Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (81 page)

More commonly she simply struck out on her own. She continued her press conferences and began speaking on the radio. Her six-minute weekly broadcasts weren’t publicized as a counterpart to Franklin’s Fireside Chats, nor did she intend them as such. But inevitably some observers interpreted them that way. Eleanor’s broadcasts clearly differed from Franklin’s in one crucial respect: she was paid for them. The three-thousand-dollar weekly fee struck many people, including Eleanor, as exorbitant. “No one is worth $500 a minute,” she admitted. But the fee was what the sponsor, the Johns-Manville corporation, a manufacturer of building materials, was willing to pay, and Eleanor arranged for the funds to be transferred to the American Friends Service Committee. She wrote a monthly column for
Woman’s Home Companion,
for which she received a thousand dollars per month. She tried, in her radio broadcasts and her column, to avoid topics that might embarrass Franklin. She skirted politics, at least at first, and concentrated on matters of domestic and maternal interest.

She traveled frequently, often in the company of Lorena Hickok, the reporter from the 1932 campaign. Hick, as she was called, had had to fight her way into the male preserve of political reporting. She swapped lewd stories with the boys on the beat and shared the booze that eased the boredom of waiting for news to break. She covered the Lindbergh kidnapping case for the Associated Press, crawling through snowdrifts around the Lindbergh house in response to a rumor that the baby had been retrieved. The AP put her on to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932, an assignment that cost Hickok her objectivity and eventually—after her editor learned that she was letting Eleanor read her stories before she filed them—her job. Eleanor thereupon found her a position with Harry Hopkins, who headed the administration’s relief program. Yet she made time to travel with Eleanor, and the two became close friends.

Eleanor usually traveled in her official role as First Lady, giving the requisite interviews and speeches. Occasionally, though, she tried to retrieve the private life she had enjoyed before her husband became so famous. In the summer of 1933 she and Hick took a road trip to Quebec and around the Gaspé Peninsula. She left the Secret Service at home, to the agents’ displeasure. “They predicted that we’d be kidnapped,” Hickok remembered. The abduction and killing of the Lindbergh baby had shocked the nation the year before, and law enforcement was on high alert. Hickok and Eleanor laughed. “The idea of anyone trying to kidnap two women, one nearly six feet tall”—Eleanor—“and the other weighing close to two hundred pounds”—Hickok—“seemed funny,” Hickok said. Eleanor chuckled: “Where would they hide us? They certainly couldn’t cram us into the trunk of a car!” The trip went well and inconspicuously. Eleanor wasn’t as recognizable as she would become, and to many of the people they encountered they were simply two women on a holiday. Others apparently recognized Eleanor but left her alone. “They’re all Republicans up here,” she explained to Hickok in New Hampshire.

Subsequent vacations were less satisfactory. Franklin Roosevelt declared 1934 to be “National Parks Year,” and Eleanor decided to tour the West with Hickok. At Yosemite she insisted that they ride horses among the mountain peaks; she found the experience exhilarating, but Hickok, who avoided exercise whenever possible, gasped and strained at the altitude and the effort. “How could you do this to me?” Hickok complained. “You’ll manage,” Eleanor responded.

Hickok recuperated on the drive from Yosemite to San Francisco, where she had arranged for them to stay in a small, previously quiet hotel. The owner was surprised to learn that the second member of Hickok’s party was the president’s wife, yet he maintained his aplomb and their secret. One member of the hotel staff, however, was less discreet, and when the women returned from dinner the lobby was overflowing with reporters. Flashbulbs popped; questions were shouted at Eleanor. She refused to answer, beyond declaring, “I’m here on a vacation. I’d like to be left alone.” But San Francisco was ruined for them. Reporters and photographers followed them all around the city the next day. They had intended to remain longer but decided to leave at once.

They drove north into Oregon, stopping at Bend, a small town on the east side of the Cascades. The news of their approach had preceded them, and the manager of their hotel said some people wanted to meet them. Eleanor begged off. “We’re tired,” she said. “We have to leave very early tomorrow morning.” Dinner was quiet, and the two watched the sun set over the snow-capped mountains. But as they exited the dining room they encountered a large crowd, headed by the mayor. Eleanor sent Hickok along and, as politely as possible, shook the required hands.

Half an hour later she extricated herself. She went upstairs and slammed the door—“something I’d never known her to do before, nor did I ever know her to do it since that night,” Hickok remembered. Eleanor sat down on the bed.

On either cheek was a red spot. They used to appear that way when she was annoyed.

“Franklin was right!” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“Franklin said I’d never get away with it,” she replied. “And I can’t.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed and added: “From now on I shall travel as I’m supposed to travel, as the President’s wife, and try to do what is expected of me.” Then she added defiantly: “But there’s one thing I will not do. I will not have a Secret Service man following me about.
Never!
”

If the western trip failed as a getaway, it confirmed the bond between Eleanor and Hickok. Eleanor remained attached to Franklin by complex ties of affection, obligation, and ambition, but deeper emotions gradually connected her to Hick. “I’ve been wondering what I really want for my declining years,” she wrote Hick in the spring of 1934. She had attended a conference on aging and the problems old people in America sometimes confronted. “I hope you and I together have enough to make it gracious and attractive.” She reflected on the future, and her thoughts included Hick more often than they did Franklin. “Someday we’ll lead a leisurely life and write—so we can take our work with us and do all the things we want to do.”

Hickok had difficulty waiting. “And now I am going to bed—to try to dream about you,” she wrote when they were apart. She counted the moments till they would be together again.

Only 8 more days. 24 hours from now it will be only 7 more—just a week. I’ve been trying to bring back your face to remember just
how
you look! Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.

Eleanor reciprocated. She told Hick how she had been helping some friends set up a house and had fallen asleep beside one of them in a big double bed. “Only I wished it was you,” she wrote. She regularly reassured Hick, who often seemed the needier of the two emotionally. “Love is a queer thing,” Eleanor wrote. “It hurts one but it gives one so much more in return!” She, too, wished for their separation to end. “Someday we will do lots of work together! I love you deeply, tenderly and my arms feel very empty.”

H
UEY
L
ONG’S AMBITIONS
as a young man weren’t much different from Franklin Roosevelt’s. He told the woman he would marry that he intended to enter politics at the state level, advance to governor, then run for national office, eventually president. That such ambitions seemed natural for Roosevelt, a scion of the New York gentry, but excessive for Long, a child of back-country Louisiana, accounted for much of Long’s resentment against Roosevelt.

Until the 1920s Long’s ambitions and resentments remained hidden from most of the country. He made a minor stir by attacking Standard Oil from his seat on the Louisiana commission that regulated the petroleum industry in the state, and he ran third for governor in 1924. But he learned from his defeat and in 1928, even as Roosevelt was squeaking to victory in the race for New York governor, Long barged into the governor’s house in Baton Rouge by the largest margin in Louisiana history. His politics were populist; his slogan—“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown”—was borrowed from William Jennings Bryan. Yet Long was no Bryan. The essential sweetness that even Bryan’s opponents noted in the Nebraskan was utterly missing in the Kingfish, as he called himself. The journalist A. J. Liebling said that Long’s complexion was “the color of a sunburn coming on” in truth it wasn’t sunburn so much as indignation, on behalf of himself and those he professed to speak for. Long toured the Cajun districts of his state and doffed his hat beneath the boughs of the Evangeline Oak. “It is here under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came,” he said to the dirt farmers gathered round.

Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here!

Long rammed laws through the legislature, bypassing the formerly powerful and trampling the toes of the wealthy. He bent some rules in the process, and the bending allowed his enemies to mount an effort to impeach him. Punches were thrown in the state house of representatives; blood was drawn. Long looked to the senate for support, persuading a core of senators to announce for acquittal even before the charges were fully aired. He lived to fight another day, with different tactics than before. “I used to try to get things done by saying ‘please,’” he said (to the puzzlement of those many who had never heard the word pass his lips). “That didn’t work, and now I’m a dynamiter.”

Louisiana law forbade Long from succeeding himself as governor in 1932, and so, before his term was half finished, he plotted how to take his high-explosive act elsewhere. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1930 and won but declined to assume his seat until he could arrange the election of a minion as his replacement for governor. Oscar Allen fit the bill perfectly, demonstrating not the slightest independence. “A leaf once blew in the window of Allen’s office and fell on his desk,” Long’s brother Earl said. “Allen signed it.”

The Great Depression hit Louisiana harder than most states. Long hit back with methods not dissimilar to those Roosevelt would employ at the national level. He poured money into public works, building bridges by the score and paving roads by the thousands of miles. He hatched a plan to curtail cotton production by means of a cotton holiday: a concerted refusal by southern farmers to plant a cotton crop in 1932. The holiday never happened, because of Long’s inability to secure the support of other cotton states, but it softened up the opposition to the less drastic crop restrictions Roosevelt’s AAA would introduce. It also allowed Long to cast himself as the champion of poor folks all across the South. “You are the Moses of the cotton farmer,” one of those farmers told him.

Long sided with Roosevelt in 1932, albeit ungraciously. “I don’t like your son of a bitch,” he told an emissary from the Roosevelt camp. “But I’ll be for him.” In public Long played the loyal Democrat, and he won votes for the Roosevelt ticket in the districts where he stumped for it—all the while expanding his own voter base. His salvos against the citadel of privilege amazed even hardened journalists. “Seven motor trucks and Senator Long’s private automobile composed the campaign caravan,” one reporter wrote. “Two of the trucks were the specially designed and built sound trucks developed by him…. Each is equipped with four amplifying horns. Inside the vehicle body are the loudspeaker panels, an attachment for playing phonograph records, several folding chairs, a folding table, a pitcher and glasses.” One of the sound trucks would arrive at a rally half an hour before Long was scheduled to speak. It would play music and draw a crowd. Long’s car would pull up, and the senator would leap out. By no means were all of his listeners starving; many drove in their own cars, clogging the roads for miles around. But soon he’d have them believing the wolf was at the very door.

Think of it, my friends! In 1930 there were 540 men in Wall Street who made $100,000,000 more than all the wheat farmers and all the cotton farmers and all the cane farmers of this country put together! Millions and millions and millions of farmers in this country, and yet 540 men in Wall Street made $100,000,000 more than all those millions of farmers! And you people wonder why your belly’s flat up against your backbone!