AUDASE

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Volume Three: The War Years and After 1939–1962

720pp. Viking. $40.

{TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT/London)

Biographies of outstanding public figures used to be written to inspire and impress; now, they are written as much to explore human fallibility as to celebrate achievement. It is not easy for contemporary biographers to do both, especially when, for example, early reticence about a marriage gives way to a tide of revelation and speculation. Both these books work hard to achieve the right balance.

Eleanor Roosevelt, distant cousin and then wife of the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – architect of the New Deal and the man who led his country out of depression and into the Second World War – was one of the outstanding women of the twentieth century. Then and now regarded as his moral compass, she became a national and international celebrity in her own right, a campaigner and communicator who transformed, even if only temporarily, the role of First Lady of the United States, with her energetic dedication to progressive and humanitarian causes. She and her husband had an extraordinary relationship, both personally and politically; quite how extraordinary has taken some time, and the gradual release of much private correspondence, to become clear. Both books under review take the crucial question about any political marriage – the extent to which the couple’s private life affected their conduct of public affairs – further than ever before.

Blanche Wiesen Cook has been working on her comprehensive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for over a quarter of a century. The first part appeared in 1993, the second in 2000; both won prizes and much praise. This is the third and final volume, taking her subject through the war and the death of her husband in 1945 and her last years working for the United Nations; as in the first two, Cook tells the story as a straightforward, detailed, blow-by-blow narrative. This approach could have seemed old-fashioned and dull, but her deftness in selecting and handling her rich material makes it consistently absorbing. It also ensures that private matters, whether family or romantic, are always seen in the context of the demands of the Roosevelts’ demanding and dizzyingly complex political activities.

ER and FDR (as Cook calls them) have enormous archives, and many previous accounts have been written, mostly by their admirers, although there have been those whose right-wing predilections made them more critical. Cook acknowledges from the start that as a lifelong left-wing activist and feminist herself, with a long history of support for pressure groups such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she has always regarded ER as an inspiration. She is too scrupulous a historian to let this significantly affect her account, which does not present ER as a paragon; but it does sometimes affect her prose, which can slip into heroine worship. And it is indicative that an unattractive episode from ER’s later life, when she behaved badly in public to a woman senator during a disagreement over the Suez crisis – first shouting at her and then refusing to shake hands – is related not in the body of the text, but almost casually, in the preface.

In the first chapter of the book, “Lady Great Heart”, Cook conveys the substance of the previous volumes, sketches in key moments and relationships and gives us a sense of what is to come. Her admiration is clear from the outset. “Everywhere she went, ER offered hope. Her interest and concern empowered impoverished communities and healed the wounded.” ER’s empathy for those in trouble went back to her childhood, which had left her, by her own admission, in desperate need of love and attention. Both the alcoholic father she adored and her chilly, critical mother were dead by the time she was ten, and the happiest period of her youth was spent at Allenswood boarding school in England, where the first of her strong emotional connections with independent, unconventional women was formed. Cook credits Marie Souvestre, the French headmistress who also taught Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey’s clever sisters (one of whom put her experiences into the once scandalous novel of schoolgirl passion, Olivia), with recognizing ER’s character and intelligence and rebuilding her confidence, preparing her for a life of “endless learning, passionate intensity and surprising romance”.

The other defining episode in ER’s earlier life, Cook reminds us, came in 1918 when, having had six children and after thirteen years of marriage to her handsome, ambitious cousin, she discovered his affair with her friend and social secretary, Lucy Mercer. ER agreed not to divorce him on condition that marital sex cease (she apparently told her daughter later that it had always been an ordeal), that he allow her to build her own social and political life, and that he never see Mercer again. The first two conditions held; as this volume shows, the third did not.

As Cook – here and elsewhere unafraid of cliché – says of Eleanor: “She would forgive, but she would never forget”. The bargain with her husband ensured that their partnership, for the most part affectionate and mutually supportive, endured. She looked after him with devotion during the illness that left him partly paralysed in 1921, and was always concerned about his health: she turned a blind eye to his flirtations and permitted his secretary, Missy Le Hand, to become virtually a junior wife. Cook maintains that FDR would only ask her to moderate her opinions and actions for “reasons of state”, sometimes national, sometimes international; and when he did, she complied. Above all, their agreement released ER to move into public life, pursue the causes dear to her heart, and make new friendships, most of them with able, politically active women, several of them in stable same-sex relationships.

Two couples were especially important to her from the 1920s onwards. Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, leading campaigners for workers’ and women’s rights and racial equality, who lived in New York and were deeply involved in the Democratic Party, were her political touchstones, and Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook became her colleagues and companions at Val-Kill, the communal house, school and furniture workshop on the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson. Val-Kill became ER’s retreat from the formality of the family home, Hyde Park, and FDR’s formidable mother. FDR called it “the love nest”. ER’s “core emotional team”, consisted, according to Cook, of those four as well as Malvina Thompson, her devoted gatekeeper and secretary; Earl Miller, a young state trooper who taught her to ride and play tennis; and, from 1932, Lorena Hickok, known as Hick, a leading reporter who covered her arrival in the White House that year, fell deeply in love with her and was soon, as Cook rather primly puts it, ER’s “primary companion”. It was Hick who encouraged her commitment to the New Deal, accompanied her on tours to deprived parts of the country, and helped her to establish her nationally syndicated column, “My Day”.

ER’s romantic friendship with Hick has been known about since their correspondence became available to researchers in 1978 (they exchanged more than 3,000 letters). The first reaction was shock, and the suggestion that the collection should be closed. Since then, writers – including Cook – have been more open and sympathetic, while still holding back from asserting that ER and Hick had for a while, as the letters certainly indicate, a passionate physical relationship. Now Susan Quinn, herself in a long-standing lesbian partnership, has been able to write an account that takes love between two women for granted – although she still meets people who cannot believe ER was susceptible to it.

As her subtitle shows, Quinn also wants to give Lorena Hickok her due as one of the people who helped to make ER the effective writer and campaigner she was. Hick was an outstanding journalist from a tough background. She worked in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press, and met ER when she was assigned to cover her during FDR’s first campaign for the presidency in 1932.

After the two became close – they would end nightly phone calls by saying to each other “je t’aime et je t’adore” – Hick gave up her job, moved into the White House, where she had a base for the next twelve years, and devoted herself to working with and for ER. It was her suggestion that ER should hold news conferences especially for women journalists, to build up her own support base, and that the lively, informal letters ER sent Hick about her activities could be made into a newspaper column. “My Day” became a huge success, appearing six days a week and being syndicated all over the country. Quinn also demonstrates that Hick’s work for Harry Hopkins on researching and extending New Deal projects in poor communities had real influence on FDR, directly as well as through his wife.

The trouble, as time passed, was that while ER was the centre of Hick’s life, ER had many other demands on her time and her affections. Hick was the favourite at court for some years, but by the late 1930s “the personage”, as ER called her public self, was often taking her away, physically and emotionally, from Hick. There were jealousies and scenes. By 1939, as war approached, Hick’s role was dwindling, although ER was always loyal, kind and supportive as her friend’s financial and health worries increased.

During the war years, ER’s energies and attention were more on international than domestic affairs, as both she and FDR struggled to overcome the country’s deep reluctance to go to war in Europe again even as the evidence of Hitler’s atrocities mounted. ER, with her network of younger radical friends, had lobbied for the Republicans in Spain and now began to press for action on behalf of refugees fleeing fascism, with only partial success; she admitted later, after the full horror was clear, that the US had not done enough. Cook has expressed dismay that the plight of Jewish people features very little in ER’s papers, although she intervened more than once to help individuals brought to her attention by friends. She continued to urge FDR to act, and her lobbying and allegiances to young activists, some with communist associations, were not always welcome. But she never gave up.

As both Cook and Quinn demonstrate, Hick was to some extent replaced in ER’s later life by two younger men: Joseph Lash, who abandoned his early communism and later wrote several books about ER and FDR; and David Gurewitsch, who became her doctor and favourite travelling companion during her post-war widowhood. Both men were married, and ER was always friendly with their wives; but both, as correspondence shows, were emotionally vital to her. She once wrote to Gurewitsch that she had never loved anyone as she had him. All her life she needed to give and receive love in one form or another. Neither of these books says enough about ER’s frequently difficult relations with her own children; she found it hard to forgive her sons’ troubles with drink, money and women, and was hurt badly when she discovered that her daughter Anna had known of FDR’s renewed relationship in later life with Lucy Mercer.

After the war, under successive presidents – Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy – ER continued to write her columns, to broadcast, to press for racial equality and civil rights, and to work, through the newly established United Nations, for a new world order that would ensure peace. Chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights, she led the way to the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Until her death in 1962 she remained in touch with Hick, who lived quietly not far from Hyde Park, always drinking her morning coffee from the blue and white cup she had used over breakfast with ER at the White House.