Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Her efforts to save British children intensified. On 17 September a German U-boat torpedoed The City of Benares, embarked for Montreal and Quebec. Of the 406 passengers and crew, 248 were lost, including 77 children who had been headed for safety. The first lady spent much of that week meeting with various children’s committees. Besides her work for the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, she was also active with the Foster Parents Plan for War Children, which raised money for the education and shelter of more than 32,000 refugee children currently at a large estate outside London, where they awaited transport to North America. And she worked with the Women’s Committee for Mercy Ships, which advocated legislation, sponsored by Senator Carter Glass (D-VA), that would enable U.S.-registered ships to go to Britain to bring refugee children directly to the United States. There were reportedly 200,000 children who awaited refuge in North America. ER’s committee made it clear that their work was not limited to British children: “We want American ships to rescue children who are in danger, without regard for race, creed, or nationality.” Moreover, for those who managed to arrive in the United States, it would “give every possible aid.”*

  In Philadelphia on 20 September she attended a ceremony for FDR, who received an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She lunched with his party, which included her grandson Bill (Elliott’s son), former daughter-in-law Betty Donner, Curtin Winsor, and William Bullitt, as well as Anthony Biddle, the American ambassador to Warsaw, and his wife, Margaret. Tony Biddle told ER about witnessing the carnage in Poland, and then France: “I used to pray every morning to be so busy . . . I could not stop to think. If you had nothing to do, the sights you saw were too overwhelming.”

  ER returned to New York for the opening of the film Pastor Hall, a British anti-Nazi film for which she had narrated the prologue. The film is based on Ernst Toller’s last play, Pastor Hall,* which in turn was based on the real-life Reverend Martin Niemöller, who protested the mistreatment of Jews from his church pulpit and in 1937 was imprisoned in Dachau. He is best remembered for his words from Dachau:

  First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

  He spent over seven years in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Flossenburg concentration camps. He was liberated on 4 May 1945 when U.S. troops entered Flossenburg. He dedicated the rest of his life to German redemption, world peace, and nuclear disarmament.

  The fictionalized version of Pastor Niemöller in the film, named Pastor Hall, suffers cruel torture until his escape and return to his church. According to Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review, actor Wilfrid Lawson “achieves a moment of ascendant emotion when he exhorts his congregation to put on ‘the whole armor of God’ to fight the anti-Christ.” After this last sermon, he is shot by waiting storm troopers and dies on the steps of his church.

  ER previously had seen the vivid and controversial film at a private and secret viewing and felt inspired by Niemöller’s courage. After leading Hollywood studios refused to distribute the film in the United States, James Roosevelt consulted his mother as to whether she thought he should do so. She encouraged him and volunteered to do anything to help get the film widely seen throughout the country. To that end, she had recorded a prologue to the film, in which she said:

  I am glad to introduce this motion picture because I believe it tells a story of most vital importance to all of us. It is a story that is true—tragically true—a story of the insidious growth of the spirit of hatred, intolerance and suppression of liberty which is now sweeping over the face of this earth. The leading character . . . is a simple man of God, . . . the same kind of minister that you and I have known and loved . . . in every community . . . where men and women are free to worship God in their own way. To me this picture carries a message of inspiring truth. It is deeply encouraging.

  The film’s opening in New York was a notable event. “Not even the oldest Broadwayite,” the Sunday Mirror noted, “could remember a premiere like that in the Globe Theatre last night. . . . Chief among those in the distinguished audience” was the first lady, who “entered the theatre on the arm of her producer son Jimmy.” ER was also accompanied by Tommy, Joe Lash, his friend Agnes Reynolds, and Harry Hooker.

  ER was proud of her son’s determination to bring this film to the United States and happy to be part of his act of courage and defiance. Still, “it seemed strange to see my son’s name” on the marquee, and “even stranger to see myself announced at the beginning of a feature picture. I can’t say that I like myself on the screen, but I do hope people will go to see the picture and remember the lesson it carries. Hate and force cannot be abroad in such a great part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it. . . . It is important for us to see what a system can do to human beings when it brings out all that is worst in them.”

  Most New York reviews of Pastor Hall were positive, and when Sara Delano Roosevelt saw it, an unnamed Times reporter observed that she “applauded vigorously” after ER’s prologue. The reporter watched her carefully: “During some of the concentration camp scenes, at which several women walked out, she [remained calm].” Subsequently SDR told the reporter she would not call the film “brutal” but rather “realistic.” “Anti-Nazi movies have my approval because the truth must be shown now as never before. I hope to see it again soon and I think everyone should see it.”

  ER herself viewed Pastor Hall as a prayer for the future in the battle for humanity. She considered the film “extraordinary” and hoped it would jar her many friends in the youth movement who still opposed any support for Britain and objected to her appeals for a year of service, universal conscription, and military preparedness. She was stunned by their apathy as well as the general public’s disregard for the world’s suffering. She was outraged that the film was banned in several cities, including Chicago, “as propaganda and too shocking,” and that there were widespread protests against the concentration camp scenes. ER relied on her own creed, The Moral Basis of Democracy: life is about the struggle, and we are all responsible.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Defense Is Not a Matter of What You Get, But of What You Give”

  ER did not underestimate the bitter political climate within the United States in 1940. While most polls indicated a growing revulsion among Americans against Hitlerism and fascism, a vast majority of the voting public (83 percent, according to published polls) opposed any increase in immigration quotas and rejected providing military aid to Britain. She understood and shared the abiding antiwar sentiment, but she could not understand this passivity in the face of human suffering. If Americans could name it and even despise it, why did they turn away from action and even demand that nothing be done?

  ER had read Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches in German. She frequently asked her isolationist or anti-interventionist correspondents if they too had read his words—and if so, how could they be so passive while his plans for slavery, tyranny, and horror marched triumphant? Hitler’s frequent references to U.S. history sickened her: he invoked “Indian removal,” the reservations and massacres, as well as the legal segregation and humiliation of African-Americans, with separate drinking fountains and park benches, separate schools and swimming pools, separate sections on buses and trains. He considered America his great ally when it came to “savages” and eugenics. Blood ruled.

  To purify Germany and create the “master race,” one of Hitler’s first 1933 decrees ordered the forced sterilization of more than five hundred mixed-race or Afro-German teenagers, and many thousands of physical and mental “Untermenschen” with disabilities, as well as the blind and infirm. Wherever he ruled, he outl
awed those without “pure” German blood or who had allegedly blood-destroying limitations: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, deviants, disabled and other “problem people,” including “single infertile women” and “useless eaters,” who drained the economy and whose “lives were not worth living.” They were to be removed to “reservations” and quarantined.

  For ER, Hitler cast a floodlight on America’s unfinished agenda for democracy. In the South, a surprising level of bigotry against Jews, foreigners, outsiders, and “aliens” prevailed. Southern Democrats remained committed to their traditions of “race etiquette”—those features of white supremacy regnant in Hitler’s crusade for the master race. Some U.S. congresspeople were willing to support increased defense expenditures and conscription, but they rejected any steps toward racial justice, including Willkie’s, and sought to defund New Deal agencies. Standing up for liberty, freedom, and justice against Hitler, ER thought, would require another, albeit different, New Deal.

  She was proud to be part of the progressive Southern Conference for Human Welfare and to work with friends and advisers such as Virginia Durr, Lucy Randolph Mason, and Ellen Woodward—staunch New Dealers and radical activists for race justice. Hailing from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, they vigorously opposed segregation, discrimination, the poll tax, and lynching. They understood that immigrants, migrant farmworkers, and African-Americans must achieve full citizenship and respect—immediately. They represented a growing movement but had little support among southern leaders in Congress.

  Significant communities of activists elsewhere in the country also supported Hitler. Besides the Nazi Bund, many Catholic, anti-British, Irish, and Italian groups were in league with the fascist radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. By 1940 more than 110 fascist organizations were on the scene, opposing all U.S. defense measures. In a galling alliance, isolationists, pacifists, and antiwar progressives—many of whom had been among ER’s closest friends—joined them. She increasingly distrusted her embattled allies within the youth movement, concluding that their international views had been defined by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. She also deplored the punitive measures made possible by the Smith Act and all efforts to stifle free speech and debone the Bill of Rights.

  The deep divisions within the nation reflected the turmoil within ER’s own divided heart. Like her great friends who had led the peace and social justice movements—Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Carrie Chapman Catt, Caroline O’Day, Clarence Pickett, and the Quakers—she believed profoundly that war destroyed democracy and devoured liberty. During the 1920s and 1930s she had worked with the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the WILPF. She never doubted that the passions of militarism forged intolerance and repression, demanded conformity and silence. While she did not want the United States to be at war, she could not bear to imagine a future that was everywhere dominated and controlled by Hitler.

  Lillian Wald died on 1 September 1940. The founder of the Henry Street Settlement, the Visiting Nurse Service, and the modern public health nursing movement, Wald was a founder of WILPF and the American Union Against Militarism, which had created the ACLU. She introduced “so many things which we accept today as a responsibility of government,” ER noted—playgrounds, public health services, music, theater and dance in schools, community centers, and settlement houses. Wald once said she would die happy because all she had fought for was now the government’s concern.

  ER had kept in close touch with Wald during her years of retirement and illness at her House on the Pond in Westport, Connecticut. “I always fall under the spell of her personality,” ER wrote after one visit, “and wonder what quality . . . makes an individual sway others by the sheer force of her own sympathy and understanding of human beings,” their needs and their suffering. She was grateful for Wald’s “lifelong influence” on her own vision: “I have long paid homage” to her “amazing vitality and love of people.” Wald embodied ER’s own creed, that she who works for “culture and justice represents an art of humanity.”

  ER sent an extraordinary “spray of white dahlias and purple chrysanthemums” to Wald’s funeral service at the Neighborhood Playhouse along with a telegram of regret that she could not attend, “but my thoughts will be with all those who loved and honored this shining spirit.”

  For ER, both Lillian Wald and Jane Addams left enduring legacies for peace and freedom—which meant security and human rights for everyone everywhere. Now the WILPF existed to continue their work, but its members were themselves endangered and threatened. In June the WILPF’s international headquarters, which had been in Geneva since 1919, was removed for safety, along with the ILO and the League of Nations. Gertrude Baer, director of the WILPF’s international work, moved to New York and issued monthly bulletins of information and news about “the most alarming situation created by the presence of millions of war refugees in all territories where war is raging.” WILPF members participated in “the sheltering and caring of these refugees.”

  As a member of WILPF, ER received Baer’s extraordinary circular letters with their urgent discussions of strategies and principles. In “From Europe to Women in America,” Lida Gustava Heymann presented the pacifist’s dilemma. Heymann, a suffragist and trade union organizer from Bavaria, and her life partner, Dr. Anita Augspurg, Germany’s first woman judge, were ardent WILPF workers; Heymann had been international vice president since 1919. Although they were Aryans of “pure blood,” the Nazis deemed them political unacceptables. In early 1933, as Nazis were harassing and arresting peace advocates and WILPF members in Berlin and Breslau, the two women fled to Zurich, abandoning their belongings and leaving behind their “considerable wealth” to live in a friend’s attic. But they never thought of themselves as “exiles.” As “world citizens,” they felt everywhere at home.

  But now it was time for action. Heymann wrote:

  American Women: Listen to us in this very last moment when the hands of the clock are almost on the point of closing time. . . .

  Brute force is on the point of destroying the whole world . . . [and] we have come to see that today it is no longer possible to overcome the violent methods of Fascism and Nazism by pacifist means. . . .

  A small barking dog cannot stop a dashing train. The reversion to barbarism after a period of humanism is catastrophic. But catastrophes take their inherent course. Fascism and national-socialism today can be destroyed only through means [able to impress] the brutal men.

  Those words reflected ER’s thoughts in 1940: the Nazis had to be resisted. She hoped that Heymann’s wise analysis would influence those pacifists in the WILPF, the American Friends Service Committee, and others who continued to reject war and military involvement.

  • • •

  That summer debate raged over the Burke-Wadsworth bill, which proposed to institute a peacetime military draft. Many were opposed to it, ER noted. Some objected to the age range, others to compulsory registration. Still others criticized the bill’s failure to protect conscientious objectors, and ER agreed that “conscientious objectors should be protected, but they should be required to work for the country’s good in ways which do not conflict with their religious beliefs. . . . To put a man in jail, even when at war . . . seems to me one of the regrettable actions we ought to guard against.”

  Still others, her own pacifist friends and allies, objected to conscription as such. When the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas spoke on the radio against the draft, she wrote: “No one hearing him could refrain from feeling that he was a most able and persuasive speaker. . . . I think all of us should listen to both sides,” debate the issue, and trust in democracy. ER was heartened by the “full and free discussion” under way.

  For her part, she felt that aspects of this particular conscription bill “may prove to be wrong, and . . . [we will] want them changed.” But in general “I approve of the principle of a selective draft.”

  Still, she was annoyed that dis
cussions around the bill failed to consider her proposal for a universal draft for community service, to which all citizens would contribute. She also missed any sign that lessons on the impact of greed had been learned from the last war. Profiteering had tarnished past war investments. Any new military draft, she argued, had to be connected to a draft for business and industrial interests, so that “business and government [will be] working together.” For “it is one thing to draft young men to give their services to their country and another to draft such capital as may be lying idle for investment [in areas] necessary for defense and which may mean little or no return to the investor.” ER softened this radical call with a disavowal: “I am no economist. I am not a public servant. I am a mother and a citizen in a democracy.” She called upon “the best minds in the country” to consider “how it can be made equally certain that capital . . . is drafted for the use of the country in just the way that lives are drafted.” Congress and “administrative circles” had a responsibility to reassure the people that this was “being considered and adequately safe-guarded.”

  Finally, ER reaffirmed that “national defense is a matter of spirit as well as of material things.” She demanded some recognition that spirit mattered, that “spirit is the most important part of it.” We will not be successful until “we realize that defense is not a matter of what you get, but of what you give.” Her democratic and nondiscriminatory vision of universal community service stirred controversy even among her young AYC friends. They championed work, education, welfare, and civil liberties—the best of the New Deal—but they opposed any military buildup. Meanwhile many of her other friends were staunchly for defense but dismissed issues of full employment and “morale” as “Utopian, superfluous, or irrelevant.” Her riding companion and occasional ally Major Henry Hooker, for one, dismissed most of her ideas as dreamy.