Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Woody Guthrie, who had “hoboed in from Galveston Texas” to Washington that day, was staggered when FDR called the students’ “trip and the stuff that they stood for ‘twaddle.’ It come up a big soaking rain and he made the kids a 30-minute speech in it.” On the spot, Guthrie wrote a song: “Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?”

  It was raining mighty hard in that old capitol yard

  When the young folks gathered at the White House gate. . . .

  While they butcher and they kill, Uncle Sam foots the bill

  With his own dear children standing in the rain.

  ER admired Guthrie and evidently never objected when this song was sung in her presence. But one Guthrie song that members of the AYC repeatedly sang during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact really annoyed her:

  Oh, Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt.

  We damned near believed what he said.

  He said, “I hate war and so does Eleanor,

  But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.”

  People closest to FDR were deeply distressed by his performance. Anna wrote a letter to her mother, unusually dismayed by her father’s words. ER replied:

  I felt as you did about Pa’s speech to the American Youth Congress, tho’ I wish they had better manners about it! Many of the youngsters are inclined to believe well of Russia but that is because they are so afraid of all propaganda & feel Russia in Finland may be a victim of that. [Russia] helped Spain and they don’t trust [Herbert] Hoover’s efforts for Finland since he did nothing for Spain or Czechoslovakia or Poland or China. They think “well the Finnish government was fascist once we know.” I found them not communist except for a few city groups, and not concerned about communism which was forced down their throats at every turn but deeply concerned about getting a job and finding out how they could help themselves and each other in their respective communities to do this. Pa lost their support and will have to win it back. I’d like to show Pa [your letter] but I wont for the sake of family peace!

  ER wrote Anna nothing of her own ordeal during the Citizenship Institute. The afternoon FDR was booed, she attended a plenary session where John L. Lewis scorned FDR in general, and the paternalistic condescending tone of his address in particular:

  FDR gave you statistics that indicate improvement. I reject such statistics, while 12 million Americans are still unemployed.

  FDR dismissed your views as “twaddle.” Your resolution on Finland was substantially the same as the mineworkers’ resolution. That is not twaddle; that is democracy.

  Every sentence was greeted with gusts of approval, whistles, and cheers. In the end, Lewis urged America’s youth to leave the cold embrace of the Democratic Party and join his Labor’s Non-Partisan League.

  ER’s inner torment, both at her husband’s humiliations and at the savaging of her own beliefs in such hostile fashion, can only be imagined. Yet while Lewis hurled contempt at her husband, ER sat passively knitting. On his way out, Lewis paused to greet her. He leaned over, hand extended. As they shook hands, there was a momentary intake of breath throughout the filled-to-capacity auditorium—a pause of courtesy on a bitter day.

  As the afternoon proceeded, ER’s hopes for the AYC were restored. Speeches by the young delegates themselves were important, fact-filled, and galvanizing. Harriet Pickens of the YWCA, daughter of NAACP officer William Pickens, spoke for civil rights and decried a Mississippi proposal for free but censored textbooks for grades one to eight. All references to “citizenship and voting rights” were to be deleted for Negro children. According to Lash, Harriet Pickens’s “speech was a cry from the heart.”

  ER was particularly stirred by the vigor and eloquence of Dorothy Height. An NYU graduate, journalist, and social worker, Height represented the Christian Youth Council. “War is an outrage and a sin. It violates the very fundamentals of Christianity,” Height said. “For Christian young people there is no alternative. We join with the young people of America and the world in working for . . . a true peace which transcends race, nation or class.” An African-American student leader and YWCA officer, Height had worked closely with Mary McLeod Bethune since 1937 at the National Council of Negro Women and had been one of ten AYC leaders who worked with ER to make the Vassar World Youth Congress a success. ER admired her as an independent force within the AYC.

  The first lady was also impressed by Louise Meyerovitz’s vigorous words on behalf of Young Judaea:

  Tactics of anti-Jewish persecution which proved so successful in Germany are being transplanted to the United States. One group has been used as an entering wedge. When that group is done away with, another group is selected until all the people who oppose the suppression of freedom are put off the map. The threat of war paves the way for dictatorship and rule by decree. It endangers the freedom of life of all the citizens, including American youth of Jewish faith.

  Frances Williams’s concluding presentation appealed to ER most of all. As AYC administrative secretary, she represented the leadership’s vision, which gave ER abiding hope in the group. Williams’s emphasis on civil liberties and full citizenship rights for all included fearful warnings about new anti-alien and sedition laws, the end of free speech, press, and assembly, and the march of repression in troubled times, which particularly targeted labor’s rights through corruption, vigilantism, and terror. Democracy itself was in a state of siege, Williams warned, and academic freedom and all minority rights were imperiled. ER agreed with Williams, and with the AYC, on most issues.

  But the meeting was entirely divided between those who wanted to support Britain and France and those who were so pro-Soviet that they declared Britain and France imperialist enemies. ER’s close friend Abbott Simon, the legislative chair, recently returned from Europe, declared France to be “a semifascist state,” where Spanish refugees lived in squalor and misery and were forced to repatriate to “the firing squads.” An Indian student asserted: “We in India [see] no difference between German fascism and British or French imperialism.” Several others gave speeches to make it clear that “the Yanks are not coming.”

  That was “the harsh setting” ER faced on Sunday night, Lash later noted, when she rose to address the final session, titled “How War Affects American Youth.” For this most controversial session, ER had previously agreed to answer questions from the floor.

  In the past she had entered AYC events accompanied by AYC leaders. That night she arrived on the arm of her son FDR Jr., with harsh lights of newsreel cameras upon her, in a long black evening dress, and a corsage of orchids given her by AYC leaders.

  “When I rose to speak,” she remembered, “I was greeted with boos, but that made no difference to me. I waited until I could be heard and then remarked that since they had asked me to speak and I had listened to all the other speakers, I thought in return they had an obligation to listen to me.” According to Leslie Gould, newspaper accounts “made it a giant boo demonstration . . . of antagonism and disrespect to Mrs. Roosevelt.” Actually, the response was aimed at the first question, “on the sore spot of Finland” asked by “one of the disturbers” who had wrangled with Joe Cadden the night before.

  The audience of over two thousand remained politely quiet throughout, after she held up her hand to cut their initial reaction short: “I want you neither to clap nor hiss until I have finished and then you may do whichever you like.”

  She took the first question from her cousin Archibald Roosevelt: “Don’t you think that a congress truly representative of American youth should be willing to pass a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Finland?”

  No. I don’t think you should go on record for anything you don’t believe in. . . . However, I think it is only fair to say that I do not think you fully understand some of the history underlying many situations. . . .

  I agree with you that a stand should have been taken when Ethiopia was attacked. I agre
e with you in your sympathy for Spain; I agree with you in your sympathy for China and Czechoslovakia. I also have sympathy for Finland. Even though you may think that the government which came into Finland originally had certain fascist tendencies, I think it has been clearly proved that the government . . . is what the Finns want it to be. In all fairness, I think, however, it should be said that there is no excuse for a big nation invading a little nation which has not been attacked by that little nation. . . .

  Therefore, our sympathy as a free people should be just as much with the Finnish people as it would be with any other small nation which is invaded.

  ER answered every question put to her for over an hour—gravely, sincerely. She chose, above all, to defend her husband’s remarks. She tried to explain the administration’s failure to end unemployment: it “is a world question—a basic economic question. The administration does not know the answer. The administration program is to do what seems possible, do it fairly and continue to look for the answer.” She agreed that all programs so far, the “increased social security legislation,” the NYA and WPA efforts, were “a drop in the bucket.” On the subject of economic retrenchment for social programs, she turned the question to a failure to organize public opinion. She called upon the audience to rally movements in their home to communicate “because Congress is responsive to you.”

  On the hope for continued neutrality and aid to belligerents, she was vigorous: “I do not want to see this country go to war again. . . . But domination of any great part of the world by any great nation is always a danger.” She did not know what constituted “adequate defense.” “I want to see war abolished,” she declared. But when wars were being fought, defenses were needed. To a mounting rumble of protest, she continued:

  You never go to war unless the nation wants to go to war. You cannot because Congress is responsive to the nation. . . . You are not the only ones who don’t want war. I don’t think there are any older people in this country who want war, and certainly none of us who know what war is like. . . . Do you think that the President wants war? Then you forget that we have four sons who are just the age to go to war.

  The United States, she said, was in no position to criticize struggling nations facing war “when we do so little.” She wondered if Abbott Simon had been “fair to criticize France” when the Wagner-Rogers bill to bring in refugee children, “all of whom were to be paid for, the money had been acquired,” had been defeated “because the people of this country would not back it.” The United States, therefore, was in no position, she insisted, to sit in “harsh judgment on other nations.”

  In conclusion, ER thanked the AYC for its patience and courtesy. “I am very, very fond of many of your leaders,” she said, “and I am sure I would like to know all of you personally.”

  It had been a frank, painful, courageous evening. There were no easy answers, no simple solutions. The audience gave her a standing ovation. All observers agreed that, both for ER and for America’s youth, it had been an exhausting, extraordinary ordeal.

  ER’s feelings about the event ranged from depressed to philosophical. In the end, she confided to Hick, she answered their questions “in a way which was not too popular & there was considerable hissing. FDR made them very sore, more by the way he said things than by the things he said & it is especially hard to stand in the rain & ‘take it’ when you feel as sensitive as youth does.” Then John L. Lewis “walked away with them,” and “I brought them down to earth . . . which wasn’t pleasant either. However, when all is said & done it was remarkable to have so many come & talk & listen & I think it was a great experience for them & I learned much myself.”

  Hick was unforgiving. Imagine! To hiss ER! All the Democratic leaders Hick met as she traveled for the party to build support for the 1940 election, and explore FDR’s third-term possibilities, were wild with outrage. What nerve, Hick declared, “after all you have done for them! It does make them look sort of bad.”

  Dewey Fleming of the Baltimore Sun observed: “The nation probably has not seen in all of its history such a debate between a President’s wife and a critical, not to say hostile, auditorium full of politically minded youths of all races and creeds.”

  Betty Lindley wrote to Anna: “I went to all the sessions of the American Youth Congress—and I’m still boiling mad. They were impudent, closed-minded and destructive. . . . And how they can talk! Your mother was magnificent Sunday evening when a bunch of rigged-up questions were handed to her to answer.”

  ER’s closest friends were aghast throughout the weekend. The young people’s rude behavior toward FDR made Tommy livid. At tea, immediately after that event, she confronted several AYC leaders: “How dare you insult the President of the United States?” Before dinner, FDR sent for Tommy. It was unusual for her to be summoned to his study. As she entered, he looked up from his papers and whispered intently, “Thank you, Tommy.” While her outrage consoled FDR, he sought to comfort his wife. Later that evening, he leaned over to ER and with his most disarming smile said, “Our problem children are always unpredictable, aren’t they!”

  ER left almost immediately for an unprecedented vacation in Florida. She had never before departed just to get away, to heal her heart, and to assess her changing alliances and friendships. Safe and secluded at a beach house that Earl Miller had borrowed from a friend, with Tommy and her partner Henry Osthagen, ER did little but read, ruminate, and relax. She swam and wrote her columns, enjoyed the good cheer and playful games Earl invented, and filled her days with an abandon she had never before allowed herself.

  For the next two weeks ER’s columns were datelined “Golden Beach, Florida”: “Here I am installed in a very comfortable house . . . and our holiday has already begun.” She launched her time off with a visit to Mary McLeod Bethune’s college in Daytona Beach. Until then, “I never realized what a really dramatic achievement” Bethune-Cookman College actually was. Founded in 1905, with five dollars, faith in the future, and “five little girls” enrolled in what was then called the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, the college now “ministers to the needs of 100,000 Negroes from Daytona south, and it takes 250 students.” Bethune-Cookman trained “leaders who will return to their communities and serve their people.” Bethune’s vision and achievement profoundly moved ER, who alerted her readers that “like all other colleges, they still need a great deal—a library building, for instance, and many more books . . . a substantial endowment fund,” and new buildings to keep up with its splendid growth. ER ignored the fact that her visit and call for donations rankled Dixiecrats. Subsequently she would visit Bethune-Cookman College many times and support it in various ways.

  While on vacation, she told her readers that except for her columns, she would have no social engagements “or duties of any kind” for the duration. It “is really a very nice feeling, but not having experienced it very often in my life, it makes me feel a bit guilty. . . . In any case, I am going to enjoy every day as we live it.” The next day she wrote her daughter, “I’m getting a good tan & doing nothing social. Henry [Osthagen] & Earl are having some friends for cocktails today & yesterday Tommy, Earl & I went to see ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ otherwise I’ve lived on the beach in a bathing suit.”

  But in her columns, she ceaselessly struggled to work out her feelings about the Citizenship Institute. She wrote about sitting on the beach with nothing to do: “My husband likes the ocean from the deck of a ship, even when the vessel rolls and pitches so much that most people retire to bed. My own appreciation of the ocean is always enhanced by being on dry land.” Actually, she preferred to drive along the coast, “close to the beach, or high above it.” She never wrote that she hated the sand, which she did, and besides, “it does not seem to me particularly warm here,” but she was assured it would get warmer. She enjoyed her days on the beach. “I should record that during the past twenty-four hours I have spent many of them lying in the sun and fin
d it very pleasant.” Moreover, such enforced relaxation heightened her interest in local conditions. Notably in segregated Florida, she was drawn to issues of race. A local effort to introduce retraining schools for unemployed workers excited her imagination, and she suggested it for all communities.

  The new Association for the Study of Negro Life and History seemed to her spectacular:

  There is nothing which gives one so much pride as to be familiar with the achievements of one’s own race. There is so much today in literature and art which can give the Negro people a sense of the genius and achievement of their race, but too often their history is forgotten. I think this association will promote goodwill and respect between neighbors of different races in our own country.

  As always, human suffering and issues of respect for others dominated ER’s thoughts. The film version of The Grapes of Wrath struck her as “well done,” but she feared it did not convey the full reality of people’s suffering. She was particularly moved by Mrs. Joad’s question to Tommy when he returned from prison: whether he had “been hurt so much that he is just ‘mean-mad.’ I have felt people were ‘mean-mad’ at times and wondered if life were not treating them so harshly that they were unable to retain any of the qualities which make people lovable and that make life worth living.”

  During her vacation, “in the midst of a world which seems to provide one at every turn with new tales of horror and suffering, a story has come to me which has nothing to do with war.” Korea was suffering due to “the mercilessness of nature.” A protracted drought and heat wave had resulted in famine. Korea’s chief winter food is rice and “‘kimchi,’ a kind of pickled cabbage.” Their cotton crop failed, and the people of Korea “are starving, freezing and dying.” ER again asked for donations. “Perhaps you will send an occasional check to . . . the world’s suffering people.” And she acknowledged, “It seems hard to sleep at night because the stress of homeless, hopeless people haunt one’s dreams.”