Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  *The Caporte, the Monte Olivia, and the Mendoza went from Montevideo to Buenos Aires to Mexico City to Paraguay. At the same time Costa Rica expelled an untold number of Jews whose ninety-day permits had expired.

  *Only the passengers in England were actually safe. When the Nazis invaded Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 216 of 619 of the passengers were among those rounded up. Most of that group perished. At least 460 St. Louis passengers ultimately arrived in the United States, while others achieved sanctuary in Argentina, Australia, and elsewhere. After the war, the West German government honored the gallantry of Captain Gustav Schröder.

  *Subsequently in 1940, when a similar fate confronted the SS Quanza, ER was determined to intervene. See Chapter 13.

  *According to T. H. Watkins, fifty-eight “traveling troupes carried shows to the wilderness camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps.” Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim. In addition, the Federal Theatre of the Air produced three thousand radio shows a year. There were French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish language companies. There were African-American theater companies in major cities, north and south; in New York and Chicago, Birmingham, Atlanta, Raleigh, and Greensboro. Chicago’s Negro Unit produced The Swing Mikado, a vastly popular “jazzy window-rattling” Gilbert and Sullivan adaptation—it ran for five months. When it moved to New York, ER and Mayor La Guardia were among the enthusiastic dignitaries at the opening night gala.

  *It was produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles. After weeks of rehearsal, the production was canceled before it opened. Considered “dangerous” in Washington, The Cradle Will Rock dramatized a steel strike and featured “bloated capitalists,” “heroic union organizers,” prostitutes, and molls. But it was not merely leftist propaganda. According to Aaron Copland, it was a musical drama of such power and achievement, inspiring an entirely new generation of American opera. In any case, Welles and Houseman resolved to open the production independently. After last-minute frantic negotiations, Welles rented another theater and moved the entire production uptown along with the opening night audience of six hundred. The twenty-block walk, and the magnificent evening, made theater history and underscored the pending war between politicians and performers. Blitzstein played the score on an old upright piano, center stage. The cast, placed throughout the audience, burst into song from where they were, so as not to violate Equity union rules against performing in “an unauthorized production.” See Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon’s 1999 film Cradle Will Rock.

  *This July 1939 AYC congress, still influenced by united front politics, was democratic, pro–New Deal, and pro-Roosevelt. ER was particularly drawn to specific leaders, including Joseph Cadden, who accompanied her throughout the event; Mary Jeanne McKay, president of the National Student Federation; Frances Williams, student director of the Foreign Policy Association; Harriet Pickens of the Business and Professional Girls Committee, YWCA; Molly Yard, chair of the American Student Union; Robert Spivack, secretary of the International Students Service; Ephraim Kahn, of the American Medical Students Association; and Joseph Lash, executive secretary of the American Student Union.

  *Oumansky reported to Ickes that destroyers that Russia had ordered from U.S. shipbuilders, and that had been agreed to by FDR and Hull almost two years before, were still not delivered—even though the Soviet Union had agreed “to accept the ships without any armament” and to every other “consideration imposed.” State Department protocol, and the very same people who now agitated for a loan to Franco, had held up the deal. Ickes was appalled. Morgenthau told him that he had “held out” against the State Department—but then FDR said he wanted to make that loan. Subsequently, Ickes noted, Morgenthau “imposed conditions” on Franco’s loan, which had not yet been met. Morgenthau also wanted to impose duties on imports from Italy, but the State Department absolutely refused. It all made Ickes want to write an article about the “State Department and its tender consideration of the dictatorships while pretending to serve the cause of democracy.” Ickes, Secret Diary, pp. 2:669, 670, 677.

  *Claud Cockburn’s controversial left-wing paper was read both by business leaders and by radicals. MI5 kept an amazing file on Cockburn, while the Soviet Comintern criticized him as too close to bankers and the “bourgeois camp.” Married three times to journalists, he is best known today as the father of journalists Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick Cockburn and as the grandfather of Laura Flanders. See Patrick Cockburn, The Broken Boy (New York: Vintage, 2006), for details on Claud Cockburn’s MI5 file. See also Hope Hale Davis, Great Day Coming (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 1994).

  *Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) was particularly bitter toward FDR, in part because of the president’s incomprehensible insistence on maintaining the embargo against democratic Spain. On 2 May 1938 Senator Nye had introduced a resolution to raise the embargo on the lawful government of Spain and maintain it against the fascist insurgents; all shipments were to be sent to Spain on a “cash and carry basis.” Nye’s commitment to democratic Spain was courageous in an election year, since so many of his North Dakota constituents were German Catholics. Had the resolution had FDR’s support, it would have passed easily, according to FDR biographer Ken Davis. Instead, the president endorsed the evasive policy of Cordell Hull, preferring scrupulous noninterference and the avoidance of all possible “complications” in such a complex situation. After that, Nye was convinced that FDR’s policy was shaped by Britain and was dangerous, dishonest, and unjust. See Davis, FDR: Into the Storm, pp. 398–99.

  *Borah, the “Lion of Idaho,” was known in family circles as Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s lover and as the father of her daughter Paulina. See Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, chaps. 8 and 9.

  *The atomic age arrived slowly, and every scientific step was published and celebrated globally, until 1939. Many of the German physicists were Jewish and were expelled in 1933. Some emigrated to the United States, including Hungarian-born Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann. Enrico Fermi had emigrated when Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws threatened his wife, Laura, and his two Jewish children. In December 1938, Fermi was awarded a Nobel Prize for his neutron-bombardment experiments; he and his family left Stockholm for New York, where he joined Columbia University’s faculty. Austrian physicist Lisa Meitner also fled Germany but joined Niels Bohr’s laboratory in Sweden. Meitner’s physicist nephew Otto Frisch, who worked with Bohr in Copenhagen, joined her in Sweden for the holidays. Together they used Einstein’s equation to calculate “the energy release per split atom” of the chemical observations made by Hahn and Strassmann. Their paper on “the atom-splitting process called nuclear fission” was published in London’s Nature, a journal read by scientists worldwide. Armed with the details of the Meitner-Frisch research, Bohr sailed for a term’s collaboration with Einstein at Princeton and with Fermi at Columbia—where in Pupin Hall a second experiment succeeded on 26 January 1939. That week America’s leading physicists met at George Washington University to hear Bohr and Fermi. Their words and equations “created a sensation.” Some scientists left abruptly to phone their home institutions or flee to their laboratories. The energy released from one chain reaction might equal hundreds of pounds of explosives. Within weeks the process of uranium fission was confirmed by studies at Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Institute in Washington, and the University of California at Berkeley. While Szilard and Walter Zinn worked at Columbia, and the Joliot-Curies worked in Paris, Hahn and Strassmann—along with Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and many others—continued to work in Germany. Moreover, Carl von Weizsäcker, one of the best young physicists, was the son of Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, Ribbentrop’s close associate.

  When the militarized use of their nuclear researches was confirmed, Fermi and others resolved to speak with U.S. military and naval officers. His appointment with a navy research scientist, 17 March, coincided with Hitler’s occupation of all Czechoslovakia, the only sit
e of Europe’s uranium deposits. But the admiral he intended to see was too busy, and he was greeted by junior officers, who infuriated him by their contemptuous, ignorant lack of interest. For months, the émigré scientists received reports that all research was now “concentrated in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute,” where they worked on uranium.

  The letter was hand-delivered to FDR by Dr. Alexander Sachs on 11 October 1939; Sachs had been introduced to Szilard by former Reichstag member Gustav Stolper. According to Martin Gilbert, on 26 September Berlin scientists met in secret to discuss their work on nuclear fission. The German War Office agreed to spend whatever was necessary for the new secret weapon. Hitler was exultant. It is very likely that the émigré community learned of this meeting. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm, pp. 471–85, 509–12; Gilbert, p. 14; Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand.

  *The WPA indictments, widely cast, with little evidence, and aimed at suspected Communists, had actually surprised Jackson. They had been initiated by his predecessor Robert Murphy, who was now a Supreme Court justice. Jackson considered them politically unwise, unconstitutional, and reprehensible.

  *Robert Jackson’s speech was written in part by Michael Straight, who had only recently departed from his own radical student days among the Communists at Cambridge in the UK. The son of ER’s great friend Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst, Straight now worked for Ben Cohen.

  *Vera Lachmann taught first at Vassar, 1940–41; then at Brearley; then in the German departments at Salem College in North Carolina, Bryn Mawr, and Yale. In 1948 she moved to New York, where she taught classics at Brooklyn College until her retirement. From 1944 to 1970, she ran Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There she and her life partner, Tui St. George Tucker, a composer, flutist, and recorder teacher, inspired generations of classicists, musicians, artists, dramatists, poets, and writers. See Miller, Catawba Assembly, and Miller, ed., Homer’s Sun Still Shines, a collection of Vera Lachmann’s works.

  *Shortly after the 1938 Evian Conference, General Rafael Trujillo offered the Dominican Republic as a haven for up to 100,000 refugees, partly in order to whiten his island country; see Edward Paulino, “Forgotten Atrocities: The 1937 Genocidal Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” in Smith, Genocide Essays, pp. 79–99. Paulino also discusses the U.S. rejection of Haiti’s offer for haven. Trujillo contributed an estate on the island’s north shore, called Sosúa, with timberland, agricultural land, a deep harbor, and “buildings enough for 200 people,” with an eye toward fostering agricultural development. See Wyman, Paper Walls, pp. 60–63; Smith, American Empire, pp. 299, 513n18; and “First 37 for Sosúa Settlement Reach Dominican Land of Refuge,” New York Times, 9 May 1940. But wartime conditions limited refugees’ movements, and by May 1940 only thirty-seven Jews had arrived. In the end no more than five hundred refugees disembarked in the Dominican Republic.

  *The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was not founded within the Department of Labor until 28 April 1971.

  *When Hopkins’s second wife, Barbara Duncan, died of cancer in 1937, Diana was not yet five. ER offered to be her guardian if Harry were to die, and she spent as much time as possible with the little girl. See Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, pp. 35–37, 106–7.

  *In addition, Ickes worried profoundly about the return of industrial profiteers to Washington. He disapproved of FDR’s apparent willingness to create a “super-government” led by William Knudson of General Motors and Edward Stettinius of U.S. Steel. While FDR spoke about the need for an excess profits tax on industry’s naval contracts and plant expansions, nothing was done to protect workers, or limit greed.

  *Among those who compiled lists were Thomas Mann, the French theologian Jacques Maritain, Max Ascoli, Jan Masaryk, Alvarez del Vayo, and Joseph Buttinger, who identified endangered Italians, French, Czechs, Spaniards, Austrians, and Germans. Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art sent names of condemned artists whose books and works had already been banned or burned.

  *While some of the Quanza passengers who gained a haven within the United States remembered ER’s offer to take them in as her personal guests, and gave her substantial credit for their safety, the efforts of Morewitz and others were critical.

  *Among them was ten-year-old Shirley Vivian Cathin, the daughter of writer Vera Brittain, who spent three years in Minnesota with WILPF activist Ruth Gage-Colby and her physician husband. Decades later, Shirley Cathin Williams, MP, would be one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party.

  *ER had met Toller and Klaus Mann on 11 May 1939, when she hosted a White House reception for the international writers’ congress arranged by PEN in conjunction with the World’s Fair. Mann and Toller “stuck together throughout the whole festive, fatiguing day,” when they were introduced to FDR in his study, and when they spoke at lunch with ER. That great lady, Mann wrote in his memoir, was always able to impart “a touch of intimacy” even in a large gathering. “A heartening appeal emanates from her smile and look. She seems particularly interested in the affairs and opinions of every individual with whom she just happens to chat. Only a woman of so aristocratic a background and with so democratic a heart can afford the exquisite simplicity typical of all her words and ways.”

  But, Mann wrote, it was the last time they saw each other. Ernst Toller committed suicide on 22 May 1939, in his New York City apartment, after he learned of the fall of Madrid. Poet, revolutionary, and dramatist, Toller had been one of Thomas Mann’s most esteemed students, subsequently known as “the student prince” of Munich’s unlikely, extraordinary “bloodless revolution.” In 1918 writers and artists persuaded the army to declare “a democratic and socialist Bavaria.” Their pacifist revolution was crushed in February 1919, when White Armies pronounced “a red terror” and slaughtered both partisans and bystanders. Toller escaped but was arrested and served five years in prison. When he emerged, he wrote Hoppla, Wir Leben (Hey, We’re Alive)—selected by Erwin Piscator to open his new theater. It was a cry of agony against apathy and pretension, the lunatic nature of Weimar politics. People were crushed, and nobody noticed; everywhere “faces in the street” were blank disinterested “lumps of flesh . . . blown up with worry and conceit.” One had only two choices now, Toller wrote in 1925: “to hang oneself or to change the world.”

  Toller left Hitler’s Germany immediately. His last two major works were No More Peace and Pastor Hall. ER considered the decision to distribute Toller’s film a tribute to his call for hope to change the world. See Klaus Mann, Turning Point, pp. 322–23; Friedrich, Before the Deluge, pp. 253–54; Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, pp. 11, 271–72; and Heilbut, Thomas Mann, pp. 324, 530.

  *The three were Richard J. Morris Jr., the twenty-two-year-old cousin of Newbold Morris, head of the New York City Council; Roger Barlow, twenty-eight; and Henwar Rodakiewicz, thirty-seven. ER personally knew Rodakiewicz, who was married to Peggy Kiskadden, the mother of future Harvard president Derek Bok. Peggy remained close to Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read and saw ER often—at Salt Meadow and in New York at 20 East Eleventh Street.

  *The Justice Department stalled for two years; Thurgood Marshall subsequently learned that Hoover’s FBI agents questioned witnesses in the presence of Tip Hunter. In January 1942 the Justice Department closed the case for insufficient evidence, despite the evidence White and Marshall had presented. White concluded that the power of Senator Kenneth McKellar (D-TN) and Memphis political boss Edward Crump were involved in the cover-up, even after NAACP member Francis Biddle became attorney general and pursued such cases in 1942. See Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, pp. 237–42.

  *There were no plans to segregate other racial groups. Indeed, a particular effort to recruit tribal leaders among Native Americans was under way. In 1940 Indians were to be fully integrated, and designated “warriors”—while African-Americans were to
be segregated and designated servants. Alison Bernstein to author; see Bernstein, American Indians.

  *In Christmas, ER’s tale of the Netherlands countryside, seven-year-old Marta and her mother wait for her father to return from the war. “Greed, personal ambition, and fear all were strong in the world fed by constant hate. In the howling of the wind . . . evil spirits . . . seemed to run wild, unleashed with no control.” Would it ever end? ER’s answer was only the glow of hope from the child’s candle—to light the way to love.

  *ER was editor of the monthly Women’s Democratic News, which first appeared in May 1925. It became Democratic Digest in 1936.

  *On 27 June 1940, after weeks of panicked flight, Alma and Franz Werfel reached Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, close to a border crossing and the hope of survival. They found sanctuary with several families and were told the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a nineteenth-century miller’s daughter whose conversation with a statue of the Virgin Mary come to life engendered the pilgrimage center dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. As he listened, his depression slowly lifted, and Werfel began research on the historic novel that would sing her song. For Werfel, the road to rescue began in Lourdes. See Marino, Quiet American, pp. 68–76. Monumentally popular, The Song of Bernadette was published in 1941 and became an Academy Award–winning film starring Jennifer Jones in 1943.