Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Joseph Lash, whom she met when he was an activist in the American Youth Congress (AYC), also became a dear friend. He brought a keen intellect, vision, and passion to his relationship with ER, and their friendship deepened when he married Trude Pratt, whose many contributions to the first lady’s activism during the war years remained long unacknowledged.* ER’s deep interest in Trude and Joe Lash’s romance was in part about love across barriers and divides and the ways they bridged religious and national differences. Their relationship enhanced ER’s life, in many ways shaped her wartime efforts, and inspired her hopes for the future. During and after the war, ER and Trude worked together on projects for civil rights and human rights, and opposed discrimination in housing and segregation in the city’s schools. Their friendship endured many changes and was framed by daily morning phone conversations, wherever both of them happened to be.

  ER’s quest for peace and justice expanded during the war years, 1939–1945, as she struggled to influence domestic and international policies, not merely as first lady but also as lobbyist, journalist, public critic, and activist power broker. Joseph Lash noted, during the 1984 centennial celebrations of her birth, that ER was “infinite”—and the impact of her work incalculable. “She went to great lengths to deny and conceal her influence,” Lash said, partly to avoid charges of “petticoat rule” from political enemies and thereby protect her husband. While she was pleased when FDR adopted her words and ideas, she was aware that he never publicly acknowledged “her role in his life.” She understood he needed her presence among the American people and abroad, where she became his goodwill ambassador for the United States and was beloved by so many.

  However unacknowledged, history’s most active and controversial first lady appreciated their partnership and was grateful for every opportunity actually to influence policy from a position of power. Although many have observed the tensions between them, which grew during the war, others observed their mutual reliance. ER’s friend Justine Wise Polier emphasized the intensity of all they shared, their different observations, and fully explored disagreements. Polier was sometimes present at the White House dinners, or when FDR phoned his wife, and she observed their discussions during urgent crises. While they “both grew individually . . . in very different ways,” they grew together “throughout their marriage.” To the end, they confided in and trusted each other, even as they increasingly traveled separately.

  ER was frequently hurt by FDR but remained loyal to his vision and respected his political acumen. They disagreed profoundly about strategies to end racial violence and segregation and also about efforts to rescue Europe’s endangered refugees. Whenever she was silenced, she deferred to his judgment about what was politically needed and feasible. She was his conscience, and she knew it.

  Chester Bowles, director of the Office of Price Administration during the war and subsequently a member of Congress from Connecticut and ambassador to India, was close to ER, whom he credited for his political career. Bowles agreed with Polier about the increasingly tense Roosevelt partnership but concluded that ER retained an enduring influence. ER told Bowles that when FDR traveled, she generally spoke to him on the telephone each morning: “I have learned by experience to recognize the point at which the President’s patience is about to give out and he will begin to scold me. At that moment I hurriedly say Franklin, my car is waiting, I must be on my way, I shall call you again tomorrow.”

  Bowles believed the views and ideas of FDR’s “remarkable wife” were found throughout his policies and speeches. ER, he wrote, “deserved a major share of credit for all that he succeeded in doing. She helped bring to the surface his compassion, his concern for people and for human dignity. . . . She brought the American people to him and encouraged him to give himself to the people.”

  ER was a proud card-carrying member of the Newspaper Guild. She brought union members, both rank-and-file and officers, into the White House to dine and to meet the president, and she encouraged them to use their meetings to lobby, agitate, and make their causes known. After one White House weekend, a notable unionist was interviewed. She recounted that she had awakened in the middle of the night, stunned by her surroundings: “Imagine me Feigele Shapiro, sleeping in Lincoln’s bed.”

  ER’s ties to her labor colleagues remained strong during the years on the scholarship committee of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). Rose Schneiderman of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was “like a sister,” according to the historian Brigid O’Farrell; ILGWU head David Dubinsky was a good friend, and United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther was “like a beloved son.”

  ER believed union rights, civil rights, and human rights would help create a peaceful world defined by economic security, housing, health, and freedom for all humanity. She lived in service to these ideals. But today, seventy years after the end of World War II, as we embark on a new era of intensified racism and conflict, ER’s vision remains embattled. To reconsider her efforts, to review what she considered at stake in our fight for liberty, dignity, and security, is to reignite hope and recall notable successes. Throughout the 1940s she helped young interned Japanese-Americans leave their camps to attend schools, colleges, and universities, and she worked for their right, women and men, to enlist in the military. On Easter Sunday 1943, after visits to the Gila River and other Japanese internment camps, she changed public opinion by her columns.

  Throughout the war, ER agitated for black recruits and nurses in all services and for an end to the most discriminatory segregation practices—at public events, in officers’ clubs and dining halls, and on public transportation. Her enthusiasm for the skills of the Tuskegee pilot Charles Alfred Anderson, with whom she flew, resulted in the successful training and deployment of more than 990 Tuskegee Airmen. Throughout the war she monitored the activities of the heroic black fighter pilots, who were finally sent into combat in April 1943 after she protested their prolonged idleness.*

  ER also lobbied for the full participation of black and white women in the military. In 1944, when James Forrestal replaced Frank Knox as secretary of the navy, black women were finally accepted into the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Two were selected for officer’s training—ER’s student activist friend Harriet Ida Pickens, daughter of NAACP officer William Pickens, and Hunter College graduate and social worker Frances Wills Thorpe.*

  Thurgood Marshall, who became director of the NAACP’s legal defense fund in 1938 and shepherded the most significant integration cases through the courts during the 1940s and 1950s, called ER “Lady Big Heart.” Appointed by Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Supreme Court, Justice Marshall credited ER for the hope that sustained race activists throughout the decades. He told his biographer, the diplomat-journalist Carl Rowan, that “Eleanor Roosevelt did a lot; but her husband didn’t do a damn thing.” She became “a great force for justice” and was “one dream maker” who empowered Marshall and gave “the NAACP a reach that exceeded the mean clutches of all the racists” who dominated U.S. politics and so limited FDR’s efforts.

  In 1957 Rowan sought to learn why Justice Marshall considered ER “one of the greatest of dream makers.” When he called her for an interview, she replied, “What a coincidence. I am this moment reading your new book, Go South to Sorrow,” and she invited him to her New York apartment. The interview turned into a prolonged visit at Hyde Park, during which she told Rowan the story of her childhood and of the legacy of her many struggles. “All my life I have fought fear—physical fear, and the fear of not being loved,” she remarked candidly. Her privileged childhood offered prestige and money, but affluence did not “shield her from the agony of watching her fathers and uncles drink themselves to death.” Unloved, dressed in ill-fitting “hand-me-down” clothes that her aunts had discarded, young ER had known she was “different from the other girls” and confided to Rowan: “I never lost a feeling of kinship for anyone who is suffering.” F
or ER, there were no inferior children; there were only new pathways to love, education, and respect.

  During his two-week visit, Rowan became mightily impressed with ER. They spent many long evenings after dinner alone on the porch “listening to frogs croak from the lily pads of Val-Kill Creek,” as ER shared private and political confidences “openly and honestly.” She said she never had real differences with FDR “on racial and social reforms, but there was conflict over timing. She always wanted to move faster than Franklin did.” He insisted that “a democracy moves slowly,” and he required the political support of Congress. He juggled but encouraged ER to say and do what she believed necessary.*

  After FDR’s death, when she represented the United States at the United Nations, she too juggled. Opposed by Dixiecrats and McCarthyites, limited by State Department restraints and Cold War tensions inflamed by aggressive Soviet propaganda, she seemed to follow FDR’s political strategy precisely—and moved differently than she might have were she not in the government. Profoundly anti-Soviet, but condemned as a Communist by U.S. politicians, ER compromised. But her brilliant diplomacy resulted in the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. From that day to this, the declaration remains the single most important document of worldwide hope for peace and justice.

  Subsequently, ER’s activities for civil rights intensified. During her final meetings with northern student activists in 1961 and 1962, she encouraged boycotts and sit-ins, as well as demonstrations for integration. She advised, “Go South for Freedom.”*

  While ER’s legacy regarding civil rights and human rights remains “infinite,” this volume focuses on the infinitely controversial war years, 1939–45. To learn about her efforts, especially regarding race discrimination and the failure to rescue refugees in flight from Nazi horror, is only to intensify the controversies. ER’s struggles regarding race and rescue enable us to understand history’s slow, still ongoing movement toward international justice and human rights.

  Debates over FDR’s “indifference” to the Jewish slaughter will surely continue. Those who argue that FDR did “everything possible” are contradicted by ER’s assertion that nobody did all they could have. In 1946 she visited displaced persons camps in Germany, and when she returned to the United States, she addressed the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal: “We let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something that we knew was wrong. We have therefore had to avenge it—but we did nothing to prevent it. I hope that in the future, we . . . remember that there can be no compromise . . . with the things we know are wrong.”

  In 2003, Arthur Schlesinger suggested that he and I meet for dinner to discuss, as he put it, “our differences” regarding FDR, which had been aired mostly at the Graduate Center for several years. After a cordial evening, during which we agreed about all contemporary issues, our final exchange was illuminating. I said, “I know what ER proposed and FDR rejected. How can you argue that FDR did everything ‘possible’ to rescue and save the perishing?” Schlesinger answered by pointing to the politics of FDR’s position: U.S. anti-Semitism. Look at the numbers, he said. Thirty percent of the U.S. population was German-American; the Democratic Party was Irish, Italian, and southern. There was no congressional support to save the Jews, no movement to save them, and intense division among Jewish leaders—many of whom remained silent throughout. Silence. Denial. Complicity.

  Our understanding of the U.S.-British failure is complicated by ER’s silence regarding Eleanor Rathbone’s parliamentary efforts to “rescue the perishing”—despite the fact that ER’s friend Lady Stella Reading was a member of Rathbone’s committee. The full story remains to be told.

  Subsequently, ER became an optimistic Zionist. She visited Israel three times, accompanied by David Gurewitsch, Ruth Gruber, and Trude Pratt Lash. She was concerned about Jewish refugees languishing in displaced persons camps mostly in Germany, as well as about Palestinian refugees newly removed from their homes who languished in camps mostly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, under conditions ER pronounced entirely unacceptable. She saw why violence had escalated as it did in the 1948 war but tended to absolve Israel for the Nakba, the flight or removal of 800,000 Palestinian refugees. “The truth is the Arab authorities are to a large extent responsible for this wholesale flight. Mass evacuation was apparently a part of their strategy,” to be followed by a quick victory of the Arab armies and restoration of all property. ER concluded that responsibility “must be shared” by all parties, including the British, and that to avoid endless war throughout the region, all parties must pursue peace—repatriation or resettlement—through UN negotiations.

  Because in war there are no final victories, and every war sows the seeds for the next, ER’s vision for a permanent just peace is urgently needed now. She brought to the United Nations two convictions: that humanity was connected now as never before, and that liberal democracy was essential to humanity’s survival. As FDR said in 1940, “We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages.” In 1943, she concluded the time had come for “world thinking” to ensure a postwar economy of creativity, education, abundance, and full employment. It was a theme that she had expressed vigorously since 1934 and now brought to the world stage for global impact.

  To deny any part of a population the opportunities for more enjoyment in life, for higher aspirations is a menace to the nation as a whole. There has been too much concentrating wealth, and even if it means that some of us have got to learn to be a little more unselfish about sharing what we have . . . , we must realize that it will profit us all in the long run. . . . I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come . . . all of us, regardless of race or creed or color. We must wipe out any feeling . . . of intolerance, of belief that any one group can go ahead alone. We all go ahead together, or we go down together.

  Today, as poverty, inequality, and neoslavery return across the United States, as women and children are condemned to bondage and refugees are in flight worldwide, ER’s words are urgently needed. Her prescience can serve to embolden U.S. politicians finally to discuss and ratify the Economic and Social Rights Covenant of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the inspiration of her life can be a guide for healing and restorative movements worldwide.

  Chapter One

  “We All Go Ahead Together, or We All Go Down Together”

  The events of 1938 had left ER’s world, all that she cared about personally and politically, in disarray. Now on every front, 1939 ushered in a dangerous and frightening reality. She began the year with the clear recognition that the times called for fortitude and boldness.

  At home, things continued to spiral downward. Over ten million Americans were still unemployed, farm prices were low, and recession conditions prevailed, yet every domestic program the Roosevelts supported had come under vicious attack. It seemed to ER and her allies that America “had become ‘bored with the poor, the unemployed, the insecure.’”

  Indeed, congressional opposition to New Deal reforms had intensified. FDR’s effort to purge conservative Democrats during the 1938 midterm elections, especially in the South, had backfired as anti–New Deal Democrats and Republicans won major victories. There were now 13 new Republican governors, 8 new Republican senators, and 81 new Republican congresspeople (up from 88 to 170), representing the first significant GOP gains in ten years. Although Democrats maintained a two-thirds majority in the Senate and a significant congressional majority, they were severely divided among themselves. Fortified by the election of right-wing politicians, members of both parties declared war on FDR, his progressive vision, and the very idea of a permanent New Deal. ER became the obsessive focus of vitriolic commentary, especially concerning her support for civil rights, racial justice, working women, and radical youth.

  Internationally, global peace was endangered as fascists triumphed in Europe. Brutal dictat
ors led by “the mad dog of Europe,” as Adolf Hitler was increasingly known, orchestrated war, war everywhere. In Spain, General Francisco Franco’s forces, aided in part by the Anglo-American arms embargo, were in ascendance over the Loyalists. In Munich in September 1938, British and French appeasers sought to ensure “peace in our time” by sacrificing democratic Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s demands. The United States was becoming more isolationist, yet FDR was certain that catastrophe was imminent.

  But life went on during the December 1938 holidays as the White House filled with children, grandchildren, and extended family. A rare debutante party for ER’s eldest niece, her brother Hall’s daughter Eleanor (known to history as Eleanor Roosevelt II), was scheduled for two days after Christmas.

  For this first White House debutante dance since Helen Taft’s party in 1910, ER planned a festive occasion. ER was delighted to celebrate her niece, in part to atone for having suddenly recalled her from Paris in October. ER II had begun a year of study abroad, but due to FDR’s fears of impending crisis in Europe, her aunt and uncle had “ordered” her home. Deeply disappointed, nineteen-year-old Eleanor had returned to the home of her mother, Margaret Richardson Roosevelt Cutter, in Dedham, Massachusetts. But when Eleanor offered to host her coming-out ball, joy returned. In Washington, surrounded by cousins (Roosevelts, Delanos, Alsops), the children of cabinet members, and her two brothers, Henry and Daniel, ER II, charming and elegant in an “all white ruffled frock of French organdy,” was escorted to the “sparkling east ballroom” by her father and her aunt. As Benny Goodman’s band played, “Aunt Eleanor danced with my father. They were a striking pair, both of them tall and good dancers.” It was “all very thrilling and wonderful.”