Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One, 1884-1933

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

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Essays and Criticism

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To qualify as a feminist heroine a woman must meet three tests. She must have a successful career ‘‘in her own right’’; she must be ‘‘assertive and aggressive’’; and she must have a pre-, extra-, or nonmarital sex life, preferably ambidextrous.

What to do with Poor Nell, who did not even need to go through the trauma of changing her maiden name? Poor Nell, nicknamed ‘‘Granny’’ as a child and ‘‘Patient Griselda’’ as a young wife, who slept on the doormat rather than wake the servants. Poor Nell, whose sons claimed she didn’t know what a lesbian was, whose daughter said she regarded marital relations as ‘‘an ordeal to be borne,’’ and whose cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, present at the doormat incident, remembered her ‘‘rising like a string bean that had been raised in a cellar.’’

Women’s Studies professor Blanche Wiesen Cook blames this politically incorrect image of ER on stereotypes, such as the one that sets the tone of this book: ‘‘White, Protestant, aristocratic, and ‘unattractive’ women are not supposed to flourish in the political arena, and are not presumed to have sex or independently passionate interests.’’

Unliberated women lock their bedroom doors and go without sex to punish straying husbands, but feminist heroines do not, so we must revise our assumptions about the aftermath of FDR’s dalliance with Lucy Mercer. ‘‘Was there anything left between them? Was there love? Could there be trust? Could they start over? Might they even try?’’

Yes, Miss Cook says, they did. She is sure of it, because the only evidence for a post-Lucy sexless marriage comes from daughter Anna and sons James and Elliott, who said their parents stopped sleeping together: ‘‘But children are unreliable sources concerning their parents’ sexuality, and are particularly vulnerable to the historical stereotype that conjures up the frigid mother and the deprived father.’’

Age does not wither feminist heroines, so at 45 ER had an affair with 32-year-old Earl Miller, the New York State trooper who served as her bodyguard during FDR’s governorship. Miss Cook can’t prove it because somebody burned their letters— she knows not who, but she knows why. ‘‘There are two stereotypes at play here: frumpy older women do not have sex—because they cannot; aristocratic women do not—because they will not.’’ She is sure ER did, however, and bolsters her contention by quoting James Roosevelt, one of those unreliable child sources she dismissed earlier, who wrote: ‘‘I believe there may have been one real romance in mother’s life outside of marriage. Mother may have had an affair with Earl Miller.’’

ER certainly knew what a lesbian was because she had an ‘‘inevitable and undeniable’’ affair with AP reporter Lorena Hickok, a victim of ‘‘hateful stereotypes’’ due to her homeliness. Hick had already had an affair with contralto Ernestine Schumann- Heink, a victim of the fat-opera-singer stereotype, whose favorite encore was Sapphische Ode.

Surviving letters between ER and Hick prove they went to bed, Miss Cook insists, ‘‘although Hickok typed, edited, and then burned the originals of ER’s letters between 1932 and 1933,’’ when the alleged affair was at its height. Having said that, Miss Cook blithely ignores the possibility that the feverishly romantic Hick might have ‘‘retyped’’ the affair into being. Certainly a number of phrases simply don’t sound like ER. The ‘‘Oh! Darling!’’ passages and maudlin love poems are tasteless enough, but what really rouses suspicions is a phrase that reeks of middle-class fallen archness: ‘‘So endeth my first Sunday.’’

Lesbianism is often on the author’s mind and she goes out of her way to find it, even hinting that Elliott Roosevelt’s...

(This entire section contains 1006 words.)

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sister—ER’s Aunt Corinne— had some sort of passionate interlude with her brother’s mistress, to whom she wrote overheated poems that ER kept and cherished. This is supposed to prove how worldly ER was on the subject, but in case we still don’t get it, we are told that ER was the model for a character inOlivia, a lesbian schoolgirl novel by her old classmate, Dorothy Strachey.

Miss Cook goes positively ga-ga when she describes ER’s lesbian friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. Rich liberal activists who held court in Greenwich Village, they ‘‘celebrated excellence in food and champagne, art and conversation. They were passionate about music and theater. Cut flowers in great profusion decorated their homes in the city and the country. Their candle-lit dinners were formal, splendidly served, and spiced by controversy.’’ Less elegant were carpenter Nancy Cook and teacher Marion Dickerman, whom a jealous ER froze out when FDR demonstrated that he could turn even a lesbian into a handmaiden. As Miss Dickerman later recalled: ‘‘Never in my life have I met so utterly charming a man’’; it seemed to her ‘‘only right and natural that people should devote themselves heart and soul to him and his career.’’

What the author doesn’t know she manages to suggest without violating the rules of scholarly research. While the orphaned adolescent ER was living with her father’s family, ‘‘three strong, very protective locks were installed on the door of her room. Was she ever hurt or abused? Did Uncle Vallie or Uncle Eddie ever actually get into her room? What kind of battle ensued?’’ Thus, Miss Cook plants the idea of rape when all she really knows is that the uncles were such reeling drunks that they easily could have entered the wrong room by mistake.

Despite Miss Cook’s efforts to paint ER as a political titan, she still comes across as one of those freelance female activists, with a finger in every agenda, that Nightline calls on whenever Something Happens. The real towering female figure here, as in every Roosevelt book, is Sara Delano, whom even this author treats with grudging admiration. The disappearance of full-sailed grandes dames has left a void in democracy’s heart that mere assertive feminists can never fill.

Source: Florence King, ‘‘In Bed with Mrs. Roosevelt,’’ in National Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 12, June 22, 1995, pp. 51–53.

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