Roosevelt generally allowed himself to be seen in public in only two situations—either standing with his braces locked, or seated in an open car. But here, in the presence of so many young amputees, he was willing to reveal his vulnerability, to let them see that he was as crippled as they. “With a cheering smile to each of them,” Rosenman observed, “and a pleasant word at the bedside of a score or more, this man who had risen from a bed of helplessness ultimately to become President of the United States and leader of the free world was living proof of what the human spirit could do.”
There was one other occasion when Roosevelt had allowed a group of strangers to witness his infirmity, according to Anna Faith Jones. The occasion was the dedication of a new building at Howard University in 1936. Before the ceremony began, Jones’ father, Howard’s president, Mordecai Johnson, had asked Roosevelt to allow the students to see that he was crippled. They had been so crippled themselves, Johnson pleaded, if the president let them see him as he was, they could say to themselves, If he can do this, we can do anything. Roosevelt agreed. He let himself be lifted from the car and set down in full public view, and then he proceeded to walk slowly and painfully to the podium.
Rosenman claimed he had never seen the president with tears in his eyes, but that afternoon in Oahu, as he was wheeled out of the hospital, “he was close to them.” Later that day, Roosevelt reboarded the Baltimore for the final leg of his long journey—a visit to the troops at Adak, a treeless island located off the western coast of Alaska.
CHAPTER 21
“THE OLD MASTER STILL HAD IT”
On Sunday evening, July 30, 1944, while Roosevelt was cruising the Pacific en route to Alaska, Missy Le-Hand was in the movie theater at Harvard Square with her sister Ann Rochon and her friend Maydell Ramsey. A double feature was playing that night: The Man from Down Under, starring Charles Laughton as a World War I veteran who smuggles two orphans back into Australia, and Rationing, a light comedy about a small-town storekeeper frustrated by wartime restrictions.
The accompanying newsreel featured images of Roosevelt’s acceptance speech, delivered from his railroad car at San Diego. As the story was told to Missy’s friend Barbara Curtis, “Missy was shocked at the way he looked and the way his voice sounded.” Having not seen his picture for several months, she was unaware of all the weight he had lost, unprepared for the haggard look on his face. Until this moment, she had still envisioned him as the vigorous, well-built man she had last seen the previous spring.
It was raining at 11 p.m., when Missy returned to her Orchard Street home. In her bedroom, she began agitatedly leafing through old pictures, almost as if she were trying to conjure up a substitute image for the one that was now in her mind. In her collection of photos she had a handsome shot of Roosevelt in a striped bathing suit, a charming picture of the two of them sitting together on the porch at Warm Springs, a group shot at a picnic. Suddenly her left arm, which had not moved since her stroke three years earlier, began to move up and down. It seemed for a moment as if she might finally recover her faculties.
But the reprieve was short-lived. Sometime after midnight, Ann heard strange noises coming from her sister’s room. Looking in, she saw Missy tremble violently and then slump over. An ambulance was called, and at 2 a.m. Missy was taken to Chelsea Naval Hospital.
There doctors determined that she had suffered a cerebral embolism. Death came seven hours later, shortly after 9 a.m. The death certificate listed auricular fibrillation and rheumatic heart disease as contributing factors to the fatal embolism. She was forty-six years old.
Eleanor was in Hyde Park when the news reached her. She immediately sent a telegram to Missy’s sister, offering to come to Boston to be with the family during the funeral. “I am sure that for her, after her long illness, death will be a release,” Eleanor wrote in her column. “But those who loved her . . . will feel her loss deeply. She was a member of our family for a good many years.”
Roosevelt received the sad news by means of a radiogram to his ship from William Hassett and Steve Early. “Regret to inform you that Miss LeHand died in the Naval Hospital at Chelsea at 9:05 today . . . . Admiral Sheldon [of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery] said she had attended theater last evening and that the change for the worse was unexpected . . . . Have notified Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Tully. Await instructions.”
A second radiogram followed a few hours later, letting the president know that Mrs. Roosevelt would attend the funeral and that his absence had been carefully explained to Missy’s family. “I’m glad F is away,” Eleanor confided to Lash, “for he would have felt he had to come and these journeys are always depressing.”
A statement was drafted in the White House and issued in the president’s name. “Memories of more than a score of years of devoted service enhance the sense of personal loss which Miss LeHand’s passing brings. Faithful and painstaking, with a charm of manner inspired by tact and kindness of heart, she was utterly selfless in her devotion to duty.”
“Missy’s death,” Arthur Krock noted in The New York Times, “severs a shining link between these grim times and the exciting days when the New Deal and the administration were young. Her influence upon the President was very great and constructive as was Mr. Howe’s. Many of the friendliest observers of Mr. Roosevelt since he took office have, after these intimate counselors left the White House, attributed certain acts and words of his that evoked widespread criticism to the loss of their devoted and wise services.” Writing in a similar vein, Harold Ickes observed that Missy’s disability “constituted the greatest loss that the President has suffered since his inauguration.”
Letters of condolence poured into the White House, revealing the extraordinary impact Missy had on all those who had come to know her. “What the devil can a fellow say,” Roosevelt’s old friend Ralph Cropley wrote, “who was as close to Missy as I was in those days when Missy, Louis Howe and I put up the fight to instill in that head of yours the desire to live? Outside of Eleanor, no one knows more than I what sacrifices Missy made for you. She was one of the grandest persons who ever lived.”
“I know how profoundly affected you are by Missy’s death,” journalist Herbert Swope wrote the president. “I, too, loved Missy. She was a rare person in her loyalty, in her intelligence, her courage and her principles.”
Some twelve hundred persons attended the funeral mass at St. John’s Church in North Cambridge. Hundreds more stood outside as the president’s wife, wearing a blue suit and a black straw hat, arrived to join the LeHand family in the second row. The mourners included James Farley, Former Boston Police Commissioner Joseph Timilty, and Joseph Kennedy. Bishop Richard J. Cushing read the prayers, and the body was lowered into a grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
To family and friends in the working-class community of Somerville, Massachusetts, Missy was a celebrity. “She was a real role model in our whole family’s history,” Missy’s grand-niece Jane Scarborough observed. “Her life had glamour, excitement, independence, and mystery. I remember when Elliott Roosevelt’s book came out implying a romance between the president and Missy, I asked my aunt [Marguerite Collins] what she thought. ‘It would be nice to have some spicy past in our family,’ she replied with a smile, ‘but I simply don’t know.’”
Since her sister Ann’s divorce, Missy had supported her two nieces, Barbara and Marguerite. It was Missy who took care of their education and bought their clothes for school. “There was an air of magic about Missy,” neighbor Barbara Dudley recalled. “She had the most beautiful jewelry, which Ambassador Bullitt had given her. When I was young, I loved to go into her room with my friends and peek in her bureau drawers. She had magnificent underwear from Paris and sweet-smelling perfume. We’d try everything on and then put it all back into the drawers in exactly the same order, so she’d never know.”
In her will, Missy divided her belongings between her two nieces. To Marguerite she gave her mink coat, wristwatch with diamonds, small diamond ring, and, perhaps
her most precious possession, the small hanging bookcase that President Roosevelt had made for her. To Barbara went her ermine cape, gold watch, and amethyst earrings given to her by Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt.
The rest of her things—photographs, appointment books, signed drafts of the president’s inaugurals and fireside chats—were packed in an old brown suitcase and kept in her sister’s closet. The suitcase ended up in Connecticut, in the attic of Barbara’s daughter, Jane Scarborough. Years later, Scarborough dimly remembered seeing what must have been the hanging bookcase that Roosevelt made for Missy. “It was in my brother’s attic. We often wondered if there were a story behind it. But no one in our generation had any idea what it was. It was so ugly. I think in the end it went off in a garage sale. I wish I had realized what it meant to Missy.”
“You and I lost a very dear friend,” Grace Tully would later sympathize with Roosevelt. “And he was about to cry,” she recalled, “and so was I, and he said, ‘Yes, poor Missy.’ But he never liked to talk about those things . . . . He didn’t want to show any emotion.”
Missy’s death took its toll on him. While he rallied to greet the troops at Adak on August 3, he suffered an attack of angina a week later while standing on the deck of his ship delivering a speech to ten thousand navy-yard workers in Bremerton, Washington. This was the first time in months he had used his braces. Because of all the weight he had lost, they no longer fitted him properly, so that he had difficulty keeping his balance. A sharp wind began to blow. The heavy rocking of the ship compelled him to grasp the lectern with both hands, making it hard to turn the pages of his speech. As he struggled to keep his place, his voice faltered.
Ten minutes into the talk, he experienced an oppressive sensation in his chest which radiated to both shoulders. The constricting pain lasted nearly fifteen minutes, but he managed, sweating profusely, to continue talking, keeping himself upright by gripping the edge of the lectern. When he finished, he returned to the captain’s quarters and collapsed in a chair. Dr. Bruenn cleared everyone out, including Anna, who had flown to the West Coast earlier that evening to join her father for the remainder of his trip. Dr. Bruenn took an electrocardiogram and a white blood count. Though no permanent damage was found, the attack was sufficiently frightening to Roosevelt that he agreed to rest completely during the trip home.
• • •
The week the president returned to Washington provided a defining moment in the young life of the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In its first three years of operation, hampered by administrative shuffling, lack of funds, limited power, cumbersome bureaucratic machinery, and continuing congressional attacks, the FEPC had failed to realize the bright hopes of its founders. Lacking the power of enforcement, the agency succeeded, historian John Blum writes, “only when black workers were courageous enough to file complaints and corporate offenders decent or embarrassed enough to comply.” In too many situations, it surrendered to pressure. Three times, for instance, hearings on discrimination in the railroad industry were postponed as powerful interests—big business, the railroads, organized labor unions, and the Southern bloc—were brought to bear.
On August 1, 1944, when ten thousand mass-transit employees in Philadelphia went out on strike to protest the upgrading of eight Negro employees to motormen, the FEPC was confronted with “the supreme test” of its history. The Philadelphia Transit Company had always resisted employing Negroes as conductors and operators. The five hundred Negroes who worked in the company were confined to laboring and custodial jobs. After Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, on discrimination, in 1941, a group of Negro employees requested the opportunity to compete for platform and clerical positions. They were told that nothing could be done because the company union had a contract specifying that “customs bearing on the employer-employee relationship” could not be changed without the agreement of both sides.
The FEPC had notified both the company and the union in the fall of 1943 that they were violating the president’s executive order. Conferences were held and a directive was issued ordering the company to hire and upgrade Negroes. This was the first time the FEPC had ordered an entire city transit system to offer equal opportunity. But both the company and the union refused to honor the directive. The impasse remained until the spring of 1944, when a new union, pledging nondiscrimination, defeated the old company union in elections to represent the transit workers.
Deciding that the time was ripe for bold action, the FEPC pressed the company to comply with the president’s executive order. Under duress, the company announced a new round of qualifying examinations, open to anyone, for the position of motorman. William Barber, a young Negro who had started with the transit system as a laborer and worked his way up to welder, was one of fifty who took the exam. “The exam was a written test, math plus some general questions,” Barber recalled. “Eight of us passed. I got a ninety-eight, one of the highest scores. I was pretty proud of that, since several of the people taking it had a college education, while I hadn’t finished high school.”
As August 1, his first day on the new job, approached, William Barber was excited. “I felt like a pioneer as I went out to catch the trolley to the carbarn. I knew it was a big thing. But when I get to the corner there are no trolleys anywhere. Everyone was milling around, wondering what was going on. So I go back home, put on the radio, and hear that the whole system—everything, all the trolleys, buses, and subways—is on strike on account of me and my friends’ starting our training as operators.”
The night before, as it happened, the old union, sensing a golden chance to regain its former positions, had called a mass meeting to protest the hiring of Negroes. Three thousand workers cheered lustily when union leader Frank Carney shouted: “We don’t want Negroes and we won’t work with Negroes. This is a white man’s job. Put the Negroes back where they belong—back on the roadway.” Workers cheered again when John Smith, a training instructor, announced that he would quit his job rather than instruct a Negro trainee.
Handbills distributed to the crowd argued that seniority would be destroyed if Negroes were allowed to be upgraded. “Your buddies are in the Army fighting and dying to protect the life of you and your family and you are too yellow to protect their jobs until they return. Call a strike and refuse to teach the Negroes. The public is with you.” Other handbills bore a fabricated message from Franklin to Eleanor. “You kiss the Negroes and I’ll kiss the Jews and we’ll stay in the White House as long as we choose.”
By the end of the emotional meeting, the decision was made to call a strike. It began at 4 a.m. that Tuesday, August 1. By 6 a.m., all streetcars and buses had been stopped, leaving William Barber and thousands of work-bound Philadelphians stranded on street corners. By 10 a.m., the city’s subway and elevated lines were paralyzed. “There was one motorman who was late in hearing about the strike,” a reporter for PM noted; “his was the only car which rattled merrily around the loop at 23rd and Hunting Park. Four cars full of strikers bore down upon it, chased the passengers out and drove the trolley down to the carbarn.”
Along every street, long columns of workers could be seen walking or trying to thumb rides with the few cars that were still on the road. The Philadelphia Navy Yard, employer of nearly forty-five thousand workers, developed an emergency transportation system for its employees. But for most of the city’s nine hundred thousand war workers, there was no way to get to work. Production of critical war materials, including radar, heavy artillery, heavy ammunition, and incendiary bombs, was halted.
On the third day of the strike, with the fourth-largest war-production center virtually paralyzed, President Roosevelt took decisive action. He issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war “to take possession and assume control of the transportation systems of Philadelphia Transportation Company.” The order called upon the army to operate the streetcars and subways “on the basis of conditions that prevailed before the strike”; in other words, the army was to be guided by the
nondiscriminatory policies laid down by the FEPC. In contrast to the situation that had developed during the Addsco strike in Mobile, Alabama, the previous year, where the government seemed to condone the practice of segregation, this time both the president and the FEPC acted to uphold equal opportunity.
Events moved quickly after that. The citizens of Philadelphia turned against the strikers. “In whatever degree the PTC walkout is based upon race prejudice, it is wholly indefensible and thoroughly un-American,” the Philadelphia Inquirer editorialized. “It represents nothing but insult and injury to millions of Philadelphians.” On Saturday morning, August 5, the strike leaders were arrested for violating the Smith-Connally Act. Hours later, five thousand soldiers moved into the city. And at five that evening, an ultimatum was broadcast to all the strikers: unless they returned to work by Sunday at midnight, they would lose their jobs, receive no unemployment, and fall subject to the draft. “The war cannot wait,” Major General Philip Hayes declared, “while the employees of this company make up their minds whether they will come back to work or not.”
Roosevelt’s strong-arm tactics worked. Faced with the choice of work or war, the strikers hurried back to work. By Monday evening, all the bus lines, streetcars, subways, and elevated trains were running at full capacity. The transit strike made headlines across the country, provoking a new round of protest in the South. “In the case of Philadelphia,” the South Carolina Post wrote, “the trouble can be traced directly back to the FEPC through its arbitrary and inept policies.” The Savannah News pinned the blame directly on “Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt’s persistent efforts to force social equality on the American people.”