O March, FDR broadcast a Fireside Chat to defend his Court scheme: Economic recovery and all future legislative progress depended on Congress’s ability to protect America from catastrophe, but the Supreme Court denied Congress’s right to legislate and thwarted “the will of the people.” We “must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself…. [We] want a government of laws and not of men.”
FDR did not seek a bench of “spineless puppets.” He wanted justices who would not override legislation demanded by the needs of the people. We “cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present….”
ER heard his address in Fort Worth, with Elliott, Ruth, and Tommy. She cabled their congratulations: It was a “grand talk.” ER now fully supported FDR’s plan. She could understand people’s fears, but they minimized “the difficulties and obstacles” he faced.
While ER was in Oklahoma the first installment of her memoir appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was a heady, exciting time. She was mobbed everywhere, and in some towns she was scheduled to do several lectures in a day, in addition to meetings, luncheons, teas, and dinners. Tommy blamed Colston Leigh’s agency for being inconsiderate, and creating an itinerary without even a glance at a map. She wrote Anna from Oklahoma City: “We started off on this trek in a fairly peaceful frame of mind,” but it had been altogether too hectic.
In Huntsville, Texas, Anna Pennybacker introduced ER for “exactly 29 minutes.” Exhausted by her rhetorical bouquet, Tommy thought ER “should have lain down and let it serve as an obituary.”
In Perry, Texas, ER “was actually mobbed by an enthusiastic crowd.” Then they were driven a hundred miles to Alva, Oklahoma, where they were put up in a “dinky little place,” with wretched food, and given a bill for $30—about $300 in today’s dollars. ER felt “in her ‘position’ she could not squawk, but I wanted to.” Their last trek was by car through “miles of mud from Alva to Oklahoma City.” Tommy vowed to go after Leigh’s scalp. In the future, they would study a map, and insist on one lecture per day, without trappings, lunches, dinners, tours, meetings. “We could have done the whole thing in two weeks instead of three.”
ER made no such complaints. But she was insulted by one encounter, and wrote Hick:
Yesterday was the worst day I’ve had! The lady president of the college [Kate Zaners, State Teachers College, Durant, Oklahoma] told me that the people cared much more about seeing me and touching me than hearing me speak and if anything were canceled the speech would matter least! A point of view not calculated to make one do one’s best but after both speeches I received between 2 and 3,000 people….
In the Deep South, where ER was both hated and loved, the KKK had made death threats and she was surrounded by security:
We’ve had some funny times as in Shreveport [Louisiana] where the police had me so on their minds that the five hours we were in the hotel they sat in our sitting room with us and so became our bosom friends!
In Birmingham, Alabama, ER was overwhelmed to be officially and enthusiastically welcomed: “My reception was horrible … and we went through the streets like FDR crawling behind a band and high school cadet corps and the flags.” There was a heat wave, and ER was mobbed by thousands of people everywhere she went, including Negro and white PWA housing projects, and everywhere she spoke, including colleges, universities, and large public forums. There were casual events, formal events, and gatherings: “They love FDR but I’m a little weary playing prexy!” At no time did ER imagine the outpouring of affection and regard was for her. Tommy, on the other hand, wrote Anna: “There may be something in this rumour of running your mother in 1940!”
While ER toured, FDR was at Warm Springs with a party that included James’s wife, Betsey, and William Bullitt. ER wrote her husband:
I am glad to see that you got off and are now enjoying Warm Springs…. Newspapers in Oklahoma seem to be for you dear and in spite of [critical editorials] and Senators’ speeches I think the people of such parts of Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma as I have seen are with you on the Supreme Court.
There was mostly amusing publicity about ER’s toting a loaded pistol. She assured FDR that she carried it only when alone in her car. “I never carry it around at other times.” Her schedule was “strenuous but one week is over and we are still intact and going strong. My love to Bets and Missy and I hope you all have a grand rest and much fun.”
On 17 March, their wedding anniversary, ER reported that “a cunning little boy and girl appeared on the stage after my lecture,” dressed as bride and groom. “They marched over and presented me with a bouquet of flowers, followed by someone bearing a wedding cake. It was a most amusing little ceremony and the children were very solemn about it.”
ER returned to Washington on Good Friday, 26 March, “twenty-four hours ahead of the President.” She needed the day to “pick up the threads and start the house at high speed again.” On Easter Monday a record fifty-three thousand children enjoyed the White House annual egg-rolling festivities.
Home for less than two weeks, with spring in the air, ER’s “Wanderlust” sent her with Hick on a ten-day trip to the Smoky Mountains. Enspirited by nature’s bounty and gratified by the New Deal’s efforts to preserve it, ER wrote about her holiday for the Democratic Digest: “I drove my own car with a friend,” and saw “cedar trees about a thousand years old!” The ride was glorious, and in Gatlinberg, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountain Park, the “Federal Government is preserving some virgin timber which is well worth seeing,” as were the wonderful works achieved at various CCC camps.
ER wrote her daughter from Charleston, South Carolina:
Darling, This trip has been really beautiful and I think Hick has enjoyed it except for a few rangers in the park! I hadn’t planned on any hikes because I knew she was working in an office all winter but we did walk 4 miles to see some wonderful trees and she bore up nobly. The Great Smokies are lovely and would be wonderful for a week of climbing afoot or on horseback if ever I can find anyone who likes it!
ER wanted to return in June “when all the rhododendrons and azaleas and mountain laurel are out….”
ER’s need to find somebody she could hike and ride with, someone actually to enjoy the kind of vacations she craved, became a significant factor in the distance that grew between her and Hick. While they each wrote their time together was pleasant, Tommy wrote Anna:
Your mother started off last Saturday with Hick on a week’s motor drive. Each one separately told me she had no desire to go so I am wondering what kind of a time they are having. Naturally, I kept my own counsel and did not relay the messages….
It seemed to ER rather a lonely spring. Her children were scattered, and Anna was unavailable for months. Isabella Greenway was in New York, and her Val-Kill companions were upset and upsetting.
Earlier in the year, Marion Dickerman had attempted to buy a school building without clear title. Tommy wrote Anna that “Dickie is having fits about the school,” which was a business, and the building she wanted was in a residential zone.
Her lawyer knew it but thought they could get away with it. When your mother turned her interests over to Harry Hooker, he discovered it at once and wouldn’t let them ignore it because… if any suit was brought your mother’s name would be the only one mentioned.
Dickie was furious, and the core of trust along the Val-Kill continued to erode.
ER was also in a cold rage about daughter-in-law Betsey. According to Tommy, “Betsey and Missy are still very thick and Missy spends most of her time with Betsey and Jimmy as far as I can see. Betsey’s devotion to your father is something!”
With her household imbalanced by a daughter-in-law who usurped her place and increasingly took charge of details ER actually enjoyed presiding over, including seating arrangements and floral decorations, even when she was in residence, ER more frequently absented herself. She agreed to a series of radio programs, which Tommy thought would be easier than “lecturing and one night stands.” But ER only added the radio programs to her lecture schedule.
ER herself added to household tensions when she wrote a column poking fun at FDR’s mounting annoyance over bland White House food. FDR was unusually ruffled by his wife’s words. ER wrote Anna:
Pa is both nervous and tired. The court hue and cry has got under his skin. I thought stupidly his little outburst of boredom on meals was amusing and human and used it in my column and it was taken up by papers and radio and over the ticker and Steve [Early] and Jimmy got hate letters and were much upset and Pa was furious with me.
James came and reproved me and said I must distinguish between things which were personal and should not be said or none of them would dare to talk to me and he thought I should apologize to Father. I did before McDuffie Monday night before leaving as I couldn’t see him alone and Pa answered irritably that it had been very hard on him and he would certainly say nothing more to me on any subject! So it has become a very serious subject and I am grieved at my poor judgment and only hope it won’t be remembered long. Will I be glad when we leave the WH and I can be on my own!
ER rarely allowed her anger to seep out so publicly. But her “misjudgment” reflected her rising bitterness over Betsey’s interference, and White House arrangements out of her control. FDR’s ability to hurt ER with his attentions to women, even his flirtatious daughter-in-law, was surely in proportion to her ongoing love for him. Unable to forgive him, unable to have fun with him, she resented those who did. She felt aggrieved, but was unable to change her emotional patterns—except by more work, and longer trips away.
Before she left again for a Western tour, ER was steeped in controversy. After the second installment of her memoirs was published, she received a letter from a troubled reader, Esther S. Carey of Chicago: “My dear Mrs. Roosevelt: When it was announced… that you were going to write the story of your life, I was elated…. I couldn’t wait to read the life story of the woman who seemed to be the paragon of American womanhood.”
When it arrived, “I stopped work and literally devoured the First Installment.” But then came the second installment:
Alas as I was reading I came across two mentions of “darky.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Surely no one of the Roosevelt blood could be guilty of using this hated term, and we do hate it, as much as the Jew hates “sheeny” and the Italian “dago” or “wop.”
I am a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and we looked upon your Uncle Theodore with reverence and thought that the blood of a Roosevelt could not hurt and humiliate Negroes who live and struggle under such dreadful handicaps.
I am not given to writing letters of protest [and] this is the first I have ever written; but when the First Lady of the Land dubs us “darkies” it hurts—and I feel as Caesar felt when he had been stabbed by Brutus—I also ask “et tu Brute?”
ER replied: “My dear Mrs. Carey: ‘Darky’ was used by my great aunt as a term of affection and I have always considered it in that light. I am sorry if it hurt you. What do you prefer?”
The next week ER received a similar letter from a New York attorney, R. B. DeFrantz. Now DeFrantz noted that as one of her “millions of admirers” he was certain “it has never occurred to you that the word ‘darky’… is offensive to many of your readers, and by many it is thought to do harm to the Negro as a race.”
His letter pierced her defenses:
I am terribly sorry if the use of the word “darky” offends and I will change it when my autobiography is published in book form….
ER never used the term again, and forevermore excised words and stereotypes that lingered from her family traditions. She confronted the remnants of “race pride” in her own politics and within her own circle. She struggled against them privately and publicly. During a lecture at Barnard College, ER urged her audience of fifteen hundred women to consider their role in the future of democracy:
Unless we can divest ourselves of that self-righteous feeling of superiority we are going to find it hard to understand how other people feel about their people, their history, their heroes and achievements.
ER considered it essential to know the truth “about our people and other peoples the world over.” She received many letters from people affirming that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower. “How all the people who came to this country in the Mayflower were contained in the Mayflower I don’t know.” But she did know that it was that “sense of superiority because you think you are a little more native than somebody else [that] we have got to get over.” After all, “every race and every nation has that feeling.”
By 1938, ER had moved beyond insult and condescension and directly opposed white supremacy. She received a letter of regret from a white woman who was irate that Negro children were invited to Hyde Park events and had eaten with the family:
The influence you are having on the Negroes may do great harm to this nation. You are making them feel they are equal to the white race…. You may not believe in amalgamation of the races, but they do not know that….
ER replied:
Eating with someone does not mean you believe in intermarriage. My grandmother was from Georgia and I was brought up in Southern traditions, but I have known colored people who are not only the equal of whites, but mentally superior….
In April 1937, while ER was in Charleston, the Wagner antilynch bill was debated in Congress. In 1936, ER had urged her husband to take “even one step” toward recognition of this bill. When it failed, Walter White called the president’s silence the bill’s “greatest single handicap.” Now, with FDR’s monumental victory, White dared again to be optimistic.
After Costigan retired from Congress, Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana joined Wagner as cosponsor in the Senate, and Joseph Gavagan of New York City introduced a companion bill in the House. In April 1937, Walter White lobbied ER to support the Gavagan-Wagner-Van Nuys bill. He asked to meet with her during the House debate.
ER intended to support the bill, but was away for the entire week of the critical House debate, which featured important speeches by Caroline O’Day and Hamilton Fish—FDR’s longtime enemy, the leading anti-New Dealer of Dutchess County.
More than a Republican effort to win back the black vote lost in 1936, Hamilton Fish’s speech reflected a breach in conservative ranks in support of racial justice and labor’s right to strike. He had commanded black troops during the war in Europe, and he declared:
I would be derelict to those colored soldiers… who paid the supreme sacrifice on the battlefields… fighting to make the world safe for democracy…. The time has come to put an end to mob violence and the hideous plague of lynching….
Five thousand Americans have been lynched in the last 50 years in this great free country of ours, that is supposed to be the most civilized in the world. The rest of the world laughs at us every time we say we stand for justice and law and order. They bring up that stigma of lynching law and throw it back in our face….
With fascist violence on the rise, Fish opposed his Republican colleague who asked: “If we cannot legislate on the greatest mob crime of the age, sit-down strikes, how in the world can we constitutionally legislate on this?” Fish replied: Sit-down strikes “involved the invasion of private property,” not “the destruction of human lives…. I believe in placing human rights above property rights.”
ER regretted that her husband lost a chance to challenge his longtime enemy on this important subject, and she particularly hailed Caroline O’Day’s courageous political speech, given as a woman born and brought up in Georgia. Like ER, who in 1934 connected international and domestic race violence, O’Day declared that with Japan’s atrocities in China and Hitler’s repeated boast that he treated Jews in Germany better than Negroes were treated in the United States, worldwide floodlights were cast upon American lynchings.
O’Day had returned from a world tour, and everywhere she went she met people who believed that America was defined by a culture of bloodlust, sadism, and race hate. In her travels, she defended her country’s honor and declared that only isolated incidents occurred, but she now addressed Congress with passionate urgency:
This free country of ours, where our liberties are supposedly so fully guaranteed under the laws, is the only country in the world which tolerates lynching….
Enlightened Americans… are revolted at the thought of mob violence [and]… are now supporting the anti-lynching bill….
In a recent poll, “7 out of 10, or 70 percent, of our citizens were in favor of a Federal anti-lynching bill; and to the honor of the South… a full 65 percent” favored it.
Unless it became law, O’Day declared, we stand before the world condemned as an outlaw nation. In India, for example, “I saw in many places for sale a book called Uncle Sham. This book held up our country as calling itself civilized, and then throughout the pages of the book was pointed out every dreadful thing that ever happened…. The chapter on lynching was particularly horrible.” Not admitted into the United States, the book might be dismissed as communist propaganda; but it was written “by a Hindu… translated into 86 Hindu dialects and is one of the best sellers in India.” It was also translated into Japanese, and she had similar experiences in China, Siam, and “in a far-away jungle in French Indochina….” Even in South Africa, where race problems are “very much more acute… everywhere I went people… brought up this subject of lynching; and I assure you it is impossible to make people in other parts of the world believe that all of us here are not in favor of it….”
Caroline O’Day was proud to be among many Southerners who wanted an end to the rule of states’ rights, race discrimination, and lynching. The people of the world “cannot understand our philosophy of States’ rights, for they look upon us as a unified nation under one federal government.”
During the debate, a particularly grisly lynching witnessed by a mob of hundreds occurred in Mississippi. Two men were abducted as they were taken from the courtroom to jail in Winona; they were tortured with gasoline blowtorches and then burned on a pyre. Emmanuel Celler brought the outrage to the floor, noting a bitter irony: Governor Hugh White was giving an address in Jackson, proud that Mississippi “had not had a lynching in 15 months,” when he was informed of the cruel facts. It was the third lynching of 1937. There had been eighty-three lynchings since 1933.
Another Southerner rose to support O’Day, and in a resounding speech, John Marshall Robison of Kentucky, who had supported the Dyer antilynch bill in 1922, challenged FDR personally. A Republican, he pointed out that Southern and border Democrats would block this bill unless FDR put it on his “must” list. “The Democrats have more than 3-to-l majority in the House; and nearly 6-to-1 majority in the Senate;” 95 percent of Republicans supported the bill; Democrats opposed it. Robison argued that the bill could have been passed in the 73rd and 74th Congresses if FDR had spoken. There were sufficient “northern, western, and eastern Democrats… with the help of the Republicans… to put this… through, and even pass it over the president’s veto. If it is not put through we know the administration is… deceiving the colored people of this country….”
On 14 April 1937, the House passed the Gavagan-Wagner-Van Nuys bill, 277-120. ER promised Walter White every help in moving it through the Senate. As before, she personally appealed to FDR—who argued that his political capital was wrapped up in the Supreme Court fight. He refused to see White or Joel Spingarn and had no advice to offer the NAACR With a heavy heart, ER wrote White:
The President says that he is not familiar enough with the proper procedure to give you really good advice. I think you had better trust to the people in charge of the bill….
For months, ER appealed again and again to her husband for one public word. The legislation stalled in the Senate, and when it was brought up after the summer, it was confronted by a six-week filibuster. The South brought Congress to a standstill. Everything pending seemed doomed. Senator Wagner worried about his housing bill and his new wages and hours bill. Nothing would happen, ER and her allies believed, unless FDR spoke out. FDR disagreed with his wife’s assessment of the defiant South and refused to risk the future of his other issues on lynching. Finally, in October 1937, Senator Wagner withdrew the Wagner-Gavagan-Van Nuys bill.*
Besides the Court, FDR’s only legislative initiative during the dreary political months of the 75th Congress was to extend the Neutrality Act of 1935, which had been due to expire on 1 May 1937. The new law gave the administration more discretionary authority and allowed trade on a cash-and-carry basis. It extended embargoes to civil war situations, previously uncovered, which specifically legitimated FDR’s embargo on Spain.
FDR left for a cruise on 27 April, to fish in the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks. He signed the Neutrality Act of 1937 aboard ship at 6:30 A.M. on 1 May. But it satisfied nobody, least of all his wife. ER considered it a hateful piece of legislation that made no distinction between aggressor and victim nations, and actually favored well-armed aggressors ready to attack. It also favored maritime nations, notably England, France, and Japan. In cash-poor Germany, the press condemned the cash-and-carry feature as “an Anglo-American alliance.” Nevertheless, U.S. copper and steel companies continued to give Germany loans, since there was no embargo against Germany.
It appeased businessmen who resented limitations on export trade and ignored pacifist groups who wanted a full embargo of raw materials, especially those needed in war: petroleum, steel, copper, magnesium, phosphates, cotton. The new act placed an embargo on arms, ammunition, and travel, but specifically excluded raw materials.
ER was not alone in her bitter dismay over the embargo against Spain. It was a compromise neutrality that limited risks and preserved profits. It was a cold war neutrality that acknowledged Hitler and Mussolini as acceptable barriers to anarchists, communists, radical democrats.
Howls of protest from both isolationists and internationalists emerged. World Court supporters, notably Henry Stimson (Hoover’s secretary of state), deplored the abandonment of America’s “self-respecting traditions, in order to avoid the hostility of reckless violators of international law.”
Allen Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong condemned the embargo as a reversal of America’s traditional position on freedom of the seas and all Wilsonian principles and said it would serve as a terrible “instrument in the hands of the German and Italian totalitarian governments.” Isolationist senator Gerald P. Nye agreed and condemned it as a terrible injustice.
Liberals then called for the embargo to cover Germany and Italy, since they were the aggressor parties to the “Civil War.” But FDR refused to distinguish between aggressor and victim nations: That would not be “neutral.”*
For ER, the Spanish Civil War was the moral equator. Furious over her husband’s policy, which enabled trade to soar with Germany and Italy, trade which was then used to devastate Spain, she wrote of it regularly in her May columns.
On 26 April 1937, Guernica, a town of seven thousand people in the Basque province of Vizcaya, close to the sea and thirty kilometers from Bilbao, was the first open city to be bombed from the air, without warning or pity. On Monday, market day in Guernica, at 4:40 P.M., the central square, filled with farmers, florists, craftsfolk, and shoppers, was razed by Nazi Heinkel 111s. As the people ran for shelter and safety they were machine-gunned by diving planes. Incendiary bombs and high explosives were dropped every twenty minutes for four hours. The raid killed 1,654 and wounded 889.
Guernica was a Roman Catholic citadel, and Basque priests under the vicar-general of Bilbao, center of Basque nationalism, had voted to remain loyal to the democratic Spanish Republic, in defiance of the Catholic hierarchy. This bombardment was their punishment. It heralded the century’s new wartime strategy of carpet bombing against civilian populations. Guernica also heralded a new psychological warfare technique of cover-up and denial. News of Guernica did not become public until 7 May 1937, when Britain’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, announced that Britain “had evidence Guernica was destroyed by airplanes” and called for a neutral inquiry. That same day, The New York Times headlined that five thousand women and children had been taken from Bilbao to France for safety, guarded by British warships, and many other refugees were preparing to leave.
Franco claimed the Basques had destroyed their own town, and Germany denied all involvement.*
ER was haunted by Guernica: Every time she saw a newspaper photograph or read a new story about Spain, she was overcome with a “sense of horror.” She called for relief measures, hoped that people would contribute to the English Quakers who rushed to aid the suffering children of Spain, and wondered “why people go on stupidly destroying” civilization.
One day, on a train up the Hudson, she could not work, could not knit, could do nothing but contemplate Spain. As she gazed at the rolling river she loved so well, she wondered: “If this were Spain would I be sitting so calmly and with such security…?” Today, there were “no shells dropping on our cities and villages; no children in great number are being separated from their parents….”
She hoped America’s commitment to democracy would survive:
If reforms do not come peacefully, they have to come through violent upheavals. As I looked out from the window of the train, I thought, “Thank God, this nation has had the courage to face the need of change before we reached the point where bloodshed was the only way to achieve a change….
Spain and refugee issues would dominate the rest of ER’s political life.
The day FDR left for his fishing vacation, ER left for a West Coast speaking tour that began in Seattle for a week with Anna and her grandchildren. Tommy wrote Anna that ER was “like a child starting out on her first outing….”
On 5 May, ER and Anna launched her new broadcast series sponsored by Ponds Vanishing Cream. They discussed the education of a daughter for the twentieth century.
Anna asked her mother to explain her educational philosophy for her only daughter. ER replied she wanted to end the restrictions she had grown up with, the notion that all women were to be “wives, mothers and adornments to society,” and wanted to encourage “any aptitudes you showed.”
Always disturbed by Anna’s disinterest in school, which had represented her own liberation, ER asked her daughter to describe the “useful” aspects of her education. Anna replied: “It was the development of my bump of curiosity,” encouraged by being with “you and father,” which made up for her attitude in school. She revealed to her mother that she also “hated to play the piano,” and hid “in the kitchen closet” when her music teacher arrived. Surprised, ER asked why Anna insisted that her daughter play the piano: “You’d better explain that a little….”
They both agreed that access to books and uncensored reading were the best part of education. As a child, ER had run off into the woods of Tivoli with forbidden books, and she now believed in the absolute freedom to read and to know. She was certain that reading adult books never hurt children: If a child happened on an unsuitable book for her age, she probably “would not understand it, but it would do no harm.”
Both ER and Anna discussed their emotional fears as girls, and ER acknowledged that she had battled “an inferiority complex” for years. Anna did as well, and blamed her mother: “I think that was your fault…. I never felt I could be as capable and interesting as you and father were….”
ER: “If only our companionship could have developed as freely when you were little as it did later on, I would have probably understood a great deal more. You are doing a better job….”
Anna: “That’s nice of you, Mother. But how do I know how she’ll feel about it when she grows up?”
ER: “Perhaps she’ll feel as we do now. I don’t think of you only as a daughter, but as my best friend.”
ER asked Anna what she most wanted for her daughter, and Anna replied that she wanted freedom “from any sense of superiority or inferiority to any group of people, and… a sense of values that will help her to be tolerant, useful, and happy.”
ER noted: “That’s the 20th Century answer and I like it, and I think the girl will be well educated to live in our world. I think if my grandmother had been asked what she wanted for her daughter she might have answered simply: ‘a good husband!’”
While ER was in Seattle, she worked on the revisions for her last installments of her memoir for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her publishers were displeased; they wanted ER to deal with the real issues of her early married days and FDR’s polio. Hick suspected that “by this time you have come to the period where you can no longer be wholly truthful. And it shows in the story. That’s the trouble with autobiographies. Probably they should always be done anonymously.”
ER sought, above all, to protect everybody she loved. Her manuscript was read by FDR, Tommy, Earl, Hick, and Anna, among others. Blue lines abounded, and some of them were surprising. FDR deleted a passage in which ER quoted Isabella Greenway’s mother about Hall’s first divorce: “If you love a person, you can forgive the big things. Infidelity under certain circumstances need not ruin a relationship.”
Although convinced of the wisdom of that insight, ER agreed to take it out. But as she wrote, and rewrote, the days of her life during the tense spring of 1937, that observation concerning Franklin had a special meaning. Never had their political disagreements been so profound. Never had she had so much access to public forums. Her lectures were sold out; her broadcast series was hugely popular; her book was an immediate best-seller. But she could not persuade her husband to consider her views, reconsider his path. With little influence at home, she stayed far away. While FDR concentrated on the Supreme Court fight, all legislative initiatives were forestalled, and ER felt the 1936 electoral mandate was wasted.
The New York Times called ER “the most traveled First Lady in history.” Away from the White House 60 percent of the time since 1933, she pointed out that she was there most of the time FDR was in residence.
ER’s travels cheered her, and the success of her book encouraged her to do even more. Tommy wrote Anna that the “circulation of the Ladies’ Home Journal has gone over three million per month, so they should be satisfied. George Bye says he will die regretting that he didn’t hold out for twice what he got.”*
Awash in controversy over the antilynch law and Spain, both celebrated and mocked by the partisan press, ER was happy to spend a quiet moment of affectionate domesticity with Earl. She had been intimately involved in all aspects of Earl’s life, and her relationship with him was now a comforting blend of mother-and-son generosity, lady-and-squire protectiveness. On 8 May, ER wrote Hick from Earl’s, who “has more things to do here than anyone I ever knew. I made curtains all morning but this afternoon we played ping pong and tonight we have to write scenes for the party tomorrow.”
ER had fun at Earl’s, was carefree and at ease with his show-business friends—and some, like Tiny, increasingly became her companions of choice.
FDR returned from his cruise in mid-May rested and restored. ER noted that “Franklin seems confident about everything!” Almost immediately after his return, ER flew to New York for “an orgy of theatre going.”
ER loved the theater and attended openings whenever possible, usually escorted by Earl. Producer John Golden never refused ER’s request for tickets for her theater parties, and he frequently presented lavish gifts to ER personally and to the White House, including a most extraordinary gold-leafed piano.
Nevertheless, ER chided her friend’s male bias in a column:
I noticed a little item in the paper the other day, and much as I like Mr. John Golden, I am going to differ with him. He says: “A writer of great plays must have lived, gone through most of the valleys, and over most of the hills of experience. Men can do that but women cannot…. There will never be any really great women writers in the theater, because women do not know as much as men.”
ER dismissed that as “ludicrous.” She considered it “funny” to think there would never be great women writers for the theater. They lacked only opportunity: “Because as a rule women know not only what men know, but much that men will never know. For how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?”
Evidently stung by ER’s column, Golden produced Susan and God, by playwright Rachel Crothers. Directed by Crothers and starring Gertrude Lawrence, it opened at New York’s Plymouth Theatre on 7 October, and Golden invited ER to attend. She wrote:
Many thanks for the flowers. Your note afforded me a great deal of amusement and you are magnanimous in producing a play by a woman which she “wrote alone.” Susan and God certainly gives one an interesting evening. I felt a little let down by the last curtain but enjoyed all the rest more than I can say.*
ER and Golden also disagreed about WPA theater productions. He feared that Hallie Flanagan’s productions did “not conform to professional standards” and might actually “harm” the theater. Although his opposition differed from the usual anticommunist bias that assailed WPA theater, ER vehemently disagreed. She considered WPA theater progressive and imaginative, the cutting edge of American culture. Because it dramatized labor issues, strikes, lynching, and other current events, an avalanche of opposition to its allegedly un-American procommunist sympathies resulted. The more controversial the Federal Theatre became, the more ER supported it. She called it excellent, and celebrated especially the theater’s democratic outreach.
New and appreciative audiences were created throughout the country for both the classics and modern theater. Everybody thrilled to Orson Welles’s African-American production of Macbeth, which went from Harlem to a four-thousand-mile tour. A WPA survey in New York revealed that only one high school student out of thirty had ever seen live theater; in many communities throughout America nobody had. Flanagan’s stock companies, road companies, tent and truck shows, puppets, pageants, operas, revues, and theater in churches, schools, and community centers changed all that. By 1937, fifteen million Americans had attended a Federal Theatre production.
ER did a national broadcast to promote Flanagan’s free Caravan Theatre, which played in parks throughout the country in summer. In 1937 “a really thrilling sequence of… Shakespeare, Shaw and Sinclair Lewis,” beginning with a “beautifully staged and orchestrated” production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brought a new level of culture to the long deprived.*
Newspapers filled with protest against ER and her support for WPA theater. It staged dangerous, immoral propaganda. One New York Times correspondent in May 1937 protested that all art and theater projects were dominated by “zealous” communists, and concluded: “I loathe fascists, but I cannot see how [fascism] can be avoided…. It is the only antidote for communism.”
ER, however, was committed to freedom, experimentation, and Flanagan. When New York State passed the Dunnigan bill, which would give the New York license commissioner authority to close any “immoral” play, she urged Governor Herbert Lehman to veto it:
The surest way to remove really undesirable plays from the stage is for the public to refuse to see them. Censorship by law has always seemed to me too difficult and complicated where art of any kind is concerned.
ER criticized only one play during the spring of 1937. In her monthly column for Democratic Digest, she wrote:
I spent a few days in New York… going to the theatre. One of the plays was a very clever one called “The Women,” but I cannot say that I enjoyed it for not only were the women rather dreadful creatures but you felt that the men who tolerated them must have been even more dreadful. Sad to say, those who were supposed to be bright spots in the way of virtue were so dull that you could not be thrilled by them! The play was clever and [about to be made] into a movie so you will probably become very well acquainted with these “Women.”
Unable to be amused by Luce’s comedy about a woman who has just learned that her husband has a mistress, ER wrote an even more fierce review in her My Day column. She considered the situation “a real tragedy” trivialized by women she would never want to know:
“I do not know the author, but I am very happy indeed that I do not very often have to associate with the women she gave us on the stage, nor, for that matter, the men….
“They must have been such dull, stupid, little men to have cared at all at any time for such dull and cruel ‘cats.’”
ER also deplored “the mother and her advice,” as well as “the one woman who was supposed to be ‘good’ and was so stupid….”
To compound her mean words, ER failed to name Clare Boothe Luce in both columns. She paid for her reviews almost immediately. Time’s previously benign coverage of the First Lady ended. She wrote Esther Lape:
I didn’t see the article in Time to which you refer although I did see the one on my income tax evasion! You know the author of the play The Women is the wife of [Henry Luce] the owner and publisher of Time, so I am not surprised at anything he says about me. I was rather ruthless in what I said about the play.
Perhaps ER’s overserious assault against Luce’s catty comedy involved her resentment over Bernard Baruch’s enthusiasm for his former lover’s work. Struck by ER’s words, Baruch encouraged her to see it again. She did, but Clare Booth Luce’s characters annoyed her exceedingly: “I felt just as soiled by ‘The Women’ which I saw again last night as I did in the first instance. It is a beastly play and I hate to acknowledge its cleverness!”
Unlike ER, Hick rather enjoyed The Women: “Strange sort of play, isn’t it? Queer, bitter, at times smart-alecky. At times, of course, very funny. Remember the scene between the cook and the maid? Pretty nasty, on the whole, and I can’t say I really liked it much, although I found it very diverting….”
The last days of May were so crowded with social obligations and official people that ER complained. Hick empathized:
I should think you would get sick of people! I get sick of them for you! God, how I loathe all that stuff! Bill [Dana] was describing to Ellie yesterday my manners at the White House. He said: “Most of the time Hick looks like a royal Bengal tiger that has been mussed up a bit!” Don’t you love it? Well, cheer up, dear. It will be over pretty soon, and you can settle down at Hyde Park for the summer.
But, ER replied, there were “still some bad days ahead!” Among ER’s bad days were 29 May, when she noted without comment that she “received the German Ambassador’s wife.” The next day, fifteen hundred steelworkers and their families were attacked in Chicago during a Memorial Day march and rally. While U.S. Steel had negotiated with the CIO, Republic and other “little steel” companies refused. They greeted strikers with tear gas and tanks in Ohio and elsewhere. But Chicago was a labor town with a labor Democrat for mayor, and the marchers were in a festive mood, with women at the head of the march. Then, without provocation or warning, 264 police officers attacked the crowd, first with tear gas. As they fled, police opened fire and 30 men, women, and children were shot; 60 were “sadistically beaten,” and 10 died. The bloody violence was captured by Paramount newsreel journalists and given to the La Follette Committee.
That evening, ER drove Tommy, Harold Hooker and Roberta Jonay to Rock Creek Cemetery to contemplate Grief.
*The bill came up again in 1938, but never passed. Hitler editorialized, on 28 January 1938, in the Nazi press that the United States treated black people less humanely than Germany treated Jews.
*The United States “ranked first in value of exports to Germany in 1933, 1934, and 1938.” Between 1934 and 1938, sales of American motor fuel and lubricating oil tripled in quantity and constituted 22 to 32 percent of German imports of petroleum. The United States supplied Germany with 20 to 28 percent of its imported copper and copper alloys and 67 to 73 percent of its imported uranium, vanadium, and molybdenum. In 1937 and 1938, U. S. exports of iron and scrap steel rose to 50 percent of Germany’s imports. It was a curious neutrality.
* “In 1946, Goering admitted that Guernica was Germany’s testing ground. But not until April 1997 did Germany actually acknowledge “its guilt in the destruction” of Guernica. The raid, conducted by the German Condor Legion, was formally acknowledged in a ceremony to commemorate the victims. Germany’s ambassador to Spain, Henning Wegener, read “a message of mourning and reconciliation.” The German parliament rejected a motion to discuss the raid and include a formal statement of regret when Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition voted against debate.
*ER’s earnings were significant that spring; the Ladies’ Home Journal paid $75,000 for the serial rights, and her radio contract was for $3,000 per broadcast for a series of fifteen. In 1930s dollars that represented a major American fortune.
* Susan and God won the Theatre Club Award in 1938.
* Playwrights especially welcomed Flanagan’s vision. George Bernard Shaw donated all his plays for a token fee: “As long as you stick to your fifty-cent maximum admission… you can [stage] anything of mine you like.” Eugene O’Neill did the same, and Sinclair Lewis spurned a commercial production of It Can’t Happen Here to support the Federal Theatre. It opened to wild enthusiasm and controversy on 27 October 1936, in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states, and toured the country, appearing before millions of Americans for 260 weeks.