Eleanor and Franklin (91 page)

Simmons paid her handsomely. “I think you are entirely right that no one is worth $500 a minute,” she replied candidly to an irate citizen. “Certainly I never dreamed for a minute I was!” Her fees, it was noted, placed her in the same class as the highest-paid radio personalities of the time such as Ed Wynn.
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Her broadcasts were sufficiently popular to bring her another sponsor as soon as the Simmons series ended, this one the American typewriter industry, for whom she did six fifteen-minute talks on child education. These were subsequently issued as a pamphlet. Her 1935 sponsor was Selby Shoes who, for sixteen fifteen-minute talks, paid her $72,000, all of it sent directly to the AFSC. An article in
Radio Guide
praised her as a radio performer. Coached by studio technicians, who were enchanted with her because she was not a prima donna, she began to learn everything about radio delivery—timing, modulation, spacing—and by 1939 she was dubbed the “First Lady of Radio” by WNBC:

Her microphone manners are exemplary. . . . She listens to suggestions from production men and cooperates in any plan to improve the reception of a broadcast. She arrives in time for rehearsals and accepts direction with no more ado than if she were an obscure personality. . . . She is not averse to a little showmanship here and there, but eschews tricks. Her voice is well-pitched and she speaks softly. . . . It is not an accident that Mrs. Roosevelt's radio voice is studied by students of speech.
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In 1936 Betty Lindley, the wife of Ernest Lindley and long a personal friend, became her radio agent and negotiated a contract with Pond's for thirteen talks at $3,000 apiece. Of this amount $200 was set aside for studio expenses, $300 went to Mrs. Lindley, and the remainder to the AFSC to cover the budget of the Arthurdale school; “after that it seems to me that the school should be taken over by the state.”
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She suffered a few mishaps as a radio performer. In her final broadcast
for Pond's there were a “few terrible seconds” when a page disappeared from her script. If she had been following her own train of thought instead of a script as she was required to do, she could have handled it without a break, she said. As it was it took her “a second or two” to collect her thoughts.
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What made her an outstanding radio performer was not so much her mastery of technique as her constant awareness of her unseen audience. She tried consciously to envision the women who were listening to her under conditions of the greatest diversity—on lonely ranches, in mountain cabins, in tenements—and to remember that they were weighing her words against their own experience. She made her listeners' interests and problems her own and tried out of her own experience to say meaningful things simply and concretely.

Her ability to identify with her listeners, to illustrate her thesis with homely stories, and to advance her point of view with such kindness and courtesy that even the most violent adversaries were stilled was even more evident in her lectures and speeches, where she was not bound by a script. Her custom, when she addressed live audiences, was to speak from a single page of notes. “Have something to say, say it and sit down,” she advised students of public speaking, as Louis had advised her. “At first write out the beginning and the end of a speech. Use notes and think out a speech, but never write it down.”
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She did not like to speak if she did not have something affirmative to say. Often as the chairman introduced her she prayed for Divine guidance to say something that might be helpful to the people in front of her. Like Gandhi, Schweitzer, and other semi-religious figures with whom she later would be grouped, she was always the teacher. Everything she said was infused with moral purpose and affirmed the supremacy of love and truth.

Her speeches generally contained a challenge, but it was issued with such graciousness and modesty that few took offense. “Be conciliatory, never antagonistic, toward your audience,” she advised, “or it may disagree with you, no matter what you say.” Before the DAR convention she championed progressive methods in education, a campaign to eradicate illiteracy, and the “grand” adult-education work of the Relief Administration, and her tradition-bound audience listened attentively. She even poked gentle fun at a superpatriot's proposal to restrict the right to change laws to people of old stock (she and the president between them had only one ancestor who arrived later than colonial days, she noted, “so if anyone would have a right on that peculiar status, we would still qualify”), and ended with a plea for
patriotism that “will mean living for the interests of everyone in our country and the world at large, rather than simply preparing to die for our country.”
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Novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote that she had “fairly bounded into the air with joy” because she had never dreamed that someone in authority could say right out what Eleanor had said to the DAR.
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A few weeks later she spoke extemporaneously at a federal prison for delinquent girls and women in Alderson, West Virginia. Her speech was Lincolnesque in its simplicity and feeling. She had been moved by the way the girls had sung the spirituals, she began, and then quoted the 121st Psalm: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” That was the keynote of Alderson, she noted, set as it was in the mountains and run by a progressive penologist, Dr. Mary Harris, to help those who were there over the rough spots. That was also what government in general was now trying to do—“help the people it governs” over the rough spots. There was a new concept of social justice and government abroad in the land. “The fundamental change is just this, that instead of each person being out for himself for what he can get for himself . . . people must think . . . of the people around them” and ask of any action not only “what will be the effect . . . on me, but what will be the effect on those around me?” She then told of a recent visit to Puerto Rico and of a little rural school there that had been started by an obscure, humble individual but which was transforming the whole approach to rural education. “So when you get a chance to push something that is new and that helps the life of the people around you to be better, just remember what I have told you about Puerto Rico and help it along.” Then she went into her own philosophy of life:

It is a wonderful thing to keep your mind always full of something that is worth while doing. If you can get hold of something that you feel is going to help the people around you, you'll find that you're so busy trying to add one more thing to it that you won't have time to be sorry for yourself or to wonder what you're going to do with your spare time. . . . If I get sorry for myself, I'm no good to anybody else. It is just the best tonic I know, to get so interested in everybody that you want to see them happy always, and somehow or other you'll find that you haven't time for any of the things that filled your mind, that kept you from being a really useful person in the community that you were living in.
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It was a speech the girls understood, delivered with such earnestness and evident good will that even the most hardened yielded to its spell. “My prediction was correct,” Dr. Harris wrote her afterward; “many of the girls have referred to it and quoted from it to me, and what I hear myself is only a small part of the comment it aroused.”
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Her speeches held her listeners because they reflected her own efforts to think through to what was right and true. “You talk the language of the new America,” wrote Frank P. Graham, the president of the University of North Carolina, after her talk at the university. A Negro woman, explaining her willingness to wait an hour and a quarter to get into one of Mrs. Roosevelt's lectures, put it more colloquially: “She's got a message. And gosh! she's given it to 'em hot!”
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By the end of 1935 Eleanor was in such demand as a speaker by forums and other groups accustomed to paying fees that she signed a contract with W. Colston Leigh to do two lecture tours a year under his management at a fee of $1,000 per lecture. The Leigh brochure advertised five subjects on which she was willing to speak:

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One thousand dollars was a large fee, larger than she would have commanded—at least at the outset—had she not been the president's wife, and since she did not feel obligated to turn over the whole of these fees to the American Friends Service Committee, some saw this as further proof that she commercialized and cheapened the First Ladyship. But she shrugged off such criticism, sensing perhaps that no one had done more to ennoble the First Lady's role; and if people came to her lectures because they were curious about the First Lady, they stayed and felt they had obtained their money's worth because of the personality with which they had come in contact.

Her first tour for Leigh began with an appearance at Grand Rapids, “and as usual I was very nervous until I found myself standing up and actually speaking.” A confidential report to Leigh from his own correspondent in Grand Rapids was ecstatic. The audience of 1,700
to 1,800 “listened intently to every word.” The observer noted that Eleanor was especially admired for the “dignified, authoritative manner” with which she handled all questions, including those meant to embarrass her. “Of course, everyone was amazed at all that she was able to do in a few hours that she was in the city. . . . I am sure that she won over all of the Republicans who heard her that evening, and there were many.”
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Eleanor liked Leigh because he was “hard-boiled” and sought to protect his lecturers from being overwhelmed by local hospitality, but Leigh's best efforts to shield her were unavailing. “All goes well but very hectically,” she wrote Franklin. “It would be easy to be a lecturer or the wife of the President but both, Oh! my.” She was to speak in Omaha on a Sunday evening to the Delphians, and would like to have a “quiet day,” Tommy advised the local committee. A sympathetic reporter described that “quiet day.” It began with Eleanor and Tommy's arrival by train at 7:00
A.M.
, when they were met by a half dozen Delphians and given flowers. En route to the hotel they were trailed by two detectives who kept themselves out of sight because Eleanor's distaste for bodyguards was by now well known. At 10:30, after they had bathed and breakfasted, Tommy let in the press for a half-hour's questioning. As they filed out, a delegation of WPA supervisors came in. “This time,” the reporter noted, “Mrs. Roosevelt asked the questions.” They were succeeded by representatives of the National Youth Administration, who invited her to inspect an exhibit of NYA handicrafts, which she did after lunch, donning low-heeled oxfords because she insisted on walking to the exhibit. An hour later, having changed to an afternoon dress, she met some forty Delphians at tea. Then came a group of women Democrats. After dinner in her suite alone with Tommy when she wrote her column, she looked in on a private party at the hotel, toured an exhibit in the hotel of bug extermination devices on display for the convention of the National Pest Control Association, and, thus “rested,” wrote the reporter, “the First Lady left at 7:45 for the city auditorium to give the speech for which she had come to Omaha.”
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In 1937, Leigh persuaded her to do the first three-week tour. A “bit too long,” she confessed to Bess Furman afterward. “Two weeks is all I can do in one-night stands and keep feeling polite towards the people who meet you at seven a.m. with bouquets and flowers and expect you to wear a smile!” Sometimes the hotels were poor, she wrote her husband, and sometimes, as was the case with the Danville, Illinois,
hotel from which she was writing, they were “delightful. When they like you we get much attention. When they don't we are completely neglected!” Yet exhausting as these tours were, when local sponsors wanted to make special arrangements for her, she objected. The lecture committee in Jackson, Mississippi, distressed to learn there would be no Pullman car from Meridian to Jackson, were arranging for a special car when Eleanor wired, “I do not mind riding in day coaches. Please do not put yourself or the railroad to extra expense.”
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She might gently complain to her husband, to Bess, or to Tommy, but to those receiving her it was their comfort, their feelings that were always paramount with her. At Oak Park Junior College in Illinois she had been told that the subject of her speech would be “Peace” and was prepared to speak on that when she suddenly heard the chairman announce, “Mrs. Roosevelt will speak on ‘A Citizen's Responsibility to the Community.'” She had no notes but went right ahead, saying “a little prayer that I would get through without them!” He was grateful, the embarrassed man wrote afterward, for her “courtesy in not changing the subject matter after I had announced it and the ability with which you handled the surprise subject.”
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Women, of course, were interested in what she wore and how she carried herself. “I have seen five queens, and this queen is regal,” remarked a cultivated Frenchman who watched her model a gown at a debutante cotillion. Dress designers chose her as “the best dressed woman in the United States” in 1934. “To have that title,” she commented, especially in the light of her family's feeling that she never paid sufficient attention to her clothes, had been one of the “funniest” but also one of the “grandest” things that had happened to her. “I have come to the conclusion,” she advised dress designer Lilly Loscher, “that a dress for this type of trip should be low cut but should have very thin sleeves coming over the shoulder which would not interfere with having a long-sleeved jacket to go with it. It should either be of lace or some crepe material which does not require a lining and which does not crush. If it is lace and has to have lining, the lining should be put into the dress because it is very annoying to have a lot of little snaps to keep straps together across the shoulders.”
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