Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  • • •

  In light of Joseph Kennedy’s warm campaign message and FDR’s gracious acceptance of his resignation on 6 November, ER was astonished when, just after the election, Kennedy launched a new isolationist campaign. On 9 November, during an interview with three reporters at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the former ambassador insulted Britain, offended Jews, and appalled antifascists. Boasting that he knew “more about the European situation than anybody else in Washington,” he rejected all talk about democracy’s survival and development and foresaw nothing but England’s defeat. “I’m willing to spend all I’ve got left to keep us out of the war,” he said. “There’s no sense in our getting in.” Perhaps he thought he was speaking off the record, but his call for appeasement was published in full on the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe and was widely reprinted throughout the English-speaking world.

  The next week in Hollywood, at a luncheon at Warner Bros., Kennedy met with producers Harry Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and others, to warn that Jews in peril should not make films to “alienate the Reich.” Douglas Fairbanks, who was also present, sent FDR a report of the meeting, saying that Kennedy “threw the fear of God into many of our producers and executives by telling them that the Jews . . . should stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the democracies versus the dictators.” Because some of the producers believed Kennedy voiced “new Administration thoughts,” Fairbanks felt obliged “to tattle” to FDR—since so many more of us “do not, cannot and will not believe that this is so.” Ben Hecht, for example, always believed that Hollywood’s subsequent opposition to his work to publicize the Holocaust originated with Kennedy’s 1940 meetings with studio bosses at FDR’s “bidding to ask them not to publicize the Nazi persecution of Jews lest the war in Europe be labeled a Jewish war.”

  From Los Angeles, Kennedy flew to William Randolph Hearst’s retreat near San Francisco. By chance, Anna Roosevelt and her husband, John Boettiger, were visiting Hearst, who was their publisher, and were alarmed by Kennedy’s appeasement rhetoric. John wrote his father-in-law that he and Anna were dismayed by what “we thought were Fascist leanings.”

  Although FDR did not publicly repudiate Kennedy, he reported to his cabinet that the former ambassador “is out to do whatever damage he can.” Interior Secretary Ickes was reassured that “there was not a sign of any sentiment for appeasement at the Cabinet meeting, especially on the part of the President.” Moreover, FDR’s plans for a major radio address to the nation, to announce that America must become “the great arsenal of democracy,” began to take shape.

  ER confided to her great friend Alice Huntington that Kennedy “has always been a pessimist and always wrong, so I do not worry very much. I do, however, hate to see any American want to make peace with Hitler by being short-sighted enough to think Hitler would ever keep his word.” Still, ER was hopeful, “because I think the majority of the people in this country are beginning to understand . . . that no matter what sacrifice they have to make, a democracy is better than slavery.”

  • • •

  In her tour of the country after the election, ER was heartened by the spirit of cooperation she found everywhere—an encouraging, prayerful commitment to democracy as bitter war news mounted. Tommy sent the details to Anna:

  We have been on this trip . . . since a week ago yesterday with a lecture every night. In every place the audiences have been capacity . . . and the attention and interest excellent. There is no question that your mother is an idol to the people of this country. . . . Your mother looked over my shoulder at this and said . . . I should say “your mother isn’t idle”!

  Where were the twenty million voters for Willkie? Tommy wondered, and sought to understand the election’s message for the future. Above all, the fear of Communism was stark, she wrote Anna:

  In New York City even Catholics like Eddie Flynn [chairman of the Democratic National Committee] admit that the local priests urged their people not to vote for your father because they are so terrified of communism, and they believe your mother is at least tainted because of the American Youth Congress, the Workers’ Alliance, the Newspaper Guild, and because there [were] newspaper stories about the number of communists in key governmental positions. . . . I think your mother is pretty definitely convinced that the leaders are communist controlled, but she likes some of them as individuals and will not give them up entirely. [ER insisted on her right to] see some of them as personal friends. I can see her point and you and I know how loathe she is to go back on anyone.

  ER was indeed loath to abandon old friends. But she welcomed the shake-up at the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Nancy Cook simply had to go, Tommy wrote Anna, since “she fought with everyone and did no work.” Caroline O’Day had been ill, she said, and “never went out once in the campaign.” An ardent pacifist, O’Day now spoke only to oppose all defense measures and had mostly retired to her estate in Rye, and Tommy even wondered “why she wants to hold on to her seat in Congress since she can’t be there.” The real work upstate, Tommy concluded, was being done by Elinor Morgenthau, Agnes Brown Leach, and Trude Pratt.

  The DNC’s Women’s Division, the Democratic Digest, and eighty thousand volunteers had ensured FDR’s 1940 triumph with the largest electoral turnout in U.S. history, and the largest turnout by women ever. Nationally over half the votes cast were the votes of women.

  After the election, Dorothy McAllister retired as director of the Women’s Division. On 11 November, in Chicago, ER met with party leaders about a successor, and agreed that Gladys Avery Tillett should replace her. They thought ER should name Tillet “just the way the President chooses the man who is to be national chairman. Eddie Flynn” agreed, and so did ER.

  The Democratic Digest, too, was currently without an editor, and as founder and first editor, ER wanted to see it survive and expand. Dorothy McAllister and Molly Dewson also suggested that Lorena Hickok take over as DNC executive secretary—in charge of all publications and publicity, from Washington, working under Tillett. “Eddie seemed to like the idea,” ER told FDR, delighted. Hick needed a job, and with her as editor, what ER long regarded as her own journal would continue in familial hands.*

  ER assured Dewson that Hick could “make a magnificent job” of the Digest and even “succeed in making the men consider it their publicity organ as well as ours,” to transmit news about government agencies and party concerns. “If it could be done we would be set for all time.” She assured Dewson that Hick would work with Trude Pratt and was keen on Gladys Tillett, and “I can work with Hick.”

  Dewson was relieved, and the transition was remarkably smooth. As soon as Tillett was named head of the Women’s Division, she appointed Hick executive secretary. Tillett announced her admiration for Hick’s twenty-year career as a journalist “with unusual and wide experience”—which would now be used to expand Democratic Party influence, with enhanced print and radio activities. As one of her “male contemporaries” had noted recently, Tillett wrote, Hick is “not only one of the best newspaperwomen in the country, but she is one of the two or three best newspapermen.”

  It was a grand partnership. Hick had long been fond of Tillett and told ER that she was a true “liberal Democrat,” and that in North Carolina she and her husband were progressive activists.

  The first lady was very pleased that Hick had a position of significant power and influence. It would enable ER to remain at the helm—or at least at the center. In 1928 she had written a bold essay calling for the creation of “women bosses,” since party politics had always been in the hands of men. Since public men often disliked women in public life and refused to share “any actual control” or power, women needed to organize and select “women bosses who can talk as equals” and stand for urgent issues with the support of their own constituencies. By “boss” she did not mean a sleazy and easy-to-buy po
litician; she meant a “high-minded leader.” This 1928 idea now came to the fore in 1940. ER had found her voice, her footing, and confidence in her mission. With Hick in charge of editorials, columns, and all publicity, ER would have a safe and agreeable base for work and new collaborations.

  ER’s relationship with Hick continued to be loving and candid. Hick still lived at the White House, and Tommy lobbied ER to “gently urge” Hick to rent an apartment in Washington now that she had a salaried position. As she told Anna, “I think it wears on your mother to have her constantly in the house because she [Hick] doesn’t like people and if she has to entertain visiting Democrats, I don’t think she should use the White House.”

  Tommy was also upset that Hick had told ER that she had “become a personage and is no longer a person. Your mother is still the same with many more interests and perhaps does too much work and so she has little time for a personal life, but I can detect no change.”

  Actually, Tommy misinterpreted Hick’s remark. Hick had read Ruby Black’s book and told ER it made her aware of the difference between the woman she knew and the public persona the first lady projected. “My trouble, I suspect, has always been that I’ve been so much more interested in the person than in the personage,” Hick told ER. “I resented the personage and fought for years an anguished and losing fight against the development of the person into the personage. I still prefer the person, but I admire and respect the personage with all my heart!”

  Almost as an afterthought, Hick added, “All this explains why I shall never write your biography. I can think of only one other person who undoubtedly felt about this as I have—or would have felt so, increasingly, had he lived, Louis Howe.”

  “You are wrong about Louis,” ER replied.

  He always wanted to make me President when FDR was thro’ & insisted he could do it. You see he was interested in his power to create personages more than in a person, tho’ I think he probably cared more for me as a person as much as he cared for anyone & more than anyone else ever has! Sheer need on his part I imagine! I used to laugh at him & tell him I had no interest in the job & I still think the personage is an accident & I only like the part of life in which I am a person!

  ER never considered Tommy’s advice to urge Hick to reside somewhere, anywhere, else and encouraged her to continue to live in the White House. ER felt about Hick much as she felt about Earl Miller: they were her trusted “steadies”—she enjoyed their company and reserved privileged space for them in her homes and in her heart. Earl continued regularly to monitor ER’s bills and correspondence to be certain that nobody cheated his “Lady” and personally went after vendors he thought had done so. Although ER once resented his ongoing suspicions, she had grown to appreciate his trained, discerning eye. But neither Hick nor Earl was any longer a source or subject of romance.

  Deep friendship with ER always had an element of romance and excitement. Some people wondered if Bernard Baruch’s continual support for her interests had romantic implications. She had frequent, mostly unrecorded, meetings with Baruch. They danced together and enjoyed concerts together. Sometimes she sat with him on his park bench in Lafayette Park to discuss politics, defense needs, and refugee issues.

  When ER became unusually insistent about defense plans and the need to stockpile military supplies and to embargo supplies to enemy nations, people wondered whether Baruch had influenced her. But her concerns about such issues, including her opposition to ongoing oil shipments to Japan, had nothing to do with Baruch. She protested scrap iron and oil shipments to Japan throughout the autumn of 1940. On 12 November, she asked FDR, “Now we’ve stopped scrap iron, what about oil?” She was satisfied by her husband’s response: “The real answer which you cannot use is that if we forbid oil shipments to Japan, Japan will increase her purchases of Mexican oil and furthermore, may be driven by actual necessity to a descent on the Dutch East Indies.”

  Although the first lady’s friendship with Baruch deepened over the years, she seems never to have been romantically attracted to him. She was actually a serial romantic. Dynamic men and women whose interests coincided with her own, and who had fresh thoughts about them, interested her. She was both nurturer and intellectual companion, a combination that made her company a delight for many.

  She was currently focused on Joe Lash. Maternally, she sought to bolster his frequently depressed spirits. She understood his moods: although bold and determined in public, he was often uncertain, hesitant, and depressed in private. His frequent meetings with ER lifted his spirits. She encouraged him, and he adored her: her penetrating eyes, her genuine kindness, her surprising insights. And she had become deeply involved in the burgeoning romance between Joe and Trude Pratt.

  • • •

  After the successful meeting in Chicago, ER continued her tour in Detroit. There she was enchanted by hours of splendid music; had lunch with her niece and namesake, ER II; and dined with her sister-in-law Dorothy Kemp Roosevelt and Hall’s daughters, Amy, Diana, and Janet. They all attended rehearsals for WPA music projects, where, ER wrote, she enjoyed “two of the pleasantest hours I have ever spent.” A Gypsy band played dance music “to which it was almost impossible to sit still.” The “delightful leader” played in the band and also narrated Gypsy stories for the children. Then a “full orchestra” presented a new symphony by Florence Price, one of the few women to write symphonic music. “She is a colored woman and a native of Chicago, who has certainly made a contribution to our music. The orchestra rendered her symphony beautifully.”

  There were “more treats in store for us,” ER noted. The next day “in a Negro church we heard a group of spiritual singers who fairly carried us away from our everyday world.” Their leader had been discovered while digging ditches. ER was so impressed by Detroit’s Negro Spiritualist Singers she arranged with Florence Kerr, assistant commissioner of the WPA, to have them perform at the White House on New Year’s Eve.

  The snowstorms that raged throughout the Midwest during this phase of ER’s tour did not diminish her enthusiastic audiences. En route she received a much-anticipated cable from Joe Lash. The International Student Service (ISS) board had appointed him general secretary, with a generous salary. ER was delighted: “You will do a fine constructive job and I hope you will make me useful.” She would see him before and after his birthday on 2 December. “My heart is singing for you . . . and this opportunity to help youth. . . . Much love dear boy.”

  The last week of her November tour took her to Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia. Although her columns rarely included war news, she was relieved to note Greece’s ongoing resistance to the Italian invasion: “Heroism is always a thrilling thing. . . . This little nation’s defense . . . makes us proud of that quality [that enables] human beings to rise above all selfish fears and interest and do their duty in the face of danger and death.”

  ER returned to Washington, and for the first time in many years, she and FDR did not go to Warm Springs for Thanksgiving. Instead they headed to Hyde Park, since it was important to spend the holiday with SDR—who had celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday in September. “The family is so scattered now that we are a small party here,” ER wrote, “but it is very pleasant to be at home and what we lack in numbers we shall make up in gaiety.” The country had many reasons to be grateful: “Today as a nation, we give thanks first and foremost for the fact that we are at peace. All of life is a struggle; at least, it should be a constant and unending struggle to make the world a better place. . . . The struggle goes on constantly against our baser natures.” In the world at war, so many are “weighed down by the knowledge that in order even to exist ourselves we must try to destroy our fellow human beings—people who live in some other bit of land and speak some other language . . . and yet who have the same needs and the same desires we have ourselves, and whom we could love and understand if it were not for this thing called war.”

  In t
hat context, ER gave “national thanks” because:

  We are free to register our will politically, to worship God as we see fit, to insist that even those with whom we disagree shall have the right to express their opinions, and that all men shall come before the bar of justice with the presumption that they are innocent until they are proved guilty, and with the right to defend their beliefs and their actions.

  We are thankful for our natural resources, for the productivity of our land, for the resourcefulness and ingenuity of our people. . . .

  As an individual, I am grateful for health and strength, the love of family and friends, for the power to enjoy so many things, for the ability to see the humor in life which softens the bitterness, and above all else for the ability and the opportunity to give a helping hand in one way or another.

  On Saturday ER journeyed to New York to do a radio broadcast and meet with Joe Lash, who took her to see his new apartment. She then hosted a dinner party at Eleventh Street for Earl Miller and two of his friends, since Earl was to leave for a month of Naval Reserve duty the next morning.

  While commuting to Washington ER read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which she recommended to her readers as “compelling” because the characters, “the everlasting mixture of good and bad, of coarseness and sensitiveness, of cruelty and gentleness, are real.” Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War “taught him that people will fight for their liberties. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the evidence of the appeal which a fight for human rights calls forth from the fine people the world over.”