No Ordinary Time

  From the start, Eleanor shared with Harry an abiding faith in the unemployed, a belief that they were decent, honest people suffering through no fault of their own, totally deserving of government help. “Both Harry Hopkins and Mrs. Roosevelt were driven during the depression by a sense of urgency,” WPA Administrator Elizabeth Wickenden recalled. “They never forgot there were these millions of people who had absolutely nothing, who had once held a steady job and had a sense of self-respect. From their wide travels across the country, they kept in their minds a vivid picture of the lives of these people, and that image drove them to push the government to create as many jobs for as many people as it possibly could.”

  Under Hopkins’ resourceful leadership, the WPA employed two million people a month. It built thousands of schools, libraries, parks, sidewalks, and hospitals. It sponsored murals for the walls of public buildings, and hot lunches for the children of the poor; it put writers to work preparing tourist guides to American cities and states; it supported plays and playwrights and actors and directors. These were the programs that captured Eleanor’s heart; it was the WPA sites Eleanor visited most frequently in her tireless trips round the country, bringing back an unrivaled knowledge of the mood of the American people.

  To Harold Ickes’ criticism that the jobs the WPA created were not permanent, that the only way to relieve unemployment in the long run was to prime the pump by subsidizing private enterprise, Hopkins replied, “people don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day . . . .” Regularly attacked in the press as a reckless waster of the taxpayers’ money, Hopkins countered: “If I deserve any criticism, it is that I didn’t do enough when I had the chance.”

  Hopkins, Eleanor wrote in her column, “My Day,” in 1938, “is one of the few people in the world who gives me the feeling of being entirely absorbed in doing his job well. He seems to work because he has an inner conviction that his job needs to be done and that he must do it. I think he would be that way about any job he undertook.” If Eleanor loved someone, a relative of hers once said, she lost her critical faculty entirely and was bound to be disappointed when reality set in. But until that moment, she was able to give herself wholly to love. When Harry’s wife, Barbara, was dying of cancer, Eleanor was there. When Harry himself was in the hospital for months at a stretch, Eleanor was there. When Harry’s six-year-old daughter, Diana, needed comfort and care, Eleanor brought her to live at the White House, installing her in a bedroom on the third floor, near the sky parlor, and offered to be her guardian should anything happen to her father.

  Eleanor’s closeness to Hopkins inevitably generated gossip. “Around the White House,” the maid Lillian Parks recalled, “there was some talk that Eleanor was romantically inclined toward the gaunt Harry.” In journalistic circles, according to Eliot Janeway, the talk took a meaner tone. “In the days before Hopkins discovered Churchill and became resident lapdog he did whatever he could to get in with Roosevelt. Among the fellows in our poker game the great joke was that he even did his duty by Eleanor.”

  Whatever truth there might be to the gossip, there is little doubt that the bond between Harry and Eleanor was shaped above all by their shared pledge to the poor and the unemployed and their shared belief in the New Deal’s restorative powers.

  “It was strange,” Eleanor later told her son Elliott, “but when I came back from New York that first night of the German invasion, I felt a great sense of foreboding, a fear that the war would get in the way of all the domestic progress we were making. But then, when I saw Harry back in the White House, I felt better, for I knew that he had never been interested in military affairs and that he’d stick with me no matter what happened.”

  Eleanor was correct in suggesting that Hopkins had little interest in military matters. Rejected from the army in World War I because of a blind eye, he had never fired a gun or fixed a bayonet in infantry drill. His only war experience was welfare work with the Red Cross in Mississippi and Alabama. Furthermore, Robert Sherwood observed, “his New Deal pacifism inclined him emotionally toward a kind of isolationism.” Writing to Eleanor on August 31, 1939, the day before the war broke out, Hopkins had said: “The war news is disquieting, but I hope and pray there will be no war. It would seem as though all of civilization were crumbling right under our very eyes.”

  But now, to Eleanor’s mind, Harry had made a devastating turn of 180 degrees in his interests and concerns. He had suddenly transformed himself into an expert on foreign affairs, as if the problems of the sick and the unemployed were no longer of any consequence to him. His total shift from domestic to international concerns was inexplicable to her, suggesting to Eleanor that all along he had been more allied to her husband’s concerns than to hers, that their friendship had never meant as much to him as it did to her.

  Indeed, Harry Hopkins was so close to the president at this point, Frances Perkins recalled, that he was almost admitted—but not really, since no one ever was—to “a total friendship” with him. Situated in the best guest room in the White House—the large suite that had once been Abraham Lincoln’s study, in the southwest corner of the second floor, consisting of one large bedroom with a four-poster bed, a small sitting room, and a bath—Hopkins was available to talk with the president at any hour about anything and everything, about consequential matters and “ordinary fooling,” as Hopkins once put it, “passing the time of day and the small talk of people who are living in the same house.”

  Tommy alluded to Harry’s changed position in the White House in a letter to Eleanor’s daughter, Anna. “Harry and Missy are thicker than the well-known thieves at the moment,” Tommy wrote; “he is staying here and has gone completely over to the other side of the house. If your father does not eat with your mother and any guests, Harry eats with him and Missy and it makes me mad and ready to smack him because your mother was so darn faithful about going to see him when he was sick, agreeing to take Diana if anything happened to him, etc. It seems to me if he had a lick of sense or appreciation, he would make it a real point to spend time with your mother.”

  During this period, Frances Perkins noticed that Eleanor seemed to be away from the White House even more than usual. She was always going somewhere, Perkins recalled. “It had begun to cause grumbling around, such as ‘Where’s Mrs. Roosevelt? Why doesn’t she stay home? Why doesn’t she take care of her husband?’” At one point, Perkins went to see Eleanor. “I really think you ought to be here in the White House more. I say it to you in the warmest kind of friendship. I think it would be better for you and better for the President. The President needs you and needs you here.”

  Eleanor looked at Perkins and, “with the sweetest smile, sort of twisting her eyes and smiling sweetly, she shook her head and said, ‘Oh, no Frances, he doesn’t need me any more. He has Harry . . . . He doesn’t need my advice any more. He doesn’t ask it. Harry tells him everything he needs to know!’”

  In the past, Eleanor had been able to work for long stretches without tiring, sleeping only four or five hours a night. But now, as the world around her turned hostile and cold, she had periods of such exhaustion that she found it difficult to get up in the morning. “One day,” Tommy reported to Anna, “she didn’t come down to breakfast until nearly ten a.m. and I nearly had a fit. I could contain myself no longer, so at 9:30 I went up to see what was wrong. She just decided to stay in bed. I told her to please send out advance notices in the future when she was going to do something so unheard of.”

  • • •

  Eleanor was no stranger to depression. In the months surrounding her husband’s first inauguration, in 1933, she had experienced a period of turmoil and loss similar to what she was feeling in the spring of 1940. What she feared then, as she feared now, was the loss of the unique partnership she had forged with Franklin since his paralysis, a partnership that allowed her both an independent existence and the chance to contribute in important ways to his fame and power. As the first lady of New York, she had been able to spend three days a
week away from Albany, teaching literature, drama, and American history to the young girls at Todhunter, a private school in Manhattan, while still managing to be her husband’s “eyes and ears” in the State Capitol the rest of the week.

  But with her husband’s nomination to the presidency, she was concerned that her dual existence would come to an end, that she would become a prisoner in the White House, a slave to the superficial, symbolic duties of the first lady. As she saw it, the move to the White House would destroy her working partnership with Franklin and bring an end to any personal life of her own.

  She couldn’t bear it, she told her friend Nancy Cook in a long letter written on the eve of Franklin’s victory at the convention, she just “could not live in the White House.” When Nancy showed the indiscreet letter to Louis Howe, his “pale face darkened . . . his lips drew into a thin line, and when he had finished he ripped the letter into shreds, tiny shreds, and dropped these into a wastebasket.” Then, according to historian Kenneth Davis, he ordered sternly, “You are not to breathe a word of this to anyone, understand? Not to anyone.”

  Howe’s injunction was respected. The public was never aware of the dismal mood that accompanied Eleanor’s journey to the nation’s capital. Only a few friends knew how deadened she felt inside, as if all the elements that had rooted her in life and given her a sense of identity were being torn away from her. An accurate gauge of her confusion is her admission in her memoirs that just before the inauguration she tentatively suggested to her husband that, beyond being hostess at the necessary functions, he might like her to do a real job and take on some of his mail. “He looked at me quizzically and said he did not think that would do, that Missy, who had been handling his mail for a long time, would feel I was interfering. I knew he was right and that it would not work, but it was a last effort to keep in close touch and to feel that I had a real job to do.”

  It was, in retrospect, a terrible idea. Eleanor was much too independent and strong-willed to spend her time simply reflecting her husband’s thinking in answering the mail, but at the time Eleanor interpreted Franklin’s negative response as a personal rejection. The downward spiral escalated.

  “My zest in life is rather gone for the time being,” Eleanor had confessed to her friend Lorena Hickok in a grim letter written in the spring of 1933, soon after she had become first lady. “If anyone looks at me, I want to weep . . . ,” she continued. “I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight & my mind goes round & round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run, & I can’t, & I despise myself. I can’t get away from thinking about myself. Even though I know I’m a fool, I can’t help it!”

  By the summer of 1933, Eleanor’s melancholy had passed. “The times of depression are very often felt as gaps,” a psychologist has written, “temporary losses of certainty or identity which leave us feeling empty.” Seen in this light, Eleanor’s despondency was the intervening period of chaos between the breakup of her old identity as teacher and political activist in New York State and the establishment of a new identity in the White House. In a remarkably short period of time, with the help of her friends Louis Howe and Lorena Hickok, Eleanor was able to forge a new role for herself, as a new kind of first lady, an activist role never practiced or even imagined before. “Within a few months,” one historian has written, “she was more firmly established in the public mind than she had ever been in her native state as a sharply defined personality, a forceful mind, an acutely sensitive conscience, a remarkably strong moral character.”

  Though Eleanor was able to surmount her particular unhappiness in 1933 by carving out a new role for herself as first lady, the storm which had swept her up in 1933 and again in 1940 had a deeper origin, in the devastating losses she had experienced as a child.

  • • •

  The story of Eleanor’s recurring depressions must begin with her alcoholic father, Elliott Roosevelt. The third of four children born to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha “Mittie” Bulloch, Elliott had grown up in a world of privilege: a fashionable town house in Manhattan, a country estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, private tutors and private schools. In a remarkable household that would produce a president of the United States in the eldest son, Teddy, Elliott was considered the best-looking, the most athletic, the most gregarious, and in many ways the most endearing of them all. But, for reasons that are not easy to understand, Elliott was never able to hold his own in the unrelenting competition that governed everyday life among the talented Roosevelts.

  At the age of fourteen, upset by his failure to keep up with his brother Teddy academically, Elliott began having mysterious seizures. “Yesterday during my Latin lesson . . . ,” he wrote his father from St. Paul’s, “I had a bad rush of blood to my head, it hurt me so that I can’t remember what happened.” There was some talk of epilepsy, but the attacks were most likely an unconscious mechanism of escape from competitive struggles he could not otherwise endure. An earlier problem with German had produced a similar fainting spell along with a plaintive letter to his father: “Teedee is a much quicker and more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be good as you if [it] is in me, but it is hard.”

  Incapable of putting forth the concerted effort needed to stay in school, Elliott wandered off to the Himalayas. Upon his return to New York, he courted Anna Hall, a debutante of such great beauty that her image remained for years in the minds of those who saw her. The stories are legion. The poet Robert Browning was so struck by Anna’s looks that he asked if he could sit and gaze at her while she had her portrait painted. Eleanor’s cousin Corinne Robinson was so entranced by the sight of Anna, “dressed in some blue gray shimmering material,” that the vision stayed with her for the rest of her childhood. But the deepest imprint was on her daughter, Eleanor, who opened her memoirs, written at the age of fifty-five, with the comment that her mother was “one of the most beautiful women” she had ever seen. As a little girl, she added, she was “grateful to be allowed to touch her [mother’s] dress or her jewels or anything that was part of the vision.”

  Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Hall made a dazzling couple. They were invited everywhere, and Anna fell in love. Like so many others, she, too, was affected by Elliott’s radiant smile and charming personality. She was nineteen and he was twenty-three when they married. Their happiness was short-lived. The responsibility of marriage and the birth of three children—Eleanor, Elliott Jr., and Hall—served to increase Elliott’s anxiety to the point where his casual drinking became heavier and heavier.

  When he was not drinking, he was loving and warm, everything Eleanor wanted in a father. “[My father] dominated my life as long as he lived and was the love of my life for many years after he died,” Eleanor wrote in her memoirs. One of her earliest recollections is of being dressed up and allowed to come down and dance for a group of her father’s friends, who enthusiastically applauded her performance. Then, when she finished, her father would pick her up and hold her high in the air, a moment of triumph for both the father and the little girl. “With my father I was perfectly happy,” she recalled. “He would take me into his dressing room in the mornings or when he was dressing for dinner and let me watch each thing he did.”

  When he was drinking, however, everything changed. The routine of everyday life became impossible to maintain. The household was filled with recrimination. Night after night he would show up too late for dinner, and many nights he failed to show up at all. At one point, he made a servant girl pregnant and a scandal erupted in the newspapers. At times, his drinking led to a melancholy so deep that he threatened suicide. In such moods, he would totally forget the promises he had made to his wife and his daughter only the day before. One afternoon, Eleanor recalled, her father took her and three of their dogs for a walk. As they came up to the door of the Knickerbocker Club, he told Eleanor to wait for a moment with the dogs and he would be right back. An hour passed, and then another, and then four more, and still Eleanor remained at the door, patien
tly holding the dogs. Finally, her father came out, but so drunk that he had to be carried in the arms of several men. The doorman took Eleanor home.

  Still, Eleanor preferred her warm and affectionate father to her cold and self-absorbed mother. At least with her father, she said, she never doubted that she “stood first in his heart,” whereas for as long as she could remember she felt that her beautiful mother was bitterly disappointed, almost repelled, by the plainness and the ungainliness of her only daughter. Forced to wear a brace for several years for curvature of the spine, Eleanor recalled that even at the age of two she was “a shy solemn child,” completely “lacking in the spontaneous joy or mirth of youth.” Moreover, she knew, “as a child senses those things,” that her mother was trying to compensate for her lack of beauty by teaching her excellent manners, but “her efforts only made me more keenly conscious of my shortcomings.”

  Perhaps Anna, having been taught to value beauty and charm as the most important attributes in a woman, did instinctively recoil from her daughter’s unattractive looks. But, though Eleanor could never admit it, her father’s erratic behavior was the more likely cause of the distance between mother and daughter. Feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders, Anna had little energy left for a stubborn and precocious little girl who kept her father on a pedestal and blamed her mother when her father had to be sent away on various “cures” to various sanitariums. Perhaps, in rejecting Eleanor’s fervent love for her father, Anna was rejecting that part of herself that had fallen in love with such an untrustworthy man.

  Eleanor slept in her mother’s room while her father was away and could hear her mother talking with her aunts about the problem with her father. “I acquired a strange and garbled idea of the troubles which were going on around me. Something was wrong with my father.” Eleanor was only seven at the time, too young to understand the intolerable strain on her twenty-eight-year-old mother, a strain that produced in Anna very bad recurring headaches. “I would sit at the head of her bed and stroke her head,” Eleanor recalled. “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I had experienced.”