Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER was undoubtedly stunned by FDR’s rejection, since she had helped launch Democracy in Action with a bold speech: “I am firmly of the belief that the only basis for a permanent peace is one which recognizes the necessity for cooperation among all peoples and domination by none.” ER increasingly worked with Democracy in Action, determined to end “the deadly poisons of racialism.”

  As ER focused on civil rights and the need for “a new world order,” it was her burgeoning friendship with Pauli Murray that brightened her days. ER’s correspondence with Murray had begun in 1938 but increased when the Hunter College graduate, WPA educator, and spirited NAACP youth leader became active in the Odell Waller case. Waller was a Virginia sharecropper who had killed his landlord in self-defense and was sentenced to death in 1940. Since the jury was limited to white men who paid their poll taxes, the case became a national symbol of injustice for nine million sharecroppers in the eight southern states denied all rights. Many Americans rallied for a stay of execution and an end to the poll tax, but on 4 May 1942 the Supreme Court refused to review the case. Virginia governor Colgate Darden issued six reprieves, then decided to end “the propaganda campaign” that only promoted “racial discord.”

  In June 1942 antidiscrimination activists, including ER, united to save Waller. Urgent petitions went to FDR for a presidential commission of inquiry, many demonstrated to save Waller, and on 16 June twenty thousand people participated in a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

  A. Philip Randolph organized a delegation of race leaders to lobby in Washington on 1 July; they hoped to appeal directly to FDR. The group included such respected leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, New York director of race relations at the OCD; Dr. Channing Tobias of the YMCA; and journalist Ted Poston, then with the Office of War Information (OWI). Pauli Murray, having completed her first year at Howard University Law School, and having been hired by the Workers Defense League (WDL), accompanied the group. They were shunted from office to office, and as Murray noted, even Henry Wallace “tried to evade us.” Bethune, who knew the vice president well, “was compelled to run after him in order to be heard.” He replied, “It is out of my jurisdiction.” No one at the White House would see them.

  The day before Waller was to be executed, Randolph put in many calls to ER, “our last resort,” all day and was promised a return call that evening. At ten o’clock, ER telephoned him at NAACP headquarters, and other delegates listened in. She explained to Randolph, “in a voice that trembled and almost broke,” that she had done everything she possibly could and even interrupted the president twice. FDR had said, “This is a matter of law and not of the heart.” The case was in Governor Darden’s jurisdiction, and the president said he had “no legal power to intervene. I am sorry, Mr. Randolph, I cannot do any more.”

  According to Harry Hopkins, ER called him “four or five times” that day. “She spoke and wrote to the Governor . . . and indeed, the President wrote a very long letter to request [life in prison].” After that FDR “felt he could not intervene again,” but ER “would not take ‘No’ for an answer and the President finally got on the phone himself and told Mrs. Roosevelt that under no circumstances would he intervene . . . and urged very strongly that she say nothing about it.”

  Odell Waller was electrocuted on 2 July. At Randolph’s request, Pauli Murray wrote an open letter to FDR, signed by members of the delegation, published in the Negro press, and nationally syndicated. The seven-page letter detailed the legal injustices and Jim Crow attitudes that hobbled well-trained attorneys when they sought to represent Negro clients in southern courts, and that caused the Odell Waller case to become a national symbol—which demonstrated how “the Government of the US has failed us.”

  This tragedy . . . comes at a time when the United Nations are desperately trying to hold back the Axis forces and when the eyes of the colored peoples of the globe are fixed upon the pattern of democracy which America sets for Negroes. . . .

  Waller’s execution has intensified a wave of determination for a show-down on the question of total democracy for the Negro which cannot long be held back by leaders who use the bargain and compromise method. It was the signal for the barbarous forces in this country to renew the unleashing of their hatred upon the Negro people. Within two weeks after Waller’s execution, the press reported the lynching of Willie Vinson, 25 year old Negro youth in Texarkana, Texas, the lynching of Private Jessie Smith, 25 year old Negro soldier by a posse in Flagstaff, Arizona, and the brutal beating and jailing of the Negro tenor Roland Hayes and his wife in Rome, Georgia [after an argument with a clerk in a shoe store]. . . .

  Negro citizens are demanding to know why Nazi saboteurs on trial are being given every opportunity to defend themselves, while American citizens are being hung to cotton gins and shot down like dogs. . . .

  Don’t you see, Mr. President . . . with the world in agony of a war for the survival of sheer human decency, the race issue in America is crucial to the whole struggle. If the Negro is not given full rights now, then the battle for Democracy is lost. . . . We call upon enlightened public opinion . . . to free you, our great President, and to free our country from a poll tax southern bloc which decided the fates of American citizens whom it does not represent.

  Murray sent a second, personal letter to FDR. “If Japanese-Americans can be evacuated to prevent violence being perpetrated upon them,” she wrote to the president, “then certainly you have the power to evacuate Negro citizens from ‘lynching’ areas.” Moreover, Negro voters had noticed that Wendell Willkie was clear about the race question, while “you have never come out openly.” She hoped that in the interest of the 1944 election, the president would take “a more forthright stand.”

  To Murray’s astonishment, she received a stinging yet heartfelt response from ER, defending FDR in relation to Wendell Willkie: “I wonder if it ever occurred to you that Mr. Willkie has no responsibility whatsoever. He can say whatever he likes and do whatever he likes.” If he had been elected president, he would have had to negotiate with congressional leaders “to pass vital legislation.” The letter was the clearest statement of the limits ER endured:

  For one who must really have a knowledge of the workings of our kind of government, your letter seems to me one of the most thoughtless I have ever read. Of course I can say just how I feel, but I cannot say it with much sense of security unless the President were willing for me to do so. It is very easy for us as individuals to think of what we would do if we were in office, but we forget that with the election . . . go at the same time infinite restrictions.

  • • •

  During the summer of 1942 India was much in the news. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the other Congress Party leaders were agitating for Indian independence from Great Britain, but Churchill was determined that the future of the British Empire would not be decided until the war was over. He would not offer India even dominion status until then. Nonetheless in March 1942 he sent the Christian Socialist leader Sir Stafford Cripps on a mission to negotiate with India’s leaders.*

  FDR supported imperial changes and hoped Cripps’s mission would result in steps toward self-government, but Churchill was irate at this position. FDR agreed to remain publicly silent and abide by the prime minister’s wishes. As for ER, she cared deeply about India because of her father’s adventures there, as well as his travel journal and letters. Her heart belonged to the independence movement. She had not met Cripps but knew that Joe Lash and his friends held him in high regard.

  In April, while the mission was under way, ER wrote a vigorous statement about race in her column: “Today what concerns us most deeply is the necessary change in attitude on the part of the white race. The psychology which believes that the white man, alone of all the races in the world, has something which must be imposed on all other races, must go.”

  The Cripps mission offered minor concessions, imposed strict li
mitations, and hence it failed—an outcome that seemed to many foreordained—and precisely what Churchill wanted. When he heard that the mission had come to nothing, Churchill reportedly “danced around the cabinet room.” But ER was disappointed: “One cannot help hope that some new way will be worked out whereby the people of India may feel that the future belongs more surely to them in their own land.”

  A few months later, on 9 August 1942, certain that the United States would not interfere, Churchill publicly declared war on “the half naked fakir”: he ordered the arrests of Gandhi, Nehru, and twenty other leaders of India’s nationalist Congress Party. Widespread demonstrations erupted to protest the arrests and demand that the imperial government “Quit India!” When the demonstrations turned violent, ruthless military action followed. Neighborhoods were “machine-gunned” from planes overhead, killing a thousand Indians. British officials were assaulted, and more than fifty thousand demonstrators were arrested.

  Ickes wanted FDR to pressure Churchill to free India, but even in the face of the arrests and violence, the president demanded silence from his cabinet and allies alike. “You are right about India,” he told Ickes, “but it would be playing with fire if the British Empire were to tell me to mind my own business.” FDR refused to challenge Churchill on India and repeatedly asked ER to remain silent as well. Despite her own convictions, ER honored FDR’s request and urged her young allies to avoid the subject.

  Intrigued by Pauli Murray’s spirited brilliance, she invited the activist poet whom she called “the Firebrand” to her new Village apartment. On 27 August, Murray arrived, accompanied by her friend and mentor Anna Arnold Hedgeman. The first lady “met us at the door,” Murray noted, “and disarmed me completely by throwing her arms about me and giving me an affectionate hug.” The splendid meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, defined by respect and trust, that kept ER informed about and connected to a new generation of race radicals.

  All summer ER and Trude Pratt had been organizing an ISS conference, the objective of which was “to express unity of purpose” and build “mutual confidence” among the United Nations, as Murray, who represented Howard University Law School on the U.S. delegation, described it. The conference took place in Washington that September. Students from fifty-three nations participated, including exiles from Poland, Norway, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, as well as young men and women in uniform from China, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

  Murray’s circle of friends proceeded to draft two resolutions. One demanded the release of India’s imprisoned leaders as well as renewed negotiations between India and Britain to achieve the “political freedom” needed “to mobilize the Indian people for an all-out war effort [within] the United Nations.” It also condemned “racial supremacy, renounced imperialism,” and called for “independence for colonials.” The other resolution condemned Russia’s occupation of Lithuania. The resolutions’ drafters—Louis Fischer, Lou Harris, and Bill Goldsmith, all known to ER—intended to present both to the conference’s assembly for a vote.

  During a break for a picnic on the White House lawn, ER “caught my hand, fixed her searching blue eyes upon me, and said ‘Pauli, I want to talk to you later.’” Murray knew the subject and made every effort to hide, “but one simply did not evade” the determined first lady. “She found me in a far corner of the lawn” and argued that the two resolutions raised the “grave danger” that representatives from Russia and Britain “would walk out and leave the Assembly in disarray.” We must not offend “our strongest allies,” she implored.

  Pauli found it difficult to resist ER but believed there was a difference between official U.S. policy and the independent views of young people. She agreed with the content of the two resolutions. When they were presented to the assembly, it rejected the one on Lithuania but accepted the one on India. To Pauli’s relief, approval of the India resolution did not “split the Assembly.” She was certain the goals it set were entirely in agreement with ER’s personal views, which of course they were.

  Given ER’s views about race and empire, one must pause to consider her effort to censor the resolutions. She was clear about her own limitations: she might speak only when FDR agreed that she could speak. She never publicly countered his decisions and generally followed his instructions. Now FDR had requested silence about India—and she steadfastly accommodated that wish.

  But many others who disagreed with FDR were also silenced by his requests. Increasingly she believed that she alone brought him face to face with political realities that he needed to address. Consequently, in private, she never gave up, going to him again and again. But the more insistent she became, the more impatient he grew. Tensions mounted, but she persisted because urgent issues of life and death were at stake.

  India was an ongoing case in point. The NAACP and allied liberals were disgusted by the continued imprisonment of Gandhi, Nehru, and so many Congress leaders, and protests mounted. Former Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot and his wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, organized a meeting to demand that Britain “resume negotiations with India” and were eager for Vice President Wallace to speak. On 8 September ER asked FDR to see them. The president repeated his position: although he agreed in principle with their and ER’s concerns, he would not pressure Churchill on India.

  She championed other issues, too, that he did not seriously consider. Respectful access to military training for women, especially women pilots, was high on her list of things to be done. She was pleased that her early support for pilot training at the Tuskegee Institute was bearing fruit. In March 1941 she spent an hour in the air seated behind pilot C. Alfred Anderson, the chief flight instructor at Tuskegee. A photographer snapped her great smile upon landing. It hit the national press, announcing that black aviators were in flight and ready. Finally in July 1941 the fighting 99th Pursuit Squadron was created. ER continued her crusade to ensure that black officers would be allowed to fight and be sent overseas, and would not be limited to menial jobs and support services. As Roscoe Brown, subsequently one of the most decorated Tuskegee Airmen, put it, “Fairness gives you a chance to be excellent.” Ultimately, 992 pilots were trained at Tuskegee, and 450 flew in combat missions.

  ER engendered even more controversy when she insisted that women aviators should be equally trained and their skills equally used. Her own desire to fly and her friendship with Amelia Earhart had persuaded her that women were already outstanding pilots. Willa Beatrice Brown, one of two women in the all-black Challenger Air Pilots Association, founded in 1935, became the first black woman to receive a commission as lieutenant in the U.S. Civil Air Patrol. On 1 September 1942, ER wrote the first of several columns to celebrate women in flight, saying, “Women pilots . . . are a weapon waiting to be used.” With 3,500 trained women fliers, ER was encouraged that pilot Jacqueline Cochran had been appointed to direct women’s air work, an effort that would eventually result in the formation of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.

  In mid-September, Nazi slaughters were ravaging Stalingrad. “We opened our papers this morning to find that Stalingrad is still holding,” ER observed. “This is certainly going down in history as a valiant defense.” Indeed, the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943, would become the war’s longest, bloodiest, and most brutal standoff. ER believed “everyone in this country must want to express admiration for [the Soviets’] extraordinary ability to stand and take it.” While the RAF and U.S. air raids on Germany continued, it was clear that “raids alone” would not resolve “the battle of Europe. All we can do is pray that [we] will really reach the point where decisive action can be taken.”

  In May 1942 Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had visited Washington, and since then ER had been under the impression that FDR and Churchill were planning to launch a second front in Europe. Unknown to her, however, they had decided between themselves to mo
ve instead on North Africa. On 9 October, she forwarded to FDR an article regarding the dreadful starvation conditions in Russia and attached a note: “FDR read. It is horrible. When can we move?”

  Perhaps it was because he wanted to get ER out of his way as he planned the invasion of North Africa; or perhaps it was because he wanted to benefit from her personal diplomacy and observations, especially as friction with Britain because of India mounted. Perhaps, too, he was actually concerned about her needs and saw that she was often depressed without specific war work to do. For whatever reason, FDR decided to fulfill a longtime wish of ER and send her to London. It would be her first international assignment and would be important in countless ways.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Golden Footprints”: A Permanent Bond in War and Peace

  On 9 October 1942 Wendell Willkie returned from a seven-week world tour. In deference to Churchill, India had been off-limits to him, but Willkie had not needed to go to India to see what was wrong with British policies. Everywhere he went, Willkie was disturbed by the poverty and disease that resulted from those policies and the indifference of colonial authorities. Widely published, Willkie’s words describing poverty, neglect, and subjugation in the British Empire sent Churchill into a fury.

  In the Soviet Union, he spent many hours with Molotov and Stalin, who detailed Russia’s desperate situation: the loss of fertile farmlands, important industrial centers, and the great oil fields of the Caucasus. The Nazis had burned entire cities and villages to the ground and caused millions of casualties. Russians felt betrayed by FDR and Churchill, who had reneged on their promises. Willkie called for the immediate opening of a real second front.