Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Every German citizen Shirer spoke with—in the streets, “riding around on the subway, street-cars and buses”—opposed war, he reported. They protested the absence of real news, the disaster of false news. It was hot, and most Berliners “betook themselves to the lakes around the city, oblivious to the threat of war.” But even as Hitler added to his demands for the return of all that Germany had lost at Versailles, he imposed “ration cards for food, soap, shoes, textiles, and coal,” on his people. The mood was becoming somber and fearful.

  ER felt fortunate to have at this moment as guests her aunt Maude Gray and her lifelong friend Alice Huntington, who shared her enthusiasm for young people and democracy. On 30 August they motored to a nearby summer school and work camp for college students from all across America and for refugee scholars, “boys and girls, Jews, Catholics and liberal Germans.” Some had advanced college degrees, while others were high school students; some spoke English, while others had yet to learn the language. For seven weeks, on scholarship from “various universities,” these students studied “democracy theoretically and practically” by working and playing together. They read, argued, and debated as they improved roads, painted houses, and built badminton courts and a swimming pool: “The girls work as hard as the boys at every kind of work.” They studied “economics . . . as a basis for a better understanding of democracy . . . and they have turned out a set of maps and charts which are extremely interesting and informative.” ER enjoyed her time with this “varied and stimulating group,” and was certain their mutual concern and shared experiences would make them “wiser in democratic ways.”

  The next day, the last day of peace in Europe, ER, Tommy, Alice Huntington, and Maude Gray drove to the World’s Fair. They collected Hick at her office, and she escorted them to Finland’s exhibit. ER was impressed by its glass and pottery, and the “moccasins made me think . . . of our own Indians’ work.” They toured the Italian building and the Federal building, then lunched at the Danish pavilion, where they enjoyed the extraordinary smorgasbord table. At the Greek building, “the glass, pottery and furniture all were very lovely and bore witness to the fact that the glory of Greek genius is not a thing of the past.”

  Returning to Hyde Park, ER reflected upon the many contributions of refugee groups. Her mail was filled with urgent appeals and dreadful details of refugees everywhere on the run. She was bewildered that such human suffering was met by routine silence and official disregard.

  On the morning of 1 September 1939, she was awakened at five o’clock, when FDR telephoned from Washington to tell her that “Germany had invaded Poland and . . . her planes were bombing Polish cities. He told me that Hitler was about to address the Reichstag.” FDR had been roused two hours earlier by Ambassador Bullitt in Paris. The U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, had been unable to get through to Washington and had called Bullitt and told him that “several German divisions are deep in Polish territory, and fighting is heavy.” There were bombers over the city, “then he was cut off.” FDR replied, “Well Bill, it’s come at last. God help us all.”

  Immediately FDR called Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles at State; Secretary of War Harry Woodring; Charles Edison, the acting secretary of the navy; and William Haslett, acting press secretary. ER was evidently the last person FDR called that morning, with the specific request that she listen to Hitler’s broadcast. The president had made certain the lights were lit throughout the administration. By three-thirty Hull was in his office, making the necessary international calls.

  Accompanied by Tommy and Alice Huntington, ER listened to Hitler’s broadcast with a “sense of impending disaster”:

  The thing we had feared had finally come, and we seemed to know that sooner or later we would be dragged into the vortex. . . . I do not think Franklin ever felt that war was inevitable, and he always said he hoped we could avoid it, but I had a feeling that once the war started, there was not much chance for any part of the world to escape it.

  That day an eight-page letter had arrived for ER (“My dear Totty”) from Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein, a classmate at Allenswood, her British boarding school. ER had maintained a correspondence with Carola over the years, despite Carola’s commitment to Nazism, which she considered Christ’s answer to Bolshevism. Now her German friend wrote that “when hate was rampant in the world, it was easy to believe harm of any nation” and insisted that “all the nations believed things that were not true about Germany.” She begged ER “to see Germany’s point of view and not to judge her harshly.” When ER wrote her column, she recounted the incident:

  As I listened to Hitler’s speech, this letter kept returning to my mind. How can you feel kindly toward a man who tells you that German minorities have been brutally treated, first in Czechoslovakia and then in Danzig, but that never can Germany be accused of being unfair to a minority? I have seen evidence with my own eyes of what [Hitler] has done to people belonging to a minority group—not only Jews, but Christians, who have long been German citizens.

  Can one help but question his integrity? . . . How can you say that you do not intend to make war on women and children and then send planes to bomb cities?

  No, I feel no bitterness against the German people. I am deeply sorry for them, as I am for the people of all other European nations facing this horrible crisis.

  ER did not answer Carola for a week. Instead she and her friends discussed the range of Nazi atrocities and considered Hitler’s unique evil. All that day she remembered details of diplomacy, the missed opportunities as well as the positive achievements, such as the triumphant visit of Britain’s royals. “I could not help remembering the good-bye to the king and queen,” she mused, “and the lump that had come into my throat as they stood on the back platform of their departing train. Now their people faced the final hour of decision.”

  His Majesty’s Government decided to evacuate children, old people, and the infirm from London, a move that filled her with dread and wonder. “It was the greatest mass movement of population” in British history. “From London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow and twenty-three other cities the greatest exodus is going on. . . . The numbers are stupendous. More than 3,000,000 of these helpless human beings are being taken out of danger of German bombs.”

  In Washington, FDR discussed Hitler’s maniacal methods, his barking and screeching, his bizarre lies and uncivil behavior with his companions. Reports from London confirmed the most grievous observations about Hitler’s character. According to Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary at Britain’s embassy in Berlin, Hitler emitted “such a sense of evil arrogance that one is almost nauseated.” Harold Nicolson noted, “Even the highest Nazis are amazingly disloyal to Hitler at times,” and many heard associates whisper, “For God’s sake don’t let him get away with it.” Whether or not Hitler was “a nut,” he was ready to destroy civilization. On Saturday night, 2 September, FDR hosted five intimates—Harold Ickes, Solicitor General Robert Jackson, his military aide Edwin “Pa” Watson, his physician Ross McIntire, and his press secretary Steve Early—for a stag dinner and poker party. Their wide-ranging conversation was interrupted by several news bulletins. At eleven, FDR read a dispatch handed him and said, “War will be declared by noon tomorrow.” That news ended the suspense. The appeasers had been overruled.

  After the poker party broke up at one a.m., FDR studied a memo from Navy secretary Charles Edison. News of war returned him in mind and spirit to those wartime events when, as assistant navy secretary, emergency calls awakened him to disasters all through the night. But the parallels between “then and now” must not be repeated. Above all, FDR had said on 1 September 1939, the disaster and “frenzy” of “excessive prices, profits, and costs must be avoided.” We know from that bitter experience that “excessive profits and sky-rocketing prices for materials and labor are paid for out of human misery. . . . Our defense, geographically and in a military sense, and p
articularly in a financial and economic sense, remains adequate only to the degree that we soberly and earnestly refuse to be drawn into the byways of profiteering and speculation.” Our defenses will be strong and adequate, and it will not be necessary to invoke “the drastic powers of wartime to maintain our economic structure,” but only if “our business men, our manufacturers and our labor leaders exert their great influence . . . and succeed in restraining the cupidity of those jackals of war, the profiteers.”

  FDR’s warning to “Wall Streeters and economic royalists,” already broadcast in Washington to the great distress of such administration stalwarts as Ickes, Perkins, Corcoran, and Cohen, was indeed a highlight of FDR’s Sunday evening Fireside Chat, which covered many issues. Since Americans received news “through your radios and your newspapers at every hour,” and were “the best informed people in all the world at this moment,” FDR cautioned against rumors and propaganda. “You are subjected to no censorship of news, and I want to add that your government has no information which it withholds or which it has any thought of withholding from you.”

  But FDR urged his listeners to discriminate carefully: “Do not believe . . . everything you hear or read. . . . When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”

  As far removed as America was from the fields of battle, nobody, he said, could remain detached. Every word spoken, every ship afloat, every battle fought “does affect the American future.” Therefore “let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality. . . . And I trust that in the days to come our neutrality can be made a true neutrality.” That was the president’s only reference to his intention to repeal the embargo clause in the 1935 Neutrality Act. The jackals of war, although unnamed, were specifically addressed:

  I cannot prophesy the immediate economic effect of this new war on our nation, but I do say that no American has the moral right to profiteer at the expense either of his fellow citizens or of the men, the women, and the children who are living and dying in the midst of war in Europe.

  Some things we do know. Most of us in the United States believe in spiritual values. Most of us, regardless of what church we belong to, believe in the spirit of the New Testament—a great teaching which opposes itself to the use of force, of armed force, of marching armies and falling bombs. The overwhelming masses of our people seek peace—peace at home, and the kind of peace in other lands which will not jeopardize our peace at home. . . .

  This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.

  I have said . . . many times, that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again. I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And . . . every effort of your government will be directed toward that end.

  FDR’s “neutrality proclamation,” broadcast internationally, offered slight comfort. Harold Nicolson considered it “a bad proclamation from our point of view. He says that nothing on earth will induce the Americans to send forces to Europe. But he also says that no man can remain neutral in mind and that he knows where the right lies.”

  ER never overtly opposed her husband’s policies on important issues, but a close reader of her columns would have noted divergences. After listening to her husband’s words from her sanctuary at Val-Kill, she wrote:

  It is curious when great tragedies occur, how suddenly the minor inconveniences and sorrows of life, even personal things which seemed important, become overshadowed by the general weight of world conditions. . . .

  I hope that, in spite of the contagion of war, we can keep out of it, but I hope that we will decide on what we believe and . . . I hope that we will throw our weight . . . toward a speedy termination of the war, for when there is war no one is safe and the economic consequences . . . are serious [for all]. . . . Let us do all we can for those who suffer.

  If ER was distraught that years of appeasement and international decisions she abhorred had led to this, she was perhaps gratified that her husband was finally adopting policies she had championed since 1935, when she opposed the embargo and supported the Nye Committee’s proposals to remove profits from war and nationalize war industries.

  Amid all the horror, there were also diversions. On 1 September she left Hyde Park at dawn and drove herself to New York Harbor, where she “met the steamer ‘George Washington’” and escorted her mother-in-law, Johnny, and Anne off the boat.” Then at 9:15 a.m. she flew to Newport News, Virginia, to christen the SS America, scheduled for 11:49. ER proudly noted in her column, “We reached there in ample time and the ceremonies went off without a hitch. I read a letter from the President to Admiral Land, for I represented him.” The ship was duly launched amid whistles and pomp, “and in spite of my usual anxiety I broke the bottle without any difficulty, so the ‘America’ began her career under auspicious circumstances.” From Newport News she entrained to Washington, where she “spent an hour and a half with my husband and reached Hyde Park again at 7:45 for dinner with my guests. Quite a full day.”

  In her daily life, ER was increasingly her husband’s stand-in. While he prepared his message to the nation that Sunday, she attended the annual FDR Home Club party in Hyde Park, accompanied by SDR, John and Anne, and, surprisingly, given the pervasive tensions between them, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. The president “always enjoys” this “opportunity to see and talk with his neighbors,” ER noted, but today she conveyed his message of regret and stood in for him to discuss three new schools and the details of a proposed Hyde Park post office.

  The next day John and Anne drove to Boston, and Jimmy left for California. ER sensed in all her children “a feeling of uncertainty,” a sense of urgency, for tomorrow all might be disrupted—hurtled into the dreadful unknown.

  We were discussing the 1914 psychology of today and I think people are much more aware of what war will mean from the economic standpoint as well as the military. We have had a good many years of preparation watching Spain and China and the radio is a more vivid medium of information than the newspapers were in 1914. I think it has made us more realistic, more reluctant to see war anywhere in the world, but I also think it is making us feel the necessity of knowing the facts and thinking out for ourselves what the position of our country should be.

  On 6 September ER finally answered her former friend Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein’s letter, with its defense of Nazism. In a long and rambling response, she directly questioned Carola’s effort to maintain her Christian precepts alongside her Nazi enthusiasms. But her letter contains one of history’s most curious anomalies, namely the antithetical approach adopted by even the most humane, where hatred of Hitler and the need to curb the “ascendancy of the Jewish people” continued along parallel paths:

  I cannot say that I feel the present situation had a parallel in 1914. All of us, of course, are appalled at plunging the European continent into war, but I do not think there is any bitterness toward the German people in this country. There is an inability to understand how people of spirit can be terrified by one man and his storm troops to the point of countenancing the kind of horrors which seem to have come on in Germany, not only where the Jews are concerned, but as in the case of the Catholics and some of the liberal German Protestants.

  I say this with knowledge, because I have actually seen many of the people who have reached this country from concentration camps. I realize quite well that there may be a need for curtailing the ascendency of the Jewish people, but it seems to me it might have been done in a more humane way by a ruler who had intelligence and decency. . . .

  You are wrong if you think the people of this country hate Germany . . . but they do hate Hitler
and Nazism because of the evidences that have been placed before them. . . .

  You who believe in God must find it very difficult to follow a man who apparently thinks he is as great as any god. I hope that we are not facing another four years of struggle and I hope that our country will not have to go to war, but no country can exist free and unoppressed while a man like Hitler remains in power.

  The “Jewish people” had, of course, been at the center of discussions about the war, about America’s role, and about what should be done to help them out of their plight. But the issue was always weighted for Eleanor, for many of her friends were anti-Semitic and did not hesitate to air their opinions. ER, ever the peacemaker, juggled between her own beliefs and those of her friends. It is impossible to know whether her contemptuous reference to Jews was intended to offset her harsh letter, or whether it actually represented a lingering feeling she worked throughout her life to uproot.

  ER was distressed that somebody she cared about, who was above all a fervent Christian, could at the same time condone cruel acts of bigotry. Indeed, she had focused on this peculiar mix of Christian righteousness and prejudice in her first public consideration of the “present catastrophe for Jew and Gentile.” Written on 25 November 1938 for the journalist Fulton Oursler, called in typescript “On Jews,” ER criticized an article by H. G. Wells in which he blamed Jews for their plight because they were “always conscious of their race.” ER blamed a long history of restriction, segregation, and hostility. From the Middle Ages forward, their ghettos and economic limitations walled them into confined spaces, narrow opportunities. When restrictions were lifted, steps toward assimilation began. And then the road toward integration was blocked, “and today we are seeing in some countries a return to the attitude of the Middle Ages.”