Eleanor and Franklin (142 page)

As they toured up and down the coast, they found that practically nothing had been done about civilian defense in most cities. “They all had beautiful plans on paper,” but San Diego was the only city which had a plan in operation. Eleanor went to one meeting “where the Mayor, the Sheriff & the head of the Fire Dept. sounded off on what a lot they had done & would do when the Federal Government gave them the money. I hope I showed them that getting the money was a remote possibility & doing was different from saying!” The mayor of Los Angeles had “to practically be beaten over the head to make him acknowledge that there is any danger.” But elsewhere she found people in a state of jitters. “One thing among others I've learned, if we have trouble anywhere that is where I must go because it does seem to calm people down.”
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Pearl Harbor brought an immense spurt in civilian-defense activity. Defense councils multiplied, there were demands for plans to meet the remotest eventuality, and volunteers swamped federal and regional OCD offices. The organization was being vitalized, but Eleanor returned from the coast persuaded that LaGuardia had to be supplanted. She spoke immediately with Harold Smith, director of the budget, and Wayne Coy of the Office of Emergency Management, whom the president had asked to keep an eye on OCD, and they had reached the same conclusion. “Your committee on Civilian Defense is despondent and despairing of the activities of the organization,” they had written the president just before Eleanor's return, and they had to have “a very frank discussion” with him about it. After hearing them, the president asked for a memorandum that he could use as a basis for telling LaGuardia that he wanted to relieve him of all administrative duties, having him continue perhaps as chairman of an OCD board. Eleanor, in the meantime, spoke with Dean Landis about taking over the administrative leadership.

A few days later Roosevelt saw LaGuardia. Smith told the president before the meeting that LaGuardia could not handle the job on a part-time basis, nor could he get and hold good people because of his “careless habit of firing people without much concern.” LaGuardia sensed what was up as soon as he entered the president's office, and he did not make Roosevelt's task any easier. When the president said LaGuardia could not handle both the mayoralty and the directorship of the OCD and should get an assistant to take over the administrative
work at the OCD, the mayor replied that he had been “unfairly criticized” in the press. Some people disliked him and the rest disliked Mrs. Roosevelt. Instead of being divested of administrative responsibilities, LaGuardia proposed that civilian protection be separated from civilian participation. The president was “fairly firm,” commented Smith.
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At dinner on New Year's Day when Eleanor expressed misgivings about giving too much power to Wendell Willkie, whom the president thought he might put in charge of industrial mobilization, Harry Hopkins suggested that Willkie be placed in charge of civilian defense. Eleanor threw up her hands in mock horror—she preferred the mayor, she insisted, even though she was doing her best to have him promoted up and out of the organization. The day after the White House dinner, the president saw LaGuardia again and told him he wanted Landis appointed as executive officer. The mayor yielded. He would see Landis and if he accepted, the appointment could be announced the following week.
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It was none too soon. The day before Steve Early announced the Landis appointment, the House of Representatives voted to turn civilian-defense funds over to the War Department, which did not want them, and an amendment to supersede LaGuardia by a newly created assistant secretary of war failed by only one vote. In part these votes reflected a lack of confidence in LaGuardia's ability to handle both the civilian-defense job and the New York mayoralty, but basically the movement was fired by anti-New Deal feelings and forces. “Many people still feel that advantage is being taken of the emergency to further socialize America,” said Representative Cox. The Democrats who supported the move against LaGuardia, said Republican Representative Creal, were joining hands “with the men who only a few days ago attempted to strangle every defense effort and everything else.”
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The Landis appointment did not silence the critics. “Dean Landis is very ‘pink,'” said Representative Ford, adding, “you would have a hard time getting somebody ‘pinker,' but, nevertheless, we might have had Madam Perkins, with whose record you are all familiar.” But interest in Landis suddenly subsided when a group of congressmen, abetted by the Hearst press, scented more exciting game in some of the people who had been appointed by Eleanor. They went after the author of this book whom the Hearst press disclosed to be a member of the Advisory Committee of the Youth Division of the OCD. Then Melvyn Douglas, the distinguished actor who was serving as head of an arts division,
was savaged as another radical whom Eleanor had appointed, although she had had nothing to do with his selection. Some members of the advisory group assisting Eleanor in coordinating volunteer services were shown to have been members of organizations on Representative Dies' blacklist. That kept the story and the speechmaking alive. When it was learned that Mrs. Betty Lindley, Eleanor's chief of staff at $5,600, was also Eleanor's friend and had been her radio agent, that, too, stoked congressional indignation—as if every good executive does not staff his or her office with people in whom they have confidence and whose capabilities they have tested. But what had been a field day turned into a saturnalia with the discovery that Mayris Chaney, a dancer and close friend of Eleanor's, was employed as an assistant in the physical-fitness program at $4,600. “Twice as much as Captain Colin Kelly got,” shouted Representative Faddis, “and he gave his life that this nation might continue.” Congress and the press resounded with denunciations of “fan dancers” in the civilian-defense program. Representative Hoffman launched a “Bundles for Eleanor” campaign to help place “unfortunate idle rich people” in civilian-defense jobs. “It is not hard to get volunteers to take work at these figures,” Representative Ford mocked. In vain did Eleanor insist that the valid criticism was that her division had moved “too slowly in getting able people to develop a necessary war program.” With regard to salaries, they had tried to build “a nation-wide program with a staff that included only seventeen people in the Washington office who received over $2,600 a year; only four received $5,600 or more.” The total paid staff numbered less than seventy-five.
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Such pallid statistics were overwhelmed by the hue and cry over Mayris Chaney. If she was worth $4,600, asked Representative Bennett, why not employ fan dancer Sally Rand, who should easily be worth $25,000?

In 1941, despite eight years of the New Deal, society still moved in the afterglow of an ethic of work and individualism which made “do-gooders” and “social workers” objects of derision and ridicule. Eleanor lent herself to caricature. Since the OCD was preaching physical fitness to the country, she felt it should set an example. So, during lunch hours and in the later afternoon there were calisthenics and square dancing on the roof of the OCD headquarters. It was done “with all the good heart in the world,” said Landis, “but people weren't feeling that way”—and the press was tipped off. The government decreed nylon was not to be used for stockings, and when Eleanor appeared at
headquarters the next day in dowdy cotton stockings every woman at OCD felt obliged to follow her example although many of them, having no wish to be classed as a bluestocking, hated it.
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And finally, to cap the charges of inefficiency, Communism, and do-goodism, there was, underlying the hostility of the southerners, the racial issue. A city like Atlanta did not want to let Negroes into its civilian-defense setup and the South generally resisted civilian-defense integration. “Now, Mrs. Roosevelt tackled that in her usual manner,” Landis later recalled, “and naturally there were outcries against that, and a lot of people rallied to that banner.”
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The Republicans were gleeful. John Callan O'Laughlin, editor of the
Army-Navy Journal
and one of Herbert Hoover's regular informants in the Capital, was pleased over Eleanor's growing difficulties in her OCD activities, partly because of skepticism of those activities and partly because of her sponsorship of “communists.”
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“They burnt Mayris Chaney at the stake in Congress last week,” wrote liberal columnist Samuel Grafton. “And one metropolitan newspaper ran four signed columns and three editorials attacking her within the space of two days.” While Mrs. Roosevelt had “unwisely” given a job to Miss Chaney in civilian defense, Grafton went on, that was not the reason Congress was hot on her trail. “They've needed you, girl. For down below, the thing is still smoldering, the hatred of the last eight years, of the galling march of social change, so intimately connected with the name of Roosevelt.”
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It was a time of cumulative military setbacks, almost disaster, but it was in vain that House leaders urged a sense of proportion and decency upon their colleagues. “What kind of statesmanship can condone the taking of a large part of two days' debate ranting about the employment of two individuals—not in the bill—and making no reference at all to vital items in the bill providing for the safety of millions along our eastern and western seaboards and making provision for the money necessary to carry on the war?” asked Representative Cannon, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, but most of his colleagues were not disposed to listen. The OCD had become “a haven for so-called liberals,” replied Representative Shafer, “who have long campaigned for America's participation in the war but who are now apparently seeking every means of avoiding the front-line trenches and doing any fighting.” Even the level-headed and usually restrained Raymond Clapper joined in the hue and cry, summoning Westbrook Pegler to “come down here and do one of his justly celebrated scalping
jobs on the Office of Civilian Defense. I mean on Mrs. Roosevelt, too, because half the trouble could be got rid of if the President would haul her out of the place.” In a final thrust at Eleanor the House voted to ban the use of OCD funds for teaching “physical fitness by dancing” or for “promoting street or theatrical shows.”
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Eleanor's recommendation of Mayris Chaney for a post with OCD had been unwise, a response of the heart rather than the head. Her unwillingness to turn her back on friends and associates whom unscrupulous critics stigmatized as “communists” made her vulnerable to attack. The exercise of power has its laws. The name of the codifier of those laws has entered the dictionaries as a synonym for political expediency, craft, and deceit. Those who place friendship, loyalty, and righteousness above power, wrote Machiavelli, are better off as private citizens.

Eleanor's love of people, when it came to her friends, expressed itself in a “loyalty . . . that is boundless—and even reckless, on occasion,” said her old friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

“To know me is a terrible thing,” Eleanor quietly remarked.
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But even if she had not known or been fond of Mayris Chaney and the others under attack, she would have stood by them. Rare was the administrator or politician who was willing to employ someone whose background and record did not conform to conventional standards of success and propriety. But for Eleanor, to blow on the spark that encouraged another human being—defeated, flawed, despondent—to try to transcend his limitations gave life its savor. And an unconditional integrity made it predictable that she would not apply to others a “loyalty” test that she felt she herself would not pass if she were not First Lady.

The attacks on her confirmed her deepest forebodings about taking an official post in her husband's administration. She had come to OCD to help the program, and here she was, lessening its effectiveness. Her mail was heavy with letters about the Chaney-Douglas appointments, seven out of every eight critical, over half “more or less abusive” and, added Tommy, “still coming in.” Eleanor had never had such an unfavorable press. The columnists who defended her were the exceptions, and one of them was Walter Winchell, who at the height of the hue and cry, concluded a weekly broadcast, “I remain your New York correspondent, Walter Winchell, who wishes the House of Representatives would again read the Bill they voted for on December eight. . . . It was a Declaration of War on the Axis—not Mrs. Roosevelt! Goodnight.”

“I am not in the least disturbed by this latest attack,” she wrote Kellogg. “It is purely political and made by the same people who have fought NYA, CCC, WPA, Farm Security, etc.” Yet even before this final flareup she had concluded she must resign. The Interdepartmental Committee in OCD had to be under his chairmanship, she wrote Dean Landis. “You must preside over it, and you must have contacts with the other departments. I am afraid that being the President's wife would make it pretty awkward for a good many people if I were to do the job.”
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It was awkward even for Dean Landis. It was “a perfectly impossible situation to have as an assistant director the wife of the President of the United States.” She tried to do the best she could, according to Landis:

For example, she had an office just one floor away, and this was a constant problem. I would call her up and say, “I'd like to see you about a matter,” and she'd say, “Oh, no, I'll come up and see you.” She made it a point always to do that so that outwardly the line of command would be there.

But, after all, she would have channels of communication with the President considerably closer than mine! It was a difficult situation. And then, if she would take a position, that would involve the President; whereas if just an ordinary assistant director took a position it didn't involve the President. It might involve me but it didn't involve the President.
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