The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Roosevelt once again stoked the notion of class warfare by getting Congress to pass the Wealth Tax Act, which sought to punish very wealthy people. He also went after large estates by assessing punitive taxes. It taxed any income over $50,000 at 75 percent, and quickly became known as the “soak the rich act.” He stirred up more rancor with an act that forbade holding companies from owning any public utility. It was later repealed by Congress.

  Adding to the nation’s misery, a drought of biblical proportions struck the Midwest. Huge portions of farmland in a dozen states dried up and blew away in gigantic dust storms. Anything that was planted died. Farmers were soon unable to pay their mortgages and were forced off their land. A steady stream of these unfortunates, known as Okies, headed west for California, which became the subject of John Steinbeck’s powerful 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.

  Roosevelt toured the devastated states by train, promising government help. He got Congress to pass a mortgage relief act making it difficult for creditors to evict a farmer and repossess his property. The Supreme Court threw out the act, but it was rewritten and stood for nearly fifteen years, after which it expired.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, in the meantime, had become an immensely popular personality in the press and on radio. She wrote a daily syndicated column called “My Day” and appeared weekly on the air. She had also developed what most historians agree was a lesbian relationship with a newspaper reporter named Lorena Hickok. The two had known each other for about five years after Lorena interviewed Eleanor at the governor’s mansion in Albany. The relationship turned into an affair just as Roosevelt took up residency in the White House. Lorena quit her job with the Associated Press and moved into a room on the second floor next to Louis Howe. As for Eleanor and her husband, they occupied separate bedrooms with a large study in between. Their marriage had been unalterably estranged by his affair with Lucy Mercer, but Eleanor still provided diligent help to Franklin by becoming “his eyes and ears politically.” As she put it in a letter to Hickok, “I realize F.D.R. is a great man & he is nice to me but as a person I am a stranger & don’t want to be anything else.”2

  Whether this was her first lesbian affair is uncertain. But Eleanor did have a close association with a lesbian pair, the women’s suffrage activists Esther Lape and Elizabeth Fisher Read, who remained partners for life. In fact, Franklin built a stone cottage at Hyde Park for Eleanor and the two women, as well as a factory building where they started a furniture-making business in 1928. The two women lived there full-time, and Eleanor came and went as practicality dictated. When the furniture-making enterprise closed, Eleanor remodeled the larger factory into Val-Kill Cottage, where she and Lorena stayed. Then Franklin was elected president and, of course, Eleanor’s presence was required in the White House.

  The nature of the relationship between Eleanor and Lorena came to light in the late 1970s, when a writer named Doris Faber was researching a book at the FDR Presidential Library and found herself sifting through cartons containing thousands of steamy love letters between the two women. Shocked, she discovered that Hickok had willed the correspondence to the library with the stipulation that they remain sealed until ten years after her death, a period that had expired. Faber, understanding the shock that would arise if the letters were made public, tried to have the library reseal them but the curator refused.

  Lorena Hickok had grown up, poor and abused, in the Midwest. She had quit home when she was fourteen, getting by on hired jobs until somehow she taught herself journalism and signed on as a reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, later joining the AP. She was rotund, homely, smoked cigars, and cussed up a storm. But she was also smart and humorous, and Eleanor clearly found something endearing in her (and, judging from the letters, something physically attractive as well).

  Franklin was said to have discovered what was going on and feared that the press would expose the affair. According to one source, he was overheard to shout at Eleanor in their joint bedroom study, “I want that woman kept out of this house.” Instead, Eleanor simply kept Lorena out of his sight, which was not difficult given that Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair.3

  * * *

  WHILE THE AMERICANS and other Western nations floundered under the worldwide Great Depression, Germany, under Hitler’s leadership, actually seemed to be pulling out of it. In the 1932 elections the people elected a plurality of Nazis to the German Reichstag, which named Hitler chancellor in 1933. Three months later, the day after Roosevelt took office, Hitler rigged a vote forcing the hand of Paul von Hindenburg, the aging president of the Weimar Republic. After Hindenburg’s death the following year, Hitler named himself Führer (leader) of the German people. He pledged to rid the nation of the burdensome Treaty of Versailles, which had caused so much economic woe.

  Hitler promised the Germans they would be a great power again, and he set about making vast infrastructure projects, such as autobahns (superhighways), under his system of National Socialism. He also secretly began a program to rebuild Germany’s military, based around two potent weapons that were developed during the First World War: the warplane and the tank. In the meantime, he launched what was at first a verbal crusade against the Communists, who were sponsored by Moscow, and against the Jews, whom he saw as Communists, disloyal to German values, and incompatible with Germanic heritage. These last outrages were received with indignation by Americans of all descents.

  Nazi thugs liquidated all other political parties and seized control of the German military and the economy. They also began depriving Jews of their civil and property rights, and began systematically beating them in the streets. Some of this activity was captured in newsreels shown in the United States, including in the White House.

  On March 7, 1936, Hitler marched a division of infantry into the Rhineland, a sector of the Rhine River in western Germany, in a direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies dithered and did nothing. Roosevelt was in the full swing of his reelection campaign and warned in a speech in Philadelphia that “the world cannot trust a fully rearmed Germany to stay at peace.” At the time, it was a bombshell declaration.

  This was a far cry from Roosevelt’s original stance vis-à-vis the Nazis. Shortly after becoming president, he had publicly embraced Great Britain’s proposal for world disarmament, except for a nation’s basic self-defense force.*1 Fifty-four nations were currently meeting for this purpose in Geneva, and the crafty Hitler agreed that Germany would attend. Roosevelt’s hope against hope, like that of Cordell Hull’s State Department, was that Hitler’s bellicose rhetoric was mostly bluster, and that eventually he would settle down and join with the peaceful nations of Europe. Roosevelt also worried that taking a stronger international stance against Nazism might rile the powerful isolationist lobby in the U.S. Senate that he needed to pass his Second New Deal legislation.

  Privately, however, Roosevelt told the French ambassador, “The situation is alarming. Hitler is a madman and his counselors, some of whom I know personally, are even madder than he is. France cannot disarm now, and nobody will ask her to.”4

  When it came to public diplomacy against Hitler, Roosevelt found himself caught up in a dodgy high-wire act of his own design. The conversation with the French ambassador clearly reveals that Roosevelt feared another devastating war could be started by the Nazis. But during his reelection campaign he had to contend not only with isolationist senators but also with voters who, following the horrors of World War I, were firmly against any more European entanglements. Therefore, after his Philadelphia warning against a rearmed Germany, Roosevelt “pivoted” with his famous “I Hate War” speech in upstate New York. In it, he recounted his experiences in 1918, when he had visited the fighting front in France as assistant secretary of the Navy. He told of the American graves he’d seen, as well as the blood and bombs, grieving widows with hungry children, and whole cities leveled into rubble. He concluded with the powerful declaration, “I hate war!”
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br />   The people believed him, including the isolationists, and on November 3, 1936, Roosevelt was reelected president for a second term by a landslide. He won every state but Maine and Vermont, which as they had four years earlier remained staunchly Republican.

  For their part, the Nazis sent Hitler’s minister of culture, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, as emissary to the Geneva disarmament conference. Rosenberg had once asserted, “On every telegraph pole from Munich to Berlin, the head of a prominent Jew must be stuck”: not an especially auspicious choice of ambassadors to talk about arms control.5

  But there was more to worry about than Nazi Germany on the foreign policy scene. In the Far East, the Japanese were now controlled by an increasingly aggressive military government that seemed intent on conquering all of Asia. Already in possession of Korea, the Japanese army overran the massive nation of Manchuria in 1931 to obtain its natural resources, as well as the island nation of what is currently Taiwan. Now, it was sweeping across mainland China toward Peking. Condemned by the League of Nations, Japan simply withdrew from it. The Japanese had already flouted the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 by building aircraft carriers and battleships far in excess of what they had agreed upon. Called to account for this, the Japanese representative walked out of that convention as well.

  Roosevelt had never trusted the Japanese; partly because his family had been in the China trade, he tended to side with the Chinese. In his first cabinet meeting, he had said that a war with Japan was not unlikely, and he later shocked brain truster Rex Tugwell by musing whether it would be better to start a war with Japan now, rather than later. In 1934, naval intelligence had shown Roosevelt a Japanese comic book that began with an air attack on Pearl Harbor and ended with peace being dictated in the White House. Army Air Corps general Billy Mitchell had for years been publicly forecasting a Japanese attack on Hawaii.6

  With the Great Depression still weighing heavily over the land, Roosevelt limited his response to Japanese aggression. He obtained House approval of an embargo on war materials to Japan, but isolationists in the Senate forced him to drop even that mild sanction.

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT DECLARED IN HIS second inaugural address that the New Deal was “far from over.” But privately he was beginning to feel put upon by Supreme Court decisions that thwarted so many of his programs. He was determined to do something about it, and on February 5, 1937, he sent a message to Congress requesting that the Court be enlarged by six additional members for a total of fifteen judges on the panel. This effort blew up in his face.

  As justification, he had cited the “heavy load” of cases before the Court and the number of judges over seventy (most of whom were Republicans). But the proposal drew immediate and ferocious criticism—not only from Republicans but from a number of Democrats as well. The Court itself weighed in on the matter by making public a letter showing a large number of cases heard and decided, reporting no backlog. Republicans charged that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the Court, and the term stuck. In the end it went nowhere.

  Roosevelt continued his efforts to promote the latest New Deal programs, getting Congress to pass an act to create public housing for the urban poor. By mid-1937 the economy seemed to pick up smartly, with rising production and even signs of inflation. Roosevelt decided to take what amounted to a campaign trip across the country.

  In whistle stops from Washington, D.C., through the Midwest and into the Far West, the president stood on the rear platform of his presidential train and told the people that the New Deal was working. He complained about the Supreme Court, and notably did not invite any member of Congress—especially those of his own party, who had opposed his programs—to stand with him on the platform. It was a victory lap of sorts, with reservations over congressional inaction and judicial defeats. Roosevelt visited many of the huge construction sites of the New Deal—dams, roads, bridges, courthouse buildings—and the press gave him ample coverage. In Chicago hundreds of thousands lined the rail tracks along his route. The day before, he had told the press he had deliberately chosen Chicago to speak on a subject of “definite national Importance.”

  Nevertheless, the growing world crisis had been on his mind and his nerves for some time. In the Far East, the empire of Japan seemed intent on creating an enormous Japanese-led economic and cultural sphere of the entire region. In Europe, forces loyal to the Second Spanish Republic were in full-scale warfare with the fascist military army of General Francisco Franco, who was backed by Hitler’s Nazis and the Fascist government of Italy. Nazi planes, Italian soldiers, and German “advisers” were wreaking havoc on loyalist guerrillas in a conflict that destabilized all of Europe.

  These were only the rank beginnings of what would, not three years later, blow up into World War II. Roosevelt was perceptive enough to smell trouble in the air and understand full well that the United States did not exist in a vacuum.

  Therefore, he told the Chicagoans that “the very foundations of civilization were threatened by the current reign of terror and international lawlessness.” He said that if conditions got worse, America “could not expect mercy and the Western Hemisphere could not avoid attack.”7

  “The peace, the freedom, and the security of ninety percent of the world is being jeopardized by the other ten percent,” he told the Chicagoans. “We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement,” he said, “but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.”8 When he had finished, Roosevelt went back inside his Pullman car and said to his secretary Grace Tully, “Well, it’s done now. It was something that needed saying.”

  The uproar that followed was intense. Pacifists claimed that Roosevelt was leading the nation to war. The country remained deeply averse to conflict, and isolationist congressmen threatened the president with impeachment. Labor unions chimed in with resolutions of their own. Letters and telegrams poured into the White House, condemning the president’s assertions. For his part, Roosevelt remarked to his speechwriter, “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.”9

  The next day, in answer to a barrage of question from reporters, Roosevelt seemed to take it all back. Or at least he didn’t reassert his position as much as try to clarify that he wasn’t about to get the United States involved in any war.

  By the end of the year the steam had gone out of the false recovery and prices and production slumped once more. The stock market hit rock bottom again. Unemployment rose dramatically. No one seemed to know what to do, including Roosevelt. The New Dealers pushed for more spending, the Republicans pushed for more fiscal responsibility.

  The anti–New Deal Democrats—and there were more than a few—seemed to be talking to the Republicans, with the result that by the end of the year Congress had passed only a small fraction of the legislation Roosevelt had proposed. Roosevelt and his aides Harry Hopkins, Ickes, and others set up a “hit list” of these errant conservative Democrats—mostly Southerners or Midwesterners—and sought ways to have them defeated in the coming elections. There was much grumbling among the president’s opponents that Roosevelt was setting himself up to be a dictator—so much so that Roosevelt felt compelled to issue to the press a denial, stating that he didn’t “have the qualifications.”

  John Maynard Keynes stuck his nose into it again, warning Roosevelt in a letter that “You are treading a very dangerous middle path. Your present policies seem to presume more power than you actually have.” FDR gave him the brush-off.

  By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives. Historian and biographer Alonzo Hamby sums up the situation succinctly: “Roosevelt, like most charismatic leaders, had generated intense emotions. Millions of Americans worshiped him; millions of others quite li
terally could not bear to speak his name.” What had gone so wrong to bring his presidency “to a seeming dead end”? It was Roosevelt’s “persistent quest to increase presidential power and probe its limits.” It was as simple as that, and many people had tired of it.10

  Yet neither the country nor the world was finished in 1938 with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nobody wanted to believe it: neither Roosevelt’s America, nor Hitler’s Germany, nor Churchill’s England, nor Mussolini’s Italy, nor Stalin’s Soviet Union. But these nations, and many others, were on the verge of the most destructive war in the history of mankind.

  * * *

  AS PRESSURE ROSE TO TAKE SIDES in the emerging European conflict, strong attitudes had developed among Americans. Because of close Anglo-American bonds and the brutality of Hitler’s Germany, a majority of citizens naturally sympathized with England and France and deplored the Nazis. At the same time, there was a powerful division over whether or not to become involved. Many recalled all too well that the previous war had resulted in fifty-three thousand American combat deaths and apparently settled nothing, since the Europeans were at it again. No less a personage than former president Herbert Hoover complained of President Wilson’s crusade to “make the world safe for democracy”; he observed that the previous effort of 1914–18 to “enforce civilization on the world resulted in at least fifteen dictatorships replacing prewar constitutional governments.” Those against war frequently cited President George Washington’s farewell address, which warned against “foreign entanglements.”