Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Only a woman of great courage and of unusual foresight could have registered her convictions with such force and persuasion. It was a great speech, a great occasion, surpassed only by the greatness of Mrs. Roosevelt.

  ER returned to Washington that night. The next morning she flew to New York City to attend the annual conference of the American Youth Congress (AYC). Always inspired by young people, a rainbow of race and politics, she listened to their earnest speeches, as they explained their activism, and watched a colorful pageant. They fortified her hopes for a democratic future.*

  In her evening keynote address to over five thousand delegates, ER hailed especially the group’s democratic creed, which condemned dictatorships, while insisting on absolute free speech for all: “Nothing finer could come out of any organization of youths. Some people are afraid to see youth come together for discussions. They should not be afraid after reading the creed you have just adopted.” She urged all members of the AYC to research conditions in their own communities, and report them to the nation: “There are many things happening in the country today which would not be happening if the people of the country knew about them. . . . It is almost impossible sometimes to find a way of informing the nation.” People were suffering and actually starving from lack of work, and programs were being cut that had formerly ensured people jobs. It was up to every member of the AYC, ER advised them, to rededicate themselves with courage and fortitude to the ideals the nation would celebrate the next day, Independence Day.

  As the war clouds descended, ER assumed the United States would be completely involved and determined that her role would be to encourage her allies to become more active in movements for democracy’s survival. For months she spoke to large political groups to urge specific actions.

  Before a large gathering of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she emphasized the need for freedom of the press, deploring propaganda and government control of information. Americans had a right to “guard against” government’s “undue influence” over the press, radio, or movies. “All points of view have the right of expression,” and “real freedom, not sham freedom of the press,” meant independence and controversy. Everywhere she went, she celebrated democracy as the alternative to “fascism and communism,” which at a minimum required “economic freedom.” People who “did not know where their next meal was coming from” could not possibly make “good citizens.” In a democracy, “we must think of the greatest good for the greatest number.”

  In the face of growing assaults on democracy by Communist and fascist movements around the world, ER insisted that Americans must “hold firmly to our intellectual freedom.” No democracy could survive “where schools and universities are not free” or where religious freedom was curtailed. She courageously highlighted racial injustice and said, “It is not a true democracy as long as some citizens cannot vote, and there are parts of this country where some citizens cannot do so; it is not a true democracy . . . when everyone does not feel free in every way.”

  She never deviated from her belief that what was good for the United States was, ultimately, good for the world. All spring in speeches and broadcasts she urged her audiences to confront “the root problem”—which was an “economic one,” and a “world problem,” and “none of us knows the answer.” “We have bought ourselves time to think.” But not much time: “We cannot establish peace when the underlying reasons for unhappiness and discontent remain the same the world over. . . . It is all very well to try to do things which will keep us safe,” but we must see “the things which will keep us safe have to do also with keeping the rest of the world safe.”

  On 15 June 1939, ER launched her first 1940 campaign speech in an address to the northeast regional conference of Democratic women. ER’s friend, the popular novelist Fannie Hurst, introduced the first lady as “the torchbearer of today” who lights up hope for tomorrow. To that audience, ER stressed the need for partisan activity: “Democracy must have from every citizen the kind of service which gives without seeking.” Her husband had said it best regarding 1940: “We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages!”

  Increasingly the New Deal was called the “Jew Deal,” and increasingly the Roosevelts were called Communists and Jews. The New Deal did endanger absolute privileges long held by white planters and industrialists who had never needed to consider labor costs or labor relations. More democracy did mean the end of white power monopoly in southern states. In Virginia, for example, only 12 percent of the population voted. Because of the poll tax, wives did not vote; nor did the poor. Black people, no matter how educated, were not allowed to pass the discriminatory literacy tests required to register. Only more intense political activism would ensure democracy’s survival.

  ER did not underestimate the widespread bigotry that flourished in America. Even her closest friends made the most appalling remarks. Hick, for example, made disparaging remarks about Jews and blacks. When ER asked the Federal Theatre people to find a job for Hick’s brother-in-law Julian, Hick launched one of her furious tirades at how he was treated, but this one was unusual even for her. She reserved her particular wrath for Paul Edwards—that “damned kike coward” who had interviewed and insulted Julian. After the Federal Theatre hired Julian, Hick’s gratitude to ER did not entail an apology: “I suppose I should say I’m sorry I wrote you that blast . . . , but I’m not.”

  There is no evidence that ER ever chided Hick, or anyone else in her circle, for prejudiced comments. Instead, she increasingly invited her Jewish friends to accompany her to public events, wrote more fully about them in her columns, and called for greater interfaith amity. She delivered a Fourth of July appeal to the National Conference of Christians and Jews: “If anything is evident today, it is the need of all groups of Americans to cooperate. . . . Mutual respect . . . and the promotion of better understanding among Protestants, Catholics and Jews in America is truly one of the most necessary tasks confronting us.”

  On Independence Day, encouraged by the public protests against the New York State Assembly’s plans to cut teachers’ salaries and vacation time, ER noted that children’s education was America’s first line of defense: limiting “educational opportunities is not wise economy, nor should the salaries of teachers be lowered. . . . We should stress better teachers and higher salaries and economize in other ways.”

  Fortified, ER journeyed to Hyde Park for the family’s annual Fourth of July Picnic. Alone on the train, she contemplated the changes in her life—her new alliances and urgent efforts, and her old friends, so uninterested in and critical of her new friends. For the first time, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman would not even be at the picnic. Nor would Hick, although Earl Miller might appear.

  ER and FDR had one day together only at Hyde Park; the congressional rancor demanded the president’s return to Washington that very night. After their traditional picnic with family and friends including the Morgenthaus, FDR called an “impromptu press conference.” He was told that Senate isolationists were “prepared to filibuster” through September. Filibuster was their right, he said, but he too was prepared to remain in session all summer, until the Senate reversed the House’s failure to lift the arms embargo. It was the only thing to do to prevent war. That evening ER wrote that “we all dined with my mother-in-law” at a gala farewell party, because SDR was soon to sail for Europe. Immediately thereafter FDR boarded his special train to the capital.

  ER remained at Val-Kill. She rode in the cool of the morning; later with Tommy, Aunt Maude, and her husband, Uncle David Gray (on a brief visit from his post as ambassador to Ireland). She paid a nostalgic visit to Grandmother Hall’s “old house” at Tivoli. Early the next morning “I left in my own car for New York City and went straight to my mother-in-law’s [Sixty-fifth Street] house to go with her to the steamer. I always like to go on board and see where my family is going to be ensconced . . . but I never like to stay to
see the steamer actually leave. Even when people are going for pleasure . . . the actual moment of parting is never very pleasant.”

  Meanwhile in the capital FDR was urgently lobbying his allies to remain in the city. He wrote, for example, to Senator Pat Harrison (D-MS), “Pat, old dear: What is this I hear about your going home ahead of time? Do please don’t! I need you here on lots of things, including the next big thing on the calendar—the Neutrality Bill.”

  ER rarely wrote about pending legislation, but she devoted an entire column to the Neutrality Act of 1939, which would end the arms embargo. Every U.S. citizen “ought to understand clearly what we mean by a desire for neutrality. We have certainly not been neutral under the present neutrality bill.” To be neutral meant to have no power at all in world events. If “we exert no influence to prevent war until it has begun,” it would be too late. If war broke out, even if the United States remained neutral, it would have an impact on American “social and economic life.” ER was asking Americans to consider the true meaning of neutrality. Not being involved also meant not having the power to influence events and thereby to control their impact on our society. Congress shared “the burden of declaring war,” of course. But the only hope for “real neutrality” was to permit the chief executive and the State Department to consider “each case on its merits.”

  On 11 July the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted, 12 to 11, to postpone consideration of the neutrality bill until the next session of Congress. FDR appealed to the entire Senate to reconsider, and ER wrote archly: “These gentlemen must go on the theory that if you delay making up your mind long enough, perhaps you may never have to. . . . My own experience is that the things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult.”

  Daily, ER read disturbing accounts of thousands of refugees in desperate search for shelter. In the spring Hitler’s newest territories, Slovakia and Hungary, had issued a variety of anti-Jewish laws; Jehovah’s Witnesses were being arrested throughout Germany; and two thousand Gypsies (Roma) from Austria were removed to German camps. By June, there were over 300,000 “political prisoners” in concentration camps.

  The situation in China was equally alarming, after three years of the calamitous Sino-Japanese War. ER received a bulletin from the Federal Council of Churches: “The amount they say will feed a Chinese child for a year seems unbelievably small. When war is going on . . . the women and children . . . suffer the most.” ER called for a movement to build support for innocent civilians: “Those of us who are at peace, should do what we can to alleviate the suffering of those who do not fight, but who nevertheless reap the results of war.”

  On 6 July, U.S. ambassador Nelson T. Johnson had reported from Chungking that Japan had bombed the city, narrowly missing his residence and the U.S. gunboat Tutuila. FDR requested that Secretary of State Hull send Japan a presidential protest against “indiscriminate bombing.” For several weeks fighting raged along the borderlands between Russia and China, with Soviet Mongolian troops battling the Japanese. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Konstantin Oumansky, told Harold Ickes and others that the Soviet leadership was predicting a long, intense war. Now that England and France had sacrificed Spain, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to German perfidy, the Russians saw no reason to trust Great Britain. If Hitler were to attack the Soviet Union, the Kremlin believed the British would continue to support him.

  Ickes agreed with Oumansky’s assessment. An “illuminating and forceful” book, Frederick Schumann’s Europe on the Eve, had convinced him that British and French appeasers were “willing to sacrifice all their European neighbors if only they can persuade Hitler to turn his attention to the East.” Ickes believed that FDR’s State Department was dominated by men who shared those views and worked for that outcome.*

  While blood still flowed through the streets of Spain, a loan to Franco was unacceptable to ER and administration liberals—who believed that some of the responsibility for Spanish policy belonged to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Ickes showed FDR a copy of the Week, Claude Cockburn’s radical London paper, which reported that “carried away by his pro-Franco sentiments, Mr. Kennedy, an ardent Catholic, . . . . goes so far as to insinuate that the democratic policy of the United States is a Jewish production.” Kennedy, Ickes recorded, paraphrasing the paper, “was privately telling his English friends in the Cliveden set that the Jews were running the United States.”*

  FDR, Ickes noted, acknowledged Kennedy’s well-known behavior. Ickes thought it was grounds for the ambassador’s recall, but FDR was determined, for the moment, to ignore the unpleasant situation. Still, the president continued to support a loan to Franco.

  In that tense and fractious atmosphere, FDR found it unacceptable that Hitler believed that “because of its neutrality laws, America is not dangerous to us.” He made a last-ditch effort to end the arms embargo by calling Senate leaders, State Department officials, and other cabinet members to the Oval Office on the evening of 18 July. ER, having spoken to FDR earlier in the day, wrote, “he sounded very cheerful,” and she hoped clear thinking would prevail that evening.

  FDR began the meeting in his most cheerful manner. After many friendly glasses of wine, whiskey, gin, and bourbon, the discussion began shortly after nine o’clock. It might be appropriate, the president said, “to open this meeting with a prayer, for our decision may affect the destiny . . . of all the peoples of the world.” As Nazi-fascist aggressions were bringing Europe to the brink of war, he once more asked the senators who were present to lift the arms embargo. “I’ve fired my last shot. I think I ought to have another round.” He then turned the meeting over to Secretary of State Hull, whose position had changed and who now wanted the arms embargo repealed. FDR added that the “extreme isolationism of Senator Nye” endangered the future.*

  Senator William Borah (R-ID), another leading isolationist, interrupted FDR to observe that Nye did not stand alone.* Borah rejected everything FDR and Hull said and insisted this current war “hysteria is manufactured and artificial.” There would not be “any war in Europe.” Hull invited Borah to his office to read incoming cables. Borah contemptuously countered that he had his “own sources” of information, and they were far “more reliable than those of the State Department.” Hull was silenced and reportedly close to tears.

  Of the Republicans present, only Warren Austin (R-VT) agreed that it was time “to repeal this impossible act.” Toward midnight Vice President Garner sought a sense of the meeting and reported, “Well, captain, we might as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes and that’s all there is to it.” FDR could not bring the bill to the Senate floor. The meeting was over.

  ER read the details of her husband’s failure to budge the senators, even as they faced tragedy, and wrote an irate column judging the senators harshly. We put our trust in these veteran legislators, and on their decision, “perhaps, hangs the fate of the world. And how much do the rest of us know about it?” We cannot go on as citizens “so complacently,” leaving the most dire “burdens on the shoulders” of tired, disgruntled, overworked men.

  Deeply disappointed, FDR nonetheless continued to fight. ER pressed him to take executive action. He asked Attorney General Frank Murphy, “How far do you think I can go in ignoring the existing [Neutrality] act—even though I did sign it?!” For six months, Congress had refused to take action, and now it had opted to wait a further six months.

  ER awaited his return to Hyde Park. “I finished the mail just in time . . . to get over to the big house and be on the doorstep when my husband arrived from the station. My mother-in-law is always there to greet any of the family who come, so when she is away I should feel very guilty not to be on hand.” The weekend was packed and delightful, with relatives and ten children romping and playing and eating all the time: “It is fun to see children enjoy themselves.” Alexander Woollcott, a good friend and fore
ver “the Man Who Came to Dinner,” was superbly entertaining. “His fund of tales is endless, always varied and interesting.” ER enjoyed the relief from war tensions and delighted in the Morgenthaus’ “annual clambake,” attended by all her weekend guests. The entertainment featured songs led by a “colored” trio, and everybody sang around the bonfire. The evening ended in the house for a dance party. ER, who loved to dance, was exhilarated by the Virginia reel, which “seems to have become popular and we had a roomful doing it in a most enthusiastic fashion.”

  ER again proved herself an expert negotiator and strategist, one who knew how to harness her husband’s strengths in the pursuit of vital support within the Democratic Party. FDR was to meet with James “Jim” Farley, long the boss of the Democratic Party. ER was closely allied with Farley (who still served as postmaster general), and trusted him completely, but tensions between Farley and her husband ran high. The brilliant New Dealers led by Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen, who had helped create so many progressive programs, sharply attacked Farley on every issue. Farley endured their rudeness in silence. After “violent” months of personal bitterness, nobody was certain where Farley stood.

  Seeking to restore peace among Democratic leaders, ER and Anna teamed up with young Norman Littell, one of Farley’s most ardent supporters and a leader of the young western liberals organizing for 1940. Farley explained that “the Senators were ‘sore’ at not being consulted by the Executive” and resented especially FDR’s “deference to the Corcoran group.” Farley acknowledged their splendid service, but “they are splitting the party wide apart and we can’t win without the party.”

  Littell was close to Ben Cohen and considered himself a member of the liberal Corcoran group, but he knew that Farley’s support was essential. Moreover, Farley spoke urgently about the need for party reconciliation and national unity and said he wanted “the most liberal administration in the history of the country to be preserved.” Much to Littell’s relief, Farley told him the “liberal vote is the vote which will turn the election. . . . The party never wins with a conservative or middle-of-the-road candidate.”