No Ordinary Time, Page 63

  The president’s careless comment settled the issue. “I won’t say that one remark of his did it,” John later admitted, “but it went farther than any or all influences that did make my mind up.” The following day, he wrote a letter to his old friend General Eisenhower requesting that he be commissioned in the army and put into service in North Africa.

  Anna was crushed. “From the moment you wrote that letter,” she wrote, “I began to suffer acutely. I seemed to know all too accurately what it was going to be like when you left.” Confused by the rashness of the decision, fearful that his leaving implied a rejection of her, terrified of running the paper on her own, she was nonetheless afraid that if she tried to dissuade him from going he would regret it for the rest of his life and take out his anger on her. “Maybe I was wrong not to have told you all I was thinking and dreading,” she later confessed, “but I just couldn’t.”

  Two days later, Eleanor accompanied Anna and John to Union Station, where they boarded a sleeper train to Seattle. “I went to the train and stayed till it pulled out,” Eleanor wrote Joe Lash. “Anna seemed to want me.” The president was delighted with John’s decision to serve, Eleanor went on, but Anna couldn’t help feeling resentful. “Happiness is a fragile thing and she fears its shattering. I can’t be delighted either. I wish pride compensated fear with me.”

  “I hated to see you go,” Eleanor wrote Anna, “for I know that having John consider going off ends something very close and precious which you two have had . . . . Yet always men have had the urge for adventure and fared forth and the women are always held by ‘appendages.’”

  • • •

  No sooner had the president returned to Washington than his attention was yanked from global strategy to domestic politics. At the War Production Board, a tremendous crisis was brewing. The military had lost faith in the leadership of Donald Nelson, believing him too weak, too nice, and too tolerant. There was merit to the military’s claim. Torn between the competing demands of conflicting agencies, Nelson was habitually indecisive. Stimson’s diary during this period is filled with recriminations against Nelson’s inability to take charge. Returning from a meeting with Nelson, Knox, Ickes, Navy Undersecretary James Forrestal, and rubber chief William Jeffers, Stimson was irate. “It was a pathetic spectacle . . . . it was like four hungry dogs quarreling over a very inadequate bone—the Army for planes and gas; Navy escort vessels; Ickes octane gas; Jeffers rubber.”

  In truth, however, the nub of the military’s complaint was not directed at Nelson’s administrative weaknesses, but at his insistence on civilian control of the production process. The military, geared to think of its own needs first, was forever arguing that too much steel or rubber or manpower was being devoted to civilian activity. Though Nelson listened to the military, he insisted on a balance between civilian and military needs. When newsprint grew short, the army argued for the elimination of comic strips, but Nelson refused. When the army opposed the diversion of scarce labor materials to build housing for war workers in overcrowded cities, Nelson argued that decent housing was essential to maintaining production.

  The continued pulling and hauling between military and civilian priorities made for disorderly administration. Stimson was in despair over the “disjointed” conduct of the war. “The President is the poorest administrator I have ever worked under in respect to the orderly procedure and routine of his performance,” he confessed to his diary. One evening while Roosevelt was in Casablanca, Stimson unburdened himself to Felix Frankfurter. “He wanted to relieve himself by talking,” Frankfurter observed, “for he has had a good many headaches recently”—all of them attributable to bad organization.

  Frankfurter told Stimson “he had better make up his mind that orderly procedure is not and never has been the characteristic of this Administration—it has other virtues but not that . . . . he had better reconcile himself to looseness of administration and the inevitable frictions and conflicts resulting therefrom which naturally go against the grain of an orderly, systematic brain like his.”

  While Roosevelt was in Casablanca, however, the quarrels within the WPB had become so bitter that Congress had stepped into the fray, threatening to replace the strife-torn organization with a new superagency, bringing production, manpower, and supply under one roof. The time had come, Economic Stabilization Director Jimmy Byrnes told Roosevelt, for Nelson to be replaced. First Knudsen had been in trouble, Roosevelt mused, now Nelson. Perhaps businessmen were not as qualified as everyone thought to run complicated government agencies.

  There was only one man for the job, Byrnes counseled, one man who would please both the army and the Congress—Bernard Baruch. The decision was not an easy one for Roosevelt; Donald Nelson had been a loyal and devoted chief. But he finally agreed, directing Byrnes to prepare a letter for his signature asking Baruch to become the new chairman of the WPB. Acting with dispatch, for fear that Roosevelt might change his mind, Byrnes drafted the letter immediately and then read it to Baruch later that afternoon.

  Baruch was delighted. This was the job he had craved since the war began. He asked only that he have time to check with his doctor the next day, to make sure that, at seventy-three, he was healthy enough to undertake the task. Byrnes was disappointed, fearing the delay would open the door for Roosevelt to back down, which is precisely what Roosevelt did.

  Later that night, at supper with Hopkins, Roosevelt began to question his decision. Hopkins told Roosevelt that, by appointing Baruch and giving in to the army, he would look weak. Baruch would emerge the conquering hero, the most powerful man in Washington. Better, Hopkins advised, to let the storm pass and keep Nelson at the post. The president agreed.

  This was not the first time Roosevelt had by-passed Baruch. As much as he respected the shrewd financier, Roosevelt did not like him a great deal. “They are too much alike,” I. F. Stone keenly observed; “both are charmers. Mr. Roosevelt feels about Baruch as a young married woman does when her mother tries to help her by showing her the right way to handle a maid or a baby. He resented Al Smith’s attempt to ‘help’ him when he first succeeded Smith as Governor and there is reason to believe that he has been irked by Baruch’s burning desire to show him how really to run a war.”

  When Baruch arrived at the Oval Office to advise the president of his acceptance, Roosevelt greeted him in his customary genial fashion. “Mr. President, I’m here to report for duty,” Baruch said. The salutation went unacknowledged. “It was as though he had not heard me,” Baruch recalled. The president then launched into a curious monologue about Middle Eastern politics which lasted until he was called to leave for a Cabinet meeting. “That was the end of it,” Baruch later wrote; “neither he nor I ever mentioned the WPB Chairmanship—then or later.” The “strange and disagreeable little drama” had come to an end.

  • • •

  On Friday night, February 5, seeking rest from his strenuous trip and escape from the muddle of Washington, Roosevelt journeyed to Hyde Park for a long weekend, accompanied by Bill Hassett, Pa Watson, and Grace Tully. He slept until ten or eleven each morning, relaxed over leisurely meals, and rummaged through his library. A heavy snowfall had blanketed the lawns and the trees just before his arrival, warming the atmosphere of the Big House. “Most of my time was spent asleep,” Roosevelt reported to Anna when he returned to Washington the following Wednesday. “I did as little work as possible—and now I am ready for practically anything.”

  While Franklin was unwinding at Hyde Park, Eleanor was traveling by train through Connecticut and Massachusetts to Portland, Maine, visiting old friends, naval hospitals and war plants. She left New York on Saturday morning, then spent the day with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read in Saybrook, Connecticut. Elizabeth was in a miserable state, suffering from cancer and “so far away in her mind” that she could scarcely participate in the conversation. For Eleanor, the only solace came in observing the “constant care and devotion” that Esther generously extended to her lifelong companion.
Through most of this “marriage,” Elizabeth had subordinated her interests and concerns to Esther’s; now Esther was returning that love, dedicating all her energies to her dying friend.

  From Connecticut, Eleanor journeyed north to Somerville, Massachusetts. There, on Sunday afternoon, she visited Missy in her home. During the thirties, Eleanor had visited 101 Orchard a number of times. “We got to know Mrs. Roosevelt very well,” Missy’s next-door neighbor Barbara Dudley recalled, “because, whenever there was a crisis or a big event in the family, she came up to help Missy out. When Missy’s mother died, she took over the kitchen. I remember we were imagining that we’d have all kinds of fancy foods, but she made two things only: tomato soup and peanut-butter sandwiches.”

  Though there was little improvement in Missy’s speech, the circulation in her right side was returning. “Where it was just like an icicle,” her sister Ann Rochon told Eleanor, “is as warm as the left side now.” With three speech lessons a day instead of one, two vigorous massages, and two hours of exercise each morning, there was, Ann reported, “a decided change for the better.” What is more, Missy “realizes it and is so excited.” But, Ann confessed, “Missy worries so terribly about the President.”

  On reaching Portland at 9 p.m. that Sunday, Eleanor went immediately to the shipyards to talk with women working the graveyard shift. “It was really very dramatic to see the plant at night,” Eleanor later wrote, praising the high spirits of the women workers. “Exhibiting her usual energy,” the Portland Press Herald observed, “Mrs. Roosevelt mounted a platform to speak with several women welders by literally ‘walking the plank’ which was the only means of ascending the platform erected four feet above the ground.” Sitting down beside them, Eleanor asked questions about the nature of their work, the training they had received, how many children they had, how they were being cared for, how the shopping got done.

  Now, for the first time, the government was targeting its recruitment ads directly and predominantly at housewives. “The real situation,” Business Week observed, “is that unless industry draws 2.8 million more [women] away from household or school duties in 1943 . . . production quotas will have to be revised down.”

  In the ads directed at housewives, the temporary nature of the job was stressed, the idea being that women would come into the factories during the war and then go back home as soon as it was over. “A woman is a substitute,” one War Department brochure claimed, “like plastic instead of metal.” To ease the transition, the work was presented as similar in kind to the work housewives already knew how to perform. “If you’ve sewed on buttons, or made buttonholes on a machine,” a Labor Department pamphlet urged, “you can learn to do spot welding on airplane parts. If you’ve done fine embroidery, or made jewelry, you can learn to do assembly on time fuses, radio tubes. If you’ve used an electric mixer in your kitchen, you can learn to run a drill press. If you’ve ironed your sheets in an electrical mangle, you can learn to run a blueprint machine. Are you ready?”

  The government’s vigorous recruitment of women provoked fierce opposition in many quarters. In their lead editorial in April 1943, Catholic World argued that “women who maintain jobs outside their homes . . . weaken family life, endanger their own marital happiness, rob themselves of man’s protective capabilities, and by consequence decrease the number of children. The principal evil in women’s work is that it alienates the life of the wife from the life of the husband and gives marriage as much permanence as the room sharing of two freshmen at boarding school.”

  Eleanor took a more practical approach. If the country needed married women to work, as it undoubtedly did, then it was the country’s responsibility to preserve home life as much as possible by helping to lighten the housekeeping burdens. Back in September, Eleanor had forecast “a very chaotic situation” unless government stepped in with a comprehensive program which included day nurseries and play schools adjacent to the plants, community laundries, family restaurants organized to provide fully prepared takeout foods for working women, and the provision of transportation for children from their homes to their schools.

  Eleanor’s early fears were realized in 1943, as the absentee rate among women working in war industries soared, creating havoc on production lines. The major cause, the Women’s Bureau argued, lay in “women’s outside responsibilities—the difficulty they have in carrying on a full-time job in the factory and also keeping up a family, doing the shopping, marketing and all the other things which must be done if you are to carry on both jobs.” Attempts at purchasing food at the close of the day were often fruitless, because stocks were exhausted and the store was ready to close. The result was that homemakers working the day shift had to remain away from work in order to secure food for their families. “No matter how intense a woman’s interest in her job may be,” the War Manpower Commission observed, “her children must be cared for, the work of running the house falls on her and she must have time for shopping.”

  In her talks with the women at the South Portland Shipbuilding yard, Eleanor called for a wide range of creative solutions—staggering the opening and closing times of the factories, keeping bank and department stores open at night, encouraging butchers to hold back part of their meat supply until 6 p.m., asking war plants to hire personal shoppers for the women, to take their orders in the morning and have the filled grocery bags waiting at the door at the end of the shift.

  For two hours, the women in the Portland plant shared the details of their daily lives with the first lady. She asked about their homes and their families as well as their work. “Shyly they came forward to speak to her,” one of the workers, Betty Blakeley reported, following her as she journeyed from one job to the next, joining her in the cafeteria for a midnight snack. For her part, Eleanor was pleased to see how “extremely interested” the women were in their work—one woman drove fifty miles a day to reach the shipyard; another endured an eighteen-mile bus ride each way. All of them loved the experience, the camaraderie of the plant, the pride in a job well done. As she left, she told the women that her trip through the yard had made her very proud of them and “the wonderful way they had taken hold, particularly of the hard and dirty jobs always heretofore assigned to men.”

  The following week, Eleanor flew to Des Moines, Iowa, to visit the headquarters of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Legislation creating the opportunity for women to serve with the army as clerks, cooks, chauffeurs, airplane spotters, telegraphers, secretaries, and telephone operators had been signed by the president the previous May. The response was overwhelming. Before the first day of registration had come to an end, more than thirteen thousand women had applied—an “infinite variety,” Life reported, including “college girls and career women, shop girls and stenographers, housewives and widows,” girls whose fathers were army men, girls whose husbands were flying planes and driving tanks, girls who had never passed the gates of a military post. Ultimately, 350,000 women would serve as members of the Women’s Army Corps and the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service in the Navy).

  When she arrived at Fort Des Moines, a little before noon, Eleanor toured the mess hall, the kitchen, and the barracks. There were forty women in each barrack. “Fall out” time was 5 a.m., with reveille at 6 and classes from 8 to 5. The training encompassed calisthenics, map reading, poison-gas identification, military courtesy, airplane spotting, current events, and parade formation. “In our spare time,” one young recruit, Ruth Thompson Pierce, wrote her mother, “we have chores. Scrubbing floors, washing windows, policing grounds, and picking up papers. My knees are like two balloons from scrubbing floors.” At KP, she later recalled, “gruff army men would give us heavy cast-iron pots to lift, hundred-pound sacks of flour to carry. Then they would stand around laughing. But we refused to cry ‘uncle.’ It was exhausting and exhilarating and I loved it.”

  Eleanor relished the sight of so many women from so many different backgrounds working together. Though she imagined that “the l
ack of privacy must seem hard to the older women,” with double-decker bunks and two thousand people eating in the cafeteria at the same time, she marveled at the adventurous spirit of this female “army behind the fighting forces.” Standing on a barracks porch in icy weather, she reviewed twenty-eight hundred bundled-up officer candidates and then watched another sixteen hundred pass in review in the Coliseum. With WAAC bands playing at both reviews, it was a memorable occasion. “I am sure that if all people in the country could see it,” Eleanor wrote in her column the following day, “they would be as enthusiastic and as full of admiration as I am about the training and the women who take it.”

  Eleanor’s desire to spend time with women war workers brought her a few weeks later to the Kaiser Company shipyard in Portland, Oregon, where women made up 60 percent of the work force. There she talked at length with Henry Kaiser and his son Edgar about the most critical problem women war workers faced—the lack of adequate day care.

  In the summer of 1942, the president, at Eleanor’s urging, had approved the first government-sponsored child-care center under the Community Facilities Act which had passed Congress the previous year. The Lanham Act, as it came to be known, provided local aid to war-impacted communities for schools, hospitals, water and sewers, and recreational facilities. Since the summer, six additional centers had been funded in Connecticut, Texas, and North Carolina, but the total number of children covered was only 105,000—“a mere drop in the bucket,” one reporter noted, at a time when perhaps two million children needed care.

  For months, Eleanor had been calling on private industry to recognize that providing a day-care center was as essential as providing a cafeteria. Until the needs of working mothers with young children could be fully met, she argued, there was no possibility of ensuring a stable work force. But Eleanor’s message was not easily accepted by a generation of men and women who believed, as the Minneapolis chief of welfare, John O. Louis, proclaimed, that “the child should be cared for by its own mother; and that only in those instances where inadequacies of physical surroundings, or mental and moral environment make it absolutely necessary, the child be placed outside the home.”