Eleanor and Franklin (102 page)

A Tennessee farmer sent her a detailed proposal for establishing a silk industry in the United States. “He wants a silk industry. It was looked into but should we look further?” The president was sufficiently intrigued to send the proposal on to Wallace, inquiring, “Is there anything in this idea?” The labor costs were prohibitive, Wallace replied. “Did anyone go over this to find out if there is anything in it?” Eleanor asked her husband in regard to still another plan. “What can we say to Mrs. Roosevelt about this?” the president asked Lauchlin Currie, one of his administrative assistants. “A crank, and not worth bothering with,” was Currie's summary judgment. But as long as someone looked into these matters Eleanor was satisfied. Usually they were wild goose chases, but one of the plans she passed on to Franklin was sent by Alexander Sachs, an economist with Lehman Brothers. In 1936 he had submitted a plan for agriculture, but in 1939 he came to the White House as the intermediary for Albert Einstein and other scientists who wanted to apprise the president about nuclear fission.
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In her search for a solution to the unemployment problem, Eleanor was as open to suggestions from the business community as from the labor movement and the left. It was through her
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that John Maynard Keynes' letter on the 1937 recession dealing with the impasse between the business world and the New Deal reached the president. Keynes wrote:

I think the President is playing with fire if he does not now do something to encourage the business world, or at any rate refrain from frightening them further. If one is purporting to run a capitalist system, and not something quite different, there are concessions that have to be made. The worst of all conceivable systems is a capitalist one kept on purpose by authority in a state of panic and lack of confidence.
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Baruch—also through Eleanor—was another who advised the president to ease up on the business community. He sent her the statement he had made before the Special Senate Committee on Unemployment in which he had warned that it was wrong to rush from a “regulate everything” position. She was not persuaded, Eleanor wrote Baruch later, but she was ready “to see us let business have some of the reforms which they think will solve their difficulties, not because I agree but because I think there is much in the psychological effect.”
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Her old friend Harry Hooker, now a Wall Street lawyer and counsel to Myron Taylor of U.S. Steel, was distressed to hear her say there was no solution known to her or to anyone else for full employment, and sent her a nine-page plan which called for repeal of the capital-gains tax, reduction in income taxes, and a ban on New Deal speeches attacking business. “Whether we like it or not, Capitalism is timid,” Hooker summed up his recommendations.
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Eleanor reported them to her husband, adding that she had also heard from a reputable economist that the way to bring about full employment was a large-scale housing program. She was for trying both. Fine, the president commented, but where was he going to get the money?

The First Lady was in advance of almost everyone in the administration in her emphasis on how much remained to be done despite New Deal achievements. At a Youth Congress dinner in February, 1939, a Republican speaker dismissed agencies such as the NYA and the CCC as ineffective and wasteful. “American youth does not want to be mollycoddled,” the Republican official asserted; what it wanted was jobs. Eleanor was moved to make an impromptu answer. She agreed that WPA and NYA might not represent “fundamental” solutions; they were, she said quietly, stop-gap measures. But the NYA “gave people hope at a time when young people were desperate,” and with the NYA and WPA we had “bought ourselves time to think.” Although she believed in the measures enacted by the New Deal, she also noted that “they helped but they did not solve the fundamental problems. There is no use kidding ourselves. We have got to face this economic problem. And we have got to face it together. We have got to cooperate if we are going to solve it.” Heywood Broun, who was in the audience, was so moved by her speech that he consulted his journalistic colleagues: “Am I just going into an impulsive handspring or is this one of the finest short speeches ever made in our times?”
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Because Eleanor was in advance not only of her husband but of
almost all of his cabinet in urging that the “fundamentals” of the unemployment problem be confronted, she had to be careful not to give the opposition a chance to raise the cry of “petticoat government.” Although the charge was completely inconsistent with the efforts to portray Roosevelt as a “dictator,” that did not deter the administration's critics. When she was in Dallas in March, 1939, to lecture, Eleanor was presented by Governor W. Lee O'Daniel, a conservative Democrat. In his introductory remarks he said, “You've possibly heard of her husband. Any good things he may have done during his political career are due to her and any mistakes he may have made are due to his not taking up the matter with his wife.” Was this southern courtliness or subtle Democratic aspersion? Eleanor promptly entered a gentle disclaimer: “A President's wife does not see her husband often enough to tell him what to do.” Simeon Strunsky, who wrote the “Topics of the Times” column, enjoyed that. “Many a man who has had the privilege of talking with the President for five minutes in the course of a year or a whole administration has been known to go on ever after mysteriously assuming responsibility for most of the President's acts”; the First Lady was “too modest.”
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But she knew the pitfalls of appearing to have any influence with Franklin. He had spent half a lifetime escaping the domination of his mother, and he resisted any kind of domination, especially a woman's. And Eleanor was a very strong-minded woman. “If the term ‘weaker sex' is to be transferred from the female to the male of our society,” commented Grace Tully, Missy's assistant, “much of the psychological groundwork must be credited to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”
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“Men have to be humored,” Eleanor wrote in answer to Raymond Clapper's assertion that women were too emotional to be entrusted with large matters of policy. “I know that men have to believe that they are superior to women, and women from the time they are little girls have to learn self-discipline because they have to please the gentlemen. They have to manage some man all their lives.” She loved the passage in Stephen Vincent Benét's “John Brown's Body” which described the lady of the plantation:

She was often mistaken, not often blind,

And she knew the whole duty of womankind,

To take the burden and have the power

And seem like the well-protected flower . . .
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Once, a student leader suggested the text of a message the president might send to a youth meeting; he noticed Tommy getting restive and finally she said tartly, “The President will write his own message.” Later Tommy came to the young man and said apologetically she had not meant to hurt his feelings but if Mrs. Roosevelt were to go to the president and suggest what he ought to say “he will just get mad.”
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When Dr. D. E. Buckingham told the newspapers that Mrs. Roosevelt had secured him his job as District veterinarian, she wrote him sharply, “You must realize that I never actually ask for anyone's appointment. I simply stated your qualifications as I would have done for anyone who had done anything for us. You have placed me in a very embarrassing position, by having made it appear that I had used my influence.” And she advised the president of the District Commissioners

that in the future I will be very glad if my name is not used in connection with any recommendation which I make.

I write these letters merely to give any information which I have when a man's name is up for consideration, and I would not, under any condition, want to influence your decision or have you do anything which was not in accordance with your best judgment.
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In a story about Ickes' appointment of Ruth Bryan Rohde to attend an Inter-American Travel Congress, the
New York Times
reported that Mrs. Roosevelt had suggested the appointment. She quickly wrote the secretary:

I hope you do not think that I was the person who suggested Mrs. Rohde for any position. I simply wrote you because the President asked me to do so. There is such a concerted effort being made to make it appear that I dictate to F.D.R. that I don't want the people who should know the truth to have any misunderstanding about it. I wouldn't dream of doing more than passing along requests or suggestions that come to me.
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The issue of her influence with the president also arose in connection with her promptings of her husband during a press conference at Hyde Park. The president was accusing the anti-New Deal coalition in Congress of gambling with world peace and the economic well-being of the country, and in the informal atmosphere of Hyde Park
Eleanor spoke up to remind him of some vivid phrases that he had used at breakfast to illustrate his point. Mrs. Roosevelt “has come into the open as the guiding spirit and co-phrasemaker of her husband's program,” Arthur Krock of the
Times
wrote afterward.
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“Did you notice that Mrs. Roosevelt during a press conference prompted the President?” John C. O'Laughlin, publisher of the
Army and Navy Journal,
excitedly wrote his friend Herbert Hoover.

Are they hereafter to cooperate rather than each to work one side of the street? Is the idea to advance Mrs. Roosevelt for something or other, even the Presidency? A fantastic notion, but in Washington suspicion follows any Roosevelt act. It may be, too, that the pair thought it advisable to show complete harmony in view. If so, the President will go much farther to the left during the remainder of his term, for you are aware of the extreme radicalism of the First Lady. . . . In any event, the incident is interesting and is welcome by the Republicans, who now feel they can attack Mrs. Roosevelt as a politician and thus avoid criticism for assailing a woman.
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“I should have learned by this time to keep quiet when I happen to sit in at the President's conferences,” Eleanor told another member of the staff of the
Times
,

for every time I have ever opened my mouth at one I have got into trouble. But it seemed to be such a shame that the phrase he had used, telling us the same things at the breakfast table, couldn't be repeated for the correspondents, because it just wasn't as good a story without those graphic expressions. So I tried to help him out—and that's all to that.
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As much as possible she sought to minimize and conceal from public view her intercessions with the president. In December, 1939, Walter White of the NAACP sent her a report on an investigation of two lynchings in Mississippi, in the hope of publishing the report with her sponsorship. She sent it to the president. Back came a memo: “You should not accept a place as a member of the group but I suggest that you ask the Attorney General to look into this whole case to smell out any interstate activity or effect in the crime.” Eleanor sent the report to Attorney General Murphy, saying that the president had suggested he look into it, and Murphy assigned Assistant Attorney General O. John
Rogge to the case. In writing to Walter White, however, she omitted any reference to the president. “I do not think it would be wise for me to give my name as a sponsor to the report you sent me, so I think this is one request I shall have to refuse. I am giving your letter to the Attorney General.”

Louis Fischer, the writer and analyst of Soviet affairs, appealed to Eleanor to help get his wife and two sons out of the Soviet Union. At his request she agreed to speak to the president about it to find out if he would mention it to Soviet Ambassador Oumansky. The president had suggested that she invite Mrs. Oumansky for tea and talk to her about it, she reported to Fischer. The affair went well, and passports were issued to Fischer's family. When he later requested permission to describe the episode in a book he was writing and enclosed what he proposed to say, she wrote back:

I hate to spoil anything you have written, but I would rather you left out my letter and any reference to the President. I do not want more than a mention of the fact that you came to see me and I said I would do what I could. I do not want it said that I interfered.
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She sought to hide her influence and effectiveness, and she held no office in government. Yet at the end of her husband's second term, Raymond Clapper included her among “The Ten Most Powerful People in Washington,” saying that she was “a force on public opinion, on the President and on the government . . . a cabinet minister without portfolio . . . the most influential woman of our times.” Grace Tully called her “a one-woman staff for the President,” and Jesse Jones thought of her as “Assistant President.” Without office she had developed an immense following throughout the country. It was never tested in a vote, but a poll on the subject published by Dr. Gallup at the beginning of 1939 showed that 67 per cent of those queried approved of the way she had conducted herself as First Lady, with women endorsing her activities by an even larger ratio than men.
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The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, close to death in Cambridge, realized what she had accomplished during her husband's first two terms in office. Writing on behalf of Mrs. Whitehead and himself, he said, “We cannot exaggerate our appreciation of the wonderful work which you are doing in transforming the bleak social agencies of the past by the personal exercise of kindness, interest and directive knowledge.” She was never able to forget, she told S. J. Woolf, “that
this country or any other country is in the final analysis a collection of human beings striving to be happy, and it is the human element which is the most important consideration.”
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