“What It Means to Be the Wife of the President”
The Pond’s Program
Wednesday, April 21, 1937, 7:15–7:30 p.m. (NBC Blue Network)
Eleanor Roosevelt launched a new radio series for Pond’s Cold Cream in the spring of 1937. The national economy had improved markedly since the depths of the Depression. American productivity rose above pre-1929 levels for the first time. Payrolls and stock prices had improved, unemployment was down. But it wouldn’t last. Assuming that the recovery would continue, FDR slashed government spending and New Deal programs. By fall, the nation would slide back into deep recession.
The sound of war grew louder around the world. There was civil war in Spain, where Fascist forces bombed the city of Guernica. Japan invaded China, capturing Peking, Shanghai, and Nanking. The Nazis opened a concentration camp at Buchenwald.
ER’s topics in the thirteen-week Pond’s series would include audience favorites like a typical day in the White House and the rigors of official state dinners. But she would also discuss the problems of working women with her friend Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League and the hardships of slum living with Ida Harris, the head of a group of mothers living in New York tenements.
The first lady made headlines when she explained in one program why she traveled so much. She said that if she stayed too long in the White House, she would lose touch with the rest of the world. In another program, she discouraged a George Washington University student from taking the so-called Oxford Peace Pledge to remain a pacifist in the case of war.
The issue of ER’s radio pay became a controversy again in the summer of 1937. Hamilton Fish, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from FDR’s home district in New York, was a relentless critic of the New Deal and the president. He accused ER of using loopholes to evade paying taxes on her radio work. As always, ER maintained that the $3,000 she got from Pond’s went to the American Friends Service Committee. What ER did not disclose was that her radio agents typically got a $500 to $1,000 cut for each broadcast. The Treasury Department approved of ER’s arrangement and the congressional committee investigating tax avoidance eventually dropped its inquiry into ER’s finances.
ER often liked to have guests on her program. Sometimes she asked the questions; sometimes the guest did. On the program about being the wife of the president, ER was joined by Genevieve Forbes Herrick, whom ER referred to as Geno, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who had covered many of ER’s White House press conferences, which were restricted to women reporters.
On one of the Pond’s broadcasts, ER’s guest was her daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger. They interviewed each other on the proper ways to raise a girl in the twentieth century. ER would not have claimed to be an expert on this subject. Her own troubled childhood in a patrician family had ill prepared her for motherhood. ER and FDR had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood. ER left much of the child-rearing to a series of nannies and caregivers. ER later regretted her maternal ineptitude and the resulting struggles her children endured.
ANNOUNCER: This is Virginia Barr of the Pond’s Company speaking from Washington, DC, and bringing you Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tonight, in beginning this series of broadcasts, Mrs. Roosevelt talks informally about what it means to be the wife of the President. First, let me take just a moment to speak of the coronation. In a recent issue of Life magazine, there were pictures of beautiful women who will take part in the coronation social activities. On two pages, there were five women shown: a daughter of an earl, a sister of an earl, [and] wives of a baron and a baronet. Now, of these five English beauties, four use Pond’s Cold Cream. So many English women use Pond’s it has become the biggest-selling cold cream in England. Remember this when you’re wondering what to do for your complexion. Follow the same method used by English and American beauties for refining the skin and keeping away signs of age. Cleanse and invigorate your skin night and morning the easy, effective Pond’s way. Begin tomorrow. Get a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream in the morning. Now, it’s my great privilege to present Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
ER: Tonight I want to tell you a little of what it means to be the wife of the president. And I’m just going to talk it over here, for you, with Mrs. Genevieve Forbes Herrick—a very charming young lady whom I came to know soon after I first arrived at the White House. She used to be well known as a reporter on the Chicago Tribune. She and her husband are now living in Alexandria [Virginia], where she is writing a monthly feature for the Country Gentleman. Now, Geno, is that chair perfectly comfortable for you?
GH: Yes, it’s fine, thank you. I wonder if you’d say, Mrs. Roosevelt, that being the wife of the president means being a very busy lady?
ER: Someone wrote me a letter recently in which she said in sport, “You may think you are useful to poke your nose into so many things. You are really America’s first nuisance.”
(LAUGHTER)
GH: How did you like getting a letter like that?
ER: I was very much amused. My family and I have laughed over it and I’ve even used it in a few speeches I’ve made.
GH: One of the things I’ve discovered about you, Mrs. Roosevelt, is a very keen sense of humor. Do you think a sense of humor is essential for a first lady?
ER: Well, I think if you can see the funny side of some things, it’s easier now and then. For instance, the day a lady wrote me that if I would stay at home and attend to the housekeeping and not run around the country so much, she would not have soiled her white gloves on the stair rail which leads up from the lower floor to the East Room. I might have taken it really seriously and made my household unhappy, but knowing that the stair rail is wiped on an average of every fifteen minutes during the period when visitors are allowed in the White House, it struck me as extremely amusing that I should personally test the cleanliness of it. People do not realize the conditions that prevail in a house of this type and consequently cannot appreciate that it cannot be run exactly as your own house would be.
GH: I didn’t meet you until after you came to Washington, and I’ve often wondered just what you thought when Mr. Roosevelt was elected for the first time in ’32.
ER: Geno, I was terrified. One of my children was at the campaign headquarters that night. He came up and asked me the same question. If I’d dared to tell the truth then, I’d have told him what I’ve just told you.
GH: Why were you so terrified? When Mr. Roosevelt was governor of New York, didn’t you get used to such a position?
ER: Four years in Albany were relatively simple. The White House, I knew, would be very different. To begin with, Albany was fairly near home. I would have to leave that. There were so many people I was fond of and with whom I worked; they couldn’t all go with me. My time was taken up with so many interests that I’d have to curtail. And my privacy—I couldn’t imagine what would become of that. I even remember wondering if I was going to be able to drive my own car.
GH: Well, you’ve been able to do that, haven’t you?
ER: Well, yes. But one old gentleman I met up in Maine didn’t think I should.
GH: What did he say?
ER: He said he didn’t believe I was Mrs. Roosevelt because if I were, I’d have a chauffeur. He said his wife had always told him if she were living in the White House she’d have a chauffeur and the most expensive make of car.
GH: Well, Mrs. Roosevelt, you’ve kept right on doing things. How have all your fears worked out?
ER: I lost some of them when I decided that I’d be lost if I pretended to be anything I was not. Of course, that applies to everyone in any position. You must retain your natural self. If you don’t, people whom you meet won’t be themselves. They will think of you as a personage, not as a person. In realizing that, you see, many fears could be discarded. The household, the increase in mail, the more formal entertaining didn’t really trouble me. But the realization of how much of it there’d be appalled me.
GH: You have quite a few people at the White House with whom you’ve worked before, haven’t you?
ER: Yes, and I don’t know what I’d do without them. There is really too much for one person to do. And if you have a few people you know can do things without supervision, you’re lucky indeed. The greatest danger, from my point of view, is that many of them are so ready to be helpful and shield me from contact with the ordinary difficulties and activities of daily life that I might become a helpless individual. As an example, Mr. Ike Hoover, who was then head usher, informed me that it was not the custom for either the president or his wife to run the elevator. I had to be quite insistent before I was allowed to do it myself, in spite of the fact that I told him that I had worked a similar elevator in our house for years and that I could still do it.
GH: With so much to do at the White House, how do you find time to be away as much as you are?
ER: I think being out and around the country is just as important, more so sometimes, than some of the things I do in the White House.
GH: Why is that?
ER: If I stayed in Washington all the time, I’d lose touch with the rest of the world. I might have a less crowded life but I would begin to think, perhaps, that my life in Washington was representative of the rest of the country, and that is a dangerous point of view.
GH: What’s the greatest satisfaction in being the president’s wife? Or what do you enjoy the most?
ER: I’d say the sense of enlarged vision. Because you can see the nation as a whole, through individuals you meet from every part of the country. Also the ability the position gives you to do helpful things for a great many people. Take the little girl, for instance, who because I was so prominent in public, wrote and told me she had never been able to walk straight. Through the kindness of my friends in the orthopedic hospital, she was put through the necessary operations. After ten months in a plaster cast she came out as straight as any other child. She is now earning her own living.
GH: Meeting so many, don’t people tend to become all alike to you?
ER: On the reception line it’s hard to get more than just a casual impression. But I meet so many others who have something definite to tell me, both at the White House and around the country. Through such meetings I know those people as individuals. I know their lives. One day a woman stopped me as she went past me in the receiving line and said, “May I talk to you for a minute afterwards? I am trying to make my living as a farmer and I need some help.” She came back afterwards and told me the familiar story of farm loans, drought, poor crops, et cetera. Between us we tried to work out some of the difficulties with the proper government agencies and I learned a great deal from her and it helped me to understand similar conditions throughout the country.
GH: What is the greatest drawback to being a president’s wife?
ER: I think it’s the fact that you have to think of what you do not as a private citizen but as a public personage. In private life you can be yourself, always. Those who know you will understand. But what you do of a public nature will be seen not only by friends who know you but by many people who will be affected by what you say or do without the background of knowledge of you, yourself. So you cannot count on a correct interpretation. For instance, a great many people may think that your interest in a certain thing is because of some political reason, whereas anyone who had known you would at once realize that that interest had been yours for many years.
GH: Do you think being the wife of a president changes a woman?
ER: No, I don’t think it does inside. It changes your method of thinking to a certain extent, but it doesn’t change you as a person at all.
GH: In being the wife of a president, what does that mean to your private life? Where do you get time for it?
ER: You have very little time. But you plan for such things as are important to you. You do what you feel you must do to retain your individuality. Some people say they can get along without outdoor exercise. I feel that’s necessary and will find time for it during the day even though it may mean I work far into the night. I feel it’s important to get away from the White House and back to people who don’t treat me as a personage. That’s why I arrange my time so as to get away and be with old friends now and then. But Geno, before we get into our other questions, Virginia Barr has a word to say, and then we’ll continue our talk.
(MIDDLE COMMERCIAL)
ER: Mrs. Herrick thinks I should tell you a little of what it means to run a presidential household.
GH: What about clothes? Do you have to have a new dress for every occasion?
ER: Oh my, no. But I have to have a great many more than I sometimes think I need. In the winter, with the increased entertaining, I have to have more dresses. This year I had new inauguration clothes, but if it were not for the many photographs one could wear clothes longer.
GH: Do you have any set time for going to bed?
ER: I never get there before eleven and frequently it is three a.m.
GH: And then up again at a quarter to eight?
ER: Oh, yes.
GH: How do you feel about the publicity that follows you so much?
ER: The essential publicity of public appearances concerns me very little. But other types of publicity concern me a great deal, not only for myself but for members of my family. Young people hate to have every move recorded and I myself very often feel that the people can hardly be interested in some of the things which are written.
GH: Do you write all your own things?
ER: Yes, I dictate every word which appears over my signature. I’ve been told that I have a ghostwriter, but there are no skeletons in my desk.
GH: What’s the funniest thing that’s happened to you?
ER: I don’t know whether I think this is as funny as it is natural, but I made some purchases in a New York department store and gave my name and address as Mrs. F. D. Roosevelt, R-O-O-S-E-V-E-L-T, The White House, Washington, DC. The girl wrote quickly and, without looking up, said, “Any room number?”
(LAUGHTER)
ER: Now, Geno, I know we could go on forever but I must go home, for we have people staying in the house and one rule is that the president is not kept waiting, and he expects dinner at seven forty-five. In closing, I should like to say to all who are listening that we will welcome any suggestions or questions you want to send in. I really can’t acknowledge your letters though, and we can’t give any assurance that your questions will be answered in the ensuing broadcasts, but we will do our best. And if you do write, would you please address your letters to the radio station to which you’re listening?
Next Wednesday I’ll be back again to describe a typical day in the White House. I’m going to select a recent day and then Mrs. Thompson and I will tell you all about it. You know I feel that the White House is your house, and in this way I hope you will feel that you’re sharing a day with me there. Good night.
(COMMERCIAL)
(CLOSING ANNOUNCEMENT)