First Ladies (43 page)

Such an energetic and independent national figure might have been expected to influence her daughter and granddaughters to move in the same direction, but courage to break new ground did not go with the genes. Eleanor's formal education had ended at the English boarding school, and her daughter, Anna, bowed to her grandmother Sara Delano Roosevelt's opinions on the proper training for her sex and did not go to college. Anna's daughter, also named Eleanor, spent considerable time with her grandparents both at the White House and Hyde Park, but she later defined her own youth as a time of very narrow opportunities for girls: “I thought of being a teacher,” Eleanor Seagraves told a 1984 audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
“or maybe a librarian, but those were really the only two options open to me.”
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Even if she had little effect on the thinking of her daughter and granddaughter, Eleanor Roosevelt set a new standard against which all later First Ladies would be measured. Much of what she did simply extended the activities of her predecessors. Called the president's political confidante and counselor, she repeated what Abigail Adams had done. Described as the president's eyes and ears, she functioned as Sarah Polk had. Identified as the humane side of the presidency, its conscience and link with the underdog, she continued a long tradition associated with First Ladies since Martha Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt's unique contribution lay in braving criticism by opening up to the press and using her influence as a force separate from the president's, especially in extending opportunities for women and others lacking equal chances. In the process she helped destroy some old, strong prejudices against combining substantive political action with “ladylike” behavior.

That a woman raised in one of New York's oldest families, when considerable attention went to learning to curtsey to one's elders, would turn up her collar and cuffs and go down in the mines to see conditions for herself or off to the Pacific to inspect military operations for her husband, surprised many people and marked a new level of performance by a president's wife. Eleanor's letters show that by the time she occupied the White House, she had become bored by the kind of activities that still concerned her wealthy relatives. After visiting a cousin in Rhode Island in 1933, she wrote “Newport is so smug,”
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and after seeing her mother-in-law off on a European trip, Eleanor noted how far she had moved from the older woman's world: “I did not want to go in the least. She's staying at the Embassy in London, going to stay with the King and Queen. … Lord I would hate it & how she will love it.”
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Only when royalty had ideas worth discussing did Eleanor appreciate conversing with them. “I talked to the Queen [Wilhelmina],” the First Lady wrote during one of the Dutch monarch's visits to Hyde Park, “and I like her. She has quality when you talk to her seriously.”
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Talking seriously—regardless of the status of the person on the other end of the conversation—became so important to Eleanor that she paid little attention to old ideas about what was proper for a lady, particularly a First Lady. On a car trip between Washington and New York, she picked up a hitchhiker, one of the many jobless wanderers known as “hoboes” or “tramps” in the 1930s, and she offered him a card with her New York address so that he could go there for a meal.
Her old reservations about the propriety of smoking evidently had disappeared in the 1930s, and she broke precedent in the White House by having cigarettes offered to women guests at the conclusion of White House dinners. The young wife who had objected to her husband's friends because they smoked now counted among her best friends cigar-smoking women reporters and she occasionally lit up a cigarette herself just to make her strike against the double standard. Perhaps she, too, had recognized in herself the merging of the “person” and the “personage.”

When Franklin died suddenly on April 12, 1945, just eighty-two days into his fourth presidential term, Eleanor, then sixty-one years old, had to work out whether she still existed as a private “person” apart from the “personage” who was Franklin's wife. She had always objected to the “fishbowl” aspect of living in the White House (although she would insist until her death that there were compensations),
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and she prepared to take up residence in a rented apartment on Washington Square in New York City. Reporters who met her train as she arrived in Pennsylvania Station got from her a terse, “The story is over,”
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but of course it was not.

Until her death on November 7, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt continued an active public life, representing her country at the United Nations, where she surprised both her American colleagues and her Russian counterparts by showing firmness in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In December 1948, when the Declaration passed the General Assembly and the other delegates rose to applaud Eleanor Roosevelt, one of her old political adversaries, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, conceded publicly what many people were thinking privately: “I want to say that I take back everything I ever said about her and believe me, it's been plenty.”
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Her final appointment came in 1961 when President John Kennedy named her to head the Commission on the Status of Women.

In the seventeen years that she survived her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt achieved recognition as “First Lady of the World”—a status that would have been impossible to attain without the springboard of the White House. Living there longer than any of her predecessors, she had experimented with the role of president's wife and changed it, opening up what had been hidden and breaking down barriers that had stood firm for a century and a half.

To those searching for some explanation of why the apparently shy and insecure young woman matured into a precedent-breaking First Lady, Eleanor offered few clues. Examples of politically shrewd, risk-taking ancestors may have moved her—relatives sometimes noted that
she resembled her Uncle Theodore, her father's brother, more than any of his own children did. Eleanor herself pointed out that her Uncle Theodore often included his two sisters in discussions during his governorship and presidency. The older sister, whom Eleanor called “Auntie Bye,” lived in Washington, and Eleanor recalled, “There was never a serious subject that came up while [Theodore] was President that he didn't go to her home on N Street and discuss with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decisions, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”
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Eleanor's loneliness in her own marriage may have encouraged her to look to public service for a sense of worth, especially after her children were grown. Perhaps as helpful as any explanation is one offered by Joseph Lash, her biographer and friend. Lash reported that Eleanor divided women into the “Marthas” and the “Marys,” after the biblical sisters who defined their lives in such different ways. Martha was “devoted, feminine, fun-loving, frivolous,” while Mary preferred the world of ideas and action. “[Eleanor Roosevelt] knew that she never could be the admiring female,” Lash wrote, “and while she accepted the fact that men sought their Marthas as well as their Marys, she insisted there would be only one ‘First Lady' in the White House.”
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For 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and for the nation—that represented a courageous redefinition of womanliness.

Whether Eleanor Roosevelt placed her successor among the Marthas or the Marys is not clear—she might have lacked the information on which to judge—because Elizabeth Virginia (“Bess”) Wallace Truman (1945–1953) moved into the White House an unknown quantity. In more than twelve years of the Roosevelt administration, journalists had depended so heavily on Eleanor that they had paid little attention to those waiting in the wings, and Bess Furman, of the Associated Press, admitted that she and her colleagues had been caught with “their pencils down.”
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Harry Truman had served less than three months as vice president when Franklin Roosevelt died. Although Harry had served in Congress and lived with his family in Washington since 1935, none of the Trumans had attracted much notice. Other Senate wives could offer little insight into Bess because she reportedly stopped attending their meetings when she found them boring.
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Even the Democratic Party lacked accurate biographical information on the wife of the new president and erroneously reported that she had once taught school.
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Margaret Truman called her mother the “least understood” member of the family.
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Bess's deep desire for privacy evolved out of her view that
publicity was undignified and unbecoming a lady, a bias that guaranteed her a different relationship with the American public than her predecessor had cultivated. Neither Eleanor Roosevelt nor any other First Lady exceeded Bess in her commitment to help her husband but she wavered on just what that meant. At first she had agreed to have Eleanor introduce her to reporters; but then on the train back to Washington after the Hyde Park funeral, she had sounded out Frances Perkins on the subject. “I'm not used to this awful public life,” Bess explained, and Perkins consoled her and assured her that Eleanor was unique in thriving on the exchange with reporters. When Bess learned that no other president's wife had held regular press conferences, she promptly cancelled hers and never scheduled another one.
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Ceremonial appearances could not so easily be avoided, much as Bess would have liked to limit them. Her hands perspired profusely at White House receptions even when things went smoothly,
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and when some mishap occurred, Bess detested being at the center of attention. One of her least pleasant public appearances, permanently recorded on film, occurred only weeks after Harry's inauguration. Scheduled to christen two hospital planes, she approached the first one and swung the champagne bottle in a way she hoped would befit a lady but also break the bottle. Neither that strike nor the eight others that followed had any effect and finally an exasperated Bess turned to a military aide for help. His four swings failed because no one had scored the bottle first.

Margaret Truman, who accompanied her mother that day, found the spectacle amusing, but Bess was nonplussed as she moved on to the second plane. This time the bottle had been prepared too well and her first strike showered her with champagne. The navy lieutenant in charge of the ceremony suggested that reporters describe it as though it had gone perfectly but they preferred the real version and gleefully relayed all the details. Harry Truman tried to make a joke of it all by teasing his wife about losing the tennis champion's arm of her youth, but she refused to be placated and retorted that she would have liked to have cracked the bottle on his head.
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Although Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt were born within months of each other, Bess remained very much a private, introspective woman of the nineteenth century while Eleanor pushed farther and farther outside herself and into the twentieth. Eleanor found traveling by plane efficient and invigorating; Bess thought it too fast to be dignified—she took the train.
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Eleanor struggled with public speaking and eventually mastered it while Bess refused to try.
Eleanor thought women would continue to make gains in politics until one of them eventually won the presidency but Bess believed that “would never happen.”
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Eleanor went out on her own, apparently unconcerned about criticism, while Bess kept carefully in her husband's shadow because she feared looking foolish. On a 1948 trip to Cuba, she would not even attempt speaking Spanish, a language she had studied, because she feared an error might be reported in the newspapers.

Such low public visibility should not obscure a very important part for Bess in the Truman administration. Margaret Truman noted that her mother felt shut out of some decisions during the White House years and became a spectator, but it was only a relative exclusion. (Harry later composed a significant epitaph for her: “First Lady, the United States of America, 1945–1953.) Eleanor Roosevelt, who strongly supported her successor's desire to do the job her own way, might well have noticed that the Truman marriage was much closer than her own to the partnership of respecting equals that she herself had described as ideal. Servants and neighbors, visiting royalty and newsmen, all agreed that the Trumans were the closest family they ever saw in the White House. With their daughter, a senior in college when Harry became president, they were dubbed by their staff the Three Musketeers. All of them laughed a lot, but particularly Bess who, one maid observed, acted as though she had invented laughter.
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Neither Bess nor Harry concealed the fact that their partnership extended to his work. Her family connections in politics had helped launch his career. In 1944, when a reporter asked what role she would have in Harry's campaign for vice president, Bess replied that she would make no speeches but would help him write his “because we've done that so long, it's a habit.”
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When it was revealed that she had been on his Senate payroll, Harry defended hiring her: “She's a clerk in my office and does much of my clerical work. I need her there and that's the reason I've got her there. I never make a report or deliver a speech without her editing it.”
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A lifetime of correspondence between Harry Truman and his wife reveals how much he valued her judgment and how often he conferred with her on important matters. Not all the letters survived, as their daughter pointed out. After he had become president, Harry found Bess burning some papers and inquired what they were. “They're your letters to me,” she said, and he responded, “Well, why are you burning them? Think of history.” “I have,” she replied and kept on burning.
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Enough were saved, however, to make more than
one book, and in 1983, hundreds of Harry's letters, written to his wife over half a century, were published in
Dear Bess.