Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  While Britain and France now intended to consider refugees from Germany “enemy aliens,” Germany was building its own “resettlement” camps in Poland. Despite FDR’s rhetorical conclusion, imploring leaders to “lift a lamp beside new golden doors and build new refuges for the tired, for the poor, for the huddled masses yearning to be free,” the conference was futile. With no consideration for the immediate crises, the delegates left in despair and sorrow.

  At her press conference, ER avoided mentioning her husband’s conference on refugees, or that on 13 October she had attended a B’nai B’rith luncheon to celebrate the Washington chapter. Nor did the journalists who covered the first lady bring up the subject. However, when asked how she felt about being called a “warmonger,” she replied fully that it was now clearly a matter of “self-defense” to be “concerned about what is happening . . . in the rest of the world.” The past taught that “a breach of the peace anywhere is a menace to peace everywhere.” She hoped “we never will have to go to war,” but she was not “a prophet.” The time to have worked against war was before the war broke out, through an international peace organization. Implying that it was too late, she said, “You must look to the future now.” But it was urgent for everybody to take a real interest in their own community and broaden democracy, “to make democracy work” by their own active participation. Disarmament, for example, would work only if “all nations cooperate.” Therefore all questions of war and peace and of this war’s impact on American democracy were connected.

  • • •

  One immediate threat to democracy was the burgeoning Red Scare, unleashed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. While no significant antifascist or anti-Nazi movement was under way, ER and her young friends became primary targets of the new crusade.

  On 6 September 1939, FDR told his cabinet that “someone who knew Goebbels well” had just reported that the Nazi chief of propaganda believed Germany would destroy Poland “within a very few days and [would] then quickly smash both France and England, largely from the air.” When FDR’s informant asked Goebbels “What next?” he replied, “You know what is next, the United States.” To the suggestion that 3,500 miles of distance made that boast absurd, Goebbels retorted, “It will come from the inside.”

  On 6 September 1939, FDR had issued an executive order that empowered the FBI to monitor all dangers, subversion, and rumors of subversion—to check “espionage and subversive propaganda” and block “sabotage.” For that purpose the FBI staff was to be increased “by 150 operatives,” and all “local officials throughout the country” were ordered “to cooperate in this campaign.” The Attorney General asked all citizens to report any information they may gather on such activities to the nearest FBI. Clearly, the order was intended to target those allied with both Nazis and Communists. But only Communists and “fellow travelers” interested FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Dies.

  The Dies Committee led the crusade, accusing ER of hosting a “Red Tea” at the White House for young Communists, meaning the American Youth Congress and its leaders. ER, their friend and advocate, publicly acknowledged that she supported the AYC and participated in their conferences at Vassar and other places. But she was convinced that her young friends, whom she knew “as individuals,” were not Communists. There was nothing “reprehensible” or disagreeable about their meetings, where controversial issues were fully and frankly discussed.

  Then on 27 September rumors that FDR had ordered a “Red purge” rocked Washington. Allegedly he sought to “purge the Federal payroll of Communists” and sent the Department of Justice an order to begin the process. Dies considered it a victory for his committee and leaked the story, but Justice Department officials refused to comment. ER dismissed it as a publicity stunt, and nothing immediately happened.

  But throughout the autumn of 1939 attacks against her became more insidious. For weeks, she was asked about the expansion of “subversive groups.” She had seen “no evidence of un-American activities in her travels about the country,” she replied. There was “little to fear” from Communist groups, so long as “all of us make an effort to live our democracy day to day.” Moreover, she said, the United States needed to do more to improve the conditions “of migratory workers,” help them to organize, see to their needs during harvest season, and provide necessary “mobile schools and better camp” facilities.

  In France, the first months of the war seemed to be fought not against Nazis but exclusively against Communists. On 27 September the French government outlawed the Communist Party along with “hundreds of societies, unions, leagues suspected of Communist sympathies. Mass arrests began.” Communist deputies were dismissed from parliament and prosecuted. Leftist journals and newspapers, including L’Humanité and Ce Soir, were closed down. Freedom of the press disappeared. But no similar action was taken against fascists.

  For ER, France—the home of Marie Souvestre, the Enlightenment, and modern democracy—seemed doomed. The country had waited too long, she wrote, to address the crying needs of the people—poverty, dislocation, confusion. It had instituted no New Deal–like measures, and so the people turned to Communism—or fascism. And now even the Communists were under Hitler’s thumb. ER hoped that continued and extended New Deal reforms would block such a situation from developing in America.

  But in this new era of raids and the Red Scare, begun in 1939 and supported by FDR, the president’s wife was to become, and remain, a primary suspect and target, even as she became increasingly anti-Communist.

  Chapter Seven

  Red Scare, Refugees, and Racism

  Wherever ER went that autumn, three issues dominated her thoughts: the unprecedented human suffering in Hitler-occupied Europe, the need to combat racial injustice throughout the United States, and the domestic Red Scare. She considered it a profoundly dangerous time that required continual learning and activity to confront these threats to democracy.

  Since the early 1930s her friend Clarence Pickett, head of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and his wife, Lilly, had been ER’s chief informants about conditions in Europe. Their travels in Germany and their Quaker colleagues provided firsthand reports and analyses that she used to guide her contributions and private efforts.

  In 1934 Pickett had visited a celebration in Worms to mark the synagogue’s nine hundredth year of service. He observed, “Jews were in Germany before Christ’s time. They love Germany. Most Jews will remain in Germany . . . driven in on themselves, but they will suffer through.” Later from Vienna he had reported on pitiable scenes of humiliation and weeks of reported suicides. When Kristallnacht took place in November 1938 he told her about brutality and destruction throughout Germany, when twenty thousand German Jews were rounded up and sent to camps.

  Hitler’s race laws transformed the meaning of citizenship, religion, and being German. A Jew, Hitler declared, was not a follower of a religion or faith but a member of a pestilent race. One drop of Jewish blood poisoned the bloodstream; one Jewish gene polluted the pool. Only “Aryans” could be German citizens. Studies were undertaken to find “hidden” Jews, families who were secular, Unitarian, Catholic, or Quaker, who had for generations been German, assimilated or converted, or of mixed marriages and parentage. Mischlingen and intermarrieds were no longer safe, no longer citizens. It was no longer possible to convert or assimilate. For ER, all hope expired in Poland, when countless Jews were herded into synagogues, set aflame, and burned to ash.

  From September to December 1939, as the Nazis massacred fifty thousand civilians and rendered millions more homeless refugees, the world looked on, whispering concerns but unready, unable, or unwilling to respond to the victims of atrocity. In the United States, the prevailing fervently anti-interventionist isolationists roared any public sympathy into silence and indeed fueled a crusade against “un-Americanism” that targeted trade unionists, New Dealers, and young people. ER herself, still restrained by FDR’s slowly evolv
ing international policies, wrote little about refugees, the slaughter of civilians, or the suffering of war.

  The unfolding European tragedy was met in the United States by growing anti-Jewish, anti-Communist fervor. Nazi sympathizers were gaining momentum. Father Coughlin’s popular radio program had an audience of over a million Catholics and pro-fascists each week. Congressmen made hysterical speeches against “refugee hordes” who sought to undermine and overthrow America on behalf of Jews and Communists. When Nazis occupied new territory and Hitler’s race laws were imposed, domestic fascists celebrated—on the radio, in Congress, at mass rallies. ER found it upsetting and frightful.

  Moreover, Hitler’s laws cast a harsh light on America’s own pattern of discrimination. Who was a full citizen? Who could vote? Who was “Negro”? Who was American? What did it mean to be “white,” Jewish, Christian, Communist, or un-American? ER considered the range and shades of her friends and allies in the NAACP, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Walter White. Sometimes her head swirled with the insanity of it all.

  ER believed that fulfilling the promise of America’s democracy required enlarging it so that it embraced everyone. And she never wavered in her conviction that to resist fascism and Communism, it was essential to save and expand the New Deal, to end racial violence, bigotry, and discrimination, and to support youth and the youth movement. While increasingly shrill voices equated calls for racial justice with Communism, her friends in the youth movement were trying to fulfill the American promise. They were radical, but they considered themselves American activists for democracy.

  They opposed bigotry, segregation, the poll tax, and all racial divides. They proved, both in their spirited meetings and in their daily lives, that it was possible to respect one another, work closely together, and form friendships across racial and religious boundaries. Their fresh intensity stirred her. Many AYC leaders were Jewish or of Jewish descent. Some were religious and belonged to Young Judea, which sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine; others were secular, agnostic, or spiritual. And by 1939 they were all being reviled as Communist Jew traitors.

  From September on, ER publicly condemned Communists whose deeds proved they were not loyal to the United States. For instance, Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of the United States, had openly avowed that his “first allegiance is to Russia”—for which she criticized him. It was “impossible to remain neutral,” she wrote repeatedly to correspondents. “Hitler and Stalin combined are a very great danger to us. It is not just a question of boundaries, population, or raw materials. . . . You cannot insulate yourself from ideas. . . . In the end I prefer to die fighting for freedom than to live under a Nazi or Communist regime.”

  But she also believed that civil liberties applied to all political parties, and that the right to speak and dissent, to march and rally, were sacrosanct. She accepted the AYC’s right to have Communist members, since to limit the rights of any one group was to endanger the rights of all. And she was convinced that her AYC friends were not in fact Communists, and that the AYC was not Communist-dominated. She had personally asked J. Edgar Hoover whether there was any hard evidence that her friends were Communists, and he told her there was nothing specific. Then she met with her friends privately to ask them to explain their political views.

  I told them that since I was actively helping them, I must know exactly where they stood politically. I knew well that the accusations might be false, since all liberals are likely to be labeled with the current catchword. . . . In every case they said they had no connection with the communists, had never belonged to any communist organizations, and had no interest in communist ideas. I decided to accept their word, realizing that sooner or later the truth would come out.

  ER’s great friend and benefactor Bernard Baruch was a secular Jewish-American and a southern patriot. He had long supported various programs now condemned as “Communist”—most notably, the schools and health centers at Arthurdale, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, as well as the AYC. And he too had long been assailed by American bigots. In 1919 Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent had assailed him specifically as the leader of an “international Jewish conspiracy.” Throughout the 1930s those charges were renewed by the KKK, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, Dudley Pelley, and various leaders of fascist groups in the United States. Now a primary target, viciously slandered as a predator-Jew-capitalist, Baruch wrote:

  These attacks never hurt me as much as did the discriminations my children suffered. My two daughters were brought up in the Episcopalian faith of their mother. Yet they were refused admission to the same dancing school their mother had attended. Even when the pastor of their church intervened, they were denied admission to several private schools for girls.

  It was not easy to explain to my children why they were suffering such senseless discriminations. Instead of allowing these things to embitter and frustrate them, I told them to take these discriminations as spurs to more strenuous achievement—which is how I myself have met the problem of prejudice.

  ER believed Baruch would understand the AYC’s politics and appreciate its goals. So when it was attacked, she turned to him for advice and support. Although he did not particularly approve of its style and disliked some of its members personally, he never refused her requests. After 1938 ER was not merely a casual friend of the AYC—she was its most generous supporter. With funds derived from Baruch, as well as from her broadcast and lecture fees, she helped finance its operations—mostly anonymously, through the AFSC.

  • • •

  During the last week of October, the Dies Committee viciously attacked ER’s closest allies in various New Deal agencies. Dies insisted there were more than 569 Communists on the government payroll, and that they aimed to destroy America. Federal employees with radical sympathies had no protection or privacy. Dies’s agents raided the Washington office of the American League for Peace and Democracy, claiming it was a Communist front. The committee then released a list of hundreds of federal workers who were members, and in late October the New York Times published their names, positions, and salaries. Included on this list was Oscar Chapman, who had helped organize the Marian Anderson concert on 9 April 1939.

  The night the story hit the press, ER was participating in a panel on “The Challenge to Civilization” at Helen Rogers Reid’s Herald Tribune Forum, whose purpose was to oppose fears of Communist-Nazi-Fascist “Termites” who bored from within. One panelist, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, told the audience of more than five thousand that he wanted to receive reports of “sabotage, espionage, or neutrality violation,” but he urged Americans to avoid “a witch hunt.” Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wondered what was unneutral about “repeal of the embargo.” While Harvard University president James Conant emphasized “academic and political freedom of the mind,” he cautioned against “becoming more intensely class conscious” and suggested a return to the promise of universal education and “social mobility.”

  ER told the crowd she was not afraid to meet or speak with Communists, so long as she remained free to speak about democracy. In her talk, “Humanistic Democracy—The American Ideal,” she articulated the distance between our national facts and American rhetoric. Everyone should be able “to come into the world healthy and strong,” but “too many mothers were without adequate food or medical care.” Every child should have the opportunity to be educated, she said, and “to earn a living under decent working conditions,” but we “fall far short of that ideal.” Until these basic democratic rights were made real, the threats of Communism and fascism would persist. Yet we could not suppress adherents of these isms, their right to speak or organize, without suppressing “our own freedoms.” “It is not enough to say we believe in the Sermon on the Mount,” she concluded, “without trying to live up to it.”

  She worried that FDR was too engrossed in the war at the expense of domestic issues. “Pa agrees wholeheartedly when you say we must not n
eglect domestic affairs,” she wrote Anna, “but he is so full of the war. . . . Perhaps when [repeal of the embargo] is out of the way he will be freer in mind.”

  When ER resumed her autumn tour, she used it partly to emphasize those New Deal issues that seemed no longer to interest her husband. In Texas she spoke to the Altrusa Club, a women’s group that she belonged to that provided job training and support for young girls and older women—including counseling and comfort “in a home for unmarried mothers.” She met with representatives of the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. She visited a CCC camp where seven hundred Indian boys were trained to do soil conservation work, and Indian girls were taught to revive traditional Indian crafts and beadwork. She was given a belt of “exquisite workmanship” that celebrated the skills of “our native Indian groups.”

  At the Texas State College for Women in Denton, she dedicated “a little chapel in the woods” with magnificent stained glass windows. More than ninety local “NYA boys” and the college’s art students had built it to illustrate the many services “performed by women,” from motherhood to industry. She took the opportunity to caution her audience of four thousand that such monuments to art and the spirit were endangered, and she told them that the future depended on their vision and actions. It was, she said, up to each individual to show the world that “a democracy can work when the day of peace comes.” Her address, called “A Typical Day in the White House,” was broadcast across the Southwest.

  ER celebrated the creativity and excellence of individuals whose talents were discovered by and trained in the arts programs the New Deal funded. Such individuals needed a well-rounded education. Both sports and the arts were vital to society, since they not only provided opportunities for talented individuals but also helped build community. Nurturing the arts required local, state, national, and individual support. A homesteaders’ group in Tennessee supported mountaineers whose craft and folk-music festivals inspired the young; the Florida State Music Teachers Association formed a club of twenty thousand professional musicians to benefit music education, orchestral opportunities, and a “congenial home for retired musicians.”