Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  It was in the context of Churchill’s upset over Willkie’s observations, Stalin’s bitterness about the Soviet Union’s grim situation, and rising anticolonial fervor that FDR finally decided to ask ER to go to London. Part of her task would be to use her personal warmth and diplomatic magic to fortify the Anglo-American alliance, encourage troop morale, and keep the United Nations together.

  She would be walking into an Anglo-American stir over race relations. In July 1942 General Dwight Eisenhower had arrived to command the Allies’ European Theater forces, and he joined Ambassador John Winant’s efforts to build a solid U.S.-British alliance. During the spring and summer, U.S. troops and military staffers had arrived in London as well. But they were supposed to remain entirely segregated, both at work and off duty. However white American soldiers regularly insulted their black compatriots. This racism shocked British sensibilities, and Britons generally welcomed black soldiers. After violent scuffles, many pubs displayed signs reading, “For British people and coloured Americans only.”

  Eisenhower and Winant agreed that this situation must change. Eisenhower ordered U.S. commanders not to restrict black soldiers’ association with British civilians, and to end discriminatory practices. He could not end segregation, but he sought to establish harmony and end instances of abuse. As for Winant, he established a British-American Liaison Board to investigate and settle race problems, which philanthropist and journalist Janet Murrow (wife of war correspondent Edward R. Murrow) agreed to chair. Subsequently Winant also persuaded Roland Hayes, a black American tenor and composer, to stay in England after a concert, tour bases, and interview black servicemen. Winant’s report went directly to Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked with Walter White and others to insist upon change.

  ER had heard that officers from the American South were “very indignant to find that Negro soldiers were not looked upon with terror by the girls in England and Ireland and Scotland.” To avoid Anglo-American tension and racial violence, she thought “we will have to do a little educating.” Her pending visit to Britain alarmed Secretary of War Stimson, who wrote FDR to demand ER not speak about racism, and was pleased to find that FDR sympathized with “our attitude.” If ER agreed not to write about race, she was determined to observe everything—and submit useful reports.

  ER’s trip was mostly arranged by Lady Stella Reading, founder of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) and by Ambassador Winant, who would serve as her primary hosts. On 21 October, adventurous and determined, she set off with Tommy for their first nonstop international flight, “across what has now become a very small pond indeed,” into the unknown abyss of war. Women’s Army Corps director Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby and her aide, Lieutenant Betty Bandel of Arizona, were part of her entourage.

  Greeted in Bristol by Ambassador Winant, ER and her party boarded a special train to London. On the two-hour trip, Winant detailed their schedule, which had been approved “by the queen and Lady Stella Reading.” Then he announced that after her stay at Buckingham Palace, ER and Tommy would have his apartment—with staff for all their needs, an arrangement for which ER was profoundly grateful.

  ER asked Winant why they had not flown to London, and he told her that the king and queen never met anyone at the airport. As they approached London by train, ER “grew more and more nervous and wondered why on earth I had ever let myself be inveigled into coming on this trip . . . to be treated as a ‘Very Important Person.’ . . . Finally we pulled into the station. The red carpet was unrolled. . . . There stood the king and queen and all our high military officials,” notably General Eisenhower and Admiral Howard Stark, as well as Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Lady Reading. Queen Elizabeth said, “We welcome you with all our hearts,” which evoked ER’s memories of the king and queen’s departure from Hyde Park in June 1939. ER would have been less nervous if she had known how tense King George VI and Queen Elizabeth seemed to observant reporters—as they checked their watches and paced about Paddington Station while huge crowds thronged the streets to greet the first lady.

  The next morning ER held a press conference at the U.S. embassy. She was startled by the size of the crowd and their blunt questions. Lunch, which King George VI and the queen hosted for the heads of “various women’s services,” was more agreeable. That afternoon, their majesties escorted ER through the devastation of the Blitz—“blocks upon blocks of rubble.” Their first stop was St. Paul’s Cathedral, to visit the faithful firefighters who had spent many nights sleeping in the crypt ready to spring into action whenever needed to save the damaged cathedral. The queen wanted ER to “stand on the steps and see what modern warfare could do to a great city.” They then toured miles of devastated residential areas, from which most people were evacuated.

  Although ER had seen photographs, she was “in no way prepared for the great area of destruction.” In a shelter that had housed over twelve thousand people nightly, and where still some three hundred people bedded down every night, ER learned “something about fear, and the resistance to total destruction which exists in all human beings.” Despite the crowding and danger, every night people retained “spirits of kindness and cheerfulness,” while “those who had lost so much still managed to smile.”

  True to her diplomatic assignment, she sidestepped controversy, even regarding issues that most concerned her, including the future of India. She refused to meet with V. K. Krishna Menon, leader of the Indian League, and declined several invitations from groups dedicated to Indian self-rule. But she dined several times with Sir Stafford and his wife, Lady Isobel Cripps. Political activists long associated with Indian self-rule, they knew Joe Lash and still worked actively with the international student movement. On 29 October, ER wrote Lash, “Sir Stafford and Lady Cripps dined with us tonight. . . . He remembers & admires you. . . . We had a pleasant time & I liked them both.” Tommy, however, disliked them both, writing to Lape, “Cripps seemed completely cold and tight-faced . . . and would not inspire me in spite of his brilliance. ER disagrees with me completely.”

  ER also dined with William Phillips, who was in London to help build Colonel William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Until October 1941 Phillips had been ambassador to Italy, where his reputation as a bigot had been attenuated by his many good works. As the esteemed writer Iris Origo’s godfather, he had helped many of her friends, including international art critic Bernard Berenson. But ER distrusted him, because of his reputation as a conservative force in Breckinridge Long’s wing of the State Department, and she was no longer particularly close to his wife, Caroline Astor Drayton Phillips. They, in turn, worried about the Roosevelt partnership. After a visit to Washington in May, Phillips had observed, “At the White House Eleanor and Franklin are hardly on speaking terms. She criticizes his policies . . . and he snubs her whenever he can. It is all tragic.”

  A bonus of ER’s weeks in England was her friendship with Clementine Churchill. Although ER never felt comfortable with Winston, she grew to admire his wife, with whom she had much in common. Far more radical than her husband, Clementine believed government had a responsibility to protect and ensure the well-being of all citizens, with a special obligation to those in need. A suffragist who believed in women’s independence, she was, like ER, an enthusiastic student who had intended to go to college and always resented her mother’s opposition. Opinionated and often angry, Clementine Churchill was an activist who got things done. During the Great War “she ran nine canteens for munitions workers” and fed more than five thousand people a day. During the Blitz, she successfully fought for government payments for volunteer civil defense workers, and she introduced hygiene and basic comforts to London’s air raid shelters. When John Winant arrived in London, they became allies in all struggles for the greater good. To many observers, they were two of the loneliest people in London, who enjoyed, and needed, each other’s company. Until Winant’s arrival, Clementine had spent most of her days alone, and
her children and various guests had worried about her well-being.

  ER contributed to one notably stressful evening with the Churchills, at a small dinner with U.S. treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau and Lady Gertrude Denman, head of the Women’s Land Army, among others. It began when Churchill asked Secretary Morgenthau if the United States was finally sending sufficient supplies to Spain. ER said that “it was a little too late” for that question, now that Franco was in control of Spain: we “should have done something to help the Loyalists during their civil war.” Churchill and ER sparred. Churchill supported Franco, while ER opposed him and never doubted that the Spanish generalissimo and his people helped usher in the era of fascism in Europe. She considered the West’s failure to support the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War the great error in international politics.

  Now Churchill argued heatedly that “you and I would have been the first to lose our heads if the Loyalists had won.” ER replied that the loss of “my head was unimportant,” whereupon he said: “‘I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine.’ Then Mrs. Churchill leaned across the table and said: ‘I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.’” Clementine’s intervention sent her husband into a frenzy, and he shouted: “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I am not going to change now.” Thereupon, Clementine rose to “signal that dinner was over.” ER welcomed her support but she evidently disappeared for the remainder of that evening.

  ER appreciated the many difficulties Clementine Churchill faced. “Mrs. Churchill is a very attractive, young-looking and charming person,” she wrote. “One feels that, being in public life, she has had to assume a role . . . but one wonders what she is like underneath.” During the many hours they spent together, “my admiration and affection for her have grown. She has had no easy role to play in life, but she has played it with dignity and charm.”

  ER met regularly with Lady Stella Reading, founder of the WVS, whose public service began during the 1920s when she served on Viceroy Rufus Isaacs’s staff in Delhi; Isaacs was the first viceroy to champion independence, and they had married in 1931. ER was delighted that WAC director Hobby had this opportunity to speak with Reading. For years ER had admired the WVS and sought to emulate it with her call for women volunteers, even a women’s draft for national service and “a Women’s Land Army.” Now that the United States had entered the war, the need was great, and many women were eager to serve, yet little was done to make it possible. Only belatedly had the Women’s Army Corps been created. In Britain ER and Hobby would have a chance to see all that Reading and her allies had accomplished, and learn how completely women were trained and how vigorously they worked—with respect and dignity—at their many tasks, in every service. The first lady hoped the United States might emulate Britain’s approach to women in the military.

  During her first week in London, ER was addressing the women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) when air raid sirens sounded. Undoubtedly aware that the first lady was in London, Germany assaulted the city with a day of nuisance raids. Through the alarms she kept talking “without faltering,” reported the New York Times, “thereby winning the admiration of several thousand girls who have acquired their nonchalance toward sirens” after three years of war. After her speech, the ATS women asked her how she had remained so sanguine. ER explained that she was “accustomed” to the frequent practice alarms in the United States. She told them how much she admired their work and hoped that all they had learned for wartime might one day be found useful in peacetime. When she left the camp, “1000 girls lined up along the driveway—they cheered and sang ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow.’”

  ER and her party were later driven to the largest ATS training center in Britain, where she toured a vast garage to meet the girls of the motor transport who trained as mechanics and drivers. She was impressed to see girls drive and repair “every type of army conveyance” and “change the enormous tires without too much exertion.” Oveta Culp Hobby was equally impressed and commented on the “toilet kits” with combs, clothes, brushes, and other useful articles issued to the girls at the quartermaster’s store. “Such kits were not issued to the WACs,” she wrote, indicating it was a situation she intended to change.

  When she returned to London, ER met with Margaret Biddle, who ran the American Red Cross Club for U.S. Army Nurses in Mayfair. ER found it “a delightful place” and was pleased to speak with “two Negro women Red Cross workers, recently arrived in Britain to work with Negro troops”—Gladys Martin, of Topeka, Kansas, and actress Ruth Attaway, whom ER had recently seen on the New York stage in You Can’t Take It with You.

  During her travels with Stella Reading and Clementine Churchill, visiting factory workers, carmakers, and shipbuilders, ER realized that British public opinion regarding class had changed dramatically. The rigid distinctions of her youth seemed tempered or gone—in dress, in work, in conversation. The shared agony seemed to have generated a new unity of respect and mutual concern. Women of different classes, who had never known each other, now worked “side by side, just as the men [fought] side by side. These British Isles, which we always regarded as . . . nearly frozen in their classes . . . became welded together by the war into a closely-knit community in which many of the old distinctions lost their point and from which new values emerged.” During a lunch with several WVS women who daily fed dockworkers, she was told: “We used to look down on the dock-workers as the roughest element in our community. We were a little afraid of them; but now we have come to know them and will never feel that way again.”

  Still, life in London had a hothouse quality, and key players lived in close proximity. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s only son and highly spoiled favorite child, was married to Pamela Churchill, the daughter of Lord Digby of Dorset. Their marriage was difficult, since Randolph was “a blustering bully whose drinking, gambling, and womanizing” continually embarrassed his parents and hurt Pamela. While he was away with his regiment in Egypt, Pamela worked with Stella Reading’s WVS. Young and free and twenty-two, she fully enjoyed the “erotic frenzy of wartime London.” She evidently met FDR’s envoy W. Averell Harriman, age fifty-two, at a party in the Dorchester Hotel, where both were living, during a night of intense bombing when it seemed everybody escaped into a love affair. By the time ER arrived in 1942, their affair was well known.

  ER and Tommy were staying in Winant’s apartment, and Harriman lived in the same house, so ER certainly saw them together. But her only reference to Pamela, written on a slant, was about her little boy Winston, whom she saw at Chequers. “Randolph Churchill’s little boy Winston,” ER wrote, “is a sweet baby and exactly like the Prime Minister. They sat on the floor and played . . . and the resemblance is ridiculous.”

  Undoubtedly ER’s observations regarding London’s romances recalled FDR’s recent flirtations with Norway’s Princess Martha. At Hyde Park only weeks before she left, Trude Pratt had expressed shock at Princess Martha’s cooing, giggly adolescent behavior, which FDR seemed to encourage. As they walked through the woods, ER explained to Trude that her husband always depended upon Martha for diversion and relaxation.

  While ER and FDR’s marital arrangement involved separate and still expanding romantic courts, ER’s chosen task now was to clarify and support FDR’s political goals. With her four sons deployed in different battlefields, she sought to do something decisive each day. Just before Elliott’s division left for North Africa, she set out to visit him and meet his photo-reconnaissance unit. The rain poured, and her driver got lost. ER was code-named “Rover,” and after several frantic calls to the embassy, with the message “Rover has lost her pup,” she was taken to her destination—where Elliott’s troops had been standing in the rain waiting for her, and were soaked.

  Senior army officers noted that ER seemed entirely satisfied by all she saw. She did not publicly criticize the discrimination faced by black troops, least of all the menial service jobs t
hat limited and restricted them, despite the range of their skills, training, and education.* Wherever she went, the press noted, she shook hands and spent significant time in conversation with Negro service members. In London, she was pleased when one white officer, the colonel in charge of “young colored trainees,” told her “his men were the best in the Army.” She determined to see Secretary of War Stimson upon her return regarding race issues. Almost daily throughout the war, she sent letters to Stimson—and to General Marshall—to relay complaints and demand needed improvements. General Marshall assigned two assistants to deal with ER’s correspondence. But during her British trip, her public statements were limited to words of satisfaction.

  At FDR’s special request, she made an overnight visit to Queen Mary in Badminton. Mary had been most cordial to Sara Delano Roosevelt during her 1934 visit, and ER thought her husband considered her “in some ways rather like his mother.” Her visit to Badminton House, where the Queen Mother spent the war years with her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort, was important to FDR.

  Queen Mary met ER and Tommy at the door, and the evening was rewarding if cold and spare. Dinner was “not . . . hilarious,” and their rooms were vast and frigid. Tommy retreated to her bed as quickly as possible, to get under the warm comforter. But ER spent a good hour in conversation with the Queen Mother and her niece and left with a feeling of “real affection” and complete admiration for Queen Mary, whose generosity and democratic instincts were manifest. For example, she told ER that one evening she had stopped her car to pick up an American GI. After a cordial conversation, she asked if he knew who was giving him the ride. He did not. She told him, “I am Queen Mary.” He said, “I’m from Missouri and you’ll have to show me.” Evidently she gave him a token of her identity and later entirely enjoyed the story. She gave ER a photo of herself sawing a dead tree limb—to prove to FDR she cared about conservation quite as much as he did. No other present from her trip gave FDR “more pleasure than that photograph.”