The First Ladies (11 page)

FIRST LADY: 1929–33

The Unsung Hero

With only daughters in pioneer California of the 1880s, Charles Henry taught Lou, his tall, athletic oldest daughter, to camp, fish, ride, shoot, and build a fire. Since he was a well-to-do banker, he also provided her with the finer things, including a normal school education so the bright girl could become a teacher.

After only a year of teaching, Lou chanced to attend a lecture on geology and was entranced. She persuaded her family to enroll her at Stanford University, where she met Herbert Hoover and changed her life’s direction. They were the same
age, but he was a senior, she a freshman. Their attraction was immediate but more friendly than romantic, since the pathetically shy Bert was poor and had no money to conduct a proper courtship. Somehow Lou instinctively knew he was a man with promise and determined to “major in Herbert Hoover.” When he graduated, he embarked on a series of demanding mining engineering jobs in exotic lands, and they agreed to correspond. By the time Lou graduated, Bert was no longer poor, nor would he ever be again. Now earning $40,000 a year, he was well able to support a wife. It was 1899; they were both twenty-five.

Their honeymoon took them to China, and for the next two decades, apart from brief visits home, they lived abroad, often in remote locations. As a degreed geologist herself, Lou helped her mining engineer husband compile his reports and catalog his samples. She also studied the culture of each of the lands where they lived. The Hoovers circumnavigated the globe twice. To pass the time on less-than-luxury liners, they translated a rare Renaissance mining treatise from its original Latin. In addition to being intelligent, curious, and rugged, Lou was also an excellent linguist. She became fluent in six languages, including two Chinese dialects. Their translated book would be a bestseller—in mining circles.

By 1914 Hoover owned his own mining consultancy, with offices in six countries. At forty, he was a millionaire several times over and living in London’s posh Mayfair district. Lou had carved out a place for herself, raising two sons, managing a household awash in servants, entertaining nearly every
night, and volunteering her time and services for various charitable causes. The beginning of World War I in Europe, however, altered their lives permanently. With more than one hundred thousand Americans stranded on the warring continent, London became the last stop and swarmed with Yanks desperate to get home. British officials recruited Hoover to help his fellow countrymen, and he immediately agreed. He had found his true calling, and Lou would find hers: humanitarianism on a massive scale. Herbert Hoover would never again work as a mining engineer, and Lou’s activities would forevermore have a larger purpose in mind.

Both of them were blessed with high energy, good health, and extraordinary administrative talents. Independent wealth gave them latitude. While Bert assumed responsibilities for helping Americans return to the States, Lou undertook the task of alleviating their short-term needs. Soliciting help from dozens of well-to-do London women, she set up day nurseries at railroad stations, arranged for food, coffee, milk, and diapers, and made sure everything ran smoothly. She would be the only woman to have a seat on the executive board established for the overall repatriation project.

Once the American emergency ended, the Hoovers faced an even larger crisis. The German army had overrun tiny Belgium, laying waste to everything and leaving its starving population homeless, fuel-less, helpless, and hopeless. Now the Hoovers would undertake the gargantuan task of rescuing that beleaguered country. While Bert focused on arranging shiploads of humanitarian supplies and all the diplomatic
finagling to permit those ships to pass unmolested by the German U-boats, Lou shuttled back and forth to America, making speeches to raise money, food, and clothing.

By the time America entered the war in 1917, Herbert Hoover was already famous. After his success in helping feed Belgium, President Wilson summoned him home to help make the United States the world’s breadbasket. Lou, now a practiced speaker, would also be a contributor to countless publications about how the war effort could be helped on the home front. When the urgencies abated by 1919, she turned her energies elsewhere.

Lou Hoover had been familiar with the Girl Guides during
her years in London. Once home, she decided her own outdoor upbringing was a natural fit for the recently formed American Girl Scouts. She volunteered as a scout leader but rose quickly in their executive ranks. She worked long and hard, helping to plan policies and programs, and using her established notoriety to generate publicity for the scouts. In short order she became its national president, and under her leadership, membership increased more than tenfold.

Between Bert’s cabinet office during the Harding and Coolidge Administrations and her civic leadership throughout the 1920s, both Hoovers had become household words when he was elected president in 1928. No two people had higher expectations heaped on their shoulders. Where Calvin Coolidge had one secretary, Hoover brought three. Grace Coolidge needed no secretary, but Lou brought two, and one more would be added—all paid by the Hoovers personally. (Neither of them ever accepted compensation for their humanitarian or governmental positions.)

When the dam of prosperity broke, the floodwaters of the Great Depression came in biblical proportions. The remarkable reputations of both Bert and Lou Hoover became mired in its sludge. Progressive in outlook but conservative in personality, magnanimous in practice but reticent by nature, neither of them were equipped to provide the dynamic leadership necessary for this crisis. Nor were they inclined to challenge years of accepted first family behavior, particularly
Republican
first family behavior. They would absorb the abuse, and if and when they fought back, theirs
would be a weak, weaponless fight. They could never have behaved otherwise.

As the Depression deepened, Lou began receiving hundreds of letters begging for her help. “Help my husband get a job.” “Help my children get shoes.” “The roof needs repair.” “We need warm coats.” “We have no food.” The list seemed endless. A third secretary was quietly engaged to help Lou review and respond to all the pressing needs. Many were referred, with Lou’s card, to government agencies, various charities, women’s clubs, and of course the Girl Scouts. Hundreds of requests were met with Lou’s personal check for a few dollars or packages of shoes and clothing or vouchers for food and fuel. When it was suggested that she make this effort public, both Hoovers were horrified at the notion of promoting their private generosity.

The huge and unselfish contributions both Hoovers made to the country have long been unrecognized, eclipsed by the vibrant Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their New Deal. It is only today, seventy-five years later, that historians have begun to realize the raw deal that befell such fine people.

FIRST LADY: 1933–45

The Incomparable Mrs. R.

It is interesting to wonder how different the world might be had Eleanor Roosevelt looked like her mother. Young, beautiful, flamboyant New York socialite Anna Hall married Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliott, but it would be a tragic union. Elliott was addicted to alcohol and laudanum. While he dearly loved his plain and very serious-looking daughter, who he called “little Nell,” he needed to live apart from the family. It would be a loveless and Dickensian childhood for the little girl. Anna Hall died when Eleanor was six. Her addicted father would die when she was ten, leaving her
to be raised by her somewhat dotty Grandmother Hall and some equally dotty Hall aunts and uncles. Well-meaning hospitality from the rambunctious Roosevelt side made the timid child uncomfortable, and Eleanor seemed cocooned in an internal world, growing too tall, too gangly, and too plain, with a hopeless overbite.

Nevertheless she was sent to a good finishing school in England, where she was an excellent student. To her surprise, the withdrawn young girl became popular with her classmates. These were the happiest three years of her youth. After being “finished,” Eleanor returned home to reluctantly make her obligatory debut into the fashionable society where she was temperamentally unsuited. Since her upbringing precluded actual employment, she joined the Junior League, whose activities were charitable and thus acceptable. She volunteered at the settlement houses on New York’s Lower East Side that teemed with old tenements and new immigrants and found her calling: being useful. She began making daily trips downtown.

A chance meeting with her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt blossomed into romance, despite strong opposition from Franklin’s domineering mother. In Sara Delano’s eyes, no one was good enough for her son, especially someone as homely, unstylish, socially inept, and financially underwhelming as Eleanor. They married anyway, when Eleanor was twenty. She bore six children within ten years.

Overpowered by her intimidating mother-in-law, Eleanor lived in the shadows. Granny ran the house and children. It
would not be until she was nearly forty, and her husband had been stricken by polio, that Eleanor emerged to become
Eleanor
. Despite a marriage that had evolved into a pattern of separate lives, both Roosevelts maintained an exceptional working relationship and a genuine friendship. She discovered political talents she never knew she had. Combined with her innate intelligence and desire to help alleviate human suffering, she had developed into a powerful force in her own right more than a decade before she became First Lady. She would become her husband’s eyes and ears, a task she understood, relished, and made her own.

Still, some things needed to be learned. If she were to be his eyes and ears, she would need to develop a sense of smell as well—that intangible sense of learning by experience. One story tells that shortly after FDR became Democratic governor of New York in 1929, he sent Eleanor to visit the prisons that came under his jurisdiction. She returned laden with charts and reports, but the governor wanted to hear her impressions—not look at paperwork. “Did you inspect the kitchens?” he asked. She said yes. “How was the food?” “Very good,” she replied and produced several weeks of menus. “Did you look in the pot, Eleanor? Did you taste it?” She hadn’t and thus learned what she considered a valuable lesson: anyone can write beef stew on a piece of paper; it does not mean they prepared it properly. Eleanor would develop a remarkable ability to smell it; to grasp the essence of a situation, learn from it, and apply that lesson elsewhere. She would also have seemingly endless opportunities to put those lessons into practice.
The list of her accomplishments and activities could and have filled volumes.

When FDR became president in 1933, the Depression was crippling the country. Thousands of Depression-burdened veterans from the Great War had descended on Washington. They set up shanty camps and demanded immediate payment of their promised bonuses. The problem was that the bonuses
were not due for another decade. The Hoover administration had sent the army to disperse them, but Roosevelt had sent “His Missus.” Eleanor showed up with coffee and sandwiches and sympathy.

Mrs. R. never inspired neutrality. For the millions who adored her, there were thousands of her countrymen and women who believed she was not only a traitor to her class but to women in general. Other First Ladies had behaved properly, knowing their place was in the respectable background. Eleanor was visible. She traveled constantly to rural areas, mines, sharecropping towns—wherever poverty had left its mark and help was needed. Once the United States entered World War II, she even traveled to the war zones. The military brass was adamantly opposed to her presence in the field hospitals, but they soon became her most ardent supporters. She was useful. The soldiers loved her. She faithfully wrote personal letters to the families of every soldier she met. There were hundreds. Not only did she go everywhere and do everything, she wrote a daily newspaper column about it. She gave press conferences with generous regularity. She had grown comfortable in the public spotlight and knew how to use it.

Wherever she went, Eleanor regularly purchased small objects from local craftsmen. The five- and ten-cent items were always laid aside as token gifts for White House staff members and their families. No one was ever neglected by Mrs. Roosevelt. Despite all her activities, despite the demands on her time, despite the usual carping from the usual complainers, Eleanor never forgot a family birthday or anniversary
or crisis. Mother R. remembered every grandchild and every godchild. Gifts were sent. Calls were made. Bedsides were visited. She even remembered every in-law. Her five grown children would have eighteen marriages among them, not a sterling comment on marital felicity. Perhaps learning from her own chilly relationship with Sara Delano, Eleanor was nonjudgmental, cordial, and welcoming. Even the “exes” had kind words for their mother-in-law.

Widowed in her early sixties, Eleanor continued her exhausting schedule, but now on a worldwide level. President Truman appointed her as a delegate to the newly created United Nations. She promoted whatever worthwhile cause came her way and went looking for any that might have been overlooked. She was definitely useful.