Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  • • •

  On the refugee issue, ER and her allies in and out of government—notably Caroline O’Day, New York’s member of Congress at large, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins—were particularly hopeful about the passage of the Wagner-Rogers bill. Introduced on 9 February 1939 by Senator Robert F. Wagner Jr. (D-NY), and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers (R-MA). The bill proposed to admit twenty thousand German refugee children under the age of fourteen over and above the official German quota. A wide array of bipartisan supporters, ranging from Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, and George William Cardinal Mundelein to AFL-CIO labor leaders, endorsed the bill. The AFSC, chaired by Clarence Pickett, agreed to supervise the children’s travel and their adoption. Within days of the bill’s introduction, forty thousand families of all faiths volunteered to adopt the children.

  For the first time, ER endorsed a piece of pending legislation at her press conference. When asked for her views on the Wagner-Rogers bill, she replied, “with permission to quote,” that she hoped it passed. “I think it is a wise way to do a humanitarian act. Other nations take their share of the child refugees, and it seems a fair thing to do.”

  But public opinion and many government officials were hostile to allowing more refugees into the country. Opinion polls in 1939 revealed that 94 percent of Americans disapproved of Nazi policies regarding Jews, and 97 percent disapproved of Nazi policies regarding Catholics, yet 83 percent wanted nothing done to assist them.

  To ER’s chagrin, FDR did and said nothing to change public opinion. When she argued that he might perhaps exercise his executive leadership to save some children who were already guaranteed homes, he replied that to do so would jeopardize other programs. On 28 February the first lady explained to her friend, the family court judge Justine Wise Polier, that FDR did not object to her supporting the bill but also did not want her to get involved “at the present time.”

  Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, Francis Biddle, and ER spoke earnestly and often in support of the Wagner-Rogers bill, but within the administration some vigorously opposed it. FDR’s cousin Laura Delano Houghteling, Uncle Fred Delano’s daughter and the wife of James Lawrence Houghteling, commissioner of immigration and naturalization, had told Assistant Secretary of State Jay Pierrepont Moffat at a cocktail party that the trouble with the Wagner-Rogers bill was that twenty thousand “charming children” all too quickly “grow into 20,000 ugly adults.” Moffat, friends with FDR since Groton and Harvard, agreed with her.

  Although it is unclear to what extent Laura Delano Houghteling’s views represented her family’s feelings, FDR’s State Department was clearly dominated by a toxic mix of isolationist, appeasing, and anti-Semitic sentiments. Moffat, of the Division for European Affairs (1933–40), had consistently opposed sanctions against Germany and argued for business as usual with Hitler. In 1934, when Harvard’s president James Conant withdrew an invitation to Nazi official Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was to have been honored at the commencement, Moffat had objected, saying that good Cambridge fellows ought to resist the pressure of “all the Jews in Christendom [who] arose in protest.” Moffat was consistent. When posted to Warsaw, where he met the Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, he reported that Litvinov had “the malevolent look of an untidy Jew.”

  U.S. ambassador to France William Bullitt, presumed in some circles to be in part Jewish, had a long history of making anti-Semitic outbursts. His correspondence with FDR and his colleagues continued to be sprinkled with comments about Jews, often unsubstantiated and generally “poisonous” in tone.

  In Congress, sixty anti-alien bills had recently been introduced to further limit the immigration quotas established in 1924. One bill sought to end immigration entirely for the next ten years. Meanwhile the White House held its fourth conference on the needs of children, which cast a spotlight on dreadful Depression conditions that persisted throughout the United States. Both ER and FDR hoped the conference would build support for federal aid to education and for expanding school health programs. FDR said lectures on nutrition meant nothing unless good food was available for compulsory school attendance. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace challenged the growing enthusiasm for eugenics, lamenting the tendency “to condemn whole groups of people as unworthy.” IQ was not about “the blood stream by economic status.” ER condemned sectional and racial inequalities and insisted that “with the country growing so close together by the development of transportation and communication, the people can no longer afford to be sectional.” She agreed entirely with Frank Graham’s enduring message, presented to over five hundred of the nation’s leading educators and social workers: “We do not have a democracy in America when we put $220 in one child’s education annually, and less than $20 in another child’s.” Federal aid to education would ensure equality of educational opportunity.

  But conservative politicians, formerly willing to ignore issues of poverty, now emphasized the needs of American children as never before, under a new political banner: America First. According to Senator Robert Reynolds (D-NC):

  America’s children are America’s responsibility, and refugee children in Europe are Europe’s responsibility. . . . Here are the grim facts: Every State . . . has a tremendous number of children in want. . . .

  Millions of starving, halfnaked children of 8,000,000 tenant farmers, scattered throughout all parts of the US, live in hovels. Their tumble-down shacks have no windows. They sleep on rags. . . . They have no medical care. . . . They are unschooled.

  Shall we first take care of our own children, or shall we bestow our charity on children imported from abroad?

  Reynolds and other conservative politicians now used the economic problems facing America as a pretext for vehement opposition to the acceptance of more refugees, who were “coming in ship after ship, and finding employment,” and causing Americans to lose their jobs. The fact that the Wagner-Rogers bill concerned children younger than fourteen did not matter to these new isolationists, who said that with 600,000 young Americans already facing a jobless future, there were too many refugees in this country.

  Congressman Jacob Thorkelson (R-MT) represented yet another congressional tendency. An anti-Semitic bigot, he simply despised the new refugees. To his mind, they were internationalists, Communists, money changers, and grotesqueries. He celebrated Germany because it had “discovered the insidious wiles” of these people. “In the US, the same crowd [Jew-Communists], filled with hatreds, has organized over a thousand anti-Nazi leagues. . . . They do not seem to consider that 120,000,000 Gentiles or Christian Americans may not agree with them.” His arguments and those of other members of Congress reflected the profound and growing fascist sentiment within the United States.

  The atmosphere during the debate on the Wagner-Rogers bill remained unchanged by international events. On 15 March 1939 Hitler invaded Prague and took over Czechoslovakia, whereupon refugees streamed out of that once-democratic country and joined the Spanish, German, and Austrian refugees seeking asylum.

  All this time, despite ER’s best public and private efforts, FDR said not one word about Wagner-Rogers. Various entertainers and public figures campaigned for it, particularly Helen Hayes and Eddie Cantor, but their efforts met with little response. Cantor made a personal appeal to the president via his secretary Marvin McIntyre. McIntyre replied that even those who were most sympathetic to the bill shared “a general feeling” that it would “be inadvisable” to try to increase quotas or change our immigration policies at that moment. “There is a very real feeling that if this question is too prominently raised in the Congress during the present session we might get more restrictive rather than more liberal laws and practices.”

  In June, Congresswoman Caroline O’Day sent FDR a memo demanding to know his position on Wagner-Rogers. O’Day was not only FDR’s friend and most loyal supporter in Congress but ER’s closest friend in Washington—one of the four partners with whom she ha
d co-owned Val-Kill and Todhunter School in the 1920s. But FDR failed to answer O’Day and wrote on her memo, “File, No Action.” She walked into FDR’s study one day and demanded to know the reason for his continuing silence about the children’s refugee bill. FDR replied, “They are not our Jews.”

  The Wagner-Rogers bill was amended to prioritize the children but count them fully as refugee quota numbers.* At that point Wagner withdrew it, announcing in June that he preferred “to have no bill at all.”

  • • •

  ER’s efforts on behalf of refugees were not limited to children; she sought protection for all the victims of Hitler. She worked closely with journalist Dorothy Thompson and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Pearl Buck, who were active with the American Committee for Christian German Refugees and the Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children, and responded to all their requests for assistance. On 24 January 1939, when Thompson was honored for her championship of refugees at a fund-raising banquet hosted by Albert Einstein, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Henry Sloane Coffin, ER sent a message of profound gratitude for her “courage and zeal.” Pearl Buck concluded the event by noting, “In Germany the Jew is merely a symbol, and when he is gone the attack will continue against all who dissent.”

  ER believed that the inclination toward appeasement among democrats in France, England, and the United States had endured with such vigor for so long because Hitler promised to wipe out Communists first. Not until Kristallnacht in November 1938 was there more widespread opposition to Nazi atrocities. Even Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 met with virtually no State Department opposition. Within days, thousands of Czechs were imprisoned or transferred to Germany to perform forced labor. Universities were closed, anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws were imposed. Jews were disenfranchised, their businesses were confiscated, and Czech culture was suppressed.

  Everything that had been done at Versailles allegedly to limit German militarism was now being undone, yet few believed that opposing Hitler was worth another world war. ER had long argued that the World Court should condemn war as murder, but that was between 1924 and 1935, when there was still hope that the United States might join the Court, and when she still imagined the Court and the League of Nations would be able to maintain peace.

  By 1939 she was convinced that war was imminent. Still, domestic support even for an economic blockade that could limit German military might was virtually nil. To build up an opposition, ER worked to promote respect for those groups that Nazis and fascists condemned and degraded—Jews, unionists, and political women dedicated to social reform. Hitler’s categories of people whose lives were “not worth living,” whom he labeled “useless eaters,” included “single infertile women” and a range of handicapped or imperfect people.

  ER focused some of her first efforts on the group that included her husband—victims of polio and other disabling diseases. The March of Dimes, a new charity founded by Eddie Cantor, sought to inspire a nationwide door-to-door campaign on behalf of handicapped children. It urged every American to donate ten cents to “fight infantile paralysis.” On 30 January, in a moving radio address in honor of FDR’s fifty-seventh birthday, ER praised the opportunities provided for “afflicted” children and adults at Warm Springs, and pointed to the need for other “havens of refuge and rehabilitation.” They were “a source of healing for crippled bodies; a veritable fountain of courage and hope,” places where youngsters might be taught “to dance on crutches” and play in orchestras. Young musicians, encouraged by their love of music, performed well and happily there and “become entirely unaware of their handicaps. . . . It is as important to mend spirits as to mend bodies.” She enlisted for the crusade her close allies on all issues of justice: Edith Nourse Rogers, Mary Margaret McBride (known to radio fans as Martha Deane), Cornelia (Leila) Bryce Pinchot, wife of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and former governor of Pennsylvania, and other notables.

  ER became ever more outspoken in her support for a federal anti-lynching law. Efforts to pass such a bill had had a long history. For generations, southern women led by black journalist Ida B. Wells had called for protection against white mob violence. Between 1882 and 1933, sixty-one anti-lynching bills had been introduced into Congress. During FDR’s first administration, the NAACP had championed an anti-lynching bill co-sponsored by Senators Robert Wagner and Edward Costigan (D-CO). ER had asked for FDR’s support, but he would say nothing on its behalf. Southern Democrats with seniority controlled the Senate and had threatened a filibuster that would block all New Deal efforts. FDR believed that the success of his programs depended on placating the old-line southerners. The Wagner-Costigan bill died. From 1934 to 1940, 130 more anti-lynching bills were introduced, and every effort was resisted.

  ER understood the power of the forces lined up against passage of an anti-lynching bill, but she refused to be silent. On 13 January 1939, at the National Conference on Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, she took questions on the current bill “on the clear understanding that I am speaking for myself, as an individual, and in no other sense.” The bill should be passed, she said, “as soon as possible.” It was the first time she had clearly announced her position. In these perilous times, it would be “a gesture, it would be a step in the right direction. . . . It would put us on record against something we should certainly, all of us, anywhere in this country, be against.” Clearly she agreed with Walter White of the NAACP that the United States could no longer stand before the world and “lecture other countries without being derided as hypocrites unless we first put our own house in order.” America’s ongoing refusal to ensure even the most basic civil right—the freedom from legally sanctioned murder—for black Americans provided the country’s enemies with a considerable propaganda weapon. And in 1939 White called FDR’s silence the “greatest single handicap” against the bill.

  In February ER resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) because her continued membership might seem to signify agreement with “a policy of which she disapproved,” as the Times reported.*

  In January, V. D. Johnston, treasurer of Howard University, had applied to the DAR for use of Constitution Hall, a four-thousand-seat auditorium that the DAR owned tax-free; it was the largest concert space in Washington. Marian Anderson, a world-famous contralto whom renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini had called “the voice of the century,” had returned from her annual tour of European capitals and hoped to perform there on Easter Sunday, 9 April. But the DAR told Johnston that Constitution Hall expressly prohibited Negro artists, whereupon he published letters of protest in several newspapers. The result was a spontaneous and robust campaign on Anderson’s behalf.

  ER, who had invited Anderson to sing at the White House in 1936, resigned from the DAR very publicly, thereby striking a blow against race traditions previously regarded as sacrosanct. Her resignation was overwhelmingly popular across partisan lines throughout most of the country. “Prejudice,” the Washington Herald editorialized, “rules to make the capital of the Nation ridiculous in the eyes of all cultured people and to comfort Fuehrer Hitler and the members of our Nazibund.”

  Her action spurred an avalanche of letters and editorials from musicians, stars, leading public citizens, and Americans from every walk of life. Enthusiastic letters of support even came from unexpected sources, including her brother Hall’s second wife, the noted Cleveland pianist Dorothy Kemp Roosevelt. “How kind of you to write your approval of my stand on race prejudice,” ER replied to her. “It seems incredible when we are protesting the happenings in Germany to permit intolerance such as this in our own country.”

  In San Francisco, Anderson herself observed, “I am not surprised at Mrs. Roosevelt’s action because she seems to me to be one who really comprehends the true meaning of democracy. I am shocked beyond words to be barred from the capital of my own country after having appeared in almost every other capital of the world.” Sol Hurok, Anders
on’s manager, considered ER’s resignation “one of the most hopeful signs . . . for democracy. . . . By her action Mrs. Roosevelt has shown herself to be a woman of courage and excellent taste.”

  But it was not ER’s first such protest—she often matched her convictions with actions. In May 1934 at a meeting of America’s educators she had made a speech supporting the passage of a resolution against school segregation. She had demanded equality in education and opportunity for all children, concluding, “We will all go ahead together, or we will all go down together.” Then in November 1938 she again challenged America’s “race etiquette” when she sat alongside a key civil rights leader, Mary McLeod Bethune, at the opening of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, making a personal protest against segregation. When Sheriff Bull Connor’s policemen ordered her to leave the black section, she moved her chair to the aisle between the two segregated sections.

  An alternative venue for the Marian Anderson concert, the Central High School auditorium, was proposed—but then was vetoed by Washington’s Public School Board. ER was outraged. At this point Howard University, the NAACP, and the Society of Friends, in an effort to find another venue, formed a citizens’ committee that quickly garnered five thousand supporters. The first lady telegraphed the committee, “I regret exceedingly that Washington is to be deprived of hearing Marian Anderson, a great artist.”

  She joined NAACP chair Walter White and Oscar Chapman, assistant secretary of the interior, in an effort to secure a space for an outdoor public concert that would be open to everyone. When Chapman decided to use the Great Mall at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, he notified his boss, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who called the president. FDR shouted into the phone, “Bully for Oscar! She can sing from the top of the Washington Monument if she wants to!”