“The worst mother is better than the best institution,” Mayor LaGuardia argued in January 1943, and few officials publicly disagreed. So prevalent was the theory that mothers belonged at home that Frances Perkins, the sole woman in the Roosevelt Cabinet, felt compelled to speak up against government-sponsored day care. “What are you doing,” Perkins asked the chief of the Children’s Bureau, Katherine Lenroot, “to prevent the spread of the day nursery system which I regard as a most unfortunate reaction to the hysterical propaganda about recruiting women workers.”
Undeterred, Eleanor stepped up her campaign for day care. Whether one felt it advisable or not for women to work, the fact remained that women were working: more than three million new women had entered the work force between 1940 and 1942, and three million more were expected to enter before the war was over, bringing the total of female workers to nineteen million. Furthermore, the profile of the female worker was changing. Whereas the majority of women workers had been young and single, now 75 percent were married, 60 percent were over thirty-five, and more than 33 percent had children under fourteen. Without day care, Eleanor argued, there was a real danger of child neglect.
From war centers across the country, disturbing reports were coming in of makeshift, unsatisfactory solutions to the child-care problem. In one family in Chicago, Fortune reported in February 1943, “a 9 year old boy gets up in a cold house, rouses and feeds his 4 year old sister, delivers her to kindergarten on his way to school, takes her home and prepares her lunch, then locks her in the house while he returns to school.” In another family in Connecticut, The Saturday Evening Post reported, “a woman in the graveyard shift drives her car close to the windows of the place where she is employed and her four children sleep in the automobile.” In California, a four-year-old girl is found with a box of matches in her hands. She has been trying to light the gas stove as her mother does. The teenage girl who was supposed to baby-sit for her had not shown up.
“These are not isolated cases,” The Saturday Evening Post concluded after sending a team of reporters around the country. “You can multiply them and cases like them by the thousands. First let it be understood that this country has long had a serious child care problem never adequately met. Now the industrial upheaval of war is blowing up the child care problem to the proportions of an enormous and thinly stretched balloon.”
Believing that child neglect was verging on a national scandal, Eleanor pleaded with Kaiser to create a model child-care center that could serve as a prototype for other wartime industries. Kaiser empathized with Eleanor’s concern. More than four thousand of the sixteen thousand women at Swan Island and Oregonship, the two Kaiser shipyards in Portland, were mothers, many with children of preschool age. If a day-care center could be constructed at the shipyard so that the mothers could bring their children before work and stop in to see them during the day, the level of productivity would undoubtedly rise.
Within weeks of Eleanor’s visit, under the leadership of young Edgar Kaiser, plans were under way to construct a spectacular day-care center, complete with the newest play equipment, the most sophisticated teaching devices, a cafeteria staffed by nutritionists, and an infirmary staffed by nurses and doctors. With construction costs covered by the U.S. Maritime Commission and operating costs borne by Kaiser, nothing was spared in the attempt to create a wholesome, happy environment for the children.
The Swan Island Center was built in the shape of a wheel, which enclosed a great inner court protected from outside traffic. The spokes were fifteen playrooms, each with long banks of windows on two sides to ensure proper lighting. “It was as nice a building as one could imagine,” the center’s director, James Hymes, recalled. “The walls were painted in beautiful pastel shades; the chandeliers had a futuristic look, with the letters of the alphabet and elephants painted on them. It was one of those rare settings where the only obstacles, like time, were not man-imposed.”
Outstanding teachers were recruited to staff the center, which was open whenever the shipyard was open—six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Mount Holyoke graduate Mary Willett was teaching at an exclusive nursery school on the East Coast when she heard about the new center at the Kaiser shipyards. “I could tell immediately that this was something special,” she recalled, “a chance to reach children from all different backgrounds at a very early age. I was thrilled when the telegram came offering me a position at $55 a week. How privileged I was to be part of this great experiment!”
When Miss Willett reached the Swan Island Center, the situation was even better than she hoped. The children, ranging from eighteen months to six years, came from farms in Minnesota, Ohio, and Iowa, from city streets in St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Oakland, from Southern towns and foreign lands. “We had Indian children, Mexican children, and black children,” she recalled. “I remember one big black woman whose son, Freddy, was in the program. She was so happy to know that, for the first time in Freddy’s life, he was not being Jim Crowed.”
The Swan Island Center was a head-start program a quarter of a century ahead of its time. One woman came all the way from Louisiana because she heard the program was great for children. And the experience was unique for the teachers as well. “It was without question the highlight of my whole career,” Mary Willett lovingly recalled fifty years later.
In its first year of operation, the Swan Island Center served nearly two thousand children. Opened at first only for day and swing shifts, it soon added cots and bedding supplies to accommodate the graveyard shift, keeping its doors open twenty-four-hours a day. During summers and school vacations, it operated a separate program for children from ages six to twelve. An additional program was created for nonenrolled Swan Island families who needed emergency care just for the day, if their usual arrangement broke down. The total cost for full-time care, including food, was 75 cents per child per day, $1.25 for two. And the center went a step further. At the end of the day, tired workers could pick up, at cost, fully cooked dinners to bring home to their families. For this Eleanor was directly responsible. “She had seen a food-service operation in England,” Director James Hymes recalled, “and had told Henry Kaiser about it.”
The success of the Swan Island Center stimulated war plants and shipyards across the nation to provide day care. It was estimated that each child-care center serving forty mothers made possible eight thousand productive man hours monthly. Slowly, Eleanor was winning her long struggle to make child care recognized as a national problem that required a collective response. Though the needs of working mothers were never fully met, nearly $50 million would be spent on day care before the war came to an end, $3 million for construction of new centers and $47 million for operating expenses. By the summer of 1945, more than a million and a half children would be in day care.
• • •
When Eleanor returned home from her travels in late February, she found that her husband had been sick in bed for a week with an intestinal grippe. In her absence, Margaret Suckley had taken care of him, sharing tea with him in the late afternoon, sitting by his bedside at night, traveling with him to Hyde Park. It happened that Churchill was also confined to his bed that week, suffering from fever and pneumonia. “Oddly enough,” The New York Times observed, while the papers were full of war maps showing the tides of battle, “the two most important war graphs of the last fortnight were never published . . . . They are the temperature charts of the recent sick rooms in the White House and at 10 Downing Street . . . . It is no exaggeration to say that the doctors’ charts were fully as important for the world as any maps in the newspaper.”
“I think I picked up sleeping sickness or Gambia fever or some kindred bug in that hell hole of yours called Bathhurst,” Roosevelt teased Churchill, referring to the capital of British Gambia, where his plane had refueled en route to Casablanca. “It laid me low—four days in bed—then a lot of sulphadiathole which cured the fever and left me feeling like a wet rag. I was no good after 2 p.m. and after standing i
t for a week or so, I went to Hyde Park for five days: got full of health in glorious zero weather—came back . . . and have been feeling like a fighting cock ever since. Please, please for the sake of the world don’t overdo these days. You must remember that it takes about a month of occasional let-ups to get back your full strength. . . . Tell Mrs. Churchill that when I was laid up I was a thoroughly model patient and that I hope you will live down the reputation in our Press of having been the world’s worst patient.’”
• • •
As the tenth anniversary of Roosevelt’s first inaugural approached, reporters remained astonished by his unruffled demeanor. Amid tumultuous events abroad, turmoil in Congress, and trouble at home, he remained relaxed, good-humored, and self-assured.
The war had cut into many of Franklin’s favorite relaxations. The hours before bed that he had used to devote to his stamp collection now went to a study of thick reports about tanks and planes, while the unending pile of work on his desk—four thousand letters a day compared with the four hundred President Hoover received—took away the late-afternoon swims he had so enjoyed in the White House pool.
But still he was able to joke and to laugh. And still he found ways to relax—over cocktails, movies, and cards. At his ritual cocktail hour, the unwritten rule remained that all talk of politics or war must cease. On weekends at Hyde Park, he refused to work until after noon, indulging in long hours of sleep and lazy jaunts through the woods that invariably lifted his spirits.
While Roosevelt continually renewed his energies through relaxation, Adolf Hitler diminished his strength through overwork. “The Fuhrer seems to have aged 15 years during three and a half years of war,” Goebbels noted in his diary that same March. “He doesn’t get out into the fresh air. He does not relax. He sits in his bunker, fusses and broods.” In time, Albert Speer argued, Hitler’s tendency to overwork left him “permanently caustic and irritable,” unable to absorb fresh impressions, unwilling to listen to criticism.
During the early days of the war, Hitler had taken great pleasure in the ritual of a late-afternoon tea to which, much like Roosevelt’s cocktail hour, he invited close associates and friends for relaxed conversation and idle gossip. But as the pressures of war mounted, the hour for tea was steadily pushed back, from four to six to eight to ten. By 1943, Speer noted, Hitler’s evening tea did not begin until two o’clock in the morning. While most of Berlin slept, Hitler sat with his aides, recounting tales from his youth or from the early days of struggle. Within this intimate circle, Speer remarked, Hitler’s familiar stories “were appreciated as if they had been heard for the first time,” but exhaustion took its toll, and no one could “whip up much liveliness or even contribute to the conversation.” At the end of the “relaxed” tea, Hitler was more agitated than when it began.
Roosevelt’s tenth anniversary in office found Eleanor, in Tommy’s judgment, “a bit worn as to patience,” still tending to crowd too many engagements into a single day. “Five minutes here and five minutes there are not satisfactory to anyone,” Tommy complained in a letter to Esther Lape. But as long as America’s boys were dying abroad, Eleanor refused to lighten her load; as long as she was privileged to travel, the least she could do was to visit wounded soldiers in hospitals wherever she went. “I’m completely exhausted after a hospital day,” she confessed to Joe Lash, “& I lie awake thinking what we should do in the future for them but one goes on with daily round of life.”
Eleanor had promised Lash before he went into the army that she would give up any other engagement if she had a chance to see him. Despite the pressure of an almost inhuman schedule, she kept her promise. No sooner was Lash transferred to weather-forecasting school at Chanute Field than Eleanor journeyed to Urbana, Illinois, to see him.
She arrived at the Hotel Lincoln on Friday night, having reserved room 332 for herself and Tommy and a connecting room for Lash. At 9 p.m., Lash joined Eleanor for dinner in her room. On Saturday, they stayed in the hotel all day long, eating all their meals in their room except for lunch, which they ate in the hotel dining room. Afterward, Lash “stretched out luxuriantly” on the bed for a long nap. “I’m so happy to have been with you,” she wrote Joe Lash after she returned to Washington on Sunday. “Separation between people who love each other, makes the reunion always like a new discovery. You forget how much you love certain movements of the hands or the glance in the person’s eyes or how nice it is to sit in the same room & look at their back!”
Three weeks later, Eleanor joined Joe Lash again, this time at the Hotel Blackstone in Chicago. Here, too, they stayed in Eleanor’s room most of the day. In the afternoon, they went out for a walk; in the evening, Lash was so drowsy that he fell asleep on the bed while Eleanor stroked his forehead. “I loved just sitting near you while you slept . . . ,” Eleanor later wrote.
But the pleasures Eleanor derived from her time with Lash were quickly dispelled when she was told by a hotel employee that her room had been bugged. For weeks, it turned out, Lash had been under surveillance by the army’s Counter-intelligence Corps. Mistakenly convinced that he was part of a communist conspiracy, the CIC had been reading his mail and trailing him wherever he went. When the first lady’s telegram arrived, inviting him to join her at the Hotel Blackstone, the CIC bugged her room.
Apparently unconcerned about the impropriety of spending two weekends in adjoining rooms with a young serviceman, Eleanor went to see Hopkins as soon as she returned and pleaded with him to find out what was going on. Hopkins took the matter up with General Marshall, who confirmed that Mrs. Roosevelt’s room had indeed been bugged. When the president learned that army agents had put his wife under surveillance without presidential authorization, he was furious. Moving quickly to take action against everyone responsible, he ordered an immediate shake-up of the army’s intelligence operations, including the disbanding of the CIC. In addition, military orders were drawn up to send Lash overseas, along with his entire group of weather forecasters.
Years later, Lash was still unsure whether the president himself was behind the decision that sent him to the South Pacific. “All the top men who were involved in this affair—the President, Hopkins, Marshall—were preoccupied with decisions that carried the fate of nations and millions of lives,” Lash recorded. “They would understandably be impatient with G-2 and its obsession with Eleanor Roosevelt and myself. They may well have decided that, in addition to shaking up G-2, the most expeditious way of getting rid of the Lash problem was to ship me overseas along with a group of fellow student forecasters so it would not seem that I had been singled out for this sanction.”
• • •
In March, Eleanor’s attention was drawn once again to the struggle for equal treatment in the military. On her desk she found an eloquent plea for help from Henry Jones, a Negro sergeant stationed at Carlsbad Army Air Field in New Mexico. Sergeant Jones described the morale-shattering treatment visited upon Negro soldiers as a consequence of segregated facilities. The Negro men of the 349th Aviation Squadron were “loyal Americans,” he began, “ready and willing to do their part to preserve Democracy. For the most part the Personnel of this Squadron is made up of young men who were born and lived in the Northern states where they enjoyed to a large degree the advantages of a democracy. However, the fact that we want to do our best for our country and to be valiant soldiers, seems to mean nothing to the Commanding Officer of our Post as indicated by the fact that ‘Jim Crowism’ is practiced on the very grounds of our camp.”
The sergeant’s complaint focused on the Negro soldier’s unequal access to recreational facilities and transportation—visible symbols of injustice. At the post theater, with a total capacity of over a thousand seats, only 20 seats, in the last row, were provided for Negroes. At the post exchange, where refreshments were served, Negroes did not have the privilege of eating inside the building. On buses to and from camp, the front seats were reserved for white soldiers; Negro soldiers were either crammed into one small row of sea
ts in the rear or passed up altogether and forced to walk.
“We do not ask for special privileges,” Jones concluded, speaking for 121 fellow Negro soldiers whose signatures were attached. “All we desire is to have equality; to be free to participate in all activities, means of transportation, privileges and amusements afforded any American soldier.”
After reading Jones’ letter, Eleanor wrote a long letter to Henry Stimson describing the conditions at Carlsbad and said she would appreciate it very much if he would request an investigation. Unfortunately, the discrimination at Carlsbad was standard practice throughout the country, since the majority of army camps were located in the South and the Southwest, where strict segregation prevailed.
Most army camps boasted a central post theater, where movies were shown, lectures delivered, and concerts performed. In some camps, as Jones described, Negroes were confined to a few seats in the last row. In other camps, a separate, less adequate space was allocated. “They have a show where the colored go,” one GI explained, “and you sit on the outside to see the picture. If it rains there isn’t any picture.” Observing these unequal arrangements, the singer Lena Horne cut short her tour of army posts. German POWs imprisoned in the U.S., she argued, had a better opportunity to hear her than Negro soldiers.
For Negro soldiers, like Henry Jones, who had lived all their lives in the North, subjection to the Jim Crow laws of the South was intolerable. In almost every Southern city or town, Negro soldiers were restricted to a small area of the city where a few restaurants and lounges were crowded together on a single block. If they tried to go elsewhere, restaurants refused to serve them, merchants evicted them, and townspeople shouted at them.