THE YEARS 1919–20 WERE FULL OF TUMULTUOUS UPheaval, not only for Eleanor Roosevelt personally but for the world. With the war in Europe over, the battle for the future began. Everywhere profound changes in politics, culture, and understanding were under way. Anticolonial movements flourished. The Russian Revolution was greeted with “mad, glad joy”—and unbridled horror.
The map of the world was being redrawn with abandon. National groups that had histories of the most bitter hatred were herded together into newly created countries with no cultural affinity or political unity. The great and divisive schisms of the twentieth century were being forged by the contradictory visions that emerged at the end of World War I.
Nothing was stable; nothing was certain. German soldiers in uniform marched beneath the Red flag and sang the “Internationale.” British miners went on strike to demonstrate their solidarity with the workers of the world. In the United States, more than four million workers participated in 2,665 strikes.
Women demanded the vote, power, a real voice in society. For fifty years, in England and the United States, they had picketed, marched, petitioned, demonstrated. They had been arrested, brutalized, and, when they conducted hunger strikes in prison, force-fed. English and American women thrilled to the rallying cry of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence: “There is no life worth living except a fighting life.” But during the war they had suspended their militancy to support the troops, and expected now to be vindicated and rewarded.
In every area, long-overdue accounts were to be redeemed, as sacred myths about authority and control met the wrecker. Children of workers, serfs, and slaves demanded education, economic security, political rights, equality—and dignity. The colonized sought independence. Nationalists wanted new boundaries. Racial and religious minorities called for an end to violent repression. Workers organized unions. Everybody wanted freedom, security, and self-respect. As feudalism in Europe ended, the titled nobility and the ruling classes lost their prerogatives and prestige, if not yet many of their crown jewels. The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires were smashed. The wealth of the resource-rich world, including vast Arab oil fields, was once again up for grabs.
Woodrow Wilson’s sonorous phrases about peace with justice, and open treaties openly arrived at, masked secret treaties secretly arrived at. The Treaty of Versailles was punitive and imperial, and mocked every one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. ER wrote Bob Ferguson: “I think the terms must please you, they certainly could not be more drastic and all the English and French here seem well pleased.” ER, who doubted that the treaty was in the United States’ best interests, was more appreciative of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which had included self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, the removal of trade barriers to international commerce, and a League of Nations to guarantee the independence of nations, great and small. From the beginning, the new Soviet government was excluded from the League, and greeted with a blockade of food and industrial products that completely contradicted the words and purpose of the peace. Indeed, before the treaty was completed, the world was again at war.
Revolution was met by counterrevolution and reaction. Repression greeted every movement for social change. In the United States, a year of tyranny and violence, of Red Scare and race riots, called America’s constitutional precepts into question. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly was buried in an avalanche of superpatriotism led by vigilante missionaries of a new “Americanism.” The war to make the world safe for democracy ended with the secret Allied Intervention against the Soviet Union and bloodshed in streets throughout America, as Wilsonian crusaders declared war against Bolsheviks and all their soft-minded liberal friends. The Red Scare carved the heart out of American liberalism, and charted the course of twentieth-century politics.
After 1919, most of the promises of women’s suffrage and progressive reform fell victim to the repressive crusade. At the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, all opponents of World War I—all pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and political dissenters—became the target of a massive campaign of arrests and reprisals. Thousands of foreign-born women and men, as well as American-born unionists and thousands of other perfectly innocent people who just happened to be in the path of Palmer’s dragnets, were arrested on no evidence of wrongdoing, without warrants or due process.
Bolstered by the Espionage Act of 15 June 1917 and the Sedition Act of 16 May 1918, Palmer’s agents were free to arrest all who gave aid or comfort to the enemy; all who seemed disloyal in word or deed or attitude; all who opposed the draft or who spoke ill of the president, his advisers, the government, or the military. “Scurrilous” or “abusive” newspapers or journals were denied U.S. mailing privileges. People were arrested for “suspicious” postures, “disloyal thoughts,” displeasing “foreign” accents.
Secret agents infiltrated union meetings, attended political rallies. The new twentieth-century sleuth, with his eye in the keyhole and his ear at the door, took copious notes, as if all political interests and public demonstrations were sly, un-American secrets. From these meetings records were compiled relating to all the supposedly dangerous and disorderly elements in America, forming the basis of John Edgar Hoover’s famous index-card files of revolutionary Reds. Hundreds of people were imprisoned under the Espionage Act, and Hoover kept files on the activities of thousands of Americans in every village and town. Activists as diverse as Jane Addams and Eugene Debs, Carrie Chapman Catt and Margaret Dreier Robins, Lillian Wald and Eleanor Roosevelt—all the twentieth-century visionaries who imagined there might be political, economic, and social change in the United States in their lifetime—were monitored, spied upon, and often hounded and harassed by state-sponsored officials and self-appointed patriots. They were transformed from the conscience of America into the enemies of America.
Joining the new crusade, on the eve of the women’s-suffrage victory, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, still chaired by Alice Hay (Mrs. James) Wadsworth, changed the name of its journal from “Woman’s Protest to Woman Patriot, asserting that suffragism and socialism were the same and indivisible. And in 1920, the NAOWS became the Woman Patriot Corporation, which over the years targeted and red-baited such social feminists as Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Ironically, Alice Wadsworth and Eleanor Roosevelt lunched together one afternoon on the New York-to-Washington train, just before the suffrage amendment became law. According to ER, Alice Wadsworth spent the entire time “trying to persuade me to come out against ratification. I was very noncommittal.” Although ER “considered any stand at that time quite outside my field of work,” she sidestepped Wads-worth’s efforts and urged her mother-in-law to do the same.
The Red Scare went beyond patriotic harassment of suffragists, socialists, and reformers. From 7 November 1919 to the spring of 1920, in what were called the “Palmer Raids,” federal agents invaded “gathering places” of alleged Reds in eighteen cities; they “broke up meetings, seized tons of literature, and herded …foreign men and women into various offices for examination.” On 9 November, The New York Times reported that “Thirty-three men, most of them with bandaged heads, black eyes or other marks of rough handling,” were removed to Ellis Island, while of the 150 who were set free, most of them “also had blackened eyes and lacerated scalps as souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which has been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected Reds.”
On 21 December 1919, the first “Red Ark”—the Buford—sailed for Russia with 249 women and men aboard, including the famous anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. But they were practically the only anarchists on the ship. Of the deportees only four were known anarchists. The Buford seemed to sail with America’s most fundamental principles in its hold: freedom of speech and opinion; due process of law; a fair judicial trial. Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman, then co-publishers of The Liberator, printed an angry protest: The deportations rendered the United States’ “boast of a superior liberty and regard for human rights hollow and absurd.”
On 5 January 1920, The New York Times ran an approving headline—”’RED’ CONCENTRATION CAMPS HERE URGED“—and in an editorial entitled “REDS BY THE THOUSAND” praised the “shrewdness” and “large wisdom” of the Department of Justice, and prophesied that these raids were “only a beginning”: “Without notice and without interruption the department will pursue and seize the conspirators against our Government. Some 60,000 Bolshevists’ names are recorded in the department. Its future activities should be far-reaching and beneficent….”
Palmer’s descriptions of radicals and the foreign-born encouraged the crudest racism and xenophobia: Just gaze into the face of an alien and see the criminal, the thief, and the murderer. In article after article, A. Mitchell Palmer spread his venom: “Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type.” They represented evil, and the “chief evil of the Red movement, both here and abroad, consists in the …constant spread of a disease of evil thinking.”
In February 1920, Palmer warned the readers of The Forum to guard against the Reds: “Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution” would devour “every American institution.” “It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bells, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”
For a time, democracy seemed limited to American anti-radicals. In the House of Representatives, the anti-Bolshevik socialist Victor L. Berger, who had been elected by a vast majority of the people of Milwaukee, was denied his seat. Some members of Congress recognized that the very principle of representative government was at stake. But in January 1920, their second vote to reseat him was defeated, 330 to 6. That same week, the New York State Assembly refused to seat five elected socialists from New York City. When, in April, their expulsion was again debated, Eleanor’s cousin Teddy, Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt (III), was almost alone in his opposition to this unprecedented disenfranchisement of sixty thousand voters. His protest on behalf of the principle of a free and representative government was met with derision: Assembly Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet read a passage from Theodore’s father, TR, on “Americanism” and denounced his son as “painfully un-American.”
Although the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare frightened many and silenced some, they did not kill the commitment to justice that had been at the heart of the bipartisan progressive movement before World War I. A core of progressives remained active, as they watched with dismay the cruel death of Wilsonian liberalism, hurled into a mass grave by Wilsonians who allowed “Americanism” to replace reform.
In 1920, Warren G. Harding, a congenial but lackluster senator from Ohio running for president on the Republican ticket, called for a “Return to Normalcy”: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.” He believed that the number of radicals in the United States had been greatly exaggerated, and announced that “too much has been said about Bolshevism in America.” Woodrow Wilson had refused to release Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s candidate for president who received one million votes while in prison, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for having said: “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder…. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles….” President Harding, on the other hand, pardoned Debs in 1921—and invited him to the White House. But, despite Harding’s pardon and Debs’s release after thirty-two months, the Red Scare continued throughout the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover decade.
During that entire time, ER was active in many of the groups and causes Palmer and his successors opposed, including the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Foreign Policy Association. Moreover, she publicly condemned the mean-spiritedness of the Red Scare and the excesses of many superpatriotic organizations.
As a member in good standing of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she was particularly outraged by the shift in its tone. It had been a progressive organization that supported suffrage, conservation, the League of Nations, federal aid to education, an end to child labor, and such social reforms as the Children’s Bureau and the Sheppard-Towner Act (guaranteeing maternity and infant health care). During the 1920s, new leadership emerged that transformed the DAR. It abandoned its former vision, purged all opposition, called for censorship of books and teachers, and sponsored wild antiradical tracts that outdid even the Department of War’s “Spider Web.” The DAR’s screed, “The Common Enemy,” expanded to ninety the list of un-American groups caught in the Bolshevik web. In addition to all those in the original web, as mapped out in 1924 by the librarian of the Chemical Warfare branch, Lucia Maxwell, the DAR included the YWCA, WCTU, NAACP, Federal Council of Churches, and U.S. Department of Labor.
ER was appalled. In the July 1927 issue of the Women’s Democratic News, which she edited, she suggested that “all our leaders,” the leaders of the women’s committee of the Democratic Party, read, circulate, and discuss an article critical of the DAR by Carrie Chapman Catt, which ER considered the most significant words written on the subject of the Red Scare.* Like Catt, ER believed that the Daughters had made a fundamental error: They had failed to recognize the real threat—all the economic and political factors that had led to the emergence of communist parties everywhere. Not until poverty and injustice were dealt with, she insisted, would the revolutionary threat disappear.
As early as 1919, ER was certain that progressive change was the answer: “Now everyone is concerned over strikes and labor questions and I realize more and more that we are entering on a new era where ideas and habits and customs are to be revolutionized if we are not to have another kind of revolution.” By 1927, she was convinced “oppression and suppression and the fear of those in places of power …have brought revolutions in the past and will do so again. Courage, justice and fair play do not breed revolutions, let us bear that in mind.”
OVER THE YEARS, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT BECAME IDENTIFIED with every progressive issue condemned as un-American. As a result, agents of the FBI recorded her speeches, clipped her columns, and monitored her every word in behalf of racial justice; international peace; the right to economic security and collective bargaining; the right to housing, health, and education; the hope for human rights around the globe.
But ER’s hostility to Palmer and to the activities of the Red Scare had not been immediate. The Roosevelts and the Palmers had in fact been friendly colleagues and neighbors during Wilson’s administration—they lived across the street from each other. On the evening of 2 June 1919, Palmer’s house was dynamited. Returning home after midnight from a formal dinner party, the Roosevelts were amazed by the commotion on quiet, tree-lined R street. Glass, debris, and blood were everywhere: Their windows were blown out, and the man who had thrown the bomb had been blown up. Shards of his bones were found for days.
ER related the scene to SDR: “We certainly had an exciting night and got to bed at 2:15 A.M.! It was a wonderful escape for the Palmers, if he had not gone to bed and had still been sitting in his sitting room in his usual chair he would have been blown to bits for there is nothing left of the chair. The roof of our sun parlor & our front windows on the lower floor don’t exist, all our front curtains & shades on all 3 floors were down, plaster fell promiscuously inside & out! James did not hear the explosion but heard the resulting confusion.” ER told James, her only child at home at the time, of the explosion “in the most matter of fact tone as though it was a daily occurrence and he returned to bed & sleep at once.” The Roosevelts offered to take the Palmers in, but they preferred to leave. “Now we are roped off and the police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every new bone found! I only hope the victim was not a poor passerby instead of the anarchist.”
IN 1919 AND 1920, AT A TIME WHEN MOST OF THE WOMEN AND men who were to become ER’s closest friends and allies were directly engaged in the political turbulence that swirled around her, ER herself was only marginally involved in the fray. In 1919, she was still a political bystander. But her own revolution, while largely private, was well under way.
During her years in Washington, her world fell apart and was reconstituted; her heart was devastated and refurbished; her direction changed. Subsequently she told her friends that she could forgive but could never forget. Cloaked by a mantle of lonely determination that occasionally made her seem cold and detached, she moved on. She contemplated new questions, and arrived at different decisions. Eventually she could say: “There was a time when I thought happiness did not matter but I think differently today.”
To reconstruct the process by which Eleanor Roosevelt transformed her life, we need to reconsider the holly grove dedicated to Clover Adams where, day after day, ER spent most of her quiet, solitary hours whenever she was in Washington during that year. It is a closed, secluded space, almost hidden, though at the center of the cemetery’s meadows. Stone benches designed by Stanford White face the imposing statue, with the haunting, handsome face for which both young men and women posed. Occasionally there is the sound of the wind and the songs of birds; nothing else disturbs the solitude.
In that sanctuary ER contemplated her life, the lives of women and of wives: She was connected to generations of Washington wives, married to officials and notables, with or without talents of their own, always with expectations and dreams, always with something special to contribute; mostly overworked, frequently ignored, generally misunderstood, often betrayed, casually mistreated.
In the Lincoln era, Marian Sturgis Hooper (Clover) represented the pinnacle of modem womanhood. Although her mother had died when she was five, her father, Robert William Hooper, a prominent physician, took pains to continue his wife’s commitment to the education of their daughters. Marian Hooper was educated in Greek, Latin, and the modern languages at Elizabeth Cary Agassiz’s school for girls in Cambridge. During the Civil War, she worked with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and in 1866, while on a trip to England with her father, she met Henry Adams, whom she married in 1872. In 1877, they moved to Washington, and eventually resided directly across the street from the White House. Clover Adams was known as the most considerate and brilliant hostess in town, and their Lafayette Square home quickly became the center of entertainment for political and intellectual leaders, including Eleanor’s Uncle Theodore and Aunt Bye.
It was generally alleged that Marian Sturgis Hooper Adams took her own life on 6 December 1885 at the age of forty-two, while in a profound depression over her father’s death. Clover Adams did indeed mourn her beloved father. Except for her sisters, who had done so much to extend education for women, and who had worked so hard to build the Harvard Annex, only he had seemed fully to understand her and to appreciate her wit and talents. But she had another cause for depression: her husband’s obsession with Elizabeth Cameron.
Those who claimed to know what went on behind the privets and façades of Washington society never doubted that Clover Adams drank that bottle of photographic acid when she learned of Henry Adams’s love for Elizabeth Cameron. Married to a powerful senator, William Don Cameron, and known as the “most beautiful woman in Washington,” Elizabeth rivaled Clover for Henry Adams’s affections. There were those who said their love was chaste; and Elizabeth explained that was out of her loyalty to that “lump of clay” she married. Chaste or lustful, their love was ardent. Henry Adams wrote Elizabeth Cameron in 1884: “I shall dedicate my next poem to you. I shall have you carved over the arch of my stone doorway. I shall publish your volume of extracts with your portrait on the title page. None of these methods can fully express the extent to which I am yours.”
While Henry Adams swooned in praise of Elizabeth Cameron, he discouraged his wife’s work. A diligent researcher and skilled translator, she contributed significantly to his histories. But he never acknowledged his wife, or expressed his gratitude in any public way. Rather, he wrote with horror of women’s intellectual ambitions:
Our young women are haunted by the idea that they ought to read, to draw, or to labor in some way …to “improve” their minds. They are utterly unconscious of the pathetic impossibility of improving those poor little hard, thin, wiry, one-stringed instruments which they call their minds, and which haven’t range enough to master one big emotion much less to express it in words or figures.
Longing for her own creative work, she achieved success with her photographic studies. But when her portraits were acclaimed and sought for publication, Henry Adams prohibited their sale.
Even as late as 1885, the year of Clover’s suicide, Henry Adams wrote a howling letter of protest to the American Historical Association when he found a woman historian listed in the program. How did his wife feel about his blistering contempt for educated women, including presumably all the women in her own family?*
After her death, Henry Adams never publicly referred to his wife again. He never mentioned her or even the fact of their twelve-year marriage in any of his writings. He destroyed much of her work, and burned every letter that had been sent to her, including her father’s entire correspondence, as well as his own early diaries. As he erased her name, he embarked upon a romance of Womanhood, dedicated himself to the celebration of women’s superior intellectual and emotional gifts, and arranged to be buried beside her upon his death.
Clover Adams took her own life a year after Eleanor Roosevelt’s birth, and Eleanor had heard the stories—the whispers and mysteries persisted. ER and Clover Adams shared a set of realities: the realities of women who have been trifled with, humiliated. And they shared a quest: During a time when women were without place or honor, they sought to live a generous life, to give of their talents and vision, to do significant work, to find meaningful activity. As ER contemplated the statue of Grief in that unmarked holly grove, she forged a healing bond with a stranger—a bond that helped to strengthen her to live the kind of life she wished to lead.
Over the years, ER brought many of her closest friends to see the statue. Those to whom she wanted to show something of her own hard-won struggles, something of her deepest feelings during those years of her greatest discontent, were generally invited to make a pilgrimage with her to Grief early in the days of their friendship.
It was not that ER was half in love with death. She did not romanticize suicide. Her instincts craved happiness and fulfillment. Sitting before the statue of Grief gave her permission to contemplate the great range of contradictory emotions she had struggled so hard to suppress. There she could cry and rage, and begin to feel the stirrings of understanding, forgiveness, hope.
IN 1919, ER’S LIFE SEEMED TO HANG SUSPENDED. AT THIRTY-five, she felt abandoned, and unlovely. She had felt abandoned before, but then she was young and life seemed so vast and mysterious. As an orphan of ten, she had a world of fantasies; as a Washington wife of thirty-five, she had a world of responsibilities. Her five children now ranged in age from three to thirteen. She did not want them to suffer, to experience upheaval or pain, or to wake up to the cold mornings of a house blanketed by betrayal, jealousy, and contempt. She had criticized her mother’s cold embrace, and now struggled to climb out of a frozen gloom all her own.
As she contemplated Clover Adams’s life, her thoughts turned to other women, other lives. Her Aunt Bye was thirty the year Clover Adams died—a dutiful daughter, a well-educated spinster. Everybody had relied on her many services and attentions, until, twelve years later, at the same age Clover Adams had ended her life, Bye married and created a new life for herself, though her family was greatly shocked and inconvenienced by her decision. Marie Souvestre created and recreated her life several times, and she always seemed entirely satisfied. ER’s mother, dead at twenty-nine, never had a chance to redefine or rebuild her life. And her grandmother, who lived a long and unhappy life, had refused every opportunity to change or enhance her circumstances.
ULTIMATELY, ER CONSIDERED GRANDMOTHER HALL’S UNhappiness critical to her own determination to begin again, to take charge of her life with a new authority, a bolder purpose. As ER explored the contours of her life, death was very near. On 14 August 1919, Grandmother Hall died. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of her father’s death. Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall died in her seventy-seventh year, in her home at Tivoli, where, ER wrote, “she would have wished to be.” ER and Franklin journeyed from Washington to be with her family: “Her life was a sad one in many ways, and yet those who were closest to her mourned her deeply and sincerely.”
ER considered her grandmother’s life largely wasted: “I wondered then and I wonder now whether, if her life had been less centered in her family group, that family group might not have been a great deal better off. If she had some kind of life of her own, what would have been the result?” ER recalled that when her grandmother “was young she painted rather well. Could she have developed that talent? I know that when she was young she might have had friends of her own, might even have married again. Would she have been happier, and would her children have been better off? She was not the kind of person who would have made a career independently; she was the kind of woman who needed a man’s protection. Her willingness to be subservient to her children isolated her, …and it might have been far better, for her boys at least, had she insisted on bringing more discipline into their lives simply by having a life of her own.”
Her grandmother’s unused capacity for a full life now intensified ER’s intention to recast her own. “I determined that I would never be dependent on my children by allowing all my interests to center in them.” Unlike her grandmother, ER would no longer allow anyone “to feel assured” of “love and unquestioned loyalty” unless it was justified by specific “behavior.”
As ER waited for the warming sun to heal her heart during those days she spent at Rock Creek Cemetery, a new resolve emerged. It came in the shape of words she repeated over and over again—words that were to be the banner of her adult life, words she repeated as advice to her many friends and the young people who would from then on enter her world, a new world of action and activism: “The life you live is your own.” “Life is meant to be lived.”
With those words, ER determined to take charge of every aspect of her world. Nothing would remain the same. To begin with, she fired all the servants in her Washington home. Perhaps she considered them disloyal—in collusion with Lucy Mercer, or her mother-in-law, or both—but her decision was stunning. Certainly they had come to represent her mother-in-law’s preferences, her mother-in-law’s tastes. ER realized that Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had never given up a shred of control in her own homes, had encouraged ER to surround herself with servants who bullied her, and who recognized her mother-in-law as the final arbiter of all decisions. She had allowed herself to give up a sweeping measure of independence and control. During the spring of 1919, in open defiance of her mother-in-law, ER suddenly staffed the entire household with black servants. Indeed, her timing was stunning: ER had the audacity to hire black servants when Wilsonian Washington was in a state of racial turmoil.
As America’s troops returned from Europe, those hired to replace them when they had left two years before, women and blacks particularly, were summarily fired. The intensified economic dislocation and competition added fuel to the fires of resentment that Wilson’s segregationist policies had ignited. During the spring and summer of 1919, racial tensions erupted in a series of race riots and racial confrontations throughout the country. The benefits of the war to make the world safe for democracy were to be restricted to whites. As Ku Klux Klan activists marched through black neighborhoods accompanied by jeering and violent white men still wearing their uniforms, African-American veterans and their families organized to defend themselves.
It was in that tense environment that ER replaced all her servants, retaining only an English nurse and a Scottish governess. Within “a day or two I had a new cook, kitchenmaid, butler and housemaid.” Steeped in the language of her class and culture, ER explained her decision in stereotypic racialist terms: Perhaps it was her Auntie Gracie’s “tales of the old and much-loved colored people on the plantation,” or perhaps it was “the Southern blood of my ancestors, but ever since I had been in Washington I had enjoyed my contact with such colored people as came to work for me. I have never regretted the change which I made when I completely staffed my house with colored servants….
“The colored race has the gift of kindliness and a fund of humor…. Though their eyes may mirror the tragedies of their race, they certainly have much to teach us in the enjoyment of the simple things of life and the dignity with which they meet their problems.”
ER wrote those words in 1937, when Washington was still as segregated as it had been under Wilson. During the summer of 1919, race riots transformed twenty-six U.S. cities into war zones, where black citizens, many still in uniform, were lynched with impunity and their homes were burned because they dared to organize to demand job opportunities, access to public beaches and parks, an end to discrimination. In response, throughout America, blacks armed themselves for self-defense and retaliation.
ER had decided to remain in town during part of the summer of 1919. Realizing that her traditional departures to Campobello had eased and encouraged her husband’s gambols, she also hoped that spending more time with Franklin might bring them closer together. So Eleanor and Franklin remained in Washington throughout June and spent part of July at Hyde Park. FDR then returned to spend some of August alone in Washington. Their time at Hyde Park had not been pleasant. ER’s new determination to do things her way led to acrimonious confrontations with her mother-in-law. There was tension between Eleanor and Sara over the children; over food, politics, money; over social attitudes and clothing styles. ER felt insulted and demeaned. Her temper flared and her disposition soured. When she left Sara and Hyde Park for the calm of the Delano family compound at Fairhaven, she was momentarily relieved to be alone again with the children. On 23 July, she wrote FDR: “I feel as though someone has taken a ton of bricks off me and I suppose she feels just the same.”
Although she had planned to vacation with the children at Fairhaven for several weeks, she soon changed her mind when race riots consumed Washington. For three days, she endured nerve-racking tension when she failed to hear from Franklin. “You seem to have had pretty bad race riots in Washington,” she wrote him. “Have you seen anything of them?” Then, the following day, “No word from you and I am getting very anxious on account of the riots. Do be careful not to be hit by stray bullets.” And on the day after that: “Still no letter or telegram from you and I am worried to death…. Even if something is wrong why don’t you let me know. I’d always rather know than worry. I couldn’t sleep at all last night thinking of all the things which might be the matter.”
ER was concerned about the riots, and she was suspicious. Was FDR alone? Was he even at home? Had he been shot, wounded, or killed? Or was he with Lucy Mercer, or another?
Their letters (which at the time took only a day to deliver) had crossed. On 22 July, he had written a glib and jaunty note:
It is surely a rainy time. It has poured ever since I got here…. This am I was awakened …by a drip, drip, drip and found your bureau afloat, rushed upstairs and found the sun parlor a lake. Worked hard for an hour in my pajamas with bath towels and tooth mugs and saved the house! Westcott will send a man.
Do hope you had a fairly good trip….
Kiss the chicks and I miss you so much.
Always unprepared to deal directly with the tensions between his mother and his wife, FDR concluded his letter: “Wasn’t it a nice 9 days at Hyde Park?”
Then, on the 23rd, he wrote again: “The riots seem to be about over today, only one man killed last night. Luckily the trouble hasn’t spread to R Street and though I have troubled to keep out of harm’s way I have heard occasional shots during the evening and night. It has been a nasty episode and I only wish quicker action had been taken to stop it.” FDR ended this letter by noting: “A letter from Mama this morning. It will amuse you as she says everything is going very smoothly!“
The “nasty episode” swamped Washington in terror and bloodshed. One of the most violent episodes of white racism since Reconstruction ravaged the black community for days. Law-enforcement officials and the military virtually ignored the mob violence, when they did not directly exacerbate it. Homes were burned; men, women, and children were beaten.
The actual riot began when two hundred sailors and Marines attempted to find and lynch two released youths accused of “jostling” and insulting the wife of a naval officer. White sailors marched into southwestern Washington and stopped every resident on the street. Women, men, and children returning home from school and work were questioned; every instance of resistance was met with violence. If Josephus Daniels or his assistant, FDR, made any effort to curtail the situation that first night, there is no record of it.
During that night, a black citizen shot and wounded an abusive police officer in self-defense. There were many witnesses and no disagreement as to what happened. But self-defense was an unacceptable breach of race etiquette in Wilson’s Washington. The next day, scores of white soldiers and sailors rampaged through the area, pulled women and men off streetcars, beat them senseless and unconscious. The violence went on for hours, and nothing was done to stop it. When the officials of the NAACP petitioned Secretary of the Navy Daniels to restrain the sailors and Marines responsible to his authority, Daniels rebuffed them without explanation; their petitions were simply ignored.
After two more nights of violence, The Washington Post headlined: “It was learned that a mobilization of every available serviceman …has been ordered for tomorrow evening…. The hour of assembly is 9 o’clock and the purpose is a ‘clean up’ that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”
This public threat and call to arms, this advertisement for an officially sanctioned lynching bee, was taken seriously. Throughout Washington, black citizens armed themselves for self-defense. Rumors persisted that Howard University’s ROTC prepared to distribute arms and ammunition to the attacked black community. For the next two days, attacks on black neighborhoods were resisted, and retaliatory attacks on white neighborhoods were made. Scores of people of both races were wounded and at least ten died. Seven hundred police and four hundred military officers attempted to quell the situation. But a wild mob of over a thousand white civilians stormed a cavalry cordon in an effort to destroy a black residential neighborhood. Even though homes were invaded and destroyed, blacks attempting to defend their property, themselves and their families were arrested, while the white mob rampaged through the night. In prison, those arrested were again beaten. Finally, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and Josephus Daniels called for self-control and prepared to bring in Marines from Quantico, sailors from two ships anchored in the Potomac, and additional troops from Camp Meade. With two thousand supplementary troops, a serious (though belated) appeal for an end to the assaults, and a driving rain, the riots began to subside.
As the wounded city healed, the NAACP demanded a congressional hearing into the violence and the officially accepted practice of lynching. A. Mitchell Palmer queried the district attorney’s office about the “unreasonable” bail and “extreme” sentences demanded for those blacks arrested, but refused to hold hearings. Some black organizations praised the “heroic resistance” of the community, which “defied the point of bayonets, the sting of blackjacks and the hail of bullets in defending themselves” against lynch mobs of white citizens who were never held accountable for their actions. Until people of color were actually protected by the law, and by a system of equal justice, they would have to prepare to defend themselves. One editorialist frankly concluded: “As the police have failed to protect the Negroes of the capital there is but one course open. Let every Negro arm himself and swear to die fighting in defense of his home, his rights and his person. In every place where the law will not protect their lives, Negroes should buy and hoard arms.” Although official Washington paid little heed, the Washington race riots of 1919 “gave birth to the new Negro,” and reignited the civil-rights crusade abandoned so quickly after Reconstruction.
A decade later, ER began to campaign for an enforceable antilynch law (which never passed), and an end to discrimination, prejudice, and segregation. But during the summer of 1919, she was concerned exclusively about her husband’s safety and whereabouts. On that score, his letters were not reassuring. His plans were vague, his hours of leisure many. There were no details to indicate precisely how or with whom they were spent: “I don’t know whether I shall be here Sunday or not. I have given up Norfolk…. I may go to Harrisburg to make a speech Sat. night and come back here Sunday. I long to have you back—very lonely, also hot again!”
ER planned to join him that Monday. FDR would meet the train, and they were to dine at Chevy Chase. But the party at Chevy Chase, which began as a celebratory reunion, turned into an unacceptable spree. FDR flirted and danced with others—including, evidently, Lucy Mercer—and his attentions seemed altogether elsewhere. ER left the party, insisting that FDR continue to enjoy himself. But she had forgotten her key. This was the final public episode in the Lucy Mercer story that over time gave Alice Roosevelt Longworth such pleasure in the telling. When FDR returned home toward dawn with his cousins Irene and Warren Delano Robbins, ER had been waiting, asleep, on the doormat for almost six hours. Years later, in You Learn by Living, ER wrote that she had made FDR “feel guilty by the mere fact of having waited” for her gay blade to come home.
However much this display might have gratified her momentarily, ER understood that she needed to care less about her husband’s activities and more about her own. Neither his joy nor his guilt could satisfy her own increasing longing for some interests and some community of her own. She longed for new friends to whom she could turn for fun, companionship, diversion; confidantes with whom she could talk and share her life. All the relationships in her life were in disarray.
As ER contemplated the changed circumstances of her life, she felt a great empty space. Above all, she wanted serious work of her own. She wanted, in fact, to participate in the very aspects of life traditionally denied to women—who were, after all, supposed to find total satisfaction in their husbands and homes and the unfolding lives of their children. From 1905 to 1919, ER had imagined that she might be satisfied by her efforts to fulfill her husband’s needs and promote the happiness of his hearth. Immediately after her marriage, she withdrew from her interests and many of her friends, and confided only in her baby nurse, Blanche Spring. Of that period, she wrote: “I do not remember having any other friends.” “My family filled my life.”
For fifteen years, she kept up with only two friends, her childhood companions Isabella Selmes and Bob Ferguson. Although they lived in New Mexico and she saw them infrequently, correspondence had, beginning with her father, “meant much” to ER: “I would often have been lonely in my life if it had not been for letters. I have always had many people about me but few close friends.”
As FDR’s interests expanded and included new friends concerned primarily with his well-being, his happiness, and his future, ER felt increasingly lonely and alone. While she cared for the moods and the needs of others, there was nobody in her life who cared very much about her.
She had been a model Washington wife, and she was proud of her “feats of endurance.” Official trips built up her stamina, revealed many hidden reservoirs of strength and perseverance. She learned that she could be tired and go right on with her obligations. “I could never say in the morning ‘I have a headache and cannot do thus and so.’ Headache or no headache, thus and so had to be done, and no time could be wasted. I could not be a burden and add any care to a man who had plenty of official things to do.”
During the summer and autumn of 1919, ER addressed the depth of her discontent and acknowledged her confusion. In September, she returned to Hyde Park, still unsettled in her feelings toward FDR. When he left for a short trip, she wrote: “I’m glad you enjoyed your holiday dear. & I wish we did not lead such a hectic life, a little prolonged quiet might bring us altogether & yet it might do just the opposite! I really don’t know what I want or think about anything anymore!”
But she increasingly resented FDR’s refusal to leave his mother’s homes. As she felt more estranged from him, she grew to hate his childhood environs, his mother’s daily presence, her presumptuous dominance. On 3 October, ER wrote from Hyde Park: “Mama and I have had a bad time. I should be ashamed of myself but I’m not.” For over fifteen years, ER had hoped that by being the perfect wife and the perfect daughter-in-law she might win her mother-in-law’s acceptance and approval, perhaps even a corner of her heart. Now, no matter how hard she tried, it felt a bottomless well of vain effort.
Even with her children she was eclipsed by SDR, entrapped by conventions, and regularly confronted by Sara’s opposition and frank subversion. ER’s efforts at maternal discipline and concerned love were no match for her mother-in-law’s imaginative largesse and unlimited bounty. Granny pampered the children with generous gifts that devoured parental authority. Over time, SDR would replace a car smashed by an errant college boy while driving drunk, just as swiftly as she had replaced toys broken by hapless toddlers. She took two of her grandchildren on the European grand tour that ER herself had longed to make with them, and in many other ways came between Eleanor and her children. If ER complained, she was made to seem a cold, uncaring ogre.
Sara Delano Roosevelt expected her daughter-in-law to transcend it all, carry on with a cheerful demeanor: for the children, for the family, for the future. ER was not supposed to have a life of her own. With her emotional life discounted, ER felt again an outsider with no safe space for her feelings. ER and her mother-in-law quarreled; they grew cold and distant; they hurt each other.
After every argument, every scene, ER felt remorse, and more estranged. On 6 October, she wrote a letter of apology:
I know, Mummy dear, I made you feel most unhappy the other day and I am so sorry I lost my temper and said such fool things for of course as you know I love Franklin and the children very dearly and I am deeply devoted to you. I have, however, allowed myself to be annoyed by little things which of course one should never do and I had no right to hurt you as I know I did and am truly sorry and hope you will forgive me.
On 11 October 1919, ER, alone on her birthday, wrote in her journal, “I am 35. Margaret and Hall sent me a book. Mama and Tissie and Franklin wired.” Her birthday seemed no particular cause for celebration that year. She was in Washington. SDR was in Hyde Park. FDR was on his way to a hunting trip in New Brunswick with his friends. There was as yet no particular friend of her own that she might have dined with, no circle of friends who might have surprised her with a cake.
That October, however, ER made her first contact with “women’s organizations interested in improving working conditions for women.” From 28 October to 5 November, representatives from nineteen nations attended the International Congress of Working Women in Washington, chaired and largely financed by Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the Women’s Trade Union League, which existed above all to promote the organization of women into unions. Because so many delegates could not speak English, ER and other Washington wives who spoke several languages volunteered their services. “I liked all the women very much indeed, but I had no idea how much more I was going to see of them in the future.”
At the height of the Red Scare of 1919, ER joined the activist labor women who were to become her lifelong friends and allies. The U.S. delegation included union activists Rose Schneiderman, Leonora O’Reilly, Maud O’Farrell Swartz, Mary Anderson, Fannia Cohn, Julia O’Connor, Lois Rantoul, representatives of the Women’s Trade Union League, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Telephone Operators, the waitresses’ union, various teachers’ unions, boot and shoe workers, the Federal Employees Union, and many other groups then assailed as subversive, dangerous, un-American.
Margaret Dreier Robins and her husband, Raymond Robins, were progressive Republicans. Passionate about peace, full employment, union protection, and economic security for all, the Robinses had been quickly added to the long lists of subversives being compiled by John Edgar Hoover, a new bureau chief in Wilson’s Justice Department. Like ER, Margaret Dreier Robins was independently wealthy, and used her inheritance to support the causes she believed in: “I never earned a dollar of it and I recognize that I hold it in trust.”
Margaret Dreier Robins opened the First International Congress of Working Women in 1919 with an angry denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, for feminist reasons: “Women had no direct share in the terms of the Peace Treaty. It’s a man-made peace. Women have had no direct share in the labor platform with its emphasis on the protection of women in industry rather than its emphasis on the participation of women in plans to protect themselves which is significant of the attitude of men, even in the labor movement, toward women.”
The Labor Platform that she now called for demanded a universal eight-hour day for workingwomen, and laws guaranteeing maternity benefits, before, during, and after childbirth. The Congress heard a petition from the two million “Negro Women Laborers of the U.S.” who were not represented, and asked for cooperation “in organizing the Negro women workers of the U.S. into unions, that they may have a share in bringing about industrial democracy and social order in the world.”
ER was impressed by the women who gathered for this first International Congress of Working Women. She was interested in their ideas, and invited the U.S. delegation and several others to her home for lunch. From that moment on, she supported their efforts. Over the years, she sought their advice on national policies. But in 1919, she might have been as intrigued by the unusual marital partnership between Margaret Dreier Robins and her husband as she was by her vision. Married the same year as ER, the Robinses had exchanged unusual vows: They promised each other independence and unity, the “unhampered freedom to serve.” They might work together or separately, but each agreed “to work untrammeled for the growing good of the world.”
Philanthropists and activists, they were long identified with the peace movement, unionism, women’s rights, the Chicago settlement-house movement, and TR’s Progressive Party. In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt had written to Raymond Robins that his friendship was a particular “honor of which all my life I shall be proud.” A businessman and an adventurer, Robins was both practical idealist and romantic mystic. Leonard Woolf, who posthumously published Robins’s sister’s celebration of his adventurous years in Alaska (Elizabeth Robins’s Raymond and I), called him a quixotic “crusader on behalf of any peoples or persons whom he thought to be despised, downtrodden, or persecuted.” But in the United States in 1919, he was attacked as a Bolshevik.
He was, after all, the most outspoken opponent of the Allied Intervention against Russia. In 1917, as head of the Red Cross Commission to revolutionary Russia, Robins had established a working relationship with Lenin and counseled continued commercial relations with the new government. He argued that it was folly to attempt to destroy Bolshevism by starving the Russian people. He criticized the blockade, and when Wilson decided, in July 1919, to join Britain, France, and Japan in the counterrevolutionary military intervention, Robins returned to the United States to protest.
At the same time, on 10 July, Wilson presented the Treaty of Versailles and his League proposals to the Senate. Ignoring all the imperial deals, border disputes, and military activities in Europe, Wilson’s rhetoric focused entirely on the League, a future of democracy and self-determination: “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”
For Robins, and for the thirty-nine Senate “irreconcilables” led by William E. Borah, Henry Cabot Lodge, and others particularly faithful to Theodore Roosevelt, the League now meant only entangling alliances and deadly military adventures that would devour capital and inhibit the growth of business and international commerce.
League opponents differed in tactics. Borah, an absolute “irreconcilable,” opposed the League absolutely. Lodge was willing to compromise: To parallel Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he introduced fourteen amendments to protect America’s national sovereignty, and a fifteenth that called for the independence of Ireland.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s association with her new friends put her at odds with the administration her husband served. Although ER hoped that the United States would enter the League, she agreed with the need for Lodge’s amendments, and hoped particularly that Congress would retain the right to declare war anywhere and at all times.
ER never quite warmed to Woodrow Wilson. He did not evoke warmth particularly. He was rude to individuals, contemptuous of entire groups, and never notably interested in seeing or hearing very much around him. She judged him harshly for his lack of concern for people, especially young people, and his failure to read the newspapers, a fact about which he boasted. In Europe, she regretted that even on official inspection tours of hospitals and other centers of human interest he seemed uninterested: “I can’t say the President looked as though he saw much!” Still, she agreed with his rhetoric concerning the League of Nations: a forum for negotiation, arbitration, and peace was “the only hope for mankind.”
But almost immediately on their return from Europe, the Roosevelts were perceived as allied with Wilson’s enemies. Wilson distrusted Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt; and he evidently told Josephus Daniels that he “hated” FDR. Above all, he despised the Roosevelt friendship with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s former foreign secretary who had returned to the United States to persuade Wilson to accept Lodge’s amendments. Britain favored U.S. participation in the League on any terms.
Grey had been an intimate friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and a family friend for many years. Now old and almost blind, he had agreed to go to Washington because he believed Wilson would see him; talk with him. He had, after all, long supported the idea of a League of Nations. He had no idea, nor did anybody else, just how infirm, peevish, distrustful Wilson had become, or how intransigent. Wilson refused even to see him.
ER invited Sir Edward to dinner on several occasions. She also invited Alice Longworth, who had dedicated herself to Wilson’s destruction. Alice Roosevelt Longworth had become maniacal in her hatred of Wilson and the League. She blamed him for her father’s sudden death, and fervently believed that the Rough Rider would have been re-elected president in 1920. She kept a doll representing Wilson into which she regularly stuck pins. She met his train at Union Station and stood anonymously on the curbstone, fingers crossed, making the “sign of the evil eye,” incanting over and over: “A murrain on him! A murrain on him!” Wilson’s opponents were known as the “Battalion of Death,” and she was their acknowledged “Colonel of Death.” Daily, she and Ruth Hanna McCormick watched the Senate debates until 3:00 A.M. and returned at ten that same morning to cheer the most insistent irreconcilables: Ruth’s husband, Medill, and her friend William Borah. But she continued to dine with Cousin Eleanor and Franklin, and was at their home to entertain Sir Edward Grey.
Moreover, ER invited Grey not only for occasional dinners but also for Christmas, an intimate family affair attended only by the Howes and their children and Sara Delano Roosevelt. The Wilsons were evidently appalled.
His mission a failure, Grey returned to London in January 1920 and wrote a letter to the London Times to state that in his opinion the Lodge amendments were insignificant. Tensions escalated; Wilson refused to negotiate, even after Lodge indicated that he would compromise further. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty; Wilson’s diplomacy ended in disaster and ER would spend over a decade in an ardent campaign to promote America’s entrance into the League and the World Court.
AS ER’S MOST TUMULTUOUS YEAR ENDED, SHE CAST ABOUT for a new way to be. She acknowledged her loneliness and yearning for change, looked for new alliances and new work to do. There seemed at first nobody she could turn to for advice or encouragement. Her godmother and former confidante Cousin Susie Parish was increasingly incapacitated by profound psychological maladies. ER was disturbed by her self-indulgence and distressed by her reactionary political and social views.
ER had been concerned about Cousin Susie for years. Although she was devoted to her godmother, and visited her whenever she was in New York, she confided to Isabella that “the root of all her trouble” was her addiction to prescription drugs, pain killers and antidepressants—laudanum, Eudunal, and “lately Veronal,” which “undermined her health and I think her character.” ER was also convinced that another part of her problem was that she never “had to consider anyone but herself.” After spending “three months with Dr. Riggs [in Stockbridge],” Cousin Susie “returned to taking no interest in life, dreading the lightest care or even the thought of seeing a friend. The root of it all is that she cares for no one sufficiently to forget herself…. She was a spoiled child and a spoiled woman and never was forced to sink her own feelings in anyone else’s good.”
The Delano women, who had once seemed to ER models of generosity and familial love, now seemed to her arrogant and overbearing. One evening, after dinner with her mother-in-law and her sisters, Aunt Dora and Aunt Kassie, ER wrote Franklin: “They all in their serene assurance and absolute judgments on people and affairs going on in the world, make me want to squirm and turn bolshevik.”
Her maternal aunts were also unavailable. Aunt Tissie, who wrote with frequent concern, lived largely in England; Aunt Maude was preoccupied with David Gray, her new husband, and her new home in Portland, Maine. Aunt Pussie, always mercurial and emotionally overwrought, had lived for some time in California, but had recently divorced her husband, Forbes Morgan, a nephew of J. P. Morgan, and returned to New York. But on 4 February 1920, she perished with her two young daughters, Barbara (fourteen) and Ellen (ten), in a mysterious and tragic fire that sent billows of smoke throughout her Greenwich Village carriage house on 9th Street. Trapped in an upstairs bedroom, they were overcome by the smoke while neighbors tried desperately but unsuccessfully to rouse the fire department.
This final tragedy in the life of Edith Livingston Ludlow Hall Morgan, thought by many to be the model for Edith Wharton’s complex and doomed Lily Bart in her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, added another jolt to the course of ER’s life during the first months of 1920. Alone in New York, then enveloped by one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history, ER made all the funeral arrangements: “It was one of those horrors I can hardly bear to think of…. To this day I cannot bear any funeral parlor.”
New York was at a standstill. In the solitude of her grim errands, as she walked back and forth across Central Park to complete the details, ER mourned the woman who had once “called out my deepest admiration and devotion.” Aunt Pussie was the first to take ER to the theatre and the opera; she introduced her to the mysteries of music, the beauty and rhythm of poetry. Aunt Pussie and Aunt Maude, who was delayed by the blizzard on her journey from Maine, were ER’s “early loves and few women since have seemed to me to surpass them in beauty and charm.” But Pussie had never been dependable in her affections: Flamboyantly generous, she could be cruel and petty. Her insults had devastated the young ER, and the harsh, careless way she told her about her father’s life had been unforgivable. Now, however, ER concentrated on what she might have been. Women’s abilities were never encouraged or much valued in Pussie’s world; and ER mourned especially a creative life misspent: “Given greater discipline, the drive of necessity and wider opportunities, I believe that Pussie might have been an artist of real quality.”
ER wrote Isabella Ferguson: “If it were not for the horror, I would feel sure that Pussie was happier than she’s ever been here. She could not meet an everyday existence, [although] she had some lovely qualities and was always groping for spiritual thoughts. Forbes …had a deep affection for her and loved the children and often went to see them but no one could live with her. Isn’t it a strange world, tragedies on every side in life and death and yet so much kindness, goodness and helpfulness that one knows it must all be for some worthwhile end.”
The three bodies were buried at Tivoli, in the family vault, “where the summer before, we had laid my grandmother. I could not help being devoutly thankful that my grandmother was dead. One more tragedy in her life had been avoided.”
During this ordeal, ER realized consciously for the first time in her adult life how much she needed to feel in charge, and she allowed herself to appreciate the range of her own managerial skills. Pussie’s husband and her entire family welcomed her support and advice, and were grateful for her presence and direction: “It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with other human beings creates a bond which nothing seems able to break…. Happiness will not lead you to feel that your presence is always welcome should an emergency arise, but a period of stress lived through together will give you this assurance.” With her Aunt Maude, Forbes Morgan, and William Forbes Morgan, Jr., who had been at boarding school, ER consciously experienced that assurance, and concluded that it was above all “the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.”
Months later, as ER prepared to leave Washington and the official chores of her role as wife to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, as she packed to leave R Street and eight years of obligations and social responsibility, she understood how much she had missed that sense of being needed and wanted Determined to embark on a new life, she broke no ties, created no public disturbances. The Roosevelt hearth seemed steady and united, a partnership of trust and mutual regard. Few recognized that its survival depended on shared political enthusiasms, and the most painfully derived understanding and respect.