Eleanor and Franklin (141 page)

She hoped Franklin would now be ready to make changes in the Big House so that it would be more livable and more theirs than Sara's. He did not say yes or no to her, but when Anna and John came East at his
request, he told them that he wanted the house kept as it was. When Eleanor heard this from Anna, she said that she was unable to live in a museum: she would live in her cottage at Val-Kill and go to the Big House only when the president was there. The insistency with which she made it clear, even to strangers, that this had been her mother-in-law's house, not hers, betrayed how deeply she had been hurt: “My mother-in-law owned the house and ran it herself up until she died a year ago, and it is exactly as she left it. It never was my home in the sense that I had anything to do with the furnishing or running of it.”
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September was one of the most difficult months in her life. No sooner had she begun to go through Sara's clothes and papers than she was summoned to Washington, where her brother Hall was in Walter Reed Hospital. He had had a few good years in the thirties as assistant to Frank Murphy when the latter was mayor of Detroit. But after the death of his son Danny he had disintegrated and had settled in Hyde Park where he was experimenting with prefabricated rural housing built on the president's land. “His liver is gone as they told him it would,” she wrote Maude Gray. For the next ten days she lived at the hospital, sleeping in her clothes, keeping vigil with Hall's companion of his final years, the faithful Zena Raset.

My idea of hell, if I believed in it, would be to sit or stand & watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns & thinking “this was once the little boy I played with & scolded, he could have been so much & this is what he is.” It is a bitter thing & in spite of everything I've loved Hall, perhaps somewhat remissedly of late, but he is part of me. I do have a quieting effect on him & so I stood by his bed & held his hand & stroked his forehead & Zena stood by me for hours. She won't give up hope of his recovery & keeps asking me if I don't think he's strong enough to pull through till I could weep.

“It has been a hard two weeks,” she wrote after Hall's death, “& from last Sunday until yesterday morning more harrowing than I could tell you, till the end which was quite peaceful. I wish all youngsters who drink & abuse their health could see the results of great strength with the liver gone.” In her column she recalled a small boy with golden curls whom their young aunts called “cherub” which made her jealous. From the time he was eighteen, “the only way that anyone could hold him was to let him go. . . . He loved life, he could enjoy
things more than almost anyone I have ever known.” He had generosity, warmth of heart, courage amounting to recklessness, a brilliant mind, “and a capacity for work which, in his younger days, made him able to perform prodigious tasks, both physically and mentally.” After a service in the East Room she accompanied the body to Tivoli for burial in the Hall family vault in St. Paul's churchyard.
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Two days later she reported for work at the OCD offices in Dupont Circle. The situation was not promising. “I had a talk with Corrington Gill today who has just come in to the Mayor's outfit & we agree that there is none [organization] & that we must have some.” The Sunday before she went to work she had awakened at three in the morning and, finding herself wide awake, calm and rested, spent the next three hours mentally organizing the OCD work. At six she made some notes, which she gave to Tommy at breakfast to type out.
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The notes began with a section on “over-all objectives,” enumerated the “goals of Department heads” to be achieved “by November 1,” and then went on to a section that stated “our first job [is] to organize headquarters office.” Each person was asked to “begin” by writing out for her the duties they had, salary agreements made, their staff in Washington and in the field.

Elinor Morgenthau, who had volunteered to come in to the office with her, “will confer when I am not available. All letters involving policy or any new procedure to be submitted to me
before
going out and not to be sent until approved. A copy of all letters on business matters to be sent at end of each working day to my secretary.”

She wanted a detailed report on how work in the field was carried on and checked. A policy would have to be established on “our responsibility to the rest of organization and to the Mayor.” This was followed by precise instructions on the handling of press and publicity. She enumerated the people who were to be put through on the phone, and added, “only listen in when I request it.” All mail was to be opened but brought to her at first “until we can establish system.” She set times for staff meetings. No visitors were to be put through except when they were on the appointment list or at the request of Mrs. Betty Lindley or Miss Dorothy Overlock.

She showed her plan to Baruch, who “approved my setup as far as charts went but I don't think he realizes what Defense Councils are going to be like to deal with!” The lack of organization, the absence of clearly defined tasks for the volunteers, the jealousies of the established departments, not to mention state and local defense councils,
were even greater than she had anticipated:—“things are devious & I wonder if I have knowledge & courage to go on successfully.”
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“We have an amazing reservoir of volunteers ready and willing,” she wrote Lady Reading. “The difficulty has been in organizing the Washington office so it would be able to react down into the local communities and into our rural areas.” The president had understated it in March when he had complained that working out the administrative setup for the OCD was one of the most difficult jobs he had ever faced.
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To develop a program involved painstaking negotiations with established government departments which were determined not to allow the upstart defense agencies to usurp responsibilities they felt were theirs. Speaking to a National Nutritional Conference in June, Eleanor had noted that deficiencies in diet were at the root of one third of the rejections from Selective Service on physical grounds. But when, in early November, the head of the Physical Fitness Division of the OCD proposed to print and distribute a nutrition chart, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Security Agency refused to approve the chart. Her only interest, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Paul V. McNutt, was to reach “the greatest number of people with information which is simple and fundamental about the things they should eat.” She was quite willing to have Mr. Kelly transferred to Mr. McNutt's department if that would expedite matters. “I have no feeling whatsoever if you think it would work better to have him actually in your Department.” She saw similar problems arising with other departments and some method of cooperation and coordination had to be reached. Not even the Red Cross “cooperated wholeheartedly,” she confided to Belle (Mrs. Kermit) Roosevelt. “The Red Cross was supposed to train 20,000 women in six weeks. They trained—rather inadequately—some 3,000 in seven weeks.”
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She inherited other organizational problems. The Army and the Navy often were not on speaking terms with each other, and both were impatient and scornful of requests from the OCD for cooperation. Every voluntary organization wanted to get into the civilian-defense setup, “which was fine, but also they wanted to run their own show in the way they thought it should be run.” LaGuardia's part of the OCD staff in Washington was made up of mayors; James M. Landis, dean of the Harvard Law School, counted fifteen of them. They were talkers, not workers, and Landis “fired them all in one night,” after he succeeded LaGuardia. As his deputy in charge of civilian protection, the
mayor brought in General Lorenzo D. Gasser, a retired Army deputy chief-of-staff who was “extremely military-minded. He came into a conference—everybody stood up!”
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Eleanor realized that the job of the Volunteer Participation Division in Washington was not so much to recruit volunteers as to find significant activities for the volunteers who were locally recruited, and she staffed her office with strong program specialists who shared her vision of a better America. She asked Paul Kellogg, the distinguished editor of the nation's leading social-work magazine, to spend two days a week in Washington advising her. She persuaded Judge Justine Polier to give up her month's vacation to work up a family and child-welfare program with the interested government bureaus. As head of operations she appointed Hugh Jackson, who had done a brilliant job reorganizing New York City's Welfare Department. She made Jonathan Daniels, a gifted writer and recognized authority on regionalism, an executive aide, and brought in Mary Dublin, who as research director of the National Consumer's League and director of the Tolan Committee's hearings on migratory labor was familiar with the problems associated with the dislocation and movement of population. Together with Elinor Morgenthau, Betty Lindley, and Molly Flynn (an expert on welfare coordination), these persons constituted a program-planning committee.

Through her discussions with this group Eleanor began to develop a clear working conception of the scope and focus of her side of the OCD. Instead of civilian participation she now spoke of community mobilization. She wanted to make it, as Kellogg put it, “a yeasty force for interagency action at the federal level, and for effective community organization throughout the country.” A conference in her office to discuss the wartime needs of children produced interagency agreement, no mean achievement, on a program of federal support for day care and additional grants to the States for maternal, child-health, and child-welfare services, which the president subsequently accepted as part of his social-security program. She was, said Kellogg, an “inspiring” force. Leila Pinchot, a volunteer in the Washington office, spoke of the impact of her “passionate integrity” in dealing with community representatives.
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Her appearance in a community created a sense of excitement and gave it the feeling that it was important in the defense program. If the organization still did not have the sweep and vitality of Lady Reading's in England, that was to be expected when no bombs were falling,
cities were not being gutted, children were not being made homeless, and few took the threat of attack, not to mention invasion, seriously. Then came Pearl Harbor.

All afternoon on Saturday, December 6, Eleanor worked on OCD business in her sitting room with Judge Polier and Paul Kellogg. As they prepared to leave she took them in to say good night to the president. “Well, Justine,” he greeted them, “this son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God.” He had played his last card for peace in the Pacific, he went on to explain to the startled trio, in a personal message to the Japanese emperor.
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The next day, Sunday, December 7, there was a large luncheon at the White House which Eleanor expected Franklin would attend since his cousin Ellen Adams and her children were among the guests. At the last moment, however, he sent word that he had decided to stay in his study and lunch with Harry. The first intimation of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached the president at 1:40
P.M.
Eleanor heard the stunning news when she went upstairs after the luncheon “and found everyone telephoning.” The president was busy all afternoon with Hull, the chiefs of staff, with calls to Churchill and others. But before she went over to the radio studio to do her weekly broadcast she went to talk with him. She found him “more serene than he had appeared in a long time,” and sensed that it was “steadying to know finally the die was cast.” This was the note she sounded in her broadcast:

For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important, and that was preparation to meet an enemy, no matter where he struck.

That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.
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Fearful that the West Coast might soon be attacked—there were reports of Japanese submarines surfacing off San Francisco—Eleanor and Mayor LaGuardia quickly decided to fly out.
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She spent the next morning at the OCD office, dashed back to the White House
to accompany the president to the Capitol to hear him ask Congress to declare a state of war in existence between the United States and Japan since December 7, a date that he predicted would “live in infamy.” This was the second time Eleanor had heard a president ask Congress for a declaration of war. She remembered her anxieties in 1917 for her husband and her brother and “now I had four sons of military age.”
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Overnight, Washington was a changed city. Soldiers with bayonets patrolled bridges, railroad junctions, the White House. Uniforms were everywhere in evidence. James and Elliott were in theirs when Eleanor saw them in the Whit House just before leaving for the West Coast, and her heart ached when James told her he wanted active duty with the Marines, even though his father thought he would be more valuable in the Capitol. He did not want to hold a desk job, he told his mother, and asked her to support him. She was sure the president would let him do his duty as he saw it, and within days she and the president were to say good-by to him.
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She, too, had her duty to do. At the airport she and LaGuardia said they were going to the coast to strengthen civilian-defense organization and morale. No one really knew what had happened at Pearl Harbor, the president had told her, except that no ships had escaped damage, the fleet was crippled, and the West Coast lay exposed to enemy raids. The trip did not begin auspiciously for the mayor. The plane hit an air pocket as he was being served dinner and a glass of milk spattered him, and he retired to his berth soon afterward. Eleanor was at work in her little compartment when the pilot brought her a flash from the Associated Press asking her to inform the mayor that San Francisco was being bombed. She paled and went to speak to LaGuardia. There was nothing to do but go on and fly directly to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, he said. She liked that response. At Nashville she called Washington to verify the news and learned that the Army had failed to notify the mayor of San Francisco that it was merely holding a practice blackout. Everyone on the plane was
relieved, but no one that night believed it impossible or even improbable that San Francisco might be bombed.
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