When she reached her Washington Square apartment, Eleanor was exhausted. A cluster of reporters was waiting at the door. She had nothing to tell them. “The story,” she said simply, “is over.”
• • •
But the story was not over. Indeed, for Eleanor, whose strength of will was never more apparent than in the spring of 1945, a new chapter was beginning. She had passed through difficult days—absorbing not only the death of her husband but the discovery that Lucy Rutherfurd was with him when he died. Yet, as she doggedly resumed her labors—writing her daily column, traveling, and beginning to answer the hundreds of thousands of letters that were sent to the White House after the president’s death—she gradually moved toward reconciliation with her husband’s memory.
She had fought him on so many issues for so many years, pressuring him when her pressure was neither wanted nor welcome, that the full import of her husband’s meaning to the nation had been hidden from her. But now, wherever she went, people—porters at the station, taxi drivers, doormen, elevator men, passengers on the train, riders in the subway—told her how personally bereaved they felt, how much they had loved him, how much they missed him. “I am realizing day by day,” she wrote in her column, “how much my husband meant to young people in Washington, to veterans in the service hospitals, to men and women.”
“It has warmed my heart,” she told her readers, “to discover how many people would stop and speak to me as they left the train, often murmuring only: We loved your husband.” On the subway in New York, a man, visibly controlling his emotion, came up to her and said: “‘He was like a friend who came and talked to us every now and then.’ These spontaneous outbursts of affection for my husband from casual people whom I have never seen before, are spoken so sincerely that I often wish my husband could hear them himself.”
She was stunned, she wrote her aunt Maude Gray as the United Nations Conference opened in San Francisco in late April, by the “upsurge of love” on the part of so many people, and by their realization of how much they had depended on him. “One feels in the San Francisco Conference that a strong hand is missing,” she went on. “I am sad that he could not see the end of his long work which he carried so magnificently.”
Eleanor confessed to her friends she had not realized until after he was gone how much she, too, had depended on her husband. “I find that mentally I counted so much on Franklin,” she wrote Joe Lash, “I feel a bit bereft.” The readjustment to being alone, she said, without someone else at the center of her life, was harder than she would have imagined. She was only now beginning to realize, she told Elinor Morgenthau, who was recovering from her heart attack, how much she had relied on “Franklin’s greater wisdom,” and it left her “without much sense of backing.” Moreover, she observed, “I think we had all come to think of him as able to carry the world’s problems and now we must carry them ourselves.”
Eleanor had decided, even before the funeral train from Warm Springs reached Washington, that if the children agreed, which they eventually did, she would turn the Big House over to the government and make Val-Kill her permanent home. By the fall, the Big House had to be emptied of everything the family wanted—a task requiring hours of sorting and packing. In the midst of her labors, Eleanor took unexpected comfort in Fala’s return to the Roosevelt household. Shortly after the funeral, Jimmy Roosevelt had written Margaret Suckley and asked her to send Fala back. “In talking to my sister and brother, we all feel very disappointed that Fala is not staying with Mother,” Jimmy wrote. Fala was “part of the family,” and it would make Mother “very happy to have him back.” Suckley agreed, and Fala came to live at Val-Kill. Soon he and Eleanor became inseparable. Fala accompanied her on her walks through the woods, sat beside her chair in the living room, and greeted her at the door when she came home. “No one was as vociferously pleased to see me as Fala,” she noted proudly after a trip to New York. Still, Fala missed the president. When General Eisenhower came to Hyde Park to lay a wreath on Roosevelt’s grave, Fala heard the sirens of the motorcade and thought his master was returning. “His legs straightened out” and “his ears pricked up,” Eleanor noted; he was hoping to see his master coming down the drive.
• • •
As the war in Europe came to a close, Eleanor was saddened anew that Franklin had not lived to see the triumphant end result of his wearying labors. On April 30, 1945, as the Red Army advanced on Berlin, Adolf Hitler hastily married his mistress, Eva Braun, and then committed suicide with her in his underground bunker. A week later, a newly assembled German government surrendered unconditionally. When Eleanor heard Truman, Churchill, and Stalin proclaim the surrender of Germany on the radio on May 8, she could almost hear her husband’s voice making the announcement. “V-E Day was a curious day,” she confessed to Maude Gray. “It was sad Franklin couldn’t have announced it. I felt no desire to celebrate.”
“I cannot help but think today of that little garden in Hyde Park where Franklin Roosevelt lies,” Harry Hopkins told reporters the same day. “No man in the world contributed more to victory and freedom, and I believe that the free people of the earth will forever bless his name.”
Churchill, too, thought of his friend on V-E Day as the bells pealed throughout England and all of London came out into the streets, laughing, cheering, dancing, singing. “It was without any doubt Churchill’s day,” New Yorker correspondent Molly Panter-Downes observed. He was greeted everywhere he went with a roaring enthusiasm that “exceeded by double” anything anyone remembered. But even as he celebrated what he called the greatest day in the long history of England, Churchill’s thoughts turned to Roosevelt and to “the valiant and magnanimous deeds of the USA” under his magnificent leadership. These extraordinary deeds, Churchill predicted, “would forever stir the hearts of Britons in all quarters of the world in which they dwell.”
Ten weeks later, Churchill was unceremoniously swept out of office when the Labour Party triumphed in the British elections. Having gone to bed on election night believing he had won, he awoke just before dawn “with a sharp stab of almost physical pain”; a subconscious conviction that he was beaten “broke forth and dominated” his mind, he said, only to be confirmed later that day. The news that he had lost was difficult for Churchill to absorb. “It’s no use pretending I’m not hard hit,” he told Lord Moran. “It would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.”
Now it was Eleanor’s turn to recall what Churchill meant to her husband, to the British, and to the Americans. “His place in the hearts of the people of Great Britain is safe for all time,” she wrote. “No one in the British empire—nor in the United States—who heard his brave words after Dunkirk will ever feel anything but the deepest respect and gratitude and affection for Churchill, the man and the war leader.”
A week after the British elections came the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Eleanor had first learned about the secret weapon in July 1943, when a young physicist working on the project came to see her in her Washington Square apartment. The young man, Irving Lowen, was worried that Germany was pulling ahead of the United States in the search for an atomic weapon. He begged Eleanor to impress upon the president the need to proceed as quickly as possible. The president agreed to see Lowen at Eleanor’s urging, but when the young scientist breached security a second time by returning to see Eleanor, he was transferred out of the Manhattan Project.
Eleanor did not question the decision to drop the bomb, believing that it would bring the war to a speedier end, but she “could not help feeling a little sad,” she wrote, “when the news came that we had to use our second atomic bomb.” She had hoped that “after the first bomb, which was followed by Russia’s declaration of war and their prompt entry into Manchuria, the Japanese would decide to accept unconditional surrender and the loss of life could come to an end.” It was not until August 15, six days later, that Japan finally surrendered.
The most
destructive war in history had come to an end. The best estimates put the number of deaths at an unimaginable 50 million people. The Soviet Union lost 13 million combatants and 7 million civilians. The Germans calculated losses of 3.6 million civilians and 3.2 million soldiers. The Japanese estimated 2 million civilian and 1 million military deaths. Six million Jews had been killed. The number of British and commonwealth deaths is calculated at 484,482. With 291,557 battle deaths and 113,842 nonhostile deaths from accident and disease, the United States suffered the fewest casualties among the major nations.
When the word was flashed on August 15 that the war was over, Eleanor found herself “filled with very curious sensations.” Though she was thrilled “to be in a world where peace has come,” she had no desire to join the happy throngs on the streets. Recalling the way the people had celebrated when the last war ended, she felt that this time “the weight of suffering which has engulfed the world during so many years could not so quickly be wiped out.” Moreover, she admitted to her daughter, “I miss Pa’s voice and the words he would have spoken.”
• • •
“Now that the war is over,” war worker Mary Smith lamented, “I’ve lost my job—for no other reason apparently except that I am a woman.” The bomb was dropped, Frankie Cooper recalled, and a few days later the foreman gathered all the women in the shipyard together. He told them that the first troop ship was coming home from the Pacific and he asked them to take off their welders’ caps, let their hair down, and go down to the dock to meet the soldiers. “We were thrilled. We all waved,” Cooper said. The next day, all the women were laid off. “It was a shock.” At the Kaiser day-care center in Portland, Oregon, schoolteacher Mary Willett experienced a similar jolt. Though her center had cared for two thousand children at its peak and had received national attention for its excellent work, it was permanently closed down and all the teachers were dismissed just two weeks after the war was over.
In her columns that fall, Eleanor tried in vain to stem the tide. She argued on principle that everyone who wanted to work had a right to be productive. She asked industry to face the fact that many women were obliged to work to support their families and that “it was essential they be treated in this respect on a par with the men.” She railed against the closing of the childcare centers as a shortsighted response to a fundamental social need. “Many thought they were purely a war emergency measure,” she wrote in September. “A few of us had an inkling that perhaps they were a need which was constantly with us, but one that we had neglected to face in the past.” She had received a number of letters from women, she reported, appealing to her to help keep the child-care centers open. Some of the women who wrote had husbands who were killed in the war. Others had husbands who were crippled or wounded. For these women, work was the only means of supporting their family. “My whole life and that of my two children,” Mrs. Dorothy Thibault wrote, “depends on my working eight hours each day. My little girl is 4 and the boy is 2 and one-half. The care and training they have received in this childcare center is the best possible thing that could have happened to them.”
Despite all these problems—despite the layoffs, the insufficient child care, and the postwar elevation of domestic virtues into an ideology—millions of women would refuse to abandon the workplace. Though female jobs in manufacturing fell sharply after the war, the rate of female employment as a whole began climbing steadily upward again in 1947, soon surpassing the wartime peak. “My husband would have been happy if I went back to the kind of girl I was when he married me,” Frankie Cooper recalled, “and that was a little homebody there on the farm, in the kitchen. I wasn’t that person anymore . . . . I tried it for a couple, three years, but it just didn’t work out . . . . I did all the things—churned butter, visited the neighbors, I became president of the PTA—I did all the things, but I wasn’t satisfied. I just had that restlessness . . . . I wanted to go back to work.”
As women’s expectations shifted, divorces multiplied. In 1946, the United States would experience the highest divorce rate in the world, thirty-one divorces for every hundred marriages. Shirley Hackett had supported herself while her husband was away and had become accustomed to an independent life. But the moment her husband returned, she was expected to revert to the role of housewife. When her husband found her writing checks to pay the bills, he asked, “Why do you want to do that? I’m back!” When he saw her changing a tire on the car, he treated her as if she were “insane” to think that she could do such a thing. Troubles developed in the marriage.
War wife Dellie Hahne had a similar experience. “My husband did not care for my independence,” she recalled. “He had left a shrinking violet and come home to a very strong oak tree.” The marriage lasted only a few years. “I think the seeds of my liberation and many other women’s started with the war,” she observed. The first intimation Hahne had of the changes that were taking place came when she was invited to a friend’s house for Sunday dinner and heard the mother and grandmother talk about which drill would bite into a piece of metal at the factory. “My God, this was Sunday dinner in Middle America and to hear, instead of a discussion of the church service, a conversation about how to sharpen tools—it was a marvelous thing. I remember thinking that these women would never again be the same.”
Throughout the war, Eleanor had talked unceasingly about her hopes for the next generation of women, but even she could not have foreseen the myriad ways in which the experiences of women war workers would affect the lives and prospects of their daughters. “Mothers that worked during the war . . . I think they have a less conservative outlook than if they had stayed in the home,” Frankie Cooper said. “They traveled . . . met different kinds of people, they listened to different kinds of ideas, they went home with a completely different outlook on life. I think that this rubbed off on their children. You see, the boys that went overseas had their war stories, and the women that were in war work had theirs. And daughters and sons listened to these.”
In a Senior Scholastic poll of thirty-three thousand girl students taken in 1946, 88 percent wanted a career in addition to homemaking, and only 4 percent chose homemaking exclusively. The war had proved to millions of women, Frankie Cooper observed, that they could do things they’d thought they couldn’t, and now they were telling their daughters: “You can do anything you want to. You can be anybody you want to. And you can go anywhere you want to.”
The war had made possible, social historian William Chafe has written, what no amount of agitation could achieve. “The content of women’s lives had changed, and an important new area of potential activity had opened up to them. Work had proved liberating and once a new consciousness had been formed, there was no going back.”
• • •
From the beginning of the war, Eleanor had insisted that the struggle abroad would not be worth winning unless democracy were renewed at home. All along, Franklin had assured her that the mobilization process would be an agent of change, that once the dormant energies of democracy were unleashed, the country would be transformed.
Eleanor had been unable to share in her husband’s optimism; she had worried constantly about what America would look like after the fighting stopped, whether the liberal and humane values which had animated the New Deal were being sacrificed to the necessities of war. But in the fall of 1945, as she began traveling around the country again, she realized that the nation had taken even greater strides toward social justice during the war than it had during the New Deal. Indeed, the Roosevelt years had witnessed the most profound social revolution in the country since the Civil War—nothing less than the creation of modern America.
The small-town America, where people clung to their roots, immobilized within their ethnic and income class, had passed into history. Over fifteen million Americans had left their home towns to work in war plants and shipyards and were living in a different state or county from the place of their birth. Twelve million more had entered the armed forces and been flung
out over the turbulent globe. More than 20 percent of the entire population had taken part in the great migration. They had moved from the farm to the factory, from the South to the North, from the East to the exploding states of the Western rim. And there would be no return. The habit of mobility, which would prove both liberating and fragmenting, had become ingrained. America had become irrevocably an urban nation.
The war had been both a catalyst of unity and a disrupter of community ties. More than ever, citizens sought their identity not through ethnic bonds, but as Americans. Flagmakers fell months behind in their orders. There was a sharp decline in foreign-language radio broadcasts, and many foreign-language publications went bankrupt. Men and women hastened to become American citizens—almost two million aliens became naturalized during the six years preceding and following the war. Yet this new national identity also threatened the smaller units within which Americans had located themselves, both physically and psychologically. It would prove difficult—perhaps impossible—to re-establish the once-secure ties of neighborhood and community.
No segment of American society had been left untouched. More than seventeen million new jobs had been created, industrial production had gone up 100 percent, corporate profits doubled, and the GNP had jumped from $100 billion to $215 billion. The war had radically changed the shape of the American economy, exerting a profound impact on the everyday lives and expectations of people in all parts of the country. In 1940, only 7.8 million Americans out of 132 million made enough money to pay taxes; in 1945, that figure had risen to nearly 50 million in a population of 140 million. The wartime economy allowed millions of Americans who had been on relief to get back on their feet and start over again. Miners had enjoyed steady employment for the first time in twenty years. Automobile workers had doubled their incomes and expanded their skills. Black sharecroppers had left the rural South for the cities of the North, where, despite terrible racial tensions and a hard destiny, they would find a more abundant life than the one they had left behind.