The Book Club

ER vs. HRC

Dear Chris,

To begin with the end of your last entry, I find I have to give you some ground on Cook’s reflexive leftism. It is wrong to equate anti-communism with opposition to “all public improvements,” and Cook does tend to caricature all anti-communism under the rubric Red Scare. (I can’t see Cook’s putting “freedom” in quotes as anything but a perfectly respectable rhetorical device, though. Are you the same Chris Caldwell whose excellent recent Standard report on Hillary’s Senate campaign included the observation that “most of the ‘neighbors’ ” rustled up for her initial appearance were in fact Democratic activists?)

I’m asking myself why I so easily read past all such lefty rhetoric in this bio; I pretty much took it as a given–like the local weather, as you so nicely put it–and at least felt that Cook took no pains to conceal her point of view. I suspect myself of an end-of-history mellowness about it. Which I raise because it seems to speak to the question of why I come down on the side of admiring Eleanor but really can’t bring myself to like Hillary Clinton.

Your theory that Eleanor’s do-goodism is distinguished from Hillary’s by its “reactive” nature doesn’t quite work for me. (Even though Eleanor had a miserable childhood, I don’t buy it as the complete explanation for her empathy toward the downtrodden. I was as least equally interested in–and impressed by–Cook’s awareness of how much Eleanor came to savor power.) I think it’s more about circumstance: When ER talked about the excitement of forming a new social order, well, she had a point. Her husband’s administration was in the midst of saving capitalism from itself. And ER was talking about the redress of some of the more shameful circumstances of pre-war life: lynching, child labor, total segregation, pervasive poverty. What’s not to reorder?

When Hillary came along, and spoke at a similar rhetorical pitch, she was talking to a generation of contented fellow boomers, in an era of prosperity, at a time when social norms have shifted hugely–to the good–in a more progressive direction. No, the heaven of racial harmony has not been achieved, and yes, of course any number of social pathologies persist. But Hillary has always seemed to chide us, as if we were all mossback fat cats of the ‘30s who were getting ready to go down to the Trans-Lux and boo Roosevelt (isn’t that how that other great cartoon of the times went?).

That note in her voice, of the unreconstructed left, is the same one I pretty much tuned out in reading Cook’s bio. I suspect the world is divided between people who tune it out and people who are driven crazy by it, with a small remaining percentage who agree with it. (These are the same people who held rallies to support Clinton during his impeachment and called the House managers “ayatollahs.”) Hillary’s success in driving some people crazy with it is what’s made her so darned successful at attracting the right enemies, at least. But it leaves me–and, polls suggest, the vast majority of my fellow Americans–wishing a pox on all their houses.

Still, the parallels between Hillary and Eleanor are irresistibly striking: A bright, intense young woman marries a profligately charming man who takes her home to his disapproving mother. She is dashed by his flirtations (and more?) with other women, but flowers when he runs for office and she discovers her own skills as a political wife. The higher he rises, the more she uses the role of spouse (and some apparent sense, within the marriage, that he owes her) to bring her own agenda to the fore. He needs her to organize him (he’s always late and always talks too long to any gathering) and also to bring in money for the family (the few years he spends out of office, the practice of law bores him silly). She gradually finds that her marriage to him allows her to exercise power in his name that she was never able to claim in her own right.

But of course the other circumstance that makes the two women different is that Eleanor really had no initial way of claiming power for herself, whereas Hillary could have launched her own political career decades ago, instead of offering us that unnerving two-for-the-price-of-one arrangement. This is a big reason why people mistrust Hillary, whereas it made a lot of sense to people, in the ‘30s, that ER should be a kind of shape-shifting adjunct to her husband. (Not, as indicated above, that ER was innocent of personal ambition. “How I hate doing these things and then they say someday I’ll run for an office,” she complained. “Well, I’d have to be chloroformed first!” Sure, sure …)

But I’ve saved the most important thing for last: How could you say that ER was not a force for good? Do you think she was the opposite, or not a force of any kind?

Best,
Marjorie