George V (Samuel West) pushing Roosevelt’s (Bill Murray) wheelchair into the library where they can talk freely
Same night, Daisy (Laura Linney) smoking freely by small cottage on the grounds of Hyde Park
Dear friends and readers,
Until I read the reviews which came out around the time this film was released, this past Christmas (yes I’m 7 months late, but then this is better than my usual 10-20 years), I was going to tell of how much I enjoyed the movie the first time I watched it around 1 in the morning so perhaps in the mood for a sort of odd “midsummer night’s dream” about real people escaping the world of day. Then how I grew to dislike it as I considered all it had left out about the importance, greatness, nobility of the finest, best president the US has ever had bar none, his decent associates, and listened to the tasteless and hypocritical voice-over commentary of the film-makers. And then how I reversed again upon third viewing, again at 1 in the morning (gentle reader it’s been so hot here), realizing its appeal lies is that it’s traditional costume drama of the BBC type done for film adaptations with a quirky difference. It is a genuine defense of unconventionality; of people with what’s called and in the case of Roosevelt certainly was after polio disabilities. Its center is a spinster with little ambition.
Love-making in a flowered field — Daisy also begins to smoke in this scene
So, quirky, but not so much because of the female narrator whose marginalized kindly, apolitical, private point of view permeates the film: that’s par for the course in these sort of films. They often have such women only they are usually made beautiful and married by the end. The usual nostalgia there is (including the use of film taken from a historical picnic at the time which provides the film’s penultimate scene), alluring landscapes, wistful light music, the leisurely pace, the complex psychology of some of the characters, multi- and parallel stories. Rather it’s quirky because of its self-deprecating non-solemn or off-hand presentation of the unconventional, the disabled, women no one wants (but Roosevelt it seems), the usual slice of life angle from the upper class (Hyde Park house is a sort of Downton Abbey, with several extensive staffs, steward, butler, man to carry the president when needed), one presented so wryly and combined with an important political reconciliation (this was the first visit of an English king to an American president).
Daisy and Missy (Elizabeth Marvel) as friends playing cards, fringe hangers-on — the happy ending
The quirkiness is also in presenting disabilities (a stutterer, cripple), spinsters (Missy LeLand is as much a spinster as Daisy Suckley), and an unconventional marriage (FDR and Eleanor’s) as not needing to be normalized. There is none of this heroic overcoming we had in King’s Speech, no great win as in Lincoln, the stuttering and bigotry (the butler is simply let go for not being willing to allow black men on his staff in the kitchen) and unromantic sexual habits go on.
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As in a novel the opening sentence is telling so in a movie the opening still: we begin and end with Daisy’s voice and here she is from the back answering a phone call to come help cheer the president
It was the second thought, the doubts I was going to emphasize. This is one of the cases where the over-voice commentary on the DVD is worse than a waste of time: Roger Michell and his buddies talked false hype: continual
self-regarding stories about “the stars,” silly stories about Roosevelt; if the film-makers understood anything of the film techniques they were using (which they surely did) it was the last thing they were going to discuss. What do they think people listen to commentaries for? To be given a commercial in disguise. And the feature was not a feature but a trailer, which like most trailers distorted and dumb-downed the movie to make it appeal to a larger audience many of whom would not like this movie. I was particularly offended with their salacious references to the “hand-job” Daisy is said to give FDR in the film, and thought they had handed the public a deliberately degrading and debased way of viewing the man responsible for the few social ameliorations US people enjoy today and whose laws until they were repealed controlled the rapacious banks.
I thought one typical remark in the commentary revealing. The film-maker apologized for cutting the scenes of Blake Ritson as Johnson (luxury casting here), the butler who refuses to work with black men whom Eleanor has hired.
Scene filmed from odd angle, Eleanor (Olivia Williams), president’s mother (Elizabeth Wilson) faced by Johnson (Blake Ritson) and other staff, two black men from the back
He says it’s them or me. Eleanor says it’s you and Ritson as butler is fired. All cut — you can view it in the DVD’s deleted scenes. No explanation from Michell beyond how sorry he was to lose Ritson’s performance. This is a part of the lavish flattery of these features for all the people participating in the film and pretense of happy times for all doing the film seen together with no rivalry (it seems). I think they cut it because it lacked the semi-humor with which everything else was dramatized.
I know FDR was the greatest (best, most decent, unbeatable as to programs) president the US ever had (bar none), though I’ve never sat down and read a full-length book about FDR or Eleanor — only what essays have come my way in periodicals we get in the house. I’ve the highest respect for Eleanor — and feminist avante la lettre as to her expressed points of view — I’ve never even read her memoir which I’ve had in my house for donkey’s years. I don’t know which is the best and don’t know where to ask, and know what is written about him is so skewed — during his 4 terms (my father used to say) from the newspapers you’d think he was the most hated man in the US and each election it was presented as astounding that he’d won again and big. His one mistake (driven to it, partly by illness) was to give up Wallace as his vice-president in that last term. History might have been different. I’m telling myself I’ll find out the best book and get to that memoir. I’m no “Americanist” — just don’t read much American literature though most of the books as a child and young woman without trying were US authors and types. I do like American gothic.
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But then I read the reviews and realized the film was dissed as “imbecilic” and idiotic because it told the story from Daisy Suckley’s, an obscure woman’s point of view: Daisy has “a termite’s view of history” said one reviewer. Who could care about her? I love that it was as much a heroine’s movie as say Frances Ha or an Austen film.
Daisy (Laura Linney) appealing to and FDR (Bill Murray) reciprocating affection
A film without great stirring events and resolutions offended reviewers: it wasn’t going anywhere, had no point (like Lincoln). (None of the adulterers is punished like Anna Karenina [another Xmas movie], except if you think being told that while FDR shared his estate with Missy he did not visit her in the hospital when she felt fatally ill.) Eleanor (who did keep a second house) looked dowdy! (but she did in life). Those who recognized the film’s genre complained about what was the point: its discomfort, the unease. I agree a sceptical harder view of who these individuals were and why they hooked up (more characters should have been individualized) would have improved it (see Peter Bradshaw) — there were more serpents in this garden than the disabilities never discussed.
There is something odd in this film, but no one asks what it is: why did Nelson choose the incident of the king and queen’s visits (he adds it onto Daisy’s diaries) to show Roosevelt’s astuteness and humanity? it’s not only singularly devoid of hard mean politicking, war enter only through the king’s pity for the children in Spain bombed out of existence, and it does focus on the most privileged pair in the UK, partly trivializing them too, though Elizabeth’s (Olivia Coleman) needling George (Samuel West) with pointed references to his more suave brother, Edward VIII (who vacated the throne) seemed not improbable. The film is explicitly, consciously a defense of keeping secret the private lives of these politicians – that can be used by conservatives to cover up the their personal uses of their offices, I see that, but ti also allowed a crippled man to be president greatly. Should people’s sex lives and vulnerabilities be exposed when its their economic and social ideologies that count? In this film the characters have freedom in private.
Roosvelt catching himself with his hand
Its central scene is where the president comforts the king for his stuttering by showing himself lurching along a desk as a crippled man to reach his cigarettes. And its climax occurs when Daisy discovers the president is having an affair with Missy as well — in that cottage she thought he had set up for her. And how the two women then became close friends, buddies in a car together.
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So instead I will emphasize how the film does not enforce normalcy. How it shows people behave irrationally: that the British King should eat an American hot dog as a great symbolic act is silly, and yet that is what happens in life. How Daisy remained the spinster around the place, the president’s friend except to those in the know. Daisy’s point of view is good-natured, open, tolerant, caring about others (her aunt played by Eleanor Bron who also lurches) as she hopes to be cared for,
and this wins me over.
As with The King’s Speech, I felt sorry for the king while his character played so adeptly and slightly comically by Samuel West is not paid enough attention to. He makes the film fun. I liked his jokes (lame as they were) when the poor servants dropped those trays heavy with dishes and food.
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And the performances were very good. My view of Laura Linney has changed: I’d hitherto only seen her enacting that godawful introduction to Masterpiece theater where she is dressed in a ludicrous trussed-up sexual way. Here she is a Fanny Price who gets to stay on, everyone’s confidante.
As one commenter said, it’s a fine summer romp that I recommend. A beautiful movie.
The president asks Daisy how does she like the landscape; she says very well.
And then sit down and read a good book on FDR, Eleanor, Henry Wallace, the political, economic and social worlds of the later 1930s. Yes we would have learned more to have Frances Perkins in the film (and political associates of FDR), but that and Eleanor’s politics require a separate documentary or biopic. Due to some good talk on Trollope19thCStudies I’ve ordered Kirsten Downey’s book on Frances Perkins. Also Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley, ed Geoffrey Ward — Daisy’s diaries and private papers (nowadays very cheap), and Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (ditto).
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary
of Labor and His Moral Conscience
By Kirstin Downey
New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009, 480 pp., $35.00, hardcover
The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression would have been much worse if Frances Perkins, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in the US cabinet, had not been there to push, prod, and cajole Roosevelt into doing the right thing. Kirsten Downey’s exciting, fast-paced biography makes it clear that FDR depended on
Perkins’s formidable legislative skills, her ability to bring opposing sides to the table, and her near infallible insight into people’s characters.
Reading about Perkins’s heroic contributions, I kept wondering why her story is being told only now, nearly 65 years since she stepped down from her twelve-year, record-setting stint as secretary of labor. Although Perkins engineered many of the most important New Deal victories, her feminist sensibilities relegated her to the sidelines. She ranked social justice above personal fame and glory. From 1933 until 1945, she was every
bit as powerful as the men around FDR. She was so effective, in fact, that many in Congress, the labor movement, and various cabinet offices resented her presence. Perkins’s life is an object lesson in what women — Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and even Sarah Palin – -endure in the rock-’em-sock-’em chauvinistic dust-up of national politics.
Fanny Perkins was born on April 10, 1880, and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, the oldest daughter in a conservative New England family. She attended Mount Holyoke College, where she was impressed by her course in US economic history. The students visited factories, observed working conditions, and saw first hand how long hours, low pay, child labor, and unsafe conditions undermined the lives of workers.
After graduating in 1902, Perkins, a progressive and woman suffragist, did not want to return to her parents’ Massachusetts home or join debutante society. By 1909, after a brief stint in Chicago working at Hull-House, where she learned about Jane Addams’s progressive interventionist theory of social work, she was living in Greenwich Village, socializing with the artistic avant garde, earning kudos among her suffragist peers for her
oratorical skills, and building the network of friends and associates to whom she would later turn whenever she needed behind-the-scenes help. An ardent supporter of votes for women and the illegal “family limitation movement,” Perkins knew full well where her politics led: “feminism means revolution and I am a revolutionist.” Determined to create social change, she was pleased to land a job with the National Consumer’s League in New
York City, whose mission, in the words of the league founder Florence Kelley, was to “investigate, record, agitate.” Perkins’s particular brief was bakers’ working conditions, women’s long hours and low wages, child labor, and workplace fire hazards. These kinds of issues remained front and center throughout her career.
On March 25, 1911, Perkins was having tea with friends in an elegant Greenwich Village townhouse just off Washington Square Park when the Triangle fire broke out. The tragedy — in which 146 factory workers at the Triangle Waist Company, most of them young women, died–taught Perkinsthree lessons that shaped her approach to social welfare for the rest of her life. First, she saw that little would change if reformers bet that the powerful would voluntarily improve poor people’s working and living
conditions. Perkins became a champion of government regulation of the conditions in shops, factories, mines, and farms, and pressed for legislation throughout the 1920s.
Second, she learned that no matter how horrible the event, a carefully orchestrated response to it could advance progressive causes. After the Triangle fire, Perkins took the political lead in organizing for stricter workplace fire laws. She enlisted key New Yorkers to speak out against the danger of sweatshops. Throughout her life, she would draw on friends, associates, and friends of friends to call public attention to pressing
problems that would otherwise have been invisible. Once the problems were apparent, she created alliances to pass remediating legislation.
Finally, Perkins helped to create “a totally new kind of government entity — the New York State Factory Investigating Committee — a legislative panel empowered to investigate questionable working conditions around the state and to recommend legislative remedies.” It would be impossible to list even half the commissions on which Perkins served and equally difficult to list those she called into being. Throughout her life she made
sure that talented people participated in governmental investigations. She also made sure that politicians knew she was paying attention, frequently presenting awards to states and cities that implemented committee recommendations.
A regular in Albany, Perkins became well-known in New York political circles. When Roosevelt was elected governor in 1928, Perkins was the obvious candidate to head the state’s Department of Labor. She worked closely with Governor Roosevelt, traveling to dozens of cities and towns to traveling to dozens of cities and towns to mediate volatile industrial disputes. During this period, she remade herself. She stopped using the name Fanny, which could lead to bad jokes; she dropped two years from her age; and she consciously assumed such a somber, dowdy persona that she became known as “Ma Perkins.” Although she’d been married since 1913, she never changed her name, not even after the
birth of her daughter.
Downey does a wonderful job of handling previously unknown facts about Perkins’s private life. Few of her contemporaries were aware of her husband’s mental illnesses, and fewer still of the breakdowns suffered by her daughter Suzanna. Perkins always hid the fact that she was essentially a single mother. Playing a significant role in state and national politics, she knew how important it was to keep her private life under wraps.
Republicans and conservative Democrats would have been happy to use her nontraditional family arrangement to cast aspersions on her character and undermine her policy recommendations.
Downey’s virtuoso use of primary materials shows readers how the I New Deal actually came about. The most significant legislation of the era, such as the 1935 Social Security Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, was passed because of her support, guidance, and strategic maneuvering. For example, FDR wanted a draft of the Social Security Act by Christmas 1934. As the deadline approached, the 23-member committee of cabinet members,
pension experts, and others began squabbling. The press caught wind of the bickering and reported that legislative support for the act was dying. A night or two before Christmas, Perkins called the committee members to a meeting in her home. “She led them into the dining room, placed a large bottle of Scotch on the table, and told them no one would leave until the work was done.” As a result, the president presented a bill to Congress in
January 1935.
Then, key senators and representatives wavered in their support. The American Medical Association, which no one could ever accuse of being a frontrunner in the race to serve the sick and needy, mobilized such intense opposition against government intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship that the committee, joined by FDR, agreed to remove every provision for healthcare from the bill. Southerners threatened to withhold support unless racist exclusions were applied to agricultural and domestic workers. Meanwhile the National Association of Manufacturers called the
bill “the ultimate socialist control of life and industry.” Still,
Perkinspressed forward, finally achieving congressional approval of the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935:2010 is the 75th anniversary of this momentous legislation.
It’s impossible not to draw the parallels between Perkins’s experience with healthcare and the debacle we face today. Indeed, President Obama, addressing a joint session of Congress last August noted, “A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943.” That Dingell’s bill was not introduced in 1935 is testimony to how much things haven’t changed. Today, corporations continue to block policies that would improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Without a federal
mandate for healthcare provision, enterprises that offer their workers health insurance incur higher costs, and their returns suffer. Entire communities collapse as capital leaves, seeking opportunities for higher profit. Deindustrialization, high unemployment, and soaring inequality are the result.
New Deal historians would be rich if they had a dollar for every person who claimed responsibility for creating Social Security. Oddly, few credit Perkins. But in the words of Maurine Milliner, assistant to New York Senator Robert E Wagner, one of the first members of the Social Security Board, “The one person, in my opinion, above all others who was responsible for there being a Social Security program in the early 1930s was Frances Perkins.” According to then Solicitor of Labor Charles E. Wyzanski, Perkins “virtually forced the president to have a Social Security program.”
Perkins learned from Wagner that policies concerning wages, hours, and working conditions had to be enacted at the national rather than the state level; otherwise there was nothing to prevent a “race to the bottom” in which businesses would pack up and head to the least restrictive areas. His insight came into play repeatedly, as new legislation regarding unions,
unemployment compensation, and other social programs came up for
congressional consideration. To this day we suffer from the effects of conservative victories in this battle. Each state has its own unemployment compensation program, welfare eligibility rules, and system for funding public education.
The resulting patchwork means that Americans face far more economic insecurity than do citizens of other rich industrial nations. US citizens have no guaranteed minimum income, no assurance that they will get the healthcare they need, and little public housing. The income supports the government provides to help families in poverty would be a joke if the problem were not so serious. Perkins’s goal was not socialism, and she did not trust or like Communists. Rather, her goal was national legislation to ensure that no one in the US would live with the shame associated with poverty, hunger, and prolonged joblessness.
Downey stresses the close personal bond between Perkins and FDR. Noting that their friendship was completely outside the usual pattern of male-female relationships, she points out that many of Perkins’s colleagues resented her easy, spontaneous access to the president. Although Perkins”thought she had successfully adopted male patterns of communicating … she still couldn’t suit the men,” Downey says. Sometimes Perkins’s fellow cabinet members passed each other notes while she was speaking; their
resentments were not terribly well-concealed. At one point, when
Perkinsducked in to talk to FDR, she realized she’d stepped on
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s toes. As she left the president’s office, Ickes was waiting for her outside the door, fuming. When Perkins and Ickes next met, Perkin went out of her way to be friendly to him. Of her conciliatory gesture, Ickes later noted, “There is something to the old adage, ‘a woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be.'” By 1939 Perkins has so irritated male colleagues and become the object of so much vitriol in the press that Congress took the highly unusual step of initiating impeachment proceedings against her. Charges centered on her support for Harry Bridges, the leader of the successful San Francisco general strike. The investigation eventually folded, but the message was clear: “woman, watch your back.”
Generally, though, Perkins was so adept at flying under the radar that few of her most important accomplishments were ever noticed. She gave the order to desegregate the Department of Labor’s cafeterias, making them the first integrated eating-places in the nation’s capital. Unlike many in the administration, she took the Nazi threat seriously. Early on, she used the authority of her department to help thousands of Jews escape from Germany. She single-handedly persuaded FDR to bring the US into the International Labor Organization (ILO) and then, in 1940, when ILO leaders faced certain death at Nazi hands, Perkins helped them escape from Geneva, Switzerland. She never took public credit for any of this.
Downey’s feminist biography revises the perceived pecking order of the personalities of the New Deal. Previous discussions of Perkins’s life do little more than note that she was the first woman to hold a cabinet position, and most historians have focused on the men. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his three-volume, 2,000-page, 2003 biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mentions Frances Perkins 123 times. William Leuchetenburg, another acclaimed New Deal historian, mentions her just sixteen times in his 1997 classic, The FDR
Years (1997) and 25 times in his recent FDR and the New Deal (2009). In The Defining Moment (2007), Jonathan Alter mentions Perkins 42 times. But the New Deal sexist-history prize goes to Anthony Badger. His 224-page book FDR, the First Hundred Days (2008), mentions Perkins all of nine times. Had earlier historians of the New Deal not been so biased in their work
Perkins would likely have had a much easier post-Washington career. Instead, after her cabinet service, she was very nearly penniless.
Thank you, Kirstin Downey, for writing this biography and correcting major errors in the historical record. The book is a must read for everyone interested in progressive social change in the US. We now know that Perkins played an important role in every aspect of the New Deal. Downey
demonstrates that without Perkins’s skilled leadership, few of the programs we take for granted today would have made it through an often unwilling and hostile Congress. In short, the little bit of economic security provided by New Deal reforms — what few programs there are to protect citizens from economic calamity and provide some check on the ability of the powerful to exploit the rest of us–owe their existence to the tireless efforts of
Madame Secretary, Frances Perkins.
Downey’s work was hindered by the fact that the Perkins papers are not gathered together in any one spot. Important holdings are scattered throughout various archives and in private hands, and few of the existing collections have proper finding guides. The newly created Frances PerkinsCenter, located on the grounds of the Brick House, the 55-acre Perkins-family home in Damariscotta, Maine, is bringing these collections and related artifacts together. The center will preserve and advance the pioneering social-justice legacy of the feminist “she-ro,” Frances Perkins.
Susan Feiner is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Economics at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She is a frequent contributor to Women’s Enews and On The Issues.
Feiner, Susan. “The revolutionist.” *The Women’s Review of Books* Nov.-Dec.
From Susan H: ” You might have enjoyed (as I did, hugely) a recent play written and performed by Alison Skilbeck, Mrs Roosevelt Flies to London. http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/38713/rada-festival-another-life-mrs-roosevelt There were only four performances, and unfortunately I don’t know when or where others may be given.
Diane K: I thought it a great romp too. Bill Whatsisname was a terrific FDR. He was the hero of all four of my grandparents, and the reason today that I have had five Scotties. He was’t so great on Central America, I gotta say. If you have never visited Hyde Park, you must, and then while there, stay overnight and eat once or twice (or three times) at the CIA– by which I mean the Culinary Institute and not Central Intelligence.
Me: I know that like all presidents he did have to compromise and he was a man of his time too. I’ve never been to Hyde Park on the Hudson. I’ll add it to my desired places to see. It’s very pretty upper New York State.
Diane: Eleanor’s cottage is worth the trip in itself; our tour guide was a (very) elderly woman who showed us a photo of Eleanor at her daughter’s confirmation at the church they attended together. And then there is the Roosevelt home and the library and the grounds. Lots of photos and stories!
Interesting review! I thought the movie was odd overall, yet not as bad as it was called after the release.
I’m going to leave this pretty short this time though. I keep the Blake Ritson fanblog (blake-ritson-love.tumblr.com). Do you have the full deleted scene with the butler aka. Blake and the black men? I’d be interested to see and share it via my blog. Us Blake fans really are after all the material 🙂
Not as bad as it was called. This is faint praise indeed.
Sorry to say I don’t have a YouTube, but I do have some of the stills. I am going away for a day and one half; come back and I’ll send you what I’ve captured. I like Ritson. He was a effective Edmund Bertram in 2007 MP (Maggie Wadey scripted). He reminds me of Jonnny Lee Miller in typology: Miller was a similar Edmund Bertram in 1999 (Rozema’s MP). They were both together in Sandy Welch’s 2009 Emma, then Miller as Mr Knightley and Ritson as Mr Elton.
On Closest Companion: Daisy & FDR were friendly in the 1920s; he invited her to the 1st inauguration in 1933; the friendship changed is said to have deepened (turned into erotic romance too?) in September 1935. For years she was always in his entourage; friends with all those who were part of his personal group. In 1991 when she died her relatives found under Daisy’s bed a battered black suitcase containing years of diaries and letters, 38 in FDR’s own hand, revealing their long-term relationship. Some of these are censured, a lot has been lost. But what is there is a goldmine of information about daily life in the FDR private world, and FDR confided in Daisy in the last year’s of his life. Fala was her gift and she walked this Scottie dog regularly.
Ward’s book is a common type: a male scholar puts together the life-writing papers of a woman who never published them in her life time.
E.M.