First Ladies (40 page)

When time came to entertain wives of congressmen, Lou Hoover had to decide what to do with the wife of Chicago congressman Oscar DePriest, the first Negro to serve in the legislature since Reconstruction. No black had been a guest at the White House since Theodore Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington in 1901, and Lou Hoover understood that an invitation to Jessie DePriest could bring unpleasant repercussions. She sounded out a few of the other wives, found twelve who would not embarrass the congressman's wife, and then gave a separate tea for them.

When word of the invitation got out, several Southern publications objected that Lou Hoover had “defiled” the White House, and the
Mobile Alabama Press
reacted bitterly: “Mrs. Herbert Hoover offered to the South and to the nation an arrogant insult yesterday when she entertained a negro [
sic
] woman at a White House tea. She has harmed Mr. Hoover to a serious extent. Social admixture of the negro and the white is sought by neither race. The negro is entitled to a social life but that the two races should intermingle at afternoon teas or other functions is inadmissible.”
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Lou Hoover's decision to follow through with the DePriest tea, in spite of criticism, reinforced her reputation as extremely egalitarian. She drove herself around Washington and invited a wide variety of people to dinner, causing one reporter to note: “She does not keep the rules, [but] mixes the great and the near-great with the obscure and the near obscure.”
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A woman willing to brave so much controversy might have been expected to open up to the press, but she was far less open with reporters in the White House than she had been in her early days in Washington. She refused to permit either interviews or casual photographs. Her grandchildren, who resided in the White House for a few months while their father recuperated in the South, were strictly off-limits to journalists. The formal, posed studio portraits that she released, showing a perfectly coiffed, distant matron, did little to render her human or compassionate.

The Hoover White House provided such a dry spell for thirsty reporters that one of them, Bess Furman of the Washington AP, contrived to enter the family quarters by passing herself off as a Girl Scout Christmas caroler. Dressed in the traditional uniform, hair tucked
under her cap, Furman went in “as one of the taller girls” and moved undetected within arm's reach of people who encountered her everyday as a reporter. During the carols that she could not sing, Furman kept her face down, furtively taking in details so she could write an account of how a president's family celebrated Christmas. In a burst of bravado, Furman sent a copy of the article to the First Lady, who marked it “nice story,” without ever discovering who supplied the details.
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Lou Hoover's reticence in the White House extended to policy matters as well as publicity, thus underlining the traditional side of her view of a wife's role. If she differed with Herbert on any significant matter, she kept the difference to herself. She tailored her own suggestions for economic recovery to fit her husband's remedies, and her public pronouncements on how to end the Great Depression reinforced her husband's reputation for relying on volunteerism. In March 1931, when the country edged towards the trough of unemployment, she went on radio to thank American women for their donations of food and clothing. The First Lady urged women to volunteer in one of three ways: by identifying people in need and determining how they could be helped, by working in hospitals and visiting-nurse programs, and by setting up recreation opportunities for unemployed young people.
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Even after Herbert lost the 1932 election (and Lou heard that one indignant mother had changed her young son's name from Herbert Hoover Jones to Franklin Roosevelt Jones), she took to the airwaves to encourage “every woman in America … to consider herself a volunteer associate member of the National Women's Committee of Welfare and Relief Mobilization … [because if people cooperate there is] ample food and clothing for us all.”
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More than most of her predecessors, Lou Hoover had exceptional ability and training for leadership, but she failed to win the country's approval or its interest. She foreshadowed Eleanor Roosevelt in her formidable energy and active participation in her husband's presidency. Alice Roosevelt Longworth (who was never particularly charitable to her famous cousin) credited Lou with being the first president's wife “to take a public part on her own.”
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But Lou's natural reticence unfortunately isolated her, so that, while she set the stage for Eleanor's accomplishments, she came nowhere close to equalling them.

Lou also lacked Eleanor's willingness to take risks. While Eleanor did not hesitate to disagree with her husband or introduce guests who would question his ideas, Lou preferred a safer course. She protected Herbert by inviting guests for his pleasure rather than for his growth,
and then she diverted conversation from difficult topics. While other presidents' wives sought to watch out for their husbands' health, Lou gave the impression of standing guard against challenges to Herbert's thinking—challenges that might have moved him in other directions than those he took.

The contrast between the two women is underlined in the letter that Lou Hoover wrote to her sons and husband not long before her death in 1944. It is a message that could not have come from Eleanor's hand. Even from Lou, it startles. The woman who started out camping and fishing like a boy, and then proceeded to earn a geology degree equal to her husband's, ended up describing her life as entirely peripheral to him and their sons: “I have been lucky,” she wrote, “to have my trail move alongside that of such exceptional men and boys.”
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Together, the three First Ladies of the 1920s reflect that decade well since they present contradictions and inconsistencies rather than one clear line of development. But they also form a bridge to the period that followed, and it is difficult to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt initiating the changes she did without the foundations laid by her immediate predecessors—in experimenting with the press, speaking out on important issues, and extending women's rights and opportunities.

EVEN BEFORE THE
1932 presidential election, Eleanor Roosevelt (1933–1945) made clear that she meant to break some precedents if her husband won. Just how much she was responding to the special urgency of the Great Depression remains unclear. Perhaps she would have been just as active and innovative a First Lady if her husband had presided over a prosperous nation. But most Americans in 1933 were neither prosperous nor optimistic. The previous summer, midwestern farmers, disgusted by the low prices they were receiving, dumped their milk. Then thousands of jobless veterans marched to Washington and set up camps of shacks and tents, dubbed Hoovervilles. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took his oath of office in March 1933, many of the country's banks had closed and business halted. Young children in the largest cities learned to walk past furniture, sidewalk-stored, of their dispossessed neighbors and to expect that one day they would return from school to find their own things there.

Surely such times called out for new approaches, and Eleanor Roosevelt complied on several fronts. She had hinted during the campaign that she and Franklin sometimes disagreed, but the real shocker was her announcement that she meant to keep—even if she became First Lady—the job she had held while Franklin had served as New York's governor. During his four years in the Albany state house, Eleanor had traveled down to New York City to teach three days a week at her school on East Sixty-fifth Street, and she saw no reason why his transfer to Washington should alter her schedule or stop her from doing what she “enjoyed more than anything I have ever done.”
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Such independence came late to Eleanor Roosevelt, after a childhood notable for its loneliness and lack of strong female models, and a marriage dominated for many years by her mother-in-law. The only
daughter of an exceptionally beautiful woman, Eleanor had suffered greatly as a child when she heard herself described as an unattractive “Granny.” Nor did her confidence grow after her mother's death when she and her younger brother, Hall, came under the control of a stern and distant grandmother. Only the erratic attentions of her
bon vivant
father saved that period from becoming, for Eleanor, an uninterrupted bad memory. Much later in her life, after she had married and had children of her own, she singled out the times spent with her father as the best of her life.
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When his excessive drinking and playboy lifestyle led to an early death, those pleasant interludes abruptly ended and strict Grandmother Hall took an even larger role in Eleanor's life until, at age fifteen, she was enrolled in a boarding school in England. There she met a strong, thinking, caring Parisian, Marie Souvestre, who had a powerful impact on her young student.
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“She gave me an intellectual curiosity and a standard of living which have never left me,” Eleanor wrote years later. “[On trips across Europe,] she did all the things that in a vague way you had always felt you wanted to do, enjoying the food and being comfortable but at the same time seeing how the people lived.”
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Three years with Mademoiselle Souvestre could hardly cancel out the fifteen years that went before, and Eleanor returned to New York to do the expected: make her début and marry at the first opportunity. Although she later admitted that at the time of her marriage, she had little idea of what loving or being a wife and mother meant, she quietly accepted the mold that had been cast for women of her class and time.

Urbane and handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have seen beauty or sophistication or confidence in his bride in 1905, but like many of the men who later became president, he made an advantageous marriage. In this respect he illustrates a remarkable pattern evident in presidents' lives. Most of the men who later achieved the country's highest office married up into socially or economically superior strata of American society, while the women married into more adventure, travel, or risk than they had found in their parents' home. Franklin's choice of his distant cousin was hardly social climbing, but the marriage helped him in two ways. As Joseph Lash, the Roosevelts' biographer noted, young Franklin's “dissemblings contrasted with Eleanor's scrupulousness.” Lash concluded: “Perhaps she appealed to Franklin because he needed someone to temper his fun-loving, easygoing, frivolous side.”
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Another motive may have been working, at least subconsciously. Eleanor's uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, then resided at
the White House, and a politically ambitious young man—even one who intended to align with the Democrats—could do worse than marry the favorite niece of an immensely popular Republican president.

For her part, Eleanor recognized the difficulty of fitting into Franklin's world. His mother, with whom the couple lived, imperiously controlled the household; and Franklin's friends, with their cigarette smoking and quick wit, made Eleanor so painfully aware of her rigid views and conversational inadequacies that she often begged to stay behind when he went out partying.

Six pregnancies between 1906 and 1916 left Eleanor little time to gain confidence or acquire control over her life. Even the nurses she hired for her children intimidated her and made her feel inadequate. She tried to improve her French and German but found such study unrewarding, and when she ventured down to the Lower East Side to teach in a settlement house, her mother-in-law advised her to stop because of her fear that Eleanor might bring home diseases.

If Eleanor had shared her husband's interest in politics, she might have found a way to break out of her mold earlier but on that subject she lacked both knowledge and curiosity. The intricacies of government remained a mystery to her, and she later admitted that at the time of her marriage she could not have explained the difference between state and national legislatures.
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At the 1912 Democratic convention in Baltimore, she found the confusion and noise so objectionable that she left early and joined her children at the family's summer retreat on Campobello. When Franklin's jubilant telegram arrived later to announce Woodrow Wilson's nomination, she failed to comprehend the reason for his excitement. Her husband's support of woman's suffrage about the same time shocked Eleanor, and she realized that she had never given the matter serious thought, although it had been the central objective of the feminist movement for more than half a century.
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About 1917, the shy and insecure Eleanor Roosevelt began a metamorphosis so enormous in its consequences that historians have debated its causes. By then in her thirties, she had already managed a partial escape from her domineering mother-in-law when Franklin's appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy took them to Washington in 1913. Sara Roosevelt still came down to rearrange the furniture, but as soon as she left, Eleanor could put it back. And put it back she did. More important, Eleanor had the examples of other Washington wives who were breaking away from old traditions and accomplishing something on their own.

In part, they were drawn out by the exigencies of war, just as women in the 1860s had been impelled by the Civil War to make speeches, collect money, and put their energies into national organizations to aid in victory and to ease suffering. In Washington, as in other American cities, the entry of the country into World War I created shortages of male workers so that women ran streetcars, delivered mail, and took other jobs that under peacetime conditions they would not have gotten. Eleanor Roosevelt joined with wives of other government officials to open canteens for servicemen stationed in the capital and to visit wounded and sick men. This was the kind of activism and involvement that she had so admired in Mademoiselle Souvestre, and Eleanor could hardly conceal her enthusiasm: “I loved it,” she wrote later, “I simply ate it up.”
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Her cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, singled out the war years as the time when Eleanor went “public.”
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