“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” This long-remembered line from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration speech in March of 1933 heartened the unemployed, impoverished, and worried citizens throughout the United States suffering through the third year of the Great Depression. But the new president knew that words would have to be followed by actions. After he took office, Franklin determinedly set out to get the country back on its feet.
The first one hundred days of Franklin’s administration were a whirlwind of activity. They had to be, as the country was in crisis. A quarter of the workforce was out of work, more than a million people were homeless, banks were failing, and savings had disappeared. In those one hundred days, Franklin ignited his New Deal. He pushed fifteen major bills through Congress that attacked the Depression from all sides: banking, industrial changes, farm aid, employment, and social welfare. He spoke to the public in radio “fireside chats,” and his calm and optimistic tone buoyed listeners across the country.
Franklin and Eleanor ride to his inauguration on March 4, 1933.
Franklin delivers his sixth fireside chat in 1934.
Sometimes it seemed that the New Deal had formed an “alphabet soup” of agencies. There was the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, providing jobs for young men in forestry and other conservation services; and the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, employing millions to work on infrastructure projects like roads and bridges, while artists and writers and musicians carried out arts projects. The Tennessee Valley, a part of the country particularly hard-hit, was provided flood control and electricity by the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority.
This well was the only source of water in a Tennessee town until the Tennessee Valley Authority helped modernize the area.
The goal of these agencies and others was to provide direct relief to Americans. Some of the programs worked, others did not. A few, like one to regulate agricultural production, were ruled illegal by the courts. In 1935, Social Security was established, giving many older Americans a monthly stipend to help secure their futures. Though the Depression dragged on for years, finally ending with America’s entry into World War II, the quick actions Franklin took did stabilize the country.
Eleanor, as always, did her duty. She had been correct about the fishbowl that was Washington, D.C. Everything she said, did, and even wore was scrutinized. Despite any personal discomfort, she soon realized that there was much she could do to help her country through this crisis, even though she had no formal title other than First Lady. But that was enough.
As he had done as governor of New York, Franklin used Eleanor as his eyes, ears, and legs. He started her traveling on a national scale, both to view actual conditions in the country and later to report on the progress his programs were making. Sometimes she would go to the sites of federal relief projects unannounced, so she could see the real situations, not versions prettied up for the First Lady. It seemed Eleanor was everywhere: in rural areas, in crowded tenements, in national parks, in prisons, even down in a coal mine.
Eleanor put her stamp on the role of first lady, traveling throughout the country—even down in the coal mines—as an active participant of her husband’s administration.
A problem arose when the head of the Secret Service discovered the independent First Lady was not going to allow an agent to accompany her on her travels. One day, he came to Louis and tossed a revolver on his desk and said, “Well, all right, if Mrs. Roosevelt is going to drive around the country alone, at least ask her to carry this in the car.” In her autobiography, she reported, “I carried it religiously . . . I asked a friend, a man who had been one of Franklin’s bodyguards in New York State, to give me some practice in target shooting so that if the need arose I would know how to use the gun.” It took a good deal of practice, but Eleanor did become knowledgeable about handling guns.
Eleanor learns how to shoot a gun.
Republicans, who didn’t like the Roosevelts and their activism, along with some members of the press, made fun of Eleanor and her travels. (A newspaper published a half-joking prayer, “Just for one day, God, please make her tired.”) But most Americans admired her efforts. They began to feel she was a friend and started writing her letters. Before bed, after long days that might include a visit to a CCC camp or hosting a dinner for foreign dignitaries—or both!—she would try to answer her mail. “From March 1933 to the end of the year, I received three hundred one thousand pieces of mail . . .,” she reported. “The variety of the requests and apparent confidence that I would be able to make almost anything possible worried me.”
Though she could not, of course, answer most personally, she did reply to a cross section, referred others to the proper government agencies, and sometimes offered advice or even money to those who sounded desperate.
She also continued a practice she had started during the 1920s, getting paid for writing books and newspaper columns and guesting on radio programs. A First Lady receiving wages was unheard of, and though Eleanor did receive criticism about this, especially from Republicans, her writing proved extremely popular—and profitable. The money allowed her to continue giving money to the charities of her choice.
Through her travels and writings, Eleanor was in touch with everyday people and seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the country. She continued to be particularly interested in women’s issues, while a new focus was the youth of America. She was concerned that the United States was in danger of losing a whole generations of young Americans—“a stranded generation,” she called them—disillusioned with an economic system that had let them down and left them with little hope for the future.
Eleanor at She-She-She Camp for unemployed women in Bear Mountain, New York. The first lady was the driving force behind the camps. The Civilian Conservation Corps was designed for young men only, whose work involved forestry and utilizing the country’s natural resources. Eleanor made sure there were programs for jobless women as well.
It was Eleanor’s determination and persistence in lobbying her husband, as well as others in the administration, that led to the formation of another successful entry in the alphabet soup of commissions: the NYA, the National Youth Administration, or as Franklin affectionately called it, “the missus organization.” NYA programs gave grants to high school and college students to help them stay in school, and those who had dropped out could apply for job-training programs. Using a similar “family” metaphor, the head of the program in North Carolina echoed a sentiment heard around the country in a letter to Eleanor. “Out here we think of the NYA as your government child. Certainly no member of the alphabet family is more popular.”
Despite her history as a politically astute reformer and champion of the underdog, there continued to be one group that didn’t receive much of Eleanor’s attention. She was in her forties and First Lady of the United States before she began to seriously look at the problem of racism in America and the injustices faced by its African American (then called Negro or colored) citizens. But once she did, she was determined to help.
Why was racism still such an issue almost seventy years after the end of the Civil War in 1865? The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, gave former slaves citizenship and all persons born in the United States equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, said that race could not be used as a reason to deny the right to vote—for men only, of course; women wouldn’t get the vote for another fifty years.
Northern troops occupied the South until 1877, a period called Reconstruction, and enforced these laws. One of the results was that African American men were elected to public office. Another result was the simmering anger of many white citizens who had lost not only the war, but their way of life. When the troops left the South, ways were found to disenfranchise black voters and return political and economic power to whites.
A system of strict segregation was set up in which blacks were kept separate socially from whites and in subservient positions. African Americans in the Southern states had to defer to white people, eat in their own establishments, go to their own schools, sit separately in public venues, use public bathrooms for blacks only, and even drink from their own water fountains.
Other parts of the United States had their own forms of segregation. Some were codified into law, for instance, the separation of blacks and whites in hotels and a prohibition on intermarriage; other restrictions were more a matter of custom than regulation. These laws varied in different Northern and Western states. In the South, they were more uniform and harsher, and the penalties for breaking them often more severe. These were called Jim Crow laws, named for a stage character insulting to blacks.
During the hard times of the Depression, there wasn’t much for whites or blacks, but African Americans always got the shorter end of the stick. Nevertheless, there were groups fighting hard for change against sometimes dangerous, always overwhelming odds. The best known was the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, its goals included political, educational, social, and economic equality under the law.
With her sensitivity to people, especially those whose lives were difficult through no fault of their own, it would seem Eleanor should have been an early supporter of African American rights and groups like the NAACP. So why wasn’t she?
As with many people, her racism began in childhood. Eleanor’s paternal grandmother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, was raised in the South before the Civil War, where she had lived on a plantation. Though Martha had died a few months after Eleanor’s birth, the girl grew up hearing romanticized stories from her great-aunt Annie, Martha’s sister, about the Bulloch girls’ happy childhood in Georgia. As a part of plantation life, the sisters had young slaves, called shadows, who waited on the girls and slept at the foot of their beds. As a girl, Eleanor enjoyed the tales. She never thought about the stories from the enslaved children’s points of view.
But even as an adult, she didn’t consider African American sensitivities. One of her biographers has speculated that approaching middle age, the only blacks she knew were servants. Her road to racial sensitivity was not only slow but uneven. As late as 1936, even after her ideas about social justice had begun to broaden, she could be thoughtless. One example—she was still using the offensive term darky, and in her autobiography, no less.
Eleanor was put on the defensive by a young African American woman, a graduate of Tuskegee University, who saw the word darky while reading a magazine excerpt of Eleanor’s autobiography. She wrote to the First Lady: “I couldn’t believe my eyes” when I came across the “hated” and “humiliating” term. The writer continued that it was even more shocking having been written by a women she admired so much.
Eleanor responded, “Darky was used by my Georgia great aunt as a term of affection, and I have always considered it in that light. I am sorry if I hurt you.” A chastised Eleanor asked, “What do you prefer?”
Visiting New Deal programs to see how they were working was an important part of how Eleanor saw her job as first lady. Here she is visiting a WPA African American nursery school on Des Moines Avenue in Iowa in 1936. Many of the New Deal programs in both the North and South were segregated.
The awakening of Eleanor’s social consciousness had begun with her charity visits as a child and working at the Rivington Street Settlement House as a young adult. Later, issues like child labor and workers’ rights captured her attention and energy. But for many years, she only saw herself doing good works from a position higher than those she was helping. She didn’t consider them as equals.
It was over the course of her adulthood, especially after she became First Lady, as she traveled and talked, observed and learned, that Eleanor began seeing the common humanity she shared with people of all races. As one historian put it, “She was not afraid to allow herself to change and become a better, more accepting, more balanced and informed person.”
This was perhaps most true when it came to her willingness to stand by the side of those fighting for their civil rights. Her personal friendships with individuals of color finally brought Eleanor to a greater understanding of what African Americans endured, and in many ways this shocked her. The White House was to become her new schoolhouse, the place where she would truly begin to learn what it meant to be black in America.