick wrote: “Gus was an amazing person, wasn’t he?” At the White House, two administrative assistants who were friends of hers, Johnny and Wade, were bereft:
It seemed they had some mutual friend, a man who had known Gus for years, and Gus used to go out to their house a lot and play the piano for them! I never knew until last night that they knew him. They used to go to his birthday parties, at the Mayflower. Marvelous parties, they said, with one of the White House servants—it sounded like Mingo—to wait on his guests. All kinds of people used to be there, they said—high and low. And they said Gus was a gorgeous host…. They are coming to his funeral if it’s permissible. I told them I thought it was…. I judge by what they said that, if his friends all come [to the White House funeral] there will be some crowd!
FDR asked ER to prepare the funeral service in the East Room, which she arranged. And everybody was aggrieved to think about Gus’s plans for retirement; he had bought a farm near Hyde Park that FDR helped him furnish. It accentuated the tragedy, FDR wrote ER: “Gus was really living for that farm—he thought about it day and night,” and bought things for it at every stop. “Ever so much love. I’ve missed you a lot and it will be good to be back Tues. Eve. / Devotedly F.”
As FDR sailed home, King Edward abdicated his throne. FDR was bemused, and wondered about diplomatic protocol at dinner with British officers in Trinidad: “Do I or do I not propose the ‘health of the King’? Awful dilemma. It is however to be solved by good manners and not by State Dept diplomatic protocol.”
Presumably the president toasted the king, although Ickes noted that FDR was “disgusted” by the abdication, and thought that Edward “could have forced this situation.” He could have been crowned and then announced that Mrs. Simpson was now “the Duchess of Cornwall.” The president and everybody aboard had “guessed wrong” and bet King Edward would keep his throne.
Hick also wrote of the abdication, which became something of an emotional litmus test in ER’s circle: “Poor little King!… I wonder what he will do. Lord, but living is such hard business, for so many people!”
Hick could not have known Edward’s politics, and her enthusiasm for the “great little guy,” who was also an ardent friend of new Germany, related to her identification with the king’s loss of throne—and career—for the woman he loved:
Poor fellow. I do hope he’ll never be sorry—disappointed or disillusioned. I’m sorry for Mrs. Simpson. She will have an awful job on her hands. What will he do with himself all these years that are left? He’s only in his early 40’s. They can’t go sailing around on yachts forever. I wonder if he won’t be very bored and restless and unhappy…—and if she can keep him happy. He probably doesn’t know it now—but I’m afraid he is in for some very bad times….
ER too considered it rather a shame. Like FDR, she was surprised that Edward had decided to abdicate: “Well, and so—all is lost for love. Too bad he couldn’t have served his people and had his love too!”
It was, for many, a dismal holiday season. Spain cast a grim, shadow, and within the White House, one loss followed another. Shortly before Christmas, Marshall Haley, the twenty-year-old son of ER’s personal White House maid Mabel Haley, died. Tommy called to notify ER in New York, and she was grateful that Hick, who was in Washington, wanted to go to Virginia for his funeral service. “The world has seemed so full of sorrows these past weeks.”
Hick was the only white mourner at Marshall Haley’s funeral, and the staff was impressed by her consideration for the family and the young man, who had been studying to become a minister and was president of his class. She wrote ER the details of the day:
They buried [Marshall] down by the railroad tracks. It just looked like an unkempt field to me…. I didn’t think it was a cemetery—there isn’t even a fence around it…. Then it occurred to me … very few colored people can afford to have tombstones….
Hick drove down with Lizzie McDuffie, the White House maid:
Mrs. MacDuffie is a fascinating person! She was a most diverting companion…. She recited a lot of poetry to me—Paul Laurence Dunbar, some deliciously funny things in dialect, one about a Welsh clergyman that she said was the President’s favorite, and a very stirring thing, called “Hagar’s Farewell to Abraham.” My God, what feeling she puts into those lines! One was Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Abandoned Plantation”… or “Deserted Plantation,” and she told me that every now and then the President’s mother sends for her and has her recite it to her. “I guess,” said Mrs. MacDuffie, “she feels it might happen to Hyde Park some day, that the young folks don’t care so much for it, and she’s seen all those other places along the Hudson, deserted after the old folks have died.”…
My dear, I think you must do a novel about your mother-in-law sometime! She also told me all about “Gone With the Wind,” which she borrowed from a Secret Service man and read last summer and liked a lot. She said she understood they were going to dramatize it, and that she would dearly love to play the Negro mammy in it! “She’s exactly like my own grandmother was,” she said. And that led to a discussion of slavery…. She told me about her grandparents—all slaves, and her mother was born in slavery—and what they did after the Civil War…. Fascinating stories.*
Between hospital visits to Boston where her son Franklin was still in serious condition, ER spent several days with Earl Miller, who uncharacteristically asked her for a favor. Earl loved to cook and bake almost as much as he loved to ride and shoot, and now requested ER to do something “I know nothing about! Earl wants me to try and watch John make a cake to find out what he does wrong! Then I’m to show him about ironing shirts! In the meantime,” ER wrote Hick, “Earl’s nerves are about like yours for different reasons so it is probably a good thing I’m here!”
Earl “is another person like you in whose soul there is no peace. He has to attain it himself but I think it is harder for him than for you because he has no intellectual resources which he has developed.”
Hick replied: “I’m sorry Earl was so upset. Poor dear, you just jump right from the frying pan into the fire, don’t you?…”
ER now worked harder than ever; saw more people in a day; took on new projects. At first her relentless schedule was her lifeline; increasingly, it was what made her happy. She dined with Bernard Baruch, and he stayed until after midnight. She wrote Anna: “Baruch dined with me alone … and he is a stimulating guest. He wants something and I rather hope Pa gives it to him for I think he’ll make something out of it.”
The next night Molly Dewson spent three hours with ER to discuss the future of the second administration, and she too “wants something.” Then she met with Monty High about the NAACP’s antilynching plans, with a delegation from Arthurdale, and with several other groups. She wrote Anna: “For one and all I must do things, so my work is cut out for me after Pa gets back.”
In December, Hick spent many days rereading their vast correspondence in Louis Howe’s room:
Today I stumbled into a lot of the early letters, written while I was still with the AP. Dear, whatever may have happened since—whatever may happen in the future—I was certainly happy those days, much happier, I believe, than many people ever are in all their lives. You gave me that, and I’m deeply grateful. There were other times, too—many, many of them.
It was painful for Hick to read those early letters and confront so much passion spent. Now their relationship was neither routine nor tumultuous; moments of longing and loneliness were largely passed. Those hectic romantic times when they abandoned discretion in order to spend a week or weekend with each other in some secluded inn were over.
Hick wondered what to do with the letters when she was finished. “Throw them away? In a way, I’d like to keep them, or have them kept somewhere. They constitute a sort of diary, as yours to me probably do, too. They might be of some use when I get around to that biography. What do you think?”
ER’s interests, priorities, emotional needs had changed. Her political commitments now eclipsed all private considerations. But she valued their correspondence, expected Hick to write her biography, and never considered discarding the letters.
Hick was happy to report that she did not really mind “reading them so much today, although some of them make me feel a little wistful. I don’t suppose anyone can ever stay so happy as I was that first year or so, though. Do you?…
“Goodnight, dear. You have been swell to me these last four years, and I love you—now and always.”
*ER wrote the producers to suggest Mrs. McDuffie for the role eventually played by Hattie MacDaniel.