Friday night she saw Philip Barry’s new play, The Philadelphia Story, advising her readers that “[Katharine] Hepburn and all the cast do so well that this play deserves its great success.” Saturday evening she and her unnamed company (presumably including Aunt Maude Gray) returned to the World’s Fair to see Billy Rose’s Aquacade, an extravaganza with music, dance, and swimming: “It is so delightful that it should not be missed by anyone.”
ER then set off for Seattle, for a long-planned visit with daughter Anna and her family. She was “thrilled” that Anna had encouraged the visit, as she was eager to see her grandchildren: Sistie, Buzzy, and six-month-old John. “People ask me about them everywhere! I am dying to see ‘little’ John who must be a monster!”
To be with Anna’s children and see how quickly they grew seemed to ER the perfect antidote to the world at large: “It certainly is fun to visit one’s children. I found myself marveling at the strength of my youngest grandchild. He is the most friendly, happy baby. . . . The older children are fascinated by him and when he grows up I suppose it will be hard to keep them from spoiling him.” ER also enjoyed a walk with Anna, Sistie, and their two Irish setters. “‘Jack’ never forgets me and greeted me warmly, but ‘Jill’ is a fickle lady and took very little interest in my arrival, but she has no objection to be petted, which some will say is a woman’s trait.”
On the flight from Seattle to San Francisco, ER read the October issue of the Survey Graphic, devoted to “the schools of our country.” Thirty-one educators and experts had been asked about the most basic questions of democracy “with which we are all concerned”:
1. What are the goals of our schools? Are they meeting the tests of American education in the American way?
2. Are our children learning how to think for themselves as citizens of a democracy, or are they likely to fall in line behind a rabble rouser?
3. Can we cut across economic and racial barriers and really provide equal opportunities?
ER considered these questions fundamental to democracy’s survival, yet over 800,000 children “did not attend school last year.” Either there was no school in their neighborhood because the community was too poor, or the family was too poor to provide books, shoes, clothes, or the means to send them to school. In addition, because of economic demands, in “certain parts of our country, the school year has been curtailed.” Although “some great men succeeded without schooling,” most came under the influence of “a great teacher who pointed out the way whereby they might educate themselves.” In her own life, Marie Souvestre at Allenswood had inspired vision, commitment, and deep learning. Today, in too many places, “we are giving little thought to the development of great teachers,” ER lamented. “We think more about curtailing their salaries than we do about improving their qualifications. A really good teacher can never be [sufficiently] paid, and they do not develop well on starvation wages.”
In San Francisco, ER spent most of her time with her dancer friend Mayris “Tiny” Chaney, whom she had met through Earl Miller. They went to the West Coast World’s Fair, which was spectacular. The grounds were filled with exotic, wild, colorful flowers and extraordinary plants; the art exhibit featured a great range of contemporary artists and old masters; and the Asian and Pacific Island exhibits were unique. The next day ER visited Tiny’s new hat shop and “bought for myself two winter hats.” Then they went off to Chinatown and Gump’s “to see the miniature silver display.”
In San Francisco the Western Union strike hampered ER’s ability to file her column. “How can we ever hope that different races will sit down and in a spirit of justice and goodwill consider [their] difficulties . . . if we in our own country cannot even persuade groups with different interests to meet and arbitrate their difficulties?” To ER, the surest way “to prevent war,” a question she was asked over and over again by women particularly, was to “desire justice and goodwill at home. We cannot have peace unless we begin with the individual and we must build up machinery to bring this peace about. . . . There must be representatives of varying points of view. There must be disinterested people who listen and patiently try to solve the difficulties. There must be a place for discussion. This is true at home and true in international affairs.” ER wanted all the human stories behind the picket lines told, to give “management a better understanding of the actual human needs.” Until we understood and respected each other and our differences, there was little hope for peace.
Her son James flew up from Los Angeles with several friends to have lunch and tour with his mother. They returned together to Los Angeles, where James now worked for Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn. In September, he had separated from his wife, Betsey. Everyone feared impending divorce, and Sara Delano Roosevelt had taken the news very hard. ER was glad that FDR had gone to Hyde Park to be with his mother.
After her time in California, ER flew to Fort Worth, Texas, to visit her son Elliott and her “very attractive” grandchildren. “I am always fascinated when I hear Tony, aged three, solemnly address me as ‘Grandmother Roosevelt.’” ER went with Elliott’s wife, Ruth, to listen to FDR’s radio broadcast, then flew home for her birthday week.
On 7 October her daughter-in-law Betsey’s father, Dr. Harvey Cushing, first Sterling Professor of Neurology at Yale University, suddenly died. ER flew to New York, where she met SDR to take the noon train to New Haven for the funeral. “It seems to me that the unexpected is always happening in life. One never knows from day to day what fate may have in store.”
Surrounded by work and grief, ER was uplifted by art exhibitions and an exciting new musical organization called the Little Symphony Society of Philadelphia. Directed by Esther Lape’s friend Leopold Stokowski, this orchestra was to provide accompaniment for emerging soloists “in a great music center” and offer guest conductors opportunities to premiere new works. It meant “an opportunity for young musicians to be heard, which has been difficult,” and ER considered it a thrilling development.
The eleventh of October 1939 was ER’s fifty-fifth birthday. She reflected on her life as the world she loved plunged once again into the madness of war. Twenty-one years earlier the Great War had ended with her marriage in disarray because FDR loved another woman. ER had been in a crisis of gloom, unable to eat, lonely, and afraid. But new friendships, new interests, new work, and bold political activity had helped her out of her despair. She had created a new life within the hearth of her old one. Her travels and contacts enabled her to ward off her “Griselda moods,” and the good work she was able to do in partnership with her husband advanced the best of their shared vision.
ER had a full and happy birthday. Bernard Baruch sent an admiring birthday telegram: “May you be spared many years to bring happiness comfort and courage to those who are privileged to call you friend and to those countless thousands who are bettered by what you say and do and stand for.” She received a mountain of cards, letters, and more telegrams filled with good wishes, so many that she thanked her friends in her column. She “deeply appreciated” their kind thoughts, although so many of her correspondents asked her “actually to do something definite” that she would not be able to respond personally. In “a very busy day, all these good wishes were a very pleasant background to many activities.”
Actually, ER was happiest when she was busiest, especially when she felt needed. On her birthday she met with Frances Perkins at the Department of Labor about jobs and training for youth and had an informative lunch. Perkins seemed “very jittery about ‘reds,’” due to the continual assaults on her and her department by the Dies Committee—it was “getting on all their nerves,” ER observed. Throughout October, the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, chaired by Martin Dies (D-TX), was railing against liberal Democrats and administration officials. The “Committee has been running hog-wild lately and has become a danger of the first magnitude,” remarked Harold Ickes. Recently in Washington and Chicago, it had
raided various organizational headquarters “under the pretense of serving subpoenas . . . and then simply walked out with all written records and lists.” Ickes compared Dies to A. Mitchell Palmer, who had committed the Red Scare outrages at the end of the last war. Dies was now “an actual menace” who threatened “to give out names of prominent New Dealers in the Administration connecting them with communistic activities. I know perfectly well that he will try to smear me.” That very week Dies investigated the Spanish Refugee League Campaign Committee, which Ickes chaired. Furious, Ickes noted that he knew no Communists and had never read Karl Marx. He had every right to help collect money for “Spanish refugees who are miserably circumstanced in France.” That week ER wrote about the need to send relief to Chinese and Spanish civilians.
Her sons Jimmy and Elliott, her brother Hall, and several other guests were at the White House for ER’s “pleasant” birthday party. Her husband gave her a check, with a note on which he had scrawled in a bold large hand, “E.R.: Many Happy Returns! With this goes the necessary for a good ‘Green’”—a reference to the new lawn around the swimming pool at Val-Kill. FDR’s abrupt scribble, lacking their customary salutation of love, is a curious anomaly in their correspondence. Had he made a more loving toast? Had he even attended her birthday dinner? There is no evidence of his presence or any other exchange that day.
FDR spent part of that afternoon in a momentous meeting with Dr. Alexander Sachs, who appealed for government support for new experiments in atomic physics. A Wall Street economist and director of the Lehman Corporation, the Russian-born Sachs had impressed FDR in the past with his economic advice. Now Sachs appeared on a different mission. He had been trying to arrange a meeting with the president since 2 August, when Albert Einstein agreed with Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi that the United States needed to be prepared to face specific challenges from Nazi laboratories, based on research they had once all done together.* That same day, Einstein had written in a letter to FDR:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Szilard and Fermi in America—that it may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. . . .
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. . . .
You may think it desirable to have some permanent contact between the administration and the group of physicists now working on chain reaction in America. . . .
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines. . . . That [Germany] should have taken such early action might be understood on the ground that the son of the German Undersecretary of State, von Weizsacker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
In addition to Einstein’s letter, Sachs gave FDR a memo written by Szilard and a letter of explanation and urgency he wrote himself. Nobody else was in the room, and there is no record of the discussion. But as soon as Sachs left, FDR summoned his senior aide Edwin “Pa” Watson, handed him the three documents, and said, “Pa, this requires action!”
Action was taken slowly over time, but for several years little was done with the support of U.S. military assistance. Meanwhile misery, suicide, and death prevailed in Poland and all Nazi-occupied territories. As the numbers of the dead, wounded, plundered and dislocated rose, Hitler called it the Sitzkrieg, while Senator William Borah called it “the phony war.”
Engorged by his victories, Hitler issued a series of horrific edicts. He signed an amnesty order to release all SS officers who had been arrested by army authorities on charges of depraved brutality against civilians and mass executions of old people and children. Warsaw was designated Poland’s “General-Government,” with Cracow the new capital. It would be ruled by Hans Frank, a vicious Nazi who initiated an “Extraordinary Pacification Program” whereby thousands of leaders, teachers and intellectuals, priests and potential “subversives” were summarily executed. Frank also instituted a “Housecleaning Plan” specifically to remove Jews. Ordinary Poles were systematically forced from their homes, farms, and businesses. Unable to take their possessions, they were purposefully rendered destitute—“so poor the Poles would want to work in Germany.”
The “methods employed” during the forced removals, General Field Marshal W. Keitel noted, were “irreconcilable with all our [German] existing principles.” While Germanic Poles were removed to German provinces, special Jewish “reservations” were created where Jews deported from Vienna, Czechoslovakia, Baltic ports, and western Poland were to be dumped, along with groups of stray Jews, some of whom had been captured in Hamburg as they waited to board ships for the United States.
Many Jews fled eastward, across the River Bug, to the Soviet side—and were surprised to see Jews fleeing west, imagining that Nazi rule might be “less burdensome” than Communist rule. Throughout occupied Poland the “New Order” meant Nazi work camps for all Jewish males, aged fourteen to sixty. By December 1939 there were twenty-eight labor camps in the Lublin area, fourteen near Warsaw, twelve near Cracow, and dozens more scattered across the plains. In Lodz, where 200,000 Jews lived, Goebbels announced the “surgical task” of removal and slaughter. The insane nightmare had begun. Evidence was sent to ER and FDR through many sources, including photographs and newspaper cuttings.
On 11 October, ER’s great friend Caroline Astor Drayton Phillips (Helen Astor Roosevelt Robinson’s cousin, FDR’s second cousin), a member of ER’s World War I–era biweekly Sunday dinner “club,” left for Rome to join her husband, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, William Phillips. She wrote in her diary, “I go, not without fear and dread, into the black cauldron of war, which is Europe, glad to be going to my dear William, but in every other way, most unwillingly.”
Within weeks Caroline Phillips’s diary was filled with details out of Poland: “Dreadful reprisals by the Germans. . . . The Polish Ambassador told William about an old Polish Countess in Danzig, aged seventy, who was taken out and shot for having burned a table [for warmth and fuel] in her own house. Everything is considered to be German property now. They are trying . . . to kill off as many Poles as possible. There are now 30,000 Polish refugees in Hungary and 10,000 in Romania.”
On 22 November she recorded the account of trusted visitors; airplanes were bombing “peasants working in the fields,” “women and children fleeing from Warsaw”:
The Germans kill everyone, far more than the Russians do. The Russians confiscate all the estates of the nobles but only rarely shoot them, but the Germans shoot them and take the property and shoot and loot the peasants also. They said the Bolshevik soldiers were more humane than the German ones. They also told us that the Polish doctors attending wounded German airplane pilots found they had all been drugged with morphine and other drugs and that it is well known that they send them up with very heavy drinks as otherwise they could hardly stand all the killing they have to do.
For all the reported agony, the “phony” war continued for almost eight months. The British called it the “the Bore War”—a “bloody bore” of waiting, tension, and discomfort. Churchill called it “the Sinister Trance.”
ER, silenced by her husband’s political needs and his own secrecy regarding refugee negotiations with international and business leaders, avoided public discussion of the situation. In early October FDR wrote to Secretary of State Hull with his “original” observation that as the war continued “there will be, in all probability, more Christian refugees than Jewish refugees.” Since so many “of them will be Catholics, the Vatican itself may [decide] to take an active interest.” He wanted discussions with American Christian organizations, as well as European groups. Moreover, he envisioned
sending a “special Minister or Ambassador” directly to the Vatican, in order to put “the whole refugee problem on a broad religious basis, thereby making it possible to gain the kind of world-wide support that a mere Jewish relief set-up would not evoke.”
Then on 17 October FDR held a White House Conference on Political Refugees. The president addressed the delegates with a sense of urgency: there would be between ten and twenty million refugees “before the European war was over.” Places of “permanent settlement” would be needed. That was now to be the immediate task of an Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, under the direction of Paul van Zeeland, Belgium’s former premier.
FDR considered this resettlement program an enormous challenge. It was too late “to speak of small settlements. . . . The picture should be in terms of a million square miles occupied by a coordinated self-sustaining civilization.” FDR had a long-range fantasy of postwar resettlement that required unlimited investments—from governments and business leaders. He believed it could be done, at least partly, on a profitable basis: “It is my judgment that 50 percent of the cost can properly be financed on a business basis but that the other 50 percent would have to be given—not loaned—in the form of gifts from governments and individuals.”
The president understood Britain’s opposition to continued large-scale resettlement in Palestine, and at this conference Britain withdrew its offer of British Guiana as a potential homeland for European Jews. FDR had no intention of changing America’s own restrictive immigration laws and sought a “supplemental national home” in one of the many unpopulated or “vacant spaces” on earth. His rhetoric aggravated American Jews, who favored Palestine.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 19
