To be sure, Harry Hopkins provided a companionship that comforted many lonely hours. Night after night, Roosevelt sat in his study with Harry, talking about the war, sharing a meal, exchanging gossip. There were times, Hopkins told the president, when he thought it might be easier if he found a place of his own. But Roosevelt always insisted he stay. “He seems to want to have someone around he can talk to when he wants to,” Hopkins recognized, “or not talk to.”
But even Harry Hopkins was replaceable. “Each imagines he is indispensable to the President,” Eleanor once remarked. “All would be surprised at their dispensability. The President uses those who suit his purposes. He makes up his own mind and discards people when they no longer fulfill a purpose of his.”
Still, it must be borne in mind that the president never seemed bothered by the loneliness ascribed to him by others. “He had more serenity than any man I have ever seen,” Attorney General Francis Biddle said. “One felt that nothing ultimately would upset him.” If friends and family were frustrated by his lack of capacity for intimacy, he regarded it as a strength.
• • •
“Bright-eyed and smiling,” Eleanor was “just about the most composed person” during the inaugural festivities, the Washington Post observed. Not a trace of the fear so palpable in her at the time of the first inaugural remained. On the contrary, she seemed radiant, full of life, good-humored. Her eight years as first lady had opened up to her a new and irresistible world, filled with extraordinary accomplishment, pride, and prestige. Her old fear of failure, her melancholy, though not entirely disappearing, had substantially abated. In support of her belief that the position of first lady could be used as a power for good, she had committed herself to an astonishing range of activities which had earned her the lasting gratitude of millions of citizens.
Her years as first lady had also brought a positive change in her appearance. She had removed from her hair the ugly black hairnet that had accompanied her for too long in public life. Dressed by day in simple, tailored clothes and by night in elegant gowns, she walked with a more confident step, her naturally high complexion enhanced by a small amount of rouge.
To be sure, the first lady had her own share of critics. The hectic travel and honest talk that made her a heroine in some quarters rendered her vulnerable to attack in others. Columnist Westbrook Pegler called her “Madam President,” “Empress Eleanor,” and “The Gab.” Why couldn’t she stay home with her husband, she was frequently asked, “and tend to her knitting as an example for other women to follow”? After visiting the White House on a tour, one woman gave Eleanor unsolicited advice. “Instead of tearing around the country, I think you should stay at home and personally see that the White House is clean. I soiled my white gloves yesterday morning on the stair-railing. It is disgraceful.” All these resentments came together in the 1940 campaign in a prominent button: “We don’t want Eleanor, either.”
Eleanor appeared unruffled by most of her critics. “If I could be worried about mud-slinging, I would have been dead long ago,” she said. “Almost any woman in the White House during these years of need would have done what I have done”—become a voice for the poor, the migrants, the Negroes. Though this was certainly not true, Eleanor’s insistence that she was only trying to do what others would have done, and did not deserve all the attention she received, only added to her charm.
“She is the President’s Number One Adviser on sociological problems,” U.S. News proclaimed. Many people assumed that the New Deal’s domestic program would be abandoned as Roosevelt shifted his focus to war and defense, but “they reckoned without the President’s wife . . . . She never lets the President or his administrators think that all is well, that there is time to rest from advancing their liberal objectives. She backs the President’s most courageous self . . . . No matter how deeply absorbed he may become in international affairs, she will keep him from forgetting the New Deal.”
• • •
A family reunion was arranged at Hyde Park for the weekend before the inauguration. Anna and John had flown in from from Seattle; Elliott was en route from Texas; and FDR, Jr., and Ethel had come up from Washington. “The nearer I draw to Hyde Park, the more excited I become,” Eleanor wrote in her column, admitting a particular pleasure at the thought of seeing Anna. “With my daughter I feel the bond that exists with any child, but in addition there has grown between us the deepest understanding such as exists with an intimate friend. John is not just my son-in-law, but one of my dearest friends. I can be serious or I can be gay with Anna and John without any thought of age or generation to divide us.”
“It was wonderful to have two full days in the country,” Eleanor wrote. “We walked and talked, ate too much, and slept too little which is always the way of family reunions for once conversation starts time slips by unnoticed!”
Sara, too, was in her element, delighted to have her son at home, surrounded by family and friends before the White House claimed him for another four years. For every one of the guests she had a gay smile, but most of her attention, as always, was focused on her brilliant son. “I always have been proud of him and still am,” she said.
The dinner table looked resplendent on Saturday night, January 11, 1941, with the president at one end and Sara at the other. In the course of the conversation, Eleanor raised the troubling question of housing under the defense program. During her last trip to the West Coast, she had seen the devastating effects of overcrowding in Washington State, where the navy yard and shipbuilding construction had attracted thousands of workers from all over the country, part of the first wave of what would be the greatest internal immigration in American history. In Bremerton, she noted, every habitable shack and shed had been rented, scores of families were crowded into unsanitary trailer camps, and two thousand children were without schools. “I think we are going to have to be a nuisance about these questions if we are going to be fair to people all over this country,” she believed. “What we do now must be with an eye to the well-being of the people who are going to do the work essential to our defense. We have no right to ask them to sacrifice their home life to live in a way not compatible to our way.”
In response, the president said he had just appointed Charles Palmer, an Atlanta real-estate man, to head the new Division of Defense Housing, with broad powers to assure speedy construction in connection with rearmament and military-training programs. This was not the response Eleanor wanted to hear. From her own sources she had learned that Palmer’s interest in public housing “arose from his desire to rid Atlanta of slums that were depreciating his own holdings.” In contrast to Eleanor’s belief that “in the long run all housing is defense housing,” Palmer had declared that “sociology was no part of his job, that overcrowding would remain the private builder’s opportunity.” For weeks, Palmer had been under fire in the liberal paper PM for his belief that government construction was not needed since the overwhelming percentage of defense housing could be handled by private firms. Now, this was the man the president had chosen to coordinate the government’s housing program!
“Would he be sensitive to problems of low-cost housing, schools and the like in defense areas,” Eleanor wanted to know. The president became restless, impatient. But, despite the uneasy glances flung at her by Sara, Eleanor persisted, saying “she had heard that Palmer was partial to real estate people.” Clearly annoyed at this point, the president agreed to “appoint someone with Palmer to watch for these things.” But, Eleanor countered, would that person “have any authority?”
While Franklin and Eleanor were arguing, Sara motioned to the butler to bring the president’s wheelchair to the table. Furious at Eleanor’s hectoring, Sara stood behind her son and had him shifted to the other end of the table. In the past, Sara’s obvious reproof would have left Eleanor distraught—at a parallel family dinner two decades before, Eleanor had collapsed in tears when Sara turned on her about something—but at this point in her life, Eleanor had enough confide
nce to confront both her husband and her mother-in-law on an issue she considered important. After dinner, Anna, John, and FDR, Jr., all congratulated her on having stuck to her guns.
“My mother-in-law belonged to the established world of the last century,” Eleanor once wrote. “She accepted its shibboleths without questioning.” To her, “there were certain obligations she as a privileged person must fulfill. She fed the poor, assisted them with money, helped them with medical expenses. This was a form of charity required of her.” She simply could not accept the idea that “human beings had rights as human beings”—a right to a decent house, a job, education, human dignity.
The next day, Sara invited the son of Arnulfo Arias, the president of Panama, to dine with the family. He was “a dandyish” young man, Lash observed, whom Sara affectionately called “Robertito.” When it was learned that young Arias had bragged to reporters that he was lunching privately with the president, FDR, Jr., told his grandmother she was being taken in. Refusing to acknowledge this, Sara announced that she wanted to invite him to the White House for the inaugural festivities. “It fell to Mrs. Roosevelt,” Lash recorded in his diary, “to tell her it could not be done. [Mrs. James] complained that she was never allowed to have any of her friends, an obvious dig at the kind of friends Mrs. R. invited.”
How far off seemed the early days, when Eleanor had first started to work for the League of Women Voters. At that time, in 1921, she had entered a world of feminist women whose values and behavior were totally foreign to Sara—women who lived with other women; active, accomplished women who did things outside the home; independent women, well satisfied with their lives and convinced that they could not possibly live in any other way.
The apprenticeship of Eleanor Roosevelt had begun with two remarkable League women, Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape. Read, an honors graduate of Smith College, was an accomplished lawyer; Lape, a Wellesley graduate, had taught English at Swarthmore and Barnard and then achieved prominence as a publicist. Brilliant, hardworking, and ambitious, they had found in their love for one another the freedom from conventional marriage that allowed them to live according to their own desires, surrounded by music and books. Eleanor was immediately entranced by the stimulating lives these women led, with discussions of politics and public policy at dinner, and poetry readings after dessert. Their book-lined house in Greenwich Village reminded her of the happy days she had spent at Mademoiselle Souvestre’s school in England.
When Eleanor first met Read and Lape, she was still suffering the effects of having discovered her husband’s love affair with Lucy Mercer. She sorely lacked confidence. She needed appreciation and she was lonely. She found in Elizabeth and Esther’s community of women the strength and encouragement to do things on her own, to explore her own talents, to become a person in her own right. Over the years, the friendships deepened into an intimacy which would continue for the rest of Eleanor’s life.
Through her work with the League, Eleanor met two other lifelong friends, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. Cook, a vital, tough-looking young woman, was the director of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party. Dickerman, a tall, soft-spoken scholar whose grim countenance hid a dry wit, was a teacher and vice-principal at Todhunter, an exclusive girls school in Manhattan. Like Elizabeth and Esther, Nancy and Marion lived together in what has been described as a “Boston marriage.” Over the years, both women had been actively involved in the long struggle for women’s suffrage, the movement to abolish child labor, and the efforts to establish maximum working hours.
There is every evidence that the four women, along with half a dozen others (including Elinor Morgenthau and Caroline O’Day, members of the Women’s Division of the New York Democratic State Committee, social worker Molly Dewson, and AP reporter Lorena Hickok), played a substantial role in the education of Eleanor Roosevelt, tutoring her in politics, strategy, and public policy, encouraging her to open up emotionally, building her sense of confidence and self-esteem. In contrast to the distant relationship she had with most of the males in her life at this juncture, her relationship with her female friends was warm and open, frolicsome and relaxed. They kissed and hugged each other when they met; they had pillow fights at night; they wrote long and loving letters when they were apart; they challenged the traditional sense of what was possible.
When Eleanor first came into contact with these bold and successful women, she found herself in awe of the professional status they had acquired. “If I had to go out and earn my own living,” she conceded, “I doubt if I’d even make a very good cleaning woman. I have no talents, no experience, no training for anything.” But all this would change as Eleanor, encouraged by her friends, began to discover a range of abilities she never knew she had—remarkable organizing skills, superb judgment, practical insight, and astonishing endurance. In the space of two years, with the guidance of her female colleagues, Eleanor emerged as a major force in New York public life, speaking out in behalf of political reform, worker’s rights, and children’s issues, sought after for statements in newspapers, chosen to serve on all manner of committees. At the same time, she began teaching three days a week at Todhunter, organizing courses in literature, drama, and American history. “She loved it,” Marion Dickerman recalled. “The girls worshiped her.”
Though Franklin and Louis Howe sometimes joked about Eleanor’s “squaws” and “she-men,” they both recognized that she was becoming an excellent politician and that her tireless work around the state would inevitably redound to Franklin’s credit. Even before polio had crippled Franklin, Howe had encouraged Eleanor to become actively involved in politics. Once the polio struck, Eleanor’s ability to stand in for her husband became critical. Moreover, both Franklin and Louis genuinely liked Elizabeth and Esther, Nan and Marion, and found their conversation stimulating and absorbing.
For Sara, Eleanor’s transformation was harder to accept. Sara was appalled at the idea of a well-bred woman’s spending so much time away from home in the public eye. A woman’s place was with her husband and her children. “My generation did not do those things,” Sara explained. The more involved Eleanor became in politics, the less time she had to take Sara out to lunch or to pour tea for Sara’s friends. “My mother-in-law was distressed and felt that I was not available, as I had been,” Eleanor recalled.
Sara often displaced her criticisms onto Eleanor’s friends, making them feel uncomfortable whenever they came to visit at Hyde Park, scanning their mannish suits and oxford shoes with disapproving eyes, glaring in bewilderment at their close-cropped hair. To Sara, they all looked alike: unkempt, unconventional, unnatural. Understanding the situation, Franklin suggested that Eleanor and her friends Nan and Marion build a cottage for themselves in the woods so they could have a place of their own to pursue their interests apart from Sara’s. “My Missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods,” Franklin explained to Elliott Brown, whom he asked to supervise the project. He then became actively involved in the building of the “shack”—a fieldstone house which eventually grew to accommodate twenty-two rooms.
“The peace of it is divine,” a grateful Eleanor told her husband the first summer she spent at Val-Kill, in 1925. From that time forward, though she stayed at the Big House whenever Franklin and the children were at Hyde Park, Val-Kill became Eleanor’s home—the first home of her own she had ever had. “Can you tell me why Eleanor wants to go over to Val-Kill cottage to sleep every night?” a perplexed Sara once asked one of Eleanor’s friends. “Why doesn’t she sleep here? This is her home. She belongs here.”
The woman who in 1925 had been frightened by the prospect of earning her own living was in 1941 among the highest-paid lecturers in the country, pulling in $1,000 a lecture. Her syndicated column, “My Day,” was printed in 135 newspapers, placing her on a par for circulation with Dorothy Thompson, Westbrook Pegler, and Raymond Clapper. And in 1938, the first installment of her autobiography,
This Is My Story, had been published to widespread popular and critical acclaim. To be sure, as Eleanor recognized better than anyone, her success was due in no small part to the fact that she was the president’s wife. Nonetheless, in April 1940, when it was not at all certain that Roosevelt would run for a third term, United Features had renewed her column for five additional years, a clear recognition that she had established herself in her own right.
So, in January 1941, when it fell to Eleanor, seated at the table in Sara’s house, to tell her mother-in-law that her young Latin American friend was not welcome in her house, the big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was clear that the balance of power between the two dominant women in the president’s life had shifted.
• • •
The president was in high spirits on January 20, 1941, as he headed toward the Capitol for his inaugural. The sky was clear, the sun shining, and the Gallup poll showed that his public support had reached a new high of 71 percent. Seated in an open-air car, he flashed his familiar smile and waved his top hat to the thousands of well-wishers who waited for him at every point along the way.
At high noon, the president stood before a cheering crowd on Capitol Plaza and took the oath of office for a third time. Nineteen members of the Roosevelt family witnessed the historic moment, including Sara, Eleanor, and all five children. When he began to speak, the raking winter sun lit up the right side of his face like a cameo. His voice was clear; his gestures were strong; his speech was a summons to the spirit of democracy.
“There are men who believe that democracy . . . is limited as measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate—that for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that is not true.