Blanche Wiesen Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two 1933 - 1938
Rosen, Ruth
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: VOLUME Two, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook Viking, 1999 696 pp $34.95 IN DIVORCE COURT, lawyers and judges of ten hear amazingly different stories about a marriage...
...Nesbitt's culinary disasters were notorious in the nation's capital...
...Instead, she judged behavior by the ideals of such extraordinary leaders as Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House settlement house and the international women's peace movement...
...The key to ER's politics," writes Cook, "was her ability to empathize with the poorest, loneliest, most needful people in every circumstance...
...Ever since 1918, when she discovered her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer, ER had gone her own way, forming a romantic relationship with journalist Lorena Hickcok that became the core of her emotional life...
...With dogged determination, she badgered and lobbied for most of the ideals she cherished...
...By the time FDR took office in 1933, ER had broken enough shackles to achieve some of her life's goals...
...For ER, it was the culmination of decades of women reformers' work, creating a welfare state that would protect society's neediest and most vulnerable citizens...
...ER's dream of a New Deal—not yet accepted, not yet rejected— still remains at the very heart of our nation's most fiercely debated political ideals.• RUTH ROSEN is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis...
...Her ethic was simple: She wanted to see the best she could imagine for herself and her loved ones made available to everyone...
...What about the married women fired by the government...
...For Americans who loved FDR as well as those who loathed him, it was his alphabet agencies, his support of labor, his public works, and his cheerful optimism that came to define the era that we call the New Deal...
...When ER and her platoon of women peace activists begged him to forgive the foreign debt at the 1933 London Economic Council, first he seemed to agree, then he waffled, and then he refused, declaring the national economy to be more important...
...But in truth she was relentless, and FDR and ER probably drove each other crazy...
...It turned out that nine out of ten of these women, many of whose husbands were unemployed, needed to support their families...
...While ER spent her happiest times secluded with Hick and her closest women friends, a merry and garrulous FDR sailed up and down the Eastern seaboard or enjoyed rollicking evening parties, fueled by the finest liquor and wines, at which his secretary and confidante Missy Le Hand joined him in witty conversation and magnificent feasts...
...Sooner or later, the American people will once again consider whether an unfunded and weakened government can care for the public health and their common good...
...As always in twentieth-century America history, race both shaped and narrowed the possibilities of political action...
...As First Lady, ER tried to turn that goal into a reality...
...she challenged the administration...
...ER also socialized with Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook and Caroline O'Day, among many other women friends with whom she shared her private enclave, Val-Kill, a small oasis at New Hyde Park where she avoided both her husband and her mother-in law...
...In the first volume of her biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook introduced readers to ER's lonely and awkward youth and tracked her transformation from a cowed young woman married to a philandering politician into a 114 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 grown woman determined to break the shackles of her marriage...
...To console Hick, ER wrote in one letter, I believe it gets harder to let you go each time . .It seems as though you belonged near me, but even if we lived together we would have to separate sometimes and just now what you do is of such value to the country that we ought not complain only that doesn't make me miss you less or feel less lonely . . . .Darling, I ache for you . . . Still, Hick's discontent only grew, causing tension and eventually, even greater distance between the two women...
...On the road, lonely and longing, Hick felt neglected by ER, whose life was filled with hundreds of responsibilitiesFDR, her children, and her New Deal projects—that prevented them from seeing each other with any regularity...
...Why couldn't they work in the Civilian Conservation Corps...
...For FDR, the New Deal was a strategic way of saving the nation from economic poverty and despair...
...In history, as well, there are also his and her renditions of the past...
...A A S THE WAR drew closer, ER found herself increasingly shut out of her husband's administration...
...In the hands of a less talented writer, the threads of all these personal and public stories might have unraveled...
...But there was also another New Deal, one that Eleanor Roosevelt championed, an agenda yoked to the vast number of women social reformers and peace activists with whom she had worked since the early years of the twentieth century...
...But she repeatedly bumped up against the pragmatism of party politics...
...Cook's captivating account reveals stories for which there are probably no comparisons...
...Nor had any New Deal programs addressed the needs of the millions of unemployed women...
...But the president also "admired his wife, appreciated her strengths, and depended on her integrity...
...And if it didn't exactly match that of her husband, well, that's just the way it was...
...In addition, ER took the unprecedented step of renting an apartment in lower Manhattan, where she hapDISSENT / Winter 2000 n I 15 BOOKS pity met her friends and escaped the attention of the Secret Service, and the crush of the press and the crowds...
...Through constant letters, she and "Hick" nurtured an ardent, passionate, tumultuous, and intimate relationship, punctuated by brief encounters and vacations, and sustained by occasional dreams of a shared future...
...As soon as she had earned $75,000, a jubilant ER wrote a friend, "I've done it...
...ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: VOLUME Two, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook Viking, 1999 696 pp $34.95 IN DIVORCE COURT, lawyers and judges of ten hear amazingly different stories about a marriage that has long disintegrated...
...As a political leader, she edited and co-published the Women's Democratic News...
...In this second volume of her biography of the most extraordinary First Lady in American history, Blanche Wiesen Cook writes about that other New Deal, the one that ER fought for, in battles she sometimes won, but mostly lost...
...At age forty-eight, ER nevertheless entered the White House with considerable trepidation...
...Critics ridiculed Arthurdale...
...As an educator, she co-owned and taught at a New York school for girls...
...When ER and labor democrats implored FDR to include domestic and agricultural workers (mostly African Americans) in the new Social Security legislation, he once again pacified his southern democratic base, which he needed for reelection...
...She constantly brought her own agenda directly into the White House...
...Silenced by the State Department, she never reported the horror of German cruelty against Jews to the American people...
...Instead, she traveled the country, visiting Jewish communities and synagogues, denouncing anti-Semitism in America...
...And what about all the single women ignored by the public works projects...
...A A S FIRST LADY, ER's relationship to her world of women only deepened...
...Soon she learned how to take advantage of her role as insider...
...These were the women who introduced kindergartens, public health programs, free evening classes, mothers' pensions, compulsory free education, and social work into American life...
...asked ER in her writings and at her press conferences...
...In the second volume, which covers the years 1933-1938, Cook offers a historical account of a mature ER who, with courage and connections, invented new ways to navigate or side-step the politics of Washington, and who relentlessly tried to keep her pragmatic husband focused on the needs of women, children, minorities, and the poor...
...For twelve years, FDR bitterly complained...
...and hundreds of other women reformers who had begun to build an embryonic welfare system during her youth...
...ER risked constant ridicule and public damnation to reach that goal...
...Whenever ER's ideas genuinely failed to interest the President, she simply pursued them anyway...
...Franklin listened to both her private and public complaints, often agreed, but rarely implemented her more radical agenda...
...The first hundred days of the New Deal, for example, had done nothing for the estimated 140,000 women who wandered the streets and hobo encampments of America...
...Against all odds, ER brought African Americans into the White House, determined to challenge FDR's political obligations to southern whites...
...Cook interprets Eleanor's behavior as just one of the passiveaggressive weapons she routinely used in their daily power struggle, a revealing example of how sexual politics and power struggles shaped and sustained the marriage of these two quite remarkable individuals...
...But history does not end, despite the wishful thinking of the fans of unfettered capitalism...
...Friends even sneaked gourmet tidbits to a president who craved exquisite meals...
...She then gave almost all her earnings to various causes...
...Having come of age during the women's reform and peace movements of the Progressive Era, ER rarely saw the pragmatism of party politics as a political touchstone...
...How she might do that, she did not yet know...
...As Cook describes it, they each ran their own administrations and "courts...
...FDR and ER, for example, each targeted different projects, traveled with a special entourage, and socialized with different friends in remarkably dissimilar ways...
...government officials griped about the waste of public funds...
...All of her predecessors, she knew, had either died or fallen ill in office...
...Fiercely competitive with FDR, in politics as well as in their personal lives, ER even set herself the task of matching FDR's presidential salary...
...Florence Kelley, the socialist-feminist leader of the National Consumer's League, Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the last suffrage campaign and a major figure in the international peace movement...
...To force editors to hire more female reporters, she banned male journalists from her press conferences, so newspapers and magaII 6 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 BOOKS zines had to hire and train women who could cover Eleanor's frantic schedule...
...Her new book, The World Split Open: How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America, will be published by Viking in February 2000...
...I've earned as much as Franklin...
...ER could have found other employment for Nesbitt and FDR certainly could have fired her...
...As a businesswoman, she co-owned the Val-Kill Craft Factory...
...When ER and her coalition of white liberals and African Americans pleaded with FDR to support an anti-lynching bill, he passively supported the southern Dixiecrats instead...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 117...
...And yet ER did this regularly...
...BOOKS This was a generation of women who championed trade unions, safety and health standards, fair work practices, the end of child labor, consumer labels, and industrial codes...
...In 1933, ER published her first major book, It's Up To the Women...
...Where was the New Deal for women...
...Thirty years later, that same vision of social and economic justice rocked the nation, igniting a thirty-year cultural war...
...In Scott's Run, West Virginia, one of the poorest areas of the country, ER found private and public funds with which to create an experimental community of singlefamily homesteads...
...One of Cook's most amusing stories concerns ER's stubborn unwillingness to fire Henrietta Nesbitt, the White House chief chef "who ruined the president's food on a regular basis...
...Perhaps most original is Cook's account of ER's New Deal, the one that failed, leaving an unfinished agenda for America's poor, women, and minorities...
...But neither of them took any action to change the situation...
...During FDR's first term, Hick gave up her journalistic career and took a position reporting on the New Deal's impact on social and economic conditions to the administration...
...Then, in the 1990s, what was left of ER's New Deal was attacked by those who believe that government, rather than poverty and despair, is the greatest evil facing the American people...
...Accustomed to a domineering, intrusive, and opinionated mother, FDR mostly put up with a stern, scolding, moralizing Eleanor, who, as Cook point outs, could be "mean and cold and disagreeable...
...A principled, at times even self-righteous, moralist, Eleanor spent her years in the White House engaged in combat with the pragmatic realism of her affable and charming husband...
...Besides leaving notes in a basket beside his bed— nearly every night—she publicly challenged him on how he should shape the New Deal...
...Every Monday morning, ER met with her "newsgirls" and explained her dreams for a New Deal...
...But he believed in politics, and she believed in economic justice...
...Experienced dinner guests regularly dined out before arriving at White House dinners...
...With her upper-class formality and unfailing graciousness, ER seemed like a contained, even unflappable, First Lady...
...F F DR AND ER' S combative and competitive marriage sparked the greatest political creativity this nation witnessed during the twentieth century...
...But Blanche Wiesen Cook has managed to produce a tightly woven tapestry, one that offers the reader a vivid and engaging portrayal of ER—her marriage and friendships, her personal and political passions...
...But to ER, Arthurdale meant providing the poorest of the poor with shelter, modern conveniences, subsistence farming, and factory jobs...
...Drawing upon a lifetime spent in the political culture of women's movements, she believed that women had to assume national responsibility for ensuring a healthy, well-educated population...
...Her questions never stopped...
...To amplify her message, she also lectured and lobbied for her political agenda as a radio broadcaster and, by 1936, began writing a daily syndicated column called "My Day...
...It is almost unthinkable, for example, to imagine Hillary Clinton writing newspaper articles attacking her husband's policies...
...Tough and resilient," writes Cook, "ER set out to create another example...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
