Free First Ladies by Margaret Truman Page A

But the Alley Bill was stalled in Congress by segregationists and obstructionists. Inevitably,in the summer of 1914, Ellen Wilson slipped away. Her husband, frantic with anxiety and grief, barely left her bedside, in spite of the ominous war clouds that were gathering in Europe.
    On the morning of August 6, it was apparent that Ellen would live only a few more days, perhaps only a few hours. She reached out for Woodrow’s hand and whispered: “I would go away more peacefully if my Alley Bill was passed by Congress.” Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, rushed to the Capitol with this request, and the Senate passed the bill on the spot. The House of Representatives made a solemn promise to pass it the next day. Tumulty dashed back to the White House with the news. Less than an hour later, Ellen Wilson smiled at her husband and daughters and died.
    I would be exaggerating if I said Ellen Wilson started a mass movement. But one woman watched and remembered that a First Lady could back causes that subtly—and perhaps not so subtly—opposed the policies of her husband’s administration. The shy, plain wife of Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy, she was much too busy raising five children and playing adoring second fiddle to her handsome husband to imagine herself presiding at the White House. But Eleanor Roosevelt was a very perceptive woman. She undoubtedly grasped the inner meaning of Ellen Wilson’s quiet crusade.

Chapter 5
    —
THE LOST
COMPANION
    T HE W HITE H OUSE HAS SEEN ITS SHARE OF COMPLEX MARRIAGES, BUT none has been quite as complicated as Eleanor Roosevelt’s union with Franklin D. Roosevelt. On one level they loved—or at least esteemed—each other. Their letters are addressed to “Dearest Babs” and “Dearest Franklin.” Uninitiated readers would assume they were exchanged between deeply affectionate spouses—and to some extent they would be right. But initiates knew that beneath this veneer of affection was a gulf of simmering anger which frequently boiled up as exasperation throughout their White House years and more often manifested itself in Eleanor’s prolonged absences.
    Mrs. Roosevelt had the same mildly panicked reaction as other First Ladies when her husband was elected President of a Depression-racked America in 1932. In her case, she feared she would be reduced to a ceremonial figure—a podium person—by the hoary weight of tradition. One story has her weeping bitter tears on election night and exclaiming: “Now I’ll have no identity.”
    She swiftly shook off the podium tradition and proceeded to reinvent the job on her own terms. Claiming that her wheelchair-bound husband, crippled by polio, needed her as his eyes and ears, hands and feet, she became the most ubiquitous First Lady in history. She hurtled around the country, inspecting everything from prisons to coal mines, speaking in Boston one night and Des Moines the next and Denver the next, often taking stands on the issues of the day that left the President’s spokesmen red faced and floundering.
    I am sometimes amazed by how many otherwise reliable historians accept FDR’s crippled state as the explanation for Eleanor Roosevelt’s hyperactivity. Every President, not merely FDR, stayed pretty close to the White House until the airplane brought almost instant mobility. The White House is, after all, the President’s office
and his
home. The claim also suggests that, because he was confined to a wheelchair, FDR was
unable to
leave the White House, when we know he was one of the great campaigners of the twentieth century. Some of his most famous speeches were delivered in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and other bastions of the Democratic Party.
    No, Eleanor Roosevelt left the White House repeatedly because she was not happy there. She was not happy in any house with her husband. Moreover, she felt free to differ with her husband’s positions on a wide range of issues because she saw herself as something other than a