Eleanor and Franklin (78 page)

The Roosevelts recognized that the nation's crisis was primarily one of the spirit. Fear was the worst thing that happened to the country as a result of the Depression, Eleanor had written in December, “fear of an uncertain future, fear of not being able to meet our problems. Fear of not being equipped to cope with life as we live it today.” What people needed was to have something “outside of one's self and greater than one's self to depend on. . . . We need some of the old religious spirit which said ‘I myself am weak but Thou art strong oh Lord!'”
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Franklin Roosevelt soberly expressed the same feeling on the way to Washington. Religion and a belief in God, he said to Farley, as he looked out at the stricken countryside, “will be the means of bringing
us out of the depths of despair into which so many apparently have fallen.”

Before going to the White House to pick up the outgoing president and his wife, the whole Roosevelt household and the new cabinet attended services at St. John's Episcopal Church. The old rector of Groton, although he had voted for Hoover, was there at Roosevelt's invitation to lead the congregation in prayer: “May Thy son Franklin, chosen to be our President, and all of his advisers, be enlightened and strengthened for Thy service and may he direct and rule according to Thy will.” Eleanor's head bowed low. The stirring hymn of faith and resolve rang out: “Eternal Father, strong to save.”

Two limousines, with Roosevelt in the first and Eleanor in the second, moved toward the White House. There they were joined by the Hoovers. The crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue cheered. Roosevelt waved and doffed his silk hat, but Hoover, his face set stonily forward, was unresponsive to either the crowds or Roosevelt's effort to make conversation. What would Mrs. Hoover miss most? Eleanor asked her companion as they rode in the car behind. Not being taken care of, was the reply, not having train reservations made for her, not having her wishes anticipated and attended to. Eleanor made a silent vow never to permit herself to become so dependent.
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The immense crowds in the Capitol plaza cheered, but the country waited. On the inaugural stand the cold wind blew, and Eleanor, in a velvet gown and coat of “Eleanor blue,” which it had taken her less than thirty minutes to select, was not dressed warmly enough. But she was impervious to the cold, intent on the response of the listening throng to her husband's words. Roosevelt's buoyant voice carried a message of action. In later years when the country had recovered its faith in itself, the electric line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” addressed to the crisis in spirit and morale, would be the one by which the speech was recalled. But on that gray day the millions of Americans who listened on their radios were most stirred by the call to battle stations: “This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” If necessary to meet the emergency, he was prepared to ask Congress for power “as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Here the president received his greatest burst of applause. Eleanor found it “a little terrifying. You felt that they would do
anything
—if only someone would tell them
what
to do,” she commented afterward
at the White House. She had a feeling “of going it blindly. We are in a tremendous stream and none of us knows where we are going to land.” But what was important was “our attitude toward whatever may happen. It must be willingness to accept and share with others whatever may come and to meet the future courageously, with a cheerful spirit.”
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She and the president set an example. His “exuberant vitality . . . high spirits . . . tirelessness . . . gave a lift to the spirits of millions of average men, stimulated them to higher use of their own power, gave them a new zest for life,” wrote Mark Sullivan of the opening days of the Roosevelt presidency.
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And Bess Furman of the Associated Press, reporting on Mrs. Roosevelt's debut as mistress of the White House, ended an exultant story, “Washington had never seen the like—a social transformation had taken place with the New Deal.”
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Eleanor was spontaneous, sensible, and direct, and the result was a shattering of precedents. She would run the little wood-paneled elevator herself, she firmly told Chief Usher Ike Hoover. When, because of constant interruptions, Hick was unable to finish an interview with Eleanor in the sitting room, they retreated to the bathroom. In her eagerness to get settled, she pushed furniture around herself. The thousand guests who had been invited for tea turned into three thousand, and for the first time tea was served in the East Room as well as the State Dining Room; Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the Hyde Park neighbor whom Eleanor had brought to Washington as housekeeper, sent out repeatedly for more sandwiches, more little cakes. The tea guests had scarcely departed when dinner guests began arriving—seventy-five Roosevelt relatives, including Alice Longworth, all of whom Eleanor greeted at the door instead of waiting until they were assembled to make a ceremonious descent.

The most radical break with precedent was her decision to hold press conferences, the first ever given by a First Lady, in the White House, on the record. The contrast with Mrs. Hoover could not have been more marked. That silvery-haired, kindly woman had shielded herself from public notice. The handful of women who were assigned to keep track of her, who were known as the “Green Room girls,” were permitted to observe her only at a distance at official receptions, teas, tree plantings, charity bazaars, and public appearances with the president. The few occasions on which she appeared in the press in her own right were in connection with the Girl Scouts. Behind the screen of protocol, within the confines of the White House, there was a motherly human being whose warmth, had the nation been permitted
to share it, would have done something to relieve the impression of severity the Hoovers created. But only in the final days of the campaign did the Hoover managers realize that it had been a mistake to keep Mrs. Hoover at arms' length from friendly reporters. On the Roosevelt campaign train, Mrs. Roosevelt was talking daily to Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press, and out of the blue Bess Furman, the redheaded AP correspondent traveling with the Hoover campaign special, was told she could interview Mrs. Hoover, the only interview she was granted in four years of covering the First Lady. The ground rules, Mrs. Hoover informed her, were that she should not be directly quoted; Miss Furman would have to write about the biographical details Mrs. Hoover would now furnish her as if she had obtained them from a library.
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Mrs. Hoover had conformed to a pattern of behavior established for First Ladies from the time of Martha Washington. It was not a model Eleanor Roosevelt could follow without stultifying herself, and it was not a model she thought appropriate in a democratic society where the channels of communication between the people in the White House and the people in the country should, she felt, be open, lively, and sympathetic. So when Hick suggested that she hold press conferences, Eleanor agreed, and Bess Furman, whom she consulted, approved enthusiastically—as did Franklin and Louis. On Monday, March 6, two days before her husband's first press conference, an astonished and somewhat disapproving Ike Hoover, or so Eleanor thought, accompanied her into the Red Room, where thirty-five women reporters had assembled. The conference had been restricted to women, she explained, in order to encourage the employment of newspaperwomen and to make it more comfortable to deal with subjects of interest primarily to women. To further emphasize that she was in no way encroaching upon Franklin's domain, she had stipulated that no political questions could be asked. She brought with her a large box of candied fruits which she passed around—to hide her nervousness, she later claimed. The first news conference did not produce much news, but the women were elated, although some of them, especially May Craig of the
Portland
(Maine)
Press Herald
, having fought hard to break down masculine professional barriers, were uncomfortable that men were excluded. However, the attitude of the men was “Why in the world would we want to come to Mrs. Roosevelt's conferences?” Byron Price, the manager of the AP, predicted that the institution would last less than six months.
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However, a few weeks later, when a
bill to legalize 3.2 beer went up to Congress, Roosevelt was asked at his news conference whether beer would be served at the White House if the bill were passed; that would have to be answered by his wife, he replied off the record. Eleanor was on her way to New York, so Ruby Black of the United Press raced out to catch her at the airport. Would she, a teetotaler, permit beer to be served at the White House? “You'll have to ask my husband,” was Eleanor's guarded reply. Told that the president had referred the press to her, she burst into laughter. She would have a statement for them at her next news conference, she promised. By Monday, when the women reporters trooped in for their meeting with Eleanor, masculine scorn had turned to anguish, and some of the men begged the women to fill them in later.

Beer would be served at the White House to those who desire it, Eleanor's mimeographed announcement read. She herself did not drink anything with an alcoholic content, but she would not dream of imposing her convictions on others. She hoped, however, that the availability of beer might lead to greater temperance, and to a reduction in the bootlegger's trade.
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The scoffing ceased. Eleanor proved to be such a good news source that Emma Bugbee, who had been sent by the
New York Herald Tribune
to report on the First Lady's inauguration activities, was kept in Washington by her Republican employers for four months. “Well, if it's going to be like that,” Emma's office said, after their reporter had lunched with Mrs. Roosevelt and had been taken through the living quarters of the president's family, something Mrs. Hoover had not done until the final months of her husband's regime, “you had better stay down.”
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Another Monday the press conference became a classroom in diets—patriotic, wholesome, and frugal; the women learned the recipe for Martha Washington's crab soup and for dishes that Andrew Jackson ate in the days “when the onion and herb were as important as the can opener.”
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Sheila Hibben, the culinary historian whom Eleanor had invited to the news conference, even ventured a theory of history about White House menus: “The more democratic our Presidents have been, the more attention they paid to their meals.” The lecture on the wholesome, inexpensive dishes that other First Ladies had served their husbands led up to an announcement that with the help of Flora Rose of Cornell, Eleanor had served “a 7-cent luncheon” at the White House—hot stuffed eggs with tomato sauce, mashed potatoes, prune pudding, bread, and coffee. In London a woman read this menu and exclaimed to a friend that “if Mrs.
Roosevelt can get her kitchen staff to eat three-penny, ha-penny meals, she can do more than I can with mine!”

“Oh, I don't know what she gives the servants,” the friend replied. “She gives them to the President—and he eats them like a lamb.”

Malnutrition, Eleanor concluded, was not only a result of a lack of food, but often of a lack of knowledge of menus that cost little and had high nutritional value. She thought the White House should set an example in the use of simple and nourishing foods. “Perhaps because of the depression we may teach people how really to feed their children.”

Bess Furman contrasted the news-conference styles of president and First Lady: “At the President's press conference, all the world's a stage; at Mrs. Roosevelt's, all the world's a school.”
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Eleanor's ban on political subjects did not mean a ban on issues of consequence and controversy. She hit out at sweatshops. She urged women to patronize the merchants who provided decent working conditions. She called for the elimination of child labor and urged more money for teachers' salaries. When in April the foreign dignitaries came flocking to the White House to confer with the president on the forthcoming World Economic Conference, she startled her press conference with the passion of her anti-isolationist plea. “We ought to be able to realize what people are up against in Europe. We ought to be the ready-to-understand ones, and we haven't been. . . . We've got to find a basis for a more stabilized world. . . . We are in an ideal position to lead, if we will lead, because we have suffered less. Only a few years are left to work in. Everywhere over there is the dread of this war that may come.” She spoke, wrote Emma Bugbee, with “an intensity her hearers had never seen in her before.”
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With many of her press-conference regulars, what began as a professional relationship soon ripened into friendship. Before the inauguration, Ruby Black (Mrs. Herbert Little) had shown Eleanor a photograph of her fourteen-month-old daughter. Eleanor had said she would love to see the child, and Ruby had thought it was an expression of courtesy rather than of intent. A week after she was in the White House, however, Eleanor telephoned her—could she come the next day to visit Ruby? She did, driving her little blue roadster to Ruby's house and making friends with the child. Newswomen found themselves being given lifts in the White House car, receiving Easter lilies from the White House greenhouses, lunching at the White House table, being invited to Hyde Park. Eleanor's gestures of thoughtfulness were not matters of calculation, of “being nice to the press”;
one natural act of friendliness led to another. But friendship did not encroach upon journalistic responsibility. The women asked the questions to which they or their editors felt the public was entitled to know the answers. When a reporter cautioned the First Lady that an answer might get her into trouble, her colleagues made their displeasure known; the First Lady could take care of herself, they felt. And she did.