The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

“Well, it’s almost all over,” Mildred Kilgore said in her slow Southern drawl. She sat down at the table in the Dahlias’ clubhouse kitchen. “I don’t mind saying that I, for one, am glad.”

Aunt Hetty Little came to the table with a pitcher of cold lemonade and began to fill the four glasses on the table. “All over?” She chuckled wryly. “Why, bless your heart, child, it’s just begun!”

Mildred was nearly forty, but Aunt Hetty was no spring chicken and felt qualified to call everyone “child,” especially when they were talking about presidential elections. At eighty, her memory of presidents went back to Abraham Lincoln, although she had only been able to cast her vote since Mr. Harding, twelve years before. “Can’t blame the mess in Washington on us women,” she liked to say. “That place was a mess long before we got the vote.”

“The nominating conventions are just the beginning,” Elizabeth Lacy said, agreeing with Aunt Hetty. She put her Dahlias’ club notebook on the table and sat down, taking a deep breath. The kitchen door was open and the sweet scent of honeysuckle filled the room, along with the evening song of a perky Carolina wren, perched in the catalpa tree just outside the window. “It’s a long time to the elections, although Mr. Moseley says he’s pretty sure that—”

“We all know what Mr. Moseley says, Liz,” Verna Tidwell put in dryly. She took a chair on the opposite side of the table. “He’s been angling for months to get that fellow Roosevelt on the ticket. I sure hope he doesn’t regret it. We all know Hoover. Nobody knows what FDR will do.”

Verna was tall and thin, with narrow lips, an olive complexion, and dark, searching eyes under unplucked (and thoroughly unfashionable) brows. She didn’t pay much attention to fashionable dressing, either. She had come to the meeting straight from her office in the Cypress County courthouse and was still dressed in her working clothes: a plain white cotton short-sleeved blouse and a belted navy gabardine skirt. But what Verna might lack in conventional prettiness, she more than made up for in smarts, which was why Lizzy Lacy liked her so much.

Lizzy reached for one of the pecan jumbles, an old-fashioned cookie that Aunt Hetty had brought. The previous week, the Democrats had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, on the fourth ballot, after a floor fight that just about wore all the delegates out. At least, that was according to the story in the Darling Dispatch. What Lizzy herself knew about politics wouldn’t fill a peanut shell. But for over a year, Mr. Moseley (her boss and the most prominent lawyer in Darling) had been working like a stubborn mule for Roosevelt, and she tried to keep up with what he was doing. She and Verna and several of their friends had got together in the diner after closing on Saturday night to listen to Mr. Roosevelt’s acceptance speech on the radio. The governor had actually chartered an airplane and flown all the way from Albany to Chicago to speak to the convention delegates. An airplane! That was a first for any presidential candidate.

Lizzy wasn’t sure how she felt about Governor Roosevelt. He had talked about the federal government’s responsibility to help people who needed to find work. But he’d been pretty vague about what he intended to do, except for promising a “new deal,” whatever that was. Some people thought they could guess, based on his plans for an old-age pension and unemployment insurance, which he had tried to push through the New York state legislature. But nobody knew for sure.

Lizzy was the kind of person who always liked to know as much as she could about what was going on, so she had asked Mr. Moseley for an explanation. But even he didn’t know what a “new deal” was, at least, not specifically.

“It’s something the Brain Trust cooked up,” he said. When she asked what a “brain trust” was, he’d just laughed. “You might call it a kitchen cabinet,” he replied, which left her even more mystified—until he had handed her the third volume of James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson. A scrap of paper marked page 338, where she read about the men who were “supposed to have most of the president’s ear and confidence.” The kitchen cabinet, she imagined, got together over cigars and coffee (or something stronger) to cook up policy.