BY JULY 15, 1934, HOMESTEADERS had moved into forty-three of the first fifty homes at Arthurdale. Another 150 were out for contractors’ bids. The average unit cost of the first houses and outbuildings had come to $4,880—above the initial $2,000 estimate, but well below the $10,000 reported in the Saturday Evening Post.
The Hodgson prefab houses had turned up one problem after another. Poorly insulated and lightly built for icy Preston County winters, their ten- by forty-foot dimensions failed to line up with the cinder-block foundations the miners had already dug. Pre-set brick fireplaces missed the cottage walls by as much as eight feet.
Eleanor had been the troubleshooter since mid-November 1933, when she and Eric Gugler, a New York architect, arrived to correct the problems with the houses. Eleanor asked Nancy Cook to plan the household interiors and worked with Gugler to extend the walls to include the fireplaces, which of course drove up costs, as did each home’s separate well, electric pump, and septic system, not to mention a special grease trap, indoor plumbing, and the supplementary furnaces when the original woodburning fireplaces proved inadequate to the harsh winters. Few rural communities knew such conveniences, Eleanor was paying for some out of her own pocket, and the final cost for each house reached as much as $8,550.
Beyond the individual farms, more than 440 acres were worked collectively, plowed, planted, and harvested for Arthurdale’s produce co-op. Adding to the social and farming experiment, the progressive educator Elsie Ripley Clapp,1 an associate of John Dewey, was hired to plan the community’s school. Clapp believed it could serve a central role in restoring community life and promoting the ideal of self-realization as an expression of civic responsibility. But the students would have to wait for books, desks, and chairs, even for school buildings, none of which were ready when school opened that fall of 1934.2
Arthurdaleans, meanwhile, would not have any African American neighbors. Despite Eleanor’s arguments, West Virginia’s entrenched prejudice and Jim Crow laws, heightened by Depression violence, prevailed. Arthurdale, like Warm Springs, remained whites-only. Back in Washington, congressional Republicans wasted no time heaping contempt on the project as “Eleanor’s baby.”
Trouble came when Republican leaders in Congress examined the costs of subsistence homesteads. Reedsville was pronounced “a dismal failure.”3 The Morgantown Post added up what the government had spent in nine years. Exclusive of loans it came to $14,000 for each of the 165 homestead units of three acres each. Inclusive of $677,754 in government loans, each of the 165 homestead units came to $18,100. Time magazine tutted, “The average American farm is of 174 acres valued at $5,518, according to the 1940 census.”4
Critics had a field day. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a vocal member of the Republican minority, had championed the New Deal’s public works programs, welcoming the Civilian Conservation Corps’s reforestation teams—two and a half million men—to his state’s depleted timberland and abused farmlands. With Arthurdale, the Michigan senator attacked furniture building as a big-government threat to nearly seventy employers in his hometown, Grand Rapids, long touted as “The Furniture Capital of the World.”5 Vandenberg further framed Arthurdale’s cottage industries as a form of collectivism distinct from the New Deal. “Social responsibility and socialism are entirely different things,” sniffed the senator from “Furniture City.”6
Forced to account for unprecedented activities, Eleanor gave Congress an itemized account of $36,000 in radio earnings—almost half as much as the presidential salary of $75,000—donated to the Friends Service Committee between May 14 and December 31, 1934. One half year’s salary she had given to Elsie Clapp, teacher: $3,500 for incorporation of Reedsville Cooperative; $111 for handicraft; $6,000 for Logan County West Virginia; health work, $6,000; scholarships for girls at Kentucky and West Virginia educational camps, $500; general work of Friends Committee, $3,000. Total $19,111.60. The 60 cents was for tax on checks.7
SHE WAS FIFTY, THE YEAR that she would cycle into menopause.8 Grandmother Hall, Cousin Susie, and generations of Ludlow women had lived by the idea that as soon as they were no longer vessels for children, their feminine value diminished. A woman of Eleanor’s age and class was supposed to throw a veil of mystery over “the change of life” and resume homemaking and local charity work without a thought to exploring her own interests. “If she really cares about her home,” countered Eleanor, “that caring will take her far and wide.”9
Her birthday morning had produced October’s brightest blue weather, but she stayed indoors with an article she was readying for publication with Hick’s help. For the first time since they had fallen in love, Eleanor felt secure enough to expose her careless punctuation, slapdash facts, and ingrained tendency to do anything but take herself seriously. “I will try to do better work as long as it matters to you!” she assured Hick, admitting that on the one hand, “I care so little at times,” while on the other, “I realize if one does anything, one should do it as well as one can.”10
A similar ambivalence had found voice that week in Washington, when Minna Miller Edison, wife of the famous inventor, attended a conference on relief administration. In the course of making a plea to her fellow delegates to remember the needs of the elderly, Mrs. Edison had started women talking when she asserted that the wife of a great man could lead a more useful life “ministering to him and making life flow more smoothly for his work than if she had sought a career of her own.”11
Eleanor had stopped trying to do it all for Franklin fifteen years before. “Stamina,” explained one friend, “enabled her to continue to serve him, her household, and at the same time to lead a life of her own.”12 Now she exceeded her husband in popularity among women. Two voters in every three approved of the way Mrs. Roosevelt had “occupied the place of First Lady since her husband’s election.”13
She now took very quiet satisfaction from demonstrating to official Washington that she could do the impossible better than any of them. Starting on the first day of the New Year, she was responsible for hosting—with the President, of course—five official receptions each social season: the diplomatic (abstemious and weight-watching); judicial (light-drinking, nibbling); congressional (big business around the punch bowls); departmental (long, slow lines); and the army and navy (chowing down).14
Eleanor welcomed groups no one had ever imagined being received in the President’s house. She had conducted a surprise visit to see for herself conditions described as “barbaric” at the National Training School for Girls, a reform school north of Georgetown, where a huge brick building along Little Falls Road looked like a haunted house.
Inside, she found poorly lighted hallways, chilled and rat-infested rooms. The “students,” mostly African American, ages fourteen to eighteen, were kept like prisoners in spite of ample grounds and beautiful views. “Never have I seen an institution called a school which had so little claim to that name,” she said.15 Other first ladies had briefly visited, but Eleanor was the first to make the girls her guests.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of May 16, 1934, nearly fifty young women arrived at the White House. They wore silk print dresses, arranged by Eleanor with WPA funding; and each shook hands with the first lady, who led the girls on a tour, served lemonade, ice cream, and cake, then sent them on to Mount Vernon. The event was hailed in the black community’s newspapers as a powerful symbol of the progressive sentiments of the Roosevelt administration, while Time attacked the girls as thrice-convicted “diseased prostitutes,” opening the way for editorials to suggest that President Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally disturbed.16
Conservatives and Southerners, for whom all this was “unthinkable,” wanted the girls severely chastised, since “Mrs. Roosevelt’s appeal, as released through the press, made no mention of the need of converting these girls to a sense of shame and a resolve to mend their ways, so that they would need no institutional incarceration for venereal disease treatments. Rather, her entire appeal centered on the need for better material comforts and institutional advantages for the girls.”17
All too briefly, she did reform the reformatory. With Eleanor’s intervention, cottages were built, gas replaced coal stoves, the girl’s private rooms were heated and given electric lights, bars were removed from windows. Classrooms were set up for housekeeping, business, and “beauty culture” training.
When she next visited the school, “The change is so remarkable I would not have known it to be the same place.”18 Sadly, the improvements instigated by ER had cost $100,000 and became a pretext to slash spending. Conditions would deteriorate and the school would ultimately succumb to a combination of congressional interference, mismanagement, and complaints from neighbors.
LOUIS HOWE HAD JUST BEGUN planning FDR’s 1936 re-election campaign, when he fell ill that spring of 1934. Unable to resign from his official job as the president’s secretary or his unofficial role as adorer in chief, “Colonel” Howe became the latest sideshow ghost of the Lincoln Bedroom19— “the least seen and least understood secretary to the President that Washington has ever known.”20
Louis’s pitiful helplessness about anything except power and politics drove Eleanor mad as she supervised his nursing. Franklin, true to form, stayed clear until she shifted Louis to the naval hospital in Bethesda,21 and then it was safe to have himself wheeled into the patient’s room, calling out a mock Act-One-Scene-One greeting: “Ludwig! You’ve just got to get back to the White House and get in the show!”22
Even more than the banishment of Lucy Mercer, or Missy’s ascension to the position of unofficially accredited junior wife, Louis’s long fade made it painfully clear that Eleanor would not be called in to fill the breach. By September 1934, she was striking out again on her own—serving as stump speaker and finance chairman on behalf of the congressional candidacy of her longtime friend and Val-Kill partner, the veteran social welfare leader Caroline O’Day.
O’Day, sixty-five, never before in elective politics, had a geographically and demographically challenging race for New York’s representative-at-large. Before leaving the White House and boarding the Midnight, Eleanor called a press conference to make clear that she was leaving her official duties as first lady completely behind. As “plain Anna Eleanor Roosevelt,” she then delivered five out-and-out political speeches in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Manhattan23 to carry her appeal for O’Day the length of the state she had mastered for Franklin.24
Nothing she had done in her first tradition-shattering term had so angered Republican women. “She can no more cease being First Lady than she can cease breathing,” declared one GOP matron, who quickly begged reporters for anonymity.25 Insisting that it was “obviously impossible”26 for Mrs. Roosevelt to break the rules this way, they flooded the press with the kind of venom that allowed the wise and knowing of Washington to predict that his wife’s work would ruin the President. With so much covering fire, O’Day’s Republican opponent in the three-woman race, Natalie Couch, a New York lawyer, could shade the first lady’s move “questionable,”27 but the strength of Roosevelt support statewide helped O’Day win the election as a strong pacifist and champion of immigration reform.
ELEANOR ALWAYS WANTED THINGS TO happen faster.
As FDR went on skirting anti-lynching legislation, and the Democratic Party ducked any issue that confronted African American disenfranchisement, segregation, or economic inequality, it became Eleanor’s duty to respond to questions of discrimination in New Deal relief programs.
Eleanor had not recognized the depth of institutional racism in the New Deal until, in 1934, she urged the Subsistence Homesteads Division to admit African Americans to Arthurdale. Her intervention failed, as had her every appeal to FDR to take charge of the country’s terror crisis and champion anti-lynching legislation. Joining the DC chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she had made common cause with the national executive secretary, Walter White, the one determined crusader for racial justice in New Deal Washington. She now invited White, Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service, and the presidents of six African American universities to the White House to discuss the Arthurdale situation.28
At eight in the evening on Friday, January 26, 1934, Eleanor opened the problem of race in the homesteads to the group. One of the educators, Robert Russa Moton, a Virginia-born son of former slaves and the president of the Tuskegee Institute, had been the keynote speaker at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, where he had been kept apart from the other speakers and made to sit alone. Five years later, Moton, a lifelong advocate of accommodation in race relations, made a deal with Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s secretary of commerce, then receiving highest praise for his handling of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which had unhoused more than half a million blacks. Tens of thousands suffered various forms of re-enslavement at gunpoint in Hoover’s tent cities. When Moton was chosen to head the Red Cross’s investigation of the atrocities in the refugee camps, Hoover promised Moton that he and his people would play a significant and historic role in a Hoover administration if Moton would conceal the scandal. Moton, good to his word, hushed up the horrific findings. Hoover took the traditional Republican black vote in 1928, but as soon as the Great Engineer had claimed his prize, he refused even to acknowledge Moton. Blacks turned on Hoover in 1932, and because Franklin had been the political beneficiary, Dr. Moton was now able to vent his frustration directly with the President, who came in from another meeting in the Oval Office and joined what had become a historic and unprecedented tutorial on racial discrimination.
The meeting broke up after midnight, having “set before all of us,” wrote Clarence Pickett, “a new standard for understanding and cooperation in the field of race.”29
The group had by no means solved the homestead issue, but FDR might have been pleased with Eleanor’s handling of it. After all, as Pickett recorded, “no one could have entered more fully into the nature of the problem or have expressed more intelligently a desire to find a way to help than did Mrs. Roosevelt.”30
The President had the independence of the Philippine Islands on his mind that week, as well as the carping of congressmen unsatisfied on matters of patronage, and a budget director refusing to allow FDR’s relief program more than $500 million for public works.31 FDR and his aides tolerated Eleanor’s intercessions, even when “my Missus” next pressured National Recovery administrator Donald Richberg to investigate the race-based wage differentials implemented by Southern industries and then asked navy secretary Claude Swanson why blacks were confined to mess hall assignments.32
Eleanor’s agenda accommodated segregation while championing equal opportunity. It was fine for the President’s wife to urge states to address the inequities in “separate but equal” public school funding—the farther from Washington and Dixie the better. FDR’s Virginia-born press secretary scarcely noticed the African American press extolling Eleanor’s sincerity and strength of character. By January 1934, she was receiving thousands of letters describing racial violence, poverty, and homelessness intensified by racial discrimination, all petitioning the President’s wife for assistance. Eleanor frequently forwarded the hardest cases to Harry Hopkins and his assistant Aubrey Williams, to whom she had already sent a list of suggestions of ways to include African Americans more fully within Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) programs.
Franklin was fine with that. White supremacists still dominated every committee of the House and Senate, but he was not concerned with them—some were good New Dealers, and he was candidly dependent on all of them as the firmest constituency of the Democratic Party.
Walter White had meanwhile been bombarding the President with telegrams, letters, and interview requests, all of which had been turned down. “I realize perfectly that he has an obsession on the lynching question,” wrote Eleanor to press secretary Stephen Early, “and I do not doubt that he had been a great nuisance… both now and in previous administrations. However, reading the papers in the last few weeks, does not give you the feeling that the filibuster on the lynching bill did any good to the situation and if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has.”33
She then tried to defend White’s recent protests, which had gotten him arrested in the Senate restaurant. “It is worse with Walter White because he is almost white,” she explained to Early, a white Southerner who had helped stall lynching legislation for fear of losing the Dixiecrat wing of Roosevelt’s congressional coalition. “If you ever talked to him, and knew him, I think you would feel as I do. He really is a very fine person with the sorrows of his people close to his heart.”34
The filibuster began on April 26. On May 7, Eleanor got FDR to agree to meet White to hear his side of the argument, in the hope that the President would intervene and break the filibuster. They met on the South Porch of the White House on a Sunday afternoon—White, Eleanor, the President’s mother—and, finally, Franklin, who returned late from sailing the Potomac, and so expended most of their time with boating yarns. When Eleanor finally got in a word about the filibuster, the first thing the President did, defensively, was to explain to White his own predicament, giving one reason after another why he couldn’t support the bill. When White countered with detailed arguments, FDR lost patience: “Somebody’s been priming you,” he growled. “Was it my wife?”
Franklin pouted. “Well,” he said, turning to his mother, “at least I know you’ll be on my side,” at which the older woman gave a crisp toss of her head, saying she agreed with Mr. White.
“If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now,” resumed the President, “they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”35
In October, Claude Neal, an African American farm worker in Florida, was arrested for the rape and murder of Lola Cannady, a white woman. He was abducted from the jail where he was being held, and the leaders of the lynch mob notified the press that justice would be served at the Cannady farm. Hundreds of people turned out to watch the lynching. Neal was taken to a secret location, brutally tortured, castrated, and killed. His mutilated body was hung outside the county courthouse. Sheriffs buried Neal, but a large crowd gathered demanding to see the body, and a riot broke out. Nearly two hundred African Americans were attacked and injured during the riot. The National Guard was eventually brought in to control the mob. The lynching and subsequent riot attracted massive news coverage, and many Americans were outraged and disgusted.
In December, on a national radio hookup, FDR was finally moved to put the power of the presidency against lynching—but only because, when two victims were dragged out of the San Jose jail, they were white. Twice more, in 1937 and 1940, when the House passed anti-lynching laws, FDR offered no presidential sponsorship, remaining silent as the bills moved to certain death in the Senate. Eleanor, alone in the gallery, stern and silent, sat in protest through hours of filibuster by the Southern wing of their party.
Thurgood Marshall, then a young lawyer arguing civil rights cases across the South for the NAACP, would later hold the President responsible for “most of the grim difficulty in changing racial patterns in America.… You cannot name one thing he ever did to solve the antilynching problem. He was threatened by Senator Tom Connally of Texas about what the Southerners would do if Roosevelt backed an antilynching bill. So Roosevelt never said one word in favor of it. He was not the great friend of Negroes that some people think. Now Eleanor Roosevelt did a lot; but her husband didn’t do a damn thing.”36
Marshall would come uncomfortably close to this side of Roosevelt in 1941 when Attorney General Francis Biddle brought him onto a phone call with the President to discuss the NAACP’s involvement in a race case in Virginia. At Biddle’s instruction, Marshall picked up an extension phone, only to hear President Roosevelt thunder: “I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor’s niggers. Call me one more time and you are fired.”37
“The president only said ‘nigger’ once,” recalled Marshall, “but once was enough for me.”38
AS THE PRESIDENT TORPEDOED THE London Economic Conference of 1933 and remained indifferent to France’s fascism-friendly occupation of the Ruhr, Eleanor began reconciling herself to the compromises by which every democratic leader disappoints people. Still, Franklin’s martini-stirring hubris exasperated her. Inside his sitting room on the second floor with Betsey, James’s pretty wife, on one side, and Missy, laughing at his latest jest on the other, Franklin was about twenty; down in the Oval Office, arm-twisting one of the filibustering Southern Democrats in the Senate, just a few years older, to judge from the crafty thrill he took from the slow manipulation of his Deep South political bosses.39
Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, was the first African American leader to denounce the American system of racial terror by drawing the then historically incomplete comparison to Nazi persecution. Under the headline U.S. WORSE THAN HITLER, Johnson asserted in February: “Not one thing done to the Jews in Germany by Hitler can be compared to the treatment which colored people receive in the United States.”40
Nazi propaganda called America the “Land of the Lynchers,”41 citing government-sanctioned terror and violence against African Americans, entire Native tribes, Asians, Filipinos, and other non-“Nordic” groups as “proof” that “Nordic” America was as intolerant of its “racial inferiors” as “Aryan” Germany.
In tropical June heat, Thomas Mann, author of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice, came for dinner at the White House, noting in his diary for June 29, 1935: “Black boys and butlers.” He sketched the President “in a wheelchair,” “rather ordinary food,” “a lad in a white dinner jacket,” and FDR’s “energy and self-satisfaction.” After a “too-long movie,” Roosevelt took the German Nobel Laureate to see the marine watercolors in his study. When Eleanor gave the signal to disband, she lightly trilled, “Auf Wiedersehen.”42 Perhaps she was saying good night to the Germany of Goethe and Faust and Wagner and Lohengrin and Franklin’s boyhood summer idylls: the Germany, indeed, of Thomas Mann.
The Fatherland’s embrace of authoritarian rule had cleared the way for Berlin to menace all of Europe. Hitler had crushed parliamentary democracy, then swallowed the Saar, industrial key to a war-making Reich. German business and German youth alike had hailed rearmament and universal military service. Fourteen years of the Versailles Treaty’s messy humiliations had prepared the most conservative German to fear chaos, demonize Communism, and embrace the crisp ruthlessness of a Teutonic savior promising redemption of past losses through his glittering vision of the thousand-year Reich to come.
Mussolini, a strongman ringmaster in the Nazi tent, had mobilized Italy, massed troops on the Ethiopian border, and on October 2, 1935, invaded Emperor Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia, throwing Europe into war panic. Clearly, East Africa—colonial cradle of the First World War—was just one aim of these conquests. Where would the dictators strike next? What was behind their brutal aggression?
With such authorities as the Third Reich’s foremost anti-Semite, Julius Streicher, announcing, “One thing is certain—when this is all over, the Italian people will realize Jews are at the bottom of it,”43 Europe’s freedom-loving peoples turned to the mighty pillars of the International Court of Justice at The Hague in Holland. Better-known as the World Court, this was the nine-member tribunal that the League of Nations had set up in 1920 so that countries could bring war-provoking disputes to arbitration before armies mobilized. Each time Eleanor had urged Franklin as president to champion American membership in the World Court, he had eluded her with the grin with which he disguised his real plans.
Announcing that he would lead a drive to win Senate ratification of a treaty for American participation on the World Court, FDR became the fourth president to urge U.S. accession, which, though mainly symbolic, nonetheless gave the United States an opportunity, as FDR put it to the Congress, “once more to throw its weight into the scale in favor of peace.”44
And so, on Wednesday, January 16, 1935, as the Senate opened debate on the protocol for American adherence to the court, the President sent up from the White House a message asking for ratification, giving FDR a chance to emphasize for his old League of Nations foes, “The sovereignty of the United States will be in no way diminished or jeopardized by such action.”45
The Senate proved sharply divided on whether the time had come for America to step up to fulfill its international obligations. A vote was scheduled for Tuesday, January 29. With battle lines so closely drawn, the White House was willing to apply direct pressure, sending for every Democratic and Independent senator to appear at the President’s desk so that the chief executive could arm-twist each man personally.
“Banking everything on the Court getting through this week,”46 Esther Lape wired Eleanor on January 15, 1935. But, that Friday, instead of calling for a vote, Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson agreed to adjourn for the weekend.
Nearly two-thirds of the nation now owned radio sets, which funneled into people’s living rooms the scheduled rants of populist demagogues like Senator Huey Long, sputtering from Baton Rouge about “the lyin’ newspapers” and blaming Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Baruch for taking “eighty-five percent of the vittles off the table.” Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic parish priest in Detroit, had an even greater knack for tapping into resentment against Wall Street. Rallying his flock at Madison Square Garden in May 1935, the “radio priest” launched a furious attack on the press and was hailed by twenty thousand wildly cheering believers as “President Coughlin”—“Our Next President.” To reporters in the press gallery, the crowd shook its fists and chanted, “Throw them out! Throw them out!”47
That Sunday evening on NBC Red Network, Coughlin warned Congress not to “tie the Gordian knot of the World Court around the neck of the American people.”48 He kept deliberately vague the threat of a “secretive government” created by his usual targets: plutocrats, international bankers, and Communists (code for rich Jews), who would use “their own international court” to “dominate the armies and navies of the world.”49 Denouncing as unfair the decisions that Americans would receive from the World Court, Coughlin urged his listeners to send their senators protest telegrams immediately—“tomorrow may be too late.”
Eleanor’s speech, a fifteen-minute call to enlightened internationalism, marked the first time she had broadcast “as a citizen and as a woman” into the live hot center of a national debate.
Speaking in her clipped, unruffled voice to “ladies and gentlemen and friends,” she came right to the point: “We do not want to get into any other war. Nor,” she firmly reminded, “did we want to get into the World War.” But modern times and modern technology were shrinking the world, its nations growing ever more interdependent, and the United States in its new role as the world’s creditor nation had an obligation to maintain its own higher standard of living. On the familiar commonsense appeal that George Washington had recommended against entangling alliances, she recalled that by partnering with France, Washington had helped America win its war for independence.
She spoke directly to her listeners, and out of the sincere surprise of having heard that “you people who are listening to me tonight by your radios have no interest in the World Court.” She said how sad that made her feel, “for I love my country and all its people, and I have a particular interest in the women and the young people. I feel when you have thought of this question in the light of today and of the future you will feel a deep interest in it too.”
She outlined the need for nations contending in an age of mass slaughter to develop a body of international law that would enable them to settle disputes in court instead. She grappled with the fear of an international tribunal’s jurisdiction, explaining that the U.S. would join under an optional clause that allowed no question concerning U.S. interests to be submitted to the Court without the people’s consent. And she remembered the World War herself. She recalled how she had “looked on the acres of cemeteries in other countries where lie our boys and the boys of other nations.” She paused and said plainly: “These dead are the result of war.”
“We cannot escape being a part of the world,” she concluded, making a special plea to the women of her generation who remembered the horror of war, and to Democrats, and to all women of America.” She begged of them all, “if you want to see the influence of your country on the side of peace,” to let their senators in Congress know.50
Overnight, telegraph offices did torrential business. Western Union added extra lines into Washington, operators working double shifts to funnel protest and outrage to Capitol Hill.
On Monday morning, with the Senate still recessed, tens of thousands of telegrams—eventually numbering some forty thousand— flooded Senate offices,51 for and against ratification.52 A Hearst newspapers crusade brought in another wave of “Stay out of it!” telegrams, followed by a mostly isolationist tide of lobbying for and against the measure, as well as various amendments that delayed the vote. In the Senate cloakroom, opponents of the resolution grumbled about the influence of Sunday night’s radio speeches, bitterly criticizing Mrs. Roosevelt for “mixing up in this fight.”53
On Wednesday came the vote, passage requiring a two-thirds majority. The measure needed no Republican allies to win: sixty-nine Democrats numbered ten more than two-thirds. But when the votes were taken, the Senate rejected the Court by a margin of seven votes—to volatile applause in the packed galleries. Counting up the thirty-six senators, including twenty Democrats, who had placed themselves on record against the principle of law before war, FDR grumbled about the apologizing they would be doing if they ever got to heaven, since undoubtedly God hated war as much as Franklin thought God did.54 Senator Borah, a longtime “bitter-ender” opponent declared it the most important decision since the World War, and Interior Secretary Ickes conceded “a major defeat of the Administration.”55
Eleanor remarked, “It is discouraging that Mr. Hearst and Father Coughlin can influence the country in the way that they do, but that is that.”
FDR HAD MADE AN UNSAVORY deal with William Randolph Hearst to win the nomination in 1932—the price, Franklin had said, that reformers had to pay if they wished to wield power.56 Hearst then quarreled violently with the New Deal, turned his newspapers viciously on FDR, and now in the spring of 1936 was looking for the Republican to run against a weakened President Roosevelt.57
The Supreme Court had handed the administration one constitutional defeat after another, often by one-vote margins, on New Deal pillars such as the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935. The big question for the 1936 election was whether or not the voters would go along with the conservative Hughes court and reject Roosevelt as the creator of constitutional shortcuts. A straw vote on the New Deal taken by the Literary Digest, which had been correctly predicting presidential elections for a quarter of a century, claimed that a majority of those polled stood against the administration’s programs.” Eleanor responded at once with a flurry of speaking engagements. After one, she came in to find that the White House switchboard had an urgent call for her from Bethesda. Louis Howe had died in his sleep at the naval hospital. It was April 18, 1936.
The real Louis had been gone for months.58 Random sightings had continued on the second-floor corridor, and in his final days, Eleanor had begun to miss the things she had most resented about Louis. “Even when I complained,” she eulogized to Hick, “I loved him.”59 Howe had offered to make Eleanor president, insisting in 1933 that as soon as Franklin was through, he could get her elected. She just as firmly held that she had no interest. She understood that for Louis the whole show was his “power to create personages, more than [his interest] in a person, tho’ I think he probably cared more for me as a person, as much as he cared for anyone, and more than anyone else ever has!” She added her usual tartness: “Sheer need on his part I imagine!”60
The last thing Eleanor had been able to fix for him was a telephone cord long enough to reach inside his oxygen tent.
Funeral rites in the East Room were followed by a twenty-one-hour burial journey, starting from Union Station on a cold rainy midnight. Just before the train left Washington, Eleanor visited the baggage car where the body lay and inspected the arrangements she’d been making—her final chance to be his Louis Howe.
She gave her approval to the undertaker from Gawler’s, signed the papers, then handed along jurisdiction of the dark bronze casket to the Fall River, Massachusetts, funeral director. The innumerable little arrangements struck her as pitiful, and it depressed her to think of how often she had done this very thing.
“I hope I get put in the ground in the least expensive of coffins,” she told Hick. “It all seems so unimportant when ‘you’ no longer exist.”61
In the stillness of the President’s car, she rode with Franklin through the chill Northeast spring night, reflecting on her discovery, as she had packed up Louis’s things, that by the end of his life, he had framed and placed in his room more photographs of her—Eleanor—than comparable images of Franklin or Grace.62
Crowds had gathered to greet the train in Providence and Taunton and at the Fall River station. Some twenty-five thousand more onlookers silently lined the route to Oak Grove Cemetery, where they laid Louis McHenry Howe to rest under leaden skies and a budding mulberry tree.
Homeward, musing again on mortality, Eleanor decided that she would probably outlive Franklin. “I rather hope that I will be the one to go, before I go through this again.”63
AS FDR LAUNCHED HIS REELECTION campaign with a tour of Arkansas, Texas, and Indiana, Eleanor suggested that Eddie Peabody, the “King of the Banjo,” and a regular at White House musicales, become a traveling member of the President’s entourage. It was the sort of thing Louis Howe had given her an instinct about; she envisioned Peabody playing Southern banjo airs as a prelude to presidential platform appearances. But Franklin bristled at the notion of his campaign becoming a kind of old-time medicine show, ripe for Republican recasting as “Dr. Roosevelt selling New Deal tonic.”64
Eleanor pressed her plan, Franklin decided against it, and someone leaked the story to the conservative press, which, on the one hand, portrayed ER as the administration’s “No. 1 brain truster,” and on the other, as a target of contempt for FDR’s “official family,” who upon hearing that the banjo act had been nixed heaved a collective sigh of relief that for once the President had put his foot down. Steve Early allowed himself to be anonymously sourced accenting the misogyny typical of the time: “Sometimes I think the Constitution should require that the President be a bachelor.”65
Whether it was Franklin’s male secretariat gathered around his bed and breakfast tray in the morning, or his mother joining whoever made up the family circle for cocktails in the West Sitting Hall, Eleanor always found herself back where she started. “I realize more and more,” she confided to Hick, “that FDR’s a great man, and he is nice, but as a person, I’m a stranger, and I don’t want to be anything else!”66
One evening, Eleanor forthrightly told Sara that it would not break her heart if Franklin was not reelected. She then left to see about dinner, whereupon Granny turned to her eldest grandson, raised her voice for effect, and caroled to James: “Do you think Mother will do anything to defeat Father? Is that why she stays in politics, just to hurt his chances of reelection?”
“Now I ask you,” rumbled Eleanor to Hick, offstage, in a letter that night, “after all these years?”67
When it came to direct threats to global peace—in 1935, Fascist atrocities in Ethiopia; in 1936, the Nationalist rebellion in Spain, as well as armed conflicts in the Far East and in South America—Eleanor remained unwilling to temper her own reactions to her husband’s politically minded inaction. Now that countries around the world were once again “armed camps,” she contended in Why Wars Must Cease, joining ten of the nation’s foremost women to declare 1914–1918 a war of extermination,68 “many peace time industries have taken on potential value” since “there has never been a war,” argued Eleanor, “where private profit has not been made out of the dead bodies of men. If our country is to survive, our people must turn to love, not as a doctrine, but as a way of living.”69
The Democratic-controlled 74th and 75th Congresses had harnessed the American heartland’s most embittered beliefs about World War I to enact isolationist legislation eliminating the United States from Europe’s wars. Each time the President signed another of the Neutrality Acts—1935 (banning munitions exports to belligerents, restricting American travel), 1936 (prohibiting loans to belligerents), 1937 (extending limitations to civil wars), 1939 (outlawing goods and passengers on U.S. ships to belligerent ports)—FDR applauded keeping the country out of what one senator called “the poisonous European mess.”70
In private, Franklin abominated neutrality’s constraint on executive power, while in public having to answer every European warning of authoritarian encroachment with renewed pledges that the United States would remain “at peace with all the world.”71 When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 and the administration maintained strict neutrality, Eleanor’s frustration mounted. “Franklin knew quite well he wanted the democratic government to be successful, but he also knew he could not get Congress to go along with him. To justify his action, or lack of action, he explained to me, when I complained, that the League of Nations had asked us to remain neutral. But he was simply trying to salve his own conscience. It was one of the many times I felt akin to a hair shirt.”72
Before the Republicans nominated Kansas governor Alf Landon that same summer, Jim Farley overconfidently claimed that the election was “in the bag.”73 Then the seamlessness of the Republican convention in Cleveland and the popularity of the Landon-Knox ticket in the West and the East challenged the Roosevelt strategists.
With a fight shaping up, anxiety grew about what effect Eleanor’s “flamboyant career” would have on FDR’s chances in what political reporter Joseph Mitchell—later the highly regarded New Yorker magazine staff writer—was now calling “the most momentous political contest in the history of the nation.”74
Of the 60 million female citizens counted in the US Census of 1930, 36 million were of voting age,75 many just now coming out from under Old Country assumptions. Eleanor did for women what the union movement did for labor. She pervaded. She was not just a consort or a surrogate but, more alarming to Republicans, a “woman of unequaled influence,” reported Time, “superlative in her own personal right.”76 The less she responded to her critics and enemies, the more she mobilized friends, making them angry enough to go and vote—and not necessarily the way their husbands had told them to.
Her wholehearted participation at interracial gatherings strengthened her position as an admired ally of African Americans, while her often-unexpected visits to black colleges, CCC camps, churches, and WPA housing projects drew praise from the leading voices of the black press: “In our day there has never been a mistress of the White House so energetic, so brave, and so fired with enthusiasm of service to the common people,”77 all of which served to consolidate the President’s strength among black voters and panicking their Southern oppressors.
The idea that, “Negroes almost worshipped Eleanor Roosevelt,” as one historian told it,78 inflamed Southern politicians like Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who seized the opportunity to attack FDR through his wife, publishing photos several times through the campaign of Eleanor accompanied by African American ROTC students at Howard, captioned “Nigger Lover Eleanor.”79
Every day that Franklin’s second-term candidacy was a topic of conversation, Eleanor was accused of neglecting her husband and their children, wasting taxpayers’ money, dying of cancer, fostering Communists, having a nervous breakdown, looking for another man to marry.80 She was hated above all for the truth of her criticisms and the effectiveness of soothing the sharpest of them with a smile. Finding that government subcontractors had designed an entire $8 million Resettlement Administration project with laundry tubs and coal bins in the same room, she tutted, “A woman would have seen that right away, because she’s the one who does the washing.” Beaming, she added: “It simply proves what I always say, that a man should have a woman at his elbow when he’s planning these things.”81
Rumors circulated in many Southern states about “Eleanor Clubs” supposedly forming to activate African American female servants in white homes. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that domestic workers were preparing to evacuate kitchens all across the state.82 In one version of the rumor, Eleanor herself had organized the members of the “clubs,” each of whom had sworn to resign on the spot if their white employers spoke against the President or his wife. Many variations went the rounds: the Eleanor of Southern imagination had urged blacks to “show more backbone,” and therefore domestics had allegedly planned to engage in a sidewalk terror campaign to slam older whites into the gutter.83 The club slogan was believed to be “All Negroes out of the kitchen by Christmas,”84 its members expecting to be received at the front door and addressed as “Miss” or “Mrs.” Reports from Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, and Florida prompted FDR to order investigations by the Secret Service and FBI, and though no evidence was ever found to support such claims, they were repeated so frequently that “Eleanor Clubs” became treated as fact.85
When the Republicans milked her many speeches and articles and broadcasts for opposition research, it was hard for them to choose just which disaster would provide the best dirt to fling at FDR—her career as a major radio performer; product sponsor; political writer; or, as Joseph Mitchell judged her, “the equal of Columbia University president Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler as a newspaper oracle.”86 In public remarks following the controversial trial and conviction of German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and death of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, she questioned whether or not circumstantial evidence was safe ground for a conviction resulting in a death sentence, provoking uncertainty about the president’s views on capital punishment.87 Her speeches to college students sounded subversive: “Study history realistically”—“Do not always believe your country is right”—“You’ll love your country just as much, the same as you love your parents, although you might not always believe them to be right.”88
On June 27, when FDR accepted his party’s nomination under the open sky at Franklin Field, Philadelphia, he reached out on the platform to shake hands with the poet Edwin Markham,89 his crutches jammed, and he toppled forward. With the Secret Service working to get him back into position, he comforted Markham, who wept at what had happened, and then went out before a hundred thousand Democrats, took his place at the microphones, and gave a dazzling speech.
“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,” began FDR, his voice “never more confident, never more commanding, never warmer in its sympathy,” according to veteran White House reporter Raymond Clapper. Roosevelt played on his audience with all his skills, asserting that theirs was “a war for the survival of democracy,” and he was enlisted for the duration.90
In November FDR defeated Alf Landon, carrying forty-six out of forty-eight states, winning re-election by the largest margin in history.
LAND, WATER, AND ELECTRIC POWER were now in better supply for many. Factories began to run again at full blast. Banks performed soundly. Keels were laid down for two new 35,000-ton battleships—the first built in two decades and the first to be armored against air attack.91
But hard times were not over. The Supreme Court had dismantled New Deal farm policy by striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933; further rulings showed that the justices appeared ready to invalidate Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the National Labor Relations Act, calling into question the very foundations of the President’s power to mobilize the country.
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” declared FDR in his 1937 inaugural address, reminding the Court and the United States: “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.”92
Emboldened by the scale of his electoral victory, the President then opened the second administration by announcing a one-third cut in relief spending and his promise to balance the budget.
This vexed Eleanor. She knew that recovery, according to Keynesian economics, was a function of government planning and spending. From the austerity of balancing her own checkbook she could also see what was going to happen to the staff and programs at an emergency agency like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) when, for instance, the $1.5 billion earmarked for relief in 1938 was slashed to $750 million, or as little as $500 million. “I do hope,” she told her readers, “that we make our economies without making people suffer who are in need of help. There are wise and unwise economies as every housewife knows and figuratively speaking the women of the country should be watching their husbands to see that the national budget is balanced wisely.”93
But on “this budget balancing business,” she learned as she went and left others to try pinning her down as an aristocratic Democrat, a democratic aristocrat, a Red, a reactionary, a renegade Republican, a New Deal humanitarian—and those were the nicer things people called her.94
As her second term began, people understood her as an urban liberal Democrat, foe of slumlords, friend of labor, advocate for the voiceless. She was trusted by the Washington African American community. Yet events of these next two years would force ER to challenge her beliefs about herself, the world she was leading, and the world she had been raised in.
On April 24, 1937, the Afro-American, “a distinguished newspaper—foremost for forty-three years” in Baltimore, with distribution in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, ran an editorial “with painful regret,” calling attention to “a serious error made by [ER] in the May Ladies Home Journal when twice she uses the epithet ‘d——y’ to designate members of the colored race. The error becomes grievously regrettable when one realizes the broad grasp that the First Lady has on public sentiment and the interpretation that is bound to come from her lack of thoughtful respect for a group that had come to believe in her with such profound admiration.”95
The appalled editors of the African American press had every reason to take Mrs. Roosevelt at face value as not just a friend—but the friend—of racial equality. “What are we to believe?” George B. Murphy, Jr., managing editor, asked ER directly. “The fact that this reference appeared in print means that it was read several times after it was written, during revision and proof-reading. In light of your wide and democratic contacts throughout the country, it hardly seems possible to us that you were unaware of the fact that no self-respecting colored American tolerates, or condones the terms ‘nigger’ or ‘darky’ through which the white South makes known its contempt for colored citizens—regardless of their cultural status.
“Will you please, then, tell us, as one of the small group of white Americans whom we have so far been able to respect and admire, how this harm came about, and what you, as an American gentlewoman, would care to do to correct it.”96
Tommy, not Eleanor, offered an explanation:
“In writing her autobiography, Mrs. Roosevelt was quoting her great aunt, who was born in Georgia and lived on a plantation, and who had great affection for the colored people. When Mrs. Roosevelt referred to them as darkies it was a term of affection. She was talking of that period and quoting her great aunt, and the word had been used in all the early stories as they were told to Mrs. Roosevelt.”97
But, in point of fact, ER used no quotation marks. She simply deployed the old language in her own autobiography, specifically to identify one person, namely, her father’s coachman.
Of course no one mentioned the odd fact that the Roosevelts had been the original translators of their own Roswell plantation tales. Well before Joel Chandler Harris popularized the Br’er Rabbit stories in the Uncle Remus books, Eleanor’s great-uncle, Robert Barnhill Roosevelt, had collaborated with her grandmother, taking the tales by dictation from Mittie, then confecting them for Harper’s magazine, where, as Theodore sternly noted, “they fell flat.”98
Tommy concluded the explanation to Murphy with: “Mrs. Roosevelt had not the slightest intention of hurting anyone’s feelings and will change this word in the book, now that it has been brought to her attention.”99
“It is not a mere question of social propriety,” the Afro-American insisted. “It is a far more serious question when the very First Lady of the land openly sets her approval on the very spirit of humiliating racial tactics which the South has used to keep colored citizens down economically, culturally and socially. In this stage in this serious matter let’s be generous and say the First Lady did not mean this epithet as an affront, or that she is ignorant of its serious consequences. Then at least she is due American colored citizens an immediate apology, else she has done us a greater wrong than any good she has ever done.”100
But she delayed her apology. When speaking or writing to white Southerners, Eleanor never hesitated to say that because of her Georgia ancestry she had “always had an understanding of the problems facing Southern white people on interracial questions.” She forthrightly stated that she “quite understood the Southern point of view” and was “familiar with the old plantation life.”101
As for the African American point of view, “from my earliest childhood I had literary contacts with Negroes,” she explained to Ebony magazine readers in 1953, “but no personal contacts with them.” She recalled “reading about Negroes” when Aunt Gracie “would read to us from the Br’er Rabbit books and tell us about life on the plantation. This was my very first introduction to Negroes in any way. It was a rather happy way to meet the people with whom I was later to make many friends because all the stories our aunt told us were about delightful people.”102
Eleanor did not reply when the members of the DuBois Circle, also in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote on May 7 to say that they were amazed to read such a word in Mrs. R’s prose, presumed it was unintentional, but wished to remind her that use of such a term was “an affront to 12,000,000 Americans.”103 A White House secretary, presumably Tommy, wrote in pencil “usual explanation/will make correction in book.” Tommy also gave the usual explanation to E. Birdie Smith, managing editor of the California News (“The Greatest Weekly West of the Rockies/Covers California Like the Sunshine”) in Los Angeles, where Mrs. Roosevelt had “received a great deal of criticism from prominent Negroes and from church and social organizations in our city.”104
To a Tuskegee graduate who wrote her an outraged letter asking how “the paragon of American womanhood” could “use the hated and humiliating ‘darky,’ ” Eleanor did respond herself, explaining that it had been used by her Georgia great-aunt as a term of affection: “I have always considered it in that light. I am sorry if it hurt you. What do you prefer?”
BY SEPTEMBER 1937, WITH VAL-KILL in turmoil and her relationship with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman coming apart, Eleanor and Lorena Hickok had been drifting in different directions. “I’ve tried hard105 to be perfectly acquiescent this summer,” Hick told her. “I think the feeling that I had to do most of the trying just got me down and completely discouraged. And I’ve hated the thought so of seeing you—or trying to see you—when you didn’t want to see me. Perhaps I was right. I may have been wrong. I don’t know any of the answers.”
They flirted with ways of showing the world without telling a single person that Mrs. Roosevelt was in love. Hick liked making a mock-horror memory of Eleanor’s long tickling fingers the night they shared the cabin in the auto camp. Eleanor was powerfully drawn to “all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures…”106 On ER’s special plane to Puerto Rico, they played the Groucho Marx game of ditching decorum and goosing the dowager for a giggle, Hick playfully swatting the first lady’s bottom in front of the press gals, Eleanor maintaining perfect aplomb.
Each wrote nightly; intimacy in bed, or its geographic opposite, duty in the field, was the unambiguous text of their letters. Going to work for the New Deal leveled their playing field: Eleanor as the President’s field scout for Southern Appalachia, Hick as Harry Hopkins’s chief investigator among a team of crack reporters (including the nomadic Martha Gellhorn), traveling the country, section by section, reporting on the effectiveness of local relief administrations as well as the physical and mental condition of those receiving help from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).
Eleanor was a believer in Nature as the great revealer of character. It was a form particular to her class and generation: shipwrecked Edwardians faced with survival, the butler becomes the leader, the aristocratic family his desert-island servants. Her first motoring trip with Hick had been a lovers’ idyll on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula—tourist cabins with laughable bedsprings, quoits to pitch out back, canoes turtled under the pines. Their second outing, a real camping trip to Yosemite National Park, proved to be a light comedy of errors, full of exactly the sort of trading-places reversals the nature satire was supposed to stir up. Hick, the wisecracking ace reporter, panicked when she read Eleanor’s written instructions to the Yosemite guides: “Miss Hickok will require a quiet, gentle horse, since she has not ridden for some time.…” Hick had never ridden, much less in the High Sierras, much less on steep mountain trails eleven thousand feet above sea level.
“How,” she growled to Eleanor, “could you do this to me?”
Said the “reluctant” first lady, always struggling to get back on the horse after her husband’s career had thrown her again: “Oh, you’ll manage.”107
Sitting tall in the saddle of her huge palomino, Eleanor, formerly the fearful, shamed rider, became a daring and accomplished high-country horsewoman. Four days on an old brown mare taught Hick how to roll a cigarette in the saddle and to fall gently off the horse when she decided they both needed a roll in the river.
Hick, the type to scarcely get a breath on her way to the bar, panted pathetically all through their high-altitude holiday but never dropped out of the game. Eleanor elatedly climbed to still higher peaks, followed by admiring young guides, forever banishing her honeymoon nightmare of Franklin and Kitty Gandy roped together on the spires of the Faloria.
The sexual reserve that had constrained Eleanor’s earlier life had been loosened by months of affection from and for Hick—but only up to a point. Eleanor had originally seen herself as the one locked up; and Hick did indeed turn a key in Eleanor, allowing her a far easier give-and-take than she had yet managed in any of her relationships. But Eleanor naturally became the more dominant and extroverted partner as she more and more confidently grew in public. Hick, the former Front-Page star, was the lover suppressing a “rich nature” to “keep down” all that she yearned to give.108
Their strong sexual attraction was not as clear to others. History would view them ambiguously as lovers, yet the record they left of their erotic pleasure and lovers’ joy makes unmistakably clear that the relationship wasn’t sexuality on the one side and good works on the other. Hick was no predator, Eleanor no closeted do-gooder. Neither were they schoolgirls with soon-to-be-outgrown crushes. Behind cabin doors or under the stars, all barriers fallen, all hairnets burned, all acts of love being equal, passion was spent. They were sexual intimates. Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok is not a story of unfulfilled sexuality or of sexuality unveiled or of a cheated woman’s revenge on her husband. The story is of intimacy—left incomplete. The question is why their bond, having deepened during their first infatuated eighteen months, no longer came first. Did Eleanor want to be close?
“I know you often have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind but I feel I love you just the same,” Eleanor tried explaining in May 1935. “So often we entirely satisfy each other that I feel there is a fundamental basis on which our relationship stands.”109
But even as she reassured Hick, she was growing beyond the daily churn of their secret attachment. There had come a moment of shocked recognition that suggested a turning point. Hick’s report from New Orleans pictured the steep economic decline of “the whole white collar class” in Louisiana. Set against the desperation of unemployed reporters, reduced to begging, Hick described the bulk of cases—some 85 percent of the whole—on which the agency needed to spend time and resources. These were African American, and Hick had no doubt that “thousands of those Negroes are living much better on relief than they ever did while they were working.” Hick wondered, “If we were not carrying so many Negroes, if perhaps we couldn’t solve the white-collar problem to some extent by giving more adequate relief.” She recognized that if such engineering were ordered from Washington, “we’d undoubtedly be up against a charge of racial discrimination.”110
Eleanor realized that Hick was proposing to drop African Americans from New Orleans’ relief rolls so that white recipients could be given the whole sum of available monies. Blacks were so catastrophically poor anyway, pronounced Hick, they “really could manage to subsist without it.”111
THAT WINTER, ELEANOR SCALED BACK her responses to Hick’s needs and demands. She took care to manage expectations about how free she could make herself. Then, feeling guilty that she’d retreated, she committed to a Long Island weekend alone with Hick in a friend’s cottage. In the next special delivery—it never failed—Franklin Jr. jumped her with a letter threatening to quit college if his parents (i.e., Eleanor, since no one expected the President’s involvement) didn’t make “more effort to understand him.”112 In the meantime, he was rowing for Harvard at Annapolis, so would Mother please just come watch him on the 25th?
She hated having to postpone “our weekend,” Eleanor told Hick, offering alternate dates. “Let me know what you can manage,” she added, “& please don’t be upset.”113
Hick was ever afraid of losing the relationship for which she had given up her career. She turned her investigative eye upon rivals for ER’s devotion, surreptitiously gathering information, suffering every comparison, the pettiness of being mean diminishing the high-heartedness that had drawn Eleanor to her in the first place. Disappointment was no good either—it just made Eleanor cloak herself in silence.
“What a nuisance hearts are,” tried Eleanor, “& yet without them life would hardly be worthwhile!” She added: “Well I’ve talked & knitted all evening so now I must get to work on the mail. A world of love & I wish I could put my arms around you.”114 As Hick had long since detected, Eleanor’s answer to Hick’s feelings of neglect was always to flee, “the next task the uppermost thing in her mind.”115
CERTAIN NEW DEAL PROGRAMS HAD begun to have dramatic modernizing effects on the isolation and poverty of the South. Highway expansion conducted by the Works Progress Administration had more than doubled the total mileage of new or improved roads throughout Dixie. Around every curve in Alabama in 1938 seemed to be another sign announcing, WPA-men at work.
But after five and a half years of unprecedented federal spending, “The South’s unbalance is a major concern” contended the President, “not merely of the South but of the whole nation.” FDR convened a body of scholars and writers to investigate economic and social conditions in the region. Their ensuing publication, A Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, detailed the region’s desperate poverty. It also declared that the region was “the nation’s number one economic problem” because of low industrial and farm wages, low family incomes, and few public services.
The report was nearing completion when Roosevelt was visited by Joseph Gelders and Lucy Randolph Mason, two of the South’s most determined reformers. Gelders, an organizer for the International Labor Defense, was a Birmingham native who worked tirelessly to eliminate poverty and racism, and Mason, who hailed from a well-to-do Virginia family, was the public-relations representative for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the South. Gelders had long envisioned a region-wide conference to address the repression of civil liberties in Southern cities, and in Mason and Roosevelt he found a receptive audience. Roosevelt saw in a conference the opportunity to publicize the grim findings of the report and possibly rally more Southern support behind the New Deal. Eleanor widened its scope, suggesting that the conference address all of the problems afflicting the South, including segregation, limited educational opportunities, and low wages.
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare held its inaugural meeting on November 20, 1938, in Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium. Labor’s new gains in organizing both blacks and whites in the cities and rural areas combined with bolder demands from African American churches to draw in labor leaders, industrialists, government officials, farmers and sharecroppers, civic leaders, ministers, politicians, economists, and students—to create the largest liberal gathering the South had seen—neither race relations rally nor labor meeting, but rather a citizens’ forum to consider constitutional rights, women and children in industry, prison reform, youth problems, and race.
The conference was billed as “the South’s answer” to the national emergency council report that “their section” was the nation’s foremost economic problem—a trope that Eleanor assailed from the moment she stood to address a mixed-race audience of more than seven thousand, including three thousand delegates.
The three-man Birmingham City Commission, governing body of the city known to progressives as “the little Hitlers,” afterward denounced it as a “left wing movement financed in whole or in part by Communists” and demanded a congressional investigation, asking the House Un-American Activities Committee to determine to what extent federal funds were made available or pledged, what part the deputy Works Progress administrator Aubrey Williams had played in organizing the conference, and to what extent prominent Southerners were bribed to attend.
Out of the SCHW would come resolutions for federal legislation to abolish the poll tax; a movement supporting a federal antilynching law and “full citizenship for all persons regardless of race”; demands for equal pay for black and white teachers; a plan for a voting rights campaign.…
The conference subdivided into sections—on Race Relations, on Southern Youth, etc.—and in the youth section, “the discussion of the Anti-Lynching Bill reached its most dramatic heights. It precipitated a heated discussion between Congressman Patrick of Alabama and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and in an inept answer by the Congressman to Mrs. Roosevelt’s question why he opposed the Anti-Lynching Bill if he objected to lynching.”116
On the second day, Eleanor spoke about the poll tax at an integrated workshop, then joined the full body of delegates at the Municipal Auditorium, which overnight had been surrounded with police wagons.
Then, New Deal administrators, white and black leaders from thirteen Southern states, labor organizers, university presidents and professors, newspaper publishers and editors, Southern liberals, Senator John H. Bankhead, coauthor of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Bill, and Associate Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court, who had maintained strict silence as he tried to live down revelations he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, moved on into the building, deliberately violating the city ordinance that made integrated meetings illegal.
The stout, jug-eared rookie public safety commissioner of Birmingham gave the order in his bullfrog voice: “White and Negro are not to segregate together.” And with that malapropism, Bull Connor nullified the agenda set by the President of the United States and made race the medium of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
THEOPHILUS EUGENE “BULL” CONNOR PEGGED a cord from the lawn outside the auditorium and through its front doors, running up its central aisle to the stage, bisecting the seating so that at least two thousand African Americans ended up segregated from five thousand whites for Eleanor’s speech that evening.
Eleanor, meanwhile, had found a seat in the area set aside for blacks. Quickly, police marched up the center aisle to inform her she was in violation of the city statute. She folded up her chair. Rather than submit to the humiliating ordinance and take herself to the whites-only section, she deliberately placed her seat in the aisle. When she unfolded it and sat down, she was sitting squarely astride Bull Connor’s police line. She refused to move, and Connor and his men dared not touch the first lady of the United States.
Likewise, Eleanor dared not make more of violating the ordinance. The President’s wife could not afford to put the President in an awkward position, as she spelled out when declining to be drawn into reporters’ questions after her evening speech. Asked, “What do you think of the segregation here tonight?” she answered, “I do not believe that is a question for me to answer. In the section of the country from which I come, it is a procedure that is not followed. But I would not presume to try to tell the people of Alabama what they should do.”117
The Birmingham-raised historian Diane McWhorter observes that in context of the more personal firestorm of Bull Connor’s responses to the Civil Rights social revolution twenty-seven years later, Eleanor’s cool action in the Municipal Auditorium would be understood as “a gutsy moral stand.” But in November 1938, most white Southerners saw a low-level drama, “the wife of the President of the United States browbeaten by a crude radio personality,”118 starring their strongman Bull Connor in his national debut.
The next day, the conference voted to condemn the South’s Jim Crow laws and never to meet again in the future in cities with segregation ordinances. For Eleanor, the risk of being arrested was impersonal. But she took very personally the jeopardy in which she was placing her friend and New Deal colleague Mary McLeod Bethune, exposing the highest ranking African American woman in government to confinement in Bull Connor’s Black Marias.
Bethune’s response to Eleanor—unexpected forgiveness—set the stage for events the following year, when the world-famous contralto Marian Anderson, sponsored by Howard University, was denied the chance to give an Easter Sunday concert in Constitution Hall, the only venue in Washington large enough for the diva’s usual audience. The powerful private organization that governed the facility—the Daughters of the American Revolution—cited their policy of limiting the use of the hall to white artists. That was enough to set off alarms at Howard and in the press, which the DAR only magnified by defending its policy, touching a nerve throughout the capital city and beyond.
With Birmingham’s implacable defense of its segregation ordinances still at the front of her thoughts, Eleanor examined her own conscience as a member of the DAR, telling her readers, “I have been debating in my mind for some time a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life. The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization?”119
In the past, when such an organization invited her to work actively, she usually stayed in until she had at least made a fight and had been defeated. Even then, upon accepting defeat, Eleanor invariably decided that she had been wrong to have let herself get that far ahead of the thinking of the majority. But, with the wired-shut DAR, there was no telling if there even was a minority position; and, in any case, no active work could be done by the first lady with the organization’s “Generals,” who considered the President’s wife much too liberal anyway.120
To remain a member would imply approval of the DAR’s racist treatment of a great artist whom Eleanor had invited to sing at the White House three years before, and to whom Eleanor was now scheduled to present at the NAACP’s annual convention its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal.
And so, on February 27, Eleanor announced to her readers that she had resigned membership in a patriotic organization whose unjust actions she deplored. Privately she told the president of the DAR, whose name she had not revealed in her column: “You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”121
The first lady’s resignation—supported by 67 percent of Gallup’s respondents, 33 percent opposed122—turned an episode of local bigotry involving a provincial ladies’ organization into an international news story that brought Eleanor further smears from Southern reactionaries alongside such awakenings of conscience from Northern whites as that which she received from old Dr. Peabody, still headmaster at Groton School, who shook his fist both at the DAR and at “the prejudice, I might say cruelty, with which we have dealt with the negro people. Your courage in taking this definite stand called for my admiration.”123
Walter White collaborated with Anderson’s business manager, the famed entertainment impresario Sol Hurok, to propose that the diva present her program at an outdoor concert, free and open to all, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which fell under the mantel of Harold Ickes, whose first official act as FDR’s irascible secretary of the interior had been to abolish the department’s segregated lunchrooms, followed by further decrees to desegregate facilities in National Parks across the country. With the President’s express approval, and Eleanor’s behind-the-scenes advancement, Ickes arranged for the concert and presided himself as Anderson stood on the chilly steps of the memorial, overwhelmed by the vast crowd of more than seventy-five thousand, which stretched as far back as the Washington Monument—the “first civil rights rally,” as it would come to be called.
Legend to the contrary, Eleanor was not present to hear Anderson break the anticipatory hush of the audience with a proudly determined rendition of the national anthem, or the grave, supremely controlled “America” that followed. The spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” had a transfiguring effect, re-forming what had made Anderson vulnerable and her audience ashamed into a new, electrifying surge of hope. She had decided that it would be inflammatory for her to attend—her presence might incite haters. But she nonetheless opened up and magnified the day, having muscled those radio stations on which she herself broadcast to carry the concert live. Without those recordings, history itself might have been deaf to “freedom’s concert.”
Birmingham 1938 had pegged the boundary in Eleanor’s public life. After the Southern Conference she could not go back to the white world of official Washington and to business as usual. She now had to ask her readers why they swore vengeance upon Adolf Hitler but suppressed Marian Anderson.…
It would take a little longer for her to kiss Dr. Bethune on the cheek without self-consciousness. But she could no longer task Tommy to placate the editor of the Afro-American with some well-intended nonsense about how much Mrs. Roosevelt’s family had loved the servants it had enslaved. In Birmingham, in 1938, by defying the local statute and standing up and placing herself, as if for the first time, as the national intermediary, she had found her way to address the internal split running, as tautly as Bull Connor’s pegged cord, from the stage of the Municipal Auditorium, back up through the central aisle, out the main doors, all the way north to the big, now more inclusive spaces between Washington and Lincoln’s monuments.