FDR returned from his cruise on 15 December. At dinner that very night ER showed him a letter Hilda Smith had sent about her conversation with a Washington taxi driver, who said: “It is nice to know, isn’t it, that the American people have so much intelligence. Moreover, they have a long memory.”
The driver had been a glass-bottle blower in Pennsylvania whose employer committed suicide when the banks failed. His company’s workers, three hundred men, were dismissed. He was on the road for two years; he stood on breadlines, slept in parks. In 1933 he arrived in FDR’s Washington, worked hard, got a taxi, and moved to Virginia to be able to vote: “I never cared before who was President…. It takes a hungry man to appreciate Roosevelt.”
This election was about the working people of America. FDR’s promises could not be achieved by cutting the budget, or downsizing WPA. ER was disturbed by her husband’s first postelection decision to trim and cut. The election mandate, she insisted, was to push for the larger goals in housing, work security, and racial justice. They were the themes ER emphasized in her busy correspondence between the election and inauguration. Also, she introduced a subject we would now call “affirmative action.”
She wrote Jim Farley about her visit with black Philadelphia activist and writer Crystal Bird Fauset, who reported that black women WPA administrators were disproportionately fired:
There are 500 more colored women relief cases … than white…. But in the supervisory capacity, there have always been a great many more white than colored. So in cutting down [Fauset and her allies] have tried to bring it a little more into line. However, they have left in every case the two to one ratio, meaning two white women to one colored woman in a supervisory capacity. This seems entirely fair as … there are more colored women in actual need of work to support their children…. This is going to happen all over the country….
ER urged Farley to speak directly with Senator Guffey, who “has a big colored constituency and I think he would perhaps want to consider it.” She concluded: “There is one other point that I should like to emphasize—we did make a tremendous play for the colored vote, and we got it, but we got it because they thought on the whole we were fairer….” The Negro vote went to FDR ten to one, and ER wanted that trust honored by Democrats—especially by her husband.
He had agreed to an article placed in The Crisis by the Democratic National Committee, “Roosevelt the Humanitarian,” which celebrated him as a pioneer in race relations “who spread true Democracy” and ended government rule exclusively “by and for the few powerful, rich men.” PWA, WPA, NYA, and CCC benefited hundreds of thousands of Negroes, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation saved homes and farms. “FDR is America’s second emancipator.” ER now wanted those words written by his publicists translated into new action.
ER believed that FDR could now be “independent” of Southern Democrats, since the South had voted out the most vigorous “bigots,” including South Carolina’s Ed Smith and Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge. However much the race question seemed to FDR too hot to handle, the very fact that the First Lady spoke so publicly and earnestly served to change the nature of the political landscape. During the campaign, race became a political factor in unprecedented ways. While FDR’s advisers continued to worry about the impact of ER’s racial concerns on Southern Democrats, they were the significant losers of 1936.
For the first time, hundreds of thousands of blacks who were able to vote left the party of Lincoln and voted Democrat. For the first time black Americans were actually involved in the national democratic process. There was reason to believe that Roosevelt’s reelection might begin to end, even in the South, the worst aspects of an economy that kept black Americans landless and economically marginal.
ER was in New York on Friday, 18 December, when FDR held his cabinet meeting, and was cheered when she heard of a “surprising” turn of events. Vice president Garner “suddenly, out of a clear sky,” bowed to each Southern cabinet member and said: “With all due respect to you… and although I live in Texas and all my ancestors came from [the South], I am in favor of an anti-lynching law.” The cabinet seemed to agree, and Ickes noted: “It begins to look as if real justice and opportunity for the Negro at long last might begin to come … at the hands of the Democratic Party….”
It was, for ER, a very hopeful sign: Uncertain of her husband’s plans, particularly on matters of race and relief, she had confided to Elinor Morgenthau immediately after the election: “As you know I rather dread the future, but they may… manage better than I dare hope!”
But when she pressed her husband for his response and urged him again to make a public statement on the antilynch issue, he refused. FDR had returned exhausted from his trip, and depressed by Gus’s death. He had little patience for ER’s agenda. His first order of business was to achieve an embargo around Spain in the name of “complete neutrality” and a campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize for Cordell Hull. FDR believed “no one deserves it more than Cordell and he should have had it this year instead of Saavedra Lama.”
Spain was to be an agonizing issue between ER and FDR, and incomprehensible to his more liberal advisers. Not only did FDR seek an absolute embargo against the democratic government of Spain, his State Department in August announced that American exporters and American ships had the right to land supplies in Spanish ports held by Franco’s rebels. This despite U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers’s report that Franco’s forces were “the same element as that opposing your administration.” Like Dodd in Germany, Bowers was an historian who did his own research. He believed the fascists were hated, and doomed to fail. He wrote FDR on 26 August 1936, “the thing will be over soon.” But that was before FDR’s “neutrality” blockaded and strangled Republican Spain, while his State Department allowed oil and supplies to Franco’s troops.
Given the Supreme Court’s ongoing opposition to the New Deal, there was a bitter irony in the fact that the Court actually gave FDR executive authority over foreign affairs. To support either side of a conflict, the Court ruled, FDR had freedom of action “in this vast external realm” of international relations. The Supreme Court’s decision involved an embargo against Bolivia and Paraguay, at war in the Chaco jungles during 1934. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation sued for the right to sell machine guns to Bolivia. The Court held that international powers did not derive from the states, but resided in the nation, and the “important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems” of international negotiation required the president to have “a degree of discretion and freedom … which would not be admissible were domestic affairs alone involved.” FDR did not actually need congressional authority for an embargo, nor for the right to supply the legitimate elected Popular Front government. Those decisions were entirely his.
Although FDR’s sympathies were thought to be with the democratically elected government, his aggressive embargo policy devoured its ability to survive. In September he wrote Bowers: “What an unfortunate and terrible catastrophe in Spain!” FDR agreed with Claude Bowers’s report that the press falsified news from Spain:
You are right about the distortion of the news …Over here the Hearst papers and most of the conservative editors are playing up all kinds of atrocities on the part of what they call the Communist government in Madrid—nothing about atrocities on the part of [the Franco] rebels.
Determined to ignore German and Italian military support for Franco, FDR insisted on “our complete neutrality in regard to Spain’s own internal affairs.”
Actually, he agreed with William Bullitt, who saw Spain as a key battlefield in the competition between expanding communist influence and expanding fascist influence. Bullitt preferred the latter. Horrified by his months in Moscow, Bullitt was now the U.S. ambassador to France, eager to achieve a Franco-German alliance. On 8 November 1936, he wrote FDR: “The war in Spain, as you know, has become an incognito war between the Soviet Union and Italy.”
The Spanish Civil War persuaded Europeans “that there is such a thing as European civilization… [which] may be destroyed by war or Bolshevism.” To unite Europe against communism, Bullitt now urged FDR to “assist diplomatically” in a reconciliation between France and Nazi Germany. Bullitt did not want a “grand gesture”—just some quiet work to “prepare the ground” and the prompt removal of William Dodd from Berlin. Bullitt wanted America’s most outspoken anti-Nazi ambassador replaced by career diplomat Hugh Wilson. Bullitt was blunt: “Dodd has many admirable and likable qualities, but… he hates the Nazis too much to be able to do anything with them or get anything out of them. We need in Berlin someone who can at least be civil to the Nazis and speaks German perfectly….” Dodd spoke German, but he opposed a Franco-Nazi alliance, and was useless as a diplomat.
While Spain exploded, the First Couple’s own family geography was unsettled. FDR returned home convinced that his son James was perfect to fill the empty spaces left by Louis Howe and Gus Gennerich. It was an impossible task for anyone, and ER was dismayed by her husband’s blithe assumptions about his son’s future. She wrote Anna that James had arranged for another New York State trooper for FDR “to try out,” and James would begin his new post as secretary on 15 January. But: “I am saying nothing these days & Pa has no time to be talked to except on matters of business!”
After saying nothing for several weeks, evidently out of respect for FDR’s state of mourning, ER finally “protested vehemently.” She told FDR it was “selfish to bring James down”; and told them both that she was not only “unhappy” about their decision but “appalled.”
ER had always opposed special privileges for her children, but she was virtually isolated in her opposition to many family decisions. The children were spoiled by their grandmother who was generally supported by FDR, and ER’s worries and sense of correctness were usually dismissed as overbearing and unnecessary. James wanted to work with his father. He enjoyed politics, and his father’s company. He especially enjoyed his role as FDR’s responsible eldest son, who served with distinction and protective intelligence.
Proudly, FDR detailed James’s new chores as presidential secretary, at the rank of Stephen Early and Marvin McIntyre. He was to be liaison to the “little cabinet” and coordinate the activities of twenty agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the WPA, the Housing Authority, the Federal Reserve Board, the Social Security Board, the Maritime Commission, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Federal Power Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Veterans Administration, the Civil Service Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps.
It was a bit much, and he was called the “Crown Prince,” and the “Assistant President.” ER had only one ally in opposition, FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano.
Although his health failed and his marriage floundered, James considered it the happiest time of his life. It was the only time he and FDR had time to do “father-and-son things together.” It was for ER a significant ordeal. That FDR returned too busy to speak with his wife about personal matters was one thing. That she increasingly learned about his political intentions from her son was another. On 16 December, she wrote Anna: “J told me & if true I think it diverting, they plan to make Harry Hopkins Sec of War to reorganize the Dept till Congress creates a Dept of Welfare or whatnot when Harry will go in there! A pacifist in the War Dept is funny, now isn’t it?”
Embatded and distressed at home, ER sought comfort elsewhere. Shortly after FDR’s return, she went to Val-Kill with Earl. She wanted to walk in the snow, take long vigorous horseback rides through the woods. The more difficult ER’s family situation became, the more she turned to Earl, and again to Hick. Needed and wanted as she had not been for a long time, Hick responded with renewed warmth. Moreover, Hick was in a better mood. Her new job and time away with good friends had refortified her own sense of self. With new friends Hendrik van Loon and his son Willem, and Bill and Ella Dana, Hick was no longer dependent on ER and often seemed now practically carefree.
She was patient about ER’s unexpected schedule changes. She accepted the primacy of ER’s children’s needs, especially when they were in extremis—as FDR, Jr., was all that season. She became almost gracious about all the people, old and new, in ER’s life. Bernard Baruch, for example, entered ER’s letters more and more frequently: “Such a joke. Mr. Baruch bought me a superlative vanity case for Xmas but the catch was broken so he took it back but you can think how much I need cigarettes, lip stick and powder in a light tortoise shell case!”
ER also turned to new allies, new organizations. Interested in sharecroppers and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, ER wanted Mary McLeod Bethune to be appointed to the new presidential study committee on farm tenancy. It was a thirty-eight-member committee, chaired by Henry Wallace, whose initial disinterest in race and the plight of the sharecropper changed after he made a fact-finding Southern tour. Surprised by the dire poverty he witnessed, Wallace was now eager to make amends for the damage done by AAA crop reduction programs. Florida’s liberal senator Claude Pepper supported the First Lady, and Bethune was appointed.
Within the administration, and with ER’s support, Bethune did more than any single individual to move the race agenda forward. Bethune invited ER to address a January conference, sponsored by the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs, which she now chaired. Planned with Aubrey Williams, the Conference on Government Policies and the Problems and Future of the Negro and Negro Youth was to be momentous. Bethune wrote ER: “Negroes all over the country so fully believe in you that it would mean much … to have your counsel.”
ER attended and spoke at the three-day conference, which focused on economic security, educational opportunity, improved health and housing, and equal protection under the law. Grateful for her presence and “valuable contribution,” Bethune wrote:
You may well understand that this is the most significant conference ever held by a Negro group in connection with the Government…. It marks a new epoch and a very decided forward step…. A note of harmony and understanding was struck… that we have never before heard…. The recommendations present a unified voice of the twelve million Negroes of this country. Surely a new day has dawned.
On 21 December, ER hosted the annual Gridiron Widows party, working with Elinor Morgenthau and Betty Lindley on the entertainments. Held since 1933, ER’s party for women journalists and public officials coincided with the men-only Gridiron party and tended to be just as much fun, and quite as silly. Over the years some spice was added to the parodies, but they were never scathing.
In 1934, ER participated in the first costume party. According to Bess Furman, it was “a night of sheer delight,” and the First Lady stole the show when she appeared in complete disguise for her skit as Apple Mary, based on a film character. Her tattered rags were so dingy, her makeup so amazing, she was unrecognizable. In fact, the chief White House usher made a move to stop her.
As the lights went up, she sat under a large umbrella, rocked back and forth, muttered, and keened. Oh so cold; oh so hungry: “Oh, the divvil, the divvil!”
Thereupon a red devil in red leotards and tail leaped onto the stage. Anna looked hard at Apple Mary and recognized her mother: “So it has come to this! To keep yourself in the headlines you even disguise as an old Apple Woman!”
Apple Mary was apologetic: It had seemed “such a good way to see people.”
But the devil was harsh and forced her to return to her role as First Lady and endure the ordeals of her position, for three scenes: In an effort to remain inconspicuous and knit on a train, she was mobbed by autograph hounds. At the airport she was laden with flowers in impossible profusion. In her own car she was hounded by an obnoxious motorist who sought to keep abreast of her. ER went faster and faster but the obnoxious motorist kept up with her, all the while hurling mean comments about her children. This was achieved by ER and Anna in a race astride rapidly moving chairs.
Finally, ER decided to return to the role of Apple Mary: “I like my miseries better this way.”
After Howe died, for theatrical staging for the Gridiron Widows skits, ER relied on Elinor Morgenthau, and Gabrielle Forbush, a professional writer who worked in the Treasury department. According to Time, the 1936 Gridiron Widows party was “the most intimate show ever seen at the White House.” There was a burlesque in which “a plump newshen did a striptease, another in red flannel underwear did a fan dance,” and a scene in which the Roosevelts were honored because they liked people, “they marry so many of them.”
“The big act” was “Romeo and Juliet, 1936” in three episodes: Juliet du Pont warned Romeo Roosevelt that if “my kinsmen see thee, they’ll make thee join the Liberty League.”
John Boettiger Juliet asked William Randolph Hearst Romeo: “Shall I deny my father-in-law and accept thy jack?”
Mrs. Simpson Juliet and Edward Romeo loved and lost “Pomp and Circumstance.”
ER’s act was off the record, but in song and square dance celebrated Tobacco Road’s transformation into a model community.
Competitively, ER noted that her parties were more fun, and “lasted longer than the men’s, so Franklin was usually home and in bed before I went upstairs after bidding my last guest good-night.”
On 22 December, ER wrote Hick that she had decided to go to Boston to be with her ailing son FJr, and had to cancel all her plans including the special parties she had planned with Hick, and with Tommy and Henry: “Hick darling, I hate to write you this but you can’t possibly feel lower about it than I do.” She asked Hick to do her the favor of taking “Tommy’s and Henry’s things to them on Xmas eve and either take your own Xmas stocking there and open with them or here early in AM and I’ll telephone you as soon as I get to the hotel on Xmas morning….”
Instead, Hick went with ER to Boston, and they spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning together. As she returned to New York, Hick wrote: “I love being with you more than with anyone else, of course, but I don’t ever want to intrude or make you feel you’ve got to ask me to save my feelings. You don’t need to worry about that, you know.” Also Hick loved her gifts: the Val-Kill desk and chair—which she received earlier:
And all the nice little things you remembered—like the black lace stockings—they mean so much—I may have had my bad times, dear, but they weren’t your fault. And you’ve made me happier, too, than anyone else ever has. A happy Christmas and my love—all the best of it—
ER shared Hick’s feelings about their unexpected journey together. After she left for New York, ER wrote her Christmas column, about loneliness. She recalled other lonely Christmas days, “one in Paris with a French family, and another in Rome, when I was at school.” Then there was one “in bed with a baby two days old.” But never before did she see “the children hang up their stockings in one city” only to arrive in another to be in a hospital “with one lone child. There were so many at home this year that I hated to leave, but we couldn’t any of us bear to think of Franklin, Jr., alone by himself… so here I am in Boston.”
While her son slept, she read, and noted with dismay that a newspaper announced “that $3,600 a year was really the minimum on which an average family could lead a satisfactory existence. Most of us know that a considerable percentage of our people see only from $200 to $600 … during the course of a year. Many other have incomes under $1,000….”
This problem is so vast, ER wrote, the government needed help to solve it: “We, as a people, must solve it by deciding on the type of social and economic philosophy which we wish to see established in this country….”
Unlike the New Deal’s opponents, ER did not consider it communism, or near communism, to suggest that a certain amount of economic planning for social welfare was in order. Americans needed to think boldly or nothing really would get done: “When we know what changes we want, we can then set government machinery to work to accomplish them.”
After Christmas, Ethel du Pont arrived, and ER wrote Anna that she was “a sweet child” with “much to learn. However, there is a practical streak there which may save many a situation!”
Weary and depressed, surrounded by journalists everywhere, ER wrote Hick from her hotel room:
[One reporter] said I’d be saved a lot if I had the AP girl along who used to travel with me! I told them you came up with me but had returned to NY. I’ve become utterly unreasonable I know but I simply don’t feel I can do anything but go in and out of the hospital and this hotel. I dread people’s eyes and how stupid it is!
Bless you dear for coming up with me … it was the nicest Xmas present you could have given me tho’ I love all those others you did give me. The quilt, underclothes, raincoat, etc. are all a great joy…. You yourself were the grandest present….
With her son’s condition both painful and perilous, and press gossip about her family routinely unkind, ER was exhausted. But Hick admired the way ER handled the most fearsome situations:
I think probably you are a lot more worried than you admit. Lord, I admire your courage and your calm. I know plenty of women—and so do you—who would be all in pieces if they were in the spot you are in right now. Madame, I salute you!
Hick urged ER to work on her book, and not think about her detractors: “Honey, don’t let ‘the eyes’ get you! Just look right over their heads as you’ve always done and go about your business. You mustn’t get that way, you know….”
After several days, ER asked Tommy to join her and she agreed to. move from her dreary hotel room to a friend’s lovely home to work on the galleys of This Is My Story between hospital visits.
At last, FJr’s nose stopped bleeding for forty-eight hours. His life had evidently been saved by an experimental antibiotic, and ER left immediately for New York. She wanted to surprise Hick with a visit on New Year’s morning as soon as she arrived. But Hick’s apartment was filled with her old friends, including Carolyn Marsh, and Hick was unprepared. ER wrote: “Dearest. It was good to see you today even if I did rout you out of bed! I hope Mrs. Marsh didn’t mind!” Mrs. Marsh did mind a little. It was, after all, a curious way to meet Mrs. Roosevelt, and it was Carolyn Marsh’s first trip to New York and away from her husband and children in decades—Hick chided.
ER concluded her New Year’s letter with a reference to Hick’s houseguests and social schedule, which kept her from her writing, with an uncharacteristic flourish: If Tommy and I “do as much on the train tomorrow as we did today it will be swell for I won’t feel so guilty about ‘my’ book. I hope YOU feel guilty as Hell!”
From New York, ER raced to Washington for the diplomats’ New Year dinner, the first big reception of 1937. The family took bets on whether Alice Longworth would appear after her nasty campaign against her cousins. ER noted the evening was a success, but “Alice came and FDR was rude, looked straight at [his aide Pa Watson] and said ‘I won my bet’!”
Hick replied:
I chuckled over your hoping I felt “guilty as Hell.”… It always amuses me so when you get profane! And I also chuckled over the President’s reception of Alice Longworth. He was bad, of course—but, oh, she so richly deserves it! Your indifference and your poise simply are more than human!
As Hick pulled away, and ER’s family crises mounted, ER wrote a revealing New Year’s column: “I have always thought the Japanese idea of keeping works of art put away and bringing them out one by one is a very good one, for you can always choose the ones which fit your mood,” from light-hearted to gloomy. ER wondered if this was not also true about human relations. One could say in the morning:
“This is the day I must look up Jane; she is just the person my mood requires.” Or: “This is just the day for Alice.” We never seem to take into consideration that there is an art in human relationships and that our appreciation of people may vary….
There are really very few things you want to look at every day in the year.
Still, ER countered Hick’s withdrawal with suggestions for several exclusive trips together: In January they would tour Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans in April. Hick was agreeable: The dates “are grand dear”; “I’d love to go to Charleston”; “I don’t care which car we take.” But, “Will you let me drive yours?”
They would take ER’s new convertible, “and you can drive all you want.” Hick was thrilled about New Orleans: “We’d enjoy that place together.”
Hick was not ER’s primary worry as she contemplated her next four years. The political future, her children, and also her own health disturbed her: “I hear less and less. My voice gets worse and worse too. I’ll probably be deaf and dumb in a few years more and perhaps that will make me really write—because I can’t do anything else! Queer world!”
Because FDR insisted he required a groundswell of public activity in order to move toward real action on health security, ER invited Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to Washington to attend the cabinet dinner and FDR’s Annual Message to Congress on 6 January. They planned to introduce their new agenda to FDR during a relaxed moment.
Lape and Read had refocused the American Foundation’s work on a national health care program for mandatory health insurance. The American Medical Association had blocked 1935 efforts to include health care in the Social Security Act. Now Lape and Read had assembled a distinguished roster of physicians and health educators to counter the AM A. Their team of 2,100 specialists in every branch of medicine worked to prepare a two-volume study, American Medicine: Expert Testimony out of Court, to arouse the nation to America’s dismal health care realities, and with ER they planned a well-considered strategy to get their views before the nation and onto FDR’s schedule of priorities.
In his 6 January message, FDR outlined his plans. First of all he sought an extension of the Neutrality Act to cover “the unfortunate civil strife in Spain,” then he wanted to modernize and overhaul the executive structure to carry out the mandate for recovery.
Except for his words on Spain, FDR’s speech echoed ER’s interests and included new programs for slum clearance, the creation of healthful dwellings, and the end to “an un-American type of tenant farming.” FDR proposed to end peonage and make tenant farmers “self-supporting on land which can eventually belong to them.” As ER had demanded months earlier, he called for “the intelligent development of our social security system” through “frequent amendment of the original statute.”
In conclusion, FDR devoted an undramatic paragraph to the Supreme Court: “The Judicial branch also is asked by the people to do its part in making democracy successful…. The process of our democracy must not be imperiled by the denial of essential powers of free government” acting “for the common good.”
That paragraph heralded a secret plan that FDR had brooded over and developed for weeks. He consulted nobody except his attorney general, Homer Cummings; ER and his closest advisers were kept in the dark about this looming surprise—not to explode for another month.
Following his 6 January State of the Union message, ER had several conversations with her husband that resulted in what she considered an almost perfect second Inaugural Address. Although he again refused to mention lynching, ER’s most urgent concerns were supported by FDR’s powerful rhetoric on 20 January 1937:
I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of national resources….
But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens … who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life….
I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day….
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children….
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished….
We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s concern…. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little….
FDR’s speech was brilliantly delivered, despite dreadful weather, and ER marveled at her husband’s dramatic skills. America’s first winter inaugural occurred on a wet, springlike day. Grass was greening, forsythia was in bloom; an epidemic of flu and pneumonia raged. As FDR spoke, the rains came down in torrents on the presidential party, wearing lightweight formal attire.
In the lull between FDR’s speech and the inaugural parade, ER wrote her column. Her impression so far was: “Umbrellas and more umbrellas!”
It was a day of mishaps and confusion. At nine in the morning, ER was presented with a profusion of her favorite flower, violets from Dutchess County, and “the entire family [left the White House] with bunches of violets.” But en route to St. John’s Church, the car with her grandchildren Sistie and Buzzie was stopped by policemen, who refused to let them in until the service was half over. Then she caused a delay at the Capitol while she arranged sheltered seating for her friends.
Edith Helm had forgotten to reserve seats for cabinet wives and other important guests. ER was furious. She actually spent almost thirty minutes looking for various notables to get them on the stand, including Dr. Peabody, Nan, Marion, Molly Dewson, and Laura Delano.
Hick reported that while ER scouted, holding up the ceremonies, radio announcers filled the air with rhapsodic praises of the First Lady: “Because of the delay, the announcers had to ad lib…. It was nice—they really said lovely things about you. You would undoubtedly have hated it.”
ER confessed to Hick: “Yes, I gave Mrs. Helm a very bad time tho’ I said nothing to her! She simply can’t do that kind of work, and I should know it by this time.”
ER’s ability to give somebody a bad time, without saying a word, was one of her most unpleasant traits. But neither her irritation nor the weather spoiled the day: “Hardened as I am to official occasions, I could not hear the oath … without a catch in my throat.” ER believed FDR’s speech represented his sincere commitment to “the opening of the second stage in a long period of change.”
FDR insisted they drive home with the top down. Bareheaded, they smiled and waved and became, wrote ER, “well soaked through.” She had “a minute and a half” to change dresses before she greeted her luncheon guests. ER endured it all in appropriate style, and wrote her daughter, who was sorely missed that day:
You would have been proud of Buzz taking off his cap whenever Pa did and standing by him all thro the parade. Sisty looked sweet too….
Well, another four years begins. I thought Pa’s speech very good, what did you think? It is a new job & a hard one however. For me, some struggle for a personal life, an effort to do some good because of the position and a continuing effort to make Pa’s life as far as the mechanics go easy so he can have what he wants materially and not think about it. I’m a bit weary as I think about it but I guess I’ll live through it! I love you both a great deal.
ER wrote a more introspective letter to Hick:
I went around and thanked everyone today for they were all wonderful and when you think that 710 ate lunch and 2700 had tea and everyone so far tells me things moved smoothly I think everyone deserves a pat on the back. I confess that arrangements and people bothered me beforehand but even more my sense of four years more beginning bothered me….
Why can’t someone have this job who’d like it and do something worthwhile with it? I’ve always been content to hide behind someone else’s willingness to take responsibility and work behind them and I’d rather be doing that now, instead I’ve got to use my opportunities and I am weary just thinking about it! Well, we’ll live through it and worry along and see the irony of it and laugh at ourselves!
With Louis Howe gone, there was nobody to hide behind, or work behind. ER was on her own as never before.