The society of a few haves and a multitude of have-nots had been transformed. Because of the greatest—indeed, the only—redistribution of income downward in the nation’s history, a middle-class country had emerged. Half of the American people—those at the lower end of the compensation scale—had doubled their income, while those in the top 20 percent had risen by little more than 50 percent. Those in the bottom half of earners had seen their share of the country’s income increase by 16 percent, while those at the top had lost 6 percent. As a result, social historian Geoffrey Perrett observed, “barriers to social and economic equality which had stood for decades were either much reduced or entirely overthrown.”
The foundation of postwar progress had been constructed. When the war ended, pent-up demand—desire matched with money—would fuel a postwar boom. And wartime policies would ensure that business had the capital to meet this demand. They had enjoyed large profits and a tax code which enabled industry to carry forward the paper losses from accelerated depreciation to offset taxes. Thus, industry had a large cushion of capital. They had won a new respect from the government and the electorate. They had benefited from a multitude of technological advances and, even more important, had discovered the intimate relation between technology, research, and growth which, a half-century later, is still a dominating characteristic of the modern economy. The fears of a return to depression—which so preoccupied the political leaders who followed Roosevelt—would never be justified.
The American economy had not merely been revitalized, it had been altered. The old laissez-faire ideal—buyers and sellers conducting transactions in an untrammeled market—was gone forever. The feared socialist order would not materialize. Instead, a new economic order would come into being, one that economists would call “a mixed economy.” No longer would government be viewed as merely a bystander and an occasional referee, intervening only in times of crisis. Instead, the government would assume responsibility for continued growth and for fairness in the distribution of wealth. Big government—modern government—was here to stay. The new responsibilities of government amounted to nothing less than a new relationship between the people and those whom they chose for service, a new understanding, a revised social contract, one framed within the democratic limits of the original understanding, but drastically changed in content.
It may well be true that a social revolution is not possible without war or violent internal upheaval. These provide a unity of purpose and an opportunity for change that are rarely present in more tranquil times. But as the history of other countries and America’s own experience after World War I illustrates, war and revolution are no guarantee of positive social change. That depends on the time, the nation, and the exercise of leadership. In providing that leadership, Franklin Roosevelt emerges as the towering public figure of the twentieth century.
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Eleanor Roosevelt added a vital dimension of her own to the achievements of wartime America. At a time when her husband was preoccupied with winning the war, she remained an uncompromising voice in behalf of justice in the allocation of wartime gains. Though the logic of Roosevelt’s mobilization program in 1940 dictated a policy of accommodation with anti-New Deal business interests, Eleanor strove with considerable effect not only to maintain the fundamental goals of the New Deal but to further social advance. Many joined her in this effort—civil rights leaders, labor leaders, liberal spokesmen. But her voice in the highest councils of decision was always influential and often decisive.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s stand on civil rights, her insistence that America could not fight racism abroad while tolerating it at home, remains one of the affirming moments in the history of the home front during the war. Though she was naïve about many aspects of the racial problem, she was far ahead of the president and the times in her understanding that separate but equal facilities were not enough, that the fact of segregation itself impaired the lives of the Negro population.
She had insisted, against the advice of the White House staff, that the president meet with Negro leaders to discuss what could be done about discrimination and segregation in the armed forces. Progress was slow and incomplete, but these meetings, along with Eleanor’s continuing intervention, eventually led to broadened opportunities for Negroes in both the army and the navy. Between 1940 and 1945, the Negro military force had increased in size from 5,000 to 920,000 and the number of Negro officers had grown from 5 to over 7,000. Moreover, whereas almost every Negro soldier in 1940 was confined to a service unit, by war’s close Negroes held responsible jobs in almost every branch of the army as artillerymen, tankmen, infantrymen, pilots, paratroopers, doctors, and more. “The Negro was no longer regarded as an Army auxiliary,” Jean Byers concluded in her study of the Negro in World War II. “He had at last attained the status of a soldier.”
The changes in the navy during the war were even more spectacular. Though the navy still had not succeeded in using every Negro “in accordance with his maximum capacity,” since half the Negro sailors still remained in the stewards’ branch, great strides had been taken. “The Navy of 1945,” Byers concluded, “was hardly recognizable as the Navy of 1941.” At the start of the war, the navy considered it unthinkable to allow Negroes to enter its organization on an equal footing with white men; Negro sailors could enlist only if willing to serve as mess men. By 1945, hundreds of Negroes were serving in all manner of posts, as machinists and metalsmiths, radiomen and electricians. In 1941, the navy adhered to a rigid policy of racial segregation; in 1945, the navy officially declared that the integration of black and white sailors was “both possible and desirable.” In sum, “the Negro was considered a servant by the Navy in 1941; in 1945, the Negro was acknowledged as a sailor.”
More than anyone else in the White House, Eleanor was responsible, through her relentless pressure of War Department officials, for the issuance of the two directives that forbade the designation of recreational areas by race and made government-owned and -operated buses available to every soldier regardless of race. By the end of the war, only one major step was needed to ensure true equality for Negro soldiers, and that step would come in 1948, when President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the armed forces.
Through her travels and her close ties with Negro leaders, Eleanor made Franklin more aware of the new spirit of militancy that was developing within the Negro community in reaction to continuing discrimination in employment. She played an instrumental role in the negotiations surrounding the threatened March on Washington which led to the creation of the FEPC, the first presidential action on civil rights since the Civil War. She provided access for Negro leaders and ordinary Negro citizens. American Airlines President C. R. Smith recalled that, when he came to the White House one night, “the place was running over with blacks.” Smith said to Eleanor: “Looks like we’re entertaining most of the blacks in the country tonight.” She said: “‘Well, C.R., you must remember that the President is their President also.’” Such moments were all part of a bigger victory—making the federal government more relevant and more responsive to Negro Americans.
Though civil rights remained the great unfinished business of American democracy at the end of the war, Eleanor could take much satisfaction in knowing that the war had been a turning point in the struggle, a watershed experience in which the seeds of the protest movements of the succeeding decades were sown. Looking back on the 1940s, historian Carey McWilliams observed that “more has happened in the field of race relations in this country; more interest has been aroused; more has been said and written; more proposed and accomplished than in the entire span of years from the end of the Civil War to 1940.” These years, historian Richard Dalfiume confirms, constitute “the forgotten years of the Negro revolution.”
Eleanor was also far ahead of her time in championing the movement of women into the factories. Through her speeches and her columns, she provided a powerful counterweight to the negative attitudes that prev
ailed in the early years of the war against women working outside the home. She played a central role in securing government funds for day-care centers and in getting local cities and towns to provide after-school programs, takeout foods, and community laundries. If there had been no Eleanor Roosevelt, women would still have gone to work, but the conditions under which they worked would have been far less conducive to the preservation of home life, and their resulting productivity would have been substantially lower.
Eleanor’s influence can also be seen in the generally supportive position Roosevelt adopted toward labor during the war despite the rising frustration and anger of Congress and the public against unions and strikes. Her constant reminder that labor should not bear the brunt of sacrifice as the country converted to a war footing, served to counter the powerful voices of the businessmen who flooded into Washington during the war. And her insistence on the importance of planning for the postwar period played an important role in Roosevelt’s call for the GI Bill of Rights.
She also had her own share of failures. Her misguided appointments and actions at the Office of Civilian Defense brought about the congressional outburst which blunted her voice and forced her resignation. Her call for tolerance toward the Japanese Americans was lost in the tide of hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor. Her attempts to bring more refugees into the United States met with limited success. Her call for the protection of small business went unheeded. Her hopes for using the defense emergency as a lever for replacing the slums were never realized.
Unsympathetic observers referred to her as “Lady Bountiful,” “The Busybody,” “The Meddler,” and “The Gab.” It was said that she was not a systematic thinker, that she had no ability to focus or to set priorities, that her chatty columns qualified as journalism only through her position, that she was the victim of her generous impulses, intervening in behalf of any person in trouble, whether the complaints were justified or not. “Oh, my God, here’s another one,” officials at the War Department and the State Department would lament when yet another missive from Mrs. Roosevelt would reach them.
Even Eleanor’s most ardent admirers in the Roosevelt inner circle admitted that she pushed her husband too hard at the end of the day, when he was tired and needed to relax. “She would come in after he’d been wrestling with major problems all day long and insist that he find a job for some unemployed actor in New York,” Anna’s daughter, Eleanor Seagraves, recalled. And if he refused to do something she asked, she would come back again and again until it reached the point where he had to tell his aides to keep her away. If he would not meet somebody she thought he should meet, she would simply invite the person to dinner without telling anyone and seat the person next to the president. “I think he let her get away with stuff he wouldn’t have,” White House aide Jonathan Daniels said, “if he hadn’t had that sense of guilt.”
It was said jokingly in Washington during the war years that Roosevelt had a nightly prayer: “Dear God, please make Eleanor a little tired.” But in the end, he often came around to her way of thinking. Labor adviser Anna Rosenberg had been one of those who criticized Eleanor’s unceasing pressure on the president, but years later she changed her mind. “I remember him saying, ‘We’re not going to do that now. Tell Eleanor to keep away; I don’t want to hear about that anymore.’ And then 2-3 weeks later he would say, ‘Do you remember that thing Eleanor brought up? Better look into it, maybe there’s something to it—I heard something to indicate that maybe she’s right.’ I’m not sure she would have had the opportunity to bring things to his attention unless she pressured him—I mean he was so involved and in retrospect it was never anything for herself . . . . He would never have become the kind of President he was without her.”
They made an extraordinary team. She was more earnest, less devious, less patient, less fun, more uncompromisingly moral; he possessed the more trustworthy political talent, the more finely tuned sense of timing, the better feel for the citizenry, the smarter understanding of how to get things done. She could travel the country when he could not; she could speak her mind without the constraints of public office. She was the agitator; he was the politician. But they were linked by indissoluble bonds and they drew strength from each other. “The truth of the matter is that a deep and unshakeable affection and tenderness existed between them,” Jimmy Roosevelt said.
On the walls of the president’s study hung a charming portrait of Eleanor painted when she was young. “You know, I’ve always liked that portrait,” Franklin told Frances Perkins. “It’s a beautiful portrait, don’t you think so? . . . You know the hair’s just right, isn’t it? Lovely hair! Eleanor has lovely hair, don’t you think so?” As Perkins listened, she was struck by the “light in his eye,” which to her mind signaled “the light of affection.” White House aide Isador Lubin also witnessed frequent moments of affection, when the president would kid Eleanor about something in a light way and would “give her a whack on the fanny.”
The fact that “certain parts of their marriage were not as happy as one would have hoped,” Anna later said, did not mean that Eleanor didn’t love Franklin. “She did love Father. There wasn’t any doubt.” Eleanor’s close friend Esther Lape agreed. “I don’t think she ever stopped loving him. That was why he always had the ability to hurt her.”
“He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” Eleanor observed in her memoirs. “That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.”
“She had indeed served his purposes,” historian Lois Scharf wrote, “but he had also served hers. He furnished the stage upon which her incomparable abilities and human qualities could gain the widest audience and respect. Few Presidents and no other First Ladies have ever used the platform to such effect. In less obvious ways he was her spur as much as she was his.” Together they mobilized existing forces “to create a far different political and social landscape than the one that had existed when they entered the White House.”
Though years would pass before the full extent of these changes were understood, Eleanor was convinced in the fall of 1945 that “a new country is being born.” It seemed to her, she told her son Jimmy, that “a giant transference of energy” had taken place between the president and the people. “In the early days, before Pearl Harbor,” she said, “Franklin was healthy and strong and committed to the Allied cause while the country was sick and weak and isolationist. But gradually, as the president animated his countrymen to the dangers abroad, the country grew stronger and stronger while he grew weaker and weaker, until in the end he was dead and the country had emerged more powerful and more productive than ever before.”
It was a romanticized view of her husband’s leadership, ignoring the many fierce arguments they had had during the war regarding his decision to intern the Japanese Americans, his failure to do more to help the Jews of Europe, his surrender to big business on military contracts, his caution on civil rights. She had brooded over his shortcomings while he was alive, but now she could idealize him as she had idealized her father, and grasp the elements of his greatness—his supreme confidence, his contagious faith, his sense of timing, his political skills. Beneath all, there had been, she could now see, a fundamental commitment to humane and democratic values, a steadiness of purpose, a determination to win the war as fast as possible, a vision of the principles on which the peace would be based, a dedication to better the life of the average American.
“As I look back over the years,” she wrote, “I think that I am most grateful for the fact that my husband earned and deserved the love and respect of his countrymen. He cared greatly about his fellow man and they returned his concern with a full measure of affection.”
• • •
As Eleanor began to realize the magnitude of her husband’s legacy, she also came to terms with Lucy’s return to Fra
nklin’s life and with Anna’s role in making her visits possible. While she was going through her husband’s belongings at Hyde Park, she came upon a little watercolor of Franklin that Lucy’s friend Madame Shoumatoff had painted. She instructed Margaret Suckley to send the painting on to Lucy.
“Thank you so very much,” Lucy wrote Eleanor; “you must know that it will be treasured always. I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness about my husband when he was desperately ill in Washington, and of how helpful he was too, to his boys—and that I hoped very much that I might see you again . . . . I think of your sorrow—you—whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable . . . . As always, Affectionately, Lucy Rutherfurd.”
Later that week, Anna telephoned Lucy. She had not spoken to Lucy since her father’s death, but now, perhaps knowing from Margaret Suckley what Eleanor had done, she felt free to call. “Your telephoning the other night meant so much to me,” Lucy wrote Anna. “I did not know that it was in me just now to be so glad to hear the sound of any voice—and to hear you laugh—was beyond words wonderful.”
I had not written before for many reasons—but you were constantly in my thoughts & with very loving and heart torn sympathy & I was following every step of the way. This blow must be crushing to you—to all of you—but I know that you meant more to your Father than any one and that makes it closer & harder to bear. It must be an endless comfort to you that you were able to be with him so much this past year. Every second of the day you must be conscious of the void and emptiness, where there has always been—all through your life—the strength of his beloved presence—so filled with loving understanding, so ready to guide and to help. I love to think of his very great pride in you . . . . He told me so often & with such feeling of all that you had meant of joy & comfort on the trip to Yalta. He said you had been so extraordinary & what a difference it made to have you. He told me of your charm & your tact—& of how everyone loved you. He told how capable you were & how you forgot nothing & of the little typewritten chits he would find at his place at the beginning or end of the day—reminding him of all the little or big things that he was to do. I hope he told you these things—but sometimes one doesn’t. In any case you must have known—words were not needed between you. I have been reading over some very old letters of his—and in one he says: “Anna is a dear fine person—I wish so much that you knew her”—Well, now we do know one another—and it is a great joy to me & I think he was happy this past year that it was so . . . . And through it all one hears his ringing laugh & one thinks of all the ridiculous things he used to say—& do—& enjoy. The picture of him sitting waiting for you that night with the Rabbi’s cap on his extraordinarily beautiful head is still vivid.