Ironically, as Eleanor, with Hick’s considerable help, grew into her role as first lady, the ardor of the friendship diminished. “No question that Hick helped Eleanor get her wings,” a Roosevelt relative observed, “but once Eleanor began to fly she didn’t need Hick the same way.” Surrounded by the love and admiration of thousands, Eleanor no longer required the private reassurances from Hick that had bolstered her in the anxious days before she left New York for Washington. In the beginning of the relationship, it was Eleanor who was jealous of Hick’s job and Hick’s accomplishments—“I should work as you do, but I can’t. I am more apt to disappoint you, dear, than you are to disappoint me”—but before long the lines of jealousy ran the opposite way. Sensing that she needed Eleanor more than Eleanor needed her, Hick became moody and sullen, demanding time with Eleanor alone, apart from Eleanor’s family and friends.
Eleanor tried to accommodate Hick’s desire for time alone, but, more often than not, she found herself apologizing to Hick for including other people in their plans. First it was Louis Howe. “I know you will be disappointed . . . ,” she warned Hick, “but Louis seems so miserable I would feel horrible to tell him I wouldn’t look after him that evening. You know I’d rather be with you.” Then it was Anna. “I’d rather go alone with you but I can’t hurt her feelings . . . .” There were so many others—Nan, Marion, Earl, Esther, Elizabeth. They all needed her, too, and though she understood Hick’s “cry from the heart for something all her own,” she couldn’t turn her back on her old friends.
After each confrontation with Hick, Eleanor felt miserable. “I went to sleep saying a little prayer,” Eleanor told Hick. “God give me depth enough not to hurt Hick again. Darling I know I’m not up to you in many ways but I love you dearly.”
“I know you have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind, but I feel I love you just the same,” Eleanor wrote Hick on another occasion. “You think some one thing could make you happy. I know it never does. We may want something, and when we have it, it is not what we dreamed it would be, the thing lies in oneself.”
But over time, Hick’s possessiveness wore Eleanor down. “I could shake you for your letter . . . ,” Eleanor scolded Hick after Hick had complained of a change of plans. “I know you felt badly & are tired, but I’d give an awful lot if you weren’t so sensitive.”
The low point came during a trip to Yosemite, when Hick became so jealous of the attention the park rangers were showing Eleanor that she “shouted and stalked like a wild animal.” When the trip was over, Hick bemoaned her conduct. “I hope you are having a happy, restful time . . . a happier, more peaceful time than you had with me. Oh, I’m bad, my dear, but I love you so, at times life becomes just one long, dreary ache for you. But I’m trying to be happy and contented.”
Driven by Hick’s behavior to a pitch of exasperation, Eleanor offered a piece of unthinking advice. “Of course you should have had a husband & children & it would have made you happy if you loved him & in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings & given you someone on whom to lavish the love & devotion you have to keep down all the time.”
What exactly did Eleanor mean by suggesting to Hick that if she loved a man her frustrated cravings might have been satisfied? Cravings for what? For women instead of men? Was Eleanor unable to accept that Hick was a lesbian? Was she speaking from ignorance, prejudice, or fear?
For her part, Hick cursed the fate that bound her obsessively to Eleanor and hoped that someday she would be free of it. “It would be so much better, wouldn’t it,” she repeatedly asked Eleanor, “if I didn’t love you so much sometimes. It makes it trying for you.”
As Eleanor’s passion diminished, her guilt increased. “Of course dear, I never meant to hurt you in any way,” Eleanor told Hick in 1937, “but that is no excuse for having done it. It won’t help you any but . . . I’m pulling myself back in all my contacts now. I’ve always done it with my children & why I didn’t know I couldn’t give you (or anyone else who wanted or needed what you did) any real food, I can’t now understand. Such cruelty & stupidity is unpardonable when you reach my age.”
Hick’s melancholy was still evident in a long letter she wrote Eleanor shortly after the 1940 election. “I’d never have believed it possible for a woman to develop after fifty as you have in the last six years. My God, you’ve learned to do surprisingly well two of the most difficult things in the world—to write and speak. My trouble I suspect has always been that I’ve been so much more interested in the person than in the personage. I resented the personage and fought for years an anguished and losing fight against the development of the person into the personage. I still prefer the person but I admire and respect the personage with all my heart . . . . I can think of only one other person who undoubtedly felt about this as I have—or would have felt so, increasingly, had he lived, Louis Howe.”
“You are wrong about Louis,” Eleanor replied. “He always wanted to make me President when FDR was thro’ & insisted he could do it. You see he was interested in his power to create personages more than in a person, tho’ I think he probably cared more for me as a person as much as he cared for anyone & more than anyone else ever has! Sheer need on his part I imagine!”
How the words “he probably cared more for me . . . than anyone else ever has” must have hurt Hick, who knew in her heart that no one had ever loved Eleanor more than she. But at this point in the relationship, there was nothing Hick could do.
By the time Hick moved into the White House in 1941, a permanent pain had settled in her heart. Though she had come to accept that she could never mean to Eleanor what Eleanor meant to her, the yearning in her soul was still too powerful to allow her to break away. Accepting Eleanor’s invitation was in some ways a self-destructive act, but, by living so close, she rationalized, she would at least have the chance to share an occasional breakfast with Eleanor in the morning or talk with her late at night. It was not enough, but it was better than nothing.
• • •
“A more discouraging agenda could not have been imagined,” U.S. News suggested, than that which faced the president in early April, when he “settled down in his swivel chair” upon his return from Fort Bragg: “urgent proposals for more aid to Britain”; Allied defeats in the Middle East; “seizure of Axis ships in American ports; expulsion of the Italian naval attaché”; and, perhaps most discouraging of all, news of lagging production and record numbers of strikes.
Though 1940 had been relatively quiet on the strike front, with only 2.3 percent of the workers in the country involved—the lowest percentage since 1932—1941 became a banner year for strikes. One of every twelve workers, the highest percentage since 1919, would go out on strike in 1941, and the number of strikes would be exceeded in history only by 1937 and 1919.
The most severe strains that spring were in the aircraft industry, which was still in the process of being unionized, still fighting a rearguard action against the rights labor had gained in much of the automotive industry. But strikes were also being fought over wages, work conditions, work loads, and jurisdictional disputes. “Some friends of labor are very deeply troubled,” columnist Raymond Clapper wrote, “over the fact that labor is working itself into a role of irresponsible obstruction to war production.”
Believing that legislation was necessary to prevent strikes altogether, the War Department sought to use the strike statistics as a public-relations weapon. Every week in March and April, the War Department printed bulletins showing how many man days had been lost as a result of the various strikes at Allis Chalmers, Vultee Air, American Car and Foundry, and Motor Wheel. The bulletins also contained a list of critical items affected—light tanks, landing wheels for the P-40 plane, ammunition, blankets, generators, bombs, zinc. The public-relations effort worked. At theaters across the country, audiences loudly booed whenever pictures of strikers were shown on the newsreels.
Eleanor took a different tack, arguing that business cau
tion, not labor excess, was the root of lagging production. She contended that the fear of being left with surplus capacity after the war was still operating as a brake on plans for expansion. As long as the defense agencies were weighted down with wealthy businessmen (dollar-a-year men, as they were called), there was little hope for change. “All these men will be returning to business,” Eleanor told Bernard Baruch at lunch. “How can they be expected to crack down on people with whom they will have to do business in the future?”
“I cannot escape the feeling,” Eleanor told the readers of her column, “that the tendency so far has been to say that labor must make sacrifices of wages and hours because of necessities of national defense. I have yet to see anywhere a statement that manufacturers and business concerns . . . shall make this same type of sacrifice by cutting profits and reducing the salaries of executives.”
Amid these charges and countercharges came the news that the Ford employees in Dearborn, Michigan, had struck for the first time in the thirty-eight-year history of the River Rouge plant, the largest auto plant in the world. The Rouge plant was the capital of the Ford empire. An entirely self-contained twelve-hundred-acre unit, the plant generated enough power to light all the homes in Chicago, used enough water to supply all the families of Detroit, Cincinnati, and Washington combined, and wore out seven thousand mops a month to keep itself clean.
The strike had begun during the night shift in response to the firing of eleven union workers. As word of the firing spread, the men in one department after another began a spontaneous walkout. At midnight, with the strike officially authorized by the UAW-CIO, squads of union members roamed the plant urging workers to leave their jobs. By 3 a.m., almost all the night workers, eight thousand or more, were out in front of the plant, cheering and singing the union song, “Solidarity Forever.” In the meantime, union members from the day shift began to arrive by the thousands to barricade the roads leading into the plant.
Ever since 1936, Newsweek reported, the UAW-CIO had awaited the chance to crack Ford, “the last unconquered citadel in its campaign to organize the auto industry.” In the wake of the sit-down strikes in the mid-thirties, General Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, Nash, Packard, and Willy had all come to terms with the union. In moments of vanity, owner Henry Ford liked to believe that he was different from all his colleagues, that they had brought their troubles on themselves whereas he had been an ideal employer, so ideal that his employees didn’t need a union.
In truth, fear had been the operating force behind the reluctance of the Ford employees to join the union. Over the years, Ford Service Department head Harry Bennett had built a powerful goon squad of three thousand ex-pugilists, ex-jailbirds, fired policemen, and small-time gangsters, whose primary function was to spy on the employees, taking names of any workmen who accepted union leaflets, tearing union buttons off the caps of employees, physically assaulting union organizers. Little wonder that for so many years the union drive at Ford had stalled.
Ford’s miserable labor relations complicated the government’s position in the defense crisis. The War Department believed that Ford’s immense facilities were essential to rapid munitions production, but labor’s vociferous complaints were hard to ignore. In the end, the need for mass production won out; on November 7, 1940, the army had awarded Ford a $122-million contract for the production of four thousand plane engines—the largest such order of the arms program. A week later, a second contract had followed, for a mosquito fleet of four-wheel-drive midget cars, able to go anywhere and get there fast.
Labor spokesmen were horrified at the government’s decision to reward “union enemy number one.” In liberal circles, the Ford contracts were considered a grievous setback which threatened to take away all the rights working people had achieved through a decade of bitter struggle. “Ford is the country’s foremost violator of the Wagner Act,” The Nation decried, referring to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guaranteed collective-bargaining rights and outlawed such management practices as blacklisting union organizers and spying on union members, “a symbol of the determination of big business to remain above the law,” and yet the government had chosen to award the company with not one but two contracts.
The first lady shared labor’s discontent, telling delegates at an American Student Union Convention that she thought it was “a bad thing to give contracts to uncooperative people.” For his part, the president fully appreciated the complexity of the situation, but his first impulse, he told Henry Stimson, was “to let bygone issues go and concentrate on getting Ford to play fair with labor in the future.” It was Roosevelt’s belief that once Ford accepted large defense contracts change was inevitable; the dynamics of the situation would eventually force Ford into accepting the union. It was with similar reasoning that Roosevelt had expressed the naïve hope to Negro leader A. Philip Randolph that, by putting white and black regiments side by side in the fluid situation of war, the armed forces would eventually back into integration.
In February 1941, Ford’s refusal to “play fair” took its toll on the company. Though Ford was the lowest bidder on a large government order for airplanes, the War Department, under strong pressure from labor, felt compelled to reject the bid because management refused even to sign a clause pledging future compliance with the labor laws. “Best news in a long time,” I. F. Stone wrote. The decision gave heart to union organizers at Ford, who began a new drive. Emboldened further by a Supreme Court decision that fixed responsibility on Ford for violating the Wagner Act, union leaders succeeded in signing up thousands of workers. The stage was set for the strike that began on the first of April, when Ford fired the union’s key organizers.
From the beginning, the historic strike was complicated by racial conflict. Though the overwhelming majority of the workers stood behind the strike, there remained within the plant nearly two thousand nonstriking Negroes who claimed loyalty to Ford and refused to join the union. Stationing themselves on the roof of the main plant, hundreds of Negro employees hurled metal buckets into the crowd of picketers marching peacefully below. At one point in the struggle, two hundred Negroes armed with steel bars and crudely fashioned swords rushed the main gate, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the strikers. By the second day of the strike, with company agents busily stirring up racial hatred in the streets, the situation had escalated out of control, threatening to produce a full-scale race war. If the violence continued, the Ford Company argued, the government would have to issue an injunction and send troops to end the strike. Ford also claimed to have evidence of a direct connection between the CIO and the Communist Party. The strike, Ford alleged, was part of the communist program to impede America’s mobilization.
Fortunately for the strikers, Roosevelt’s lines of intelligence stretched beyond Ford’s assessment of the situation. From Hyde Park, where she had gone for the weekend, Eleanor sent Franklin a copy of a long memo she had received from civil-rights leader Mary McCleod Bethune. In this memo, Bethune explained that, though it was true that Ford had earned the loyalty of Negroes by employing “more Negroes in skilled and semi-skilled capacities than any other auto manufacturer in the company,” the policy was rooted in opposition to the union. Over time, Bethune explained, “the Ford Negro workers have been propagandized very strongly against trade unionism of any kind and it was expected that in any labor dispute these workers would form the backbone of the Ford anti-union forces.” Ford’s immediate plan, Bethune had learned, was to use these Negro workers as the vanguard of a back-to-work movement sometime after the weekend. If this was attempted, Bethune predicted, it would result in “one of the bloodiest race riots in the history of the country.” Bethune closed by saying she was sending this confidential information to Eleanor in the hope that Eleanor would use her influence to prevent an occurrence “which would set race relations back a quarter of a century.”
Armed with the information Bethune provided, Roosevelt appreciated the terrible bind in which the Negro workers f
ound themselves, caught between their past loyalty to Ford and their hopes for the future. “It will be a bitter blow to those who look to the future of the Negro in trade union organizations,” the Pittsburgh Courier observed, “if this most crucial strike is lost by use of Negro scabs.”
Refusing to be drawn into the situation on Ford’s side, the president articulated a policy of “watching and waiting and watching,” intended to give the mediation machinery a full chance to work. Republicans in the Congress had a field day with the Ford strike. “With the help of the President of the U.S., Hitler has closed the Ford plant,” Congressman George Dondero argued. “The dictators in Europe ought to be celebrating today.” Representative George Shafer of Battle Creek agreed: “I am convinced the President and his utterly incompetent Secretary of Labor have purposely remained inert and silent while the defense program has been sabotaged.”
While the Republicans railed against the president for failing to issue an injunction, he was working behind the scenes to bring about a peaceful settlement. With Roosevelt’s approval, NAACP head Walter White journeyed to Detroit to address the Negroes in the plant. Speaking from a union car, White urged the Negro workers to reject their role as strikebreakers, to evacuate the plant and stand shoulder to shoulder with their fellow workers. After several tense days, the Negro workers finally agreed to come out of the plant, clearing the way for the negotiations between labor and management to begin.
The fate of the strikers now rested in the hands of two men, the seventy-seven-year-old founder of the company, Henry Ford, and his only son, Edsel. The elder Ford, stooped and diminished by a series of small strokes, had begun to show unmistakable signs of failing powers: forgetfulness, stubbornness, episodes of inattention and drowsiness. His eyes, one Ford employee said, looked as if someone had “dimmed the power behind them.” Two decades earlier, Edsel had replaced his father as president of the company. When the old man came into the plant, however, his word was still law. In June 1940, Edsel had committed Ford to build nine thousand Rolls-Royce engines for British Spitfire planes. Henry agreed at first, but when he realized that the company was expected to deal directly with the British, he changed his mind. It was against his isolationist principles to provide war materials to a foreign power. Edsel was humiliated by the sudden turnabout; when William Knudsen asked him to explain, he could only say that his father had made him do it.