Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  The political stalemate in Washington groaned on, with no movement by Congress to advance any of FDR’s goals. FDR had threatened to stay in overheated Washington until Congress acted—throughout the summer if necessary. At Val-Kill, increasingly agitated, ER began to write a book on democracy, which she envisioned as a companion to her 1938 book, This Troubled World. She also wrote an essay on religious freedom in which she stressed the importance of civil liberties and the needs of youth in crisis, to counter a growing evangelical crusade to “keep America Christian.” She emphasized the importance of spirituality and responsibility—in accord with Christ’s own commitment to love all humanity, especially those in need and in want.

  As ER prepared for her summer 1939 appearance at the NAACP convention, the conservative forces in Congress regrouped with stunning ferocity to battle the New Deal and all liberal advances. She was outraged by congressional inaction on lifting the arms embargo and by the raging right-wing crusade against the National Youth Administration and the Works Progress Administration—youth and the poor. An astonishing movement to criminalize poverty was under way—to regulate, fingerprint, and even disenfranchise the unemployed, especially WPA workers and relief recipients. New York congressman Vito Marcantonio (who switched from the Republican Party to the American Labor Party) deplored that Congress was “playing politics” with the suffering of millions of Americans.

  The Dies Committee sought to defund and destroy all New Deal arts projects. After a year of assault, on 15 June 1939, the House passed a devastating bill that discontinued payment of relief workers at “prevailing wages”; demanded the dismissal of WPA personnel after eighteen months; ordered a loyalty oath for new workers; and continued the Writers’, Music, Art projects “only if locally sponsored.”

  It defunded the Federal Theatre Project entirely. Ten thousand theater workers were to be dismissed. Popular and meaningful, entertaining and provocative, the Federal Theatre presented plays, circuses, operas, vaudeville, dance theater, and children’s theater events in public parks, schools and colleges, community centers and hospitals. Under its auspices, new regional theaters were built throughout the country. From Boston to Los Angeles, Chicago to Iowa City, in Dallas, Tampa, and Birmingham, twelve regional theater centers hosted resident and touring companies. In every region of the country, in America’s cities and hamlets, mountains and deltas, the Federal’s many projects had thrilled vast audiences, drawing in over forty million Americans, most of whom had never been to a play or live performance before. It thus created an entirely new generation of theatergoers. From a theatrical perspective, the pioneering, innovative Federal Theatre was an astonishing success.*

  That was, of course, the problem. Conservatives in Congress condemned federal support for creativity—music, art, and puppet shows—since it increased political awareness and contributed to fun. Every aspect of the Federal Theatre Project was deemed suspect, un-American, subversive. After all, it challenged the old order in thrilling, enduring terms.

  Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre, received the news after seeing An Enemy of the People in a high school auditorium. One “of our ticket men, looking white and sick, handed me a newspaper” that headlined a “specific ban against the use of federal money for theatre projects.” Flanagan called Washington, only to be told that WPA would not fight to save one of its most successful ventures. She resolved to fight and organized a national protest of critics, performers, and stars. And she called ER.

  ER had long been impressed by Flanagan’s creative scholarship and her experimental theater at Vassar. For four years she had championed the Federal Theatre Project in her columns and on the air. Profoundly disheartened by its defunding, and outraged by congressional belligerence and its campaign of lies and calumny, ER began a campaign to oppose the defunding. On 20 June she wrote in her column, “I confess that I am just as concerned as [Flanagan] is about the proposed ending of the Federal Theatre Projects. There seems to be nothing I can do to help. Apparently the House of Representatives has decided that it doesn’t matter what happens to people who have definite talents” in the theater arts: stagehands, set designers, lighting designers, puppeteers, actors, writers, and directors. They “can starve, go on local relief, or dig ditches, if they can find ditches to dig.” She was uncommonly irate:

  I know that this project is considered dangerous because it may harbor some Communists, but I wonder if Communists occupied in producing plays are not safer than Communists starving to death. I have always felt that whatever your beliefs might be, if you could earn enough to keep body and soul together and had to be pretty busy doing that, you would not be very apt to have time to plot the overthrow of any existing government.

  She concluded with the hope that the Senate might agree with those who believed “this is an era of civilization,” recognize that this theater might “serve as an instrument to that end,” and reconsider.

  ER also defended the Federal Theatre’s work in a national broadcast: “Somehow we must build throughout this country a background of culture. No nation grows up until that has been accomplished, and I know of no way which will reach more of our people than the great plays of the past and of the present-day authors.”

  The war over the Federal Theatre reminded ER of the controversy that erupted over the dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The play warned that dictatorship can arrive not only “by way of military invasion” but also by “a sudden silencing of free voices.” ER never doubted that it could happen here, especially if certain congressional committees were fully empowered, but she trusted in the future of dissent and the activism of youth. “I must say that talking to young people gives me great hope. There is a willingness among them to think along cooperative lines, and a desire to act unselfishly,” which was for her the most “heartening” fact during these weeks of assault.

  Her friends in Congress, notably Caroline O’Day, also vigorously defended the theater, arguing that ideas and creativity involved controversy and disagreement. Less than 2 percent of the plays produced were by contemporary writers, she noted—classics from Shakespeare, Molière, Aristophanes, and Chekhov dominated the scene. Yet their timeless works were relevant to “modern social problems.”

  In the final days of the debate, the House branded certain Federal Theatre plays lewd and “salacious.” To some members of Congress, practically everything with love in the title seemed “Red” propaganda, including classics like Sheridan’s School for Scandal and Molière’s School for Wives; modern plays like Susan Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires; and newer titles like Love ’Em and Leave ’Em, Up in Mabel’s Room, and A New Kind of Love.

  On 30 June 1939, by a vote of 321 to 23, the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act for 1940 was passed. The WPA lost $125 million in funding, and all workers on the payroll for over eighteen months were dismissed. A loyalty oath was now to be required of WPA workers. The Federal Art and Music projects would require state sponsorship to continue. And the Federal Theatre Project was terminated, effective midnight the very next day. FDR could not veto the legislation, since it involved the entire relief budget for the next fiscal year—the relief expenditures for over two and a half million people.

  Final curtains came down all over America. The theater’s production of Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock, which dramatized union activism, was canceled.* At the last performance of Pinocchio, at New York’s Ritz Theatre, the cast and crew changed the play’s happy ending: Pinocchio “having conquered selfishness and greed, did not become a living boy. Instead he was turned back into a puppet,” as the cast mourned: “So let the bells proclaim our grief that his small life was all too brief.” Stagehands then knocked down the sets and laid the puppet in a pine box with a boldly printed epitaph: “Born 23 December 1938; Killed by Act of Congress, 30 June 1939.”

  • • •

  The Congress that killed Pinocchio was also det
ermined to strangle the New Deal. Congress killed FDR’s housing bill, which would have given Wagner’s housing act the money to build needed affordable housing nationwide; and it rejected FDR’s spend-lend bill, which would have made it easier for hardworking people to get credit. Having destroyed the Wagner-Rogers children’s refugee bill, and having sent the St. Louis away without comment, Congress seemed to give Hitler a clear signal: Do as you like—the United States is determined to do nothing at all.

  ER and FDR were both distraught when Caroline O’Day voted to retain the 1935 Neutrality Act’s arms embargo. A pacifist but never an isolationist, and an antiwar activist since World War I, O’Day was closely associated with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, and Lillian Wald were mentors to both ER and O’Day among peace activists. In the 1920s and 1930s ER and O’Day and their allies had supported U.S. adherence to the World Court and Senator Gerald Nye’s (R-ND) campaign to remove profits from war industries.

  Jane Addams had donated her Nobel Peace Prize money to the WILPF when she died in 1935. In January of that year, on the occasion of Catt’s birthday, ER delivered a speech calling for an end to the “absolute waste” of war. “The more we see of the munitions business, of the use of chemicals, of the traffic in other goods [needed for war],” she said, “the more we realize that human cupidity is as universal as human heroism. If we are to do away with the war idea, one of the first steps will be to do away with all the possibility of private profit.” She contributed the speech as an essay, “Because the War Idea Is Obsolete,” to Catt’s collection Why Wars Must Cease.

  ER and O’Day had also campaigned for democratic control over international relations. They were together during a spring 1937 meeting of the Emergency Peace Campaign, when ER spoke ardently for peace through justice: “We must find a way whereby the grievances of nations, their necessities, their desires can be heard by other nations and passed upon without recourse to force.” She concluded, “We have found a way to do away with dueling in settling differences between individuals”; now law must replace force.

  During the Spanish Civil War, O’Day had sought to lift the arms embargo, correctly arguing that it supported fascist aggression. She signed a February 1937 congressional protest against the embargo along with thirty-one members of Congress. And ER, in her 1938 book This Troubled World, had agreed. Back then, FDR had opposed all congressional efforts to lift the embargo. Not until Franco’s triumph did he permit arms sales to Spain. ER had found this policy incomprehensible.

  Now, with Nazi aggression on the rise, FDR had changed his position, advocating repeal of the arms embargo because it helped the aggressors and weakened their victims. ER welcomed the change; she thought FDR had stood by the embargo far too long. Now O’Day’s vote to retain the embargo was incomprehensible. When she cast that vote, FDR wrote her a frank and bitter letter:

  I think it may interest you to tell you in great confidence that two of our Embassies abroad tell us this afternoon that the action of the House last night has caused dismay in democratic, peaceful circles. The anti-war nations believe that a definite stimulus has been given to Hitler . . . and that if war breaks out in Europe, because of further seeking of territory by Hitler and Mussolini, an important part of the responsibility will rest on last night’s action.

  I know you always want me to be frank with you and I honestly believe that the vote last night was a stimulus to war and that if the result had been different it would have been a definite encouragement to peace.

  • • •

  For several months after O’Day’s vote, she and ER did not speak; a blast of cold transformed their friendship.

  O’Day was part of Congress’s isolationist group, representing the pacifist, liberal wing. Her fellow members there, like Oswald Garrison Villard, were veterans of the peace movement—civil libertarians, dedicated progressives, antifascist pacifists. They deplored war, because they believed that it was merely destructive. The new warfare of unlimited aerial bombardment against open cities, as in Barcelona and Madrid, left only rubble and agony. War destroyed democracy and civilization: it created only victims, never victors. O’Day supported the Ludlow Amendment, which called for amending the Constitution to require a national referendum before Congress could declare war.

  Other isolationists, however, had very different politics. “America Firsters” supported Nazi efforts to rid the world of Communism—Hitler’s publicly stated goal. Some publicly supported Hitler’s messianic call for a final war of good against evil, defining evil as Bolshevik-Jewish democracies. Some, with no consideration for human rights violations against Hitler’s subject peoples, generally despised liberal, “Communist,” and Jewish efforts to rally interventionism or protest against Nazism.

  Although ER shared many of O’Day’s convictions about the costs of war, she rejected the proposed Ludlow Amendment as a dangerous restriction that threatened America’s security. Finally she rejected neutrality and asked again, as she often had in the past: “I wonder whether we have decided to hide behind neutrality? It is safe, perhaps, but I am not sure that it is always right to be safe.” In February 1939, when Carrie Chapman Catt called for increased military appropriation, ER defended her. A peace ally, Elizabeth Baker, associated with Catt’s National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, protested to ER:

  Protect our Mrs. Catt from this spectacle. A dear sweet faced old lady internationally known as a worker for peace, now at eighty, begging for guns with which to kill other mothers’ sons. Preserve her past testimony against all wars and killings. Save her international friendships and prestige.

  ER replied, “I am sorry that I cannot agree with you. Mrs. Catt’s attitude is based on years of study and is correct.”

  While FDR remained in Washington to negotiate urgent Senate support to lift the arms embargo, ER left to attend the thirtieth anniversary of the NAACP in Richmond, Virginia. On her journey she considered the dire international situation. What would be the impact of continued U.S. silence on the new refugees streaming out of Jozef Tiso’s fascist Slovakia, as well as Romania and Hungary? Poland was pro-Nazi, but Poland was a diverse country, with millions of democrats, antifascists, and Jews. Global war seemed imminent, and Hitler had spies everywhere, even in U.S. pressrooms and throughout the country. She very much hoped that FDR’s urgent lobbying with the senators to repeal the arms embargo succeeded.

  Her talk at the convention, which included her presentation of the Spingarn Medal to Marian Anderson, was scheduled for the closing gala on 2 July. NAACP president Walter White had arranged live national radio coverage of her speech as well as Anderson’s response and performance.

  As ER stood before the huge crowd, formally dressed for the splendid occasion, she remained silent for a moment, reviewing the situation: African-Americans were segregated or restricted from full citizenship by poll taxes and literacy tests, which deprived them of suffrage, and by limited job and educational opportunities. Fully aware that the congressional revolt against New Deal promises was aimed in part at her audience, and knowing her words would be broadcast nationwide, she launched into a powerful speech regarding America’s future.

  ER focused on education. Educational reforms were needed to ensure a well-educated citizenry and should emphasize the study of history and politics, music, art, dance, theater—precisely those programs Congress so meanly targeted: “The danger of people who cannot understand the problems before their government is a real danger for us, because Congress represents the people. . . . It goes back to the people every time in a democracy and therefore it does not matter whether you belong to one race or one group. All races and all groups must see today that we as a whole, as a people, are able to understand the problems before us.”

  This could happen only in the right “environment,” one that allowed “good citizens” to flourish. America can no longer turn its back upon the need
s of the people for health care, housing, the special needs of young people: “We have to have healthy citizens. Physical health affects the mind, affects the spirit. But you cannot have physical health, mental development, spiritual happiness” without the proper environment. “Now, this may require sacrifice from the nation as a whole. Very well. Then the sacrifice” must be made. Making these changes will involve “all of us, if we care about America—and we do.” But these things “mean a future for the nation or decay.”

  ER then presented the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually to a person who had overcome great obstacles on the path to significant achievement. Marian Anderson, she noted, had

  the courage to meet many difficulties. She has always had great dignity; and her modesty and her dignity together with her great gift have gained for her wide recognition. . . . I am glad to have been chosen to give you this medal, Miss Anderson, for your achievement far transcends any question of race. It is an achievement in the field of art, and this medal is given to you in recognition of the perfection of your art. My thanks and good wishes go with you, Miss Anderson, for you bring to this country as a whole not only enjoyment but much beauty.

  Anderson thanked ER, saying, “I feel it a signal honor to have received the medal from the hands of our First Lady who is not a first lady in name only but in her every deed.” She then asked the assembly to join her in singing “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”

  ER’s appearance at the NAACP convention received recognition in the black press for months. The Chicago Defender celebrated her commitment to democracy:

  Speaking in the very stronghold of southern reactionary groups, she made no attempt to compromise with southern traditions. She stated in clear, definite language the problems of a democracy and the tasks of its citizens, in the presence of those stalwart sons of Virginia—Senators Byrd and Glass—who have opposed every major liberal legislation of the New Deal.