Eleanor and Franklin (95 page)

A young man who described himself as still in difficult circumstances said he was prepared “to starve a little . . . if I knew that the man in Washington who captured my imagination and admiration in 1933 was unchanged.” “Would you like to answer or shall I?” Eleanor queried her husband, adding, “It is rather nice.” Franklin asked her to write and presumably indicated the reply she might give. “Nothing has happened to F.D.R., but reforms don't come in two years.”
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An Iowa Republican who had voted Democratic in 1932 confessed that she was beginning to lose hope because the old order seemed unchanged. “I would write her,” Roosevelt suggested, “that there is one thing to learn and that is not to believe everything she reads in the newspapers. Also tell her that the position of the Administration has not varied one iota and that it still has the same objectives.”
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Molly Dewson was another who communicated to Eleanor her alarm over the president's failure to exert more vigorous leadership. Eleanor replied to Molly along lines suggested by Franklin:

These things go in cycles. We have been through it in Albany and we are going through it here. . . . He says to tell you that Congress is accomplishing a great deal in spite of the fact that there is very little publicity on what they have done. . . . The relief bill and the [social] security bill are bound to go slowly because they are a new type of legislation. If he tried to force them down the committee's throat and did not give them time to argue them out, he would have an even more difficult Congress to work with. . . .

Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership that he is seeing the men constantly, and that he is working with them, but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship and I hardly think the country would like that any better than they do the delay.

The ups and downs in peoples' feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately. Considering the time we have had to work in the past for almost every slight improvement, I should think they might get over with it, but they never do.

Franklin says for Heaven's sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.
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Sometimes even Roosevelt became impatient and was tempted to twist arms and apply the whip to Congress, and it was Eleanor who urged patience and perseverance. She lunched with some friends of World War I days—Caroline Phillips, Mary Miller, Anne Lane. “She was as dear, as affectionate, as simple and spontaneous as she was at 17 when I first knew her 35 years ago,” Caroline recorded in her diary. But she also looked “very tired” and was “worried about the harm Huey Long is doing.” The president was ready “to take the whip to Congress and abandon his conciliatory attitude. Eleanor tries to prevent this, but has only a limited influence,” Caroline noted.
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In mood and objective she was allied with the New Dealers, but she felt that education, not the “whip,” was the way to move ahead. Congress must have time, she counseled an Iowa progressive who wondered whether the president had deserted the progressive group in Congress for big business: “If he went on the air and forced legislation through, there would be the cry of ‘Dictator,' and no willing cooperation.”
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In Warm Springs at Thanksgiving time she urged her husband to adopt “the same method he had used in Albany of holding a school of his own members in Congress so that they can get a chance to talk out their own ideas and he can get his across to them.”
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But Roosevelt felt he did not have the time, he told Sam Rosenman, who agreed with Eleanor about a school for legislators, “and besides, there are so many of them that we could never get around to all.”
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Eleanor had strong convictions, but she respected her opponents
and believed, moreover, that in a democracy reforms had to be both gradual and subject to revision. The objectives set forth by people like Huey Long, she wrote a correspondent, were fine; the problem was to obtain them “without too much dislocation and too much hardship to everyone concerned.”
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Nor did her strong disagreement with the American Liberty League alter her warm feeling for Al Smith, one of its chief architects. Louis had been “a hater” in politics, “the most intense hater I have ever known,” she said; he never forgot and rarely forgave a politician who had crossed the president. But Eleanor, as columnist Arthur Krock noted, did not seem to take “her husband's political wars personally. She has seen a lot of feuds and reconciliations in politics.” Krock's comment was prompted by the one-day sensation caused when it was disclosed that Eleanor had invited Al Smith to stay at the White House when he came to Washington to address the American Liberty League on January 25, 1936. Smith declined the invitation. Had not Mrs. Roosevelt understood, Krock wondered, that the invitation to Smith, when he was coming to Washington with the avowed purpose of blasting the president, would be considered suspect? People had to understand Eleanor Roosevelt's “simple and candid” nature, he was told by White House aides. She considered the White House her home. She was an extraordinarily direct person with a feeling of warmth for Smith, and had invited him without considering the political implications. The president had had nothing to do with it.
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One of the most bitterly fought measures in the 1935 Congress was the social security bill. There were differences among its advocates over a national versus a state approach, over the size and method of contribution, over whether it should be a new agency or lodged within the Labor Department. And there was the more basic opposition of the Republican party to the principle of social security, which conservative businessmen felt would lead to the “ultimate socialistic control of life and industry.”

Eleanor's “old crowd” reflected the virulence of the conservative opposition. She invited the ladies of the exclusive Fortnightly Club to hold their March meeting at the White House and proposed that “social welfare” be the topic of discussion. Her cousin Helen Robinson, since the Club's Board of Governors did not dare write directly, was asked to convey to Eleanor their fears that they would not feel free while receiving her hospitality to criticize the administration and to disagree with pending legislation. It had not occurred to her that
the social security bill was political, but if the board could think up another subject, she would have no objection: “Of course, I would have expected them to criticize administration measures where they touch on politics. I cannot see why everyone should be expected to think the same way about anything.”
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Faced with strong opposition to the very principle of social security, Molly Dewson, although she had strong views on the specific features of the bill that were in contest, said she would take a bill “anyhow it's drafted.” Eleanor felt similarly. She did not expect to get a complete “security program” in the next two years, she told her news conference, but hoped to see the program launched. Asked about the differences among the proponents of social security, she replied: “I have always been amused to note that those who want a great deal more, and those who want a great deal less done, find themselves, unconsciously to be sure, working together and preventing the accomplishment of a moderate middle-of-the-road program.”
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“You've done more to influence thought in the past 21 months, than anyone except your husband,” one of her newspaper regulars wrote her at the beginning of 1935.
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Educate! Educate! Educate! That was her theme. It was part of the bond between herself and Molly Dewson. Molly sent her a leaflet advertising a Democratic rally in Michigan with speakers on the “New Work Relief Program” and on the CCC. “Dear Eleanor,” Molly scrawled on it, “Aren't the men fun imitating the girls and becoming ‘reporters' on special subjects instead of making general gas talks.”
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She was “much more interested in possible far-away developments and [the] steady increase of women's influence, which, I feel, tends to ameliorate bad social conditions,” she told Martha at an early stage in their friendship, “than I am in any immediate political developments.” In a last interview that he gave to Bess Furman of the Associated Press, Louis Howe was equally sanguine about the long-range ameliorative effects that women could have on politics:

If politics divides, as it may, very sharply along the lines of the humanitarian and there are ten years in which to see how this experiment of females in government is working . . . and if they make good, and if the great mass of the people conclude they want New Deal ideas in recreation, labor, schools, and want to support that line—and if in time there arises some woman who gets the confidence of the people as a whole, there might be the argument
advanced that the problems of the day are problems which have been neglected by man since George Washington, and men don't seem to understand what it's all about. The people may say: “Let's try a woman out.” I don't think it's at all probable but there's nothing so clear now as the humanitarian issue.
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Eleanor had swiftly discouraged Louis when he had broached the idea that she might be the person the country might turn to—with a little prompting from him. But the idea was occurring to others. A Missouri congressman sent her a local column proposing that she be named the vice-presidential candidate in 1936 as a way of rescuing that post from oblivion; the congressman seconded the nomination. But, as Eleanor wrote Martha Gellhorn, she was interested in the mobilization of women's influence for basic reforms and sensed instinctively that she would be more effective as an educator if she were “in politics but not of it.”
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Roosevelt's strategy for the 1936 election placed heavy stress on the campaign as an opportunity to educate and inform the electorate. He outlined his plans to the women at the dinner in mid-December, 1935, that Eleanor had arranged at Molly's request. It would be a New Deal, not a Democratic party, appeal, with a special effort made to reach the new groups which had a stake in the continuance of the Roosevelt policies—workers, farmers, Negroes, young people, women, independents. The opposition was formidable because of the wealth it commanded and because it had the support of 85 per cent of the press, and thus there had to be a major effort to counter its propaganda and get the truth into every home. The women's division had the most experience with a campaign based on truth-telling and falsehood-exposing. Roosevelt counted on the women's division, he told them, and wanted the party to make wide use of their educational techniques. Molly sent Farley a post-dinner synopsis of the session with the president with the admonition that “in carrying out his ideas, we rely on you.” To insure doubly that Farley did not pigeonhole the decisions, Molly sent a copy to Eleanor.
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Under the plans outlined by Roosevelt the women were to be given more space at headquarters, their budget was to be increased, and they were to have the help of the men in obtaining government officials as speakers. His active campaign would begin with his address at the
Jackson Day dinners, he told the women, and from that date on the ban on government officials making political speeches was off and the whole organization should be geared to countering Republican propaganda in the Republican-controlled press. He also said that he wanted a “Friends of Roosevelt” type of organization set up to appeal to those not functioning in the regular party organizations and an effort made to vitalize the Young Democrats through a national contest for the best speech on the New Deal.

Molly immediately drafted a letter that she asked Farley to send to the members of the cabinet. “Dear Henry, Frank, Harry, Harold, Frances, Arthur, etc.” it read,

The President has told the Women's Division of the National Democratic Committee to go ahead full steam in answering the avalanche of Republican propaganda after January 8th, when the Democratic campaign will open with the Jackson Day Dinners.

He also said that after January 8th there is no ban against government officials speaking at political meetings. No one knows the record better.

Will you please have prepared for the use of the Democratic National Committee a list of those in your department who are excellent, good and fair speakers upon whom we may call. . . .

During Howe's tenure the political chain of command had been clearcut: Roosevelt, Howe, Farley. That, at least, was how Molly Dewson saw it. “Mrs. Roosevelt told me in January that the ‘high command' which I presumed meant the President, Mr. Farley and Mr. Howe had decided that the bulk of literature issued in the campaign should be the Rainbow Fliers. This statement was based on the reception given the fliers in the 1932 campaign.”
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With Louis gone the question of who was to carry out the commander-in-chief's directive became acute. Theoretically it was Jim Farley, national chairman, postmaster-general, and chief dispenser of patronage. He was loyal and effective, a professional politician who, however, did not particularly appreciate the New Deal as a movement of ideas and values or have much rapport with many New Dealers.

Farley was a technician, not a progressive crusader. During a national reconnaissance tour in late winter, 1936, Molly picked up reports on the West Coast that Farley was building a machine to make him president in 1940. “Just imagine JAF as President!!” she wrote
incredulously to Eleanor; “for one thing he had better turn Methodist.” Eleanor, who had a warm feeling about Jim, discounted the report: “Molly, I can't believe this is Jim's idea.” She got along with the national chairman, but the exchange between the two women indicated their awareness of his limitations. Molly was under attack that spring by Emma Guffey Miller, the Democratic national committeewoman from Pennsylvania and sister of Senator Joseph Guffey, a highly influential Pennsylvania Democrat. Molly did not think Farley supported her in that contest with sufficient enthusiasm. “I go to your defense with loyalty and ardor practically every day,” she wrote him. “The few times I have disagreed with you I have told you and no one else except Mrs. Roosevelt to whom I feel primarily responsible.” Eleanor intervened on Molly's side. Farley retreated: “Regarding appointments,” he wrote Eleanor, “please be assured that I will discuss them with you, and be governed by your wishes on anything I do relative to the activity of women.”
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