First Ladies (9 page)

Two years before she entered the White House, when FDR was Governor of New York, Eleanor Roosevelt had been profiled in a magazine as the ideal modern wife. She gave the journalist a thoughtful, penetrating analysis of contemporary marriage. Ideally, for a woman, it consisted of three things: motherhood, partnership, and companionship. In the past motherhood had taken first place, almost obliterating the other two ideals. Now, thanks to labor-saving devices and the rising expectations of modern women, the other two goals had become paramount.

Eleanor Roosevelt made no attempt to apply this analysis to her own life. No one expected such candor from a politician’s wife in 1930. It was just as well, because the companionship side of the Roosevelt
marriage had collapsed in 1918, when Eleanor discovered FDR was having an affair with Lucy Page Mercer, a Maryland beauty who had been her social secretary for the previous four years. Seldom has a wife been as humiliated by both parties in an infidelity. Lucy and Franklin made a fool of Eleanor, deceiving her literally under her nose in her own house. The marriage teetered on collapse. But in straitlaced 1918 that would have meant the end of the assistant secretary of the Navy’s promising political career, something he found difficult to contemplate. Lucy, a devout Catholic, was ready to sin for love but hesitated to marry a divorced man and cut herself off from her church.

With the help of Sara Roosevelt, FDR’s strong-willed mother, a truce was arranged, mostly on Eleanor’s terms. FDR was banned from her bedroom forever. The shy, primly correct society matron who had marveled over attracting the handsome Hudson River scion also vanished forever, to be replaced by a disillusioned woman determined whenever possible to go her own way.

This determination only redoubled when FDR contracted polio in 1921 and emerged from the ordeal a crippled man, bound to a wheelchair except for public appearances, when he donned leg braces heavier than anything worn by Georgia chain gangs. Most betrayed wives would have accepted this cruel fate as more than enough retribution for their pain and grief. But Eleanor Roosevelt was not your average betrayed wife. Her husband’s infidelity had triggered an upheaval in her soul which exhumed the deepest trauma of her childhood—her love for her forlorn father.

Eleanor was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s brother, Elliott, who despaired of competing with his aggressive older brother at an early age and slowly sank into alcoholism and failure. He married a cold, wealthy New York beauty, Anna Hall, who seems to have disliked her daughter almost as much as she hated her husband. She called Eleanor “Granny” and described her before visitors as a “funny” [strange] child—“so old fashioned.” Only her absent father loved Eleanor without qualifications, and she returned his love with absolute adoration—even when he took her on an outing to his club,
parked her in the cloakroom, and adjourned to the bar, where he got so drunk he went home without her.

Elliott died when Eleanor was ten. Two years earlier her mother had died, leaving her to be raised by her stern, puritanical Hall grandmother, who did not have the word
love
in her vocabulary. In her heart, Eleanor clung to a vision of her father that approached the saintly. She treasured stories of how he once gave away his overcoat to a shivering boy on a New York corner. “With him the heart always dominated,” she said. She carried his letters with her and read and reread them with rapturous intensity.

This was the young woman Franklin D. Roosevelt married—a person who willed herself into absolute love and refused to see human blemishes. A few days after FDR proposed, Eleanor wrote him a prophetic poem:

At the time, she had added: “I wondered if it meant ‘for life, for death’ for you at first.” Franklin’s infidelity with Lucy Mercer confirmed this primary doubt, and—in the opinion of more than one biographer—triggered all the anger Eleanor felt but could never express about her charming, dissolute father.

Henceforth Eleanor Roosevelt vowed to seek love and consolation elsewhere. She distinguished sharply between the “personage” who was the public wife of Franklin Roosevelt and the “personal” woman, who lived a very different life. For a long time these were almost two separate people. “I think the personage is an accident and I only like the part of life in which I am a person,” she told one friend.

When she became First Lady, this habit of mind intensified. “It was almost as though I had erected someone a little outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I lived and worked until I left the White House,” she told another friend.

She summed up her psychological technique in a letter to still another friend: “I have the power of disassociating myself from things, because I’ve had to do it so often, and I’m not unhappy that way, you should cultivate it, you won’t be happy but you won’t be unhappy.”

All this does not add up to a parable of forgiveness. There must have been times when Eleanor yearned to achieve that spiritual ideal. But it remained tragically beyond her reach. The marital wound never really healed, the resentment never ceased to fester. Their son Jimmy described his parents’ relationship as an “armed truce which endured to the day [FDR] died.” Jimmy added that several times he saw his father “in one way or another hold out his arms to Mother and she flatly refused to enter his embrace.”

This was the context in which Eleanor Roosevelt launched her epochal career as First Lady. It deserves that imposing adjective. The mere catalog of her activities would fatigue a squadron of Olympic athletes. She held 348 press conferences in her twelve years in the White House. She received and tried to answer as many as three hundred thousand letters a year. She wrote books, a monthly magazine column, a daily newspaper column, and she worked tirelessly to win access to the President for people and groups she supported.

At first she seemed to do everything right. When departing First Lady Lou Hoover offered to send a car for her first visit to the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt replied she would walk—neatly recapitulating the decision of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, to walk to his inaugural rather than ride in a coach and four. At her press conferences she allowed only women reporters—a neat riposte to the male chauvinists of that era of newspapering, who relegated females to the women’s page, when and if they put them on the payroll.

These self-satisfied males were soon an envious green—or furious purple—over the press coverage Eleanor Roosevelt generated. One scholar has taken the trouble to count the number of stories on her in
The New York Times
during her first year in the White House—320. Only Jacqueline Kennedy won more ink in a comparable period. Barbara Bush, for example, while a popular First Lady, did not even come
close to such a figure. Another interesting statistic, which I freely admit astonished me, shows how Eleanor Roosevelt increased the coverage of her successors: Bess Truman had 118 articles in
The Times
in her first White House year.

The newspapers were only the first of Eleanor’s targets in her campaign to expand job opportunities for women. Even before she got to Washington, she had established a network of activist women inside the Democratic Party. In 1928 she had served as head of the national women’s campaign for Democratic candidates, one of whom was her husband, who was running for governor of New York. One of the people Eleanor recruited for this endeavor, which included the doomed attempt to make Al Smith the first Roman Catholic President, was a dynamic social worker named Molly Dewson.

When Eleanor went to Washington as First Lady, Molly Dewson went with her as head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party. Even before she acquired that title, Party Chairman Jim Farley was calling Molly “The General.” On April 27, 1933, six weeks after FDR was inaugurated, Molly sent Eleanor a seven-page letter listing the names and qualifications often women who “absolutely” had to be recognized with good jobs and another thirteen who were next in line. In FDR’s first term, they put over a hundred women into jobs that ranged from employees of the National Aeronautics Board to the secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet post.

Eleanor Roosevelt backed Madame Perkins, as my father sometimes called her, from start to finish. A shy New Englander, Ms. Perkins was appalled by the way the Washington, D.C., press corps wanted to know every imaginable detail of her private life. (She was married to an economist and had one daughter.) Her reticence eventually gave her a poor public image, which her mostly male enemies did not hesitate to use against her. She constantly sought the First Lady’s advice and support. Often that took the form of telling her to become resigned to the fact that “men hate a woman in a position of real power.”

Laws and social programs we now take for granted were born under Frances Perkins’s leadership, with Eleanor Roosevelt’s vigorous
endorsement: unemployment insurance, social security, the Wagner Act, which made trade unions viable. The reserved Yankee became a devoted admirer of the First Lady. “She was a very easy woman to know,” Ms. Perkins said.

Meanwhile, another Eleanor Roosevelt surrogate, Ellen Woodward of Mississippi, became head of the women’s division of the Works Progress Administration, better known as the WPA. Woodward was there to make sure women got a fair share of the jobs being funneled to the state directors of this gigantic effort to put America back to work. (For a brief while Missouri’s director was Harry S Truman—until he decided to run for the U.S. Senate.) The First Lady forwarded to Ms. Woodward over four hundred letters a month from desperate women seeking help.

Eleanor Roosevelt also recognized the importance of access to the President. “When I needed help on some definite point,” Molly Dew-son later recalled, “Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup.” The First Lady also used the White House to strengthen friendships within her women’s network. She compiled a list of women in executive positions in the government and regularly invited them to receptions and dinners. So many of them shared their problems with her, she launched a series of spring garden parties exclusively for them—where they could really communicate with one another.

During these same dramatic years of FDR’s first term, Eleanor Roosevelt led the fight against the Depression notion that women should be fired from as many jobs as possible to aid men with families to support. She also played a key part in opening up lesser jobs for women in various federal departments. In the Post Office alone, one historian credits her for the hiring of four thousand women.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s visibility soon began to attract criticism. She regularly issued disclaimers to possessing any political power. “I [have] never tried to influence Franklin on anything he did,” she declared at one of her press conferences, “and I certainly have never known him to try to influence me.” The latter part of that statement
is probably true. FDR remarked more than once that it was impossible for him to win an argument with his wife. The first part, though, is a country mile from the truth.

Virtually every insider in the Roosevelt White House testified to Eleanor’s often relentless attempts to influence her husband. She sometimes shocked friends by talking of “getting my time with him”—as if she were simply one of several members of the inner circle—and was determined to use her access to the fullest.

Many Presidents’ wives have wielded political influence, back to the second First Lady, Abigail Adams, whose enemies called her “the presidentress.” What was unique about Eleanor Roosevelt was the incredible scope and variety of the causes and issues she embraced—and the tenacity with which she pursued them, not only with her husband but with other members of the administration. Seldom if ever did she invite a cabinet officer or other official to the White House without having an agenda of what she called “ideas I think we should work on.”

More than one cabinet officer expressed irritation at her intrusions into his department. When she pestered Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to spend budget-busting amounts of money on a housing project in West Virginia, Ickes, who shared many of the First Lady’s liberal views, confided to his diary: “She is not doing the president any good. She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think she is harmful rather than helpful.”

As early as 1934 Willard Kiplinger, author of a powerful Washington newsletter, warned Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that he was going to attack Mrs. Roosevelt. “She is throwing monkey wrenches into the government departments and they are all afraid to say something because she is the wife of the President,” Kiplinger said.

These were comments from Eleanor’s
friends
. From her legions of conservative enemies came a barrage of invective and denunciation that portrayed her as a walking, talking menace to the American way of life.

Eleanor brushed aside these criticisms. Early in her husband’s presidency, she appointed herself its conscience. She was determined to
extend the range of the reforms that the New Deal promised, often in vague terms, as it struggled to renew the American economy. As one of her biographers put it grandiloquently, “That conscience of hers was like a steady Gulf Stream of goodness radiating out from the White House through all the ambits of New Deal power and along its coasts of ambition, gentling them to beneficent purposes.”

The First Lady was an early proponent of civil rights and did everything in her power to support that cause in the teeth of ferocious hostility from conservative southerners. In Birmingham, Alabama, when she attended a meeting of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, she found the auditorium segregated. She calmly moved her chair into the center aisle, symbolically bridging the racist gap. She entertained blacks in the White House. She pushed again and again for blacks to be appointed to government jobs—usually with little success. FDR, always a political realist, feared the wrath of the southern Democrats, who chaired many powerful committees in Congress.