Eleanor by David Michaelis

Author:David Michaelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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FOR SIXTY-FIVE YEARS THE U.S. Congress, having abolished local government in the federal city in 1874, had ruled over local municipal affairs through a presidentially appointed three-member Board of Commissioners.

At St. Elizabeth’s after the war, Eleanor had learned the full range of congressional oversight applied by the district commissioners to shell-shocked and other “convalescents.” From the White House in 1932, she had continued to probe conditions in Washington’s long-term welfare facilities and penal institutions, and had brought to light abuses to impoverished women, the indigent elderly, and children of the state. Yet Eleanor was not invited to testify before any congressional subcommittee—no president’s wife ever had been. The country’s foremost female lay figure was not given a voice in a subcommittee investigating welfare institutions in the nation’s capital for another three years, when at last Eleanor strode into the old House Office Building, entered the marble caucus room, and took the witness chair opposite Representative Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., father of the future Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

As late as 1936 most of the press still viewed what Mrs. Roosevelt did as “breezing about.”53 Joseph Mitchell, filing a three-part series to the World-Telegram in May 1935, was one of the few reporters outside the White House pool who recognized Eleanor as “one of the most expert investigators in a nation of investigators.”54

But when it came to Washington’s penal institutions—the District Jail, the Workhouse and Reformatory at Occoquan, and the Industrial Home School for “backward, truant, and delinquent” boys55—the notion of inspections by a first lady was utterly foreign. Inspections by anybody, for that matter, rarely happened at all. The district commissioners more often looked the other way, appointing a committee to look into matters only if the local press began to circulate rumors about daily inmate escapes, interpersonal violence, or corrupt management.56

Eleanor went ahead and made her own appointments and drove herself to the Blue Plains Home for the Aged and Infirm, the Home for Impoverished Women, the Children’s Receiving Home, and the Industrial Home school for boys. Received cordially and shown around by the head of the facility, she would stubbornly go off tour, poking around until she saw with her own eyes that an overcrowded prison camp populated almost entirely by African American boys served meal after meal of stone-cold, inedible food.

No matter how often she inspected the District of Columbia’s welfare and penal institutions, bringing her report directly back to the White House, she never failed to be shocked how one horror or another would almost always emerge in an utterly mundane way.57

Driving with her brother Hall out North Capitol Street one morning in January 1937, the mere sight of the District Jail’s caged windows started her imagining what nights must be like inside, “with all that closely packed humanity thinking no very happy thoughts.”58

The superintendent, Thomas M. Rives, led the tall Roosevelts through the tight high-ceilinged corridor that ran the length of the jail, until they reached the prisoners’ mess hall, a narrow birdcage with tall barred windows in the South Wing.

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