FDR and Eleanor Captured Heart of a Boy and a Nation

On a recent fall day a troop of inner-city Boy Scouts in mismatched uniforms lined the hemlock hedge in the rose garden and saluted the white marble monument with the simple inscription:

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

1882-1945

ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

1884-1962

“He was the greatest man of our time,” the Scoutmaster told them in a melodic Jamaican accent, “and that was the greatest woman.”

As they headed off to tour “Springwood,” the president’s home on the banks of the Hudson, the receding past flowed back on a green tide of memories.

I was a Boy Scout in a ragged uniform placing three fingers over my right eye to salute the smiling man in the blue navy cape jauntily waving a long cigarette holder from an open car. The motorcade moved past the crowds thronging the avenue at so stately a pace you could see the dark mole above his jutting jaw and his eyes twinkling behind those pince-nez glasses.

It was July 11, 1936. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had come to dedicate the Triborough Bridge, linking Manhattan and the Bronx to Queens, where we lived less than a mile of tenement rows away. Across the East River from our Depression-blighted neighborhood, the skyscrapers loomed magical and unreachable as the emerald towers of Oz.

Our sixth-grade nun told us the great bridge had been built by the PWA, the Public Works Administration.

This was confusing, because my Uncle Hughie was on the WPA. He gave me a nickel not to tell anybody when I had happened on him pushing a long broom in the men’s room at the trolley depot. He was a proud man who, like millions of others, had been unemployed for five years until the Works Progress Administration came to the rescue with a workfare job. Cartoonists ridiculed them as leaf pickers and shovel leaners.

The New Deal’s alphabet soup was cooked up by a Democratic Congress to feed hope to FDR’s “forgotten man,” the one-third of a nation he saw “ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished.” It was served everywhere.

In Scout camp we slept in new log lean-tos erected by the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Courtesy of the NYA, the National Youth Administration, I got a job after school stacking books at our storefront library at the new minimum wage of 40 cents an hour.

Thanks to the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, light bulbs replaced kerosene lamps at the boarding house in the Catskill Mountains where we went for a week every summer.

Our front window proudly displayed the blue eagle of the NRA, the National Recovery Administration created to fight the Great Depression after the president told us on the radio that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

Some Sunday nights my two brothers and I were allowed to stay up after 10 to hear Roosevelt deliver a “fireside chat.” We could picture him sitting there by a cozy White House fire with Fala, his shaggy Scottie, frolicking at his feet. Actually, he was seated before three microphones marked NBC, CBS and MBS (Mutual) in the Diplomatic Cloak Room, which had no fireplace.

That September a dozen new kids, one of them black, came to our school from what we called “the projects,” PWA housing blocks that rose from the vacant lot where the Springfields, our pathetic semipro baseball team, had their diamond.

Saturday night’s menu invariably was hot dogs and baked beans. But Mom called them “a meal fit for a king,” after the New York Daily News pictured Eleanor and Franklin serving wieners on a silver platter to the king and queen of England at a Hyde Park picnic.

Eleanor was everywhere in the papers: going down coal mines, touring the wards of mental hospitals, in the fields with migrant workers, visiting Puerto Rican sweatshops, hugging children in the tar paper shacks of Appalachia. She held press conferences for female reporters only, forcing editors to hire more women and liberate them from the society beat.

The president’s wife was not one to stay home and bake cookies. “She shattered the ceremonial mold in which the role of the first lady had traditionally been fashioned and reshaped it around her own skills and commitments to social reform,” observed the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Bob Hope joked that Franklin rode around in his railroad car, hoping someday to meet his wife.

Like most of the country, we didn’t know that she was his legs, going places he couldn’t go to research social ills. More than a decade before taking the presidential oath, he had been stricken with crippling polio.

The news media then had an unwritten rule never to photograph the president below the waist or mention his disability. Few knew that he used a wheelchair and could stand only for brief periods with 10-pound leg braces.

At the White House, he rode a converted dumbwaiter to the second-floor living quarters, where at his bedside he kept an “Eleanor basket” to receive her suggestions for reform.

Nearing the end of his second term, her Gallup Poll popularity topped his.

Our troop gave the Scout salute again when the president in an open Packard visited the 1939 World’s Fair in New York’s Flushing Meadows. In months to come we saw the lights go out on the Belgium, Netherlands and Norway pavilions as Hitler’s panzer divisions rolled across Europe. When the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed, the Soviet Union exhibit, with its 70-foot statue of “The Worker,” was demolished.

In the church basement we packed “bundles for Britain,” clothing collected for families bombed out in the blitz. One night we had to unpack and sort through the boxes because little Ralph Liccione couldn’t find his new jacket. FDR already had extended Lend Lease to Britain, but this was going too far, the parents joked.

In my second year in high school, we went on a winter hike one Sunday across the river in New Jersey. A lone horseman shouted as he came through the woods:

“The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!”

Next evening the family gathered around the gothic-arched Atwater Kent radio to hear Roosevelt decry Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.”

On Christmas Eve we tuned in as Winston Churchill joined the president in lighting the tree on the White House lawn. The prime minister stayed for 24 days, and they embarked on a remarkable friendship of which Eleanor did not always approve. She thought Winnie drank too much and kept her husband up to all hours.

“If anything should happen to that man,” Churchill was heard to remark later, after their Casablanca summit, “I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the furthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”

A fireside chat about the shortage of rubber urged us to collect old tires, inner tubes, garden hoses. The jolly fat lady in the candy store shocked us by contributing her girdle. Stickball wasn’t the same without “Spaldeens,” the pink rubber balls that soared above the telegraph poles when swatted by a broomstick.

At Eleanor’s urging, FDR issued an executive order banning segregation in defense industries. To her dismay, he signed another confining 120,000 West Coast Japanese in relocation camps. The young Japanese-American working for the dry cleaner in our neighborhood was beaten up by barroom patriots on his way to night class at Columbia law school.

Soon my brother was drafted and went off to basic training in Texas. Dad hung a blue star in the window. I got a summer job splicing cargo nets at a rope yard, joining the wartime work force of 15 million. Many were leaving farms and cotton fields to migrate north and west for jobs in munitions plants, aircraft factories and shipyards.

“Rosie the Riveter,” or one of her 2 million sisters, passed our door each evening on her way to the night shift at the nearby Brewster aircraft assembly line. Millions on far-off battlefronts were learning about different cultures in Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific. Unwittingly, we were witnessing a profound social revolution.

FDR altered the war and future wars when he had Albert Einstein as an overnight guest at the White House and embraced the atom bomb project.

Robert Brooker, a kid from the projects, died on Omaha Beach, the first casualty in our grammar school class.

My brother John’s infantry unit had crossed the Siegfried line into Germany by the time I was drafted and hurried overseas as a rifleman replacement in the 106th Division, which had been decimated in the Battle of the Bulge.

Our lives already were destined to be different when FDR signed the GI Bill, promising a college education for so many like us whose parents had never gone to high school.

Eleanor in war seemed to be everywhere and into everything.

She toured American airfields in Britain and visited the wounded on Guadalcanal. She begged Allied leaders to rescue Jews being herded off to Hitler’s death camps, but their plight never made the agenda at any of the eight summit meetings.

In interviews and in “My Day,” her syndicated column, Eleanor frequently disagreed with her husband on touchy issues like integrating the armed forces immediately, which enraged Southern Democrats.

“FDR gave her a lot of latitude to speak her own mind and openly disagree with the president,” said historian John Sears in an interview at his Hyde Park office. “Certainly Hillary Clinton has not had that sort of latitude.”

When pundits and politicians deplored Eleanor’s views and outspokenness, FDR jovially responded, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about my wife.”

They respected and admired each other, but few knew that theirs was a strained, strange marriage.

In 1918, after bearing him six children, Eleanor discovered her husband was having an affair with Lucy Mercer, her young social secretary. She considered divorce, but on his promise never to see Lucy again settled for separate bedrooms.

Franklin was always surrounded by attractive, adoring women. Son Elliott suspected he was having an affair with Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, the poker-playing secretary who handled his correspondence, controlled his appointments and served the highballs he religiously mixed at cocktail hour.

Son James felt sure he was romantically involved with Crown Princess Martha of Norway, the royal refugee living in the wartime White House.

Daughter Anna served as go-between when the widowed Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd came back into his life, sneaking her into the White House under an assumed name.

A discreet White House press corps played poker in the club car while the presidential train dallied for hours on a rusty siding at Allamuchy, N.J., where Lucy lived, or was shunted into “Hobcaw,” Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate, where she hurried over from her nearby summer place.

Eleanor had her own adoring circle. She had a New York hideaway in the Greenwich Village home of political activists Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read.

To escape Sara, Franklin’s domineering mother who reigned as first lady at Hyde Park, Eleanor found refuge a mile away across the woods at Val-Kill, a stone cottage Franklin had built for her and her close friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman.

Lorena Hickock “fell madly in love with Eleanor,” as historian Goodwin puts it. They exchanged more than 3,000 letters, which now fill 18 boxes at the FDR Library in Hyde Park.

“The tone of many of their letters was ardent, with repeated allusions to a physical attachment,” wrote Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan. Hickock quit her job as an AP White House reporter and moved into the wartime White House.

Somehow Eleanor and Franklin managed to live their separate lives in amiable harmony. Despite everything, son James perceived “a deep and unshakable affection and tenderness between them.”

Eleanor was shattered to learn that Lucy was at the little White House in Warm Springs, Ga., when FDR had a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on April 11, 1945.

That day, the 84th Division had taken Hanover, and my brother John’s platoon was advancing through the rubble when he heard a radio blaring in German from a shell-battered house. An old man emerged shouting:

“Roosevelt ist tot!” Roosevelt is dead!

The 32nd president was laid to rest in the rose garden where as a boy he had sat with his stamp collection, dreaming of exotic lands that later became pinpoints on the war maps in the Monroe Room.

Eleanor retired to Val-Kill, the only house she ever called her own, but retirement lasted but a few months.

Calling her “first lady of the world,” President Truman appointed her U.S. delegate to the United Nations, which she regarded as her husband’s greatest achievement. Human rights for everyone on the planet was her abiding concern to the day of her death, Nov. 7, 1962.

Historian John Sears agrees with the Scoutmaster who brought his ragged troop to Hyde Park.

“Without question, Franklin Roosevelt is the statesman of the century,” Sears says. “His role was crucial in America’s response to the Depression and to the Allied cause in World War II.

“And Eleanor, absolutely, is the woman of the century. I don’t think any woman had such a wide influence over so long a period of time.”

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The Roosevelts in Their Own Words

FDR

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.

--Speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, July 1932

*

Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

--First inaugural address, 1933

*

I have seen war. . . . I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line--the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

--Speech, 1936

*

The work, my friend, is peace. More than an end of this war--an end to the beginnings of all wars.

--Speech undelivered because of his death, April 1945

Eleanor Roosevelt

He might have been happy with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur. I was one of those who served his purposes.

--1945

*

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. . . . You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

--1960

Letters to Roosevelt: ‘I Never Heard of a President Like You’

Within a week of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in March 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, the White House mail room was swamped with half a million letters. The outpouring continued through his years in office. Here, a letter from an unidentified writer in the summer of 1933:

*

“Dear Mr. President:

“This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer.

“You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us.

“I never heard of a president like you.”

(Source: “David Wallechinsky’s Twentieth Century: History with the Boring Parts Left Out.”)