Eleanor and Franklin (99 page)

She transgressed against all the rules of tidy administration, though this, of course, was in the New Deal style. She asked help for supplicants
whom officials often thought were malingerers and charlatans, and sometimes were. “Aside from the fact that I am disappointed in finding your story was made up entirely out of whole cloth,” she wrote a woman in California, “I feel I must call your attention to the fact that when a letter is received which is as untrue as yours, it takes the time and energy of people here in Washington to follow it through which really should go toward trying to help someone who is really in difficulty.”
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She had not expected Governor Brann of Maine to help an applicant personally with a loan which she had referred to him, she wrote, slightly appalled, but since the governor and his aide had done so, Tommy informed them that “the money she [Mrs. Roosevelt] has is all pledged at the moment, but she does not want you and the Governor to suffer and she will take over the note and pay as she can.”
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Officials often took her suggestions as commands when she had really meant them to use their own judgment, she said, but it was also true that she made her wishes known rather forcefully. Sometimes she was naïve and sometimes she asked for things that really meant a great deal of effort, yet only the most overweening in her husbands administration did not respond to the disinterested desire to be helpful that was back of her steady flow of communications to all the government departments. It might violate all the rules of political economy, but how was one to say no to a woman who felt the exhilaration of battling wind and snow on a wintry day and then immediately thought of what the foul weather meant to the poorly housed and poorly clothed?
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Her methods of getting the bureaucracy to respond varied with the degree of her outrage. Usually she sent a letter with a query—how should she answer? What was being done? Couldn't something be done? “Right in the mails she got a great many of these appeals,” Will Alexander recalled. “She looked at the thing and decided whose business it was in the government to find out about it, and sent that letter with her own initials on it and wrote, ‘Find out about this letter. You know what it's all about.' You'd better do it. She never forgot.”
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If she felt very strongly she invited the appropriate official to lunch and, since her right ear was slightly deaf, placed him on her left regardless of protocol. Or she asked him to tea. The day she received a delegation of sharecroppers in the Red Room she invited Henry Wallace and Dr. Alexander to be present. Sometimes she marched over to the offices of an agency in order to insure speedier action. On a letter she had from the National Federation of Federal Employees protesting the lack of housing for middle-income workers at a naval gun factory, she wrote,

Take to Mr. Hillman and Mr. Knudsen. Make appointment for me on Tuesday at 12 with Mr. Hillman and Mr. Knudsen together if possible. Call Mr. Hillman and ask if it can be so arranged and I will go to their office. I want to talk about housing. If Tuesday not possible would Thursday at 11:30 do?
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If an administrator's response to a letter seemed inadequate, she took it up with the president. She sent Acting Secretary of War Louis Johnson complaints she had received from residents of Maroc, California, that the Air Force's use of Maroc Dry Lake as a bombing range was endangering life and property; she did not like the Army's reply. “Give whole thing to F.D.R. and say I think answer of Mr. Johnson a bit lame!”

Experience and intuition taught her to which officials she was obliged to use the formidable words, “The President has asked me . . . ” The readiness to do her bidding did not follow ideological lines. With Wallace and Ickes she usually invoked the president's authority. Wallace steered clear of her. On the way over to the White House, Wallace warned Will Alexander, whom he had just appointed administrator of the Farm Security Administration, “Now, Will, I want to give you some advice. You want to let that woman alone. She's a very dangerous person. You don't want to get mixed up with her.” Wallace did not trust her judgment, Alexander thought. “I, of course, trusted Mrs. Roosevelt almost more than anybody I ever saw.”
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Ickes was as distrustful of her judgment as Wallace. With Hopkins and Jim Farley it was quite the opposite. Hopkins' aides were under standing instructions to give her whatever help she required, and Farley did her bidding even when he did not quite understand what she was after. Although Chester C. Davis, who succeeded George Peek as administrator of the AAA, was the leader of the “agrarians” as opposed to Rex Tugwell's “liberals” in the Department of Agriculture, he was a relaxed, kindly man, and Eleanor found him open-minded. When she came back from a trip to upper New York State where farmers had complained to her about the operations of the Federal Loan Bank, she got in touch with Davis about the matter. “Here is a concrete letter showing just what I mean,” she followed up a few days after speaking to him about it. “Will you see that someone takes it up and looks into other conditions which I feel sure they will find throughout New York State?” No mention of the president.
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She lunched regularly with the wives of the cabinet and hoped her example might inspire some of them to join her in some of her undertakings. Few did. Young Jane Ickes, newly married to the secretary, wrote her in October, 1938, that because of a common devotion to progressive causes, Mrs. Roosevelt might be able to give her some advice on how to avoid Washington's pitfalls. Eleanor replied that she would be happy to do so.

I think, however, that the person who can help you more than anyone else is Mrs. Morgenthau. She has succeeded in doing work which interests her in Washington, on things which are not controversial and which, therefore, do not jeopardize her husband's position. I think the general feeling is that our husbands have to do enough jeopardizing for themselves and therefore we should do as little as we possibly can along that line!

It is a little easier for me. . . . Because of my years and old affiliations, I am apt to be blamed singly and not to put quite so much on my poor husband.
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She comforted herself with the thought that the country realized she had her own point of view with which Franklin might not agree. And he did have his ways of conveying to people that in her activities and opinions she was an independent personality. Once she entered his office while newsmen were jammed around his desk for a press conference. She wanted to bid her husband good-by as she prepared to leave in order to attend Cornell Week. The president looked out at the falling snow and told her to telephone if she got caught in a snowdrift.

“All right. I will telephone you from a snowdrift,” Eleanor called over her shoulder as she left the room.

“And she would, too!” the president told the newsmen. This was more than husbandly admiration; it was testimony to his wife's independence.

Once she asked him whether her advocacy of the anti-lynching bill might hurt his efforts to get southern votes for his rearmament program. “You go right ahead and stand for whatever you feel is right,” he said. She was not wholly persuaded that he had meant what he said and repeated her question. “Well, I have to stand on my own legs. Besides, I can always say I can't do a thing with you.”
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Franklin never tried to discourage her, she wrote later, discussing
some of the controversy she had created.
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But it was more than that. He approved. Just because he had to ease up on his efforts to get New Deal legislation, he wanted her to press harder. It helped politically with the groups whose claims he had to postpone and, more important, it helped him resist the temptation of following the easiest course. That was her old role. One of the reasons he had married her was to keep him from sinning. “She had stronger convictions than he on the subjects of social welfare and social progress,” observed Arthur Krock, who had occasionally been invited to small family dinners by Eleanor. “She was also a very determined woman—determined not only to make a career for herself so that she would not be just the President's wife, but also to make a career that would in her opinion put pressure on her husband to pursue the path of social and economic reform that he was embarked upon.” She was not, she said in later years, “what you would call a ‘yes-man' because that wasn't what he needed.” Nor was it what the president particularly wanted, she added. “He might have been happier, if he had always been perfectly sure that I would have agreed. He wasn't. And it was probably good for him that he wasn't. But there must have been times when he would have liked it if he didn't have to argue things.” She acted as a spur, she said, “because I had this horrible sense of obligation which was bred in me, I couldn't help it. It was nothing to be proud of, it was just something I couldn't help.”

Rexford Tugwell recalled:

No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt sit down facing her husband and, holding his eyes firmly, say to him “Franklin, I think you should . . . ” or, “Franklin, surely you will not . . . ” will ever forget the experience. . . . And even after many years he obviously disliked to face that devastatingly simple honest look that Eleanor fixed him with when she was aware of an injustice amenable to Presidential action or a good deed that he could do. . . . It would be impossible to say how often and to what extent American governmental processes have been turned in new directions because of her determination that people should be hurt as little as possible and that as much should be done for them as could be managed; the whole, if it could be totalled, would be formidable.
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They were, in the White House years, consorts rather than bosom companions. Her relationship to him was less intimate than some wives
had with their husbands after three decades of marriage but she was more influential. She had a point of view, a platform, a following, and he was a large and secure enough man to respect her for it.
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Cabinet officers often grumbled, some of them used her, but generally they complied with her requests. Some, like Henry Morgenthau, Jr., did so because there were times when they wanted her to find out what the president's mood was before they went in to see him, sometimes even to intercede with him.

On one occasion Morgenthau, sensing presidential displeasure with his views on tax policy, wrote in his diary that he had gone to Eleanor Roosevelt. “I told her that if she would be willing to accept the responsibility I would like to place myself in her hands as I felt that Franklin and I were drawing further and further apart. She said she was going to talk to the President.” A few days later the president seemed to have softened toward Morgenthau's views and remarked at the cabinet meeting that “he and his wife had a discussion on economics in the country. . . . When he got through he gave me a searching look,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. When Morgenthau and Hopkins were trying to get the president to approve a $250,000 special outlay for milk for needy children in Chicago and were getting no response, Morgenthau went to Eleanor. “I'll ask Franklin about it tonight,” she told him, “not as though you said anything, but as though I were troubled.” Her intercession worked, commented Morgenthau.
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The bristly Ickes occasionally sought her patronage for one of his projects. When she was in Knoxville, for example, he wanted her to drive through the newly opened Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She did and expressed her pleasure in a column. He even tried to enlist her in his empire building. The wife of the naval governor of Samoa complained to her about the sanitary conditions on that island after thirty-seven years of United States' ownership. She sent the
letter to Ickes because Roosevelt had placed the Division of Territories and Island Possessions in the Interior Department. But in doing so, Ickes informed Eleanor, the president had excluded Samoa and Guam. “Needless to say, I would be happy if in the process of governmental reorganization Samoa and Guam should be transferred to the Division of Territories and Island Possessions.” Eleanor, however, did not take up the hint.
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She was glad to agree to requests to receive the staffs of federal agencies at the White House, but she deftly put such visits to her own use. The assistant to the public printer, Jo Coffin, brought the women who worked in her office to tea at the White House. “The nicest thing of all,” she informed Eleanor afterward, “was the little conference when you gathered the girls around you on the lawn. You spoke of the urgent need of raising the standard of living of the colored people.” The Children's Bureau brought its child-welfare field staff to Washington. “The opportunity for informal discussion of problems with Mrs. Roosevelt following the delightful tea was the highlight of the conference,” Katherine Lenroot, chief of the bureau, wrote Tommy.
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Eleanor was careful in dealing with the members of Congress, fully aware of how jealous that body was of its status and how quick to resent what it considered pressure from the president or his wife. Occasionally a flare-up of moral indignation caused Eleanor to depart from her rule not to comment publicly on what Congress was doing, but she did so circumspectly, almost always asking Franklin's permission beforehand. If she sent a letter to a senator or representative, the note that accompanied it was studiedly neutral; it was simply for the gentleman's information to do with as he saw fit and generally elicited a courtly letter of thanks. But even in this area, when she was confronted with injustice she was not to be contained, especially if there was some bond of fellowship, either political or social, to make a direct appeal for help to a congressman appear to be the most natural course. That was the case in the matter of the sharecroppers.