IN HER MONTHS OF PREPARATION to be a First Lady like no other before or since, Eleanor made a “most momentous decision . . . to pay tribute to her father.” And in more ways than one.
Few people knew anything about Elliott Roosevelt as late as 1932; most people who heard his name thought of Eleanor’s son, not her father. But those who did still recall the latter found him a controversial figure—disdained by some, eliciting no more than a bewildered shake of the head from others. These were people who believed that his daughter had succeeded despite his influence, not because of it. It was not an unreasonable assumption. It was also the most fundamental of misunderstandings.
Eleanor was advised not to pay tribute to her father. Or at least not now, and certainly not in the manner she proposed. But she wouldn’t listen. She wanted to do something to express her gratitude for all that Elliott had meant to her, and continued to mean to her. And so what better time than the present, on the eve of her residence in the nation’s manse, to acknowledge the man who had been her only ally and champion in her troubled youth. Regardless of what others might think, she believed her father was more responsible for her coming eminence than anyone else.
So she began honoring Elliott by collecting his correspondence, a portion of it, at least. She omitted much, including his most personal and revealing messages, especially those to her. Most of the letters, in fact, had been written before she was born. She edited them and published a book called Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman.
Eleanor explained her decision to publish the book at such a crucial time, a time when millions of Americans would begin forming their opinions of her, in the foreword. Conceding that he had “many shortcomings,” she went on to repeat a familiar and heartfelt theme. Her father, she said, “was the one great love of my life as a child, and in fact like many children I lived a dream life with him; so his memory is still a vivid, living thing to me.” Since she would soon learn that her secretary, Lucy Mercer, was doing double duty as her husband’s paramour, and later learn that there had been others, she might also have added that her father was her one great love as an adult, too, certainly her most constant, even though he had long since passed away.
Blanche Wiesen Cook goes on to provide more insight into Eleanor’s decision to release her father’s letters to bookstores at this time:
Although it was not her intention, the book . . . established Elliott and his daughter in a social tradition of fabulous wealth and international privilege. Her father’s life was one of global travel and big-game hunting that depended on an Anglo-American club of sportsmen and colonial rulership that seemed during the 1930s in rapid decline.
But ER ignored that aspect of her father’s legacy and emphasized rather his “great love and tenderness” for his family and her impression of his sense of personal democracy: “He loved people for the fineness that was in them and his friends might be newsboys or millionaires. Their occupations, their possessions, meant nothing to him, only they themselves counted.” However exaggerated her impression, that trait represented the core of her father’s bequest to her.
Perhaps more than publishing the book, the First Lady–to-be’s “most extraordinary tribute to her father” was her unannounced decision to take the stage at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera between the first two acts of Simon Boccanegra shortly before Christmas 1932. With America sinking ever deeper into the Depression, and more descent on the way, she was inspired by Elliott to make a plea for the kind of philanthropy in which he believed and practiced.
“When you come face to face with people in need, you simply have to try to do something about it,” she told an audience even more startled by her message than her presence. She further told the grandees in the audience a story about a man who had been out of work for several months. “There was no heat at home, no food, and even the gas had been turned off. And there were five children.” She asked those before her to think of that man and so many others like him, and to donate all they could to the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee. “After all,” she concluded, “this is the richest country in the world. We cannot allow any one [sic] to want for the bare necessities of life.”
Like an overcoat, Eleanor might have been thinking, the kind of garment her father gave away one frigid night when she was a child.
ELEANOR BEGAN HER TERM AS First Lady in a most unconventional way: by disputing the policies of her husband, the president. Some of his policies, at least. For instance, Franklin believed it was necessary to eliminate or curtail spending on a number of government programs. Eleanor opposed him on a few of them, such as programs aimed to create jobs and provide food without cost to those who needed it most. These programs were necessary, she declared, even though “we will have to pay for [them] through taxes and our people might just as well face this fact. . . .” In other words, the most common pejorative applied to Roosevelt’s New Deal by upper-class Americans, that it showed the president to be a “traitor to his class,” belongs as much to Eleanor, as it does to her husband.
In addition to domestic affairs, Eleanor also disagreed with Franklin’s positions on a number of international affairs. For one, his isolationism, the backbone of which was a number of laws that had been in effect since the end of the Great War, and were in fact the result of it. She also believed that one of the most necessary steps toward solving the Great Depression was to forgive, in their entirety, debts owed to the United States by foreign nations; this, she insisted would “end the worldwide depression and the rising tide of bitterness that threatened world peace.” Franklin did not think so, and was certain Congress would rage at him for even suggesting such a measure, believing it would worsen, not solve, the Depression at home.
That Eleanor took different stands from her husband on so many issues, in a few cases before he was even inaugurated, revealed more than anything else yet the distance she had come from the little girl who would shrink at the opprobrium of others. She was no longer shy. She did not fear controversy or hide from it in a tree. The transformation was remarkable, and required a great deal of support.
JUST AS FRANKLIN HAD ASSEMBLED his famed “Brains Trust” (although seldom used, the plural is the correct term) to serve as architects of the New Deal, Eleanor had her own circle of advisers helping to form her own views. They included such little-known but influential figures as Esther Lape, Molly Dewson, Elizabeth Read, Earl Miller, Louis Howe, and Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, her secretary and personal assistant. As Blanche Wiesen Cook tells us,
With her activist team ER contemplated the traditional fate of a First Lady. She was expected to give up her own life and stand by her man, affirming and silent.
She could not do it. Unlike her predecessors, ER claimed her right to a public role. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1932, she boldly broadcast her conviction that the tragic economic conditions which prevailed were due to the “blindness of a few people who perhaps do not really understand that, after all, the prosperity of the few is on a firmer foundation when it spreads to the many.” She believed that everybody would soon realize there were only man-made reasons for so much deprivation in a land of overproduction. And now, because of her husband’s election, she sensed a new spirit of giving all around her, and she hailed the renewed impulse toward generosity. “We are going through a time when I believe we may have, if we will, a new social and economic order. . . .
On 3 March 1933, the eve of FDR’s inauguration, she gave her last commercially sponsored broadcast in a series that had become increasingly controversial. On one occasion, she ignored prohibition and counseled women on moderate alcohol consumption. The Women’s [sic; it is singular, “Woman’s] Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and church groups attacked her as America’s primary “Jezebel.”
Perhaps Eleanor smiled when she heard this. So long ago, she had heard so much worse.
However, Eleanor did not ignore Prohibition so much as try to make it more workable, less unrealistic. She did favor a ban of some sort on alcoholic beverages, and this was one of the major points of contention between her husband and her. But her feelings about the Eighteenth Amendment were “complex,” by her own admission. “ER had hoped that Prohibition might result in ‘less drinking now among young people than there was among our fathers.’”
The phrase could not be more telling. If only, Eleanor thought, there had been a workable prohibition when her father was young. If only . . .
In large part because of Elliott, his daughter abstained from alcoholic beverages, and supported most of the aims of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But “she now believed that the United States faced more critical issues,” and Prohibition was no longer the priority it had once been.
As for Franklin, his stance was simple. Although once a supporter of the Eighteenth Amendment, he had changed his mind and campaigned against it, although waffling his opposition rather than speaking out directly. Having it both ways, the candidate’s dream; it seldom works. But it did in this case. Since Hoover stood foursquare behind a dry America, Roosevelt, however timid his dissent, seemed by comparison his Republican opponent’s avowed foe, and in the process might have accumulated enough votes to win the election on that issue alone.
He knew, of course, what alcohol had done to the man who would have become his father-in-law had he still lived, but decisions like this were matters of realpolitik, not personal experience.
Franklin had also shifted his position on the League of Nations and World Court; again, he once supported them, but had become an opponent well before Election Day 1932. “Eleanor, on the other hand, continued to work with Esther Lape for ratification of the World Court,” Blanche Wiesen Cook tells us. “Pleas for action over her signature were sent to all Democratic senators, and she asked the Democratic national committeewomen from their states to get after any senators who did not respond.”
Further, Eleanor and Franklin were at odds over the president’s attitude toward Tammany Hall, the corrupt New York City political machine. Although never a supporter of either its power or its practices, Roosevelt was in its debt; it had thrown its considerable resources, not all of them ethical, behind his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, playing a major role in delivering America’s largest city—and thus the state—to the Democrats in both elections. So, once in the White House, FDR was measured in his criticism of the group, especially since, after running New York for almost eight decades, Tammany had begun to age and was a more feeble organization than it had been when William Marcy “Boss” Tweed was its head.
But Eleanor didn’t care; aging or not, lacking its previous power or not, Tammany and Tweed were blights on democracy, and she wanted her husband to think of them as public enemy number one, or something close to it. Franklin found her a nag on the issue, as she was once again urging him to take a completely unrealistic position. And there were more: despite agreeing with his wife, the president had to dismiss her pleas to pass tougher laws on child labor and increase the amounts of money for unemployment compensation. Did this woman realize there was a Depression going on? Did she realize that introducing such legislation now would lead, not to higher wages but to bitter resentment in Congress?
Eleanor was, as well, one of the first advocates of more jobs for women in federal government, and a greater role for women in all workplaces. But at the same time, she believed that many women already working were being forced to spend too much time at it. In 1925, before Franklin was even governor, Eleanor spoke before the New York State Assembly, expressing her support for a bill that would reduce—by six, one per day—the number of hours women had to spend on the job each week. She told the legislators that the “great majority of the working women of this State are really in favor of this bill and would like to see it become law. I can’t understand how any woman would want to work 54 hours a week if she only has to work 48 and could receive the same rate of wages.” And, as Joseph Lash tells us, “The battle for the 48-hour law went into the 1926 and 1927 legislatures where she again clashed with the lobbyists for industry.”
Members of the New York State Assembly shook their heads. This Eleanor Roosevelt wanted more jobs, yet fewer hours! Franklin, for his part, believed that women should stay home with the children.
AS HER HUSBAND STARTED UPON his presidency, Eleanor began a practice that would not be tolerated today. She accepted payment from outside the government to serve as editor of a magazine called Babies—Just Babies. “Although it did not last,” said the authors of The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, “its overriding theme, education for motherhood, fitted well with new ideas on parenting in the 1930s as middle-class couples reduced the size of their families and attached more importance to raising the children they did have.”
In fact, Babies—Just Babies went out of business after six months, but that was long enough for controversy to form. During that time, not only was the First Lady taking money for outside employment, which seemed improper to some and had never been done before; she was doing so by supporting, at least implicitly, birth control, which seemed improper to even more people.
Eleanor gave second thoughts to none of her actions. The money she made editing the magazine went to charities of her choosing. She had decided that if the government was not funding needy causes, it was up to the individual to do so, even if that individual was the president’s wife.
Nor was she troubled by a far less significant matter, her occasional decision to travel by public transportation instead of a government vehicle when she felt like it. She enjoyed contact with the people she believed she represented. And, if she wanted privacy, there was her occasional decision to walk, refusing the escort of a military aide.
One morning, instead of having breakfast at the White House, she decided on the nearby Mayflower Hotel. Warren Delano Robbins, the president’s cousin in addition to being the State Department’s chief of protocol, met her there with his wife and a limousine to accompany her back to the executive mansion. It was a nice day, she said; she preferred a stroll.
“But Eleanor, darling, you can’t do that,” Robbins told her. “People will recognize you! You’ll be mobbed!” The argument between the First Lady and the protocol chief went on for several minutes, attracting the attention of people at nearby tables. In the end, however, Eleanor won. With only Lorena Hickok by her side, she made her way back to the White House. Un-mobbed, as it turned out. She would do things, all things, large and small, her own way.
Franklin respected his wife’s tough-mindedness, so absent when he first became acquainted with her. But he was not always pleased with it. In truth, though, he and Eleanor were in accord more often than in dispute on the issues of those troubled days, and even after Eleanor found out about Lucy Mercer, she continued to respect her husband as the nation’s leader and a master politician who sincerely wanted to help the little man rise out of the Depression’s mire. Both Franklin and Eleanor strongly believed in the country’s future economic growth, and that the fruits of that growth should be shared as equitably as possible among all Americans.
HOWEVER, MANY OF THOSE WHO had the president’s ear were upset by Eleanor’s independence, believing, according to precedent, that First Ladies should be seen, not heard. Or, as Joseph Lash put it, “Franklin was the politician, she the agitator.” No one shared that opinion more than Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. “She is not doing the President any good,” Ickes believed. “She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think she is harmful rather than helpful.”
But Ickes was only one of those who sang in the chorus against Eleanor.
Some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers—Sam Rosenman, his counsel and speech writer, and Doe O’Connor, his law partner and a political counselor, thought Eleanor was dangerously idealistic. Not long after Rexford G. Tugwell was drafted as a member of the Brains Trust in the spring of 1932, he was stunned to hear O’Connor say to him and Ray Moley, Columbia University professor and the first to be recruited into the Brains Trust, that he hoped they knew one of their first jobs was “to get the pants off Eleanor and onto Frank.” Sam agreed. Eleanor’s “well-meant probings” annoyed them, so much so that they tended to avoid the dinner at the mansion that preceded a work-out with the Brains Trust.
Others, apparently, avoided White House social functions as well. It was said, one hopes with exaggeration, that the “Roosevelt receptions and parties were ‘so carefully avoided by the “nice people,”’ and ‘a Washington cave dweller was heard to say, that Eleanor “had to invite the people who worked for the government in order to have any attendance at all.”’”
It is true that outside of her circles of friends and advisers, Eleanor’s supporters during the early months of her husband’s first term were few. Perhaps the most influential was the syndicated newspaper columnist Heywood Broun, who founded the American Newspaper Guild, now known simply as the Newspaper Guild. Like Eleanor, he was a champion of the little man who would not be muzzled by so-called political necessities, and he pronounced himself “delighted to know that we are going to have a woman in the White House who feels that like Ibsen’s Nora, she is before all else a human being and that she has a right to her own individual career regardless of the prominence of her husband.”
Even though few other columnists wrote on her behalf, Eleanor was by consensus “the most influential woman in Washington.” Further, she “became the most outspoken first lady this country has known—the most active, the most independent, the most courageous, the most admired, the most savagely mocked. She dealt, as a woman in the political arena, with constant condescension. ‘Any woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide,’ she said.” Continuing with the animal metaphor, she stated that a woman could be successful in politics only if she combined “the wisdom of the serpent and the guileless appearance of the dove.” But the dove, under whose wings she had hidden as a child, was only a disguise; and in some cases it wasn’t the serpent’s wisdom that proved necessary; it was the fangs.
Her fangs came in much later than her teeth, but Eleanor accustomed herself to them quickly and was not afraid to bare them, although she seldom seemed unladylike when she did so. As a result, Joseph Lash is correct when he points out that, after FDR had been in office for a hundred days, it was Eleanor
as much as her husband [who] had come to personify the Roosevelt era. She as much as he had captured the imagination of the country. Far from being a prisoner of the White House and having to content herself with riding, catching up on her reading, and answering mail, as she had predicted to friends, she found herself so busy that she had no time to have her hair washed . . . Her [own] mail, which at the end of the hundred days was heavier than ever, showed that hope was returning to the country, and that morale and self-confidence were bounding upward. That represented the nation’s response to Roosevelt’s fulfillment of his pledge of “action, and action now,” and it also expressed the nation’s recognition that in Eleanor as well as in Franklin it had again found leadership.
Theirs was not, as was said back then and is still believed by some today, a “co-presidency.” But the term was occasionally heard—as a compliment by those who admired Eleanor’s tenacity, as an insult by those who believed that, of all American women, it was the First Lady who most belonged at home with the kiddies, even if home was the White House.
MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, FRANKLIN tolerated his wife, sometimes seeming amused by her earnestness. Occasionally, it even inspired him to act. But there was no doubt that the commander in chief was commanding. “He was a showman,” says Joseph Lash, accurately, “and his charm and magnetism were so overpowering that the household naturally gravitated around him; everyone’s interests were subordinated to his. A woman in love with a man could accept this, but that kind of love had died with the Lucy Mercer affair, Eleanor told herself. She was not in love with him. Yet she was prepared to render him a labor of love by serving his work . . . if he would be thoughtful, considerate, and treat her as a partner and confidante.”
And he often did.
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN ELEANOR had to get away from it all. She had not been raised in the world of politics, and was still puzzled, and occasionally beaten down, by the degree to which an honest statement of ideas (hers) could rouse such hostile responses (theirs). So she would retreat to a cottage that had been built in 1924 on the Roosevelt property in Hyde Park. When not in the White House, she and Franklin would spend an occasional weekend—longer, if possible—in their prepresidential home, the so-called “Big House”; the cottage, named Val-Kill, a Dutch word that means “valley stream,” was about two miles away. It was there that “she could entertain whoever she wanted, stay up reading as late as she liked, and be alone if she chose.” It was there, Eleanor said, “where I used to find myself and grow. At Val-Kill, I emerged as an individual.”
Actually, there were two buildings on the site, the Val-Kill Cottage itself, and a smaller structure known as the Stone Cottage. Initially, the former was a small factory whose operations were overseen by the future First Lady and three of her friends. “They hoped to train local people in craft skills that they could use to supplement their income from agriculture without having to move to the city. The high quality reproduction Early American furniture Val-Kill Industries made did well in the 1920s.”
As for the Stone Cottage, Eleanor spent as much time as she could there with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, friends and fellow “executives” in Val-Kill Industries. When the company went out of business, Eleanor had the factory converted to a house and moved in, part-time, leaving the Big House to her husband and the Stone Cottage to Cook and Dickerman, who lived there together for the next twenty-one years.
The solitude of Val-Kill was a restorative for Eleanor, a tonic for her psyche. The Big House remained her primary, or at least nominal residence, but the cottage always beckoned and always received her in warm, silent, and familiar welcome. When her husband died, Eleanor, uncomfortable despite her upbringing in what she believed to be the falsity of grandeur, made the much more modest cottage her full-time residence. The Big House became a library and museum, attracting people like me, who saw an untold story in the past.
AS IT TURNED OUT, THE homage Eleanor paid to her father by publishing his letters was one of the least controversial actions she took in her early years as First Lady. But the letters she did not publish, which are kept in the Big House, several of them following in this book, tell a more gripping story. It is those messages, almost all of them brief, that reveal how Eleanor tried to help her father from afar during his last, agonizing days, and what Elliott Roosevelt meant to her, before, during, and long after those days had passed.