• • •
If Franklin thought that marriage represented an escape from his mother, he was wrong, for she was unable to back off and he was unable to make her go. Instead, he allowed her to compete with Eleanor for his devotion, build a town house in New York that adjoined his and Eleanor’s, retain the purse strings for the family, and share with Eleanor in the task of raising their children.
Over the years, Franklin’s failure to separate from his mother would play a major role in undermining his marriage, but for now, as we seek to understand the wellspring of the president’s equanimity as he faced the Nazi threat in June 1940, it must be recognized that his mother’s unequivocal love for him remained a powerful source of strength all the days of his life. “Reasonable it is to assume,” the Ladies’ Home Journal correctly surmised shortly after Roosevelt moved into the White House, “that much of the President’s strength in facing incredible obstacles [was] planted in a childhood presided over by a mother whose broad viewpoint encompasses the art of living.”
To be sure, other factors contributed to the president’s sublime confidence, chief among them his mental victory over polio, which strikingly confirmed his native optimism. “I think,” Eleanor said, “probably the thing that took most courage in his life was his meeting of polio and I never heard him complain . . . . He just accepted it as one of those things that was given you as discipline in life . . . . And with each victory, as everyone knows, you are stronger than you were before.”
But in the end, no factor was more important in laying the foundation of the president’s confident temperament than his mother’s early love. So it was that, as Hitler journeyed triumphantly to Paris, Roosevelt returned quietly to Hyde Park, the locus of his earliest memories, the nest in which his expansive personality unfolded most freely.
CHAPTER 4
“LIVING HERE IS VERY OPPRESSIVE”
As the White House geared the country for war in the spring of 1940, Eleanor became increasingly depressed. For seven years, through days that began at 6 a.m. and ended long after midnight, she had carved out a significant role for herself as her husband’s partner in social reform. She believed in what she was doing and knew that her work was respected by millions of people, including, most crucially, her husband. “The President was enormously proud of her ability . . . ,” Frances Perkins confirmed. “He said more than once, ‘You know, Eleanor really does put it over. She’s got great talent with people.’ In cabinet meetings, he would say, ‘You know my Missus gets around a lot . . . my missus says they have typhoid fever in that district . . . my Missus says that people are working for wages way below the minimum set by NRA in the town she visited last week.’”
Now, however, with the president concerned about little but munitions and maneuvers, Eleanor felt a sense of remoteness, a lack of connection to both her husband and the major issue of the day. Robbed of desire, she moved mechanically through her duties; all sense of challenge seemed to have fled. “All that she had worked for over so many years was now in jeopardy,” Eleanor’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt observed. “She feared that everything would be taken away from her—her value, her usefulness, her role.”
“Living here is very oppressive,” she confessed to her daughter, Anna, “because Pa visualizes all the possibilities, as of course he must and you feel very impotent to help. What you think or feel seems of no use or value so I’d rather be away and let the important people make their plans and someday I suppose they will get around to telling us plain citizens if they want us to do anything,”
Eleanor had an intriguing idea: she would see if she could go to Europe with the Red Cross to help organize the relief effort for refugees. It seemed to her the perfect solution—the chance to relieve suffering and dislocation while at the same time to be right in the thick of things, delivering clothing, blankets, and medical supplies to shelters in bombed-out cities, organizing hot meals for children in schools and canteens, giving first-aid instruction to civilians.
Eleanor had worked with the Red Cross before. While she and Franklin were in Washington during World War I, she had run a canteen at Union Station. Clad in the familiar khaki uniform, she and her fellow volunteers had handed out cups of coffee, newspapers, sandwiches, candy, and cigarettes to trainloads of soldiers en route to army camps and ports of embarkation. “I loved it,” she said later. “I simply ate it up.” Freed by the war from the social duties she detested, she was able, for the first time in her married life, to spend her days doing work she truly enjoyed.
Indeed, so much had Eleanor loved her work with the Red Cross that summer of 1918 that she had offered her services to go overseas. Many women she knew were working in canteens near the front in France, and she felt that their work was more central to the war. “Yet,” she lamented in her memoirs, “I knew no one would help me to get permission to go, and I had not acquired sufficient independence to go about getting it for myself.”
Now, twenty-two years later, she was the first lady and she had a plan. On May 12, she was scheduled to accompany her husband on a cruise down the Potomac River on the presidential yacht, U.S.S. Potomac., Included in the president’s party were Missy, Attorney General and Mrs. Robert Jackson, and the object of Eleanor’s campaign, the chairman of the Red Cross, Norman Davis, a white-haired, ruddy-complexioned man of sixty years.
For the president, the Potomac offered the perfect escape from both the heat of Washington and the persistent ring of the telephone. Having loved the water since he was a child, he enjoyed nothing more than sitting on the deck, an old hat shading his head from the sun, a fishing rod in his hands. The Potomac was not a luxury liner, but a converted Coast Guard patrol boat, rough and ready, tending to roll with the waves, a sailor’s boat, with a fair top speed of sixteen knots.
It was a brilliant afternoon, with blue skies and a strong breeze, but even the most perfect day for cruising could not still the anxiety Eleanor felt, the legacy of a frightful childhood experience during a trip to Europe with her parents, when their ship, the Britannica, was hit by another ship. The collision beheaded a child and killed a number of other passengers. Amid the “cries of terror,” the two-and-one-half-year-old Eleanor clung frantically to the men who were attempting to throw her over the side of the ship into the arms of her father, standing in a lifeboat below. The transfer was eventually accomplished, but a fear of the sea was ingrained in the small child which the adult woman could never fully shake. In the early days of her marriage, knowing how much Franklin loved to sail, Eleanor had made a concentrated effort to conquer her panic, but in recent years, except on special occasions such as this particular cruise, she generally stepped aside and allowed Missy to take her place.
On deck, the president’s party gathered in a circular lounge equipped with heavy cushions, easy chairs, and tables. There, as the president relaxed with his fishing rod, Eleanor zeroed in on the chairman of the Red Cross. Davis, a peace-minded idealist who had been appointed to the chairmanship by Roosevelt in 1938 after serving under two previous presidential administrations, listened with genuine interest to Mrs. Roosevelt’s proposal, but knew he could not say yes until he talked it over with his fellow Tennessean, Secretary of State Cordell Hull. So the matter rested while the Potomac continued its lazy cruise down the river, returning to the Washington Navy Yard after ten o’clock that night.
The following day, Davis discussed Eleanor’s proposal with Secretary Hull. The spring of 1940 was a critical period for the American Red Cross. For months, while Germany marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland, Davis had maintained a policy of “extreme circumspection,” trying to keep a neutral attitude in the tradition of the International Red Cross. But with the German invasion of Western Europe, all pretense to neutrality was cast aside. At the moment of Eleanor’s request, the Red Cross was focusing all its relief efforts entirely on those nations that were being overrun by Germany. If Eleanor were to join the Red Cross in Europe now, she would be placing herself in a dangerous situation.
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At another moment, Eleanor was told, it might have worked, but now, because of “the imminence and possibility of a Hitler victory” and because “the capture of a President’s wife would be a serious matter,” her request was denied.
• • •
Two weeks later, Eleanor suffered an additional disappointment when her young friends in the American Youth Congress turned on her for supporting her husband’s call for rearmament. Throughout the 1930s, Eleanor had developed a special bond with the young activists involved with the AYC, an umbrella organization including members of the YMCA, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the Popular Front. Though she knew that some of the young people belonged to the Communist League, she trusted that the majority were liberals like herself, committed to social reform and collective security. In recent months, her trust had been tested as the AYC, following the flip-flop of Soviet policy in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, had abruptly shifted its stance from pro-New Deal collective security to antiwar isolationism. Still, she refused to give up on her young friends, believing that with her support the liberals would win out.
To this end, she agreed to address the closing session of the Youth Congress at the Mecca Temple on West 56th Street in New York on May 26, 1940. Reaching out to the antiwar crowd, she admitted that she knew all too well how futile war was as a means of solving problems. “You don’t want to go to war,” she said simply. “I don’t want to go to war. But war may come to us.” Declaring that England had long “been asleep” and therefore totally surprised by Hitler’s onslaught, she told the delegates it was necessary to arm in order to avoid the same crisis. “I think occasionally in the world, you are faced with events over which you have no control.” However, she added, her definition of a defense program included, in addition to arms, more and better housing, expansion of the health program, and continuation of work relief until everyone had a job.
The delegates listened in sullen silence, extending only polite applause when she finished. Harlem Representative Vito Marcantonio, who cast the only vote in Congress against the president’s defense program, received a standing ovation far exceeding in volume and length that accorded to Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing what he called a “war hysteria” in Congress, Marcantonio charged that the president’s defense program was bound to “take us right into the meat-grinder of European battlefields.” The only purpose of the war, he went on, as the delegates jumped to their feet, cheering, whistling, and stomping, was to “defend the American dollar and the British pound.”
“Poor Mrs. Roosevelt!” The New York Times editorialized after her Mecca Temple speech. “After mothering this brood of youngsters . . . harboring them under her wing at White House teas, she suddenly discovers them to be ducklings taking to the water of Communist propaganda as to their natural element. Her scolding did no good . . . . They refused to reconsider their resolution against preparedness.”
When Eleanor reached her Village apartment that night, she called Joe Lash, who had been in the audience, to see what he thought of her speech. He answered honestly, saying he didn’t feel she had convinced anyone, that even their polite applause “was to demonstrate their views to her rather than to appreciate what she had to say to them.” Normally, Eleanor was able to accept criticism as a matter of course, but on this night, gloom crowded in on her. The many small struggles of political life suddenly became too much, and she felt terribly weary.
In the days that followed, emptiness and exhaustion set in. Eleanor’s mood became unpredictable, shifting from placid to sullen to stern in a matter of hours. “I really think,” a worried Tommy confided to Anna in mid-June, “and this is strictly between you and me, that your mother is quite uncontented . . . . She has wanted desperately to be given something really concrete and worth while to do in this emergency and no one has found anything for her. They are all afraid of political implications etc. and I think she is discouraged and a bit annoyed about it. She spoke to your father and to H[arry] H[opkins] and Norman Davis. Outside of making two radio speeches for the Red Cross she has not been asked to do anything. She works like Hell all the time and we are busier than ever, but . . . she wants to feel she is doing something worthwhile and it makes me mad, because she has so much organizing and executive ability she could do a swell job on anything she undertook . . . . I hate to see her not visibly happy and I feel powerless to do anything about it. She would probably dismember me if she knew I wrote this to you, but I know you are about the only one to whom I could write like this and have it end with you.”
Eleanor’s dark mood was barely visible to the outside world. To rant or rave, to create a scene, was not her way. Believing that her best recourse was to escape from Washington—“anything that makes me forget the war clouds,” she confessed, “is a blessing these days”—she embarked on a series of journeys in late May and early June—a week in New York, an expedition to Appalachia, and then a return trip to New York.
In traveling to Arthurdale, the small homestead community in the hills of West Virginia that she had vigorously supported over the years, Eleanor hoped to buoy her spirits. Considered “Eleanor’s baby,” Arthurdale was a product of the imagination of the early New Deal, an attempt to relieve the desolation of the hundreds of miners and their families who had been stranded in Scott’s Run, West Virginia, when the mines were permanently closed. With Eleanor’s backing, the government had advanced the capital for the construction of a school, a community center, and fifty farmhouses, hoping to see under what conditions part-time farming and industrial employment could be combined. Once the structures were completed, fifty families were invited in, on the promise that they would repay the government in thirty years.
But the key to whether the transplanted miners could make a living and repay the government was the successful establishment of an industry within the community to go along with the subsistence farming, and that task had proved more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Fearing that a government-subsidized factory would destroy private industry, Congress had refused to appropriate the funds for the factory, forcing the homesteaders to rely solely on their farms for their livelihood. Eleanor would not be defeated, however, and over the years she had managed to help the homesteaders in a hundred ways: a special grant here, a WPA project there, a government-subsidized nursery school here, a craft shop there.
But during this visit, her energies already depleted, Eleanor came to see the price of her continued support. So dependent on her had the homesteaders become that when their school bus broke down they sent it to the White House garage for repairs. “Deeply disillusioned” at the sight of what she now recognized as a frightful loss of initiative, she admitted to Joe Lash when she returned to New York that “they seemed to feel the solution to all their problems was to turn to government.”
In New York, the days were more pleasant. Speaking to an overflowing audience of students at City College, she received a standing ovation. Touring the exhibits at the New York World’s Fair, she was met everywhere she went by a huge, friendly crowd, waving to her, throwing out kisses, calling out, “God Bless You.” The lights, the attention, the universal murmurs of support were still there, but as soon as she returned to the White House, it all disappeared. The problem was not simply, as she wrote, “the anxiety which hangs over everybody,” the exhaustion that comes from “the state of apprehension in which we are living,” but, rather, her sense of being cut off from her husband at this critical time.
In the past, Eleanor’s trips around the country had been a source of fascination and pleasure to the president, who delighted in the thought-provoking stories she invariably carried back. Over the years, a cherished tradition had evolved. The first night of Eleanor’s return, he would clear his calendar so the two of them could sit alone at dinner and talk, so he could hear her impressions while they were still fresh. These long, relaxing talks had become the bond between husband and wife, a source of continued enjoyment in one another.
Bu
t when Eleanor returned to the White House after her trips to Arthurdale and New York, she was told the president had no time for their traditional dinner. She could join him in his study for a meal, but Harry Hopkins would also be there. At dinner, she tried to engage her husband in a conversation about Arthurdale, but it was clear from the start that his thoughts were following a train of their own. The conversation quickly turned to the war, with Hopkins holding forth at great length. As Eleanor listened to Harry talk, it became obvious that he was far better acquainted with the subject than she was, though how he had learned so much about military matters in such a short time she simply could not fathom. Having little to add, she sat in silence, feeling unwanted and irrelevant.
But Franklin, perhaps feeling the difficulty of Eleanor’s position on a night meant for the two of them alone, returned the conversation to domestic affairs and the New Deal. Eleanor took the opening and proceeded to pour out all her worries about the domestic situation, the recent cut in the food allowance for unemployed mothers, a new study on the spread of illiteracy, the civil-liberties questions involved in fingerprinting aliens, the need for greater housing programs and more old-age pensions.
The next day, Eleanor felt, in her own words, “terribly guilty,” confessing to Joe Lash that she shouldn’t have distracted the president with stuff that didn’t relate directly to the international crisis, that he had listened to her late into the night and then worried about all the issues she raised until all hours of the morning.
As guilt and sadness overwhelmed her, Eleanor’s feelings of loss focused on Harry Hopkins. Of all the people in the administration, Eleanor felt most closely connected to Hopkins. Indeed, it was her appreciation, back in 1928, for the work this impassioned young social worker had done in New York that had brought Harry to the president’s attention in the first place, setting in motion his remarkable career as head of the largest work-relief program in the history of the country, a program that at one point employed more than 30 percent of the unemployed at a cost of $6 billion.