Cwo days after the inauguration, on 22 January 1937, ER embarked upon a more independent phase of her political life. She promoted Senator Robert Wagner’s bill for federal aid to initiate a ten-year plan to rehouse low-income Americans in affordable decent housing, which FDR had not yet endorsed.
In her keynote address to the National Public Housing Conference, ER reaffirmed her conviction that decent affordable housing was the basic requirement for a better future. She read FDR’s greetings, which celebrated PWA’s housing efforts to date: fifty-one community projects were under way. The well-attended conference, chaired by pioneering housing advocate Mary Simkhovitch, seemed an auspicious way to begin the New Year, and the new administration.
January closed with FDR’s annual birthday frolic. The first year without Louis Howe, it was also the first year Harry Hopkins attended. ER invited him:
As you know, what we call the “Old Guard,” who were in the 1920 campaign with Franklin, have for years had a dinner on his birthday. We used to have a stunt party, but none of us have the heart to do that now without Louis, who was always the moving spirit.
We have decided that we would like to invite some guests, the gentlemen to sit in after dinner at a poker game. I hope very much that you will be among the guests this year….
While the men drank and gambled, ER’s “job” was to attend the fund-raising “Birthday Balls” that raised thousands of dollars annually for polio research and other good causes.
ER’s gift to her husband was a bound unfinished manuscript of her memoir, This Is My Story, accompanied by a handwritten note:
This may not look it but it is,
A book which will some day appear
So little else You’ll get
My dear!
Serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal before publication, it was immediately the subject of excitement. Fannie Hurst was ecstatic to hear the Journal’s editors at a luncheon speak exuberantly about ER’s book. Certain that “this will give you a thrill,” she related their conversation: They especially “admired the ‘fine clear prose’ and the ‘simplicity and forthrightness of the narrative.’…”
ER spent more time with Fannie Hurst, who sent her additional glasses to complete the vividly colored crystal set Howe had so awkwardly accepted the year before. ER wrote: “I can’t tell you how sweet you are and … we will have a liqueur together for tender memory….”
In some ways This Is My Story was ER’s tribute to Louis Howe. Subsequently, ER noted that Howe was “more or less my agent” until the White House years, and then, “it was Howe who kept encouraging me to write, as he had from the beginning.”
After he died, she wrote her memoirs to clear her mind, clarify her course, send a letter to her friend of friends. Her book was her major focus for the first six months of the second administration.
On 26 January 1937, ER brought a special guest to her press conference: Jane Hoey, director of public assistance for the Social Security Board. Hoey outlined the need for stronger social security measures and condemned states that attached punitive restrictions to aid for the needy, dependent children, the aged, and the blind. Based on Elizabethan poor laws, these state laws deprived the needy of all civil rights, including the right to vote, and recipients were obliged to “take a pauper’s oath.” The federal government opposed these requirements and wanted state legislatures to eliminate them immediately. Their elimination reflected only some of the changes ER had in mind, which included passage of a new health security package and a full-employment law.
Asked about FDR’s comment that “federal hand-outs” were not his goal and represented no “permanent solution,” ER said:
Perhaps the President did not make himself clear…. He favors federal aid until economic conditions are raised. It has been misinterpreted into meaning that he opposes federal aid to communities too poor to care for their health and education.
That represented precisely, ER insisted, the “big job for the next decade.” That big job was not only about social security but about prison reform. The first week of February, ER revisited the National Training School for Delinquent Girls, which had so offended her the year before that she protested and invited the girls (aged ten to twenty) to a White House garden party. The school was remodeled and modernized: “The change is so tremendous that I can hardly recognize the place. All the bars are gone, plenty of light and air, everything bright and new and clean….”
ER agreed with Dostoevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” She urged all citizens to familiarize themselves with public institutions that, as taxpayers, they were responsible for: If one investigated, one might “find something really valuable” to be done. Personally, she wrote:
The mere sight of the barred windows and doors, the thought of what nights must be with all that closely packed humanity thinking no very happy thoughts, makes me shiver as I go in, and breathe a prayer of gratitude as I come out again into the air and sun, free.
Also, the WPA was under assault, and ER stepped up her defense. She dismissed mean-minded accusations of “shovel leaning,” and urged the critical to do hard manual labor, or shovel snow themselves, “and then see how you feel. I know because I’ve done it myself.”
Speaking to a group of Junior Leaguers, ER acknowledged that some people were lazy, that there were employees everywhere who were “no good,” but their children still deserved to eat, and everyone deserved jobs and training. ER repeatedly insisted that the only true anticrime bill was full employment.
She had never seen a WPA project she “was not really proud of.” And she was particularly proud of WPA arts projects, which she hoped would create permanent institutions for leisure, recreation, and culture in every community:
I hope also that we will continue to be able to look upon art and artists as one of the factors which can be used to draw nations together…. We need emotional outlets in this country and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation.
Closest to Hallie Flanagan’s Federal Theatre Project, ER was credited for “saving” the murals project, which was under attack, and she campaigned for the Federal Music Project under Nikolai Sokoloff. Grateful, Sokoloff reported to the First Lady that by 1937 his unit employed almost sixteen thousand musicians in 163 symphony and concert orchestras, fifty-one bands, a composer’s project, fifteen chamber music ensembles, sixty-nine dance orchestras, 146 teacher projects, grand opera and operetta companies, various library, copyist, and soloist projects, and a folk song project in the Kentucky hills.
After June Rhodes told Hick that ER looked unusually exhausted, Hick proposed an alternative to travel for their upcoming vacation. Hick wanted ER “to retire” with her for a week of peace in “the little house at the Danas.”
Hick wanted ER to be with her in Long Island during her first spring vacation there. But the Danas planned to return to Nevada by April, and if they knew ER planned to visit, they might stay. Hick did not want to share their time together:
They would pester us to death. Nor would I want Tommy or anyone else around. I’m very fond of Tommy—honestly—but I’ve decided that, while I can have a perfectly good time with either of you alone, I do not particularly enjoy being with you together. I suppose the reason is that when you are together you can never forget for more than fifteen minutes at a time your darned jobs. That shuts me out, and I get bored and miserable.
Also Hick worried that it might turn out as other times together in New York and Washington had, “when I was taking a vacation supposedly with you, but with you not actually taking one.” In that case, she would “infinitely rather go on the trip.”
The “little house” was little only by the baronial standards of the neighborhood. A bright, comfortable, sun-filled home, it was a two-story dwelling with several bedrooms, a small library, a sitting room, cozy fireplaces, and several rooms to spare. There was an upstairs deck and a downstairs porch. Part of a close community, it became Hick’s home and refuge for almost twenty years. A short walk from the bay, nestled deep in the woods, surrounded by wildlife and nature, it was a serene space, and she felt at the moment content.
Hick’s World’s Fair boss, former state senator Joseph Baldwin, asked if she would work with him in the future. Baldwin intended to run for Congress “and would like to have me for his ‘Mrs. Moskowitz.’… No, darling, I didn’t laugh in his face.” Actually, Hick was pleased: Belle Moskowitz, Al Smith’s chief adviser and administrator, had been one powerful woman.
ER warned Hick: “Don’t be anybody’s Mrs. Moskowitz.” The work was grueling, and anonymous, “and your temperament would find it hard!”
That week they spent an especially lovely evening together, and Hick wrote: “Darling, when one has one’s emotions fairly well under control, life can be diverting, can’t it?”
Politically, life was astir. ER had a long talk with Anna Louise Strong, who had just returned from Spain and Russia. ER had sent her a “warm welcome-home letter” and invited her for lunch. She wrote Hick that Strong had “told me interesting things” about the Spanish People’s Front, the Soviet trials, “and who has softened towards us a bit!”
Strong’s goal during their meeting was to convince ER that the United States should be supporting the Spanish Loyalists. She seemed to Strong “appreciative but noncommittal.” ER brought their conversation to FDR, who remained adamantly committed to his policy of embargo and noninvolvement.
While the future of democracy, communism, and fascism exploded in Spain’s civil war, America seemed in peril of taking the same path. Immediately after the inauguration, lawful strikes and innovative sit-down strikes were opposed by bloody strike-breaking episodes that challenged the future of democratic unionism promised by the Wagner Act and reinforced by FDR’s oratory.
In February, ER received several letters demanding military action against strikers. She wrote Hick about a woman who wanted the sit-down strikers evicted “in the name of sacred private property rights—and if the militia can’t do it the U.S. Army should be used! I ask you!”
ER supported the union movement and was revolted by the industrial violence resorted to each time unions tried to organize, beginning with the Southern and New England textile strikes of 1934. After 1920 when she joined the Women’s Trade Union League, she remained convinced that nothing would change until workers organized for their own protection and economic needs.
ER’s emphatic support for labor unions was demonstrated by her own membership in the American Newspaper Guild, which she joined when she became a United Features Syndicate columnist. In December 1936, the Newspaper Guild voted to leave the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and join the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a move ER publicly endorsed. Subsequently, she invited CIO leaders to a White House Conference on Youth, and pointed out that there were many more young people in the CIO than in the AFL.
Initiated by star reporter Heywood Broun in 1933, the Newspaper Guild was an aggressive union often damned as communist. ER was the first First Lady actually to join a labor union, although she told her press conference on 5 January 1937 that she would not join a picket line or strike, “at least in the immediate future.” But she was proud to be a member of the Guild, which, she said, “had done perfectly splendid things.” For ER the union “principle is sound and right.”
Throughout the 1930s, ER was loyal to the Guild, and to Broun, who adored the First Lady. In 1937, he reported that the pecan workers of San Antonio wanted ER for president—a view he commended: “At the moment Eleanor Roosevelt has a deeper and closer understanding of the needs and aspirations of millions of Americans than any other person in public life.”
ER always rejected such ideas: “Nothing on God’s green earth would induce me to run for anything.” But she demanded justice for all workers, including the embattled workers of General Motors in Flint, Michigan.
Although she initially deplored confrontations and sit-down strikes, ER condemned GM’s Alfred P. Sloan for refusing to attend a conference Frances Perkins called with John L. Lewis in Washington. ER declared: “If we are going to settle things peaceably, we have to have a spirit of good will.” Sloan’s attitude of “fear and distrust” made it impossible to bargain collectively, which was labor’s right, and to “reach reasonable conclusions.”
In 1937 when the Supreme Court reversed its twenty-year stand and finally held the minimum-wage law for women and children constitutional, ER proceeded to battle for minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws for all workers. So long as employers could pay women less for the same work, all would be underpaid.
ER attended union meetings, participated in union socials, and personally helped mediate various strikes. She emphasized collective bargaining, and by 1938 hoped that unionism would promote “a yearly wage” to replace hourly wages, which, she said, were responsible for underemployment and workers’ indignity. When unionism was fully accepted, there would be a new deal of full employment and a truly living wage.
For ER, democracy and workers’ rights were synonymous. In May 1934 she gave a lecture to 2,700 delegates at a YWCA convention on peace and progress. There could not be progress for some unless there was “progress for everybody; and [that] must include cooperation between industry and labor; with labor organized in unions so as not to remain weak and unsubstantial.” Industrial peace, as well as international peace, depended on justice for workers: “The old desire to gather profit for the few at the expense of the many” was what all religions and races must oppose today: Industrial peace depended on women’s involvement and an awareness of labor conditions in every community.
ER made it clear that she did not limit her notion of community to white communities: We could not ostracize “some races” and pretend to be good Christians. We could not “follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and permit in this country some of the things we stand for today.” It was the responsibility of the YWCA to “reach out to all countries and spread the belief that human beings can grow into a brotherhood the world over.”
Although ER said nothing publicly about sit-down strikes, she honored picket lines. In 1939, she even refused to cross one to attend FDR’s birthday ball at a Washington hotel where the waitresses were on strike for better daily wages.
ER continued to hope that unionism and collective bargaining might be achieved without strikes. In an address before the League of Women Shoppers, chaired by her friend Evelyn Preston (married to the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin), ER said strikes “brought a great deal of harm” to both sides. Although she realized that in certain industries “there may be no other way,” she preferred to see “all factions” bargain collectively “in a spirit of good feeling.”
ER completely misjudged the labor situation in 1937. For John L. Lewis and the CIO it was the year to organize the unorganized. Lewis had rejuvenated the union movement, and was responsible for the successful slogan: “The President wants you to join a union.” He had contributed heartily to FDR’s 1936 campaign, and in exchange for the United Mine Workers’ $500,000 cash contribution (the equivalent of $5 million in 1990s dollars), he expected presidential support for labor. Moreover, FDR’s campaign oratory against “economic royalists” gave Lewis every reason to believe he had presidential support.
Sit-down strikes immobilized industry after industry and resulted in unionism’s greatest triumphs and heartbreaks. From the Firestone rubber plant strike in Akron, Ohio, in 1936 to the famous General Motors auto-workers’ triumph in 1937, there were almost seven thousand strikes. Mostly, the CIO achieved its goals: higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, paid vacations, dignity and respect for industrial workers. In fact, 60 percent of the strikes during the 1930s were for the right to unionize; union recognition meant respect. But everywhere the crusade was marked by contempt and organized cruelty.
ER’s vision of an era of “good feeling” and amiable negotiation was mocked by industrial violence, company vigilantes, and local militias. Hundreds of workers were tear-gassed, wounded, shot. As the CIO organized to end industrial tyranny, antiunion terror intensified. In 1936, Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel, and the du Ponts organized a “special conference committee” to crush the CIO with vigilante violence and charges of communism. These were the “economic Royalists” against whom FDR campaigned, and he was the target of their Red Scare tactics.
Now, Wisconsin’s progressive Senator Robert La Follette held hearings on industrial violence, and his publicized findings stimulated a national debate about labor’s democratic right to organize against repressive, even torturous, industrial tactics. According to the Senate’s La Follette Committee on Civil Liberties, industry spent over $80 million to spy on and eliminate union efforts between 1934 and 1936. In addition to engaging in espionage, corporations stockpiled noxious gases, machine guns, and various projectiles. Between 1933 and 1937, Republic Steel, for example, purchased 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 254 shotguns, 143 gas guns, 4,033 gas projectiles, 2,707 gas grenades, and many other weapons to use against its employees.
La Follette’s committee deplored the climate of terror and intimidation, the armed brutality that curtailed “the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech and of assembly,” which now specifically protected unionists as a result of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. In contempt of procedures set up by the National Labor Relations Board, industrialists escalated their intimidation, and fortified their arsenals.
At the same time, strikes erupted nationwide: WPA artists, members of the Workers Alliance, held a “stay-in-strike” in New York City. College students picketed against food costs in Chicago. Newspaper reporters and workers struck from Seattle (the strike settled when Hearst hired the Boettigers) to Flushing, New York. Silver miners struck in Nevada; asbestos workers halted work in New Jersey’s Johns Manville Company.
In January 1937, many Americans were disgusted to read in newspapers how Eleanor Roosevelt’s name was used to discredit unionists. When the La Follette Committee held hearings on “Jack Barton” (a.k.a. Bart Logan), his story made headline news. His effort to organize the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, in Bessemer, Alabama, resulted in harassment and three arrests: once as a suspected communist (though the Communist Party was then legal in Alabama); once for being in possession of seditious literature (including The Nation and The New Republic); and once for vagrancy (although he had $35 cash in his pocket and was employed). When questioned about his “communist” activities, he was asked what his contacts were with Heywood Broun and Eleanor Roosevelt.
At his trial, the court refused him a lawyer or a jury, and he was sentenced to 180 days at hard labor and fined $100. When the International Labor Defense Committee provided bail, local authorities refused to accept it. He was forced into leg shackles on a chain gang. His legs became infected and his arrested case of tuberculosis flared. Within weeks he lost fifteen pounds, collapsed, and was sent to a sanatorium.
Although ER’s connections to the many unionists who were asked about their alleged friendship with her were irrelevant, and usually nonexistent, she became personally close to one of the many heroes and victims of torture La Follette investigated, Joseph Gelders. The former physics professor at the University of Alabama, as Southern representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, launched a campaign for Bart Logan’s release. After a nighttime meeting in Bessemer, on 23 September 1936, Gelders was surrounded by four vigilantes and clubbed with a baseball bat. His nose was broken and he was beaten unconscious. When he awoke, he was stripped, flogged, kicked, and beaten again. Driven into the country and left for dead, Gelders survived and hitched a ride to a hospital in Clanton. Although he subsequently identified his assailants, the grand jury refused to indict them. The company controlled the town; unionists and their friends were unwelcome. Civil libertarians and Birmingham’s labor community organized against terrrorism and class war, with support from Governor Bibb Graves, who offered a $200 reward for the capture of Gelders’s attackers.
Ultimately, the La Follette Committee’s revelations helped change the industrial climate of the country. Even though Southern senators opposed its investigations into local industrial habits and threatened to defund the committee, public opinion shifted in favor of the CIO. Logan and Gelders, the only Southern witnesses, dramatically improved the situation in Alabama, and their testimony influenced Myron Taylor, who announced that U.S. Steel would recognize the CIO.
By 1938, ER worked closely with Joseph Gelders and the CIO’s Southern field representative Lucy Randolph Mason. Together they launched and organized the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Gelders initially wanted a conference of liberals and labor leaders to focus on the economy and civil liberties. ER invited him to the White House to discuss his plans and arranged a meeting with FDR, who suggested the conference deal with all Southern controversies, including voting rights and the poll tax.
While the La Follette Committee broadcast the plight of unionists and encouraged workers’ rights, the United Auto Workers organized General Motors plants in fifty-seven communities throughout the United States and Canada. ER subsequently became close to the Reuther brothers, who built the UAW, which in January and February changed labor history as thousands of strikers sat down in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Unprecedented and dramatic, tense and dangerous, the six-week stand-off seemed like the dawn of Armageddon. Led by Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther and supported by the wives, mothers, and grandmothers of the striking autoworkers, a grassroots movement democratized industrial America.
“With Babies and Banners,” the Women’s Emergency Brigade and the Women’s Auxiliary, organized by twenty-three-year-old Genora Johnson, fed and protected their husbands and sons. With red armbands and red tarns, they marched and sang, broke windows when their men were gassed, and put their bodies in front of threatening police. The strikers were family, creating a new social order. “A new type of woman was born in the strike.” Union wives would never again, they vowed, be silent or uninvolved. “The home and the union are becoming fused….”
The songs and rallies, the perseverance and courage, at Detroit and Flint changed industrial life and remained legendary: “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Union Maid,” “Sit Down,” “Write Me Out My Union Card,” “Solidarity Forever.”
CIO president John L. Lewis expected a sign of presidential support, at least a promise of relief for the strikers. The strikers assumed the president was “completely on their side.” But FDR would say nothing to endorse the lawless occupation of private property.
Flint, Michigan, was the center of the vortex. Rubber workers and coal miners arrived to help out; “a revolutionary spirit surged through the town.” Michigan’s New Deal governor Frank Murphy, close to FDR, held frantic meetings with GM president Alfred P. Sloan, Frances Perkins, and John L. Lewis.
Charges of radicalism, of communism, abounded. But when Sloan refused Perkins’s offer for government mediation, public opinion was with the strikers. Then, on 2 February, a Flint judge issued an injunction and ordered the strikers out. They refused, and sent a telegram to Governor Murphy:
Unarmed as we are, the introduction of the militia, sheriffs or police … will mean a blood-bath of unarmed workers…. We have no illusions about the sacrifice this decision will entail. We fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us many of us will be killed and we take this means of making it known to our wives, to our children, to the people…. You are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths!
John L. Lewis headed for Detroit. Everything depended on Murphy’s next move. He was with the union, but he was obliged to enforce the law of an injunction. When Lewis arrived, Murphy reported that FDR wanted sit-down strikes ended. Lewis was surprised. FDR had told him to “let them sit.” Murphy called for clarification, with Lewis on an extension. They heard FDR together: “Disregard whatever Mr. Lewis tells you.”
According to Saul Alinskey, those words started the unending and “deadly feud between Lewis and Roosevelt.” Lewis later told Alinskey it was at that moment he “discovered the depths of deceit, the rank dishonesty and the doublecrossing character of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
ER dreaded the implications of FDR’s evenhanded silence, and grieved to see capital actually mobilized to crush labor in America on her husband’s watch.
With a militia of thirteen hundred, reinforced by twelve hundred heavily armed cavalry and other military personnel, the strikers were surrounded. For a time a blockade threatened the workers with starvation. But Murphy called it off, and the CIO’s auxiliary women’s battalion got food to their men. Then Murphy replaced one National Guard unit with the 125th Infantry, from Detroit: Comprised of autoworkers and their sons, brothers, cousins, and friends, it was a heroic demonstration of support. Still the atmosphere crackled with trouble as unionists descended from every area, and street fights with armed vigilantes ensued.
Insurrection, even revolution, was in the air. GM turned off the heat, to drive the workers out. Workers opened the windows, which threatened to freeze everything inside, including the firefighting apparatus—which rendered GM’s insurance policies void. In a frenzy, GM representatives at Murphy’s insistence sat around a bargaining table with Lewis and Murphy, but refused to bargain. They dickered for a week, and settled nothing. On 9 February, Murphy alerted the National Guard. Death seemed imminent, as did the destruction of GM’s plants. Flint was to become a battlefield, a cemetery. Murphy was about to give up; Lewis invoked the names of Murphy’s Irish revolutionary forebears and urged the governor to remain steadfast. At 2:45 A.M. on 10 February, GM capitulated.
At noon on 11 February 1937, General Motors recognized the United Automobile Workers, CIO. Both sides of the strike now called for industrial peace. ER, like all friends of unionism, was relieved by the monumental victory.
In a February column, ER showed her support for organized labor—and workers’ unity: She had been visited by six New York City unionists, five of them unemployed “probably because they belong to this union, which is not a very strong one as yet.” Their demands seemed to her entirely reasonable: a wage to guarantee decent living, a forty-hour week, fair notice before layoffs. ER explained: “Many people do not believe in unions”; industrialists had competitive business needs; “unions and their leaders are not always wise and fair, any more than any other human beings.” Nevertheless, she concluded, only unionization will protect workers; and she, like the “majority of the people,” favored unions because they represented a democratic means to a necessary goal.
FDR’s support for Murphy’s arbitration helped avoid bloodshed and advanced union recognition. But his silence did not protect him. It invoked Lewis’s bitter enmity and failed to stem charges of communism against the New Deal. The winds of the “little Red Scare” intensified as CIO victories mounted: Firestone, Goodyear, Studebaker, General Electric, Pittsburgh Plate Glass.
On 2 March 1937, Myron Taylor announced U.S. Steel’s contract with Lewis. Without a strike, 60 percent of the steel industry was now CIO. But Walter Chrysler, considered a just and fair man by autoworkers, opted for a showdown with the strikers at Chrysler.
Ironically, Nicholas Kelley was Chrysler’s general counsel. Florence Kelley’s son was not spared Lewis’s Shakespearean wrath: After a litany of his mother’s pioneering support for workers and unionism, economic justice and democracy, Kelley shouted: “STOP IT, STOP IT, MR. LEWIS! … I—I—AM NOT AFRAID OF YOUR EYEBROWS.” The stalled negotiations ended in laughter, and Chrysler signed the. CIO contract. Walter Chrysler told Lewis: “I do not worry about dealing with you, it is the Communists… that worry me….”
ER’s steadfast friends and political allies Esther Lape, RIGHT, and Elizabeth Read, BELOW.
SDR’s 80th birthday, 21 September 1934. Back row (left to right): FDR, Jr., Elliott, James, John; Middle row (left to right): ER, SDR, FDR. Front row (left to right): Ruth, Betsey, Sara, Eleanor (Sistie), Curtis (Buzzie), Anna.
ER with Ruth Bryan Owen, the U.S.’s first woman ambassador, 4 October 1934.
LEFT: The “Cause and Cure of War” dinner, 21 January 1936, with Dr. Mary Woolley and Carrie Chapman Catt.
Jane Addams, ABOVE, and Lillian Wald, RIGHT, ER’S great mentors and models.
In Washington, ER met regularly with the Four of Hearts, childhood friends Mary Harriman Rumsey, Isabella Greenway… …and Elizabeth, Lady Lindsay. Frances Perkins regularly joined their “air our minds” lunches.
Aubrey Williams, ER, Josephine Roche, and Harry Hopkins, National Youth Administration luncheon, 21 August 1935.
The first of ER’s famous visits to coal mines, Bellaire, Ohio, 1935.
Louis Howe, the bridge between ER and FDR.
ER with her brother, Hall Roosevelt, at a ceremony for new PWA housing in Detroit, 1935.
In 1935, ER exchanged flowers with six-year-old Geraldine Walker in Detroit. The Georgia Woman’s World ridiculed the tender moment in its hate campaign with the headline “BELIEVE IT OR NOT!” In 1998, the U.S. Post Office celebrated the same event with a commemorative stamp.
Bernard Baruch and ER at a Metropolitan Opera benefit for unemployed women, 2 April 1935.
On the campaign train for the 1936 election.
Jim Farley, Molly Dewson, and ER launch the campaign in 1935.
ER and Tommy at Democratic National Headquarters, 1936.
ER’s valentines to Hick illuminate the arc of their relationship. In 1934 there is romance, and “it is you I want, my dearest, only you.” By 1935 “life’s rough seas” have intruded. In 1937 even tea for two is difficult to arrange.
Weddings in the family: Franklin, Jr., marries Ethel Du Pont, June 1937.
And John Roosevelt marries Anne Clark, June 1938.
Mary McLeod Bethune, leader of the Black Cabinet.
Molly Dewson at a celebratory Democratic dinner, 1938.
Thanksgiving at Warm Springs, Ga., ER, FDR, and Robert Rosenbaum, 24 November 1938.
ER relaxing on the Sequoia.
Square dancing at Arthurdale.
Signing a copy of This is My Story.
Listening and knitting at the World Youth Congress at Vassar, 1938.
OVERLEAF: ER at Norris Dam.
The great CIO victories of February-March 1937 led to dignity for workers and the mobilization of a new American movement that united economic and racial justice.
On 5 February 1937, while the CIO dominated headlines, FDR eclipsed the news. The president held a startling news conference in which he announced that he wanted legislation enabling him to appoint a new Supreme Court justice for every justice over seventy who refused to retire. At the time six justices were over seventy. Though it was not an outrageous suggestion, given the Supreme Court’s contempt for New Deal legislation, it exploded unexpectedly.
The plan he had referred to only obliquely on 6 January was now introduced without warning. He had alerted nobody, prepared no public support. The press went wild. Congress was frantic: “Power mad,” FDR intended to “pack the court” and ruin the nation.
Never before had FDR acted without consulting his closest allies, or creating a congressional support base for his most controversial decisions. In part, he simply misjudged the political circumstances. After all, he enjoyed one of the greatest majorities in both houses of Congress in U.S. history. After the election of 1936, there were 76 Democrats and 16 Republicans in the Senate and 332 Democrats and 89 Republicans in the House. Clearly he expected support from his co-partisans. But the landslide was a political illusion. Where real issues of liberal change were involved, Northern Democrats had little in common with Southern Democrats, and black and white Democrats remained embattled in every region.
FDR’s secrecy was a misguided tactic. Fears of dictatorship, charges of a brutal violation against constitutional sanctity, emerged from unlikely quarters; a wide spectrum of friends and foes opposed his “court-packing” proposal.
ER was surprised and troubled by FDR’s scheme. Although she agreed there was a need to transform the Court, she doubted the wisdom of his decision to increase the number of justices from nine to fifteen. She invited Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to the White House to discuss what they considered FDR’s threat to the nation’s celebrated “balance of powers.” Attorney and legal scholar, and ER’s personal investment adviser, Elizabeth Read had actually sat and wept at her dining-room table when she first read of FDR’s intentions. Nothing he had done, not even their differences over the World Court, had ever seemed to her so wrong and dangerous. She feared charges of dictatorship would create opposition to all his good works.
Bipartisan opposition to FDR’s court-packing bill suspended all other issues for months. ER subsequently wrote that “he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble” had he had the patience to wait until several justices died or retired.
ER was mostly perplexed by her husband’s priorities. Given his great election victory, he might have instead focused on positive solutions to the nation’s ills. And she was always disturbed by FDR’s secretiveness. She frequently lamented that everybody who left his office left convinced that he had been promised something specific, when he had been promised nothing at all. As ER contemplated FDR’s Supreme Court proposal, she believed Howe would have prevented this boner, and she fully realized how far outside FDR’s decision-making process she now stood.
Despite her private qualms, ER publicly defended her husband. Charges that he had become a dictator to grant favors to “a minority” were ludicrous. She wrote that all opposition to FDR’s Court reform plan came from the very people who opposed the “social legislation of the present Administration, and the views of the people on this legislation were rather clearly expressed in November,” by a vast majority. The people of America had voted for FDR; he represented them and was obliged to protect their needs and interests.
Although she initially told FDR that as she traveled across the country, she heard opposition to his plan across the political spectrum, she was persuasive in her defense. June Rhodes wrote: “I am reading everything you write about the Supreme Court each day, and … it seems in my humble opinion that [the President] is doing the right thing at the right time.”
Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read remained bitterly opposed; Hick was in favor, but wavered; her circle was mostly opposed. ER’s correspondence emphasized the subject for months as it absorbed the nation’s business and dominated Congress.
In February, Hick spent several days at the White House to attend Democratic Party festivities and private events. On 15 February, “we all spent a very happy evening” celebrating Jim Farley. Hick enjoyed wearing her new black velvet gown, and for ER “the high point” occurred “when I suddenly saw my very dignified friend, Molly Dewson … turn and pin a rose on her chief, giving him a kiss at the same time.”
ER made much of Molly Dewson’s ceremonial kiss, and explained to the Democratic women of New York that tall, muscular Molly, Polly Porter’s longtime partner, rarely if ever kissed men, and so this occasion “was not as spontaneous as it seemed for she is not accustomed to embracing gentlemen and I think she must have had some coaching—but it was profitable coaching for it went off very well.”
That week ER had an “air our minds” luncheon with Elisabeth Lindsay and Isabella Greenway—who had decided not to run again for Congress, evidently because of her differences with FDR, and had moved to New York. Far less pleasant was tea with Alice Roosevelt Longworth. ER wrote her daughter that Alice had arrived “at her request, and she can’t see why any of us should mind anything she has said.”
Although Cousin Alice had been vicious during the campaign, and her “mollycoddle” column was unforgivable, ER nevertheless avoided a final break. Besides, she had for the moment won their lifelong competition. Alice’s daily column, printed in some papers beside “My Day,” was initially a spirited lark. ER wrote her old friend, now congresswoman, Nan Honeyman: “She certainly writes well. I wish I were as free as she, though I do not wish ever to be as bitter.”
But Alice’s columns were dull and soon canceled, and the final insult came when the Ladies’ Home Journal, which had been losing money, was taken over by Bruce and Beatrice Gould. To get the serial rights to ER’s memoir, they not only offered her $75,000, they offered Alice “a settlement of $2,000 to give up her column,” so that ER would consider their bid more kindly.
On 16 February ER and Elinor Morgenthau drove off “in a young blizzard,” heading north to Cornell, and Tommy wrote Anna that “your father was really upset. He told the usher that no matter what he was doing to bring him word from her at once that she had arrived safely somewhere for the night. He told your mother she was a little mad and she said she was glad—she got more fun out of life that way!”
At home, White House tensions bristled over the Supreme Court. ER wrote Hick: “FDR is tired and edgy and they are all working on a speech.”
Elizabeth Read had a stroke that affected her memory and her ability to write and “to find the right words.” ER rushed to be with Esther Lape: “Elizabeth is ill and must be absolutely quiet…. I rather hate leaving Esther she looks so worried. Theirs is a companionship of long standing with Elizabeth the more unselfish & understanding in the past.”
ER’s friends were in agony over FDR’s Court scheme and also devastated that FDR had rejected the American Foundation’s new health care plan, due out in April. Lape’s committee of distinguished physicians, led by Dr. Hugh Cabot of the Mayo Clinic, concluded that America’s health was unsatisfactory and in some regions entirely neglected. Their report provided brilliant testimony with incontrovertible evidence and made a splendid case. But FDR decided to postpone all consideration of the health security issue.
FDR wanted to fight only one big battle at a time, and he was absorbed by the Court fight. On 4 March he addressed a Democratic victory celebration dinner at the Mayflower. Ickes considered it “by all odds, the greatest [speech] he has ever made…. It was a fighting speech,” with one clear point: There could not be “social justice and economic freedom” so long as the Supreme Court, “one of the three horses pulling the national plow,” went off on its own and opposite direction.
We have only just begun to fight….
Here are thousands upon thousands of men and women working for long hours in factories for inadequate pay—NOW!
Here are strikes more far-reaching than we have ever known, costing millions of dollars—NOW!
Here are spring floods threatening to roll again down our river valleys—NOW!
Here is the Dust Bowl beginning to blow again—NOW!
If we would keep faith with those who had faith in us, if we would make democracy succeed, I say we must act—NOW!”
Hick rhapsodized over FDR’s speech: “God, it and he were magnificent! There MAY have been more powerful speeches than that, but I’ve never heard them or read them. And I had a year of Cicero when I was a kid.”
In March, ER went south for her lecture tour. She sent Hick birthday greetings from New Orleans, “something small,” and ordered “beautiful nightgowns,” which she hoped had arrived. “You have my love every day dear … and may every year be happier than the last.”
Tommy wrote Anna that New Orleans was fabulous, and ER liked it about as much as Santa Fe. All of ER’s lectures went well, “your mother is quite professional.” Tommy echoed ER’s observations about Huey Long: Although Long “was a pain in the neck,” he was not basically “very different in his interest in ‘the people’ than is your father.” He introduced a gasoline tax “which pays for nearly everything which benefits the ordinary people—roads, schools, school books…. When you think of states like West Virginia which have been wrung dry … you realize how foresighted he was.” But ER remained aloof from Huey Long’s legacy, and whenever his name was mentioned “with much compliment, neither your mother nor I moved a muscle!”