Mrs. Roosevelt, Liberal Icon
EMERY, NOEMIE
Books Mrs. Roosevelt, Liberal Icon By Noemie Emery Dynasties track, in their family members, the course of great causes and movements. Three of the Kennedys- brothers Jack, Ted, and Bobby- stand...
...In retrospect, it is this shift, from Franklin's to Eleanor's view of persuasion, that blew the Democratic party open after 1965...
...These double negatives posed no problems for Churchill, who welcomed Stalin into World War II while being prepared to fight him later, or for FDR, who once called an ally "our son of a bitch...
...She defended him again-and again and again-when he refused to support the Powell Amendment (which would have suspended federal aid to segregated school systems), refused to condemn the Emmett Till lynching, and refused to commit himself to the use of federal marshals to carry out the Brown ruling...
...Noemie Emery, whose "Abortion and the Republican Party: A New Approach" appeared in our Dec...
...Roosevelt knew this, and her instinctive pacifism had long since been overcome by her husband's insistence that fascism had to be defeated by military power...
...Churchill, said Eleanor's friend Martha Gellhorn, "got Roosevelt steamed up in his boy's book of adventure...
...In FDR's lifetime, these contradictions were muted, as her activism was edited by a supremely hard-headed master of politics...
...First, her pacifism...
...Hiss had been "failed" by the judicial system...
...The first lady of legend, the figure of national and international stature, is the result of the White House and the platform it gave her, and that rested in turn upon FDR's wiles and the votes of the people she urged him to alienate...
...But what she stood by was not guns, but her personal prejudice, which led her to indulge in self-deception: What Chambers was-or represented-was less important than what Hiss had done...
...Anita Hill is an iconic figure, while Paula Jones, with a far more credible story, is fair game for sexist abuse...
...Eleanor never did...
...This is not finesse...
...In the end, many liberals overcame their objections to the naming-names process to conclude Hiss was guilty of something...
...He loved the derring-do and rushing round...
...Eleanor's discomfort with anti-communism was another leading indicator of liberalism's moral deflation...
...Roosevelt's day, with government smaller, it was possible to have too rosy a view of government providence...
...FDR and Teddy Roosevelt created the activist presidency, believing the state should respond to discrete social problems...
...The elaborate construct of quotas and mandates now being painfully dismantled by the courts and the voters seems an Eleanor model that broke FDR's party by setting its voters at odds...
...Liberalism mutated into the "L-word," and its hold on the public declined...
...Three of the Kennedys- brothers Jack, Ted, and Bobby- stand for the phases of the modern Democratic tradition at its height, its ebb, and its transitional agony...
...Teddy and Franklin were Theodore's heirs, merging his aims with political strategy...
...Roosevelt was cured early of the idea that the Soviet Union was anything but an enemy of American ideals and interests...
...But FDR and the White House helped make her a legend...
...Even after [Hiss] was convicted of perjury . . . Eleanor Roosevelt continued to argue that Chambers's credibility, rather than Hiss's loyalty, was the key to the trial," Black writes...
...Fundamentally, there is [not] any cleavage between my point of view and that of Stevenson, and the really wise Negro leaders," she said, and in so doing she broke with her friends, backed a "moderate" plank at the party's convention, and finally threatened to leave the NAACP if it did not stop attacking Stevenson...
...Of the three, she had the purest character, with an almost saintly simplicity of purpose...
...But what was a lapse in her own life is a way of life with her heirs...
...But his "wartime priorities" involved beating Hitler, and the very survival of the "American consumer"-much less his continued ability to consume anything whatever-depended completely on what the "ambassadors and admirals and generals" were able to do...
...In fact, Mrs...
...Roosevelt had always been on guard against the wiles and stratagems that her husband had employed in pushing for his goals, lest the objectives be compromised," Lash writes...
...Of Churchill himself, she was always suspicious...
...Black, on the other hand, does not know this is wrong, much less what is wrong with it...
...The result is a book that is unwillingly useful...
...As Mrs...
...Her own plans tended to founder, victims of her weakness for mandate-expansion...
...the small businessman, seeing his low bid trumped by a higher one made by a protected contractor...
...But when her favorite Adlai Stevenson enraged civil rights leaders by saying that America must "proceed gradually" with school integration in the wake of the l954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, she quickly rushed to his defense...
...At her best, Eleanor Roosevelt fed into American liberalism an inspiring rage against human injustice, part of the "divine fire" she shared with her family...
...Another massive federal plan for child immunization reached few of the children, and wasted millions of dollars in badly warehoused vaccine...
...How could she believe Chambers, whose major character trait she described as 'a very unsavory personality,' and whose veracity was only supported by a committee whose integrity she never believed...
...Goodwin cites this as an attitude-chasm, Eleanor favoring "imposed order and discipline," with FDR "temperamentally opposed to the imposition of compulsory discipline" on the "rich variety" of human life...
...They protect, for 20 years, a Senator Packwood, as useful to feminist causes...
...She could not...
...Passing the two in their improvised war room, Eleanor noted, "They looked like two little boys playing soldier...
...She disliked Churchill's prescient Iron Curtain speech...
...The Viet Cong were heroes, because the Diems were oppressive...
...They were having a wonderful time-too wonderful, in fact...
...Eleanor, and some of her followers, tended to carry this into hyperactivity, a belief in the state without restriction, a belief that defined progress in terms of state control and state money and thought even ephemeral and indefinable things such as "social justice" and "economic democracy" were goods that the state could deliver, like mail...
...Black blames the former for succumbing to waves of mass terror, and praises Eleanor for standing by her guns...
...Roosevelt, claiming her switch from activism to power politics and quickly back again as an example of political "finesse...
...One final episode- adjudged a triumph in Black's book-seems to sum up what went wrong...
...The House Un-American Activities Committee did some dirty work and some people were actually spies...
...A connoisseur at the fine art of deploying people (as presidents should be), FDR used her to broaden his efforts, while knowing when to ignore her suggestions...
...Roosevelt was not fooled by the Communists, but her political heirs would take this to extreme dimensions, excusing, or idealizing as heroes and rebels, murderous Third-World regimes...
...The irony is that wiles and stratagems, timing and compromise, are needed to reach great objectives...
...c) the race-norming systems and multicultural curricula in most modern colleges...
...Thus, she wished to quash dictators while disliking the military...
...But the improved homes ran eight times over budget, parents protested the modern curriculum, and the miners, Lash writes, "became dependent...
...To liberals in the diversity lobbies, this was a barely adequate use of federal power...
...But, "the more she tried to discuss these issues . . . the more disgusted she became with his wartime priorities, and the advisors who urged him to act on them...
...In The Years Alone, Joseph Lash, a genuine FDR liberal, called her behavior "opportunistic," and disapproved delicately...
...She goes back to being another professional activist, little known outside of political circles, with little power to move her crusades...
...ambassador, Mrs...
...Roosevelt, Black says, believed in "bold" leadership, with no room for trimming or compromise...
...Goodwin quotes FDR telling NAACP head Walter White why he could not back an anti-lynching measure: "Southerners . . . occupy strategic places on most of the House and Senate committees...
...The McGovern campaign, which did shear off both the South and the ethnics, is purism brought to its final conclusion, distilling the party down to its liberal core with nothing around it...
...Unable to blame Hiss (or clear him), she displaced the burden and blamed Chambers for having named him, blamed the press for reporting it, blamed the jury that convicted Hiss, then blamed the jury system...
...As U.N...
...Remove these blocs-the South, and the ethnics-from the Democrats' column, and the coalition collapses...
...The Sandinistas were heroes, because the Somozas were thugs...
...Historically, the role of the Roosevelts has been to thread the family conscience through the process of politics, at steadily escalating levels of public commitment...
...or d) the federally subsidized "art" of Piss Christ and Karen Finley, and she would attack it, as would her uncle and mate...
...In 1942, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in No Ordinary Time, there was a family quarrel over the shift to a wartime economy...
...The downside is you carry one state...
...Black chooses to treasure for valor and wisdom what even friendly biographers like Lash and Doris Kearns Goodwin have noted as Eleanor's lapses in judgment...
...Her critiques in the 1950s of Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, among others, were scathing...
...Roosevelt's new crop of friends (like Black) seem to admire her for all the wrong reasons: for the mistakes, for the misjudgments, for the false promise of an activism that attempts to transcend and escape from politics but in the end is self-defeating...
...This was an aberration in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, brought on by her faith in a man she admired...
...This eagerness to separate her from Franklin (and Teddy), and to raise her above them, is a bad sign for liberals...
...But the parent, seeing his children bused to bad schools in strange places...
...But the pacifism was there, and, greatly exaggerated, was to mutate into the Pat Schroeder view of military activity, which sees the armed forces as a great place to employ gays and women, and the military through the prism of Tail-hook, not Desert Storm...
...But the complex truth was that both Batista and Castro were dictators...
...Starting out to praise liberalism as it evolved after FDR's passing, it shows, in the form of some missteps, where she and where it all went wrong...
...a victim of the "politics of fear...
...Politically, the family begins with the first Theodore Roosevelt, a rich New York businessman who made a life's work of compulsive compassion, energetically endowing a series of charities with what historian Peter Collier has called "maniacal benevolence," going so far as to educate orphans he found on the street...
...This is only partly accurate: It is less the party of Eleanor Roosevelt than the party of Eleanor's faults, having successfully shed all the things worth the keeping and hoarded all that was not...
...Reviewing Goodwin's book in the New Republic, Joe Klein described the modern national Democrats as Eleanor's party, purified at last of the South and the ethnics, "skewed-well beyond the bounds of reason-toward isolationism, industrial policy, the unlimited rights of the afflicted, and social science run amok...
...To Teddy and Franklin, politics was purpose plus power plus pleasure in battle...
...Between the two views is a vast moral chasm...
...And few today would know Eleanor's name...
...Chambers crystallized all the political and patrician [italics mine] objections she had to the HUAC process," Black writes...
...b) the public-school system in the District of Columbia...
...She backed the generous Marshall Plan, but not the critical Truman Doctrine...
...How this occurred is a riveting story, a stern warning to all parties and movements, told with inadvertent skill in Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Post-War Liberalism, a billet-doux from liberal historian Allida M. Black (Columbia University Press, 298 pages, $29.95...
...Under Teddy's cousin Franklin and the spur of a crisis, the Square Deal became the New Deal, a proactive policy to manage and control the market economy...
...Roosevelt liked Stevenson because he was not John Kennedy, her fans seem to like her because she was not FDR: tough, assured, ruthless, warlike, and glamorous, the Rogue Male right down to his toes...
...so much so that when the school bus broke down, they brought it to the White House garage for repairs...
...Much like Mrs...
...Stunned by the militancy of the Soviet Union after World War II ended, many Americans became anti-Communists...
...FDR for all of the above...
...After his death, however, they went unchecked, and were ever more evident, undermining her party, and causes...
...Its end is not the triumphal reign of Franklin, but the Goldwater and McGovern campaigns...
...Or because other matters took precedence...
...But it would prove too complex for too many liberals, who found some villains guiltless by virtue of contrast...
...Richard Nixon corrupted the press, which corrupted the public and jury...
...His son Teddy was the first activist president, imposing the power of the federal government between the citizen and the full force of the market economy, urging a "Square Deal" for American workers...
...How this occurred is what Casting Her Own Shadow tells us, which gives it perverse fascination: A terrible book about Eleanor Roosevelt, it is a fastidious guide to the mechanisms by which movements corrupt and then destroy themselves...
...Had FDR not used guile and subterfuge, he could not have won four presidential elections...
...Early on, Black shows Eleanor waging a lonely fight through the war years to keep FDR focused on the domestic issues that had once been his preoccupation...
...But she also had the drawbacks that go along with this temperament, among them a persistent tendency to will the end of something while loudly disapproving of the means...
...Postwar liberals lost most of the fire (or dribbled it away in affirmative action), while inflating the ingenuousness beyond all rationality...
...Eleanor favored civilian conscription: "All of us-men in the service, and women at home-should be drafted, and told . . . what to do...
...It denigrates the worldly springs that raised her up...
...Appalled by the excesses of some of these people, others became anti-anti-Communists...
...It was to erode their ability to make rational judgments, and public trust in them...
...none of these people could understand why their government had decided to punish them and defected to the Republican enemy in droves...
...Castro was a freedom fighter, because Batista was corrupt...
...Three of the Roosevelts-President Teddy, his niece Eleanor, and the cousin she married-track the arc of liberalism in the American century: in its promise, its apotheosis, and its decline...
...From the White House years on, Eleanor Roosevelt was an ardent supporter of desegregation, scolding her husband and a long train of other political figures when they did not seem to move fast enough...
...Earlier, a pilot plan to give government housing to unemployed miners evolved into a program for a model village, with factories, enlarged houses, and progressive schools...
...Black cannot bring herself to forgive Adlai Stevenson, whom she seems to condemn by omission...
...to pass bills (for social goals) without logrolling or compromise...
...But the boys and their toys make life safe for the girls and their social programs, as both TR and FDR knew...
...Thus, she chided Truman for his ties to urban bosses and southern conservatives...
...Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the latter: so much so that at the moment of highest national drama in the late 1940s-the confrontation between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers-she seemed moved by the need less to see Hiss as guiltless than to establish that the lower-class, fat, ostentatiously Catholic Chambers could never, ever be right...
...Her efforts worked, and Stevenson was nominated in 1956 without splitting the party...
...But she does defend Mrs...
...At worst, she fed into it too an ingenuousness that would afterward sap its vitality, among them the high-sounding but dangerous notions that one could have government without politics, leaders without ambition or ego, and progress without guile or compromise...
...Roosevelt's affection for Adlai Stevenson-she seemed to like him because of his weaknesses-Mrs...
...They will block every bill I ask Congress for to keep America from collapsing...
...As a pacifist, an outsider (who spoke for outsiders), a wronged wife who built her career on the emotional wreck of her marriage, an ardent crusader for racial minorities, a friend to a number of lesbian women, she hits every key in the cluster of interest groups that now form the party and are uneasy with the macho flair of FDR...
...I just can't take that risk...
...As the feminizing of the Democratic party continues, Eleanor Roosevelt is supplanting her husband at the heart of a party that feels closer to her than to him...
...Today, there is no excuse whatever for Allida M. Black to write the following words as a compliment: "More than any of her contemporaries, she defined the liberal agenda that would emerge in the decade after her death . . . public and low-cost housing, public education, affirmative action, universal health care, government support of the arts and the United Nations, regulation of corporate development and serious consideration of other cultures and political philosophies . . . that is so seriously attacked today...
...The tone of this-"little boys playing soldier"-fits perfectly with such modern conceits as "missile envy" or the idea that warfare is merely the acting-out of infantile male aggression...
...For this reason, her best crusades involved things people should be made to stop doing-persecuting blacks, punishing Jews, interning the Nisei-rather than schemes she created herself...
...she "watched the developing affection between the President and the Prime Minister with a worried eye," writes Doris Kearns Goodwin, who quotes a grandson as saying, "She saw in Churchill a male tendency to romanticize war...
...to win the electoral landslides that kept Franklin (and herself) in positions of power while urging her husband (and others) to antagonize, or disavow, his political base...
...They campaign against greed, while up to their own necks in dubious land deals...
...But in her words and acts are traces of other things- multilateralism, a distrust of confrontation, and a sense of diplomacy as social work-that would later cause trouble for liberals...
...Instead of using carrots and sticks, incentives and goads, to encourage integration to bubble up from the bottom, liberals created a fully matured model of an integrated society and tried to force it down from above on the culture...
...The upside is that you are suitably "bold" and properly true to your principles...
...When it unwittingly indicts itself...
...When does a bad book still have something to tell us...
...When she saw a thing to be done, she charged ahead, asking 'Why not?'" Why not...
...Franklin did not: "Wary of having the government assume too much power over something as sacred as a man's right to a job, he chose instead to rely on indirect persuasion...
...Recently, another Eleanor admirer-Hillary Clinton-pushed an effort to improve health-care delivery into a government takeover, with guidelines laid down for the number of medical specialties and the percentage of minorities to be employed in each of them...
...That done, she reverted to campaigning for Stevenson before black and liberal audiences, blasting Eisenhower for stands on race more liberal than Stevenson's had ever been...
...Modern liberals, on the other hand, have lost the legitimacy of her moral convictions, while taking her errors to new and strange heights...
...America might not have entered the war, or been able to win it...
...Had Lincoln run in 1860 as an abolitionist, he could not have saved the Union or issued the Emancipation Proclamation...
...Black describes the widowed Eleanor as "freed from the constraints of the White House," "relieved that FDR's death freed her to pursue her own goals...
...Black quotes her as saying, "I bring the American people to the President . . . constantly reminding him of the American consumer, and the people [with] whom he's gotten out of touch...
...Because the timing was wrong, or because votes were missing...
...the employee, seeing his promotion go to a less qualified other...
...Eleanor Roosevelt was a moral presence of hurricane force, with a holy rage against all forms of human injustice, yet able to make striking misjudgments...
...as do FDR's power and Eleanor's voice...
...This is hypocrisy: an obvious use of the selective high dudgeon for which many liberals are known...
...But it was Eleanor, the human bridge between them-Teddy gave her to Franklin at their wedding-who was the true heir to her grandfather Theodore's manic benevolence, merged with what her friend and biographer Joseph Lash has called "a seemingly inexhaustible spring of human sympathy...
...Given a job at civil defense in wartime, she hired friends at high wages to teach people dancing...
...To Eleanor, it was charity on a national landscape, philanthropy writ large...
...25 issue, is writing a book on sex, politics, and wives...
...And the Left is a spent moral force...
...The "divine fire" of the Roosevelt breed has mutated into self-satisfaction and the hypocrisies needed to sustain these illusions, while the errors have been magnified beyond belief...
...Kennedy for efforts to broaden his voter base...
...she claimed their perceived "moderation" on this sensitive issue made them unfit for the office of president...
...In the end, the purism she urged would have stifled her influence and done her own causes great harm...
...Confront the shade of Eleanor Roosevelt with a) a public-housing project in Chicago...
...In Mrs...
...Liberals invent Borking, take it to egregious heights with Clarence Thomas, then complain loudly when it is used, far less cruelly, on a Lani Guinier...
...People were judged not on their own, but on one's distaste for their opposite numbers...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 34
