Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  In Battle Creek, Michigan, ER said the United States “must keep out of war, so that we may be the one torch of hope in the world. . . . When you go to war you cease to solve the problems of peace. This nation has a responsibility to go on to solve the world’s problems.”

  Throughout this leg of the tour, ER fielded ignorant and rude questions about her husband’s disability. Generally, their enemies continued to ask whether FDR’s handicap affected his mental capacity. She always answered that the president’s condition strengthened his concern for all people. While Hitler rampaged against “lives not worth living” and targeted infirm and handicapped men, women, and children for elimination, ER was met at stations all across the country by groups of handicapped children.

  At Joplin, Missouri, for instance, a “group from the crippled children’s school” greeted her train. They were accompanied by railroad officials who cared “for these youngsters” and were taking them “for treatment to Kansas City and St. Louis.”

  In Kansas City, ER met a young girl who had been a patient at Warm Springs. “She is very much upset,” the first lady reported, “because she has not been able to find a college within her means where it would be possible for a crippled youngster on crutches to . . . get the proper assistance.” The solution is not to establish “a special college for crippled children” but rather to install useful facilities in all “state universities, so that handicapped young people may obtain college educations at the least possible expense in normal surroundings.”

  As her train turned southward, ER looked forward to spending time at the SCHW conference with activists who shared her sense of urgency about racial justice and democracy’s future. She was particularly eager to resume her conversations with her ally Dr. Will Alexander. A Methodist minister and southern race radical disturbed by the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after World War I, Alexander had founded, with other white southern liberals, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) to oppose lynching and race violence. During the 1920s and 1930s the Atlanta-based CIC was the only interracial grassroots coalition across the old Confederacy. It grew and flourished—but so did the Ku Klux Klan.

  During the 1930s, as chair of the Farm Security Administration, Alexander had been ER’s primary adviser and supporter on the Arthurdale project. His work and vision continued to inform and fortify her efforts. Now ER was delighted that the SCHW was to honor him with the Thomas Jefferson Award for Vision, Service, and Leadership.

  In Chattanooga on 15 April, ER joined her many activist friends and allies who worked to move America forward. Unlike the 1938 meeting in Birmingham, where Sheriff Bull Connor had insisted on segregated seating, these proceedings took place in a largely calm and fully integrated environment. Among the delegates were iconic leaders of the twentieth-century civil rights movement: Frank Porter Graham, Virginia Durr, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lillian Smith, Joseph Gelders, Maury Maverick, Lucy Randolph Mason, Clark Foreman, Walter White, and Judge Louise Charlton. ER was close to them and also to Myles Horton and James Dombrowski, who ran the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which ER supported and the Dies Committee attacked; and southern youth leaders Helen Fuller and Howard Lee, who now served as SCHW chair. Howard Lee denied that he was a Communist, but ER no longer trusted him completely. Still, she believed it was important to continue to fight together on urgent issues for youth, for the South, and for America. She did trust Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, who had assured her that she would be surrounded by friends and there would be no “untoward happenings,” and thanked her for supporting the SCHW “personally, financially, and spiritually.”

  ER spoke on a panel, “The Children of the South,” with Georgia educator Horace Mann Bond and executive director of the National Negro Congress John P. Davis. She also presented a keynote address, calling for federal aid to education, so that every child in every region would be guaranteed “an equal opportunity” to develop all their talents for the best interests of the nation. Education must become a national responsibility, “if we care anything at all about democracy.”

  For three days the delegates met in harmony. There were no agitators or divisive upheavals. But one moment of tension arose when a delegate introduced a resolution to condemn “Communist aggression in Europe.” A bitter debate ensued, but Frank Graham saved the day with a substitute resolution to condemn “the violation of human rights and democratic liberties . . . by all Fascist, Nazi, Communist, and Imperialist powers alike.” Graham’s resolution “was overwhelmingly approved.”

  ER attended a panel on “The Industrial South” with Judge Louise Charlton, who spoke about the important advances, in both industry and agriculture, made possible by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Indeed, the rural electrification project had improved the lives of all people in the region. Despite difficulties faced by organized labor in the South, rural residents now had refrigerators, electric lights, flush toilets, and more. Meanwhile, ER noted in her column, the utility companies had benefited with a mighty “rise in net profits.”

  • • •

  ER returned to Washington energized and active. She conveyed to the Justice Department a message from Judge Charlton concerning violations of civil liberties and union rights in Alabama and Tennessee, which she hoped Attorney General Robert Jackson would investigate. She sent a sizable check to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which she considered a splendid training center for labor leaders and southern activists. Since the Dies Committee had attacked the school’s leaders, her friends Horton and Dumbrowski, as Communists, she intended to show her support publicly.

  Her tour had crystallized her main theme: Americans must remain free to speak with, disagree with, and know one another. While on tour, she had revised and edited a long article for Liberty magazine, “Why I Still Believe in the Youth Congress,” which appeared on 20 April, the day she returned to the White House. Her defense of the AYC dismayed many of her friends, but it was what she believed most profoundly. Because the millions of unemployed young people in the United States represented half of those out of work, she stressed, the government had a responsibility regarding job training and new jobs. It was good that youth congresses and other forums existed where younger citizens could share their experiences, air their grievances, and seek guidance.

  Regrettably, members of the AYC had exhibited “bad manners” on the White House lawn in February, but “it was raining and it was cold.” Four to five million young people out of work and suffering were “good material for Communists,” she wrote. “Of course we have Communists in this country, and of course they appeal to youth. The Communist Party leaders are giving youth training. . . . They are giving them a feeling that they are important in the world.” She warned of the dangers of ostracism and appealed for understanding, respect, and cooperation across the generations. “We have gone about obtaining this cooperation most stupidly. . . . We certainly cannot help [youth-led organizations] by attacking them, or by refusing to cooperate when we are asked for financial assistance or for speakers to attend their meetings. . . . We must go and deal with them as equals, and we must have both courage and integrity if we expect respect and cooperation.”

  ER’s ability to express such controversial positions depended largely on her husband’s consent. In areas where he asked her to be silent, she was silent. In others, he trusted her understanding and political efforts. Her defense of the AYC, despite its radical elements, appeared to be an example of the latter.

  She was rarely entirely silent, and her newspaper column provided her with a large audience for many of her ideas and beliefs, some of which FDR’s government rejected and key members of the Senate vehemently opposed. ER knew her boundaries, since she knew FDR so well. But she pushed against those boundaries as hard as she could, never actively going against her husband but making her case as vociferously as possible.

  In the first My Day column written upon h
er return, ER expressed her gratification at FDR’s welcome: “It is nice to be home again! From the cheerful sound of my husband’s voice when he greeted me, the pleasant smile on everybody’s face, I enjoyed the happy feeling of welcome.” She concluded with a moment of reflection about “the pleasure of a dinner at home with a talk about all the happenings of the world. I think this is one of the things I miss most when I am away, the evening opportunity of discussing with the President the events of the day.”

  The war in Europe remained “disheartening in the extreme.” A letter from her uncle David Gray, posted from Dublin on 16 April, was alarming:

  The news from Norway and Denmark has shocked people here in a way hardly realizable to you at home. The unexpressed feeling is that if the British fleet goes we [in Ireland] are next. Thoughtful people feel that if that fleet goes, European civilization goes with it. A wave of barbarism will spread over the continent. . . . There is great gratitude to the President for his clear thinking and courageous speaking on this question. But they wonder what he can do about the peace, if England is beaten. It will be, they say, a German peace and the US will have to prepare alone for the great struggle for existence that must ensue.

  Uncle David’s letter compounded ER’s distress regarding Nazi barbarism. For several months she had received almost daily letters of vivid detail, including an appeal from a group of Polish women who had escaped to Paris:

  In the very heart of Europe, Poland has become a great prison, a place of torture. Polish mothers implore American women to help us. Germans kill our children and mishandle our women. Our beautiful capital is ruined; its defenders starve in German prisons. Our houses are demolished, our families ruthlessly ejected from their home. We ask the women of the U.S., with whom we worked for principles of civilization and culture. Help us in the name of liberty and common ideals.

  ER’s immediate response continued to be endless work. She could not sleep at night, could do nothing really to relieve the Hitlerian horrors. But she would work every day for a bolder, better America. The United States, she was convinced, needed to step up its own defenses, which she defined broadly to include decent jobs, education, and housing. Efforts to stifle dissent, outlaw free speech, and criminalize Communism not only would be counterproductive but would also lead to the erosion of “our basic liberties.” In the United States as in France, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had resulted not in an effort to stifle fascism but rather in a drive against Communists and labor unionists. The Quislings, the traitors who devoured from within, had shown American constitutional precepts to be fragile. Many other countries, “in their fear of ideas, of people and of groups, resorted to restrictive measures which resulted in the loss of liberty for all.” She cautioned the press and the public to beware “of the jitters.”

  Subsequently, she expanded on that theme. Before Americans demanded new laws to limit freedom, we should review how our “regularly constituted government agencies” functioned. It was to the courts that government agents must bring “any accused person and present proof of guilt. This necessity of proving any suspicions should never be relaxed for a minute, because if we once begin to neglect any of our carefully built-up protections, we are leaning toward the solution arrived at by dictatorships to protect the dictator and not the public. Here, in the United States, we are interested in protecting the public.”

  ER’s whirlwind of Washington activity exhausted Tommy and surprised even the first lady. She met with social workers, with the prison reformer Dr. Miriam Van Waters, and with unemployment and worker activists who complained that there was no labor department in the District, where occupational diseases were rampant and industrial safety measures were “sadly needed.” ER agreed to put the issue on her national agenda.* At a luncheon “with the ladies of the 75th Congress,” she emphasized the need for more education and funding to stamp out venereal disease. Congressional funding was “still inadequate,” although the public health battle for the treatment and prevention of venereal disease was a priority.

  One afternoon ER consulted a speech teacher to improve the placement of her voice during public lectures. The teacher “believes she can tell a great deal about a person’s make-up from the voice and she proceeded to tell me that I was extremely nervous and excitable. This shows, I am afraid, that my voice is not well coordinated with the rest of my body and character, for I think that everyone around me will bear witness to the fact that I am neither excitable nor nervous!” ER was insulted not to be seen as calm and steady or alternatively, if her voice did betray her innermost feelings, as intense and passionate. However calm and steady, ER acknowledged that she had been living life so rapidly, she had “forgotten to mention the riot of daffodils” and magnolia trees in spectacular blossom throughout the White House gardens.

  Within the next few days, ER commuted between Washington, New York, and Hyde Park, amid rain and even snow, for dinners and meetings. Every hour was filled with urgent issues. Still, she had moments of relaxation and joy. The New York Metropolitan Opera Guild was having a fundraising drive, leading her to observe that “if you have enjoyed [the opera] radio broadcasts as I have, you will perhaps feel as I do that . . . everybody in the country has a stake” in their continuance. Now, “when it is so hard to think of things which draw us together instead of splitting us apart, music and art” are vital to our well-being and represent “a world interest.” She was also glad to be of use to Dr. John Rothstein, director of London’s Tate Gallery, who toured Canada and the United States to find safe places for great works of art. Tommy wrote Esther:

  Such a week as we have put in! Even Mrs. R said she was ashamed to tell anyone about all the things she did because it seemed so ridiculous to have planned so much for one short week. She spent her time dashing from one thing to another and going back and forth. . . . [And] all the people who had existed somehow while she was away, were panting for appointments—the Aubrey Williams type, plus the women of the Democratic National Committee!

  Then ER left for the southern phase of her speaking tour. She spoke in Miami and then visited the Everglades “to see some of the Farm Security work.” Not yet a national park, the Everglades were “miles and miles of flat, rich soil, beginning with muck” from one to six feet deep. “This is probably the biggest acreage of undeveloped farm land we have left” in the United States. Its “fields of beans, celery, tomatoes, cabbage and sugar cane” covered more than 100,000 acres. But with absentee landowners and a mix of tenant farmers and farmworkers housed in tiny shacks jammed close together, the conditions were “deplorable.” ER hoped that the “new Farm Security Camps being established for both white and colored labor will set a new standard of decency” for employers to follow.

  From Florida, ER journeyed by train to the Carolinas for more lectures and visits to NYA and WPA camps and projects, which she championed but which faced congressional budget cuts. The decision to cut off truly needy WPA workers from all support bewildered her. Unemployment, mounting hardships, and familial crises were spiraling out of control. “What is going to happen to them?” she angrily asked her readers, referring to the hungry and afflicted. “How would you meet their situation?”

  On 1 May 1940, the Nation magazine honored her with its “first annual award for distinguished service in the cause of American social progress.” More than a thousand political leaders and professional luminaries gathered at New York’s Hotel Astor for the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary dinner.

  William Allen White, who now ran a committee to keep the United States out of war by aiding the Allies, gave a witty speech about partisan confusions, then turned to ER and said, “My dear, I don’t care if he runs for the third or fourth term as long as he lets you run the bases, keep score and win the game.” Frank Kingdon, who worked with ER on international aid and refugee issues, said she had “a remarkable revenge upon the Presidency since the time when another President Roosevelt stole the show on her wedding day. . . . Sh
e has demonstrated that while the Presidency could overshadow the bride it has not been able to eclipse the woman. Few will dispute the statement that today she is the most widely beloved person in our whole national life.”

  When Freda Kirchwey presented the award, ER used her acceptance speech to emphasize the responsibility of every individual to make “democracy a reality to more people.” The stories of refugees, she said, had shocked her to a new level of recognition about our task: it is not for ourselves but “for all people” that we must fight to create a “life worth living.” We now fight to keep a flame of “hope for the rest of the world,” and we must work so that in some future time, we may be able “to offer” that hope. As for the Nation, it “has stood for freedom of thought and expression, and has often voiced the defense of ideas which could have had a hearing nowhere else.”

  To be recognized by people she admired, and by a journal she respected, which routinely called her “The First Lady of American Liberalism,” was important to ER when she was under increasingly shrill attack.

  That May she was in Washington at the National Institute of Government conference sponsored by the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Her old allies surrounded her, including Molly Dewson, Dorothy McAllister, Josephine Roche, May Evans, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Lorena Hickok. Hick, Dewson, and Douglas were her houseguests. The meeting, which also included representatives of the NAACP, Young Democrats, and other groups, heralded what was yet to come.

  In March, ER had told her husband to be prepared for a gathering of one hundred women, eager to meet with him, with legislators, and with their Democratic allies. Now five thousand women converged for what Time called the dream program of “solid, tweedy, 65-year old Mary Williams (Molly) Dewson, ex-director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee.” At a lawn party at the White House, the large crowd of delegates surged so vigorously toward the first lady to greet her that their enthusiasm “tore a ribbon from her hat.”