The First Lady of Radio (2 page)

Community responsibility to ensure excellent education, decent affordable housing with gardens and playgrounds, and quality health care for all remained ER's abiding themes, which were intensified and internationalized during the war. They defined democracy and the need to build a world peace movement—issues she addressed in all her broadcasts. She rejected greed and bigotry, fear and pettiness, as she pursued a new understanding to build a future of domestic amity and world peace. While bombs exploded, homes were rendered rubble, international borders became meaningless, and limitations regarding women's work and responsibilities ended. As public schools close across the nation and hard-won victories for women's health rights and citizen voting rights are canceled, ER's words resound with urgency. With this amazing collection, we have the path to ER's healing vision: our survival depends on war's end. We must learn to respect, honor, even to love each other, and recognize that our human family inhabits one connected community—dedicated to liberty, justice, and human rights.

Stephen Smith's comprehensive collection of Eleanor Roosevelt's broadcasts is perfectly timed to stir activists everywhere to continue the struggle for decency and survival—and to finally achieve ER's legacy of human rights for all.

—Blanche Wiesen Cook

July 2014

Eleanor Roosevelt broadcasts a message to the American people in 1942 (courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum).

Introduction

Sunday at the White House began much like any other. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt described it as a “quiet” morning, although the staff was preparing for a luncheon of thirty guests, including close friends, visiting relatives, and government officials. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would take lunch privately in his study with his most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins. Tensions had been steadily mounting between the United States and the increasingly belligerent Japanese. The president had been up late the night before, drafting a message to the Japanese emperor. So on Sunday, FDR was enjoying a few moments of private relaxation with Hopkins, his Scotty dog, Fala, and his stamp collection. ER was “disappointed but not surprised” that her husband passed on the big luncheon crowd.
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It was December 7, 1941.

At 1:47 p.m., Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox telephoned the
president with news that Japanese airplanes had attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack would kill more than 2,400 military personnel and civilians and strike a heavy blow on the US Pacific Fleet. Before long, the White House corridors filled with military officials and political aides. ER overheard the news and said good-bye to her guests. FDR was clearly occupied, so ER spent the afternoon in her sitting room. She worked on correspondence, keeping an ear cocked to the hallway traffic coming and going from the president's study. She also revised her script.

As it happened, ER was scheduled to make her regular fifteen-minute national radio appearance that evening. The first lady's program was called
Over Our Coffee Cups
, airing on 122 stations of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and sponsored by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, an organization representing seven Latin American coffee-growing countries. The program was one in a series of commercially sponsored prime-time radio shows that ER hosted while she was first lady. On that Sunday afternoon, the president dictated to his secretary the “date which will live in infamy” speech he would deliver to Congress and on national radio the next day. The first lady was across the hall rewriting her upcoming broadcast.

At 6:45 p.m. on her live broadcast, in her calm, measured voice, ER explained that the president was meeting with his cabinet and members of Congress and had spent the afternoon conferring with diplomatic and military officials. She explained that Congress would have a full report on the situation the next morning. Then, as she often did, ER cast herself as the radio listeners' fellow citizen, rather than the first lady. “We, the people, are already prepared for action. For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads,” she said. “That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face and know that we are ready to face it.” Then Mrs. Roosevelt's words grew more personal.

Speaking to the women of the country, she noted that she had a son on a Navy destroyer somewhere at sea. “For all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific,” she said. Two other Roosevelt children lived in cities on the Pacific coast and could be vulnerable to Japanese attack. ER said she understood the anxiety women would suffer over loved ones in the service or living in danger zones. But she called on American women to go about their daily business, determined to press on. “We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America,” she said. Then ER spoke briefly to America's young people. A great opportunity to serve their country lay ahead, she told them: “I have faith in you! Just as though I were standing on a rock and that rock is my faith in my fellow citizens.” With that, the first lady moved on to the previously scheduled theme of the program, Army morale, and an interview with a soldier from Fort Dix.
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It was a remarkable broadcast at a critical moment in the nation's history. With America under attack, the public heard first not from their president but from his wife. By going on with the show, ER could ask the American people to carry on as well. And she was careful to keep her proper place in the feminine sphere by addressing the nation's women and young people. On an evening when millions of Americans were gathering by the radio for news, it was an unprecedented moment for a first lady.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had adopted radio as a communication tool when the medium was so new no one was certain what place it would find in American culture. In 1932, the year FDR was first elected president, some 65 percent of American households owned a radio. The two primary broadcasting companies, NBC and CBS, were well established. Surveys found that listeners in the 1930s spent an average of more than four hours a day listening to radio broadcasts. By 1940, radios were in 81 percent of American households.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a consummate broadcaster, but ER was
the radio professional. During her years in the White House, ER made some three hundred radio appearances, about the same number as her husband. But for dozens of those broadcasts she got paid handsome talent fees by advertisers. Her shows were sponsored by the makers of cold cream, mattresses, coffee, typewriters, building materials, and beauty soap. It was a novel and controversial career for a president's wife. ER was criticized for commercializing her White House role and for meddling in public affairs best left to her husband. But ER was also praised for making thoughtful observations on world events, for helping unify the nation during the Depression and World War II, and for bringing Americans into more intimate contact with the White House and the presidential family.

In 1932, before FDR took office, ER declared that it was “impossible for husband and wife both to have political careers.”
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She denied having any particular political influence on the future president. But in ways both subtle and direct, ER's radio programs and other media work did far more than reflect her personal views. She helped publicize FDR's New Deal. She alerted the nation to the growing threat of world war. Once the fighting started, ER helped rally the home front. She battled her husband's critics. At the same time, her radio work challenged conventional restrictions on women as broadcasters and as political professionals. “ER set a new pace, new goals, a new understanding of what was possible and acceptable for women to achieve,” historian Blanche Wiesen Cook writes.
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ER did so in a medium, radio, that historians have argued had an “incalculable impact” on American life and politics, but that scholars and intellectuals have tended to ignore.
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Radio was just one of the bully pulpits ER used to influence public opinion. Her column, “My Day,” was syndicated in ninety newspapers at its peak. She traveled extensively around the country and the world. Although these efforts have been widely noted by historians, far less has
been said about ER at the radio microphone. In fact, few contemporary listeners have ever heard these programs.

ER was a first lady of firsts. She was the first president's wife to fly in an airplane. She was the first to testify before Congress. She was the first to hold a government job, to address a national political convention. ER's independence and determination—including her hours before the radio mike—fueled scalding criticism from those who deplored her views, disliked her voice, or thought a proper first lady should confine herself to managing domestic life in the White House. Toward the end of her first year as first lady,
Time
magazine suggested that ER was using the executive mansion “less as a home than as a base of operations.” It reported on her exhaustive daily schedule, her seemingly boundless energy, and “her countless crusades.”
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A writer for
Good Housekeeping
magazine said she initially thought ER's commercial work “was not only bad judgment and bad taste but bad ethics as well.”
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Though the writer came to admire ER, the impulse was clear: first ladies, however accomplished, were expected to maintain a kind of dignified obscurity.

Today, it is unthinkable that a president's spouse would host a commercially sponsored program on radio or television or an Internet website. As Cook points out, such an arrangement would be condemned as “an illegal or immoral conflict of interest” today.
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While it was controversial in Mrs. Roosevelt's day too, she generally shrugged off the criticism. According to historian Maurine Beasley, ER was the first president's wife to openly use the media for her own professional and political purposes. “Undaunted by the technology of modern communications, she became its master,” Beasley writes.
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ER liked being able to talk directly to Americans on such a vast, immediate scale. She also liked the money. In the 1930s, ER earned more from a single appearance on one of her radio programs than the average American worker made all year. An independent income allowed ER to
support people and charities she cared about. During the Depression, she sent some of the money to struggling Americans who wrote to her for help. Much of her radio earnings went to the American Friends Service Committee to support Arthurdale, a New Deal project for displaced coal miners in West Virginia. The experiment in subsistence homesteading became a favorite of ER's. It also mattered to ER that she have her own work with her own sphere of influence. In her broadcasts, speeches, and newspaper columns, ER would challenge conventional thinking about women and work. “Isn't it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard?” ER asked an audience in 1936. “Did anyone make a fuss about it until they began to get paid for their work?”
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When a letter writer from Long Island complained to ER that, at $500 a minute, she was overpaid for her radio work, ER wrote back saying she agreed. “The reason they are willing to give me this money is, of course, because my husband is the president,” ER wrote. She was unapologetic: “It puts money in circulation, the money is spent for a good purpose, and these people could not otherwise be helped.”
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ER's fee put her among the highest-paid radio talent in the nation. But she didn't offer to work for less.

In her twelve years as first lady, ER hosted eight commercially sponsored radio shows. While she occasionally used the White House radio studio created for FDR's Fireside Chats to make noncommercial broadcasts, all the paid programs appear to have originated in network studios. Some programs were aimed specifically at women listeners, such as
It's a Woman's World
—a series of Friday-evening programs on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), sponsored by Selby Arch-Preserver Shoes. Topics included daily life at the White House and the rigors of official entertaining. In a 1937 NBC series sponsored by Pond's, ER discussed slum housing, the problems of working women, and how to properly educate a daughter for the twentieth century. The longest-running series—and perhaps the most important one in ER's White House
years—was
Over Our Coffee Cups.
The twenty-eight weekly shows ran on Sunday evenings from September 1941 to April 1942. It was ER's most overtly political radio series up to that time. She attacked FDR's isolationist critics, deplored anti-Semitism, and called on Americans to defend the free-speech rights of those with whom they disagreed.