ER simply could not comprehend how the man who had written to her husband in April, “Fear is the child of ignorance and the parent of intolerance,” could have written such a decision. Aggrieved, she complained to FDR, but much to her astonishment he rejected her criticism. Indeed, in conversation with Frankfurter at Hyde Park, the president supported his onetime mentor. But others never forgave Frankfurter. Yes, he hated Hitler; yes, he was an American patriot. But in the name of patriotism for democracy, he had “ordered the children to ‘Heil.’” ACLU cofounder Roger Baldwin and other civil libertarians ended their long alliances with the justice: no decision “dismayed us more than his labored defence of compulsory flag saluting.” Baldwin said he hoped never to see his old friend again.
• • •
The first couple spent the weekend of 21–23 June together at Hyde Park, driving around their woods of elm, cypress, and oak. “We have been remarkably fortunate in having sunny, beautiful weather while the President has been here,” ER wrote in her column for the weekend. “Friday afternoon, we spent an hour driving up to his cottage and looking at a number of plantings of small trees. They were not visible until you gazed into the tangle of grass and weeds for a long time, but my husband said by winter we would discover quite a forest growing up. Yesterday morning, we visited the new school which has been given his name and is just back of our cottages.” All that weekend, they went back and forth between the Big House, Val-Kill, and FDR’s new Top Cottage. They visited with SDR and consoled Aunt Dora; they spent many hours alone in conversation.
News of the war preoccupied them. They listened to William Shirer’s broadcasts from Berlin and read aloud C. Brooks Peters’s vivid reports from the German capital in the New York Times. In the past, the first couple had disagreed about priorities and strategies. They had argued about the World Court, Ethiopia, and Spain; but now they were often in agreement. It was a time to bolster their common interests and their shared visions for the future, both in America and abroad.
The president’s long periods of inaction often exasperated ER, even though she knew they were part of the careful process of a politician biding his time in order to outwit his opponents. She was generally impatient for him to get to the point of action after a long period of hesitation and juggling.
He did not consult her about his plans for the presidential election of 1940. “I never asked my husband what he really wanted to do,” she wrote in her memoir. She knew he preferred to retire, which was also her wish, and she had long believed he would not run for a third term. For one thing, she worried about his health, especially after his much-witnessed “faint” during a festive dinner in May. He was rumored to have had a heart attack, and the episode was even reported as such in Time magazine. Another concern was his shifting team of advisers, especially Harry Hopkins’s disturbing new prominence. But she never said a word publicly about FDR’s health or his advisers. Finally, ER was dismayed by his consistently indirect political strategy. Even as her own efforts and writings were becoming ever more direct, he seemed more inclined to dissemble and prevaricate.
But his 10 June “stab in the back” commencement speech against Mussolini’s treachery persuaded ER that he would run again. And she was now convinced that he was the only man in America fully able to lead a united democratic struggle against the forces of totalitarianism, which were now triumphant in Europe and Asia. His new cabinet appointments confirmed her certainty that he would run again, but true to form, he kept his thoughts to himself. This time the man who often said he never let his right hand know what his left hand was doing annoyed her.
On Sunday evening ER went down to the station to see “the President and his party off for Washington with much regret, for the country is very lovely and it is possible to forget for a little while how horrible conditions are in much of the rest of the world.
I drove through the woods just as the sun was setting last night, a most mysterious magic hour. There was a soft light on the deep green leaves. A fat woodchuck scuttled across the road ahead of me. A little white-tailed rabbit ran along the road, too frightened to get out of the way, until I stopped the car and let him run to cover.
How can one think of these woods converted into a battlefield? Peace seems to be in the heart of them and yet, I remember some just like them outside of Paris and in the forests of Germany and England.
• • •
While ER was at Hyde Park, Joe Lash stopped by with three friends en route to an AYC convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (for which ER had raised funds). The owner of the car was Trude Pratt, a brilliant and generous activist whom ER was delighted to meet.
Born Gertrude von Adam Wenzel in Freiburg, Germany, on 13 June 1908, she was the eldest of five children. Independent and rebellious, she had been expelled from a convent school (as had ER), then studied in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg. She taught school and studied journalism in Berlin, then she worked for a PhD in literature at the University of Freiburg in 1930. Her dissertation, “The Baroque Style of John Donne,” was highly regarded, and she was awarded a fellowship to teach at Hunter College in New York. She worked with the International Student Service (ISS), an organization founded to support students who had been displaced by war.
At an ISS meeting in Manhattan in 1931, she met and fell in love with Eliot Pratt, the philanthropic son of an oil-rich family who shared her views. In 1932 she returned to Germany to work as a reporter for an anti-Nazi paper, infiltrating Nazi meetings for the ISS. Pratt joined her in Berlin, and they married. After Hitler came to power in January 1933, Nazis plundered and ransacked her office. Trude and Eliot returned to New York in February. In 1936 they journeyed to Germany during the Olympics to establish a rescue network. The Nazi propaganda effort to appear democratic during the international games enabled the Pratts to help many of their Jewish and political friends escape. Their rescue network brought six of Trude’s friends out in 1936 and expanded during the war.
When Joe met Trude at an ISS meeting in 1938, she was the very busy mother of three young children and a dedicated antifascist activist. Now in 1940 ER saw that Joe was “more than casually attracted to Trude.” She was immediately impressed by her and wrote Joe a letter to tell him so. It was the beginning of a long and deep relationship among the three of them, a bond that grew over the years and brought ER much joy.
• • •
John Gilbert Winant was a man of legendary stature in ER’s circle and was especially close to Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. In the 1930s, although he was an independent progressive Republican, he had also been a New Deal idealist and labor rights advocate during his tenur as governor of New Hampshire. FDR was so impressed by his integrity and vision, he appointed him first chair of the Social Security Board.
In 1940 he became director of the International Labor Office (ILO), based in Geneva. At the time FDR applauded the choice as a chance to demonstrate that “Washington had moved away from isolation.” Winant’s first speech to the ILO was generative: “Everything that is in me . . . is dedicated to the service before me. . . . The world rightly belongs to those who really care.”
But on 15 June 1940 the world of hope and amity in Geneva fell into immediate danger as the Nazis overran France. Winant appealed for sanctuary to save his staff, the ILO library and papers. He feared that “twenty-four of the best members of his staff” faced “liquidation” if they did not get out. They all had “unquestioned loyalty to democratic principles” and deserved visas. He turned to Frances Perkins and Cordell Hull for help in obtaining refuge for the ILO in the United States.
According to Winant’s biographer, during an evening meeting on 17 June, Perkins “convinced” FDR to approve Winant’s request. But FDR subsequently retracted his invitation, explaining to Perkins that while he had formerly agreed to “harbor” the League of Nations at Princeton, he did not want to upset Congress any more than necessary during his efforts to bolster aid
to Britain. In the end, the State Department offered the ILO staff transit visas if they would proceed to another country. Happily, Winant had a good friend at McGill University in Montreal, which offered the ILO “a home for the duration.” The ILO could continue its work safely in Canada. Winant decided to spend much of his time in Washington, to work with Nebraska’s Senator George W. Norris and other independents for FDR’s election.
ER never understood FDR’s State Department. She was bewildered by its seeming indifference to the plight of refugees and its adamant refusal to help them in any way. What did State officials think of the bitter and ongoing human tragedies her allies and friends related? Every day brought news of further outrages, horror stories of refugees rounded up. FDR’s refusal to stand up to the department’s intransigence dismayed her, although she believed he would ultimately do the right thing and bypass State.
Meanwhile she would continue to work to change public opinion regarding the plight of European refugees as well as the need for aid to Britain. She determined to write more bluntly and vividly, devoting a column to her visit to Congress House. This refugee home in Manhattan had been established by Louise Wise, wife of Rabbi Stephen Wise, and the women’s division of the American Jewish Congress. “The three houses she has taken over,” ER wrote, “must indeed seem a cheerful haven to strangers landing on our shores. I wish we could receive everyone who comes to this country with the same spirit which [Louise Wise] and her colleagues have been able to create in these houses.” She made it clear that “not only Jewish, but Catholic and liberal Protestant refugees from Germany have found a haven here.” In a short time, Congress House, “a Shelter for the Homeless” on Sixty-eighth Street near Central Park, would welcome over four thousand European refugees.
As the swastika unfurled all across Europe, ER wrote and spoke almost daily about refugees. She was determined to assist them before all the doors out of Europe’s inferno slammed shut. She worked to organize Kindertransporten so that vulnerable children could find havens in Britain and North America. For the moment, FDR seemed to support her, although he grew annoyed when she broached this subject.
In New York on 25 June ER met with several individual philanthropists and representatives from the AFSC, as well as Catholic, Jewish, and nonsectarian relief groups, to organize a new Committee for the Care of European Children. “I am thankful beyond words,” she wrote, “that it is going to be possible to do something for these European children, but my heart is heavy when I think of the tragedies which haunt the lives of many grown people.” She persuaded Chicago philanthropist Marshall Field to serve as the committee’s director, and she agreed to serve as honorary chair. From that moment on, the battle for refugee children would be in very good hands.
• • •
That same evening, 25 June, Joe Lash brought Trude Pratt and Karl Frank to ER’s Eleventh Street apartment for dinner. Also present was Joseph Buttinger, head of Austria’s underground socialist movement. Frank explained that in its armistice with the Nazis, the Vichy government had agreed to “surrender on demand” anyone on French soil who was of interest to the Reich. That meant antifascist activists in France were trapped, within reach of the Gestapo. Political and labor leaders were immediately endangered, as were artists, writers, academics, and intellectuals who had in any way opposed Hitler.
That night the five dinner companions—Lash, Pratt, Frank, Buttinger, and ER—created the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), to save these refugees. The first step was to compile lists of the people who were in immediate danger. A number of lists had already been compiled, and Frank and Buttinger gave them to ER.*
ER then picked up the phone and called the president to ask him to help these refugees. According to Lash, FDR received the request somewhat impatiently, stressing that everything that could be done was being done. ER was persistent and responded to each of FDR’s reasons with a counterargument. When he mentioned that Spain refused to admit even American refugees, she reminded him that he “always said it was possible to bribe Spanish and Portuguese officials.” Then he said, “Congress would not let them in.” She wondered what had “happened to us. . . . We had been the traditional land of asylum and now we’re unwilling to admit political refugees.” She was tenacious, and the president grew annoyed. Their long conversation that night was only the first of many on the subject.
In the end, ER took Frank and Buttinger’s lists and promised to see that they were sent to American consulates throughout Europe. With the creation of the ERC, ER had work to do, the kind she most wanted. It would become one of her most enduring contributions to rescue efforts.
Her fellow ERC cofounders soon introduced her to Varian Fry, the key figure in the group. A scholarly journalist whose life had formerly been devoted to learning and literature, Fry had been a classics major at Harvard, then studied international relations at Columbia. While on assignment in Germany in 1935, he had witnessed outrages against Jews in Berlin, which changed his life. Upon his return to New York, he raised money for anti-Nazi groups and worked closely with Karl Frank’s American Friends of German Freedom, led by such luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr, head of Union Theological Seminary, and ER’s friend the educator Dr. Frank Kingdon.
Then Fry made a fateful decision: as he told ER on 27 June, he would go to Marseilles, lists in hand, to help these endangered people personally. By obtaining emergency visas, he believed he might be able to rescue them all within a month. He gave ER a letter for the president, asking him to appeal to Latin American governments for asylum. On 8 July ER wrote Fry, “The President has seen your letter. . . . He will try to get the cooperation of the South American countries.”
Between the ERC and the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, refugees would be high on ER’s agenda for the foreseeable future. Her deep depression, her recurring “Griselda mood,” was over. Tommy noticed that she was “happier now that she has so much to do for this child refugee committee.” As honorary chair of the U.S. Committee, she actively sought to protect refugee children. In her column, she described what the U.S. Committee was doing and how refugees could help the war effort:
Under the quota we have received a number of German, Austrian, Italian and Spanish refugees. People who have been marked people in their own countries because of their active opposition to Fascist or Nazi regimes. They have left behind them, however, in France, Sweden and England members of their families, intimate friends, beloved political leaders and now cannot rest in safety because of the dangers which surround their loved ones. Most of these people could help us greatly in the next few weeks or months, for they know how Communists, Nazis and Fascists work.
Her work on refugees would keep her increasingly in New York, although the Washington summer was cool so far, and, she wrote to Anna, “I love my porch at night.” In New York, she met with members of the U.S. Committee’s fundraising subcommittee, notably Marshall Field and Frank Kingdon. She was grateful that Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen gave her ample time on their Washington Merry-Go-Round broadcast program personally to launch the campaign for refugee children. She was rarely so insistent about the need for donations, but the need was urgent, and she intended to be increasingly blunt.
As the threat of a German invasion of Great Britain loomed, the first ship, with thousands of refugee children from Britain and the Continent, was scheduled to leave Britain for North America. The children, out of harm’s way, should be admitted as guests, not as refugees, ER argued. In a national broadcast over the CBS network, she declared: “The children are temporary visitors, not immigrants.” Applying current State Department regulations on immigration would strangle the chances of the children sent “to this country to escape the war. . . . Red tape must not be used to trip up little children on their way to safety.”
Emphasizing interfaith efforts, she hosted a picnic and concert for the Christian Action Committee for Scandinavian Relief to aid Finland and Norway. She met
regularly with the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief, served as vice-chair, and called repeatedly upon Americans to work to “break down the wall of indifference” and realize that “anything any American can do to help is a contribution to the effort to return the world to sanity.”
Still, across the country a spirit of unwelcome toward refugees continued. Perhaps “the years of depression have made us less sure of ourselves, oversuspicious and overcautious,” she wrote at Hyde Park during a pounding thunderstorm. “Take, for example, our attitude toward the acceptance of any foreign political refugees. . . . These people love liberty and value it [and] have had experiences which may be of value to us in recognizing the propaganda methods used by totalitarian dictators. We must, of course, use caution, but we need not be cautious to the point of going back entirely on our traditional hospitality to political refugees.”
• • •
In the political surprise of 1940, the Republican Party at its convention nominated Wendell Willkie as its candidate for president. Up to that point the isolationists of the GOP, led by Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH), Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), and New York district attorney Thomas Dewey, had been the front-runners. Willkie, an internationalist, had formerly campaigned for America’s entrance into the World Court and was now running as an interventionist. Handsome, tall, and hulking, the “huggy-bear” of American politics triumphed on the sixth ballot over the isolationists.
Willkie, a former New Deal Democrat, was a genuine progressive and civil libertarian, as well as an attorney and business magnate. A director of the Morgan Bank, he was a leader of the water power industry and president of Commonwealth and Southern Corporation. He had campaigned against the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, but that seemed his only difference with FDR—until he decided the president had retreated from his most significant liberal commitments. Now Willkie favored national health care, absolute racial equality, and an extension of all social and economic benefits. He opposed engorged bureaucracy and feared dictatorship. He suspected FDR and the “third term-ites.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 36
