Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [44]
The signs of suffering and want were everywhere. As the nation’s transportation hub, Chicago attracted thousands of transients to its already siz-able stable of indigents and unemployed; throngs of uprooted men and women descended upon the city hoping for work and lodging, but they found only breadlines and cardboard shacks. By 1930 a shantytown had appeared at the very edge of the Loop on Randolph Street. Its residents named it ‘Hooverville’ and its streets ‘Prosperity Road,’ ‘Hard Times Avenue,’ and ‘Easy Street.’ The relief agencies strained to meet the demand for shelter—they used asylums, poorhouses, and veterans homes to house the needy—but like all departments of city government, they were ill prepared to deal with such large-scale misery.”4
By 1932 the unemployment rate had hit 40 percent, and 130,000
families were on relief. In April 1933, the month Edith’s friend Ed Kelly became mayor, fourteen thousand schoolteachers, who hadn’t been paid for months, stormed the banks in the downtown financial district; the police repelled them with tear gas, and hundreds were arrested. A few days later, twenty thousand public high school students staged a one-day strike in support of their desperate teachers.5
None of this affected Nancy, however, who was completely shielded from any sign of this upheaval and suffering. Her entire day-to-day life took place within a twelve-block cocoon surrounding the grand apartment 7 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House buildings of East Lake Shore Drive, where the Davises lived from 1932 on.
Passavant Hospital, where Loyal Davis worked, was six blocks south, and it catered to the rich—patients’ meals were served on linen tablecloths with china and silver.6 And while Edith did a lot of charity work, it was more about raising money than ladling out soup to bums.
Every year for Easter vacation, beginning in 1930, Edith and Loyal took Nancy to the posh Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale. Nancy spent eight weeks of every summer until she was fourteen at Camp Kechuwa—“darling” in Sioux—in Michigamme, Michigan. In an early letter to Loyal, she wrote: “Please excuse my writing. It is hard to write sitting up in bed. I think I told mother that I passed my red cap. So I am working on my green cap now. Will you please tell mother that I wove a rug for the guest bathroom. How do you like my book plates that I made?
I hope you like them. I passed a safety test for canoeing so I can go out in a canoe alone. I have learned how to paddle. Are you and mother coming down to see me? I hope so. Doctor Loyal, there were a lot of girls from school that come here that I know so I know more than I thought. I miss you and mother a lot. Love, your daughter Nancy.”7
From the time Nancy was ten in 1931 until she graduated in 1939, she attended the Girls Latin School, set in the heart of the Gold Coast at 59 East Scott Street. The Latin School of Chicago had been established in 1888 by newly rich Gilded Age parents who wanted their children to have a classical education. (Girls were admitted in 1896; Boys and Girls Latin became separate but associated schools in 1913.) In the years Nancy attended, Girls Latin was run by a strict New England spinster whom everyone addressed as Miss Singleton. The small student body, with no more than twenty girls in each class, was extremely homogeneous. “I’d say Protestant mostly,” said Nancy’s friend Jean Wescott Marshall, whose father was a corporate lawyer.
“What percentage of the parents were Republican?” I asked. “Pretty much all.” Most of these families lived on the Near North Side or in nearby Lake-view, another upper-class enclave. Were their daughters aware that there was a Depression going on? “We were told to turn out the lights,” Marshall said. “That was about it. Isn’t that awful?”8
“Girls Latin was a very conservative school,” said China Ibsen Oughton, who was in the class behind Nancy’s. “Academically it was very good. I don’t know if I’d want to use the word ‘best,’ but it