The Book Club

FDR’s and ER’s Sentimental Politics

Dear Marjorie,

I must have overcompressed my last letter, because you’ve read as a single argument what I meant as two: (1) By “Gingrichian,” I meant profiting off governmental power that is not really your property. Maybe that’s a problem, maybe not. But Eleanor’s using the money she made to reward like-minded philanthropists (hence, buy political support) doesn’t change the ethics of it. (2) For someone intent on remaking the social order, Eleanor was working with a curiously narrow definition of privilege, a definition that left her lifestyle largely untouched.

Another thing: I didn’t say FDR was dictatorial, but anyone who sent a friendly greeting to an American Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1934 (a discovery for which Cook deserves great credit) was worth keeping an eye on. The most high-handed moment of his presidency–the attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937–is made the worse by his almost insane assertion that the Supreme Court was one of the “three horses” pulling the New Deal “plow.” Without calling him undemocratic, one can wonder what his idea of democracy was.

The best point either of us made all week was your Monday one about the division of labor between presidents and their wives. You asked,

Did the bifurcated Roosevelt White House do a disservice in providing a model for later administrations, in which poor folks and children and the lame and the halt were insidiously sentimentalized as women’s work?

 My answer would be: Yes, we’re still stuck with that model–although I wouldn’t blame Eleanor for it. And I’m less bothered by the gender stereotyping it entails than by the good cop/bad cop tactics through which it gets played out.

Because sentimental politics can be a way to fob off rhetorical solutions on people demanding practical ones. Sometimes this is a good way to defuse radicalism which would otherwise be hard to answer. When the Bonus Marchers came back to Washington, FDR couldn’t tell them to take a hike, but he couldn’t cave in to them, either, without unleashing similar protests across the country. So he gave them three-hots-and-a-cot across the Potomac and sent Eleanor out to sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” with them.

But sometimes sentimental politics is merely a way to salve one’s conscience when real action is possible and one would prefer to do nothing. Cook feels FDR did much less than he could have to help European refugees in the late 1930s. She’s right. But I would ask whether Eleanor’s public hand-wringing didn’t provide him with cover for his inaction. (One note: If I left the impression yesterday that Eleanor’s pacifism extended to support for unilateral disarmament, I should be clear that–particularly as war approached–it decidedly did not.)

You’re right that it’s race where the interplay between rhetorical and programmatic politics was most complex. Cook snorts throughout at the demands of FDR’s advisers, particularly Jubal Early’s grandson Steve, that “racial etiquette” be respected. But at some level she understands that it was a matter of etiquette. The guerrilla warfare of manners that Eleanor waged–showing up in public with Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White, turning the White House into a place where black people were routinely seen coming in and going out the front door–may have been the most effective way to strike against racism at a time of severely limited options. (Of course, it alone could never carry the day. Bull Connor advised FDR on Southern matters until FDR’s death, ran Birmingham for almost three decades after Eleanor’s sit-down protest, and was even the Democratic National Committeeman for Alabama during the Kennedy administration.)

You also noted early on that some of the “mixedness” of Eleanor’s relationship with FDR was lost in Volume 2. I liked this book better than the first, but I think you’re right. I never quite figured out, for example, what the particular crisis was that left Hick worried that Eleanor would ditch FDR on the eve of re-election–although it’s another tidbit to add to our Clinton-Roosevelt Parallels file. Poor Hick, bereft of career, living in a perpetual state of low-intensity jiltedness (“Miss you so much,” runs the typical Eleanor letter, “but you’d hate it here so don’t come“), traveling the barrooms of the country as Eleanor’s eyes and ears, remains for me the hero of the book.

Marjorie, it’s been a delight to correspond with you this week. Best wishes until we meet again–perhaps over Volume 9 of some future 14-volume biography of Rosalynn Carter.

Yours,

Chris