The Book Club

Is Eleanor’s Nanny State Really So Bad?

Dear Chris,

I don’t see how we can say that the good things ER was involved in (e.g., civil rights) would have happened just fine without her, but she must take a huge share of the blame for the invention of the nanny state. Eleanor (like all do-gooders motivated by the perilous business of noblesse oblige) might have had her authoritarian leanings, but the point is that FDR wasn’t a dictator, and neither was Eleanor, who–whatever she may have mused aloud at the start of the New Deal–never got half the loaf she wanted.

What she did get was a chance to rally and embolden the men and women inside the New Deal who shared her belief that its benefits ought to extend to everyone, including “negroes,” and to give some lasting symbolic weight to the civil rights movement. Symbolic weight isn’t nothing in this case: No one can say how much it ultimately meant that ER had lunch on the patio of the White House with Walter White of the NAACP, but it meant something for the country’s first hostess to say that there was no reason a black man shouldn’t eat with her, in the White House, as her equal. If she hadn’t broken that bar, who would have? Bess? Mamie? Pat? Civil rights would always be a cause that moved by symbolic advances, and the fact is that Eleanor took down more than her fair share of bricks from the edifice of respectable racism. And she did it, as Cook makes clear, in spite of her class and upbringing, which she saw past only with great difficulty.

C’mon, don’t you love the scene from the Southern Conference on Human Welfare? It’s Bull Connor’s Birmingham, November, 1938; Connor has insisted that the 1,500 delegates sit in segregated sections. ER, upon entering, takes her place among the black delegates. When the police ask her to move, she stands and moves her chair to a spot between the two sections–where she plants her chair every day for the remainder of the conference. What’s a little aristo (dis)ingenuousness, held up against such brave improvisation? (I know, you’re going to tell me that the Southern Conference on Human Welfare was full of com-symps. But so did Cook tell me that!)

Besides, let’s say I grant you that Eleanor is responsible (in part) for the nanny state. I still can’t grant you that this is a bad thing. I know we don’t want to get lured into this old argument, but still, which part of the New Deal did you hate? Was it the SEC? The NLRB? Social Security? Putting my grandfather to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps? I know, I know (or at least I think I know): We’re talking about a spectrum here, in which some freedom is traded for some security, and reasonable liberals like me and reasonable conservatives like you simply differ on where the appropriate balance is reached. But where ER and FDR are concerned, I think the burden’s on a conservative to explain whether and why the New Deal should have halted short of where it did.

Finally, you really lost me on that last curve–about Gingrichian buck-raking, and rich old Eleanor inveighing against the greed of others. Why isn’t it better to make a lot of money you give to charity than to make a lot of shady money you give to your Newt-PAC? Maybe ER’s money made her modestly hypocritical in preaching against the greed and privilege of others, but it strikes me as unfair to seize on this as a reason to disqualify her as having done any good. (It’s not that I have reasonable objections to what you did; it’s the way you did it, or who you were as you did it …) Would it have been more virtuous of her to while away the Depression polishing the White House china? May only the poor object to the treatment of the poor?

But I’m very grateful to you for the word “latifundium.” I had to look it up.

Cheers,
Marjorie