No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“It’s a terrible thing,” he told his aide Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”

“By the brilliant but simple trick of making news and being news,” historian Arthur Schlesinger observed, “Roosevelt outwitted the open hostility of the publishers and converted the press into one of the most effective channels of his public leadership.”

Rejecting the traditional notion that government was the handmaiden of business, the New Deal Congress had enacted an unprecedented series of laws which regulated the securities market, established a minimum wage, originated a new system of social security, guaranteed labor’s right to collective bargaining, and established control over the nation’s money supply. “It is hard to think of another period in the whole history of the republic that was so fruitful,” historian William Leuchtenberg has written, “or of a crisis that was met with as much imagination.”

The crucial difference, in terms of American public opinion, between the British and the German children was that the British boys and girls were mostly Christian, the German children mostly Jewish.

Though physicians examining Roosevelt after his polio attack specifically noted that he had not been rendered impotent by the disease, his son Jimmy believed that “it would have been difficult for him to function sexually after he became crippled,” since the sensation in his lower body was “extremely limited.” Further, Jimmy argued, he would have been “too embarrassed” to have sex, too vulnerable to humiliation. Elliott disagreed with his brother’s assessment. In a co-authored book written long after both his parents were dead, he alleged that Missy and his father had been lovers.

“I shudder for the future of a country,” one congressman commented, “whose destiny must be decided in the dog days.”

“Nothing is more pleasing to the eye,” Roosevelt once observed, “than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one.”

So the battle to save lives by bringing large numbers of refugees into America was lost during the crucial months of 1940, when Germany was still willing to grant exit permits to the Jews. “True, the Nazis wished to be rid of the Jews,” historian David Wyman has written, “but until 1941 this end was to be accomplished by emigration, not extermination. The shift to extermination came only after the emigration method had failed, a failure in large part due to lack of countries open to refugees.”

In retrospect, it is clear that Missy’s condition was caused by neither insomnia nor the change of life; her collapse on the evening of June 4 was most likely a small stroke, an undiagnosed warning signal for the major stroke she suffered two weeks later. The naval ambulance arrived at the White House at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 21.

Why is it not surprising that a woman's health issues should be so little understood? And how depressingly little has changed in the past 80+ years!

Recognizing that Missy’s therapy would take months, if not years (and even when it was completed, there was scant hope that she could return to her demanding job in the White House), Roosevelt worried about what would happen to her if he should die. The only money Missy ever had was her annual salary, which at its peak of $5,000 was half that of the male secretaries.

“Be not dismayed in these terrible times,” Randolph exhorted the black community. “You possess power, great power. The Negro stake in national defense is big. It consists of jobs, thousands of jobs. It consists of new industrial opportunities and hope. This is worth fighting for . . . . To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes march on Washington . . . . We call upon President Roosevelt . . . to follow in the footsteps of his noble and illustrious predecessor [Lincoln] and take the second decisive step to free America—an executive order to abolish discrimination in the work place. One thing is certain and that is if Negroes are going to get anything out of this National defense, we must fight for it and fight for it with gloves off.”

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders,” Churchill observed in his memoirs, “but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equaled that of which Stalin and the Communist Chiefs were guilty when they . . . supinely awaited or were incapable of realizing, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.”

“I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler,” Churchill explained to Colville before the speech, “and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Despite the last-minute arrangements, Eleanor lamented, she was unable to give the prime minister all the things he liked to have. In the morning, Churchill confronted the President’s butler Alonzo Fields. “Now, Fields,” Churchill began, his bare feet sticking out below his long underwear, his crumpled bedclothes scattered on the bed, the floor strewn with British and American newspapers, “we had a lovely dinner last night but I have a few orders for you. We want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen. One, I don’t like talking outside my quarters; two, I hate whistling in the corridors; and three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and 90 year old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

What a Karen!

Repulsed by the abundant trays of liquor that accompanied Churchill wherever he went, Eleanor went to Franklin, White House maid Lillian Parks recalled, and told him “that she worried about Churchill’s influence on him because of all the drinking. FDR retorted she needn’t worry because it wasn’t his side of the family that had a drinking problem.”

Ooh, that was a low blow, FDR!

“I like Mr. Churchill,” Eleanor wrote Anna, “he’s lovable and emotional and very human but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.”

When Churchill reached London, an affectionate message from the president awaited him. “It is fun,” Roosevelt told Churchill, “to be in the same decade with you.”

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith agrees. “Before the war,” he points out, “there were 1,466,701 black farm workers in the rural labor force of the Old Confederacy, all, virtually without exception, exceedingly poor. In 1970, there were 115,303.”

As the leader of a democracy, Roosevelt had to be concerned with the question of morale; the constant challenge he faced, through speeches and actions alike, was to figure out ways to sustain and strengthen the spirit of the people, without which the war could not be won. “We failed to see,” George Marshall observed after the war, commenting on the army’s opposition to the president’s plan for North Africa, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word but it conveys the thought.”

Women took the loss of pleated skirts and one-piece bathing suits in stride, but when the rubber shortage threatened the continuing manufacture of girdles, a passionate outcry arose. Though government sources tried to suggest that “women grow their own muscular girdles, by exercising,” woman argued that “neither exercise nor any other known remedy” could restore aging muscles to their original youthful tautness. Without “proper support from well-fitted foundation garments” to hold the abdomen in place, there was no way, journalist Marion Dixon argued in a contemporary health magazine, that a woman past thirty could keep her posture erect or do physical work without tiring. “Certainly,” Dixon concluded, “Uncle Sam does not want American women to wear garments that would menace their health or hamper their efficiency, especially during wartime, when every ounce of energy and effort is needed.” The government heeded the women’s cries. Not long after the first public discussion of curtailing girdles, the War Production Board announced that foundation garments were an essential part of a woman’s wardrobe, and as such could continue to be manufactured, despite the precious rubber involved!

At the time of Pearl Harbor, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary stood at the top of the best-seller lists. It was replaced the following spring by Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris and John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down. Then, in July, “a meteor burst across the publishing skies” as Marion Hargrove’s memoir of training camp at Fort Bragg, See Here, Private Hargrove, became one of the best-selling books of all time. Americans liked to read, one observer noted, about what their boys were doing at that moment. When the boys went into action, books about the war itself, such as William White’s They Were Expendable, took center stage.

The Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, would have agreed with this assessment. “The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without ammunition,” he once said. “The battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.”

In her cables to her husband, Eleanor described the spirit of the soldiers, the scourge of malaria, and the stultifying overprotection of the top brass toward her. “I’ve had so many Generals and Admirals and MPs to protect me that I remind myself of you,” she joked.

To Eleanor’s mind, the New Deal was more than a description of old programs; it was a rhapsodic label for a way of life representing a national commitment to social justice and to the bettering of life for the underprivileged. And that commitment, Eleanor argued, was every bit as important in 1943 as it had been a decade before.

The death certificate listed auricular fibrillation and rheumatic heart disease as contributing factors to the fatal embolism. She was forty-six years old.

Missy Le Hand's death

The Churchills and party came at 11, Harry Hopkins at 12, the Duke of Windsor at 12:15. After lunch I dashed to the cottage and did one column, returned at 3:30, changed all the orders given at 12:30 and walked with Mrs. Churchill for an hour and a half ending up at Franklin’s cottage for tea, worked again 5-7:15, dashed home and had Henry and Elinor and [neighbors from Staatsburg] the Lytle Hulls for dinner.

What the heck was the Duke of Windsor doing there while Churchill was visiting? I thought the Duke was persona non grata during the war

Though she acknowledged her responsibilities to her husband, she felt “inadequate,” fearing there was no longer “any fundamental love to draw on, just respect and affection” and “little or no surface friction.”

When these women were asked if they enjoyed working more than staying at home, an astounding 79 percent said yes; of this total, 70 percent were married with children. For some, the best part of work was the sociability of the workplace versus the isolation of domestic responsibilities. For others, the best part was the financial independence, the freedom from having to ask their husbands if they could buy a new dress or clothes for the kids, the knowledge that they were contributing to the family’s economic welfare. Still others relished the mastery of new skills, the sense of industry, the pleasure of a job well done.

With Roosevelt settled comfortably in an armchair by the fireplace, Shoumatoff volunteered to tell her favorite ghost story about the black-pearl necklace of Catherine the Great.

Wait! I want to hear this ghost story!

The most destructive war in history had come to an end. The best estimates put the number of deaths at an unimaginable 50 million people. The Soviet Union lost 13 million combatants and 7 million civilians. The Germans calculated losses of 3.6 million civilians and 3.2 million soldiers. The Japanese estimated 2 million civilian and 1 million military deaths. Six million Jews had been killed. The number of British and commonwealth deaths is calculated at 484,482. With 291,557 battle deaths and 113,842 nonhostile deaths from accident and disease, the United States suffered the fewest casualties among the major nations.