Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER was subsequently annoyed to learn that Charles Graves, a British journalist, had attended the party under false pretenses. A guest of her unsuspecting godmother, cousin Susie Parish, he wrote a derisive account of the event for the Washington Post. In a harsh letter to Graves, ER noted that it had been a private party, as he certainly had known. His intrusive, rude behavior might seem a trifle, but it gave U.S. journalists “a feeling of injustice that I would allow you to come as a reporter, which, of course, was not my intention, when they were barred.”

  ER was particularly upset about the episode, she explained, because it endangered friendly U.S. feelings “toward England and the English people.” Indeed, ER and FDR were eager to improve U.S. public opinion regarding the United Kingdom and had worked together for months on arrangements for an unprecedented royal visit in June. The very week ER wrote her letter of reproach to Graves, the president had sent a letter to King George VI detailing various outings he thought the royals might enjoy. The Roosevelts were determined to create a new climate of friendship and support, especially in the face of recent Gallup polls indicating that over 70 percent of Americans disapproved of any economic or military aid to Great Britain.

  ER planned an intimate New Year’s Eve that featured a Gary Cooper western. Before dinner, she wrote a New Year’s Day message on youth and democracy addressed to the United States and the world. “I hope adults everywhere, particularly women, will emphasize the value of the contribution which youth can make” to help solve the “problems of all nations.” She called for “all assistance possible” to help young people work for “the value of democracy,” which depended on the commitment of “every individual to take an active part in his government.”

  After dinner ER II chose to watch the western with her aunt and uncle while her contemporaries went out to party. At 11:45 the household gathered in the Oval Office, where a dozen stemmed glasses awaited FDR’s daiquiri cocktails. ER II described the scene: “Aunt Eleanor proposed the first toast—‘To the United States of America, [may] our union promote peace and freedom on the earth.’ After we ‘drank to her heartfelt wish,’ she raised her glass again: ‘To the president of the United States. May he remain in good health, and may God help him to lead this nation forward, as it is his wish to do, into better times for every citizen, young or old, of every color or faith, male or female, as our democracy struggles to establish a democratic way of life throughout the earth.’” There followed an hour of lively conversation and toasts to “absent family and friends.”

  For ER, the evening was marred by a serious security breach when two brazen sixteen-year-olds, one disguised as a girl, and pretending to be invited guests, sauntered into the family’s private quarters, accompanied by the doorman. When he announced the girl as Joan, Henry Morgenthau’s daughter, who was expected, ER demanded to know the truth. The two boys had broken in on a dare, for an autograph. But ER was horrified by their complete lack of consideration and frightened for her husband, so vulnerable in his wheelchair. “They came up the back stairs” to FDR’s study, she told her press conference. “I never saw such nerve.”

  Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, had been at the White House since before Christmas and intended to stay for another week, for the christening of her newest great-grandson, FDR III. While ER had been happy to ride her horse each morning and festivities had gone on apace, the household was so filled that there had been considerable tension. SDR particularly disapproved of Hall and was routinely rude to his children. ER looked forward to getting away to New York for diversion and a brief respite.

  Her “flying trip” to New York on 2 January turned out to be unusually trying. Cousin Susie, once her close confidante, had suffered for years from various maladies, exacerbated by an addiction to painkillers and antidepressants; ER found her company tedious. And the Broadway play she had looked forward to seeing—Oscar Wilde, with Robert Morley in the title role—disturbed her profoundly. “I said I would tell you something about the play which I went to see with our two youngest sons and their wives,” she wrote in My Day. “It was beautifully cast and beautifully acted, but . . . to me his story is unpleasant and the end was tragic. . . . Since I am not obliged to know him as an individual, I think I would rather forget him and enjoy only what he has left us in literature, which can be enjoyed and leaves no bad taste behind.”

  In New York she stayed at the apartment she had rented since 1935, a private refuge from her public life as first lady. The third-floor walk-up was in the Greenwich Village townhouse of life partners Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, her political mentors and advisers. While in her Manhattan hideaway, ER was stunned to learn that Bill Dana, owner of Hick’s beloved sanctuary, the Little House, in Mastic, had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only forty-five and had seemed in robust health. Everybody who knew him was devastated. ER sent her best thoughts to Hick: “Bill was so fond of you that I know what this means to you personally aside from your sympathy for Ella & the complications which may arise about the place,” a reference to his widow Ella Dana’s possible need to rent out the big house, which would render Hick’s future in the Little House uncertain.

  As for her own household complications, ER wrote Hick, “I’m playing a rather mean trick tonight, pleaded a headache and sent Mama [FDR’s mother, SDR] down to sit as hostess at the Diplomatic dinner! She told everyone at lunch today how much she disliked having to sit so far down the table so I thought this was a good way to put her at the top & I’ve had one and a half hours of sleep so I’ll really be able to enjoy the music for a change!”

  Besides ER’s concerns about FDR, who looked older “this winter & seems to me to mind the social things more,” her former boon companion and bodyguard Earl Miller had been sick, she wrote to her daughter Anna, bringing fresh anxiety.

  Politically, she had one good thing to report: on 21 January the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which “made Pa very cheerful this morning.” But that good news was overshadowed by the Senate’s cut in funding for the WPA, the New Deal’s most useful Works Progress Administration. FDR lost by one vote, and ER believed Vice President John Nance Garner, who had presidential ambitions for 1940, was responsible. She wished WPA supporters, and all the writers, artists, and unionists involved in it, “would demonstrate at the Capitol but they won’t, they will write to me & I won’t be able to do much from now on.”

  Internationally, on 26 January 1939, General Francisco Franco took Barcelona and moved on to Madrid. The fascist onslaught in Spain involved appalling casualties. Mussolini sent 100,000 Italian troops to support Franco, and the Nazis tested every new plane in their arsenal against the Loyalists. The bombing raids were merciless. Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul and poet, wrote from Madrid, “And through the streets the blood of children flowed / Simply, like the blood of children.” ER wrote Anna, “Father is very gloomy. . . . He thinks Spain lost to Franco which means Hitler-Mussolini domination & then he thinks gradual infiltration into South America & inevitable closing in on us. He thinks England and France go this spring. It is not cheerful.” ER’s secretary, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, also wrote Anna, “At the moment your mother is hoarse explaining that she cannot lift the embargo on Spain, and has nothing to do with the WPA cuts.”

  ER tried to cheer herself up by experimenting with new hairstyles: “I bobbed my hair yesterday & learned how to use make up . . . & find it a great care & time consumer!” But even such inconsequential private decisions offered her critics ammunition. When the press first reported that ER used lipstick, “at the insistence of her daughter,” for example, religious fanatics and the Roman Catholic Church slandered her viciously, accusing her of leading adolescent girls (“hot bloods”) astray. Such issues became ever more the stuff of controversy as religious fundamentalists attacked her for her commitment to women’s rights, especially women’s rights to work and to receive birth control information.
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br />   As ER confronted each petty and large disturbance of heart and hearth, domestic and global, she was encouraged by one dominant fact: FDR was in a fighting mood. Her husband’s renewed vigor delighted her. He had made up his mind to demand significant changes in U.S. policy and spent every available minute during the holidays writing what he had determined would be one of the most important speeches of his presidency. When he read his wife various drafts, ER, his best critic, usually wanted more, but this time they were in accord.

  FDR’s sixth State of the Union, delivered to Congress on the morning of 4 January, sent a prescient warning to the nation. America could not possibly sail alone, aloof and uninvolved, through the world’s turbulent waters.

  FDR described his concept of the role of religion in public life more specifically than ever before. Religion was “the source” of democracy and the guarantor of international good faith. “Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors. Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows. International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will of civilized nations . . . to respect the rights and liberties of other nations.” Modern civilization depended upon and required all three.

  Where freedom of religion has been attacked, the attack has come from sources opposed to democracy. Where democracy has been overthrown, the spirit of free worship has disappeared. And where religion and democracy have vanished, good faith and reason in international affairs have given way to strident ambition and brute force.

  FDR went on to make two specific demands: for immediate military preparedness in the face of lawless aggression, and for changes in the 1935 Neutrality Act, which he had initially championed. ER had consistently opposed the act because its arms embargo clause served to support Germany, Japan, and Italy. The connectedness of all people in time of war was a theme she had been insisting upon in private letters and in her public writings for many years. On 5 April 1938 she had written, “Of course the trouble is that most people in this country think that we can stay out of wars in other parts of the world. Even if we stay out of it and save our own skins, we cannot escape the conditions which will undoubtedly exist in other parts of the world and which will react against us. . . . The best we can do is to realize nobody can save his own skin alone. We must all hang together.”

  Now in his 1939 State of the Union, FDR acknowledged that “our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim. The instinct for self-preservation should warn us that we ought not to let that happen anymore.” His concept of preparedness went beyond rearmament to include national unity and the development of every sector of the economy. The New Deal, “our program of social and economic reform,” was “part of defense, as basic as armaments themselves.” He promoted a conservation movement for “land, water power, forests”; he invoked the continuing need to “provide food, shelter, and medical care for the health of our population” and “new opportunities for work and education” for youth; and he called for a commitment to sustain “our obligation to the aged, the helpless, and the needy”—all of which were integral to our strength and “common destiny.” “Above all,” he asserted, the people of the nation needed to come together, so that “differences of occupation, geography, race, and religion no longer obscure the nation’s fundamental unity in thought and action.”

  FDR wanted to expand Social Security and create better health security measures. He wanted a permanent Civilian Conservation Corps and public works programs. The race to “make democracy work” required yet more federal spending. But to “balance the budget” he wanted to cut federal spending by one-third. At that point the Republicans in the audience, hitherto silent and stony-faced, broke into enthusiastic applause. Smiling grimly, the president acknowledged this outburst and concluded with the words of Abraham Lincoln: “This generation will nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. . . . The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless!”

  In her column, which she evidently wrote immediately upon returning from the Capitol, ER assessed FDR’s historic address from the point of view of his enemies. Seated in the executive gallery, she had observed “a solid block of people beneath us who were opposed on general grounds” to everything FDR might say. Occasionally one or another nodded in agreement to the truth of a statement. But they were so determined to maintain their silence that, with one exception, they refrained from applause even when they were in agreement. “When it ended, I doubt if anyone in the room remained entirely cold.”

  Her husband’s words about democracy in an era of mounting Communism and fascism generated a national conversation that ER joined. She told her regular press conference, “There can be no real democracy unless there are three basic things. 1. Economic security sufficient to give at least some minimum to make living worthwhile. 2. Sufficient education to understand the problems before the country and to help solve them. 3. The sources of information must be free—press, radio, movies.” To remain free, she insisted, “we have to watch other factors . . . such as bankers, subscribers and advertisers. They have to be watched by the people as carefully as government is watched.”

  At that press conference, ER was asked her opinion of George Gallup’s polls, since in the most recent one she had achieved a higher approval rate than FDR (68 to 51 percent). “Where you have no official position and no responsibility,” she replied, “it is much easier to be popular.” But she hated “to see us put so much trust in polls. After all, they don’t represent reasoned thought, and we may be influenced in our thinking by what is said in a poll.”

  She did, however, enjoy one poll taken by members of the Dining Car Employees Union, which named her “the most generous tipper among women riders on the country’s railroads.” According to the New York Times, women generally tipped “much less” than men, but ER redeemed her sex. She was, the Times headlined, “a Leader in Tipping.”

  Shortly after his State of the Union, FDR made a momentous telephone call to his friend and mentor, Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter, with the news that he intended to name him to the Supreme Court, to replace Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Stunned, Frankfurter whispered that he wished his “mother had been alive to see this day.”

  Justice Cardozo had died in July 1938, thereby vacating the “scholar’s seat” that had previously belonged to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. For six months legal scholars and New Dealers had been lobbying FDR on behalf of Frankfurter. But FDR had resisted, intending to name instead a legal scholar from the West in order to achieve geographic balance on the Court. He did favor putting Frankfurter on the Court eventually but planned to wait until after Justice Louis Brandeis retired so there would not be two Jews on the Court at the same time. It is unclear why, after six months of inaction, he changed his mind.

  The rising anti-Jewish feeling may have bolstered his decision. Several years earlier Sam Rosenman—FDR’s counsel, chief speechwriter, and editor of his presidential papers—and his wife, Dorothy, had initially declined to join FDR on his 1936 campaign for fear that “two Jews on the train,” as it went through the Bible Belt, would inflame opposition, but FDR had replied, “That’s no way to handle anti-Semitism. The way to handle it is to meet it head-on.” Sam and Dorothy Rosenman had joined the train.

  The pressure against Frankfurter was great. Senator Patrick McCarran (D-NV) launched a crude anti-Semitic campaign against him, while delegations of prominent Jews descended on him to demand that he refuse the nomination, worrying that it would intensify anti-Jewish feeling in the United States. He replied, “So you would create your own ghetto!”

  The three days of confirmation hearings degenerated into an anti-Semitic circus fill
ed with “witnesses” who decried the impending loss of Christian America. Dean Acheson, Frankfurter’s former student who accompanied him throughout the hearings, observed that all the witnesses “were fanatical and some were very definitely mental cases.” Senator McCarran’s “vicious mis-representation of Felix’s views and undisguised anti-Semitism” were sheer spectacle, since McCarran was determined to paint Frankfurter as “a dangerous radical, if not a Communist.” The committee chair, Senator Matthew Neely (D-WV), asked Frankfurter point-blank whether he had ever enrolled in the Communist Party. The candidate replied forcefully, “I have never been enrolled and have never been qualified to be enrolled, because that does not represent my view of life, nor my view of government.”

  With that, the hearings were over. The gavel banged down, and a great roar of approval came from the crowded room. Frankfurter’s appointment to the Supreme Court was approved unanimously that day.

  The ugliness of the hearings might have served as a warning of things to come. But initially FDR’s circle was relieved, and Frankfurter’s friends were ecstatic. Although ER never particularly liked or trusted Frankfurter, she approved of FDR’s appointment of him as a stand against bigotry, so dangerously on the march throughout Europe and the United States.

  Indeed, the outspoken Frankfurter had been a prescient opponent of fascism. His words had been useful as ER and the leadership of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) struggled to generate concern about victims of fascism and especially about the fate of refugees from Germany, Austria, and Spain. In 1933 and 1934 he had written to FDR from Oxford and Palestine, warning of looming horrors. “That things should be happening . . . in the land of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant and Beethoven requires a complete re-orientation of one’s sense of reality as well as one’s historical sense.” He worked ardently for refugee sanctuary within the United States and in Palestine, and also battled the rising tide of anti-Semitism in American universities, including Harvard Law School, where his own dean, Roscoe Pound, was a Nazi apologist who argued that Hitler “was saving central Europe from ‘agitators.’”