Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Although signs of distress and poverty in Missouri and Nebraska were disturbing, ER was heartened by NYA programs that trained white and colored youth in stonework, which had resulted in an “epidemic” of new stone houses. Several judges in the Ozarks sponsored this project, with the result that “delinquency has been cut down 65%.” Too often homeless, orphaned, abused children were designated “delinquents,” but ER was adamant: across the country, we must care for our hurt, abandoned, needful children.

  During her tour, on 27 October, the Senate finally voted 63 to 30 to repeal the arms embargo. ER wired her husband, “Delighted all went well in the Senate, Much Love.” Several days later another moment of private jubilation came when the House passed the 1939 Neutrality Act and FDR signed the legislation, which at long last lifted the embargo. Now the United States would be able to sell desperately needed supplies to Great Britain and France. FDR considered the law a triumph. ER was relieved by the victory, but to her great dismay, her friend Caroline O’Day had again voted against it. An absolute pacifist, O’Day agreed with those World War I antimilitarists like Oswald Garrison Villard and Norman Thomas who were allied with isolationists like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who declared that repeal and cash-and-carry “would suck the war right into our front yard.”

  ER returned to Hyde Park to vote in the November election, and conferred with her husband. He still wanted her to write nothing about conditions in conquered Europe, or about the secret negotiations and private conversations regarding long-range but vague plans for potential havens. But she was now free to write about the refugee situation. In her column, she compared the urgent appeals from “war refugees in different parts of the world” to the good work done in each locality by community chest drives:

  I wish very much that we could have some central organization, now coordinating civilian relief, make the contacts necessary . . . for adequate care of refugees in our own country and help other nations whose refugee loads are far greater than ours. . . . Think of sixty million Chinese war refugees! “Bowl of Rice” parties held all over the United States under the auspices of the United Council for Civilian Relief in China.

  Such efforts could be coordinated “for the Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Czecho-Slovakian and German refugees.”

  An American journalist in Bucharest, Romania, wrote a long letter to ER that detailed “the deplorable conditions” faced by refugees in Eastern Europe. Ann Cardwell, wife of Paul Super, national secretary of the Polish YMCA, had been residents of Poland for over seventeen years. While she and her husband were safe in Romania, they had witnessed firsthand the deplorable plight of the refugees:

  It is of these Poles I want to write you. From the hour we left Warsaw we have been traveling with crowds of them. The roads have been full of trucks, cars, wagons, motorcycles, bicycles, . . . people afoot.

  There were no rest rooms, flies swarmed. . . . It was extremely difficult to prepare food for babies and young children and no place to bathe or rest but in the homes of kindly people. Nowhere would Poles take money from us, American guests, though we were abundantly able to pay. But a word more about the children. We do not see how half of them could survive this awful retreat. Then there were the old and the ill, who could endure it no better. It was dreadful to see the wan, worn faces.

  Cardwell warned of the winter to come and the impossibility of survival.

  In addition to the unsanitary conditions of such life, there was constant danger from bombs and machine guns. Since coming here we have talked with a young doctor who was in charge of a train load of women, children and wounded soldiers being taken out of Krakow before the city fell. And he told of how . . . they had to stop [repeatedly] to take out the dead—8, 10, 12 at a time. The German planes continually bombed the train though it was evident that it was filled with people being evacuated. . . .

  How many Poles have escaped from Poland nobody knows. None has come because he was a coward. They have come as did we, to avoid falling into German or Russian hands. . . . Every person I meet among the refugees tells me a tale of tragedy. . . . More, these people are stunned by the passing [of Poland], even though it will be but temporary, of the state their ancestors and they fought through 150 years to restore and rebuild on the basis of respect for personality and human rights. The material and social advance accomplished in the 20 years of freedom was little short of marvelous.

  My husband and I will stay here and do everything we can, he as head of the Polish YMCA and director of the American Y relief work for Poles, I to help wherever I can, chiefly . . . by writing. We have little more than the clothes we have on, having had to leave everything in our beautiful Warsaw house, now without doubt a mass of ruins. . . . But these people must have money or die. . . . Romania, it seems, will let them stay here. . . .

  And so, Mrs. Roosevelt, in the name of humanity, I appeal to you to do what you can for these people who have been robbed of their all and driven from their home. Russia, I know has urged all Poles to return, saying that Russia will take care of them. The Poles know the Bolsheviks well, and . . . cannot trust themselves to Russia. It is to England, France, and America they must look for help. If England and France give their sons and share their sufferings and loss of war, surely America will come forward with relief funds. I am not addressing you . . . as the wife of the President, but as a woman deeply interested in human decency.

  The next week in her 14 November column, ER celebrated the creation of a new Polish relief organization: “I was very glad to see this morning that a committee had been set up again, with Dr. Henry MacCracken as chairman, which will undertake relief work for the Poles. I hope that everyone who can, will help this committee.”

  While cautious discussions about refugees and safe havens continued, FDR offered refuge to several European leaders: “The United States would be glad to receive former [Polish] President Mościcki if he cares to visit this country.” Since Hitler’s next targets would be Holland and Belgium, FDR personally invited King Leopold of Belgium and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. He wrote Cordell Hull, “In view of the fact that Leopold is an old friend of mine and that I have ancestral Dutch connections it would be a decent thing to do.” FDR assured the monarchs that “Mrs. Roosevelt and I would gladly look after their safety and well-being and . . . we would regard them as members of our own family.”

  Rumors of impending attacks accelerated so furiously that even Dora Forbes, SDR’s ninety-three-year-old sister, reluctantly agreed to leave her Paris home. Carmel Offie wrote Missy LeHand, “We were very glad Mrs. Forbes left. She looked very well,” and her behavior was “magnificent.” Offie “could have died laughing when the night before she left she asked the Ambassador whether he would not lend her $100 and a portable radio; otherwise she would not leave. . . . She was very nice indeed to both of us, and especially the Chief” and evidently left Bullitt and Offie with treasured tokens from her beloved home and “many kindnesses.”

  Avenues of safety, access to escape, were rapidly closing. On 15 November, ER wondered if “we will ever return to the day . . . when little was thought of passports.” On 19 November Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, announced that “the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw must be shut off from the rest of the capital.” It would be barricaded and walled off, since Jews carried “diseases and germs.” William Shirer was told by a friend just returned from Warsaw that “Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews.” They were herded in massive numbers to eastern Poland, along with “several thousand Jews from the Reich,” without access to food, shelter, or warmth, sent there simply “to die.”

  Safe now in Paris, America’s ambassador to Poland, Tony Biddle, and his wife, Margaret, worked closely with the Polish government in exile and performed vital relief services for refugees from everywhere. For over a year, Biddle had reported the daily horrors of “unchecked Nazism.” Shortly after Kristallnacht, he had cabled Cordell Hull that
almost half a million Jews in Hungary were subjected to various new laws of cruelty, 900,000 Jews of Romania faced “increasing pressure . . . as its Fascist government mimicked Nazi measures.” In Poland, 3.5 million Jews were in desperation.

  Tony Biddle, a staunch humanitarian in the State Department, represented a distinct minority. His warnings had gone unheeded in 1938, and his reports were ignored in 1939. Privately, he and his wife did as much as they could. “Margaret has been [wonderful] with the Polish refugees,” Offie wrote, “and also for French refugee children who have been evacuated from the large cities. She [donated] blankets, medicines, tobacco, etc. to the Poles.” Margaret also sent the French prime minister Édouard Daladier a check for a million francs “to give a little happiness to some of the soldiers for Christmas. And she does it all anonymously.”

  Given the isolationist, antiwar fervor that dominated U.S. politics during a critical election year, private efforts may have been the only efforts possible. Throughout the autumn, ER’s audiences everywhere asked one question: could the United States “stay out” of Europe’s wars and Europe’s miseries? Her answer was always the same: the United States was connected to Europe’s wars and miseries in myriad ways. The only way to “stay out” was “to protect and enlarge our own democracy . . . from assault both within and from afar.”

  The United States, still “on the outside” of war, was in a position to evaluate the situation created in part by “patriotic” lies. We should, ER wrote, notice “how many people are being taken in, and try to study how a method can be evolved whereby in the future leaders cannot fool their people. . . . Will we ever learn to use reason instead of force in the world, and will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?”

  In her effort to stem the rising tide of bigotry and anti-Communism within the United States, ER answered the many letters sent to her in the hope that her words would contribute to activist democracy, which she considered essential for humanity’s survival. In November 1938 a Yale University instructor, William Mulvey, wrote that he deeply appreciated her “poise and patience during this period of turmoil and tribulation.” But he had been profoundly shocked to hear her say, concerning “the Jewish situation,” that she hoped we “‘will remain as free of prejudice and tolerant as we have been.’ Have you unwittingly disregarded the present deplorable status of the Negro in the United States? Or, have you completely given up the whole problem?” He could not believe either could be true, but her “broad statement must surely have caused despair and derision in the hearts of twelve million beleaguered colored folk.” He considered “our prevailing attitude of passive indifference even more deadly than the old active antagonism.”

  ER replied:

  I think we are in grave danger in this country of being swept away by a fear of communism, which has been inculcated by various groups . . . into a panic which will bring us greater prejudice and intolerance. We have been making some progress even in the South as regards the Negro, but at the moment there is a general attitude of fear which will affect every solution which I had in mind. . . . That is why I have reiterated on every occasion that we have to live up to the traditions of our country as expressed in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence even though I know in many cases we have fallen short. . . . I am far from giving up the problems of the Negro situation or any other. I am too old not to realize that lost causes usually are won in the end.

  In September 1939 Mulvey wrote again, this time to ask if, in this new era dominated by “the brawls of busy little men abroad,” something more significant could not be done to alleviate the suffering and neglect that still dominated America’s “Negro problem.” In this more rambling letter, which in part seemed to blame the victims for their own inaction, he suggested the “modern weapon” of propaganda: “Prejudices are built up by propaganda. Why can’t they be torn down with the same agent?”

  In reply, ER disagreed that Negroes were inactive:

  Most of the educated ones I know are interested in bettering the lives of their people and are leading them in a kindly and sane manner. A few, of course, are fanatical but we white people have fanatics too.

  It is a long process of education for both white and colored. They should have better pay for their work and an equal chance at education before the law. The white man especially in the South must learn that keeping the Negro at a low economic level keeps him down too. . . .

  I agree we must keep hate out of our thinking—both white and colored and remain sane as only by keeping our democracy at peace can we have a real influence toward a permanent peace. We can all help by maintaining a fair and honest and unprejudiced attitude.

  Convinced that the United States could have no influence on democracy abroad while lynching and bigotry at home continued, ER agitated publicly and privately to end inequality in all its forms. When Walter White told her about a campaign to keep Negro workers out of new shipbuilding jobs, she asked Admiral E. S. Land of the Maritime Commission to do something “to make the labor unions take a little better attitude [regarding] an even break to the workers of different races” and perhaps “insist on fairness both for skilled and unskilled laborers.”

  She encouraged Walter White and the NAACP to revive the anti-lynching law effort and supported his resolution. White wrote:

  It is our conviction that before the US sets forth again, directly or indirectly, to preserve democracy beyond the borders of the US it must wipe out such undemocratic practices as lynching. . . . Negroes, who are the chief sufferers from lynching, will be among those American citizens called upon once again to fight for democracy. Congress must see to it that there is no repetition of what took place during the first world war when relatives of Negro soldiers, fighting in France for democracy, were seized by mobs in the US and lynched, some of them being burned at the stake.

  Many letters ER received were filled, to her dismay, with contempt and disdain for various minorities. Congressional Democrats were still dominated by the “solid South,” which demanded political silence regarding racial justice. Indeed, attempts to improve the lot of the Negroes, Dixiecrats claimed, would destroy New Deal programs and Democratic unity. Nevertheless, ER kept issues of race and New Deal progress at the forefront of her considerations. She was disappointed that these issues were no longer visible on her husband’s agenda while he focused on aid to Britain, military rearmament, and his new library.

  ER and her husband were increasingly at odds as she was more routinely kept out of political conversations and denied access to international deliberations. While the couple rarely confronted their differences on race and refugees, tensions between them escalated. ER understood that her primary purpose was to accommodate and facilitate her husband’s preferences, which she made every effort to do. Still, their political distance amplified their private grievances.

  The week before Thanksgiving the Roosevelt family turned its attention to plans for the FDR presidential archive. The cornerstone was laid at Hyde Park on 19 November. ER’s column devoted to this occasion was circumspect, as the lunch at the dedication of the library revealed a growing separation between her court and the president’s. She was specifically hurt by his cavalier dismissal of her performance as official hostess, though the “very simple” ceremonies had rather pleased her. Before the event, however, she had heard a resounding “crash and discovered that one of the card tables around which some people were sitting, had collapsed and all the china had fallen to the floor! It was too bad to break the china, but I had to laugh, remembering the table which collapsed when the King and Queen were with us.”

  ER wrote nothing of her own feelings, but Tommy sent Anna the full story:

  We had a funny time on Sunday—funny now. . . . Your father and the [library’s fundraising] committee made up the lists of people to be invited, etc. Missy and Tully apparently had a han
d in it—neither [Edith] Helm nor I were invited to anything. No one asked our advice and the lists were given to our social bureau to send out. . . . Your mother asked how many for lunch and was told it was a selected few. . . . Your grandmother added a few of her pets. I was to have lunch at the cottage for some of our pets. Your mother asked your father who was quite calm and said the people would not expect lunch and when asked what they were supposed to do between l:30 and 3, he said blandly: “Oh, they can just wander around.” November in the country! [Everyone arrived] cold and hungry. They were given sandwiches and coffee, ice cream and doughnuts. . . . Your mother said she deliberately kept out of the dining room so she wouldn’t have to be embarrassed. The selected few, of course, had a good lunch which your grandmother had planned. I never saw your mother so mad!

  Riled, ER mounted her horse for a long afternoon ride.

  Tommy concluded by mentioning the strains on the once great Val-Kill friendship among ER, “the Cook and the Dickerman,” as Tommy referred to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. While emotionally their friendship had dissolved by 1938, politically they were still connected. Personally, at Val-Kill, Tommy explained to Anna, they “leave us very much alone,” but Marion Dickerman still expected every convenience when she stayed at the White House, which she did for the labor hearings. “I urged your mother to say the house was being cleaned, or any excuse . . . but your mother didn’t think she could do that, so Dickerman . . . ordered cars and generally made herself at home. I don’t see how anyone could have such thick hide. Your mother has certainly made it unmistakably plain that she doesn’t want anything to do with them.”