Feeling irritable, Roosevelt decided at week’s end, November 13, to take the overnight train to Hyde Park. Though he had to be back in Washington early Monday morning, he knew, with characteristic clearness, that sleeping in his old bedroom would soothe him, as it always did. Accompanied by Harry and Louise Hopkins and Princess Martha, he spent thirty-six hours relaxing over breakfast, talking by the fire, and calling on his cousin Laura Delano, who was convalescing from pneumonia. Despite the frosty temperatures in the Hudson Valley that weekend, he found what he was looking for—warmth, security, and peace of mind.
Returning to Washington with a clear head, he agreed to issue a clarifying statement to the press which removed much of the sting of the criticism. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements for the time being,” he said. “I thoroughly understand and approve the feeling in the United States and Great Britain and among all other United Nations that in view of the history of the past two years no permanent arrangement should be made with Admiral Darlan. The present temporary arrangement . . . is only a temporary expedient justified solely by the stress of battle.”
Meanwhile, the news from the war front was excellent. Both Algiers and Oran were in Allied hands. Allied fighters had driven away German and Italian dive-bombers. At Casablanca, despite fierce fighting, the U.S. forces had secured their beachheads. The great port of Rabat had fallen. The Allies were plunging into Tunisia. By November 14, a week after the invasion had begun, the Axis forces were in full retreat.
The Allied victory in North Africa, army historians contend, represented the triumph of superior military force, of abundant equipment, weapons, and supplies in the hands of the Allied soldiers. The Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, would have agreed with this assessment. “The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without ammunition,” he once said. “The battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.”
• • •
“The news from Africa has given the British people a tremendous lift,” Eleanor wrote in her column from England. “Everywhere there was a feeling of: ‘now we are fighting together.’ It seemed to add to the people’s courage and was reflected in group after group. The dockers along the Liverpool docks and streets cheered more lustily. One woman said: ‘God Bless Your Men; May this be the beginning of the end for old Hitler.’”
By the final days of Eleanor’s trip, the soles of her shoes were completely gone, and the newspaperwomen who had followed her for three weeks looked as though they were “about to die.” But the trip was an unqualified success. In London, reporter Chalmers Roberts wrote, “Mrs. Roosevelt has done more to bring a real understanding of the spirit of the United States to the people of Britain than any other single American who has ever visited these islands.”
There was much debate about how to send her home. Both Churchill and Ambassador John Winant thought it too risky to send her by a commercial flight along the southern route. Her trip had been so publicized that her plane would present a juicy target to the Germans. As the discussions stalled, Roosevelt finally weighed in, telling Churchill to send her as quickly as possible. He wanted her home.
• • •
When Eleanor’s plane landed in Washington on November 17, 1942, she saw the Secret Service standing near the waiting cars and, glancing swiftly round, realized, with a tug at her heart, that the president had taken time off to meet her. Her eyes glowed as she stepped from the plane and gave her husband a hug. “I really think Franklin was glad to see me back,” she confided in her diary, “and I gave a detailed account of such things as I could tell quickly and answered his questions. Later I think he even read this diary and to my surprise he had also read my columns.”
That, after thirty-six years of married life, her husband’s simple gesture afforded Eleanor such unconcealed delight, suggests how deeply she still loved him despite the troubles in their marriage. For his part, the president was pleased to have her back, safe and sound and in such high spirits. “I met her at the airport,” he cabled Churchill, “and found her well and thrilled by every moment of her visit. My thanks to you and Mrs. Churchill for taking such good care of her.”
At noon, Eleanor lunched with Franklin in his office, “which is something I only do on particular occasions,” she proudly reported. She gave him the presents she had brought—a shillelagh, a cane from Londonderry, and a tin of Scottish shortbread—and they talked together for more than an hour. That evening, they dined together again, just the two of them, while Eleanor shared with her husband everything she had seen and felt.
Because the war had been brought home to Britain more deeply than it had to the United States, she told her husband, the British people were ahead of us in mobilizing every person to do his part. With women in particular, America was just at the beginning; Eleanor believed there would inevitably be an enormous expansion of the sphere of women’s work. The key challenge she saw, after visiting England’s day nurseries, was to set up similar programs in America, for “it was useless to expect women to go into factories without making arrangements for care of children.”
That Eleanor also shared with her husband her observations on the excellent morale of the Negro troops, who found the prejudice in England much less than in the American South, is suggested by the fact that the president sent a confidential memorandum to Attorney General Francis Biddle that afternoon, asking him to study the constitutional question of universal suffrage. “Would it be possible,” he wrote, “for the Attorney General to bring an action against, let us say, the State of Mississippi, to remove the present poll tax restrictions? I understand that these restrictions are such that poor persons are, in many cases, prevented from voting . . . .” Though he cautioned that the issue of race should not be raised, it was clearly a radical suggestion whose implementation twenty-five years later would forever alter the face of Southern political life.
In the days that followed, as Eleanor permitted herself to unwind from her trip, she spent more undistracted time with her husband than she had in months. They dined alone together again in midweek, and on the weekend she traveled with him to Shangri-la. “Quiet day,” she recorded, “devoted mostly to reading all the things which had accumulated, from reports to magazines.” Surprisingly relaxed, she allowed herself the luxury of spending over an hour and a half having her hair and nails done, something she normally could not stand to do.
It must have been a pleasant interlude for them both, with the president relieved and happy over the course of events in North Africa, and Eleanor jubilant about her trip to England. “It was deeply interesting and I am very glad I went,” she wrote her friend Martha Gellhorn. “I did see an enormous amount and I think, with the training which Tommy and I acquired in the past through traipsing around in our own country, we got a great deal of what was underneath as well as what was on top.”
But the peripatetic Eleanor was never able to relax for very long; she was home for less than a week when she began traveling again: first to New York overnight, then to Philadelphia to a bond rally for “women in war work,” then to Connecticut for a day with the faculty and students at the Connecticut College for Women.
Curiously, years later, when she came to write about her homecoming from England in her autobiography, she mistakenly recalled that the very day she arrived home Franklin had a large dinner for the president of Ecuador. “I should have liked at least one evening to catch up on my family, for I had been away several weeks,” she wrote, “but that is a pleasure a public person cannot always count on. Naturally Franklin could make no change in an engagement of this kind which had been arranged weeks before.” In fact, the dinner with the president of Ecuador did not take place until a week after Eleanor arrived home, and, according to the White House Usher’s Diary, Eleanor did not even attend. After taking tea with her husband’s foreign visitor, she went off to dine with Joe Lash and then took the overnight train to New York.
In the intervening years, th
e guilt she may have felt in neglecting her duty as her husband’s hostess in favor of a dinner with Joe Lash had been transmuted into anger at officialdom and sorrow for herself. The convoluted memory may also have masked an unwillingness on Eleanor’s part to admit that, every time Franklin tried to draw close to her, she invariably moved away.
On Thanksgiving Day, the president and the first lady attended religious services in the East Room. Members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, and members of the Supreme Court, about two hundred people in all, had been invited for this first-ever service, designed by the president, who personally selected the hymns. Earlier in the week, Eleanor had received a letter from someone asking why the president could not have cut out Thanksgiving entirely this year, adding that there was nothing to be grateful for. “I can think of a thousand things,” she countered, “for which I am deeply thankful. I am grateful for the fact that my country is made up of many peoples; that I have an opportunity to show that I really believe that all men are created equal; that our boys whom I love have not fallen; for my husband’s strength and for his belief in God.”
Though Roosevelt seldom talked about religion, Eleanor was right in recognizing the strength of his belief in God. “His religious faith,” Robert Sherwood once observed, “was the strongest, most mysterious force that was in him.” Christened an Episcopalian, he had become a warden in the St. James Church in Hyde Park, as his father had before him. Though he did not attend church regularly as president, he drew upon the Bible frequently for inspiration, and greatly enjoyed singing hymns.
For this Thanksgiving service, the president had chosen a few of his favorites: “Faith of our Fathers,” “Come, Ye Thankful People Come,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The service opened with the president’s reading of his Thanksgiving Proclamation, continued with the prayers and lessons from the Book of Common Prayer, and ended with the hymns. It was all well conceived, William Hassett recorded in his diary, “and carried out with dignity and simplicity.” The only note of displeasure was voiced by the president later that night. “I selected the hymns, but I couldn’t control the singing,” he remarked, noting that the Marine Corps band had jazzed up the melodies. “They made a two step out of the Battle Hymn,” he noted wryly.
• • •
Three days after Thanksgiving, as ordered by the OPA, coffee rationing went into effect. The order followed a week during which all sales were halted to allow the dealers to make the necessary preparations for the new system. Eleanor promptly announced that the limitation to one cup a person per day would be observed in the White House as well, and that the after-dinner demitasse would be dispensed with. “Personally, whether I drink coffee, tea or hot water, it is all the same to me,” she told her press conference. But for millions of Americans who, unlike Eleanor, cared passionately about their coffee, November 29 was “a drab and gloomy day.”
By the end of November, government regulations extended into almost every aspect of American life. Shortages of iron and steel prohibited the manufacture of a wide range of consumer items, including electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, sewing machines, electric ranges, washing machines and ironers, radios and phonographs, lawn mowers, waffle irons, and toasters. The use of stainless steel was prohibited in tableware. Shoe manufacturers were ordered to avoid double soles and overlapping tips; lingerie makers were limited to styles without ruffles, pleating, or full sleeves.
As the level of public irritation increased, someone had to take the blame, and that someone was OPA Administrator Leon Henderson, the man “who had to step on everybody’s toes in order to protect everybody from runaway inflation.” Henderson, journalist David Brinkley observed, “was not one of the boys. He was never known to have slapped a back at a Rotary Club luncheon. He was merely a brilliant public servant who took nothing for himself.” For Democrats, still smarting from the loss of forty-four seats in the by-election, Henderson was the ideal whipping boy. A powerful bloc of legislators threatened to cut off all OPA appropriations until Henderson was replaced. The word went out: Henderson’s days were numbered.
To forestall damage to the OPA, Henderson submitted his resignation. “I have determined to cut my connection with government completely,” he wrote the president. “Different times require different types of men. I hope I have been suited to the battling formative period. I am decidedly not adjustable to the requirements of the future as it now begins to disclose its outline.” After his resignation, OPA official John Kenneth Galbraith noted, Henderson was “never completely happy again. The public interest had been his mistress, his true love, and now he was cut off from that love. Divorced from public concerns, he did not wholly exist.”
Liberals were disconsolate. “We have lost one of the bravest and best of the generals that we possessed,” The New Republic wrote. “If there was one high ranking leader in government who was right on policy all the way through it was Leon Henderson. He was right on the battle for expansion; right on the steel construction program; right in demanding conversion a year before it was accomplished, right in foreseeing, early, the necessity of adequate price and cost control.” To I. F. Stone, Henderson’s resignation marked “the second phase of the New Deal retreat, as the alliance with big business in May 1940 marked the first.”
The struggle for control of the OPA was accompanied by a struggle over manpower that pitted the military, the War Department, and civilian authorities against one another. In mid-October, War Manpower Commission chief Paul McNutt had come to the president with a plea to combine Selective Service and the U.S. Employment Service under his authority. This was the only way, McNutt argued, to allocate the manpower needed by the armed forces and by essential industry in an orderly manner. The president was sympathetic to the idea of combining both military and civilian manpower under the same supervision, but he knew Secretary of War Stimson was adamant against the idea of the combination and against McNutt, the man who would be king. The whole trouble, Stimson believed, was the softheartedness of the president, who he feared “might quite possibly hate so to hurt the feelings of McNutt he would take McNutt’s plan.”
Stimson’s worries were justified. Though the president delayed the inevitable for a while, offering the manpower job to Ickes one day and then taking it back the next, he finally decided not only to keep McNutt but to give him the authority he needed to accomplish his goals. On December 5, he signed an executive order which centralized all manpower decisions, including selective service, in McNutt’s hands. In this way, Roosevelt was able to bridge the gap between the military’s desire for compulsory national service and his own desire to keep the job market voluntary as long as possible. With this sweeping order, The New York Times observed, McNutt was given “more power over men in this country than anyone has ever exercised before in its history. McNutt may now, in effect, say whether a man is to go into the Army or the Navy, the Marine Corps, Coast Guard, shipbuilding or some other plants or to a farm.”
Another key decision was made that fall with the establishment of the Controlled Materials Plan, a bold new vertical system of materials distribution, which finally broke the logjam on raw materials. Designed by a former investment banker, Ferdinand Eberstadt, the CMP brought an end to the continuing battles between contractors for scarce materials. It assured the completion of end products by allotting each contractor the supplies he needed of three critical materials—steel, copper, and aluminum—at the time the contract was signed.
• • •
Eleanor was in New York on December 2, 1942, for the Day of Mourning and Prayer, sponsored by Jewish leaders to focus public attention on the desperate situation of the European Jews. In various synagogues throughout the city, special services were held; in factories and stores, Jewish laborers halted production for ten minutes, and several radio stations went silent.
The Allied world had been aware for months that Jews from all over Europe were being rounded up and deported by train to various “labor camps” in the Eas
t, but a new and devastating report from a reliable source had just reached the United States. The report, from German refugee Gerhart Riegner, revealed that a plan had been discussed in the Führer’s headquarters to deport all the Jews in German-occupied countries to concentration camps in the East, where they would be “at one blow exterminated in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe.” Though officials in the State Department questioned the validity of the report, it did explain the mass killings in Russia, the round-ups in Holland and France, the crowded trains heading toward Poland.
The next morning, sensitized to the situation by the Day of Prayer, Eleanor noticed a small item buried in the paper which filled her, she said, “with horror.” In Poland, it was reported, more than two-thirds of the Jewish population had been massacred. News of massive killings in Poland had been leaking out for months, but this was the first time that Eleanor had fully absorbed the enormity of the slaughter. At the beginning of the year, there was only one camp, Chelmno, to which Jews were being deported and killed; by the end of the year, a half-dozen more, including Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Birkenau, were in full operation. In the space of twelve months, nearly three million Polish Jews had been murdered.
The Riegner report so terrified Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise that he asked for a meeting with the president. The meeting, which included Adolph Held of the Jewish Labor Committee and Maurice Wertheimer of the American Jewish Congress, took place at noon on December 8. According to Held’s notes, the president received the group hospitably and immediately launched into a story of his own about his plans for postwar Germany. When the president had finished, Wise read aloud a two-page statement put together by a group of Jewish leaders which stressed that “unless action is taken immediately the Jews of Hitler’s Europe are doomed.” The group asked the president to issue a warning against war crimes. He readily agreed, and asked the Jewish leaders to draft a statement for him. The meeting drew to a close. Roosevelt had talked 80 percent of the time. “We shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment,” he said as he bid the group goodbye.
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