Eleanor and Franklin (79 page)

“Sometimes I say things,” she said to her press conference,

which I thoroughly understand are likely to cause unfavorable comment in some quarters, and perhaps you newspaper women think I should keep them off the record. What you don't understand is that perhaps I am making these statements on purpose to arouse controversy and thereby get the topics talked about and so get people to thinking about them.
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Most of the correspondents were friendly—too friendly, some of the men grumbled. The women alerted her as to what was on the public's mind and the questions she should be prepared to answer, and sometimes she consulted a few of them about the answers she proposed to give. Even the most “hard-boiled” were willing to help. This was, after all, a male-dominated capital and the women should stand together. Sometimes Eleanor blundered. Mrs. Mary Harriman Rumsey was running into public-relations difficulties as head of the Consumers Division of the National Recovery Administration, and Eleanor talked to Bess Furman and Martha Strayer, of the
Washington News
, about taking on second jobs, for which they would be paid, to help out Mrs. Rumsey. No, they told her regretfully; they were for the NRA and the whole New Deal, but accepting money from the government in any way could mean the loss of their jobs.
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Publicity and newspaper work were closely allied, but the line between them was sharply drawn, particularly in Washington. They were right and she was wrong, and she did not press the offer. Lorena Hickok, who suddenly realized that her close relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt was affecting her detachment as a journalist, resigned her job with the AP to work for Harry Hopkins in the new relief administration, but her intimacy with Mrs. Roosevelt was unique. Friendship was another matter. Most of the women reporters felt they could be friends with the mistress of the White House without losing their objectivity, and marveled that she wanted to be their friend. In a city where human
relations were usually governed by a careful consideration of interests and motivations were usually suspect, Eleanor's warmth and good will were refreshing. “I always thought when people were given great power it did something to them,” Martha Strayer wrote to Eleanor. “They lost the human touch if they ever had it. To have been able to see you at close hand, demonstrating the exact contrary, means truly a great deal to me.”
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A few weeks after the inauguration, the Gridiron Club, a male journalistic stronghold, gave its annual dinner, which was attended by the president and his cabinet but from which women were barred. Eleanor organized a Gridiron Widows buffet supper for newswomen, cabinet wives, and women in government. “God's gift to newspaper women,” the feminine press fraternity murmured.

What enchanted the press captivated the public. As First Lady, Eleanor's approach to people great and small remained as it had always been: direct and unaffected, full of curiosity and a desire to learn—and to teach.

On her return from a trip down the Potomac on the
Sequoia
with Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald and his daughter Ishbel as guests, she and Ishbel went on board a fishing schooner from Gloucester, Massachusetts, filled with fishing captains who had come to the Capital to ask for help for this “oldest industry.” She invited the skippers to visit the White House, and twenty-seven came, escorted by their congressman. Eleanor herself took them around, and after the tour of the public rooms invited them to go through the family quarters on the second floor. Down the wide hall the weather-beaten men trailed, peering into historic rooms as Eleanor opened the doors and told some of the history that had taken place in them. The men chortled when she hastily closed a door behind which she had spotted Anna sleeping, and concluded, as one skipper put it, “There ain't too many ladies in her position who would have done what she did.”
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A few weeks later she entertained Sara and the members of the Monday Evening Sewing Class at luncheon. Helen Wilmerding, a friend from the days of the Roser classes, was in the group. “All the old tribe we grew up with in New York have turned towards you like sunflowers,” she wrote Eleanor later. “At first they were naturally more anxious than other people as to how you would stand up against the difficulties of your position. You are one of them and they cared more. Now they are sunflowers I need say no more.” Eleanor appreciated Helen's note “very much,” she replied, “for I felt the old crowd might disapprove of many things which I did.”
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The “old crowd” was also somewhat astonished by the growing elegance of her clothes. In the twenties it had been fashionable to deplore Eleanor's lack of interest in what she wore. It conformed with society's stereotype of a strong-willed woman of good works to see her in bulky tweeds and a hair net, and to whisper that without a corset her stomach showed. Eleanor had dressed acceptably in the governorship years, but now the top couturiers of the country, who naturally wanted her patronage, pressed their advice and most stylish models upon her. If she did not devote more time than in the past to the selection of clothes, she was more willing to be guided by friends like June Hamilton Rhodes, who had helped in the campaign and now worked as a fashion publicist for the elegant Fifth Avenue shops. “I got a lot of clothes for myself and Anna in one afternoon last week,” Eleanor wrote Franklin three weeks before the inauguration. “It is better to have plenty and not buy any new ones for quite a while!”
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But the dress shops argued that such restraint in shopping did not help business recovery, and she evidently agreed, for in May, Lilly Daché shipped her six blue velvet hats “of the June Hamilton Rhodes material” and asked her to return those that did not please her entirely. “Mrs. Roosevelt kept all of the hats as she likes them all very much and would like to have you send a bill for them,” replied Malvina “Tommy” Thompson who had come to Washington as her secretary.

“Your dress, hat and coat were lovely,” Helen Wilmerding commented after the “old crowd's” visit to the White House. “I wanted to snatch them off and put them on myself. . . . ” Gentle Helen had not been among those who had mocked her taste in clothes, but since so many of her contemporaries had considered Eleanor a little dowdy in her dress, Helen's letter must have given her considerable gratification.

“Everyone makes very low prices,” Eleanor had remarked on the afternoon she devoted to getting her White House wardrobe. She did not spurn them. She used to comment with amusement on the Scotch streak in Franklin, but it was a characteristic she shared. However, in spite of the Fifth Avenue shops' low prices, she was quite prepared to switch to less fashionable and less obliging establishments if that was the only way to get fair conditions for labor. “I feel sure that you will understand,” she wrote to Milgrim's, “that I will have to wait before coming to you again until you have some agreement with your people which is satisfactory to both sides.” A distraught Mr. Milgrim telegraphed her within the week that the ILGWU's strike had been settled and that both sides were satisfied. “I was quite upset when I received
your letter and am very anxious to explain the facts when you come in for your fitting which will be ready Thursday, October 12th.”
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This pro-labor gesture was in September, but in March she had already yielded to her incorrigible reforming impulses and struck out into precisely the kind of activities she thought she would have to give up as First Lady. “Friends who have wondered how long it would be before Mrs. Roosevelt's instinct for civic and social reform would assert itself in Washington had the answer today, when the story of her inspection trip to Washington's alleys was told for the first time,” wrote Emma Bugbee.
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Mrs. Archibald Hopkins, eighty-one, a “cliff dweller” with a social conscience, asked her to tour Washington's alley slums with her. By focusing public attention on these disease-and crime-ridden back streets perhaps they might be able to persuade Congress to do something about them. Eleanor made the tour, driving in her roadster. She reported her grim findings to the press and even suggested that Congress should act. Mrs. Hopkins' committee had prepared a bill to reconstruct the alley slums, she pointed out, and while it was a rule with her that she did not comment on pending legislation, she would say, “Of course I am sympathetic with the general theory of better housing everywhere.” She spoke to Franklin about what she had seen and about the bill, and he permitted her to indicate to Mrs. Hopkins that he would help at the right moment. She enlisted the aid of the president's uncle, Frederic A. Delano, head of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. “I have talked with Franklin and Uncle Fred about the bill,” she reported to Mrs. Hopkins. “Franklin thinks that at the special session it will be quite impossible to get through any local bills of any kind, but I feel quite certain that at the regular session it can and will be done. Uncle Fred talked to me the other night and he feels he has convinced Senator King [chairman of the Senate District Committee] that the bill should be pushed. If it should happen to slide through well and good, but if it does not get through do not feel discouraged, for I feel sure it will go through at the next session.”
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Discouraged? Mrs. Hopkins, who had first visited the White House in Abraham Lincoln's time, at last had an ally on the distaff side. She felt invincible.

District institutions, Eleanor believed, should serve as a model for the nation. Instead, voteless and at the mercy of an economy-minded Congress that was, in addition, singularly indifferent to the Negroes who would be the chief beneficiaries of improved services, the residents of the District had among the worst hospitals, nursing homes,
and jails in the nation. Her interest in the District would be a continuing one.

The Hoover action that had most offended the country was the eviction of the “bonus army” veterans from Washington in 1932. That Mr. Hoover, a Quaker, could have authorized the use of military force to drive jobless veterans out of their squatters' shacks seemed to Eleanor a dreadful object lesson in what fear could make a well-intentioned man do. As a consequence, when the Veterans National Liaison Committee informed the White House that the veterans were returning to Washington and expected the new administration to house and feed them, she pressed her husband to treat them with consideration and see to it that there was no repetition of the previous summer's panic. Louis—whose official title was secretary to the president and who called himself “the dirty-job man”—took on the job of handling the new bonus army.
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The Veterans Administration directed to house the men lodged them in Fort Hunt, an old army camp across the river, provided them with food, medical care, even dental service. A military band entertained them. Louis kept in daily touch with the leaders and received reports on the mood among the men, including the activity of the Communists. The veterans having presented their case by the middle of May, Louis told them that twelve hundred of them could be enrolled in the CCC and tried to persuade them to pass a resolution to go home. The men debated and dallied, and then Louis played his trump card: he brought Eleanor to visit the encampment. The men were pleased and heartened to see the First Lady among them and quickly took her over, proposing that she tour the camp. She went with the men through tents, barracks, and hospital, ending up at the mess hall, where she mingled with the men in the mess line and was persuaded to make a little speech. She reminisced about World War days and her work in the railroad yards when the “boys,” perhaps some of those who were here, had come through Washington on their way overseas. She also spoke of her post-war tour of the battlefields where they had fought and concluded, “I never want to see another war. I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.” She led the men in singing “There's a Long, Long Trail” and departed amid cheers. “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife,” said one left-wing veteran, who was chagrined over the Communists' loss of influence. Soon afterward the bonus marchers passed a resolution to disperse. “It is such fine things as that which bring you the admiration of the
American people,” wrote Josephus Daniels from Mexico City, where he was the U.S. ambassador.
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Eleanor and Louis had not allowed the Secret Service to accompany them to the encampment, and there was considerable relief when they returned safely to the White House. Eleanor's insistence on not being shadowed by police and Secret Service enhanced the country's image of her as a woman unafraid, seeking to be herself, but it was a sore issue with those responsible for the safety of the president and his family. After the attempt on Roosevelt's life in Miami on February 15, 1933, he wanted to ask the Secret Service to assign a man to protect her. “Don't you dare do such a thing,” she warned him. “If any Secret Service man shows up in New York and starts following me around, I'll send him right straight back where he came from.” But Colonel Starling, the head of the presidential detail, brought the matter up repeatedly with the president and Louis. He was particularly worried over her insistence on driving herself around unescorted. She was unbudgeable, they explained.

Local police found her as stubborn as the Secret Service. When she came to New York to visit the headquarters of the Women's Trade Union League, she found four policemen in front of the building.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“We're here to guard Mrs. Roosevelt.”

“I don't want to be guarded; please go away.”

“We can't do that, the captain placed us here,” the head of the detail explained in some embarrassment. She went inside and called Louis, who phoned police headquarters. The captain came immediately. “Please take them all away. No one's going to hurt me,” Eleanor said to him.