Dear Chris,
Thanks for your excellent recap of Eleanor, Volume 2. I’d probably quarrel with some of your emphases–and certainly with the strength of that adjective, “irresponsible.” I did think you unfair in characterizing it as “Whig History for the PC era, full of paeans to same-sex love,” and so on. You especially underrate Cook’s careful narrative of ER’s emotional life, in suggesting that her bio is given to “sweeping generalizations about emotional needs.”
But you touched unerringly on all the elements of ER’s life that give Cook’s work its fascination. I found her portrait of the Roosevelt marriage in most ways rich, in other ways frustrating. She’s definitely broken new ground in establishing how thoroughly bifurcated their extended family was–Franklin’s circle/Eleanor’s circle, Franklin’s place (Warm Springs)/Eleanor’s places (Val-Kill and Campobello), Franklin’s surrogate spouses (Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand)/Eleanor’s surrogate spouses (one-time state trooper and bodyguard Earl Miller and Lorena Hickok). That the Roosevelts managed to keep all these plates in the air, while also raising five children and sharing the presidency of the United States, is just another big reminder that any one marriage is a stranger and more mysterious land than an outsider can possibly know.
That it wasn’t easy is suggested by the jealousies that bordered their arrangements: Woe betide anyone (with the possible exception of Louis Howe) who tried to befriend Eleanor and Franklin equally. Eleanor’s friends–even the lesbian ones–occasionally made the mistake of falling for Franklin’s easy charms. In Volume 1, Cook wonderfully described two of them, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, as beginning a “slow slide toward that dangerous abyss they considered neutrality.” But this leads me to what I found a bit frustrating. Cook by no means ignores what was difficult about the Roosevelt marriage, but I think she minimizes it, or rather that her awareness of it seems to come and go. On the one hand, she writes that
in relation to Franklin, ER still occupied a lonely sphere which echoed the isolation of her childhood. Beyond the First Family’s jolly facade, ER endured a lifelong sense of exclusion that represented for her an ongoing humiliation regarding FDR’s domain.
But in between such acknowledgments that ER’s independent life began as an accommodation to the deep pain FDR’s philandering caused her, Cook tends to present their domestic life as a settled, deeply fond, mutually beneficial arrangement. I’m sure that there’s realism in this portrait–a long marriage is never all amity or all its opposite. But somehow I thought that Cook didn’t manage to keep the mixedness of it in focus as well in this volume as she did in the last one.
Is this because it’s so hard to admit that Eleanor’s strengths came in part from being married to an impossible (in the marital sense) man? Cook did a great job in Volume 1 of demonstrating how flawed Franklin was as a husband; how he relinquished all control to his mother and absented himself from the brutal conflicts that resulted between ER and her mother-in-law. Grrrrrr. But it isn’t very satisfying to say that Eleanor Roosevelt became a great woman mostly by making the best of a bad business, is it?
I’m entirely fascinated by the Hickok material in this volume. You’re right that “Hick” is a sympathetic character–and in many ways a sad one. Cook is entirely hip to the irony of their relationship: Just as Eleanor was coming to the full command of her own powers, poor Hick (who quit the AP over the conflict of interest posed by her personal ties to ER) was pining away over having given up the career that had lifted her out of poverty and brought her every good thing in her life up to the time she met ER. It’s ugly to watch ER’s rather man-like collusion in this process; with her advantages of class and marriage, she couldn’t begin to imagine what Hick had sacrificed for her.
I didn’t find it paradoxical that Cook insists on the centrality of Eleanor’s lesbianism. And actually, “insists” is not the right word. What she does is assume the centrality of it, for the most part, and leave the reader to puzzle out what it means. I think Cook made quite a canny–and possibly political–decision to be so matter-of-fact about the lesbianism of Eleanor’s circle. It leaves us readers to grapple with our own reactions. (You mean the first lady was tooling around the U.S. on vacation in an open convertible with her lesbian lover? And she got away with it? Isn’t that kind of… wild??)
Some other things I’d like to touch on this week: 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? (See Barbara Bush.) And of course, the Clinton parallel … but we’ll need at least a whole day just for that. If Eleanor Roosevelt was a force for good, as I definitely believe, then why does Hillary Clinton drive me mad?
Best,
Marjorie
P.S.: A personal aside: Your allusion to Earl Browder fell wide of the polemical mark with me, because I actually lived next door to Earl Browder as a child. His son Bill was a professor in the Princeton math department, and his granddaughter Julie was my best friend. So I knew Browder as a somewhat gloomy but kind old gent who took a daily constitutional up the block to Nassau street, where he would buy me and Julie a package of Hostess cupcakes–the orange-flavored ones, with icing squiggles on top.
